We have had plenty of practice dealing with bad news over the last few years. Putting patients in charge of their own surgeries… Clients in charge of their own trials…
Inventing Ivana Trump: Her Improbable Rise and Tragic Death
An only child born eight weeks premature on February 20, 1949, she is bestowed with a Russian first name—“Maybe they thought it would help me with the Soviets”—by her parents, an electrical engineer and a telephone operator. The family lives in a concrete house on the grounds of the Bata shoe-factory complex in the town of Gottwaldov, where everyone toes the party line but Ivana Marie Zelníčková. …
Syrovatka moves to London for work but arranges for Ivana to live in his family’s “large and beautiful apartment” in Prague while she earns her master’s degree in physical education at Charles University. Here, she finds true love for the first time, not with Syrovatka but with Czechoslovakia’s premier young poet and songwriter, Jiri Staidl, 30. He writes her love songs; she becomes his muse. A heavy boozer and reckless bon vivant who a friend will say “drove like he was grabbing death by the ass,” Staidl is speeding in his sports car on the night of October 9, 1973, “with several shots in him and an unknown beauty in the passenger seat,” reports a Czech newspaper. When a truck slams into the car, Staidl is propelled out of the vehicle and hits the guardrail, dying on the spot. The unknown beauty is thrown into the back seat, but by some miracle she walks away without a scratch. According to Syrovatka, the newspaper identifies her only by her initials: I.Z.
When should you interact with your boss?
Motivating Creativity
I am interested in Danil Dmitriev’s job market paper from UCSD:
How should one incentivize creativity when being creative is costly? We analyze a model of delegated bandit experimentation where the principal desires the agent to constantly switch to new arms to maximize the chance of success. The agent faces a fixed cost of switching. We show that the principal’s optimal reward scheme is maximally uncertain—the agent receives transfers for success, but their distribution has an extreme variance. Despite being stationary, the optimal reward scheme achieves the principal’s first-best outcome provided that the agent’s outside option is sufficiently valuable. Our results shed light on the non-transparent incentives used by online platforms, such as YouTube, and guide how to design incentives for creativity in such applications.
One feature of this model is that extreme uncertainty about rewards motivates project-switching, which is what the principle wants. Most projects should offer low rewards, but a small percentage of winners should offer very high rewards. In this model it is also the case that opaque bonus schemes perform better than transparent ones. As I understand this result, the principal wants the agent to keep on switching and thus does not want to offer any kind of “safe haven” where the agent can rest securely.
AP Exclusive: Google tracks your movements, like it or not
Google agreed to pay $391.5M to settle a lawsuit with 40 U.S. states over allegations that the tech giant was tracking user location data even when users had opted out. A 2018 Associated Press (AP) investigation found that the tracking issue affected as many as two billion people using Google Android devices and hundreds of millions more who used Google Maps.
More:
- The initial claims made by the AP were confirmed by research conducted by Princeton computer scientists.
- State officials involved in the suit against Google said that the company used illicitly-gained location information to target consumers with advertisements.
- State attorney generals claimed that Google misled users about location tracking practices since 2014, violating consumer protection laws.
- As part of the settlement, Google agreed to make those practices more transparent to users by showing them more information when they adjust location tracking settings.
- It will also provide a website that allows users to see what data Google is collecting about them.”
- Internal Documents Show How Close the FBI Came to Deploying Spyware
- NYTimes
- Taking down a ransomware hacker
- CBC
- A Porcelain Sink, Then Chaos: Inside the Takeover of Twitter
- NTYTimes-x2
- Latest Laughs on on Twitter?
- Lauren Weinstein collected by PGN
- FTX Bankruptcy
- NYTimes
- He was hailed as crypto's saviour. Now he needs billions for a bailout
- CBC
- TrustCor Systems
- David Lesher
- Asteroids, climate change, killer robots: A handy guide to doomsday scenarios
- *The Washington Post*
- AI computations want 250kW densities per rack
- Henry Baker
- How to get better and more reliable telecommunications services
- Fibrecoookery
- Re: The Rise of Rust
- Henry Baker
- Re: Scientists Increasingly Can't Explain How AI Works
- Henry Baker
- Re: Same New York lottery numbers drawn twice in one day
- Martin Ward
- *Dark Ships* Emerge From the Shadows of the Nord Streaam Mystery
- Gabe Goldberg
- Re: There's a good chance Meta has your contact info. Here's how to delete it
- Anthony Thorn Dick Mills
- Info on RISKS (comp.risks)
