Deb Roy: The birth of a word

His team wondered: could this kind of analysis be applied to television or, say, Twitter to discover communication trends?

These are the kinds of questions that today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post explores. Here, three of the great essays that are available now for your reading pleasure. 

Deb Roy: The Birth of a Word

Three trajectories came together in 2005 and took me to new frontiers of cognitive science (and subsequently, it turns out, the media industry).

• The first trajectory: I began to see an unexpected connection between my research in robotics at MIT and theories of how children learn to talk, leading to studies of child language that I did with my wife and collaborator Rupal Patel over the past decade.
• Second: The era of Big Data was dawning, and the far-fetched idea of video-recording everything that happens in a home had become a practical reality.
• Third, Rupal and I learned that we were expecting our first child in July 2005.

This confluence of events sparked an unusual study of child language featured in the first half of my TEDTalk. Read the full essay »

Gayatri Devi: How Do I Improve My Memory? Forget More!

Do you know what is essential for a good memory? The ability to forget. To completely and thoroughly forget. Forgetting, like breathing or sleeping, is physiologically normal. This is at odds with our modern compulsion to record and remember everything and is a perfect recipe for anxiety.

Deb Roy, a cognitive science professor at MIT studying language, recorded 8-10 hours daily of the first three years of his son’s home life. He compiled a quarter million hours of audio and video, creating a 200,000 gigabyte “ultimate memory machine.” (Most computers store about one gigabyte.) Consider how much information each of us is exposed to in 24 hours, on streets, subways, screens and in sleep. Imagine recording and remembering all this. Thankfully, we were never meant to.

Fact: We are evolutionarily programmed to forget. Our brains evolved over millennia with built-in forgetfulness. Our brain is engineered to remember tastes, smells, voices, touch and visions, not names. Our brain is engineered to solve problems (How do we keep track of cattle? Mathematics; How do I communicate? Language), not remember disjointed facts. A fact not linked to a sense, an emotion, or a concept is quickly forgotten. Read the full essay »

Ben Hecht: Big Data Gets Personal in U.S. Cities

Much has already been said about how big data is dramatically changing the way that organizations make decisions. Today, more data is being created from more places than ever before. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube videos, retailer loyalty cards, mobile phones, and sensors on buildings are producing tons of data daily. Private sector companies, in their real-time data warehouses, are storing, analyzing, and harnessing it to help them to better understand their customers, dynamically alter pricing based on real-time demand, and even change their business models. And, increasingly government is putting the wealth of data that it generates to work to increase efficiency, save dollars, and create more proactive policy. But, as Deb Roy highlights in his TED Talk, the true promise is where the numbers and patterns from this data connect and become personal — enabling us to understand and to respond to humanity and the world in ways previously unimaginable. This type of analysis has infinite potential for improving the human condition on an ongoing basis; and strengthening people’s commitment to our democracy. Already, in U.S. cities, we are seeing many promising signs of the transformative personal application of Big Data:

Mass Personalizing of Government Data and Services: The movement towards open government data in the U.S. has already had huge implications for the relationship between citizen and government. Read the full essay »

TED speaker Rick Smolan is asking students between the ages of 13 and 18 to become “Data Detectives” for a new project he’s unveiling today — and that he will talk about at TEDYouth this Saturday.

By answering a 20-question online survey, teenagers will help build a data set that will let then compare themselves to teens all over the world. Some sample questions from the survey: “Are you more like your mother or father?” “How do your parents discipline you for bad behavior?” “How do you get to school: by bus, public transportation, limo, donkey, or skateboard?” The survey is anonymous and takes about 10 minutes to complete.

Take the Data Detective survey here >>

You can watch a FREE livestream of TEDYouth on Saturday, Nov 17, 1-6pm EST. Just bookmark this page and check back at 1pm Eastern on Saturday: http://new.livestream.com/tedyouth

How many detectable alien civilizations are out there in our galaxy? In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake developed an equation to estimate the number. Now data journalist David McCandless, who gave the talk “The beauty of data visualization” at TEDGlobal 2010, has created an information graphic for the BBC calculating the Drake Equation — with a twist. It’s interactive, and you can be as optimistic or skeptical as you like as you set the value of each variable in the equation. Any tinkering leads to highly different conclusions.

Jill Tarter, the head of the SETI Institute, would no doubt set her variables on the optimistic side. Tarter gave the wonderful TED-Ed lesson “Calculating the Odds of Intelligent Alien Life,” which explains the Drake Equation and its many variables. Tarter won the TED Prize in 2009 and called for more people to join the search for extraterrestrial life. “From my perspective, we live on a fragile island of life in a universe of possibilities,” says Tarter in her talk. “So what exactly is SETI? Well, SETI uses the tools of astronomy to try and find evidence of someone else’s technology out there. Our own technologies are visible over interstellar distances, and theirs might be as well … SETI doesn’t presume the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence; it merely notes the possibility, if not the probability in this vast universe, which seems fairly uniform.”

Chris Anderson, TED’s intrepid curator who made the TED-Ed lesson “Why can’t we see evidence of alien life?,” would be optimistic too. “In the past year, the Kepler space observatory has found hundreds of planets just by nearby stars. If you extrapolate that data, it looks like there could be half a trillion planets just in our own galaxy,” he says. “If only one in 10,000 has conditions that might support a form of life, that’s still 50 million possible life-harboring planets right here in our Milky Way.”

But the real question is — how optimistic or skeptical will you be as you play with McCandless’ interactive data set? View the full chart here >>

On August 31, 2009, politician Malte Spitz traveled from Berlin to Erlangen, sending 29 text messages as he traveled. On November 5, 2009, he rocked out to U2 at the Brandenburg Gate. On January 10, 2010, he made 10 outgoing phone calls while on a trip to Dusseldorf, and spent 22 hours, 53 minutes and 57 seconds of the day connected to the internet.

How do we know all this? By looking at a detailed, interactive timeline of Spitz’s life, created using information obtained from his cell phone company, Deutsche Telekom, between September 2009 and February 2010.

In an impassioned talk given at TEDGlobal 2012, Spitz, a member of Germany’s Green Party, recalls his multiple-year quest to receive this data from his phone company. And he explains why he decided to make this shockingly precise log into public information in the newspaper Die Zeit – to sound a warning bell of sorts.

“If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing,” says Spitz. “If you have access to this information, you can control your country.”

Curious what information is being collected on you? After the jump, some surprising tidbits.

Your internet search habits are recorded

Journalist Alexis Madrigal sought to find out the extent to which companies collected data about his search habits, for the purpose of targeted advertising, in an article in The Atlantic in February 2012. Madrigal had expected to see about 10 companies following his every click, but was surprised to find that the list totaled up to 105 companies, ranging from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! to smaller advertising businesses. [Note: TED uses DoubleClick, an industry-standard ad tracker.]

You can get caught in a “filter bubble”

Online organizer Eli Pariser explains in a fascinating talk at TED2012 that search engines are smart, learning from what you click in the past to determine which results to give you in the future. Pariser warns that this process of data collection may be encasing people in a “filter bubble.” Sounds great, but there is a dangerous unintended consequence: We don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldviews.

Your phone’s address book can be collected

In February 2012, the New York Times reported that mobile apps like Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Yelp, Gowalla and Foodspotting were mining address books in smartphones and, in some cases, storing data on their own computers. In fact, the mobile security company Lookout found that 11 percent of free apps in Apple’s iTunes store collected address book data. At the time, the issue was beginning to be discussed by members of Congress. Meanwhile, Apple stated that apps storing address book data were violating guidelines, and assured users that permission would be asked in future software releases.

The government can request your data

In a talk given at TEDxSanJoseCA, privacy researcher and TED Fellow Christopher Soghoian reveals that telecommunication companies like Google and Facebook, as well as phone companies, have entire departments dedicated to responding to government surveillance requests. And these departments are very busy. Soghoian explains that Sprint set up a website in 2009 allowing law enforcement to log in and track users’ GPS location information. In the first year, the site had been used 8 million times. Meanwhile, Verizon revealed in 2007 that they got 80,000 requests per year for data on users from law enforcement agencies.

Want to protect your privacy? Here, some resources:

• Collusion. This Firefox tool, which Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs introduced in the TEDTalk “Tracking the Trackers,” records the breadth of companies capturing data about you as you search. Collusion developer Atul Varma spoke to the TED blog in February about the tool, its uses, and what inspired it.
• Tor Project. This free software protects your privacy by bouncing communications all around the world, via a network run by volunteers.
• Do Not Track Plus. This app goes beyond browser-based controls and blocks data collection as you search.
• Lookout. A mobile security app that is available for Android and iPhones.
  
• European Digital Rights. Founded in 2002, this organization is a clearinghouse of news when it comes to digital civil rights, including telecommunication data retention.
• American Civil Liberties Union. This organization is dedicated to protecting rights in the United States, and considers civil liberties in the digital age one of their key issues.

And take a moment to play with Malte Spitz’s data map on Zeit Online, to see what kind of data phone companies regularly collect on users.