9 Dec 2010 - permalink
Tim Bray has written an excellent post on the whole WikiLeaks affair:
Here’s a sound bite I can sign up for, from Simon Phipps: “Wikileaks is like Pirate Bay; something that I don’t like but have to defend because of the collateral damage caused by attacking it.”
Unlike Simon, there are quite a few things I like about WikiLeaks; but even where it’s open to criticism, its sins pale beside those of the rabble of wastrels, guttersnipes, nincompoops, and cowards lined up against it.
Exactly!
7 Dec 2010 - permalink
Financial Times has an interesting article about Facebook and it looks like they are working on becoming an integral part of what we consider the web to be:
Facebook is no longer merely a social network, where users check out updates from friends, glance at photos and play some games. Rather, it is making moves to be an essential part of the entire online experience. The company is becoming people’s homepage, e-mail system and more. Much in the way Google extended its capabilities from search to include e-mail, maps and books, Facebook is becoming a part of ever more daily services on the web. The company is also making strides to achieve one thing Google has not: it is well on its way to becoming the de facto identity platform for the internet.
It used to be IBM that was the giant, then Microsoft. Today, Apple, Google and Facebook are a huge part of our lives in ways previously unknown. Unlike the open, cooperative and, partly, government funded computer and internet revolution that enabled these to grow, the future is increasingly being built and controlled by corporations. I am not sure that is a good thing.
Fortunately, brilliant things and being built and thought every day as the TED videos demonstrate. I hope there is room for them.
6 Dec 2010 - permalink
Researchers at Stanford have created a social network based on the standards used every day in email. John Fontana from Ping Identity writes
The goal is to provide an open and federated social network platform, shatter the silos of personal and other data that individual sites control, and give users ultimate power over their data and relationships.
I love how it’s based on an already widespread and robust system for communicating. Email is well understood unlike setting up your own server, that most other decentralized social networks require. Read more at Stanford MobiSocial Lab
24 Nov 2010 - permalink
The last decade has been about data. Computers and the internet has made available unfathomable amounts of data on just about anything (albeit a lot of it of questionable quality). More than 10 years ago, Google changed how we search through a very small part of it by understanding the importance of statistical analysis. They called it PageRank.
Companies like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn build their business around collecting data about their users and selling it to their customers. But it’s not the data itself, it’s the relations, the correlations hidden within the terabytes. It is visible every time they “magically” suggest other people we might know or when Amazon displays a different book, equally interesting. iTunes Genius or Netflix works similarly.
Like the beauty of fractals, which the late Benoit Mandelbrot helped describe, and which we cannot comprehend without the billions of calculations possible on computers, we need help making sense of the seemingly disconnected bits of information that is everywhere.
Hal Varian, chief economist at Google put it like this:
I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.
Rockstar statistician Hans Rosling has made the important point that it is not data we lack. It is understanding it. His remarkable appearances on TED made it clear that our beliefs of the world can be very far from the truth (YouTube list). He founded Gapminder to visualize complex or large datasets in order to help us understand – and brilliantly so.
Two years ago Wired published a story called The End of Theory argues how data is changing the scientific method. We no longer depend on the idea for a theory. Rather, computers will be programmed to look for patterns in the sea of data and help us find correlations. Statistics is increasingly becoming the foundation of knowledge. From data visualizations in newspapers to research in medicine and physics, data science is coming.
Google recently released Google Refine, based on software by Freebase, that makes it easy to work with messy data, clean it up and convert to a veriety of formats. Good data is the basis for useful statistics and Refine makes it a lot easier than juggling regular expressions.
There are now several sources online (IBM’s Many Eyes, Gapminder and Freebase to name a few), each with huge datasets on diverse subjects, ready for analysis. Around the world, governments are opening their databases to the public, allowing anyone to find new relations or make it accessible to a greater audience.
Understanding the data we have will help us understand the world and statistics, data parsing and communication is how to do it. To end with a quote from Hans Rosling:
The seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world.
23 Nov 2010 - permalink
Jeffery Kluger for Time:
One by one, the berms we’ve built between ourselves and the beasts are being washed away. Humans are the only animals that use tools, we used to say. But what about the birds and apes that we now know do as well? Humans are the only ones who are empathic and generous, then. But what about the monkeys that practice charity and the elephants that mourn their dead? Humans are the only ones who experience joy and a knowledge of the future. But what about the U.K. study just last month showing that pigs raised in comfortable environments exhibit optimism, moving expectantly toward a new sound instead of retreating warily from it? And as for humans as the only beasts with language? Kanzi himself could tell you that’s not true.
It’s long overdue that we start viewing animals in a manner consistent with what we know. The biggest difference between them and us may well be the arrogance with which we treat them.