There is only one more stage in the 2020 Tour de France, but there’s still time to catch up on the action before the final leg.
Here’s how to get up to speed on this year’s race, the sport, and the history of the tour:
Watch or read to learn the rules of the race, what the green, polka dot & white jerseys mean, and why the overall winner may not win a single stage of the race.
Stage info including distances, elevation, and routes, can be found on the Tour de France website (spoilers if you’re catching up, each stage shows the winner).
You can follow many of the riders on Strava, and realize how much faster they are than you.
Watch extended race highlights (without spoilers in the video preview) on the NBC Sports YouTube channel. The 20 to 30 minute recaps make for a riveting daily tv series. Plus, Phil Liggett is a legend, and his commentary with Bob Roll will make you consider watching each stage in full.
The Tour de France channel also has race highlights, but they include the stage winner in the video title and thumbnail, so it ruins the fun of not knowing who wins before watching.
The history of the race, and its most renown scandal, is well told through the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, LANCE. While the Tour de France is exhilarating to watch, there is always a hint of controversy lingering in the background, and this doc helps explain that feeling of uneasiness.
This made quite the ruffle today when Google transferred the domain duck.com to the privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo.
Google’s ownership of Duck.com was previously a source of frustration for DuckDuckGo, when it would redirect users to Google’s rival homepage instead of DuckDuckGo. Google kindly tried to clear up this confusion in July by adding a DuckDuckGo link to the page. Visiting Duck.com now redirects users straight to DuckDuckGo.
The New York Times released a report (with some fancy graphics) detailing location data use by apps for advertising, outside the main purpose of the app. Only 10 apps were covered in depth, but the findings reveal how some advertising companies aggregate location data from apps.
It is increasingly difficult to trust someone calling from a phone call you don’t recognize. Not only are scammers calling from numbers that seem to be in your area, but they are also impersonating family members in distress.
The dirty little secret about elder exploitation is that almost 60 percent of cases involve a perpetrator who is a family member,according to a 2014 studyby Lachs and others, an especially fraught situation where victims are often unwilling, or unable, to seek justice. Such manipulation sometimes involves force or the threat of force
This trick has been around for a while, but there are new defenses available to guard against the scam.
On Feb. 5, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an industry body, put into effect “the first uniform, national standards to protect senior investors.” It now requires members to try to obtain a trusted contact’s information so they can discuss account activity. It also permits firms to place temporary holds on disbursements if exploitation is suspected.
Interesting idea; a two person authentication for account transactions, but it still may be easy to beat the system.
Loewy, who left her job as a prosecutor in 2014 to join EverSafe, a startup that makes software to monitor suspicious account activity, is underwhelmed by the industry projects.
“They may say they’re focused on it, but they aren’t really doing much more than training employees,” she says. “Exploiters know what they’re doing. They take amounts under $10,000 that they know won’t get picked up by fraud and risk folks at banks. And they steal across institutions over time.”
In his post Nobody is immune to ads, Georges Abi-Heila explores the psychology of how humans react to the barrage of brands and ads we see every day.
There’s no scientific consensus on the number of ads we’re exposed to daily, as estimates vary from a few hundreds to thousands. Why is it so hard to get a reasonable figure? Because it depends on a variety of factors that greatly affect the final result (sorted by level of importance):
What is considered an ad? Including brand labels and logos can increase 10x the final result. Think about every time you pass by a brand name in a supermarket, the label on everything you wear, the condiments in your fridge, the cars on the highway… Where does the subject live? The denser your living environment, the more ads you’re exposed to as companies fiercely compete for your attention (and, ultimately, your wallet). Visual pollution is one of the drawbacks of living in big city… What is the subject’s job? During work hours, a hotel receptionist sees a lot less ads than a truck driver which is less exposed than a social media manager.
Want to see an interesting example? Have an iPhone? Ignore for a moment all the brands you see from the icons on your home screen, this one is more subtle. What does it say in the top left corner?Â
So every time you pick up your phone you are served an ad for your cell carrier. Why does it exist? Do you frequently forget you are on the AT&T network?
It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”
. . .
“It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them,” Mr. Harari said. “They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.”
. . .
He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale
The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying. It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them. As he writes in his introduction: “What are today’s greatest challenges and most important changes? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?”
The Exponent podcast is back! And there’s a lot of news regarding pressure to change existing App Store pricing models.
it seems incredibly worrisome to me anytime any company predicates its growth story on rent-seeking: it’s not that the growth isn’t real, but rather that the pursuit is corrosive on whatever it was that made the company great in the first place. That is a particularly large concern for Apple: the company has always succeeded by being the best; how does the company maintain that edge when its executives are more concerned with harvesting profits from other companies’ innovations?
Plus, after shipping Fortnite outside of the Google Play Store, Epic Games is moving in on Steam with a new game store and taking a smaller cut of sales.
Developers receive 88% of revenue. There are no tiers or thresholds. Epic takes 12%. And if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%.
I believe that one reason podcasts have exploded is that they carry so much friction: They’re long and messy, they often take weeks or months to produce, they’re hard to clip and share and skim — and as a result, they’re calmer, more human, more judicious, less crazy-making.
Writing . . . is full of friction. It’s hard and slow, and the words on the page fall short of the music and clarity I imagined they’d have. But it is, in the end, rewarding. It’s where I have at least a chance to create something worth creating. The work is worth it.
Richard Freed is a child psychologist who focuses on helping families work through “extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media.”
Preteen and teen girls refuse to get off their phones, even though it’s remarkably clear that the devices are making them miserable. I also see far too many boys whose gaming obsessions lead them to forgo interest in school, extracurricular activities, and anything else productive. Some of these boys, as they reach their later teens, use their large bodies to terrorize parents who attempt to set gaming limits. A common thread running through many of these cases is parent guilt, as so many are certain they did something to put their kids on a destructive path.
Kids might be struggling with technology, but adults may also act like children if older folks had to go a day without technology. Maybe we should all take a digitaldetox.
Captology
BJ Fogg directs the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. There is tons of research and design practices used by today’s most popular apps, websites, and games, but we can still use this newfound power for good. Although, whether good or bad, the techniques are still shaping human behavior without consent.
Fogg’s website also has lately undergone a substantial makeover, as he now seems to go out of his way to suggest his work has benevolent aims, commenting, “I teach good people how behavior works so they can create products & services that benefit everyday people around the world.” Likewise, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab website optimistically claims, “Persuasive technologies can bring about positive changes in many domains, including health, business, safety, and education. We also believe that new advances in technology can help promote world peace in 30 years.”
Why don’t we make it easy for kids and adults to spend their time doing the things society deems productive. Part of the challenge is exposing kids to new opportunities and experiences to help them understand their real world potential, even at their age.
While persuasion techniques work well on adults, they are particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain. “Video games, better than anything else in our culture, deliver rewards to people, especially teenage boys,” says Fogg. “Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second.” And it’s persuasive design that’s helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.
According to B.J. Fogg, the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers. Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.” Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use. Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications urging users to view friends’ pictures, telling them they are missing out while not on the social network, or suggesting that they check — yet again — to see if anyone liked their post or photo.
It seems we should be able to reframe the three motivation, ability, and triggers behavioral factors into a more productive framing of inspiration, capability, and reinforcement. For example, a kid who enjoys watching YouTube creators may be inspired to make a channel of their own. YouTube, influencers, or another service, can help kids build their movie making capabilities. Feedback on work can help reinforce learning and growth. In the end, kids are still spending time where they want to, but the behavioral model focuses on a healthy balance of creation and consumption leading to development in modern day, “real world capabilities”.
Mostly terrifying
the startup Dopamine Labs boasts about its use of persuasive techniques to increase profits: “Connect your app to our Persuasive AI [Artificial Intelligence] and lift your engagement and revenue up to 30% by giving your users our perfect bursts of dopamine,” and “A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.”
Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”
Facebook Messenger Kids
How has the consumer tech industry responded to these calls for change? By going even lower. Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”
Facebook’s narrow-minded vision of childhood is reflective of how out of touch the social network and other consumer tech companies are with the needs of an increasingly troubled generation. The most “exciting thing” for young children should be spending time with family, playing outside, engaging in creative play, and other vital developmental experiences — not being drawn into the social media vortex on phones or tablets. Moreover, Facebook Messenger Kids is giving an early start to the wired life on social media that we know poses risks of depression and suicide-related behavior for older children.
In response to the release of Facebook’s Messenger Kids, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) sent Facebook a letter signed by numerous health advocates calling on the company to pull the plug on the app. Facebook has yet to respond to the letter and instead continues to aggressively market Messenger Kids for young children.
Conscious workflows vs impulsive habits
President John F. Kennedy’s prescient guidance: He said that technology “has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.”
Workflows are arguably more important than your high-level habits when it comes to impacting how effectively you produce valuable things (my preferred definition of “productivity”), but they’re a topic that’s often ignored.
Indeed, for most people, the workflows that drive their professional life are processes that haphazardly arose without much intention or consideration.
This fall, in other words, consider spending some serious time evaluating your workflows before turning your attention to the habits that help you deal with the obligations these flows generate.
Technology gives us the tools to do more. It’s up to us to decide how we leverage our new powers.
The best analogy I’ve ever heard is Scientific American, I think it was, did a study in the early 70s on the efficiency of locomotion, and what they did was for all different species of things in the planet, birds and cats and dogs and fish and goats and stuff, they measured how much energy does it take for a goat to get from here to there. Kilocalories per kilometer or something, I don’t know what they measured. And they ranked them, they published the list, and the Condor won. The Condor took the least amount of energy to get from here to there. Man was didn’t do so well, came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list.
But fortunately someone at Scientific American was insightful enough to test a man with a bicycle, and man with a bicycle won. Twice as good as the Condor, all the way off the list. And what it showed was that man is a toolmaker, has the ability to make a tool to amplify an inherent ability that he has. And that’s exactly what we’re doing here.
Additional reading
BJ Fogg commented on the article and provided a list of his works to raise awareness about the ethics of persuasive tech.
A recent Atlantic article, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?,” by Dr. Jean Twenge
Stratechery article on Tech’s Two Philosophies:Â Some problems are best solved by human ingenuity; others by collective action
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9276345/jbareham_170916_2000_0088.jpg)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9597629/jbareham_171101_2099_A_0104.jpg)
Ryan's Blog 