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Tag: Insights
too long for Unix domain socket
If you’re an Ansible user and encounter the following error:
unix_listener: "..." too long for Unix domain socket
you need to set the control_path option in your ansible.cfg file to tell SSH to use shorter path names for the control socket. You should have a look at the ssh_config(5) man page (under
ControlPath
) for a list of possible substitutions.
I chose:
control_path = %(directory)s/ssh-%%C
Inner City “Dueling” Over “Micro Aggressions”
From the comments section of a summary of a paper called “Microaggression and Moral Cultures“:
Re: In the inner city men are dueling over the smallest of, er, micro aggressions.
TMMD ?
Kerngeschäft der Klägerin ist die Vermarktung von Werbung
Angeblich sollen Springer-Anwälte dem Gericht in einem Verfahren gegen die Macher von Adblock Plus folgendes erklärt haben:
Das Kerngeschäft der Klägerin ist die Vermarktung von Werbung. Journalistische Inhalte sind das Vehikel, um die Aufmerksamkeit des Publikums für die werblichen Inhalte zu erreichen.
Nicht, dass das jetzt überraschend kommt … dennoch beunruhigend.
IQ of Doom
If Eliezer Yudkowsky is right we’re doooomed:
Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.
In Vino Veritas … At Least Untill You Have To Pee
Who would have thought the lies we tell are more convincing when we need to pee.
I’m watching out for sentences like this in the news: ?
[…] complained they were subjected to ‘forced urination’ before they were interrogated by the TSA.
The actual paper.
Abstract: The Inhibitory-Spillover-Effect (ISE) on a deception task was investigated. The ISE occurs when performance in one self-control task facilitates performance in another (simultaneously conducted) self-control task. Deceiving requires increased access to inhibitory control. We hypothesized that inducing liars to control urination urgency (physical inhibition) would facilitate control during deceptive interviews (cognitive inhibition). Participants drank small (low-control) or large (high-control) amounts of water. Next, they lied or told the truth to an interviewer. Third-party observers assessed the presence of behavioral cues and made true/lie judgments. In the high-control, but not the low-control condition, liars displayed significantly fewer behavioral cues to deception, more behavioral cues signaling truth, and provided longer and more complex accounts than truth-tellers. Accuracy detecting liars in the high-control condition was significantly impaired; observers revealed bias toward perceiving liars as truth-tellers. The ISE can operate in complex behaviors. Acts of deception can be facilitated by covert manipulations of self-control.
Data is not an asset, it’s a liability
A short blog post that drives home a very important point:
Here’s a hard truth: regardless of the boilerplate in your privacy policy, none of your users have given informed consent to being tracked. Every tracker and beacon script on your web site increases the privacy cost they pay for transacting with you, chipping away at the trust in the relationship.
Because
The all too typical corporate big data strategy boils down to three steps:
- Write down all the data
- ???
- Profit
This never makes sense. You can’t expect the value of data to just appear out of thin air. Data isn’t fissile material. It doesn’t spontaneously reach critical mass and start producing insights.
Which leads to the realization:
Think this way for a while, and you notice a key factor: old data usually isn’t very interesting. You’ll be much more interested in what your users are doing right now than what they were doing a year ago. Sure, spotting trends in historical data might be cool, but in all likelihood it isn’t actionable. Today’s data is.
So
Actionable insight is an asset. Data is a liability. And old data is a non-performing loan.
Moral parents, moral babies
Ars again covers interesting research on the psychology toddlers. This time: toddlers with parents with lower tolerance to injustice show stronger differences in EEG-readings when watching prosocial vs. antisocial behavior.
It also has a discussion on how difficult it is to do a “psychological” assessment of toddlers’ behavior and derive concrete explanations or conclusions from them.
The Trick of Hope
I often tell myself and my students: medicine is the most human of all the sciences that is stuck with the least human of all the experiments: and that is the randomized trial.
Randomization doesn’t exist because doctors are malign or medicine is nasty it exists precisely for the utterly opposite reason: because we hope too much.
We’re so hopeful, that we want things to work so badly-especially against cancer-we want things to work so badly that we’ll trick ourselves to believing that they’re working.
And there’s nothing as toxic or as lethal as that trick: the trick of hope.
— Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee in PBS’ Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies
NSA’s Speech-to-Text capabilities
The Intercept has a lengthy article on what we know on the NSA’s speech recognition capabilities. Putting aside the actual capabilities, just the fact that anything you say will be recorded, stored and may be accessed at any point in the future only protected by “policy” sends shivers down my spine.
“People still aren’t realizing quite the magnitude that the problem could get to,” Raj said. “And it’s not just surveillance,” he said. “People are using voice services all the time. And where does the voice go? It’s sitting somewhere. It’s going somewhere. You’re living on trust.” He added: “Right now I don’t think you can trust anybody.”
Also when all the voice data gets automatically transcribed, made keyword-searchable, flagged and presented to agents as “potentially interesting” there’s basically no way of producing any sort of indication for suspicion other than pointing at a black box and mumbling something vaguely resembling “correlation.”
“When the NSA identifies someone as ‘interesting’ based on contemporary NLP [Natural Language Processing] methods, it might be that there is no human-understandable explanation as to why beyond: ‘his corpus of discourse resembles those of others whom we thought interesting’; or the conceptual opposite: ‘his discourse looks or sounds different from most people’s.'”