Growing up in the bay area, George Deglin has always been in the middle of the Silicon Valley action. Having both parents being engineers, he was influenced to study Computer Science at Berkley. During that team, he co-founded a startup in the education space. After building this company up, he parted ways to start his next venture. This next venture led to the discovery of the vision for OneSignal – the most widely used Push Notification and marketing platform, sending over 5 billion messages a day.
There is a glimmer of hope that the United States may soon be able to exit its longest war. What stands in the way? Chris Preble and John Glaser explain.
There is a glimmer of hope that the United States may soon be able to exit its longest war. What stands in the way? Chris Preble and John Glaser explain.
Yep. Here it is. Let’s dive right in ... to poop. Hippo poop. Ferret poop. Octopoop. Dogs. Cats. Yours. The charming and informative Dr. Rachel Santymire -- aka Dr. Poop -- has a background in animal physiology and endocrinology and is elbow deep in dung as a research director at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Dr. Poop sits down with Alie to talk turds and how she uses poo to determine the health and stress of wild and captive animals, plus: poop vs. poo, why some animals poop pellets, muck middens, taking glitter pills, why the Bristol Stool Scale is “the best thing in the universe,” and why the Lincoln Park Zoo has 17 freezers full of dookie. You’re welcome.
Echeruo's new venture is called Love and Magic, a startup studio that helps companies of all sizes maximize their ability to innovate.
For anyone that has an idea they have been hoping to turn into a startup, Echeruo and his collaborators just introduced the Startup School of Alchemy. It's being taught at WeWork and Princeton University. It offers a six-week curriculum designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs find product-market fit.Apply with the code "stackoverflow" and you get $1000 off the course, a 40% discount.
Echeruo says his time working in finance and with Microsoft Excel was what gave him the ability to think of how data from maps could be optimized by an algorithm and built into a useful mobile app.
For those who don't know, our co-founder and Chairmam, Joel Spolsky, was part of the team at Microsoft that built Excel. Here is legendary 2015 talk, You Suck at Excel, where he organizes a spreadsheet to keep track of what he pays his Pokemon, ahem,I mean, uh, employees.
You can take a deeper dive into the backstory of how Chinedu built HopStop below, related in his own words.
I've always had difficulty with directions. When I grew up in Nigeria, I remember getting lost in my own house. It wasn’t like it was a mansion, it was a four-bedroom house.
So you can imagine how I felt when I got to NYC and had to get around with the subway and bus system! I remember walking up once to one of those blown up maps in the subway station. My nose was a feet away from the dust laden map. The subway lines looked like tangled noodles. Complexity galore!
New Yorkers used to walk around with these pocket guides—Hagstrom maps. I was going on a date in the Lower East Side. It doesn’t have the grid like the rest of the city. I got lost and was very late getting to the bar.I can't remember how, the date went but I remember what I did first thing next morning. I walked over to the subway station, grabbed a subway MAP and laid it on the floor and tried to figure it out. There’s driving directions. But there weren’t subway directions. So I was solving my own problems.
I was looking for the complete directions—leave your house, turn left, go into this particular entrance, get on this train, get off at this station, use this exit. Because I was, in a lot of ways, the ultimate user, we ended up building a product that solved the complete problem—get me from where I am now to where I need to be.
I was non-technical, I worked for a hedge fund. I may have been thinking algorithmically, I knew that this was computationally possible. But I didn’t know how to make it a reality. In conceiving the problem, I threw all the data into spreadsheets. I interned at this company when I was in college, where I learned about spreadsheets. I found the work very tedious, but I learned how to think about data, to think in tables. It allowed me to conceptualize complexity.
To conceptualize the first subway data as a spreadsheet, I started by staring at the subway map laid on the wood floor of my apartment. The most obvious features were colors, lines, and stops. So those are the tables I typed into Excel first. Then I realized the lines also represented two train directions so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized the stops served multiple subway lines, so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized some of the stops would only be active during certain periods, so I redid the spreadsheet. We kept on learning and adjusting. It took us a long time before we had a data model that robustly described NYC's subway system. We even figured out how to automatically account for the frequent weekend NYC subway diversions.
To build the first version of the app, I went to eLance, described to these computer scientists the data set in Excel, routes, stops, exits, entrances, and I sent it in. This developer in Siberia, Russia, emailed me, came up with a solution. But he turned out to be a complete genius, he built the core of the first version of Hopstop. Here I was, a Nigerian, sitting in my apartment using messenger, email, on a laptop. And I never met Alex for four years. We built Hopstop over four years without ever meeting each other.
We ran very lean. Alex did all the coding. I did the subway data and user experience. I'd have to ride to different subway stations to note each subway entrance and exit, etc. When we added the bus system, Rajeev and his data team in India helped input the bus stops and schedules. And four years later, we were purchased by Apple, so quite the ride.
Today's episode brings you our first look at the efforts by Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin to copyright "every melody ever" as part of a way of reconceptualizing copyright law as it applies to music. SPOILER: We're going to have Riehl and Rubin on the show to discuss their work in more depth. We also discuss Chevron deference and a recent dissent by Clarence Thomas that's No Laughing Matter.
We begin with a deep dive into the Riehl and Rubin "Every Melody Ever" effort, which builds upon the music copyright episodes we've previously discussed in Episode 236 ("Stairway to the Supreme Court") and Episode 288 ("More on Led Zeppelin"). What exactly are Riehl and Rubin doing, and will it put an end to copyright lawsuits against musicians? Listen and find out!
After that, we check out a case (Baldwin v. U.S.) in which the Supreme Court refused to grant certiorari -- and the dissent filed by Clarence Thomas. That prompted a headline that got some chuckles last week -- "Clarence Thomas cites Thomas in overruling Thomas" -- and we learn that (of course) this turns out to be no laughing matter, but part of a concerted effort to roll back not only a 2005 Clarence Thomas opinion, National Cable & Telecommunications Ass'n v. Brand X Internet Svcs., 545 U.S. 967 (2005), but Chevron deference itself. Find out why even the howler monkey contingent wanted to take a pass on this case -- but not Clarence Thomas!
After all that, it's time for the answer to perhaps the easiest #T3BE ever -- or is it? (It is.) And remember, you can always play along with #T3BE by sharing out the show on social media!
Appearances
None! If you’d like to have either of us as a guest on your show, drop us an email at openarguments@gmail.com.
On the Gist, 1946 was a good year for presidential births.
In the interview, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is here to discuss his new book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. He and Mike debate the meaning of decadence, Douthat’s ideas of a way out of decadence, and whether or not we just need to pivot to a different religion.
In the spiel, this Democratic nomination process sucks.
Depending on your views, far-right populism can represent a welcome return to the past , or a worrying one. The former, argues sociolinguist Ruth Wodak in this Social Science Bites podcast, is one of the hallmarks of far-right populism – a yearning for an often mythical past where the “true people” were ascendant and comfortable.
She’s termed this blurred look backward retrotopia, “a nostalgia for a past where everything was much better,” whether it was ever real or not.
Wodak, who to be clear finds herself worrying and not welcoming, offers host David Edmonds a recipe for becoming a far-right populist. In her scholarship, she’s identified four ingredients, or dimensions, to the ideology that often underlie populist far-right parties.
The most apparent from the outside is a strong national chauvinism or even nativism. This nativism is very exclusive to a specific set of insiders, who focus on creating “an anti-pluralist country, a country which is allegedly homogeneous, which has one kind of people who all speak the same language, have the same culture, or look the same. [Having] this imaginary ‘true people’ is very important.” is very, very important. Far-right populists decide who belongs and who does not belong to the ‘true people.’”
And just as important is then having a group of outsiders to cast as scapegoats responsible for major problems – making for “an easy narrative for very complex issues.” It’s probably no surprise, then, that “conspiracy theories are part and parcel of the far-right agenda. They are very supportive in constructing who is to blame, etc., for all the complex problems.”
Another ingredient is an anti-elitism that targets elites or ‘the establishment’, i.e. managers, teachers, journalists, intellectuals, liberals or your political opponents; “all the people who allegedly don’t listen to ‘us’ and who have very different interests from ‘the true people’.”
Next comes a focus on law and order (“an agenda of protecting this true people”) enforced through a hierarchal party structure. This top-down structure frequently focuses on a charismatic leader who encapsulates the spirit of the ‘true people’ – and rejects the ‘other.’ “Along with the scapegoat,” Wodak explains, “comes ‘the topos of the savior’ … the leader who will save the true American or the true Austrian or the true British people from those all dangers, they will ‘solve’ the problems, protect the people, and they promise hope.”
The final standard ingredient is endorsing conservative values and perceived cultural touchstones, such as Christianity in Europe.
This recipe matters, of course, thanks to the rise of far-right populist politics across the Americas, Europe and Asia. Wodak herself is Austrian – she’s professor in linguistics at the University of Vienna and emeritus distinguished professor and chair in Discourse Studies at Lancaster University – has seen plenty of recent natural experiments in populism throughout continental Europe.
She cites several reasons for the popularity of far-right populism, including the end of the Cold War and the resultant increase in migration from Eastern Europe into the West. Those migrants, previously seen as refugees from communism who were welcomed and even feted, morphed into unwelcome and fear-inducing interlopers (and despite being white and from Christian cultures). Around the same time, she continues, neo-liberal policies changed labor policies in the West, creating inequalities that the right could build on – just as they did in the pro-business responses to the global financial crisis of 2008 (“saving the banks instead of the people”) and globalization.
In this podcast, Wodak also discusses how right-wing populism makes use of social media, how exploiting “otherness” helps roll over self-interest, what the role of a social scientist is in exploring fraught ideologies, and how someone might counteract malign politics.
Joe Biden scores a decisive victory in the South Carolina primary, causing Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer to end their campaigns. As the last four candidates look to Super Tuesday, the Trump Administration continues to bungle the response to the growing threat of coronavirus. Then David Plouffe talks to Jon L. about what to watch for on Super Tuesday and his new book, A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump.
