GQ’s Devin Friedman: Late 30+ year olds doing social media stuff is “kind of like androids having sex”

GQ’s Devin Friedman tries to understand, by taking a visit to Silicon Valley and the Y Combinator, why everyone wants to share so much. He comes up with as apt of metaphor as I’ve seen about the older generation’s befuddlement about this societal shift:

I gave two sites access to my credit cards so I could share my purchases with my friends. I did my best to check in wherever I went on Foursquare. And what it all made me feel, mostly, was stupid. And anxious—that I didn’t have enough people following me and then that I was the kind of person who wants people to follow him. Every update, every tweet, every check-in, ultimately began to feel not unlike doing my expenses.

The experience isn’t unusual. I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. Meanwhile, and infuriatingly, we know that humans just like to bone.

Read the full story.
Hat-tip to longform.org

  

BARC Canines in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

One of my favorite volunteer activities in the city is walking dogs, usually pitbulls, for the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition in Williamsburg. You get some quality dog-time and get to see the scenic part of hipster-ville.

Walking a BARC pitbull in Williamsburg, Metropolitan Ave. near Kent Ave. Kayrock Screen Printing mural.

Walking a BARC pitbull in Williamsburg, Metropolitan Ave. near Kent Ave. Kayrock Screen Printing mural.



Walking a pitbull in Williamsburg

These two beautiful dogs weren’t from the shelter, but we saw them tied outside of Blue Bottle Coffee:
Williamsburg: Beautiful dogs

  

ProPublica Investigates Dialysis: For-Profit Providers Flourish as Care Quality Flounders

A great in-depth look by my ProPublica colleague Robin Fields into the dialysis industry. It was a field I was barely familiar with, as only about 400,000 Americans are on dialysis, but the entitlement as grown from $135 million to $20 billion annually, with mixed and depressing results.

I took this photo of a woman whose mother nearly bled to death after being improperly hooked up to a dialysis machine.

Cathleen Sharkey holds a frame of photographs of her mother, Barbara Scott, whose bloodline became disconnected during a dialysis treatment at Dutchess Dialysis Center. Scott never fully recovered and died shortly after of heart failure. (Dan Nguyen/ProPublica)

  

Google Refine, a.k.a. Gridworks 2.0 released; ProPublica’s “Dollars for Docs” featured.

Good news for data-nerds everywhere. The 2.0 version of Google’s fantastic data-cleaning tool, Google Refine (formerly Gridworks), has been released. And they were nice enough to feature ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs as an example of a use-case. I talked briefly to BusinessJournalism.org about how I used Refine to put together the pharma top earners list.

It’s possible I could’ve done it using SQL queries and Ruby libraries. But I definitely would’ve missed a lot of matches, and probably overdosed on over-the-counter pharma-painkillers.

  

What does China *really* know about cutting-edge technology, anyway?

Left: a Seagate factory in Wuxi, China

A couple of anecdotes to remember before accepting the conventional wisdom that all China is good for is mass-producing (or copying) non-Chinese tech products (i.e. iPhones):

From Seymour Hersh’s recent New Yorker piece examining the hype of cyber-warfare:

A few weeks after Barack Obama’s election, the Chinese began flooding a group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with a barrage of intercepts, two Bush Administration national-security officials and the former senior intelligence official told me. The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand.

“The N.S.A. would ask, ‘Can the Chinese be that good?’ ” the former official told me. “My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I’d say, ‘Can you read Chinese?’ We don’t even know the Chinese pictograph for ‘Happy hour.’ ”

And today’s New York Times, on a Chinese research center building a supercomputer that outclocks the current one by 40 percent.

Modern supercomputers are built by combining thousands of small computer servers and using software to turn them into a single entity. In that sense, any organization with enough money and expertise can buy what amount to off-the-shelf components and create a fast machine.

The Chinese system follows that model by linking thousands upon thousands of chips made by the American companies Intel and Nvidia. But the secret sauce behind the system — and the technological achievement — is the interconnect, or networking technology, developed by Chinese researchers that shuttles data back and forth across the smaller computers at breakneck rates, Mr. Dongarra said.

“That technology was built by them,” Mr. Dongarra said. “They are taking supercomputing very seriously and making a deep commitment.”

The Chinese interconnect can handle data at about twice the speed of a common interconnect called InfiniBand used in many supercomputers.

  

NYPD’s Feris Jones is too old for this shit

NYPD officer Feris Jones


“Lethal Weapon” reference inspired by @andymboyle

From the New York Times: Off-duty NYPD officer Feris Jones was at Sabine’s Hallway, a beauty salon in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, when a robber came in, brandishing a gun, and ordered her and the other patrons into a bathroom. Jones told the owner to call the bathroom before stepping out and ordering the robber to surrender. The robber, from 12 feet away, fired four shots at Jones with his .44 Magnum revolver. Jones dodged the bullets and returned fire with her own revolver five times, hitting the robber’s hands and causing him to drop his gun and hitting the front door lock, jamming it and slowing down the robber’s escape.

Five-time prior arrestee Winston Cox, 19, was apprehended at a Bed-Stuy hotel on Monday, his hands wrapped in towels.

Jones has been with the department since 1990 and worked in evidence collection for the past 12 years. The Oct. 23 attempted stickup was the first time she had fired her gun in the line-of-duty. Not only should her marksmanship should be commended, but her restraint and levelheadedness in not shooting the fleeing robber in the back (he apparently had to crawl out through a glass panel, even though moments before he nearly killed her. No wonder the suspect’s mother is proud of Jones.

Sometimes, life is like a cop movie.