The human-readable face of big data: real-time ambiency

A new group of tools are putting a human readable face on big data, providing an on-demand real-time graphical frontend to querying and visualizing high-volume multi-dimension datasets. An obvious next step could be the continuous streaming of ambient information pushed automatically per inferred interest profiles to wall-based HDMI smartscreens...

Some interesting Websites and Tools:

• Next-gen infovis: Visual.ly, FlowingData, Many Eyes, and Mondrian are some examples, more are listed at WikiViz for exploring and creating next-generation datavis infographics
• Social network mapping and analysis: Gephi (slideshare presentation)
• Interactive simulation: A tool for converting data into interactive visualizations is D3 - adaptable code swatches that can be inserted into html webpages to render real-time visualizations; a javascript library that supports SVG. Example: choropleth maps (e.g.; red/blue election results shading by county)
• Graphing: Neo4 j, a graph database for big data (NOSQL) that accommodates RDF triple stores and sparkle (advanced subject, predicate, object graphing)
• Mapping: Kartograph, TileMill, Polymaps, Cost of Living for multi-layer annotated data over street-mapping or other geographical data
  

Genetic and environmental rejuvenation of aging stem cells

The Buck Institute for Research on Aging held a symposium on Stem Cell Research and Aging March 1-2, 2012 in Novato, California. A range of levels of talks were given by scientists in the field to an audience of approximately 100 people. Three of the overall themes included a focus on the commonality of systemic cellular processes in development, aging, and rejuvenation, the importance of intervention in middle age when pre-clinical conditions are already in effect (for example, synapse loss, and over/under-expressed transcriptional profiles), and some of the challenges encountered thus-far in human stem cell clinical trials. The stage of the research is still more focused on characterization in a variety of model organisms rather than translational intervention for humans. Two of the most interesting areas of presentation were epigenetics and neurodegenerative disease.

Epigenetics
Since a good definition distinguishing young and old cells is not yet available, it was suggested that a cell’s epigenetic state and transcriptional network could be used to determine cell age and measure the impact of rejuvenation interventions. The stem cell environment is a critical factor to stem cell health and operation, and it has been found that aging can be reversed by altering the stem cell environment. One technique uses heterochronic parabiosis (pairing older and younger cells together), where each cell takes on the expression profiles of other. Genes that are downregulated in aging are reexpressed when exposed to younger cells, and stem cells put in an old environment take cues and act old (e.g.; have different expression profiles and lose lineage fidelity). Other rejuvenation techniques involve manipulating the transcriptional network, the networks of small RNAs that regulate the stability of the stem cell niche, and function appropriately in younger cells but not in older cells. However, in addition to heterochronic parabiosis, muscle stem cells may be rejuvenated through transcriptional interventions such as overexpressing the protein upd, activating the notch gene, inhibiting the Wnt gene or the TGF-beta gene, and stimulating proteins secreted by embryonic stem cells. The good news is that given the right genetic and environmental clues, aging cell states may be reversed.

Neurodegenerative disease
Regarding neurodegenerative disease, there is a new understanding of human cortical neurogenesis; that it occurs in the outer sub-ventricular zone (OSVZ) as opposed to the ventricular region, which also may explain how so many cortical columns are generated. The results of a four-year NINDS-sponsored clinical trial injecting fetal brain stem cells into aged patients with Parkinson’s disease were discussed; that the outcome and side effects were discouraging. This type of trial might fare better in patients who did not already have the movement disorder dyskinesia and with an improved understanding of the biological mechanisms of the disease, and better cellular delivery methods. Also regarding Parkinson’s disease, synapse loss is already beginning in middle age; for example there may be a 60% synapse loss before the disease is detected. Pacemaker neurons degenerate synapses and then synapse loss degenerates soma (the cell body of neurons).

The uncanny guest of post-nihilism

Nietzsche delivers the message that ‘god is dead’ with a parable where a madman goes into a 19th century European marketplace with a lantern at high noon asking ‘where has god gone?’ to the atheist-filled marketplace (in The Gay Science). Whereas previously the church had provided meaning to life and an endpoint to the story (e.g.; salvation), god was now dead and the marketplace was taking the church’s place in providing value and meaning to life, and there was no endpoint to the story, just nihilism (nothingness, e.g.; life is meaningless). Nietzsche presciently predicted the arrival of nihilism as ‘Europe’s uncanny guest.’ (from remarks by Robert Harrison at the Roundtable on the topic of "Nihilism" on February 29, 2011)

One could then ask, in the figurative marketplace for the new faith, what next uncanny guest might be lurking as the successor to nihilism? Post-nihilism could be the turning back to ‘something’ from ‘nothing,’ perhaps as many subjective virtual somethings as there are and will be ‘individual’ intelligences. The inward-turning path to individual liberty, choice, and subjectivism continues to prevail as opposed to a regression toward normative objective truths. Degreed objective truth (akin to degreed belief) is merely a transport layer for convenience and social lubrication but not a content layer. Early clues of the move towards greater subjectivism can be seen in the modern economy 2.0. The marketplace continues as a literal and figurative metaphor with an important mechanism for commuting meaning being the increasing value of the new currencies: reputation, status, attention, intention, etc. supplementing and perhaps eventually superceding money and labor. The need for stories and endpoints has as much relevance as ever.

Crowdsourced stock market trading

Stock market trading has become a dirty word, or if not that, at least uninteresting. Wall Street excesses and the 2008 crash have led to little recent opportunity for financial return (non-existent interest rates for saving, and flat stock markets for equities (the S&P 500 return in 2011 was 0% (S&P 1257 at 12/31/10, 1258 at 12/31/11). Gold has been one of the only asset classes to realize real return (142% five-year return, $632 as of 12/28/06, $1531 as of 12/29/11). The particular subjective day trader gave way to faceless high-frequency computer algorithms as one of the only means of squeezing profits out of the stock market.

One thing that could turn this around, and have the dual benefit of bringing more transparency to markets and market practices is crowdsourcing. The enormous amounts of clean, freely available, computable, straightforward-to-understand data without privacy issues are ideal for crowdsourced manipulation.

Earlier attempts at applying crowdsourcing to stock market trading (for example, Yahoo Prediction Markets with leaderboard-style tracking of traders’ mock portfolios) fell by the wayside with the 2008 crash, but the concept could be reincarnated. There are several obvious ways to deploy crowdsourcing in stock market trading startups:

1. First would be a direct implementation of crowdsourcing as from the Wikinomics, fold.it, eteRNA model: making usable web-based datasets available to the wisdom-of-crowds to apply diverse ideas from different disciplines, often resulting in better results than those produced by the ‘experts’ in any field. Leaderboards, competition, leveling-up, forums, badges, and other gamefication techniques would be expected.
2. Second would be a platform where real-life traders can open source their trades, either before or after execution. Interested traders would grant open access to their trade logs, inviting crowd review to find winning trades, strategies, and traders, and conduct meta-analyses like what strategies work well in a high-volatility environment, a down economy, etc.
3. Third would be prediction markets 2.0, a more social gamefication implementation of prediction markets for stock trading, sales forecasting, movie hit projections, elections, and flu outbreaks through platforms like Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade, etc.

Black Swan thinking – there’s an app for that!

As mobile apps increasingly mediate human interaction with the outside world, possibly eventually becoming a full buffer layer, there should be an app for Black Swan thinking, or more broadly, for bias reduction.

A Black Swan is an event that is rare, has extreme impact, and is retrospectively (but not prospectively) predictive. As humans with story-based not statistics-based evolutionary-relic perceptual systems, we should think more black swannishly or at least have mechanisms for minimizing exposure to downside black swans (e.g.; stock market crashes, terrorist attacks, health situations), and maximizing exposure to upside black swans (e.g.; startup investments, knowledge, parties).

Antibias App: a decision-making tool based on personal bias
The Antibias App, an on-board bias reduction coach (an extension to the Siri 2.0 personal virtual coach), could improve human perception by allowing randomness to be seen, statistics-based thinking, and a focus on the unknown (antiknowledge) as opposed to the known.

The Antibias App could list the top 5-10 bias areas (e.g.; confirmation bias, decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases, social biases, and memory errors and biases) with your personalized score for each one and a composite score as applied to different contexts (e.g.; personal, professional, political, economic). Even determining personalized biases is valuable; this could be accomplished through automated data collection, sentiment analysis of social media droppings, and online tests.

An advanced feature of the Antibas App could be a click-through to see the top three pro/con arguments on any issue and where different composite bias scores lie (e.g.; your own, your social network, your professional peers, your neighborhood, your nation state, etc.).

The Antibias App could be viewed in different modes such as story mode, statistics mode, graphics mode, and data visualization mode. The meta goal of the Antibias App is to increase liberty and choice by opening up more ways of thinking about bias and improved action-taking as a result.

Detroit 2.0 – cultural transformation

Certainly cultural transformation occurs but to what degree can it be actively catalyzed?

Creative class cities bloom and their opposites become walking Detroits.

How to revitalize your city into Rochester 2.0, Detroit 2.0:

• Free houses for artist communities (the aesthetic future starts now); stimulatory homesteading initiatives
  
• The post-ecotourism fad: ghetto tours; hip hop music and dance classes
  
• Favorable tax policies and free trade zones like Paul Romer’s Charter Cities program (example: Hong Kong in Honduras)
• Singapore/Korea-like targeted industrial policy (Welcome Stem Cell Research!)
• Social policy liberalization: immigration amnesty, gay marriage, euthanasia, decriminalized marijuana use
  

The big data era's flux and pulse

Big data is an important contemporary trend but what does it actually mean?

What is big data?
Big data refers not just to the absolute size of a body of information (which currently can be on the order of terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes), but its usability and manageability. Some of the defining parameters of big data are its large size, high velocity activity (incoming, processing, outgoing), heterogeneous nature (a variety of structured and unstructured data types like video and images), and requirement for real-time analytics.

What is the process of working with big data?
The process of working with big data involves several steps. First there may be an exploration of the data using tools for classification, visualization, and summarization. Then there is the detailed step of data cleaning to make the data consistent and usable. The next step is data reduction, for example defining and extracting attributes, decreasing the dimensions of data, representing the problems to be solved, summarizing the data, and selecting portions of the data for analysis. Then, the steps of predictive analytics, scoring, reporting, publishing, and quality validation and maintenance can be applied.

What are the applications of big data analysis?
Some of the benefits of big data analysis are the ability to summarize information, make predictions, identify trends (for example, consumer spending patterns), and rank and prioritize information. Some of the specific algorithms employed include for summarizing: clustering and associations; for making predictions: tree-based methods, neural networks, and k-nearest neighbors; for identification: anomaly detection, similarities and matches, and change detection; and for ranking: logistics and frequency detection.

Excerpted from an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) talk on Big Data & Predictive Analytics (slides).

Craigslist 2.0: task outsourcing to local crowd labor

In the time, reputation, and fun hungry modern world, new tools like task outsourcing are emerging to provide these qualities, offering better ways for the invisible hand to meet in your meatsphere neighborhood.

The concept is that the crowdsourcing workplace meets Craig’s list in a local listing service with a reputation economy and badging/leveling up.

At least two startups offer task outsourcing services, TaskRabbit, which has accepted 1,000 reputation-garnering runners into their network to run tasks on demand, and Zaarly, where a consumer names their price for anything and obtains it from people nearby.

It will be interesting to see if there will be crossover in task outsourcing between physical-world tasks and online tasks, whether tools like TaskRabbit and Zaarly could become a 2.0 version of outsourced labor communities like elance, odesk, and 99designs.

Design and the disruptive startup: dynamic pivoting

In the mashup world of life, business, and web 2.0, spurred on by the Apple-ification of the world (iLife - as a concept not a product), one new idea is applying design to business models, and really by extension, applying design to everything.

Unfortunately, this does not mean as one might think, applying aesthetic principles, conceptually and literally, to business, business models, or any life context, adding beauty to function, and thereby function to function, and questioning the right proportionality of form and function.

Rather, at present applying design to business models means more basically, using design tools and design thinking in a business context, specifically, in the conduct of an iterative prototyping process with users.

In business 1.0, an entrepreneur would dream up an idea and write a business plan. In business 2.0, the claim is that entrepreneurs should interview dozens of potential customers to pivot through value propositions for ideas that solve the biggest customer pain points. Customer acquisition is tantamount, in a 'get, keep, grow' cycle. Elliptical tools like the business model canvas are proposed as support for this iterative prototyping process.

Terahertz information compression era

Information compression eras is an important area of futuretech: the progression from analog to digital and the developing friction for the next era.

Analog and digital are modes of modulating information onto the electromagnetic spectrum with increasing efficacy.

The next era could be characterized by the even greater effectiveness of electromagnetic spectrum control, particularly moving to multidimensional attribute modulation. Already DNA is a potential alternative encoding system with four and maybe eight combinations instead of the 1s and 0s of the digital era. Terahertz networking (Clariphy, Aurrion) and data provenance are early guides in the progress to the next node of information compression.

Excerpted from: "Reality: analog, digital, or information compression continuum?"