History and Victory, a New Perspective

The quote goes, “History is written by the victor.”

A stirring insight into the reality that, historically, those who wield power are best able to propagate their accounts and perspectives on the world.  After all, in the historical case of warring proto-states, it’s tough to imagine the losers scribing a grand narrative from the grave or in chains.

However, in the modern age, I’d wager that the truism needs to be updated, at least for the case of stable or developed societies.  Now, people talk of culture wars and rhetorical battles, and the norm is that combatants are rarely deprived of their capability of expression following defeat.

The writing of history has become a weapon, rather than a prize.  Certainly, those in power have a greater capability for broadcasting their accounts, but ultimate acceptance of those histories remains an uncertain quantity.  Surely, the success of any given historical narrative must be connected with its expressive power and semblance of rigor.  Thus, I propose the following amendment:

Those who write history, and write it well, are the victors.

Graphed and Corruption

Powerful data visualizations are like masterful paintings– through art and insight, they intimate broad ideas and usher in understanding.

I, however, am neither a master painter nor an expert data visualizer.  Neither are many of my contemporaries in the “technically skilled and socially aware” demographic.  Still, I believe that even mediocre pieces of art or analysis can help communicate interesting and important ideas.

I propose a new “genre” of data visualizations, centered on accessible summarization and public commentary — political graphs.  Think of political graphs as the the numerically supported equivalent of political cartoons — not necessarily “great art” by traditional definitions, but certainly entertaining and informative.

Data visualization techniques have been applied to political topics for ages; I’m just trying to define a niche where you don’t have to be as inspired as Tufte or as laugh-hungry as Indexed to share something of social value with people.

Since I’d like to explore this notion a bit more, I’ll be either generating myself or reporting on good examples of high-quality political graphs in the near future.

Business Analysis through Payroll Metrics

I bet you can learn a lot about a company by taking a look and how, when, and how much they pay their employees.  Naturally, to get the most out of this theoretical analysis, the data should be correlated with  publicly accessible or easily determinable individual information like employee positions, job title progressions, and larger stats such as industry health and company profits.

Once all the caveats are in place, I think that it might be possible to measure and model how the company rewards and encourages certain career-scale behaviors.  We could put a number on in-company job mobility, measure just how long it takes for corporate success to trickle into the wallets of workers, and maybe even quantify philosophical emphasis on the importance of given roles within the corporate community.

While I’m sure that this sort of analysis is already conducted within companies, I wonder how difficult it would be to accomplish as an outsider.  Perhaps targeted voluntary polling could generate representative payroll numbers and job descriptions.  Maybe this sort of examination could be a service provided by the companies to which other business outsource their payroll management and software.

If you put enough companies put under payroll-enriched scrutiny, one could develop a strong tool for potential employees looking to evaluate their career options.

Music from our Genes (Bio-Electronica)

I enjoy artistic experiences that communicate some expression of meaningful information.

Maybe this is inherent to all analysis-junkies and artists.  Pretty graphs that explain complex data sets.  Poignant songs that sum up intricate social and political circumstances.  Equations that encompass beautiful realities. Etceteras, etceteras.

In that vein, what could be more meaningful than the blueprints of life, genes?  I’ve seen them literally represented with some pizazz through circular graphs (thanks to Circos for the image), but I’m not quite satisfied.  The circle graphs, however useful, seem a bit overwhelming and “all at once” to present a comprehendible/enjoyable experience without a two-week tutorial in modern genetics.

So, how about music?  We could translate each nucleotide into a note, like the cute gene2music web application, but I think that approach conceals the true richness of the data.  Without delving into full gene-parsing, perhaps a solid intermediary route would be to step it up one level of abstraction and use amino acids.

So, each amino acid parsed from a raw genetic sequence would relate to a specific note.  The different codons that correspond to a given amino acid could be translated as different note-lengths or octaves.  The general function of a gene (so far as biologists know it) could set tempo or other flourishes.

I can think of no geekier a way of generating one’s own intensely personalized theme music…

Asynchronous Bayesian Classification Databases (ABCDs)

I’d like to peek around the next corner in technology.  Specifically, what technological challenges and solutions will arise following the advent/ascension of the mobile web. Let’s fast forward about five years, give or take some technological optimism.

Assumptions

• Broadband wireless internet is widely accessible in the developed world.
• Mobile audio and visual data capturing devices with day-scale battery and storage ranges are available at prices reasonable for amateur bloggers/lifestreamers/artists.
• Consumer-targeted voice, eye, or gesture based user command interfaces for the above are also around.
• No earth-shattering breakthroughs in computational speed or information processing occur.

I posit that since people will be gathering information about the real world at an incredible rate, the successful parsing and filtering of this information will a primary challenge.  To put it a different way, the challenge will revolve around the generation of classification/contextualization metadata about objects, people, and events.

From how things look now, it will be relatively easy to use video clips of someone’s face to automatically look up their public online identity since faces tend to be highly structured and are well-modeled.  Less “regular” information about complex scenes or objects might be a lot tougher to tease out automatically.

Since I’m not convinced that complex-object-recognition software will develop quickly enough, I’m guessing that we’ll at least temporarily turn to human-assisted classification.  That’s where an Asynchronous Bayesian Classification Database comes in to help bridge the gap.

Chain of Conclusions

• Lifestreamers would naturally generate their own commentary on the things they observe. (i.e. A user says, “Oh look, an elk!”)
• This commentary will end up associated with the observation-data-stream. (i.e. Video feed surrounding the above utterance marked with tag “elk”)
• Lifecast aggregations will accumulate massive stores of observational data linked with human-generated classification metadata. (i.e. a huge online pile of elk-related video, audio, and text)
• A Bayesian scheme that continually refines correlations between observational data and lifecaster commentary could be invaluable for building robust classifications. (i.e. Taking into account that some people can’t tell an elk from a moose)
• These databases could then be used to estimate the expected interpretation of visual/audio/textual information related to a given metadata query, or vice versa.  (i.e. The software is able to tell some other user in the future, “The thing you are looking at is probably a male elk.  Petting it is not advised.”)

Outlining the relevant portions of a picture or voicing extra audio commentary could also go a long way towards minimizing the amount of effort needed to make the system work.  You know, circling the region of the video feed where the elk is standing, or saying “What a nice brown coat of fur,” so the system knows you aren’t talking about the trees also in the picture.

I certainly hope this sort of mini-David-Attenborough exposition will be incorporated into the lifestreaming culture, as it would greatly enrich the world’s stores of computer-parseable real-life data.  Luckily, most lifestreamers are probably quite happy to describe their world to others in an accessible fashion.

In turn, these ABCDs could serve as the building blocks for more sophisticated AI-based recognition and analysis tools to help us filter through the rising tide of information.  Training wheels for an augmented reality system.

Nature Haiku

A break from the usual tech-talk, here’s a short poem that popped to mind this morning.  If your art-glands hurt afterwords, blame the inspiration for picking crappy a poet.

new-wrought buds of leaves

in neon em’rald they bloom

against the concrete

The Flip Side of Lifestreaming

For those outside the know, lifestreaming is the phenomenon of more or less continuous recording and transmission of observations about one’s life.  It’s the log of a perpetual twitterer, the live webcam someone wears on their hat, the flickr account of a geotagged-mobile-phone-camera-addict.

The side of lifestreaming everyone talks about is the fact that you get an incredible amount of options for broadcasting details of your life.  The other side of the equation is, naturally, all those other people that fall into the scope of “your life.”  From their perspective, your lifecast is going to have an impact on the set of information out there about them.  In other words, lifestreaming affects the digital identity representations of the entire population of the dynamic social sphere.

So, what happens when everyone starts lifestreamiing?

My guess is that you’ll lose control over a hearty segment of your public identity.

Nowadays you generally have to make an effort to broadcast your thoughts, works, and life details to develop an online public identity.  This means that you get the chance to be the primary author and manager of this online identity — you’re the one generating all the content.

Once other people around you start lifestreaming, this editorial control will slip away, since the lifestreamers you interact with will produce alternate, semi-independent accounts of your life.  Celebrities won’t be the only people with widely accessible outside speculation and documentation about their lives any more.

Where does this all lead?  Maybe towards a more cautious society, where people have to wisely consider their actions in front of others.  Think lots of Little Sisters who might gossip or tattle rather than one Big Brother.

Image-Keyed Information Filtration

People remember images more easily than they can remember complex strings of words.  Furthermore, images can automatically evoke complex sets of associated thoughts and emotions.  We should leverage the associative power of images to help sort through thick information sets.

I’m talking about web-searching with an unconventional “semantic” twist.

The tools to make this work are all in place.  Several image formats support textual metadata packaging.  This metadata could be used to store words associated with the image and their relative weights.

The metadata could be generated by direct human characterization, image parsing and object recognition, or by trawling “nearby” sources of textual information.  Think web pages that store or embed the image and their own contextual and general metadata.  Google and Flickr, I’m looking at you.

The metadata could be further categorized by type.  To wit, associated words might describe the emotional, allegorical, compositional, or literal content of the image.  Then, users could choose to use any image as a versatile query tool.

For example, consider an idyllic picture of a child and a dog playing happily on a swing (photo courtesy of teresia).

One user could use this image to search for other pictures containing children and dogs.

Alternately, the user could use the images to search for text-based articles relating to “childhood” or “pastoral” or “happy” subject matter, simply by shifting the focus from literal metadata to abstract metadata.

Image-metadata-based-filtration boils down to a rich-content, easily-comprehended “key” used as a pointer to complex, versatile semantic datasets that in turn will aid in navigating the endless ocean of information.

The Future of the Background

Back as a grade school kid, I was impressed by the array of neat options we had for decorating our desktops on the old Macs.  Patterns!  Colors!  Eventually… whole pictures!  “Cool beans” at the times, really.  Even back then, I was wondering how we’d be entertaining our eyes in between games of Super Word Muncher, Mario Teaches Typing, and Make the Computer Verbalization Program Say Silly Words.

Sadly, nothing much has really changed.  Static pictures adorn the vast majority of backgrounds.  A few pioneers have information dynamically sent to their desktops, but only after hours of tomfoolery and unofficial certifications in awesome geekery.  Still, in the mainstream, few everyday users get more complicated than a slideshow of background photos, changing on a day-to-year long time scale, with or without automation.  Boooooring.

Then again, boring might be good.  Reduced distraction from activities more productive than staring at a music visualization screensaver and so forth. Backdrop and other similar “blank out everything” applications are growing in popularity of late along with a general “simplification” trend in interface design.

On the other hand, productivity might be overrated.  Entertainment has a respectable value on its own.  More importantly, there is the possibility of inducing wonderment in young users with a fancy, mind-begoggling base user stomping ground.

What sort of desktop decorations could do this?

Universal Truisms

If there is such a thing as a universal truism, is there a way to communicate it universally?

Some working definitions to guide the thought process:

Truism

A bit of wisdom about life.  More specifically, wisdom that can be practically applied.

Universal

Applicable and understandable at some point in any given person’s life, regardless of cultural circumstances.  Caveats added for extreme personal circumstances (e.g. mental disability, brevity of lifespan).

Communicate

Transfer of information from an entity (human or artifact) to a person.

If this were possible, the next step towards enlightenment would be some means of identifying truisms…

“Open Source” Legislation

A hearty congratulations to the forward-minded people at the Sunlight Foundation for their most recent effort, a highly-comment-able version of the Transparency in Government Act of 2008.

While one certainly can’t expect all legislation to become this accessible in a heartbeat (especially those with even more arcane references to older bills), the very act of crying out for direct public investigation without intermediation is quite wonderful.

At this point, I wouldn’t suggest taking the notion a step further and fully wiki-fying the bill, but I would like to see at least two outputs from PublicMarkup in the future to prove the authenticity and success of the effort:

1. A revised edition of the bill that incorporates the public’s comments and general consensus.
2. An “editor’s edition” of the bill that specifically highlights changes from the previous version to the current version.  It should give credit to the citizens that suggested the assorted major changes, and perhaps profile or interview them.

The former is common sense, the latter is a great chance at adding a “human element” of interest to the whole Open Source Legislation concept, which could stand to separate itself from the “teeming masses” imagery of other “flat-democracy” efforts.

Class Notes Made Easy

How about an application that made reviewing what you learned in class easy?

People already record lectures for later review, but listening to a whole course worth of class might take way too long.  Students need a way to summarize these audio recordings so that they can better focus their studies.

One technique would be to use audio recognition software to generate a transcript of each class.  Then, the transcripts could be run through some language filters to identify the most emphasized, most commonly mentioned, or most verbatim-repeated phrases.

These phrases could then be used to generate summary documents (or audio files) that contain only the important bits of a class.

Just be certain to check for content surrounding the words “this will be on the exam…”

When is the Right Time to Learn Regular Expressions?

Perhaps an enterprising secondary school math teacher could lead the charge by introducing regular expressions in Algebra class.

Regular expressions are algebraic, useful for  logical theory and, eventually, handy for programming manipulations with real language.  I posit that introducing students to regular expressions at the same time that they’re learning the axioms of algebra would be a great “real world” bit of learning synergy.**

I for one would have appreciated first thinking about regular  expressions when terms like “commutative” and “associative” were fresh in my head…

**Well, as real as the never-ending techno-evolutionary world of computing ever gets.

Enhancing the Re-Watch-ability of Movies

How about using eye tracking technology to enhance your home theatrical experience?  If we use information about where a viewer’s eyes are focusing as an indicator of attention, we could shift the audio “focus”  of a film in real-time.  Since the projected media information would change from viewing to viewing based on what the user is interested in, the viewing experience would be fresh each time.

An example — a party scene in a film.  By looking at given cluster of people (probably the main characters), the conversation becomes “in focus” and its sounds are the loudest among the general buzz.  However, if the viewer looks at a different character participating in a separate conversation, that conversation has its volume amplified while the others are suppressed.

This sort of interactive viewing would require multiple audio channels for films, as well as some way of weighting the input from multiple viewers to reach some sort of compromise that the local speakers can handle. I’m not certain about the aptitude of current commercially available eye-motion-trackers at handling more than one pair of eyes or about the necessary extra production costs for cramming in those additional audio flows, but only the former seems like a serious technical challenge.

While we’re in the realm of futuristic film enjoyment, we could extend the notion a little further and suggest the possibility of multiple planes of focus or selective highlighting for the visual side of movies to boot!   Sony, are you taking notes?

Why the Pastor Wright Controversy is Good for Obama

The roiling media-orgy surrounding Barack Obama’s pastor, Reverend Wright,  will ultimately yield great benefit to Mr. Obama’s campaign.  Why?

The controversy draws significant attention to the fact that Senator Obama is Christian.  Some of the less scrupulous portions of American society have been trying to put the notion that Obama practices Islam into the heads of bigots everywhere.

This claim, however spurious as it may sound to anyone familiar with either the Senator or Islam as it is actually practiced, has remained a thorn in Obama’s side throughout this (exceedingly long) electoral season.  However, today, to tune into almost any form of news media is to be exposed to the following two facts:

1. Obama has a pastor who makes impassioned, controversial sermons.
2. Obama has a pastor.

It doesn’t take a great deal of mental capacity to leap to the third fact that would round out that list.  “Ergo, Obama, being a person who has a pastor, is probably a Christian.”

I’d wager that the Obama campaign’s worries about misplaced anti-Muslim shadow bigotry are bound to diminish from here onwards, thanks to the Wright controversy.