Facebook's ad voting - fascinating

I can't provide a link, but on my morning commute I heard a 63yo NPR journalist describe how her Facebook ads changed over the past year -- for the better.

A year ago, when she bothered to look, she found large volumes of wrinkle cream and weight loss scams. When she removed her age, the ads became more interesting -- or at least less irritating.

Advertisers were wasting money, targeting her based only on age rather than on other facebook profile data.

Recently, her ads became more appropriate. It turns out that women over 50 voted wrinkle ads off the island ...

Facebook Now Lets Users Vote on Ads (2008)

... Facebook quietly added the ability for users to vote up or down on ads last night. Facebook watcher Nick O'Neill points out that the site has recently gotten rid of the same voting feature that was in the Newsfeed for a short period of time. Will this work for ads?

Initially we thought this would be an ineffective effort, but the more we looked at terrible ads on Facebook and thought about how happy we'd be to vote them down - the more sense it made...

I didn't know about this feature, but it's brilliant in an retrospectively obvious sort of way. I didn't think of it, but then I don't consiously notice advertising of any sort (knowing the limitations of my own mind, I suspect I'm not imagining my ad neglect).

So why can't Google do the same thing?

Well, Google does click through, but Facebook has a strong advantage in this domain. Facebook has strong identity data about their customers. So they can focus the votes they track on a valid sample, and screen out various forms of vote attack.

I wonder what the wrinkle cream scammers make of this development? Was their ad money always wasted, or were the ads both despised and effective? Was Facebook making money on the ads -- in which case why does Facebook care if they weren't working?

Is your drywall emitting toxic radioactive gases? No, really …

This Consumer Report blog article is the first I’ve heard of this one. Apparently the reports started in 2007, with customers learning of corrosive gases emitted from drywall manufactured in China. Consumer Reports wrote of this in March 2009, and again today (emphases mine) ….

Homeowners seek remedy as probe of Chinese drywall continues: Consumer Reports on Safety

As if the problems with Chinese drywall weren't bad enough, two fires are being investigated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Florida State Fire Marshal's Office to see if toxic drywall contributed to the blazes. It's not too far-fetched given the reports of corroded electrical wiring, air conditioner coils, and other appliances and electronics degraded by the drywall.

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that some experts believe the problematic drywall was made using a radioactive phosphorus substance—phosphogypsum—that is banned for construction use in the U.S. but has been used by Chinese manufacturers for almost a decade.

Copies of Chinese customs reports obtained by The Times indicate that drywall made with phosphogypsum was shipped to the U.S. in 2006 by at least four Chinese-based manufacturers and trading firms….

… Also this week, the CPSC responded to four senators who last month asked the agency to "expedite its investigation and testing" of the drywall. In its status report, the CPSC said it was working with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other agencies to "coordinate a federal action plan." This involves collecting samples of drywall and degraded electrical components, taking air samples in affected homes, and formulating health advice for residents.

… The CPSC says it has received more than 608 incident reports from 21 states and the District of Columbia with most coming from Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia.

In an earlier analysis comparing some samples of imported drywall with its American-made counterpart, the EPA discovered:

• Sulfur was detected in all of the Chinese drywall samples, but in none of the four U.S.-manufactured drywall samples.
• Significant levels of strontium were detected in the Chinese drywall samples. Strontium was also detected in the U.S.-made samples, but at much lower levels.
• Two organic compounds associated with acrylic paints were found in the Chinese drywall samples, but not in the U.S.-made samples.

… Unfortunately, it seems the only sure way to rid a home of problems is to tear out the Chinese drywall and replace it—a very expensive and involved process.

Our Take: While the finger pointing as well as the CPSC, CDC and EPA investigations continue, affected consumers should be extra vigilant in monitoring potential health effects as well as electrical safety hazards that might occur from yet another tainted product from China.

Thus far the problems seem localized to 3 states, but we’ll all need to keep an eye on this one.

We plan to cut our own trees and hew the wood for our future home remodeling projects.

On the bright side, Obama is resurrecting the government Bush wrecked. In a couple of years we might be almost back where we were in the year 2000.

See also:

• pufferfish and drugged eels
• poisoned toothpaste
• Christmas light lead
• counterfeit medications and glycol poisoning
• surgical supply fraud
• “fake” fur that’s genuine dog
• toxic heparin
• melamine infant formula, melamine and cyanuric acid in pet food, more melamine, more in Africa
• Salmonella snacks

Update 7/11/09: It's gone national. The US Consumer Protection agency has a drywall page. This is one of the agencies Obama has been raising from the dead. The CPSC PDF report from July 2009 has a lot of details. They're focusing on a particular mine in China, the problems go back to pre-2006. A lot of American construction may be affected.

Do you want health care reform? Then take 10 minutes with the Organizing for America web page.

Health care reform scares the pants off politicians. It’s a huge threat to reelection; true reform will make far more enemies than friends.

No sane politician wants to do this. They need a huge push – and that has to come from voters. They need to know they’ll be punished almost as much for failure as they will be punished for success. If the two are reasonably close, they may do what they know needs to be done.

Obama, of course, knows how critical public support is. The Obama OFA Blog is asking everyone o write a letter to local newspapers. They’ve done all the hard work, you need to only spend 10 minutes on the letter content…

Organizing for America | OFA Blog: A Critical Time for Health Care Reform

… The behind-the-scenes committee negotiations aren't front-page news, but the lobbyists trying to block reform are following every detail, and they won't miss a day. If the final plan is to uphold President Obama's principles of reduced costs, guaranteed choice -- including the choice of a robust public insurance option -- and quality care for all, your voice must be heard.

Please write a short letter to the editor of your local paper expressing your support for President Obama's three principles for real health care reform, and asking your Congressional representatives to do the same. You can write and submit your letter in just a few minutes using our simple online tool…

You enter your zip code and then choose which papers the letter goes to. I sent mine to our two local newspapers, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. I omitted the New York Times – they hardly need more letters supporting reform.

You will be asked for email and a phone number. I provided my yahoo.com junk email address – the valid address I check once a month and delete all the messages from. I provided my Google Voice number that’s voice mail only.

If you don’t do this, and healthcare reform fails, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself – and your Senator, of course.

Parasite mind

The more we learn about the astounding variability of human brains (presumably related to the rapid human evolution of the past 5,000 years) and the “normality” of some persons with fairly gross variations in the genes affecting brain development, the more peculiar commonplace human cooperation seems.

To a geek, of course, this is rather like the same software being able to run rather similarly on very different hardware. It’s not surprising to us that Chrome OS will run on very different ARM and Intel architectures, or that I ran the same software on my G5 iMac (RISC) and my Intel MacBook.

Which leads inevitably to all kinds of weird speculations.

Do dogs, with their whacko plastic genome and 25,000 years of co-evolution with humans now run a stripped down version of our minds on their wetware?

If we think of brains as a substrate for minds (and, of course, memes), then minds start to feel like different things, things that have their own evolution and natural selection. Things that might not completely respect species boundaries … (Science fiction readers can readily fill in that blank).

Minds can’t live independently though. They need something to run on.

Kind of like parasites, though not to be immediately confused with the Zimmerian world of mind-controlling parasites.

I wonder if that’s anything like the parasite mind now sold on Amazon ….

See also: The emergent ecosystem of the corporate amoeba, and prosthetic memory.

Google Chromestellation has landed, the Netbook wars begin again

Last December I wrote about Google Chromestellation. I was excited about it. Subsequently Microsoft counterpunched the Netbook gang by giving away XP. They gave up a lot of revenue to keep the wolves at bay.

It's worked, Linux Netbooks are in retreat and prices have stayed at the $400 and up range. Netbook prices haven't fallen into disruptive $150 range.

Microsoft won the first battle of the Netbook War.

Today the second battle began ...

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser ... today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android...

Chromestellation, the modern Chrome version of Netscape Constellation, is now real.

I expect Google will brand some of those OEM Netbooks and they will be sold for very little money. When used on WiFi they will be advertising delivery systems. They will be useable on mobile phone networks with metered use, a certain amount of use may be paid for by ads.

Microsoft will fight like Hell.

This is going to be fun.

Update 7/8/09: The best commentary I’ve read so far came from the reincarnation of Fake Steve Jobs. It’s a parody of course, but FSJ always has a serious message. I read it as saying:

• It will hurt Microsoft by forcing them to lower Windows 7 pricing.
• It will hurt Apple more than Microsoft (presumably because Microsoft is impregnable in the business market, Apple is vulnerable in the home market).
• It will be a money loser for Google and it won’t have much impact on the world

I think everyone would agree it puts pressure on Win 7 netbook prices. I think Apple users are a different market, but I agree Apple will be vulnerable.

I disagree on the third one. I think Google is aiming for a huge market that currently has little relationship with the Net and with computers.

Update 7/9/09: The NYT has two strong commentaries, one of which refers obliquely to Netscape Constellation:

• Shrinking Operating System
• Rival to Windows

There are many millions of people in the US alone that do very little on their computer, or who live with virus infested machines that routinely crash, or who don't have a working computer because they can't afford to buy or, more importantly, maintain a modern OS.

Google is aiming straight at this group. Microsoft is nowhere near them.

At the same time there are many families with one or two computers and 3-5 family members. They really need more machines, but they'd be fine with 1 Mac (say) and 4 GooBooks (goobook.com, btw, has been registered).

Microsoft can and will respond to this threat, but they will be badly hurt. That's good news for Apple; my hunch is that Google's entry will so weaken Microsoft that the net effect for the Mac will be relatively neutral.

Since I'm paying for your health care, how much will you get?

If we stay employed, we'll be on the hook for this ...

Editorial - Financing Health Care Reform - NYTimes.com

If health care reform falls apart again in Congress, the most likely cause will be failure to agree on how to subsidize coverage for tens of millions of uninsured Americans. The cost will almost certainly be at least $1 trillion over the next decade and perhaps much more, depending on how generous the reform might be.

... Our preference would be to extract savings from the bloated, inefficient health care system — but also to raise revenues from a wider pool, preferably from well-to-do Americans who could be taxed more for a badly needed reform that would benefit all Americans.

The first task is to find savings. Some respected analysts suggest that as much as 30 percent of all health care spending in this country — some $700 billion a year — may be wasted...

... Even with all the cuts people are considering, new fees or taxes will almost certainly be necessary....

Let's dispense with the delusions about "waste". Gawande did a wonderful job with his paper published in a little known medical journal (The New Yorker) ...

… Brenda Sirovich, another Dartmouth researcher, published a study last year that provided an important clue. She and her team surveyed some eight hundred primary-care physicians from high-cost cities (such as Las Vegas and New York), low-cost cities (such as Sacramento and Boise), and others in between. The researchers asked the physicians specifically how they would handle a variety of patient cases. It turned out that differences in decision-making emerged in only some kinds of cases. In situations in which the right thing to do was well established—for example, whether to recommend a mammogram for a fifty-year-old woman (the answer is yes)—physicians in high- and low-cost cities made the same decisions. But, in cases in which the science was unclear, some physicians pursued the maximum possible amount of testing and procedures; some pursued the minimum…

Is the minimum right? The maximum? Something in between? What if biologics really worked -- but cost $100,000 a year per person treated? Forget all this blarney about "waste" and magical cures. There won't be any miracles. Electronic medical records won't save us.

So that leaves taxes. Meaning I'm paying for "your" health care. Or, should I lose my job, you're paying for my 3 kids and my wife and I (we'll take care of the dog). Believe me, we're expensive.

Since those lucky enough to be employed will be paying taxes to provide universal coverage, how much do we want to pay for? Do we want to pay for nice waiting rooms? For new CT scanners? For every effective treatment? For acupuncture and massage therapy? For herbal remedies?

I think we should guarantee good-enough care for every American -- and we need to accept that it will be damned Spartan. If I lose my job, I'd be very glad to have it for my family. If I keep my job, I'll be glad to pay for someone else to have it.

We need to start telling our politicians that we understand this, that we're grown-ups, that we don't believe in magic and ponies.

Because if we don't tell them we're cool with good-enough care, we won't get squat.

Twin Cities: where Somali meet Hmong

Interesting place ...

Twin Cities: vibrant with diversity | Twin Cities Daily Planet | Minneapolis - St. Paul

.... The cumulative effect has been dramatic. In the seven-county metro area in 2007, more than 125,000 residents were Latino, nearly 45,000 were Hmong, and an estimated 30,000 were Somali, said Barbara Ronningen, a demographer with the Minnesota State Demographic Center.

St. Paul has the largest urban Hmong concentration in the world. Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the United States, most of them in Minneapolis. More than 80 languages are spoken in the Twin Cities area...

Evolution is not obliged to simplify our lives

Natural selection makes use of all the information processing and storage capabilities at “its” disposal. It doesn’t “know” about the boundaries we draw …

Fat mice missing a specific kind of "junk DNA" more likely to be diabetic: Scientific American Blog

… Computational analysis suggests that the retrotransposon identified in this study has embedded itself in at least eight different places in the mouse genome.  One known site is in the Zfp69 gene.  Consequently the gene can no longer be fully transcribed--converted—into RNA.

In mice that did not have the retrotransposon, the Zfp69 gene was made into RNA, and these mice had higher blood glucose and more fat in their livers (both indicators of diabetes) than obese mice carrying the retrotransposon.  The group found similar results in human tissue.

These findings are unexpected in that usually interfering with RNA production triggers or promote diseases.  The results also provide evidence that transposons, once regarded as useless, might have important beneficial functions in the cell…

If we were Creators, we’d make things that were much easier to understand.

See also: freight train pneumatic braking systems.

The post-DRM world - Dave Brubeck via iTunes

A few months ago Apple removed FairPlay DRM from their Apple store music collection. It's all "iTunes Plus" now, which for the new Dave Brubeck release I reviewed means it's all 256 kbps AAC encoded.

I can play it anywhere that can manage AAC, including my SONY car stereo and any "MP3" player that's worth bothering with.

It's not the quality of a CD of course. On the other hand I could get the music quickly, listen to it immediately, save the hassle of filing the CD and ripping the music, and the $10 price on the retrospective album seems fair to me.

So I bought the album.

I wouldn't have done that back in the days that Apple DRMd all their music (video is still DRMd, of course). Now I'm willing to do it, and I'll buy more.

It took me a while for me to change my habits. If not for the mildly shady business of the used CD store, I wonder how large the CD sales market would be? After all, if even I'm done with buying (new) CDs ...

The origins of corporate mediocrity - promoting the best

It would be easy to mock the results of this computer simulation, but I think they're on to something. When you read the following synopsis consider what I assume were the assumptions of the simulations:

• Different jobs require different skill sets
• Different workers have different skill sets
• The best worker at a job will be the one who's skill sets best match the job demands

If you think through these assumptions, you might be able to predict the results of the simulations ...

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Why Incompetence Spreads through Big Organizations - Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455: The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study

Promoting the people most competent at one job does not mean that they'll be better at another, according to a new simulation of hierarchical organizations.

There's a paradox at the heart of most Western organizations. The people who perform best at one level of an organization tend to be promoted on the premise that they will also be competent at another level within the organization...

In 1969, a Canadian psychologist named Laurence Peter encapsulated this behavior in a rule that has since become known as Peter's Principle. Here it is:

"All new members in a hierarchical organization climb the hierarchy until they reach their level of maximum incompetence."

That's not as unfair as it sounds, say Alessandro Pluchino and buddies from Universita di Catania, who have modeled this behavior using an agent-based system for the first time. They say that common sense tells us that a member who is competent at a given level will also be competent at a higher level of the hierarchy. So it may well seem a good idea to promote such an individual to the next level.

The problem is that common sense often fools us. It's not so hard to see that a new position in an organization requires different skills, so the competent performance of one task may not correlate well with the ability to perform another task well.

Peter pointed out that in large organizations where these practices are used, it is inevitable that individuals will be promoted until they reach their level of maximum incompetence. The unavoidable result is the runaway spread of incompetence throughout an organization.

Now Pluchino and co have simulated this practice with an agent-based model for the first time. Sure enough, they find that it leads to a significant reduction in the efficiency of an organization, as incompetency spreads through it....

But is there a better way of choosing individuals for promotion? It turns out that there is, say Pluchino and co. Their model shows that two other strategies outperform the conventional method of promotion.

The first is to alternately promote first the most competent and then the least competent individuals. And the second is to promote individuals at random. Both of these methods improve, or at least do not diminish, the efficiency of an organization.

Clever!

Of course the assumptions I assume were used in this study do have limitations. Many (most?) corporate superstars are characterized by an insatiable appetite for work and a relative disinterest in sleep, family and friendship. These traits do transfer well between roles. It's also true that senior roles are largely about managing down (reports), laterally (peers), and up (bosses). The political and personal skills that allow people to excel in those roles are reasonably universal.

So the model oversimplifies.

On the other hand, there really does seem to be something amiss with the modern publicly traded corporation. In general, they are less than the sum of their people. If not for the sheer advantages of size, such as the ability to buy or destroy smaller would-be competitors, I suspect most large corporations would not be able to effectively compete. (The CEO? The empiric evidence suggests that CEOs don't have large effects unless the business is very troubled or the CEO is really incompetent. Additionally, CEO selection is particularly perverse, it's no surprise most are ill-suited to the role they fill.)

Maybe the promotion effect does play a role in limiting how well a corporation can do.

PS. I think they should have tested a strategy of random promotion and rapid demotion for those who don't succeed.

The end of passwords - episode LXVII

Yawn.

It turns out that if you know a little bit about someone it's possible to compute their social security number. Social security numbers, of course, are often treated as a secret password, something that's known to only one person, and thus proof of identity.

Well, ok, two people. You and the the bank.

Okay, you and the bank and the hospital and your employer and your former employer and the IRS and your spouse and your ex-spouse and whoever stole your health insurance card and 425,000 hackers.

In other words, it's a lot like the secret questions my scream-inducing bank tortures from me. It's a backdoor for anyone who wants to steal your Gmail account (fortunately, few do).

Houston, we have a problem.

Shades of grief

World of sorrows ...

BBC - James Reynolds' China: Three years in China

... In the summer of 2007, I went to central China to cover the news that hundreds of men had been found working as slaves in illegal brick factories. Some had been kept underground for so long that they no longer knew their own names.

I met a man called Zhang Bairen. His son Zhang Zhike had gone missing and the father was hoping that his son might be one of the rescued slaves. But he wasn't.

I asked the family if they could show me a picture of their missing son but they didn't have one. The family was too poor to afford any photos.

A year later, some more men working as slaves were rescued. The family hoped that the missing Zhang Zhike might be among them. But, again, he wasn't.

Another year on, family members tell us that they have now given up hope of ever finding their lost son. Theirs is a silent grief...

Other people love Microsoft Word almost as much as I do

About 6 years ago I wrote about Microsoft Word: Living with the Beast. Nothing has happened since to change my opinion of Word.

Recently some Word bug related to cross-references made a hash of a technical document I wrote. A quick Google turned up this pithy quote from an anonymous tech writer commenting on a newsletter post

Word annoyance: Cross-referencing « CyberText Newsletter

[JR, comments]… Microsoft Word 2007 is a steaming pile of flaming maggot [censored] coded by a bunch of monkeys typing random keys on their keyboard and hoping it compiles…

Join the club comrade.

The GOP’s amazing spiral into historic irrelevance

Somewhere Mitt Romney is screaming “Pull Up”, Pull Up” and hauling back on the control stick as his one winged plane screams groundwards …

GOP Pols Losing Control Of Tea Party Movement? | TPMDC

Thousands of right-wing activists across this country rang in the Independence Day holiday with yet another round of tea-party protests against President Obama...

… Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was booed at the event in Austin -- on the grounds that he's part of the problem in Washington, having voted for the Wall St. bailout last fall…

… Gov. Rick Perry -- who famously seemed to raise the specter of Texas seceding from the union during the April Tax Day protests -- was also booed at the same Austin event as Cornyn. Attendees saw him as yet another tax-hiking tyrant, because he supports toll roads in order to relieve traffic congestion…

… Katie Vandermeer … heard about the tea party through the Texas Nationalist Movement, which advocates Texas' secession from the U.S.

In Bemidji, Minnesota, a headline speaker for their "Freedom Over Socialism" rally was state Rep. Mary Seifer … who warned of government taking away everyone's personal freedom: "Now suddenly we tell you that you have to wear your seat belts … Another speaker, former state legislative candidate John Carlson, spoke favorably of the Articles of Confederation.

The tea party in Columbia, South Carolina, featured Sen. Jim DeMint and state Rep. Nikki Haley, a leading Republican candidate for Governor. One prominent person was missing, though: Gov. Mark Sanford, who had previously headlined a Tax Day tea party back in April.

The tea party in Boiling Springs, South Carolina, featured a colorful cast of characters. The headline speaker was Alan Keyes, who has been a leading name of the "Birther" movement … One attendee took out a flyer that said, "Zelaya today, Obama tomorrow," but said he was advocating impeachment of Obama after he was asked directly whether he was in favor of a coup.

At the event in Los Angeles, right-wing former Saturday Night Live actress Victoria Jackson -- who has previously called Barack Obama a Muslim and a communist -- called for the President's impeachment, "There, I said it," and did a handstand dedicated to our men and women in uniform….

I knew the GOP was in trouble, but I didn’t expect it to come apart at the seams.

This is bad. We all need a credible, Rational, alternative to my currently favored party. The only thing a wrecked GOP will produce is right wingnut terrorists.

Maybe Romney will pull the GOP out of its dive into oblivion. Or maybe they’ll be so shattered in 2010 and 2012 that we’ll end up with a new political party …

Alternative local news: MinnPost and TC Daily Planet

Our Twin Cities newspapers are in intensive care and not expected to live.

Dog bites man stuff.

So I'm looking for alternative sources for local professional investigative journalism. I'm following two at the moment via Google Reader:

• Twin Cities Daily Planet | Minneapolis - St. Paul
• MinnPost

I haven't figured out which is the more Rational of the two. Reason aside, they should both give up on world/nation coverage. That's the beat of NPR, the Guardian, NYT, BBC, WSJ and the blogosphere. At the very least they need to provide a feed that excludes national/world coverage - just local news, events, entertainment, etc.

Anyone know of other new media startups doing metro and state coverage?