Ericsson predictions for 2016

It’s about that time of year for predictions and trends. Ericsson has some for the next 5 years:

  • They say early adopters no longer matter for communication technologies, because new ones achieve mass market status so fast.
  • “Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enable interaction with objects without the need for a smartphone screen…Smartphone users believe AI will take over many common activities, such as searching the net, getting travel guidance and as personal assistants. These are areas already being addressed by current generation AI interfaces in smartphones. But the desire to use AI for more advanced purposes is apparent. 44 percent think an AI system would be good as a teacher and one third would like an AI interface to keep them company. Furthermore, a third would even rather trust the fidelity of an AI interface than a human for sensitive matters. 29 percent agree they would feel more comfortable discussing their medical condition with an AI system.”
  • Virtual reality will start to come into its own for tech support, sports, dating, and shopping.
  • ” sensors could be integrated into bricks and mortar in your house, literally connecting your home from the ground up. “
  • “Judging by consumer interest, the next generation of body-monitoring technology may not be worn, but may instead be found within the human body. These ‘internables’ will initially have a similar focus to the current external body monitoring devices. Half of all smartphone users believe internal sensors will give updates on their health and wellbeing in three years.”

guns in the U.S.

Does the United States have a gun problem? There are facts and figures, and there are emotions. You are not a normal human being if you don’t react emotionally to certain kinds of events, and being in touch with these emotions can be a good guide to what you think is right and wrong. Then again, I believe any human being within the normal range can be trained to dig into the facts and evidence, draw appropriate conclusions and build their own personal mental model of the world. Once you have a sense of what you think is right and wrong, this is how you figure out what you think can and should be done about it. So, I’m going to quote from an article that caused a strong emotional reaction from me (warning, it’s probably upsetting to almost anyone but especially parents), and then I’ll go to some facts and figures that I find disturbing on an intellectual level, but also point toward some ideas about what can and should be done.

If you are not emotionally dead, you will be horrified by this stomach-churning New York  Times article about children who are killed accidentally by guns.

It had been a good day for Tristan. He had used the potty for the first time. He and his mother had danced a little jig. Down the hall, Tristan entered the bedroom where his father had been staying because of quarrels with his wife. She had chided her husband in the past for forgetting to safely store his .45-caliber handgun. But he had recently put a lock on his door to keep out his wife and children. He thought he had locked the door before going out to cut the grass.

The lock, though, had failed to catch. Tristan found the loaded gun under the pillow on his father’s bed. He pointed it at his own forehead and pulled the trigger. Hearing the gunshot, Sergeant Underhill sprinted inside to find Tristan face down on the bed, the gun beneath him. When he called 911, the sergeant was screaming so hysterically that the dispatcher initially mistook him for a woman.

“My 2-year-old just shot himself in the head,” he said breathlessly. “He’s dead.”

There’s a picture of the kid alive and happy, which makes it infinitely worse. That’s one horrifying anecdote in this story. It goes on and on and on.

That’s the horror. Let’s turn to some cold facts and figures. Here’s a blog posting called “Deaths from assault over time in 40 relatively rich countries“. Other rich countries do not have the level of violence that we have in the United States. If you are the evidence-inclined type, have a look at the graphics and note that they are on a log scale. The United States has a rate of violent death 5-10 times higher than our close cultural cousins like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. And all these places have a little bit higher rates than most of Western Europe and Asia. The places with rates equal or higher than the United States are developing countries and/or countries with organized crime on a large scale.

So is the easy accessibility of firearms the cause of violence? I tend to think tough guy culture (one thing that is unmistakable in both articles is that men and boys are the ones shooting and being shot), a history of inequality and racial discrimination, and the so-called war on drugs are the real drivers. These are the policy levers we need to be working in the medium to longer term. But being awash in guns certainly makes the violence that does occur more deadly. Common sense gun control policies would certainly be great in the short term to treat the symptoms, as long as they are backed up by policies to treat the disease. But hard-core, violent law enforcement approaches to treat the symptoms may actually make the disease worse in the long term, which is probably what happened in the 80s and 90s that we are continuing to pay for today.

cyberattacks and superflares

Need some new things to worry about? Look no further!

  1. a catastrophic cyberattack on the U.S. electric infrastructure

In this New York Times bestselling investigation, Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the United States is shockingly unprepared.
 
Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people over several states are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Devices we rely on have gone dark. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and law and order are being tested as never before.

It isn’t just a scenario. A well-designed attack on just one of the nation’s three electric power grids could cripple much of our infrastructure—and in the age of cyberwarfare, a laptop has become the only necessary weapon. Several nations hostile to the United States could launch such an assault at any time. In fact, as a former chief scientist of the NSA reveals, China and Russia have already penetrated the grid. And a cybersecurity advisor to President Obama believes that independent actors—from “hacktivists” to terrorists—have the capability as well. “It’s not a question of if,” says Centcom Commander General Lloyd Austin, “it’s a question of when.”

2. in case people are not enough to worry about, the Sun could turn on us.

Astrophysicists have discovered a stellar “superflare” on a star observed by NASA’s Kepler space telescope with wave patterns similar to those that have been observed in the Sun’s solar flares. (Superflares are flares that are thousands of times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun, and are frequently observed on some stars.)

The scientists found the evidence in the star KIC9655129 in the Milky Way. They suggest there are similarities between the superflare on KIC9655129 and the Sun’s solar flares, so the underlying physics of the flares might be the same…

Typical solar flares can have energies equivalent to a 100 million megaton bombs, but a superflare on our Sun could release energy equivalent to a billion megaton bombs.

November 2015 in Review

What did I learn in November? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-10):

  • The World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Risks Report came out. Some of the top risks are interstate conflict, water crisis, failure of climate change adaptation, unemployment and underemployment. Hmm, that “interstate conflict” items might be what we used to call “war”. And I think there might be one underway right now in the Middle East, which Jimmy Carter says we are getting all wrong. And it just might be caused by the other items on the list. And speaking of war, there is a new book on the Vietnam War aimed at the middle grades, but it seems pretty harsh for that age to me. (-2)
  • I noticed that Robert Costanza in 2014 issued an update to his seminal 1997 paper on ecosystem services. He now estimates their value at $125 trillion per year, compared to a world economy of $77 trillion per year. Each year we are using up about $4-20 trillion in value more than the Earth is able to replenish. The correct conclusion here is that we can’t live without ecosystem services any time soon with our current level of knowledge and wealth, and yet we are depleting the natural capital that produces them. We were all lucky enough to inherit an enormous trust fund of natural capital at birth, and we are spending it down like the spoiled trust fund babies we are. We are living it up, and we measure our wealth based on that lifestyle, but we don’t have a bank statement so we don’t actually know when that nest egg is going to run out. (-3)
  • This crop of presidential candidates is easy for comedians to make fun of. I enjoy it but think it may be a contrary indicator for the health of the country. (-1)
  • Bicycle helmets are not making U.S. bicycle riders any safer. This is why we need streets designed on the European model to be safe for driving, bicycling, and walking. It’s 100% known technology and there can be no excuses! (-2)
  • In current events, we had the awful, shocking terrorist attacks in Paris. I suggested that the long-term answer to violence caused by angry young men anywhere is to understand why they are angry, address their legitimate grievances, and give them productive work to do. Short term, we also have to detect and disrupt any plots involving nuclear or biological weapons, of course, because we can’t afford even one. (-2)

Positive stories (+9):

infrastructure infrastructure infrastructure

Hillary wants to spend $250 billion on infrastructure. Bernie wants to spend $1 trillion. Infrastructure investment is good. Economists all say so. Politicians who care at least a little about reality all say so. The American Society of Civil Engineers says so. I happen to be a civil engineer so it is definitely good for me.

The idea is that the infrastructure we have in the ground now wears out gradually, and we almost never do enough maintenance to keep it in its original condition. So there is a constant loss of value to the economy. You can also think of infrastructure as reducing friction, transaction costs, wasted time, effort, and energy in the economy. If people and goods can get where they need to go efficiently and cheaply, they can do more productive work and produce more value each day with less waste. The same idea applies to getting energy and water around. Finally, there is the economic idea that when economic growth is below capacity, as it is now, you could pay people to dig holes and fill them back in again, and there would be a net economic gain. So any infrastructure investment, even if it is not optimal, has even more benefit and it is a sort of free lunch, something for nothing, two birds with one stone. And interest rates are so low that it makes sense for the government to borrow money, or even print it, and realize this almost automatic, guaranteed, magical return on the investment. Politicians who oppose infrastructure investment on debt or deficit grounds just don’t understand or don’t care about reality, or else they are telling a cynically calculated story to people who don’t.

Optimal, planned infrastructure investment would be even better, of course. We really don’t do any planning at the national scale in the United States. Maybe we are still trying to differentiate ourselves from the Soviet planned economy, but seriously, it is time to get over that particular hangover.

I like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop because it is a big idea and it asks if we should be considering something bold, big, and different, not to mention more efficient and cost-effective than the same old ideas from the 1950s! But we need to remember infrastructure is not just about transportation, it is about energy, water resources, food, commerce, trade, information, environmental quality and ecosystems. Infrastructure has an ecological footprint which needs to be measured and considered in decisions. Let’s think big, take a holistic, long-term look at the whole system, and ask what kinds of investments would be best. What kind of integrated infrastructure system do we think would make sense in the future, and what steps would we take today to get there? One of the hard things about infrastructure, though, is that it is long-lived. The technology available actually changes much faster than the infrastructure wears out, so blindly repairing and perpetuating old infrastructure ends up retarding the pace of change. A good plan needs to take a long-term view, but it has to be flexible enough to adapt to changing technology, environmental, climate and socioeconomic conditions during the course of its implementation. This is the essence of good planning, but it is hard for many of today’s hyper-specialized, local- and short-term-thinking professionals to pull off.

children and patterns

Here’s an interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Laszlo Polgár, a Hungarian who set out to turn his daughters into chess prodigies, and succeeded. A few interesting quotes:

There are three Polgár sisters, Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsofia (Sofia), and Judit: all chess prodigies, raised by Laszlo and Klara in Budapest during the Cold War. Rearing them in modest conditions, where a walk to the stationery store was a great event, the Polgárs homeschooled their girls, defying a skeptical and chauvinist Communist system. They lived chess, often practicing for eight hours a day. By the end of the 1980s, the family had become a phenomenon: wealthy, stars in Hungary and, when they visited the United States, headline news…

Laszlo believed that physical fitness was vital to intellectual success, so the girls played table tennis several hours a day, on top of their full day of chess and schooling. The parents were tireless in their devotion, buying every chess book they could, cutting out pages with past games, gluing them to cards, and storing it all in an old card catalog. They assembled more than 100,000 games; at the time, only the Soviet Union’s restricted chess archive could match it…

By the late 1980s, researchers had established that, contrary to what you might imagine, chess masters don’t tend to anticipate more moves as they gain skill. Rather, they gain expertise in recognizing patterns of the board, and patterns built out of those patterns. A question remained, however: How do they gain those skills? …

The focus of the article is on “nature vs. nurture” and the “10,000 hour rule” or “practice makes perfect”. What caught my attention though is the idea that children have a natural aptitude for pattern recognition. And systems are about patterns. I am thinking about H.T. Odum’s beautiful system diagrams, which are essentially circuits depicting the energy flows through any type of system. The building blocks are simple but they can be combined to describe very complex behavior in systems of any physical type. (Odum would have said they describe all the important aspects of social and economic systems too, but I haven’t decided if I agree with that yet.) So if young children of roughly average mental aptitude can memorize patterns in chess, could they learn to memorize Odum’s system patterns through repetition, perhaps through games? And if all children learned general systems theory in this way, could they be prodigies in solving the world’s complex problems later on? Are we focusing on entirely the wrong things in school?

Holmes and cocaine

Still reading some of the early Sherlock Holmes stuff (I’ve moved on to The Sign of the Four), I’m a little surprised by descriptions of his drug use. The implication is that his brain had no “off” switch. He had to be always thinking and analyzing. Human relations really held no interest for him. Mental idleness led to extreme depression, which he would temporarily self-treat with drugs, music, or a combination of the two. I’m nowhere near this extreme, and I’m not into drugs, but I can sympathize somewhat. I am more interested in quiet contemplation, and less interested in spending time with other human beings, than the average person, I think. I don’t dabble in drugs (because I am interested in living for a long time) but I definitely enjoy a good stiff drink as a way to maximize the recharging power of my alone time.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.

Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.

“Which is it to-day?” I asked,—”morphine or cocaine?”

He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine,” he said,—”a seven-per-cent. solution. Would you care to try it?”

“No, indeed,” I answered, brusquely. “My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.”

He smiled at my vehemence. “Perhaps you are right, Watson,” he said. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”

“But consider!” I said, earnestly. “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.”

He did not seem offended. On the contrary, he put his finger-tips together and leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair, like one who has a relish for conversation.

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

dark matter killed the dinosaurs?

A new book proposes that dark matter changed the course of a comet, which killed the dinosaurs. This article is also interesting to me for its possibly over the top use of analogies to communicate scientific information.

Sixty-­six million years ago, according to her dark-matter disk model, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth at least 700 times the speed of a car on a freeway. The collision produced the most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb, heating the atmosphere into an incandescent furnace that killed three-quarters of Earthlings. No creature heavier than 55 pounds, or about the size of a Dalmatian, survived. The death of the dinosaurs made possible the subsequent rise of mammalian dominance, without which you and I would not have evolved to ponder the perplexities of the cosmos.

how do you value data?

This article lists six ways a company or organization can try to value its data:

  1. Intrinsic value of information. The model quantifies data quality by breaking it into characteristics such as accuracy, accessibility and completeness.
  2. Business value of information. This model measures data characteristics in relation to one or more business processes. Accuracy and completeness, for example, are evaluated, as is timeliness…
  3. Performance value of information…measures the data’s impact on one or more key performance indicators (KPIs) over time
  4. Cost value of information. This model measures the cost of “acquiring or replacing lost information.”
  5. Economic value of information. This model measures how an information asset contributes to the revenue of an organization.
  6. Market value of information. This model measures revenue generated by“selling, renting or bartering” corporate data

Another article says that algorithms are becoming less valuable as data becomes more valuable.

Google is not risking much by putting its algorithms out there.

That’s because the real secret sauce that differentiates Google from everybody else in the world isn’t the algorithms—it’s the data, and in particular, the training data needed to get the algorithms performing at a high level.

“A company’s intellectual property and its competitive advantages are moving from their proprietary technology and algorithms to their proprietary data,” Biewald says. “As data becomes a more and more critical asset and algorithms less and less important, expect lots of companies to open source more and more of their algorithms.”

 

The internet is telling you what you want to hear

That’s right, the internet is telling you what you want to hear. In some cases, it really is government and corporate propaganda, known as “astroturfing“. This is the practice of creating a fake media buzz to give you the impression that there is grassroots support for something when there really isn’t:

Astroturfing is the attempt to create an impression of widespread grassroots support for a policy, individual, or product, where little such support exists. Multiple online identities and fake pressure groups are used to mislead the public into believing that the position of the astroturfer is the commonly held view.

Although usually associated with the internet, the practice has been widespread ever since newspaper editors first invented the letters page. Pick up any local paper around the time of an election and you will find multiple letters from “concerned residents of X” objecting to the disastrous policies of Y…

As reported by the Guardian, some big companies now use sophisticated “persona management software” to create armies of virtual astroturfers, complete with fake IP addresses, non-political interests and online histories. Authentic-looking profiles are generated automatically and developed for months or years before being brought into use for a political or corporate campaign. As the software improves, these astroturf armies will become increasingly difficult to spot, and the future of open debate online could become increasingly perilous.

The other thing going on is the “online filter bubble”, which is simply the idea that search and marketing algorithms are increasingly telling you what you want to hear. This makes sense in the logic of marketing, but is dangerous when you are trying to figure out what is going on in the world. From TED: