From Bloomberg:

Last month, Uber accounted for 47 percent of all rides expensed by employees whose companies use Certify, the second-largest provider of travel and expense management software in North America. In March 2014, Uber accounted for only 15 percent, according to a study by Certify released on April 7. Over that period, the amount spent on traditional taxis, limousines, and airport shuttles fell from 85 percent to 52 percent of expensed rides. Lyft, a rival ride-hailing service that caters more to consumers than professionals, currently accounts for 1 percent of business rides, the study found.

And

The average ride in an Uber—a category that includes the low-cost UberX service, in addition to the pricier black car and SUV variations—costs $31.24, while the average fare for a taxi, shuttle buses, or limo was slightly higher, at $35.40. “Across business travel we have seen the strongest growth on UberX, our lowest cost option,” says Max Crowley, who manages the Uber for Business program. “Employees recognize the value of riding with Uber and are saving their companies money in the process.”

Disruption continues apace.

Oh — and you can now use Uber to hail auto rickshaws in Delhi!

Good rhetorical question from Dave Winer:

Why do people shame other people on the net? Because (I theorize) it’s one of the few forms of power left to them. One of the few ways their ideas are considered valid. It’s a channel for expressiveness, a gesture that might seem to have meaning.

Why do people troll on comments? Speak silly talking points they got from Fox News or MSNBC? This is one area where there is equivalence, the “left” and “right” both do this. Seek out each other for a permanent argument. My guess is they do it because it gives them a simulated nutrient-free sort of relevance.

The thing about the Internet that we rarely talk about is that it holds a mirror up to human nature. It reveals things about humanity that we’d rather not admit to. Which is why we blame the mirror, not the thing it reflects. Many years ago, when I was writing my history of the Internet and there was a lot of noise about online pornography, I tried to re-frame the discussion. If there’s a lot of porn on the Net, I argued, then doesn’t that tell us something interesting about human nature? Because if there wasn’t such an apparently insatiable appetite for porn, then ultimately it would decline on the Net. So instead of obsessing about the impact of the network, maybe we should be asking what the human appetite for porn means? What does it tell us, for example, about our relationships? About the differences between men and women? I got nowhere with that argument then, and clearly things haven’t changed much in the last 15 years.

Lovely talk by Charlie Nesson (complete with mutt).

Source

From today’s New York Times:

BERLIN — Even in the nightmarish immediate aftermath of the plane crash in the French Alps on Tuesday, Carsten Spohr, the former pilot who runs Germany’s Lufthansa airline, was sure of one thing: the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, 27, was “100 percent” fit to fly.

Mr. Lubitz, after all, had been through the widely respected Lufthansa training system — “one of the best in the world,” Mr. Spohr said — and had met all other requirements to fly commercial aircraft.

In the decades since it emerged from the ruins of Nazism, this country — which reunited in 1990 and in recent years has dominated Europe as its economic powerhouse — has come to define itself as orderly, rule-driven and well-engineered. It is an identity that is both an antidote to its past and a blueprint for economic success. From Mercedes-Benz cars — “the best,” says a current ad campaign — to its countless tidy towns, Germany purrs excellence.

Now Mr. Lubitz — born and raised in one of those pretty towns — has upended that well-ordered world and challenged other assumptions built into German life. As Mr. Spohr noted, the co-pilot’s terrifying deed was a singular, perhaps unstoppable disaster. Yet somehow the system failed.

Sure, it did. Systems do. Even in Germany.

Apropos our research project’s recent symposium on virality, and in particular the relative speeds of online dissemination of truths and untruths, this paper from Google researchers is interesting. At the moment, Google ranks search results using a proprietary algorithm (or, more likely, set of algorithms) which perform some kind of ‘peer review’ of web pages. The essence of it seems to be that pages that are linked to extensively are ranked more highly than pages with fewer inbound links. This has obvious drawbacks in some cases, particularly when conspiracist thinking is involved. A web page or site which proposes a sensationalist interpretations for a major newsworthy event, for example, may be extensively quoted across the Internet, even though it might be full of misinformation or falsehoods.

The Google researchers have been exploring a method of evaluating web pages on the basis of factual accuracy. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy”, they write. “The facts are automatically extracted from each source by information extraction methods commonly used to construct knowledge bases.” They propose a way to compute a “trustworthiness score” – Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) — using fairly abstruse probabilistic modelling.

The paper reports that they tested the model on a test database and concluded that it enabled them to compute “the true trustworthiness levels of the sources”. They then ran the model on a database of 2.8B facts extracted from the web, and thereby estimated the trustworthiness of 119M webpages. They claim that “manual evaluation of a subset of the results confirms the effectiveness of the method”.

If this finding turns out to be replicable, then it’s an interesting result. The idea that ‘truth’ might be computable will keep philosophers amused an occupied for ages. The idea of a ‘fact’ is itself a contested notion in many fields, because treating something as a fact involves believing a whole set of ‘touchstone theories’. (Believing the reading on a voltmeter, for example, means believing a set of theories which link the movement of the needle on the dial to the underlying electrical phenomenon that is being measured.) And of course the Google approach would not be applicable to many of the pages on the Web, because they don’t make factual assertions or claims. It might, however, be useful in studying online sources which discuss or advocate conspiracy theories.

Even so, it won’t be without its problems. In an interesting article in Friday’s Financial Times, Robert Shrimsley points out that the Google approach is essentially using “fidelity to proved facts as a proxy for trust[worthiness]”. This works fine with single facts, he thinks, but runs into trouble with more complex networks of factual information.

And what about propositions that were originally regarded as ‘facts’ but were later invalidated. “In 1976, “, Shrimsley writes,

“the so-called Birmingham Six were officially guilty of bombings that killed 21 people. Fifteen years later their convictions were quashed and they were officially innocent. This took place in a pre-internet world but campaigns to overturn established truths take time and do not always start on sober, respected news sites. The trust score could make it harder for such campaigns to bubble up.”

And of course we’re still left with the question of what is established truth anyway.

Who knew? The poor suffer more from worry, stress, pain, sadness and anger than the rich.