“Google held its annual developer event, IO, which is a platform for lots of announcements. For me, the overall theme was that Google is a cloud and machine learning company, not a hardware or OS company, and the further we got from devices and the more into the cloud and into big data analysis the happier the presenters were. Beyond that, Google’s self-confident ambition to be the platform for everything is apparent – this is very obviously the new Microsoft.”
Benedict Evans 31 May 2015.
Dr Johnson is one of my heroes. One of the lovely things about the Old Town in Edinburgh is its ghostly relics of great thinkers.
This morning’s Observer column about the strange fascination that the automobile industry has for otherwise sane geeks:
I remember once being in a British shopping arcade on the day that the local Apple Store opened for the first time. Long queues had formed from the moment the arcade gates had been unlocked that morning. Then came the magic moment: the glass doors opened, a hush fell on the assembled crowd, a group of T-shirted staff walked out, formed a human avenue leading into the store and then clapped rhythmically as the mob surged in. It was a truly extraordinary moment in which the conventional marketing mantra about the customer being king was turned on its head. In the case of Apple, it seemed, the customers felt privileged to be allowed to enter the store. Here are the Top JavaScript Libraries that can be used in developing a good social marketing strategy.
At the time, I concluded that much of this Apple worship could be put down to the astonishingly charismatic personality of Jobs. He was, after all, the only chief executive in the history of the world to be accorded the kind of adulation normally granted to rock stars and messiahs. Apple was obviously a one-man band and he was the Man. It seemed reasonable to conclude when he died, therefore, that the cult of Apple would diminish or at any rate that its share price would have peaked. An Apple car? Computer firm hires automotive engineers Read more
How wrong can you be? Jobs has been succeeded by Tim Cook, a nice man for whom the phrase “charisma deficit” might have been invented. But the cult of Apple is still going strong…
An Edinburgh shop window at Easter.
LATER
Nice note from Michael Dales pointing out that “Edinburgh shop windows don’t reflect Scotland, just what Scotland thinks tourists willing to spend money think Scotland thinks of itself :)”
…a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours – distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labelled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: ‘But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow, with a corrected and updated version.’
The *Washington Post‘s David Broder, quoted by Alan Rusbridger in his farewell message to Guardian readers*.
From today’s NYT
Mr. Obama has kept up pressure on the Senate to pass the legislation by arguing that the surveillance it authorizes is vital to thwarting a terrorist attack, despite a lack of evidence that it has ever done so.
In a statement issued shortly before Mr. Obama spoke, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said that intelligence professionals “will lose important capabilities” if the authorities expire.
Senior administration officials say that even if the programs cannot be shown to have foiled any attacks, they provide essential “building blocks” on which terrorism investigations are built, akin to grand juries, which are an integral part of criminal cases even if they never themselves stop a crime.
Emphases added. So much for evidence-based policy-making.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Calling the Obama Administration’s actions against the soccer organization “weak and ineffective,” Senator John McCain on Thursday proposed military action to “dismantle and destroy FIFA once and for all.”
“These are people who only understand one thing: force,” McCain said on the floor of the United States Senate. “We must make FIFA taste the vengeful might and fury of the United States military.”
McCain said that he was “completely unimpressed” by the Department of Justice’s arrests of several top FIFA lieutenants this week, calling the action “the kind of Band-Aid solution that this Administration, sadly, has become famous for.”
“Rounding up a few flunkies in a hotel is meaningless when the leader of FIFA remains at large,” he said. “I will follow Sepp Blatter to the gates of Hell.”
McCain requested a four-billion-dollar aid package for moderate elements within global soccer, and said that the United States should be prepared to put boots on the ground in Switzerland.
Calling the use of force against FIFA “long overdue,” he placed the blame for the group’s alarming growth squarely on the shoulders of the White House. “Barack Obama created FIFA,” he said.
“Sir, I’m just calling you to say that we’re going to need you to come to your door and open it for us, or we’re going to have to kick it in.”
Concierge at the Baur au Lac hotel during the arrest of FIFA officials.
Source: Today’s New York Times.
Lovely insight from Maureen Dowd:
WHEN my brother Michael was a Senate page, he delivered mail to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who had offices across the hall from each other.
He recalled that Kennedy never looked up or acknowledged his presence, but Nixon would greet him with a huge smile. “Hi, Mike,” he’d say. “How are you doing? How’s the family?”
It seemed a bit counterintuitive, especially since my dad, a D.C. police inspector in charge of Senate security, was a huge Kennedy booster. (The two prominent pictures in our house were of the Mona Lisa and J.F.K.) But after puzzling over it, I finally decided that J.F.K. had the sort of magnetism that could ensorcell big crowds, so he did not need to squander it on mail boys. Nixon, on the other hand, lacked large-scale magnetism, so he needed to work hard to charm people one by one, even mail boys.
Yep.
From an article by the Editor of The Lancet after attending a symposium last week on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research organised by the Wellcome Trust.
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices.”