#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. […]

#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…

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…

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.

“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 […]

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. …

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

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…

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

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/

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 […]

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.