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.
May 22, 2012

COMMUNAL NESTING BEES ALTHOUGH MINING BEES…

Communal nesting bees Although mining bees are solitary, a handful of species in the UK often nest communally. Communal bees have a simple form of social structure: they share a nest, but individual females will build their own cells, lay eggs and provision their own offspring: they do not have the complex social organisation with workers and division of labour of honeybees. … If a high level of relatedness is not responsible for the evolution of communality, why do these bees nest communally? A potential benefit is improved nest defence. There are always bees going in or out, and in my own observations, a few bees often sit by the nest entrance (like as in the photo at the top), therefore opportunities for parasitism by cleptoparasites might be reduced. More: http://abugblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/communal-mining-bees.html via +Kyle Crider
May 22, 2012

THE PEER TO PEER MANIFESTO VIA +MICHEL BAUWENS…

The Peer to Peer Manifesto via +Michel Bauwens 13. The best guarantor of the spread of the peer to peer logic to the world of physical production is the distribution of everything, i.e. of the means of production in the hands of individuals and communities, so that they can engage in social cooperation. While the immaterial world will be characterized by a peer to peer logic of non-reciprocal generalized exchange, the peer-informed world of material exchange will be characterized by evolving forms of reciprocity and neutral exchange. More: http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/the-peer-to-peer-manifesto-the-emergence-of-p2p-civilization-and-political-economy/ ____________ This hits some of the right notes; others I disagree with or think don’t go far enough. Still, this is in the same spirit as the work I’ve been doing on #digitalpolitics and the #attentioneconomy , and it is definitely worth a share to get more people talking. The faster we can triangulate on the same basic insight, the easier it will be for all of us to work together. The Peer to Peer Manifesto: The Emergence of P2P Civilization and Political Economy Michel Bauwens Our current political economy is based on a fundamental mistake. It is based on the assumption that natural resources are unlimited, and that it is an endless sink. This false assu…
May 22, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM BRUNO GONÇALVES

Abstract: In a “tipping” model, each node in a social network, representing an individual, adopts a behavior if a certain number of his incoming neighbors previously held that property. A key problem for viral marketers is to determine an initial “seed” set in a network such that if given a property then the entire network adopts the behavior. Here we introduce a method for quickly ?nding seed sets that scales to very large networks. Our approach ?nds a set of nodes that guarantees spreading to the entire network under the tipping model. After experimentally evaluating 31 real-world networks, we found that our approach often ?nds such sets that are several orders of magnitude smaller than the population size. Our approach also scales well – on a Friendster social network consisting of 5:6 million nodes and 28 million edges we found a seed sets in under 3:6 hours. We also ?nd that highly clustered local neighborhoods and dense network-wide community structure together suppress the ability of a trend to spread under the tipping model. __________ Translation: We can quickly find the key influencing nodes in a network and feed them data that will adjust the overall shape of the network to suit our specifications. Yowza. Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets. (arXiv:1205.4431v1 [cs.SI]) In a “tipping” model, each node in a social network, representing an individual, adopts a behavior if a certain number of his incoming neighbors previously held that property. A key problem for viral marketers is to determine an initial “seed” set in a network such that if given a property then the entire network adopts the behavior. Here we introduce a method for quickly finding seed sets that scales to very large networks. Our approach […]
May 23, 2012

THE 20TH CENTURY WAS THE PEAK OF THE INDUSTRIAL…

The 20th century was the peak of the Industrial Age, and it culminates with the invention of the Internet. The mythical structure is that of the Titans, warring and fighting and love-making in order to give birth to the Gods that ultimately overthrow them. Industrialization is about ordering; when humanity is the one so ordered the result is #alienation . In this fabulous interview, Postman delivers the 20th century’s worries about the Digital Age as clearly and humbly as one can. The potential for radical alienation is, he thinks, the stakes of this Faustian bargain. What everyone in the 20th century missed was that the Digital Revolution isn’t just a continuation of the ordering of the Industrial Age. Instead, the Digital Age is about organization. Understanding how order and organization differ is the conceptual basis for the paradigm shift, but you don’t need to understand the concepts to see it’s implications. This paradigm shift is precisely why the paradigmatic structures of the digital age are the communities that Postman worries might not exist in the Digital World. In fact, such communities thrive in abundance, largely because we’ve worked out the ways for being co-present and assembling digitally. In 1995 those communities were still distant and hard to reach, but today billions of us are there, and it works. Postman expected that technological change breeds only order, and thereby alienation, and so his worries here are entirely appropriate. In fact, technological change can also breed organization, and organization is holistic and presents only solutions to the alienation of the Industrial Age. Our deeply human sociality won out over the imposed alienation, and for this reason the Digital Age is reworking the fundamental organizational structure we’ve inherited from the age of industry. Via +joe breskin Neil Postman on Cyberspace, 1995
May 23, 2012

I’LL BE GIVING A TALK FOR THE COMMON ACTION…

I’ll be giving a talk for the Common Action Free School today and tomorrow at 6pm in The Coffeehouse in Uptown Normal. This is a free event, and everyone is welcome! Today’s talk is titled “Ants and Organization” Tomorrow will be “Organization and Consensus” You can see more, including links to resources and other learning materials at the link below! http://digitalinterface.blogspot.com/2012/05/ill-be-leading-series-of-discussions.html More about the Common Action Free school here: http://www.commonactionfreeschool.org/
May 24, 2012

A VISION OF STUDENTS TODAY ARGUING AGAINST…

A Vision of Students Today Arguing against +Mark Letteri‘s technocynicism in this thread: https://plus.google.com/u/0/110903754634045683249/posts/d18RPZdkLK1 brought up this wonderful +Michael Wesch video, part of his Youtube series on the experience of college students in the digital age. The video has surprisingly few hits, and apparently hasn’t gone around G+. If you want to know how the rising generation views the world they are about to enter, and the skills and habits they will bring to bear, have a look. “a few ideas …” (Visions of Students Today)
May 24, 2012

ANTS AND ORGANIZATION

From the Organization lecture series from the Common Action Free School. Part Two
May 24, 2012

RESHARED POST FROM BRUNO GONÇALVES

+Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues have put together attention-based models looking at Twitter activity in the run up to the #americanidol decisions. They were able to predict the winner with a pretty high degree of confidence using an extremely simplified model of the Twitter activity. They posted the model to the arXiv a few days ago, and then updated with results from the big vote yesterday. Their updated paper is linked below. This is both a validation and benchmarking case for quantifying and modeling the #attentioneconomy . They conclude: ” We have shown that the open source data available on the web can be used to make educated guesses on the outcome of societal events. Speci?cally, we have shown that extremely simple measures quantifying the popularity of the American Idol participants on Twitter strongly correlate with their performances in terms of votes. A post-event analysis shows that the less voted competitors can be identi?ed with reasonable accuracy (Table II) looking at the Twitter data collected during the airing of the show and in the immediately following hours.” Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol. (arXiv:1205.4467v2 [physics.soc-ph] UPDATED) We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined electoral phenomenon that each week draws millions of votes in the USA. We provide evidence that Twitter activity during the time span defined by the TV show airing and the voting period following it, correlates with the contestants ranking and allows the anticipation of the voting outc…
May 24, 2012

THE LOGIC OF DIVERSITY THE COMPLEXITY OF…

The Logic of Diversity The Complexity of a Controversial Concept By +Cosma Shalizi … The division of labor is, in part, an adaptation for handling complex problems, but only those which are complex in the straightforward sense of being very large. It relies on finding a way of decomposing the large problem into nearly-separate parts, so that it can be attacked through a strategy of divide-and-conquer, with different people specializing in conquering the various divisions. (This topic, and its relation to hierarchical structure, was explored by Herbert Simon in his classic Sciences of the Artificial.) Diversity, in the sense Page is talking about, is another way of adapting to complexity, and specifically to complex problems which are not decomposable into neat hierarchies. Put strategically, the idea is like this: Agents have only a limited capacity to represent, learn about, and predict their world, and so solve their problems. When the problem or environment is too complex for any one agent, then you should have many weak agents make partial, incomplete, overlapping representations. You’ll be better off by doing this, and then learning a way to combine them, than by trying to find a single, globally accurate representation, such as a single super-genius agent which can handle the problem all by itself. Collectively, the combined representations of the group of agents are equivalent to a single high-capacity representation. But nobody, individually, has anything like the complete picture; in fact, everybody’s individual picture is pretty much wrong, or at best drastically incomplete. Powerful, high-level capacities which emerge from the interplay of low-level components are a common feature of complex systems, but here as elsewhere, just having the components and letting them interact is not enough. The organization of the interactions is crucial. In the brain, for instance, this is the difference between […]
May 24, 2012

+DILAN TORY AND +STEVEN WAGNER RAISE SOME…

+dilan tory and +Steven Wagner raise some interesting questions regarding the complaint in the linked article. Any thoughts from the stream? Quoting dilan’s question below. “Dan, I thought you might be interested in the legal/conceptual issues here. Steve wonders what you think about the following: What counts as a database/what does intent mean in this context? As for myself, I’m just wondering how often someone in France has to search for “Jew” after a name to cause google’s algorithmic whizgizmos to suggest it as a prompt. And I want to know whether French people do this more than, say, Germans or Americans-is French pop culture becoming obsessively anti-semitic? I can’t help but find this menacing–I’m in the middle of reading the postwar correspondance between Jaspers and Hannah Arendt…” _____ One interesting thing to consider is that Google already shapes your search results according to personalized metrics. In other words, if my communities are heavily involved and influential in, say, antisemetic circles, that would tend to raise the number of antisemetic results I’d get in a search. Presumably, this is what I’d want, given my online communities. Consequently, laws like this seem like ways of restricting which communities one might engage with. This might seem like an acceptable result when dealing with so-called “hate-based” communities, but of course when state institutions have this kind of authority it tends to over step its bounds. More generally, I think a lot of issues with online censorship are traditionally understood in terms of “free speech”, and so issues like this become difficult because it isn’t exactly clear what speech is getting suppressed when you silence autocomplete results. I’d personally suggest that +Google (as an artificially intelligent computing agent, not the corporation) is having its speech suppressed, but since I don’t think Google yet has […]
.twitter-timeline.twitter-timeline-rendered { position: relative !important; left: 50%; transform: translate(-50%, 0); }