[There] is an emerging industry aimed at using the tweetstreams of millions of people to help predict the future in some way: disease outbreaks, financial markets, elections and even revolutions. According to new research released today by Topsy Labs — which runs one of the only real-time search engines that has access to Twitter historical data — watching those streams can provide a window into breaking news events. But can it predict what will happen?

The theory behind all of this Twitter-mining is that the network has become such a large-scale, real-time information delivery system (handling more than a quarter of a billion messages every day, according to CEO Dick Costolo at the recent Web 2.0 conference) that it should be possible to analyze those tweets and find patterns that produce some kind of collective intelligence about a topic.

Wired also has an article about the same idea, but from another company seeking to do this sort of data-crunching and prediction:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

Which all sounds very science-fiction to me, a cross between Minority Report and Asimov’s Foundation novels. One of the issues with both of these stories is the slight degree of hyperbole on the reporting of them; it seems that rather than predicting the future, it is more about a very close reading of existing data trends and being able to spot them before anyone else does. It’s not about the future, it is about the now.

The other issue I see is what famously former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld called, “unknown unknowns“. What I mean by this is that any algorithm applied to the data will only be sensitive to what the creators deem to be important. What is deemed to be important is what we know from the past was important. So to a large degree the warning the system gives of events always has one foot in the past. That is not to say it cannot generate meaningful results, I am sure that is possible, just that it cannot predict the future nor accurately account for trends that have little or no historical precedent.

Hat-tip to Michel for the link. (Also posted on my blog.)

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In the conference’s opening keynote, physicist Michael Nielsen spoke about ‘open science’ – conducting research in a manner that makes ideas, data and thoughts available for others to look at and build on as you go along, rather than in hording them until publication (see also, as @alicebell pointed out, this blog post by Jack Stilgoe). The trouble is, open science is failing.

Nielsen says there needs to be a reward for sharing knowledge – it requires a change in the culture and reward system. He highlighted the efforts of Tobias Osborne, who’s tried to encourage open data sharing in the quantum physics community through an open lab book of sorts. But his efforts have revealed that few in the community give back. Nielsen referred to the ‘changing to the other side of the road’ metaphor – people are reluctant to change ingrained societal behaviour. But a change in regulation may well benefit the whole industry.

He asked about the concept of ‘the provision of ‘public good’ – under what conditions can we succeed in this non-rivalrous concept? For instance, ideas discussed by a researcher on a blog are already ‘in the public good’ by being revealed publicly.

So what’s the solution? Maybe it’s starting small. Nielsen drew comparison with the trade unions: these are made up of small groups formed around social incentives to help one another. The small groups then join conglomerate when their interests align and they have incentive to. Is that the way that open science might succeed?

Here’s the key thing for me: the problem with many open science projects is they start too broad. Like the unions, many social networks start narrower (in terms of audience) because it is easier to focus on small groups – easier to provide incentives and they can always broaden later. Look at Facebook starting with Ivy League colleges. As Nielsen said, narrowness is a feature and not a bug when you are getting started.

There is lots of interesting things here.  The fact that open science is struggling because the community was not giving back (aka freeloading) is not an issue unique to this area, but to all open projects (and discussion of possible remedies is here).  The trade union analogy is a good one, but the same issue occurs there from my experience with those involved often giving varying amounts of time to the union and most of the work being done by a few people.    Ultimately open science is the best way to go for many branches of inquiry simply because the problems science needs to help resolve, such as climate change, need a border push from all of us, and the best way to get people involved is to make them a part of the process.  So discussion and work on opening science is more welcome than ever.

I was also interested in this idea of narrowness being a feature – which I can see.  With a smaller focus and indeed group it does seem to me easier to make the common connections that will keep people working together.  Once the focus blurs, overall progress can blur too.  At Virt3c@Hull I had a really interesting set of conversations with Gabriella Coleman, who had studied the motivations of those who work on free software.  She said that in projects where all the participants got together to meet up in the real world and talk and socialise were much more focused and cohesive as a group that those project that did not.

For more from the event, see here.

(Also posted on my blog.)

The post Open Science – Making It Work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

An ant network

Those ants then quickly returned to the destroyed nest to recruit followers. They repeated the process until enough had gathered at the new nest site to relocate the entire colony.
Most studies of how ants find new nest sites use colonies unfamiliar with a new territory, and assume that all workers follow the same rules. But that’s not realistic, and as a model for self-organization and distributed decision-making — ants have inspired various forms of traffic coordination, from cars to data — it might not be optimally efficient.

“This begins to change how we think about self-organization,” said Nicola Plowes, a behavioral ecologist and ant specialist at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research. “Informed individuals making those decisions actually result in a process that is more efficient than a simple homogeneous self-organized system.”

(Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on my blog.)

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The amount of productive work varied significantly between the autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire conditions. When the leaders arrived late in the authoritarian groups, for instance, the boys made no initiative to start new work or continue work already under way. In the democratic condition, the groups were already productive. In laissez-faire the groups were active but not productive.

When the leader left the room in the groups showing a submissive reaction, the percentage of time spent in serious work dropped from 74% to 29%. In the groups showing an aggressive reaction, the drop was from 52% to 16%. The motivation to work was leader-induced, not intrinsic to the boys. In contrast, the democratic group remained stable, with a negligible drop from 50% to 46%.

The democratic groups had by far the highest quality of work and made far more suggestions about how work could be done. They had internalized the group goals. Pride in work also differed significantly. The democratic groups presented their work or took it home, whereas in one authoritarian group, the boys actually tried to destroy what they had made.

Overall, the democratic form showed its superiority on every measure.

It seems that by empowering people within a workplace to be involved in how that space and the activity within operates, you also help to motivate people too. This seems to fit to me, because as the places we work (if you live in a democratic country) are also within our democratic societies, you’re not going to check in your experiences at the door when you clock in. Work is still part of society.

Merrelyn breaks work organisation down into 2 models of operation; autocratic (DP1) or democratic (DP2):

DP1 is called ‘redundancy of parts’ because there are more parts (ie people) than are required to perform a task at any given time. In DP1, responsibility for coordination and control is located at least one level above where the work is being done. That is, those above have the right and responsibility to tell those below what to do and how to do it. DP1 yields a supervisory or dominant hierarchy. Individuals have fragmented tasks and goals: one person–one job.

DP2 is called ‘redundancy of functions’ because more skills and functions are built into every person than that person can use at any one given point in time. In DP2, responsibility for coordination and control is located with the group of people performing the whole task. Each self managing group works to a unique set of negotiated and agreed, measurable goals, comprehensively covering every aspect of the work, social and environmental as well as production.

DP1 structures are hierarchies of personal dominance. DP2 structures are non-dominant hierarchies of function, where change is negotiated between peers. … DP1 structures induce competition, whereas DP2 structures induce cooperation. Over time, DP1 actively deskills and demotivates people, whereas DP2 skills and motivates them.

Very interesting and well worth a read!

(Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on my blog.)

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Now I need to state that I’ve not read the book, only listened to the talk so please temper my comments around that point. While there does seem to be a militarising of police forces around the world as the tools and ideas of the military are sold into civilian use, there is also the flow of technology the other way. The Internet is the classic example of a technology designed to ensure a missile control network survives a nuclear strike now used to share lolcats, or the movement of GPS from military into civilian use. Another point I’m not 100% is the repeated reference to ‘video games’ as some sort of adjunct to the military-industrial complex. Yes there are games used by and for the military – lots of them, but so are TV, film and radio.

The recent growth of games has been in the social gaming sector with games such as Farmville – which I can’t see as war propaganda. Stephen talked about how controller for military systems are being designed to ‘look like video game controllers’ implying a propaganda style link – but it made me wonder what is the causal link? My guess is that the design of video game controller design is much more advanced, has more money put into it and has much more user feedback that military systems, so yes one is copying the other but for ergonomic reasons.

Still, those points aside it is an interesting talk and worth a listen and I might try to get hold of a copy of the book…

(Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on my blog.)

The post Cities Under Siege Discussion appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“[I]t became increasingly clear — often from intercepted communications or the accounts of insurgents we had captured — that our enemy was a constellation of fighters organized not by rank but on the basis of relationships and acquaintances, reputation and fame,” McChrystal remembered recently in Foreign Policy. “We realized we had to have the rapid ability to detect nuanced changes, whether the emergence of new personalities and alliances or sudden changes in tactics.” Think Bruce Wayne getting inspired by a bat to strike fear into the hearts of criminals.

McChrystal set to work, as he put it, building JSOC’s network. One key node: CIA. During a January speech, he recalled how he needed CIA’s help getting intelligence on a Taliban leader he was hunting. CIA was secretive, compartmentalized and suspicious of other organizations meddling in its affairs — exactly what JSOC used to be like.

So McChrystal took the rare step of going to CIA headquarters, hat in hand. As it turned out, CIA just needed a promise that JSOC “wouldn’t go across the border” into Pakistan, jeopardizing its own operations. McChrystal agreed, the intel flowed, and the Taliban commander was killed.

It was the beginning of a new relationship between JSOC and the vast spy apparatus the U.S. built after 9/11. CIA operatives and analysts would visit McChrystal’s base of operations in Balad, Iraq, to plan joint missions.

And not just them: Satellite analysts from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, regional experts from the State Department, and surveillance specialists from the National Security Agency were the next people McChrystal effectively recruited. McChrystal spent his commander’s discretionary fund not on better guns, but on purchasing bandwidth so that all the nodes of his network could speak to each other, sometimes during missions.

Veterans of JSOC remember that as crucial. An NSA-created linkup called the Real Time Regional Gateway allowed operatives who seized scraps of intelligence from raids — a terrorist’s cellphone contacts, receipts for bomb ingredients, even geolocated terrorist cellphones — to send their crucial data to different nodes across the network. One analyst might not appreciate the significance of a given piece of intel. But once JSOC effectively became an experiment in intel crowdsourcing, it soon got a bigger, deeper picture of the enemy it was fighting — and essentially emulating.

“If you look at JSOC, you’re looking at arguably the single most integrated, most truly joint command within the U.S. military,” says Andrew Exum, who served in the Army’s Ranger Regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 and who advised McChrystal as a civilian in 2009. McChrystal and his brain trust “were seeking to do and succeeding in doing what many commanders and diplomats and government officials talk about: tearing down the walls that exist between various departments, agencies and military units.”

Also posted on my blog.)

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Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”

(Abstract here)

However it leaves as many questions as it answers; what do we mean by ‘committed opinion holders’? Is that people willing to die for that belief? When happens when there are competing 10%s of the population with opposing ideas?, such as in the US culture wars? I had been told before that during the American War of Independence, around 10% of the population supported the rebels and around 10% the English crown and the other 80% waiting around to see where the balance would tip, though I have no reference for that, can’t remember where I heard it!

(Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on my blog.)

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Open Object is a novel software innovation, designed and programed by Jessi Baker, enabling access to independant data and crowd sourced and verified information (created via a wiki interface) about products and brands in Augmented Reality or via an online pop-up window.

Visit the web app using any smart phone/tablet computer, curate your information preferences and browse customised independent and wiki sourced information appended to the package or brand logo you are interested in through an AR browser (if shopping in reality), or a pop-up (if online)

The Open Object application was created as part of a degree show project at the Royal College of Art, London in June 2011 and is still in beta version. It is available for testing, however to integrate much more information and product types further development and investment is required. ….

The Open Object AR Interface for many different types of user information curation, ranging from wiki comments on animal testing, to tagging newspaper headlines to independent ratings, whilst comparing three best selling face creams. The amount and type of information is controlled by the user and the content is all editable and can be rated whilst browsing…

Design for the Open Object Web Interface

Find out more via Jessie’s blog….

(Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on my blog.)

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So what is Bitcoin? It’s a virtual currency that can be used to buy and sell with much as you can with a normal currency. The difference is that while virtually all other currencies on the planet are backed by a central bank and so a nation state, Bitcoin is backed only by its users. It is a peer-to-peer currency developed for the networked age.

Before I get much deeper into what Bicoin is, its also important to consider what it is not. Most of the other innovations around money we see have been in the form of transactional means; the ease of transferring money between people (such as PayPal) or the ease of making a payment, such as using a mobile phone to pay. There have also been innovations we seel less of, such as credit default swaps that play around at repackaging value and risk. But underlying all these is still a national currency. None of these are a new currencies but a means to assist in the flow of old money but in a new world. Bicoin is, to a degree, some of these things, it is a digital native after all. But is is also not dependent on an underlying currency, because it is a currency.

To better understand we do need to spend a little time looking at what a currency is. Now I’m in no way an economist, so any reading this who want to correct my definitions, please let me know! As I understand it, a currency is basically a means of representing wealth for ease of transaction. So the various means we humans developed for representing wealth have tended towards portable yet rare items; gold being one common example. Gold as a metal was not that useful (it is now in electronics but that is another story) except that it was uncommon and easy to craft into jewellery so as to allow the owner to show off their wealth. Thus materials like gold became a proxy for wealth where so long as everybody agreed that it was valuable; it was. Paper money is also in itself not valuable and unlike gold it is not a rare material (which is why it gets forged). But what paper money does have is each note has the promise of a national state to pay the owner goods to the value of that note. Its an I.O.U issued by a state and because states tend to be powerful enterprises next to us people, its a promise that carries the weight of gold.

Now value does not have to reside in currency alone, indeed many of our problems come from an obsession with falling for the lust for proxy value. Value comes from, as with gold, the belief that an object is valuable. For example diamonds are not particularly rare, but because there is a near monopoly on their supply combined with the perception of rarity and hence value can be created. This is the first fundamental problem any new currency needs to solve; either something big a powerful (like a nation state) needs to back its value or it needs to be perceived of as rare so holding its value. The digital, by contrast, is the opposite of both of these. Digital is ethereal and far from rare because it is in its nature to be copied. To resolve this, a Bitcoin is, like a bank note, not just any collection of data but is ‘watermarked’ to ensure its authenticity. In the case of Bitcoins, they are watermarked by a hugely complex algorithmic slew of data that is uniquely generated. So copying it is not an option. The coins can be generated, or mined, by using the Bitcoin software – this starts running the algorithmic process and will, in time generate you a new coin. Your computers processing power is being distilled into a discrete package of value: a Bitcoin.

Hang on, you may think, how can a currency be created out of thin air? The answer is central banks do this all the time. Remember most money in existence is not in a physical form. Central banks create ‘base money‘ to keep their currencies flowing. Its a bit of an esoteric process as if they create too much then deflation follows yet too little and the liquidity of the economy suffers. Bitcoin uses the ‘mining’ of its peers to create the ‘base money’, so the balance of getting its level of generation right is created not by top-down be-suited men in offices, but by the natural ebb and flow dictated by the number of peers in the system.

So far there is little to recommend Bitcoins to the population at large because its central feature; being outside the control of governments was until recently only really pursued by a minority of cyper-rights, libertarians and geeks. Then the Unique-Selling-Point of the Bitcoin currency came into play; that it is outside of government regulation. A website of sorts appeared caslled The Silk Road, which offered anonymous trading but only via Bitcoins. The Silk Road is like a backstreet eBay and was soon filled with people buying and selling illegal items; cracked xboxes, guns and in the main, drugs. Lots of drugs. Suddenly there is a value to Bitcoins; you can by illegal stuff with them. The value of the currency rockets as people rush to get them to get high (I was told to $30 per Bitcoin). Then the Silk Road is interrupted and people can no longer use their Bitcoins for naughty things and so the value drops to a fraction of its high (to around 50 cents per Bitcoin). At the time of writing the Silk Road was back up and the value of Bitcoins purchased on eBay was £12.50 for 1 Bitcoin. Bitcoins are also subject to predation and gaming that afflicts normal currencies; theft, hacking and the like. Bizarrely these influences severe to show the value of this fledging currency, after all you don’t bother to steal something that is worthless.

Screengrab from The Silk Road

So where is the printing-press epoch here? Before the printing press was developed, written knowledge was expensive. Books had to be copied by hand and as the skills to do this were also rare. As such there were limits on the knowledge and its transmission via the written word. It was predominately the realm of the rich and powerful. When the printing press came along all that changed. Copies could be easily made and so the control of the written word moved out of the hands of the rich and powerful and started its long journey of democratisation that is still ongoing today. Money is subject to the same facets. It is created and controlled by the rich and powerful and even in a democracy we have almost zero control over its form, value or function. With Bitcoin that changes as the ebb and flow of form is generated non-hierarchically by its peers. It can be assigned values (for good or ill) outside the nation state.

This is the start of the transfer of power for the mechanisms of wealth from the few to the many. Like the invention of the printing press it also means more than just the process of pressing ink; the opening up of the skills to read and write, of who can put ideas up for consideration and how how we can transmit those ideas to one another for learning beyond our immediate circle. What will be equivalent collateral changes with Bitcoins? One of the things I think really important is around the idea of currency regulation. Currently financial regulation rests with the nation state and its member organisations like the IMF. Whatever regulations that lawmakers may develop to control risk within such systems will always be gamed by clever speculators. The ability for the nation state to react to such predation is poor. However in a peer currency the response for such regualtion may also rest with the users. While this wont stop gaming and predation, it may be that afluid peer system is better able to react to such attacks to evolve a means to defend itself.

One thing is clear to me, however drawn from the parallel example of the printing press, which is that Bitcoins are will not be the final form of this journey, but they are only the start of the story. A story that has a long way to run, but like the printing press will echo into all sectors of humanity. Facing serious environmental challenges such as climate change and peak oil means the systems of wealth also need to change and I’m willing to bet, with Bitcoins that what is happening here will be a part of that much needed transformation…

(Also posted on my blog.)

The post The Bitcoin Epoch: It is Akin to the Printing Press Revolution appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The idea for a specialist piece of software was sparked by kettling, a controversial police tactic to contain and demoralise protesters.
Sukey, taken from the nursery rhyme Polly Put the Kettle On, collects messages, tweets and photos from protesters and tries to make sense of what is going on. It then sends that data back to users of the app on the ground. The app provides an in-built compass which gives an indication of the best direction to move. A red marker on the compass could point towards a police cordon or kettle so a protester caught in trouble should follow the green direction to escape. By providing this data to those who need it, the team hoped that nobody would unwittingly be caught in a police kettle. “It’s a project to help people protesting stay safe, stay informed and stay mobile,” says Sam Gaus, co-founder of Sukey.org.

In many ways this is just a step towards levelling the playing-field between police and protesters. Prior to new technology such as mobiles, the police had radios, CCTV and choppers and so had access to a level of information and co-ordination that protesters did not. However the authorities in various countries have not stood still next to the advances in social media and are now responding, often in disturbing ways. This quote is from the Web 3.0 Lab, who are doing a good job of examining and documenting much of this area:

Now that regimes all over the world are aware of Social Media the balance of power has moved to their advantage. For a poorly policed site like Facebook the combination of Social Networks and a Terror State will quickly neutralize any democratic aspirations on the that Facebook might have fostered. We saw it first in Bahrain this development in Bahrain. Bahrain was one of the first regimes in the Arab world to take its battle against its own people to Twitter and Facebook. With Gaddafi joining the war on Social Media, Facebook is no longer a safe place for Arab reformers. Gaddafi is adding a new twisted strategy in their war on Facebook. Gaddafi supporters are identifying Libyans, many who live in the west, on Facebook pages and threatening them.

What is also interesting from the article is thier assesment of the role of Facebook in all this:

It is pretty clear that Facebook’s entire history is a series of unintended accidents. Its success has been more a combination of random factors than any strength of the product. And its role in Arab Revolts was also clearly an unintended accident. Sadly Facebook own blindness may soon have very serious negative consequences.

To me, this has echoes of John Naughton‘s recent discussion of how we all too often see services like Facebook and Twitter as neutral actors in the societal space, which they are not:

What’s going on, in other words, is that our media are treating Twitter and Facebook as if they were public utilities, like the open web. In fact it’s even worse than that, as Dave Winer, one of the web’s elder statesmen, pointed out last week. “The Library of Congress,” he writes, “which is part of the government, is subsidising Twitter by doing a complete archive of Twitter before making a serious attempt at archiving the web. This helps cement Twitter as the medium of record, which is ridiculous. The market is just getting started. How can you justify the government taking sides over other equivalent (or better) ways to communicate, that are not owned by a company (like the web, for example). If this isn’t against the law, to use taxpayer funds to help a company achieve dominance over competitors, it should be against the law.”

Spot on. The illusion that corporations like Facebook or Twitter are public utilities is not only naive, it’s positively pernicious because it enables them to get away with the pretence that they are solely forces for good, rather than single-minded corporations whose loyalties are ultimately to their shareholders, no matter how soothing their bedside manners are.

(Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on my blog.)

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