Pensavo fosse la classica presbiopia della mezza età, invece dopo aver letto questo articolo sto cambiando radicalmente regime di schermo digitali. Perché essi, gli schermi dei contenuti digitali, ci stanno mangiando letteralmente gli occhi.

Money quote: “After reading this story, you’ll know how to identify the damage they cause, and spot the early warnings of digital eye strain and computer vision syndrome. You’ll also learn how to protect your eyes while using technology and screens. Plus, you’ll find some extra tips about how to get the most out of your smartphone (without allowing it to damage your eyes!).”

https://medium.com/the-mission/digital-eye-strain-is-destroying-your-eyes-4ac7f8e87b24

AlphaZero di Google batte il miglior computer per giocare a scacchi - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/alphazero-google-batte-miglior-computer-giocare-scacchi/

Il Michelangelo di Excel, che dipinge con il foglio di calcolo - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/michelangelo-excel-dipinge-foglio-calcolo/

** Storie per il fine settimana

Una storia dalla quale dovrebbero fare un film. Bombardato da esattori privati che chiedono soldi (e minacciano la moglie) un agente di commercio americano comincia una straordinaria investigazione, una crociata che lo porta a fare delle scoperte straordinarie e a prendersi (parte della) sua vendetta. Uno straordinario viaggio nel mondo recupero crediti americani.

Secondo me non tanto la storia, quanto il modello di recupero crediti estremamente aggressivo sarà presto su di noi. Equitalia era solo l’inizio...

Money quote: “Therrien had been caught up in a fraud known as phantom debt, where millions of Americans are hassled to pay back money they don’t owe. The concept is centuries old: Inmates of a New York debtors’ prison joked about it as early as 1800, in a newspaper they published called Forlorn Hope. But systematic schemes to collect on fake debts started only about five years ago. It begins when someone scoops up troves of personal information that are available cheaply online—old loan applications, long-expired obligations, data from hacked accounts—and reformats it to look like a list of debts. Then they make deals with unscrupulous collectors who will demand repayment of the fictitious bills. Their targets are often poor and likely to already be getting confusing calls about other loans. The harassment usually doesn’t work, but some marks are convinced that because the collectors know so much, the debt must be real.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-06/millions-are-hounded-for-debt-they-don-t-owe-one-victim-fought-back-with-a-vengeance

The Outline scopre e documenta un giro di blogger nelle galassie dei giornali americani (un trucco per fare click anche da noi: i blogger scrivono gratuitamente o quasi, con libertà di contenuto, e portano click al sito madre) che prendono soldi dalle aziende per citarle nei loro articoli e post.

Giornali scalcagnati? Siti di secondo ordine? No: parliamo di Forbes, Fast Company e HuffPost. E la difesa dei loro direttori è un allucinato esercizio di ipocrisia.

Money quote: “People involved with the payoffs are extremely reluctant to discuss them, but four contributing writers to prominent publications including Mashable, Inc, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur told me they have personally accepted payments in exchange for weaving promotional references to brands into their work on those sites. Two of the writers acknowledged they have taken part in the scheme for years, on behalf of many brands.”

https://theoutline.com/post/2563/how-brands-secretly-buy-their-way-into-forbes-fast-company-and-huffpost-stories

Dai cantanti mascherati thai, all’analista che si collega alla BBC dalla camera da letto: i video di tendenza di Youtube per il 2017 - Il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/la-classifica-dei-video-cult-tendenza-youtube-2017/

Cybersecurity e storage: spesa in aumento grazie alla GDPR - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/cybersecurity-storage-spesa-aumento-grazie-alla-gdpr/

Nel Regno Unito oltre alla Brexit adesso hanno anche le truffe bancarie hi-tech. Meno male che il Guardian vigila.

Money quote: “Following the Guardian’s intervention, Natwest has had a change of heart and has refunded Bowman the £2,500 he lost as a “one-off” gesture of goodwill.”

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/dec/09/text-bank-student-loan-money

Dopo tanti secoli il culto di Mitra ancora resta un affascinante mistero.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mithraic-mysteries

Money quote: “Mithraism was an underground Roman religious group that worshipped a pagan deity called Mithras. All Mithraea featured a tauroctony, an image of the god Mithras slaying a sacred bull, as its centerpiece. Though the covert religion was once so widespread some historians considered it an early rival and “sister religion” to Christianity, little is actually known for certain about it.”

Le Fake news sono la conseguenza di un problema vecchio di 400 anni. Il problema vero però è che ancora non abbiamo risolto la causa...

Money quote: “The appetite for populism is not a new problem. In the ferocious newspaper battles of 1890s New York, the emerging sensational style of journalism in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal was dubbed “yellow journalism” by those concerned with maintaining standards, adherence to accuracy and an informed public debate. We now have the same problem with online misinformation”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/29/fake-news-echo-chamber-ethics-infosphere-internet-digital

Noi non diventeremo mai tossici delle notizie a questi livelli. Beh, magari voi, perché io non è che sto messo tanto bene...

Comunque, questa è la lettura lunga per la domenica. Notevole, vale la pena. Buon fine settimana a tutti.

Money quote: “In the spirit of full disclosure, I should make it clear that I’m a professional news consumer. I’m what one might refer to as an addicted, pathetic, sick, twitchy, impulsive, self-righteous, media-obsessed screen junkie. (In other words, I’m an extreme version of the worst parts of you.) So I had facial recognition unlocked my iPhone X, absorbed and analyzed the contents of the news alert, and fired off an all-knowing — and potentially viral — tweet before anyone else in the room had even laid a finger on their device.
But the media-civilian members of my extended family weren’t that far behind. Before the deluge, my sister and her adult children had never been particularly interested in the news. But that was then, and this is now, now, NOW! Everyone is interested (and I mean interested in the same sense that, in the 1980s, the after-hours crowd at Studio 54 was interested in the idea of doing another line of cocaine). So each of them took in and disseminated the news with the speed and aplomb of an experienced managing editor working the assignment desk in a big-city newsroom.
My nephew was the first to speak: “Did you hear the Post is reporting that Jared and Kislyak met to discuss setting up back-channel communication with the Russians?” My sister smiled proudly as my niece responded, “Of course, everyone has heard that,” and then, nodding toward me, “Nice tweet.””

https://medium.com/wordsthatmatter/breaking-bad-news-f8daaafd0028

Intervista inquietante all'esperto (pure lui inquietante) di piattaforme e delle Amazon della nostra vita

Money quote: "Il lavoro gratuito è stato definito da Tiziana Terranova già vent’anni fa. Anche allora stare in rete era un lavoro perché produceva contenuti per i siti e quelli che all’epoca si chiamavano “portali”. Negli ultimi dieci anni questa idea del lavoro gratuito è cambiata quando ci siamo resi conto che le piattaforme non commercializzano solo i nostri contenuti, ma commercializzano soprattutto i nostri dati personali e le informazioni. Quali marche ci piacciono o a che ora ascoltiamo musica. Dove siamo con il Gps. Il lavoro gratuito dell’utente di internet non è un lavoro creativo, ma è un lavoro inconscio e molto meno soddisfacente perché invisibile. In quanto tale alienante nella misura in cui non ci rendiamo conto a cosa servono e come sono usati i dati quando facciamo un recaptcha su Google o mettiamo una Tag su un’immagine su Instagram."

https://ilmanifesto.it/antonio-casilli-i-robot-non-rubano-il-lavoro-siamo-noi-il-cuore-dellalgoritmo/

A quanto pare il problema non è l'intelligenza artificiale, ma la mancanza di intelligenza tradizionale specializzata in questo settore: mancano lavoratori della conoscenza di questo tipo.

Money quote: "That such prized and well-compensated employees are now being put to work for others suggests that selling AI is more complex than executive keynotes imply. “The gating factor is people don’t know how to do this stuff,” says Rob Koplowitz, who tracks cloud AI for Forrester. “There needs to be some hand-holding here in the early stages.”"

https://www.wired.com/story/google-amazon-find-not-everyone-is-ready-for-ai/

Un lascito della repubblica di Weimar al successivo periodo nazista è stata una certa ossessione per la salute e l’igiene. Da questo prende le mosse l’avversione dei nazisti per il caffè e l’amore invece per la versione decaffeinata (Gag, il primo, è una invenzione tedesca di inizio novecento) della bevanda.

Money quote: “In addition to advocating nudism and organic farming, Treitel says, Life Reform practitioners followed pre-modern diets that swore off stimulants, which included refined sugar, high-proof alcohol, tobacco, meat, and caffeine. This philosophy influenced the public health policy of the Nazi regime. “In the 1930s, all of this is part of a Nazi health movement, which became basically part of official policy,” Uwe Spiekermann, a historian at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, says. “So [Nazi health researchers] like Hans Schreiber, Leonardo Conti, they were backers of these crusades against alcohol, against tobacco, against coffee.””

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/decaf-coffee-nazi-party

Google non è stato creato dalla CIA e dalla NSA: questa è una storiella buona per i meno attenti e più inclini allo storytelling di bassa lega. Però Google è nato anche con i finanziamenti di CIA ed NSA, nell'ottica di creare un sistema di sorveglianza globale. Questo sì, è vero.

Buonanotte, per stasera

Money quote: "The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why."

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/

Un giro di nostalgia sulla Route 66, da Los Angeles a Chicago. Foto belle e tristi, con una patina che fa viaggiare nel tempo degli immaginari. Le ha scattate il fotografo e filmaker Phil Donohue, che ne fa anche un discorso sulla memoria e sulla nostalgia.

Money quote: "Yet as a purveyor of nostalgia, Donohue knows that people can even long for things that still exist. He remembers having an exhibit at a shopping mall with photos he had taken of it over the years. “People would walk by the photos and say, ‘Oh my God, remember this?’” he said. “And they’re in the mall I photographed… 20 feet away from [the thing in the photo], but I guess because of the aesthetics it felt like something from their memories.”"

https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/12/documenting-nostalgia-on-route-66/547778/

È meglio la storia della vita degli scrittori che non le storie che scrivono. Affermazione assolutamente falsa, ma relativamente vera.

Money quote: "I was told, "You’ll never get a good job.” I didn’t want a good job! As far as I could tell at eleven or twelve years old, like, people with good jobs woke up very early in the morning, and the men who had good jobs, one of the first things they did was tie a strangulation item of clothing around their necks. They literally put nooses on themselves, and then they went off to their jobs, whatever they were. That’s not a recipe for a happy life. -John Green"

https://medium.com/start-where-you-are/writers-have-better-stories-than-the-stories-we-write-b2f076cd6ace

Le acquisizioni Apple, cosa è cambiato da Steve Jobs a Tim Cook - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/le-acquisizioni-apple-cosa-e-cambiato-da-steve-jobs-a-tim-cook/

Foto di Manhattan meravigliose.

Money quote: "We first got to know Humza Deas three years ago, when he was a 17-year-old self-taught photographer taking the sorts of thrilling pictures of the city, often from places he wasn’t technically supposed to be, which someone who is maybe no longer a teenager would probably not attempt. One of them ended up on the cover of our 2014 Reasons to Love New York issue, of his legs dangling awesomely (or terrifyingly, if you’ve got a touch of vertigo) over the streets. More recently, he’s been experimenting with taking photos with a drone, letting us again see our familiar city in all-new ways. We loved them, and asked him to shoot some of them just for us."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/drone-photos-of-new-york-city.html

L’informazione è un dato che elimina l'incertezza. Fra i nostri sensi, questo ruolo tocca al tatto. Per eliminare le incertezze, per asseverare la consapevolezza ad esempio che le nostre chiavi sono in tasca, le dobbiamo toccare. La nostra società però è diventata visiva a seguito della scrittura e delle arti figurative, metodo più efficiente del tatto ma anche del suono parlato o cantato per trasmettere le informazioni “dense”. La naturalezza della profondità consapevole però è nel tatto.

Questo articolo lo spiega molto bene e apre nuovi scenari intrganti sulla possibilità di successo - o di effettivo funzionamento - della realtà aumentata come interfaccia dominante. Io non credo in un futuro di voci sintetiche o di stanze a chi parlare, ma neanche di fumetti che galleggiano davanti agli oggetti fisici, visibili tramite impianti digitali nella nostra cornea. Io voglio toccare. Il rischio sennò è la dissonanza cognitiva.

Money quote: “An important aspect of touch is often missed: touching is more psychologically reassuring than seeing. Touch does not always make us experience things better, but it certainly makes us feel better about what we experience. Even when we can see that the keys are in our bags, we are much more certain that they are once we’ve touched them”

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-you-need-to-touch-your-keys-to-believe-theyre-in-your-bag