How the Google Reader team decides what to do

Google teams are annoyingly driven by user requests. I prefer Jobs-style tyranny myself, but that's not the Google style. Different teams seem to follow different procedures.

For a time some used GetSatisfaction. The Google Reader team used to use a Product Ideas site, but then they went to GetSatisfaction.

Now they claim it's all forum and twitter...

Official Google Reader Blog: A little bit of polish

... The way we prioritized these tweaks and fixes was based on forum and Twitter feedback, so please keep it coming....

Right. I think they just make it up and talk to their buds.

Why don't they use GR comments?

Twenty minutes on the Deepwater Horizon

Deepwater Horizon.

Oil riggers on ship that exploded in Gulf of Mexico describe fateful night

... We're waiting to get everyone here before we go!' a supervisor yelled to Eugene and the other men who were waiting near the lifeboats....

They waited 20 minutes on the exploding platform. One hundred and fifteen lived, eleven died. A few jumped and swam to rescue boats, most took the two remaining lifeboats.

Twenty minutes waiting for survivors to run, crawl and be carried to the lifeboats.

Awesome courage.

Radical notion - the missing al Qaeda A team

The eternal post 9/11 question. Hamas has an A team - despite a very high mortality rate. Why did one operation kill off al Qaeda's A team?

Daunting Question | Talking Points Memo: 

... Jon Stewart asks a genuinely worrisome question: what happens when the terrorists start sending in their A-Team, as opposed to the goofs who've tried the last couple operations?...

Why can't al Qaeda keep recruiting killers?

Maybe it's a problem with their ideology. Maybe there's something about it that doesn't appeal to murderous engineers. Maybe deeply religious Islamists really aren't all that in to murder.

Welcome to the wild times...

I expected this ...

Robert Reich (The (Almost) Crash of Wall Street)

.... Ninety minutes before the end of the trading day today, the U.S. stock market almost melted down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 1,000 points. The market regained ground before the end, like a giant 747 narrowly averting a crash landing, but the questions of the day are: What happened? And What does it mean?"

It's not going away. Might as well get used to it.

Update 6/17/2010: See also - Charles Stross - Living through interesting times.

... There's a graph I'd love to plot, but I don't have the tools for. The X-axis would plot years since, say, 1950. The Y-axis would be a scatter plot with error bars showing the deviation from observed outcomes of a series of rolling ten-year projections modeling the near future. Think of it as a meta-analysis of the accuracy of projections spanning a fixed period, to determine whether the future is becoming easier or harder to get right. I'm pretty sure that the error bars grow over time, so that the closer to our present you get, the wider the deviation from the projected future would be. Right now the error bars are gigantic. I am currently guardedly optimistic that the USA will still exist as a political entity in 2023, and that the EU (possibly under a different name; certainly with a different political infrastructure) will do so as well. But in planning the background for that novel set in 2023, I can't rely on the simple assumption that the USA and the EU still exist. We're living through interesting times; I just hope (purely selfishly, wearing my SF author cap, you understand) the earthquake is over bar the aftershocks by next March, or I'm going to have to go back to my editor and suggest she markets the new novel as fantasy.

50 million Neandertals living today

Or 50 million Neandertal equivalents ....

NEANDERTALS LIVE! | john (Neandertal) hawks weblog

... In genetic terms, we can ask, how many times has the average Neandertal-derived gene been replicated in our present gene pool? Those aren't Neandertal individuals -- that is, a forensic anthropologist wouldn't classify them as Neandertals. They're the genetic equivalent.

The answer to this is also simple: In absolute terms, the Neandertals are here around us, yawping from the rooftops.

There are more than five billion people living outside of Africa today. If they are one percent Neandertal, that's the genetic equivalent of fifty million Neandertals walking the Earth around us.

Does that sound minor? If I told you that your average gene would be replicated into fifty million copies in the future, would you be satisfied? Maybe your ambition is greater, but I think the Neandertals have done very well for themselves.

Does this mean that Neandertals belong in our species, Homo sapiens?

Yes.

Interbreeding with fertile offspring in nature. That's the biological species concept.

Dogs look a lot more diverse than modern humans and neandertal humans, and they interbreed happily. We are one with Neandertal. Tell the BBC, Walking with Cavemen needs an epilogue.

Hawks has written a long, excited, essay with the occasional sentence fragments. He's probably been hitting the champagne. Today's Nature articles on the Neandertal genome are a validation of his research and his enthusiasms.

There's more (emphases mine).

... Burbano and colleagues put together a microarray including all the amino acid changes inferred to have happened on the human lineage. They used this to genotype the Neandertal DNA, and show that out of more than 10,000 amino acid changes that happened in human evolution, only 88 of them are shared by humans today but not present in the Neandertals.

That's amazingly few.

Green and colleagues did a similar exercise, except they went looking for "selective sweeps" in the ancestors of today's' humans. ... They identify 212 regions that seem to be new selected genes present in humans and not in Neandertals. This number is probably fairly close to the real number of selected changes in the ancestry of modern humans, because it includes non-coding changes that might have been selected.

Again, that's really a small number. We have roughly 200,000-300,000 years for these to have occurred on the human lineage -- after the inferred population divergence with Neandertals, but early enough that one of these selected genes could reach fixation in the expanding and dispersing human population. That makes roughly one selected substitution per 1000 years.

Which is more or less the rate that we infer by comparing humans and chimpanzees. What this means is simple: The origin of modern humans was nothing special, in adaptive terms. To the extent that we can see adaptive genetic changes, they happened at the basic long-term rate that they happened during the rest of our evolution.

Now from my perspective, this means something even more interesting. In our earlier work, we inferred a recent acceleration of human evolution from living human populations. That is a measure of the number of new selected mutations that have arisen very recently, within the last 40,000 years. And most of those happened within the past 10,000 years.

In that short time period, more than a couple thousand selected changes arose in the different human populations we surveyed. We demonstrated that this was a genuine acceleration, because it is much higher than the rate that could have occurred across human evolution, from the human-chimpanzee ancestor.

What we now know is that this is a genuine acceleration compared to the evolution of modern humans, within the last couple hundred thousand years.

Our recent evolution, after the dispersal of human populations across the world, was much faster than the evolution of Late Pleistocene populations. In adaptive terms, it is really true -- we're more different from early "modern" humans today, than they were from Neandertals. Possibly many times more different.

Now take a look at my recent post on deep history...

... Even after the development of agriculture and writing we see thousand year intervals of relative stasis in China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. How could this be when our fundamental technologies change in decades. Are the minds of modern Egyptians radically different from the minds of only 6,000 years ago? Why? Why do we see this graph at this time in human history?...

Why do we go from steam engines to iPads in a few human lifespans? Why do we have so much schizophrenia and autism? Our brains have been rewired at top speed; accidents are common.

A big day in science, a big day for Darwin, a bad day for creationists. The Neandertals, of course, must have had souls ...

Update: More from Carl Zimmer. When I wrote the above sentence about autism and schizophrenia, much less the original post some years ago, I didn't know this ...

If you believe the difference between humans and Neanderthals is primarily in the way we think, then you may be intrigued by the strongly selected genes that have been linked to the brain. These genes got their links to the brain thanks to the mental disorders that they can help produce when they mutate. For exampe, one gene, called AUTS2, gets its name from its link to autism. Another strongly-selected human gene, NRG3, has been linked to schizophrenia...

So the brain changes that occurred after Neandertal, in the time of deep history, have associations with the disorder of schizophrenia and autism.

In 2007 I wrote: Is schizophrenia the price we pay for an evolving brain? and I speculated that we could consider autism and schizophrenia to be "evolutionary disorders".

Update 10/6/2010: Clearly prescient: Your Mother Was a Neanderthal #4 (Time Warp Trio). Also, Robert Sawyer must be feeling cheerful today. Lastly, do read the whole Hawks essay. There were a lot of hominin-variants roaming the world 50,000 years ago, and they were likely "dynamic" (or at least - kinetic). We need a word with less historic baggage than "breed" to replace "species" in this discussion.

Update 10/7/2010: The Economist has a good summary, with more on what I've been calling evolutionary disorders.

... But an examination of the 20 largest regions that have evolved in this way shows that they include several genes associated with cognitive ability—and whose malfunction causes serious mental problems. The presence of an extra copy of DYRK1A is linked to Down’s syndrome; mutation of NRG3 is linked to schizophrenia; mutations of CADPS2 and AUTS2 are linked to autism. These four genes therefore look like good places to start the search for modern humanity’s essence...

Incidentally, I did a google search on "evolutionary disorders" and the term has been in use for a year or two. I had the earliest hit I saw though!

Zimmer's article has the clearest overview so far, with a balanced review of the scientific debates.

Steam Hammer vs. John Henry 2.0

Google=Algorithm

Apple=Jobs

Steam hammer vs. John Henry 2.0.

What do we need to give Rupert Murdoch to save civilization?

Rupert Murdoch owns News Corp, including Fox news and the Wall Street Journal. Glenn Beck is his tool, the Tea Party is his tool, the WSJ editorial pages are his tool.

By the actions of his properties, we can assume Murdoch has little sympathy for science, democracy, or an enlightenment agenda. On the other hand, he is no fool. He will act to achieve his ego's ends.

His goals to date have been wealth and power. Perhaps he has dreamed they would give him immortality. If so, then science has disappointed him; he will likely die within ten years. Now, perhaps, his focus will shift to crafting a lasting myth, and perhaps a genetic legacy.

If so, he may contemplate the world that lies ahead. He may even reconsider his apparent antipathy to science and reason. Perhaps all he needs is an excuse, some sop to his massive ego.

So let us say to Mr Murdoch - "You win. You are powerful; perhaps powerful enough to injure human civilization. Do you want a statue? We can build you one. Do you want to be worshiped? We will make you a temple. Do you want a title? We can ask the English to give you one. Now, Mr Murdoch, please let civilization live."

How to end the orange alerts

In a response to the Times scare car bomb attempt [1] James Fallows comments on the alerts that have given orange a bad name ...

... for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. That is the real case against the ludicrous 'orange threat level' announcements we hear every three minutes at the airport. It's not just that they're pointless, uninformative, and insulting to our collective intelligence; it's that their larger effect is to make people feel frightened rather than brave...

Are alerts red today, now that there might have been yet another (one of ten since 2001) terroristic action in Manhattan?

No, I didn't think so.

I see the "orange alert" sign every time I drive by the MSP airport. I keep hoping some kids will have vandalized it, but of course that would be a federal crime probably punishable by summary execution. It is an endless reminder of how stupid we are.

The entire "orange alert" class of security theater is politically hard to undo. Fallows puts it well ...

... A politician who supports more open-ended, more thorough, more intrusive, more expensive inspections can never be proven "wrong." The absence of attacks shows that his measures have "worked"; and a new attack shows that inspections must go further still. A politician who wants to limit the inspections can never be proven "right." An absence of attacks means that nothing has gone wrong -- yet. Any future attack would always and forever be that politician's "fault." Given that asymmetry of risks, what public figure will ever be able to talk about paring back the TSA...

If Obama were to do anything obviously rational about these delusions, Cheney/Murdoch would be frothing at the mouth the next morning.

There is hope, however. Obama could use some terrorist act to declare that the nation must consider "orange" to the the new normal. We will never return to whatever the color below orange was. (That is likely true; the forecast is stormy forever). He can also say that cognitive science teaches us that unchanging things become invisible to us. So we will randomly make announcements and activate the orange alert signs to make them more perceptible, with an average frequency of once an hour. Over time the frequency will diminish.

The signs will dim. Some will fail. Repairs will slow. One day we will turn them off.

[1] I wonder if bomb instructions are harder to find now than they were fifteen years ago. I suspect so.

Arizona and immigration - an inarguable response

Diabolic.

Gwynne Dyer, to the bemusement of anyone who has read his past columns, seems to support Arizona's immigration policy ...

Gwynne Dyer: Arizona bucks belief illegal migrants have rights - Gwynne Dyer - NZ Herald News

The President of Mexico was furious. "Criminalising immigration, which is a social and economic phenomena, opens the door to intolerance, hate, and discrimination," Felipe Calderon told a meeting of Mexican immigrant groups.... 

... But suppose I went to Mexico as a tourist and then stayed there illegally, taking work that might otherwise have gone to some deserving Mexican citizen. I would not be treated more gently by the Mexican authorities.

Why does Mexico believe that its own citizens who are illegally in the United States deserve better treatment? ...

.... Some argue that they are doing jobs nobody else wants, but that is only a possible reason for letting them stay. It certainly does not give them the right to stay.

Yet the Mexican government reacts with outraged indignation whenever the US government, or in this case an American state, talks about enforcing the law against illegal immigrants.

It has come to think of the nod-and-a-wink arrangement that allows large numbers of illegal immigrants to cross the border each year as the natural state of things.

Arizona is calling time on that system, and intends to seek out and send home people who are in the state illegally.

In most parts of the world, that would not be regarded as unreasonable. What is different in Arizona's case?...

Hmmm. Sounds reasonable. Surprising to see Dyer on the side of the GOP though.

Except then he skewers Arizona and its supporters in the penultimate paragraph. Do read the essay, it's brilliantly done.

Teachers, doctors and pay for performance

In one paragraph, Gail Collins summarizes an important issue with basing teacher compensation on student performance:

Gail Collins - Teachers Always Show Up - NYTimes.com

... while it’s important to make teachers accountable, telling them their jobs could hinge on their students’ grades on one test is a terrible idea ... The women and men who go into teaching tend, as a group, to be both extremely dedicated and extremely risk-averse. The stability of their profession is a very important part of its draw. You do not want to make this an anything-can-happen occupation, unless you are prepared to compensate them like hedge fund traders...

The same is true of physicians by the way.

The real problems aren't simply incompatible personality traits however. The real problem is that these systems are dominated by Goodhart's law.

As Texas demonstrated many times, the easiest way to improve outcomes is to game the system. With both students and patients this is done by changing the denominator -- either by reclassification (change who takes tests) or by purging the problems (zero tolerance discipline) and filtering the candidates (programs appealing to elite students, wealthier families).

The same things happens in health insurance (risk assumption). Rescission is one way to change the denominator, another one is to promote (inexpensive!) alternative therapies that appeal primarily to health people. Putting the enrollment office on the second floor of an elevator free building is the classic approach to denominator bias.

These effective strategies don't have to be consciously applied. The "invisible hand" will reinvent them time and again.

There are many ways to improve the performance of teachers and physicians that reduce the appeal of system gaming solutions. They don't have the simplistic appeal of "pay for performance" however.

So we'll suffer through a lost decade before, once gain, letting these mistaken policies quietly die.

Anthrax - a cautionary tale

I wasn't blogging when, one week after the 9/11 attack, mailed anthrax killed five people, seriously injured 17 others, and paralyzed much of American commerce.

If I had been blogging back then, I'm pretty sure I would have joined in the general attack on an innocent man. It was a heck of an attack; this month The Atlantic tells the story of how the FBI got the wrong man. He (and his lawyers) ended up with various settlements totaling millions of dollars.

Later the FBI turned on Bruce Ivins, a troubled man. Turns out biological warfare research attracts unusual people. Ivins committed suicide. Since the post 9/11 FBI has well deserved negative credibility, nobody is fully convinced that Ivins was the murderer.

The FBI was never reformed. It staggers on today.

What have some of us learned from the anthrax story? We learned that the FBI is institutionally troubled. We learned that government can break the rules and get away with it. We learned that when crisis hits, we lose our bearings. We learned that defense lawyers are a good idea. We learned that massive security failures can be easily forgotten.

There was never a full evaluation of all the ways the FBI failed, and why. Bush/Cheney had too much dirty laundry of their own to go there, and Obama has way too much Bush/Cheney dirty laundry to clearn.

So the FBI is going to do this again.

Google has an AdSense problem

TIDBits publishes a terrific extended essay on digital photo post-processing.

These are the AdSense AdWords that show up in the full text feed:

Note the spiffy “next” buttons for more of the same.

WTF?

This is the best Google can do? That post had abundant material for analysis, not to mention the TIDBits URL. At least put in ads for Mac related goods.

Something’s broken. I hope for the sake of Google’s shareholders it’s just a transient glitch.

Stross on the post-PC world – mostly right

Charles Stross is in good form with an essay on the post-PC world. It’s the world we’ve been expecting since Netscape Constellation (1996) and Larry Ellison’s proto-netbook (1995). That world became real for me in 2007 (yes, it was that long ago) with the iPhone and in 2008 with the Target netbook [1].

I agree with almost everything he wrote, with one big exception….

… Moreover, the PC revolution has saturated the market at any accessible price point. That is, anyone who needs and can afford a PC has now got one…

Uhhh, no. PCs are not cheap. Not at all. The iPad is cheap [3], but PCs are very expensive.

Yes, you can buy a “PC” for a pittance. It makes a crummy boat anchor though. If you want it to do something useful you need to buy internet service. Where I live that’s about $600 a year – year after year. Unless you bought a Mac, or are geek enough to go without, you need to buy antiviral software. In theory you also need to $150 or so for Microsoft Office. And good luck with backup.

But that’s not the real cost.

The real cost is that you need an IQ-equivalent of 110 or higher, and a love of debugging and troubleshooting. For most of the population, that’s absolutely unaffordable.

PCs are very, very, expensive. The iPad 2.0, or its rivals to come, can be the poor person’s computer [4].

So Charlie got this one point wrong – but it only strengthens his overall argument. My four month old quad core iMac running 10.6 is an anachronism [2]. Its era is passing. Welcome to the third era of the personal computer.

[1] I thought things would blow up in 2009. Didn’t happen! Microsoft dropped the price of XP to about nothing and crawled back enough control of the netbook to stun the market (same thing they did with Palm in the 90s by the way). It’s still going to happen, but that’s not the first time I’ve been wrong on transition times. I’ve since learned to take my time estimates for technology transitions and triple them.

[2] Charlie also omits the role Digital Rights Management (DRM) plays in driving this transition. DRM is one of the reason there’s so much good software being produced for the iPhone. Your CDs may be worth money some day.

[3] Not least because of the pay-as-you-go capped data plan. That’s as big a deal as the device. Yes, I know iPad’s require a PC-as-peripheral, but that will change within the year.

[4] Of course that’s what the original Mac was – the “computer for the rest of us”. Closed architecture. All applications were to be vetted by Apple. Strict UI standards. Heavy investments in usability and design. Single button mouse. It worked too – it really was easy to use. Much easier to use than OS X. Almost as easy to use as the iPad. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it spirals.

The Cheonan sinking: insanity or accident?

When Sarah Palin bloviates, the media goes mad. When a South Korean military vessel blows up, perhaps from a North Korean missile, things get very quiet.

This is a good thing. Evidently the prospect of WW III does concentrate minds. It’s a sign that our legislators aren’t as stupid as they look.

A recent BBC summary outlines the current public analysis…

BBC News - Seoul's dilemma over sunken warship

The 26 March sinking of the Cheonan, with 40 lives lost and six men still missing, is certainly a South Korean military disaster…

… The shattered wreck of the 1,200-tonne gunboat has now been winched to the surface, in two pieces, and is being examined at a naval dockyard.

The investigation team includes American, Australian, Swedish and British experts, in part, to ensure that its conclusions are seen as free from South Korean political influence.

… suspicion is mounting, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae-young concluding that a torpedo attack is among the "most likely" causes.

… "If it's a torpedo firing then that's about as big a thing as you can do short of rolling across the border," he told me. "Unless you have a desire to start World War III then you don't do it…

… If it is shown to be a torpedo that hit the Cheonan, then perhaps it can be seen as retaliation for the fact that North Korea is reported to have come off worse in the most recent naval skirmish.

Or maybe it was an attempt to rally the military around the leadership of the ailing Kim Jong-il, reportedly trying to manage a difficult transition of power to his youngest son.

But others have suggested that it might be the military acting alone, a sign of a dangerous shift in the balance of power inside North Korea, and a far more worrying prospect.

So the options are …

• North Korea’s leadership is insane
• North Korea’s military is insane
• It’s a freak accident with an impossibly ancient mine

The last is unlikely, the first two are discouraging. I wonder, just based on watching humans for a while, if there isn’t a fourth explanation.

An accident. A blunder. A screw-up.

Remember when the US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 civilians? No, that wasn’t US military policy. It was a screw-up.

We now know how crummy the Soviet military infrastructure was before the collapse of the USSR. It’s likely that North Korea’s is in much worse shape. It’s likely their submariners are desperate and ill-trained. it’s a setup for an accident, or for a crazed officer to do something very stupid.

Would the submarine officers confess to having screwed up? In North Korea that would probably be a death sentence – or worse.

My money is on blunder.

Now it’s all about China, which has huge investments in North Korea. It’s all about whether China will decide that North Korea has to end, and, if so, on what terms and timeline.

Causes of the Great Recession: China, GPSII and RCIIIT. Now for Act III.

To the right of us – Greece, Portugal, Spain and perhaps Italy and Ireland (GPSII):

How Reversible Is The Euro- - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

For a long time my view on the euro has been that it may well have been a mistake, but that bygones were bygones — it could not be undone…

…but what if the bank runs and financial crisis happen anyway? In that case the marginal cost of leaving falls dramatically, and in fact the decision may effectively be taken out of policymakers’ hands…

…if Greece is in effect forced out of the euro, what happens to other shaky members?

I think I’ll go hide under the table now.

and to the left of us – China:

Andy Xie - I’ll Tell You When Chinese Bubble Is About to Burst - Credit Writedowns

“My maid just asked for leave,” a friend in Beijing told me recently. “She’s rushing home to buy property. I suggested she borrow 70 percent, so she could cap the loss.”

Sigh. It’s not over. Act I was the NASDAQ (remember the NASDAQ?) tech bubble. Act II was the property/asset bubble. Act III takes place in Europe and China.

It really does feel like a world of hurt down here, and we haven’t even hit Peak Oil (but it’s on the way.)

We all wonder why. Why now? A year ago I made up my personal list of 10 contributing causes (Feb 09) and, recently, I wrote up one way out of America’s particular set of challenges.

Since then I’ve been chipping at the list, looking for the cause of the cause of the cause (etc – go too deep and it’s all entropy). Sure we’ve got above average corruption and economic financialization, but those tendencies have always been with us. This feels like something novel, something that, in modern times, has come along every century or so. (In deep history every 2,000 years or so.)

I’m nominating two independent but self-reinforcing causes – information technology (IT) and the Rise of China and India (RCI, aka globalization).

The Rise of China and India (RCI) has been like strapping a jet engine with a buggy throttle onto a dune buggy. We can go real fast, but we can also get airborne – without wings. Think about the disruption of German unification – and multiply than ten thousand times.

RCI would probably have caused a Great Recession even without any technological transformations.

Except we have had technological transformation – and it’s far from over. I don’t think we can understand what IT has done to our world – we’re too embedded in the change and too much of it is invisible. When the cost of transportation fell dramatically we could see the railroad tracks. When the cost of information generation and communication fell by a thousandfold it was invisible.

The IT transformation is not stopping. If anything, it’s accelerating. There are more than 350 million mobile phone subscriptions in Africa.

Think about that for a minute.

In five years Africa will have at least 500 million 2010 iPhone/Droid interconnected equivalent devices, and Google’s sentence-salad English/China translation will probably work. I’m still thinking we miss Kurzweil’s 2045 catastrophe, but the prelude will be rough enough.

RCI and IT (RCIIT?) Alone each would have thrown the world for a loop. Together they’ve put us into an entirely new level of future shock.

We might as well get used to it.