Monthly Archives: July 2016

For Your Consideration: Cotton Robots, Datamining for Literacy, and Childhood Memories

1. Automation and the Cotton Gin

When the cotton gin was invented, many people thought that it would reduce our new nation’s dependence on slavery by removing the painstaking work of separating the usable cotton from seeds, hulls, stems, etc.

But ironically, it resulted in the growth of slavery.

The gin could process cotton so efficiently that more cotton goods could be produced, and it turned out that there was massive latent demand for cotton goods. So while the robots did indeed reduce the reliance on slaves to do the finishing work, they also increased demand for cotton, which resulted in many more cotton fields, and many more slaves to tend them.

I don’t know enough history to know whether this was a core issue that led to our Civil War or just a contributing factor. Probably somewhere in between. But it took us more than 100 years to really process all the implications of just this one technology advance (and I think really you’d argue that we haven’t fully come to terms with them even today.)

So you see where I’m going with this.

Fast forward to our own era, and we’re working our way through software automation instead of cotton processing automation. And it seems obvious to me that as we’re making systems and processes easier and easier to automate, we’re also generating massive new previously latent demand for software driven systems.

I’m not arguing at all that this will result in anything like the growth of slavery in the first half of the 19th century — more that we’re in a time of profound change. And that worries over whether robots will take all our jobs I think will prove to be ultimately misplaced. I think that if you look not just at the cotton gin, but most technology automation advances what you’ll find is that the demand for labor nearly always increases.

2. Mobile Phone Data Reveals Literacy Rates in Developing Countries

One of the millennium development goals of the United Nations is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. That’s a complex task, since poverty has many contributing factors. But one of the more significant is the 750 million people around the world who are unable to read and write, two-thirds of which are women.

There are plenty of organizations that can help, provided they know where to place their resources. So identifying areas where literacy rates are low is an important challenge…

The usual method is to carry out household surveys. But this is time-consuming and expensive work, and difficult to repeat on a regular basis. And in any case, data from the developing world is often out of date before it can be used effectively. So a faster, cheaper way of mapping literacy rates would be hugely welcome.

Pål Sundsøy at Telenor Group Research in Fornebu, Norway, says he’s worked out how to determine literacy rates using mobile phone call records. His method is straightforward number crunching. He starts with a standard household survey of 76,000 mobile phone users living in an unidentified developing country in Asia. The survey was carried out for a mobile phone operator by a professional agency and logs each person’s mobile phone number and whether or not they can read.

Sundsøy then matches this data set with call data records from the mobile phone company. This provides data such as the numbers each person has called or texted, the length of these calls, air time purchases, cell tower locations, and so on.

From this data, Sundsøy can work out where all the individuals were when they made their calls or texts, who they were calling or texting, the number of texts received, at what time of day, and so on. This allows him to construct a social network for each user, working out who they called, how often, and so on.

Finally, he used 75 percent of the data to search for patterns associated with users who are illiterate, using a variety of number crunching and machine learning techniques. He used the remaining 25 percent to test whether it is possible to use these patterns to identify illiterate people and areas where there is a higher proportion of illiterate people.

3. Why Childhood Memories Disappear

“People used to think that the reason that we didn’t have early memories was because children didn’t have a memory system or they were unable to remember things, but it turns out that’s not the case,” Peterson said. “Children have a very good memory system. But whether or not something hangs around long-term depends on on several other factors.” Two of the most important factors, Peterson explained, are whether the memory “has emotion infused in it,” and whether the memory is coherent: Does the story our memory tells us actually hang together and make sense when we recall it later?

But then, this event- or story-based memory isn’t the only kind, although it’s the one people typically focus on when discussing “first” memories. Indeed, when I asked the developmental psychologist Steven Reznick about why childhood amnesia exists, he disputed the very use of that term: “I would say right now that is a rather archaic statement.” A professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Reznick explained that shortly after birth, infants can start forming impressions of faces and react when they see those faces again; this is recognition memory. The ability to understand words and learn language relies on working memory, which kicks in at around six months old. More sophisticated forms of memory develop in the child’s second year, as semantic memory allows children to retain understanding of concepts and general knowledge about the world.

“When people were accusing infants of having amnesia, what they were talking about is what we refer to as episodic memory,” Reznick explained. Our ability to remember events that happened to us relies on more complicated mental infrastructure than other kinds of memory. Context is all-important. We need to understand the concepts that give meaning to an event: For the memory of my brother’s birth, I have to understand the meanings of concepts like “hospital,” “brother,” “cot,” and even Thomas the Tank Engine. More than that, for the memory to remain accessible, my younger self had to remember those concepts in the same language-based way that my adult self remembers information. I formed earlier memories using more rudimentary, pre-verbal means, and that made those memories unreachable as the acquisition of language reshaped how my mind works, as it does for everyone.

“Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power—the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments—what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.” – Erik Brynjolfsson

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, please subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/peopleinpassing

I hope that you’ll read these articles if they catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Please email me questions, feedback or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of something on a related topic, or of interest, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these links comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

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For Your Consideration: American Political Insanity, Google Machine Learning, Gaming Education, and Instagram Hell

1. How Google Is Remaking Itself As A “Machine Learning First” Company – Backchannel

Google’s bear-hug-level embrace of machine learning does not simply represent a shift in programming technique. It’s a serious commitment to techniques that will bestow hitherto unattainable powers to computers. The leading edge of this are “deep learning” algorithms built around sophisticated neural nets inspired by brain architecture. The Google Brain is a deep learning effort, and DeepMind, the AI company Google bought for a reported $500 million in January 2014, also concentrates on that end of the spectrum. It was DeepMind that created the AlphaGo system that beat a champion of Go, shattering expectations of intelligent machine performance and sending ripples of concern among those fearful of smart machines and killer robots.

While Giannandrea dismisses the “AI-is-going-to-kill us” camp as ill-informed Cassandras, he does contend that machine learning systems are going to be transformative, in everything from medical diagnoses to driving our cars. While machine learning won’t replace humans, it will change humanity.

The example Giannandrea cites to demonstrate machine learning power is Google Photos, a product whose definitive feature is an uncanny — maybe even disturbing — ability to locate an image of something specified by the user. Show me pictures of border collies. “When people see that for the first time they think something different is happening because the computer is not just computing a preference for you or suggesting a video for you to watch,” says Giannandrea. “It’s actually understanding what’s in the picture.” He explains that through the learning process, the computer “knows” what a border collie looks like, and it will find pictures of it when it’s a puppy, when its old, when it’s long-haired, and when it’s been shorn. A person could do that, of course. But no human could sort through a million example and simultaneously identify ten thousand dog breeds. But a machine learning system can. If it learns one breed, it can use the same technique to identify the other 9999 using the same technique. “that’s really what’s new here,” says Giannandrea. “For those narrow domains, you’re seeing what some people call super human performance in these learned systems.”

2. How American Politics Went Insane – The Atlantic

Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

The disorder has other causes, too: developments such as ideological polarization, the rise of social media, and the radicalization of the Republican base. But chaos syndrome compounds the effects of those developments, by impeding the task of organizing to counteract them. Insurgencies in presidential races and on Capitol Hill are nothing new, and they are not necessarily bad, as long as the governing process can accommodate them. Years before the Senate had to cope with Ted Cruz, it had to cope with Jesse Helms. The difference is that Cruz shut down the government, which Helms could not have done had he even imagined trying.

Like many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction. Reversing the spiral will require understanding it. Consider, then, the etiology of a political disease: the immune system that defended the body politic for two centuries; the gradual dismantling of that immune system; the emergence of pathogens capable of exploiting the new vulnerability; the symptoms of the disorder; and, finally, its prognosis and treatment.

3. Gaming Reality – Games and the Education System – CNN

To understand why Quest to Learn thinks games are crucial to the educational system, one first must take a look at why games are so compelling in the first place.

That’s easy if you talk to James Gee, a presidential professor at Arizona State University’s department of education, who has made a career out of assessing the usefulness of games.

“What a video game is, is it’s just a set of problems to solve — that’s it,” he said. “And it has a win state. You get feedback and you know when you’ve solved the problem. And then the game designer has to create good motivation for you to do that.”

Take “Angry Birds” as an example. It’s a game where smartphone owners are asked to use a digital slingshot to catapult birds across the screen and into towers of sticks with evil pigs — their enemies — hiding inside them.

That game is compelling, Gee would argue, because there is a clear problem (pigs that need to be pummeled), a feedback system (after each level, players are given stars based on how quickly they’re able to pummel said pigs) and, to some degree, an inherent motivational structure. Players who want to advance to harder levels (to “level-up” in gamer-speak) must improve their scores to do so — maximizing efficiency.

Something about it works: The game has been downloaded more than 1 billion times.

Quest is appropriating those ideas in a system it calls “game-like learning.” Instead of regular classes, kids are sent on missions where they’re expected to make their own discoveries and compete against other students or classrooms from the school.

Sometimes students here use video games and other high-tech tools — there’s a 3-D printer on site; laptops and iPads seem to be everywhere; kids play “The Sims” as part of class — but often they don’t. Duke’s “The Way Things Work” classroom looks pretty much like any other eclectic science class in America: bright posters on the walls, class pets in the back corner, a model skeleton leaning against the window.

It’s how the class is framed that’s different. Kids are told they are no longer students but explorers. They’re put inside a narrative that’s bigger than them — they’re dispatched on a “mission” to discover, in this case, the many mysteries of the metric system.

Then they play games in order to make those discoveries.

The magic of the school is that, just like in a video game, when one challenge ends another begins, co-founder Salen said. You move to the next level. The school is designed to create challenges that the students actually want to tackle, without worrying about grades or tests, just because they’re actually interested in the world.

Games “create a reason for young people to want to engage in a problem or around a set of content,” Salen said. “And then you make those resources around them available so they can do work and practice around that problem.”

Put another way: The carrot is always in front of the horse.

4. Is Instagram Ruining Travel? – BackChannel

Like a bad motivational speaker, I’m a sucker for a good sunrise and Angkor Wat was delivering. This was the edifice that had survived since the 12th century and had miraculously been spared the Khmer Rouge’s rod of destruction during Cambodia’s 1970s genocide. It has inspired sages for generations and graces everything from the labels of local beers to the set of “Tomb Raider,” an architectural wonder draped in a sheet of spiritual mystery and marvel.

I took a breath and a sip, then raised my iPhone to the sky. Thirty seconds of cropping and captioning later, I posted on Instagram an odious, travel-envy shot of the moment, knowing very well that most of my friends back in New York City were cold, miserable urban yetis. Meanwhile, I was eating, praying and loving and now there was a 1080-by-1080-pixel image to prove it.

It sounds like a moment of pure trekking ecstasy. But it was fraudulent.

I didn’t post what was behind me.

That scene — the fight for the perfect Instagram — is one I’ve witnessed over and over, on at least three continents during the last year or so. At times, it felt like destinations were morphing into mere photo sets. In New Zealand, I saw adventure companies that made getting the perfect photo-op part of their pitch for kayaking, hiking or ziplining expeditions. In Thailand, a woman next to me on a beach squealed to her friends about getting her hair just right for a shot destined for her Tinder profile. Back home in New York, I have more than once found myself in the crosshairs of a narcisstick aimed at a scraggly Elmo in Times Square.

Our desire to get the perfect sharable photo has even led to deaths by selfie, with Mashable reporting that in 2015 more people died from taking selfies than shark attacks. Last year, Disneyland banned selfie sticks at its theme parks, citing safety as a concern. The Russian government even released a guide for how not to die taking one, kicking the “safe selfies” movement into motion.

To be sure, these are extremes. But as I stood there in Cambodia, swatted by selfie sticks, bruised by elbows, perfumed by the body odor of my fellow photogs, I realized the irony of being at a temple in which no one was really present. Was Instagram ruining travel?

“Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.” – Eckhart Tolle 

If you were forwarded this newsletter and enjoyed it, please subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/peopleinpassing

I hope that you’ll read these articles if they catch your eye and that you’ll learn as much as I did. Please email me questions, feedback or raise issues for discussion. Better yet, if you know of something on a related topic, or of interest, please pass it along. And as always, if one of these links comes to mean something to you, recommend it to someone else.

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