Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #833 - Universe's Missing Matter, Sex Workers, Google Design - Slashdot News roundup
Hi Mom,
I have really been enjoying being subscriber and one who shares news posted to SLASHDOT since I discovered the site (sort of a re-discovery, really, but first sign up) at Penguicon in April.
It's a news site for nerds and for "stuff that really matters."
I am enjoying its format, which though it shows some ads seems mindful of the intrusion of the content and the design of pages for best viewing. Plus I love the idea of an open source project not only in which users post news but for which users can update the code that runs the site. I would like to be more involved, if only as a contributor, but I will have to wait for my schedule to settle even more, assuming it ever does. Meanwhile, these three stories stood out recently and so I saved them.
I have devoted some of my precious free time to culling back through my in box of my email where I had saved dozens of links to articles and Internet bits that I might like to share on my blog. I dropped my in box from 1400 some unread emails to 1100 some with just a couple of hours of work and have saved two very large scrolls of links in a draft blog post plus a gaggle of draft posts ready for days when I am short on time and yet want to maintain my daily schedule.
Instead of saving these three beasties in separate posts, I decided to do a news roundup but not to go nuts with it by posting too much.
One thing that makes Slashdot great is the summary nature of the posts, which make for great conversation starters, as I did the other day after learning the disturbing news that the mysterious Facebook algorithm somehow wormed its way into the Internet to show a sex worker her clients as potential friends in her separate and personal Facebook profile that uses her real name whereas her work identity is completely separate, under an assumed name, and not on Facebook. Clearly, this is a case of the algorithm matching emails in data queries somehow via the Internet and yet the way this is happening is not something Facebook will disclose. However, the harm to the woman whose real name is outed despite her efforts to keep her work private is real. It's time for Facebook to give users an option to exclude email accounts so this matching will not harm others because the harm in this case could be lethal.
The other two stories are completely different.
After a recent post that APPLE IS BAD AT DESIGN, here's a clear counter argument that Google is good at design, though the prevailing belief in geek world has always been the opposite. It's an amusing story but also pro-Google, which I like (which is why this blog is hosted at Blogger).
My favorite of these three stories is the one about the universe's missing matter. Not DARK MATTER but rather "ordinary" matter -- probably between galaxies -- that has so far gone undetected so far. Well, no longer. Very cool. And confirmed by two separate teams of scientists.
If you ventured here, enjoy these stories.
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Half the Universe's Missing Matter Has Just Been Finally Found - Slashdot
https://m.slashdot.org/story/
Google Is Really Good At Design - Slashdot
https://m.slashdot.org/story/
How Facebook Outs Sex Workers
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/10/12/144237/how-facebook-outs-sex-workers
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Half the Universe's Missing Matter Has Just Been Finally Found (newscientist.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report:The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe -- protons, neutrons and electrons -- unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space. You have probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far. Two separate teams found the missing matter -- made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter -- linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas. "The missing baryon problem is solved," says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader of one of the groups. The other team was led by Anna de Graaff at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before.
Google Is Really Good At Design
Joshua Topolsky, writing for The Outline:The stuff Google showed off on October 4 was brazenly designed and strangely, invitingly touchable. These gadgets were soft, colorful... delightful? They looked human, but like something future humans had made; people who'd gotten righteously drunk with aliens. You could imagine them in your living room, your den, your bedroom. Your teleportation chamber. A fuzzy little donut you can have a conversation with. A VR headset in stunning pink. A phone with playful pops of color and an interface that seems to presage what you want, when you want it. It's weird. It's subtle. It's... good. It's Google? It's Google.It was only a few years ago that Google was actually something of a laughing stock when it came to design. As an aggressively engineer-led company, the Mountain View behemoth's early efforts, particularly with its mobile software and devices, focused not on beauty, elegance, or simplicity, but rather concentrated on flexibility, iteration, and scale. These are useful priorities for a utilitarian search engine, but didn't translate well to many of the company's other products. Design -- the mysterious intersection of art and communication -- was a second-class citizen at Google, subordinate to The Data. That much was clear from the top down.
Enter Matias Duarte, the design impresario who was responsible for the Sidekick's UI (a wacky, yet strangely prescient mobile-everything concept) and later, the revolutionary (though ill-fated) webOS -- the striking mobile operating system and design language that would be Palm's final, valiant attempt at reclaiming the mobile market. Duarte was hired by Google in 2013 (initially as Android's User Experience Director, though he is now VP of design at the company), and spearheaded a complete reset of the company's visual and functional instincts. But even Duarte was aware of the design challenges his new role presented. "I never thought I'd work for Google," he told Surface Magazine in August. "I had zero ambition to work for Google. Everybody knew Google was a terrible place for design." Duarte went to work on a system that would ultimately be dubbed Material Design -- a set of principles that not only began to dictate how Android should look and work as a mobile operating system, but also triggered the march toward a unified system of design that slowly but surely pulled Google's disparate network of services into something that much more closely resembled a singular vision. A school of thought. A family.
How Facebook Outs Sex Workers (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report:Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed to know about one of them. Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse). Her "real identity" -- the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about politics -- joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook's "People You May Know" recommendations, Leila (a name I'm using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients. Despite the fact that she'd only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people -- and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them. Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again. "We're living in an age where you can weaponize personal information against people"Kashmir Hill, the reporter who wrote the above story, a few weeks ago shared another similar incident.
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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 835 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1710.17 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
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