The Fires Last Time

Tenement fires in New York in the 60s and 70s were a special terror on top of a general horror show. When your or your neighbors’ home burns in the tight quarters of the city it consumes your psyche, not just your belongings, and, even if just briefly, you are on the street. It happened on the Lower East Aide, in Harlem and elsewhere in the boroughs, as landlord neglect set in, as housing got crowded and as old tenement infrastructure decayed. Over time, the flames raged most drastically in the South Bronx. That is the back drop for a 2010 book that looks at this plague era, with a special eye toward the role a think tank’s overhyped computerized statistical analysis played in fanning the flames. Joe Flood’s “The Fires” (Broadly subtitled, “How a computer formulas, big ideas and the best of intentions burned down New York City and determined he future of cities.”) has particular portent in this age, when big data algorithms are a prowling wolf.

The Fires - Amazon.com

How quantum inspired were my algorithms?

Johnny B. Goodenough

I found these to be utterly remarkable. At 97, John B Goodenough has just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. What a lovable prof! And very telling: He easily cut to the heart on an issue we have continually pondered. The use of technology. Says Googenought: "Our inventions are morally neutral - it depends on how people use them."

🚨Bonus #podcast alert🚨Just ahead of the main show, we’ve got a quick Podcast Extra where @JacquesHughes speaks to John B. Goodenough who was awarded a #NobelPrize in Chemistry today. (Listen out for his infectious laugh). Find it here https://t.co/PZCcLbLn5v pic.twitter.com/5gXPOfbyRr

— Nature Pod & Video (@NaturePodcast) October 9, 2019

MemSQL through the years

More data is in motion these days, and that leads some shops to opt for newer types of data stores https://t.co/zWIHQWINgN Example MemSQL

— Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) October 15, 2017

NewSQL databases rise anew -- MemSQL, Spanner among contenders https://t.co/0InASvuDxz via @sdatamanagement

— Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) December 14, 2018

#MemSQL unveils #Helios, upgrades flagship #SQL database https://t.co/2IbjpoV9fl

— Datanami (@datanami) September 24, 2019

Confkluent Kafka Use Case: Lyft

IoT on the Edge

Multi-Source Data Analysis using Spark and Tellius

Shores of ML

Limits of ML? - I noticed this last week, when looking for Barnum's Bio, that a chap had re-published it and attached his patent. Writer David Streitfield here investigates the rape of Orwell's work.

"Amazon said in a statement that “there is no single source of truth” for the copyright status of every book in every country, and so it relied on authors and publishers to police its site.  The company added that machine learning and artificial intelligence were ineffective when there is no single source of truth from which the model can learn." Really? 1984? https://nyti.ms/33KyQ6v

Surveillance Capitalism on the March?

In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff defines Surveillance Capitalism as a new economic order that claims human experiences as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction prediction and sales. She, begins her story visiting a paper milling town in the 1980s where a plant manager ruminated on the difference between you working for a robot and a robot working for you.

The moment became a touch stone for Zuboff’s career in academia as along with a “Home Aware” project at the beginning of the century. The basic assumption of the project’s scientists and engineers was that the data being generated as part of system would be owned by the people who lived in the house.

It’s a far remove, she notes from the Smart Home as it is promoted today, where Nest and other arrays of thermostatic sensors eagerly harvest individuals’ data to sell advertising and to feed predictive models.

Zuboff is dealing with history and the biggest questions. She is dealing from a strong point: the existential question of whether a society will produce masters and slaves is played out again and again through time. It is going to take effort but I am looking forward to her analysis of the battle going on in this regard today. - Jack Vaughan