Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 6, 2017

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton

Well, we’re back with material on Uber, Roomba, peer-review, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook and To Do lists, not to mention Edison’s To Do list and job application test, then there is the end of Flash to celebrate, plus electronic and alternative music timelines in an unusual layout, not to mention three lots of pictures: the Milky Way, the Earth and a sculpture. The URLs in the scanner section point you to material about the FAA and seat size, Snopes, data storage on tape, Intel, Amazon, and Twitter financial results, a French castle, and radioactive water at Fukushima.

Happy reading!

Shorts:

I always feel ambivalent about Uber. On the one hand they are undoubtedly one of the classical mold-breaking uses of technology. On the other, I don’t like the way they treat their staff and customers. Now, it seems, the drivers have found a way to collectively game the system! Uber uses something it touts as ‘algorithmic management’. That’s just a fancy way of saying it controls the work with a computer program, or programs.

Among other things the program controls setting the prices for customers. There’s nothing fancy about it. More people wanting cabs, or less cabs available, and the cost of a cab goes up. There’s no magic in it, it’s supply and demand. It’s basically what I coded into the trading exchanges in my game Federation 30 years ago!

However, the ‘management’ may be by computer, but the cabs are driven by humans and humans will always, eventually, find away round a computer program. In this case the drivers discovered that they could control the prices , and thus their remuneration, by coordinated logging off the net until the price went up, because the software registered less cabs available.

The truth is that if you have any scheme that involves work based on numbers, sooner or later someone will figure out how to game the system. The more unpleasant the management style, the faster it will happen!

No wonder Uber would like to use driverless cabs!
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/181/11002.html

Do you own a Roomba cleaning robot, or are you thinking of getting one? It seems the company that makes them, iRobot, has come up with a wheeze to make extra money out of selling the floor plans of its customers’ houses to Amazon, Google and Apple. I bet you didn’t even know that the thing recorded your floor plans while cleaning, let alone that it sent them back to iRobot. Do I detect a class action in the works?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/26/irobot_q2_fy2017_roomba_maps/

Homework:

I know I’m always encouraging you to be sceptical, especially about what you read on the net. On that front peer-reviewed journals are something that figure as being one of the more reliable resources. But it seems that not all peer-reviewed journals are created equal. To see why not, take a look at the August edition of SciFi fanzine ‘Ansible’. Point your browser at the URL, scroll down to the ‘Infinitely Improbable’ section and look for the paragraph headed ‘Science Masterclass’. Star Wars fans will be particularly amused.
http://news.ansible.uk/a361.html

Here is something to exercise your brain over the next week or so. Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook has now been digitised. So as long as you don’t mind reading backwards writing, that is. On the other hand, perhaps you’d like to take a look at his ‘To Do’ list. Yes, even in the 1490s they had To Do lists. Fifteen items in Leonardo’s case.
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/leonardo-da-vincis-visionary-notebooks-now-online-browse-570-digitized-pages.html
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/leonardo-da-vincis-to-do-list-circa-1490-is-much-cooler-than-yours.html

Maybe you’d prefer something a little more recent? Then how about Thomas Edison’s ‘To Do’ list. That one is 150 items long. And I thought my 10 item list was getting too long...
http://www.openculture.com/2016/11/thomas-edisons-hugely-ambitious-to-do-list-from-1888.html

And while we are on the subject of Edison, why not try your hand at the 145 question knowledge test he set for people wanting a job in his company. How well would you have done?
http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/thomas-edisons-146-question-knowledge-test-for-prospective-employees.html

Geek Stuff:

Hurrah! Adobe has announced the end of life timetable for its perfidious Flash plugin technology. Quite apart from fact that it’s not open source, unlike most other browser plugins, the varmint was -the- major source of security holes for ordinary people.

Flash is dead (or will be by 2020)! Long live HTML5!
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3210748/web-development/adobe-flash-player-to-reach-end-of-life-in-2020.html
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/87/10979.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/27/flash_reaction/

Here’s a nifty little something that any geek would want – a history of electronic music, mapped out on a blueprint laying out the circuitry of a Theremin! Nifty, though it’s my personal feeling that Delia Derbyshire should have been much more prominent.
https://www.wearedorothy.com/products/electric-love-blueprint-original-open-edition

Incidentally, there is also a similar history of alternative music mapped onto a circuit of an early transistor radio. Ah! Nights spent under the bedclothes listening to Radio Luxembourg and the offshore pirate radio stations of the early sixties...
https://www.wearedorothy.com/products/alternative-love-blueprint-a-history-of-alternative-music

Pictures:

First a stunning astronomy picture – the Milky Way (our galaxy) over Monument Valley, Utah. I wish I could take photographs like that! [Note: I was having some problems accessing this site early this morning, but I found that a little persistence paid off! – AL]
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170726.html

And next, no less than 45 pictures of the Earth taken from space over the last 70 years, including the famous ‘blue marble’ one. Classic.
http://newatlas.com/gallery-photograph-earth-from-space/50704/

Finally, some amazing pictures of an indoor rainbow coloured sculpture made of thousands of threads. I just wonder how long it took to make...
http://geekologie.com/2016/11/indoor-rainbow-made-from-thousands-of-di.php

Scanner:

Court says FAA must explain why it won’t do anything to stop the “Incredibly Shrinking Airline Seat”
https://consumerist.com/2017/07/31/court-says-faa-must-explain-why-it-wont-do-anything-to-stop-incredibly-shrinking-airline-seat/

Snopes.com asks for bailout amid dispute over who runs the site and collects ad dollars
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/snopes_seeks_bailout_amid_legal_dispute/

Sony and IBM shatter magnetic tape storage density record
http://newatlas.com/sony-ibm-magnetic-tape-density-record/50743/

Intel, Amazon, Twitter: Your 60-second guide to the latest financials
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/27/intel_amazon_twitter_q2_fy2017_earnings/

The Anti-Disneyland, a French castle built on authenticity
https://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/the-anti-disneyland-a-french-castle-built-on-authenticity

Fukushima’s radioactive water to be released into ocean under new plan
https://www.rt.com/news/396358-fukushimas-radioactive-water-released-ocean/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.

Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
6 August 2017

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.

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