BEST READ SO FAR OF 2019 => An unusually elegant link of superb spelunking and social commentary
“In some ways, though, this example simply proves that the shift from due process of law to trial by journalism has its own temporal and moral gaps. Manafort’s story is journalistically problematic because there is no way to prove the allegations. One cannot verify these texts weren’t inserted post-hoc. Or access the men in foreign countries who were purportedly paid to participate in the gang bangs. And in this case, the putative victim — Manafort’s wife — has not announced her victimhood nor stated any desire to have a public discussion of her marriage. Andrea Manafort’s texts were not shared on a Tumblr; they were hacked, illegally. Feminism’s tools of “consent” and “choice” are limited in this situation because both remain murky. The story remains illegible."
Virtue signaling has its limits, apparently
“Although most Panera Cares consumers profess to care broadly about the social problem of food insecurity, they are not comfortable with the very real experience of being proximal to those consumers. … The food insecure are also not comfortable with eating in close proximity to the food secure. An important principle that undergirds the notion of serving a temporarily food insecure population, and providing dignity, is that of anonymity. … Yet the reality within the cafés differs from this, and because of the proximity to food secure customers, results in discomfort stemming from physical proximity.”
The upper bound of text processing AI
“The big picture is beautiful. The AI understands the reference to Legolas and Gimli as placing this in the setting of Middle-Earth. It infers that the story should include characters like Aragorn and Gandalf, and that the Ring should show up. It maintains basic narrative coherence: the heroes attack, the orcs defend, a battle happens, the characters discuss the battle. It even gets the genre conventions right: the forces of Good overcome Evil, then deliver inspiring speeches about glory and bravery.”
““I don’t think these are going to have the impact that people think they are,” said Lawrin Van Keuren, who oversees real estate investments for the money management firm controlled by the family of Fred Hayman, a founder of the luxury retailer Giorgio Beverly Hills. “We are in a wait-and-see mode.”"
ZOIB and slider scales, united
“In summary, ZOIB is a reasonable model of slider scale data that can capture their major features, has support for the entire [0, 1] range of data, and does not assign density to impossible values (unlike the normal model). It also has an intuitive way of dealing with the boundary values as a separate process, thus providing more nuanced information about the outcome variable under study.”
Commercial power generation gone off grid
“Asked to rank their top five choices for cost-saving opportunities, 59 percent of respondents in the Accenture survey chose distributed integration. In the top spot, 61 percent stated reducing supply chain costs through improved forecasting of materials and service requirements was their top choice.”