Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Almost every story I write has some thread in it that the editor decides needs to be pulled out. In my recent piece looking at Boston’s Next tech goldmine, I decided to act on something I’d read just prior to starting work on the piece, an article about Nick Diakopolous’s thoughts on interviewing the algorithm. The story was about companies built around algorithms, so why not? But it didn’t make it into the piece, which was focused more on why Boston has lost much of its high-tech luster, and whether it can get some of that back.

You can decide whether that was a mistake. Here’s what got cut:

Watching algorithms get developed must be something like watching Thomas Pynchon write novels, sans the sex and paranoia. Someone stares at a screen, pecking at a keyboard, willing  shape out of the bits that will respond to the world around it, a being without being. But listening to an algorithm being discussed is not like book group.

“Your equation assumes that the number of actions per flight follows a binomial distribution,” says one of DataXu’s computer science PhDs during a meeting to improve part of the company’s new product, Cruise Control. Poisson distributions and non-parametric equations, statistical methods used to determine probabilities, are routinely invoked.

But then, DataXu’s technology was designed to help NASA plan a Mars mission. Baker has a sly memento of this in his office, a photo of the founding team sitting at the Apollo capsule at the Museum of Science.

Fiksu’s algorithms weren’t developed for such lofty reasons, says Micah (pronounced Mee-kah) Adler, its founder and CEO. Fiksu is Finnish for “clever,” and Adler is both, though he was born in Australia and graduated from high school in Concord, New Hampshire. After getting his BS at MIT and a PhD at Berkeley, he started teaching computer science, specializing in algorithm development, at U-Mass Amherst, publishing papers with titles like “Towards Asymptotic Optimality in Probabilistic Packet Marking.”

Adler, 45, still has a bit of the professor in him, despite being on his fifth startup. He wears sensible brown shoes, slacks and a collared shirt, with Hugo Boss eyewear and a Pebble Smartwatch. He’ll take a moment to boil an algorithm down to its essence, the process of getting an answer to a mathematical equation. “Two plus two equals four is not an algorithm,” says Adler. “Taking two, adding two and saying it will equal four is an algorithm.” Algorithms, then, are meta math.

He says that at peak usage times, Fiksu’s algorithms are choosing between 150,000 potential ad placements a second. If its algorithms lag, somebody in Europe might not find the app they’re looking for.

Fiksu’s own algorithms draw 15 people, nearly 5 percent of its workforce, to a regular  Thursday afternoon meeting. The group are mostly in their 20s, though 30 and 40-year-olds (including one physicist) are also in the room. The discussion topic of the day involves optimizing what sites Fiksu will use for ads. The leader gets up and starts writing mathematical formulas on the board, only it’s not a class; each coefficient relates to an actual part of Fiksu’s ad sales process. He uses so much of the board he’s eventually on his knees squeezing in a last bit of formula. He needs still more space, so he finally just says, “After a whole lot of math….”

Even the smartest people get flummoxed when it comes to something like what their kids should study to ensure getting a good job.
At the MIT CIO Symposium, some very sharp thinkers, including autonomous robot specialist John Leonard,  wide-ranging MIT Media Lab guru Sandy Pentland and top management thinker Tom Malone, sat on a panel about the future, moderated by Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan School of Management economist and digital business thinker. They were very good in talking about the likely trends for autonomous cars (further off than the headlines would have you think, largely because laws need to change) and on why groups with more women tend to be smarter. They had interesting things to say about why it takes so long for major technology breakthroughs to really take off.

Then, during the Q&A, someone asked what his 14-year-old son should study. This had my complete attention, since I also have a 14-year-old son. It turns out John Leonard has a 13-year-old son, and Leonard encourages him to spend time on Kahn Academy and Udacity and other MOOCs. “They need to be life-long learners, and they need to something they’re passionate about. Tell him to try to find what you’re passionate about and pursue that.”

I thought to myself, ‘professional video gaming is such a crapshoot, I’m not sure I like this advice.’

Pentland has children aged 14 and 17. He says he’s insisted that they become computer literate. “Understanding the programs, not necessarily being a programmer, will be increasingly valuable,” Pentland counseled.  He’s also encouraged them to be entrepreneurial.

Pentland said he’s nervous about what lies ahead for his kids, no matter what they know. “You have to remember that as a species we’re not doing so well. There’s global warming, war on the horizon, lots of people dying; we have to solve some of these problems or we’re not going to be around, at least in a recognizable way. We need innovation, but we also need to be giving up some of what we’re used to today.”

Malone said his son is 22, and when he was 14, it was clear that he had a creative streak. Malone encouraged that, figuring that “the prospects for people who are good at following orders are less than they were in the past. A lot of those jobs will be doable by computers.” Malone says his son “is now an art student, and I’m hoping he’ll be able to find a job.”

There is only so much we can know.

Gary Becker, the wide-ranging economist who epitomized the iconoclastic nature of the University of Chicago, died this week. I’ve been on deadline writing a piece about one of his star students, Claudia Goldin, for which I almost scored what would have been Becker’s last interview. Alas, he was too ill — his assistant regretfully informed me of this on April 28th. On May 3rd, Becker passed away.

Here are some of my favorite links about Becker, assembled by the economist Tyler Cowen. I particularly liked Steven Levitt’s sweet homage to Becker, even describing how “people feared him because he could see the truth.” I think I like that because I feared my professors at Chicago, and sometimes my fellow students, that same way. And yet I had to engage with them, because that’s what Chicago trains you to do. When you do, you find that most of them are like Levitt describes Becker, deeply engaged with the people around them, even lunk-headed students like me.
I interviewed Becker only twice. In 2006, in an interview at the Boston Copley Hotel, which got our waiter so interested he looked up Becker online while we talked. Becker surprised me by readily conceding that markets aren’t always an effective approach, even offering up pollution controls as an example. He also said he thought science and math were important, but a liberal arts education would serve his grandkids best:

[L]earn liberal arts principles, so that if in 30 years from now the details are very different, you have a foundation that you can use to change.

I also interviewed him for this piece, Chicago Schooled, on whether the Chicago School caused the Great Recession. Becker again surprised me by not saying anything more emphatic than we’ll have to wait and see.

Becker told me in that first interview that he hadn’t studied sociology because it was too hard. Surprise again for me, since I got better grades in sociology courses than economics courses, and I knew I wasn’t smarter than Becker. He probably meant it was too obtuse, as these notes from James Heckman suggest. Becker was always clear-headed, and I wish I could have interviewed him more often.

Journalists could learn a lot about source protection from drug dealers.

“Go watch The Wire!” Oliver Day  told a session at Byte B@ck, the Society of Professional Journalists recent conference. “Figure out why the drug dealers are using burner phones [cheap cell phones that can be thrown away, protecting anonymity].  Extend that to notebooks.”

Chromebooks and other cheap notebooks aren’t at the $20 per device level of some cell phones, but MicroCenter’s latest flyer has a Windows 8 laptop for $220 and Amazon is advertising a ChromeBook for $199. If you have an important story, is $200 too much to spend to guarantee secure communications with a source whose identity needs protecting?

Of course, you want to be careful about what email you use. Fake Gmail accounts were scorned by Day and his fellow panelists, Andy Sellars of the Digital Media Law Project and Cara Rubinksy, the New England News editor for the Associated Press.

“Email is dicey,” Rubinsky said. “Fake email accounts don’t protect you.” You’re likely to use them from your main computer, which means the IP address used to create them will lead back to you (hence the burner notebooks). “If you’ve got a source you don’t want revealed, don’t email about your story and create a paper trail.”

Hence the use of ‘burner’ phones, quickly discarded. The AP recommends reporters use these phones and give them to specific sources whose jobs might be endangered for talking with the press, as well.  “If you can’t protect your sources, people are going to stop telling you things,” Rubinksy said.

I wouldn’t seem to be the type of person who needed this session. Most of my reporting now involves explanatory features. I went to this session because you never know when you might need to protect a source, and it has clearly become more difficult to do since I was a working beat reporter.

Rubinsky offered some other tips: if you’re going to call sources at work, call them all the time. Every day. Better, though, is the burner phone. “Go to Wal-Mart or 7-11. Pay with cash. Don’t give them your real name. If they ask for your name, say your name is Eric Holder. Use the phone for three months and throw it out.” She also advised against using WiFi while in coffee shops and corporations, especially if you aren’t using encryption.

Day, who runs Securing Change, a non-profit that helps non-governmental organizations create secure communications, says the landscape for hacking is radically changed from just a decade ago. “There are more hackers than there were and more commercialized hacking tools. You don’t need skills, you can just go buy the stuff.”

Governments are also more willing to hack. He related stories about the Ethiopian government spear phishing a U.S. citizen, and the NSA’s hack of Al Jazeera.

• Day loves OTR, an encrypted instant messaging service.
• He also suggested journalists consider using GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard),
• the Tor Browser Bundle, which protects against monitoring.
• Tails Amnesiac is a privacy-loving operating system journalists could think about.
• He also cited TrueCrypt, for encryption software, though he warned that passwords “will not get you past judges or the rubber hose decryption method.”

He also warned that security and convenience do not go together. These tools are for the most part either not simple to use, or much slower than conventional, unprotected means of communicating.
Andy Sellars of the Digital Media Law Project talked about the twin challenges journalists face. One is hackers and bad actors, but a potentially more potent and insidious one comes from the powers that be. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the legal right to come after journalists for information. Ask yourself questions like “Who has my data? Who has access to my data? What requirements do they have to give up data if law enforcement asks? What incentive do they have to fight back if law enforcement asks for my data? ”

Using encryption and burner phones can help, he said. It reduces risks of cloud storage providers, telecom providers and ISPs giving up your sources. Above all, he said “don’t write sensitive stories on Google Docs! Google has access to them and can be subpoenaed.” He suggested SecureDrop for document submissions.
He said journalists should consult the Committee to Protect Journalists’ extensive Journalist Security Guide. He also said the Digital Media Law Project will later this year release a guide that spells out what rights journalists have. He said the law is evolving; some journalists have been able to avoid giving up their crypto keys by invoking the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination.

During Q&A, I asked about the safest way for Bob Woodward to communicate with Mark “Deep Throat” Felt if he were working on the Watergate story today. “I would still prefer a garage,” said Sellars, “still prefer going offline.”

Time for me to go watch The Wire.