Saturday, August 9, 2014
Slot-Machine Science
When people think of casinos, they often think of games like blackjack or roulette — high-stakes bouts of chance where fortunes can be won or lost in seconds. But that image is increasingly obsolete.
"Slot machines have this reputation for being these arcade devices only played by little old ladies," Schüll says. "But these devices are now driving the gambling industry and bringing in the majority of profits." By the late 1990s, slots were twice as profitable as all the other table games combined. She quotes one gambling official estimating that the machines account for as much as 85 percent of industry profits.
How did slots become so widespread? During the recession in the early 1990s, state legislatures started looking to increase revenue without raising taxes — and many of them settled on bills to allow machine gaming. "It was much easier to push through legislation [expanding the availability of slot machines] than things that carried a weightier vice image, like table gambling or poker," Schüll says. (...)
The gambling industry has realized that the biggest profits come from getting people to sit at slot machines and play for hours and hours on end. (Schüll says the industry refers to this as the "Costco model" of gambling.) As such, slot machines are designed to maximize "time on device."
Computerized slots have made this all possible. Again, in the old days, you pulled the lever and either won or you lost — and when people lost, they'd walk away.
Today's multi-line slot machines are far more elaborate. Instead of a single line, a player can bet on up to 200 lines at a time on the video screen — up, down, sideways, diagonal — each with a chance of winning. So a person might bet 70 cents and win on 35 of the lines, getting 35 cents back. That feels like a partial win — and captivates your attention.
"The laboratory research on this shows that people experience this in their brains in an identical way as a win," Schüll says. (And the economics research shows that these multi-line machines are far better at separating players from their money.)
That subtle advance, Schüll says, has helped revolutionize the gambling industry. Fewer and fewer people are now going to casinos to experience the thrilling chance at a big jackpot.
Instead, for many of the people Schüll interviewed, these slot machines have become a "gradual drip feed." They play because they enjoy being in the zone and losing themselves in the machine. Some players she talked to confessed that they actually get annoyed when they won a jackpot — because it disrupted the flow of playing.
"Slot machines have this reputation for being these arcade devices only played by little old ladies," Schüll says. "But these devices are now driving the gambling industry and bringing in the majority of profits." By the late 1990s, slots were twice as profitable as all the other table games combined. She quotes one gambling official estimating that the machines account for as much as 85 percent of industry profits.How did slots become so widespread? During the recession in the early 1990s, state legislatures started looking to increase revenue without raising taxes — and many of them settled on bills to allow machine gaming. "It was much easier to push through legislation [expanding the availability of slot machines] than things that carried a weightier vice image, like table gambling or poker," Schüll says. (...)
The gambling industry has realized that the biggest profits come from getting people to sit at slot machines and play for hours and hours on end. (Schüll says the industry refers to this as the "Costco model" of gambling.) As such, slot machines are designed to maximize "time on device."
Computerized slots have made this all possible. Again, in the old days, you pulled the lever and either won or you lost — and when people lost, they'd walk away.
Today's multi-line slot machines are far more elaborate. Instead of a single line, a player can bet on up to 200 lines at a time on the video screen — up, down, sideways, diagonal — each with a chance of winning. So a person might bet 70 cents and win on 35 of the lines, getting 35 cents back. That feels like a partial win — and captivates your attention.
"The laboratory research on this shows that people experience this in their brains in an identical way as a win," Schüll says. (And the economics research shows that these multi-line machines are far better at separating players from their money.)
That subtle advance, Schüll says, has helped revolutionize the gambling industry. Fewer and fewer people are now going to casinos to experience the thrilling chance at a big jackpot.
Instead, for many of the people Schüll interviewed, these slot machines have become a "gradual drip feed." They play because they enjoy being in the zone and losing themselves in the machine. Some players she talked to confessed that they actually get annoyed when they won a jackpot — because it disrupted the flow of playing.
by Brad Plumer, Vox | Read more:
Image: Reno Tahoe/Flickr
Friday, August 8, 2014
A Brief History of Bloggering
Blogs. Weblogs. Bloggering. Now an activity shrouded in the mists of the Old Internet, but in its day a pioneering way for people to share links and photos and stuff. Even older than YouTube.
Depending on who you ask, the first bloggering happened in the late 1990s, when the web was still young, and clicking links to pages where you’d click more links was cool. This was in the days when the only use for an animated GIF was to tell people you were still working on your web page. Even if you weren’t.
“I invented bloggering,” says mad old Laurence Fortey, a mad old internet guy from the old, old days. He can remember hand-coded websites. He started coding his own just weeks after Tim Berners-Lee, a tunnel engineer helping to build the STERN protein collider, discovered ancient scrolls buried in the Swiss soil that revealed the secrets of HTML.
Fortey didn’t call it bloggering then, of course.
“I didn’t know it was going to be called that,” he says now, interviewed in a hotel room in Chicago. “We had other names for it back then. FTP diary-ing. Internet log link sharing. Web journalizing.”
Fortey sits back in his comfortable chair, eyes upward, remembering. His hair and beard are huge, wild. Perhaps someone should switch that fan off, it’s blowing right into his face.
“It was good back then,” he says. “No comments. No one had invented comments. Oh God, comments.”
Another early bloggerer was Fran Lilley, later a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur but at the time winding up her first graduate degree.
“We started bloggering when we were still on Gopher,” she recalls. “We’d write up text files and upload them to Gopherspace, which was a bit like Twitter is now. But without the lolcats.”
She remembers clearly how blogging changed and grew as more people got involved: “We all thought it was pretty cool when you could put words and pictures together on the same page. That beat the heck out of Gopherspace, let me tell you.”
“Once blogging software came along and all the other stuff got added in, we thought we were in heaven.”
Categories and archives were Lilley’s favorite new ideas.
“Categories were great! Suddenly all your stuff was, like, totally categorized. OK, so a lot of the time it was categorized in the ‘Uncategorized’ category, but even so. Archives were so much more useful after that.”
Lilley pauses to watch raindrops on the window. “Well, a bit more useful.”
Asked to make some comments about comments, she grimaces and turns her attention back to the raindrops.
by Giles Turnbull, TMN | Read more:
Image: William Powhida, A Major B-List Celebrity, 2013
Be Lucky - It's an Easy Skill to Learn
A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.
To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.
Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."
In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. Tby he findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune. (...)
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."
In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. Tby he findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune. (...)
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
by Richard Wiseman, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Umberto Salvagnin; Flickr
Hidden Costs to Your New Comcast Xfinity Router
[ed. I called Comcast a while ago with a technical problem and was told I needed to get this new router. I didn't get it, but managed to get the problem fixed anyway. Now it looks like these new routers are part of an initiative to build out a nationwide public WiFi network (commendable) at the expense of Comcast's customers (not so commendable).]
We ran some tests with one of these dual-signal routers in our office, and found that it was indeed costing Xfinity customers several dollars extra per month to support the public hotspot with this particular router. Not a huge deal on the individual level, but it’s worth noting that, when multiplied out by Comcast’s millions of residential customers, it seemed like subscribers might potentially be footing a bill in the tens of millions to roll out the ISP’s public WiFi network. A few weeks ago, we published a blog post with our findings, and we must have tickled the beast, because within an hour-or-two, I was on a call with Comcast.
Comcast Calling
The folks at Comcast reached out to let us know that we weren’t testing with their latest home router, and that they wanted to furnish us with the latest-and-greatest so we could re-test. Sure, why not? We wanted to present solid and accurate data, after all.
A few days later, an Xfinity tech replaced our existing hardware with a Cisco DPC3939B (XB3 is the residential variant, but we have the BWG business variant). We were told that the business and home versions are identical pieces of hardware that run slightly different software. This new Xfinity router box takes the place of four different components that we used to have:
The folks at Comcast reached out to let us know that we weren’t testing with their latest home router, and that they wanted to furnish us with the latest-and-greatest so we could re-test. Sure, why not? We wanted to present solid and accurate data, after all.
A few days later, an Xfinity tech replaced our existing hardware with a Cisco DPC3939B (XB3 is the residential variant, but we have the BWG business variant). We were told that the business and home versions are identical pieces of hardware that run slightly different software. This new Xfinity router box takes the place of four different components that we used to have:
- Cable modem for the Xfinity Hotspot
- WiFi access point for the Xfinity Hotspot
- Cable modem gateway for our business account
- Linksys access point that we provided
by Speedify | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, August 7, 2014
Wanting to be Normal
“I just want to be normal.” I've lost count of the number of times I've heard this phrase in my therapy room and, as a client in therapy, said it myself. In my previous career as a writer, I spent a number of years exploring my own perceived inability to be normal. In fiction, performance, and memoir, I looked to my audiences to reflect something, anything, back to me that would allow me to fit in. I took this question to professionals too, asking if they could help me feel the way I thought other people did. And now that I am a therapist myself, my clients ask the same of me.
Feeling indefinably different from others is often a sign of depression, which is why therapists encounter it so often. Some people live their entire lives never feeling what they perceive to be normal. The seeming ability of other people to live their lives without apparent effort feels like an impossibility. You walk through life as if pushing at thickened glass. Some people with depression use alcohol and drugs in response, some self-harm, some withdraw, and some overcompensate. Depression, similarly to anxiety, parks itself like an extra layer of awareness on top of ordinary consciousness. Every living moment is so heavy with unwanted importance that it takes on a symbolic quality. (...)
Believing that you are the wrong kind of different encompasses the contentious issue of introverts versus extraverts, a very contemporary binary. Online, many people self-identify as introverts, and introvert pride is a growing movement. An increasing number of people are outing themselves as introverts who struggle in an extravert world, existentially stressed by the enforced social and adversarial interactions of school and after, pressed into high-level human sociability, bracing themselves for the onslaught of convivial activities and enforced games, and seeing extraverts constantly rewarded over and above them. It is hard not to feel abnormal when you are on the wrong side of that binary. (...)
And here's the kicker. When I start unpacking what this normal is all about in a therapy session, very often a similar reply comes back. And I discover that normal isn't just about wishing to be happy, secure and an agent of one's own destiny. Being normal, I have been told a number of times, actually means being in a long-term romantic relationship and owning a house.
by Tania Glyde, The Lancet | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
Feeling indefinably different from others is often a sign of depression, which is why therapists encounter it so often. Some people live their entire lives never feeling what they perceive to be normal. The seeming ability of other people to live their lives without apparent effort feels like an impossibility. You walk through life as if pushing at thickened glass. Some people with depression use alcohol and drugs in response, some self-harm, some withdraw, and some overcompensate. Depression, similarly to anxiety, parks itself like an extra layer of awareness on top of ordinary consciousness. Every living moment is so heavy with unwanted importance that it takes on a symbolic quality. (...)Believing that you are the wrong kind of different encompasses the contentious issue of introverts versus extraverts, a very contemporary binary. Online, many people self-identify as introverts, and introvert pride is a growing movement. An increasing number of people are outing themselves as introverts who struggle in an extravert world, existentially stressed by the enforced social and adversarial interactions of school and after, pressed into high-level human sociability, bracing themselves for the onslaught of convivial activities and enforced games, and seeing extraverts constantly rewarded over and above them. It is hard not to feel abnormal when you are on the wrong side of that binary. (...)
And yet, in view of the apparent desirability, and seeming near-impossibility, of attaining the elevated state of being normal, it is perhaps surprising there are not more public affirmations of it, such as statues or street names. There is no Jungian archetype of the normal person, nor does it appear in the tarot's major arcana. I stand to be corrected, but I'll hazard a guess that there isn't a Shakespeare play, classical drama, or opera that celebrates the protagonist attaining the state of normal as their climax or finale. And within alternative lifestyles, the word can be a euphemism for boring. Words containing norm (eg, heteronormative) are, at worst, spat out with derision. A gulf seems to exist between the meaning of normality as an outward state, and its desirability as an inward state.
And here's the kicker. When I start unpacking what this normal is all about in a therapy session, very often a similar reply comes back. And I discover that normal isn't just about wishing to be happy, secure and an agent of one's own destiny. Being normal, I have been told a number of times, actually means being in a long-term romantic relationship and owning a house.
by Tania Glyde, The Lancet | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia
[ed. See also: Gould's Book of Fish (part of my permanent collection).]
via:
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Fortune’s Child
I first encountered “Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood” in November 1953, on the same day in a college survey of English literature that introduced the class to Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. The professor in charge of the lesson pointed to the portrait as an embodiment of the further thought some lines later in Wordsworth’s poem that “a six years’ darling of a pygmy size” is both a “mighty prophet” and a wise philosopher, that a “growing boy” is “nature’s priest.”Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
—William Wordsworth
I didn’t know the painting, but the costume I recollected from having seen it on the person of Larry Spenser, five years old in September 1940, stepping out of a chauffeured Rolls-Royce on his first day at the Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California, trailing precisely the same cloud of glory—blue silk suit, lace collar, white stockings, ribboned shoes—except that he was wearing, not holding, the plumed hat. The noisy, unkempt children already present in the schoolyard, myself among them, stared in silent, gap-toothed wonder at the heaven-sent being that had cometh from afar to fall in our midst, not in utter nakedness, but in his mother’s intimations of immortality.
Larry’s mother was devoted to “the arts” and rich enough to afford the privilege of her enthusiasms—multiple husbands, houses in Switzerland and Italy, a large estate in the hills west of Palo Alto furnished with pavilions in the Chinese style, best of all with Larry, her life’s star and most prized possession. He looked the part, but the picture was deceptive. Willful, clever, ruthless, predatory, vain, Larry was nature’s brute creation, a growing beast.
Between the ages of five and eight we spent a good deal of time together, at school and on the hillside estate, where I could count on always finding him either angry or aggrieved—the German governess had burned the milk; he didn’t like the Shetland pony his mother found for him in Scotland. What she had brought him that he really liked was a sword said by the dealer in Paris to have accompanied Napoleon to Austerlitz, worn by Larry in the sash from one of his pirate costumes. His passion was cruelty to small animals, and what he liked to do with the sword was to stab a frog, behead a chicken, roast a chipmunk or a squirrel.
I was well acquainted with the swiftness of Larry’s deft and joyful turns to violence when on a Saturday afternoon in 1943 we went together to a children’s concert in the San Francisco Opera House to see Pierre Monteux conduct the orchestra playing Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The two of us at the age of eight were seated in the center of a row thirty feet from the stage, and Larry had with him what looked to be an old and venerable book, fitted with brass hinges and bound in leather. Ten minutes into the performance he decided that he didn’t like the music, found it so disagreeable that he thought the time had come to play a merry prank and do away with the fat man waving the baton. Opening the book that proved to be a box, he drew forth an eighteenth-century dueling pistol (another present from his mother’s Paris connection), its barrel oiled and loaded, its flash pan primed with powder.
As to what happened next I can’t now say for certain. I remember knowing at the time that Larry was a harsh critic, apt to act on impulse and not likely to make an important distinction between a Frenchman and a squirrel. Maybe he was only fondling the pistol to show and tell himself a mighty prophet and a wise philosopher. Then again, maybe not.
by Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Thomas Gainsborough
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Rebooting YouTube
When Susan Wojcicki took over YouTube in February, she received almost as much unsolicited advice as there are YouTube videos. One open letter not-so-subtly pleaded with Wojcicki, "So please, I'm begging you, please, please, please, don't f*** it up."
"There were lots of letters, public letters," says Wojcicki when we meet in her office in mid-June at YouTube's San Bruno, California, headquarters. "'Open Letter to Susan Wojcicki.' 'Do These Five Things.' There were videos from creators." Even her family got in on the act. "My mom is a high school teacher, so she would tell me, 'Oh, the students liked the video you posted today. Oh, the students didn't like the video that you posted today.' As though I, personally, posted a video!" she says, laughing.
Her four kids gave her a YouTube crash course. "I was just starting to get to know a lot of these videos, and they'd be like, 'Oh, no, Mom. That video came out like six months ago.' And then they would go on about the whole backstory of this content and this creator. I didn't know how much time they were spending watching YouTube."
The ambush of advice was, she admits in her amiable way, "a little overwhelming." Wojcicki, 46, is a consummate insider--she's Google employee No. 16--and a publicity deflector who isn't used to being in direct communication with a fan base as vocal and passionate as YouTube's. (...)
Her skills as a leader and operator are going to be tested at YouTube like they never were during her 15-year career at Google. Although YouTube is one of the most important brands at Google, "there's a perception that YouTube is punching below its weight," says Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Maker Studios, one of the leading management-production companies that work with YouTube creators to help them be more professional and make more money. "I assume even Google and YouTube believe it can monetize better. This is something Susan is very focused on."
Analysts estimate YouTube's 2013 revenue at $5.6 billion. (Google does not break out YouTube's revenue in its financial filings.) Facebook, the other Internet phenomenon with more than 1 billion users worldwide, brought in more than $7 billion in 2013, almost half from mobile advertising. Indeed, Facebook has been far more swift and nimble than YouTube in migrating both its audience and its business to phones, which is reflected in its $170 billion market cap. YouTube, by contrast, is valued at only $15 billion to $20 billion.
Complicating matters, Wojcicki joined YouTube amid a rising chorus of concern that creators cannot make a living producing content for the video site. The complaints: that YouTube takes a hefty 45% of revenue from ads that run with videos; and that there is such a glut of content--YouTube brags that 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site per minute--that it depresses ad rates and inhibits even the most popular creators from selling out their inventory. (...)
With both creators and their management feeling disrespected and restless, bigfoot competitors such as Amazon, Disney, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo are circling. If YouTube can't translate its longtime dominance of online video into converting the $212 billion global TV advertising market to digital, its would-be rivals figure that maybe they can.
To fend off the encroaching opposition, Wojcicki has to align the interests of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Silicon Valley--all of which play important roles in the increasingly complicated YouTube ecosystem. At the same time, she may also have the most daunting job at Google. Inside the advertising giant, the perennial question is, Where is the next $10 billion in revenue coming from? Right now all eyes are on Wojcicki.
"There were lots of letters, public letters," says Wojcicki when we meet in her office in mid-June at YouTube's San Bruno, California, headquarters. "'Open Letter to Susan Wojcicki.' 'Do These Five Things.' There were videos from creators." Even her family got in on the act. "My mom is a high school teacher, so she would tell me, 'Oh, the students liked the video you posted today. Oh, the students didn't like the video that you posted today.' As though I, personally, posted a video!" she says, laughing.Her four kids gave her a YouTube crash course. "I was just starting to get to know a lot of these videos, and they'd be like, 'Oh, no, Mom. That video came out like six months ago.' And then they would go on about the whole backstory of this content and this creator. I didn't know how much time they were spending watching YouTube."
The ambush of advice was, she admits in her amiable way, "a little overwhelming." Wojcicki, 46, is a consummate insider--she's Google employee No. 16--and a publicity deflector who isn't used to being in direct communication with a fan base as vocal and passionate as YouTube's. (...)
Her skills as a leader and operator are going to be tested at YouTube like they never were during her 15-year career at Google. Although YouTube is one of the most important brands at Google, "there's a perception that YouTube is punching below its weight," says Ynon Kreiz, CEO of Maker Studios, one of the leading management-production companies that work with YouTube creators to help them be more professional and make more money. "I assume even Google and YouTube believe it can monetize better. This is something Susan is very focused on."
Analysts estimate YouTube's 2013 revenue at $5.6 billion. (Google does not break out YouTube's revenue in its financial filings.) Facebook, the other Internet phenomenon with more than 1 billion users worldwide, brought in more than $7 billion in 2013, almost half from mobile advertising. Indeed, Facebook has been far more swift and nimble than YouTube in migrating both its audience and its business to phones, which is reflected in its $170 billion market cap. YouTube, by contrast, is valued at only $15 billion to $20 billion.
Complicating matters, Wojcicki joined YouTube amid a rising chorus of concern that creators cannot make a living producing content for the video site. The complaints: that YouTube takes a hefty 45% of revenue from ads that run with videos; and that there is such a glut of content--YouTube brags that 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site per minute--that it depresses ad rates and inhibits even the most popular creators from selling out their inventory. (...)
With both creators and their management feeling disrespected and restless, bigfoot competitors such as Amazon, Disney, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo are circling. If YouTube can't translate its longtime dominance of online video into converting the $212 billion global TV advertising market to digital, its would-be rivals figure that maybe they can.
To fend off the encroaching opposition, Wojcicki has to align the interests of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Silicon Valley--all of which play important roles in the increasingly complicated YouTube ecosystem. At the same time, she may also have the most daunting job at Google. Inside the advertising giant, the perennial question is, Where is the next $10 billion in revenue coming from? Right now all eyes are on Wojcicki.
by Nicole Laporte, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Adam Fedderly
California’s Drought Just Keeps Getting Worse
All of California is in "severe drought" (shown in orange), and 82 percent is rated “extreme drought” (in red). The agency’s highest drought rating -- “exceptional drought” (crimson) -- now covers 58 percent of the state, up from 36 percent a week ago. Exceptional drought is marked by crop and pasture loss and water shortages that fall within the top two percentiles of the drought indicators.
The water reserves in California’s topsoil and subsoil are nearly depleted, and 70 percent of the state’s pastures are now rated “very poor to poor,” according to the USDA.
Reservoir levels are dropping, and groundwater is being drained from the state as farms and cities pull from difficult-to-replenish underground caches. The state’s 154 reservoirs are at 60 percent of the historical average, or 17.3 million acre feet lower than they should be. That’s more than a year’s supply of water gone missing.
It’s not the worst drought California has ever seen -- in 1977, the state’s water storage was at 41 percent of the historical average -- but conditions are still getting worse.
by Tom Randall, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Brad Rippey/U.S. Drought Monitor
Monday, August 4, 2014
The Problem with OKCupid is the Problem with the Social Web
On Monday, I tried to list some reasons why OKCupid's self-acknowledged experiments on its users didn't seem to be stirring up the same outrage that Facebook's had. Here at the end of the week, I think I was largely right: fewer people are upset, the anger is more tempered, and that has a lot to do with the reasons I gave. But one reaction I didn't expect is that some people took it as saying that I wasn't upset by what OKCupid did, or that people shouldn't be as upset by it.
What OKCupid did has actually made me madder and madder as the week's gone on, but for reasons that are different from other people's. I think this is pretty important, so I'm going to try to explain why. (...)
Even the filtering algorithms, we're both told and led to assume, are the product of our choices. Either we make these choices explicitly (mute this user, don't show me this again, more results like these) or implicitly (we liked the last five baby pictures, so Facebook shows us more baby pictures; we looked at sites X, Y, and Z, so we see Amazon ads for people who looked at X, Y, and Z. It's not arbitrary; it's personalized. And it's personalized for our benefit, to reflect the choices that we and the people we trust have made.
This is what makes the user-created social web great. It's the value it adds over traditional news media, traditional classified ads, traditional shopping, everything.
We keep copyright on everything we write and every image we post, giving these services a broad license to use it. And whenever the terms of service seem to be saying that these companies have the right to do things we would never want them to do, we're told that these are just the legal terms that the companies need in order to offer the ordinary, everyday service that we've asked them to do for us.
This is why it really stings whenever somebody turns around and says, "well actually, the terms you've signed give us permission to do whatever we want. Not just the thing you were afraid of, but a huge range of things you never thought of." You can't on one hand tell us to pay no attention when you change these things on us, and with the other insist that this is what we've really wanted to do all along. I mean, fuck me over, but don't tell me that I really wanted you to fuck me over all along.
Because ultimately, the reason you needed me to agree in the first place isn't just because I'm using your software, but because you're using my stuff. And the reason I'm letting you use my stuff, and spending all this time working on it, is so that you can show it to people.
I'm not just a user of your service, somebody who reads the things that you show it to me: I'm one of the reasons you have anything that you can show to anyone at all.
by Tim Carmody, Kottke.org | Read more:
Image: via:
Mosquito Hell
[ed. The irresistible joys of roughing it in the Alaska bush. When you're breathing mosquitoes (or trying to shit in a black cloud of fast, biting bugs), you really do ask yourself, what the hell am I doing here?]
It's not always easy to talk to Outsiders about mosquitoes. They nod knowingly and mention Maine or Minnesota. I usually stop and talk about something else. I've been to those places, and Central America, and Africa. I remember the dark, warm nights, the rain, the bandits with machetes and machine guns. But not so much the mosquitoes.
These last two springs, the young, aggressive bugs have hatched late. Recently, my coworker Linnea Wik and I flew to Ambler. Even though it was early June, we saw only two or three mosquitoes all weekend. It was cold, yet strangely pleasant with no bugs. I liked the reprieve, but worried the swallows and other species might be starving while we humans gloated.
Sure enough, as soon as the cool weather eased slightly, hungry young mosquitoes swarmed. I knew it was bad when Don Williams and his son Alvin both texted me from Ambler about the bugs. They don't usually mention them.
About that time, a French archaeology student, Angelique, emailed me, asking if I might hike with her into the mountains north of the Kobuk to look for various sources of jade used by the old Inupiaq to make weapons and tools. All I knew about this woman was that she'd first contacted me a year ago, was half Polish and was very persistent. I wrote back, saying I was busy, she should hire villagers for any transport and the only thing I knew about archaeology was that she needed to get explicit permission from landowners. I also warned her about the brush -- thick nowadays back in the hills -- and the mosquitoes.
Unfortunately, talking about bugs in the Arctic right away makes a person sound like they're exaggerating. “It's hard to breathe,” I tell people. “Don't worry about bears. Going to the bathroom is going to seem like a life-threatening experience.” (...)
By midnight the first day, sweating and scratched after 11 hours thrashing through mindlessly thick brush, we slumped in damp moss, not quite desperate but getting there. We were too tired to eat and nearly out of water, again. Somehow the bugs seemed to worsen, hour after hour. Clouds pelted us and rode along on our packs; the buzzing was ceaseless and every 15 minutes we had to re-spray our bug shirts. I'd never seen dwarf birch like these in the Arctic -- over our heads and as thick around as my wrist, blocking all view, tangling our feet and tearing at our skin and clothes. Our progress for the last four hours had been about 900 yards an hour. My arm was numb from swinging the machete and my elbow bruised from hitting the butt of my pistol. My shoulder holster under my pack chafed through to the meat.
Angelique's boots had worn holes and her feet were soaked and blistered. With a pack on her back and another on her front, half-blinded by her bug shield, she'd fallen countless times in the brush and into creeks and swamps we crossed. Throughout the day I'd heard her call out, “Set? Set?” as she tried to locate me a few yards ahead in the brush. I hadn't heard a complaint, though. (...)
“Whose idea was this?” I muttered -- my perennial mantra.
“He usually says that when something was his idea,” Linnea reassured Angelique.
We laughed and shared the last of our water and a granola bar, doing what we'd been doing all day: suffering, sharing and laughing. In that way I guess this really was Angelique's idea -- because I imagine the old people did a lot of that: suffering, sharing, and laughing. (...)
The following day we broke camp, our packs heavy with rocks, and headed downstream, along the thickly vegetated banks of the creek. Travel was hideous. My jeans were frayed fuzzy and torn, and black flies swarmed, crawling everywhere under our clothes, biting and joining the frenzy of the mosquitoes.
Angelique's feet, after days wet, were a puffy mess. The plan had been to inflate our packrafts here and drift, maybe barefoot in the boats, resting, occasionally paddling while pleasantly dreaming of cold beers.
Unfortunately, the thickets along the banks were crisscrossed with overgrown dead-fall spruce, mired with sinkholes and wet side-channels. The pretty blue line on my USGS map translated into a narrow, turbulent chute with boulder teeth. Every hundred yards or so, a log lay across the creek, limbs combing the water.
Angelique informed me again that she couldn't swim. I assured her that it would be fine -- I couldn't either. We weren't getting in that creek anyway; we were stuck behind my machete, slashing a path, staying beside the stream so she could collect more samples.
That night, in addition to mosquitoes, our tent filled with tiny, crawling black flies. We sprayed the netting with bug dope until they fell, covering the floor and our clothes and sleeping bags with writhing half-dead bugs. Outside, the tent was being pelted. During the night I awoke, convinced that now it really was raining, a soft steady downpour. “It is rain?” Angelique asked. But it was only more and more insects striking the tent.
It's not always easy to talk to Outsiders about mosquitoes. They nod knowingly and mention Maine or Minnesota. I usually stop and talk about something else. I've been to those places, and Central America, and Africa. I remember the dark, warm nights, the rain, the bandits with machetes and machine guns. But not so much the mosquitoes.
These last two springs, the young, aggressive bugs have hatched late. Recently, my coworker Linnea Wik and I flew to Ambler. Even though it was early June, we saw only two or three mosquitoes all weekend. It was cold, yet strangely pleasant with no bugs. I liked the reprieve, but worried the swallows and other species might be starving while we humans gloated.Sure enough, as soon as the cool weather eased slightly, hungry young mosquitoes swarmed. I knew it was bad when Don Williams and his son Alvin both texted me from Ambler about the bugs. They don't usually mention them.
About that time, a French archaeology student, Angelique, emailed me, asking if I might hike with her into the mountains north of the Kobuk to look for various sources of jade used by the old Inupiaq to make weapons and tools. All I knew about this woman was that she'd first contacted me a year ago, was half Polish and was very persistent. I wrote back, saying I was busy, she should hire villagers for any transport and the only thing I knew about archaeology was that she needed to get explicit permission from landowners. I also warned her about the brush -- thick nowadays back in the hills -- and the mosquitoes.
Unfortunately, talking about bugs in the Arctic right away makes a person sound like they're exaggerating. “It's hard to breathe,” I tell people. “Don't worry about bears. Going to the bathroom is going to seem like a life-threatening experience.” (...)
By midnight the first day, sweating and scratched after 11 hours thrashing through mindlessly thick brush, we slumped in damp moss, not quite desperate but getting there. We were too tired to eat and nearly out of water, again. Somehow the bugs seemed to worsen, hour after hour. Clouds pelted us and rode along on our packs; the buzzing was ceaseless and every 15 minutes we had to re-spray our bug shirts. I'd never seen dwarf birch like these in the Arctic -- over our heads and as thick around as my wrist, blocking all view, tangling our feet and tearing at our skin and clothes. Our progress for the last four hours had been about 900 yards an hour. My arm was numb from swinging the machete and my elbow bruised from hitting the butt of my pistol. My shoulder holster under my pack chafed through to the meat.
Angelique's boots had worn holes and her feet were soaked and blistered. With a pack on her back and another on her front, half-blinded by her bug shield, she'd fallen countless times in the brush and into creeks and swamps we crossed. Throughout the day I'd heard her call out, “Set? Set?” as she tried to locate me a few yards ahead in the brush. I hadn't heard a complaint, though. (...)
“Whose idea was this?” I muttered -- my perennial mantra.
“He usually says that when something was his idea,” Linnea reassured Angelique.
We laughed and shared the last of our water and a granola bar, doing what we'd been doing all day: suffering, sharing and laughing. In that way I guess this really was Angelique's idea -- because I imagine the old people did a lot of that: suffering, sharing, and laughing. (...)
The following day we broke camp, our packs heavy with rocks, and headed downstream, along the thickly vegetated banks of the creek. Travel was hideous. My jeans were frayed fuzzy and torn, and black flies swarmed, crawling everywhere under our clothes, biting and joining the frenzy of the mosquitoes.
Angelique's feet, after days wet, were a puffy mess. The plan had been to inflate our packrafts here and drift, maybe barefoot in the boats, resting, occasionally paddling while pleasantly dreaming of cold beers.
Unfortunately, the thickets along the banks were crisscrossed with overgrown dead-fall spruce, mired with sinkholes and wet side-channels. The pretty blue line on my USGS map translated into a narrow, turbulent chute with boulder teeth. Every hundred yards or so, a log lay across the creek, limbs combing the water.
Angelique informed me again that she couldn't swim. I assured her that it would be fine -- I couldn't either. We weren't getting in that creek anyway; we were stuck behind my machete, slashing a path, staying beside the stream so she could collect more samples.
That night, in addition to mosquitoes, our tent filled with tiny, crawling black flies. We sprayed the netting with bug dope until they fell, covering the floor and our clothes and sleeping bags with writhing half-dead bugs. Outside, the tent was being pelted. During the night I awoke, convinced that now it really was raining, a soft steady downpour. “It is rain?” Angelique asked. But it was only more and more insects striking the tent.
by Seth Kantner, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Stephen Nowers
Sunday, August 3, 2014
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