How to Find a Lost Cell Phone

So you’ve lost your phone. We’ve all been there. It was just in your pocket a minute ago — and now it’s gone, lost to the phone fairies, forgotten between the seats of your couch, or misplaced somewhere during your busy day. Maybe it’s just in your other coat, or maybe it’s already in the hands of someone who found it on the sidewalk. Either way, all you want to do is get it back.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to get a hold of your missing phone. If it’s a smartphone (or even a tablet) running iOS, Android, or even Windows Phone, chances are good it already has the software needed to hunt it down — or there’s an app you can install to track your phone. Here’s our guide on how to find your phone or a similar device, including the old-fashioned way if you still own an aging flip phone.
Smartphones

If your lost phone happens to be a smartphone, all three of the major smartphone platform providers (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) now include phone retrieval technology in their smartphones, just in case you ever end up losing it but forget to install a “find my phone” app. Usually, the way these apps work is through the account associated with your device. For Android devices this is your Google account, for iPhones this is your iCloud account, and for Windows Phones this is your Microsoft account. All three allow you to remotely lock and wipe your phone, make it ring, and set up special messages to alert whoever finds it.

Of course, these features are only as good as your phone’s battery. If your smartphone dies, it’s about as easy to find as your wallet or anything else you might misplace.

We also recommend caution when communicating with anyone who has found your smartphone. Be careful to avoid giving away any personal information, such as your home address, until you know you’re dealing with someone you can trust. Stick with sending phone numbers or email addresses to communicate how the good Samaritan can return your phone. Here’s how each of the three operating systems work.

How to find a lost Android phone

Android not only offers Google’s proprietary service for finding and managing your device remotely, but also a number of third-party apps designed for finding your smartphone. The easiest to use is Find My Device, which is built directly into your Android smartphone through Google Play Services — it can also be used in a browser or downloaded from the Google Play Store. Most devices running Android 2.3 or later should be able to use this feature. Using the feature is as easy as searching “Where is my phone” in Google, which will prompt the service to start looking for your smartphone. We’ve previously written about Find My Device and its ability to call you, set up a new password, and make your phone ring from afar, along with the variety of other functions it uses for notification purposes. While you can configure Find My Device ahead of time, the service should be available in the event you lose or misplace your phone. It will use Wi-Fi or GPS to help you hunt down your device.

To verify your Android smartphone has the Find My Device feature turned on, go to Settings > Google > Security and make sure Remotely locate this device and Allow remote lock and erase are turned on in the Android Device Manager section.

If you can’t find your smartphone, you can always wipe it to prevent sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands. Your device will need an internet connection, however, and enough juice to communicate with you. In Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google also introduced Factory Reset Protection (FRP). It’s designed to prevent would-be thieves from being able to steal your phone, wipe it, and then use it or sell it. If you factory reset a phone with FRP enabled and try to set it up as a new device, you’ll be prompted to enter the user name and password for the last Google account that was registered on the device, and if you can’t, the phone will remain locked.

There are also third-party apps that you can install to help you find your phone. Cerberus Anti-theft is a great app that can be installed remotely, allowing you to obtain more information regarding the whereabouts of your phone. It provides a number of additional features, such as more granular control on how you track your device, screenshots of what your device is doing, photos from the camera to possibly catch the would-be thief, and other, more detailed notifications that Find My Device doesn’t offer. If your device is rooted, there are even more features available to prevent someone from resetting or turning off your device until you can recover it.

Another option for select Samsung smartphones is the Find My Mobile service. It can be used to locate a missing phone, lock it down, or wipe it completely. You’ll need a Samsung account, though, and the Remote Controls options enabled on your phone. To check and see if Find My Mobile is available for your smartphone, go to Settings > Security. If you see Find My Mobile in the menu, you can use the service; enable the Remote Controls options via Settings > Security > Find My Mobile > Remote controls.

by Joshua Sherman, Digital Trends |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Remembering David Lewiston, 1929–2017

Sometimes by bus; sometimes by jeep or truck or caravanserai; sometimes by donkey, though not if he could help it; and almost always on foot, across rickety bridges and footpaths, up the sides of mountains, through valleys and hills rife with goats and wayward sheep, over rocks and fences, across streams and rivers swollen by rain or dry from drought; carrying a small (but not that small) portable tape recorder, twenty or thirty reels of quarter-inch tape, a couple of microphones, cables, a week’s supply of batteries, a few packs of Fortnum & Mason tea, and a few spare shirts. The shirts have been lost to time and forgotten laundries—but the tapes, the recordings from those travels, still circulate fifty years on, filling listeners with pleasure and astonishment.

David Lewiston was born in London in 1929 and graduated from Trinity College of Music in 1953. Already interested in the spiritual teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Lewiston moved to New York City to study piano and composition with Thomas DeHartmann, Gurdjieff’s aide-de-camp and musical collaborator, and an esteemed composer in his own right. From the Gurdjieff work, Lewiston learned about the many uses of solitude; from his studies with DeHartmann, who had helped Gurdjieff transcribe and notate Eastern hymns and dervish melodies, he learned to hear and appreciate music outside of the Western canon. These proved useful as Lewiston began traveling, but neither talent helped him support himself as a young musician in New York, and he reinvented himself as a financial journalist, working on staff for Forbes and then for an in-house journal of the American Bankers Association, a magazine so dull it practically walked to the trash bin and threw itself away.

Was he bored?

“Of course I was bored! It was awful,” he told me once.

And so in 1966, he took a short sabbatical: borrowed a couple of good microphones and a few hundred dollars, bought a small Japanese tape recorder on a layover in Singapore, and landed in Bali, hoping to make some field recordings.

“It really was as vague as all that. I stumbled into it. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a career in mind. It was an adventure.” (...)

“These weren’t professional musicians. They might have been wonderful musicians, but this wasn’t their job. They were farmers or shepherds or craftsmen, so I had to make the recording sessions enjoyable for them, they had to feel appreciated. Sometimes by having plenty of beer or wine—though not so much that they’d fall asleep—and sometimes by simply paying attention. You always want to be paid, but it doesn’t always have to be with money. Musicians play differently when they know that someone’s really listening. I’ve been in a room where someone is playing piano, and maybe they’re distracted, their mind is somewhere else. And a composer or a very good player or just a keen listener will walk into that room and start to pay close attention to their sound, to the shading of the notes … and even if the player can’t see them, they’ll feel them there, they can sense them there, and the level of playing will come up a notch. Or more.

“Also, I didn’t just focus on the recordings. It had to be about the whole experience. If someone made a mistake or the wind knocked over a microphone, I wouldn’t stop and say take two. I couldn’t stop things that way, I needed the musicians to be deeply inside the music, and so I would wait until a whole performance was over and just say, ‘My, that was marvelous! What was that second piece? Could I hear that again?’ And just hope that the wind wouldn’t knock things over and that this time the genggung player wouldn’t fart.”

Lewiston’s first trip to Bali only lasted ten days, and when he returned to New York, he tried to figure out what to do with the tapes he’d recorded. Looking through records at Sam Goody, he noticed a few albums of music from Bulgaria, Japan, and Tahiti on the Nonesuch label, and he wrote down their address with a borrowed pen and got in touch with them. And when they heard his tapes, they flipped.

Those recordings were edited down into a single album, given the lovely title Music from the Morning of the World, and released in 1967 as one of the first albums on the newly launched Nonesuch Explorer Series.

People who stumbled onto it in the sixties or seventies still tend to glow and almost blush when that album is mentioned, as if it was a secret door they walked through and never quite returned from, like a first and unexpected kiss, like a half-remembered fuck in the early hours of dawn, with foghorns in the distance. It took a strange and unfamiliar music and brought it into focus, with no thought of taming it, no effort made to popularize or present it as tame or simply exotic. It came at you with the rush of A Love Supreme or Picasso’s Guernica, all good and evil, noise and silence, and everything that was left out of Western music and everything that was hidden in the shadows of your church or your past suddenly present and shining and alive.

by Brian Cullman, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited

No Contest

It’s not hard to see why reality TV is popular with television production companies: It is cheap to make. Instead of depending on conventional writers and actors, reality shows rely more on recording and editing technology itself, which allows vast amounts of footage to be captured and pared down into satisfying, formulaic narratives. But what do these formulas consist of, and what makes them so compelling?

Reality TV has two basic genres, according to media scholar June Deery: docusoap, which primarily revolves around interpersonal relationships and lifestyles — shows like the Real Housewives and Big Brother franchises, or Duck Dynasty and the Kardashian shows — and competition, which explicitly pits participants against one another in what are typically elimination contests, using rewards and punishments to orient, motivate, and rationalize their behavior. But in certain respects, this distinction between genres is superficial. Regardless of whether participants are playing a literal game, in both reality genres they are ultimately competing against one another for attention and screen time.

That kind of attention can propel a reality-TV cast member into future career opportunities: more appearances on more shows, lucrative product endorsements, and even their own lines of products, as with the Kardashians’ media and merchandise empire or LA Ink star Kat Von D’s makeup line. Reality TV is an engine for turning attention into money not merely in the form of advertisements in and around the shows, but also across the participants’ lives, what the shows turn into platforms. This makes garnering attention the driving force behind the shows and their governing ethos — the model for how one should live and what one should want.

Competitive reality TV might seem like a meritocratic alternative to the attention-grabbing instigation and ham-fisted melodrama of reality soaps. The format often exchanges screaming matches and backbiting for tests of skill and strength. These shows trade on the idea that hard work and individual talent eventually triumph, within competitions that ostensibly place all contestants on a fair, equal footing. But often the shows are less interested in celebrating merit than in re-creating an ideology of ruthless individualism in our living rooms and Twitter hashtags. These shows, by design, present individualism as an inherent part of human sociality: Manipulation, not cooperation, allows participants to effectively compete, whether in the context of winning challenges or gaining audience attention. Competition and conflict both reflect reality TV’s insistence on individuated narratives, reflecting the common wisdom this is what audiences want to see, and thus what advertisers are willing to pay for.

But why would audiences default to wanting to watch individuals pitted against each other? Such a formula may be popular because of how it conforms to our life experiences under an individualist and competitive model of capitalism. These principles become sense-making mechanisms, offering a way to understand and interpret our experience of culturally dominant narratives about the necessity of competition. As political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Undoing the Demos, our current neoliberal order is grounded in “a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms” and grounds individual subjectivity in notions of entrepreneurship. We are accordingly all market actor competing to increase the value of our human capital in the workplace, the educational system, and even the dating realm. Our lives, too, can be conceived as platforms, and our experiences relevant only insofar as they enhance the value of our skill sets for potential employers.

Individualism can only be a winning strategy in a system designed to reward it. This is as true of reality TV as it is of neoliberal society more generally. (...)

Enter The Great British Bake Off. It is a competition with winners and losers, yet unlike other reality TV competitions, the contestants generally accommodate each other and even assist each other at times, freeing up counter space for their beignets when needed. The bakers on the show copy each other all the time, and no one seems to mind. They look around the room to see what others are doing, getting hints on proper technique from the open floor plan, with no complaints from the other competitors. In seven seasons, there has been only one serious charge of sabotage — “bingate,” when a competitor took another baker’s ice cream out of the freezer for too long, causing it to melt — but that seems likely to have been an unfortunate accident.

While reality TV judges are often merciless, Bake Off’s hosts Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood are supportive, encouraging, and gentle with criticism. The show’s presenters, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, cheer the contestants on and lend a hand when needed. In the conventional “confessional” asides, contestants are without the usual snark and disdain for other competitors. They may be nervous, proud, disappointed, or even a bit jealous, but they are never mean. Rather than relying on conflict and cruelty, Bake Off entertains audiences through charm, pleasant and relatable characters whom you can’t help but root for, and baking that showcases contestants’ skill rather than their ability to stir up drama. It offers an alternative to universalizing narratives of competitive individualism grounded in economic rationality, instead making cooperation and civility not only consumable but explanatory. The show is not just pleasing to watch; it offers a gratifying model of the human experience.

by Britney Summit-Gil, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Harry Gruyaert, Magnum Photos

Dear Fed, It’s Not “Really Hard to Spot Bubbles”

Dear Fed, It’s Not “Really Hard to Spot Bubbles”

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Adolf Dietrich, Buntspechte [Spotted Woodpeckers], 1937.
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Hungarian Education III: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Budapestians

Laszlo Polgar studied intelligence in university, and decided he had discovered the basic principles behind raising any child to be a genius. He wrote a book called Bring Up Genius and recruited an interested woman to marry him so they could test his philosophy by raising children together. He said a bunch of stuff on how ‘natural talent’ was meaningless and so any child could become a prodigy with the right upbringing.

This is normally the point where I’d start making fun of him. Except that when he trained his three daughters in chess, they became the 1st, 2nd, and 6th best female chess players in the world, gaining honors like “youngest grandmaster ever” and “greatest female chess player of all time”. Also they spoke seven languages, including Esperanto.

Their immense success suggests that education can have a major effect even on such traditional genius-requiring domains as chess ability. How can we reconcile that with the rest of our picture of the world, and how obsessed should we be with getting a copy of Laszlo Polgar’s book?

Let’s get this out of the way first: the Polgar sisters were probably genetically really smart. The whole family was Hungarian Jews, a group with a great track record. Their mother and father were both well-educated teachers interested in stuff like developmental psychology. They had every possible biological advantage and I’m sure that helped.

J Levitt proposes an equation to estimate a chess player’s IQ from their chess score. It suggests that chess grandmasters probably have IQs above 160. Plugging the Polgar sisters’ chess scores into his equation, I get IQs in the range of 150, 160, and 170 for the three sisters.

[EDIT: Thanks to a few people who pointed out some problems with my math here (1, 2, 3). I still think that having three supergenius-IQ kids when you and your spouse show no signs of being a supergenius yourself (Laszlo Polgar’s daughters could beat him at chess by the time they were 8) is pretty unlikely, but I admit not impossible. I still think arguing about this is unnecessary thanks to the points below.]

On the other hand, I’m not sure Levitt’s right. Chess champion Gary Kasparov actually sat and took an IQ test for the magazine Der Spiegel, and his IQ was 135. That’s not bad – it’s top 1% of the population – but it’s not amazing either.

This is what we should expect given the correlation of about r = 0.24 between IQ and chess ability (see also this analysis, although I disagree with the details). And the contrary claims – like the one that Bobby Fischer’s IQ was in the 180s – are less well-sourced (although Fischer was the son of a Hungarian-Jewish mathematician, so who knows?).

If it were possible to be a chess world champion with an IQ of 135, then maybe it’s possible to be a “mere” grandmaster with IQs in the high 120s and low 130s. And it’s just barely plausible that some sufficiently smart people might have three kids who all have IQs in the high 120s and low 130s.

But this just passes the buck on the mystery. 2% of people have IQs in the high 120s or low 130s, but 2% of people aren’t the top-ranked female chess player in the world. The Polgar sisters’ IQs might have been a permissive factor in allowing them to excel, but it didn’t necessitate it. So what’s going on there?

“Practice” seems like an obvious part of the picture. Malcolm Gladwell uses the Polgars as poster children for his famous ‘10,000 hours of practice makes you an expert at anything’ rule. The Polgars had 50,000 hours of chess practice each by the time they were adults, presumably enough to make them quintuple-experts.

Robert Howard has a paper Does High-Level Performance Depend On Practice Alone? Debunking The Polgar Sisters Case in which he argues against the strong version of Gladwell’s thesis. He points out that there are many chess masters who have practiced much less than the Polgar sisters but are better than they are. He also points out that even though the sisters themselves have all practiced similar amounts, youngest sister Judit is clearly better than the other two in a way that practice alone cannot explain.

I don’t know if the case he’s arguing against – that practice is literally everything and it’s impossible for anything else to factor in – is a straw man or not. But it seems more important to consider a less silly argument – that practice is one of many factors, and that enough of it can make up for a lack of the others. This seems potentially true. This study showing that amount of practice only explains 12% of the variance in skill level at various tasks, and is often summarized as “practice doesn’t matter much”. But it finds practice matters more (25% of the variance) in unchanging games with clear fixed rules, and uses chess as an example.

So suppose that the Polgar sisters are genetically smart, but maybe not as high up there as some other chess masters. We would expect them to need much more practice to achieve a level of proficiency similar to those chess masters, and indeed that seems like what happens.

(all of this is confounded by them being women and almost all the other equally-good chess masters being men. It’s unclear if the Polgars deserve extra points for overcoming whatever factor usually keeps women out of the highest levels of chess.)

But I’m actually still not sure this suffices as an explanation. According to Wikipedia:

Polgár began teaching his eldest daughter, Susan, to play chess when she was four years old. Six months later, Susan toddled into Budapest’s smoke-filled chess club,” which was crowded with elderly men, and proceeded to beat the veteran players.

The study linked above suggests that Susan practiced 48 hours a week. During those six months, she would have accumulated about 1200 hours of practice. Suppose the elderly Budapest chess players practiced only one hour a week, but had been doing so for the last twenty-five years. They would have more practice than Susan – plus the advantage of having older, more developed brains. So why did she beat them so easily?

Maybe there’s a time-decay factor for practice? That is, maybe Susan had been practicing intensively, so she got a lot of chances to link it all together as she was learning, and also it was fresh in her mind when she went to the club to go play? I’m not sure. If some of those veterans had been playing more than one hour a week (and surely the sort of people who frequent Budapest chess clubs do) then her advantage seems too implausible to be due to freshness-of-material alone.

That leaves two possibilities.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

Image: via:
[ed. See also: The Atomic Bomb Considered as a Hungarian High School Science Fair Project]

The Addicts Next Door

Michael Barrett and Jenna Mulligan, emergency paramedics in Berkeley County, West Virginia, recently got a call that sent them to the youth softball field in a tiny town called Hedgesville. It was the first practice of the season for the girls’ Little League team, and dusk was descending. Barrett and Mulligan drove past a clubhouse with a blue-and-yellow sign that read “Home of the Lady Eagles,” and stopped near a scrubby set of bleachers, where parents had gathered to watch their daughters bat and field.

Two of the parents were lying on the ground, unconscious, several yards apart. As Barrett later recalled, the couple’s thirteen-year-old daughter was sitting behind a chain-link backstop with her teammates, who were hugging her and comforting her. The couple’s younger children, aged ten and seven, were running back and forth between their parents, screaming, “Wake up! Wake up!” When Barrett and Mulligan knelt down to administer Narcan, a drug that reverses heroin overdoses, some of the other parents got angry. “You know, saying, ‘This is bullcrap,’ ” Barrett told me. “ ‘Why’s my kid gotta see this? Just let ’em lay there.’ ” After a few minutes, the couple began to groan as they revived. Adults ushered the younger kids away. From the other side of the backstop, the older kids asked Barrett if the parents had overdosed. “I was, like, ‘I’m not gonna say.’ The kids aren’t stupid. They know people don’t just pass out for no reason.” During the chaos, someone made a call to Child Protective Services.

At this stage of the American opioid epidemic, many addicts are collapsing in public—in gas stations, in restaurant bathrooms, in the aisles of big-box stores. Brian Costello, a former Army medic who is the director of the Berkeley County Emergency Medical Services, believes that more overdoses are occurring in this way because users figure that somebody will find them before they die. “To people who don’t have that addiction, that sounds crazy,” he said. “But, from a health-care provider’s standpoint, you say to yourself, ‘No, this is survival to them.’ They’re struggling with using but not wanting to die.”

A month after the incident, the couple from the softball field, Angel Dawn Holt, who is thirty-five, and her boyfriend, Christopher Schildt, who is thirty-three, were arraigned on felony charges of child neglect. (Schildt is not the biological father of Holt’s kids.) A local newspaper, the Martinsburg Journal, ran an article about the charges, noting that the couple’s children, who had been “crying when law enforcement arrived,” had been “turned over to their grandfather.”

West Virginia has the highest overdose death rate in the country, and heroin has devastated the state’s Eastern Panhandle, which includes Hedgesville and the larger town of Martinsburg. Like the vast majority of residents there, nearly all the addicts are white, were born in the area, and have modest incomes. Because they can’t be dismissed as outsiders, some locals view them with empathy. Other residents regard addicts as community embarrassments. Many people in the Panhandle have embraced the idea of addiction as a disease, but a vocal cohort dismisses this as a fantasy disseminated by urban liberals.

These tensions were aired in online comments that amassed beneath the Journal article. A waitress named Sandy wrote, “Omgsh, How sad!! Shouldnt be able to have there kids back! Seems the heroin was more important to them, than watchn there kids have fun play ball, and have there parents proud of them!!” A poster named Valerie wrote, “Stop giving them Narcan! At the tax payers expense.” Such views were countered by a reader named Diana: “I’m sure the parents didn’t get up that morning and say hey let’s scar the kids for life. I’m sure they wished they could sit through the kids practice without having to get high. The only way to understand it is to have lived it. The children need to be in a safe home and the adults need help. They are sick, i know from the outside it looks like a choice but its not. Shaming and judging will not help anyone.”

One day, Angel Holt started posting comments. “I don’t neglect,” she wrote. “Had a bad judgment I love my kids and my kids love me there honor roll students my oldest son is about to graduate they play sports and have a ruff over there head that I own and food, and things they just want I messed up give me a chance to prove my self I don’t have to prove shit to none of u just my children n they know who I am and who I’m not.”

A few weeks later, I spoke to Holt on the phone. “Where it happened was really horrible,” she said. “I can’t sit here and say different.” But, she said, it had been almost impossible to find help for her addiction. On the day of the softball practice, she ingested a small portion of a package of heroin that she and Schildt had just bought, figuring that she’d be able to keep it together at the field; she had promised her daughter that she’d be there. But the heroin had a strange purple tint—it must have been cut with something nasty. She started feeling weird, and passed out. She knew that she shouldn’t have touched heroin that was so obviously adulterated. But, she added, “if you’re an addict, and if you have the stuff, you do it.”

In Berkeley County, which has a population of a hundred and fourteen thousand, when someone under sixty dies, and the cause of death isn’t mentioned in the paper, locals assume that it was an overdose. It’s becoming the default explanation when an ambulance stops outside a neighbor’s house, and the best guess for why someone is sitting in his car on the side of the road in the middle of the afternoon. On January 18th, county officials started using a new app to record overdoses. According to this data, during the next two and a half months emergency medical personnel responded to a hundred and forty-five overdoses, eighteen of which were fatal. This underestimates the scale of the epidemic, because many overdoses do not prompt 911 calls. Last year, the county’s annual budget for emergency medication was twenty-seven thousand dollars. Narcan, which costs fifty dollars a dose, consumed two-thirds of that allotment. The medication was administered two hundred and twenty-three times in 2014, and four hundred and three times in 2016. (...)

Heroin is an alluringly cheap alternative to prescription pain medication. In 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, marketing it as a safer form of opiate—the class of painkillers derived from the poppy plant. (The term “opioids” encompasses synthetic versions of opiates as well.) Opiates such as morphine block pain but also produce a dreamy euphoria, and over time they cause physical cravings. OxyContin was sold in time-release capsules that levelled out the high and, supposedly, diminished the risk of addiction, but people soon discovered that the capsules could be crushed into powder and then injected or snorted. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of overdose deaths in the United States jumped by a hundred and thirty-seven per cent.

Some states became inundated with opiates. According to the Charleston Gazette-Mail, between 2007 and 2012 drug wholesalers shipped to West Virginia seven hundred and eighty million pills of hydrocodone (the generic name for Vicodin) and oxycodone (the generic name for OxyContin). That was enough to give each resident four hundred and thirty-three pills. The state has a disproportionate number of people who have jobs that cause physical pain, such as coal mining. It also has high levels of poverty and joblessness, which cause psychic pain. Mental-health services, meanwhile, are scant. Chess Yellott, a retired family practitioner in Martinsburg, told me that many West Virginians self-medicate to mute depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress from sexual assault or childhood abuse. “Those things are treatable, and upper-middle-class parents generally get their kids treated,” he said. “But, in families with a lot of chaos and money problems, kids don’t get help.”

In 2010, Purdue introduced a reformulated capsule that is harder to crush or dissolve. The Centers for Disease Control subsequently issued new guidelines stipulating that doctors should not routinely treat chronic pain with opioids, and instead should try approaches such as exercise and behavioral therapy. The number of prescriptions for opioids began to drop.

But when prescription opioids became scarcer their street price went up. Drug cartels sensed an opportunity, and began flooding rural America with heroin. Daniel Ciccarone, a professor at the U.C.-San Francisco School of Medicine, studies the heroin market. He said of the cartels, “They’re multinational, savvy, borderless entities. They worked very hard to move high-quality heroin into places like rural Vermont.” They also kept the price low. In West Virginia, many addicts told me, an oxycodone pill now sells for about eighty dollars; a dose of heroin can be bought for about ten.

A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes, “Following the OxyContin reformulation in 2010, abuse of prescription opioid medications and overdose deaths decreased for the first time since 1990. However, this drop coincided with an unprecedented rise in heroin overdoses.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, three out of four new heroin users report having first abused opioids.

“The Changing Face of Heroin Use in the United States,” a 2014 study led by Theodore Cicero, of Washington University in St. Louis, looked at some three thousand heroin addicts in substance-abuse programs. Half of those who began using heroin before 1980 were white; nearly ninety per cent of those who began using in the past decade were white. This demographic shift may be connected to prescribing patterns. A 2012 study by a University of Pennsylvania researcher found that black patients were thirty-four per cent less likely than white patients to be prescribed opioids for such chronic conditions as back pain and migraines, and fourteen per cent less likely to receive such prescriptions after surgery or traumatic injury.

But a larger factor, it seems, was the despair of white people in struggling small towns. Judith Feinberg, a professor at West Virginia University who studies drug addiction, described opioids as “the ultimate escape drugs.” She told me, “Boredom and a sense of uselessness and inadequacy—these are human failings that lead you to just want to withdraw. On heroin, you curl up in a corner and blank out the world. It’s an extremely seductive drug for dead-end towns, because it makes the world’s problems go away. Much more so than coke or meth, where you want to run around and do things—you get aggressive, razzed and jazzed.”

Peter Callahan, a psychotherapist in Martinsburg, said that heroin “is a very tough drug to get off of, because, while it was meant to numb physical pain, it numbs emotional pain as well—quickly and intensely.” In tight-knit Appalachian towns, heroin has become a social contagion. Nearly everyone I met in Martinsburg has ties to someone—a child, a sibling, a girlfriend, an in-law, an old high-school coach—who has struggled with opioids. As Callahan put it, “If the lady next door is using, and so are other neighbors, and people in your family are, too, the odds are good that you’re going to join in.”

by Margaret Talbot, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Eugene Richards

Andrej Dugin
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The Way Ahead (or Pandora 5.0)

The great Canadian Marshall McLuhan –– philosopher should one call him? – whose prophetic soul seems more and more amazing with each passing year, gave us the phrase the ‘Global Village’ to describe the post-printing age that he already saw coming back in the 1950s. Where the Printing Age had ‘fragmented the psyche’ as he put it, the Global Village – whose internal tensions exist in the paradoxical nature of the phrase itself: both Global and a village – this would tribalise us, he thought and actually regress us to a second oral age. Writing in 1962, before even ARPANET, the ancestor of the internet existed, this is how he forecasts the electronic age which he thinks will change human cognition and behaviour:-

“Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world will become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses go outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. […] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. […] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture”.

Like much of McLuhan’s writing, densely packed with complex ideas as they are, this repays far more study and unpicking than would be appropriate here, but I think we might all agree that we have arrived at that “phase of panic terrors” he foresaw. Let me suggest a few of the anxieties we feel about the digital world today:

• Aside from the ugliness and ferocity of trolling on social media, we fret over the so-called post-truth age, with its arguments over what is ‘fake news’ and what are ‘alternative facts’ and the concomitant diminution of trust in any authoritative source of information, or consensus as to the validity and credibility of news and current events at all.
• The refusal of social media platforms to take responsibility for those dangerous, fake, defamatory, inflammatory and fake items whose effects would have legal consequences for traditional printed or broadcast media but which they can escape.
• The rise of big data and one’s personal footprint of analytics, spending and preferences, becoming, willy nilly, corporate property. The ever present threat to our privacy that this involves concerns us. Everyone we know, everything we read, watch, listen to, eat, everything we desire and perhaps every electronic message we send – all readable by a corporation or a government.
• The unfair non-contractual working practices afoot in the so-called Gig Economy – Uber Drivers, delivery couriers and so on. Not to mention the effect of those services on the pre-existing workforce of cab-drivers and others whose hard won qualifications might be set at nought.
• The ghettoisation of opinion and identity, known as the filter bubble, apportioning us narrow sources of information that accord with our pre-existing views, giving a whole new power to cognitive bias, entrenching us in our political and social beliefs, ever widening the canyon between us and those who disagree with us. And the more the canyon widens, the farther away the other side and the less likely we are to hear or see what goes on there, intensifying the problem and always at the super new speeds this digital new world confers.
• The threats to personal, national and transnational security – threats emanating from ‘bad actors’ that might be cyber-extortionists, unscrupulous corporations, unfriendly foreign powers, intrusive domestic governments and their agencies.
• The threat to the young of grooming that leads to abuse, or of recruitment that leads to extremist and violent ideologies and actions.
• Algorithms continue every microsecond to harvest data of my movements, by GPS for example, analyse my actions, read my gmail, build up information on my mood, sexuality, political, religious and cultural affiliations, habits and propensities – such data is for sale …
• Bullying – especially of the young. Body shaming. Blackmail. Extortion. Revenge porn. On-air suicides, encouragements to self-harm and live-streamed violence.
• The corporate assault on net neutrality.
• The fragile security of our entire digital world and the ever-present looming possibility of a Big One, that cataclysm brought about either by malice, act of war, systemic technical failure, or some other unforeseen cause, an extinction level event which will obliterate our title deeds, eliminate our personal records, annul our bank accounts and life savings, delete all the archives and accumulated data of our existences and create a kind of digital winter for humankind.

These are some of the things that rightly worry us. An example of every one of them can be found almost daily in a story on-line or in the mainstream so called dead tree media. All of them individually, or in a potential catastrophic avalanche, threaten to engulf us. One thesis I could immediately nail up to the tent flap is to join in the call for aggregating news entities like Facebook to be legally classified as publishers. At the moment they are evading responsibility for their content because they can claim to be ‘platforms’ rather than publishers. Given that they are the main source of news for over 80% of the population that is clearly an absurd anomaly. If they and Twitter and like platforms recognise their responsibility as publishers it will certainly help them better police their content for unacceptable libels, defamations, threats and other horrors that a free but legally bound press would as a matter of course be expected to control. But that correction of the legal standing and responsibility of social media platforms is almost certainly going to happen and soon, and is, frankly, small potatoes – as, to some extent, are the other anxieties I’ve outlined. For there is so more, so much more coming – as they say in America – down the pike. Some huge potatoes are looming on the horizon. (...)

If intelligent systems can design systems more intelligent than themselves, the exponentially steep rate of improvement will dizzy our minds. It’s very important to keep this perhaps obvious point in mind: in the field of technology we never arrive at a state of finished satisfaction. The way things are now is not how they will be in two years time. Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh water is always flowing past you. The technological stream similarly allows for no sense of stasis. Technology is not a noun, it is a verb – a process. We know that our economics is in flux too, predicated and dependent on growth, growth, growth. What we have to accept is that there has been a confluence of that economic imperative for growth, Moore’s Law of ever-increasing computational power, human curiosity and ambition and our very particular kind of consumer addiction and need for the new – all of which have swollen the river of technological progress into flood.

Great gifts will come this new phase, from Pandora 5.0, of course they will. Let me sketch a few more or less at random and far from complete. History teaches that everything I say will be an underestimation. So, AI, robotics and smart devices in the biotech and medical sphere are already coming on line, the NHS has a deal with Google’s Deep Mind machine-learning AI (originally a British company Deep Mind is now the world champion at the game Go, which it taught itself), this kind of AI in the clinical realm will offer earlier diagnosis, the ability to read medical imaging data with much more accuracy and spot incipient signs of disease, making radiologists for example redundant; in the area of virology and related sciences it can assist with analysis of amino acids, protein structures and the creation of serums and treatments hugely accelerating drug development; we will see the manufacture of greater and better cybernetic prosthesis, bionic eyes, ears and limbs; more robotic surgery, faster and more accurate genetic analysis, genotyping and biometric data; brain computer interfaces, will allow thought and dream reading, the operation by thought alone of machinery, devices, musical instruments, paint brushes, tools; brain machine data input and output will transform a huge number of activities and operations allowing the happy combination (harnessing Moravec’s paradox) of the best human abilities of motor skills and perception with the best machine abilities of calculation and precision; we will see care robots for the elderly, cyber Mary Poppins guardians and babysitters for children and the vulnerable. The fight for greater longevity will unquestionably rely on AI techniques and usher in the possibility of the conquest of death itself. We are doubtless used to hearing that the first human to live to 200 years old is already alive, the younger people in this room can certainly expect to break the 120 barrier. I have been told by more than one solemn-faced scientist that the first person to live to 1,000 is probably alive and that immortality is technically and feasibly within reach. In other arenas, not counting the world of work, we will see better weather forecasting, an amelioration of traffic flow, automated shopping and delivery. A diminution of human error in multiple areas of exchange and interaction will lead to all kinds of undreamed of benefits.

The next big step for AI is the inevitable achievement of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, sometimes called ‘full artificial intelligence’ the point at which machines really do think like humans. In 2013, hundreds of experts were asked when they thought AGI may arise and the median prediction was they year 2040. After that the probability, most would say certain, is artificial super-intelligence and the possibility of reaching what is called the Technological Singularity – what computer pioneer John van Neumann described as the point “…beyond which humans affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” I don’t think I have to worry about that. Plenty of you in this tent have cause to, and your children beyond question will certainly know all about it. Unless of course the climate causes such havoc that we reach a Meteorological Singularity. Or the nuclear codes are penetrated by a self-teaching algorithm whose only purpose is to find a way to launch…

by Stephen Fry |  Read more:

There Are Bots. Look Around.

The technological transformation of financial markets began way back in the 1970s. The first efforts focused on streamlining market access, facilitating orders with routing and matching programs. Algorithmic trading began to take off in the 1980s, and then, in the 1990s, came the internet.

When we talk about financial market efficiency, we’re really talking about information and access. If information flows freely and people can act on it via a relatively frictionless trading platform, then the price of goods, stocks, commodities, etc. is a meaningful reflection of what’s known about the world. The internet fundamentally transformed both information flows and access. News was incorporated into the market faster than ever before. Anyone with a modem could trade. Technology eliminated the gatekeepers: human order-routers (brokers) and human matching engines (known as ‘specialists’ in finance parlance) were no longer needed. The transition from “pits to bits” led to exchange consolidation; the storied NYSE acquired an electronic upstart to remain competitive.

Facilitation turned into automation, and now computers monitor the market and decide what to trade. They route orders, globally, with no need for human involvement beyond initial configuration and occasional check-ins. News breaks everywhere, all at once and in machine-readable formats, and vast quantities of price and tick data are instantly accessible. The result is that spreads are tighter, and prices are consistent even across exchanges and geographical boundaries.

Technology transformed financial markets, increasing efficiency and making things better for everyone.

Except when it didn’t.

For decades we’ve known that algorithmic trading can result in things going spectacularly off the rails. Black Monday, in 1987, is perhaps the most famous example: programmatic trading sell orders triggered other programmatic sell orders, which triggered still more sell orders, leading to a 20% drop in the market — and that happened in the pre-Internet era. Since then, we’ve seen unanticipated feedback loops, bad code, and strange algorithmic interactions lead to steep dives or spikes in stock prices. The Knight trading fiasco is one recent example; a stale test strategy was inadvertently pushed live and it sent crazy orders into the market, resulting in thousands of rapid trades and price swings unreflective of the fundamentals of the underlying companies. Crashes – flash crashes, now – send shockwaves through the market globally, impacting all asset types across all exchanges; the entire system is thrown into chaos while people try to sort out what’s going on.

So, while automation has been a net positive for the market, that side effect — fragility — negatively impacts and erodes trust in the health of the entire system. Regular people read the news, or look at their E-trade account, and begin to feel like financial markets are dangerous or rigged, which makes them both wary and angry. Media and analysts, meanwhile, simplify the story to make a very complex issue more accessible, creating a boogeyman in doing so: high-frequency trading (HFT).

The trouble is that “high-frequency trading” is about as precise as “fake news.”

HFT is a catch-all for a collection of strategies that share several traits: extremely rapid orders, a high quantity of orders, and very short holding periods. Some HFT strategies, such as market making and arbitrage, are net beneficial because they increase liquidity and improve price discovery. But others are very harmful. The nefarious ones involve intentional, deliberate, and brazen market manipulation, carried out by bad actors gaming the system for profit.

One example is quote stuffing, which involves flooding specific instruments (like a particular stock) with thousands and thousands of orders and cancellations at rates that exceed bandwidth capabilities. The goal is to increase latency and cause confusion among other participants in the market. Another example is spoofing, placing bids and offers with the intent to cancel rather than execute, and its advanced form, layering, where this is done at several pricing tiers to create the illusion of a fuller order book (in other words, faking supply and/or demand). The goals of these strategies is to entice other market participants — including other algorithms — to respond in a way that benefits the person running the manipulation strategy. People are creative. And in the early days of HFT, slimy people could do bad things with relative ease.

Technology brought us faster information flows and decreased barriers to access. But it also brought us increased fragility. A few bad actors in a gameable system can have a profound negative impact on participant trust, and on overall market resilience. The same thing is now happening with the marketplace of ideas in the era of social networks. (...)

Social networks enable malicious actors to operate at platform scale, because they were designed for fast information flows and virality. Bots and sockpuppets can be used to manipulate conversations, or to create the illusion of a mass groundswell of grassroots activity, with minimal effort. It’s incredibly easy to deploy bots into a hashtag to spread or to disrupt a message — quote stuffing the conversation the way a malicious HFT algorithm quote stuffs the order book of a stock. It’s easy to manipulate ratings or recommendation engines, to create networks of sockpuppets with the goal of subtly shaping opinions, preying on proximity bias and confirmation bias.

This would be a more manageable situation if the content remained on one platform. But the goal of a disinformation campaign is to ensure the greatest audience penetration, and achieving that involves spreading content across all of the popular social exchanges simultaneously. At a systems level, the social web is phenomenally easy to game because the big social platforms all have the same business model: eyes and ads. Since they directly compete with each other for dollars, they have had little incentive to cooperate on big issues. Each platform takes its own approach to troll-bashing and bot detection, with varying degrees of commitment; there’s no cross-platform policing of malicious actors happening at any kind of meaningful level.

In fact, until a very notable event in November 2016, there was no public acknowledgement by Twitter, Facebook, or Google that there even was a problem. Prior to the U.S. Presidential election, tech companies managed to move fast and break things in pursuit of user satisfaction and revenue, but then fell back on slippery-slope arguments to explain why it was too difficult to rein in propaganda campaigns, harassment, bots, etc. They chose to pretend that algorithmic manipulation was a nonissue, so that they bore no responsibility for the downstream effects. Technology platforms are simply hosts of the content; they don’t create it. But as malicious actors get more sophisticated, and it becomes increasingly difficult for regular people to determine who or what they’re communicating with, there will be a profound erosion of trust in social networks.

Markets can’t function without trust.

by Renee DiResta, Ribbonfarm | Read more:

Image: uncredited

No Blue Wave

No doubt the exaggerated media focus on Montana was inevitable, in the age of the voracious 24/7 news cycle: This was only the second vacant congressional seat to be filled since Trump took office, and the first where the Democratic candidate appeared to have a real shot. But the Big Sky frenzy also spoke to the way American politics has almost entirely become a symbolic rather than ideological struggle — a proxy war between competing signifiers whose actual social meaning is unclear.

Despite their abundant differences, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were both semiotic candidates, who appeared to represent specific worldviews or dispositions (the espresso cosmopolitan; the shameless vulgarian) but presented themselves as a disruption to “normal” politics and were difficult to nail down in left-right ideological terms. Understanding an off-year congressional election in an idiosyncratic and thinly populated Western state, where fewer than 400,000 voters cast ballots, as a referendum on the national mood or the GOP health care bill or much of anything else is patently absurd. But it’s a miniature example of the same reduction to symbolism, in which everything is said to stand for something else and democracy becomes pure spectacle. (...)

For many people in, let’s say, the left-center quadrant of the American political spectrum — especially those who are not all that eager to confront the fractured and tormented state of the current Democratic Party — Montana and Georgia and 2018 seem(ed) to represent the opening chapters of a comeback narrative, the beginning of a happy ending. If what happened in 2016 was a nonsensical aberration, then maybe there’s a fix right around the corner, and normal, institutional politics can provide it.

First you chip away at Republican triumphalism, and the House majority, with a couple of special-election victories. Then it’s about organizing, recruiting the right candidates for the right seats, registering voters and ringing doorbells, right? Democrats picked up 31 seats in the George W. Bush midterms of 2006 — and will need 24 or so this time — so, hey, it could happen. For that matter, Republicans gained an astounding 63 seats in the Tea Party election of 2010, and many observers have speculated that Trump-revulsion might create that kind of cohesion on the left. So we sweep away Paul Ryan and his sneering goons, give Nancy Pelosi back her speaker’s gavel after eight long years, introduce the articles of impeachment and begin to set America back on the upward-trending path of political normalcy and niceness.

I suspect it’s pointless to list all the things that are wrong with that scenario, because either you agree with me that it’s a delusional fantasy built on seven different varieties of magical thinking or you don’t, and in the latter case I am not likely to convince you.

Andrew O'Hehir, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Tom Galle
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Let's Make House of Cards Great Again

It’s hard to get excited about the return of House of Cards. Not because, as has been endlessly posited for months now, it’s impossible to create a fictional president more shocking than the real-life one. No, instead it’s difficult to get excited about the return of House of Cards because it hasn’t been good for some years now.

Sure, I’ll be watching the new series this week, but only out of rote obligation. There is a chance it will rediscover the form and swagger of its first series, but that seems unlikely. After all, that series had some solid source material to work from, which prevented it from spinning off into the soapy, hollow camp of its later years.

However, if this House of Cards really is going to be a return to form – if it can somehow become a drama about a wily career politician who’ll take out anyone in his path to get what he wants, rather than a programme predominantly concerned with Robin Wright’s lovely outfits – here are all the ingredients it needs.

A decent baddie
Series one worked because Frank Underwood was on the ropes. He’d done some awful things, and a reporter was slinking ever closer to the truth. But since that storyline was abruptly dismantled in series two, Underwood has essentially been let loose to impose his will on an endless run of barely worthy opponents. He’s committed crime after crime – he’s a pinch away from being a serial killer, in fact – and the fall-out will be world-shaking if he’s ever caught. So let’s give him someone who’s actually capable of catching him. A house of cards is no fun if all the pieces are superglued together.

A grand plan
Again, season one turned out to be a big long con by Underwood. He’s a chess player at heart. He’s Sherlock gone bad. He can see a situation in three dimensions, several dozen moves ahead of anyone else, and the joy of the show comes from watching him manipulate people into unwittingly doing his bidding, only realising at the last moment that they’re caught up in his web. Creating another situation like this will require some narrative sleight of hand, and probably a little reverse engineering, but I’d rather watch that than another half-hearted threesome scene.

More talking to camera
Underwood barely broke the fourth wall last year. That is ridiculous, because it’s his entire raison d’etre. He meets someone, then glances over at us and drawls “If this guy was any stupider, his momma would have slung him in the trash,” and we’d feel like insiders. Which helps from a narrative standpoint, too; the more he lets us into his private world, the less he looks like an utterly irredeemable chumpwuzzle. It’d also be nice if he offered us more of his crackpot, faux-profound, down-home, reverse-Confucian sayings – usually along the lines of “Some say a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, but I say a weak is no chainer than its linkest strong” – but beggars can’t be choosers.

by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: David Giesbrecht/Netflix

Obesity Surgery May Work by Remaking Your Gut Microbiome

If you want to lose weight, there’s an app for that. Actually, hundreds. Fitbits, step trackers, food logs, calorie counters—people are increasingly using digital tools to fight obesity. But every year nearly 200,000 Americans opt for a more extreme, old-fashioned solution: surgery. Physically altering the size and shape of the stomach has proven to be the most effective and long-lasting treatment for morbid obesity, cutting the risk of premature death by up to 40 percent.

Bariatric surgery comes in a few flavors; there are stomach staples and industrial strength rubber bands. The most successful approach of all—a technique known as Roux-en-Y gastric bypass—is also the most aggressive. But a mounting body of evidence suggests that it may be possible to get all the weight-dropping effects of the procedure without going under the knife at all.

Why? Bacteria, of course!

It turns out gastric bypass not only restructures the topology of the human gut, but profoundly changes which microbes can survive and thrive in it. In a National Institute of Health-backed study published today, researchers at Arizona State University showed that patients who underwent the procedure developed totally different microbiomes, replete with organisms that promoted weight loss. And the effect appears to be permanent. The results confirmed earlier research with a smaller sample size, and also compared gastric bypass with another popular, though less invasive bariatric surgery. Only the bypass impacted microbiome diversity.

Interestingly, the procedure didn’t merely shift patient’s microbial profile from an obese to a healthy one. It actually created an entirely new ecosystem.

Gastric bypass works like this: A surgeon takes the upper portion of the stomach and cordons it off with stitches, creating a small pouch. Then the doctor attaches a Y-shaped section of the small intestine to the pouch, which routes any food you might swallow directly to the second segment of the small intestine, bypassing the portions of your digestive tract that do most of the nutrient- and calorie-absorbing. It’s a pretty dramatic organ-reorganization. One that makes for a less acidic environment with more oxygen, allowing microbes formerly unable to survive in the gut to flourish.

Like, for example Lactobacillus. It’s normally found mostly in the mouth, a much more neutral environment. But as soon as patients get their guts surgically modified, it starts showing up in their stomachs and in their stool samples. And like other members of the Bacillus family, it’s associated with weight loss. In fact, many of the new residents produce molecules that signal appetite-suppressing hormones and other neurological pathways that control eating.

Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown, the environmental engineer who led the study, says they still need to tease out exactly how much of the weight loss effect can be attributed to this unique community of bacteria in humans. But previous work with mice suggests it might be something like all of it. When researchers transplanted beneficial microbes from mice that had undergone gastric bypass surgery into obese mice with normal-sized stomachs, they saw the same kind of dramatic weight loss caused by the surgery itself.

That means if you could find another way to make the gut a happy home for these waste-trimming microbes, you could get the same outcome without the dangers of surgery.

by Megan Molteni, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Jason Drees

Canada's 'Us and Them Cities'

In their bid to temper Canada’s overheated housing markets – some of which rank among the world’s least affordable – authorities in the country have slapped taxes on some foreign buyers and taken aim at vacant homes.

Now one group of analysts is recasting the crisis in a new light; exploring the dichotomy between the millions of empty bedrooms across the country and the many families struggling to live in cramped accommodation.

When the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis began delving into data on the country’s housing market some three years ago, one pattern kept cropping up. “We started to notice that there seems to be a misfit in the geometry of the population and the housing stock,” said the centre’s Paul Smetanin. The data suggested that in Ontario – Canada’s most populous province – 70% of people were living in homes that were either too big or too small for their family.

On Tuesday, the centre released a wide-ranging report that, among other findings, laid bare the extent of the issue. Across Ontario there are five million empty bedrooms. Basing itself on standards set out by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which look at the number of bedrooms required by households, the report found nearly two-thirds of the province’s households live in homes that are bigger than what they need, with more than 400,000 homes that count three or more empty bedrooms.

The contrast between the haves and the have-nots is particularly acute in Canada’s largest city. In Toronto and the surrounding area, said Smetanin, “for every bedroom that a household actually needs, there’s almost six empty bedrooms”. (...)

In Vancouver – where the housing market ranks as one of the world’s least affordable – 800,000 bedrooms sit empty. It would take just 120,000 of these bedrooms to meet the needs of the many families and residents living in spaces that are too small. “So while the media is dominated by housing affordability concerns, there’s sort of this lingering contradiction.”

Smetanin pointed to several factors to explain the phenomenon. “We live in a country that’s obsessed with ownership,” he said, with Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver boasting some of the highest home ownership rates in the world.“When you have a look at the baby boomers and empty nesters that are sitting in very large homes and they own their own homes, they’ve got nowhere else to go.”

This inertia has been exacerbated by city planning that has emphasised the construction of detached homes and condos and all but ignored “gentle density” options such as duplexes and townhomes, he said. “So even if they wanted the right size, they’ve got nowhere else to go because it doesn’t exist.”

by Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Tim Schmalz’s statue Homeless Jesus. Bernard Weil/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Zillow Faces Lawsuit Over ‘Zestimate’ Tool

It was bound to happen: A homeowner has filed suit against online realty giant Zillow, claiming the company’s controversial “Zestimate” tool repeatedly undervalued her house, creating a “tremendous road block” to its sale.

The suit, which may be the first of its kind, was filed in Cook County Circuit Court by a Glenview, Ill., real estate lawyer, Barbara Andersen. The suit alleges that despite Zillow’s denial that Zestimates constitute “appraisals,” the fact that they offer market-value estimates and “are promoted as a tool for potential buyers to use in assessing [the] market value of a given property,” shows that they meet the definition of an appraisal under state law. Not only should Zillow be licensed to perform appraisals before offering such estimates, the suit argues, but it also should obtain “the consent of the homeowner” before posting them online for everyone to see.

In an interview, Andersen told me she is considering bringing the issue to the Illinois attorney general because it affects all property owners in the state. She has also been approached about turning the matter into a class action, which could touch millions of owners across the country.

In the suit, Andersen said that she has been trying to sell her townhouse, which overlooks a golf course and is in a prime location, for $626,000 — roughly what she paid for it in 2009. Houses directly across the street but with greater square footage sell for $100,000 more, according to her court filing. But Zillow’s automated valuation system has apparently used sales of newly constructed houses from a different and less costly part of town as comparables in valuing her townhouse, she says. The most recent Zestimate is for $562,000. Andersen is seeking an injunction against Zillow and wants the company to either remove her Zestimate or amend it. For the time being, she is not seeking monetary damages, she told me.

Emily Heffter, a spokeswoman for Zillow, dismissed Andersen’s litigation as “without merit.” A publicly traded real estate marketing company based in Seattle, Zillow has been offering Zestimates since 2006. At present, it provides them for upwards of 110 million houses, whether for sale or not. Type in almost any house’s street address, and you’ll probably get a property description and a Zestimate. The value estimates are based on public records and other data using “a proprietary formula,” according to Zillow.

The Zestimate feature is the cornerstone of Zillow’s business model because it pulls in millions of house shoppers, allowing the company to sell advertising space to realty agents. Zillow makes big money with the help of its Zestimates: In the first quarter of this year, it reported $245.8 million in revenue — a 32 percent jump over the year before — including $175 million in payments from “premier” agents, who pay for advertising.

by Kenneth R. Harney, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Chris Goodney/Bloomberg

Catnip

Researchers report that nepetalactone, the essential oil in catnip that gives the plant its characteristic odor, is about ten times more effective at repelling mosquitoes than DEET — the compound used in most commercial insect repellents. (...)

Catnip Repels Mosquitoes More Effectively Than DEET

Image: uncredited via:

[ed. Why have I never heard of this before? See also: Catnip vs DEET: No Contest (includes a couple of spray recipes).

Kyle Thompson, Untitled
via:

Why Google Is Suddenly Obsessed With Your Photos

Google tends to throw lots of ideas at the wall, and then harvest the data from what sticks. Right now the company is feasting on photos and videos being uploaded through its surprisingly popular app Google Photos. The cloud-storage service, salvaged from the husk of the struggling social network Google+ in 2015, now has 500 million monthly active users adding 1.2 billion photos per day. It’s on a growth trajectory to ascend to the vaunted billion-user club with essential products such as YouTube, Gmail, and Chrome. No one is quite sure what Google plans to do with all of these pictures in the long run, and it’s possible the company hasn’t even figured that out. But in a landscape fast becoming dominated by artificial intelligence, data — in this case, your photos — has become its own reward.

At the company’s annual I/O developers conference, Google touted Photos as a signature platform getting a bevy of valuable updates. Users will soon be able to automatically share all their uploaded photos with a loved one, or filter which specific photos are auto-shared by date or topic. A new Suggested Sharing feature will use facial recognition to prompt users to send photos of their friends directly to them, similar to Facebook’s Moments app. The service already uses machine-learning algorithms to classify the objects in photos and make them searchable, so that users can easily find all their pictures of dogs or beer or sunsets. With all these perks, plus unlimited storage, Google Photos is set to become the most convenient, powerful option available for managing a large media library. No wonder the app’s user base has grown so fast. (Though I have my doubts about how “active” these users are — Photos comes preinstalled on Android devices and automatically collects your photos; I mostly use it to look up a friend’s dad’s HBO password that I screencapped once in 2014.)

But the question remains: Why is Google offering such a feature-rich product that doesn’t appear to be readily monetizable, outside of the few print photo books the company plans to sell? The simplest answer is that the company wants to keep people within its all-encompassing ecosystem. Today’s tech giants now offer to serve as caretakers to our digital lives across a suite of services in exchange for access to our personal information. “Even if Google doesn’t make any money directly from something that it offers, it’s still gathering data,” says Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and author of The Master Algorithm. “Increasingly these days, what people perceive at companies is that data is one of your biggest assets.”

What more data could Google possibly need? The search giant has effectively achieved its longstanding goal of “organizing the world’s information,” if you consider only the written word. But even cofounder Larry Page has acknowledged that the company’s mission statement is outdated. The internet is fast becoming dominated by visual messaging, benefiting platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Google Photos, especially now that it’s been fine-tuned for sharing, is a back door into the social networking and chat functionalities that Google has been trying and failing to pitch to customers for the last decade. While we allow the company to passively track us through platforms like Chrome and Maps, Google Photos may be the first Google product that persuades people to actively share their personal information with the company en masse since Gmail.

The data obtained from a photo, though, has the potential to be much more sensitive than what’s contained in an email. Google already has plenty of pictures of objects that it’s indexed across the web with its search engine, but it still doesn’t know that much about what individual people look like. To make the Photo app’s sharing and tagging features work, Google has to analyze a photo subject’s facial structure and create a unique “faceprint” for them. The company is currently fighting a lawsuit in Illinois alleging that this facial-recognition technology violates a state law protecting citizens’ biometric data, and the tech hasn’t been rolled out in many parts of Europe for fear it might run afoul of privacy laws. (...)

The cliché when criticizing free internet platforms has always been “You are the product.” Today a more accurate critique might be “You are the resource.” For a long time we worried that tech giants might sell our private information to the highest bidder. But with Silicon Valley throwing all its efforts into artificial intelligence, data itself has become its own currency. Andrew Ng, the researcher who founded the AI project Google Brain, recently called data a “scarce resource.” The firms that have the most of it can create complex machine-learning systems that power essential consumer tech products. The firms that don’t have enough of it probably never will now that we’re all firmly in the camp of Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Apple. “All those [companies] have a built-in, inherent advantage because they have tons and tons of data, and moreover they don’t have to share it with anybody else,” says Alex Rudnicky, a research professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department. “In order to get the data, they have to provide something of value to users. And that’s kind of nontrivial to figure that out. They get the data, and then they can turn around and pitch these new products that leverage data for something else.”

Google’s entire engineering workflow is fast transitioning to this model. All the AI uses mentioned above — recognizing faces, automatically replying to emails, understanding voice commands — are now organized under a broad machine-learning framework known as TensorFlow. The company is staking its future on this system, scaling it down so that it can work on an Android phone that’s not connected to the internet and scaling up to power a new AI chip that will let outside companies leverage Google’s machine-learning advancements via the cloud. Rather than creating a bunch of siloed algorithms that execute discrete tasks, Google wants to devise an overarching AI that can deal with a wide variety of tasks, just like humans do. “Over time, what we discovered is that the same machine-learning techniques and algorithms that solve problems in one area could be used in lots and lots of other product areas and product domains,” Jeff Dean, the current leader of the Google Brain research team, said in a March blog post. “And so what you see is this general explosion of machine-learning usage across Google, across now hundreds of teams and thousands of developers using these machine learning techniques to solve problems in their areas.”

by Victor Luckerson, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Getty/The Ringer

Back Channel

Let me follow up on last night’s Post blockbuster about Jared Kushner and an attempted back-channel to Moscow.

To review, Kushner allegedly asked Russian Ambassador Kislyak to arrange a secret, secure back-channel through which members of the Trump team could communicate directly to the Kremlin. But this additional detail was the heart of last night’s Post blockbuster: Kushner reportedly asked Kislyak to allow Trump team members access to the secure facilities Russia itself uses to send secure communications from the US back to Moscow. This presumably involves secure facilities/hardware at the Russian Embassy and other US-located diplomatic facilities. These definitely exist. We have the same thing in Moscow.

It is difficult to capture how extraordinary and close to incomprehensible such a step would be. As a number of former intelligence officials have noted, if an intelligence officer or really any other US government official did this it would be considered espionage.

This meant opening a channel where Trump team members could speak openly with Russian counterparts without fear of being heard by and behind the backs of the US intelligence community, US diplomats and the US military. Why do you want or need that? Even Kislyak was apparently taken aback by the request. And as a sidelight to this, even if we believe the absolute worst about Kushner and Flynn, no country would ever let foreign nationals have access to those kinds of facilities.

Why would Kushner and Flynn push for such a secret channel of communications?

by Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo |  Read more: