Tag: AMZ LINK

Pluralistic Ignorance and Theranos

Wikipedia
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance is a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but incorrectly assume that most others accept it, and therefore go along with it.This is also described as “no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes“.

Bad Blood, John Carreyrou
page 45 –
“He told himself that if the company was moving to prime Palo Alto office space, then it must be doing something right.”

page 199 –
“George said a top surgeon in New York had told him the company was going to revolutionize the field of surgery and this was someone his good friend Henry Kissinger considered to be the smartest man alive. And according to Elizabeth, Theranos’s devices were already being used in medevac helicopters and hospital operating rooms, so they must be working.”

pages 271/272 –
“That thesis, as Mr. Carreyrou explained in discussions with us, is that all of the recognition by the academic, scientific, and health-care communities of the breakthrough contributions of Theranos’ achievements is wrong”

 

Bowie in Berlin – Behind the Hero’s vocal.

How did Bowie get that distinctive sound on Heros?

“… Visconti set up three separate microphones around Tonstudio 2. The first was placed where one would expect it to be: six inches or so in front of where Bowie stood to sing. The other two were positioned around 15 and 20 feet further back, in order that they might take advantage of the excellent acoustic properties of the studio itself. Visconti placed noise gates on both of these, setting them so that they would only open – and thus become active – when Bowie’s voice reached a certain volume. The result of this marvellous innovation was that, in a single take, his voice could shift from a warm intimacy to a distant wail. And it is this, alongside the unparalleled power of Bowie’s vocal delivery, which lifted Hero’s up from its status as merely a great song to the realm of all-time classic.”
Thomas Jerome Seabrook

Under Their Thumb.

… “He’s vit me!” And it worked. Before I knew it, I was onstage with the Rolling Stones.

Freddy led me to a cubbyhole, right next to the backup singers. It held a dozen or so people and was sort of like a baseball dugout. Jerry Hall was in there, and so was Keith’s dad. We were getting a slightly skewed view
…
For better or worse, I was seeing what the Stones see. And it helped me understand why rock stars get fucked up. Being in front of 60,000 screaming fans for two hours can be an overwhelming experience. There is no way to healthily match that intensity when the tour is over and you’re home in your slippers eating corn flakes.”
Under Their Thumb, Bill German

Flagstaff over Hollywood? Things could have been different.

“In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille was looking for a place to shoot a western, The Squaw Man. He was living in New York City, so he boarded a train heading west and got off at Flagstaff, Arizona. Surprisingly, the weather was bad there. He sent a telegram to his partners back east, Jessy Lasky and Sam Goldfish (later Goldwyn): “Flagstaff no good. Want authority to rent barn for $75 a month in place called Hollywood.” The yellow barn was at Selma and Vine streets and was still being used for horses. The Squaw Man was released a year later, and is one of the first full-length films made in Hollywood. It was certainly the most successful. In 1926 the barn was moved to the United Studios on Marathon and Van Ness Streets, which soon became the home of Paramount Pictures.

If the weather in Flagstaff hadn’t been bad, if the barn in Hollywood hadn’t been for rent, if The Squaw Man had not been a hit, there wouldn’t have been a Hollywood. In later years the old weather-beaten barn in which The Squaw Man was photographed was converted into a gymnasium on the Paramount lot, equipped with weights, mats, rings, chin-up bars, and, most important: the best steam room in Los Angeles. From the time of its reincarnation as the Paramount gym, the man who ran it was a short, bald, good-natured fellow named Orlando Perry, or Perry Orlando – not even he was sure of which was correct. I got to know Perry and his gym when I was directing Good Times on the Paramount lot. I remained a regular for sixteen years, until the old barn was designated a landmark, moved off the lot, and relocated opposite the Hollywood Bowl, where it is now the Hollywood Heritage Museum.”

Friedkin, William. The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir.

OCR App demo

Q – What’s a good Document Scanning app for my phone?
A – Office Lens
See test run below.

Phone Camera image:
BookImageOCRDemo

Resulting text:
The shift-to-contrast reflex is designed so that it is suppressed when neurons in the central processing part of the model are firing at a high rate. When the firing rate drops off, say through fatigue, the reflex is released. We can, somewhat fancifully, think that the reflex is released when central processing is tired of (bored with) the current observation. For simple geometric figures, the net effect of the reflex is to cause the eye to shift to a new vertex of the observed figure.

Testing with this. Check it out.