NYT's Bob Tedeschi gives me a parting gift - iOS Parental Controls don't work

A few months ago NYT's Bob Tedeschi missed the iOS Porn story - Apple's Parental Controls don't actually work.

I know, for example, of a special needs teenager who writes at a 2nd grade level but can get from Mobiata's FlightBoard to an embedded Webkit Google search on "hot chicks" in just a few mouse clicks - when Safari is disabled. (Anything with a Twitter share button is trivial to hack.)

Bob followed up on an email I sent him last January, but I didn't see anything in his NYT articles. Until today's farewell article  ... (emphasis mine)

Some Final Thoughts on a Booming Industry - Bob Tedeschi - NYTimes.com

Having covered the boom and bust of the e-commerce industry, and then the boom and bust of the mortgage industry, I’m exiting the mobile apps beat before I see death and destruction again...

... Before stretching my journalistic legs elsewhere, though, I’d like to share a few closing thoughts about where the mobile apps industry might focus, if it hopes to stave off a bust of its own....

... No. 3: Allow greater parental controls.

If, 20 years ago, Google or Apple introduced a new television service or device that included thousands of pornographic channels, and then they marketed the product to children, you could imagine the outrage that would have generated.

Mobile devices are the younger generation’s TV sets, yet our new-age broadcasters deliver pornography and other potentially objectionable content to the devices without giving parents an easy way to reliably block that content.

As it now stands, parents who care about shielding their children from adult content on their mobile devices need a manual, an hour or more of free time and continued vigilance against apps that offer a portal to the open Web...

That bolded sentence -- that was for me. Thanks Bob.

Short of a humiliating Congressional hearing I've abandoned hope that Apple will do anything. Actually, I've pretty much abandoned all hope. Parents have embraced denial (which is a good thing when your kids are away at college, not so good when they're 10 yo). 

Unfortunately, I doubt developers can even choose to disable WebKit access when Safari is blocked. UIWebViewDelegate Protocol Reference, for example, only provides information on WebKit access, not Safari access. I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't provide Parental Control settings for use by 3rd party software.

Where is the religious right when I need them? Oh, yeah, fighting gay marriage. Way to keep your eye on the ball gang.

Fifty Lives: A Work of Historical Fiction

I want to view a work of historical fiction called "Fifty Lives: The Story of Humanity".

It could be an iPad app or a hard cover book. It could start as an undergraduate history class project blog that a professor would repurpose as a best selling book and then buy a villa in Spain.

The work starts in deep history and ends in 2010. It consists, of course, of the story of 50 "average" lives.

The lives are chosen to represent epochs of change and stability, but the primary focus is technological change. Lives can be chosen from anywhere on earth as long as are few technology regressions. So one could hop from China 1000 AD to Europe 1500 AD, but not Europe 1820 to Japan 1830.

I think it could be a popular book. Anyone know a history professor looking for a villa in Spain?

I said Romney could never win the GOP primary ...

Five years Romney was running for President. Back then I wrote:

Gordon's Notes: Romney: not possible

In order to win the GOP primaries Mitt Romney has to convince Christian conservatives that he's reversed many of his longstanding opinions. He also, incidentally, has to publicly renounce his religion and be born again as a Baptist ....

I wrote my post around Kenneth Woodward's 2007 NYT OpEd.  Woodward walked through the theological gulf between Christian fundamentalisms and Mormonism -- and he didn't even touch on the more exotic portions of traditional Mormon belief. I didn't believe a former Mormon bishop could win the GOP primary. Perhaps he could win the presidential election -- but not the GOP primary.

It took five years, but it seems I was not exactly right.

I'd like to know how he did it, and how evangelicals crossed that divide. In the meantime, I think some credit goes to GOP voters. Maybe quite a bit of credit -- depending on what they were thinking.

So how exceptional is Romney's religion? Is Mormonism technically Christian? I tried two sources, both were a bit evasive ...

Encyclopedia of Religion and Social Science

... In its Christian primitivism and antinomianism, it was akin to many other "restorationist" movements, such as the Campbellites, which emerged at about the same time in the "burned over district" ...

... in the 1840s, Joseph Smith and his successor prophets began to promulgate a series of new revelations and doctrines that moved Mormonism in a sharply heterodox direction relative to the Protestant heritage from which it had emerged. Since then, mainstream Protestantism, especially the more evangelical and fundamentalist varieties, has generally been unwilling to consider Mormons as part of the Christian family, despite the continuing Mormon claims to being the one, true, authentic church of Jesus Christ, restored to usher in a new dispensation of the fullness of the Gospel.... 

and

Mormon (religion) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Mormon beliefs are in some ways similar to those of orthodox Christian churches but also diverge markedly...

.. Mormons regard Christian churches as apostate for lacking revelation and an authoritative priesthood, although they are thought to be positive institutions in other respects. Smith, they believe, came to restore the institutions of the early Christian church. Although calling people to repent, Smith’s creed reflected contemporary American optimism in its emphasis on humanity’s inherent goodness and limitless potential for progress.

Perhaps it's a bit of a sensitive question. I'd go with technically Christian-related but not Protestant; probably closer to Christianity than Unitarianism or Judaism. Obviously there's a bit of irony if the Obama-is-a-muslim slice of the GOP ends up electing an arguably non-Christian President. (Maybe that's why Romney encourages Trump; it keeps the Birther whackos busy. Left alone they might go in another direction.)

If Romney does win he'll be expanding the religious range of the American presidency ...

Religious affiliations of Presidents of the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unitarian

• John Adams
• John Quincy Adams
• Millard Fillmore
• William Howard Taft

No denominational affiliation

• Thomas Jefferson
• Abraham Lincoln
• Andrew Johnson
• Ulysses Grant
• Rutherford Hayes
• Barack Obama (previously United Church of Christ)

However, since the list includes four Unitarians (we go there - they evidently take agnostics) the historical record already stretches a good bit beyond "mainstream" Christianity. So President Romney would be unusual, but, theologically speaking, not entirely unprecedented.

Apple's quality problem is a complexity problem too

Marco Arment, builder of a respected OS X app, writes

Three Things That Should Trouble Apple – Marco.org: 

... Apple’s software quality is declining.

I’m not just talking about the most recent releases of everything, or the last couple of months — I’ve noticed this trend for about 2–3 years. As Apple’s software has grown to address larger feature sets, hard-to-solve problems such as sync and online services, shorter release cycles, increasingly strong competition, and Apple’s own immense scale, quality has slipped...

I've noticed it for at least that long, but OS X Lion is a particular disappointment.

Siri is a recent example. After a promising start Siri died. I'll pin this one on Cook. Jobs had his flops, but he usually turned off the marketing until the bodies were buried or the problems were fixed.

The bigger quality problem though - that one came from Jobs. Some of it had to be the talent distraction of iOS development, but Lion is full of bad choices. Whoever decided to change how files were saved instead of focusing on quality and reliability should find another job.

Then there's the MobileMe to iCloud migration. Was there really no way to incrementally fix and extend MobileMe?

It is true that the endless malware race forces developers into disruptive and often imperfectly tested software updates. Microsoft faces this problem too however, and I think they're doing better with it. Apple chose to inflict much of the combinatorial complexity of interactions between iOS and OS X devices, synchronization across disparate data models -- not to mention the crazed, DRM-driven metastatic Apple ID Hell family/payer/owner identity and authentication problem. Apple chose to focus on marketing rather than customer value when they created their Aperture/iPhoto mess - and Apple continues to market Aperture as a smooth upgrade for iPhoto despite that mess. Rather like Siri, come to think of it.

Apple's quality problems are far from under control, and I don't think Cooks's executive compensation plans are helping.

Periodic Table of the US Navy?

My son brought home a Periodic Table from his school science class. It's also an ad for "America's Navy", "A GLOBAL FORCE FOR GOOD (tm)".

I don't suppose we can get equal time for other navies?

I didn't think so.

Why coupons? Price concealment information and memetic archeology in the pre-web world

Emily and I were wondering what business purpose coupons serve. They make brand price comparison labor intensive and hence unaffordable for most of us; this presumably allows both price discrimination (selling things at different prices to different markets), but it also enables companies to hide their prices from one another.

I couldn't find a good recent overview; the best I could do was a 1984 article by MC Narasimhan (A Price Discrimination Theory of Coupons).  A modern paper would want to include comparisons to Amazon's experiments with dynamic pricing, price hiding in pharmaceutical distribution, the regulatory and strategic concealment of physician office fees all in the context of game theory, information asymmetry (Akerlof, 1970s), and behavioral economics.

I can't find anything like this. So either we have a Google fail or yet another failure of modern economic academia (or perhaps a success of journal publisher information concealment, which is probably somehow related to coupon clipping).

Update: I gave this another 30 minutes of thought and realized there's a much more interesting explanation for this meme absentia.

This is pre-web economics; work done in the 1970s and 1980s. Discussions of affinity discounts, coupon clipping, frequent flyer mile economics and the like are the province of undergraduate textbooks. I shouldn't be looking in scholar.google.com, I should be checking out DeLong and Krugman's posts, tumblrs, and tweets.

Except, of course in the 1970s Brad and Paul were high school students. Google's Usenet (1980s blog posts) archives start in 1981, and email lists aren't much older. The memetic gulf stream [1] that swept ideas from academia to geekdom didn't exist.

So this isn't really a Google or Academia fail, it's a need for new innovations in memetic archeology [2] within the pre-web world (early singularity: 1820-1995).

[1] As of 5/28/2012 Google has no results on "memetic gulf stream". Try it now.
[2] Seven real hits today. Try it now. 

PS. Emily points out that the OpenStax nonprofit textbook movement will expose many of these memes to the Google filter feeder. (Meme phracking?). Incidentally, I found that reference through my pinboard/wordpress microblog/memory management infrastructure now integrated into my personal google custom search.

A millennia of European history in six bullet points

A thousand years of European History - special needs history version ...

• 1000 Middle Ages. Lots of small Kingdoms and local rulers. Church very powerful. Terrible Black Plague wipes out much of Europe. 
• 1500 Renaissance and Protestant Reformation. Knowledge from ancient Greece and Rome and from China and India and the Middle East comes to Europe. New World “discovered” by Europeans. Catholic church loses control of power during Protestant Reformation. 
• 1600 Scientific Revolution Late in the Renaissance Europe invented the idea of Science. That changed the way people thought about the world and how they made things. 
• 1700 The Enlightenment Machines and ideas traveled around the world and caused Revolutions. 
• 1800 The Industrial Age The steam engine and other machines meant that animals and human muscles weren’t as important. The world population started to grow very quickly. Energy was important. 
• 1950 The Modern Age Today machines are starting to replace or extend the human brain. We don’t know what to call this age.

I'll update the PDF later today. When it's done I'll do an ePub version too.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Ancient Rome in a nutshell (an earlier excerpt from my special needs version of 9th grade history)

Euthenasia will come to America within the next twenty years

Thirty years ago I was distressed by the NIH's relative disinterest in demential research. Anyone who could do arithmetic knew what was coming; the time for major action was 1982.

Now we have an "urgent" NIH program focusing on dementia [1] -- but it's 25 years too late. Post-boomers will face a deluge of former-people whose bodies outlast their brains. You'd call us Zombies, except that there will be a cure of sorts ...

Parent Health Care and Modern Medicine’s Obsession With Longevity -- Michael Wolff - New York Magazine

... after due consideration, I decided on my own that I plainly would never want what LTC insurance buys, and, too, that this would be a bad deal. My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents’ long and agonizing deaths won’t do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out.

Meanwhile, since, like my mother, I can’t count on someone putting a pillow over my head, I’ll be trying to work out the timing and details of a do-it-yourself exit strategy. As should we all.

Things that can't go on don't. One way or another, America will figure out how to shorten the duration of Boomer dementia. My own plan is to buy a cottage by a cliff with no railings.

[1] "Better treatments by 2025", a meaningless goal that is sure to be met. Funded with $50 million, or what modern CEOs make every four months. Wake me up when it's funded with $50 billion.

Entanglement and the emergence of time

There's an international competition underway to create the first secure quantum cryptographic channel to an orbital satellite. Today's record is 150 kilometers.

I can't judge the security significance of this competition; it probably depends on how good quantum computers will be at factoring. Perhaps a quantum communications channel will be the only practical defense against quantum computing decryption, though my trusted expert is somewhat skeptical.

I can say, however, that humans are remarkably blase about how insanely weird it is to have technologies based on magic.

Magic, or something indistinguishable from it. This stuff is all powered by "entanglement", the modest little word that means measurement of entangled states at opposite "ends" of the universe will be "instantaneously" "correlated". [1][2]

It's been said physicists deal with this by not talking about it. I am certain, however, that many physicists think about it quite a bit. I imagine I see these thoughts around the edges of blog posts on nature of time.

Since I'm very much not a smart enough to be a physicist, I can speculate freely about what I think they're thinking. I think they think that entanglement is telling us that time is not fundamental; that in a sense everything and nothing happens all at once. When correlation can happen outside of a light cone, then time isn't what we thought it was.

I'm on the lookout now for physicists starting to mutter these thoughts aloud.

[1] Words really fail at this. I'm trying to avoid words like "cause". Also "instantaneous" is almost certainly wrong or right.

[2] We're told that there's no way to communicate information through this correlation; though something I read recently made me wonder if physicists were finding a way to cheat this rule (I can't find the link).

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Entanglement and the realness of time 8/2011
• Gordon's Notes: Carroll on Time: emergent or fundamental? 9/2011
• Carroll: Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time 9/2011
• Carroll: Quantum Mechanics and Decision Theory 4/2012
• The Quantum Biology Conundrum  - Technology Review 5/2012
• Biophoton Communication: Can Cells Talk Using Light? 5/2012
• Quantum Biology and the Puzzle of Coherence 3/2012
• A Photonic C-NOT Gate Breakthrough for Quantum Computing 5/2012
• Gordon's Notes: Quantum Entanglement: what does it tell about the nature of reality? 6/2004

Post-singularity life is burning a lot of neurons

In 3 days I've tackled three monster Apple bugs.

One is with Apple ID infrastructure, one with Image Capture in Snow Leopard, and a third probably arose in an iTunes server during an iOS tunes purchase.

Two of these bugs defeated Apple 2nd tier support. All of them are likely rare; I will probably never see these particular bugs again. Unfortunately, there are a lot of these bugs arising from interactions of Cloud and software and data.

One bug I've definitely solved -- it was bizarre. I have a good theory and a test case for another. The third might be fixed but needs more testing.

It's mildly satisfying to figure these things out, but it's an insane waste of time and neurons. I could have been learned options trading [1] in the time I've wasted.

Note that only one of these was OS X specific. Two of them are Apple Cloud bugs. The ones I understand best appear to be complexity problems -- too many moving parts, too many edge cases, too many ways for things to break.

Post-singularity life does not scale.

[1] Yeah, there are no good investments any more.

Update: This Stross essay is pertinent.

SF, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done? - Charlie's Diary 

... We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980... 

... to the extent that mainstream literary fiction is about the perfect microscopic anatomization of everyday mundane life, a true and accurate mainstream literary novel today ought to read like a masterpiece of cyberpunk dystopian SF...

 Even dystopian science fiction didn't predict we'd spend all our time keeping our whizzy tools working.

Who were the crazy genius scientists?

Which famous scientists and/or mathematicians were also "crazy" (e.g. - far outside behavioral "norms") during their adult productive lives (excluding those, like Pauling, who became eccentric at an age where dementia is common)?

My current list is ...

1. Newton: Perhaps autism spectrum, but he was so brilliant, and so bizarre, that he's untypable. He's outside of the human range. He may have hard mercury poisoning late in life, or perhaps a late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis.
2. John Nash: paranoid schizophrenic, though somewhat late-onset. His recovery is remarkable, as was Newton's -- but he was psychotic for a longer time period.
3. Kurt Godel: schizotypal, later in life delusional beliefs with paranoid features.
4. Nikolai Tesla: OCD, Autism spectrum?
5. Henry Cavendish: social phobia, anxiety disorder.
6. Boltzmann: bipolar disorder (classic)

Our classifications of mental illness are pretty weak even in normal IQ adults; this group is probably unclassifiable. Who else should be on the list?

Update: Philip K Dick wasn't quite in this group, but his late-onset pyschosis experience resembles Tesla's. Matt suggested Godel and Boltzmann. The pattern of schizotypal personality disorder behaviors with late-onset deterioration or psychosis might apply to Tesla, Newton and Godel. Botlzmann and Nash had more classic neurospychiatric disorders.

These are most extraordinary minds. It would not be surprising if they had extraordinary dysfunctions.

Update 6/7/2012: An academic opinion.

Is Siri Tom Cook's Newton?

After Jobs 1.0 John Sculley championed The Newton. Wasn't ready. Flopped. Sculley left.

After Jobs 2.0 Tom Cook brought us Siri. Wasn't ready. Flopped. Cook ?

Canada vs US: What happened in the 90s?

I was playing around with Google's astounding Google Data Visualization tool [1] and I compared GDP per capital between Canada (my birthplace) and the US over the past forty years in US dollars.

WTF?!

That's one huge gap in the 90s. I assume it has to do with some exchange rate divergence and a purchasing power parity gap ...



Whatever the cause, the divergence starts @1990, but shortly after 2001 (9/11?) Canada US$ GDP/Capita skyrockets. The crash of 2008 by this measure is huge in the US, but immense in Canada. Now they're converging again even as Canada's currency seems to be ?overpriced ...

I don't see how to graph PPP adjusted GDP/person over this period, but that would be really neat.

Be neat to have an economist comment on this. For me it's mostly fun to play with this amazing tool. I suspect that some people made a lot of money based on those wild PPP fluctuations - whether directly by currency trading or indirectly through other measures. They don't seem to reflect fundamental changes in the US and Canadian economies.

PS. Incidentally, according to this tool, Bermuda is part of North America, but Mexico is not.

Minnesota 2012: Emotional health?

I tend to think bad driving is contagious. Not contagious as in passed from parent to child, but contagious as in a short-lived virus passed from driver to driver. When conditions are right, perhaps in bad weather or after tax filing, one bad driver angers another who angers another ...

So when I'm in my car and I see two people driving badly, I give everyone extra space. The virus is short-lived, typically things are back to normal within a few hours. [1]

Lately, however, it seems as though Minnesota drivers are persistently distracted, irritable, maybe angry. I see it when I'm driving, but especially when I'm walking or bicycling. It's not a mobile device problem; if anything I see less mobile use while driving. It could be demographics; Minnesotans are getting older (certainly I am), and old drivers are not happy drivers.

It's not just drivers though. I watch faces, and pedestrians too seem unhappy and distracted. That would be normal in February, but it's odd in a mild Minnesota spring.

On the other hand, a recent Gallup poll suggests a stable US emotional health index (The difference between 78.3 and 79.8 seems small, but US presidential elections are decided by less margin than that):

... Gallup's U.S. Emotional Health Index score was 79.9 last month, slightly above the previous high of 79.8 recorded in March 2008 and May 2010. Americans' emotional health has generally been improving since September, when it dropped to its lowest level in more than three years (78.3)...

So no conclusions for now, but I do wonder if Americans are starting to weary of economic stress, uncertainty, and increasing inequality. I'll be tracking this meme.

[1] I used to think there were similar epidemics of murder, perhaps with non-linear or chaotic peaks, but so far that theory hasn't held up.

JP Morgan debacle - it's all Krugman's fault

Felix Salmon pins the JP Morgan debacle on the CEO - Jamie Dimon.

Dimon supported Ina Drew's transformation of corporate "checking accounts" into big bets against Europe and the Euro. They turned a risk management fund into a trading operation. It's 2009 all over again.

Dimon's luck with his timing though. The GOP Congress will ensure there are no consequences this election year, and he can put his billions towards a Romney win.

Even better, Dimon can pin the whole thing on the guy traders hate - Paul Krugman. After all, it was Krugman who predicted that Greece would have to drop out of the Euro unless Germany accepted major reforms. 

As it happened Europe made partial reforms, pushing the date of Euro collapse into 2012 and ruining Dimon's week.

Of course Krugman has not really been disproved, but doesn't he make a great scapegoat for Dimon?

In the end, Krugman humbled JP Morgan after all. Just not the way we thought he would.