Category: data availability

How People Adapt their Behaviors to Deceive the Digital Ecosystem

I loved those articles such as this one from the Verge ‘Watch a police officer admit to playing Taylor Swift to keep a video off YouTube‘ showing how people are adapting to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence to deceive the system.

The point being that YouTube deletes all videos with copyright infringement, and therefore by playing music while being video filmed, US policemen ensure those videos of their interventions will can’t be uploaded to YouTube. Brilliant! (I am not sure how well that works though!).

Anyway that’s a good example of how people adapt their behavior to deceive the AI and digital ecosystem. I am quite sure there are many more strategies used by the tech-savvy to evade modern surveillance and ubiquitous photos and cameras. And we may implement new behaviors more and more to adapt to this digital world.

It is just the start of adapting our behaviors to deceive the digital ecosystem and AI surrounding us. Expect this to become much more prevalent!

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How Modern Offices May be a Transient Historical Phenomenon

Many things get written nowadays about the future of work. We will know in a few months how the pandemics has really changed our approach. In this post ‘The end of the office‘, Seth Godin takes a historical perspective on the modern office and how it may have been a transient phenomenon.

The modern office building has appeared with the industrial age and was conceived in fact as a data management factory. “For a century, the office was simply a small room next to the factory or the store. The office was upstairs from the bakery, or next to the stockyard or the foundry. Proximity to the worksite was its primary attribute.” Then it became sprawling office surfaces with layers of bureaucracy. For many it became one of the main centers of social life.

“As social creatures, many people very much need a place to go, a community to be part of, a sense of belonging and meaning. But it’s not at all clear that the 1957 office building is the best way to solve those problems“. With the remote work experience and the fact that we can share data irrespective of location, the need for large offices has disappeared.

I believe in the future there will be more remote work from home or decentralized offices, accompanied by a number of get-together events. This is already how many global companies work when it comes to global project teams. Transition may be faster or slower depending on industry and tradition, but it is ongoing!

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How Population is Spread by Latitude

This interesting set of maps accessible at ‘Pop by Lat and Pop by Long‘ demonstrate how the northern hemisphere is vastly more populated than the southern hemisphere.

Of course the peaks for China and India are quite visible, as well as the US population. The epicenter seems to be around 30°N.

The map also reveals how Europe is quite an exception being more northwards than the major population centers.

There can be several explanations for this fact. The first is that average temperature in Europe is higher than it should be based on latitude alone, thanks to the Gulf Stream current. The second is the offset created by India and China populations which are located significantly more to the south.

The fact that there is much less population in the southern hemisphere is also an important observation which explains why many services and calendars are dominated by northern hemisphere considerations.

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How Everything Can Be Measured Nowadays in Marketing and Beyond

In one of his newsletters, Christopher CS Penn reminds us that everything can be measured nowadays when it comes to marketing. And that if there is a lack of data, it is not because data does not exist, it is because we don’t know how to use it. In the era of digital, we have tremendous amounts of data that are just waiting to be exploited. I believe this just does not only apply to marketing – it almost applies to everything nowadays.

“I don’t believe there are things that cannot be measured. Everything can be measured. The question is whether or not we’re willing to invest the appropriate amount of time, effort, and money to measure well.”

“Let’s take brand as an example. What’s the value or strength of a brand? Brand market research has existed for decades and has proven, unimpeachable techniques for measuring the strength of the brand. For example, do a telephone poll of thousands of consumers in a representative sample and conduct unaided recall tests like “Name your favorite brand of soda to drink”.“

Thus, the important conclusion is that “The honest, ugly reality is that when someone says something can’t be measured in marketing, what they’re really saying is they’re unwilling to make the necessary investment to measure that thing. Market research, properly done, costs a lot of money – tens of thousands of dollars if you use a good market research firm. NPS data is pricey. Collecting all that data across your enterprise costs time, talent, money, and commitment.“

I believe this applies beyond marketing: nowadays if someone says something cannot be measured, it is probably because we don’t want to make the effort – or spend the money – to measure it. Data is there, or can be captured with some effort.

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How We Make Maps to Leave Things Out

In this interesting post ‘The map is not the territory‘ Seth Godin reminds us powerfully that the intrinsic power of maps is that it leave things out.

Maps are representations that are always done with a particular purpose and therefore, are adapted to the intent: be it scale, features included or left out, and design aspects such as graphics and colors.

“We make a map so we can leave things out. By leaving things out, we can help people focus on the core concepts we’re trying to get across. And so, the map of the London subway is not actually the London subway. In fact, it’s not even geographically accurate. That’s okay.”

Reminding us that the power of a representation is not just what is included and how it is included, but also what is left out, is quite powerful. And this does not just applies to maps: it applies to texts, books, powerpoint presentations, and any graphical representation.

What will you purposely leave out in your next production?

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How Human Augmentation Becomes Imperative for Defense

This interesting article ‘Space Force scientist warns it’s ‘imperative’ the US military experiment with human augmentation and AI to stay ahead of Russia and China‘ expose how military competition leads into human augmentation. And what happens in the military will undoubtedly spread later in civilian usage.

“[this Space Force scientist] announced we are entering the age of ‘human augmentation,’ which is crucial to the US’s national defense in order to not ‘fall behind our strategic competitors.‘

It proposes in particular to use self-learning algorithms to develop innovative strategies (such as AlphaGo algorithm that has self-taucht how to play go). This would lead to a battlefield combining human and IA agents (including probably drones). Therefore, human agents will need to be augmented to be able to fully work together with AI and fully participate in the battlefield.

This development was expected but we can now anticipate that it may go faster due to increased competition in the arms race between nations.

The challenge I believe will be to effectively combine the virtual battlefield with the real battlefield conditions: in effect the twin battlefield will have to reflect actual conditions on the ground and this will certainly be a major challenge in the years to come.

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How We Get Closer to Having a Second Virtual World

In this post ‘Epic Games Raised $1 Billion to Fund Its Vision for Building the Metaverse’ I discovered that some companies are actively moving into creating that virtual second world of Ready Player One fame. Epic Games is one of the largest companies in the field of video games.

“In the context of Epic Games’ announcement, the metaverse will be not just a virtual world, but the virtual world—a digitized version of life where anyone can exist as an avatar or digital human and interact with others. It will be active even when people aren’t logged into it, and would link all previously-existing virtual worlds, like an internet for virtual reality.”

“The technology needed to build the metaverse is already available.” And many companies are heavily investing in virtual reality.

The article comes with a world of caution: like in the book and movie, we may be tempted to escape the real world into the Metaverse, and there will definitely be a challenge to find the right balance between virtual and real life.

Anyway, high quality virtual worlds are coming faster than we realize, and this will be a substantial disruption in our daily life.

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How Bots May Have Amplified the GameStop Surge

Following up on our previous post ‘How the GameStop Stock Event Ushers a New Era of Collective Resistance‘, new reports have emerged of bots having also had a significant impact on what happened to this particular stock (see ‘Did Bots Help Push GameStop And Other ‘Meme Stocks’? A New Report Says Yes!‘ or ‘Thousands Of Bots May Have Played Role In GameStop Hype: Report‘. Those bots could have influenced users of social networks by amplifying an existing trend.

“It should be noted that real human beings did indeed start the conversation and push surrounding the GameStop stock and other meme stocks. The report indicates that bots were at least partly responsible for hyping and promoting these stocks once the initial Redditor-inspired campaign took off, however.” We thus seem to be in the presence of a phenomenon of bot-amplification of a trend.

This shows how bots can amplify or conversely moderate the impact of trends on social media, depending probably on how they are driven by the people who create them.

This example, like many others, shows how public opinion can be highly vulnerable to bots that mimic social media users and serve to amplify certain trends, shares and opinions at the expense of others. It is a great opportunity to explore for those that want to highlight their views, and at the same time an issue to be regulated to make sure that opinion diversity remains and to avoid extreme trends to prevail.

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How 2020s Could Be The Decade of Actual Cyberwar Commencement

Cyberattacks and the more systemic issue of cyberwar is becoming a concern, and some expect that 2021 or at least the 2020s will see the first emergence of visible cyberwar. May elements point to the increased usage of government-backed attacks in the cyberspace: from Russia involvement (read Wired ‘Russia’s global hacking efforts are going to unwind in 2021‘) to a number of events in the Middle East around Israel, Iran and other neighboring countries.

However, as the Wired post explains, the government hand is more and more obvious and the excuse of unknown private hackers is quickly becoming inadequate. In addition, cyber defenses are developed. “The allied objective will be deterrence by denial, raising the costs to the Russian attackers (including identifying the culprits by name) and reducing the value of expected gains. In 2021, we will have active cyber defences of government networks and those of critical national infrastructure to identify hostile penetration attempts.“

Cyberattacks have become much more prevalent with Covid confinement and increased remote work, however one can be now be certain that the threat has been identified and as always some form of arms race will happen around cyberattacks.

Cyberwar – with actual impact on infrastructure and physical life – or at least cyberattacks – may become an actual factor of international security in the few years to come.

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How Data Can Develop Into a Competitive Moat

The example of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies (here on wikipedia, also this excellent post ‘Jim Simons And Renaissance Technologies‘) is an excellent example of a company that has created a substantial competitive advantage from data gathering and interpretation.

The performance of the fund over decades (since 1988) has been quite impressive. The approach of the fund was to have a passionate “team of  of mathematicians whose motivation was doing exciting mathematics and science (rather than hired guns who could be lured away by money or pure trading quants, biased by the industry).”

Still, here is the interesting part: “On top of his intelligent hiring and novel approach to trading, Jim Simons recognized that an impressive data pipeline – and the technological infrastructure to digest and analyze that data was a moat to competitors. It is hard to have an edge if you use the same process and the same data as your competitors.” And from Wikipedia: “Renaissance Technologies, along with a few other firms, has been synthesizing terabytes of data daily and extracting information signals from petabytes of data for almost two decades now, well before big data and data analytics caught the imagination of mainstream technology“.

It is thus the poster-child of a company that has used data retrieval and interpretation as a moat. It is dealing with one of the most public and accessible data (financial trading data), but now the same can be done with many other kinds of user data. Data as a competitive moat is already there, has been for years, and is there to stay.

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How the GameStop Stock Event Ushers a New Era of Collective Resistance

The Gamestock event a few weeks ago where individual investors banding together drove the stock price up to create havoc in hedge funds and institutional investors is an interesting illustration of the power of the collective mobilized by social networks against institutions. This happened in a context of a brand loved by passionate geeks being under attack by finance hedge funds. I believe it is only the start of such situations and regulators in all industries will have to develop guidelines to deal with such collective mobilisations.

It is today very easy if there an online community with similar passions to create a movement, and this movement can have real-life effects. It happens on the political scene (various revolutions, not to mention the infamous US Capitol invasion) and will also increasingly happen on the economical scene (various boycotts, or joint action against certain companies deemed nefarious).

In the case of Gamestop, some wonder if it is a manipulation (i.e. a movement started by some people who had a vested interest to win heaps of money) but that will be hard to prove because it does not fall under the traditional stock manipulation definition (see for example this Forbes article “Reddit And GameStop Lessons: Former SEC Enforcement Chief Explains Stock Manipulation And How To Avoid Trouble“). At most an intent may be proven, but individuals that played along can’t get indicted.

Now that it is obvious how online communities can create substantial change in the way markets and regulated activities happen, regulators should develop strong guidelines about how to deal with such events: early detection, preventive actions and also a raft of corrective actions (mostly of the cool-off type) if effects are visible. At the same time collective action has always been part of political and trade-unions freedom and can’t be banned. It is a thin thread and it is essential to develop the right approaches and methods to deal with those events.

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How to Overcome Both Science Reproducibility and Innovation Crisis

Stuart Buck’s post ‘Escaping science’s paradox‘ addresses the current science reproducibility crisis, and in particular if the current context of replication issues and suspicions could diminish innovation. His view is that “I do not think there’s a contradiction between reproducibility and innovation. Contrary to common belief, we can improve both at once“.

The paper first gives a raft of useful references about the issues of reproducibility and the apparent decrease of innovation (compared to the budgets spent) in science today. One particular issue is the capability of institutions to fund ‘out of the box’ innovative research.

The author proposes to achieve a consistent high rate of innovation “by incentivizing failed results, and by funding “Red Teams” that would aim to refute existing dogma or would be entirely outside it.” He first proposes to make sure there is less bias towards positive results in publications by enticing publication of null result experiments or even negative results experiments. And then he proposes to make sure there is always an independent challenge to avoid groupthink, and that systematic replication of important results should be funded.

It is quite interesting to observe how improving the outcome of scientific research ends up being a psychological balance exercise, making sure to erase biases towards positive results and providing means to foster innovation. This demonstrates how the shaping of the institutional framework is important to achieve the results we need for scientific research.

On the same topic – read our previous post ‘How to Overcome the Science Reproducibility Crisis‘

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