War Talk

I seem to have randomly spent the last few days immersed in the Iraq & Afghanistan Wars.

First of all, after listening to an interesting episode of the Econtalk podcast, I read ‘War’ by Sebastian Junger one day this week. It’s a hugely powerful piece based on the fifteen months that a couple of journalists were embedded in an area know as the deadliest place in Afghanistan during the height of the war. Then discovered that there was a documentary based in the book called ‘Restrepo‘ on Netflix. Rather uniquely, despite being focused on the same raw material, both present entirely different experiences and I’d recommend checking both out.

Next up, I’d heard a podcast Tim Ferris did with General Stanley McChrystal – who basically headed up the US army’s operations at the time – a while back and stumbled across another podcast which I listened to during a few runs this week.

All of which leads somewhat randomly to what I think is a prime piece of amusement for anyone who’s spent any time themselves deeply embedded in any form of organisational hell…

Self-lacing Trainers (Bluetooth Dependent…)

There’s technology that will change the world.

And then there’s technology that has evolved through the application of innovation for the sake of gimmickry.

At this point in time, I’d argue self-lacing Nike’s fall firmly into the latter category. Attempting to replace a technology that’s been around for (the shoelaces) perhaps illuminates the fine line between being visionary and foolhardy. Particularly when the app fails to sync and you’re left with a pair of useless loose trainers…

I wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of change to footware does ultimately catch on. Hell, once we have flying cars and jetpacks, I’d be pretty disappointed if I had to bend over to deal with my laces at least twice a day. But somehow that all feels like a long way off yet. I wonder if Nike agree.

The Current State of Podcasts

I’ve written a few times about the explosion in podcasts during the last two or three years. It feels like a huge shift in the consumption of information, at least by a significant proportion of certain communities across the globe.

I was reading this Medium post (‘State of Podcasts 2018: Takeaways from Podcast Movement 2018 on monetization, diversity and discovery’) with interest earlier in the week. It’s pretty old now (July 2018 which is light years in podcasting terms) but it’s a fascinating insight from the huge Podcast Movement conference from last year.

You only have to look at recent news, like Spotify’s acquisition of podcast companies Gimlet and Anchor a few weeks ago to see the money starting to stream into this sector. Edison Research from a year ago showed that (only) 17% of Americans were listening to a podcast each week. Now, the US is vast compared to the UK bubble that I live in but I’d be utterly astonished if that number doesn’t bounce up by the time in surveys this year.

It’s hardly surprising that discovery of episodes was seen back then as one of the biggest issues. Compared to any other form of information discovery online, podcasts can be almost invisible. It’s improving but there’s a whole load of room for improvements to be made. Clearly, the situation’s not great at the moment – but at the same time, I suspect the risks are pretty good that the situation will be far worse once audio does more readily searchable. Perhaps we’ll move into an age controlled by audio search algorithms in which podcasters actively change their content in order to rank more highly in search etc. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we see the equivalent of keyword stuffing in some way, shape or form. Which doesn’t sound like the best way forward for conversational content.

It’ll also be interesting to see what happens this year when it comes to monetisation. Would you pay to access your favourite podcast? Put up with adverts (at the start / middle / end?). It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Listen to this space…

Nineteenth Century Technology

I like this piece of Jamie Bartlett’s book, ‘The People vs Tech: How the Internet is killing democracy (and how we save it)”:

“Sometimes relatively innocuous inventions open up new possibilities for social organisation. In the mid-nineteenth-century America, the settlement of farming communities in the West was impossible because roaming cattle kept destroying the crops. But the invention of ‘barbed wire’ meant that huge swathes of land could be enclosed. Roaming buffalo were doomed, which in turn destroyed the Native American way of life.”

A great of example of technology destroying and creating at the same time.

The Universe (And 9,000 Glaswegians)

Tonight I went along to watch Professor Brian Cox at The SSE Hydro in Glasgow. As I’ve written about before, it feels like there’s something different in the current climate these days when 9,000 people turn up to hear a scientist speak:

I learned a lot tonight. Many different avenues for further study just opened up out of nowhere. And any night which combines Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity, wormholes, the 4D Space Time Continuum, photos of the Big Bang, a simulation of an Event Horizon by the guys who created the Interstellar Gargantura black hole is A Good Night…

But here’s my favourite.

We’re all made up of stars.

Quite literally. Pow.

Simple and (Less In)secure

One of the principles that seems to be constant no matter what endeavour you’re engaged in is – simplicity is your friend.

When it comes to eating plans, exercise regimes, cooking lessons, writing practices – whatever – an imperfect plan consistently practiced will always beat the perfect plan inconsistently followed.

Success is found that way mainly because of the incredible power that comes from building habits (no matter how small).

But simplicity has another very distinct benefit in another specific area – writing secure code. Or, more accurately, less insecure code (as security can never be an absolute).

To look further into this, it’s worth reading this thread by Sarah Jamie Lewis about the proposed Swiss online voting system. It’s hard to believe that this could ever be a good idea – for a whole number of reasons. But for the present purposes, let’s just focus on the security implications:

There’s been a lot of criticism about the project so far. But it’s impossible to disagree with what she’s saying here. No matter what kind of rockstar genius coders you might have, to date no one has ever written perfect code. Their will always be errors – and when the system is critical (even when it isn’t, to be honest, it’s just the stakes are much higher), you want to be using things that have been demonstrably proved to work together in ways that are robust.

Once you have complex code in play, not only does the code have to be written perfectly itself but the different packages etc also have to be integrated perfectly.

You’ve just massively increased the chances of causing problems in the future.

The easier it is to fix things, the more chance you have of getting it right. That’s why all important code has to be auditable. Because no-one can expect to get things right the first time around. And when when you start playing around with individual’s democratic rights, the stakes have just gone through the roof.

Women In Coding

Came across a good longread article in The New York Times earlier this week on ‘The Secret History of Women in Coding‘.

Whilst I already knew about quite a lot of the history (Ada Lovelace, the Bletchley Park ladies, Grace Hopper etc), I’d never thought too deeply about the reasons for the disconnect between the significant involvement of women in the early days of the computing ‘industry’ and the current split between the sexes in the industry beyond the obvious narrative around career inequality etc.

I find it particularly interesting because my original career was law – traditionally a stuffy male preserve. Yet whilst at Uni, women made up over 50% of my cohort. It’s a trend that has continued over the years, to the extent that far more women than men now study law. But in the past twenty years that I’ve been working in and around the technology industry, it’s clear that the story is quite different for coding which is now heavily male-dominated, despite its origins.

The article raises an interesting point: because in the early days literally no-one had any coding experience, recruiters weren’t seeking out those with previous expertise. But this all changed with the introduction of affordable computers into homes in the 1980’s. Suddenly you had teenagers who acquired many hours of experience whilst experimenting with their home computers. And, for the most part, they were male. The article argues this was due to the stereotypical ‘boys like building/engineering, girls like craftwork/housework’ split that was obviously more prevalent back in the households of that decade.

It’s a great long article. But for me, the most important point comes in the explanation of the different attitude adopted by Carnegie Mellon University who identified the issue. Instead of rewarding the ‘obsessive hacker’ with a place at University studying computer science, they broadened their outlook considerably:

“They still wanted to encourage those obsessive teenage coders, but they had come to understand that the neophytes were just as likely to bloom rapidly into remarkable talents and deserved as much support. “We had to broaden how faculty sees what a successful student looks like,” he says.

“The admissions process was adjusted, too; it no longer gave as much preference to students who had been teenage coders. Faculty members became more used to seeing how green coders evolve into accomplished ones, and they learned how to teach that type. 

“Carnegie Mellon’s efforts were remarkably successful. Only a few years after these changes, the percentage of women entering its computer-science program boomed, rising to 42 percent from 7 percent; graduation rates for women rose to nearly match those of the men.”

I’m a huge believer in this. With the exception of a one-off short project, experience really doesn’t matter in a whole range of activities. Give me someone who has the passion and drive to learn from scratch any day of the week. Perhaps easier said than done for many institutions that are still too brittle to change their ways or culture. Still – given the divergence between the limited supply and the unmet levels of demand for coders, when you consider just how outsized the potential rewards are, surely it can be nothing other than a direction that’s worth taking. For everyone involved.

 

The Mystery of Cicada 3301

A Saturday video for all of you who like a good treasure hunt….and they don’t come better in the digital world than the story of Cicada 3301.

To date, no one has managed to solve the mystery. There are rumours that it may be some kind of recruitment test for a secret service like the NSA or MI6 or perhaps some kind of digital mercenary group. It certainly appears to be organised by some very well-funded individuals, given the fact that the clues have been hidden all over the world.

But still the answer remains unsolved.

A Lost Opportunity

This is a lovely story.

‘Opportunity’ was the name of the rover that NASA landed on the surface of Mars back in 2004. It was designed to last just 90 Martian days and travel 1,000 metres.

Instead, it survived for almost 15 years and broke the record for the furthest distance travelled off-world (ie Earth) at over 28 miles.

This little overachiever did many things – not least of which was sending us confirmation that the history of Mars included time as a wet planet that was suitable for habitation.

So it’s not surprising that the folk responsible for coaxing that little rover across the darkness for many years felt a tug at the heartstrings when it – finally – gave up the ghost following a particularly heavy Martian sandstorm last year.

The last signal was received on June 10th 2018. All subsequent attempts to communicate failed – and NASA have finally now pulled the plug.

It’s not hard to imagine that if we get this all wrong – the overpopulation, the nuclear game theory, the global warming – we’ll end up sealing our own fate here on Earth. And many years down the line, some other civilisation will stumble across one of our furthest explorers and be struck with exactly that same sense of wonder in considering what became of us as we hold today about that hot red planet.

The Romance of Valentine’s Day

Rather than crafting a beguiling paean to love on Valentine’s Day today, I thought I’d share a couple of much more interesting facts for all you non-romantic types out there. Both newsworthy events happened somewhat bizarrely on exactly the same day back in 1929.

The Valentine’s Day Massacre

Yeah, about as far from red roses and heartfelt chocolate sentiments as you can imagine. In 1929, the final big gang battle took place in Chicago between the forces of crime bosses Al Capone and Bugs Moran.

Capone’s team tricked Bugs’ crew into taking part in a bootleg whisky deal. Dressed up as policemen, they tricked them into lining up against a wall without weapons – before gunning all seven down in cold blood. Bugs himself only escaped when he saw the police uniforms entering the garage in front of him and scarpered before it all kicked off.

It was the last big confrontation between the two gangs and shocked the public who started to question whether banning whisky was more important than overturning the Prohibition that gave criminals such as Capone the power to build little empires in the first place….

Sir Alexander Fleming Discovers Penicillin

But whilst the headlines were being written in Chicago, a far more quiet revolution was starting in the UK. On 14th February 1929, Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming made one of the greatest discoveries of the modern medical age when he discovered penicillin.

It’s hard to overstate just how significant this discovery was. It heralded the dawn of a new antibiotic age. Before then, anyone could end up with a fatal infection from a simple cut or scratch. And all because Fleming returned from holiday to find a blob of mould growing on one of his petri dishes which seemed to have stopped the growth of the bacteria. It’s impossible to estimate just how many lives have been saved so far by penicillin. But that number can only be described as one thing: humungous…. (technical term)

So for all you non-romantic types, resolutely resisting any tugs on your heart strings by your loved one this evening, I hope that’s cheered you up. After all, this is a day that gets its title from the beheading of St. Valentine in 278 A.D. He was a priest in Rome who defied Emperor Claudius’ ban on all marriages and engagements since it was believed that they were making men far too attached to their wives and reluctant to join the army. Valentine was all too happy to perform marriages for young lovers in secret….until the Emperor found out and order him to be beaten to death with clubs and beheaded.

Ah, the romance.