Coruscation

This week, Facebook unveiled its search tool, which it calls graph search, a reference to the network of friends its users have created. The company's algorithms will filter search results for each person, ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user would trust the most. At first, it will mine users' interests, photos, check-ins and "likes," but later it will search through other information, including status updates.

"While the usefulness of graph search increases as people share more about their favorite restaurants, music and other interests, the product doesn't hinge on this," a Facebook spokesman, Jonathan Thaw, said.

Nevertheless, the company engineers who created the tool -- former Google employees -- say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is "sparse," as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.

The things people declare on Facebook will be useful, when someone searches for those interests, Tom Stocky, one of the creators of Facebook search, said in an interview this week. Conversely, by liking more things, he said, people will become more useful in the eyes of their friends.

Technology with graph search Facebook bets on more sharing.

Mr. Stocky offered these examples of how more information may be desirable: A single man may want to be discovered when a friend of a friend is searching for eligible bachelors in San Francisco or a restaurant that stays open late may want to be found by a night owl.

"People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook," Mr. Stocky said. "It's latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that."

Users have been encouraged to check their privacy settings in order to fine-tune whom they wish to share with. At the same time, Facebook eliminated a longstanding option that users enjoyed: if someone is searching for them, they will no longer be able to remain obscure.

Still, some Facebook users may be skeptical. Jana Uyeda, 35, a photographer and social media consultant in Seattle, said, "I love my friends, but sometimes their taste in restaurants is terrible."

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Brad Newman also told me about the time he was among numerous people waiting for a table at a busy Chicago restaurant. He flashed his ReviewerCard and jumped to the head of the line.

Wasn't that unfair to everyone else?

"That's one way of looking at it," Newman said. "I see it as letting the restaurant know that they should treat me good because I'm going to be writing a review."

I asked if he discloses in his reviews that he seeks and receives special treatment from the businesses he writes about.

"No," Newman acknowledged. "But that doesn't change things. If the hotel is close to the train station or has a comfy bed, that's why it's getting a good review."

This is, of course, wrong on many levels and is an example of how the culture of amateurism that was once one of the Internet's more endearing qualities has become a free-for-all unburdened by any thought of ethics or moral integrity.

But it's apparently legal, lawyers tell me. As long as a reviewer isn't making explicit threats to harm a business, the implied shakedown of presenting a ReviewerCard probably won't get anyone in trouble with authorities.

Newman hopes his ReviewerCard will become as influential as the American Express black card -- a totem of the bearer's clout and achievement.

I can only hope that businesses see it for what it is: a shameless bid to extract personal favors under threat of Internet ruin. I can only hope they politely inform ReviewerCard holders that they're entitled to the same treatment as all other customers.

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Ross Douthat abortion counter:

2013 January


1. douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/the-liberal-hour

   But a tentative and ambiguous pro-choice trend in public opinion after a long period of pro-life gains does not mean that liberals have won the abortion wars, especially given that the main policy shift of the Obama era has been an uptick in state-level abortion restriction.

2. nytimes.com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/douthat-divided-by-abortion-united-by-feminism.html

   Stereotypes link the anti-abortion cause to traditionalist ideas about gender roles -- to the belief that a woman's place is in the home, or at least that her primary identity should be maternal rather than professional. Writing in the Reagan era, the sociologist Kristin Luker argued that this dimension of the debate trumped the question of whether unborn human life has rights: "While on the surface it is the embryo's fate that seems to be at stake, the abortion debate is actually about the meaning of women's lives."

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The Philips Hue, sold exclusively at Apple stores for the next month, can change colors along a broad spectrum and offers settings that can mimic sunrise in the morning or use a special "light recipe" intended to raise energy levels. The bulb has been a big hit, executives say, attracting a host of software developers who have created free apps for new features, like making it respond to voices or music. The bulb can also tie into the Nest thermostat, a so-called smart device from Apple alumni who helped develop the iPod, that learns consumer heating and cooling patterns and adjusts to them automatically.

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Chris Baca trains a new employee how to steam milk properly at Verve in Santa Cruz; Tristan Walach, also known as Ant, teaches people how to make coffee in San Francisco at Sightglass.

The essence of good espresso, of good coffee in general, revolves around three numbers: the amount of quality dry coffee used, the amount of time water flows through it and the amount of coffee that comes out the other end. When the ratio is right, the process extracts the best flavor. If it is wrong, the good flavor never surfaces or is watered down. A mistake in seconds or grams, I am coming to learn, is the difference between something wonderful and awful.

¶ Mr. Baca explains that you have to experiment to find just the right balance of these three elements for each coffee machine and coffee grind, and then replicate them. He has tested the machinery at Sightglass and determined that we want to use 17 grams of high-end coffee and run water for 25 seconds to yield about 30 grams of coffee.

"How hard can coffee be? It's an attitude we're constantly encountering," noted Ellie Matuszak, director of professional development for the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a trade group with thousands of company members and 1,200 people in its growing Barista Guild.

Ant explains how to steam the milk. In brief: position the steam wand just below the milk's surface until the milk swirls in a circular motion and puffs up as it absorbs the steam, then drop the wand lower until the milk reaches 135 degrees, as verified by a thermometer. There's a sweet spot between milk and temperature, the point at which the sugars cook and the milk becomes sweeter, but before the sugars burn.

MR. BACA, 32, planned to be a high school history teacher. But he dropped out of college and took a job at a cafe in Modesto. He developed a love affair with coffee, moved to San Francisco to work for a trendy cafe called Ritual, then started competing in 2006. In 2010, he finished second out of 50 competitors in the United States Barista Championship. In the freestyle competition, he made a crème anglaise espresso drink, cherry infused with a citrus garnish.

¶ "I know, this all seems like 'Best in Show,' " says Ryan O'Donovan, an owner of Verve, referring to the faux documentary about dog shows. "It seems ridiculous. We're trying to make it less ridiculous."

¶ Verve, where Mr. Baca is director of education, devotes 1,500 square feet to training. It's part of what the cafe considers the "third wave" of the coffee movement -- the first being campfire and drip coffee, the second the Starbucks revolution and the next understanding and evoking the complexity of coffee. Training, Mr. O'Donovan says, "is the nucleus of what we do."

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GTD or simpler alternatives ? at LifeHacker in lifehacking/.

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For liberals seeking progressivity and fairness, that should be the easiest possible concession to make. The $400,000 threshold still puts the top bracket close to where it was under Bill Clinton when you adjust for inflation, and that Clintonian definition of "rich" wasn't an implausible one: While the whining of the upper upper middle class (or, if you prefer, the not-that-rich rich) can be unseemly, there really is a big difference between a taxpayer making six figures annually and a taxpayer making seven or eight, and setting the top rate in the mid rather than low six figures is a way of acknowledging that the near-rich and super-rich do not occupy the same financial universe.

And here I think liberals have a real reason to be discouraged by the White House's willingness -- and, more importantly, many Senate Democrats' apparent eagerness -- to compromise on tax increases for the near-rich. Liberal pundits seem most worried about what this concession signals for the next round of negotiations, over the sequester and the debt ceiling. But if I were them I'd be more worried about the longer term, and what it signals about their party's willingness and ability to raise tax rates for anyone who isn't super-rich. As I've suggested before, these negotiations amounted to a test of liberalism's ability to raise revenue, and it isn't clear that this outcome constitutes a passing grade: If a newly re-elected Democratic president can't muster the political will and capital required to do something as straightforward and relatively popular as raising taxes on the tiny fraction Americans making over $250,000 when those same taxes are scheduled to go up already, then how can Democrats ever expect to push taxes upward to levels that would make our existing public progams sustainable for the long run?

Alas, many of the revenue-enhancing tax reform proposals that have been bruited about would probably raise taxes significantly on earners in the $100,000-$400,000 range, which means that exempting the near-rich this time around doesn't mean that they won't end up paying more down the road. (And, in fact, it looks like the proposed deal will include a de facto down payment on such a reform, by reinstituting a phaseout on exemptions for households making over $250,000.)

Alas for liberals, the tax debate isn't that simple, because it's taking place in the context of immense projected future deficits and a welfare state that seems unsustainable without substantial increases in revenue. Given these realities, fairness and progressivity are necessarily less important to liberalism over the long run than simple dollar figures, and the American left actually has a long-run incentive to make the federal tax code less progressive, because only a broader base can keep the liberal edifice solvent in the long run.

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