Nancy Shute:
> Three studies published Monday add to multivitamins’ bad rap. One review found no benefit in preventing early death, heart disease or cancer. Another found that taking multivitamins did nothing to stave off cognitive decline with aging. A third found that high-dose multivitamins didn’t help people who had had one heart attack avoid another.
Chrys Bader on the pending demise of Facebook:
> As your Facebook network becomes saturated, it can feel very public. It puts the focus on managing your image, rather than truly bonding with people. Young startups like Snapchat are providing shelter from the institution of Facebook by serving as a place where you can express yourself comfortably. A place where you don’t feel like your every move is being watched.
He has some really good points, which can be applied more broadly than just to Facebook.
Josh Gerstein:
> “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval,” wrote Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
Hope.
Great work from Anna Hill showcasing how deceptive ads are when it comes to beauty (well and probably just about anything other ad).
I think a lot of people now realize that *every* magazine type image is photoshopped, but I don’t think many people realize just how much things are photoshopped. Or, more importantly, just how easy it is.
There are countless YouTube videos and NAPP tutorials that you can watch — all that walk you through quick and easy steps to make (usually) women look more “inline” with magazine models. Some common ones that I can think of off the top of my head (ones that would take me no more than 10 minutes to do on a slow day):
– Disproportionately scale the image size so that you shrink the width of the image by 1-2%. This gives a thinner/trimmer look to the face/body and is hard to perceive even if you know the model well in real life.
– Add a Gaussian blur over the skin to make it porcelain smooth. (For men you do the opposite, looking to add contrast and sharpness to make more pronounced “manly” stubble.)
– Obvious: remove any blemishes, moles, and stray hairs.
– Whiten teeth to match white of the eye, which the white of the eye has had most veins removed from it.
– Isolate the iris on the eye and boost the vibrancy to get more colors/contrast/pop.
– Isolate the eyes and make each one bigger.
– Isolate the lips and make each on bigger.
– Grab the liquify tool and shape to Barbie like perfection.
And on, and on…
Diane Bartz:
> Former Google Inc executive Michelle Lee has been named deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and will run the agency until a new director is named, the agency said on Wednesday.
Word in D.C. is that the USPTO is heavily shopping around LinkedIn for Samsung execs to fill the top spot.
Susan Wyatt:
> May said the TSA agent went through the bag, through the sewing supplies and found the two-inch long pistol.
> “She said ‘this is a gun,’” said May. “I said no, it’s not a gun it’s a prop for my monkey.”
> “She said ‘If I held it up to your neck, you wouldn’t know if it was real or not,’ and I said ‘really?’” said May.
Dipshits.
[John Gruber, voicing a frustration about the “rate this app” nag screens that are the scourge of iOS users][1]:
> I’ve long considered a public campaign against this particular practice, wherein I’d encourage Daring Fireball readers, whenever they encounter these “Please rate this app” prompts, to go ahead and take the time to do it — but to rate the app with just one star and to leave a review along the lines of, “One star for annoying me with a prompt to review the app.”
It’s actually hard to be an iOS user and *not* agree with Gruber here. Those screens are shitty and annoying.
I hate them with a passion.
If you have been following any iOS developers on App.net/Twitter that do these nag screens, you will have also noticed that Gruber’s post seems to have started to affect the app ratings overall for apps with nag screens. (Which was the point, as we hope it would inspire change.)
We hope we will eliminate these nags by giving bad reviews.
Except that’s only looking at the problem from *one* side of things.
### User Side
From the user perspective: you took time to download this app and therefore should be able to use it without being nagged to death to rate the app.
This is only logical.
As a user you also expect a stable app that is given regular updates and improvements. Again, not wholly unreasonable.
Mostly, you just want to use the app when and how you want to and then get on with your life.
### Developer Side
Developers *need* to get their apps into the hands of as many users as possible to fund the future development of apps.
Developers also know that people are unlikely to buy poorly rated apps, and that not everyone reads blogs about apps to stay abreast of what is best. Therefore developers need good ratings to fulfill the first obligation of sales/downloads and thus the nag screen.
There’s no more evil to it than that, with developers feeling like it is a small ask of their users. Again, not wholly unreasonable.
## Opposing Forces
This is where the problem exists. The developers have every incentive in the world to cause a user a *minor* annoyance and ask users to rate the app via nag screen. The developer figures this minor annoyance is worth it for the user because it indirectly helps the developer continue to work on the app.
More ratings = more installs = more money = more time spent developing the app = benefits to users. Everyone wins…
It’s rather simple. And in that vein it is in the best interest of the user in the long-term.
Except the user’s priorities don’t align with this thinking. The user faces a few problems with nag dialogs that aren’t typically expressed in the developer perspective:
1. *Your* app isn’t the only one nagging them to review. In fact, if it was just one app every once and a while nagging the users, then users would likely never care — but it’s not just one app every once and a while. Actually *most* apps, most of the time, are nagging thus creating a feeling of *constantly being nagged*. It’s like driving a school bus: what’s the harm in *one* student asking “are we there yet?” There’s no harm in that, but the fact is that once one student asks they all ask, and then you just pull the bus over and walkaway from those little brats.
2. The user has to stop their day. Think about that, especially if your app is designed to help the user accomplish something faster/better/easier. You, the developer, are asking your user to forgo the potential “productivity” benefits of your app, stop, head over to the App Store, write a few words, sign in, agree to new terms, sign in again, pick a star rating, and submit. It’s not a minor annoyance, it’s typically a big pain in the ass that takes real time.
The simple fix is for Apple to allow submitting reviews from inside an app. That’d be great and simple.
But that’s not reality today, and we need to deal with reality.
It’s not fair for users to review apps one star based on the fact there was a nag screen from rating the app. We should *all* agree on this.
But it’s also not fair for developers to nag users to review their app based on the fact that “it’s vital to development and doesn’t take any time”. Again, we should *all* agree on this.
I think a better strategy is this: If you don’t like nag screens and an app nags you, don’t rate that app, but pencil in some time once a week to rate one app you like that never nags you.
It’s a matter of punishment versus reward. I think, in this case, rewarding those that don’t nag is better than punishing those that do nag.
### Side Note About Push Notifications
But, with all that said, fuck those people that abuse push notifications. Slaughter them in reviews.
[1]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/12/05/eff-your-review
John Carey is now selling prints of his images and I now cannot decide which one(s) to buy.
Ashkan Soltani, Andrea Peterson, and Barton Gellman:
> Apps transmit their locations to Google and other Internet companies because ads tied to a precise physical location can be more lucrative than generic ads. But in the process, they appear to tip off the NSA to a mobile device’s precise physical location. That makes it easier for the spy agency to engage in the sophisticated tracking techniques the Post described in a story Dec. 4.
It makes perfect sense for the NSA to use data from cookies to track targets, because ,as the article says, nearly everyone has a Google cookie on their machine. This site serves three: WordPress (I think there may be two here, one for WP stats and another for your login/remember me), Mint (self-hosted analytics), and Go Squared. I am now considering removing all three, especially since I don’t need the stats to show advertisers. ((I mostly use stats to see who is linking in to me, and how well received each post is.))
There are many options for limiting how many cookies your computer stores, but it does break some websites and at the very least is fairly annoying. It’d be less profitable if Google removed the unique ID, but it is the best thing they can do for users.
Ellen Nakashima:
> Morale has taken a hit at the National Security Agency in the wake of controversy over the agency’s surveillance activities, according to former officials who say they are dismayed that President Obama has not visited the agency to show his support.
Maybe if their PowerPoint slides weren’t so fucking bad President Obama would put them up on the fridge and everyone could feel better.
For this month only, you can get the yearly membership option on this site for $30 a year. That’s a $10 savings right to your wallet.
*(Also, you are welcomed to upgrade from monthly membership to yearly and get the $30 price. Just cancel your membership, stay logged in and go to the join page. Select the new membership and enter the info asked. You should now be rolled over. However you won’t get a refund for any partial month stuff.)*
Thank God for baseball season again. Dave Cameron:
> It could also be a total disaster, though. If the other moves don’t come together, or simply aren’t enough to turn a bad team into a good team, the Mariners could easily have the best second baseman in baseball surrounded by a supporting cast that still doesn’t leave them with a better than .500 club. And this team is very vulnerable to injuries, especially to either Cano or Hernandez, who represent a huge chunk of the team’s chances of contention. A prolonged DL stint by either one probably sinks their season.
I hate long contracts. Five years seems like far too long for baseball. (But salary and contract lengths have gotten crazy.) I hope this works out, but then again, Mariners.
Go Ms?
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani:
> The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
Here’s the fun part:
> NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said.
$39 a month, or $399 a year.
*Good luck with that.*
Ewen MacAskill, James Ball and Katharine Murphy:
> Australia’s surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
> The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share “medical, legal or religious information”, and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.
*See*, it’s not *just* the United States acting all shady.
Angelica Leicht:
> What Linda is doing here is infuriating. There are people donating to her that don’t realize she’s full of shit. People who have good intentions and big hearts and are attempting to make a difference in the life of a person who, by the sound of it, is living in some pretty dire surroundings. But folks, these are made-up dire surroundings. Stop giving her money.
Shane Cole:
> For every $1.00 in app download revenue earned by iOS developers, their Android counterparts earn just $0.19, according to data compiled by Business Insider. The gap for up-front and in-app purchases is slightly narrower, with Android bringing in $0.43 for every $1.00 on iOS, while advertising revenue is the closest at $0.77 on the dollar.
The source is, erm, *questionable* — but that’s a huge disparity even if the data is only close.
Some solid plugins here, recommended by David Sparks no less. Just started using these and now I’m happy to snag them in a bundle.
Eric Jaffe:
> In the iPad condition, the endowment effect thrived. On average, test participants using the tablet wanted to sell their item for significantly more than those using the laptop (roughly $213 to $154). Pressing a finger against a digital image on a fake website in a laboratory–that’s all it took to make people feel like they owned an item, and to value it more as a result.
So, perhaps, the smartest way to save money this “Black Friday” is to *not* use an iPad. I’m screwed.
Ian Crouch:
> What you call the looming storm threatening the East Coast this Thanksgiving week depends on where you get your weather news. If it comes from the several platforms of the Weather Channel, then you know that the storm has a name, Boreas (the Greek god of the cold north wind), and so are most likely referring to it accordingly. If you get your forecasts elsewhere, then you are probably using some variant of “that shitty storm” as you nervously eye your holiday travel plans.