Stephen Baker - The Numerati http://www.thenumerati.net/ Stephen Baker - The Numerati en-us Talking in Abu Dhabi http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=545 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=545 Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:16:00 GMT
That's me, trying out the washing stand at the giant new Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Mosque in Abu Dhabi. You're supposed to wash many parts of your body (mouth, nose, forehead, hands, arms, etc) three times each, and then splash more on the top of your head. Our guide was very patient with me.

Rupert Murdoch will open this conference with a keynote in a few hours. I'll be talking about managing the data avalanche after dinner. The question now: Work on speech... or sleep?


I visited the mosque with two former BusinessWeek colleagues, Joyce Barnathan and Manjeet Kripalani. (Incidentally, I tried to upload these photos to Flickr, but saw that the site is blocked in the Arab Emirates.)

]]> Rangaswami on sharing and privacy http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=544 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=544 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:30:00 GMT If you have a couple minutes, this post by JP Rangaswami makes provocative points about sharing and privacy. These are issues, and values, that are undergoing a metamorphosis in the networked age. The conclusions we come to will affect not just businesses like Facebook or Google, but also the lives we lead.

Every time we share a secret, we carry out a quiet risk/reward calculation. We take into account the discretion of the people we're communicating with and the people they might blab to, and we project the pay-off from having them in the know. Sometimes the pay-off is the unburdening of something we've been holding in. Other times, it's the naughty pleasure that comes from trafficking in inside dope. And then there are the secrets told strategically in the hopes of receiving one in return. Sharing secrets is a step toward establishing deeper ties.

So what happens when we share our secrets with the whole world? That's what Rangaswami grapples with. In one section, he contrasts two types of relationships, contracts and covenants.

In a contract relationship, it...rsquo;s all about privacy. The contract sets out separate recourse in the event of breach. The two parties in a contract are inherently separate. As against this, in a covenant relationship, it...rsquo;s all about sharing. The covenant sets out what the people in the covenant do together when things go wrong. As I...rsquo;ve said before, in a contract you answer the question ...ldquo;Who pays?...rdquo;; in a covenant you answer the question ...ldquo;How do we fix this?...rdquo;

]]> Friendship data: 33Across crunches the numbers http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=543 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=543 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:20:00 GMT If you leave a comment on this blog post (and I hope you do), how likely is it that you'll be interested in the most recent book I bought on Amazon? (FYI, Chess Metaphors--Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind arrived just yesterday.) I'd say there's an excellent chance that you would not buy that book. But even if 90% of you ignored an ad for it, advertisers would be thrilled if the other 10% clicked. In their world, a 10% click rate is akin to winning the lottery.

That's the thinking that drives 33Across, a number-crunching start-up in New York. The company, in offices perched high above the rail yards west of Penn Station, tracks social network behavior of some 115 million anonymous Web surfers in the United States. If one of them checks out, say, an office chair online, 33Across can lead an advertiser to the people in touch with that person. Maybe they forward articles to each other or comment on each other's blog. (Another company chasing the same market with a different approach is Auren Hoffman's Rapleaf. According to a Mashable story, the company has data on 389 million people worldwide.)



...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp; Eric Wheeler

Yesterday, I stopped by 33Across and chatted with Eric Wheeler, the co-founder and CEO. He says that in some categories, people's social contacts are more than five times as likely to click on the same ads, and buy the same products, as the general public. This type of friendship analysis is hot now, because with Facebook, Twitter and other social tools, online humanity is producing torrents of friendship data. Mining these relationships (while steering clear of a privacy backlash) could finally provide those companies and others with a social network business model. (I wrote a BusinessWeek cover story about this last year. And the possibilities for this data extend far beyond marketing. Controversial research even attempts to correlate obesity to patterns of friendship.)

These are early days for this type of analysis. 33Across can supply companies with people's strong ties--people they contact on a regular basis. Most of us have about five to 10 of these. They can provide greater numbers of weak ties. If customers give them sample data, they can target people by age and gender. With time, outfits like 33Across will be able to sharpen the focus. What are the correlations among people who communicate more on weekends, or late at night? (Just guessing, but I'm betting that a liquor company would be more interested in people we talk to at midnight than those we deal with at noon.)

In any case, this type of analysis is useful for advertisers who want to scale their data. If 10,000 shoppers check out a product, the chances that they might be enticed to buy it are high. But how to do expand that list from 10,000 to 100,000? Easy, by contacting their friends.

I recorded a 11-minute chat with Wheeler. It's on the post at Smart Data Collective. (Below, the rail yards below 33Across. That's the Hudson in the background)


]]> Higher insurance rates for Twitterati? http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=541 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=541 Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:58:00 GMT Just came across this report that UK insurers might jack up insurance rate for people on social nets. The idea is simple: If you tweet that you're heading up into the Poconos for the weekend, burglers who follow you can raid your empty house. No advanced analytics required.

But how about if you tweet that you just bought four angry dobermans and a sawed-off shot-gun? Should insurers lower the burglary risk (while raising the mauling and accident premiums)?

These are the early days. Eventually, insurers are going to get their mitts on all sorts of behavioral data from us, and will tailor the policies accordingly. It will into advanced statistical models. And those of us who choose to withhold our data, I'm guessing, will be stuck paying premium rates. Privacy, in this world, has its costs.

]]> Afterthought: The third age of math http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=540 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=540 Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:28:00 GMT I'm fascinated by a book I picked up at the library yesterday. It's called Afterthought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence. It was written by James Bailey, a former exec at Thinking Machines Corp., way back in 1996.

Here's his thesis: We're entering the third age of maths (as he called them). Each is a product of the technologies and media available, and each changes the way we think. In the first age, the Greeks were trying to figure out the location of themselves in the world and the universe. They focused on ...quot;Where,...quot; and developed geometry to handle the job. With the scientific revolution, and the development of mechanical clocks, the focus turned to movement: speed, velocity, pace. And for this, Newton and others developed calculus.

Now, Bailey writes, much of science, academia and industry remains locked into an equations paradigm even as the next stage of math makes its entrance. This is the search for patterns in immense sets of data. It has more to do with statistics, probability, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, etc. (He was heralding the Numerati a decade before I started writing the book.)




Bailey makes the point that the technology we have at hand greatly influences the types of calculations we do. In ancient time, for example, the Greeks drew their geometical designs on papyrus. To their east, Babylonians were also carrying out sophisticated astronomical calculations. But their cuneiform tablets (above) didn't lend themselves to arcs and tangents. (Try drawing a good circle in clay) So they used a number-based system, which led to algebra.

Through the Middle Ages, Europeans kept at geometry, drawing their circles and triangles in hand-written books. But with the printing press, this became difficult. They switched to a numbers- and letters-based approach that could be laid out in movable type. With computers, Bailey writes, we're moving back into a medium built for graphical representations. And they'll communicate the evolving, morphing, teeming behavior of networks, contagions, automata--all them summoned by mankind's third generation of math.

I only started reading the book yesterday. I might be posting more about it. Incidentally, I'm flying to Abu Dhabi on Sunday for three days at the Media Summit there.That's about 26 hours in airplanes, coming and going. I'll need some other books to take along, and am open to all suggestions.

]]> What to keep in our heads? http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=539 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=539 Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:10:00 GMT
Here's what I posted last week on Smart Data Collective.

I'll start with what sounds like a silly question: Which brain do you do most of your thinking with, the spongy one in your head or the electronic wonder at your fingertips? Which one stores more of your memories, and stitches together the webs of your friendships?

Even a decade ago, the answer would have been obvious. We depended on the prodigious thinking machine we carry between our ears, the most sophisticated work of circuitry known in the universe. But in recent years we've been turning to the giant and fast-expanding external brain we all share. The networked world, its vast air-conditioned data centers linked by neurons of fiber-optic cables, answers our questions, corrects our spelling and details not only our location, but the annual rainfall and average annual income there, and the name, weight and mating habits of the species most likely to climb the back fence and ravage the tomato plants. Unlike our own faulty equipment, this brain forgets nothing. ...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp;

While our brains have stayed more or less the same for 40,000 years, treading evolutionary water from the Cro-Magnon cave painters to Quentin Tarantino, our external brain is leaping ahead. In the last year or two of the 20th century it learned how to search. It was as if it had sprouted a lobe for memory. Then with the growth of social networks it took up the study of friendships. As I write, computer scientists are teaching it how to read, and how to identify human faces in crowds. Every year, this global brain doubles in transistors. It's growing stronger. And as it does, it piles up not just mountains of data, but entire ranges of them. This brain, nourished by everything we feed the networks, every chat, every click, every edit in Wikipedia, is getting smarter. As it does, we use it more and more, summoning it with new devices, keeping this fabulous resource on call every waking hour. And why not? At this point, forgoing our common brain would be like volunteering for a lobotomy. You'd have to be an idiot.

But each of us has to come up with a strategy for our own heads. As the external brain learns and expands and comes up with new ways to reach and service us, what do we need to store in our biological brains? What skills do we need to set us apart, to make us happy, to thrive? In short, what do we need to know?

In a sense, many of us living through this information revolution share something with ...nbsp;legions of medieval monks who were ambushed by the last big one. They spent years of their lives memorizing sacred texts that would soon be spilling off new-fangled printing presses. Instead of storing all that data in their heads, the monks could have saved lots of time, and presumably freed up gobs of capacity, by archiving those texts on shelves. (We won't stop here to discuss whether the monks were eager for ...quot;free time,...quot; a concept dangerously close to Sloth, the fourth of the Seven Deadly sins.) In the same way, much of the knowledge ...nbsp;we have stuffed into our heads over the years is rendered superfluous by new machinery....nbsp;

As we grapple with these two brains, far more is at stake for each of us than acing resource management for thoughts, calculations, dreams and memories. Beyond efficiency, it's a matter of defending and defining what it means to be human. There's a battle raging between these two brains, and I have some sobering news. Our flesh and blood standard, the seat of our being, is in retreat.

Here, I should clear up one point. At times I may describe the external brain as a single entity, with its own strategy and interests. It's not. It's an ecosystem in which we all participate. It includes everything that reaches through networks for our attention, whether it's a text message from a supervisor at work or a blinking banner ad on Yahoo! All of these elements are vying for a moment or two of our time. That's their nourishment. Imagine what would happen if all of us spent a few months off the electrical grid, playing cards or paging through old books and magazines. The network would be starved for information. Companies would lose track of workers and operations. Twitter would wither, Wikipedia would grow stale. Facebook would stand still in time. Google would go broke. Our electronic brain, bereft of human input, would be little more than a big calculator in the sky.

In a Darwinian sense, the survival of each player in the network hinges on its ability to tap our attention. Just like geraniums, which grow bright red to attract bumblebees, each element develops its own appeal. Some offer answers, others gossip or sexy photos. Some of the most effective, including e-mail and social networks, enlist us to engage our friends. The services they provide can be useful, fun or even necessary. But if you look at it from the point of view of the beleaguered brain, the networked world places an enormous and distracting bazaar right before our eyes. It leads us down dozens of paths. If successful, it can turn a simple e-mail check or Web search into a multi-hour voyage into chaos. In the worst of cases, we get confused and distracted--by some measures, perhaps, dumber--and it keeps growing smarter. I look at it as a giant and thriving parasite. ...nbsp;...nbsp;...nbsp; What happens to our own brains during this process? Far more than a work shop or a reference book, our brain, after all, is the headquarters for love, faith, joy, friendship, everything we experience in life. How can we assert our mastery over the electronic brain, this globe-spanning marvel, without surrendering to it? In a sense, this is much the same challenge we face when we eat. Through most of our time on earth, humans, like other animals, have had to scrounge for nutrition. Cave men didn't count calories. But with today's abundance in wealthy societies, our omnivorous instincts lead to obesity. Information, too, has long been scarce. But this is true no more. We can overload. We can binge on junk. This feeds the electronic brain and risks starving our own. We must manage more than ever what we put into our heads.

A couple of months ago, I drafted a proposal to write a book about this issue. (It included several of these paragraphs.) The trouble, I soon realized, was that while I could describe the challenge, I was short on answers. What should we keep in our heads? Since I had only vague ideas, I've written this to kick start a conversation. Maybe together we can figure it out.

]]> Sleep patterns: Not too complicated (at least for me) http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=537 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=537 Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:43:00 GMT Last year, when I was still at BusinessWeek, I checked out Zeo, the sleep-monitoring tool. I was thinking about doing a story just about sleep, but the Wall Street Journal did one. So I worked Zeo into a story about Gordon Bell and his attempt to log the data of his life. It's pretty clear to me that we're going to have more and more tools to monitor our behavior and body functions, and sleep is an important part of that.

In the first week using Zeo, I learned a lot about my sleep patterns. It was interesting. I usually fell asleep within 10 minutes, entered deep sleep early in the night, and then divided the rest of the sleep between REM and light sleep. One time I thought I had been awake for a couple of early morning hours, but later saw that I had been in REM for most of that time. I was probably dreaming that I was struggling to fall asleep.

Every night you get a ...quot;score...quot; on the quality of your sleep. It's based on an algorithm that combines hours of sleep, REM and deep sleep. On my best nights, I broke into the 80s. My 21-year-old son tried it one night and broke 100. (You don't need a machine to know that younger people sleep more deeply.)

The point, of course, is to improve your score. You upload your data to a Web site, and Zeo provides automated coaching. The problem for me, and the reason I stopped using the machine, is that my sleep turned out to be simple. As I see it, there are four variables that I can control: Alcohol, caffeine, bedtime, animals. In other words, if I minimize alcohol and caffeine (in the p.m.), shut the cats in the basement and go to bed before 11, I get a good score. Now that I know this, I can lose the electronic headband (which didn't turn out to be a huge turn-on).

In this sense, the Zeo worked perfectly. The goal for these monitoring machines should be to provide us with feedback, so that we understand and perceive our patterns on our own.





]]> Snow http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=538 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=538 Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:14:00 GMT DSC00674

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]]> Salesforce Chatter: Facebook for the enterprise? http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=531 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=531 Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:27:00 GMT The business world is crawling with software vendors and consultancies selling collaboration tools, from Microsoft's Sharepoint to IBM's Lotus Notes. That's nothing new. But this Scoble post makes the case that Salesforce.com could become a power in enterprise Web 2.0.

One key: Relevant data. Salesforce's Web-based service reaches deep into some 70,000 enterprises and tracks all sorts of data about customers, deals and transactions. It's new Chatter offering not only lets people follow colleagues and customers (that's nothing new); they can also follow deals or documents. In other words, every time a document you're following is amended, you get an alert on a service that feels like Facebook.

If a service like Chatter takes off, it will be easier than ever for companies to map not only the behavior and friendships of their employees, but also the development of their documents and projects. Increasingly, creative employees will be leaving their fingerprints all over the place--as will everyone else.

]]> Rosen on New York Times: What to say about "tyranny?" http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=536 http://www.thenumerati.net/index.cfm?postID=536 Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:48:00 GMT Jay Rosen writes a provocative piece on a New York Times article about the Tea Party Movement. (ex Weinberger) He focuses on a passage in which the reporter, David Barstow, cites a common fear among these angry conservatives: It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny. Later he writes: I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

Rosen's point is that ...quot;tyranny...quot; is not an impending danger in the United States, and that the reporter tacitly validates the Tea Partiers' raison d'etre by not pointing this out.

My feeling, shared by some of the commenters to Jay's post, is that by swiping aside their motivating fear as delusion, the writer reinforces the widening gulf in the country. He lets us know that the people he's writing about are nuts. At that point, anyone with even a shread of sympathy for the Tea Partiers writes off the report as biased (which is what they expect from the NYT).

I think it's better to let readers come to their own conclusions. That said, the Times should follow up with another article specifically on that issue. Millions of Americans appear to think we're falling into a dictatorship. What are they seeing? Is it delusion?

I don't think so. There are at least three different ...quot;tyranny...quot; narratives in this country. One is the police state. We got glimpses of that in the Bush years, with the wiretapping, torture and suspension of habeus corpus. The second fear, more common among the Tea Partiers, is the ...quot;nanny state,...quot; a government that forces us to buy health insurance and wear motorcycle helmets, forbids smoking, takes away guns, teaches victim history and godless science, etc etc. The third, of course, is the Numerati state, which overlaps a bit with #1 and #2. Here, governments and corporations keep us under digital surveillance, monitoring our data 24/7.

Tyranny, and the public perceptions of it, is worth a special report.





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