links of the day

The Other Zuckerberg

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The New York Times has a brief profile of Randi Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s creative and rebellious older sister:

In August, Ms. Zuckerberg, 29, quit her job at Facebook, where she had been among the first two dozen people hired. Most recently, she was the director of marketing. In its early days, Ms. Zuckerberg was a buoyant presence, representing her reticent brother to an eager press. Later, she earned attention (not always favorable) singing at company functions with a band composed of colleagues. And she came up with the idea for Facebook Live, the social network’s video channel, which has featured interviews conducted by Facebook executives with Oprah Winfrey and President Obama.

So is Randi on Facebook and Twitter, then?

Now Ms. Zuckerberg has started her own business, R to Z Media, to help companies take advantage of social media.

Mark and Randi discussing Randi’s compensation package, right before she started working at Facebook:

On her last night there she joined her brother in his office to negotiate her signing package. Mr. Zuckerberg, then 21, sat behind a desk and slipped her a piece of paper with two lines: one with her salary; another with the number of stock options she would receive. She crossed out the stock options, doubled the salary and slid it back. “He took the pen back from me and rewrote the original offer he proposed,” she said. “And, he’s like: ‘Trust me. You don’t want what you think you want.’ ”

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Not to miss: a profile of Mark Zuckerberg, published last year.

Atlanta, Zombie Capital of the World

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How fast can you say “Braaaains”? My hometown, is getting some nice press coverage in The New York Times… Namely, Atlanta is the zombie capital of the world!

That, at least, is what Atlanta Magazine, the glossy monthly, has dubbed this Southern city [editor’s note: the feature in Atlanta Magazine is really worth your time].

It’s not only that “The Walking Dead,” the hit zombie show that began its second season on AMC on Sunday, is filmed and set here. Or that Atlanta holds some of the nation’s largest zombie film festivals, zombie paradesand zombie haunted houses. Or that even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that staid Atlanta-based federal agency, joined in the fun with a tongue-in-cheek guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse.

So why Atlanta as the setting for The Walking Dead?

Robert Kirkman, the Kentucky native who wrote the graphic novel on which “The Walking Dead” is based, wanted the story set in a large Southern city. One of the largest annual gathering of zombies, DragonCon, a fantasy and science fiction convention, happened to be founded by an Atlanta resident. And this sprawling city, with swatches of foreclosed or abandoned property, is easy to make look spooky.

I’ve watched the first season of The Walking Dead. Personally, I think it’s an okay show, but nowhere near as good as, say, Breaking Bad or LOST.

What do you think of The Walking Dead? Is it just a big hype of a show or does it have something special going for it?

The Upside of the Blackberry Outage

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After the three-day Blackberry outage across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, The National (the English newspaper of the United Arab Emirates) reports the upside of the said outage:

A dramatic fall in traffic accidents this week has been directly linked to the three-day disruption in BlackBerry services.

In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents.

I’d like to see more concrete evidence here, but anecdotally, this makes sense: texting kills.

One statistic from the article that seems excessive to me:

On average there is a traffic accident every three minutes in Dubai, while in Abu Dhabi there is a fatal accident every two days.

Does anyone know of such traffic statistics for other cities around the world?

Notes from a Dragon Mom

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A heartbreaking piece from a mother whose son, Ronan, is diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease; unfortunately, the child isn’t expected to live much past his third birthday…

Ronan won’t prosper or succeed in the way we have come to understand this term in our culture; he will never walk or say “Mama,” and I will never be a tiger mom. The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

This just tugs at you… It’s about living in the present:

But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice. I can see my reflection in his greenish-gold eyes. I am a reflection of him and not the other way around, and this is, I believe, as it should be. This is a love story, and like all great love stories, it is a story of loss. Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.

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The Casting Director for Police Lineups

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Ever wondered where they find the people to fill in police lineups with the guys who didn’t commit the crime? Apparently, in New York, they hire this casting director:

For some 15 years, Mr. Weston has been providing the New York Police Department with “fillers” — the five decoys who accompany the suspect in police lineups.

Detectives often find fillers on their own, combing homeless shelters and street corners for willing participants. In a pinch, police officers can shed their uniforms and fill in. But in the Bronx, detectives often pay Mr. Weston $10 to find fillers for them.

A short man with a pencil-thin beard, Mr. Weston seems a rather unlikely candidate for having a working relationship with the Police Department, even an informal one. He is frequently profane, talks of beating up anyone who crosses him, and spends quite a bit of his money on coconut-flavored liquor.

Sounds like something from the movies, right? It sounds like a hectic life:

Mr. Weston says he is always on call; his Bluetooth earpiece comes off in public only when he goes to the barber for his weekly $16 trim. His cellphone, he says, holds the numbers of some 100 potential lineup fillers, mostly friends and acquaintances from the Mill Brook Houses, the public housing project in the South Bronx where he has lived most of his life.

He often complains about how people hound him for the chance to make a few dollars through lineup work.

“I can’t even play basketball on the courts or sit here and drink a beer,” Mr. Weston said on a recent afternoon. “People are always asking me if there is a lineup.”

Hey, someone’s gotta do it, right?

The Original Name of Amazon

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From a good piece on Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal:  Amazon’s original name was Cadabra, which was nixed after someone misheard it as “cadaver.” Interesting fact of the day, to be sure.

The other highlights from the piece. Ding!

At first, there were a half-dozen orders per day. One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in. A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off.

I share this philosophy about launching. Put it out there, and then constantly improve what you build (rather than aiming for perfection at the beginning):

At launch, the site wasn’t even truly finished. Mr. Bezos’s philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it.

Fascinating tidbit about a glitch of an early version of Amazon’s site:

Among the early mistakes, according to Mr. Bezos: “We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books.”

Sounds like I would have been a candidate for the third book mentioned here:

In the very early days, Mr. Bezos had employees pick out the 20 strangest titles sold every week and awarded a prize for the strangest. Some of the winners: “Training Goldfish Using Dolphin Training Techniques,” “How to Start Your Own Country” and “Life Without Friends.”

Finally, I had no idea Amazon had a patent on the one-click purchase option:

From the beginning, Mr. Bezos was fanatical about squeezing from Amazon.com every incremental degree of usefulness. New features were often simple things, like 1-Click ordering—whose notorious patent was called by one law journal “probably the most memorable example of an unoriginal software patent.” It forbids any other online retailer from using a one-click purchasing option without paying a royalty to Amazon.

Way to go, Mr. Bezos.

The Limit of Human Population Growth

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A good post at The New Yorker, summarizing the growth of human population. Earth should hit the 7,000,000,000 population mark sometime in the next two to three weeks:

Sometime on October 31st, the world’s population will hit seven billion. The baby who does the trick will most likely appear in India, where the number of births per minute—fifty-one—is higher than in any other nation. But he or she could also be born in China—the world’s most populous country—or in a fast-growing nation like Nigeria or Guatemala or, really, anywhere. The idea that a particular child will on a particular day bring the global population to a particular number is, of course, a fiction; nobody can say, within tens of millions, how many people there are on earth at any given time. The United Nations Population Fund has picked October 31st as its best estimate. That this date is Halloween is presumably just a coincidence…

If you aren’t already familiar with Thomas Malthus’s famous treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he espouses that the rate of human growth will outstrip the food supply (which he argued, grows linearly), you should take a look at this Wikipedia page. Malthus’s essay is mentioned prominently in The New Yorker piece.

Furthermore, making predictions is hard. Hence, the frequent revisions:

The further ahead you look, the trickier things become. This is partly a matter of birth rates; because the base is now so large, even relatively trivial changes produce enormous effects. In most European nations, and also in countries like Japan and China, birth rates have already fallen below replacement levels. Until quite recently, the U.N. was projecting that rates in other parts of the globe would follow a similar downward slope, so that sometime toward 2050 global population would level out at around nine billion. A few months ago, though, the U.N. announced that it was revising its long-term forecast. The agency now estimates that the number of people on earth in 2100 will be ten billion and still climbing. One reason for the upward revision is that birth rates in many developing countries, particularly in Africa, have remained unexpectedly high.

The big question: is there a theoretical asymptote for the number of humans that Earth can sustain? If so, what is that number, to a first-degree approximation?

On Aggregation Versus Plagiarism

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Jack Shafer at Reuters has some thoughts on how plagiarism hurts the reader:

The plagiarist defrauds readers by leading them to believe that he has come by the facts of his story first-hand–that he vouches for the accuracy of the facts and interpretations under his byline. But this is not the case. Generally, the plagiarist doesn’t know whether the copy he’s lifted has gotten the story right because he hasn’t really investigated the topic. (If he had, he could write the story himself.) In such cases he must attribute the material he borrows so that at the very least the reader can hold somebody accountable for the facts in a story.

Or to put it another way, a journalist who does original work essentially claims, this is true, according to me. The conscientious journalist who cites the work of others essentially makes the claim that this is true, according to somebody else. The plagiarist makes no such claims in his work. By having no sources of his own and failing to point to the source he stole from, he breaks the “chain of evidence” that allows readers to contest or verify facts. By doing so, he produces worthless copy that wastes the time of his readers. And that’s the crime.

I guess the underlying assumption here is that if the reader wants to contest the facts of the article, he/she would be inclined to act upon his beliefs: contacting the author, the editor of the publication, etc. It’s certainly something to think about.

And what of aggregators, like the Huffington Post? Jack Shafer, again:

Instead, I would remind the established media that the Huffington Post is trying to teach it a lesson: That a huge, previously ignored readership out there wants its news hot, quick, and tight. At any point in HuffPo’s astonishing rise, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or any dozen other media companies could have strangled it in its crib by producing an equally entertaining and edifying pop-news Web site that drew on the Associated Press wire, licensed photo banks, its own stories, and, yes, rewrites of other sites’ content.

So, if aggregators stick to fair use and cite their sources, it’s a fair game.

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(hat tip: Felix Salmon)

The Man Who Sailed His House

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In this month’s GQ, Michael Paterniti writes a remarkable story of a Japanese man named Hiromitsu who survived the March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Not only is the story incredible, but so is the narration (you here are this man, experiencing the catastrophe in the present):

At two forty-six, something rumbles from deep in the earth, a sickening sort of grinding, and then everything lurches wildly, whips back, lurches more wildly still. The cut boards stacked along the wall clatter down, and your first move is to flee the shed, to dive twenty feet free onto open ground and clutch it, as if riding the back of a whale. Time elongates. Three minutes becomes a lifetime.

When the jolting ends, stupefaction is followed by dismay—and then a bleary accounting. Already phones are useless. The boss, Mr. Mori, urges you to rush home to check on your wife and parents, but fearing a tsunami, fearing a drive down into the lowlands by the sea, and trusting the strength of your concrete house to protect your wife and parents, you at first refuse. There are ancient stone markers on this coast, etched warnings from the ancestors, aggrieved survivors of past tsunamis—1896, 1933—beseeching those who live by the water to build on the inland side of their hubris or suffer the consequences.

A description of the approaching tsunami:

You don’t look out to sea, not once; you stand staring at the mountain, Kunimi, in the distance. And now you can hear her downstairs, inside again, and now comes the creak of the bathroom door. Comes the sound of running water. Comes this vision of the mountain, placid, immovable—and then, to your right, to the north, within twenty feet, drifts the whole house of your neighbor. The house is moving past as if borne by ghosts. When you turn left, to the south and the garden, everything is as it’s always been, dry and in place. When you turn back the other way, you can see only this coursing field of ocean.

Just an incredible descriptive paragraph here:

This force is greater than the force of memory, or regret, or fear. It’s the force of an impersonal death, delivered by thousands of pounds of freezing water that slam you into a dark underworld, the one in which you now find yourself hooded, beaten, pinned deeper. The sensation is one of having been lowered into a spinning, womblike grave. If you could see anything in the grip of this monster, fifteen feet down, you’d see your neighbors tumbling by, as if part of the same circus. You’d see huge pieces of house—chimneys and doors, stairs and walls—crashing into each other, fusing, becoming part of one solid, deadly wave. You’d see shards of glass and splintered swords of wood. Or a car moving like a submarine. You’d see your thirty pigeons revolving in their cage. Or your wife within an arm’s reach, then vacuumed away like a small fish. You frantically flail. Is this up or down?

The experience of being out at sea, and deciding: should I drink? Should I eat? Can I?

At sunset, sky in scratches of purple light, a gnawing in your gut tells you it’s dinner, so you crack open the first can, drink, then, head tilted back, try to lick out the last drop. The roof is perhaps twelve feet by six, of corrugated metal nailed to wood beams, your raft at sea. Last night, you and Yuko slept beneath it, and now you perch atop it on the sea, above the goblin sharks and whatever else lurks below. 

Hiromitsu forces himself from going to sleep, and soon experiences hallucinations. Frightening:

You’re convinced you see a body coming near, and start screaming—Help me! But then it’s a tree trunk. In another you see a huge wave hurtling toward the roof and imagine turning into a tree to save yourself. But just as you think to stand and hang your arms like branches, you stop yourself for fear the roof will tip.

And what of the rescue?

Out of the oblivion, a clear voice responds, “We’re here,” and the boat drifts alongside your roof-home, and the voice asks, “Which side is safest?” And you say, “The side toward land, please,” as you strip the plastic container full of notes from your body and place it on the altar of your futon. Then one of the bundled figures steps out of the lifeboat onto the tippy roof and comes toward you with arms outstretched. The figure leads you across, five paces, and only when you lean forward into their boat and splay your body over its hard gunwale, like a glorious falling tree, do you know it’s real…

This is a story of survival, love, and loss. Hiromitsu lost his wife to the tsunami, but he carries her memory:

This is how you speak to her, through the scraps in the bag, but also aloud sometimes. Before eating, you might murmur, “Thank you,” as if she’s prepared the food on your plate. You might do the same on a beautiful day, as if she’s created it. And before bed each night, you tell her you love her. You say this to her presence or spirit, but you forgo mementos, little altars, or pictures on the wall. You can’t bear the idea of seeing her again, as you knew her in all those endless days before the wave.

The Mystery of the Faster than Light Neutrinos

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I’ve been following this story of “faster than light neutrinos” since the news first came out in late September:

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. 

To date, there have been more than 80 papers published trying to explain the 60-nanosecond discrepancy. But according to one physicist, Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen, the scientists at CERN neglected to consider nuances of the time mechanism. In particular, in order to synchronize the two locations (they are more than 700km apart, after all), the team used GPS satellites, which each broadcast an accurate time signal from orbit some 20,000km overhead. But herein lies the problem, according to van Elburg:

So what is the satellites’ motion with respect to the OPERA experiment? These probes orbit from West to East in a plane inclined at 55 degrees to the equator. Significantly, that’s roughly in line with the neutrino flight path. Their relative motion is then easy to calculate.

So from the point of view of a clock on board a GPS satellite, the positions of the neutrino source and detector are changing. “From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter,” says van Elburg.

By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground.

The OPERA team overlooks this because it thinks of the clocks as on the ground not in orbit.

How big is this effect? Van Elburg calculates that it should cause the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early. But this must be doubled because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment. So the total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team observes.

Here is the full paper (PDF). And the conclusion:

We showed that in the OPERA experiment the baseline time-of-flight is incorrectly identified with the Lorentz transformation corrected time-of-flight as measured from a clock in a nonstationary orbit and in fact exceeds it by at maximum 64 ns. The calculation presented contain some simplifying assumptions, a full treatment should take into account the varying angle between the GPS satellite’s velocity vector and the CERN-Gran Sasso baseline. We expect that such a full treatment will find somewhat lower value for the average correction. This is because the velocity of the GPS satellite is most of the time not fully aligned with the CERN-Gran Sasso baseline. In addition full analysis should be able to predict the correlation between the GPS satellite position(s) and the observed time-of-flight.

We know from special relativity that time is reference frame specific. This paper shows that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) happens to be less universal than the name suggests, and that we have to take in to account where our clocks are located. Finally, making all calculations from the correct reference frame might also lead to further improvement of the accuracy of GPS systems as the errors reported here for the time-of-flight amount to a ±18 m difference in location.

I am skeptical. This is rudimentary physics, and I can’t believe that the OPERA scientists would have neglected to consider such a triviality. I’ll be paying attention to how this story unfolds…