WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
November already – Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year are approaching rapidly... In the meantime we have kudos for 33rd Square web site, and anti-goth cult investigated by the FBI, time changes, Chinese pharmaceutical research, C++ web pages, stats from StatCounter, face recognition, and some special Dalek pictures. Scanner has URLs pointing to smart watch sales figures, sunbathing and hyperactive children, the ultimate battery fire, artificial gravity, Microsoft and Apple, HP 3D printer with no DRM.
Not bad, not bad at all...
Shorts:
I’m getting old enough that my eyes are not as sharp as they once were. That’s unfortunate, because the ‘in’ design for web sites at the moment features using very thin grey fonts on a light grey background. the sites look very trendy, but are unreadable. As regular readers will know, I sometimes draw your attention to material on the excellent on the 33rd Square web site, and I was having problems with their text. So, I thought, maybe I’ll drop them a line. After all, if nobody tells them there’s a problem, there is no way they can be expected to fix it.
To be honest I didn’t really expect them to take any notice, being old and cynical. But I was wrong! wrong! Wrong! WRONG! A short while later I receive an email from them:
“Hi Alan,
Thank you very much for your feedback regarding our site. We strive for the
best possible user experience, and have made some styling changes to
reflect your concerns.
We hope the text is easier for you to read now.
All the best,
Geoff
www.33rdsquare.com”
I zoomed over to their site (actually I clicked on the chrome browser icon and pasted the URL into the address bar). And it was true. the style was the same but they’d darkened the text, and I could now read it without squinting!
That’s brilliant. Now that’s what I call paying attention to your customers problems with your product.
Ten house points and a gold star for 33rd Square...
http://www.33rdsquare.com/
MuckRock has a rather amusing tale about the FBI spending two years investigating a fictional anti-goth cult. It seems that they failed to look on the web site that triggered the investigation – a parody site – before starting. It’s good that the FBI would take seriously such cults, there’s no doubt about that, but getting taken in by a parody site doesn’t do much for their reputation for efficiency and omnipotence...
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/oct/31/fbis-investgation-god-hates-goths/
Homework:
It’s the shift to winter time in the USA this weekend. The rest of the world did it last weekend. I guess it’s one of the few things on which the USA lags behind the rest of the world! It’s a real pain, but there seems to be no way to stop it, and our cooker clock (which I’ve never actually used in cooking) is an hour wrong.
Thus it was that I was already pre-disposed to believe a story someone sent me in ‘News Thump’ about a report showing that Britain loses half a million man-hours (actually more like half a million woman hours – AL) trying to figure out how to reset the clocks on cookers during the time change. It was a very genuine sounding story, but two things made me suspicious. The first was that there was no URL to the report that I could use to check it. The second, of course was the ridiculous suggestion of half a million person-hours wasted. Anyone who has ever tried to change the time on an oven clock knows that the figure should be at least two million person-hours!
At this stage I noticed that the usual warning that the site uses cookies was covering up several lines at the top of the page, so I clicked on it to go away, and lo and behold it revealed a line saying “UK Spoof News and Satire”. Hurray! I threw my deerstalker hat into the air.
So, now you know the work that goes into researching material for this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious newsletter!
http://newsthump.com/2016/10/31/britain-loses-half-a-million-man-hours-trying-to-change-the-time-on-the-nations-ovens/
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/history.html
On a more serious note I picked up a story about a one year study of Chinese clinical trials by the Chinese government, which revealed that the data used in trials was 80% fabricated. I picked the story up on the ‘Radio Free Asia’ site, but a little research (Google is your friend on this one) revealed a report on the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) site, and the BMJ does have a good reputation.
It’s pretty worrying when you think about. This is a Chinese government investigation, which if it was a whitewash you would expect to be writing things up favourably. It’s worrying here in the west because a lot of the generic medicines we take are manufactured in China. Although this study doesn’t specifically look at drug manufacturing, it has to trigger alarms about the whole Chinese pharmaceutical industry.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-fakes-09272016141438.html
http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5396
Geek Stuff:
Whoopee! It looks like I’ll soon be able to code web stuff in C++, instead of having to wrestle with JavaScript, PHP or Python. The enabler for this, what’s known as WebAssembly, has been a long time in its gestation, but now Microsoft, Mozilla and Google have announced preview versions of WebAssembly that allow C++ to run in a browser.
Once it’s firmed up, I’ll be writing a version of FedTerm to run in a browser!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/31/webassembly_browser_makers_buy_in/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3137206/javascript/webassembly-now-available-as-release-candidate.html#
Interesting news. According to StatCounter in October use of mobile devices exceeded that of desktop personal computers. There was all sorts of gloating over this from those who have been predicting the demise of the PC for the last five years. Of course, if you look a little more closely, the story is not quite so simple. The fact is that cheap android-based phones are available and affordable in many places where PCs aren’t.
The figures for what StatCounter calls ‘mature’ market (it has separate graphs for the UK, USA, Ireland, and Australia) show convergence, but not yet crossover. I suspect this isn’t a fluke. I think that what is happening is that people who have access to both a PC and a mobile device use both of them, depending on what they are doing.
There is also a methodological problem from my view. The GlobalStats headline states, “Mobile and tablet internet usage exceeds desktop for first time worldwide”. Information further down gives details of their methodology when it says, “StatCounter Global Stats data is based on over 15 billion page views per month to over 2.5 million websites.” That’s interesting, because what it means is that StatCounter is defining internet usage solely as browsing web pages.
I think this is bad research design, taking the easy way out. There are lots of apps, both on smart phones and PCs, that use the internet and don’t connect with web sites. I have no idea what percentage of the internet use relates to the web, and I don’t, offhand, know of any recent research that indicates the figures, but I do know that assuming the web is the internet is a very dubious thing to do.
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobile-and-tablet-internet-usage-exceeds-desktop-for-first-time-worldwide
Face recognition is all the rage, but it’s not quite so good as the powers that be would have us believe. At the 2016 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, researchers presented a paper showing that it is relative easy to fool commercial face recognition software with just a pair of the right sort of spectacle frames. And it doesn’t just make it more difficult for the recognition software, it makes them get it wrong 100% of the time. For instance, a white male test subject wearing the glasses was identified as actress Milla Jovovich 87.87% of the time.
Back to the drawing board, guys...
http://qz.com/823820/carnegie-mellon-made-a-special-pair-of-glasses-that-lets-you-steal-a-digital-identity/
Pictures:
Here’s some pictures of something that Dr. Who fans would like to get their hands on – a very classy stained glass Dalek. “You will be Excommunicated... Excommunicate! Excommunicate!”
http://io9.gizmodo.com/this-gorgeous-stained-glass-dalek-is-just-as-likely-to-1788192467
http://www.jamieanderson.me.uk/designing-stained-glass-dalek/
Scanner:
Finally, that tech fad’s over: Smart watch sales tank more than 50%
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/24/smartwatch_sales_tank_over_50_percent/
Sunbathing mothers guard against hyperactive babies
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/09/sunbathing-mothers-guard-against-hyperactive-babies/
Samsung are amateurs – NASA shows how you really do a battery fire
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/29/nasa_shows_a_real_battery_fire/
The weak pull of artificial gravity
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3094/1
As Apple fiddles, Microsoft reaches for Apple’s discarded creative crown
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3135269/macs/as-apple-fiddles-microsoft-reaches-for-apples-discarded-creative-crown.html
HP Inc: No DRM in our 3D printers, we swear (unlike our 2D ones)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/28/hp_inc_3d_printers/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
6 November 2016
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
