Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
How about pretentious writing about the future. Is anyone tracking that?
Ask the megacloud to track the writing pretention quotient rate of change across social networking superintelligence thegoogle synergy.
Funny story. The Pythagoreans in fact believed(religiously) that all numbers were in fact rational; that is very number can be expressed as a/b, where a and b are integers. When a mathematician called Hippasus proved (using the Pythagorean theorem) that the square root of 2 was irrational, the Pythagorean were so offended, they killed him.
Having digressed, I will return to the topic at hand by saying that most people often for get that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean that you should. Just because we now have the technology to tag, monitor, follow and record everyone at all times, it is not necessarily going to be good for anyone if we do so.
This and many similar suggestions are based on what Edmund Burke--writing in the wake of the French Revolution--called "levelling reason". Without some kind of grounding; without a philosophical or moral compass, people and societies can lose their way particularly when enabled by new technologies. Ridiculous ideas and notions, contrary to all prior reason, are lauded as rational, neccessary and beneficial developments and will indeed may appear as such especially to those devoid of any real education or philosophical grounding. Unfortunately, this group now encompasses the majority of those entrusted with making decisions in society, as well as their backers. No one listens to calm thinkers anymore; everyone just listens to PR men.
We are turning into the society Burke feared. One dominated by emotive, shallow views which applies naive levelling reason to all problems it encounters. This is why our prisons are filling up as crime goes down; why our internet is being censored even as our society becomes more tolerant; why our politics becomes more polarised even as our political parties become more homogeneous. And it is why we seek to gather vast, unprecedented amounts of data about ourselves without bothering to really try and use it, or to consider the consequences of doing so.
For most stories like this, despite the modern age and technologies involved, ninety percent of these--usually negative--consequences can be discovered by a simple reading of Aesop's Fables. Not that anyone--particularly the people who report them--will bother to. As a society, uur reasoning remains at a primary school level and rationality is something we can only apply to numbers, not ourselves.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
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.