5IT, 11/14
1. It's not just U.S. Marshals flying Cessnas over cities who can intercept cell phone data.
"This Article illustrates how cellular interception capabilities and technology have become, for better or worse, globalized and democratized, placing Americans’ cellular communications at risk of interception from foreign governments, criminals, the tabloid press and virtually anyone else with sufficient motive to capture cellular content in transmission. Notwithstanding this risk, US government agencies continue to treat practically everything about this cellular interception technology, as a closely guarded, necessarily secret 'source and method,' shrouding the technical capabilities and limitations of the equipment from public discussion, even keeping its very name from public disclosure."
2. This guy pipes the sound of wifi into his hearing aids.
"Recreating hearing is an incredibly difficult task. Unlike glasses, which simply bring the world into focus, digital hearing aids strive to recreate the soundscape, amplifying useful sound and suppressing noise. As this changes by the second, sorting one from the other requires a lot of programming. In essence, I am listening to a computer's interpretation of the soundscape, heavily tailored to what it thinks I need to hear. I am intrigued to see how far this editorialisation of my hearing can be pushed. If I have to spend my life listening to an interpretative version of the world, what elements could I add? The data that surrounds me seems a good place to start."
3. Uber as a San Francisco company.
"'That,' says an acquaintance of Kalanick, 'is when semi-crazy Travis came into the mix. If you want to get some insight into why Uber has the reputation for being above the law or being fed up with bureaucracy, there you have it. San Francisco created that. For fuck’s sake, this is a city where Gavin Newsom is considered a rightist.' The suggestion is that San Francisco didn’t just birth Uber—it also birthed the antiregulatory philosophy that would come to dominate the company’s worldview. The city’s bureaucracy, in this reading, turned Kalanick from a largely apolitical observer who had happily shelled out for President Barack Obama’s first inauguration into a regulatory renegade who until only recently had as his Twitter avatar a detail from a cover of the libertarian bible The Fountainhead."
4. A different wrist-worn device history, focusing on its radio capabilities.
"The first depiction of the wrist radio occurred in a murder mystery involving the billionaire industrialist Diet Smith and attempted theft of his son Brilliant’s latest invention. Tracy’s hillbilly associate B. O. Plenty found one of the first five two-way miniature devices outside Smith's mansion. Tracy proclaims it 'miraculous' as Gould depicts its insides twice in two days: two tiny vacuum tubes, a tiny battery, a microphone, and a loudspeaker. Smith, upset at the invention’s exposure, exclaims that the wrist radio was 'our top secret! It was still in the research stage!' "
"In both scientific and popular contexts, traditional gender stereotypes were projected onto the novel scientific information, which was harnessed to demonstrate the factual truth and normative legitimacy of these beliefs. Though strains of misogyny were evident within the readers’ comments, most discussion of the study took pains to portray the sexes’ unique abilities as equal and ‘complementary’. However, this content often resembled a form of benevolent sexism, in which praise of women’s social-emotional skills compensated for their relegation from more esteemed trait-domains, such as rationality and productivity. The paper suggests that embedding these stereotype patterns in neuroscience may intensify their rhetorical potency by lending them the epistemic authority of science."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
contact. The use of contact as a verb except in technical language (the two wires contacted to cause the spark) is still avoided by many writers & speakers (e.g. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.) Webster labels it 'slang.' Others defend it as useful, and it is rapidly becoming 'standard' in US, at least in business. Contact n.=(business) connection &c, is also chiefly US.
The Credits: 1. papers.ssrn.com / @csoghoian 2. newscientist.com 3. modernluxury.com 4. todaysengineer.org / @IEEEhistory 5. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Dominate the Company’s Worldview