The age of biological machines

"Isn't an astonishing idea that life can be programmed like a machine and then the components can be simply ordered online from a standardized toolkit, and this means that engineers and computer scientists and mathematicians can come together with biologists. This is a totally new way of doing science and it's happening right now".

"Playing God", presented by Adam Rutherford, BBC documentary, 2012

Lead and technology will follow

I've read an interesting article in the New York Times called "Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?" by Diane Ackerman. She gives some great insights which help bringing to the surface the notions of embodiment, presence and the senses in the discussion of human-technology relationships. I'd like to comment on some of her ideas.   

"... we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature."

I believe that the search for balance is key in the face of any technological innovation and so-called "progress". Encouraged by scientific intelligence and high doses of imagination, technology tends to expand itself to the level of science-fictional proportions, but when it faces human interaction, this comes as a reality check that puts it back on its tracks. Any technology that do not align to and serve the human condition and its purposes will fail, because technology is only in relation to the biological realm. In this sense, how useful is to long for a previous historical period of life under certain bio-technological conditions in which humanity used to be more in contact with nature?

The senses are at work also in our relationship with technology, but they are contested by its apparent complexity, although more so is technology, which undergoes the test of human perception. What doesn't pass the sensory and corporeal scrutiny, it will fade as a useless technology. Presence is also in our interaction with any kind of technology, like when driving a nail with a hammer or browsing the Internet.

But of course, I understand what Ackerman is referring to: how can I know what a tree is if I haven't seen it, touched it, felt it... how can I ever truly know India if all I have seen are photos in a computer... it's true that digital media seem to be getting between us and the concrete world we live in. But there are signs of balance, which is evident as media technology is increasingly going mobile. Our bodies, our senses, our drive to interact with nature have taken the development of technology to more intuitive, safer, grounds. In this world, everything is in constant change, and "transitioning" is the normal state of things. If we want for things to fall into the right place, we just have to exercise that human quality that it is all about being present: patience.

Big Data markets and individual freedom, a new frame for an eternal dispute

In the online article by Inc. Magazine called "Business Opportunities in Big Data", it is stated that Big Data is hot because:

"In an increasingly digitized world, everything you do creates an electronic record—every purchase, doctor's visit, or instance you "friend" someone on Facebook. As organizations continue to amass hundreds of terabytes of that information, they are looking for more sophisticated software tools to mine and analyze it, to help businesses better understand their markets and customers, and even predict what's next."

It is clear that if Big Data is a market, then our digitized actions are treated as commodities. Information sourced from our own digital actions are being used or sold to governmental or commercial entities but we're also buying it ourselves (let's say you're paying Linkedin to access more and better information about the state of your professional online relationships).
As technology always evolve in an experimental phase, we also follow by jumping into those new developments, until it comes a time to assess and make meaning of that technology and our relationship with it. In the Big Data context, now that the movement is going mainstream and it is big enough to become a market, it is time (again) to revise the meaning of individual freedom and autonomy. The only thing we have freedom for in this world is to decide what we want to think about our individual position in relation with the technologies we evolve with. When it comes to our bodies and actions, we've always been subjected to our connection with other entities and technologies. In fact, we are "in connection".
For me, the notion of the market of Big Data is just another technical way of visualizing and administering the connections and relationships that make the world, those that of course existed even when the previously analog materiality of media didn't allow us to recognize (although we've always felt them). As there is another way of seeing what has always been happening, the time has come to revise how we want to think about ourselves in this new media context, to ask ourselves if we are willing to understand our identities in function to the state of the media through which they actualize. Either you fight the Big Data movement and the challenges it supposedly represents to our identities and privacy or you consciously choose to attune to it by understanding that it could be just another stage in the history of our bio-technical evolution.
Of course, we may not be free from the constraints of media forms that shape our social life but we can be critical about the direction that is taking, and that freedom should be non negotiable. Change can only come from within. 

Image credits: Inc. Magazine and Viegas/Wikipedia

Diving into the past of the future

This is a Carmagnolle diving suit made in France in 1880. It sits, unused, in the Navy museum in Paris. Compare this suit with current ones made of spandex or Lycra which work as a second skin and it becomes clear that the evolution of a useful design has to do with the evolution of its components and materials. We have always had the same ideas and desires: to fly, to dive, to communicate remotely... just that the state of technology hasn't always been the right one to make them realize at their full potential.
There is nothing ever new but hardly old things become updated, refashioned. It is rather a matter of naming. For example, the functional quality of "paper" doesn't belong to the paper itself but to many other different things like, let's say, the ipad. What "dies" or gets replaced is just the name of the thing, but not its function. We can say "paper" is dying but in fact it is the word that may be going out of fashion. Its functionality just gets remediated into another technological device made of a different material that serves for the same purpose.

Images you can read

"Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they're doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections."

Created by Matt Richardson, the Descriptive Camera is a regular photo camera which instead of producing an image, outputs a text description of the scene using Amazon's Mechanical Turk API. This is an interesting project that makes us think about what an image really is and how it works, exploring other ways to engage with its content. In my opinion, it triggers similar debates about narrative forms, content and meaning as in the case of a book when is made into a movie.

Images: mattrichardson.com/Descriptive-Camera

Big Data: an introduction in 10 tweets

This week, between April 19-28, 2012, the Big Data Week has been taking place in 3 countries simultaneously, consisting in 50 meetups about Dig Data. A panel session held in London featured the brightest minds in the Big Data industry:

* Doug Cutting, co-founder of the Apache Hadoop project and creator of Nutch and Lucene
* Nick Halstead - Founder/CTO DataSift
* Hilary Mason – Bit.ly Chief Scientist
* Andy Kirk – Visualising Data
* Edd Dumbill – Program Chair Strata Conference – Moderator

I couldn't attend the event, but I followed the Twitter conversation on #BigDataWeek. Here there are 10 tweets to help beginners like me understand what kind of issues are involved in the discussion about Big Data:

1. @IanFOsborne Big Data means never having to sample anymore!

2. @michellegallen Education is fragmented and operates in silos. This works against training data scientists who need to work across disciplines

3. @jamesholwell Right on. Insightful data analytics alone won't get board-level attention, has to tell a story (and look pretty!)

4. @jamesholwell Big data in 5 years time: sentiment analysis applied to the whole of humanity (assuming privacy doesn't get in the way)

5. @rosshitch media scientists are rare and tend to generate objective results but businesses need action points

6. @wacinski "There will be regulatory constraints on how we're able to analyse datasets, such as the information held by Facebook"

7. @DavidRajan open data open innovation datascience and big data - is all converging

8. @nick365 okCupid an example of not such big data but very very interesting relationship discoveries from their blog.okcupid.com

9. @FlyingBinary Apart from the finance applications by the panel mentioned there is #bigdata revolution underway in the HR and Research space

10. @darachennis Data is a collection of facts. Can't IP or (c) that. Why not treat data as a legal person? Would prevent lots of dumb lawsuits

Open or closed societies: that's the question

Human nature is rather technological

Mark Pagel, one of the world's leading experts on human evolution and development, talks about our species' capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

A matter of perspective

"We shape our buildings, then they shape us", said Winston Churchill. The same we can say about technology, which, among other things, took us into space. Look at these astonishing images, they definitely have the power to shape on us a new way of thinking.



YouTube video description:
A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, El Salvador, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line), a satellite (55sec) and the stars of our galaxy.

We are all cyborgs now

"It's not that machines are taking over, it's that they're helping us to be more human - helping us to connect to each other" (Amber Case)

I am, therefore I exist

"Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world,a serendipitous world. You'll be working and living inside a network of people, and you'll never have to be alone again."

Goodbye Second Life. We learned how to be ourselves in the cyberspace. We're not scared anymore to show our life on The Internet as it is in real life. What made Facebook outstanding was the fact that it offered a platform that served as a ground for this social experiment and transition, incorporating a golden rule to play the game: you have to be yourself to let others recognize you and interact with you.
Despite all the social goodness that pushes transparency to rule the Internet, I wonder how much of this transforming movement we also owe to the commercial web. e-commerce has been growing stronger and transforming economies over the past years, and as it turns out, you also need your real identity to pay by credit card. It's just that now we're looking at both sides of the coin.

High-Tech fruits and vegetables

Funny how the biggest and most popular technology businesses have a fruit or something related to everyday life for a name. Apple, Blackberry, Orange, Sun, you name it. It’s part of the effort of these kind of companies to enter the customers’ conscious space. Despite their complex products and services, they want to claim that they are as simple to deal with as a fruit. For a funny example of how weird this seems if you take it out of context, watch this video.