Intellectuals are freaks – and that’s not a criticism.
The Best Bookshops in Copenhagen. If you like bookshops (and I do), Copenhagen is a great place to live.
Puzzled by the rise of Snapchat? Hint: it’s about fleeing the performance anxiety induced by Facebook and Instagram. Perceptive piece by Farad Manjoo. There is, however, a downside: people want to escape the news.
Twitter suspends 235,000 more accounts over extremism. Yep, that’s 235,000. But Trump is still there.
If, like me, you consult Nate Silver’s prediction page (which is updated every two hours) then you may have relaxed a bit. I’ve just looked at it and it’s currently showing a 78.4% to 21.6% margin for Clinton in its ‘polls+forecast’ estimate, and a 89.5% to 10.5% margin if the election were held today. So the prospects for a Trump win look dim.
But something happened yesterday that might change things. Trump appointed a guy called Steve Bannon, the brains behind Breibart News, as his new campaign chief. The mainstream media are largely unimpressed by this move – just another right-wing nutter hooking up with Trump. (Roger Ailes, ex Fox News, is also aboard, apparently.)
I’m not so sanguine. Bannon may be very right-wing, but he’s not a nutter. See this long 2015 Bloomberg profile for a good impression of how he operates. Most importantly, he probably knows more about the strange finances of the Clinton Foundation than any man living. My hunch is that Hillary is in for a rougher ride than most people expected. Stay tuned.
LATER Interesting New Yorker piece by John Cassidy touting a conspiracy theory that I hadn’t heard before. The gist of it is that Trump knows that he’s bound to lose, and that that’s of little concern to him, because what he’s after is the creation of a new media empire focussed on the segment of the population that he’s identified as being under-served by mainstream media — even Fox News.
Here’s the relevant extract:
The appointment of Bannon isn’t merely another affront to establishment Republicans, such as Paul Ryan, whom Breitbart News has lately been targeting. It is an acknowledgment by Trump that he no longer has any interest in modifying his strategy to appeal to college-educated voters in places like the suburbs of Philadelphia and Milwaukee, where he is running miles behind where Mitt Romney was in 2012. Instead, he has decided to retreat to his base, which is a surefire recipe for political failure. But not necessarily business failure.
Back in June, Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison reported that Trump was “considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States.” A person briefed on Trump’s thinking told Ellison that it went like this: “Win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” One of Ellison’s sources also reported that Trump resents the fact that he has helped raise the ratings of certain news organizations, such as CNN, without getting a cut of the additional revenues. Trump has “gotten the bug,” the source said, “so now he wants to figure out if he can monetize it.”
Bannon, a former investment banker who took over Breitbart News in 2012, after the sudden death of its eponymous founder, also has large ambitions, and they involve taking on the mighty Fox News…
Interesting, eh?
A new research study suggests that the use of wearable video cameras by police officers is associated with a 3.64% increase in shooting-deaths of civilians by the police. The study also found that “found that body cameras were associated with a larger increase in shooting deaths of African Americans and hispanics than whites and Asians”.
Ford promises “a fully automated driverless vehicle for commercial ride-sharing in 2021”.
Wintel Rides Again: Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to bring Virtual Reality to ordinary folks.
Anti-trust’s blind spot – swallowing your start-up competitors before they can really get going. All the digital giants are doing it. They hate competition, you see.
“The Generations of Economic Journalism”. Great essay on the significance of Walter Lippmann.
The Wall Street Journal is tweaking its firewall. Intelligently.
How a (daft) conspiracy theory about the Clintons has gone viral in China. Interesting for those of us who study conspiracy theories.
Why Monday was a very bad day for the NSA. (And it’s not something to cheer about.)
Puzzled by Virtual Reality’s potential? Me too. But Ben Evans’s The VR Idea Maze is insightful and persuasive.
Data-mining shows that Donald Trump’s most angry or intemperate tweets come from an Android phone. The less contentious tweets come from an iPhone.
Nice to see empirical evidence from an independent, reputable body. On a less exalted level, driving round the less privileged parts of the UK it’s interesting to see the positive impact that new universities have had on cities like Stoke-on-Trent and Liverpool.
Hmmm… On the basis of this trailer I’m not sure it’ll be worth the journey. It looks like famous-director-who-knows-nothing-about-the Net goes round talking to famous geeks who blind him with tech and say silly things.
Werner Herzog has made a documentary, Lo and behold, about the internet and its implications which premieres this week. He’s done an interview with TechCrunch about it.
The IBM PC – the machine that made personal computers acceptable to chartered accountants – was launched 35 years ago this month.
27,000 computers in London’s Metropolitan Police are still running Windows XP. Here are some reasons why.
Google plans to obliterate Flash from its Chrome browser from next month.
Joe Nye on the fragmentation of the Internet.
Reading a fascinating WashPo interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, I was struck by this:
We’re a bit larger today, so we can do a bit more than we could do 10 years ago or even five years ago. But we still have, for our size, an extremely focused product line. You can literally put every product we make on this table. That really is an indication of how focused it is. I think that’s a good thing. Regardless of who you are, there’s only so many things that you can do at a very high-quality and deep, deep level — personally and in business. And so we’re not going to change that. That’s core to our model and way of thinking.
This seems very different to the way most successful modern companies operate. With them, the game appears to be to provide a product to match every discernible market niche.
Take Mercedes, for example. I’m perpetually baffled by the various Mercedes model I see on our roads. So I went to the company’s site to try and get a handle on the range.
Here’s what I found. Mercedes sell 28 different types of consumer vehicle in the UK (I’ve ignored the commercial stuff), to wit:
My guess (I haven’t checked) that the BMW range is just as diverse/confusing. It must be a hell of a challenge to maintain some level of coherence in this profusion. How do Mercedes sales personnel keep up? Maybe they instantly categorise every customer who comes in the door. As in: Here comes an estate-car customer. Oh, bet she’s a coupé type. He’s definitely S-class material. And so on.
Maybe the contrast between Mercedes and Apple is emblematic of the cultural differences between the tech and the auto industries. In that sense, Elon Musk’s approach to the Tesla range seems much closer to Apple’s.
My Observer review of Maria Aiken’s new book.
Note the doctorate after the author’s name; and the subtitle: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behaviour Changes Online; and the potted bio, informing us that “Dr Mary Aiken is the world’s foremost forensic cyberpsychologist” – all clues indicating that this is a book targeted at the US market, another addition to that sprawling genre of books by folks with professional qualifications using pop science to frighten the hoi polloi.
This is a pity, because The Cyber Effect is really rather good and doesn’t need its prevailing tone of relentless self-promotion to achieve its desired effect, which is to make one think about what digital technology is doing to us…