Interessanti sviluppi nello studio dei numeri primi

Money quote: "Early this year a software engineer, Shaun Gilchrist, reached out to me after reading a blog post of mine from many years ago, about my informal search for hidden patterns in the prime numbers.

The Ulam Spiral revealed non-random patterns, but they didn’t quite match up. Both Shaun and I had long felt there was a better way to wrap the primes that would reveal a deeper structure.

Shaun explained that he had developed a new algorithm (he calls it “Parallax Compression” or, “Deana,” named after his wife) for wrapping the primes on a plane, and visualizing their distribution, inspired by the Ulam Spiral. Shaun’s algorithm revealed an interesting glyph-like, fractal pattern in the distribution of primes, that to our knowledge, had not been seen before."

http://www.novaspivack.com/science/we-have-discovered-a-new-pattern-in-the-prime-numbers-parallax-compression

Alla WWDC non aspettiamoci l'impossibile (ma speriamo nell'improbabile) - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/alla-wwdc-non-aspettiamoci-limpossibile-ma-speriamo-nellimprobabile/

Perché poi le grandi trasformazioni si appoggiano su cose semplici ma fondamentali, pervasive. Ad esempio: il livello di alfabetizzazione e cultura generale di una nazione non dipendente tanto o soltanto da come è strutturato il sistema scolastico, ma anche dalla pervasività del sistema bibliotecario nazionale. Perché leggere non è solo un'industria, nonostante gli editori la pensino diversamente (e trasformino le librerie in ristoranti e tavole calde).

Non credo che i paesi del nord Europa siano il paradiso ma in questo caso la Findladia è veramente davanti.

Money quote: "“Finland is a country of readers,” declared the country’s UK ambassador Päivi Luostarinen recently, and it’s hard to argue with her. In 2016 the UN named Finland the world’s most literate nation, and Finns are among the world’s most enthusiastic users of public libraries – the country’s 5.5m million people borrow close to 68m books a year."

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/15/why-finlands-cities-are-havens-for-library-lovers-oodi-helsinki

Per chi ha studiato scienza politica e relazioni internazionali, questo articolo è un tuffo nel passato (molto ingenuo, peraltro). Cosa serve per costituire uno stato sovrano che sopravviva a se stesso, anziché collassare malamente?

Money quote: "Before answering these questions, it is necessary to define nation-building more precisely. It goes beyond the mere existence of an independent country with a flag, an anthem and an army. Some old countries (such as Belgium) haven’t come together as a nation, while other more recently founded states (such as India) have done so. There are two sides to the nation-building coin: the extension of political alliances across the terrain of a country, and the identification with and loyalty to the institutions of the state, independent of who currently governs. The former is the political-integration aspect, the latter the political-identity aspect of nation-building. To foster both, political ties between citizens and the state should reach across ethnic divides."

https://aeon.co/essays/why-some-countries-come-together-while-others-fall-apart

Bisognerebbe cominciare a parlare dei Mechanical Turks di Amazon e dell'impatto che stanno avendo sulla ricerca sociale, ad esempio.

Money quote: "To initiate a survey using MTurk, a researcher (a “Requester” in Amazon’s vernacular) establishes an account (http://www.mturk.com), places funds into her account, and then posts a “job listing” using the MTurk Web interface that describes the Human Intelligence Task (HIT) to be completed and the compensation to be paid (Amazon assesses Requesters a 10% surcharge on all payments ed: this surcharge has now increased and is typically 20-40%. Each HIT has a designated number of tasks and the requester can specify how many times an individual MTurk “Worker” can undertake the task. Researchers can also set requirements for subjects, including country of residence and prior “approval rate,” which is the percent of prior HITs submitted by the respondent that were subsequently accepted by Requesters. When MTurk Workers who meet these eligibility requirements log onto their account, they can review the list of HITs available to them and choose to undertake any task for which they are eligible."

Money quote2: "The sudden availability of a conscientious, diverse, non-student source of survey respondents has led to something of a golden age in survey research. There is no shortage of interesting, creative social science that has tapped into the power of the crowd."

https://daily.jstor.org/amazons-mechanical-turk-has-reinvented-research/

Un Raspberry PI, una microcamera, una rete neurale, e tanta voglia di contare le api, intese come animaletti che volano...

Money quote: "the second thing was to decide exactly what i was trying to get the neural net to do. if the task is "count bees in an image" you could arguably try to regress directly to the number but it didn't feel like the easiest thing to start with and it doesn't allow any fun tracking of individual bees over frames. instead i decided to focus on localising every bee in the image."

http://matpalm.com/blog/counting_bees/

Come funziona il lavoro delle grandi aziende rispetto ai progetti open source? In realtà lo dovremmo già sapere, perché ad esempio da due decenni circa Ibm pompa codice dentro Linux e altri progetti open source, ma è un processo abbastanza invisibile a chi sia fuori dal loop. Invece, un esempio che mi tocca più da vicino, perché uso il software in questione, è l'evoluzione del protocollo di comunicazione di Git. Interessante soprattutto vedere come funziona dalla parte di Google, che ha introdotto le migliorie che le interessano come azienda; Google infatti usa Git per la sua base di codice, che è enorme, e ha problemi di utilizzo e trasporto delle infornazioni, quindi vuole assolutamente un protocollo di trasmissione migliore.

Egoismo o altruismo?

Money quote: "To try out protocol version 2 for yourself you'll need an up to date version of Git (support for v2 was recently merged to Git's master branch and is expected to be part of Git 2.18) and a v2 enabled server (repositories on googlesource.com and Cloud Source Repositories are v2 enabled)."

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2018/05/introducing-git-protocol-version-2.html

Non tutti sono in grado di raccontare la stessa storia. Helen DeWitt ci riesce perfettamente e svela il marcio nel mondo editoriale. Banale, ma perfettamente eseguito.

Money quote: “DeWitt’s ruthless honesty about the sausage making of literary production is no doubt autobiographical. She has described her travails in the selling, copyediting, and typesetting of her now classic first novel, The Last Samurai, as well as the baroquely harrowing ordeals with the publishing industry and the financial difficulties that followed. But the generosity and humor of these stories soften any sense of personal grievance into something much more interesting and complicated. The stories are devastatingly specific, and yet they serve as broad parables about the inevitability of being misunderstood, both as an artist and as a person”

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/29/helen-dewitt-lacerates-the-literary-world/

Altro che non-luogo...

Money quote: “The airport is a metaphorical hyperbaric chamber of sorts, allowing you to decompress and slowly prepare for your return to the slippery surface of the real world. “

https://lifehacker.com/airport-time-is-a-welcome-state-of-limbo-1826421486

Ecco iA Writer 5 macOS, il minimalismo fatto app - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/ecco-ia-writer-5-macos-il-minimalismo-fatto-app/

Il cloud mangia la banda? La risposta è la connessione privata on demand - il mio articolo per CorCom

https://www.corrierecomunicazioni.it/digital-economy/cloud/il-cloud-mangia-la-banda-la-risposta-e-la-connessione-privata-on-demand/

Le cose sono sempre un po’ più complicate di quello che non sembra. Anche quando riteniamo di averle capite. E gli effetti della realtà sulle proiezioni delle nostre attese sono strabilianti, vedi la vittoria di Donald Trump alle elezioni americane. Una delle chiavi di questa vittoria? Il declino dell’industria manifatturiera americana e la perdita di posti di lavoro. Ma se gli economisti hanno dismesso come populismo la crisi dei “blue collar” su cui ha invece costruito Trump, salta fuori che ci sono anche i dati che gli danno ragione. Solo che nessuno l’aveva capito.

Money quote: “But it turns out that Trump’s story of US manufacturing decline was much closer to being right than the story of technological progress being spun in Washington, New York, and Cambridge.
Thanks to a painstaking analysis by a handful of economists, it’s become clear that the data that underpin the dominant narrative—or more precisely, the way most economists interpreted the data—were way off-base. Foreign competition, not automation, was behind the stunning loss in factory jobs. And that means America’s manufacturing sector is in far worse shape than the media, politicians, and even most academics realize.”

https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/

Ecco Rog di Asus con il suo primo gaming-smartphone - il mio articolo per Il Sole 24 Ore

http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/tecnologie/2018-06-04/ecco-rog-asus-il-suo-primo-gaming-smartphone-143733.shtml?uuid=AEskH5zE

Un po' di archeologia delle font, in particolare di quelle del Macintosh originale del 1984. L'articolo è davvero molto interessante, non solo per gli appassionati di tipografia.

Money quote: "Because a typeface is not just its pixels, but also its spacing, I wanted to look at the authentic source material for Chicago. That required some technical archaeology: the original Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first widely available computer that used proportional typography on screen and it had an entirely unique way of storing and managing fonts. (Standards like TrueType didn’t appear until later.)

I have some software background in typography, so I managed to extract the genuine 1984 font data using my 2018 computer. (The details of that part are a bit beside the point but are in the footnote at the bottom if you’re interested). Having got the font, bitmap and spacing data for Chicago, I used the same little program to extract all the other Macintosh bitmap fonts."

https://medium.com/@bzotto/hidden-sheep-and-mac-typography-archaeology-efce770da76c

Poliamore, sesso libero, coppie aperte: chiamatele come volete. Esistono da sempre, ma adesso sono state più chiaramente individuate. E questo è un male, se vogliamo, ma anche un bene, perché se ne può finalmente parlare. E imparare.

Money quote: "I found myself in my relationships trying to manipulate situations so that I got what I really wanted without having to ask for it because asking directly for something you need and being told by someone you care for greatly that they refuse to do it is absolutely gut-wrenchingly horrifying. And the greater my need for any one thing, the less likely I was to ask directly for it."

https://medium.com/@thelolaphoenix/thirteen-things-i-wish-id-learned-before-choosing-non-monogamy-ce3533cbd525

E in tutto questo, noi ovviamente non solo non prestiamo attenzione, ma neanche partecipiamo alla creazione delle cose importanti. Il Regolamento europeo della ePrivacy attende di entrare in vigore e fa sembrare la GDPR una barzelletta. Nessuno da noi ne parla, soprattutto nessuno dei nostri eurodeputati che io sappia è stato determinante nella sua scrittura e nel suo processo di formazione. Eppure, è forse la cosa più importante che stia succedendo in questo settore, ancora più della GDPR, anche perché qui si decide veramente il modo con il quale le persone possono essere toccate dalle aziende che raccolgono, tracciano e monetizzano le loro auree digitali.

Money quote: "Industry and consumer advocates are essentially fighting over a contentious issue central to the post-Cambridge Analytica online economy: whether data-driven digital services represent more of a boon to consumers or the kind of surveillance that can threaten democracy.

“With one click you can manipulate hundreds of thousands or millions of people, whether you know their names or not,” said Birgit Sippel, a European Parliament member from Germany who drafted the ePrivacy legislation. “That is why protecting privacy is becoming more important, especially in the digital environment.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/technology/europe-eprivacy-regulation-battle.html

Finalmente un discorso sensato, strutturato, sistemico sulle piattaforme. Visto che viviamo nell'epoca delle piattaforme (che spesso confondiamo con dei mercati, ma non lo sono), era l'ora!

Money quote: "In their book Platform Revolution (2016), Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne and Sangeet Paul Choudary argue that businesses used to be ‘pipes’ (linear models) and are becoming ‘platforms’ (networked models). Before the digital revolution, firms created goods and services, which they pushed out and sold to customers. The flow was from point A to point B – like pipes connecting deep-sea oil wells to the person who fills up the tank of their car with refined petrol.

Unlike pipes, however, platforms disrupt the clear-cut demarcation between producer and consumer, because they enable users to create as well as to consume value. Platforms need a different, non-pipe-like infrastructure. The major business challenge is to attract creators and consumers in the right proportions for transactions to occur. Platforms are in fact very similar to marketplaces: both create economic value by fostering exchanges between two (or more) groups. Now, though, this value can be generated within a company, not just outside it."

https://aeon.co/essays/workers-of-the-world-unite-on-distributed-digital-platforms

Tutto su Mojave, il nuovo sistema operativo del Mac - la mia gallery per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/06/06/tecnologia/tutto-su-mojave-il-nuovo-sistema-operativo-del-mac-Z63tAwC9PKo1Tjz1B3aPOK/pagina.html

Non potevo non condividerlo...

Sto rientrando in Italia da Taiwan via Hong Kong (dove sono per una giornata). All'andata ho visto un bel film in aereo, che è su Netflix: Kodachrome. La storia è stata ispirata da un articolo del New York Times del 2010 sulla chiusura dell'ultimo posto dove venisse sviluppata la pellicola di Kodak.

Money quote: "Demanding both to shoot and process, Kodachrome rewarded generations of skilled users with a richness of color and a unique treatment of light that many photographers described as incomparable even as they shifted to digital cameras. “Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day,” Paul Simon sang in his 1973 hit “Kodachrome,” which carried the plea “Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/us/30film.html

Windows 95: l’ultimo sistema operativo onesto sulla Terra

Money quote: “All good things come to an end and Windows 95 was shut down for good in 2001. While, obviously, it’s not a viable operating system nowadays, the first real attempt of Microsoft to build a computer system available to everyone left a valuable legacy.

What really stands out are the main qualities that Windows 95, as a product, had and that are not common nowadays. It had a memorable launch, it was honest regarding its objectives, focused on the user, objective and transparent.“

https://medium.com/@Imaginary_Cloud/why-we-should-all-be-using-windows-95-5b63ad50e9e8