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“Why Obama has failed to close Guantánamo” is a New Yorker article interesting for some of the data presented. (You can probably guess the conclusion regarding the title question: it turns out not to be President Obama’s fault; Donald Trump will be a dictator with unlimited power, but Obama’s hands have been tied by bureaucrats and Congress.)

There are 76 prisoners and it costs taxpayers $445 million per year (can this accounting be correct? how does one separate the cost of the prison from the surrounding naval base?). That’s almost $6 million per prisoner per year.

Generally foreign governments seem to have a keener grasp of the obvious than do we:

In February, 2009, the U.S. Ambassador, Deborah Jones, met with Kuwait’s Minister of the Interior and, according to State Department cables, warned him that Kuwait had to “show its seriousness in changing and controlling the behaviors of extremists within its society.”

The minister responded, “You know better than I that we cannot deal with these people. If I take their passports, they will sue to get them back.” He added, “If they are rotten, they are rotten, and the best thing to do is get rid of them. You picked them up in Afghanistan; you should drop them off in Afghanistan, in the middle of the war zone.”

Related:

• First-person account of what goes on in Guantanamo
• Should we open up the Guatanamo Bay prison to visitors?
• Life after Guantanamo
• Jihadist’s view of Western asylum/refugee system
• State of the Union Speech — Transcript Analyzed

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Canon has announced the fourth version of the 5D (dpreview first impressions), a camera that was literally awesome in its first incarnation and that has fallen ever deeper into the shade of the Sony sensors with each succeeding version.

Here’s what dpreview said about what has been the biggest Canon weakness:

The 30.4MP chip offers a decent jump in resolution over the 22.3MP chip in 5D III. And judging from the improved dynamic range in Canon’s other recent DSLRs (the 80D and 1D X II), we expect Raw dynamic range in the IV to be much improved over its predecessor, which had some of the worst shadow noise and banding we’d seen in a modern full-frame digital camera. The improvement is thanks to the recent move to a design that uses on-chip analog to-digital-conversion, resulting in lower downstream read noise and therefore less shadow noise and better overall dynamic range at lower ISOs.

There doesn’t seem to be any promise that this $3500 camera will offer image quality competitive with what you get from a $1000 Sony body or any of the Nikon bodies that incorporate Sony sensors.

Disturbingly it seems that the autofocus system may not be that great except in Live View (at which point why aren’t you just using a Samsung phone?):

In terms of AF, the increased coverage area is definitely a big deal: after all, its the exact same AF system found in the company’s flagship sports camera. The 150,000-pixel RGB-IR metering sensor, which feeds scene information to the AF system, is borrowed from the original 1D X, bringing enhanced subject identification (including faces) and tracking (‘iTR’), as well as improved metering and flicker detection. Unfortunately, we’ve found iTR to be too situation dependent to be generally relied upon, and our initial impressions from our brief time with the Mark IV leave us similarly unimpressed at the camera’s ability to automatically shift AF points to stick to your specified subject.

Readers: What have you gleaned from the Canon press releases, etc.? Are you ready to buy this camera?

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From our anonymous insider…

Anatomy begins at 7:00 am sharp. With the outside temperature well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, we immediately know we are entering a different kind of learning experience kept at a chilling 55 degrees! Most of my classmates seem excited for a break from the 4-times a week, 2-3 hour morning lectures on cellular and molecular biology. Not only can these lectures be somewhat tedious, especially for the abundant biology majors, but everyone seems eager for something different from the traditional undergraduate lecture format. The class piles into the classroom and begins on time — surgeons are punctual.

The trauma surgeon instructor briefly goes over dissection tool technique and we begin the exam of our “first patient”. Our first dissection focuses on understanding the role of the “superficial back muscles” on shoulder support and joint motion. The scapulae, or shoulder blade, is an alien wing-like bone almost completely detached from the central skeletal system. Unlike most bones, the scapulae is supported primarily by numerous muscle-tendon insertions with just a single bone-bone “pivot” at the lateral edge of the clavicle, or collarbone. The fine-tuned muscle contractions slide the scapulae along the back for precise positioning of the shoulder joint.

As I look around at my new classmates, scalpels in hand, most sluggish from a night of getting to know each other over booze and late-night burgers, you see a few patterns. Aspiring physicians include an abundance of type A personalities, which means that many clamor to be the primary dissector. However, once the dissection begins you can quickly see the few who are captivated by anatomical exploration through slicing and dicing. I would bet that those few pursue the cult of surgery, addicted to the “cut” as one of my surgical physician mentors put it.

Class ends at 12:30 pm and I grab lunch with my classmate who is a young father. It turns out that his wife is also starting a graduate program meaning their budding family is entirely supported by student loans. They’re expecting a second child soon. He jokes that he’ll just use all his vomit-stained clothes for anatomy lab.

Class begins every weekday either at 7:00 or 8:00 am. Two days per week, classes, workshops, patient interviews, and other activities end before 1:00 pm. On the other three days activities conclude around 4:00 pm. We have anatomy lab once per week. The rest of the week is centered on lectures about cell and molecular biology, including signalling pathways, molecular structure-function pairings and cell microenvironment. Much of the material is familiar from my undergraduate biomedical engineering studies. However, after a year in the working world, I am surprised by how much I have forgotten. I spent a total of 6 hours doing homework this week. Dinners were off-campus with classmates. A typical weekend activity is a pick-up soccer game, getting drinks downtown, or a class hike.

The Whole Book: http://tinyurl.com/MedicalSchool2020

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My recent Baltic Sea cruise included passengers from more than 50 countries. I was called over to a gathering of young Arabs, mostly Saudis and Kuwaitis, for my perspective on the upcoming U.S. Presidential election. Some of these folks I had met on various shore excursions and we’d talked about their time in the U.S. (generally at least four years of college). On the question of politics I gave my standard answer that I wasn’t following the candidates because my vote, as a citizen of Massachusetts, is not relevant. The consensus of the Saudi/Kuwaiti group was that Trump was bad because he might make it tougher for them to come to the U.S. and they perceived him as “anti-Muslim”. They liked Hillary even less, however, and asserted that, like most establishment politicians, she was controlled by the Rothschild family, whom they believed to be worth $350 billion (i.e., more than Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Carlos Slim combined; Forbes, on the other hand, suggests that the family is worth in the single-digit billions; why would Rothschild family members break a sweat operating vineyards and selling wine if they are in fact worth $350 billion? You don’t see Carlos Slim-brand vino.).

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Here’s something you probably wouldn’t see in a country that follows common law:

The trees in Fredericia, Denmark are too big/old/tall to have low enough branches for climbing. So apparently the town has put these ladders in the park to help kids get up to the lowest branches.

Related:

• the International chapter of Real World Divorce, showing the differences between common law and Civil law countries

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I’m more than halfway through Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez. If you’re a fan of Lean In (my review) you might be interested to know what Sheryl Sandberg actually does in her role as COO. Martinez provides one concrete example:

First up in the Sheryl show was a product manager named Dan Rubinstein. Dan resembled a Woody Allen figure: short, thin, nebbish, but without the crackling anxiety. Also a former Googler, he seemed like one of those old PM hands who always made sure to take good notes and get his weekly report in on time. He fronted for User Ops, which was the user police, and the user-facing version of what I did on the ads side. Ever wonder why your feed never features any form of porn or otherwise grotesque imagery? It’s because a team in User Ops has managed to sift through the billion photos uploaded a day, and pick out a pile of offensive needles in an Internet scale haystack.

On the screen now, Dan launched a demo of a tool that was essentially that: on loading the Web app, a raft of user photos appeared, which a User Ops “analyst” could easily click to eliminate, like plucking weeds from a garden. That image would be banished forever, including versions with small color changes or cropping done by veteran spammers and sketchy ad types. As he walked the room through the demo, he would click on an image of a kitten—kittens evidently represented the porny pictures they’d normally filter—and that kitten would be gone, as well as all variants of that kitten image. Click, ban, reload, click, ban, reload. A well-oiled kitten-banning machine, ladies and gentlemen.

Suddenly Sheryl interrupted: “So, what’s with all the kittens?”

Dan, a bit startled, peered at Sheryl, clearly confused.

“Why are all the bad photos kittens?”

Dan flatly replied, “We use kittens as the bad photos in demos, because the real bad photos are . . . you know . . . kind of obscene.”

“Right,” said Sheryl, “but why kittens and not something else?”

The room was deathly silent with thirty-plus sets of twitchy eyes rising from barely concealed phones and laptops to stare at Dan and his kitten-banning machine. You could almost hear everyone mentally asking in chorus: Yeah, what is it with the kittens?

Dan looked up at the screen as if noticing the kitten pics for the first time, and then turned to Sheryl and answered, almost under his breath: “Well . . . for demo purposes we don’t show really bad photos . . . so the engineers use kittens instead. Because, you know . . . kittens and cats are like, pu—

He stopped right there, but he almost said “pussy” in front of the Queen of Lean, Sheryl Sandberg. “Got it!” she expectorated. After sucking in a lungful of air, as if loading for a verbal barrage, she continued. “If there were women on that team, they’d NEVER, EVER choose those photos as demo pics. I think you should change them immediately!” Before the salvo had even finished Dan’s head was bowed, and he was madly taking notes in a small notebook. CHANGE PUSSY PHOTOS NOW! one imagined they read. He looked like a forty-year-old scolded child.

I was dying inside. You could feel either awkwardness or repressed laughter seething from everyone in the room at this unprecedented display of management wrath and PM folly. Demoing the pussy filter to Sheryl. Epic!

Dan limped along with the rest of his demo, and then it was my turn. After that high-water mark of incompetence, it was hard to fuck things up. I glided through the slides, lingering on the money shot: a plot of the number of ads reviewed versus human man-hours. The former was up and to the right (MOAR ADS!), the latter was flat (fewer expensive humans!). All was right with the Ads Review world. I drowsed through the other presentations and bolted at the first opportunity.

 

More: read Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Related:

• Shift of power from publishers to advertisers

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Vergara v. California has run its course, with the California Supreme Court today deciding not to examine an appeals court decision. It seems that the right of a government worker (schoolteacher) to continue collecting a paycheck is superior to the right of a child to an education. Not exactly news, but certainly heartening for anyone considering a career as a government worker.

Related:

• The public schoolteacher on incentives to work hard
• Young teacher’s view of older teachers
• Academic tenure leads to reduction in quantity and quality of work

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“Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis” (Reuters) is an interesting example of why the highest return on investment for American business is lobbying the government:

Massachusetts is preparing to levy a 5-cent fee per trip on ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft and spend the money on the traditional taxi industry, a subsidy that appears to be the first of its kind in the United States.

Republican Governor Charlie Baker signed the nickel fee into law this month as part of a sweeping package of regulations for the industry.

The law levies a 20-cent fee in all, with 5 cents for taxis, 10 cents going to cities and towns and the final 5 cents designated for a state transportation fund.

Of course, the fee is small right now but federal income tax was originally (1913) at a 1% rate, with the first $3,000 exempt ($73,000 in today’s mini-dollars; see Wikipedia). Once the mechanisms are all set up and running it should be easy to adjust the fees and extend the law beyond its proposed 2026 sunset.

One question is how to realize the American dream of a river of cash without working. A taxi medallion in New York was $1.3 million in 2013 (nytimes) and “more than $700,000” in 2014 in Boston (Globe). But most of the suburbs of Boston are small towns in which it may not cost much to register a taxi (Waltham seems to charge $25). As this is a statewide law the handouts should be distributed statewide as well, not just in the city of Boston where taxi medallions are expensive. Why not set up a taxi company in Waltham, for example, linked to an Ooma phone number that always goes to voicemail saying “We are busy right now”? Now we are in the Check of the Month Club?

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Paris’s city museum of modern art displays “The Electricity Fairy,” a massive 1937 mural by Raoul Dufy. This is off the beaten tourist track but well worth a visit if you’re technically inclined. Nearly every electrical unit is represented by a figure, with Amps, Ohms, and Volts close together. Scientists and mathematicians are given due credit, with greats such as Maxwell and Leibniz (“Leibnitz” in French; competitor Newton is not depicted!).

See my photos.

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I’m reading Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez and found this good explanation of how the Web world has changed:

Internet advertising has the same atavistic resemblance to the newspaper advertising that preceded it. The first such ads were run in La Presse a Parisian paper, in 1836. Advertisement was originally a scheme to lower the paper’s selling price and capture market share. A successful strategy, it was soon copied by all newspapers. The ads themselves were rectangular frames of advertiser-created content, placed either below or alongside regular content, and marked as distinct by their blocky frame and large, garish lettering.

By 2008, that had all changed, which is why a former Wall Street quant like me was at Adchemy. A company called Right Media was allowing advertisers to segment users into specific clusters based on their actions on a given site (e.g., putting something in a shopping cart). Originating the notion of real-time data synchronization between the online world and specific publishers, Right Media even let you tag users that came to your site (or anywhere else) and find them again later. Acquired by Yahoo in 2007, it had developed the first “programmatic” media-buying technology; “programmatic” meaning media controllable via computers talking to one another, rather than humans talking to one another via sales calls. Additionally, one could target advertisements based on user demographics like age, sex, and geography. Media buying was no longer about putting a square on the automobile or real estate section, but about finding specific users anywhere and anyhow.

In media, money is merely expendable ammunition; data is power. With this new programmatic technology that allowed each and every ad impression and user to be individually scrutinized and targeted, that power was shifting inexorably from the publisher, the owner of the eyeballs, to the advertiser, the person buying them. If my advertiser data about what you bought and browsed in the past was more important than publisher data like the fact that you were on Yahoo Autos right then, or that you were (supposedly) a thirty-five-year-old male in Ohio, then the power was mine as the advertiser to determine price and desirability of media, not the publisher’s. As it turned out (and as Facebook would painfully realize in 2011, forming the dramatic climax of this book), this “first-party” advertiser data—the data that companies like Amazon know about you—is more valuable than most any publisher data.

This was a seismic shift that would affect everything about how we consume media, leaving publishers essentially powerless and at the service of the various middlemen between them and advertiser dollars, all in the name of targeting and accountability. If the publisher wasn’t savvy enough to arm itself with sophisticated targeting and tracking before tangling with the media-buying world, then that world would come to them, in the form of countless arbitrageurs and data quacks peddling media snake oil.

Here’s something you may not know: every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves undersea fiber-optic cables, the world’s best database technologies, and everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time. The magic of how this happens is called “real-time bidding” (RTB) exchanges, and we’ll get into the technical details before long. For now, imagine that every time you go to CNN.com, it’s as though a new sell order for one share in your brain is transmitted to a stock exchange. Picture it: individual quanta of human attention sold, bit by bit, like so many million shares of General Motors stock, billions of times a day.

The author is a former Physics grad student who joined Goldman Sachs in 2005 and then got into Internet advertising as Wall Street collapsed (but not Goldman: “When the markets presented an apocalyptic Boschian landscape, every Goldman grunt, sergeant, and general would close ranks and form a Greek phalanx of greed. Unlike almost every other bank on the street, Goldman could actually calculate its risk across desks and asset classes out to five decimals. The partners, who had much of their net worth wrapped up in Goldman stock, held tense meetings and came up with a plan to save the foundering ship. Favors were called in. Clients squeezed. Risks very quickly hedged and positions unloaded. Despite the mayhem (and all the promises of drama in Liar’s Poker) I rarely saw anyone lose their cool for longer than two seconds. We bled, but others died, and you felt fortunate to have a front-row seat at the biggest financial show in a generation.”).

No punches will be pulled in this book it seems, e.g., “Goldman Sachs was unusual among Wall Street banks in that it had mostly kept a partnership management structure. Hence, every incoming employee was hired by a specific partner, and you were that partner’s boy. My feudal liege lord was a short, balding guy with an intense stare and oddly biblical name: Elisha Wiesel. Elisha was none other than the only son of Elie Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor whose horrifying Night is required reading for many American high schoolers. His father may have been a Holocaust luminary and a public intellectual, but his son was a vicious, greedy little prick.”

I wonder if there will be a further dramatic change in Internet advertising or if this will prove to be the steady-state (television advertising reached a steady state in the 1950s?). If so, this means that mass-market publications (celebrity news!) will increase their dominance over specialty publications? Or if the specialty publication (about yachting?) attracts super rich readers then it can still thrive by auctioning them?

Readers: Who else has read Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley?

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