Everyone's got them. Mine are here.
Politics, technology, science, economics and video games discussed.
I've been checking out some of the new stuff coming out of CES this year, and the Pebble Steel is probably the first smartwatch that offers reasonable functionality while still maintaining marginally decent looks and great battery life. Certainly, it's the first that I'd consider wearing (unless you count the Fitbit Flex, which I do wear).
The Pebble Steel in matte black.
The Verge has a brief write-up, but check out the video on the Pebble Steel site as well.
As long as I've been around, the FBI has been about law enforcement. So imagine my shock when I read today that the Bureau has recently completely dropped "law enforcement" from its mission statement, instead replacing it with the vague category "national security".
Image credit: The Cable at foreignpolicy.com
"When our mission changed after 9/11, our fact sheet changed to reflect that," FBI spokesman Paul Bresson told Foreign Policy. He noted that the FBI's website has long-emphasized the agency's national security focus. "We rank our top 10 priorities and CT [counterterrorism] is first, counterintel is second, cyber is third," he said. "So it is certainly accurate to say our primary function is national security."
Not that there's anything wrong with National Security (at least, as a general principle), but don't we already have the NSA, the CIA and DHS for that? So we're now running four agencies with similar mission statements? Isn't "law enforcement" already part of national security?
Anyway, apparently enforcing laws is no longer the FBI's primary function.
Wait, what?
I was really impressed with Netflix' remake of the House of Cards series. It delivered a really compelling political drama filled with intrigue and dripping with style. So I'm pretty excited for the next installation. Conveniently, they just released a trailer, and it looks like the series will continue to impress.
Fingers crossed. February 14th can't come fast enough.
The Verge has an article today, which goes over Economists and their dislike for Bitcoin as a currency.
University of Berkeley economist Brad DeLong believes that Bitcoin will fail because the cost of producing a Bitcoin clone is zero. George Mason economist Tyler Cowen agrees, and adds a warning about deflation.
-The Verge, 12/31/2013
These views are fundamentally incorrect, and show a massive misunderstanding of the infrastructure that supports the blockchain. The cost of producing a bitcoin clone is... quite high, actually. Creating an alt-currency is a near-zero cost endeavor, but producing an actual clone of Bitcoin, with the mining/transaction nodes in place is prohibitively expensive, as is encouraging a wide audience to adopt the currency, and put it into use. The difficulty for crypto-currencies is adoption, not creation. Imagine it more like trying to start a new religion: the writing is easy, it's getting people to believe that's hard.
I have had and am continuing to have a dialogue with smart technologists who are very high on BitCoin — but when I try to get them to explain to me why BitCoin is a reliable store of value, they always seem to come back with explanations about how it’s a terrific medium of exchange. Even if I buy this (which I don’t, entirely), it doesn’t solve my problem. And I haven’t been able to get my correspondents to recognize that these are different questions.
What Krugman should take a look at is Bitcoin's base value as being derived from the computational power and infrastructure required to manage the transactions and the blockchain. Every node active on the Bitcoin network adds value to the currency, in somewhat the same way that gold's value can be seen as a store of value because it can be used to make pretty jewelry.
Now, obviously no one would value gold simply on it's ability to be melted down and made into rings and necklaces, or serve as a conductive material, right? Two other key points go into the base value of gold: its rarity, and its ability to be used as a medium of exchange for goods and services.
Don't look now, but Bitcoin manages to meet both of those requirements as well, but is arguably far better as a medium of exchange, due to its ease of use in transfer.
Bitcoin does have a lot of issues facing it in the future. To name a few:
None of these are issues caused by knock-off alt-coins.
BlackBerry's CEO, John Chen, talked about the future of the company in an open letter to their (remaining) customers today.
"We're going back to our heritage and roots - delivering enterprise-grade, end-to-end mobile solutions. As we refocus back to our roots, BlackBerry will target four areas: handsets, EMM solutions, cross-platform messaging, and embedded systems."
- John Chen, open letter to customers, 12/2/13
Good for them. I think there honestly could be a market for a leaner BlackBerry, one more focused on enterprise, and one that chooses either Windows or Android as an OS for their handsets. At this point, it should be completely clear to the company that they can no longer deliver on the idea of BBX as their mobile OS. It simply isn't viable without a development community behind it.
As I see it, there are two options for the company to go at this point:
Android
Focus on the shift to mobile for enterprise, and deliver a mobile solution on Android that bests Samsung's Knox offerings. Essentially, deliver a device that integrates well with Google's services, with a secure, IT-friendly integration with BlackBerry's messaging and enterprise solutions. Android's share of the mobile market is second to none, but how much of that share is in the high-end market that generates most of mobile profit share, falls into a gray area. The drawback here is that Samsung has swallowed such a large portion of the Android pie that it may be difficult to make inroads without an extremely large capital outlay on advertisement. BlackBerry has done this in the past, but that was with a much larger war chest of funds.
Windows Mobile
Deliver core integration based on Windows, and try and do it better than Microsoft has done thus far. There is significant room for improvement, and because Microsoft has been focused so heavily on the consumer market, there is a lot of room for BlackBerry to develop. Windows already owns the marketshare for enterprise in the workplace, and integration with traditional business solutions like Office, Outlook and Exchange will be crucial to enterprise expansion. Additionally, it's entirely possible that Microsoft would shoulder some of the advertising muscle as they continue to try and grow their own mobile OS marketshare. The biggest con to this solution is simply that Windows mobile OS doesn't have the critical mass to catapult BlackBerry devices onto the main stage, though this may not be an issue if BlackBerry chooses to focus solely on the high-end device and enterprise solutions market that they claim in the letter.
It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out. I haven't had a lot of confidence in BlackBerry for a long time, particularly since they've spent so much time with their head in the sand while iOS and Android blew them out of the water, but I do see that there exists a possibility for them to eke out a profitable position by abandoning their mobile OS in favor of another, and focusing on delivering tailored enterprise solutions.
Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have sold over a million units in their first 24 hours, proving to be the fastest selling consoles in their companies' respective history.
That's great news for our industry, which has been carved up by rising development costs, falling PC sales, and increased competition from mobile devices.
It looks like HPV has another realm for cancer risk, based on research entered in Nature.
"...people with head and neck cancer were 15 times more likely to be infected with HPV in their mouths or throats than those without."
Something to think about the next time you're thinking about vaccinations at your doctor.
Apple launched a site that shows how people use the iPad in their daily professional lives.
Not only does it showcase how people like professional speed skater Bridie Farrell use the iPad, but it also highlights some of the apps (like Dartfish Express) that they use do do so. I'm particularly fond of Dr. Itaru Endo's story. It highlights not just how transformative the device is for the user, but also the people who directly benefit, the patients.
"The iPad app [co-developed by Dr. Itaru Endo], which is moving through clinical evaluations, provides comprehensive access to three-dimensional surgical data. The app uses augmented reality to overlay complex vascular systems during operations. This reveals liver perfusion patterns that are invisible to the human eye, giving greater insight into the exact location of certain blood vessels."
To me, this is the way to sell products - show what the product will do for you, what it will do for your business, and what it will do to make your life better. Though the iPad Air and new Mini are ridiculously fast and have gorgeous displays, advertising them isn't about the specs, it's about how you will use them.
Bloomberg Report: The U.S. Lags in Life Expectancy Gains
In the past 40 years, America has dropped from above average to below average life expectancy among developed countries, despite the fact that we spend significantly more per capita on healthcare.
“Life expectancy [in the U.S.] is now more than a year below the OECD average of 80.1,” the OECD said in a press statement, “compared to one year above the average in 1970.”
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report
Every single country doing better than us has some form of socialized healthcare. Purely privatized healthcare for the vast majority of Americans is not fine. The Affordable Care Act may have some serious issues in both implementation and, you know, affordability, but the system is a step in the right direction. It needs to be fixed, not scrapped.
Unless, of course, someone got serious about an actual single-payer system.
Earlier this week, Samsung announced that they'd shipped 800,000 of their new Galaxy Gear smartwatch. This seemed to many people to be strange, given that the thing was universally panned by the tech press, and even in the event that someone would have liked to buy one, it only worked with the Galaxy Note 3. Kind of a downer, if you'd just bought the Galaxy S3 or S4.
As it turns out, the reality of their sales figures are slightly less... outstanding.
"Also on September 25, Samsung Electronics released the Galaxy Gear in time for the wearable computing generation. Yet this product has cumulative sales under 50,000, with daily sales of only 800-900 units. These low sales values for the Galaxy Gear are far below the initial expectations of the industry."
Not exactly numbers that are setting the world on fire.
