Diary of a Geek

Digital Marketer. Technology enthusiast. Left-handed Canadian.

[patnoble]

Once $399 A Year, Google Earth Pro Is Now Free Greg Kumparak, techcrunch.com

Lots of people have dabbled with Google Earth to fly around their neighborhood or poke around a 3D version Paris. But how many dropped $400 (per year!) for a Pro subscription?

Not a ton, it would seem. At least, not enough for Google to keep…

Google Maps Pro is now free!

[patnoble]

10 Things I Learned Reading 70 Digital Marketing Trends Articles for 2015 (So You Don’t Have To) Ryan J. Davis, huffingtonpost.com

In the last month, every digital marketing agency and social media strategy blog published countless articles, with occasionally baseless and sometimes arbitrary predictions, on the next year in digital marketing. As someone in the digital marketi…

What are the top ten digital marketing insights for 2015? The author read every year-end prediction post so we didn’t have to. And, knowing how busy all of you are, I’ve read his post and summarize the brass tacks here. You’re welcome.

Here, then, are the top 2015 digital marketing trends to be building into your tactical plans: 1) Content marketing, notably video, 2) Growth of local, 3) Social campaigns need to be omni-channel (translation, cross channel), 4) Pay however, wherever, 5) Expansion of messaging app usage, 6) Personalized marketing, 7) Mobile majority, 8) Influencer marketing, 9) Realtime marketing, 10) Pay to play social.

[patnoble]

Broadcast from your phone to your TV. For $40. Awesome.

If your TV has an HDMI port (and if it was bought in the past 5 years, it does), do yourself a favour a pick up a Chromecast from Google. For less than $40, it will let you broadcast video, Youtube, a browser tab, Netflix, and much more, from your phone or tablet to your TV. Awesome. Really. For the full 411, head on on over here.

[patnoble]

The Dataclysm is Upon Us…

"Data has a long head start — Facebook was collecting 500 terabytes of information every day way back in 2012 — but the analysis is starting to catch up."

Just finished Christian Rudder’s engaging and well-written book, “Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking)”.

Published in the fall of 2014 by one of the founders of the dating site, OkCupid, the book delves thoughtfully into the insights that can be gleaned from big data’s analysis of the breadcrumbs we leave behind as we move through our increasingly digital lives, traverse the internet and engage on social media websites.

Here’s a taste of Rudder’s observations on what sifting through the constantly growing store of human yearning, opinion, and chaos captured in those databases can yield:

On the merging science of “social physics” ... “We, the users, the producers, the consumers — all our manic energy, yearning to be noticed, recognized for an important contribution to the conversation — are the problem. It is fueled by our own increasing need for attention, validation, through likes, favorites, responses, interactions. It is a feedback loop that can’t be closed, at least not for now.”

On big data companies like Acxiom... “These corporate data marketers, with reach into bank and credit card records, retail histories, and government filings like tax records, know stuff about human behavior that no academic researcher, fishing for patterns on some website, ever could.”

On the new social billionaires... “Twitter is very much the world of the One Percent. Its most precious resource, followers, is distributed far more unequally than wealth. In my sample, the top 1 percent of accounts has 72 percent of the followers. The top 0.1 percent has just over half. It is much, much harder to get to a million followers than it is to make a million dollars. There were 300,890 people who reported over $1 million in income to the IRS in 2011. Right now there are 2,643 Twitter accounts with 1 million followers, worldwide. Perhaps half are in the United States. Being an American with 1 million Twitter followers is roughly equivalent to being a billionaire.”

On Zipf’s Law and language... “This counterintuitive relationship between the popularity of a word (its rank in a given vocabulary) and the number of times it appears is described by something called Zipf’s law, an observed statistical property of language that, like so much of the best math, lies somewhere between miracle and coincidence. It states that in any large body of text, a word’s popularity (its place in the lexicon, with 1 being the highest ranking) multiplied by the number of times it shows up, is the same for every word in the text. Or, very elegantly: rank × number = constant This law holds for the Bible, the collected lyrics of ’60s pop songs, the canonical corpus of English literature (the Oxford English Corpus).”

[patnoble]

At the heart of Eric Ries's "The Lean Startup" is a simple idea: the products a startup builds are really experiments. From that provocative starting point, his book advances a novel framework, founded in the lean manufacturing and agile programming movements, for turning product and service ideas into sustained innovations. At the heart of his thesis is the argument that building sustained long-term change requires immediate experimentation and continuous, incremental improvement, moving as quickly as possible through successive Build --> Measure --> Learn development loops. The framework emphasizes driving to the build phase rapidly by focusing on a minimum viable product to be tested with early adopters in decisive split-test experiments. These experiments should produce clear, actionable, baseline metrics – as opposed to "vanity" metrics – that permit validated learning, allowing entrepreneurs to make the key decision to persevere or to pivot in the direction of a new strategic hypothesis. In practice, however, implementing the loop above actually requires reverse planning: figure out what needs to be learned, use innovation accounting to figure out what needs to be measured to know if validated learning is occurring, and then figure out what minimum viable product needs to be built to run that experiment and get that measurement.

[patnoble]

In other news… My take on Sunday’s momentous presidential election in Brazil, the world’s fourth largest democracy… With a population of over 200 million, Brazil goes to the polls on Sunday. The initially humdrum race ended up resembling one of the country’s famed soap operas, with a frontrunner not even a candidate until the lead on her ticket died in a plane crash in August.

Despite frustration from an electorate fed up with poor public services and with corruption ingrained at all levels of society, not just in federal politics — frustration that drove more than a million people into the streets in sustained protests 16 months ago — the party in power since 2003, the Workers’ Party, were expected to cruise to victory with support from many of the poor and new middle class who credit its social policies for the rise in their standard of living.

But, from a blistering 7.5% growth in 2010, the Brazilian economy shrank into recession this year as investment dropped sharply, as belt tightening by millions of new middle class citizens dampened a credit-driven spending spree, and as hosting the World Cup suffocated economic activity.

As a result, we are in a horse race heading into the final lap.

Sunday’s presidential election pits Brazil’s first female president, economist Dilma Rousseff — a former Marxist rebel tortured under the military dictatorship that ran Brazil until 1985 — against two main competitors:

1) Marina Silva — who, if elected, would be Brazil’s first black president — is an ardent environmentalist, a former minister in the government, and an evangelical Christian (as are 22% of Brazilians), who grew up in a poor, illiterate family of rubber tappers in the extreme northwest of Brazil. She draws broad support among young people, the middle class, and those in the elite who are fed up with politics as usual, AND 2) Aécio Neves, the grandson of a former president (Tancredo Neves, who died in 1985 before actually taking office), who is supported by the upper middle class and the business community.

Dilma is starting to show momentum ahead of Sunday’s vote, but this soap opera may yet have a dramatic finale. With the latest polls showing no one likely to win a majority on Sunday (Dilma sits at 40.4%, Marina at 25.2%, and Neves at 19.8%), the election could go to a runoff in three weeks, on October 26, in which the third-place candidate (currently Neves) — although he has regularly attacked her candidacy — could become kingmaker by throwing his party’s support behind second-place Marina in an “anyone but the Workers’ Party and Dilma” gamble.

Whoever wins the presidency, however, the real winner here is a healthy Brazilian democracy, which emerged from over two decades of military dictatorship in 1985, overcame hyperinflation in the early 1990s, peacefully transitioned in 2003 to the current left-wing government; and has emerged as one of the “Big Four” BRIC countries in an apparent shift in global economic power away from the developed G7 economies towards the developing world.

[patnoble]

Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark

I recently finished "Our Mathematical Universe" by Max Tegmark of MIT. A week later it's still percolating in my little brain — sign of a good book for me. If science about what the cosmos is fundamentally made of floats your boat, it's first half is a lucid, engaging and at times humorous round-up of the latest thinking about cosmology from a born communicator.

One friend picked up on my reference to the "first half" of the book being an extremely lucid account of the latest science, and asked about the second half. To which I responded as follows...  

"It's even better yet it gets into more of a speculative but still compelling theory that our mathematics doesn't just accurately describe our universe but more profoundly that our universe is math all the way down. That is, our universe is fundamentally a mathematical object."

When I posted comments to that effect, I had a response from yet another thoughtful friend with a fundamentally important question about how Gödel's ideas about the inconsistencies of mathematics impacted the thesis? Here is my response to that second comment:

"Don't worry about transcendental numbers, they're always so irrational... Seriously, though, at the risk of alienating anyone who believed me that the first half of the book was the most lucid, straight-forward, easy-to-read survey of what we know about our Universe and how we actually know it... It really is!I'm way beyond my pay grade here so I'll let Max explain it in his own words... Strap on your interstellar propeller hat.... Here goes... He acknowledges the problems presented by Gödel's theorem raises and explores them thoroughly: 'Gödel's work leaves open the possibility that everyday mathematics is inconsistent, and that a finite-length proof exists within number theory itself, demonstrating that 0 = 1. Using this shocking result, every other syntactically correct claim about whole numbers could in turn be proven to be true and mathematics as we know it would collapse like a house of cards.' Then he (Max) argues that, while mathematically useful, infinities (or "the continuum", which he uses as a synonym) likely do not actually describe our Universe: 'Are infinities, undecidability and potential inconsistency really inherent in the ultimate physical reality, or are they merely mirages, artifacts of our using powerful mathematical tools that are more convenient to work with than those that actually describe our Universe? [An] approach that I feel is worth exploring is abandoning the continuum as fundamental and trying to recover it as an approximation. As mentioned, we’ve never measured anything in physics to more than about sixteen significant digits, and no experiment has been carried out whose outcome depends on the hypothesis that a true continuum exists, or hinges on nature computing something uncomputable. Indeed, certain discrete computable structures can approximate our continuum physics models so well that we physicists use them when we need to compute things in practice, leaving open the question of whether the mathematical structure of our Universe is more like the former or more like the latter.' Tegmark concludes that our Universe is a mathematical structure that is more like the former, a discrete computable structure."

As you can hopefully gather from the foregoing discussion, this is a book that I highly recommend. Pick it up and let me know what you think.

[patnoble]

The Truth About Exercise

Please find 45 mins in the next week or so to watch this fascinating BBC show “The Truth About Exercise” on the latest in exercise physiology. Stretching credulity, ongoing large-scale longitudinal studies on two important markers of long-term health — insulin sensitivity and maximal oxygen consumption — have demonstrated that, for most people, three 20 SECOND high-intensity burst of exercise three times a week — or three minutes total a week — have been shown to deliver the same benefits as the recommended 3-4 hours of light to moderate exercise. This is not, of course, to discount all the other good reasons why we should all continue to exercise regularly, but the results are still fascinating nonetheless and, as far as I can tell, compelling.

[patnoble]

Think about this... "$2 of every $5 owned today was created in the last five years, and went mostly to the richest 10%, mostly untaxed. And most of it was accumulated passively, and unproductively, by just waiting out the stock market. As America's wealth increased from $47 trillion to an incredible $80.66 trillion in just five years, the richest 1% are estimated to have added an average of $5 million each to their fortunes. They pay no wealth tax, they can defer their income taxes, and they pay a reduced capital gains tax when they decide to cash in."

[patnoble]

Here’s hoping history repeats itself, or at least rhymes.

On this day, May 10, 1979 — A powerful childhood memory: Sitting with my four brothers and parents on a spring evening, a Thursday, in the suburbs of Montreal watching one of the most exciting hockey games I’ve ever seen.

Boston is up 3-1 going into the 3rd period of Game 7 in the semi-final series. Rick Napier and Guy Lapointe even the game at 3. With four mins to go, Rick Middleton puts the Bruins up again with a fourth goal.

Two mins later the Bruins get a penalty for too many men. Bowman sends out Guy Lafleur, Larry Robinson, Serge Savard, Steve Shutt and Jacques Lemaire for the power play. And to ecstatic Habs fans in our living room and across Canada, Guy Lafleur scores a tying goal off a pass from Jacques Lemaire with barely a minute left, sending the game into OT. After ten nerve-wracking OT minutes, Ivon Lambert brings it to an end.

The Habs move on to the finals against the Rangers and win their fourth Stanley Cup in a row. (And the Bruins fired Don Cherry as coach a few weeks later.)

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“Chreasters”. That is what sociologists apparently call those of us who attend church only on Christmas and Easter. (Versus the “nones”, the 20% of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation at all.)

According to latest Google Trends data for 2004 to 2013, more Americans search for “church” around Easter than at any other time, with the Christmas season usually ranking second. The summer months, by contrast, have consistently low levels of interest in web searches for “church.”

Here’s a link to an article on the whole fascinating (to me, at least) subject, http://goo.gl/92lBpH with the interesting claim that, for better or worse, the temple of “my personal opinion” may be the real “established church” in modern America; and the recommendation of Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone (http://bowlingalone.com) for anyone interested in the broader trend of increasing overall social disconnectedness.

Happy Easter! And Happy Pesach (Passover) to my Jewish family and friends.

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The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.

Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) (1835-1910)

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Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

David Hume (1711-1776)

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Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Facts as of March 16

The recent disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 came up repeatedly at a dinner party last night. While media reports have been long on speculation, I felt short on facts. So I've done some spade work to determine the currently known "facts" as best I can. 

As far as I can gather, here is what is known about #MH370 as of Sunday, March 16. Precise details on the functionality and disabling of communication systems for the 777 aircraft are hard to come by. As a mere layman trying to pin down what we know, I welcome any and all to correct my assertions below.

1) The flight departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on 8 March at 00:41 local time (16:41 UTC, 7 March). It was scheduled to land at Beijing Capital International Airport at 06:30 local time (22:30 UTC, 7 March). It had 239 people on board—a flight crew of 12 (all Malaysian) and 227 passengers. 154 of the passengers were Chinese. There were 2 Canadians and 3 Americans on board together with citizens from up to 11 other countries.

2) The plane was a $50 million Boeing 777-200ER. The pilot and first officer were Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, both Malaysian citizens. The former joined the company in 1981; the latter in 2007. One of the passengers has been identified on the passenger manifest as a 29-year-old Malaysian, an aircraft engineer for a private jet firm.

3) Two men identified on the flight manifest, a 61-year-old Austrian and a 37-year-old Italian, had reported their passports stolen in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Two Iranian male passengers, aged 18 and 29, now since named, were flying with these passports. American officials have not found any known terrorist connection for pilots or passengers, incl. 2 Iranian men. The head of Interpol said the two Iranian men are believed to be asylum seekers.

4) The plane is equipped with two broadcasting communication systems: a) its transponders (main & backup) which communicate with civilian air traffic controllers and convey location, altitude, speed and call sign, and b) Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) that lets pilots send text message-like communiques to flight operations staff and allows the plane’s systems themselves to communicate too. According to a friend who works at ICAO friend, ACARS data can be transmitted automatically in one of four ways: VHF ACARS operating at low speed data to line of sight ground stations; VHF ACARS at high speed using VDL Mode 2 to line of sight ground stations; ACARS over Iridium satellite using short burst data; and HF ACARS where the data is transmitted by ionospheric propagation to one of several ground stations around the world. Both the transponders and the ACARS were manually turned off within Malaysian air space, not at the same time as would happen in a crash but, it appears, within minutes of each other, ACARS at 1:07 am and transponder at 1:21 am local time.

5) Turning off the transponder could be done by toggling a switch in the cockpit that you would move from “ON” to “SBY” (standby) or “OFF” modes. The information part of the ACARS system was shut down, but not the SATCOM link part for which, apparently, it would be necessary to go to an electronics bay beneath the cockpit. Turning off any of these systems require pilot/crew involvement, coerced or not. Despite being deactivated, the ACARS continued to send out automated electronic “handshakes” / pings which contain no explicit location info, once an hour by satellite for four to five hours.

6) The last voice communication from the cockpit at roughly 1:30 am were the words: “All right, good night.” They were uttered at the Vietnam air traffic control border, but after the ACARS and the transponder had, it is claimed, already been shut off. The plane then took a sharp left turn back over Malaysian air space.

7) The last confirmed signal of any kind between the plane and a satellite came at 8:11 am local time—7 hours and 31 minutes after takeoff. If the plane was still in the air at that point, it would have been near its fuel limit. An Inmarsat-3 satellite in geostationary orbit 22,250 miles over the middle of the Indian Ocean received the transmission. This transmission only establishes the angle between the satellite and the plane and does not identify precise location. At take-off, the plane had enough fuel to fly for up to about 8 hours.

8) Based on the angle from which the plane sent the ping, it came from somewhere along one of two arcs: a) roughly over China somewhere from southern border of Kazakhstan to northern Thailand, or b) somewhere from near Jakarta to the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia. This signal could only have been sent if the plane was intact and powered.

9) The plane flew for up to 7.5 hours off official flight track, indicating the diversion was clearly intentional. The plane flew for six more hours after leaving Malaysian airspace. Military radar appear to show the plane may have climbed to 45K feet (2K feet above the flight ceiling of a 777-200) and then well below cruising height to 23K feet.

[patnoble]

What Makes Us Human: Deciphering the Neanderthal Genome

Fascinating article about Swedish biologist, Svante Pääbo, who is deciphering the Neanderthal genome in an attempt to learn what makes us human (http://goo.gl/3sTQul). Worth a read, as is his latest book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes.

If books aren’t you thing, check out his Ted Talk (http://goo.gl/VZNs4d).

Here’s my thumbnail sketch…

Extinct for roughly 30,000 years, the full Neanderthal genome, based on 3 individuals, was published in May 2010.

Anatomically modern humans & Neanderthals diverged as species roughly 300,000 years ago, but met up again and bred, probably in the Middle East, about 90-100,000 years ago. As a result, modern Europeans and Asians, but not Africans, have 1.5-2.1% of Neanderthal DNA.

Modern humans have only 96 changes in protein-coding genes when compared with Neanderthals. It is this complex of 96 genes that, in theory at least, makes us “human”.

[patnoble]

FATHER JOSEPH NOËL RITCHOT - FATHER OF CONFEDERATION

On this Louis Riel Day, February 16, 2015, I want to honour my grandfather’s uncle and Father of Confederation, Abbot Father Noël-Joseph Ritchot (1825-1905).

Father Ritchot was a staunch defender of Métis and francophone rights in Canada. He suggested to the government of Canada that the name “Manitoba” (God who speaks - Dieu qui parle) be adopted, and he negotiated the province’s entry into Confederation in 1870.

In addition to the Ritchot-Riel monument in St Norbert, MB, and the commemorative plaque on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislative Building (both pictured), he is commemorated by Rue Ritchot in Winnipeg and by the Rural Municipality of Ritchot, Manitoba.

Born in Quebec on Xmas Day 1825 in L’Épiphanie, QC, he arrived in the Red River colony in 1862 and eventually became Riel’s spiritual advisor.

On the night of Oct. 21, 1869, with Bishop Taché away in Rome, Ritchot and Riel launched the rebellion that led eventually to the founding of Manitoba. Ritchot hosted its leaders, including Riel, in his home and billeted the Métis “soldiers” in his church. In some accounts, it was Ritchot who actually drafted the “Declaration of the People of Rupert’s Land”.

At Riel’s request, Father Ritchot led the secret negotiations for Manitoba’s entry into Confederation with G.-E. Cartier and Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, who described Ritchot as that “obdurate priest”.

According to a recent article, Macdonald was confident he could stare down the inexperienced prairie delegation and assert the government’s will. But he was stunned by Ritchot’s steely determination in demanding everything be put on the table. He wanted full provincial status for Manitoba, responsible government for its citizens, and provisions for separate schools for Catholics. Ritchot also persuaded the government to grant 1.4 million acres of land to the children of the Métis.

In May 1870, his work was done and a new province was born.

[patnoble]

Robert Bellah on Steven Weinberg

Though the more he comprehends the universe, the more pointless it seems, the activity of inquiry, the “research itself,” “the effort to understand the universe,” even if what he understands is not comforting, is a good in itself, is a source of meaning in itself.