http://thenumerati.net/ Stephen Baker en-us http://thenumerati.net/?postID=868&paris-panel-the-annotated-city http://thenumerati.net/?postID=868&paris-panel-the-annotated-city Sat, 12 May 2012 09:43:00 GMT On Christmas night of 1999, the wind picked up in Paris. We were finishing dinner, and we heard things falling in the street, but didn't think much about it. The next morning, we saw that a wind storm had inflicted tremendous damage. In the Bois de Boulogne, a big park near our apartment, more than 3,000 trees were broken or felled.

Just a few weeks earlier, my sons and I were walking through the park and came across one famous oak tree bearing bullet holes from World War II. On Aug. 16, 1944, just a week before the Allied liberation of Paris, the Gestapo marched 35 French resistance fighters into the park and murdered them on that spot. A nearby sign told the story. So on the morning of Dec. 26, we went back into the park and made our way across the chaos of fallen trees to see if that one oak had survived. It had.

I'm thinking of discussing this incident at a panel I'll be moderating Monday in Paris at the New Cities Summit. I'll be speaking with Charlie Hale of Google, Jean-Louis Missika, deputy mayor of Paris (for innovation) and Alessandra Orofino, co-founder of Brazil's Meu Rio. The theme will be "The Annotated City." The idea is that information in cities will evolve and become personalized, perhaps coming to us through next-generation billboards, smart phones or even Google glasses. We'll learn more of what is relevant to us, and less of what authorities decide we should know. In this sense, cities will follow the path of media, in which we learn more from our friends, through messages and updates and links, and less from the nightly news.

Why talk about the tree? Authorities, long ago judging that the tree was newsworthy, annotated it for all to see. I, for one, am glad they did. But others in the Bois in the weeks following the storm might have been interested in other, more personalized, annotations.

That area of Paris is a place of business for hundreds of prostitutes, many of them transvestites. Following the storm, they and their customers were literally barricaded from doing business. So many of the prostitutes made their way to the properous suburb of St. Cloud, just across the river from the Bois. This caused quite a hubbub in the town. Nonetheless, it would have been highly useful to them to be able to leave virtual messages in the park, some sort of annotation, letting their customers know where to find them.

As new cities develop, each of us will be getting the streams of information that are relevant to us. We'll have fewer shared experiences. After all, if your friends are steering you through Google glasses to the boat rentals in the Bois (below), you might walk right past that oak without seeing it. Of course, if you're interested in history, maybe your friends will direct you straight to that tree. I would.

]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=867&sensors-on-our-food-and-our-diets http://thenumerati.net/?postID=867&sensors-on-our-food-and-our-diets Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:38:00 GMT
I bought this orange pepper last week at a grocery story called Corrado's, down the road in Clifton, NJ. It cost 99-cents/pound, a bargain for colored peppers. But you can see from the dimples at the top that this pepper was in that bargain bin for a reason. It was getting a little old.

Corrado's is full of bargain shoppers. If I had traveled two miles in the other direction, to Whole Foods in Montclair, I could have bought a spryer version of this pepper for perhaps four times as much. But I prefer to dig through the produce at Corrado's and unearth (relatively) youthful specimens in bargain bins. I'm able to do this, I think, because the grocers have only a vague idea of the freshness of the produce. If a batch has been around for a certain number of days, mark it down. This is a rule, or heuristic. But science is busy replacing those vague rules with specific instructions, ones based on observations. That is, data.

Scientists at MIT have now developed sensors to detect the step-by-step process of ripening and rotting in fruit and vegetables. These sensors detect and measure tiny traces of ethylene, a gas that promotes ripening. In time, these sensors should be cheap, and it will be possible for grocers to place them on crates of produce. Then they will be able to calculate exactly how much to charge for an orange bell pepper that will be dimpling (like mine) within, say, 14 hours. (Of course, the calculation is extraordinarily complex, because it has to balance the potential of enticing non-pepper buyers vs the revenue lost when shoppers already planning to buy full-priced peppers opt for cheap rotting ones instead. Data analysts, as I outlined in The Numerati, are busy grappling with such issues.)

Once we have affordable sensors to detect a fruit's exact stage or ripeness, consumers will be using them, too. In time, we'll be able to monitor each piece of produce in our refrigerators. Food columnists and diet book authors will be telling us at exactly what point to eat shittake mushrooms or Belgian endives. Some of us will demand this data from supermarkets. And then, no doubt, some will attempt to correlate the ripeness of the food we eat with our health, and with the risk of dread diseases. Next thing you know, dinner guests will be alerting hosts that they don't eat this or that vegetable past a certain freshness threshhold.

Here's the worst part. What if it turns out that certain foods are much better for us before they actually taste good? Will those of us who eat ripe pears and tomatoes be viewed as decadent? Perhaps. I know this is heresy in the age of Big Data, but there's such a thing as knowing too much....Meantime, I have a certain pepper to eat right away.



]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=866&thinking-in-a-foreign-language http://thenumerati.net/?postID=866&thinking-in-a-foreign-language Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:25:00 GMT A study in Wired makes the case that thinking in a foreign language makes for more rational decisions. The idea is that people have to slow down to express their thoughts in a second (or third etc.) language, and that this pause might lead to more sensible decisions about which medicine to give your kid or how to invest your 401K.

As someone who has spent many years speaking a second and third language, my response is: hmmm (which, by the way, translates seamlessly into Spanish and French.) The problem with a non-native language is that you lack the ability to express nuance. Let's say you taste a soup. It's slightly sweet, but whoever cooked it went a little wild with the cumin, leaving it with a taste that recalls the leather tassels that held your ancient baseball mitt together. You could say that in your native language, assuming that protocol didn't interfere. But in a second language, you're more likely to reduce it to the basics.

Here are some choices:
Sophisticated: Tasty, but perhaps a bit too much cumin.
Simpler: Good, but a little strange.
Basic: Good.

So does thinking in a foreign language remove nuance from the equation? Probably not. Even though the speaking is often more primitive, the thinking is not. In fact, the person with rudimentary language skills has to work hard to reduce complex thoughts into a few words that communicate the essence of it. This involves a search for meaning, a task that native speakers can bypass. It's a bit like taking a complex discussion and trying to boil it down into a tweet. Perhaps this editing process can lead to better and more nuanced decisions--even if the words aren't on hand to express them.


]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=865&kahneman-foer-memory-and-time http://thenumerati.net/?postID=865&kahneman-foer-memory-and-time Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:34:00 GMT I was under immense pressure. Maybe a hundred of us were lined up around a spiral staircase at the Rubin Museum playing a game of Whisper Down the Lane. At the bottom of the staircase was Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. He was sending a message, through us, to the Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein. (I swear, my next book is going to have a title like that...) The success of this transmission, the so-called Karma Chain, hinged on each of us. It was no stronger than the weakest link. That was what concerned me.

I was standing next to a young woman who was not born in this country. As I peered down and saw the message climbing the 108 steps toward us, one person whispering to the next, I overheard her talking to her friend. Her English was... labored. The moment finally came. I bent down. She whispered to me. But instead of concentrating exclusively on the sounds coming out of her mouth, I was thinking: Each word that I don't catch is gone forever, because I won't be able to ask her to repeat it! The noise, as I played it back, was something like "sing." I collected myself, and captured the last few words. But when it came to the next step, transmitting this information to my wife, I realized that I'd blown it. Fully half of the sentence that Kahneman had uttered, at least the twisted version that had made its way up to me, was gone.

I had to make something up. So I fashioned a small phrase around "sing," and the result was something about "you sing the memory of my meaning," or some such. That ridiculous sentence made it, more or less intact, all the way to Foer. And when he got on stage with Kahneman, to talk about Time and Memory, he delivered it. Everyone laughed. The key word in the original sentence was "think," which I had changed to "sing." I felt the perverse thrill of a graffiti artist: That sentence is mine! I had unwittingly, or perhaps wittlessly, sabataged the communal effort.

Following this debacle, the two men, one an elderly psychologist, the other a young memory champion, discussed what happens to our memories over time. For me, the section on memory was the most interesting part of Kahneman's book, how we interpret and experience our lives, and even curate them, as a function of our memories. He discussed two different types: the experiencing memory and the historical one. The first is what is happening to you today. The second is what you choose to file away from today, if anything, for future reference, and how you classify it. One is how you experience your life, the other is how you remember it.




The experience memory (Nantucket)

Kahneman contrasted two types of vacations. The experience vacation is a week or two at the beach. Every day is more or less the same, and the same as it was last year and the year before that. It's pleasant. It appeals to the senses and settles, in the best of cases, into easy routines. Sure, children and grandchildren file through, as do storms, sun burns, jellyfish stings, hangovers. But for the most part, these vacations are for experiencing, not remembering.

The second kind is the archetypal eight-day trip to Paris, Rome, London and Madrid. This is the memory vacation. Much of it might be spent in lines, listening to fellow foreigners gripe about the $14 coke on the Champs Elysees or the taxi driver who "pretended" not to understand English. But these trips are projects for the historical memories. People dutifully take photos, read guidebooks, and walk through the Prado or the Vatican Museum until their lower backs feel wobbly. At the end, they have to make an editing decision: What to remember? Some put together memories like scrapbooks: Our Wonderful Time in Europe. They remember great meals, wonderful art, beautiful vistas, and they use them to feel good about their lives--and justify them to others. It is the historical lives that people generally include in their year-end group letters.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The memories we choose to keep and curate represent important furnishing for our minds. Decades ago, I climbed to the peak overlooking Macchu Picchu with a friend. I'm sure I wasn't enjoying it the entire time. Knowing us, we were probably arguing about politics or baseball, or maybe how much money we'd spent the previous night at dinner. But my memory of that day, no matter how inaccurate or idealized, remains precious to me.

Still, Kahneman, with the wisdom of his years and experience, urged us not to minimize the value of the experience memory. He stressed focusing on the simple pleasures, and spending less time and effort today trying to create valuable memories for tomorrow. In a sense, he was preaching to the home crowd, since the Rubin Museum, with its focus on Himalayan cultures, is big on living in the Now. But it was interesting to contrast his point of view with the much younger Foer, who seemed intent on building, tagging and archiving memories, and struggled to appreciate the value of the days, no matter how pleasant, that slip into oblivion.

]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=864&ozzie-guillen-bob-dylan-and-castro http://thenumerati.net/?postID=864&ozzie-guillen-bob-dylan-and-castro Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:33:00 GMT As you've probably read, Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen is in trouble for telling a Time magazine reporter that he "loves" Fidel Castro. It's not an uncommon opinion, especially in Guillen's Venezuela, where some appreciate Castro for his politics, and far more for thumbing his nose at the Americans for so many decades. Here's Guillen's quote:

"I love Fidel Castro. I respect Fidel Castro, you know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that motherf****r is still here."

That reminded me of a song Bob Dylan sang 50 years ago, Motorpsycho Nightmare, with a very similar line:

"I had to say something
To strike him very weird,
So I yelled out,
"I like Fidel Castro and his beard."
Rita looked offended
But she got out of the way,
As he came charging down the stairs
Sayin', "What's that I heard you say?"

I said, "I like Fidel Castro,
I think you heard me right,"
And ducked as he swung
At me with all his might.

If Dylan, like Guillen, ran his business in Miami's Little Havana, he too would have been under loads of pressure to apologize. But something tells me he would have laughed it off.

]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=863&dont-let-your-kids-in-the-car http://thenumerati.net/?postID=863&dont-let-your-kids-in-the-car Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:23:00 GMT danah boyd writes about social media and the culture of fear. One of the distinctions she draws is between our assessment and our perception of risk. Say a sinuous shadow crosses your vision gives you a start. As our ancestors learned (the hard way), It could be a tiger's tail. Then you might assess the situation: First, Tigers are rare in Newark's Liberty Airport. Then you look to the source and see a baby in front of the window playing with a stuffed monkey. You relax.

But the television in the departure lounge keeps playing a story about a Pakistani militant linked to the 2008 Mumbai bombing. He's apparently still in business. You've just been through a security operation that reinforces the perception that terrorist threats are everywhere. But what's your assessment of the risk?

Boyd writes:

...[P]arents regularly come up to me and ask what's the #1 thing that they should do to keep their kids safe. They really want to hear something like "don't let them on Facebook" or "don't give them a cell phone." Their idea of what they should fear is all about new technology.  No one is prepared for my response: "Don't let them get into a car with you."

Invariably, they twist their faces in confusion as I explain that statistically, children are more at-risk in a car than in any other setting they encounter, regardless of who's driving. To a parent, the car "feels" safe because they feel as though they're in control. They feel as though they understand the care. Things like the internet do not feel safe because they feel out of control and that they don't know how these newfangled things operate.

Feel is the operative word here; it's all about perception.  Fear is not predicated on risk assessment, but the perception of risk. We fear the things – and people -- that we do not understand far more than the things we do, even if the latter are much more risky. For this reason, it's not surprising that people fear technology. Its newness is confusing and no one's quite certain what to do with the promises it offers. Furthermore, technology allows us to see people who are different than us, the very people we are likely to fear. We fear the unknown.  And technology is both an unknown itself and a vehicle to connecting us to greater unknowns.

(photo from Bigstock.com)

]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=862&overzealous-software http://thenumerati.net/?postID=862&overzealous-software Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:59:00 GMT How's this for a calendar app going beyond the call of duty? I was in Milan last week, and I set an appointment for 4 p.m. today in New York. A few minutes ago, I saw to my horror that I'd missed a 10 o'clock meeting!

Turns out that the software, "aware" that I was in Europe, set the 4 p.m. meeting for 10 o'clock New York time. At least, that's what I make of it. Conclusion: If you have two cognitive systems that are responding to changing conditions, they're bound to get their signals crossed. For these cases, I'd prefer to leave the smart stuff to the human, and count on the machine for dumb and dependable work.

                                                     In Milan: Hurry! We have a meeting at 10.

]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=861&lehrers-imagine-hits-number-one http://thenumerati.net/?postID=861&lehrers-imagine-hits-number-one Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:46:00 GMT Congratulations to Jonah Lehrer and the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team for the number-one best-seller, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Jonah and I share the same great editor, Amanda Cook. I'm sure the success is a bit bitter-sweet to the people at HMH, because Amanda left earlier this year for a top position at Crown. But a #1 best-seller, in any circumstances, is cause for celebration.

]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=860&mobile-e-commerce-how-i-fell-for-the-hype http://thenumerati.net/?postID=860&mobile-e-commerce-how-i-fell-for-the-hype Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:38:00 GMT It's hard to imagine this now, but 12 years ago I was working for a fabulously prosperous magazine. At the height of the dot-com boom, BusinessWeek was so getting so fat that the magazine was outgrowing the staples holding it together. We had so many advertisements that we scrounged for editoral content to accompany them. The art department even put together photo essays. That eased the burden a bit on reporters.

I was in Paris, covering mobile technology. It seemed to me at the time that our U.S. coverage, centered around Silicon Valley, was PC-centric. I was convinced that smart phones would create a new Internet, and became the staff's mobile evangelist. Foolishly, I believed this transformation would occur within three or four years.

I was reminded of those years when I saw a Forbes column by Rob Hof, my old BW colleague, about advertising on smart phones. Rob writes:

Still, it’s already clear that mobile devices are rapidly becoming a huge source of revenue for Google and other search engines. From 5% in January 2011, mobile devices are expected to account for 25% of Google’s paid search ad clicks by the end of this year. Google said recently that mobile ad revenues, including both search and display ads, are running at a $2.5 billion annual clip. Maybe this finally will be the long-promised year of mobile ads after all.

I was predicting that this would occur a full decade earlier. In this story, bursting with embarrassing hype, I wrote:

It's the long arm of the Internet that will soon extend the electronic marketplace right into hundreds of millions of pockets, purses and cars--and all of humanity's waking hours. It promises mind-boggling conveniences. Imagine your phone directing you block by block, either with a voice or a blinking dot on a map, as you walk through Istanbul's crowded Kasbah. Suddenly it interrupts itself to beep the alert you've requested: Microsoft Corp. shares have dipped below $100. You punch a couple of buttons to purchase 100 shares and continue the guided stroll.

It was a perfectly reasonable scenario, but I quoted IDC studies predicting such services for 2004. The technology wasn't anywhere near ready. I was new to tech reporting and hadn't yet learned the adage that technology revolutions arrive much later than predicted--and then often overdeliver on their initial promise.

Nokia Web-phone. During the boom, I had one of these monsters, a gift from a Spanish friend.

After the dot-com boom collapsed, advertising shriveled and I was brought back from Paris to New York. Skepticism ruled. At meetings, the I-told-you-so crowd held sway. In this new no-nonsense climate, my mobile predictions had become a subject of ridicule. This pendulum swing, of course, carried us away from the real story: The Internet, while brimming with hype and surrounded by market speculators, was on a course to deliver more transformation than we predicted. Ultimately, it would contribute to the magazine's demise. And mobile, as not even the wildest hypester could have guessed, would provide the platform for the then-struggling Apple to redefine music, the telephone and computing itself, and become the most valuable company on earth.

What did I learn from all this? Well, while writing Final Jeopardy (now out in paperback), I included the perspective of many Watson-skeptics. And I refrained from predictions that AI machines like Watson would be turning medicine, banking or government upside-down in the next several years. Such changes come more slowly, in part because they require humans to adapt, and also because new tech challenges pop up. Yet within a decade, knowledge machines that make sense of natural language will be transforming our world in ways that few of us can imagine. More and more, machines will be molding our thinking, and even carrying it out.

My novel, The Boost, takes place in my version of this future. More about the book in coming posts. I'm revising the manuscript now. Tor, a division of MacMillan, will be publishing it next year.


]]> http://thenumerati.net/?postID=859&twenty-four-hours-in-milan-what-to-do http://thenumerati.net/?postID=859&twenty-four-hours-in-milan-what-to-do Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:11:00 GMT I flew over to Milan, gave two speeches (about data or, as the Italians refer to them, dati) and then had a little more than 24 hours to enjoy myself in the city. As I was coming to grips with all the possibilities--would I be able to get a ticket to see Leonardo's Last Supper?-- the world-famous Barcelona soccer team was moving into my hotel and my whole neighborhood was gearing up for a Milan-Barça showdown.

Turned out I couldn't score a ticket for Leonardo or the soccer game. So I went to art museums, starting with the Pinocoteca de Brera. There I saw an Andrea Mantegna of the dead Christ, a painting whose date (circa 1475) I had to memorize for an art history class decades ago. He was experimenting with perspective and foreshortening, or scorzo. But I have to say, I looked at the painting for about 10 minutes and couldn't get over the impression that his Christ had tiny legs.

Before I left for Milan, I grabbed a William Trevor book, My House in Umbria, from the shelves. I later came across a quote in it that summed up my experience at the Pinocoteca: "Pictures of angels and saints, and the Virgin with the baby Jesus, are very pretty and are of course to be delighted in, but one after another can be too much of a good thing."

Of course, as Mantenga demonstrates, not all of them are especially pretty. This didn't stop me, however, from walking across the vast Cathedral square, where Barcelona and Milanese soccer fans were chanting and taunting each other, to the Palazzo Reale, where they had an exhibit of Titian and 16th century landscape paintings. I went to buy my ticket, and when the woman told me it would cost 9 euros, I must have looked a little startled. So she told me that if I was retired, a student or... a journalist, I could get in for free. I walked in and promised to blog about it.

The first painting I saw was a magnificent small Bellini, which blew away everything I'd seen at the Pinocoteca. My sad little smart-phone image doesn't begin to do it justice. Yes, there is a crucifix prominently placed. But the scenery, il paesaggio, is what makes it.

Crucifixion, Giovanni Bellini, circa 1490

I was planning to eat royally in Milan. But I was alone, so I just dined at neighborhood joints, pasta one night, risotto the next. The one thing that surprised me was that when I ordered salads, the waiters both nights plunked a liter of olive oil on the table, along with a big bottle of vinegar. This was Do it Yourself in a big way.  Below, a street with springtime budding in Milan.



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