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La Revolution

We just finished watching “La Revolution” on Netflix. Very cool! It’s a lush, gritty series based around the French Revolution, but with a supernatural element. The cinematography is excellent. The story is gripping. Both Helen and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

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Isle of Dogs

Last night we went to see the movie "Isle of Dogs" at the Duke of York's PictureHouse cinema in Brighton. Apparently the Duke of York is one of the oldest continuously run movie theatres in the World! The movie was fantastic! Both Helen and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Definitely a must see.

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The Reputation Age

We need to deal with so much information from all sorts of media these days, that reputation is becoming a larger and larger factor in our society.

In the past the path to publication was much harder, so something that was published acquired a reputation simply by virtue of the publication process. These days however, it's cheap and easy to publish. Fake news sites are ones that have the trappings of a real news site, but initially attract people by appealing to biases. They trade off the gain in reputation simply by appearing like a reputable site and having a plausable domain name.

We often rely on "reputation chains" to validate information. We believe a study because scientists have reviewed the study as part of the peer review process. The study has gained from the reputation of the journal, and to the more knowledgable - from the reputation of the reviewing scientists. Unfortunately sometimes people with good reputations can spread misinformation, so we still need to be critical as to the veracity of the information we receive. Our cognative biases can cause us to reject true information, so we need to be caution when rejecting information from a reputable source.

We also have more reputation transmission mechanisms these days. We have accreditations, charter groups, and social networking sites for signalling reputation. We have awards and prizes for boosting reputation. Reputation is an increasingly bankable attribute these days.

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Agents of Shield

Last night I binge-watched 6 episodes of Agents of Shield on Netflix! I hadn't watched the series for ages, and so I picked up from Season 3. I absolutely loved it!

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Facebook and the Algorithmic Curation of Content

Facebook has recently got into trouble over an accusation that they are suppressing conservative news stories in the trending news categories. Facebook have an algorithmic system that promotes trending topics to a human curation team, who make the final decision about what gets promoted. Obviously human beings have bias. One of the interesting things that has happened in finance is that banks are using algos more and more to ensure that humans aren't involved in situations where there can be a conflict of interest. One example is the 4pm FX fix which are now required to be handled algorithmically. There's a trend here - algorithms are being used to ensure fairness. Will media companies be forced to have algorithmic editors to remove bias from reporting?