Increasingly, our everyday lives are influenced by computing algorithms that we cannot see or control.

This is the somewhat alarmist but nonetheless grounded in truth statement by Kevin Slavin in his recent TED talk (shown in the embedded player to the right). It’s not just financial markets, but movie scripts, book recommendations and advertising selections… the online and media world is increasing using software algorithms to tailor itself to what a mathematical equation thinks we want.

I find one of the most alarming examples is Facebook’s algorithm to determine what warrants “top news”. Effectively, Facebook is deciding for you which of your many friends’ updates is most important. And the implications of that are quite scary.. What if a friend thinks you are not listening because Facebook filtered out their update? Or what if you miss an opportunity for a future romantic involvement because Facebook hides a party update from what it thinks is someone you don’t care about?

Increasingly in the future we are going to have to think carefully about what decisions we allow software to make for us, and what things we should keep full control of ourselves.

Watch the TED video here or embedded above, or read the BBC News article for more information.

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The sequel to Deus Ex, one of the top-ranked games of all time and a pioneer in the cyperpunk genre, is nearing release. The sequel paints a pretty bleak picture of human augmentation. But this live action trailer goes way beyond promoting a game; it’s nothing short of a short film on the consequences of human augmentation.

Watch the clip. Forget it’s a video game. How likely is this kind of thing in coming years?

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You know that scene in Bladerunner where Harrison Ford uses a computer to zoom, refocus and travel in 3D space within a photograph? For years we’ve all thought that would be forever impossible, but new technology from Lytro suggests that this sort of thing may soon be possible.

Their forthcoming light field camera captures not just one perspective of a scene, but uses a lenticular array to capture the entire light field, meaning that the 3D space from which the light originated can be explored after the photo is taken – so you can change which part of the scene is in focus, generate 3D images or even peek “behind” foreground objects.

The Silicon Valley startup clearly faces technical and financial challenges to change their prototypes into an affordable consumer product – but the cat is out of the bag on the idea, and we can expect camera manufacturers to race to catch up and enter this brand new market. This is a disruptive technology with huge potential to change the way we think about photography. Soon we may have a completely new kind of camera, which can truly capture a moment in a way we never thought possible. Some are wondering if it will take the skill out of photography, while others are already speculating about what this might do to re-ignite 3D film-making.

Read more details at AllThingsDigital and try refocussing images for yourself in Lytro’s Picture Gallery.

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Zdenek Kalal, a PhD at the University of Surrey, has developed an impressive real-time system which looks within a live camera feed for an identified object or person, then watches and learns to track that object as it rotates, moves or disappears, reappears. He demonstrates a prototype of the system in the video shown to the right.

The project won him the ICT Pioneer award and has attracted a great deal of attention from press and industry alike, as this could enable a plethora of image-tracking applications, from security systems to video stablization and control systems for the handicapped.

What is remarkable about the system is that it needs no special training (for example learning what a face is), you can simply identify an object on screen and the system will learn to track it. It looks like the stuff of science-fiction, but it’s very real. Read more on his project page.

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The non-profit grassroots organization ahumanright.org recently launched a bold new campaign to help to bring Internet access to some of the 5 billion people who aren’t online. They hope to raise sufficient funds to buy the abandoned TerreStar-1 satellite and offer free Internet access to citizens of impoverished nations, funded by renting usage of the satellite to other communications companies.

If it succeeds, it could become a lot harder for governments to shut down the Internet in their countries during civil unrest, as the satellite coverage would span international boundaries and the organization would be managed with a human right to information at its core.

If you have a spare $1m lying around you can make a donation at http://www.buythissatellite.org/. Read more at TIME or watch the TEDx talk.

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Natural language processing and semantic analysis allows us to extract sentiment from documents. Marketing organizations and community managers rely on tools from Scoutlabs, Radian6, and others that try to understand how online communities feel about their brands and products.

As we share more of our lives online, there’s more to analyze. Researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University analyzed Twitter’s mood over the day. This kind of sentiment analysis can look at someone’s online messages and decide whether they’re angry or content, happy or sad. Given data over time, it can likely recognize patterns of mood, even cycles.

Such as those that occur every twenty-eight days.

(It’s at this point that my dinner companion launched a well-aimed palm at my somewhat scruffy chin.)

Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool, generally aimed at understanding a particular thing.

But we could point the same kinds of tools at people, in an attempt to understand when it’s a good time to sell them something, or ask a favor, or send them an unsolicited message.

The Decade of Sharing is upon us, and public disclosure means public analysis. Knowing how receptive a prospect might be to a particular sales pitch could be invaluable to marketers.

Moods may relate to natural cycles–variances in hormones, day length, weather, and so on. They can occur in both men and women (a point I tried valiantly to make in my defense, without much success.) And they can be triggered by a huge range of causes.

This could have some interesting consequences.

• Wily consumers might try to game the system, posting carefully worded messages in the hope of steering good deals their way.
• Companies might restrict what their purchasing officers can do online, fearing that they might lose out in negotiations.
• Marketing companies could start selling data on individual consumers’ mood patterns.

Because of cross-site cookies, online marketing already targets users, as my friend Julie Matlin recently found out. But in Julie’s case, while the offer of a pair of shoes followed her around the web, it was a dumb offer: it didn’t take into account how she was feeling. Julie’s an unusually transparent online persona, and there’s plenty a marketer could have used to craft a targeted proposition that would have made her likely to buy.

Websites use A/B and multivariate testing to decide which propositions work best. By adjusting a range of variables — color, price, wording — each time someone visits their site, they can optimize their online businesses and maximize their revenues. If marketers can correlate causes with shifts in mood among their target markets, they’ll have tremendous power over consumers. If they then apply A/B and multivariate testing  to those consumers, they’ll quickly learn what approaches work for what moods, taking direct marketing to an uncomfortably personal new level.

Let the slapping begin.

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The ideas were the result of the OpenInnovation competition – read more at the site.

At first it seems quite useful, putting information onto surfaces like desks and mirrors. But if you take that to to the extreme you end up with something like the world shown in this second concept video, which uses augmented reality to put information everywhere. To me, it looks like something of a nightmare. What do you think?

(This video was created for an architecture project by Keiichi Matsuda. Read more here.)

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Understanding human behaviour is vital for good product design. But you can’t just ask people what they need, you have to observe them first-hand. iPods, eBay and TiVo exist because designers watched people, noticed a problem with current products, and designed a solution for a problem people didn’t even know they had.

At OXO Foods in the UK, researchers studied how people measure liquids while cooking, and noticed that most people need to bend down repeatedly to read the markings on the side of the container. None of them reported this as a problem when interviewed. So OXO designed a measuring jug(cup) which could be viewed from above (shown right). This is an example of the growing science of design ethnography – product design based on direct human observation.

How to measure human behaviour “in the wild”?

Observational studies are expensive to conduct, and sometimes distorted because you can’t always observe someone in their natural environment. Fortunately, computers now make it much easier to collect data from “real world” activities. Such data is invaluable – for product designers to better understand their users, and also for us to help us cultivate a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Consider a game designer who wants to improve the interface for her game. At HCI2010, I saw Dr Richard Lilley demonstrate the new i-View X technology from SensoMotoric Instruments, shown in the video below. This tracks the player’s gaze and records what part of the screen they are looking at.

As well as recording the game experience and user inputs, a webcam captures facial expressions. With this system, our designer can examine both qualitative and quantitive data to measure the impact of interface changes – such as repositioning an on-screen HUD – based on how much attention the user gives it and how it influences their play. The designer can develop the game systematically and improve it faster. By watching his own recordings, a player can learn and improve his skills quickly too – and this approach is already being applied in a variety of different sports. For both player and designer, the feedback cycle is shortened considerably.

Visualizing Gameplay Data for Deeper Understanding

At the same conference I met Alicia Dudek, an MSc Design Ethnographer from the University of Dundee, whose research explores ways to gain deeper understanding of how people play games. Your choices when playing a game are a combination of your personal circumstances and the way the game is designed, so both must be explored – but the first step is to identify behaviour patterns.

To do this, Alicia and her colleague Rachel Shadoan analysed 18 months of player histories from the web game Plant Wars. They plotted this data on a graph, with the vertical axis representing time of day, and the x axis representing the passage of time in weeks and months. Different activities in game are marked using dots of different colours and sizes at the appropriate time. Here is the visualization for one player: (Click the chart for a larger version.)

These graphs were used as the basis for player interviews, where key events were annotated with feedback from the player. Having these visual stimuli yielded more detail than relying on memory. Here we can see how the game rules, the player’s daily routine and even the device he used had measurable affects on his patterns of play. The study is detailed in full in this PDF.

From Gameplay to Real Life

Visualizing and explaining behaviour patterns will help designers create better games, but can they help players too? I asked Alicia where this research might lead in future:

“We create vast amounts of data about our behavior patterns, which over time form habits, altering us as people. We need to elevate our awareness of our intangible interactions. We cannot touch emails or feel battles in games. Our minds and ways of thinking are being restructured. Research like ours aims to make it easy to understand your behaviour without specialist training. One day you may be able to know not only what you’re getting good at in a games but also how it affects you.”

As we enter the age of metrics, games and sports are just the tip of the iceberg. Already you can track your computer usage, the language you use, or even your sex life! And the behavioural data we all generate daily is very valuable. Twitter and Google both collect and analyze your web surfing habits. And fraudsters want your behaviour data too. But a new generation of tools are emerging, with which we will explore and learn from our own behaviour data. In the future, our choices will be much better informed.

For example, with my Fitbit I can measure my calories burned and consumed and see it on a graph:

Right now, you need to add your own annotations. But it’s easy to imagine a tool that would let you annotate and interpret patterns like these. Your phone could even alert you when you’ve over-eaten and discourage you from making that restaurant booking.

As more data about our lives become available, we’ll gain new insights into our unconscious habits; computers will increase our awareness of ourselves. They’ll help us understand how music affects our mood, how our diet affects our work productivity, or how our sleeping habits affect our relationships. Life visualizations will empower us to make better decisions. The only caveat: As we use this new power to reduce many decisions to equations, we’ll need to be careful not to sideline those intangible, unmeasurable qualities like love, happiness and instinct.

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Researchers at the University of Plymouth in the UK, have made some significant steps forward in the quest to create an artificial intelligence that can learn about the world around it. Using the iCub robotic toddler, designed by a consortium of European universities, they have trained software to recognize and identify moving objects in its field of vision, based on their position relative to the robot’s body. This is the same way a human child learns.

To learn more, watch the video or read the New Scientist article.

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In the 1970s bestseller The Joy Of Sex, we learn about a man who could only be aroused in a bathtub full of spaghetti. Back then, he probably led a lonely, normal life — albeit one in which he bought a lot of pasta and had a higher water bill than his neighbors. It’s unlikely that he had friends who shared his particular turn-on.

Communities define decency differently. In Canada, certain sexual practices are only legal when two people are present; no spectators. Until a 2003 Supreme Court ruling, many states outlawed specific sexual acts, and many of them remain on the books despite being invalidated by the high court. Communities were defined by their geographic boundaries. That’s why adult sites contain text like this: (and I’m just making this up here (okay not really)):

THIS SITE CONTAINS ADULT MATERIALS OR MATERIALS THAT MAY BE CONSIDERED OFFENSIVE IN SOME COMMUNITIES. YOU MAY NOT ENTER THIS SITE IF YOU ARE EASILY SHOCKED OR OFFENDED OR IF THE STANDARDS OF YOUR COMMUNITY DO NOT ALLOW FOR THE VIEWING OF ADULT EROTIC MATERIALS!

Which leaves me wondering: what’s the standard of my community?

Mass-market pornography died with mass-market media; today, specialization is the key. In the demented tapestry of the modern Web, one can find most any kink or predilection (see also rule 34.) Today, our ravioli romancer can find his pasta porn easily.  And it’s probably porn his geographic neighbors won’t like.

Of course, these days, his community isn’t just the people next door; it’s the people he hangs out with online. The Web holds more than pasta porn for our Fettuccine Fancier — it’s where his friends are.  The more he hangs out with kindred spirits, the more likely he is to conclude that he’s in the majority.

Surrounded by our fellow linguine lovers, or Daily Show fans, or Tea Party protesters, we’re emboldened.

The everyone-else-is-doing-it problem

Our brains are designed for tribes. The Dunbar Limit suggests we can track just under two hundred interpersonal relationships, and this appears to be wired into us: different primates have different Dunbar numbers.

The Web stumps our tribal brain. If many people in our cannelloni Casanova’s community crave soggy noodles the way he does, then soon, he believes himself to be entitled, part of what is — to him — the moral majority. He lobbies for noodle subsidies, marches in the streets in a Lasagna leotard, and raises money for entirely new kinds of food-borne illness.

To everyone else, he’s just weird.

Putting up walls

Many people, each convinced they’re in the moral majority, is a bad thing for consensus. These “moral minorities” emphasize how different we are from one another, rather than exploring common ground. Rather than becoming tolerant of one another, we reinforce the perimeter defenses of our own tribe, something that’s playing out right before our eyes in the zero-sum games and scorched-earth attitudes of (for example) US debates around taxation, health care, and gay marriage.

The ultimate irony of a Web that bring us closer to like-minded citizens is that it splits us apart from humanity. Rather than a smooth fabric of consensus, tomorrow looks like a noisy quilt of special interests and squeaky wheels.

It’s easy to forget that the Internet was built by hippies and hobbyists, idealists who were relatively free from commercial interests and were far enough from the mainstream to escape regulation. We may one day remember the days of Usenet and Napster as the Web’s Golden Age, a time before regulation and governance.

Fast-forward thirty years, and much has changed. The Web is the key to winning hearts, minds, and elections. It can undermine regimes and expose corruption. Because it’s so prevalent, we try to legislate it. We inspect packets, take down content, and put up firewalls.

This medium, spawned by utopian idealists, is looking more and more mainstream every day. Which, of course, collides with the idea of independent communities and squeaky wheels finding a place to live out their alternative lifestyles. It’s not much of a hiding place when it’s streamed into every phone, laptop, and living room. That has important consequences for how we legislate online behavior, and how our culture deals with a commingling of our public and private lives.

Making rules when everyone’s a freak

How should we govern this coming citizenry of moral minorities?

First, legislators must recognize that the Web gives us the right to be weird at scale. Adult content has long placed the burden of decency on the consumer. But the burden is really on all of us, because now community standards are contextual, despite the fact that we hold people to a fixed standard based on where they live and vote.

One day soon, someone will run for office. And someone who doesn’t agree with him or her will leak the history of all the online porn they’ve watched. Christine O’Donnell is dealing with a deliciously ironic witch hunt right now, in fact. We’ll have to decide whether a politician’s behavior is scandalous — because it’s not acceptable to even the most vocal, restrictive communities — or whether it’s his or her own business, and therefore should be discounted.

Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau famously said, “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

But Trudeau also said, “when it becomes public it’s a different matter.” And now, as we live lives in the open, everything’s public.

We have three problems to deal with.

• Everything is available everywhere. The whole world’s kink can leak into anyone’s geographic community over a broadband connection, and you can find support for nearly any idea if you look hard enough.
• We’re enthusiastically public. Social networks, a sharing culture, and like-minded communities mean that we make everything from sexual preference to religion to political bias a matter of public record, often with unbridled narcissism thrown in for good measure.
• We have no common standards for decency. It’s impossible to filter for decency at the source in a truly world-wide Web. Need proof? Just look at what Wikipedia is dealing with when it comes to material that some consider inappropriate.

We can either adopt a “squeaky wheel” standard of decency — banning anything that offends anyone, thereby ensuring that we’ll be led by the blandest, and most secretive, among us. Or we can accept that everyone’s a bit weird, including lawmakers, and legislate from that starting point. Their nocturnal cravings shouldn’t exclude them from a productive daily life.

As citizens of the Web, we must understand that just because we’re in touch with like-minded freaks, that doesn’t mean we’re the majority. The Web will pull back the veil of privacy, and our culture will adjust to a world in which everyone’s a freak, and nobody’s worse — or better — for it. If we give up our privacy, we need to gain some contextual tolerance.

The walled gardens we so often decry are also the edges of our communities. What’s acceptable at home won’t fly at the office, as Facebook’s new Employers Portal should remind us. Right and wrong aren’t as simple as “community standards” any more; we need to weigh someone’s behavior according to the context in which it occurred.

Privacy discussions aren’t really about privacy at all. They’re about the fact that our communities’ borders now change dynamically, according to time, place, and medium. An Internet with garden walls, that forgets, is a good start; after all, good fences and a charitable forgiveness make good neighbors. But a generation that judges decency in the context of others’ communities, not their own, is the basis for a connected, civil society.

Ultimately, we need to rewrite the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, if you had their friends, preferences, and communities. Anything else is just imposing your worldview on the rest of the planet.

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Bonus: there’s also a 3D version of the video clip, using Youtube’s 3D technology (side-by-side, red-blue, and so on.)

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Do the benefits of online sharing make the loss of privacy worthwhile?
Julie Matlin extolled the virtues of blogging as a means of coping with stress, making sense of difficult situations and finding support. She explained that since she began writing her intensely personal “Mommy Said What?” blog, she feels an immense sense of freedom to be herself. People judge her less, and understand her behaviour better, when they know exactly what is happening in her life at any given time.

How will we augment our bodies in future?
Donald Donovan explored some ways in which humans could add new senses to the human body by installing sub-dermal magnetic implants. We could detect poison gases or heat signatures, know compass direction instinctively, use lie detection in everyday conversation, or even have truly silent ringtones. RFID chips can be implanted to allow us unlock doors with a wave of the hand. This sparked discussions about the future of the human race. Will we add so many robot parts we will cease to be human? Is the ultimate goal of man-machine interaction a sort of Borg-like collective consciousness or hive-mind? James Duncan also raised concerns about how mankind is using up the planet’s resources of not just oil, but also food and water. Attendees debated whether technology will save us or if we will wipe out civilization before we can organize ourselves to act.

Could tablets save education?
Perhaps our best hope for the future is to improve education. Many people believe that the iPad, and other tablet devices, could revolutionize education, by letting every student progress at their own pace, a true “no child left behind” for our children. What’s more, teachers can then use analytics to see what is working, what areas need more attention, and to tailor their lessons to help every child reach their potential. Alistair Croll explored these ideas and also predicted that teachers’ unions will fight such progress, as it would move teaching (in the US at least) back to a performance-based model of recognition. David Chouinard took this a step further and argued that the entire model of education today is based on outdated industrial-era thinking, and that we should harness the power of the Internet to create more collaborative, digital schools for learning.

Is boxed-in thinking inhibiting the progress of society?
The prevalence of outdated ways of thinking was a recurring theme. Xiao Yu reminded us that we still use the QWERTY keyboard – a layout designed to slow down typing so that typewriter hammers don’t get jammed. The Dvorak keyboard is provably more efficient, but we stick with what we know, even on new types of device like the iPad. I (Alex Bowyer) proposed that the model of files and folders is similarly dated and inefficient. We should start thinking of our personal data as streams, which would not only help us manage information overload, but enable much more powerful applications and computer systems to be built. It seems that human society is highly resistant to change.

Are we losing serendipity?
We don’t just resist change, we seek out things we already know & like. Amazon, Pandora and Google News all encourage you to find content similar to what to you like. Dating sites help you find other people that are just like you. Lenny Rachitsky put forward a convincing case that while having such systems tailor the digital world to us might seem attractive, we are losing something valuable in the process – the happy accidents that allow us to stumble upon new foods we love, fall in love with people with whom we share nothing in common, or broaden our minds by exposing us to new and exciting ideas. Jeremy Edberg and Ross Noble also reminded us of the value of exposing ourselves to people and ideas outside our immediate influences – as engineers, businesspeople, or just as humans. Mike Gero pointed out that sometimes as we inject technology into hobbies like fishing, we lose something of the escapism we originally sought.

How can we model real-world relationships?
In the digital age, new technologies create new problems. But the impact of social sites like Facebook has rarely been as profound as that experienced by Stephane Bousquet. When he and his wife broke up, her simple act of changing her status from married to single on Facebook, broadcast to all of his friends that he was now single, which of course had profound consequences for all his relationships with friends and family. In the physical world, we have much more control over when and how information passes to our friends – in the Facebook age this was the equivalent of calling up 500 friends right after the other and saying “Hey, we’ve split up”. Who owns data that represents our shared relationships and personal interactions – should it be like a joint bank account, controlled by both parties?  Bryan Watson looked at another impact of social networks, pointing out that as we collect more and more online “friends”, we are effectively sacrificing a few strong ties for a larger set of weak ties – in effect devaluing friendships – something that rang true for many of the attendees.

Games, music and storytelling
Not all the “short bits” were what-ifs and thought exercises – there was much fun to be had too. We saw demonstrations of how to change a digital photograph into music (Christine Davis), how to build your own iPad-controlled Arduino robot (Nick Kruchten), and how a wall might be turned into an interactive touchscreen (Theo Ephraim). We were reminded how simple human acts remain just as important today as they were before the Internet; Julie Steele explored storytelling and its role in helping us understand the world we live in, and Gina Minks explored the impact of the digital divide and the dangers of digital recordings being taken out of context – something that is far easier today than it used to be.

Ilana Ben-Ari showed this inspiring video created by Charles Ledbeater, reminding us we are going through a period of great change as a society. Ilana then demonstrated her new communication skills game, Twonicorn – which is a great non-technical example of the mass innovation the video talks about.

Next year, Bitnorth will take place on September 17th and 18th.

Photos by Eva Blue (cc) and diagrams/screenshots are by the presenters.

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FourSquare Visualization by WeePlaces.com from Eric Wu on Vimeo.

This reminds me of nothing as much as Plazes, an early check-in competitor (that relied on MAC addresses to “claim” locations — this was pre-iPhone, of course.) Plazes caught on a bit, and was eventually bought by Nokia, but lacked the critical mass needed for applications like Foursquare, Groupon, and Gowalla.

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Read more at Fast Co Design.

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Kate Lund from the group highlighted the limitations of the few location-based games that have reached the public attention. For example Foursquare and Gowalla have very simple actions and very limited gameplay. The group had took inspiration from geo-caching, noting that is is inclusive and easy to do, but has limited appeal.

They re-invented geo-caching as a game for families and children, creating a new mobile game called “Free All Monsters”. Children can use their creativity to draw monsters, these monsters then get transplanted into the real world, where they and their friends can then use a “Magical Monstervision Machine” (a Nokia N95 running special software) to detect and find monsters in the real world. The display overlays the sensor information and monster pictures onto the real world, much like Layar and other augmented reality applications:

The game reinvents geocaching in a creative, understandable way. For example, the strength of the GPS fix is represented as a “Captoplasm” gauge – you can’t capture monsters if you haven’t got enough. The game reinforces creativity throughout. Children’s monster creations are added to a “Liber Monstorum” (book of monsters), which is used to populate the game world – personalizing the game to the players.

Players also have a “Monster Spotter’s Guide” (which helps encourage teamwork) and have a set of thought-provoking questions for players to answer for each discovery, like “What does this monster dream?” or “Where would he go on holiday?”

The game is also designed to keep players focussed on the real world (which is why the camera augmentation approach is chosen) and favours teamwork and fun over speed and competitiveness.

The game has been used successfully on a small scale at a number of outdoor open days, and will soon be released for use anywhere in the world as an iPhone application (early video here).

There’s more about the group and their research at mobileradicals.com

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He gave many examples of existing systems that harness the Internet to help with human problems – such as 911.gov, a conceptual site which would allow US residents to report crimes, but more importantly to request and give assistance to each other. For example, allowing a disabled resident being able to find a volunteer to help them get out of the building in an evacuation. Real-world examples included amberalert.gov and nationofneighbors.net as well as the use of Twitter to track the spread of Californian wildfires. Another example was patientslikeme.com which takes a more open view to the sharing of personal medical data than most current medical institutions, but has shown measurable benefits for the participants.

Ben highlighted the nascent nature of such thinking in the public consciousness, and speculated that greater steps need to be taken to help the public see both what is possible but also to give them the tools to make better use of data for good. To achieve this, he said, we will need deep science research to take place which can then be applied to everyday systems and functions.

As an example, Ben introduced SocialAction, a network analysis tool for researchers which can uncover hidden information in human networks. In the following video you can see the tool being used to uncover the strength of relationships between US Senators who voted the same up to 2007. The tool shows that voting is highly partisan – and also identifiers outliers who vote independently, and those who do not have strong voting allegiance to either party.

The research, carried out at the University of Maryland, showed that such techniques can deliver valuable understanding and insights to practitioners in a variety of professions – significant discoveries were made by a political analyst, a bibliometrician, a healthcare consultant, and a counter-terrorism researcher. It can also be used for other problems, such as word sense disambiguation. In one study Flickr photos tagged with the word “mouse” were automatically separated out into those where mouse referred to the input device, the rodent, or the famous Mickey.

Finally Ben introduced NodeXL, a free plugin for Microsoft Excel on Windows that allows anyone to carry out this kind of analysis. With the tool you can import and analyse your own data sources, including your email contacts or Twitter or Flickr contacts. NodeXL is also the subject of a new book by Ben

Ben encouraged everyone to help progress the public understanding and skills in this area, and suggested that in today’s connected Internet age, network analysis could be taught in schools in place of a subject like calculus – as it will be more applicable in future to daily life for our children.

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Just as external storage can become a form of prosthetic memory, so computers can become prosthetic decision-makers. If we were to make them understand the dilemmas before us, computer assistants could advise us on the economically rational thing to do.

Would we be able to deal with being told we’re wrong so much of the time?

Evolution isn’t the best designer. While the variety of life is astonishing–prompting many to invoke a creator–a study of biology reveals plenty of inefficient compromises. For example, the Laryngeal nerve runs from the brain, down to the heart, and back up to the vocal cords. This is a terrible, wasteful, error-prone design; but because it arose from an efficient model in fish (which didn’t have long necks), it’s what we’re stuck with.

Here’s a video of a dissection of a giraffe, showing just how inefficient the nerve’s routing is. It’s not for the squeamish.

Our brains, like our bodies, evolved from these kinds of evolutionary compromises. We think we’re smart beings, making rational decisions about things; in fact, we tend to rationalize after the fact, and go with what worked in the past. This made good sense for our ancestors: they shouldn’t sit around thinking about whether that tiger was going to eat them, they should just run. We reinforce patterns that work, because they’re the ones that keep us alive.

One of the side effects of reinforcing our past beliefs is that we’re reluctant to reconsider things, even on the basis of new information. We play all sorts of mental tricks on ourselves to help us stick to our beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary: adaptive preference formation, cognitive bias, and so on. All of these are attempts to relieve the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, a disconnect between our belief systems and the real world.

So if you’re answering a questionnaire, your early answers may bias you against later answers. Psychologists love this kind of research–generally replacing self-interest with candies, under the assumption that everyone has a sweet tooth.

According to recent research, when you ask a test subject something to do with fairness, their answer will cause them to “dig in their heels”, reinforcing their later behavior. A classic demonstration of this process is the Monty Hall problem: you’re presented with three doors, and behind one of them is a prize. You choose one of the three–but then your host reveals one of the other two and asks if you’d like to switch. This New York Times piece explains the problem, and even provides an online game you can play — though the piece reveals that some of this can be explained by pre-existing biases, not just those acquired during the test.

Whether it’s prejudice, or a learned bias forcing us to reject new evidence, the reality is that humans make decisions badly. The Prisoners’ Dilemma and other experiments show that we often make poor decisions rather than economically or morally rational ones (check out the awesome SMBC explanation of this dilemma.)

Can machines help us overcome these inefficiencies? If a computer could help guide us in decision making, we might overcome these biases. At the very least, we’d make better decisions on TV gameshows. Proponents would point out the tremendous benefits of rational decision-making: a utopian world where we all solved for maximal utility and minimal suffering. Detractors would see this as a great levelling, turning us all into automatons, bland communists with little incentive to try something new or take a risk, stripping away the biases and preferences that make us individuals.

If computers helped us decide, we’d find out that Dan Ariely is right: we’re largely irrational. But can our self-reinforcing psyches cope with being told we’re fools? Or will we reject the rational correction, retreating into costly self-affirmation and embracing our bad decisions?

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The new Android software from Google, Voice Actions lets you send a text, write an email, bring up information or call a business whose number you don’t have to hand using just your voice. The demonstration is impressive (though from real world tests it does not seem to be as speedy as the demo suggests).
If it works, this could be a great feature for hands-free drivers who want to access information on the move.. but will we use it in public? So far, voice technologies have not gained mainstream adoption – some people think it is because we feel silly talking to our electronics. Perhaps, as voice recognition technology improves, the biggest barrier is no longer technological but psychological…

Find out more at TechCrunch

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Today we photograph more than ever before – and thanks to the negligible cost, we film situations that would never have been captured before. But police and other authority figures do not want to be recorded, and all over the world a battle is playing out between officials pushing current laws to extremes to prevent such recordings, and citizens who fight back with equal vigour to protect their freedom to photograph.

Should photography be criminalized and recording devices banished from any situation where that recording might be used for ill? Or should we assert our right to capture anything we experience as a fundamental right?

16 years in prison for recording a policeman?

In Maryland, USA, the State Police are currently prosecuting motorcyclist Anthony Graber, not for speeding – a charge which he readily admits – but for video recording the officer who arrested him, as shown above. He’s being charged under wiretap laws, the claim being that he illegally recorded a private conversation without consent. If found guilty, he could face 16 years in prison. The attorney defending Mr. Graber points out that “To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, pulling someone over, has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist. There’s more on the story here, here and here. Many are claiming this is an example of police intimidation.

Is photographing police a crime?

There have been many incidents over the last five years of citizens around the world being challenged for recording police. Here’s just a few examples:

• A man photographed a police car in a London park and was questioned by police under anti-terror laws.
• A press photographer was arrested in France – and allegedly assaulted – after photographing a recreation of a murder scene.
• A 16 year old boy was harassed by police for photographing police cadets at a passing out parade in Romford, UK.
• A freelance writer in Arizona had his camera seized and photos deleted when he tried to capture a skirmish that was taking place at a Mexican border crossing.
• A photographer in Nottingham, UK was arrested for photographing a police armed response.
• In Florida, a man was tackled to the ground and charged with nine misdemeanors after photographing police in a construction zone.
• A journalist was handcuffed and arrested for photographing a road traffic accident near Milton Keynes, UK.

In all of these cases, there is ambiguity over precisely which law, if any was broken. The incidents appear to be more fuelled by individual police officers’ sentiments about being photographed.

Andy Handley, the journalist in the last example, observed when interviewed at the time, “This is a worrying development in the relationship between [the police] and the media.. It is the right of the media to operate unhindered that helps keep the liberty of all in this country.”

With this, he has hit the nail on the head. In both the USA and the UK, police are effectively an extension of the democratically-elected government – ultimately answerable to the people – and while they have authority to enforce the rule of law, they are subject to those same laws themselves.

To prosecute citizens that photograph them would break this equality, and could enable governments or law enforcement agencies to abuse their power. If citizens cannot scrutinize police and hold them to account, what is to prevent them breaking the very laws they are there to uphold? As one commenter on the Graber case said, “The [US] first amendment was specifically intended to allow for dissemination of information regarding improper use of authority”. Or as Plato first asked in The Republic, “Who watches the watchers?”.

A delicate balance

While individuals feel their liberties are being curtailed, clearly police feel threatened by photographers, sometimes even just by their presence. And it’s true that terrorists could gather information for planning attacks by taking photographs of police operations or public gatherings. It’s also true that there are many innocent, legal reasons to photograph those same scenes. It is impossible to criminalize the intent, only the behaviour.

The police are in a difficult situation. When the Olympic flame visited Montréal earlier this year, I personally witnessed riot police being harassed by protestors, who threw snowballs to provoke them, while other protestors stood, “armed” with video cameras ready to capture any police wrong-doing. It was the first time I’ve seen a camera used as a weapon.

What do you think the law should be? Were these police right to intervene, or were the citizens right to stand up for their right to photograph?

Join in with this important debate and add your comments below – or on Twitter with the hashtag #human20.

We’ll be exploring this topic more in future posts, looking at the sensitive issue of photographing children as well as recent grassroots efforts to protect photographers’ rights, so send us your thoughts and we may include them in those posts.

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Break out your tinfoil hats: now Google and the CIA may be up to the same thing, having invested in a “temporal analytics” startup called Recorded Future last year.

According to Wired:

The CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

Sentiment analysis is nothing new; what’s different here seems to be the visualization and extrapolation of past trends into the future.

Like Brunner’s Delphi, this helps guess what might happen, but rather than soliciting our input directly the way prediction markets do, this uses the trails we leave online — links, comments, retweets, and so on. The predictions can include competitive intelligence, brand monitoring, and personal investigation.

Incidentally, in Brunner’s novel, the government uses the Delphi pools to placate an otherwise implacable citizenry, and often alters the results before publishing them to sway public opinion.

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