an unlived life
/Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life. – Eric Fromm
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Earnest was right, but no on listened
/As legend has it, Ernest Duchesne was a student at a French military medical school in the 1890s when he noticed that the hospital’s stable boys who tended the horses did something peculiar: They stored their saddles in a damp, dark room so that mold would grow on their undersurfaces. They did this, they explained, because the mold helped heal the horses’ saddle sores. Duchesne was fascinated and conducted an experiment in which he treated sick guinea pigs with a solution made from mold—a rough form of what we’d now call penicillin. The guinea pigs healed completely. Duchesne wrote up his findings in a thesis, but because he was unknown and young—only 23 at the time—the French Institut Pasteur wouldn’t acknowledge it. His research vanished, and Duchesne died 15 years later of tuberculosis (a disease that would someday be treatable with antibiotics). It would take 31 years for the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming to rediscover penicillin, independently and with no idea that Duchesne had already done it. In those three decades, untold millions of people died of diseases that could have been cured. Failed networks kill ideas.
Clive Thompson, Smarter Than you Think
What a TikTok Ban Won't Do
/
While Congress has been up in arms about TikTok, it has failed to pass even the most basic comprehensive privacy legislation to protect our data from being misused by all the tech companies that collect and mine it.
The even deeper problem is that putting TikTok under state control, banning it or selling it to a U.S. company wouldn’t solve the threats that the app is said to pose. If China wants to obtain data about U.S. residents, it can still buy it from one of the many unregulated data brokers that sell granular information about all of us. If China wants to influence the American population with disinformation, it can spread lies across the Big Tech platforms just as easily as other nations can.
it would be much more effective for China to just hack every home’s Wi-Fi router — most of which are manufactured in China and are notoriously insecure — and obtain far more sensitive data than it can get from knowing which videos we swipe on TikTok.
Investigative journalist Julia Angwin writing in the New York Times
Two kinds of Coping Strategies
/Psychologists like to group coping strategies into two main types: emotion-focused and problem-focused. Emotion-focused strategies change the way we feel, like distracting ourselves, getting support from friends, or looking at the situation from a different perspective. Problem-focused strategies, on the other hand, involve taking action to solve the problem directly.
No one strategy works all the time, and you’ll often see people get stuck in their favorite way of coping. If you tend toward distraction and denial, you might avoid dealing with a problem that you actually could have solved; if you’re an inveterate problem-solver, you might feel helpless and angry when confronting a problem—or a loved one’s—that has no solution, when all that’s really needed is support and connection.
Kira Newman writing in Greater Good
The Secret of Success
/Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning.
The problem here is that you rarely take away from these inspirational figures advice on what not to do, on what you should avoid, and that’s because they don’t know. Information like that is lost along with the people who don’t make it out of bad situations or who don’t make it on the cover of business magazines – people who don’t get invited to speak at graduations and commencements and inaugurations.
The actors who traveled from Louisiana to Los Angeles only to return to Louisiana after a few years don’t get to sit next to James Lipton and watch clips of their Oscar-winning performances as students eagerly gobble up their crumbs of wisdom. In short, the advice business is a monopoly run by survivors. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.”
Before you emulate the history of a famous company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in time when that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome of its decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment. He sums it up like so, “If you group successes together and look for what makes them similar, the only real answer will be luck.”
Entrepreneur Jason Cohen, in writing about survivorship bias, points out that since we can’t go back in time and start 20 identical Starbucks across the planet, we can never know if that business model is the source of the chain’s immense popularity or if something completely random and out of the control of the decision makers led to a Starbucks on just about every street corner in North America. That means you should be skeptical of any book promising you the secrets of winning at the game of life through following any particular example.
David McRaney Read more here
The Security Threat of Quantum Computers
/Quantum computers are a security threat before they even exist thanks to the encryption-breaking threats it posses.
Tuesday Tech Tools: 56 Data Visualization Tools
/Below are the nine most recommended.
Carto*
Perhaps the best interactive mapmaker but a high learning curve though more of a time investment than a technical-background requirement. No coding needed to look impressive. Used for location intelligence and and journalism alike. Free with paid plans. Video examples here.
Canva*
Graphic design tools. Create social media graphics, headers, slides, flyers, photo collages, posters, infographics, even mind maps for concepts using drag-and-drop. 60k templates. Clip-art library available or upload your own images. Share to social media from the app or download a jpg, PDF, etc. for posting. Free. $12 a month for more options.
Data Wrapper*
Tool for journalists looking to create fast, easily-to-understand visualizations but useful for anyone. Easy to embed. Free version allows creation of 10k charts.
Easely.ly*
Create infographics. Video sample here.
Florish*
A data visualization tool that makes it easy to create both standard charts and a mobile-friendly animated charts. Some customization available. Examples.
Infogram*
Infographic tool especially useful when working with complex data. No coding skills needed. Works with Google Sheets or Dropbox. Create interactive illustrations. 35 types of charts and 200 types of maps. Includes a built-in spreadsheet tool for data editing. Basic version is free but requires the Infogram logo. Upgrades run from $19 to $67 a month.
Meograph*
3D animation of people from 2D video of people. Video explanation.
PiktoChart*
Flat but beautiful interactive graphics. Easy-to-use. Video explanation.
Thinglink*
Create hot-spot graphics. Make images interactive by adding music, a voice over, and text. Free . Sample.
You’ll find all 56 here.
The theory of multiples
/If you look at the world’s biggest breakthrough ideas, they often occur simultaneously to different people.
This is known as the theory of multiples, and it was famously documented in 1922 by sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas. When they surveyed the history of major modern inventions and scientific discoveries, they found that many of the big ones had been hit upon by different people, usually within a few years of each other and sometimes within a few weeks. They cataloged 148 examples: Oxygen was discovered in 1774 by Joseph Priestley in England and Carl Wilhelm Scheele in Sweden. In 1610 and 1611, at least four different astronomers—including Galileo—independently discovered sunspots. John Napier and Henry Briggs developed logarithms in Britain, while Joost Bürgi did it independently in Germany. The law of the conservation of energy was laid claim to by four separate people in 1847. Ogburn and Thomas didn’t mention another multiple: Radio was invented around 1900 by two different engineers, working independently—Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla.
Why would the same ideas have occurred to different people at the same time? Ogburn and Thomas argued that it was because our ideas are, in a crucial way, partly products of our environment. They’re “inevitable.” When they’re ready to emerge, they do. This is because we do not work in a sealed-off, Rodin Thinker fashion.
The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand. If four astronomers discovered sunspots at the same time, it’s partly because the quality of lenses in telescopes in 1611 had matured to the point where it was finally possible to pick out small details on the sun and partly because the question of the sun’s role in the universe had become newly interesting in the wake of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory. If radio was developed at the same time by two people, that’s because the basic principles that underpin the technology were also becoming known to disparate thinkers.
Even if you assume the occurrence of true genius is pretty low (they estimate that one person in 100 is on the “upper tenth” of the scale for smarts), when you multiply it across the entirety of humanity, that’s still a heck of a lot of geniuses.
When you think of it that way, what’s strange is not that big ideas occurred to different people in different places. What’s strange is that this didn’t happen all the time, constantly.
Clive Thompson Smarter Than you Think
Deep within us
/Deep within us-no matter who we are-there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving. – Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers), born March 20, 1928
Confronting our feelings
/Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness. - Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers) born March 20, 1928
The decisions
/The decisions we make, make us.
Cry Bitterly
/Cry bitterly. Laugh Loudly. Drink Deeply. –Stephen Goforth
My world felt Small
/You are an extension of your environment. I realized after my teen years that I was usually happier and more productive with a clean room. I was usually more energetic when I was outside or with my friends. My world would feel small when I spent the day only looking at my phone.
Jace in Seattle
The Coming Textpocalypse
/From a piece of genre fiction to your doctor’s report, you may not always be able to presume human authorship behind whatever it is you are reading. Writing, but more specifically digital text—as a category of human expression—will become estranged from us.
Am I worried that ChatGPT could have (written this article) better? No. But I am worried it may not matter. Swept up as training data for the next generation of generative AI, my words here won’t be able to help themselves: They, too, will be fossil fuel for the coming textpocalypse.
Matthew Kirschenbaum writing in The Atlantic
The day we stop playing
/The day we stop playing is the day we stop learning. -William Glasser
Why the power of AI may end up in hands of a small group
/The underlying costs of these generative AI services are tumbling. OpenAI’s price cut is a sign of how quickly the new technology is moving into mass adoption, and a warning sign that this may be a business with few producers.
Richard Waters writing in the Financial Times
The road to becoming more of a manager than a leader
/If you catch yourself referring to people on your team by their job titles as often as by their names, beware—you're on the road to becoming more of a manager than a leader. A real leader thinks of people individually and holistically, and tries hard to understand strengths and weaknesses, goals and interests. I saw this all too often in the military, for example, where great leaders grew to know their soldiers, and lesser leaders referred to them generically, either by their ranks or occupational specialties.
Bill Murphy Jr. writing in the Understandably newsletter
A new version of ChatGPT
/UPDATE MARCH 14 PM: Access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 will be available to users who "sign up to the waitlist and for subscribers of the premium paid-for ChatGPT Plus in a limited, text-only capacity,” GPT-4 is superior to the previous version of the program, but it “can still generate biased, false, and hateful text; it can also still be hacked to bypass its guardrails.” The MIT Tech Review has more information here.
POSTED MARCH 14 AM: The next ChatGPT update is coming soon. OpenAI released GPT-3.5 in November. A Microsoft executive recently implied the launch of GPT-4 is just days away. It will apparently be a multimodal tool, able to translate users’ text into images, audio and video. AI multimodal tools are not new. Meta released its "Make-A-Video" option last year, which creates a video based on a short prompt. OpenAI’s CEO has warned that many rumors about GPT-4 on the internet are “ridiculous.”
Two things are infinite
/Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. -Albert Einstein (born March 14, 1879)
7 Free Webinars about AI, journalism, writing, & more
/Monday, March 13 - AI & the Future of Journalism
What: We will examine the AI field and its impact on journalism, for good and for ill. What features of AI hold the most peril for journalists? Which hold the most promise? How does an AI program actually work? Does AI threaten journalism jobs? Can journalists investigate AI tools? If so, how? Are there practical hacks for determining whether content is AI-generated or real?
Who: Garance Burke, global investigative reporter, The Associated Press; Daniel Verten, head of creative at Synthesia; Emilia Diaz Struck, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; Justin Gluska, founder of Gold Penguin and AI technology blogger.
When: 6:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free but registration is required
Sponsor: The Deadline Club
Tue, March 14 - Elevating Your Nonprofit's Online Presence: Best Website Practices for 2023
What: The trends and strategies that will help your organization stand out in the digital landscape. Whether you're a new or a well-established nonprofit, this webinar has everything you need to take your website to the next level. From mobile-first design to accessibility compliance, we'll cover all the essential elements that go into creating a seamless and satisfying online experience for your users.
Who: Erin Mastrantonio of Elevation which designing websites for nonprofits.
When: 11 am, Pacific
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Nonprofit Learning Lab
Fri, March 17 - Firewalls & Journalism: What to know about Internet shutdown trends
What: Join us for a virtual panel discussion that will delve deep into the worrying spread of Internet kill switches and what it specifically means for a free press.
Who: Ksenia Ermoshina, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and Center for Internet and Society; Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel for digital rights watchdog group Access Now; Nat Kretchun, senior vice president for programs at the Open Technology Fund; Moderator: Rachel Oswald, National Press Club press freedom team lead and a foreign policy reporter for CQ Roll Call
When: 11:30 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsors: National Press Club & The Journalism Institute
Sat, March 18 - Ask an Editor: The Craft & Business of Writing
What: We will answer questions and offer insights into the craft of writing and the struggles we all face in these uncertain times.
When: 10 am, Pacific
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: Allegory Editing
Tues, March 21 - The state of digital publishing: metrics, insights and revenue strategies
What: A look at the current state of digital publishing and what will it look like in 2023 and beyond with information from Pugpig’s State of the Digital Publishing Market report. Including: Comparison of reader engagement across users and platforms, case studies of innovation in digital publishing, the use of audio and how it drives engagement, and how news publishers intend to retain readers in 2023.
Who: Jonny Kaldor, founder and CEO, Pugpig, a digital publishing platform for hundreds of news, consumer, specialist and B2B media brands.
When: Noon, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: America’s Newspapers to take a deeper look into the report.
Tues, March 21 - AI-Generated Art: Boom or Bust for Human Creativity?
What: A discussion on how generative AI works, how artists are using these tools, and whether AI-generated art will be a boom or bust for human creativity.
Who: Ahmed Elgammal, Professor, Rutgers University; Patrick Grady, Policy Analyst, Center for Data Innovation; Marian Mazzone, Associate Professor, College of Charleston; Irene Solaiman, Director of Policy, Hugging Face; Brigitte Vézina, Director of Policy, Creative Commons
When: 11 am, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Center for Data Innovation
Wed, March 22 - ChatGPT, Journalism, and the Future of Creativity
What: What happens when leading journalists who cover science and eminent scientists who reach mass audiences get together to exchange ideas? What do their differing perspectives tell us about how science communication is changing and how we can do it better?
Who: Joanna Stern writes and makes videos at the Wall Street Journal, where she is the senior personal technology columnist. She won an Emmy in 2021. Jean Oh is an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University who builds robots with advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
When: 6:30 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: The Journalism Institute at New York University
Thu, March 23 - Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism
What: A discussion of the inspiring stories of pioneering women journalists. You’ll hear about the challenges they faced and how they paved the way for the next generation.
Who: Brooke Kroeger, Kim Todd, and Knopf editor Jonathan Segal about their book “Undaunted”
When: 7 pm, Eastern
Where: Zoom
Cost: Free
Sponsor: American Journalism Online