Data, like people can lie

Three cheers for the West Virginia University team whose research caused the net to enclose upon the existential Euro varmints of VW. Who used software to neuter U.S. emission tests (and probably laugh about it over bears). Data, like people can lie. Data exists within the construct of the civilization around it -  What's the bet that a few Euro's in an off shore bank will cause Trump and Bannion to cut research funding in to emissions? - Jack Vaughan

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/business/inside-vws-campaign-of-trickery.html

It couldnt look bleaker unless your name is Meeker

Mary Meeker's annual report for Kleiner Perkins on the status of Internet commerce is always interesting - chock full of data and packed with gleefully greedy West Coast VC perspective.  Let's look at some highpoints out of the 150-plus Power Point Slide opus.

Do you smell the fear in the Fortune 500? Smells like they could use some baby wipes. They can get them from Amazon, actually, which trails only Huggies and Pampers for online market share. For Duracell, it is deep doodoo, as Amazon surpasses the check out counter champ entirely  - on the Web. All that marketing and technology innovation - not too mention shelf shoving -- over many years seems for little or naught. (Off beat: I worked for 6 months at a drug store on 34th St in the 1970s and among the thing I learned was: "You cannot keep Pampers on the shelf" Translation: Shit happens.)

The sound of foot prints echoes double in network television where the biggies are flat or in decline, but Netflix is on a skyrocket up.

And disruptors (the Internet advertising vehicles  that disrupted convention media) can be disrupted too, especially if they face big hungry disruptors  such as Facebook and Google. They who grow ad revenue in double digits while Everybody Else flatly contests the small pie leftovers.

Maybe Facebook and Google are as much beneficiaries of an underlying sea change in Internet usage..as of anything else. While desktop and Laptop Internet use has been steady or in slight decline over the last eight years, Internet   time on the smartphone side has been vaulting forward stridently. What is different about mobile? The message might be real real concise, the ambiance more transactional, and the market more consumerish.

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Related
http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

Technology and Koyaanisqatsi

By U.S. HUD 

Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi concept brought to wide attention as the title and central motif in Godfrey Reggio's 1983 movie. There are a lot of ways of looking at the meaning of the word, but the one that Reggio lit upon can stand, as it is a pretty useful way of framing the modern world. Koyaanisqatsi represents "Life out of balance," and, to me, that representation aptly depicts 1000-plus years of rising science and technology threatening human values.

I suppose there is more - that there is a unified theory gluon waiting, something like Capital, or Greed. But let's start with some simplicity.  Asking: Where is harmonious technology and humanism to be found, and where and why does Koyannisqatsi begin to emerge. - Jack Vaughan