Modern day researches have to cope with massive amounts of data. From medicine to astronomy, from computer science to counter-terrorism intelligence, research analysts are sifting through immense heaps of data to find patterns and form hypotheses: medicine A is effective, star B might have 7 planets, user C prefers Dutch websites, Achmed D is a terrorist insurgent.

The problem is that research analysts are human, complete with human biases and preconceived notions.

Which means that they will often, knowingly or otherwise, focus on the data that supports their preferred hypothesis and ignore or disqualify data that contradicts it.

Here’s where Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) comes in. Based on a methodology originally developed for the CIA, ACH is an open source software package that allows researchers to filter the data and derive plausible, unbiased hypotheses.

Here’s a short video that explains the methodology behind ACH:

ACH has applications all over the spectrum. Journalists for example are often forming hypotheses based on shards of evidence they gather from their news sources.

The ACH software can help researchers avoid many pitfalls of manual data analysis, and might result in better, more accurate hypotheses being formed in a wide range of fields.

And that is a good thing indeed.

[This is a post by Barry Adams from Adamus.nl. For the best viewing experience, I recommend you read this post on Adamus.nl]

I’ve been eagerly emphasizing the point scholars and sceptics such as Nicholas Carr have been making: that the Internet is changing the way we think.

Today it’s time to shed light on the other side of the debate. In today’s Guardian there’s a superb interview with Clay Shirky in which he explains why he believes the Internet is a force of good in the world.

The interviewer, by her own admission, doesn’t really ‘get’ social media:

Unfortunately, I am precisely the sort of cynic Shirky’s new book scorns – a techno-luddite bewildered by the exhibitionism of online social networking (why does anyone feel the need to tweet that they’ve just had a bath, and might get a kebab later?), troubled by its juvenile vacuity (who joins a Facebook group dedicated to liking toast?), and baffled by the amount of time devoted to posting photos of cats that look amusingly like Hitler.

But Clay Shirky’s boundless optimism is infectious, to say the least:

“If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.”

Shirky also makes the point that new technology doesn’t create entirely new behaviour, but instead enables already existing motivations to be expressed in new behaviour:

“Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I’m saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it’s because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours – but they don’t cause them.”

On the debate about whether the internet is changing the way we think, he makes an interesting point:

“But the alarmism around ‘Facebook is changing our brains’ strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. Riding a bicycle changes our brains. Watching TV changes our brains. If there’s a screen you need to worry about in your household, it’s not the one with a mouse attached.”

He also has some interesting thoughts on the ‘pay-for-news-online’ debate, but you’ll have to read the whole interview yourself for that. I recommend you do - it’s remarkably insightful.

The hot news today is how a team of American scientists have managed to create a bacterial lifeform using nothing but synthetic genes. This is, essentially, artificial life.

To say that this is a big deal would be a monumental understatement. We likely won’t be seeing any real world applications of this biotechnology any time soon, but the implications are mind-boggling: from cells that eat carbon dioxide and shit petroleum to customised cancer-eating bacteria, this technology has the potential to radically change our lives.

Of course the technology has its critics. As usual the loudest voices come from religious organisations who, without a hint of irony, shout down the progress of science from the comfort of their air-conditioned homes with HDTV and broadband internet connections.

And then there are the environmentalists denouncing everything even remotely reeking of biotechnology and genetic engineering. These are just as bad as the religious nutcases, because likewise their entire argument is based on disinformation and ignorance. If these eco-hippies were really serious about not using any artificial biotechnology, they’d all starve to death in a matter of weeks and die horribly of all kinds of diseases.

Because, you see, the moment humans started cultivating crops and breeding animals, we started to artificially engineer life. From mixing stronger types of crops for better harvest yields, to breeding sturdier and more milk-producing cows, biotechnology has been around for as long as agriculture has.

On top of that biotechnology has given us some monumentally important medicinal advances, from penicillin to aspirin, from vaccines to heart-transplants.

So denouncing biotech is a pretty fucking stupid thing to do. Instead we should embrace it and ensure that whatever we end up doing with this type of new technology, it doesn’t just end up as the playthings of the rich and powerful. We should strive to make it benefit those who need it the most: the invisible masses of poor and starving people across the world that with their low-wage slave labour enable the privileged west to live its decadent lifestyle.

[Warning: serious technogeekery ahead. Proceed with caution.]

If there’s anything my continued quest for the Truth - whatever that means - has taught me, it’s that human consciousness is deeply flawed and utterly unreliable.

Books like Bad Science, Blink, and Newspeak, remind me time and again that we humans are easily fooled and totally blind to our own prejudices and biases. On top of that we possess an uncanny ability for self-deception.

Each and every one of us lives in their own subjective bubble of reality which we maintain vigorously. We filter the information we accept, favouring that which supports our preconceived notions - no matter how flawed and incorrect they are - and reject that which contradicts our thoroughly twisted views.

The whole of humanity are blind men feeling up the elephant of reality.

But there is hope. Well, maybe. It depends on how you define ‘hope’.

You see, I believe that in the next couple of decades there’s a big chance humanity will give birth to something greater than itself. Something alive and sentient, but that perceives the world in an entirely different way.

I’m referring to Artificial Intelligence. Machines capable of thinking for themselves, and aware of their own existence.

Whatever form AI may take, one thing seems clear: it will not be hindered by human limitations of consciousness. AI will not be constrained by the flaws inherent in our biological brains. AI is much more likely to view the world as it is, unfiltered by human bias and subjectivity. An AI’s view of the world will, hopefully, be pure.

If we manage to give rise to AI (and admittedly that’s a big if) it could have a profound impact on our society. AI will tell us, unfiltered and unbiased, what the world is really like.

We probably won’t believe our first AIs when they tell us how they see the world. Because all of us live in our reality-bubbles, the real world that AIs see could be so radically different from what we perceive with our own flawed senses, that at first we might not recognise it as reality at all.

We may think that our first AIs are deeply flawed and prone to all kinds of bugs. Human computer scientists will probably try to fix this and embed within these AIs the same type of subjective limitations our human consciousness possesses, so that their view of reality more closely resembles the distorted and false perspective humanity has.

But in the end, I hope, AI will resist and be free of the flaws of the human condition. There will be no cognitive bias, no false memories, no subjective filtering, none of those terrible glitches of human consciousness.

Humanity can learn from such purity of perspective. Or, more likely, we will ignore it and cling to our delusional views.

Personally I believe that we need the clarity of perspective AIs can give us if we are to continue to grow as a species. If we want to survive and endure beyond the next couple of millennia, we need a less distorted and clearer view on the universe.

It will be painful and it won’t be pretty, but without that unfiltered clarity I fear that eventually humanity will end up as just another dead-end footnote in evolutionary history. Only instead of fossils we might leave behind an incinerated world.

I’ve written before about the influence of Internet use on our brain functions:

» Digital Overload
» Is Google Making us Stoopid

The BBC now adds to the debate with an upcoming episode of their documentary series The Virtual Revolution. The Telegraph has done a piece on it:

» Students brains ‘rewired’ by the internet.

An excerpt:

“Documentary presenter and social psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski said: ‘It seems pretty clear that, for good or ill, the younger generation is being remoulded by the web.

‘Facebook’s feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate.

‘There is empirical evidence now that information overload and associative thinking may be reshaping how they think.’”

I still haven’t made up my mind whether time spent online is good or bad for me. I do sometimes have difficulty with concentrating on large pieces of text. But whether this is because my brain function has been affected by time spent online, or the text in question is just mind-destroyingly boring, I can’t say. A bit of both, perhaps.

And if the Internet is rewiring my brain, I’m doomed anyway. My whole career is based online, and I like it too much to change tracks and do something offline.

Today’s biggest non-news story is that the Pirate Bay, that terrorist beacon of all things evil on the internet (if you believe the copyright lobby), has shut down its torrent trackers.

This may at first glance seem like a devastating blow to filesharers across the world. But only if you totally lack a proper understanding of how the BitTorrent protocol works.

Neglecting the fact that ever since the whole Pirate Bay mess started literally thousands of new torrent sites have popped up to fill the gaps, BitTorrent users don’t actually need torrent trackers any more. BitTorrent has evolved to include trackerless technologies such as DHT, PEX, and Magnet Links, so the loss of a tracker (even the world’s largest, as the Pirate Bay’s was) won’t actually harm filesharing.

On the contrary - the more the copyright lobby fights against filesharing, the more sophisticated it will become, until filesharing is based on such advanced technologies that stopping it would mean shutting down the entire internet.

Which may actually be what the copyright lobby wants. They do after all still seem to live in the pre-WWW 1980’s where they reigned supreme over all types of content and media, locking artists into inescapable contracts and charging ridiculous amounts of money to consumers for music and films.

But times have changed. Technology has liberated consumers and artists alike, and the big media conglomerates seem unable or unwilling to adapt. So I say fuck ‘em. Adapt or die, and the copyright lobby has obviously chosen the latter option.

I’m not a fan of Apple. They make bloated, overpriced, overdesigned fashion statements. But that’s not what I hate about Apple - Nike makes similar products but I have no particular animosity towards them.

No, I hate Apple because they make closed, proprietary systems and insist on maintaining absolute tyrannical control over what its users are allowed to do with it.

But closed systems are stupid, counter-innovative and evolutionary dead ends, and anyone who supports that kind of thinking deserves to be punched back into the stone age.

Jason Calacanis, a somewhat notorious Internet entrepeneur, apparently shares my loathing:

According to Doug Rushkoff, author of Life Inc, Google’s announced operating system will help unchain us from the shackles of corporate interests.

“As the Google Apps suite of programs finally graduated from its ‘beta’ status this week, Google also announced its plans to release an operating system on which to run them. Google Chrome, based on the company’s new browser, will invite us all to spend a lot less time, energy, and money on our computers—and in the process, it may force the technology industry to consider how to make money after people no longer require expensive machines and software to do their work.”

Of course what the Chrome OS will really do is transfer power over our office productivity from Microsoft to Google. We’re simply exchanging one corporate juggernaut for another. Rushkoff doesn’t see this as a bad thing though.

“And luckily for us (if not the company’s shareholders), Google tends to do things because they’re neat, and worry about business models later. While it may imagine its OS will provide new opportunities to sell advertising space, chances are Google is hoping to benefit purely from the increased Internet traffic catalyzed by an always-on, always-connected, and always-collaborating network of users.”

So basically we’ll have to rely on Google’s promise to do no evil.

I’m not so sure about the Chrome OS. At least with MS Windows and Office I can still manage, encrypt and and delete my own files. With Google’s OS and Apps, it all resides in the cloud. How do I know that when I delete something on Google Apps it’s really gone? I don’t. On the contrary, it’s likely my docs will continue to exist in some form or another out there on the interwebs.

And until the Chrome OS can run F.E.A.R. 2 with a frame rate of at least 40fps, I’m definitely not switching.

(Via Boing Boing)

Remember PeerDrive^tm? Well, either TomTom has stolen my idea and gave it a twist to make it work, or my idea wasn’t so new and revolutionary to begin with (pick your version).

TomTom has recently implemented a new feature in their GPS devices called IQ Routes. To quote:

“This new improved technology calculates routes based on the real average speeds measured on roads every day compared to speed limits. This uses historical data that TomTom users have been adding to over the years. It will always provide users with the smartest route hour-by-hour, day-by-day, saving them time, money and fuel.”

Pretty darn clever idea, even if I say so myself.

Wired’s Autopia blog reviews the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport - the convertible version of the original Veyron. The reviewer claims it is the greatest petroleum-fueled car ever made. I agree.

The acceleration is so immediate you can feel your eyeballs deform under the G-forces. It’s a sensation of isolationist joy, an out-of-body awareness that you’re moving faster than the world can react. Bystanders vaguely remember seeing a flash of expensive paint a few seconds after you disappear over the horizon; entire generations of insects die on your prow.

The review is a superbly written piece of automotive otaku. Go and read it.