I'm working my way through this and realized...

I'm working my way through this and realized...
It's a must share type of item. Thanks martin shervington

Originally shared by David Amerland

The Craziness of Data

When I was young I used to play a game. I would find a high vantage point from which I could watch people go about their business. I would then deliberately unfocus my eyes. The ensuing blur of moving images would become a pattern that made a kind of crazy sense. I would see each person as a digital dot (Pacman http://goo.gl/NfX6J was really big at the time). While none of the dots mattered, collectively they added up to a pattern that did. A tapestry that became us, the world. Everything.

It was my way of coping with a world that truly felt too big to grasp. The exercise did not release any fresh insights about how the world worked but it served to remind me that it did. The craziness, the weirdness and the isolation were part of a pattern that made a whole. 

We’re hardwired to seek meaning. Our brains are not really designed to deal with unfocused eyes. Our minds latch on data and try to organize it. In my work, as an analyst sense and order are vital. 

It’s been a little crazy for me lately. A little too much travel, too many meetings and too many corporate speeches. Each one adds its own weight to a whole but the really unfocused moments on the web happen when I spend time online connecting digital dots that might not have originally been designed to be connected, unless you’re willing to unfocus your mind’s eyes a little.  

And to start it off consider, for a moment, the incredible visual stitching that occurs within our heads as we piece together the visual narrative of the world we see. In reality what our eyes supply is not a smoothly flowing, cinematic experience but a series of rapid snapshots where objects and the world have moved, changed angle and position and where objects have even changed shape. 

Because we are never really stationery what our eyes report are constant changes of perspective and positioning, ‘camera shake’ and optical angle changes, the world we see is visually jarring, amateurishly created, crazy. What happens inside our heads, however, is nothing less than incredible. A complex visual mechanism within our brains not only analyzes and smooths out the camera jitters from our visual input but it also predicts and synthesizes the next scene, pre-creating it in our heads so that we then have to supply only minimal, corroborative details for it to appear. 

This not only makes us constant visual storytellers but it also saves on bandwidth (so to speak) in what we upload and store in our brains and, at the same time, it becomes the means through which we can also be tricked (http://goo.gl/pOANKx) believing something to be other than it is simply because “we have seen it”. This also opens the door wide to an experiment that can practically “break our brain” albeit temporarily - http://goo.gl/Ceebnd. 

And since we’re talking of brain and visual narrative spaces let’s not forget the voices in our head. Apparently, talking to ourselves not only reinforces our sense of self but it is part of our self-talk strategies for coping with performance anxiety, stress and worry (http://goo.gl/eGQsSf) and should be encouraged in children as part of their developmental psychological needs (click on the link – it will download a PDF study on the subject: http://goo.gl/0wLLnQ). 

It is our brains (again) that make us, writers, a little bit odd (http://goo.gl/iKUzUE) and also point out that our education system may be failing because we’re focusing on the wrong things. Work has become unstructured. Order has to arise out of self-imposed discipline rather than circumstances and when that does not quite happen, we have all sorts of modern day inconsistencies occur.

Which helps explain why we latch onto anything that promises an easy out: http://goo.gl/bZCX3o and that includes apps that somehow help us function better by promising to take the hard work out of being … well, erm, human. 

But if we’re talking about ‘better’ does that mean we’re not quite right? Can we be, indeed, broken by input inconsistencies? In an interesting experiment an NFL fan played a computer game in which he gets to push the machine’s thinking to its very limits. What he got was pretty interesting in itself: http://goo.gl/ihDGSl. 

As someone who doesn’t follow football (or indeed any team games at all) the ability of team sports to make people happy or sad has always fascinated me. In our data-centric world we now have the means to see how all this affects us in a more direct way as a Facebook sentiment analysis study shows: http://goo.gl/YB8bu6 

Data is the connecting thread to our next jump as we consider the craziness of a world where we constantly seek access to more data and the tools to use it and then we have to find of safe and permanent ways to dispose of it: http://goo.gl/GFA8sJ. 

And speaking of the need to dispose of sensitive information, privacy, data and minds, consider that the most private of activities, the consumption of adult content on the web synthesizes the strong psychological drives we have for sex with data in an unusual way. What is not known to many is that the Pornhub team runs a data analysis blog (http://goo.gl/VVdgvA) that is pure gold in itself. I’ve used it in the past for a number of corporate client reports that ran from gauging interest in a particular media moment that reveals the close ties between mainstream media coverage, novelty factors and popularity on the web (like in the Belle Knox moment) to establishing a baseline for risqué advertising in different states based on the top search terms they use when they look for adult content on the web. 

There are several things that are important here: first nothing we ever do on the web is quite private or hidden, no matter what safeguards we put in place. Second, the metadata that we glean from activities that are personal shows a close correlation between our internal and external worlds that can then be used to make value judgments on our expected RL behavior so in a sense a data-mining tool also becomes a mind-mapping one. 

Data is also at the heart of an almost impossible task: the search for antineutrinos (http://goo.gl/MgiOsy). Those who understand just how elusive neutrinos (http://goo.gl/Rs1cxQ) are in the first place realize the difficulty inherent in looking for their opposite. 

For a frequent flyer, like me, data is also a source of comfort. I check airline safety records, plane model statistics and publicly available aircraft fleet maintenance schedules before making a booking. Though aircrafts feel very fragile indeed, it is always reassuring to see the high degree of engineering that has gone into creating robust systems with high “extreme moment” absorption capabilities - http://goo.gl/mqLoA2. 

My final link, today, is also an almost impossible one. We don’t realize that what keeps us intact (and airplanes in the air) is air pressure. The moment atmospheric pressure drops liquids begin to boil at room temperature as their molecules can break through the liquid/air interface, turning the liquid into gas. The activity releases energy and depletes energy states forcing a liquid to also freeze. Exposed to space our bodies would boil and freeze at the same time and it would look a little like this: http://goo.gl/CbFpLT. 

We’re at a cusp of sorts, and I have kept this Sunday’s Read a little lite on purpose. It is also the first Sunday Read I’ve pulled together outside G+ links using, as a springboard, the many different streams of data that crisscross my mental horizon when I am not here. 

The increased transparency of the world offered by our technologies. Our ability to see and see being seen, is challenging us on many different fronts. We supply more data signals than ever and we have access to more data than at any other time in history. Questions of integrity, transparency, morality, education, culture and even truthfulness, abound as we consider what it reveals and how we can best make use of it. We really are only just beginning to edge towards contemplating all this, let alone coming up with answers, which is why the conversation we’re having is so important. In the meantime technology and its capabilities gallop ahead, propelled by different directives and other forces. 

Coffee and donuts are de rigueur on a Sunday. Croissants and cookies a strong second favorite. I hope your stockpiles hold true, your mind is clear and you get to recharge your batteries. Above all I hope you have an awesome Sunday, wherever you may be.

#davidamerlandsundayread