19 posts tagged data
Your data is your interface (via Pando Daily)
By Jarno Mikael Koponen On April 17, 2013We all view the world differently and on our own terms. Each of us use different words to describe the same book, movie, favorite food, person, work of art, or news article. We express our uniqueness by reviewing, tagging, commenting, liking, and rating things…
-
Data scientists are fast becoming the rock stars of the 21st century. Thanks in part to Nate Silver’s eerily accurate election predictions and Paul DePodesta’s baseball-revolutionizing Moneyball techniques, math nerds have become celebrities. It’s debatable how much their work differs from what statisticians have done for years, but it’s a growing field, and many companies are desperate to hire their own data scientists.
The irony is that many of these math nerds aren’t as math nerdy as you might expect.
Some of the best minds in the field lack the sort of heavy math or science training you might expect. Silver and Paul DePodesta have bachelor’s degrees in economics, but neither has a PhD. Former Facebook data scientist and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher — who helped define the field as it’s practiced today — only has a bachelor’s in mathematics. The top ranked competitor at Kaggle — which runs regular contest for data scientists — doesn’t have a PhD, and many of the site’s other elite competitors don’t either.
“In fact, I argue that often Ph.D.s in computer science in statistics spend too much time thinking about what algorithm to apply and not enough thinking about common sense issues like which set of variables (or features) are most likely to be important,” says Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom.
Data scientist John Candido agrees. “An understanding of math is important,” he says, “but equally important is understanding the research. Understanding why you are using a particular type of math is more important than understanding the math itself.” (via The Modern Data Nerd Isn’t as Nerdy as You Think | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com)
Source 
“
Data struggles with the social. Your brain is pretty bad at math (quick, what’s the square root of 437), but it’s excellent at social cognition. People are really good at mirroring each other’s emotional states, at detecting uncooperative behavior and at assigning value to things through emotion.
Computer-driven data analysis, on the other hand, excels at measuring the quantity of social interactions but not the quality. Network scientists can map your interactions with the six co-workers you see during 76 percent of your days, but they can’t capture your devotion to the childhood friends you see twice a year, let alone Dante’s love for Beatrice, whom he met twice.
Therefore, when making decisions about social relationships, it’s foolish to swap the amazing machine in your skull for the crude machine on your desk.
”Source 
Researchers in Japan have come up with a storage solution to keep your most important data with a method that seems to be drawn directly from the pages of Superman.
Everyone who has gone through the process of upgrading their computer system knows the inevitable task of transferring data involves a certain amount of acceptance that some data will forever be lost.
Saved on storage devices without drives to retrieve the files, or by the deterioration of the storage substrate, data becomes lost.
Even Ray Kurzweil mentions in The Singularity Is Near, how he resorts to paper printouts to save his most important data for the long term.
Now, Japanese storage and electronics company Hitachi has announced that it has come up with a solution that stores data on slivers of quartz glass, keeping important data safe and sound for perhaps as long as hundreds of millions of years. The company’s main research lab has developed a way to etch digital patterns into robust quartz glass with a laser at a data density that is better than compact discs, then read it using an optical microscope. The data is etched at four different layers in the glass using different focal points of the laser. (via 33rd Square | Superman’s Indestructible Data Crystals May Be Possible)
“[Artificial Intelligence] may well be the most vital of all commodities, surpassing water, food, heat and light. Without it, we will certainly not survive as a species.
…
One of our problems is data - masses of it. A few hundred years of scientific inquiry and the invention of the data-generating and sharing mechanism that is the internet has left reams of crucial information unused and unanalysed.
…
AI is not about sentient robots, but machines that mimic our organic intelligence by adapting to, as well as recognising, patterns in data. AI is about making machines understand.”
(via logicianmagician)
Artificial Intelligence’s Killer App: Getting Things Done
Until task management software can literally think for you, it’ll always be cumbersome to use.
Read on:http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507916/artificial-intelligences-killer-app-getting-things-done/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews
“Welcome to your everyday world of “Big Data,” the infinite sea of facts, products, books, maps, conversations, references, opinions, trends, videos, advertisements, surveys — all of the sense and nonsense that is literally at your fingertips, 24-7, every day from now on. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, estimates that humans now create in two days the same amount of data that it took from the dawn of civilization until 2003 to create. Micro-bursts of technological innovation over the past decade have created a supernova of new data and a virtually limitless capacity to create and store it, shaping everyday lives across the planet. What may be most fascinating, experts agree, is that this change has come so quietly and seamlessly. “An extraordinary knowledge revolution (is) sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, health care and everyday life,” says Rick Smolan, co-creator of a new book, The Human Face of Big Data.”
Source 
As a membership requirement, all personal data would needs to be surrendered to Acclair, including credit, health, travel, etc. Surprisingly, few users had qualms with this aspect, nor with Acclair’s biometrics process, “dataveillance” or the implications of a failed test. Perhaps because the project never did actually collect any of this data; in any case the rewards seemed to outweigh the problems. Although there were a number of people who were skeptical of the Acclair approach, there seemed to be an inherent trust of the system, that the system was actually scanning the brain, analyzing the data and evaluating the user. In a way, these first prototypes confirmed their suspicions that people give away their personal data much too freely.
Scientists and engineers have a tremendous capacity to detect, track, measure and otherwise observe phenomena of all kinds. This growing capacity is perhaps their most powerful tool. But it presents problems, too, because it is no easy task to marshal this flood of data and present it in ways that others — or sometimes even they themselves — can understand and make use of it. Now Felice C. Frankel and Angela H. DePace are offering some help. They bill their new book, “Visual Strategies,” as a guide to graphics for scientists and engineers, but it will be useful for anyone who wants to make clear presentations of data of any kind. “Images engage us in ways that words cannot,” they write. But they add that creating a graphic is like writing an article. You must plan what to say, in what order, with what details. The message of this book is that the extra effort is well worth it.
It’s not news that technology is getting smaller, faster, but once things start happening on a molecular level, it starts to get kind of ridiculous. Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology just published breakthrough research in Nature explaining how they were able to read and write a bit of information on a single molecule. The principle behind the process is relatively simple. The researchers embedded a single magnetic iron atom in an organic molecule made up of 51 other atoms that act as a shell to protect the information inside. Applying a stream of electricity to the new molecule changes the state of that iron atom, effectively storing a bit of data. (via How to Store a Bit of Data on a Single Molecule | Motherboard)
Source 
