Computers Will Predict The Future

Let's do an experiment.

Let's take supercomputer with 1024 Intel Nehalem cores and let's call it Nautilus.

Let's take Nautilus and give it 100 million news articles to read.

Let's ask Nautilus to apply mood detection for those articles searching for words such as "terrible", "horrific" or "nice". Those words will describe global sentiments.

Let's ask Nautilus to detect words for locations, like 'London', and record those locations on the map, showing where the specific waves of news were produced.


What do we get?


We get a trend, showing that BEFORE large events happening around the world, the mood of the words used in the news becomes very negative. And we know the location of the places, where the mood goes down. Such analysis is possible because Nautilus was programmed using similar algorithms for analyzing news as those used in DNA simulations and weather forecasting. It was done a posteriori - after the events happened - but now it will be applied to the ongoing events with better location engine.


What Nautilus did is, indeed, a weather forecasting for the large events in the worlds. Not perfect, but definitely above the level of chance. Still, as @mjrobbins points in his article for Guardian, you need human to make sense out of the analysis outputted by Nautilus, so it's not that computer does all the job. But it's a good start.

Details are in this paper and slightly biased BBC news article.

Drawing by Geek On Acid
@motioninsocial

We Are Mobile Phones, But Our Mobiles Phones Are S**t

There are currently 4.023 billion mobile phones connected globally with the world population of 6.75 billion people. That's 0.596 phones per capita (per person). It (roughly) means that more than a half of the world population owns a mobile phone. Let's dig it.

More people have access to mobile phones in India (543 million), than to adequate sanitation (366 million) (UN, 2010). 

China is a leading single country with the highest number of mobile phones connected - 547.3 million (with India being second). But lets put it in the context. Population of China is 1.31 billion people. So the estimate is 0.416 phones for a person.  

Europe has 712.8 million mobiles connected. With population of around 593 million, we have 1.2 phones for a person. Even if you look at fine details, countries like Germany, Italy, France, UK, Poland, Spain or Ukraine have roughly between 1.1 - 1.5 phones per capita. So proportionally, we are leading, side-by-side with Russia (which has also around 1.3 phones per capita).

It's a big number. It means statistically every person in Europe has a mobile phone. Obviously, that's not the case, but number is still extremely high.

Mobile phone is becoming a body organ. You can now browse the net, watch TV, listen to radio (ok thats old school), geotagg the reality around you, direct yourself around any place (with GPS coverage), play complex games, shot photos and videos, book a tickets or restaurant with just few clicks. We are constantly connected. You go to the pub and you see 8 people sitting silently around the table, clicking their phones. They eventually come back to conversation, but every social pause will be an excuse to send a text or check/update Facebook/Twitter.

But with all this attachment and expansion of mobiles there is still not that much innovation coming in a field, just redesign and recycling old solutions.

Sure, iPhone redefined touch interface and globalised common app use, and the trend is now evolving very quickly within mobile application development. But hardware development just froze in time, and mobile phones are becoming increasingly clunky. Phones from HTC, Apple, RIM, Nokia are loosing their key features - battery life, sustainability, simplicity of interface, cheapness, signal strength and toughness. And services are also going down with expensive contacts, confusing insurance policies, expensive roaming and data transfer rates. My iPhone can let me send the e-mail, but it will cost me £3/Mb from outside UK, and the battery dies on me after a day. Ten years ago I had Nokia 3310 which battery least for 5 days easily, with frequent use. 

My point is that someone has to redevelop current concept and services of mobile phone. Software is there, but hardware and mobile networks lacks perspective. It's all iPhone-touch-screen-HTC-another-version-clones now, with competition on 'who get's bigger OLED screen' and whether O2 or Orange screws more users on data plans with "free" phone.

So...

I want good battery life (5-7 days, or 2-3 weeks like ebook readers!). 

I want very simple interface (well, Apple kind of succeeded here). 

I want just a few apps I use on the daily bases. Honestly, how many apps that you download from App Store you actually use regularly? 5? 8? I recon that's my personal estimate. And I have about 100 of them kicking around in my iTunes library - most of them just useless crap (for some of which I paid, looser...). 

I want a quality calls (with faces, yes, they have it in Japan already, Apple) and good network coverage. I want cheap roaming rates and cheap data. Not for downloading YouTube movies, but to turn on simple GPS to find some cool bar when I'm chilling somewhere abroad. 

I want simple and clear contract, that I can easily personalise and adjust according to my calling/traveling/data needs with free access to wi-fi hotspots around Europe (especially airports).

Is it really THAT much? ;-)

[All data in this post has been calculated and sourced using Wolfram Alpha]

[Image: Geek On Acid ©]

Should we send robots to space that looks like us?

Which is exactly what NASA is planning to do. It's called Robonaut 2. For the moment he will be an assistant for human astronaut on the international space station with simple tasks, like tools handling. For the moment, the Robonaut 2 is build from behaviors. Automatic tasks. But in the next stage, it will have options to make some decissions in the actions.

Now, it makes sense to build a humanoid robot to work with astronauts, because we like to interact with humanoids rather than 26-arm robot. We simply prefer the human look from non-human look. It's very well explained in this Wired article. There is still an issue of uncanny valley - robots looking very close, but not exactly as live humans, will trigger our repulsion towards them. We just might have higher cognitive expectations towards human-like robots. However, guys in NASA thought about this problem, and made the robots look like they are from Star Wars, and we all know that EVERYONE loves Star Wars.

More interesting is a question, whether they are going to send Robonauts into deep space or even Mars, without human crew. It might not be rational from the functional perspective, because the 26-arm-octopus robot will be able to complete more tasks at any given time, than Robonaut. Hell, it will be much cheaper to make rather less than more robots, so one octopus robot might be much better deal that 10 Robonauts. Still, maybe it would be better to distribute different tasks into series of neuronal networks instead it to one network, so from the separate interactions we would get some interesting individual differences between the robots instead of having just one hiper-robo-organism.

At the end of the day, it might only be a question of software and neuronal network design. Everything will be connected to one neural network, but task are going to be distributed to smaller, singular networks. There will be goal like 'maximize the collection of data from any environment, analyze it and adapt accordingly to maximize the survival of the mother-ship'. Mother-ship will be actually one robot, just composed of many different robots for different tasks. And both Robonaut fans and octopus robot fans will be happy :)

[image credit: NASA]