Fieldwork Fail: Get it While It's Cheap (and available)

Quick signal boost: Fieldwork Fail is going out of print, and is on deep sale for the next week or two: https://makisapa.com/.

Y'all might want to check it out -- I backed this Kickstarter in hardcover as a present for my brother-in-law, and it's a hoot: a bunch of little illustrated stories about how Real Science proves to be not-so-easy in practice.

The story of why it's going out of business is a sad tale about the difficulty of trying to do anything outside the realm of Amazon nowadays.

But anyway: get the book while it's cheap. Very suitable both for adults and kids...

It's two, two nerddoms in one...

Okay, various of my friends may be amused by Google's page on Federated Learning.

On the one hand, this initiative is pretty intriguing: basically, a new approach to machine learning that specifically keeps all of the source data on user-owned devices, and encrypts everything being sent to the servers so that the Big Evil Company doing the machine-learning at least isn't pulling personal data into the cloud and potentially leaking it.

I'd be interested to hear opinions from folks who know this space better than I -- in principle the idea makes some sense, but I don't know enough to be able to validate whether it's as secure an approach as it claims.

Mind, it's clearly not a panacea: it's just a fix to one common privacy problem. And it's very self-interested on Google's part: since they control so many devices, they are in a better position to leverage this approach than most anybody else. Still, it seems better than the status quo.

What makes this much more amusing is that the linked page is not a dry description of the project. It's actually a description of the technology rendered as a comic book by Lucy Bellwood (a current favorite creator of mine) and Scott McCloud (one of the legends of the comics field). The project was apparently pretty amusing: as she says,

There were meetings and company policies and people used the word “synergy” in conversation without irony.

Anyway, the comic's worth reading at least if you have a clue about how this stuff works, and possibly even if not...