Author: Chris

Aphex Twin on How New Sounds Can Change You

So if you hear a C-major chord with an equal temperament, you’ve heard it a million times before and your brain accepts it. But if you hear a chord that you’ve never heard before, you’re like, “huh.” And your brain has to change shape to accept it. And once it’s changed shape, then you have changed as a person, in a tiny way. And if you have a whole combination of all these different frequencies, you’re basically reconfiguring your brain. And then you’ve changed as a person, and you can go and do something else. It’s a constant change. It could sound pretty cosmic and hippie, but that is exactly what’s going on.

From this long and insightful interview with Richard. His music has always had a pleasantly ‘off’ sound. Syro is no different.

Lumpy Links

Here’s a lump of interesting articles I’ve come across over the past few weeks.

I got to see Jeffery Veen present at WordCamp San Francisco a few weeks ago. This video really hits home regarding some of our work at Mercy.

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Moving Past Default Charts (in R) – did you know R can make pretty charts?
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The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling – to say more would spoil the story.
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Ryan Goodman talks about why culture is the important part of any analytics project.
“Driving a culture where people think visually is not about a faster way to create bar charts. After carefully walking through the “people” aspect of driving a visualization roadmap, I asked the attendees (60/40 mix of business and IT professionals) to collaborate in micro round table discussions focused on technology. First, they took turns painting a perfect picture of what the optimal technology mix would look like. Immediately after they went through the self admitting process stating their organization’s current deficiencies. Sure enough, discussions evolved from technology to “people and process” and the body language quickly changed watching from the front of the room.”
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Michael Jordan (no, not the athlete) on the delusions of big data,
“Now, if I start allowing myself to look at all of the combinations of these features—if you live in Beijing, and you ride bike to work, and you work in a certain job, and are a certain age—what’s the probability you will have a certain disease or you will like my advertisement? Now I’m getting combinations of millions of attributes, and the number of such combinations is exponential; it gets to be the size of the number of atoms in the universe.


Those are the hypotheses that I’m willing to consider. And for any particular database, I will find some combination of columns that will predict perfectly any outcome, just by chance alone. If I just look at all the people who have a heart attack and compare them to all the people that don’t have a heart attack, and I’m looking for combinations of the columns that predict heart attacks, I will find all kinds of spurious combinations of columns, because there are huge numbers of them.

So it’s like having billions of monkeys typing. One of them will write Shakespeare.”

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The UK government is working on a huge (some might even say ‘Big”) data sharing program of anonymoized health data. One of the concerns being raised? Communication of what’s being shared and how.
“Many of the concerns care.data critics cite in opposing the program, such as patients being under-informed, doctors being at risk of losing their patients’ trust, and insurance companies having access to the data“

OS X Yosemite Notifications Preferences Don’t Stick

I’m really enjoying OS X 10.101 Yosemite and have only encountered one really pesky bug. Even the Citrix and VPN clients for work are running great. That hasn’t always been the case.

This bug manifests itself when you restart your computer after changing any of the Notification settings in System Preferences. They don’t stick!

Screen Shot 2014-11-07 at 2.42.14 PM

I found this fix on this Apple Support Community thread. Here’s the steps in case that thread disappears into the ether.2

1. Open the Library folder in your Home folder. Easiest way to do this is in Finder go to the “Go” menu in the menubar. Select “Go to Folder”. Punch this in: ~/Library/Application Support
2. Locate the folder named NotificationCenter. Drag this folder to the desktop.
3. Next, open the Terminal application. It’s located in the Applications/Utilities folder. Or just search for it in Spotlight.
Copy and paste each line of these commands into the Terminal window, in order. Press return after each line:

cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`
 rm -rf com.apple.notificationcenter
 killall usernoted; killall NotificationCenter

4. Close the Terminal app.
5. Restart your computer.
6. Change a few notification settings and restart one more time to make sure they stick.
7. You can delete the NotificationCenter folder you dragged to your desktop.

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As a side note, I’m going to try and compel you to turn off some of your notifications. I’m an anti-notification guy. I don’t need to know when every email comes in or every @ reply on Twitter. I’ve got other stuff to do. So do you.

The first thing I suggest you do with all your devices is turn off about half of the notifications. The computer should work for you, not the other way around.

Disqusting

A Sponsored Comment can use all types of media to get the point across, just like any other Disqus comment. But they’re not part of the discussion happening on that page. Comments to the ad are driven to a separate landing page just for that ad. This keeps the core commenting experience uninterrupted and publisher communities just as they were. That’s the best of both worlds.

So Disqus, one of the larger comment plugins used on many sites, just added sponsored comments to their product. Yuck. Not only that, but the replies to said comments – which I bet are going to be a cruel and negative cesspool – will live in their own little bubble.

How quaint. from their website, “Everything you need to build a community, turn down the noise and turn up new revenue.” You had me at community, and lost me immediately after.

I have to agree with Matt,

“I was just reading some comments the other day and thinking how it’d be great to see some sponsored brand content there instead of users, like there already was on the rest of the page. Glad there’s a solution for that on a global basis now.”

This is probably a good time to highlight other, non creepy, solutions for comments on your site. Say Jetpack or Discourse?