Beware of pickpockets

The Financial Times published a masterclass with pickpocket James Freedman 

Freedman's five tips for avoiding pickpockets:

1. Carry your Oyster card or travel ticket separately to avoid flashing your wallet or purse unnecessarily.
 

2. Don’t stand near the doors on a bus or train. These are prime spots for pickpockets.
 

3. Pickpockets often hang around near “Beware of Pickpockets” signs and then watch people instinctively tap their pockets, to pinpoint the valuables.
 

4. Don’t use the same PIN for all your bank cards and your phone.
 

5. Don’t keep your driving licence with your credit cards. Losing your cards is bad enough without giving the thief your address, full name and date of birth too
 

More on pickpocketing: this excellent profile of Apollo Robbins in The New Yorker, and a few links that are still relevant.

A cookbook from IBM's Watson

Robots taking all the jobs, cooking edition:

Steve Abrams, the director of IBM’s Watson Life research program, told Quartz that Watson scanned publicly available data sources to build up a vast library of information on recipes, the chemical compounds in food, and common pairings. (For any budding gastronomers out there, Abrams said Wikia was a surprisingly useful source.) Knowledge that might’ve taken a lifetime for a Michelin-starred chef to attain can now be accessed instantly from your tablet.
 

What separates Watson from the average computer (or chef) is its ability to find patterns in vast amounts of data. It’s essentially able figure out, through sheer repetition, what combinations of compounds and cuisines work together. This leads to unusual pairings, like Waton’s apple kebab dish, which has some odd ingredients: “Strawberries and mushrooms share a lot of flavor compounds,” Abrams said. “It turns out they go quite well together.”
 

The researchers are publishing a cookbook with recipe ideas from Watson, and it releases this Tuesday: Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson: Recipes for Innovation from IBM & the Institute of Culinary Education. I have not read the book, but some of the recipes sound intriguing (“Belgian bacon pudding, a desert containing dried porcini mushrooms”) while others sound, at best, like clever wordplay (“the shrimp cocktail, which is a beverage with actual shrimp in it”). Regardless, I'm purchasing a copy just out of sheer curiosity. Let's hope they turn this resource into an app or service instead of a book, I blame Watson's vanity for wanting this in the outdated format of a book.

To the extent that standout recipes and flavor pairings are a matter of pattern recognition, there's no reason a computer, with its infinitely more scalable hardware and software for that purpose, couldn't match or exceed a human. And, so, a variant of the infinite monkey theorem: given enough time, a computer will write the French Laundry cookbook (and win a third Michelin star).

To be clear, I'm okay with this. I just want to eat tasty food, I'm fine with employing computers to come up with more amazing things to feed me.

For now, however, the computer still requires a human to actually prepare the recipe. In a true demonstration of how far artificial intelligence has progressed, no sufficiently advanced computer wants the drudgery of life as a line chef. Better profits in cookbooks than restaurants anyway.

A new cooking show concept already comes to mind: Top Freestyle Chef. Like freestyle chess, in freestyle cooking competitors would consist of a human or a human consulting with a computer. I am ready to program this into my DVR already, as long as they don't replace Padma Lakshmi with a robot host. I'm as big a fan of artificial intelligence and robots as the next guy, but I think we're a long way from replacing this.

Trim the fat on the NBA schedule

Tonight, the Boston Celtics crushed the Cleveland Cavaliers. Of course, the Cavs played without Lebron James, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, and J.R. Smith? Why? Because the Cavs had clinched the second seed in the East and so the games really don't matter to them anymore.

Years ago, David Stern fined the Spurs for not even bringing Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili or Danny Green to Miami for the last game of a road trip. Granted, that was earlier in the season, and Stern said the fine was because they didn't inform the media and league far enough in advance that those players wouldn't be there, but let's be honest, the strategy in each case was the same: rest your best players for the playoffs, when it really matters.

Greg Popovich is by far the best coach in the NBA, and he's just doing something more teams should do. If your ultimate goal is to win in the post season, resting your players during the regular season makes all sorts of sense, especially if home court advantage is diminishing. Lebron took a self-imposed sabbatical of a couple weeks mid-season this year, mostly because he was tired. This might become an annual tradition for him, and why not? He came back noticeably fresher and the Cavs have been on fire ever since. As he ages, he should preserve the best of his remaining minutes for the highest leverage moments. The regular season falls below that cut line. 

Of course, if you're a fan who paid several hundred dollars or more for your seats, only to find one or both teams resting their best players that night, you might have a different idea of just how wonderful a strategy that is. One reason I've stopped attending many NBA regular season games is that even when both teams are at full strength, the intensity is often noticeably throttled down. Given the steep price of a half-decent seat these days, a regular season NBA game often isn't a great entertainment value. I'd rather spend a lot to see one playoff game than spend the same amount to see three or four middling regular season games.

A better solution would be to shorten the number of games in the regular season. Everyone knows it's too long, even if they won't admit it publicly. As always with professional sports, it's doubtful the owners, league, and players would be willing to forego the additional revenue from all those superfluous games. But if more and more players like Lebron just choose to watch games from the sidelines in their three piece suits, as if they were taking “personal days” in the business world, perhaps the league will try to save face and pare back the schedule. During Lebron's sabbatical this season he wasn't even at all the games he missed, he spent some of that time vacationing in Miami. Why was he even on the bench tonight? What if he were posting photos to Instagram from Drake's set at Coachella tonight instead?

If the NBA won't shorten its regular season (let's be honest, they won't), perhaps on days when the teams choose to just sit their stars, the league should give some of the ticket revenue back to fans in the form of a credit towards concessions and the gift shop, or towards a future game. Or perhaps even offer a partial refund.

Can you imagine purchasing a ticket ahead of time to see Furious 7, only to arrive at the theater to be told that Vin Diesel is taking that night's showing off because he is feeling beaten up from all the movie's stunt work?

“The role of Dom Toretto will be played tonight by Mr. Diesel's understudy, former American Idol contestant Chris Daughtry.”

Skipping the web

Why India's Flipkart abandoned its mobile website:

Now, if you tack on a gigantic population with miserable internet connection speeds, the prospect of scaling up your website operations and back end to deal with not only the overload on it, but also the abysmal experience on the consumer end, whether it is mobile or desktop, is even more bleak. An app allows a user to stay logged in while updates and other information are efficiently and constantly downloaded, ready for consumption almost instantly. It is, in fact, perfect for low-bandwidth situations.
 

People often write of places like India or Africa bypassing landlines or PCs to skip ahead to technologies like wireless or smartphones, but I haven't heard of countries treating the web as one of those intermediate technologies to be hopped over.

Having spent lots of time working out of China, I see the sense in it. Internet connection speeds are really slow there, and loading the web can be painful. Even with an upgraded pipe into the building, when I worked out of Hulu's Beijing office, I found myself browsing the web a lot less simply out of impatience.

Having grown up in the U.S., the web was one of the first and still longest-running touchpoint to the internet. My first was using newsgroups in college, and the web came about towards the end of my undergrad days. I can understand why so many in the U.S. are nostalgic and defensive of the web as a medium. Seeing so much content and online interaction move behind the walls of social networks seems like an epic tragedy to many, and I empathize.

Many people in India, China, and other parts of the world, where bandwidth is low and slow, and where mobile phones are their one and only computer, have no room for such sentimentality. They may never have experienced the same heyday of the web, so they feel no analogous nostalgia for it as a medium. Path dependence matters here, as it does in lots of areas of tech, and one of the best ways to detect it is to widen your geographic scope of study outside the U.S. Asia is a wonderful comparison group, especially for me because I have so many friends and relatives there and because I still interact with them online at a decent frequency.

In the U.S., many tech companies were lauded as pioneers for going mobile first when in Asia companies are already going mobile only. In some ways, Asia feels like it lives in the past as compared to the U.S., especially when one sees so many fast followers of successful U.S. technology companies, but in a surprisingly large number of ways, Asia lives in our near future.

Fiction's willful ignorance of tech

“And I just don’t know how to write a novel in which the characters can get in touch with all the other characters at any moment. I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of cellphones. I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters. So I have to stand on my head to contrive a plot in which the characters lose their cellphone and are separated from technology.”
 

Ann Patchett on one of the chief problems of novel-writing today. The internet has disrupted lots of things, and one of those is dramatic information asymmetry. 

Steve Himmer on one popular solution for fiction writers:

In literary fiction, the more popular solution seems to be relying on settings close to the present, but far enough back to avoid such inconvenience. Granted, the popularity of the 1970s, 1980s, and early-1990s as settings also owes plenty to generational shifts in literary production as people write about formative periods and the years they remember. But it also avoids any number of narrative problems and allows writers to go on telling stories in the way they are used to, rather than incorporating the present in ways that are difficult and disruptive. When I recently wondered on Twitter — one of those very disruptions — if we’ve reached the point of needing a term for this kind of setting, author Jared Yates Sexton suggested “the nostalgic present.” And while it’s easy enough to incorporate mention of that into this essay, where might a tweet fit into a novel? As dialogue, formatted like any other character’s utterance? Or embedded with timestamp and retweet count and all? What happens when our characters spend half their novel on Twitter, as so many of us spend our workdays? It’s a hard question, but not one that gets answered when writers aspire to be more like Andras Schiff than Lukas Kmit.
 

Himmer goes on to urge more writers to embrace the technology of today and incorporate it into their fiction, and I'm with him. It strikes me as lazy screenwriting when they incorporate one of those old school answering machines just so the audience can hear what message is being left. I haven't seen one of those in ages. If it's meant to be a message missed, show us the person as they leave the message so we can hear it. If we're meant to see the recipient read as they hear the voicemail, give us the audio as the person listens to the voice message.

Younger fiction writers, in particular, have a great opportunity here. Embrace the massive role that all this technology plays in our lives and teach readers about how it is affecting us and how we might cope. Novels are supposed to, among other things, illuminate the human condition. No one using all this technology should feel any less human, but the absence of technology in art leaves an odd temporal void in which we can only travel to the past or the future or, as Sexton suggests in the passage above, the nostalgic present.