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The Data-Driven Life
theodp recommends a somewhat long and rambling article by Wired's Gary Wolf, writing in the NY Times Magazine, on recording and mining data about your personal life. "In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The imposition on oneself of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. And until a few years ago, it would have been pointless to seek self-knowledge through numbers. But now, technology can analyze every quotidian thing that happened to you today. 'Four things changed,' explains Wolf. 'First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.' And the next thing you know, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed."
I see it as a rise of the Many-to-Many relationship.
Amazon suggestions, Netflix movies. Facebook.
The many-to-many relationship, long overlooked in database construction because of the complexities it brings with it, has now come onto it's own and is changing our lives.
they want their rationality back...
I have not joined the need-to-share-everything-about-my-life-with-the-world bandwagon. In fact, I have taken steps backward, such as deactivating my Facebook account (good luck trying to actually delete your account). In the data-driven future I plan to be Blank Reg (look it up). Or possibly a new riff on Luddite could be applied to people like me. Social-site Luddite?
Of course, the article is about much more than that and it's very interesting, but that's just my mini-rant.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Barooah wasn’t about to try to answer a question like this with guesswork. He had a good data set that showed how many minutes he spent each day in focused work. With this, he could do an objective analysis. Barooah made a chart with dates on the bottom and his work time along the side. Running down the middle was a big black line labeled “Stopped drinking coffee.” On the left side of the line, low spikes and narrow columns. On the right side, high spikes and thick columns. The data had delivered their verdict, and coffee lost.
Lookie! I made a graph and it shows something! It MUST be causation, there is no other explanation.
"Superintelligence" known as the cloud?
There's not even any need to read such tripe. In fact, I hate everyone who read that story after seeing the word "superintelligence" linked with "cloud."
There is no bound to the contempt writers of pieces like this should be shown, nor to all of the idiots who were involved in reposting it here.
constant surveillance of your life, data stored in the cloud and all of that without an orwellian government pushing you to do that / ok not until a terrorist attack which justifies total surveillance.
Who controls the controllers, again...
The word consilience was apparently coined by William Whewell, in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840. In this synthesis Whewell explained that, "The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction obtained from another different class. Thus Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs."
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is a 1998 book by biologist E. O. Wilson. In this book, Wilson discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might in the future unite them with the humanities. Wilson prefers and uses the term consilience to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor. ... . ... "Definition of consilience
"Literally a 'jumping together' of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.""
Biologist E.O. Wilson Pens Fiction Science: FiSci on Wednesday April 14, @06:05AM mindbrane Submitted by mindbrane on Wednesday April 14, @06:05AM mindbrane writes "Wired is running a short interview with noted naturalist and biologist E.O. Wilson as he speaks to the publication of his first novel. "Anthill tells the parallel stories of Raff Cody, a southern lawyer trying to preserve the wilderness of his youth, and the epic territorial wars among the ants that inhabit that land. Wilson has argued that our behavior is governed by genetics and evolutionary imperatives. In Anthill, he turns that conviction into a narrative technique, writing about human nature with the same detachment he uses when explaining how worker ants lick the secretions of their larvae for nourishment. But Wilson's novel is also an emotional plea to safeguard wild landscapes. Wilson talked to Wired about ants, evolution, and the creative aspects of the scientific process."
"The mind is just the brain doing its job." is a quote from an American neuroscientist, S. Levy (i think). The brain is stupefyingly complex. It seems to be widely distributed in terms of nodes and massively parallel processed. For example, a well known experiment had subjects meet a potential significant other in two settings. In one setting the meeting took place in mundane surroundings. In another setting the meeting took place on a high suspension bridge. In the second instance the same potential significant other was seen as much more attractive. The conclusion was drawn that the brain layers experiences and stuff leaks from one layer to another. If your in an exciting circumstance it's likely someone you meet there will appear more interesting. Just from this one experiment and the known complexity of our brains it should be at least likely that attempts to quantify our existentialist experience is doomed, happily in my opinion. It's not unlikely that if you subscribe to such a method and submit to a data driven religious experience then, more likely in the company of others who share your methods and beliefs, you'll get a rewarding experience, but it'll be a belief driven quasi religious experience none the less.
no, i did not RTFA.
ideopath @ play
How about pretentious writing about the future. Is anyone tracking that?
I expect to see a stupid or shitty article linked to here on Slashdot every so often. It happens. But the presence of this article here is just absurd!
It's bullshit from top to bottom. When it's not delivering outright misinformation, it's making baseless assumptions, or misusing common terms.
Seriously, what the fuck does "rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud" mean? Aside from the obvious misuse of "cloud" since it's just the buzzword-of-the-day, there is no "global superintelligence". Facebook and twitter are made up of the same morons and dumbfucks we deal with every day. If there's a "global" anything, it's a global idiocy.
Ask the megacloud to track the writing pretention quotient rate of change across social networking superintelligence thegoogle synergy.
"global superintelligence known as the cloud."
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
This blog post which was linked by the ridiculous times article is significantly better than the article itself. http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2009/10/the-false-god-of-coffee.php
One of the natural brakes on ridiculous cargo-cult self-help, diet, motivation, and other such fads is that nobody bothers to follow them too religiously. Now it'll be easier than ever to actually know for sure if you're following the latest pseudoscientific fad, because you'll have the data right there to validate! Hey, my friend John told me you should make sure your Baz data reading always stays under 7.2, except in the evenings it's okay if it goes up!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This idea is in Vinge's work. A group called the Friends of Privacy tries to dilute the flood of accurate information about people by spreading erroneous information, making net searches on people less useful.
I just want to know when I will be getting the green diamond over my head.
Fuck the cloud!
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I haven't lost my mind. I'm sure I've got a backup around here somewhere.
the internet has moved on it. ;)
If you want points for correlation/causation comments go to digg or reddit
From the quotation given, you might think TFA was about "the cloud" and sharing data in it. It's not, despite the fact that many posts in response seem to think it is.
Basically, the article is about people who collect data about their own lives and then analyze it. Most of the anecdotes given in the article have nothing to do with online communities, media, etc. If you're a person who has tracked your finances, weight, exercise, etc., you know what this is. The anecdotes give some more extreme versions of this tendency to collect data and analyze things about one's own life.
There is some reflection on how more people can do this now with greater ease because technology facilitates it -- both in data collection and in data representation/analysis. But the "sharing," mobile devices, "social media," "cloud," and such stuff mentioned in the summary quote are barely addressed elsewhere in the article... except as vehicles for personal (i.e., primarily private) data collection.
I consider myself to be well-read, but was amazed that I had to look up "quotidian." I'd have more respect for the OP if he had just used the simpler term "daily." Jeez, how obnoxiously highbrow can you go?
The very fact that the data can be gathered and exchanged between organisations in exchange for money tells us that it is possible to stop the data falling into the hands of the many (why would anyone pay for it otherwise). With the right laws and a will to police those laws a powerful organisation (such as a government) can ban pretty much anything if it wants to. The problem is that the government is often working hand in hand with business and makes laws to suit them rather than the people who they are supposed to represent.
Air force personnel working together could steal a nuclear weapon and bomb the Isle of Wight (on the south coast of England). They could, but they haven't. Just because it can be done, it does not mean that it will be done.
Stop being dim.