Augmented Reality for the Ears: Sharing Music

Don't do this, but idea is interesting.  Might also be used to share presentations and comments on them.

Augmented Reality Is Coming for Your Ears, Too

By Wired, August 20, 2021

Sharing your earbuds with somebody is, in every important aspect, gross. There must be a compelling reason to want to wedge another person's waxy nub into your external auditory meatus. Such as love, or an unbearably long flight with no other options (the two are not mutually exclusive). Or a shared experience that demands, in some way, that two or more people hear the same audio tracks simultaneously.

For entrepreneur Jonathan Wegener, it was a culmination of events that led him to build a new app that requires shared AirPods. Back in the early 2010s, when Wegener was building the memory app TimeHop, he was also digging Improv Everywhere's Mp3 Experiments in New York, a "participatory audio experience" that delivered coordinated movement instructions to thousands of people wearing headphones. He deemed the Mp3 Experiment "mind-blowingly cool," both private and communal: A voice whispering in your ear, a sense of camaraderie with strangers as you participate in the same public performance.

Then, several years later, Apple's AirPods came out, and Wegener, like millions of others, was stunned by the effortless, wireless audio they offered. He watched two friends in Greece, a couple, split a pair of AirPods so they could listen to music together.

So he started building his next thing: PairPlay, a clever if obvious play on Apple's "AirPlay." It's an iOS app that guides partners, friends, or kids through imagined scenarios within their own homes. It's part of a larger trend in which audio-focused entrepreneurs are taking advantage of a perfect storm of technology—from increasingly sophisticated processors to sensors that track people's movements to personal devices that can deliver remarkably good sound.

From Wired   View Full Article 

How and Why to Share Scientific Code

Rarely done this consistently, but it is a useful approach to follow.   Add it to a review and follow up of results.   Plans for maintaining models.  

How and why to share scientific code

A simple guide to reproducible research without becoming a software engineer

By Nathan C. Frey

When you do an experiment, whether that’s in a lab or on a computer, you generate data that needs to be analyzed. If your analysis involves new methods, algorithms, or simulations, you probably wrote some code along the way. Scientific code is designed to be quick to write, easy for the writer to use, and never looked at again after the project is complete (maybe designed is a strong word).

For many scientists, packaging their code involves a lot of work and no reward. I want to share a few obvious benefits and some that are hopefully non-obvious. After that, I’ll give some tips for how to share your code as painlessly as possible without detouring into becoming a software engineer. If you want a simple example of what the finished product will look like, check out my repos for Python Topological Materials or Positive and Unlabeled Materials Machine Learning.

The benefits of sharing scientific code

Encourage reproducibility. As soon as a method has more than one step (click the big red button) or a data analysis pipeline is more complex than “we divided all the numbers by this number,” it becomes unlikely that other scientists will be able to really explore what you did. If you developed a set of instructions to process or generate your data, you wrote a program, whether you wrote it down in code or not. It’s much more natural to share that program than to only write out what you did in your paper.  ... " 

Why Consumers Are Willing to Share Personal Information on Smartphones

Intriguing difference between phones and laptops. 

Why Consumers Are Willing to Share Personal Information on Smartphones

Wharton’s Shiri Melumad speaks with Wharton Business Daily on Sirius XM about why consumers share personal information on smartphones.

Nearly everyone has experienced some version of phubbing, a term to describe being snubbed by someone who is more engrossed in their smartphone screen than the conversation or activity taking place in front of them. These powerful little devices have changed virtually everything about human communication, including the way we interact with each other. New research from Wharton marketing professors Shiri Melumad and Robert Meyer finds that people are more willing to share deeper and more personal information when communicating on a smartphone compared with a personal computer. In their paper, “Full Disclosure: How Smartphones Enhance Consumer Self-Disclosure,” the professors explain that it’s the device that makes all the difference. Smartphones are always at hand, and their tiny screens and keypads require laser-focused attention, which means the user is more likely to block out other concerns.

The findings are important for marketers looking to make the most out of user-generated content, especially the kind that can be shared with other potential customers. “The more personal and intimate nature of smartphone-generated reviews results in content that is more persuasive to outside readers, in turn heightening purchase intentions,” the professors write in their paper. Melumad recently joined the Wharton Business Daily radio show on Sirius XM to discuss the research. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

An edited transcript of the conversation follows. ..."

Sharing with a Core Scientific Data Model

With data getting more complex, and havig to include many aspects of context-specific metadata, sharing it efficiently can be messy.  In our experience the integration of needed metadata can be problematic.

Simplifying How Scientists Share Data    By Ohio State News

Their system is designed to share complex datasets easily, without massive files, and without losing metadata.   Researchers have created a new open-source data-management system for scientists, in the hope the system might make collaboration easier.

Researchers at The Ohio State University, Denmark's University of Aarhus, and France's University of Orléans have developed an open-source data-management system that will help scientists share data with each other.

The system, called the "Core Scientific Data Model," is designed to share complex datasets easily, without massive files that take up a lot of bandwidth and hard drive space, and without losing metadata.

The researchers built the software, uploaded it to the web, and made the code open-source, with the goal of creating a simple, free way to combine multiple types of data into one place.

Said Ohio State researcher Deepansh Srivastava, "Instead of looking for data and plucking it from datasets, if we could simply export it as this one file type – as a core scientific data file type – we'd be able to work in a common system."

From Ohio State News

Assigning Machines to Tasks

Interesting question when we start to share work.  How is it most effectively done?   Thoughts from Kellogg linked to at the short Podcast linked to below.   But  I would offer that machines are still too simplistic to do this well.   Until now we have just applied them where they work best.

Podcast: How You Should Divvy Up Work between People and Machines

On this episode of The Insightful Leader: strategies for building a happier, more productive workplace.

Machines are taking on more and more new responsibilities at work. But are some jobs better left to humans?

On this episode of The Insightful Leader, Adam Waytz, associate professor of management and organizations at Kellogg and author of the book The Power of Human: How Our Shared Humanity Can Help Us Create a Better World, offers three guidelines for how managers can play to the unique strengths of both people and technology.    ... " 

Facebook to Allow Users to Upload Photos to Google

Sharing Photos among services. I think the main problem will be consumers will not understand the implications, given that different services treat security differently.   Also variance in global regulation.  Here first in the UK.

Facebook to let users upload all photos to Google in BBC
Facebook has launched a tool that will enable members to transfer photos and videos they have uploaded to the platform to Google Photos.

The service would initially roll out in Ireland and then, in 2020, across the world, Facebook said.

It also said it planned to include other services in future as part of its commitment to "data portability".  The Open Rights Group campaign welcomed the move but said it needed to extend beyond the technology giants.

'Rogue actors'
"It's important that Facebook and other companies allow you to move data about," said ORG director Jim Killock.

"It's critical that this kind of portability is not just for a handful of global giants, if it is going to encourage competition.    "There will also be potential privacy issues with data portability as users will potentially take risks when they move data to third parties, so companies and regulators will need to develop ways that deal with rogue actors."  ....' 

Facebook posts about potential security risks:   https://engineering.fb.com/security/data-transfer-project/   Data Transfer Project: Enabling portability of photos and videos between services.

Leadership Style and Getting People to Share

Is leadership stifling innovation and problem solving?   And a solution.

How Your Leadership Style Could Be Stifling Innovation and Problem Solving at Your Company  There's a reason fewer innovative ideas come up as your company grows.     Karin Hurt and David Dye write in Entrepreneur

Colleague Michael Schrage's HBR article is quoted:
A few years back, I helped a large, very compartmentalized and extremely silo-ed global organization launch an internal competition. Its goal was to promote greater sharing of ideas, information, best practice and innovative processes. Leadership recognized that business units and functions had effectively been allowed to ignore the rest of the enterprise. Significant opportunities and resources were left underexplored or untouched. They wanted to signal a cultural change but weren’t prepared to spend millions — or even hundreds of thousands — to achieve it.

The design was simple, clever and cheap: top management would recognize and reward people who demonstrated an ability to cross-functionally get real value from their colleagues and cohorts. We created two complementary yet competitive awards: “Thief of the Month” — a modest prize and high-profile internal acknowledgement for teams and small groups who “stole” an idea or innovation from another unit and successfully incorporated it into their own business; and “We Wuz Robbed” — a comparably modest prize and recognition for having one’s group’s best practice or process adopted by another internal group.

Dual prizes created a symmetrical “marketplace” where employees were simultaneously encouraged not just to look for interesting ideas to “steal” but to think about which of their own best practices deserved wider internal promotion. The competition thus incented both “supply” and “demand” of knowledge worth sharing. ... "

Linkedin Elevate for Enterprise Content Sharing

Interesting play.  Talked to them about this when in the enterprise.  My own experience with Linkedin, primarily with Groups and Mail, is that Linkedin has an awkward information management methodology, especially with media like images, Web and video resources.   Please fix this, Linkedin is so universal, it needs to be good.   They have much improved mobile sharing experience,  but still very different experiences on different devices.

See also announcement in the Linkedin blog.  Will take a closer look.

In Adage:  LinkedIn Rolls Out Elevate Content-Sharing Platform

Companies Including Visa, Unilever and CEB Are Early Customers

LinkedIn today is rolling out Elevate, a content curation and social sharing platform, designed to help enterprises turn their employees into brand advocates. .... LinkedIn first announced Elevate in April, and its early customers have included Visa, Unilever and CEB.  .... "Elevate enables employee advocacy at scale," he added. "Now employers have an entire employee base to be activated so they can share content across their social and professional networks." .... 

The subscription-based service is aimed at companies with 2,000 or more employees, and is available on desktop or via mobile app. It provides a platform that lets companies curate content from internal and external sources on the web, categorize content, set up guidelines about social sharing, give employees access to content, and measure the impact of content sharing on various metrics, from profile views to company page views. .... " 

Shareology: Why we Share and How We Can do it Better

Reading Bryan Kramer's new book  Shareology: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy. Addresses sharing among humans in general, and also why I run a blog and am interested in what I do.  So far a very good and surprisingly up to date book.   It maps some of my own experiences.  Will review further when I complete it.

The Sharer: New Blog on Search and Knowledge

A new blog by colleague Sundar Kadayam of Zakta. that I am following: " ... I am a technology entrepreneur. I have more than 23 years of experience in the software industry. I have been fortunate to be involved with many successful, award-winning products and industry-firsts. In 2007, I founded Zakta, where I work as its CEO. Zakta’s mission is to deliver Web search for YOU and people YOU trust. Zakta makes searching more purposeful by helping you find information faster, keep what you find and collaborate with others. SearchTeam.com, by Zakta, is the world’s first real-time collaborative search engine ... " .  

See also some of his novel collaborative search work at Zakta.com.