data availability | The Fourth Revolution Blog

Openness Alone Cannot Drive Change. It is Just the Beginning.

The title of this post is a quote from one of the most inspiring videos I have seen for a long time. Margaret Heffernan explains how having information available out in the open is not enough for people to notice and take action.

She explains how a scientist investigated the growing number of childhood cancers and had discovered the noxious effects of X-rays of pregnant women on children in the 1950’s – how all this information was published, out in the open – and how the medical establishment took decades to notice and do something about it.

Look at this 12 mins video, it’s worth it!

Here’s the link if you can’t see the video.

I love one of the final quotes of Margaret’s speech: “Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. But the truth won’t set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.”

The availability of information thanks to the Fourth Revolution is only the beginning. Leadership is needed to make something out of it, to manage the conflict that open information does provoke.

Hat tip to Tim Berry who talked eloquently about the video on his blog.

Do you Still Think that Curation of Content is a Guarantee of Quality? The Jonah Lehrer Case.

There has been a scandalous affair recently at the New Yorker that has had shaken the web (and more). One of their staff writers had just written a best-selling book about creativity and was forced to resign after he could not demonstrate the origin of some quotes he was attributing to Bob Dylan. He finally admitted that he invented them.

Jonah Lehrer - Imagine — Imagine… a book a bit too imaginative!

Funnily enough the book was about Imagination and Creativity. Don’t look for for it anywhere, it has been removed from all selling channels by the publisher (although more than 100,000 had been sold already).

More about this story if you are interested in this article on Jonah Lehrer’s deceptions (it seems to be written by the original person who uncovered the issue). More comments also in this excellent blog post on How to Resist the Temptation to Lie and Cheat your Way to the Top. There has been a flurry of posts and write-ups on the issue, so if you want even more just google Jonah Lehrer!

This is a good reminder than even the best-run fact checking factories like the New Yorker can fail to identify writers that fake it. The best curated content is not 100% mistake and lie-proof.

The Fourth Revolution brings in the validation from the crowd. And the crowd it is that uncovered that incredible falsification. It is not the first time, it won’t be the last time; but it becomes harder to fake it with the always greater insights of the crowd. This time it took a person passionate about Bob Dylan, knowing all his interviews and quotes, to figure out that something was wrong. It only took a few weeks.

And so will the world increasingly question the content of even the most reputable curators. This constant challenge by people who are extremely knowledgeable in their niche area will create increasingly better content to the world.

Funnily enough I had bought the book – it is on my Kindle – and will now read it knowing that for a book about creativity it must be really good as it is at least partially the result of the imagination of the author!

How crowd-opinions are now more powerful than any advertising

The world of advertising is trembling. As the following graph from Nielsen, a market research giant, online conversations and the opinions of other internet users have much more credibility than newspaper articles and any other form of advertisement!

Trust in Adversiting (Nielsen Survey 2011) — People trust more other people's comments on internet than newspaper articles or other ads

What can we take from this? The power is to the organizations that leverage the user’s opinions on the products by providing the right platform: this relaunched Amazon at the beginning of the 2000’s, and is the fundamental insight of TripAdvisor and many others. It’s a real crowd-sourcing of opinions that people use more and more to decide whether to use/buy the product.

Is it resilient to manipulation? It is certainly more than conventional advertisement. And the most important is to determine how the seller reacts to these opinions and improves his product.

Crowd-opinion is the new credo of trust, like crowd-knowledge is the new baseline of knowledge. It has limits, it can be sometimes dangerous but in a world where we often buy remote products that none of our friends has seen or used, it seems like the best alternative.

What do you think? How much do you rely on crowd-opinions?

Crowdsourcing to take control of health and emergency response

In the Netherlands, AED mapping has been crowdsourced so as to save patients that might need them urgently. A project is called to do that on a worldwide basis. Watch this TED video

The crowd is taking emergency intervention in their hands.

The other side of the video about taking your blood pressure, hopping on the scale… and there goes your latest health parameter on the web… to your doctor, to your social network. Are you ready to go that far?

Smart Disclosure and Colored Buttons: Enabling Full Data Availability

Beyond Open Data, there are also troves of data that cannot be made public because they contain personal information.

Blue Button Data download — The Blue Button for data download

However it would be useful to have access to this data in certain ways:

for the person concerned, for his/her personal files
anonymously / aggregated by location or through other groups for statistical analysis and other studies

There is an effort ongoing in the US and there starts to be quite a lot of papers on the subject. One of the most complete is “What is smart disclosure?” on O’Reilly. The US governments is producing standards to allow access to this data.

This lead the creation of a number of colored buttons depending on the type of data and the type of access.

These standards will certainly spread rapidly across the world as liberating those troves of data becomes an increasing national priority: the wealth of knowledge that will be derived from this data will be huge and I can’t wait to see what incredible advances we’ll see from the analysis of all this data.

Expect those colored buttons to invade your life soon!

You are contributing actively to the enhancement of the world’s knowledge… without even knowing it!

Did you know that you are routinely contributing to the development of the world’s knowledge – directly? Like… more than 10% of humankind in fact?

And we are not speaking here of global utilization of your data to do statistics about your behavior.

No – whenever you are typing a word in reCAPTCHA, these small popup words that you need to type so that the website can be sure you are a human and not a robot, the second word is there to check the spelling of an old book that has been scanned.

ReCAPTCHA example – the second word is to check the spelling of a scanned word

This is a typical example of reCAPTCHA. And when you type inquiry you actually check the spelling of that word as it was scanned. More detail on this surprising usage of crowd-contribution on this page of the reCAPTCHA from google that explains how it helps digitalize old books.

You can help the process by using this technology on your website (see how to implement reCAPTCHA on your site on this page).

This fantastic video explains how this project came about – and the exciting projects that the originators of the tool now have regarding crowdsourcing translation:

Leveraging the power of crowd-contribution has only the limits set by imagination. Think about how much knowledge the billions of internet users could contribute… and will contribute through the right usage of modern technology. Are you ready to contribute more?

The Fourth Revolution, leveraging humankind’s forgotten knowledge

The Fourth Revolution fosters a contradiction between cultural unification and diversity. And diversity wins, for sure!

We observe a quick assimilation into a unified world where English is the lingua franca, or so it looks on a first glimpse (actually there are some contradicting statistics there, and English tends to diminish on the net). At the same time the Fourth Revolution makes it easier than ever to read and understand other languages, and even save languages on the brink of being forgotten!

Forgotten language — Thanks to the Fourth Revolution, we'll continue to understand this language

We’re all using automatic translation every day; our computers can spell check an incredible number of languages, soon for sure there will be automated translators that will allow us to communicate with others, in the palm of our hands. Most of these tools use the crowd-power: Google translate asks to suggest better translations; users are constantly improving the tools.

And languages on the brink of being forgotten suddenly have more chances to be saved (see the BBC article “Digital Tools to Save Languages“).

I love the quote from the article:

“Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in – all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature”

With the widespread recording tools of the Fourth Revolution, the syndrom of the elderly dying in Africa without passing on his knowledge is behind us. The library in the mind of this wise person is not lost any more. From the remotest corners of the world, knowledge is preserved, available, searchable, offering an immense opportunity for us.

I can’t even imagine what we will be able to do with it! And you?

Fourth Revolution in action: online universities are becoming mainstream!

Online universities are becoming recognized and deliver more and more degrees.

We had touched upon this issue in the post “Another Institution under Siege from the Fourth Revolution: Universities – Will they Reinvent themselves in time?” with the example of Udacity, a revolutionary online university.

online university — Online universities are becoming mainstream

Traditional universities are now coming into play. The MIT had its courses available online for a while, but now it is a real rush towards the ever growing market of university degrees online.

Recently, the MIT and Harvard announced the creation of edX, a platform for online studying and learning (visit the edX site here and read the edX press release here). This platform has an exciting ambitious growth plan, offering classes online for free for millions (but probably paying degrees!).

This excellent post by OnlineUniversities.com, “8 nations leading the way in online education” summarizes the situation and what are the most advanced countries in the field of online education: USA, India, China, South Korea, Malaysia, UK, Australia, South Africa. Many of these countries are geographically very large or serve as a hub for a large region, offering education opportunities for many.

Online education cannot probably replace face-to-face education in all disciplines but it can in many scientific ones. It is an incredible occasion for people to grow themselves for free. It is an incredible occasion to grow the knowledge base of humankind into the remotest corners of the planet.

Those countries and those universities that will miss this revolution will trail behind and eventually disappear into oblivion. When online universities will do more than just broadcasting, when they will unleash the power of collaboration, they will dwarf Industrial Age universities. This will happen soon.

When will you start taking the classes you always dreamed of taking online, for free?

VIDEO OF THE QUARTER: Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web

In this stunning video from TED, Kevin Kelly describes the revolution of the last 5,000 days of the Web and what is coming in the next 5,000 days. Knowing that the video was shot in 2007 we can already see some predictions coming true!

Fasten your seat belts, the world is now changing amazingly!

How the web will become a ONE machine and we will all be the ONE. How in 2040, the processing capability of the web will exceed the combined processing power of 6 billion individuals. And more insight about the tremendous changes that are happening in the world!

How crowd-knowledge dwarfs the obsolete institution of encyclopedia

This is the end of another institution that started with the Industrial Age: news spread a few days ago that the Encyclopedia Britannica stopped its printed edition, having sold only a few thousand copies per year in the last years. It will continue to make its database available online.

encyclopedia britannica 1st edition - 1768

Let’s do some fun maths. In 244 years of existence, around 7 million copies of the precious encyclopedia were sold (or, on average 30,000 per year). During that time approximately 17 billion people have been born and became adults (see for example this article of Carl Haub, the specialist in historical demography). Thus on average, there was one copy of the encyclopedia available for 2,500 people.

In 2008 Wikipedia saw 680 million visitors in the year and aims at reaching this level every month by 2015. 14% of internet users (14% of 2 billion = 280 million users) go on the Wikipedia site according to Alexa.com. That’s one person for 22 living people, or probably approximately one person for 15 adults.

The English version of Wikipedia ONLY contains 50 times more words than the latest Encyclopedia Britannica, or 2 billion words, in roughly 4 million articles (the Encyclopedia Britannica boasts 65,000 articles).

The Encyclopedia Britannica counts less than 5,000 contributors; whereas more than 300,000 editors edit some part of Wikipedia every month.

Crowd-knowledge is here, orders of magnitude more powerful than centralized edition of a paper encyclopedia. In less than a decade, the institution of the encyclopedia has been toppled and made obsolete.

Who said the Fourth Revolution wasn’t here?

A day’s activity in the internet… what will we do of all this power?

Even after my research on the Fourth Revolution I am dazzled by the expansion of the internet. See this infographics by MBAonline.com:

Created by: MBA Online

Did you remember the time where there was no email, no internet, no wikipedia, no facebook, no skype? At the moment I write this post I am sitting in an airport terminal in Doha, Qatar to change flights on a long trip between Singapore and Houston, TX and (for free) I can Skype with my family back in Singapore, exchange with the world, watch an educational TED video and… write by blog on my internet server located in the US (or so I believe…).

I can’t stop to be amazed. What will we do of all this new power?

Fourth Revolution literacy: do you follow the basic rules for social networks?

The Fourth Revolution is a great opportunity. Social networks are fantastic communication and creation tools. As with all powerful tools, social network can be used the wrong way.

A new literacy for the Fourth Revolution is needed; it will without doubt be widespread in a few years time. Let’s just remind us of some rules that need to be followed when it comes to using social networks.

Mitch Joel in his blog post “keep yourself alive” reminds us about a few:

Don’t link to spouses and children
Don’t publish anything private
Be careful of groups you join (groups are not more private)
Make your acquaintances as close as your friends
Be leery of platforms with open APIs (they give third parties access to the data)

These are already advanced rules, beyond some obvious ones: don’t put your address or phone number, don’t post all your personal data like social security number or bank details…

Some schools start discussing these rules with children. When will they be part and parcel of all basic education?