How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

[ed. See also: What's Wrong with OKCupid's Matching Algorithm.]

Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA’s math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. It was 3 in the morn­ing, the optimal time to squeeze cycles out of the supercomputer in Colorado that he was using for his PhD dissertation. (The subject: large-scale data processing and parallel numerical methods.) While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.

McKinlay, a lanky 35-year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like Match.com, J-Date, and e-Harmony, and he’d been searching in vain since his last breakup nine months earlier. He’d sent dozens of cutesy introductory messages to women touted as potential matches by OkCupid’s algorithms. Most were ignored; he’d gone on a total of six first dates.

On that early morning in June 2012, his compiler crunching out machine code in one window, his forlorn dating profile sitting idle in the other, it dawned on him that he was doing it wrong. He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user. Instead, he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician.

OkCupid was founded by Harvard math majors in 2004, and it first caught daters’ attention because of its computational approach to matchmaking. Members answer droves of multiple-choice survey questions on everything from politics, religion, and family to love, sex, and smartphones.

On average, respondents select 350 questions from a pool of thousands—“Which of the following is most likely to draw you to a movie?” or “How important is religion/God in your life?” For each, the user records an answer, specifies which responses they’d find acceptable in a mate, and rates how important the question is to them on a five-point scale from “irrelevant” to “mandatory.” OkCupid’s matching engine uses that data to calculate a couple’s compatibility. The closer to 100 percent—mathematical soul mate—the better.

But mathematically, McKinlay’s compatibility with women in Los Angeles was abysmal. OkCupid’s algorithms use only the questions that both potential matches decide to answer, and the match questions McKinlay had chosen—more or less at random—had proven unpopular. When he scrolled through his matches, fewer than 100 women would appear above the 90 percent compatibility mark. And that was in a city containing some 2 million women (approximately 80,000 of them on OkCupid). On a site where compatibility equals visibility, he was practically a ghost.

He realized he’d have to boost that number. If, through statistical sampling, McKinlay could ascertain which questions mattered to the kind of women he liked, he could construct a new profile that honestly answered those questions and ignored the rest. He could match every woman in LA who might be right for him, and none that weren’t.

by Kevin Poulsen, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Maurico Alejo

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How Do Physicians Want to Die?

When you ask people how they’d like to die, most will say that they want to die quickly, painlessly, and peacefully… preferably in their sleep.

But, if you ask them whether they would want various types of interventions, were they on the cusp of death and already living a low-quality of life, they typically say “yes,” “yes,” and “can I have some more please.” Blood transfusions, feeding tubes, invasive testing, chemotherapy, dialysis, ventilation, and chest pumping CPR. Most people say “yes.”

But not physicians. Doctors, it turns out, overwhelmingly say “no.” The graph below shows the answers that physicians give when asked if they would want various interventions at the bitter end. The only intervention that doctors overwhelmingly want is pain medication. In no other case do even 20% of the physicians say “yes.”

What explains the difference between physician and non-physician responses to these types of questions. USC professor and family medicine doctor Ken Murray gives us a couple clues.

by Lisa Wade, Socialogical Images |  Read more:

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Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Marijuana Railroad

On a quiet night along the Tijuana border, you can almost hear them coming: the faint scraping of metal on dirt, falling clumps of earth, muted voices in the depths. At any given moment, there are men underground here, chipping their way toward the United States with antlike determination.

Many of the drug tunnels will be discovered and shut down before they're operational, but it doesn't matter; more will come. The economics are unassailable. A good tunnel can take nine months or more to build and cost up to $2 million, but if it can stay open for only a few hours, the cartels can move enough marijuana through it to satisfy entire time zones—making enough money to pay for twenty more tunnels. That is why they never stop coming, and why, on November 29, 2011, Special Agent Tony Armanza found himself lying in the bushes overlooking a nondescript warehouse in San Diego's Otay Mesa, waiting for signs that one of the tunnels was about to go live.

“It's getting dark out here, man. I'm starving,” he said into the radio. “What are we gonna do?” He and half a dozen other agents from the San Diego Tunnel Task Force had been watching the warehouse since 5 A.M.—an hour they sardonically called “the butt crack of dawn.” Armanza, face-first in the dirt all day, had been on countless stakeouts before and knew that the odds of the warehouse becoming active were diminishing with the sun; tunnel traffickers like to move their drug shipments during the day, when their trucks can blend in with the thousands of others coursing through the busy shipping district.

Half a mile away, Tim Durst, the supervisor of the task force, heard the exhaustion in Armanza's voice. Durst was well liked by his men; he knew that Armanza wasn't the only one tired. With a strong, goateed chin, an angular face, and closely cropped brown hair, Durst looks like a slightly weathered version of the G-man Keanu Reeves played in Point Break. He had been taking down tunnels on the mesa for five years, and today nearly one hundred agents and local cops were on call, all of them waiting for Durst's decision. “Five more minutes,” he told his team. Experience had taught him that successful operations sometimes hinged on ridiculously small windows of time and chance. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Armanza reported that a tractor-trailer had backed up to the warehouse's docking bay.

Armanza couldn't see inside the warehouse, but he knew what was going on: Men caked with dirt would be scrambling to load shrink-wrapped bales of marijuana—fresh from their passage through the tunnel—onto a truck as quickly as possible. Each bale would weigh some fifty pounds and would soon be tucked into a crate or cardboard box. One by one, they'd be lifted onto the semi. Hundreds of them.

An hour later, when the work was done, the truck's engine roared and the rig pulled away from the warehouse district, heading north toward the freeway. The agents could have stopped it immediately for an easy seizure, which would give them a search warrant to enter the warehouse and take the tunnel, but Durst's goal was strategic: He wanted not just to disrupt the operation but to deal a critical blow to the Sinaloa cartel. That meant following the truck and arresting as many players as possible. As the semi turned onto the freeway, teams of agents in unmarked vehicles followed, each car dropping off as another one picked up the tail, “passing the eye.” But after only thirty miles, the truck's driver pulled onto a side road, got out of the truck, and walked away.

“We're burned,” crackled an agent's voice over the radio. “He's abandoning the truck.”

This meant another decision for Durst: Should he order his men to move on the truck or wait and see if this was a handoff? He told everyone to wait through the night. At about 6 A.M., another car pulled up and dropped off a fresh driver, who got into the truck and resumed moving the load.

The new driver was cautious, trained to pick up tails. First he continued north, toward Los Angeles, then east, then west again. He finally pulled into a warehouse in the City of Industry, a dense industrial zone outside L.A., where he met with at least four other men. They powwowed for a few minutes; then the semi driver motored to yet another warehouse, where five vans were waiting. “It was gonna be like The Italian Job,” Durst would later say. “They were gonna load the dope into the vans and all leave and go in different directions.”

Durst wanted to wait once more and follow the vans. Where would they go? How many more nodes of the cartel's distribution ring could he take down? By now he had called forty-five men into the field. Helicopters buzzed overhead. Tailing five vans to God knew where would require more men and resources than he could readily muster. The whole operation was on the verge of becoming a crazy, unwieldy hydra. Durst had let the string unwind to the last manageable point; now there was only one option.

“Take it down,” he finally said.

As a veteran of an unwinnable war that has gone on for twenty-one years and turned the U.S.-Mexican border into Swiss cheese, he'd given that order many times before. But this bust would be unlike any other. In addition to the vans, there was the tunnel itself, which turned out to be a marvel of illegal engineering. The Mexican entrance, hidden in a two-story warehouse near the airport, had an elevator that popped up out of a tile floor. Its shaft descended thirty feet, to a staging area where bales could be loaded onto an electrically driven mining car. The railway traveled through the 550-yard tunnel atop wood planks. “It is clearly the most sophisticated tunnel we have ever found,” said Lauren Mack, the task-force spokesperson on-site at the time. The tunnel—along with many others—was believed to be the pet project of a single man. American law enforcement had been hunting him for years, but he had always managed to remain far enough removed from his creations that nobody could get to him. That is, until Durst let the string unwind—right to his doorstep.

Jason Kersten, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Atilla Futaki

Monitors Your House’s Leaks on the Cheap

[ed. I suspect we'll see a virtual flood of these types of devices as the Internet of Things becomes more of a reality.]

Earlier this month, as Google was snatching up the smart-thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion, a lesser known home sensor company made its own announcement. SNUPI Technologies, a Seattle startup, said it had garnered $7.5 million in funding. That might be pocket change compared to the Nest deal, but it was a significant endorsement just ahead of SNUPI’s first product launch: a low-power wireless sensor network called WallyHome that tracks humidity, water leaks, and temperature throughout a building.

There are already many home monitors on the market; some, such as Lowe’s Iris Home Management System and a water leak and flood sensor from General Electric, are even wirelessly networked. What makes WallyHome novel is its use of a low-power communication scheme that lets sensors send data back to an Internet-connected base station over significant distances and through obstructions like walls and floors while sipping power from a coin-cell battery.

SNUPI cofounder Gabe Cohn believes this long-distance, low-power approach will endear the product to homeowners who want a reliable sensor network that requires little maintenance and can be installed easily. The base station plugs into a wall outlet and an Internet router via an Ethernet cable. Six wireless sensors are placed in leak- or humidity-prone areas, such as behind a toilet, under a dishwasher, or near a sump pump. And each sensor’s battery should power the device for up to 10 years without a replacement, Cohn says.

by Kate Greene, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:

Image: striatic via Flickr Creative Commons

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Negotiating Conflicts, Part 1: Family Grudges

At the heart of many reader questions is this: “How do I get my family member(s) to do ‘X’ or stop doing ‘Y’?” Among the most painful of these cases (especially during the holidays) are family members who have curtailed or cut off contact. This week we take a look at how it happens that those we were closest to can have stories about us — and what has happened between us — that are so bewilderingly different from our own. And we have three strategies that just might let the healing begin. (...)

Few things are as emotionally upsetting as having a family member who has severed ties with you (or with the whole family). Most of us work especially hard not to cut off ties with family, precisely because they are family. And so when someone does, it is often experienced by those cut off as being cavalier, petty, or the result of a failure to try hard enough.

In short, he or she is holding a grudge. A grudge, by definition, is a thing that should notbe held. It’s not a legitimate or healthy reaction and the resulting choices are bad ones. A more stable person would not have taken offense in the first place and a bigger person would surely have let go of it by now.

But that’s not how it’s experienced by the people holding the grudge. They know that what they are doing is protecting themselves, drawing essential boundaries, doing the only thing left to them to do. When we cut ties with others it’s not because we don’t care; it’s because the friction or pain or dysfunction have finally overpowered even the special pull of family.

None of this tells us whether those who withdraw from families are right or wrong, justified or not. It only says that that their reasons make sense to them, even if they don’t make sense to us.

Why we have such different versions of history

Before thinking about what to do, it’s useful to understand a few reasons why people on each side of a conflict can experience it so differently.

1. Emotional math. Everyone gets frustrated, resentful, disappointed, or even enraged with others on occasion. It may come out as shouting, sarcasm, snippiness, or simply a put-upon silence. In those moments, we don’t see our emotional behavior as a big deal. They’re the ones who were being unusually annoying, it was a tense situation, you were tired. You know that your anger in that moment is not who you “really are.”

But to the other person, your anger is exactly who you are. Your emotional display is not incidental – it’s at the heart of the story they tell of what happened between you. From their point of view, your anger is the threat – the very thing they were coping with in that moment.

So you will tend to subtract your own emotions from the story, while the other person counts your emotions, say, double. And the same is true in reverse: You count their emotional reactions double, while they subtract them.

by Sheila Heen, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times

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Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming House

In one of the more bizarre twists in recent Internet memory, much of the Internet traffic in China was redirected to a small, 1,700-square-foot house in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Tuesday.

A large portion of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites ending in .com, .net or .org for nearly eight hours in most regions of China, according to Compuware, a Detroit-based technology company.

The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected roughly three-quarters of the country’s domain name system servers.

Those servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea Incorporated, a mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyo.

A simple Google search reveals that the address on Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne is not a corporate headquarters, but a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn.

That address — which is home to some 2,000 companies on paper — was the subject of a lengthy 2011 Reuters investigation that found that among the entities registered to the address were a shell company controlled by a jailed former Ukraine prime minister; the owner of a company charged with helping online poker operators evade an Internet gambling ban; and one entity that was banned from government contracts after selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.

by Nicole Perlroth, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

The Tipping Point (E-Commerce Version)

The news around shopping during the holiday season was dominated by two separate stories. One talked about how traffic to brick-and-mortar stores was well below expectations, and that these retailers were forced to discount tremendously to drive sales. The other talked about how an enormous late surge in packages coming from e-commerce companies overwhelmed the capacity of UPS and, to a lesser extent, FedEx, and caused many of these packages to arrive after Christmas.

But, to me, these two stories are not at all separate, they simply reflect different sides of the same narrative: We’re in the midst of a profound structural shift from physical to digital retail. (...)

The data suggests that there are two very different patterns going on with respect to e-commerce penetration. The two largest categories — “Food and Beverage” and “Health and Personal Care” — show e-commerce penetration well below the overall average. These categories essentially are the domains of grocery stores and drug stores, and e-commerce (at least to date) has achieved only modest penetration of these massive categories (but Amazon Fresh has designs on changing that).

The other four categories are what I would consider to be the domains of traditional specialty retail categories, the ones that are transacted in the malls of America. All of these demonstrate e-commerce penetration well above the overall average, ranging from a low of 12 percent for “Clothing and Accessories,” up to 24 percent for “Media, Sporting and Hobby Goods.” It’s in these specialty retail categories where e-commerce to date has had its strongest impact.

One additional observation is that the pace of online share gain in the specialty retail categories shows absolutely no signs of slowing down. All of these charts are “up and to the right.”

So it’s clear that a growing share of the retail pie in the specialty retail categories is being captured by e-commerce. Now let’s throw in one more massive complication for brick-and-mortar retailers in these categories: The total retail sales in these markets have been extremely sluggish, and have barely recovered back to pre-recession levels. This is a toxic combination — physical retailers in these categories are losing share of a total retail pie that isn’t growing.

by Jeff Jordan, Andreesen Horowitz |  Read more:

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Jean Arp, Bird and Necktie
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Now is Not Forever

Sometimes the Internet surprises us with the past or, to be more precise, its own past. The other day my social media feed started to show the same clip over and over. It was one I had seen years before and forgotten about, back from the bottom of that overwhelming ocean of content available to us at any given moment. Why was it reappearing now, I wondered? (...)

The more I kept seeing this clip in my feed, though, the more clear it became that its uncanniness didn’t just derive from the original feature’s depiction of primitive modems and computer monitors — and a Lady Di hairsyle — but also the fact that it had returned from the depths of the Internet to remind us, once more, that wedid see this world coming.

The information age is doing strange things to our sense of history. If you drive in the United States, particularly in warm-weather places like California or Florida, you won’t have to look too hard to see cars from the 1980s still on the road. But a computer from that era seems truly ancient, as out of sync with our own times as a horse and buggy.

Stranger still is the feeling of datedness that pervades the Internet’s own history. For someone my daughter’s age, imagining life before YouTube is as unsettling a prospect as imagining life before indoor plumbing. And yet, even though she was only seven when the site debuted, she was already familiar with the Internet before then.

But it isn’t just young people who feel cut off from the Internet that existed prior to contemporary social media. Even though I can go on the Wayback Machine to check out sites I was visiting in the 1990s; even though I contributed to one of the first Internet publications, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life, and can still access its content with ease; even though I know firsthand what it was like before broadband, when I would wait minutes for a single news story to load, my memories still seem to fail me. I remember, but dimly. I can recall experiences from pre-school in vivid detail, yet struggle to flesh out my Internet past from a decade ago, before I started using Gmail.

What the clip that resurfaced the other day makes clear is that history is more subjective than ever. Some parts seem to be moving at more or less the same pace that they did decades or even centuries ago. But others, particularly those that focus on computer technology, appear ten or even a hundred times as fast. If you don’t believe me, try picking up the mobile phone you used in 2008.

by Charlie Bertsch, Souciant | Read more:
Image: Michael Surran

Obama, Melville and the Tea Party

“Benito Cereno” tells the story of Amasa Delano, a New England sea captain who, in the South Pacific, spends all day on a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans who he thinks are slaves. They aren’t. Unbeknown to Delano, they had earlier risen up, slaughtered most of the crew and demanded that the captain, Benito Cereno, return them home to Senegal. After Delano boards the ship (to offer his assistance), the West Africans keep their rebellion a secret by acting as if they are still slaves. Their leader, a man named Babo, pretends to be Cereno’s loyal servant, while actually keeping a close eye on him.

Melville narrates the events from the perspective of the clueless Delano, who for most of the novella thinks Cereno is in charge. As the day progresses, Delano grows increasingly obsessed with Babo and the seeming affection with which the West African cares for the Spanish captain. The New Englander, liberal in his sentiments and opposed to slavery as a matter of course, fantasizes about being waited on by such a devoted and cheerful body servant.

Delano believes himself a free man, and he defines his freedom in opposition to the smiling, open-faced Babo, who he presumes has no interior life, no ideas or interests of his own. Delano sees what he wants to see. But when Delano ultimately discovers the truth — that Babo, in fact, is the one exercising masterly discipline over his inner thoughts, and that it is Delano who is enslaved to his illusions — he responds with savage violence.

Barack Obama may have avoided the fate of the protagonist of “Invisible Man,” but he hasn’t been able to escape the shadow of Babo. He is Babo, or at least he is to a significant part of the American population — including many of the white rank and file of the Republican Party and the Tea Party politicians they help elect.

“Benito Cereno” is based on a true historical incident, which I started researching around the time Mr. Obama announced his first bid for the presidency. Since then, I’ve been struck by the persistence of fears, which began even before his election, that Mr. Obama isn’t what he seems: that instead of being a faithful public servant he is carrying out a leftist plot hatched decades ago to destroy America; or if not that, then he is a secret Muslim intent on supplanting the Constitution with Islamic law; or a Kenyan-born anti-colonialist out to avenge his native Africa.

No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy. In order to succeed as a politician, Mr. Obama had to cultivate what many have described as an almost preternatural dominion over his inner self. He had to become a “blank screen,” as Mr. Obama himself has put it, on which others could project their ideals — just as Babo is for Delano. Yet this intense self-control seems to be what drives the president’s more feverish detractors into a frenzy; they fill that screen with hatreds drawn deep from America’s historical subconscious.

by Greg Grandin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Corbis

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Super Sunday, and the Crowd Goes, Um, Silent

Fans of the Seattle Seahawks collectively call themselves the 12th Man, an extra player with a noise level so pounding at their home stadium that seismologists have recorded minor earthquakes during big plays.

Fans of the Denver Broncos have a long reputation for noise that rattles visiting opponents, too, including a tradition of stamping their feet to create a rumbling called Rocky Mountain Thunder.

Both franchises used the high-decibel help of their hometown crowds to help win conference championship games Sunday. But when their teams meet in the Super Bowl on Feb. 2 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Seattle’s 12th Man and Denver’s Rocky Mountain Thunder will be mere echoes from distant time zones.

The Super Bowl is where the National Football League’s famed fan noise goes to die. What the hundreds of millions of viewers around the world may not realize, from the comfort of couches in front of big-screen televisions with the volume turned high, is just how strangely quiet it can be at a Super Bowl game.

“There’s not a lot of crowd noise,” said Ron Jaworski, an ESPN analyst who was the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles when they reached the Super Bowl at the end of the 1980 season. “People mostly sit on their hands, outside of the fans that buy the tickets for the team. It’s kind of a corporate get-together.” (...)

“It takes on the atmosphere of a game being played on a Hollywood soundstage,” the CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz said.

The broadcaster Al Michaels has covered eight Super Bowls. The loudest he can recall was Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, Fla., where Pittsburgh fans far outnumbered those of the Arizona Cardinals as the Steelers won with a last-minute touchdown pass.

“Even then, you probably had half the fans there as neutral observers,” Michaels said. “I can’t think of a time where it would ever sound like it would sound in any other venue.”

He added: “If the game is not very good, there is nothing. It might as well be played out in a park.

by John Branch, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

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