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 »

Just by living our plugged-in lives, each of us is producing a constant stream of data. Little snippets are left behind of what we search, what we buy, where we go, what we tweet … This endless flow of numbers is referred to as “big data,” data sets so large that they require sophisticated parsing to give them meaning. But big data has the potential to tell us a lot about ourselves — unearthing patterns in information flow, energy consumption, weather patterns, disease spread, education trends, and more.

At first glance, big data may not sound like a topic for teenagers. But TED speaker Rick Smolan is on a mission to make it not just accessible but fun. Smolan — who held a conference called The Human Face of Big Data in New York City a few weeks ago featuring TED alums Juan Enriquez, Deb Roy, Esther Dyson, Aaron Koblin and Jer Thorp — is asking students between the ages of 13 and 18 to become “Data Detectives.”

For anyone in the age range, becoming a Data Detective is easy. By answering a 20-question online survey, you’ll be helping to build a data set that will allow you to compare themselves to other 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 >>

By participating now, you won’t see much happen. But over the next few weeks, as more and more students donate their information and time too, the data will compound. On November 12, the Data Detectives website will be open for business, allowing you and other students to visualize the data in real time, with explosive animation by R/GA.

The juiciest insights from the data set will also be shared at TEDYouth on November 17 in New York City, as well as at the 100+ TEDxYouthDay events happening worldwide the same week.

Hey, it’s a detective job that doesn’t even require a magnifying glass.

In the information age we have access to more data and knowledge than at any previous point in human history. But more accessible data doesn’t necessarily mean more processable data — tax returns, court cases and newspaper archives may be available to the public, but they are often hard to interpret and understand. Data artists process this mess of information for us and break it down into comprehensible pieces, often enhancing it by placing it in deeper contexts and by finding surprising patterns. The designers and artists below are on the cutting edge of this work, experimenting with new technologies to take numbers and facts and turn them into beautiful multimedia works of art and knowledge.

Nathalie Miebach: Art made of storms
Nathalie Miebach’s art is both beautiful and informative: she sculpts colorful models using weather data, and then converts this information into musical scores. Thus she makes weather patterns — something inherently invisible to the naked eye — “visible, tactile and audible.” In this short talk from TEDGlobal 2011, she describes her nuanced ways of translating information into different mediums, blurring the lines between art and science.

Aaron Koblin: Artfully visualizing our humanity
Numbers can humanize us. Artist Aaron Koblin uses data to discover the patterns we make as a collective whole, so that we can better understand society and ourselves. Koblin’s groundbreaking work harnesses modern technology to produce art that is sometimes crowdsourced and collectively produced, and sometimes hyper individualized. Here, he describes his work at TED2011.

Hans Rosling: Stats that reshape your world-view
This is the first of many great things to come from data whiz Hans Rosling. In this seminal talk from TED2006, Rosling beautifully and energetically illustrates fascinating trends about global health and wealth distribution.

David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization
Graphic designer and “data detective” David McCandless is trying to make sense of the world by compressing and overlapping information, he says at TEDGlobal 2010. His gorgeous data visualizations squeeze an enormous amount of knowledge into digestible tidbits, throwing the data into new light as he contextualizes it. By making information beautiful, he makes it make sense. (Check out McCandless’ latest work, an interactive visual that lets you calculate the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy.)

Jer Thorp: Make data more human
Information artist Jer Thorp traverses the “terrain of data” to tell narratives of human experiences. These elegant data-driven stories are based on information collected from smartphones or newspapers, but breathe life back into the lives we live. In this talk from TEDxVancouver, Thorp explains how this human-centered approach to data analysis is the best route to take as technology becomes more and more central to our daily lives.

Hans Rosling: Religions and babies
Data master Rosling takes us through the effect of religion on birth rates across the globe in his most recent talk from TEDxSummit. Intersecting separate data sets enable Rosling to deeply explain human patterns of population growth and reach surprising and fascinating conclusions about how we are born and how humanity will continue to grow. (Rosling has a lot to say and a lot to show us. Check out his prolific library of talks about data visualizations.)

Every day, 450,000 people log on to TED.com. But where are they located? And what are they watching—our newest offerings or our classic talks? In the spirit of visual data artists like Hans Rosling and David McCandless, TED web engineer Alex Dean created a map of the United States which shows when and where TEDTalks were viewed on September 14th. A blue dot demarks those people watching a talk from 2012 and red and orange dots shows those watching our still-beloved oldies.  Above, watch a clip of his map in action. It shows that, yes, there are quite a few people tuning in for talks at 2am. And during daylight hours, marvel at how fireworks seem to appear over many cities.

Alex has open-sourced the code behind the map, so you can see how it was created and even make your own moving maps based on whatever data you like.

Music: MobyGratis