North Korean lore calls [Mt. Baekdu] the birthplace of Kim Jong-il, though Western experts say he was born in the Soviet Union.

The Koreas are sending a joint research team to the active volcano Mt. Baekdu, located on the North Korean-Chinese border. Apparently, the North Koreans are concerned about the possibility of an eruption – or as they’d probably call it, a glorious tribute by nature to the Dear Leader.

I find North Korea a very bizarre place; not only because of the “traffic girls” on empty streets, the lack of streetlights, the ubiquitous hand-drawn propaganda posters, and the comically bellicose official statements, but because of how the cult of personality is so entrenched in the culture. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand how it would even enters someone’s mind to say something so absurd like saying a halo appeared over the birthplace of a leader. Yet, there are those people that believe it. (There are always true believers.) I think it’s the same problem I have with religion. It’s just so patently absurd, the only honest reaction is to laugh.

Of course North Korea’s propaganda ministry isn’t the most absurd. That one goes to the late Saparmurat Niyazov‘s lackeys in the Turkmenistan. Niyazov wrote his “Book of the Soul”, and then proceeded to order it placed in mosques next to the Koran. He ordered a golden statue built and made to rotate with the sun. He ordered his picture be placed in all government buildings, and to run constantly in the corner on state television station. Most famously, he ordered the names of the months and days of the week changed. Most interestingly, this last one wasn’t his idea. It was proposed by Ahmet Çalık, a Turkmen oligarch sucking up to Niyazov.

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

Seventeen years later, it’s still the same, but in one sense it’s worse. Before it was just selling ads based on traffic. Now we’re processing the text of your posts for sentiment. Processing your social connections to determine whether your or one of your friends are more of an “influencer.” We’re trying to peer into meaning. Typically the concerns about text-mining / social-network-analysis / big-data revolve around privacy, which I believe mostly clouds the issue.

When Google started serving ads on gmail, there was a big brouhaha over Google reading users’ email. In reality though, almost no one at Google is actually reading any messages. Those that do, can’t match any one message back to a real identity, nor do they have the desire to even if they could. Instead, a machine is “extracting value” from the thoughts expressed in your email. In Hermosillo’s words, Google is commodifying you, and that disturbing realization seems to be what motivates “privacy” concerns in gmail and social networks. Rarely are the concerns about how posted information is flowing to humans that it wasn’t intended for. Instead, it’s all about information flowing to other machines, that in turn recommodify that for advertising. The latent societal concerns of automatically commodifying human thoughts and behavior, that were never intended for commercial use, are never expressed.

Why not? Well probably because we realize that if we services like gmail and Facebook, we’re going to have to give something in trade. Since most aren’t willing to pay a subscription fee, we accept advertising. Society accepts the coarse ad targeting of the traditional mass media, but is a bit squeamish when the targeting feels more personal. We know it’s not personal, but perhaps more importantly, it’s what we grew up with. Children are growing up in a world where commodified social behavior is de rigueur. I suspect they’ll look at our panics over “privacy” as what they are: rather quaint.

There are two stated assumptions to ad targeting. First, is that individuals are more likely to act on messages that are relevant to them. This assumption seems to be a fairly obvious. Since I’m a man, the probability that that I will purchase a feminine hygiene product for myself is asymptotically zero. Where as the probability that I will purchase some brand of shaving foam is quite a bit higher. The second explicitly stated assumption is that people want relevant ads, because irrelevant ads are annoying. Now being in Silicon Valley and IR, I’ve heard this assertion banded about quite a bit. I’ve even heard people (mostly those working in computational advertising) claim that they like targeted ads. Of course, these are just anecdotes. Does this actually hold?

No. Not in the abstract, and especially not when the techniques are described. 66% don’t want ad targeting, and up to 86% don’t targeting after they’re told that targeting is done by tracking what websites you visit and your offline behavior.

The best defensive of the “people want relevant ads” hypothesis is that if you’re going to be shown advertising, you might as well have it be something you might be interested in. This still assumes that the recipient gets some marginal benefit from advertising (and one probably does), but it still seems a bit silly economically for the recipient. Does the tiny benefit of a highly targeted ad, justify commodification of the recipient’s experience? Probably not. Instead the benefit stays with the advertiser and the ad server. The advertiser can spend less money on ads since the precision of the ad buy increases, and the ad server can charge a premium for precisely targeting the ads. Not that he recipient is never a party to this transaction, and so only receives at most an indirect exceedingly slight benefit. The real utility is where the money in changing hands, no place else. To put it another way: so what if they don’t care about, or want targeted ads, we’re going to do it anyway because we make money at it. It’s fine to say that, but computational advertising brokers should say that, and not try and delude themselves into thinking that they’re doing recipients a favor.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

— John Rodgers

The San Francisco Bay Area, has two airports in the top five for laser-aircraft incidents according to the FAA. While the FAA didn’t release the total number of incidents, the relative ranking of the airports are are:

1. Chicago’s O’Hare Airport
2. Los Angeles
3. Phoenix Sky Harbor
4. Mineta San Jose
5. Oakland

Money quote from the article:

The U.S. Marshals Service Office theorizes it may be due to the number of people involved or interested in high tech. While some portion of the laser shooters are thought to be middle-aged methamphetamine users looking for thrills, other shooters are young, well-educated and interested in science, science fiction and are tech-savvy, officials believe.

SFO? Where are you?

People will often want more information than they can actually process. Having more information makes people feel that they have more choices. Having more choices makes people feel in control. Feeling in control makes people feel they will survive better.

— The Psychologist’s View of UX Design by Susan Weinschenk

versus

Autonomy and Freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.

— Barry Schwartz, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less”, 2004, Chapter 5

via Unknown 8 Bit

Quotes on Design (also via Swiss Miss)

Previously

Coilhouse discuses Jesse Reklaw’s Applicant, a collection of found photographs and applications to the an “Ivy League” Biology PhD program from 1965 to 1975.

It’s so amazing just how sexist and horrible each of these comments are. Good Ol’ Boys Club indeed.

1. Start today.
2. Build one to throw away.
3. Nothing is ever finished.
4. Nothing succeeds like success