Software Predicts Tomorrow’s News by Analyzing Today’s and Yesterday’s
Technology Review (02/01/13) Tom Simonite

Researchers at Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur, based on 22 years of New York Times articles and other online data. Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz says the system could help aid organizations be more proactive in fighting epidemics or other problems. In tests involving forecasts of diseases, violence, and significant numbers of deaths, the system’s warnings were correct 70-90 percent of the time. The performance is good enough to suggest that a more refined version could be used in real settings, for example, to assist experts at government aid agencies involved in planning humanitarian response and readiness, Horvitz notes. “One source we found useful was DBpedia, which is a structured form of the information inside Wikipedia constructed using crowdsourcing,” says Technion-Israel researcher Kira Radinsky. “We can understand, or see, the location of the places in the news articles, how much money people earn there, and even information about politics.” The information used to create the predictions provides context that is not available in news articles, and which is necessary to determine the general rules for which events precede others.

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Some people worry about a camera that might record their face unknowingly while they search the web or a mic permitted to record their conversation during a phone call. Other people call this paranoid or naive. Google cares about demographics, they believe, not you individually.

Demographics are a tool of the twentieth century. Google and the Obama Campaign team are perfecting the art of direct engagment based on big pools of data on you specifically.

Google cares about the mundane conversations in our email to target you specifically with ads and search results. This leads to at least two problems:

1) As a corporation, Google has a legal responsibility to make money for shareholders. No law says they have to keep or even uphold their motto of don’t be evil. Your terms of service can outlive their currently stated priorities and values.

2) As they tailor service and results to you specifically, you lose the serendipity and free access of the internet that made it so revolutionary. The more that each of us sees what google believes fits our opinions and likes, the less opportunity we have to grow and evolve freely in unexpected ways. Imagine the impact on children. Early searches become predictive, prescriptive, and constructive. The algorithms become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Thanks to persistant documentation, filtering, and tagging of everyone’s experiences, success, and failures, we live in a learning world. We engage with micro, ad hoc lessons on a daily basis. When we need it most, just-in-time guides and tutorials arrive optimized for our learning styles, delivered by the how-to personality of our choice. We immerse ourselves in open data and generative knowledge and wisdom. As a result, we hone our craft and artistry at an early age, enjoying the fruits of our careers from our tweens to our centweens.

de-materialized

• cloud server satelilites
• no personal articifacts on earth
• Print on Demand disposable buildings
• everyone is a maker, 6 jobs, no continuity
• market value returns to life’s essentials

connectivity

• mediated relationships
• trust issues
• the personal is public
• information overload gives way to state of flow

instructables

• hyper documentations and micro lessons on everything
• celebrity teachers
• lifetime just-in-time learning at all ages
• schools become about personal growth and methods of learning, rather than about facts and skills

They have embedded their Matrix on the class tumblr.
cooplab2013.tumblr.com/models

• rename the monument to fit current neighborhood demographics
• access monument build date?
• monument as immigrant or gentrifier
• filter contemporary debates thru monuments like xtranormal
• move the monument to where it belongs (inter-borough migration)
• monument gaze — photos of what they’ve seen for the past 100 years
• occupy the monument … rename it by documenting it’s unknown history (who built it, when, why?)
• make up a story — the conflict between what they stand for and what’s happened where they gaze. write the story of their drama, their conflict.
• street view user photo overlaid on views
• stand in a room with projection of 360 view from statue
• monument + funny data … like bathroom location. sun goes down, guide GW to the nearest place to take a leak.

Can play in journalism open a space to create objectivity created by the audience person? What do we do with the risks of misinterpretation?

Play + Journalism » Immersion of audience.

But the game is not intrinsic in the toy; it is a set of player-defined objectives overlaid on the toy. – Greg Costikyan

Ideas

• I was there when.
• Inline commentary, debate, sourcing and review
• Children’s mystery books, choose your own adventure, flip book over, use color filter
• Fan fiction – compose alternative outcome, a departure from any node within the story

elements: source, data, fact, information, knowledge, researcher, subject, outlet, form,

Data toy examples:

• Cherry Blossoms Baghdad
• Pocket Full of Memories
• Making Visible the Invisible

Cyclee strives to foster ad hoc community around shared bicycle commutes. Riders who frequent the same paths can leverage their observations and experience to increase visibility of individual cyclists and visibility of this transportation system essential to a sustainable NYC.

Bikes offer individuals a rare intervention that responds to many major crises at once (economic, climate, health, congestion, etc.). They can do this because they are affordable, accessible, and human scale. New York City has a unique opportunity to further leverage this intervention. Cyclists comprise an essential though less visible segment of our transportation ecosystem — they already outnumber taxis twenty to one and reportedly deliver 50% of all restaurant industry business. But less than a percent of NYC commuters travel by bike. Compare that with Copenhagen, its similar climate, and their rate of 30% cycling commuters. NYC has room for improvement.

The most resilient improvements to the cycling network will come from solutions that cannot be disrupted by errant drivers or budget cuts to infrastructure. Cyclee allows riders to gather their experience and knowledge for distributed use across the scale of rider, community, and city. The platform fosters a peer network because of the power, flexibility, and resiliency inherent to this model. The platform mixes data and qualitative experience about routes, hazards, and the tactics of getting from point A to B. Lane use, bottle necks, and unsafe intersections can inform infrastructure changes and rider choices. Common routes between riders can become shared paths, owned, understood, and improved. Cyclee enables this with minimal effort from cyclists by integrating with their routine of a daily commute.

Data – I worked with Kim and Rod, two of the people behind bike trains (cycle social, cycle safe). We brainstormed all the different types of data that can be associated with cycling. We tried to dissect these things to discover their common attributes. This schema can guide data storage and sharing. It includes quantifiable and qualitative things: cyclists, bikes, racks, share stations, bike shops, group, potholes, accidents, road quality, lane type, ride purpose, and much more. These data types are often associated with either a place, a path, a person, and or a time.

Hardware – I worked with Zach to set up a raspberry pi ($35 pocket-sized linux computer) with a GPS device. Truthfully, Zachk did all the work. I provided the hardware and a little inspiration.

Mapping & Software – Most importantly, I worked with a handful of people to develop the software needed for the Cyclee platform. Andrew, Caroline, and a few others helped me develop a query to cut through the noise of tweets and data to highlight information relevant to a cyclists regular commute. It’s an important piece to facilitating ad hoc groups around a real-world experience. The query begins with a set of data points (potholes, bike shops, etc) and bike routes. A user searches a start and stop location. The query first finds all rides that pass near both of these points. It then finds all the data points that fall near this collection of routes. In the end a ride can dive into a city’s worth of data and quickly find the information truly relevant to their experience. More information and a demonstration here: http://cyclee.org/route-flags/

photos by kimdeek7.

Participad has three modules – three different ways of integrating Etherpad Lite into your WordPress installation, each of which can be turned on or off.

• Dashboard – The Dashboard module puts Etherpad editors into the WordPress Dashboard. Participad removes the “Visual” and “HTML” tabs from the standard WP editor, and replaces them with a “Participad” tab.
• Frontend – The Frontend module allows users to edit WordPress content from the front end of your website – no Dashboard required. Participad modifies the Edit links on your posts and pages so that, instead of leading to the Dashboard, the static content of your post is swapped with an editable Etherpad window.
• Notepad – The Notepad module enables a new WordPress Post Type called Notepads. Notepads are collaborative note-taking documents, which can optionally be linked to existing static posts or pages. Participad provides several shortcodes and widgets that make it easy to create new Notepads from the front end of your website.

https://ifttt.com/wtf

Connect bit.ly, craigslist, etsy, flickr, last.fm, google talk, instapaper, vimeo, wordpress, tumblr, instagram, evernote, and many more.

Collect, test, and experiment with interface pattern pairings of CSS & HTML. Pears is an open source WordPress theme, enabling people like you to get your own pattern library up and running quickly.

http://pea.rs/

Speaker one: “What’s up?”
Speaker two: “Hey, man, how’s it going?”

Neither expects an answer to his/her question. Much like a shared nod, it’s an indication that each has recognized the other’s presence and has therefore performed sufficiently that particular social duty. (via Wikipedia)

Is there an equivalent in interaction design? Is it merely filler or are is therea functional role, intentional or otherwise?