What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Stones, Clocks, and What We Should Actually Leave Behind Calling Me a Hero Only Makes You Feel Better - “Cashiers and shelf-stockers and delivery-truck drivers aren’t heroes. They’re victims. To call them heroes is to justify their exploitation. By praising the blue-collar worker’s public service, the progressive consumer is assuaged of her cognitive dissonance. When the world isn’t falling apart, we know the view of us is usually as faceless, throwaway citizens. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The Covid-19 Tracking App Won’t Work - “In addition to detective work, Singapore covered the cost of all treatments and tests -– which were widespread and accessible – and provided sick pay for people who had to stay home. The U.S. has a long way to go to match that. Even the best smartphone app won’t solve systemic problems. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Facebook Approved Ads With Coronavirus Misinformation Keep the Parks Open - “The outdoors and sunshine are such strong factors in fighting viral infections that a 2009 study of the extraordinary success of outdoor hospitals during the 1918 influenza epidemic suggested that during the next pandemic (I guess this one!) we should encourage “the public to spend as much time outdoors as possible,” as a public-health measure. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model - “Numbers aren’t facts. They’re the result of a lot of subjective choices that have to be documented transparently and in detail before you can even begin to consider treating the output as fact. How data is gathered — and whether it is gathered the same way each time — matters. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Using Zoom? Here are the privacy issues you need to be aware of A Failure of Systemic Thinking - “We faltered because of our failure to consider risk in its full context, especially when dealing with coupled risk—when multiple things can go wrong together. We were hampered by our inability to think about second- and third-order effects and by our susceptibility to scientism—the false comfort of assuming that numbers and percentages give us a solid empirical basis. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Google Says It Doesn’t ‘Sell’ Your Data. Here’s How the Company Shares, Monetizes, and Exploits It. Fake animal news abounds on social media as coronavirus upends life How flagging content really affects the perception of truthfulness The Age of Surveillance Capitalism “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as a free raw market for translation into behavioral data. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: All numbers are made up, some are useful - “The point is that, whatever data you dig into, at any given point in time, that looks solid on the surface, will be a complete mess underneath, plagued by undefined values, faulty studies, small sample problems, plagiarism, and all of the rest of the beautiful mess that is human life. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Data centers are the new oil The Truth About Routines - “The bottom line is that the only way to an optimal routine is through astute self-awareness—not mimicking what other people do—and experimentation. The more you can match your activities to your energy levels, the better. The more you can figure out which types of environments stimulate your best work, the better. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Fitness has become a luxury item. It doesn’t have to be The Conservative Sanctimony of Journalistic Impartiality Easy as A, B, Chromebook More Than Enough How to be an Antiracist “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Probing the Corporate Manipulation of Science - “When faced with the impeding regulations, companies don’t argue against oversight. Instead, they insist that any regulation must be based on “sound science,” a term invented by the tobacco industry to prevent or confuse scientific consensus. What makes the strategy so effective is that it uses the language of science to undermine inconvenient findings produced by legitimate scientific inquiry. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Why don’t we get the news we need? Poverty isn’t a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash - “Compare it to a new computer that’s running 10 heavy programmes at once. It gets slower and slower, makes errors, and eventually freezes – not because it’s a bad computer but because it has to do too much at once. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Athlete breaks silence about sexual misconduct of University of Guelph’s star coach - This is a pretty infuriating story. The Spy and the Traitor - The story of a Oleg Gordievsky, who worked for the KGB and became a British spy. The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President - “Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The case for … making low-tech ‘dumb’ cities instead of ‘smart’ ones Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers My life without sugar Digital Minimalism - Digital minimalism is a “philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - “While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: A Field Guide to Lies - A lot of the stuff in here as stuff I was already aware of but it’s always good be reminded to step back and think things through before accepting a claim as true, especially if it confirms your prior belief. “But it’s important to remember that people gather statistics. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Biased - This book was great at balancing academic studies on racial biases with personal anecdotes. I found it startling how much of an influence priming can have on racial biases (black faces are more likely to be picked out when induced to think about crime, aggressive words are more likely to be picked out after being shown photos of black faces) and the role that this can play in police being more violent towards black men. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: How we survive the surveillance apocalypse - “But no, privacy isn’t dead. A path to reclaiming it — fuzzy and almost too late — is starting to emerge. We just have to be angry enough to demand it.” The Meritocracy Trap - The meritocracy trap is basically a snowball effect in which middle class jobs get displaced by more highly skilled, higher paying jobs. [Read More]

All The Books I Read In 2020

Some notes and quotes from the books I have read this year: The Meritocracy Trap - The meritocracy trap is basically a snowball effect in which middle class jobs get displaced by more highly skilled, higher paying jobs. Those with the higher paying jobs then use their money to ensure that their kids are able to get these high paying jobs starting with placing them in expensive pre-schools and high schools to give them the best chance to get into the highly regarded universities to give them the best chance at getting the high paying jobs. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: My semester with the snowflakes - “To me there is no dishonor in being wrong and learning. There is dishonor in willful ignorance and there is dishonor in disrespect.” The two big flaws of the media’s impeachment coverage — and what went right - “In an unceasing effort to be seen as neutral, journalists time after time fell into the trap of presenting facts and lies as roughly equivalent and then blaming political tribalism for not seeming to know the difference. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: We Tested Ring’s Security. It’s Awful - Reason number 1249083 to not get anywhere close to Ring. Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy - “We are living in the world’s most advanced surveillance system. This system wasn’t created deliberately. It was built through the interplay of technological advance and the profit motive. It was built to make money. [Read More]