the ladybug and the lion

Apple's Supply Chain.

Apple’s rise to power in our time directly paralleled the transformation of global manufacturing. As recently as 10 years ago Apple’s computers were assembled in the United States, but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple.

Full article from the NYT.

There's also an episode of This American Life dedicated to this topic. It's worth listening to. 

Bitcoin.

Before they become such an alternative, though, the system will have to overcome a major, and surprising, problem: people have come to see it primarily as a way to make money. In other words, instead of being used as a currency, bitcoins are today mostly seen as (and traded as) an investment. There's a good reason for that: as people learned about Bitcoin, the value of bitcoins, in dollar terms, skyrocketed. In July 2010, after the website Slashdot ran an item that introduced the currency to the public (or at least the public enthusiastic about new technologies), the value of bitcoins jumped tenfold in five days. Over the next eight months, the value rose tenfold again. This attracted an enormous amount of publicity. More important, it also made people think that buying and holding bitcoins was an easy way to make a buck. As a result, many—probably most—Bitcoin users are acquiring bitcoins not in order to buy goods and services but to speculate. That's a bad investment decision, and it also hurts Bitcoin's prospects.

Full article from Technology Review.

One More Step Towards Singularity.

Computer teaches itself English so that it can play Civilization.

Revealing Preferences.

“What you do is more important than what you say,” Greg Blatt, who is the C.E.O. of I.A.C., and a former C.E.O. of Match.com, told me. (Blatt not only runs the company; he’s also a client. He is one of those guys who say they enjoy dating.) You may specify that you’d like your date to be blond or tall or Jewish or a non-smoking Democrat, but you may have a habit of reaching out to pot-smoking South Asian Republicans. This is called “revealed preference,” and it is the essential element in Match’s algorithmic process. Match knows what’s right for you—even if it doesn’t really know you. After taking stock of your stated and revealed preferences, the software finds people on the site who have similar dissonances between the two, and uses their experiences to approximate what yours should be. You may have sent introductory messages to only two people, and marked a few others with a wink—a nonverbal expression of interest—but Match will have hundreds of people in its database who have done a lot more on the site, and whose behavior yours seems to resemble. From them, depending on the degree of correlation, the software extrapolates about you.

Full story from the New Yorker.

Online Dating.

"If the dating sites had a mixer," Paumgarten writes, "you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone's first names into his sentences. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony."

Full story from NPR.

The Benefits of E-Books.

The switch from page to screen is certainly a radical one, however, so the over-my-dead-bodiers should not be mocked too caustically. Instead we should remind them, gently, that they have become obsessed with crockery instead of food. If they won’t listen, and start talking about Alexandria again, then we should rub our hands and say this: the Royal Library of Alexandria was almost certainly not destroyed by Bishop Theophilus, or any other fanatic, in 391, or any other year; it is most likely to have decayed slowly, thanks to a mixture of perishable book technology and lack of interest in its contents. Digital storage, we might add, means that any comparable loss is now more or less impossible for the rest of human history. When the children of 2011 look back, they will not see this as the year their local libraries were taken away. This will be the year they all got libraries of their own.

Full story from Prospect Magazine. 

On Watson.

Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

—Ken Jennings.

Full story from Slate.

A.I.

Meet Watson, IBM's new toy. Here's a story via Reuters:

Jennings, however, said he thought Watson could be beaten.

Fellow contestant Rutter agreed, citing Watson's weakness at grasping humor - a key part of some of the show's categories.

Reacting to a statement about actor-musician Jamie Foxx, who plays the cello, Watson's response was baffling: "Who is Beethoven?"

And the story of how Watson was built from the WSJ.

EBooks.

Here is another reason why the transition to ebooks is a positive thing: it gives authors more freedom to publish unconventional works. If a book comes out solely in an eformat, author's are no longer forced to produce 250 pages to fill out a traditional hard cover and can still make money on their ideas. This also benefits readers, because they no longer have to slog through that extra "filling" to get to the main point. Tyler Cowen's recent ebook, The Great Stagnation, illustrates this perfectly. He discusses his decision to publish solely in ebook format, and how his blog (Marginal Revolution) made the book possible, in an interview here.

Tech/Policy Blog.

MR just popped me over to Bottom-Up, an interesting technology/public policy blog by Timothy B. Lee.

From the about page:

I’m convinced that Silicon Valley’s fundamental strength is the fact that it embodies what I’ll call a bottom-up perspective on the world. The last couple of decades have brought us the dominance of the open Internet, the increasing success of free software, and the emergence of the free culture movement as an important social and political force. More generally, Silicon Valley is a place with extremely low barriers to entry, a culture of liberal information sharing, and a respect for the power of individual entrepreneurs.

Conversely, I think many of the world’s problems can be traced to the actions of institutions that are too large, too powerful, and too out of touch with the people over whom they exercise authority. I’m an unapologetic advocate for a bottom-up agenda that seeks to make these entrenched incumbents more accountable, more subject to competition, and ultimately less powerful. This blog will explore how this might be done, and why it ought to be.