anthropometaphors

Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Created as a critique of data mining, Personas is one part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit on display at the MIT Museum through the month of September.  And what a critique it is — the Personas vector created based on my name has absolutely nothing to do with me.  I know because I watched as the Internet was scoured for characterizing statements to use in its analysis; all the information used came from other people who share my name.

Josh Witten Persona’d his name multiple times to get a sense of the reproducibility of the analysis.  While his Personas vector was created based on his own information, his analysis (of the analysis of him) indicates the Personas vector is generated randomly.  Josh ran three independent trials, resulting in three truly independent Personas vectors.

While I may not learn much about myself using Personas, the schematic is nice.  The clean appearance and abbreviated legend are what I would like to see in a Personas vector of my very own.  Until then, here is the first Personas vector I mapped to Morgan Gray:

Morgan Gray, as the Internet sees her

my resume, a la wordle

I wanted to know what really stands out about my resume, and here it is, in all it’s wordled glory.  To be as accurate as possible (who knows what the wordle algorithm looks like), I generated the visual multiple times.  The weight given to the words was fairly consistent, at least for the larger words that pop right out.

Just a quick clip about AI.

I have a headache.  My body is incredibly tired.  The thermometer reads 99.6°F.  I left work an hour early to crawl into bed and sleep.  While I probably don’t have swine flu, the possibility has crossed my mind.

Overreacting by almapottery

There’s a lot of hype about the H1N1 virus (aka “swine flu”).  A friend-of-a-friend at Stanford put together a survey to assess how people think and feel about swine flu.  It’s a short, well-designed survey.  Take a look and contribute to science!

Test Your Swine IQ

Keeping within the H1N1 vein, Stephan Zielinski has taken an amino acid sequence from the swine flu virus and translated it into ambient music (via BoingBoing).  I’m listening to the piece as I write this, and I find it to be calming, eerie and somehow holy.  Here’s a link to the hear the mp3 on Zielinski’s site, or you can download the mp3 here.

And now, back to bed for me.  Stay well, wash your hands and cover those sneezies.

Virus Embroidery by The Floss Box

If the internet gained consciousness, I imagine it would be lonely.

by Wexford Girl (aka Annie Galvin)

Consider Jane, from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s series.  A sentient being, Jane arose from a pattern-recognition and prediction program that ran long enough to be able to recognize and reprogram itself.  Being the only one of her kind, Jane was understandably lonely.

The Mind Game, whose purpose was to seek out patterns across wide fields of data, is modified to predict markets and invest Ender’s trust fund appropriately, which it proves alarmingly good at; it is also used to review demographic data…It is assumed to have grown in complexity during the 3000-year gap between Shadow of the Giant and Speaker for the Dead, especially as Graff describes the Mind Game as being able to reprogram itself, and finally becomes the sentient Jane.

Some scientists claim the internet, our internet, is already semi-conscious.  Full consciousness would entail the internet evolving into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganizing itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.  That’s a high bar for consciousness; I wonder what percent of humans would meet that set of criteria.

I lurve visualizing information.

In a past life, I was a Research Associate in Product Development.  The highlight of the job was using statisical analysis to design and analyze experiments.  The end product of my work happened to be a molecular diagnostic for genetic variation.  I found satisfaction in developing a robust, reliable tool for genetic analysis, but ultimately it was the analytical process I enjoyed.

I’ve stayed in the biostatistics loop — the teams I now manage have a statistical analysis component.  I no longer do the actual stats work, but I get to have fun conversations at the water cooler.

So when I heard of Wolfram | Alpha, an analytical search engine, I was excited.  I mean really, really excited.  While screen shots from the engine aren’t being posted, a webcast is available in which Wolfram talks about the engine.

Wolfram is the creator of what I consider the holy grail of stats packages: Mathematica.  The marketing language for the newest version, Mathematica 6, claims a user can “Visualize Anything”.  While that may not be entirely true, the program can be used to visualize a fair amount.

High-Impact Adaptive Visualization

More robots in the news! This time a robot scientist (!) is in the spotlight:

A robot scientist that can generate its own hypotheses and run experiments to test them has made its first real scientific discoveries.

Dubbed Adam, the robot is the handiwork of researchers at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK. All by itself it discovered new functions for a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer’s yeast.

In all, Adam formulated and tested 20 hypotheses about genes coding for 13 enzymes. Twelve hypotheses were confirmed. For instance, Adam correctly hypothesised that three genes it identified encode an enzyme important in producing the amino acid lysine. The researchers confirmed Adam’s work with their own experiments.

The team is now working on a new robot, called Eve, which will search for new drugs.

All of this, done without human help.  At one point in time, the design, execution and analysis of the same research — performed by a human — would have been equivalent to earning a PhD thesis.

What next?  Robots capable of self-replication?

bye bye baby

Researchers at MIT are creating robot gardeners.  Is this the pinnacle of achievement?  Or one step closer to creating artificial intelligence and the cylon/cyborg entities instilled with it?

Been super busy with work; in the office and after-hours into the wee hours. While blogging is visually delicious, a compilation of links and their associated (t)witticisms can be quickly created in Twitter.

Gots to be careful with internet content of all sorts, tweets, posts and comments. I imagine the drunken tweets of today turning into the drunken tattoos of tomorrow; what seemed like a fun idea at the time was done without pausing to consider who might see it years later.  Olivier Blanchard has a good post on this topic called How to lose your job in 140 characters or less.

After reading how a hasty tweet can cost a new job, I feel much better about all the typos I’ve been making.

As someone who strives for self-improvement (or is a masochist, take your pick), I often find myself in morally or psychologically challenging situations.

Take my job, for example.  I’m essentially an introvert employed in a “people person” role.  What this means is I leverage my asocial tendencies to ensure any meetings I take part in are extremely efficient — and therefore short.  It works in some ways, and leaves me drained in others.  I imagine everyone experiences something similar when it comes to work.

For many reasons, I’m working toward a certificate in Project Management, offered through UC Berkeley Extension.  This semester I’m taking Human Factors and Team Dynamics for Project Management

Learn the leadership and communication skills needed to promote and support quality management in your organization. You’ll also learn how to master the most difficult aspects of quality management: creating, nurturing, and sustaining an organizational climate based on best principles and practices. Discover how quality management ensures concepts such as teamwork, employee empowerment, and continuous improvement don’t degenerate into buzzwords that increase cynicism and decrease employees’ responsiveness to organizational goals.

While offered online, I’ll be attending the class sessions in person, as I imagine learning people skills through interaction has it’s advantages ;]

On the topic of social skills, sociable robots are learning to get along with humans.  In particular, robots are developing unique personalities when interacting with humans, communicate using basic facial expressions or create intricate hand gestures a la paper/rock/scissors.

Robots are not yet ready to mingle freely with humans, but engineers are bringing that day closer by teaching them social tricks used by humans and even chimps.

It may seem a stretch to some, but I’m reminded so much of myself when I read stuff like this.