Fear the Cloud: Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk, a cloud-based task management service, disabled sychronization this week with Appigo's ToDo.app.

There was no warning. RTM customers who used ToDo.app simply lost sync services.

Fear the Cloud.

Identity: Legion is a character defect?

Last February I wrote The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion.

It surprised me that I had to write the post. I thought it was self-evident that adults have many identities. Google's Buzz flop made me realize I was wrong. Obviously a lot of Googlers missed the obvious.

Google may be catching on. Not so Facebook's master - Mark Zuckerberg ...

An Internet Where Everyone Knows You’re a Dog — Crooked Timber

...While searching for evidence of Zuckerberg’s broader philosophy of information, a passage from David Kirkpatrick’s forthcoming book, The Facebook Effect, is quoted:

“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Zuckerberg is famously young, and famously wealthy. He has not had to grow up; he may never have to grow up.

Adults have complicated lives. Adults have parents, and children and grandchildren, patients and students, employers and colleagues and staff, friends and neighbors. Adults live in a crowded world where wisdom and compassion means muting the self, juggling the complexity of contextual identity. What we used to call, in medical school, being professional.

Zuckerberg is not an adult. I know where he's coming from. As an aspergerish teenager I might have made the same mistake.  He'll likely grow up one day and realize he goofed.

Problem is, we can't wait. He's rich enough that growing up may take a very long time, and for that time he'll be running Facebook.

I'm winding down my Facebook presence; I'll let it die a natural death. If Google or someone else provides a smarter alternative, I'll encourage friends and family to switch.

Verizon iPhone – Can you hear us AT&T?

The WSJ is on board. The CDMA Verizon iPhone is expected after September (Sprint,also CDMA, too?). The AT&T iPhone will be shown in early June, probably available end of June.

My wife’s iPhone AT&T contract should be up in the Fall of this year, my contract expired last January. We have no reliable AT&T iPhone voice service in our St. Paul home. This is a big change from a year ago when iPhone service in MSP was fair to good. We’re paying for services AT&T can’t deliver – because they oversold their capacity.

We’re ready to switch.

If AT&T wants to keep our $2,400 plus/year family fees they need to do one or more of

1. Fix our home voice service.
2. Provide a free MicroCell for home use with some extra benefits.
3. Dramatically reduce our phone bill.

It will be a great relief to have Verizon on board no matter what we do.

If we stay with AT&T, the combination of a likely 10% drop in AT&T iPhone users and a large decrease in new AT&T iPhone customers will improve service quality and dramatically reduce the cost of a used AT&T iPhone.

If we switch to Verizon (Sprint?) we’d get 3 new 4th generation iPhones and our old devices will become iTouch-equivalents.

Can’t happen soon enough.

Hours worked per year: Greece in #2 spot

Sure, South Korea is #1 at 2,256. We knew that. (China isn't on the chart, it would presumably be in the SK range.)

But who's #2?

Ok, so I gave it away. Would you have pegged Greece at 2,120 hours? Greece, home of economic collapse and rumored early retirement? Yes, there are lots of caveats about data quality, measurement definitions, etc. Still.

Maybe after working 2,120 hours a year early retirement is mandatory. FWIW I have read that Chinese employment beyond age 50 is very challenging. In many nations "early retirement" is really "early termination". I suspect effective "retirement" age in post-industrial nations is going to fall, not rise.

Germany is way, way down at 1,430 hours a year. Poor impoverished Germany.

Oh, wait.

The US, Japan and average OECD are all at about 1,760 hours. Indistinguishable.

Canada and the UK are a bit lower at about 1,600 hours. In general, the more sane and wealthy the nation, the fewer hours worked per year. I'm looking forward to some interesting infographics illustrating those comparisons.

Google's DLF - The data privacy connection

I rail on Google, but they're a long way from Facebook on Gordon's scale of corporate evil.

Facebook has zero-forwarding email. Google has the Data Liberation Front -- and they take requests. There's no comparison.

DLF fan that I am, though, I was puzzled by an alleged connection to customer privacy ...

google's letter to privacy commissioners. DLF cited as "[an effort] to protect customers' privacy and promote transparency."

What does data freedom have to do with customer privacy? Sounds like PR-speak. I could think of only one connection, and the DLF confirmed it for me:

Data Liberation gives people a way to revoke their trust in a company if they're not pleased with the way the company is behaving.

Whitewater age: Nashville edition

Over 1.5 million people live in the Nashville metropolitan region. Median urban family income is $50,000. Vanderbilt university is a major player. Nashville is a significant American city.

About a week ago it was devastated by flooding. It's a federal disaster area now. I only know because I've visited there on business, and I have colleagues living there. Maybe it got some TV time, but it didn't get much notice in my media stream.

In the 1990s the Nashville floods would have received full spectrum coverage. Now, between market chaos, historic oil spills, the collapse of Greece, and the rest, it's just background noise. If Katrina hit today, it would probably get coverage for a week.

The world has changed a great deal in 15 years. Admittedly the 90s were an anomaly, a time when people could talk, with a straight face, about the "end of history". The early 20th century was not exactly placid. Nineteenth century America was flat out turbulent.

So these are not unusual times -- except in the context of our generational memories.

White water is the new normal. Ahead lies Peak Oil, climate transitions, immense environmental and sociopolitical change across the globe, and, perhaps, far worse.

We will become accustomed to the chaos; just as Beirutis seemed to grow accustomed to urban life in a war zone. Today's college students, however, will have to endure the boomers mourning the golden age of the (Bill) Clinton years.

I miss the 90s.

Ken's Concertina

About 3 years ago I took some pictures of a friend disassembling  a concertina. Here they are, for anyone with a concertina interest ...

Ken's Concertina

Social Fail: Room for one more

Buzz is still floundering. The alternatives aren't any better. The big three all have problems (caveat: I know FB best, Twitter least):

Twitter: Missing multiple "account" (identity/stream) management. SMS based string limitation.

Buzz: Missing identity/pub stream management, overpowering ties to critical Google identity (heavy baggage, gmail, etc). Public profile by design. Lazy "if it sticks" design. Cross-Google coherence problem (Reader notes, Orkut, etc).

Facebook: Malign business model. Zuckerberg.

Of course there are other alternatives to consider. There's AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Myspace, the Wall Street Journal, IBM, Oracle, Walmart, Newsweek ... Right. All equally irrelevant.

The big three are, amazingly, missing the target.

There's room for one more.

WWAD?

What would Apple do?

See also:

• The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion
• Google's latest inadequate Buzz patch - Profile deletion
• Good-bye Buzz – for now.
• Reimagining realtime focalcast communication – Buzz and Twitter 2.0

Update 5/10/2010: Google knows they're flailing. That's progress!

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Gallery of 56 Chinese ethnic groups

This gallery of 56 Chinese ethnic group portraits is both marvelous and overwhelming. Dienekes has organized them by group (interesting comments).

I wish the images were much higher resolution. There's so much more I'd like to see.

Jackpot: Leonard predicts oil spill in 2008

There should be a blogger prize for best medium term prediction. Leonard gets my vote for his 2008 prediction, quoted by him in today's article...

How to guarantee a Gulf oil spill - How the World Works - Andrew Leonard Salon.com

... Try, if you can, to ignore all the lurid coke-and-sex bombshells contained in the three Department of Interior Inspector General reports about the shenanigans at the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS). The program director who snorted speed off a subordinate's toaster oven, and made her give him a blow job while driving around the neighborhood. The two "MMS Chicks" who were notorious for getting plastered at conventions and having one-night stands with oil industry employees.

Try -- and yes, I know it's hard -- try even to ignore the allegation that one program director told a subordinate that if she could score him some coke during the MMS performance appraisal period, he would increase her performance award. What's the big deal? Who wouldn't be motivated by such an incentive? And what's a little drunken sex and coke binging on government time among friends? It happens to the best of us.

The significance of the three reports delivered by the inspector general to Congress on Wednesday lies not in the prurience of some of the indiscretions, but in the symbolism. The Royalty-in-Kind Program of the U.S. Minerals Management Service is where offshore drilling meets the U.S. government. And gosh, is it ever one heck of a mess. You want a toxic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Just read the reports.

That was the Bush modus operandi. Government must be destroyed, so turn it over to the incompetent and the corrupt.

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.