The index to all 30 MLB farm reports and top tens is now up; all reports are Insider except for Baltimore’s, which is free for all readers. Insiders can also read my top 100 prospects ranking and my my ranking of all 30 farm systems.
And now, the links…
- The University of Tennessee has a lot of explaining to do about the rape culture on campus.
- More SVIIB content, now just six days from the release of their final album. The questions in this interview are generic, but Alehandra Deheza’s answers are always enlightening. She also spoke to DIY about the process of finishing the record, with the tantalizing suggestion that she’ll be embarking on some sort of tour.
- The Huffington Post has some actual journalism for a change, with this piece on the horrifying scope of domestic violence in the United States.
- Here’s yet another good reason to avoid buying grated cheese: You may be buying fake cheese, or cheese doctored with cellulose. Buy hard cheeses whole and they’ll last for months. I’ve recommended the grana padano, which is virtually identical to Parmiggiano-Reggiano but is produced in a neighboring region of Italy, sold at Trader Joes; it’s 40-50% less than buying whole P-R at Whole Foods but in most applications you’d never notice the difference.
- I stand with Apple.
- Everybody seems to want their eggs to be “cage-free,” but getting to that point is complicated and expensive. One fundamental problem with our food supply, especially that of products from animals, is that we’ve lost any sense of what eggs or milk or meat really should cost. Factory-farming techniques that weren’t good for the animals drove prices down for consumers, but that model is not sustainable and consumers are increasingly demanding better treatment of the animals as well.
- One of my alma maters just reached a $750 million settlement in a longstanding patent lawsuit against Marvell Technology, after two judgments against the company that including a ruling that said infringement was wilful. The best part? The school’s President has said that CMU should “dedicate a substantial majority of this resource to helping qualified students afford a Carnegie Mellon education.”
- Meanwhile, another win for the collegiate athletics cartel, as former athletes at Penn lost their case arguing they were analogous to work-study employees and thus should be paid minimum wage for their time. The quote from the NCAA’s lawyer is stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.
- Vox interviews the woman who took 47 million academic papers and made them available, free, online. Yes, it’s copyright infringement, but I still see value in what she has to say, even if I can’t approve of what she did. The copyright owners in these cases are not content creators in the sense intended by U.S. copyright laws.
- I’ve seen this pitched as a “debunking of seasonal affective disorder,” but if I’m reading the underlying research correctly, it’s really a debunking of the idea that we’re all a bit down in winter. I’d welcome feedback from the more science-literate out there.
The CMU article you linked to quoted the President of the university as saying that most of the money should go to the inventors. The link below has your quote from the President.
http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2016/february/patent-lawsuit.html
Your other alma mater was in the news recently with some alums saying that education should be free at Harvard (I assume just the college). The thing is, it is already inexpensive, and depending on your parents income potentially free, for the vast majority of students. I think if your family’s annual household income is $75K or less, it is free. If it is under $150K, it is 10%. That’s very competitive to most state schools. So making it free for all would seem to help the wealthy the most, the one’s paying close to full price of $60K a year now.
The study on depressive symptoms and seasonal changes was interesting. I think you are right, it seems more to refute the idea that gray skies/winter results in depressed mood for many.
It is also just one study. Similar to the research on gluten, people in general are not likely to experience aversive effects with a diet containing gluten. However, those with actual celiacs will.
These studies could also be hinting at providers willingness to diagnosis SAD instead of MDD or PDD.
WRT the Apple letter, I don’t really buy the slippery slope argument (copied below). There’s a big difference between working with law enforcement to unlock a specific subpoenaed phone and the things they detail. I’ll admit I don’t know all of the nuances of encryption (I imagine few do), but this feels like grandstanding.
“The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.”
Wrt the Apple letter, if Apple is compelled to develop a new OS that bypasses the self destruct (side note – should the gov’t be able to compel a corporation to spend its money to develop tech for the gov’t?), what would prevent the Feds from just extracting the OS from that phone and installing it onto any other phone to break into it?
This is an honest question, I’m naive to tech issues like this.
Not to play the role of Apple defender, but the answer is that there’s nothing preventing the Feds from doing that. In fact, they would almost certainly do so, whether or not they admitted to it. Similarly, once the thing exists, it’s hard to make certain that there were no leaks at other steps in the process. For example, an Apple engineer could decide that rather than bust his rear end for $100,000 a year for the rest of his life, he could sell the hacked OS to the highest bidder. Quite a few governments would undoubtedly pay handsomely.
In short, it’s something of a Pandora’s Box. And that is also true on the legal end of things. If Apple helps out “just this one time,” then it’s much harder for them to say no the next time the government wants this kind of assistance. Because at that point, there will be a precedent.
I have always thought seasonal disorder largely bunk. lived in stockholm in 2012 – happiest 6 months of my life was that winter. Embrace the peace of the dark. I personally get agitated by constant sunshine demanding that I do something.
I work in data security, so the Apple issue is near and dear to my heart. For me, it comes down to this:
1) The government has this phone and they want into it
2) They don’t know how to do it
3) They’re compelling a private business to spend their time and resources, for no compensation, to performing a task the FBI cannot do themselves
4) Performing this free service for the government leads to a devaluation of Apple’s product line, as one of its features is this very encryption system
Right there, this doesn’t sit well with me.
The slippery-slope prognostications are not paranoia, and we don’t have to look far back at all (Patriot Act, etc.) to see the boundaries of personal liberty stretched, bent, and broken in the name of national security.
The FBI has a warrant to search this phone, and I encourage them to develop methods to decrypt and read this data on their own.
Compelling a private business to do their work, however, and then painting them as treasonous when they refuse, is tyrannical in nature and shouldn’t be tolerated.