Tag: Technology

Links for 8th March, 2019

  1. “The canonical source for enforcement is Facebook’s public community guidelines — which consist of two sets of documents: the publicly posted ones, and the longer internal guidelines, which offer more granular detail on complex issues. These documents are further augmented by a 15,000-word secondary document, called “Known Questions,” which offers additional commentary and guidance on thorny questions of moderation — a kind of Talmud to the community guidelines’ Torah. Known Questions used to occupy a single lengthy document that moderators had to cross-reference daily; last year it was incorporated into the internal community guidelines for easier searching.A third major source of truth is the discussions moderators have among themselves. During breaking news events, such as a mass shooting, moderators will try to reach a consensus on whether a graphic image meets the criteria to be deleted or marked as disturbing. But sometimes they reach the wrong consensus, moderators said, and managers have to walk the floor explaining the correct decision.”
    The Verge (Casey Newton, specifically), reporting on Facebook moderators – the human ones. This article is about the troubles they go through, and the costs they have to bear while doing so. A sobering read.
  2. “Our international panel of judges — Pete Souza, Austin Mann, Annet de Graaf, Luísa Dörr, Chen Man, Phil Schiller, Kaiann Drance, Brooks Kraft, Sebastien Marineau-Mes, Jon McCormack and Arem Duplessis — gave some insight on why they loved these shots. ”
    Worth it for at least two reasons – make that three. One, how skilled would you have to be, in the not too distant past, to take photographs as good as this? Two, the photographs themselves are quite breathtaking. Three, the commentary after each photograph helps you understand why those photographs are, in the opinion of the judges, so good.
  3. “India has the potential to be the single largest democratic free market economy in the world. But it needs to simultaneously cut down on its corruption, create jobs for millions of new entrants to the labor economy every year, stand up a new generation of digital-first behemoths, all the while balancing the needs of an incredibly diverse and cacophonous democracy buffeted by global markets and tastes. That’s ultimately a tall order, but if India wants to migrate from a “billionaire raj” to an “entrepreneur raj,” it will have to do all of that — at once.”
    The tech website TechCrunch, on India’s challenges in terms of becoming the next – not Silicon Valley – but China. If you want a more in-depth analysis of what is being spoken about here, I’d highly, highly recommend How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell.
  4. “Econocrats and academic scholars need to take a hard look at the rising implications of intellectual property law, cooperative agreements and proprietary agglomerations of data in stifling competitive behaviour and mobility of new firms. Aggregating more information on firm-level growth narratives and better information dissemination (for researchers) will help analyse firm-level productivity impacts on market growth and overall industrial productivity levels over time.”
    Somewhat related to what is linked to above, but also linked to a Twitter thread I linked to this past Saturday by Atif Mian. An interesting, if somewhat complicated read.
  5. “The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal ordered that no lender can declare its exposure to embattled IL&FS Group as nonperforming without its permission – even if there is a default. The ruling by the bankruptcy court, which is overseeing the government-sponsored $12.8 billion insolvency of the infrastructure financier-operator, undermines the Reserve Bank of India’s powers to make banks and nonbank finance firms present a truthful account of their financial position at all times.”
    This isn’t getting quite the coverage it should, but we’re putting a lot of stuff under what is very quickly becoming a very large blanket.

Links for 6th March, 2019

  1. “A new transatlantic alliance will require both a U.S. president who recognizes its value and Europeans who are able to overcome their own internal divisions and commit to an equal partnership. The next alliance cannot be only about channeling U.S. contributions to European security; it must also be a global partnership to which each side contributes in order to protect their mutual security and economic interests. That sort of alliance remains possible. It is worth fighting for.”
    Not for the optimistic note that it strikes at the end of the article, but rather for the good summary of the history of the alliance between America and Europe, and how it hasn’t always been rocky – but never before as at risk as it is today.
  2. “I long held the belief that my grandfather felt regret at Pakistan’s creation because of the bloody years of the War on Terror, but now I know that he saw far worse. I wonder whether the regret came to him early, or if it was the last straw, his final impression of the history of a country he was able to witness from birth until his own death. ”
    Via The Browser, an article from a Pakistani about Pakistan – ranging from his grandfather and the start of that country, to the sad mess that is has become since.
  3. “In other words, what matters is not “technological innovation”; what matters is value chains and the point of integration on which a company’s sustainable differentiation is built; stray too far and even the most fearsome companies become also-rans.”
    I am teaching a part of the course on Industrial Organization at Gokhale Institute, and every so often, I feel like outsourcing it to Stratechery. This article is one reason why – it helps you not just understand what value chains are, but provides multiple examples of how to think about them, and through them. As almost always with Stratechery, a great read.
  4. “I think that a lot of people, on some level what they think they’re doing when they sponsor young co-workers is spotting talent—they called it “talent-mapping” in the accounting firm we studied. But a lot of people we talked to were also able to reflect and say, “Part of why I was excited about that person, probably, is because they reminded me of a younger version of myself.” The word we use in sociology is homophily—people like people who are like themselves.”
    File this under a variety of things: hiring practices, labor productivity, people compatibility – but more than anything, I’d file it under behavioral economics, and the word homophily.
  5. “It’s more important than ever to manage your passwords online, and also harder to keep up with them. That’s a bad combination. So the FIDO Alliance—a consortium that develops open source authentication standards—has pushed to expand its secure login protocols to make seamless logins a reality. Now Android’s on board, which means 1 billion devices can say goodbye to passwords in more digital services than seen before”
    It didn’t take long to go from unlocking your phone with your fingerprint to unlocking everything online with a fingerprint. How long before the next innovation in security and identity comes along, and will it mean that the phone will become irrelevant? A question worth pondering.

Links for 5th March, 2019

  1. “Using a neural network trained on widely available weather forecasts and historical turbine data, we configured the DeepMind system to predict wind power output 36 hours ahead of actual generation. Based on these predictions, our model recommends how to make optimal hourly delivery commitments to the power grid a full day in advance. This is important, because energy sources that can be scheduled (i.e. can deliver a set amount of electricity at a set time) are often more valuable to the grid.”
    The big problem with renewable energy is its utter unpredictability – which is why we will always struggle to move to a world that uses renewable energy as a primary source. Unless, of course, we figure out how to make great batteries. But in the meantime, anything that helps us predict the pattern of availability of wind and solar power is great news.
  2. “Still, people do break Google’s protection. CAPTCHAs are an ongoing arms race that neither side will ever win. The AI technology which makes Google’s approach so hard to fool is the same technology that is adapted to fool it.Just wait until that AI is convincing enough to fool you.
    Sweet dreams, human.”
    Ever clicked on the “I’m a human” button and wondered why it seemed like such a stupid idea. Well, uh, not stupid. Not stupid at all.
  3. “This further tells us that people are buying and selling homes. It’s just that the builders are not a part of this transaction.”
    This is a very short excerpt, but especially for Indians, this article is well worth reading (and Vivek Kaul is well worth following!). Home loans are going up every year, but unsold inventory is also going up every year? What gives?
  4. “All of economics is meant to be about people’s behavior. So, what is behavioral economics, and how does it differ from the rest of economics?”
    An essay about behavioral economics and its many applications, written by two people who are more familiar with the field than almost anybody else. There isn’t much here for people who are already familiar with the field – but if you are new to behavioral economics, this is an excellent introduction.
  5. “Two landmark events helped pushed along the proliferation of Sichuan cuisine in New York. In 2005, the peppercorn ban was lifted, though imported peppercorns still had to be heat treated and were thus less potent than they might have been. (This restriction was finally lifted in 2018.) ”
    I was in New York in 2007, and knew nothing of how to try new food, and it is a major source of regret. Especially when I read articles like these.

Links for 1st March, 2019

  1. “What’s distinctive about modern cosmopolitanism is its celebration of the contribution of every nation to the chorus of humanity. It is about sharing. And you cannot share if you have nothing to bring to the table. Cosmopolitans worthy of the label have rhizomes, spreading horizontally, as well as taproots, delving deep; they are anything but rootless.”
    An excellent essay in defense of the idea of globalization and being cosmopolitan. Worth reading for many different reasons – understanding why Brexit may not make sense, understanding the etymology of ‘cosmopolitan’, and how affinity to those closest to you isn’t necessarily hatred for those a little bit farther away.
  2. “It might be difficult to believe that farms and physicians could use the same core compounds and never realize it—but pharmaceutical chemistry and agricultural chemistry are separate professional fields that attend different conferences, publish in different journals, and have no reason to talk to each other. Without medicine ever recognizing it, azoles came to account for one-fourth of all fungicides worldwide. They are used on cereals and seeds, tree fruits and soft fruits, vegetables and flowers, hops and beans. Because they kill fungi so effectively, their use has bled out of agriculture into a vast array of consumer goods, from paints to lumber to glue.”
    A rather alarming article about the rampant use of anibiotics – which is a theme common enough these days – across domains. You can’t help but be slightly alarmed when you read it, but all the same, it is heavily recommended reading – perhaps for that very reason. Sent to me by Aadisht Khanna, a never ending source of interesting information.
  3. “Asking a computer to ‘tell me about this picture’ poses other problems, though. We do not have HAL 9000, nor any path to it, and we cannot recognise any arbitrary object, but we can make a guess, of varying quality, in quite a lot of categories. So how should the user know what would work, and how does the system know what kind of guess to make? Should this all happen in one app with a general promise, or many apps with specific promises? Should you have a poster mode, a ‘solve this equation’ mode, a date mode, a books mode and a product search mode? Or should you just have mode for ‘wave the phone’s camera at things and something good will probably happen’? ”
    Benedict Evans, someone whose blog is worth following in any case, unpacks modern camera systems, and how they’re likely to change over the coming years – for the better is a matter of opinion.
  4. “A new circular from NSE changes the financing game for people who’ve been using the options market for financing deals. The NSE will require cash to be posted (instead of stocks or other instruments) as margin against call options shorted by participants in the longer term options markets.”
    This might not make sense to you if you don’t understand options, but if you do – please do read it. Fascinating – and also helps you understand why understanding anything by reading only a textbook never makes sense.
  5. “The American paddlefish is a beast. It weighs up to 160 pounds and can run seven feet long including its needle-nose snout. String one up and it looks like the Chrysler Building. The Roomba of the Ozarks, they patrol the waters with mouths open, filtering plankton through their gill rakers.But paddlefish have another quality — their eggs happen to taste quite a bit like Russian sevruga caviar. And that curious evolutionary fact explains why, in the mid-2000s, Russian émigrés began descending on tiny Warsaw, Missouri (pop. 2,177).”
    The story has more than its fair share of twists – and is worth reading for that reason alone. Plus, what better way to learn about markets?

Links for 20th February, 2019

  1. “There is no amount of growth that can’t be destroyed by an investor’s temptation to grab too much of it. And there is no opportunity so appealing that it will catch the eye of someone who refuses to look.But greed and fear aren’t always character flaws. People with the best intentions and ethics fall for their temptation. The two traits evolve from something innocent: the amount of confidence we have that our actions influence our outcomes.”
    I am currently teaching, at the Gokhale Institute, a course on Behavioral Finance. This blog post will be a part of the required reading when I teach the section on overconfidence (and it’s mirror image)
  2. “A Facebook press officer said, in a prepared statement: “This is one study of many on this topic, and it should be considered that way.” The statement quoted from the study itself, which noted that “Facebook produces large benefits for its users,” and that “any discussion of social media’s downsides should not obscure the fact that it fulfills deep and widespread needs.”
    What happens if you go cold turkey on Facebook? I haven’t read the paper itself, but this article from the NYT is a useful read – but not for the usual Facebook bashing reasons. There are benefits to using Facebook, for all of us. I myself no longer have the Facebook app on my phone, but freely admit to checking Facebook every now and then on the browser on my phone.
  3. “Mere hours into the first day of the Google block, my devices have tried to reach Google’s servers more often than the 15,000 times they tried to ping Facebook’s the entire week before. By the end of the week, my devices have tried to communicate with Google’s servers over 100,000 times, comparable to Amazon, at 293,000 times during its block. Most of Google’s pings seem to be in the form of trackers, ads, and resources built into websites. ”
    Speaking of which, what might life look like if you decided to go cold turkey on Google? Much worse, it turns out – your productivity takes a direct hit, as the article above makes clear.
  4. “We’ve made the case for the divergence among equipment manufacturers before: Ultimately robots and excavators aren’t dependent on the same business cycles. This is now playing out.”
    Partially because my own research during the PhD was on this topic, but also because it is a useful way to start thinking about which sectors in the economy tend to move together, and which don’t. More – does this relationship hold over time?
  5. “But the rental market is largely fragmented and unorganized. The build-to-rent model that has worked well globally in many countries hasn’t even scratched the surface here. It is a space ripe for disruption.And in the past 3-4 years, a slew of startups have begun to do just that, particularly targeting young adults and millennials (those in their 20s and early 30s) who need a place to stay when they move out of their parents’ nest or are moving to a new city.”
    This had to happen sooner or later in India – it was simply a function of the way the real estate market is, and has been in India for some time. Watch this space – I’d argue that future growth in India’s real estate sector will happen in this fashion.

Links for 13th February, 2019

  1. “The trick in a busy trauma bay is to look at a patient, decide whether he or she is dying in front of you. The way you make that decision is basically trauma poker: You’re looking for the tells that their body, the remarkable machine of the human body, is compensating to keep them alive, or refusing: heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, the color of the skin. The body, if you listen, will tell you what’s going on.”
    A harrowing read on life as a trauma surgeon in Chicago. Lessons on opportunity cost, development, conflict, retaliation, game theory and much more. Great read.
  2. “Bundled pricing is one reason why subscription models like Spotify should ultimately win out over à la carte models like iTunes. Subscription commerce can also be thought of as a form of bundling.”
    Or put another way, in the age of the internet, why does Netflix exist? There are many textbooks that do a better job of explaining this, but for a good primer on bundling, this is a good place to start. Note that this was written in 2012!
  3. “Mature fiscal systems create checks-and-balances which reduce the extent to which debt or off-balance-sheet liabilities can surge. Perhaps less developed countries have weak institutions, and then the political leadership sees a different optimisation. Short bursts of GDP growth can then be achieved in many bad ways, such as a surge in debt, piling up off-balance-sheet liabilities, etc. But this is not sustained growth: We get a spurt of high growth, and then things go wrong.”
    What do I think of this year’s budget? is a question I often get in classes – every year. This blog post is a good way to think about budgets – every year, and irrespective of who is in power.
  4. “The data means that the five warmest years in recorded history have been the last five, and that 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2001.”
    I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, and I’ll reiterate it repeatedly. We do not worry anywhere near enough about climate change.
  5. “What is more interesting, though, is the story of Windows’ decline in Redmond, culminating with last week’s reorganization that, for the first time since 1980, left the company without a division devoted to personal computer operating systems (Windows was split, with the core engineering group placed under Azure, and the rest of the organization effectively under Office 365; there will still be Windows releases, but it is no longer a standalone business).”
    Ben Thompson on something that I while growing up would have considered absolutely impossible – the end of Windows.