Facebook dirty filthy liars

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Facebook has patented the ability to continue tracking users after they have left their website. Despite this Facebook repeatedly claimed that they were not in the business of tracking their users. However, Facebook’s business is knowing their product as well as possible. You are their product. They are extremely interested in knowing everything they can about you. Why? It’s really simple. The more they know about their user’s online browsing activities the better they can customize ads for you. I imagine that they will create some pretty sophisticated models to determine who will click what sorts of ads. The more people click the more accurate the ad targeting will become.

While individual users do have a web “fingerprint” as the EFF puts it, people will typically browse the same types of websites together. For example people who play fantasy football will be going to yahoo! sport (or some other competing service), they then visit sites like espn, sports illustrated and probably a few sports blogs to try to figure out the best way to get an edge in their game this weekend. Facebook will take this data and aggregate it for a larger set of data. As there are 800 million facebook users and millions of players of fantasy sports, this data could be extremely useful for Facebook to use in placing ads. From these data they may be able to determine which sports team you’re interested in, which players are on your fantasy team, and then display ads for jersey’s from that team or for a specific player. They will also be able to figure out which ads will have an higher likelihood of someone with your browsing profile to click on.

Facebook will then be able to set a premium for ads that they do this with, or they will earn more money from the number of clicks a given ad gets. This of course is why Facebook has decided to collect this data. Some of it seems harmless enough. It’s not that big of a deal that Facebook is getting my fantasy football information, why should I care? Well, you don’t just use the internet for fantasy football, you use it for banking, shopping and a plethora of other activities. Do you know what data facebook is collecting? I certainly don’t. From the patent it is unclear what protections they are providing on the data they are collection. It also doesn’t say what data they will be collecting when you visit a third party site.

As a personal precaution I have started to use Facebook in a separate instance of Chrome using the Incognito function. This prevents my browsing history from being saved and deletes many cookies. I have also taken to deleting all my cookies every time I close my browser. I don’t do it myself Chrome does it for me. Additionally, these settings are available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I suggest that you look into doing similar safety measures to prevent Facebook from getting information from you that you don’t want them to have.

Finally, the other thing that isn’t really discussed in many places that mention the ads, this data is also being provided to law enforcement agencies. Now of course there’s the whole if you aren’t doing anything wrong then you don’t have to worry about anything. However, this worries me regardless because I’m losing my control over what information is going to the government and companies. I don’t like that. Patents like this one and cookies that record our daily activities are changing our private life into our public life.

Future of Employment II

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Yesterday I talked a little bit about the future of employment. Apparently this isn’t the most interesting topic. However, it’s important. The Slate series ends with some startling research that shows even scientists could eventually be replaced. I think we are a long way from those things happening. In my opinion the first things that  machines will do in R&D is replace humans in the creation of incremental innovations. In fact, to some extent computers already do replace humans in some of these things. Computers do a great deal of CPU, DRAM and Flash designing. Typically, these are incremental innovations. They are building on a current technology and making improvements. Humans are required for the radical innovations, such as a new chip set, calculation methodology or what have you.

Even some advanced R&D work could easily be improved by computers. Researchers have to read a great deal of papers to keep up with the state of the art in research. As the slate series points out, this is a form of data mining and lawyers are currently using automated programs to find specific words. There’s actually a branch of Science and Technology Studies that focuses on word analysis. They use similar programs and dump a few papers into it and figure out what verbal connections between the papers exist. This is a way of creating maps of knowledge. You are able to see through citations and similar word usage that a specific theory is prevalent or not. How would this apply to R&D? You could put in the materials that you’re using the problems you’re seeing and a bunch of papers that might be related and see what comes out. It could give you new materials new designs things of this nature. For this to work though, it’s a ways away.

What does mean in the long run? That no position is safe. I don’t think this will happen in our life time though. People are much too conservative to leave everything to computers. They just simply won’t be accepted. Even by our generation there’s too much distrust. It’s going to take one or two more generations for there to be enough trust in computing and technology to allow more control to shift to them. Sure some companies will be on the cutting edge with accepting these changes, others will be laggers.

If computers can do everything why do we need any jobs, isn’t the guy from CNN is right? I disagree. People will always want to work. People need to work. I’m not saying this because I’m hoping there won’t be a robotic take over or anything, but because people will not allow it to happen. In general people like to feel in control. Even if you aren’t the bus driver, knowing that it’s a person that you can relate to makes you feel like your more in control. Leaving everything to computers requires a level of surrender. Many people will simply refuse to give up that level of control. We won’t have fancy automatically driving cars for this very reason. People love to feel in control of where they go. It doesn’t matter if they would be safer, save money and get places faster. They would rail against the change because they loose control.

Would we leave the future of our economy in the hands of machines? You could argue that some companies already have. For instance take the May flash crash on Wall street. This has been attributed to high frequency trading following logical algorithms, it wiped about $1 trillion in wealth, most of it was restored.

In much of my research on academic spin-offs and technology incubators there is an important component related to tacit knowledge. Know how of the inventor of a technology. This is something that we’d lose if all of our work was robotized. There’s no difference in that than outsourcing. In developmental economics and innovation theories the ability to create copycat technologies is a precursor to developing their own technologies in that field. I think this is something we must keep in mind when discussing the reality of full automation. Without tacit knowledge and hands on experience with the devices and machines building the product it’s very difficult to develop improvements on either.

I think that we’ll have many legacy jobs hanging around for a long time. Simply because we need them to continue growing economically. Otherwise, we’ll stagnate and keep producing the same technologies.

The future of employment

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I posted this Slate series a little bit ago on my facebook and twitter feeds. It’s an interesting read about the future of robotics in the work place. Most people think of robots only in the automobile industry. However, they are in nearly every major industry now. All new semiconductor fabs can be run with only a handful of people over seeing the production of the product. The author notes that robots are making headway into pharmacies and other professions with menial tasks being a large component. In pharmacy computers also help ensure patients aren’t on conflicting medicines, with medical records in the computer it can easily flag potential issues. You could argue that this isn’t robotics it’s automation, personally I don’t see much of a difference. You use a machine to make a task faster and automated, it doesn’t matter if there are moving parts or not.

This isn’t the only recent discussion on the longevity of jobs. CNN had an opinion piece about 3 weeks ago discussing if jobs were obsolete. Which if this is the case we will have to take a serious look at our current capitalistic system. As an evolutionary economist (or at least having some training in it) I can see that this perspective is somewhat accurate. Between these two articles it really indicates that in the near future we’ll have a great deal of mechanized labor through robotics and computer programs. We will need dramatically less and less people employed in the western societies. This will even eventually trickle down into the developing societies.

My roommate argued that we should stop creating pointless jobs. That we should create a system that supports these people that continually fall out of the labor pool through job type elimination. This would take a complete reworking of our society to make this sort of change happen. Also, for a huge amount of people this freeloading kills them. We hear anecdotal evidence about some old fart at a company that is forced to retire and then within the year is dead. Whether we want to admit it or not, for the vast majority of people employment is tied to self worth. There’s increases in suicide rates when people aren’t able to work and cannot support their families. Depression is also higher among the unemployed.

There are further problems with this future. The CNN article discusses how we should be ok with just a white collar work force. I completely disagree. When I worked at Samsung some great ideas came from the technicians fixing our tools. The greater the variety of knowledge sets the higher the number of ideas. Sure a great deal of them may be really crappy, but the ones that end up surviving through the competition end up being better ideas. Make the workforce more homogeneous would reduce this affect.

I don’t have an answer to this. We need to be realistic and try to understand the fundamental changes that our economy is going through. If we see that jobs are in fact going the way of the dodo we basically have to throw out all free-market economics. Why? Because there’s no one to buy anything except an elite few and they just do not have the buying power to keep an economy of this size going. We will have to evaluate our morals, ethics and goals in life. It will not be easy.

Accessibility to Copyrighted Content

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Torrent Freak had this article today that discusses how the amount of piracy in Sweeden. In fact, it discusses how it has dropped with the introduction of Spotify. This isn’t the only case where access to material impacts piracy. Hulu (US only) has introduced an 8 day waiting period for new Fox episodes, this has lead to an increase in the amount of pirating of Hell’s Kitchen. If people are going to pirate Hell’s Kitchen, HELL’S KITCHEN!, then why wouldn’t they pirate just about all Fox episodes? Limiting access drives people to pirate.

Why are people willing to use Spotify over other streaming services? For one, it’s free with ads, but people are also able to share. They are able to share legally too. I am able to access music, which my friends on facebook have shared, from friends back in the US. From people that I only talk to on an irregular basis. My friends are able to share with me, where before I would have had to ask them for music and either bought it or download it. Since, I’ve decided to forgo using Apple products I’m limited by what is on Amazon or other music sites. Not all of the songs that my friends listen to are on those services. They like a lot of indie music.

I think that it’s time for copyright holders to wake up to the fact that people don’t really want to illegally acquire music. Sure they’d like to pay as little as possible, but they are willing to have ads, visual or audio, to listen to the music they like. The other good thing about a service like spotify is the fact that on your phone, if you pay, you can access your music there. Access is the important thing. If I’ve bought something once I should be able to access that product on any device in any manner that I want.

The differences in ability to view copyrighted material drives piracy. If copyright holders want to reduce piracy they need to increase accessibility for users. Users are willing to put up with a great deal of things if they are able to easily access content they want. Copyright holders, like Fox, should figure out a way to include online viewership into their rating system. People don’t want to be forced to watch shows when they are on TV. They want to watch shows when they are able to.

Frivolous Science? Pfft

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Today I saw this post on Reddit. Long story short this guy was asking the r/askscience subreddit why we do research like the CERN experiments, as it has no practical use. There are several reasons. I’ve mentioned some of these on here before, but they can always be mentioned again. First, research that we conduct now that is interesting only to a small subset of people may be applied for other things later. Second,  furthering our understanding of the world isn’t frivolous. Third, in many cases basic research must be completed at universities because industry will not pay for it.

Some examples, bird migration research that told us a lot about birds historically probably wasn’t very interesting to much of the scientific community. However, it’s become more important of late. One of my friends commented to me about how in Europe during the Avian flu, migration patterns became extremely important for predicting where the next could be. There are further uses, those migration patterns are being used to determine where to place wind mills, because we don’t want to put a wind farm in the middle of a bird migration path. The slaughter would be horrifying. Finally, changes in migration patterns may represent a shift in local climates. If birds take longer to migrate south, it indicates that the weather isn’t changing as fast as it used to. Over time this data could indicate a trend and we should look for further evidence of climate change.

In 2009 there was a rash of articles that questioned the importance of scientific research in some cases. This isn’t really new, even at that point there’d been the infamous McCain bear comments. Even scientists make fun of some of the more obscure types of research with the Ig Noble Awards (One award was given to a research that only cracked the knuckles on one hand to test for arthritis differences (there wasn’t any)). Despite this, some of this research is interesting and could be useful in the future. Take the recent finding that fish are angry in boring fish tanks. This research is pretty much useless unless you’re a fish fan. However, it also shows us that we clearly don’t understand animals as well as we think we do. Even popular stories about the memory span of gold fish was shown to be wrong by the MythBusters. These examples indicate that many people don’t understand the importance of research and that even scientists don’t. However, even seemingly pointless research can illuminate our understanding of the world. People love to know nearly pointless facts. This also ties back to the my first point above, we never know when something seemingly useless can suddenly have an importance beyond the scope of the original study. It may save lives. That finding about fishes could help build better large scale aquariums where it is safer to interact with dangerous fish, like killer whales and sharks.

My final point is that some basic research will not be conducted by industry players. There’s no guarantee on any return on some scientific investigation. However, it can be incredibly important for the advancement of industry. Quantum computing could be the next big thing for computing, however it’s being researched by a combination of industry and universities. Most of the money and risk is on the university side though. Our understanding of particle physics helps us understand how quantum computing can help. Eventually we may be able to use this neutrino finding, if it pans out, in communication systems. There’s no reason why we wouldn’t be able to use the spin of a neutrino to transmit information.

Seemingly frivolous research is an important part of the scientific process. Enjoy it.