Victoria Rose originally shared this post: I brought this up with +Daniel Estrada after he shared an article and I felt like bringing it up into a discussion of its own. There’s talk going on about “digitizing a person” from what I’ve been seeing on a lot of different websites. The argument is that humans are producing their ideas using computers, and that eventually, the machine will simply be a practically immortal representation of that human. But there’s one thing that just keeps bugging me that might void the idea altogether. Is it really possible to fully capture a person and especially their ideas? In reality, an idea isn’t just a single entity on its own – it involves many subsets of thoughts. You can say that you “captured an idea” by making a person write a novel or a song, but it’s likely that they had so many things that they also wanted to do with it. For example, if you’re writing on the income inequality issue of the United States, it’s likely that you start off with, “There’s income equality.” Now go on into why there’s income inequality. More than likely, your brain is about to branch off into 1) gender, 2) race, 3) corporations, 4) taxes, or 5) corruption, and often you’ll have a revelation from one point to another. “But wait, you can’t just jump topics! That’s not proper writing! People will toss your book right out the window!” And you’ll have to re-organize your writing to adapt to that. Therefore, you’re not really capturing the true essence of your idea – because the idea itself WAS that stream of thought that led to that revelation, including the revelation itself. And then, when you get into a topic such as, say, corporations, and you go on […]

The Attention Economy 0: Preamble Today begins a series where I clarify and explain the +Attention Economy There is much confusion and uncertainty over what an Attention Economy is, how it works, and what it means for our present and our future. I have some answers to these questions, but they are just rough stones; I hope together we might polish them into something far more valuable. I cannot do this work alone. Over the course of these posts I will try to lay out both the theoretical and scientific justifications for the view. I will also talk about issues of implementation, engineering, and design for an Attention Economy, as well as its implications for politics, governance, and the sustainability of the human population. These are among the most important topics of our time, and I know my communities are filled with incredibly bright people tackling these issues from humblingly diverse and creative perspectives, at times with inspiring success. My ideas here are meant as contributions to this shared project; I hope the view will tie together some of the disjointed threads that might otherwise fray loose. Although I do have some academic goals for this work, I have no special interest, financial or otherwise, in writing these posts. My interest in the topics, and the urgency and earnestness with which I write these words, is entirely a product of being alive in the year 2012. Enough preliminaries, there’s work to do. If you appreciate this work, please participate. ________ The updated, official draft of this document can be found at the google doc here: http://tinyurl.com/cb7cdc7 It is open for commenting. Feel free to leave comments on style, grammar, and so on in the document. It’ll help. This and all source material is being maintained on the Attention Economy Wiki, […]

The previous bot I posted is from the lab of Raffaello D’Andrea. His revolutionary robotics company Kiva Systems produces the bots in the video you see below. Last week, +Amazon.com acquired Kiva for an astounding 775 million dollars! Soon, Amazon’s 65 (and growing) distribution centers will be fully automated with Kiva robots. You can read more about Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/19/amazon-acquires-online-fulfillment-company-kiva-systems-for-775-million-in-cash/ You can read a more about D’Andrea’s ingenious engineering approach here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/three-engineers-hundreds-of-robots-one-warehouse I am shamelessly stealing these robot videos and links from the wonderful Robots Podcast. The link below contains a fascinating interview with D’Andrea, which touches on both the robotics and the Amazon deal. http://www.robotspodcast.com/podcast/2012/03/robots-dynamic-systems/ For anyone interested in robotics and cybernetics from a science and engineering perspective, this is a wonderful source of cutting edge work in both the industry and the academy. Their podcast from two weeks ago on Self Organized Systems is required reading for anyone interesting in the complexities of the digital age. https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/ifZhHqeQp9Q http://youtu.be/lWsMdN7HMuA

Everything about this is great. I’m guessing this is probably the most educational music video ever made. That’s not saying much, so I’ll just repeat: the video is really good, and Bjork’s dissonant nega-beats compliment it beautifully. Monika Ljubi?i? originally shared this post: Björk has premiered the official music video for her track Hollow. If you never got enough close ups of what makes up your body in science class this clip may be for you.

“Using sensors in our smartphones and other wearable devices, we can chart how many calories we burn, our body fat percentage, how many steps we take in a day, how long we sleep — even how many hours a week we spend commuting or sitting at a desk. Soon we’ll be able to access the same kind of statistics on our digital selves: Social reach and influence; tastes and preferences; achievements; credibility and reputation; habits; expertise. All that information at your fingertips at all times theoretically allows you to carefully chart a path for improvement—and share your winning strategy and stats with others. On a grand scale, that makes for an interconnected world of healthier, happier people making much more informed decisions.” It isn’t enough to just have personalized information about one’s own self. Having this information open and public is also the only way to measure and improve our social organizations. Ward Plunet originally shared this post: The ‘So What’ Of The Quantified Self The quantified self (QS) is growing – and an interesting perspective in this article. “proprietary data equals power, but insights equals gold.” So while it’s important to build up a data set comprised of useful and complementary signals, it’s the “so what?” that allows you really make money from the numbers. Unfortunately, I’m only playing “Foodville” in my mind, and don’t have a simple, gamified app that I can share or play with others. Perhaps a slick app encompassing elegant use of social and game mechanics would enable multiplayer modes, P2P pressure/obligation/guilt loops, use of Seven Deadly Sin motivators, progressive and adaptive leveling, and other tools to make Foodville palatable and easier to begin playing for mass audiences? I’m hoping to see clever QS + gamification designers team up to come up with such apps, […]

“The above chart shows a distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazon’s warehouses. What’s so crazy is that there are just as many from the last decade as from the decade between 1910 and 1920. Why? Because beginning in 1923, most titles are copyrighted. Books from before 1923 tend to be in the public domain, and the result is that Amazon carries them — lots of them. The chart comes from University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald.” Tim O’Reilly originally shared this post: This is the most amazing graph that demonstrates what our wrong-headed copyright regime has done to suppress rather than encourage economic activity! If only our policy makers were driven by data rather than lobbying by copyright interests! The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950

CAS-Group originally shared this post: CAS-Group Blog » Blog Archive » Anonymity and brevity as adaptation Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist. In one of his studies he wondered how city dwellers manage to live in such proximity to each other. As this PsyBlog article says, he found that the…

Chad Haney originally shared this post: Humans’ social games closely resemble those of apes and monkeys This is like “A Beautiful Mind” meets Jane Goodall. OK, not really, but that’s the first thing that popped into my head. A new take on the games people play in their relationships | UChicago News Human nature has deep evolutionary roots and is manifested in relationships with family members, friends, romantic and business partners, competitors, and strangers more than in any other aspects of b…

Michal Novák originally shared this post: How does Shazam work to recognize a song ? | So, you code ? So, you want to know how Shazam works? What is Shazam, you may ask ? Let’s say you’re in a bar, and they play a song that you like and you don’t know its name ? Shazam can help you find out what is th…