Netizen

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Algorithmic Management

This is not an example of the machine taking over the human. It only makes management sense to let algorithms do what they do better.

Machines manage people to do work machines can not do. That is a tongue twister, if you ask me.

Human Workers, Managed by an Algorithm

the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren't yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts. .... The best-known crowd marketplace is Mechanical Turk, which Amazon launched in 2005. ..... Turkers, who are based mostly in the United States, make only $1 or $2 per hour. ..... 41 percent of all jobs posted to Mechanical Turk were for generating spam, generating clicks on ads, or influencing search engine results ..... Consider inDinero, a three-year-old San Francisco Web startup whose software helps small businesses track their finances. Businesses can e-mail or upload scanned receipts (including handwritten ones) that then need to get logged—so inDinero sends the images to MobileWorks, which in turn farms them out to workers in India or the Philippines, who transcribe the receipt amounts into online forms.

Microgrids And The Indian Power Outage

I think it is first and foremost a demand and supply problem, not a grid problem. Although I think microgrids can help. But the real solution is on the moon.

How Power Outages in India May One Day Be Avoided

Some 600 million people in India have been left without power after parts of the country's massive electricity grid collapsed Tuesday. ..... the simple backup diesel generators that are keeping many essential services in India going right now ...... distributed solar can be cheaper than running diesel generators alone for backup power. "Solar power is very attractive when compared to diesel generators in the daytime" ...... While news reports suggested that there are 600 million people who lost power with this week's outages, that's almost certainly an overestimate—if only because hundreds of millions of people in India didn't have grid power to start with.

It's Climate Change, Stupid

A few years back random fires were getting started all over Greece. The authorities went ahead and arrested the known arsonists.

It was climate change.

This past winter in NYC was unusually warm. That was climate change. This summer in NYC was unusually hot. That was climate change.

This thing is for real.

Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current U.S. Drought?

In large parts of the Midwest, the drought has reached the worst classification possible, a D4 drought that could bring "exceptional and widespread crop and pasture losses" and "water emergencies" due to shortages in reservoirs, streams, and wells ....... the drought will worsen. ..... we're seeing, not only here in the U.S., but across the globe, events that we've never before witnessed in our instrumental record, and it's quite apparent there's a human contribution ..... You actually see more precipitation in the mid and high latitudes like Canada and the northern U.S. border, less precipitation in the southwestern U.S. and along the subtropics. You're seeing a whole shift in the atmospheric circulation system

The time to act was yesterday.

Facebook Eating Into Its Ecosystem

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Right before Bill Gates retired he was talking in terms of baking anti-virus software right into Windows. He had been doing things like that during the entire life of that operating system. Remember when he baked the web browser into Windows and got into trouble?

I think it is but natural for Facebook to eat up into its ecosystem. Instagram owed no small amount of its user base growth to the fact that it used the social graphs on Facebook to spread the word. And guess what happened.

Mark Zuckerberg Reveals He Is Open To A Radical Change In Facebook Strategy