How to read newspapers

News articles don't contain the information you think. Instead, they are written according to a formula, and that formula is as much about distorting/hiding information as it is about revealing it.

A good example is the following. I claimed hate-crimes aren't increasing. The tweet below tries to disprove me, by citing a news article that claims the opposite:




But the data behind this article tells a very different story than the words.

Every November, the FBI releases its hate-crime statistics for the previous year. They've been doing this every year for a long time. When they do so, various news organizations grab the data and write a quick story around it.

By "story" I mean a story. Raw numbers don't interest people, so the writer instead has to wrap it in a narrative that does interest people. That's what the writer has done in the above story, leading with the fact that hate crimes have increased.

But is this increase meaningful? What do the numbers actually Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 17th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 


The BOSS Great Wall. The largest structure yet found in the universe. Contains 830 galaxies. A billion light years across. 10,000 times the mass of the Milky Way.

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And there's my new book, Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10, for complete cloud newbies. 


  • $25 billion: Alibaba's Singles' Day sales; 6+ million: Slack daily active users; 4ms: boot time for a unikernel based VM; 1 billion: out of date Android devices; 10-20%: increase in RAM prices; 8 million: lines of code in F-35; $3 million: lost by Isaac Newton in the stock market; 30: it's RAID's birthday!; thousands: bugs fixed with Pentagon hackathon; 6+ terabytes: earth satellite data downloaded per day; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Berners-Lee: When I invented the web, I didn’t have to ask Vint Cerf [the ‘father of the internet’] for permission to use the internet
    • Germaine de Stael: Ridicule dries up the imagination.
    • Alex Hudson: A lot of technical write-ups focus on scaling, performance and large-scale systems. It’s definitely interesting to see what problems Netflix have, and how Continue reading

Weekend Reading: 2017-11-17

There’s an “automation meteor” headed right at us, according to financial adviser and Reformed Broker blogger Josh Brown, who used this troubling “chart o’ the day” from Wharton to show just “how quickly things have changed” over the past decade. And how they’re going to keep on changing. — Sean Langlios @ MarketWatch

Andrew Ng, formerly the head of AI for Chinese search giant Baidu and, before that, creator of Google’s deep-learning Brain project, knows as well as anyone that artificial intelligence is coming for plenty of jobs. And many of us don’t even know it. — Racel Metz @ MIT Technology Review

Cloudflare provides security and domain name services for millions of the most prominent sites on the web. The company has built a solid reputation for its secure encryption and one of the key factors in its system is a wall of 100 lava lamps in the lobby of its San Francisco headquarters. — Rhett Jones @ gizmodo

Predictions As A Service

It’s getting close to the end of the year and it’s time once again for the yearly December flood of posts that will be predicting what’s coming in 2018. Long time readers of my blog know that I don’t do these kinds of posts. My New Year’s Day posts are almost always introspective in nature and forward looking from my own personal perspective. But I also get asked quite a bit to contribute to other posts about the future. And I wanted to tell you why I think the prediction business is a house of cards built on quicksand.

The Layups

It’s far too tempting in the prediction business to play it safe. Absent a ton of research, it’s just easier to play it safe with some not-so-bold predictions. For instance, here’s what I could say about 2018 right now:

  • Whitebox switching will grow in revenue.
  • Software will continue to transform networking.
  • Cisco is going to buy companies.

Those are 100% true. Even without having spent one day in 2018. They’re also things I didn’t need to tell you at all. You already knew them. They’re almost common sense at this point. If I needed to point out that Cisco Continue reading

What do John Chambers and crickets have in common? The IoT

Earlier this year, Cisco announced the man who turned it from a small router company into the world’s dominant network vendor, John Chambers, was exiting his post as executive chairman of the board and it turned the mothership fully over to Chuck Robbins. This raised the question: What has Chambers been up to? Retired?Also on Network World: IoT catches on in New England fishing town Hardly. I met with Chambers near the end of his tenure as CEO, and he most emphatically stated he was not retiring. There are many things I admire about Chambers, but two of his more notable attributes are that he has a knack of catching market transitions and he has a burning desire to change the world. In fact, under Chambers, Cisco put together perhaps the best Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program in the industry, and that legacy has carried over in the Chuck Robbins era.To read this article in full, please click here

Show 366: Inside Cisco EVPN (Sponsored)

The Packet Pushers and sponsor Cisco dive into EVPN to explore how it works and find out why it's attracting the attention of enterprises and carriers for use cases such as data center interconnect and Carrier Ethernet. The post Show 366: Inside Cisco EVPN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

ISOC hosts successful inaugural Indigenous Connectivity Summit

If U.S. Senator of New Mexico Tom Udall’s call that “we must do better” to ensure connectivity in Indigenous communities set the tone, delegates of the Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS) in Santa Fe this month left with little doubt in our ability to do so.

Whether it’s a pueblo at the top of a mountain or a fly-in region in the Arctic, Internet access in many Indigenous communities is characterized by high costs, low speeds, data caps and poor or non-existent service.

At the Internet Society, we work to make sure the Internet is open and accessible to everyone, everywhere. The ICS was the first event of its kind to focus on ensuring Alaska Native, American Indian, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities have access to affordable, high-quality and sustainable Internet access. We heard from several Indigenous community network operators in North America and abroad about their experiences and the impact it’s had on their communities.

Perhaps the most resonant and inspiring message at the ICS was the potential of Indigenous community networks to provide access where commercial networks do not reach or serve, or areas where they may not be economically viable to operate. Speakers shared success stories Continue reading

Docs should help design medical IoT

Doctors — particularly the ones that work in emergency rooms — need to have strong stomachs and level heads, since they see illness and injury at their most serious. Violence, accidents and serious diseases are all a matter of routine in the ER.Dr. Christian Dameff is a faculty member at UC San Diego’s medical school, has seen all of that and more, since he’s also a white-hat hacker and expert in medical IoT security. He warned the audience on Thursday at the Security of Things USA convention in San Diego that the state of that security is, frankly, alarming.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows Server in the cloud: Can you, should you, and with which provider? + HPE gives up the battle for tier 1 data center customersTo read this article in full, please click here

Docs should help design medical IoT

Doctors — particularly the ones that work in emergency rooms — need to have strong stomachs and level heads, since they see illness and injury at their most serious. Violence, accidents and serious diseases are all a matter of routine in the ER.Dr. Christian Dameff is a faculty member at UC San Diego’s medical school, has seen all of that and more, since he’s also a white-hat hacker and expert in medical IoT security. He warned the audience on Thursday at the Security of Things USA convention in San Diego that the state of that security is, frankly, alarming.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows Server in the cloud: Can you, should you, and with which provider? + HPE gives up the battle for tier 1 data center customersTo read this article in full, please click here

Docs should help design medical IoT

Doctors - particularly the ones that work in emergency rooms – need to have strong stomachs and level heads, since they see illness and injury at their most serious. Violence, accidents and serious diseases are all a matter of routine in the ER.Dr. Christian Dameff is a faculty member at UC San Diego’s medical school, has seen all of that and more, since he’s also a white-hat hacker and expert in medical IoT security. He warned the audience on Thursday at the Security of Things USA convention in San Diego that the state of that security is, frankly, alarming.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows Server in the cloud: Can you, should you, and with which provider? + HPE gives up the battle for tier 1 data center customersTo read this article in full, please click here

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