Depending on how much attention you've paid to the evolution of AI this may come as a surprise, or seem expected. Without data, what's an algorithm to do?
Note: this couldn't be a better argument for standardized and universally-accessible electronic health records. Watson isn't perfect, but it can't parse what isn't there, or is there, but only partially, and not transcribed from decades of horrific handwriting, and not in any sort of standardized format.
Heck of a piece about the Minecraft generation -- which, considering its popularity, is a fair title.
I've got three young kids and three nephews and part of me is so super jealous of the many awesome branded Lego kits -- Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and more. All I ever had was my tiny Alpha Centauri base, which I cherished the shit out of.
But only after years of building whatever I dreamed up from my big buckets of bricks.
So I'm not hating on the branded sets -- there's some serious wish-fulfillment that I do love and would have loved even more as a kid -- but there's something special about open-ended imaginative play. The Minecraft designers clearly feel similarly.
“Block-play was, in the European tradition, regarded as a particularly “wholesome” activity; it’s not hard to draw a line from that to many parents’ belief that Minecraft is the “good” computer game in a world full of anxiety about too much “screen time.” In this way, Minecraft has succeeded Lego as the respectable creative toy. When it was first sold in the postwar period, Lego presented itself as the heir to the heritage of playing with blocks. (One ad read: “It’s a pleasure to see children playing with Lego — Lego play is quiet and stimulating. Children learn to grapple with major tasks and solve them together.”) Today many cultural observers argue that Lego has moved away from that open-ended engagement, because it’s so often sold in branded kits: the Hogwarts castle from “Harry Potter,” the TIE fighter from “Star Wars.”
“It’s ‘Buy the box, open the box, turn to the instruction sheet, make the model, stick it on the shelf, buy the next box,’ ” the veteran game designer Peter Molyneux says in a 2012 documentary about Minecraft. “Lego used to be just a big box of bricks, and you used to take the bricks, pour them on the carpet and then make stuff. And that’s exactly what Minecraft is.””
I get it.
My grandfather wrote this in 1993, fifty years after his high school graduation. My grandmother, parents, siblings, and I (and later, our incredibly patient spouses), heard the story countless times. So I thought I'd share. He wrote this on his trusty typewriter in his home office, the same typewriter that lived next to the stack of Tastycake chocolate cupcake wrappers (he was diabetic).
He was irreplaceable: one of the kindest, wittiest, hardest-working and most honest men I've ever known. He often told me his gallbladder surgery scar was from a Japanese bullet in World War II (he was a radioman on a submarine in the Atlantic).
Ben Thompson, wordsmith behind my favorite tech business column Stratechery, included a bit this week on the bonkers new Android security flaw. He discusses, in fairly objective words, the difference between Android's market share and Apple's security measures.
Before I quote his words below, now's a good time to remark that I'm really glad Apple's HomeKit is taking so long, if the reason really is because they're making security a huge, annoying priority. Bluetooth isn't secure. Apple's bending-over-backwards -- and making developers and, notably, HomeKit hardware manufacturers -- fix it before it's an issue. Lights that know when you're home are one thing, locks on your door and cameras are another.
From Stratechery:
“Android is the most popular mobile operating system on Earth: About 80 percent of smartphones run on it. And, according to mobile security experts at the firm Zimperium, there’s a gaping hole in the software — one that would let hackers break into someone’s phone and take over, just by knowing the phone’s number.
In this attack, the target would not need to goof up — open an attachment or download a file that’s corrupt. The malicious code would take over instantly, the moment you receive a text message…
Here’s how the attack would work: The bad guy creates a short video, hides the malware inside it and texts it to your number. As soon as it’s received by the phone, Drake says, “it does its initial processing, which triggers the vulnerability.”
The vulnerability is slightly less bad than it sounds: Hangouts processes the video instantly, but the default Android messaging app only processes the video if you view the message, leaving users at least a chance of avoiding the exploit. And, of course, Google has already issued a patch.
There, though, is the catch: as is well-documented at this point, most patches don’t make it to existing smartphone owners. They first have to be adapted and pushed out by device manufacturers and then by carriers, neither of which (particularly device manufacturers) have much of an incentive to get updates out the door. The result is that it’s fair to assume that most Android devices in the wild will remain vulnerable to this exploit.
Of course, iPhones famously don’t have this problem because Apple has dictated terms with carriers that ensure they are in charge of pushing out updates (and they are the device manufacturer), which leads to two observations:
For all the (deserved) guff that Apple gets about security, the real life implication of their business model is that they are, by a long shot, the most secure vendor serving customers in volume. I think that there is something very profound in that fact: paradigm shifts can be worth far more in practice than slavish adherence to best practices in theory
I suspect security has the potential to be far more effective for Apple from a marketing perspective than is privacy, with the added benefit that duplicitousness is unnecessary. And, of course, it has worked before.
More broadly, as always it remains the case that strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. The reasons why Android is so hard to patch are the exact same reasons why Android is everywhere; more subtly, the reasons why iPhones are better from a security perspective for normal people are directly connected to why it is that Apple drives security researchers batty. Everything is a tradeoff.”
Let's cut to the chase.
In a telephone news conference on Friday, Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, the chairman of the religious liberty committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion made “a nod in the direction of religious liberty, but not enough of one.”
“Of course we retain the right to think what we want and say what we want and preach what we want about marriage,” he said.
“But the free exercise of religion means we have the right,” he continued, “to operate our ministries and to live our lives according to the truth about marriage without fear of being silenced or penalized or losing our tax exemption or losing our ability to serve the common good.”
Fun story. Today, the Pope's long-awaited climate change speech leaked. Apparently Beyonce can keep an entire album with a matching music video for each on the hush, but the Pope doesn't know how to lock his Macbook screen.
Regardless, here's some awesome tidbits (as the Vatican stresses the document is not final) to chew on as we contemplate whether anyone really ACTUALLY gives a shit what the Pope says anymore. Or if they just say they do:
“(There’s a) very consistent scientific consensus that we are in the presence of an alarming warming of the climactic system.”
and
“...numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide and others) emitted above all due to human activity.”
and finally:
“(There is an) urgent and compelling (need for) replacing fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy. Mic drop.”
This is super exciting for a variety of reasons:
1. The POPE just dropped some science. Science. Man, I love this Pope.
2. While not the majority, a shitload of Congress is Catholic (or claims to be). Protestants still lead the way by a huge margin, but the point is: it'd sure be nice to see these fuckers answer to the man closest to God, instead of the checkbooks of coal and oil.
3. Maybe MOST exciting is that six of nine current Supreme Court justices claim to be Catholic, and two GOP presidential candidates do the same.
So what's it gonna be, folks? Your God or your slush fund? Listen to your God. You could make a lot of polar bears very, very happy.
Maybe we should all write to our Catholic congresspeople and ask.
Here's the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_affiliation_in_the_United_States_Senate#Catholic
Q
So Google Photos truly seems like a hell of a service. So similar to the stellar Apple Photos, which just shouldn't be surprising at this point, in whatever direction the copying is going: clean design, lots of white-space, places and people and moments pre-organized, auto-backup, quick editing, available over every device...
But it's also got a few semi-Google-exclusive (for now) features. Combining all of them together and doing them very well makes Walt Mossberg, Apple fan boy, call it best-of-breed.
Unlimited storage isn't surprising considering the race to the bottom for storage pricing, and their huge data center advantage. I expect Apple will update their pricing tiers next week, though I'd be shocked if they went completely free. Everyone else will do it, and soon. It's inevitable.
The super powerful search and indexing isn't surprising either. Though they seemingly do a stellar job and everyone's super blown away by the features, the truth is that Facebook has been doing Facial Recognition for a long ass time. Flickr identifies beers and dogs and shit, too. Apple Photos also does Faces (and pretty well), though, yes, it doesn't have the history and power of machine learning to really handle everything else Google does. Can't argue with that. Google's just doing them all, and probably better.
I've got more thoughts on the endless Google vs Apple debate coming soon. Photos is just a small piece. Both companies are at a very real crucible moment, for very different reasons.
Honestly, I'm just glad photo organization and storage has become a billion fucking times better and easier in the past twelve months. We are all truly better off.
More to come, but I'll leave this here:
“(Google Photos) promises privacy and the app has no ads, (but) using it requires you to trust a company whose business model is tracking your actions and selling ads.”
“...Emerging markets are following the unhealthy eating trends of the UK and the US — the price of an ice-cream halved in the UK between 1980 and 2012, for example, while that of fresh green vegetables tripled.”
No good signs for healthy eating on the international front.
And it's not great at home, either. Everyone likes to make fun of California for the drought, but the (devastatingly) sunny state produces much of the nation's produce. Once agriculture is forced to really cut back on water -- currently responsible for 80% of the state's usage -- prices are going to sky-rocket.
With great sadness, I say goodbye to Uncle Beave -- Steve Broas. Despite the efforts of everyone who participated in last year's Ice Bucket Challenge, Steve fought ALS and yesterday succumbed to its unrelenting path.
I will miss him greatly -- he lived with us when I was a child, he was my tee-ball coach, he was my even bigger older brother, my often stern, always loving moral compass even when I didn't want it (most of the time).
But I am so much more devastated for his siblings - my mom and her seven brothers and sisters - and Steve's three incredible daughters and wife, Wynne. We are so lucky to have this huge, wonderfully tight-knit family, and we will support them with everything we have.
Today I ask you to find a loved one who isn't so old, who's relatively healthy, in their prime, raising a family, and let them know how much you love them. It could be a friend, or your brother or sister, or your husband or wife.
Diseases like ALS show no respect for family ties, or youth, or potential. They know no racial, ethnic or socioeconomic boundaries. They strike quickly, and are highly efficient and predictable, holding true to pre-determined timelines, with no cure in sight.
We like to think we've come further than this. That we can control disease, that if we try hard enough, we can protect and save the ones we love. But we can only do so much, and if nothing else, please: let Steve's unabashed love of being an athlete and uncle and coach and brother and father and husband, his sudden diagnosis and brief fight against a disease he never courted, remind you to recognize or be reminded that the only thing we can control is this moment. And in this moment we can choose to play our cards close to the vest, or love without restraint or filter. We can choose, in this moment, to answer another email, or build blocks with our kids before they go to bed. We can choose to be jealous, or express pride. We can choose to be tormented by what we don't have, or appreciate what we do.
As Steve posted recently, through his Tobii communicator:
“The stories and laughs will stay with me forever.”
I love my family and my friends. I would do anything for any of you. And I would have given anything to save my Uncle Steve. But I'm so thankful for the things he taught me, and the moments we had. I hope I'm a better brother and uncle and husband and father for it.
Despite his physical slide, Steve never lost his words -- this is the unique devastation of ALS. He used Facebook to spread thanks:
“I want to tell everyone how absolutely amazing Wynne is. Word’s cannot express how much i love her and how much i appreciate everything she does. Its truly incredible. I love her, i love her. I love you Wynne”
He love the extra mile everyone went to visit him when he was stuck in his chair:
“Please feel free to come by. Hope everyone had as much fun as i had. Til next time, know i love you.”
He even had some fun with it:
“Anyone is welcome to visit. I am available all day, every day...My naps continue to produce music and fingers twitching, jamming my guitar in my head. Oh yeah! The leg’s get going and people rush to hold them at bay. Fun stuff. Have a great week everyone. Love you. Steve aka Beave.”
I've had a hard time getting out of bed today, but I can hear my kids downstairs, launching breakfast bowls across the room and eating bite-size sweet potatoes off the floor while my wife tries to simultaneously both cherish them, and tie them together, with a strong rope, like maybe heavy parachute-cord, and preferably, to a firm wall or heavy pole, for just a single moment to enjoy her goddamn coffee.
So I'm going to take the day off and play with my kids. There's adventures to be had, and lessons to be learned. I miss you Uncle Steve.
.
Precision medicine is coming. I'm very excited about these new partnerships in cancer treatment. We are entering a new age.
“It can take weeks to identify drugs targeting cancer-causing mutations. Watson can do it in minutes and has in its database the findings of scientific papers and clinical trials on particular cancers and potential therapies.”
We're not there yet, we haven't solved anything, but we're acknowledging our limitations as humans. There's far too much historical research and data, and with EHR, far more data pouring in every day. It's a potential gold mine, but we can't handle it alone. Healthcare will be a very different place in 10 years, and applications like these are going to lead the way.
“Faced with such a data deluge, “the solution is going to be Watson or something like it,” said oncologist Norman Sharpless of the University of North Carolina Lineberger Cancer Center. “Humans alone can’t do it.””
It's not the end-all solution (as the article describes), but it's a step forward. It's hope.