She’s got a tough and important job:

Harvey was the 25th employee at Twitter, where her official title is vice president of trust and safety, but she’s more like Silicon Valley’s chief sanitation officer, dealing with the dirtiest stuff on Twitter: spam, harassment, child exploitation, threats of rape and murder.

Fascinating read.

Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office said it would look into the Facebook experiment. That’s one problem for Facebook. Another is a potential class-action suit:

Critics of Facebook’s study have raised the specter that the company could face a class-action lawsuit over the study. According to a report in Forbes, the company added mention of research to its terms of service months after the study was conducted.

Julia Horwitz, a consumer protections counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said however that other portions of the user agreement could protect Facebook from legal action.

Horwitz, however, said she believes the study may have violated Facebook’s agreement with the FTC, which called for better transparency in how user information was being used.

Troubles for the little f.

CNET:

Amazon said Szabadi, who left the company in May after nearly six years, can’t solicit business from any of his former customers for 18 months after his departure. He joined Google as a lead for the reseller ecosystem team in May.

In response, Szabadi’s lawyer told Amazon that Szabadi has also signed an agreement with Google, vowing not to do business with any AWS clients that he remembers having “material direct contact” with, or that he knows “confidential information” about, according to the court document. The agreement is in effect for six months.

Google is not backing down and is planning a strong defense for the suit. said a person familiar with the company’s strategy.

Will be interesting to see how this works out. Non-compete clauses are controversial and not all states allow them. California, for example, invalidates non-competes for non-stakeholders, meaning they are not allowed for regular employees. And states that allow them hold them to a high standard, only allowing them if the terms are reasonable.

Google completed its long rumored acquisition of Songza for a reported US$39 million. Songza is a music curation service that lets you select playlists based on elements like genre, mood, and decade. It runs on iOS, Android, ChromeCast, and the web.

From Google:

Exciting news today — we’re thrilled to welcome +Songza to Google. They’ve built a great service which uses contextual expert-curated playlists to give you the right music at the right time. We aren’t planning any immediate changes to Songza, so it will continue to work like usual for existing users. Over the coming months, we’ll explore ways to bring what you love about Songza to Google Play Music. We’ll also look for opportunities to bring their great work to the music experience on YouTube and other Google products. In the meantime, check out their service on #Android (http://goo.gl/urYGx6) or iOS (http://goo.gl/c0egja) to find a playlist for any mood you’re in — whether you’re feeling a little mellow or a lot funky.

From Songza:

You know why we love building Songza? Because you trust us to make every moment of your day better — and that’s a pretty huge honor. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’re becoming part of Google. We can’t think of a better company to join in our quest to provide the perfect soundtrack for everything you do. No immediate changes to Songza are planned, other than making it faster, smarter, and even more fun to use.

Curation is playing an increasing role in recent acquisitions, making it easier for users to find music they like or just making an enjoyable listening experience easier to come by. Curation was said to be an important motive for Apple’s acquisition of Beats earlier this year.

Tim Cook on the Beats deal:

We get a subscription music service that we believe is the first subscription service that really got it right. They had the insight early on to know how important human curation is. That technology by itself wasn’t enough — that it was the marriage of the two that would really be great and produce a feeling in people that we want to produce.

LIghtroom Killer Tips:

If you’re an Aperture user, it’s time to find something else to manage/edit your photos. So if you’ve been waiting to make the jump to Lightroom, now’s your chance. Especially with the $9.99/month Creative Cloud Photography plan becoming permanent.

You’ll notice there’s many similarities between Lightroom and Aperture. So rather than start from scratch and teach you every feature in Lightroom, I wanted to just list the top 10 things I think are most important if you decide to switch. Things that you may be familiar with in Aperture, and what the counterparts are in Lightroom. Here goes!

I’ve used both apps but have favoured Lightroom for many years. Aperture users are going to need to find alternatives and Lightroom is the logical choice for many.

Vox:

Canada serves two predominant roles in modern American discourse. It is the place where Americans threaten to move when things aren’t going well at home. It is also the butt of endless jokes, generally involving Canada being America’s hat or Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor or Robin Sparkles.

Today is Canada Day, when our northern neighbors celebrate their country’s birth in 1867. And its a good as time as any to thoroughly explore the question: How great, exactly, is Canada? Should we be pining to move there, or mock it viciously?

Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians!

Wired:

It happens every time: You reach into your bag to pull out your headphones. But no matter how neatly you wrapped them up beforehand, the cords have become a giant Gordian knot of frustration. But until we invent a good way of wirelessly beaming power through the air to our beloved electronic devices, it seems like we’re stuck with this problem.

Or maybe we can fight back with science. In recent years, physicists and mathematicians have pondered why our cords are such jerks all the time.

The science behind one of life’s little frustrations is fascinating. I saw a Youtube video years ago explaining how to wrap up earphone cords with a twisting motion that prevented tangles. But I can’t find it any more. Anyone know the video I’m referring to?

I had one of the cassette models when I was a kid.

Winclone is a great way to make a complete backup of your Boot Camp partition so that you can quickly restore back to Windows in Boot Camp. Boot Runner provides an easy way to switch between OS X and Windows on dual boot Macs. Works great for both individuals and dual boot labs.

When you get a new Mac or have issues with your Windows installation in Boot Camp, re-installing Windows is time consuming and difficult. Winclone makes it easy to make a complete copy of the Boot Camp partition, and restores it back to the exact same state on your existing or new Mac. Winclone supports migration of Boot Camp partitions between Macs, moving your Boot Camp partition to an external drive to free up space, and more. It works great for mass deployment. Boot Camp can be deployed as an OS X installer package and you can also use it with existing Windows tools such as SCCM and Sys Prep for easy mass deployment.

If you manage lots of dual boot Macs, Boot Runner provides a great way to manage the OS selection. You decide which OS by selecting OS X or Windows prior to logging in. It works great in labs. Administrators can fully customize and manage the selection screen, and can remotely select the OS through network policy. Boot Runner includes a scheduling feature to make sure that the Mac is booted into Windows for important system and virus updates. Check out the intro video to learn more.

Winclone and Boot Runner are available for purchase and download today at twocanoes.com and both have full phone and online support options.

A new company called Virtual is claiming that it can imitate nearly any Android or iOS device almost perfectly in software, on any platform, with nearly ‘native quality’ performance. It does this with a combination of virtualization and emulation technology and it could change the way that developers test apps.

Apple’s CarPlay is really catching on manufacturers. On Tuesday, nine new car-makers, including Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Audi, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Mazda and Ram, signed on to provide CarPlay in future models of its cars. This is going to be a must-have feature for me in my next car.

My iPhone is a bit of a mess. My front page contains the apps I use the most, but the rest of my pages are in a random order that slightly resembles the order in which I purchased the apps, shuffled in my attempts to move apps to my front page. Sound familiar?

The linked article talks you through the relatively simple process of sorting all your apps in alphabetical order. This might not work for all people, but it does make it much easier to home in on an app when you have 9 pages of apps. Searching helps you launch an app, but it does not help you locate the app’s icon, in case you want to move or delete the app.

One thing I’d add to the discussion is the evolution of iTunes’ ability to organize your iOS device. If you haven’t plugged your iPhone or iPad into your Mac for a while, take a few minutes to plug in and see what you can currently do with iTunes. You can easily create new pages and drag pages and apps around. You can even use iTunes to transfer files between your iOS device and computer.

As the blog suggested, I would take a snapshot of my home screen, then put my apps in alphabetical order. I would then use iTunes to create a new blank home screen (click the plus sign on the Apps page, drag the new page to be first) and repopulate the new empty page with my favorites.

Any other suggestions or favorite technique? Leave a comment.

James Kendrick writes for ZDNet. He is currently using an Android phone and writes about the logic behind his decision to by pass the Windows Phone, which he was considering, and move to whatever phone Apple releases next.

Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall. In a nutshell, Apple replaced last year’s winner, Berkshire Hathaway. Apple won the award two years ago as well.

Barron’s covers financial markets and is pretty well respected. It’s owned by Dow Jones and Company, who also publish the Wall Street Journal. Down Jones is owned by News Corp.

What a beautiful guitar.

Much respect Tim and the rest of the folks at Apple.

This past Friday, this article appeared on AVClub.com and caused quite a stir.

Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It’s less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.

My guess is, the folks at Facebook who authored this study were surprised by the outpouring of criticism. Yesterday, one of those people, Adam Kramer, posted his response to this criticism.

The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn’t clearly state our motivations in the paper.

Note that if you follow the headline link to read Adam’s response in full, you’ll be taken to a Facebook page, with all that that entails.

In the hands of a master, hand-drawn animation can bring complex emotions to life. The embedded video is stylish and elegant, drawn by one of the best, Glen Keane. Keane is the son of Family Circus creator Bill Keane and has created a number of classics for Disney, including The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Tarzan, and Tangled. Not a bad resume.

In the linked article, Harry McCracken points out that the video below was created by Keane for Google’s “Spotlight Stories” project and that animation tools are no match for a master of the craft.

But the thing which makes it interesting and moving isn’t the technology: It’s the fact that it consists of a series of drawings by a human being who happens to be a master draftsman, rather than the digital stop-motion puppetry that is computer animation.

Keane may have used more modern tools than his counterparts at Disney did in the 1930s and 1940s, but the basics of his craft haven’t changed at all.

I agree that the human in the equation is, at least currently, irreplaceable. But I do think that automation tools make it possible to create incredibly sophisticated and complex animations that would not have been possible even 20 years ago. To me, the seminal year was 1995, the year Toy Story was released.

I think McCracken is right, the basics haven’t changed, but I think the tools have evolved beyond belief. I did enjoy Keane’s animation Duet, shown below, but my all-time favorite remains the first 7 minutes of Pixar’s Up. To me, that is emotional storytelling without peer.

My thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Winclone is a great way to make a complete backup of your Boot Camp partition so that you can quickly restore back to Windows in Boot Camp. Boot Runner provides an easy way to switch between OS X and Windows on dual boot Macs. Works great for both individuals and dual boot labs.

When you get a new Mac or have issues with your Windows installation in Boot Camp, re-installing Windows is time consuming and difficult. Winclone makes it easy to make a complete copy of the Boot Camp partition, and restores it back to the exact same state on your existing or new Mac. Winclone supports migration of Boot Camp partitions between Macs, moving your Boot Camp partition to an external drive to free up space, and more. It works great for mass deployment. Boot Camp can be deployed as an OS X installer package and you can also use it with existing Windows tools such as SCCM and Sys Prep for easy mass deployment.

If you manage lots of dual boot Macs, Boot Runner provides a great way to manage the OS selection. You decide which OS by selecting OS X or Windows prior to logging in. It works great in labs. Administrators can fully customize and manage the selection screen, and can remotely select the OS through network policy. Boot Runner includes a scheduling feature to make sure that the Mac is booted into Windows for important system and virus updates. Check out the intro video to learn more.

Winclone and Boot Runner are available for purchase and download today at twocanoes.com and both have full phone and online support options.

Words to live by:

So here is our appeal to you: As you leave Stanford, take your genius and your optimism and your empathy and go change the world in ways that will make millions of others optimistic as well.

You don’t have to rush. You have careers to launch, debts to pay, spouses to meet and marry. That’s enough for now.

But in the course of your lives, without any plan on your part, you’ll come to see suffering that will break your heart.

When it happens, and it will, don’t turn away from it; turn toward it.

That is the moment when change is born.

Dan Frommer on Google’s smart watch demo at I/O:

While it’s impressive how small today’s computers can get, Google and its partners have still failed to demonstrate truly compelling use cases—let alone “rich user experiences”—that will create a mass market for $200+ smartwatches. In almost every example during Singleton’s presentation, simply accessing a smartphone—an activity Google says its one billion Android users already do an average of 125 times a day—seems like it would be a more capable and comfortable solution. (And there’s no either/or option here—today’s smartwatches must be paired to a phone in the vicinity to access the internet.)

Never mind the watches themselves, which seem awkwardly large, must be charged daily, don’t handle sunlight very well, and simply aren’t cool.

This last bit, “simply aren’t cool” says a lot. It’s hard to master cool, hard to create cool. Apple may not always get it right, but their commitment to a cool design aesthetic runs very deep.

This is a heartbreaking story, made harder by the fact that I met one of the principals of this story, Marcin, when I was in New York visiting another startup. I liked Marcin and I liked the concept. Unfortunately, the business model was just not strong enough. Lessons here for everyone.

Apple announced a 16GB iPod touch with a 5 Megapixel camera for $199. Not too shabby. Though it’s clearly not a replacement for the iPhone, if you have regular WiFi access, this is a pretty nice alternative, one that doesn’t come with a monthly contract.

From Apple’s web site:

CUPERTINO, California—June 26, 2014—Apple® today announced its 16GB iPod touch® is now available in vibrant colors and equipped with a 5 megapixel iSight® camera for just $199. The entire iPod touch lineup features the 5 megapixel iSight camera with 1080p HD video recording, brilliant 4-inch Retina® display, Apple’s A5 chip and FaceTime® camera. iPod touch features an ultra-thin and light anodized aluminum design and is available in pink, yellow, blue, silver, space gray and (PRODUCT) RED. iPod touch comes in a 16GB model for $199, 32GB for $249, and 64GB for $299.

iPod touch comes with iOS 7, offering more than 200 features including Camera app filters that let you easily add real-time photo effects. Additionally, the Photos app offers ways to automatically organize your photos based on time and location. With iCloud® Photo Sharing, it’s simple to share photos and videos with exactly the people you want to see them and your friends and family can comment and access their shared streams from any iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch, Mac® or PC at any time. This fall, iOS 8 will be supported on the entire iPod touch lineup.

With the revolutionary App Store℠ on iPod touch, users in 155 countries have access to over 1.2 million apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, including hundreds of thousands of games. More than 75 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store. Customers also have the iTunes Store® at their fingertips, giving instant access to an incredible selection of music, TV shows, movies and books to purchase and download directly to their iPod touch.

Pricing & Availability
iPod touch 16GB is available starting in the US today and worldwide in the coming days, in pink, yellow, blue, silver and space gray through the Apple Online Store (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested price of $199 (US). Starting today, the 32GB and 64GB models have been repriced worldwide, at a suggested price of $249 (US) for the 32GB model and $299 (US) for the 64GB model. iPod touch requires a Wi-Fi connection or a Mac with a USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 port, Mac OS X v10.6.8 or later and iTunes® 10.7 or later; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 3 or later and iTunes 10.7 or later. An Apple ID is required for some iPod touch features.

Larry Page is Google’s CEO and Sundar Pichai is Google’s Senior VP, Android and Chrome.

An interview with the top players in any major company is going to be interesting, but I thought this interview lacked vision. Worth reading, but there was far more breadth than depth.

One exchange that stood out for me, this discussion on privacy:

Q: Do you worry that the more devices we have that are connected to Google, there’s not just a privacy question but also something like creepiness?

Page: I think that the Internet and mobile devices in general is changing people’s lives a lot. And we’re feeling that. Everyone can tell that their lives are going to be affected, but we don’t quite know how yet, because we’re not using these things — and because of that there’s a lot of uncertainty. I think we’ll figure that out and we’ll get products, services and technologies that really benefit people a lot, and that make their lives significantly better. And as we do that people will understand those — and then there’ll be the next set of things.

Q: You’re saying the usefulness of the products will change how people feel about them?

Page: Yeah, and we know that if we talk about things before people see them, there’s a much more negative reaction. That’s one of the things we learned. It’s really important for people to be able to experience products; otherwise you fear the worst without seeing those benefits.

I’m not trying to minimize the issues. For me, I’m so excited about the possibilities to improve things for people, my worry would be the opposite. We get so worried about these things that we don’t get the benefits. I think that’s what’s happened in health care. We’ve decided, through regulation largely, that data is so locked up that it can’t be used to benefit people very well.

Right now we don’t data-mine health care data. If we did we’d probably save 100,000 lives next year. I’m very worried that the media and governments will try to stoke the people’s fears and we’ll end up in a state where we could benefit a lot of people but we’re not able to do that. That’s the likely outcome.

There are also laws to consider, laws put in place to protect the privacy of medical records. There’s a certain amount of hubris in the claim that you’d save 100,000 lives next year if you could only data-mine health care data. I don’t like where that thinking is going.

You’ll need to activate the phone in-store.