data availability | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Why Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing Matters

Mark Zuckerberg (yes, Facebook’s) analyzed the history of online collaboration on Facebook and concluded that the amount of information shared on the internet roughly doubles every year.

And this is not going to stop with the substantial increase of mobile devices and their ubiquity in particular in emerging and developing countries.

We generally underestimate the power of the exponential, but this is huge! This means that in a limited number of years the increase will be dramatic. The size of the data must even increase more quickly as videos tend to replace simple pictures or music.

Zuckerberg’s law matters because it describes what is really happening with the Fourth Revolution, better than laws focused on hardware capability. We are in an era of exponential increase of exchange and sharing between individuals. And this matters.

How to Identify Quality when Products Become Commodities

Following up on our previous post ‘Why Democratization Creates Commodities‘, let’s dwell on the issue of finding quality products in the midst of the avalanche of available products and data.

Peer ratings are essential in new Collaborative Age to replace the filtering and quality control by institutions.

Of course it has drawbacks (creating trends and popularity which might not be entirely warranted) but not necessarily worse than the personal preference of an editor. The main issue is that while the opinion of an editor might be known, collaborative rating has a somewhat unpredictable outcome that might be influenced (and even possibly manipulated) through early ratings generated by supporters. Still when a domain becomes mature, collaborative rating does become effective and less influenced by initial ratings.

Democratization without a peer rating system won’t work. Both need to develop together. Be suspicious of democratization drives that would not be accompanied by a strong peer rating system!

Why Democratization Creates Commodities

When capabilities are democratized, handed over to anyone that wants to contribute, they become soon a commodity. This means that their price plummets (often close to zero), and this also means that institutions that were create to vouch for quality disappear.

Flickr - democratization of photography — Flickr – democratization of photography

A typical area is photography. It is now possible to produce great pictures with mobile phones. If you invest in a dedicated camera, all sorts of automatic settings will help produce pictures of professional quality. While press photography still exists in a more restricted sense, more and more amateur pictures are available and used.

Because amateurs don’t care so much about being compensated because they are having fun, the marginal price of photography is close to zero. Of course there is a lot more average pictures available but among the choice one can still find great pictures.

An ongoing area is education. With online Moocs the institutions that were created to vouch for course quality (universities) will have a hard time, while education will be more available to everybody. At the same time many courses may be more average, but who cares?

Hat tip to Christopher Penn

How Cars Are Nowadays The Most Sophisticated Machines on the Planet

“New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code. Compare that with about 60 million lines of code in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider” – according to the New York Times ‘Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood’.

le-corniaud — Cars were previously a much less complex contraption…

Complexity is there – many different parts with various codes that need to communicate so that everything works. Results can be quite unpredictable. Cheating can even be hidden inside the code, as the recent Volkswagen scandal showed.

The issue of code safety is a tremendous challenge to manufacturers and regulators alike. A strong position would require to remove all code lines that are not used in a particular model, but that is extremely costly as it goes against standardization. At some point it will be difficult to avoid unpredictable behavior of the system if there are various computing centers performing different functions in the car. Today, access to the proprietary code used by automakers is not even granted because of copyright protection. This will certainly evolve, and a framework for guaranteeing a minimum level of code reliability will have to be put in place.

Why the Winners in the IoT Space Will be Those That Will Overcome Security Issues

The Internet of Things (IoT) means that an increasing number of “things” are connected to the internet. It’s coming, and it is going to change the industry.

Hacked_car in ditch — Hacked car in the ditch (Wired)

Read the now well-known story how hackers managed to compromise completely a Jeep Cherokee in Wired. Don’t you find that scary? And that is just the start of the problem as more and more objects get connected.

We can heap up all sorts of security layers, once something is connected to the internet, it will always be possible with sufficient effort to hack it (it needs to be worth the effort of course!). The questions about security, safety and privacy linked to the Internet of Things are substantial, and they have no obvious answer yet. This excellent article in Forbes summarizes the challenges. Now it is clear that for the moment “Connectivity [of things] has outpaced security“.

The winners in the Internet of Things space will be those that implement a comprehensive security approach – like those who won in the area of peer-to-peer online payments (like paypal) were ultimately those who were the best at avoiding fraud. It is about implementing a comprehensive systemic approach to security, and not a device-based approach.

Why the Internet of Things Will Lead to the Emergence of New Industry Giants

The Internet of Things is coming: more and more objects have sensors that can be connected to the internet. We are actually lagging behind the available hardware to invent applications. But the actual capability is now present.

“The big game changer is that when all these physical objects can sense, analyze and interact on their own, it changes how and where decisions are made, and who makes them. The important thing to remember though is the embedded device by itself is not the game changer….it’s the combination of the applications, the people, and the processes around the ‘things’” (from IBM Center for Applied Insights).

Implementing the IoT will take time, and many trials and inventions. A good summary of the challenges in this ParisTechReview paper ‘From flowerpots to containers: a subtle anatomy of Internet of Things’.

We can already predict the emergence of new giant players that will master the applications in the Internet of Things, like Google and Facebook emerged from the first and the second version of the internet. And it is not a given that this time they will emerge from the Silicon Valley. The game is open!

How the Legal Reference Industry is Being Rebooted

The Harvard Law library (which contains reference to most of US law cases since the US colonial times) is getting digitized and will be available for search for the public. In what is a development that will redefine the law industry, legal references in the US will finally be more searchable and available and far more in the past than now. This will redefine the legal publication industry, as well as the tasks of thousands of junior legal staff that until now had sometimes to search manually through thousands of pages to support their cases. Also, a lot of the digitized databases were only available at very high cost.

shelves of law books we are getting rid of! — Shelves of law books we are getting rid of!

This paper from the NY Times explains the detail and analyses the consequences of that project. While a lot was already available in digital format, it came at a steep price from specialized companies. As explained in the paper, those companies do support the initiative with a deal that will make the data only progressively available to the general public over the next eight years, time for them to redefine their business model and develop some advanced tools on the basis of the raw data that they can sell for a profit. Still, the trend is here to make the information free and available for all.

Even the information that was standing on shelves for the last two centuries is now getting free. We are decidedly moving towards an era of free and available information, where most of the information ever produced by humans on a support will be available to all, anywhere.

How to Easily Check If Data from Complex Systems is Tampered With

Benford’s law is a great way to quickly check if data from complex systems (obeying typically to a power law distribution over several orders of magnitude) has been tampered with.

An illustration of Benford's law — An illustration of Benford’s law

According to this law, the first number of the dataset must follow a logarithmic law, and there must be much more ‘1’s than ‘9’s. This is contrary to intuition, and when people generate fake numbers they will tend to spread them more evenly.

In an interesting Guardian article ‘The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats’, studies are mentioned that showed that when applied to the macroeconomic data from countries, this simple test showed that Greece’s was quite questionable!

When questioning a dataset next time, use Benford’s law to easily check whether the data could be suspicious!

How the Internet Has Become the Nervous System of the 21st Century

“The internet has become the nervous system of the 21st century, wiring together devices that we carry, devices that are in our bodies, devices that our bodies are in“. This observation is from Cory Doctorow in a great column in the Guardian ‘The internet is the answer to all the questions of our time’.

internet map — A map of the internet. Doesn’t it look like a neuron map?

Internet is now the location where all the societal fights will be won or lost. It is increasingly the dominating medium of all the conversations that really matter. And following on his usual battle cry on a free internet, Cory Doctorow continues: “Without a free, fair and open internet, proponents of urgent struggles for justice will be outmaneuvered and outpaced by their political opponents, by the power-brokers and reactionaries of the status quo. The internet isn’t the most important fight we have; but it’s the most foundational.”

I like this image of the internet as a nervous system pervading our society, linking together the members of humanity. It is not just a neutral communication medium. It is now a pervasive part of our humanity.

Why Basic Motor Skills Are So Hard To Learn by Robots

Moravec’s paradox says that “contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources“. In other words, our unconscious capabilities are much more difficult to implement than our high level, conscious abilities.

humanoid robot falling — A semi-autonomous robot having balance problems at the 2015 DARPA challenge

As Wikipedia explains, “One possible explanation of the paradox, offered by Moravec, is based on evolution. All human skills are implemented biologically, using machinery designed by the process of natural selection. In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient“.

So while computers became better at chess than humans a few years ago, getting a robot to reproduce our moves will still require some years, as shown in this video from the 2015 DARPA humanoid robot challenge.

There is not reason why we won’t be able to built fully balanced robots in a few years (it took a decade from the first DARPA autonomous driving vehicle challenge to have fully functioning prototypes on the roads).

Yet it is really amazing to realize that those deeply engrained bodily functions we take for granted are the most difficult to reproduce! – whereas we think they are rather low-level functions.

How Mindfulness is a Reaction to Stimuli Overload

The last years have seen a tremendous development of mindfulness, including on the workplace where it becomes mainstream. It happens at the same time where our attention is increasingly diverted through various devices, notifications and information availability. This is not chance – I believe it is the symptom of a deep struggle. And it is a major issue that we need to deal with as we enter deeper into the Fourth Revolution.

Many mindfulness programs are based on the premise of mindfulness training whereby we take some pauses, cutting ourselves off from the demands of modern life for a few minutes for example by meditating. This regular exercise reinforces our ability to focus and manage our thoughts.

The question is whether this practice is sufficient, or whether it just reflects the need to find some balance. Shouldn’t we learn to manage our attention on a continuous basis, not just by taking some pauses off? Mindfulness should thus become an ongoing practice, and this will need to become ingrained in our way of life.

A major issue is that our children do not learn so much at school today how to deal with their focus and attention when faced with the multiplying stimuli of modern life.

Mindfulness is a clear symptom of a societal issue, and the question remains open if the current practices resolve it fully. I believe that more progress will have to be made to define how to deal with modern stimuli overload and find the practices that will be required by all in the Collaborative Age.

How to Measure the Value of Online Identities

The Newrepublic article “The BOT Bubble: How Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency” is an absolute must-read and mind-blowing piece about the underground economy of fake social media accounts.

The click farm owner on his bed of SIM Cards

It describes in detail the operation of a ‘click farm’ in the Philippines where fake Facebook users are created by the thousands to create followers for greedy companies (hint: it takes one SIM card per user to get through the Facebook check algorithm, hence it looks more like a SIM card storage!).

According to the article, about 7 to 10% of social media users are fake, and those profiles are leveraged to create sudden ‘following’ and ‘liking’ or brands, presidential candidates etc. This can seriously distort the real following of public brands. Of course it is also a way to distort the effectiveness of online advertising and therefore, to make advertisers lose money.

Those ‘click farms’ are another massive, cheap employment created in developing countries by social networks, parallel to the legitimate service providers that provide moderation services; and other less legitimate that provide filtering services in some countries.

An online identity has got value, and some people are ready to pay heavily for fakes that they can control and have just the right profile. Accordingly, the value of real online identities is much higher, just because of the data we are giving to social networks.

Hat tip to Mitch Joel in his usually great weekly 6 links worthy of your attention.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30