I am convinced that [virtual reality] is not going to be an extension of cinema or 3-D cinema or video games. It is something new, different, and not experienced yet. The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture, we have new stories and narrations and then we start to develop a tool. Or we have visions of wondrous new architecture—like, let’s say, the museum in Bilbao, or the opera house in Sydney—and technology makes it possible to fulfill these dreams. So you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.

 

Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality – The New Yorker

[Props to this dude for exposing an extremely invasive technology. -egg]

Three months after the FedEx episode, on August 3rd, the task force descended on an apartment complex near the San Jose airport, rented in the name Steven Travis Brawner. Agents caught Rupard outside the complex, and served a search warrant on his apartment and storage unit later that day. They found $117,000 in US currency, 230 ounces of gold, and 588 ounces of silver, along with the dark gray hoodie tying him to the drop at the train station and a Verizon AirCard tying him to the bank accounts. By the time the case was over, the agents would recover more than $1.4 million.

The suspect was charged with 35 counts of wire fraud, 35 counts of aggravated identity theft, and three other miscellaneous charges — enough to keep him in jail for the rest of his life. Taking his fingerprints three days later, the police finally worked back to his name — not Rupard, or Stout, or Brawner, or Aldrich, or any of the others. His name was Daniel Rigmaiden.

But there was something else, something that wasn’t reported on the seizure affidavit, the complaint, or any of the documents that followed. To track Rigmaiden down, the investigators had used a secret device, one that allowed them to pinpoint their target with far more accuracy than Verizon could. They called it a cell-site simulator, or by its trade name, Stingray. Neither term was found in the court order that authorized its use. The device had to be kept secret, even from the courts.

The Stingray had worked perfectly. Agents traced the suspect’s AirCard back to his apartment and now had more than enough evidence for a conviction. But in the years that followed, that open-and-shut case would turn into something far more complex. Working from prison, Rigmaiden would unravel decades of secrecy, becoming the world’s foremost authority on the device that sent him to jail. By the time he was finished, a covert surveillance device and the system that kept it secret would be exposed to the public for the very first time.

The Dragnet | The Verge

[To be honest, that trend looks kinda questionable to me — I’d like to see a 95% confidence interval on that. But certainly seems to be a negative trend at the very least, and interesting if true. -egg]

Most talk of income inequality focuses on the problems of the very poor or the broader socioeconomic implications of rising inequality. What is less well-known is that income inequality makes us all less happy with our lives, even if we’re relatively well-off.

We examined data from the Gallup World Poll and the World Top Incomes Database and found that the more income is concentrated in the hands of a few, the more likely individuals are to report lower levels of life satisfaction and more negative daily emotional experiences. That is, the higher the share of national income that is held by the top 1%, the lower the overall well-being of the general population. Specifically, we found that a 1% increase in the share of taxable income held by the top 1% hurts life satisfaction as much as a 1.4% increase in the country-level unemployment rate.

 

Source: Income Inequality Makes Whole Countries Less Happy

[From Bruce Schneier, who’s hardly prone to privacy hysteria…]

We accept all of this Internet surveillance because we don’t really think about it. If there were a dozen people from Internet marketing companies with pens and clipboards peering over our shoulders as we sent our Gmails and browsed the Internet, most of us would object immediately. If the companies that made our smartphone apps actually followed us around all day, or if the companies that collected our license plate data could be seen as we drove, we would demand they stop. And if our televisions, computer, and mobile devices talked about us and coordinated their behavior in a way we could hear, we would be creeped out.

We need to do better. We need to have a conversation about the privacy implications of cross-device tracking, but — more importantly­ — we need to think about the ethics of our surveillance economy. Do we want companies knowing the intimate details of our lives, and being able to store that data forever? Do we truly believe that we have no rights to see the data that’s collected about us, to correct data that’s wrong, or to have data deleted that’s personal or embarrassing? At a minimum, we need limits on the behavioral data that can legally be collected about us and how long it can be stored, a right to download data collected about us, and a ban on third-party ad tracking. The last one is vital: it’s the companies that spy on us from website to website, or from device to device, that are doing the most damage to our privacy.

 

The Internet of Things that Talks About You Behind Your Back – Schneier on Security

[FiveThirtyEight is generally a pretty good source for statistical analysis, although personally, when I read articles like this I increasingly feel like, “well, yes, this is why frequentist approaches to experimental significance are inherently flawed…” -egg]

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recently released its latest guidelines, which define a healthy diet as one that emphasizes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or nonfat dairy products, seafood, legumes and nuts while reducing red and processed meat, refined grains, and sugary foods and beverages.¹ Some cardiologists recommend a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, the American Diabetes Association gives the nod to bothlow-carbohydrate and low-fat diets, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine promotes a vegetarian diet. Ask a hard-bodied CrossFit aficionado, and she may champion a “Paleo” diet based on foods our Paleolithic ancestors (supposedly) ate. My colleague Walt Hickey swears by the keto diet.

Who’s right? It’s hard to say. When it comes to nutrition, everyone has an opinion. What no one has is an airtight case. The problem begins with a lack of consensus on what makes a diet healthy. Is the aim to make you slender? To build muscles? To keep your bones strong? Or to prevent heart attacks or cancer or keep dementia at bay? Whatever you’re worried about, there’s no shortage of diets or foods purported to help you. Linking dietary habits and individual foods to health factors is easy — ridiculously so — as you’ll soon see from the little experiment we conducted.

You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition | FiveThirtyEight

Automation and offshoring are playing significant roles in the types of jobs that are growing or stagnating.

Source: Jobs Involving Routine Tasks Aren’t Growing

Really interesting essay on culture clashes between widely different communication styles.

Here’s a series of events that happens many times daily on my favorite bastion of miscommunication, the bird website. Person tweets some fact. Other people reply with other facts. Person complains, “Ugh, randos in my mentions.” Harsh words may be exchanged, and everyone exits the encounter thinking the other person was monumentally rude for no reason.

While some folks in some circles make hay over “well-actuallys” and being “splained to” by “randos,” seeing such replies as bad-faith social posturing or indicative of deep-seated bias, more often than not I chalk up the friction to, like our yelling New Yorker being taken for rude, cross-cultural communication breakdown. The dynamics at play behind “ugh, randos” are so pernicious because it isn’t a simple problem of definitions or message integrity, but different views on what communication is or is for. What it often comes down to is people with fundamentally different, perhaps totally irreconcilable, values systems assuming “malice or stupidity” where the real explanation is values mismatch and miscommunication.

Splain it to Me | Status 451

This is excellent. Makes me hope he’ll do a DJ set at this year’s Big Ears festival.

Nicolas Jaar made an amazing/sprawling, 66-minute mix — “a strange and lovely bricolage” — for Resident Advisor, to commemorate the venerable electronic music site’s 500th podcast. Recorded in December 2015, in Brooklyn, New York, and featuring Talk Talk, Terry Riley, a couple of Jaar’s own tracks + more.

Source: Download Nicolas Jaar’s new Resident Advisor mix