April 11, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM ROBERT SCOBLE

#attentioneconomy #implementation Robert Scoble originally shared this post: This app will freak you out, but it’s the future of, well, a lot Everyone I’ve shown this app to today (it came out last week) says “that’s freaky.” What does it do? It captures a ton of data on your phone as you move through the world. Right now it keeps a list of places. But here I sit down with founder Sam Liang for a discussion about just what data it captures, how that data could be used, and how he’s going to get people to cross the freaky line. This is the future folks and, it, is, indeed, freaky. Learn more at https://www.placemeapp.com/placeme/ It’s a free Android or iPhone app. Last night I spent a few hours with Liang talking about this kind of persistent ambient sensing app. It studies all the sensors in your phone. Temperature. Compass. Gyroscope. Wifi and bluetooth antennas. Accelerometer. It collects all that data and uploads it to his servers. This app knows EVERYTHING about where you are, even more than you do. It is TOTALLY FREAKY and TOTALLY is the future. I’m already addicted to it, and Highlight, which uses some of the same data to show me people near me. I’m not the only one. +Tim O’Reilly is using it. So are thousands of other people. Let’s see what it learns pretty quickly. 1. Where you live. 2. Where you work. 3. Your route to work (it can tell you’re driving). 4. What church you go to, or if you go at all. 5. What strip club you go to and just how excited you are (seriously!) 6. What gas station you stop at. It also knows how many miles you have to drive before you have to get more gas. 7. […]
April 10, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM LUIS CARVALHO

#systemhacks #hugesuccess This brings us to the second part of our policy: When we build our own software or contract with a third party to build it for us, we will share the code with the public at no charge. Exceptions will be made when source code exposes sensitive details that would put the Bureau at risk for security breaches; but we believe that, in general, hiding source code does not make the software safer. We’re sharing our code for a few reasons: First, it is the right thing to do: the Bureau will use public dollars to create the source code, so the public should have access to that creation. Second, it gives the public a window into how a government agency conducts its business. Our job is to protect consumers and to regulate financial institutions, and every citizen deserves to know exactly how we perform those missions. Third, code sharing makes our products better. By letting the development community propose modifications , our software will become more stable, more secure, and more powerful with less time and expense from our team. Sharing our code positions us to maintain a technological pace that would otherwise be impossible for a government agency. The CFPB is serious about building great technology. This policy will not necessarily make that an easy job, but it will make the goal achievable. Luis Carvalho originally shared this post: #opensource I had to check a couple times if this was actually in the US… apparently, it is… WOW. Digital Native Government Agency Embraces The Power Of Open Source | Techdirt The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a young federal agency (founded in July 2011), and as such has a history of getting it when it comes to the digital world. They launched by taking online su…
April 9, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM GARY LEVIN

Dataminr combs through 340 million daily tweets on Twitter and its algorithms quickly seize on abnormal and actionable signals that can be analyzed and confirmed as a relevant event for a client. This could be anything from an assassination or general instability in certain countries to government sanctions, natural disasters or on-the-ground chatter about products or trends. Dataminr uses available Twitter metadata along with other contextual factors such as historical and concurrent data to create a mathematical signature for an event, ultimately deciding on the fly whether an event is valuable for decision-making purposes. For example, Dataminr’s clients were alerted 20 minutes ahead of mainstream news coverage of Osama Bin Laden’s death. “It’s not just that we capture early information, but also where the eyes of the world are pointing. That’s a valuable indicator of what’s happening in the world and where the world will focus in the future,” said Bailey. “We have event detection software that is able to pinpoint specific events going on in the world. Instead of predicting the future, we’re very much predicting the present and giving people better understanding of what’s happening right now. And that has enormous value.” #attentioneconomy Gary Levin originally shared this post: Dataminr builds a Twitter-powered early warning system Dataminr, a New York-based start-up that has been quietly building a global sensor network powered by Twitter, is now introducing its technology to the public today, showing how its real-time engine c…
April 9, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM DERYA UNUTMAZ

I am made of robots. Derya Unutmaz originally shared this post: Nano-sized ‘factories’ churn out proteins Drugs made of protein have shown promise in treating cancer, but they are difficult to deliver because the body usually breaks down proteins before they reach their destination. To get around that obstacle, a team of MIT researchers has developed a new type of nanoparticle that can synthesize proteins on demand. Once these “protein-factory” particles reach their targets, the researchers can turn on protein synthesis by shining ultraviolet light on them. The particles could be used to deliver small proteins that kill cancer cells, and eventually larger proteins such as antibodies that trigger the immune system to destroy tumors, says Avi Schroeder, a postdoc in MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and lead author of a paper appearing in the journal NanoLetters. MIT news Tiny particles could manufacture cancer drugs at tumor sites.
April 9, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JEFF JARVIS

“As a result,” he writes, “throughout the Institutional Revolution numerous circumstances would have existed where the old institutional apparatus was inappropriate for the new order of things. This mismatch would have acted as a brake on economic growth…. [T]echnical innovations by themselves created institutional problems at the same time they solved engineering ones. Because the institutions took time to adjust, the full benefits of the technical changes took a long time to be felt.” Jeff Jarvis originally shared this post: A post inspired by a fascinating book, The Institutional Revolution. And what it teaches today. A snippet from it (full post with links below): I’m fascinated with Allen’s examination of society’s institutions — as organizations and as sets of rules — as they adapt to or are made extinct by new technologies. He points out that the transition to modern democratic institutions and bureaucracies was slow and syncopated. “As a result,” he writes, “throughout the Institutional Revolution numerous circumstances would have existed where the old institutional apparatus was inappropriate for the new order of things. This mismatch would have acted as a brake on economic growth…. [T]echnical innovations by themselves created institutional problems at the same time they solved engineering ones. Because the institutions took time to adjust, the full benefits of the technical changes took a long time to be felt.” Sound familiar? Allen does not attempt to extrapolate to today — and perhaps I should not. But he does suggest that “an institutional reexamination of the Industrial Revolution” could “help modern economists in their policy recommendations on matter of current economic growth and development.” (Or a lack thereof.) I wonder how inadequate — or doomed — our institutions are today in the face of new and disruptive technologies, including — to echo Allen — profound new means of […]
April 9, 2012

THE INTERNET IS THE POWER TO REPLACE MONEY…

The internet is the power to replace money as the primary instrument for social organization. #ourweb #attentioneconomy I don’t think Google is paying attention, but since I know the answer to the question it is worth a shot. Let’s start something – Google Take Action You stood together to stop something. Today, let’s start a conversation about the future of the web and what makes it awesome. Because it’s about more than wires and chips, politicians and companies. …
April 9, 2012

THE OCTOPUS PROJECT POSTED THIS VIDEO TO…

The Octopus Project posted this video to their YouTube channel with zero explanation, but we do know a couple things about it. First, those big tentacles at the front are labeled as “SMA Arms,” which means that they’re actuated by a shape-memory alloy that changes is length when heated, no servos or anything necessary. The other six arms are silicone with a steel cable inside, and this steel cable is attached to a bunch of nylon cables, and by manipulating those nylon cables, the tentacle can be made to wiggle around and even grip things. More info here: http://www.octopusproject.eu/ http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/robotic-octopus-takes-first-betentacled-steps#.T4MBau3UY24.facebook robotic octopus-like crawling_SMAplusSilicone.avi
April 8, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM SAKIS KOUKOUVIS

Neuroscience discovers Aristotle. The Epic Conclusion via Athens circa 330 BCE Sakis Koukouvis originally shared this post: Validating Your Brain: The Epic Conclusion 1. The brain is working primarily on an unconscious level. Because of this, we are rarely as aware of what we are doing and why as we would like to believe. 2. The brain is well-intentioned and is trying to accomplish its sole purpose, surviving the moment. 3. Because it is focused on surviving the moment, it will make decisions that favour short-term benefits EVERY SINGLE TIME, unless we override it. 4. Because the brain operates primarily on the level of our unconscious, it usually communicates with our conscious brain indirectly. Often, it is trying to get our attention and we are not listening to it, which leads to the perpetuation of problem behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. 5. If we learn to really listen to our brain, it will tell us everything we need to know. Articles about NEUROSCIENCE http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=neuroscience Validating Your Brain: The Epic Conclusion | Science News I’m going to be demonstrating how working together with your brain, instead of fighting against it, is the surest way to mental health and a better experience of your existence. Let’s start with askin…
April 8, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM JOHN KELLDEN

Pay close attention to the argument against the Enlightenment picture of human nature as aggressive and self-interested. The digital age is perhaps most clearly understood as an overthrow of this fundamental assumption of the Enlightenment age. The enlightenment is a celebration of the individual in its freedom and autonomy; the Digital Age is the ideological revolution where we celebrate our unity as a cohesive whole. John Kellden originally shared this post: Redesign: Me to We via +Donald Lee & +Vibral Voices
April 8, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM CHRIS ROBINSON

Chris Robinson originally shared this post: Interesting graph. I wonder what the slopes will look like when people stop replacing their VCRs and land line phones. What percentage of families still own a cassette player? 30%? Source: http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-100-year-march-of-technology-in-1-graph/255573/
April 8, 2012

THE ATTENTION ECONOMY THE #ATTENTIONECONOMY…

The Attention Economy The #attentioneconomy is a unified model of social organization. In the previous post, I described some very general features of the attention economy, and hinted at your role in it. In this post, I will describe a simple thought experiment for thinking about how the attention economy might serve as a general organizational infrastructure. 10: The Marble Network Imagine that everyone straps a little box on their foreheads. These little boxes produce tiny invisible marbles at some rate, say: 10 marbles every second. While you are wearing the box, it shoots invisible marbles out at the objects you happen to be looking at. Those objects along with everything else in the environment are equipped with little devices that register and absorb the incoming marbles, so that all your marbles get absorbed by something. These marbles are a crude approximation of the attention you pay. Every time you pay attention to some object, it gets bombarded with the marbles shooting from your forehead. The idea seems silly because it is. I’d never suggest we actually fling high speed projectiles in arbitrary directions from boxes mounted on people’s foreheads, that would be dangerous and irresponsible. If this is to be implemented at all, it would of course be rendered digitally and transparently as best as our technology will allow. Moreover, the direction a person’s head is facing is a terrible indicator of where their attention is being paid; to do this precisely, we’d need something far more sophisticated. But leave these technical details aside for the moment. This is a toy model, and I’m describing it in some detail to help us think about what the attention economy is doing, and what we are doing in it. So boxes on foreheads with marbles shooting out with some frequency and […]
April 7, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM TYGER AC

h/t +Gideon Rosenblatt Tyger AC originally shared this post: Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens. All this to say: our collective memory of past is astoundingly inaccurate. Not only has the number of people reading not declined precipitously, it’s actually gone up since the perceived golden age of American letters. The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart Not only has the number of readers not declined since the golden age of American letters, it has gone up.
August 21, 2007

10 YEARS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I think this little snapshot of history is quite telling. How Do Post Office Machines Read Addresses?‘ Not until Christmas of 1997 did the USPS and the University of Buffalo’s Center for Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) deploy its first handwritten address-reading prototype, which rejected 85 percent of envelopes and correctly identified the address in only 10 percent of those it read with a 2 percent error rate. … Today, the large majority of letters sent through the post office are read and sorted entirely by computer. According to Srihari, current reading success rates are above 90 percent… the first human eyes to examine the envelope are those of the postal carrier approaching your mailbox.
August 23, 2007

HIV DENIAL IN THE INTERNET ERA

I was linked to this study in the PLOS on the apparent spread of science denial and disinformation that has become symptomatic of the Internet Age. Below are my somewhat lengthy comments in response to Twinxor’s concerns in the D&D thread. For the Record, PLOS is a legit peer-reviewed scientific journal, but is licensed under Creative Commons, so it free and open to the public. What’s more, they allow commentary by readers. I am thinking of revising this comments and attaching them to the article, so any editing advice would be appreciated. Twinxor posted: I can live with the existence of wackos with silly beliefs. The trouble is their influence – widespread doubt of HIV’s importance is very bad, because it leads people to ignore safe sex practices and a lot more people die. As I see it, the big challenge is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of science, which inoculates the public against conspiracy theory. This is a strange claim to make, because the job of science is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of its claims, and at least in these cases science has already done an admirable job of justifying its conclusions. Moreover, this article demonstrates that science is already well inoculated against pseudoscience, so much so that it can incorporate pseudoscientific practice as part of its dataset. This suggests that science is not challenged by pseudoscience. Leaving aside the obviously huge problem of scientific funding, pseudoscience seems to present no epistemological problems for the status of science itself. If science is primarily an epistemological enterprise, then what’s the challenge? The answer, I think, is mentioned in the title of the paper, but seems relatively absent from the article itself: namely, the effect of the ‘Internet Era’ on scientific practice. Before internet, people were obviously free […]
August 25, 2007

CONTENT AWARENESS

August 28, 2007

NT

September 2, 2007

CONTAGIOUS

Its a few months late, but happy 10 year anniversary to Deep Blue vs Kasparov! To commemorate the event, Dennett wrote up a short, and I think painfully superficial, discussion in MIT’s Technology Review. Higher Games The verdict that computers are the equal of human beings in chess could hardly be more official, which makes the caviling all the more pathetic. The excuses sometimes take this form: “Yes, but machines don’t play chess the way human beings play chess!” Or sometimes this: “What the machines do isn’t really playing chess at all.” Well, then, what would be really playing chess? This is not a trivial question. The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess, except for one thing: computers don’t know when to accept a draw. Computers–at least currently existing computers–can’t be bored or embarrassed, or anxious about losing the respect of the other players, and these are aspects of life that human competitors always have to contend with, and sometimes even exploit, in their games. Offering or accepting a draw, or resigning, is the one decision that opens the hermetically sealed world of chess to the real world, in which life is short and there are things more important than chess to think about. This boundary crossing can be simulated with an arbitrary rule, or by allowing the computer’s handlers to step in. Human players often try to intimidate or embarrass their human opponents, but this is like the covert pushing and shoving that goes on in soccer matches. The imperviousness of computers to this sort of gamesmanship means that if you beat them at all, you have to beat them fair and square–and isn’t that just what ­Kasparov and Kramnik were unable to do? |via Reality Apologetics| I am personally convinced that humanity […]
September 3, 2007

I’VE BEEN NAILED

So in the D&D thread on the Deep Blue article, I was getting a bit liberal with my misanthropist technophile rhetorical flourishes. This particular response makes me chuckle a bit: Not to attack you or anything, but you get overly dramatic over bizarre stuff. What do you mean by “This comparatively simple inert machine generated genuine panic and emotion in humanity’s best representative; in the face of the machine, we flinched first” exactly? It seems like you’re turning the frustration of one person into a species-wide defeat that we all felt — and on top of it, you really seem to relish it. It seems odd to me that you simultaneously place such great significance upon machines performing the tasks they were built to perform and such great satisfaction in humans “losing.” After I gave my colloquium on Friday, there was some discussion about how my intuitions concerning machines and technology didn’t align with most people at the talk. A certain Mr. Swenson suggested, via an illusion to Jane Goodall, that perhaps I had spent so much time around machines that I actually started to think like them . Well, if loving machines is wrong then I don’t wanna be right.
September 7, 2007

OVERHEARD IN AN AIRPORT

In an airport smoking lounge, two TSA officials take a smoke break with Sudoku books in hand. TSA 1: You know its just logic. If a computer had that puzzle, it could solve it in [pause] ten seconds. Just… poof [makes wild hand gestures]. TSA 2: Well, obviously I’m not a computer. [pause, smiles] If I were a computer, I’d have a real job.
September 11, 2007

WHY MAN CREATES

September 13, 2007

SCHOOL OF BBALL

From this collection, most of which is send ups or variations of rather tired internet memes. See also.
September 13, 2007

TECHNOMANCER

In case you were wondering: The Technomancer Like druids, but with tech instead of nature. Technomancers are more than just skilled technicians. They are in tune with machines, connecting with them not only on an intellectual but a spiritual level. Note: A “machine”, for purposes of the technomancer, is any electronic system. A technomancer does not necessarily have any mechanical or structural engineering abilities or knowledge. But “electrical and electronic systems, computers, and artificial intelligences” is one hell of an awkward phrase. … Robotic Companion: A 1st-level technomancer may begin play with a robotic companion. This companion is one that the technomancer has built herself. Robotic companions can have up to 2 HD. Alternatively, the technomancer may have more than one robotic companion provided that the robots’ total HD don’t exceed 2. The technomancer can also cast AI friendship on other robots during play (see the spell description below.) I’m looking for a word to describe someone almost religiously devoted to technology, but I’d prefer a word that leans towards cyberpunk and away from D&D. I don’t like technomancer, and technomage is just as bad. I like server monk, but it wouldn’t make much sense to someone who didn’t know server. Technopriest is taken by the Catholics, and electroyogi and eVicar are just silly. So help me out, cyberspace.
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