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Do we have a free will, or is it chemically determined ?

We can make all our choices, but is the fact that we choose option A something we are FREE to do, or is it already chemically determined. Or in other words : does our chemistry fool ourselves?
It is indeed a fact that brain scanners can detect your decisions seven seconds before you make them!.
Nevertheless we are convinced of our free will. Does this mean that the idea of free will is only generated in our brain after the brain made the choice ?

If this is really true, why ? What is the function of free will ? Could we not do without it ?
Life would be much easier. No free will, no more judgements about wrong choices, no more guilty feelings …
But evolution theory, Darwin, survival of the fittest etc… also had their say.
A small community with people who make the wrong choices is in danger ! So this thing of free will and the feeling that we are able to make choices and hence try to adapt our behaviour to previous experiences, to feedback from our fellow tribe members is needed to change behavior in favour of the tribe.
For you know : the research only talks about 7 seconds. A lot of decisions take a long time to make. Just think of your wife choosing a new pair of shoes …

Enjoyed this post ? Then you might be interested in the following :
– A taxonomy of psychons
– Complex decision to make ?
– Job interview or brain scan ?
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– Human brain copy protection by AnyMind Inc.

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Do not read this book for the story, but just for the unusual text !
I’m reading the third book in Douglas Adams‘ Hitchhiker’s, trilogy, namely “Life, the Universe and Everything“.
The story itself is not much but the way he writes!
I’m asking myself if he somewhere dug up a list of extremely scientific an other words that he uses in more or less random combinations when he describes the weird environments, circumstances, gadgets, mindstates and whatever.
The guy is really astonishing. Just look at the list of ‘interesting’ words/expressions I took just from pages 48 and 49:
“recipriverexclusions”, “somebody else’s problem fields”, “nonabsoluteness”, “subphenomenon”, “interactive subjectivity frameworks“.
Or look how poetically he describes the sunrise : “seven billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold an slightly damp“.
And this weird unexpected twists of mind keeps going on and on throughout the whole book.

Normally I do not advertise for books, but for this exceptional one, I make an exception.
By the way, if you did not read “the hitchhiker’s guide” yet, you should start with that one first !

Enjoyed this post ? Then you might be interested in the following :
-Gödel Esher bach online course
– Continuïty Gap in The Intelligent Universe
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– Human brain copy protection by AnyMind Inc.

Adam is the first robot that has discovered new scientific knowledge. Eve will be the next.
Adam is still a prototype but it works, proving that in some future, science will be done by robots, leaving time for the humans to do useful stuff like politics, sports, management and warfare ??

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Recently someone asked me if
1) logistic regressions can handle imbalanced datasets
and
2) if it is possible to adjust the regression equation as to truly represent the actual situation.

The answer to the first question is “YES” and “NO”. I will explain this further in this post.

For the second question : I really do not know. But somehow it seems to me that this would be very unreliable.

Can we mine a highly imbalanced dataset with logistic regression ?
Let me first put this : to mine highly imbalanced datasets, you should preferable NOT use logistic regressions, but something like decision trees. If you insist on using logistic regression then I advise the following :

If you use the entire imbalanced dataset I am convinced that, if the regression eventually converges, you will end up with a very poor model. So don’t.

Now sampling. Let us assume that the minority class are the positives.
Since you have much more negatives than positives, a first approach would be to take all the positives and the same amount of negatives, which gives you a perfectly balanced sample. (It is generally accepted for a balanced dataset that the minority class contains at least 30% of the observations).
There is a good thing and a bad thing to that approach.
The good thing is that logistic regressions do very well on small datasets (much better than for example decision trees). So with that approach you should already get an acceptable model.
The bad thing is that you have no possibility left to test the quality of your model, since you have no positives left. (This testing should allways be done on a sample that was not used to make the model).

Consequently I suggest an alternative approach, which yields a model of the same or more likely, better quality AND an indication of the quality of the model.
This approach is called BAGGING (bootstrap averaging). It is mostly used and shows the largest gains on weak classifiers like decision trees, but in this particular case it can be very useful too.

For example take 90% of the positives and about the same number of negatives (you may take a slightly higher number of negatives to obtain for example a 40% positives and 60% negatives distribution).
Then you calculate your model and test it on the 10% positives that you did not use in the model and of cause on whatever number of negatives you want.

Then you start all over again with another random sample of 90% of the positives and a sample of the negatives, preferably not overlapping with the first sample of negatives.
And after that you start all over again … and again … and again … The more the better, but 10 to 20 times will normally already do a great job.

Suppose you repeated the sampling and modeling 10 times, than you get 10 models and test results for 10 times 10% = 100% of the number of positives, and a lot more for the negatives, because they are the majority class.
With the test results you can plot the calculated probabilities against the real probabilities to relate the models to the real world.

But there is something even better : if you use the 10 models to score a new dataset, than you obtain 10 different scores for each point. These 10 scores will not be the same since they are generated by different models. What you have to do is calculate the average of these 10 scores to obtain a more accurate score than each of the 10 individual scores.

And that is what you needed : a more or less reliable model and an indication of its quality.
And to end a little paradox : you made a nicely “balanced” model with an unbalanced training set, since you used practically 100% of the positives, but 12 times more of the negatives!

Did you liked this post ? Then you might be interested in the following :
Oversampling or undersampling ?
data mining with decision trees : what they never tell you
The top-10 data mining mistakes
Text mining : Reading at Random

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What was first ? The chicken or the egg ?
It is an often heard question. The answer instead is never told.

Well, for a change : here is the answer.

First was … the egg.

But … did you not need a chicken first to lay the egg ?
The anwer is : NO !

Before the birds were the reptiles, before the reptiles were other animal species etc. And that way we can go back to the monocellular organisms.
The monocellulars, you know, those living things that consisted of only one single cell. They reproduced simply by splitting themselves in two new cells.
It was simple.
But, perhaps because it was a bit more efficiënt, those simple cells became a bit more complex, a bit more efficient to gather food, to stay alive, to duplicate. And so gradually, in stead of simply splitting in two, they built incredible complicated structures (for example a chicken) to build THE new cell : the egg.
(If you did not new : a chicken egg is one single huge cell).

So if I put it a bit awkwardly : a chicken is the means by wich an egg reproduces itself. (oh yes, there is also the rooster, which complicates the whole story even more).

But long before the chicken there was already the egg, the one that did not needed a chicken to reproduce.

Did you liked this post ? Then you might be interested in the following :
top-10 lists on evolution
Evolution in blue and red
Evolution towards Intelligent Design
Are men and women different species ?
Web 5.0 : the telepathic web

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With his recent speech about him still being against condoms, even in Africa, I believe that implicitely pope Benedictus admits to believe in evolution.

Why ?
As he wants everyone to live the rules of the catholic church, he wants to sort of punish those who do not, thus the people who think more creatively about sex.
Underneath this I think that he wants to forbid condoms in order to enhance the extinction of people who do not follow the rules of “go and multiply”, (meaning that you should only have sex if you want to make a child).
Or, like the germans, some decades ago : select and you will end up with a modified population, which is what evolution is all about !

Enjoyed this post ? Then you might be interested by the following :
Does the Pope believe in aliens?
top-10 lists on evolution
Natural Selection : posthuman evolution
Evolution of minerals
Evolution in blue and red

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Gaming for the sake of science !

Seti@home : Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, was the first and most popular scientific calculation program that makes use of those millions of pc’s doing nothing.

Now there is fold.it, a sort of game where you have to fold proteins. This is a very complex matter and David Baker invented this game to put not only the pc’s to work, but also the brains of all those humans behind the pc’s.
So it is not only cloud computing, but also cloud thinking !

Besides that there is also Games with a purpose : games that serves some purpose for the people setting up the game by harnessing human abilities in an entertaining setting

Google image labeler uses people( who have nothing better to do) to tag images.

In Galaxy zoo you can participate to the search of new galaxys in space.

Image via CrunchBase

be-a-magpie : converse your tweets into money

tweetsmarter : to add special characters to your tweet and to add a retweet link so that followers can retweet you in one click.

twollo : automatically find and follow fellow tweeple with similar interests as yours.

just tweet it : a directory for twitter users : users listed per subject.

retweetist : list of links and people that are retweeted the most in the last 24 hours.

microplaza : your personal micro-news agency

tweetbackup : freebackup for your Twitter

twitterhawk : targeted marketing based on tweets

twttrip : Where will you go next?
Share your travel plans with your tweeple!

twalala A client for Twitter that allows you to control what you see, and more importantly, what you don’t see in your twitterstream.

tweetag : wordcloud of most popular topics discussed on Twitter in the last 24h + search for topics

twitalyzer : The Twitalyzer is a tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.

Tweeterate : Tweeterate extends Twitter with the possibility to rate the tweets you get from your friends

TweeterGetter : Start Getting 1000’s Of Legitimate New Twitter Followers On Autopilot via a sort of waterfall / pyramid system

obamatwits : a mashup with twits on Obama

tweetaways : an easy way to pick a random winner for your next twitter contest or giveaway

mycleenr : MyCleenr is a unique way to sort your friends by their last tweets. It allows you to get rid off all the inactive and useless accounts that you are following!

Twit2do is a simple, online to-do list manager. Create and update to-do lists here or via twitter. No signup needed, just use your twitter login and away you go – happy twit2do-ing!

twtask : create tasks directly from twitter

twtvite : to invite people for tweetups

twittercounter : shows a graph with the number of followers

twimailer : replaces the shallow emails from twitter in your inbox when people follow you by emails with a lot of info on the new follower.

tweetvolume : howmany times a word is found on twitter ?

tweetgrid : create a twitter search dashboard that updates in realtime.

twitterthoughts : charts and maps based on twitter

tweetoclock : looks which day and time your friends tweet most, gives you an accurate idea of when they’ll be using Twitter

destroytoday : Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using Adobe AIR. It consists of a series of canvases that constantly update to keep tweets current and up-to-date using notifications that appear immediately after a new tweet arrives.

tweetmeme : the most popular links that are shared on twitter

And at this point, dear reader, I gave up !

I have found also the following sites with sometimes huge lists of twittertools, and I get the feeling that twittertools are more rapidly created than I can write them down.
So to finish this second bunch of twittertools I add some links to other sources :

twitdom

alltwittertools

another list of twitter tools

pbwiki

If you enjoyed this post, then you might also be interested in the following : A bunch of tools for twitter Micro Email = twitmail

 

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In the old days there was stenography. A shorthand style of writing that made it possible to write down what was said much faster than normal writing.

Nowadays people are typing shorthand-like texts on their cell phones to save time and space.

And since twitter is limiting tweets to 140 characters, people use some sort of shorthand to make optimal use of these 140 characters.
This shorthand is even automated : there is for example a “tweetshrink” button on tweetdeck which uses the tweetshrink functionality.

Can you believe we really are all reading texts like this :

In the old days thr was stenography. A shorthand style of writing that made it possible 2 write dn wht is said much faster than normal writing. Nowadays ppl R typing shorthand-like texts on their cell phones 2 save time & space.
& since twttr is limiting tweets 2 140 characters, ppl use sum shorthand 2 make optimal use of these 140 characters.This shorthand is even automated : thr is 4 example a “tweetshrink” button on tweetdeck.

Could that be acceptable for blogs ? Or is there some discrimination going on between tweets and blogs ?

If you enjoyed this post, then you might also be interested in the following : A bunch of tools for twitter Knowledge management and jargon lazyness Text mining : Reading at Random Micro Email = twitmail

 

                                     

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What do you prefer ?

I do not like Youtube videos .

In the old ages there were the stone tablets, then the percament, than the paper, then the movie tapes and then the Digital media.
OK, I am very superficial but what I want to say is that these days, when I click a promising hyperlinklink and it appears to be a youtube video I a already gone to the next promising hyperlink.

Why ?
Youtube videos are too time-consuming.

I do not want to invest the time to watch the video at the speed of the video waiting to see & hear enough to decide if it is worth my time.

Text is the best.

A simple text, well structured, preferably with some illustrating pictures is the best ! I “scan the text (mostly the title(s)) and within a handful of seconds I decide whether to go on reading or to abandone. This is extremely efficient .

What about slideshare ?

I find slides are the next best thing, because they allow you to advance at your own speed. Unfortunately on slideshare you see only one slide at the time. They should provide the option to view, say, six slides on one screen, so that you can pick the interesting ones, or advance more quickly through them.

Did you enjoy this post ? Then you might also be interested in the following : Reducing my work email Information overload, filters and Web 3. Email tricks Information access time : 30:30:3

 

                                     

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Dr James Marshall of the University of Bristol has found similarities between the way our brain and ant swarms compromises between speed and accuracy of decisions.

After all: our brain is just a swarm of neurons. So it is quite logic that nature uses the same mechanism for the same purpose.

Did you enjoy this post ? Then you might also be interested by the following : Ant Colony Optimisation : Ants or Locusts Do Stock Traders show Swarm Intelligence ? Swarm information transfer techniques Swarm versus intelligence

 
                                     

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We know that our brain is a huge network of neurons. Research showed that words are stored in our memories not as isolated entities but as part of a network of related words. When someone says one word, we immediatly think of related words or meanings.

Words that are “entangled” with many other words have a great chance of being recalled, while words that are entangled with few or no other words have a very small chance of being recalled.
An entangled state occurs when two words (e.g. “Red” and “rose”) are either both recalled or both not recalled in relation to a cue word (e.g. “lips”).
Note the difference between “correlated” and “entangled”. Apparently for words to be correlated, they have to be created at the same time, or under the same circumstances. To be entangled is much stranger. It is like influencing from a distance.
For the brave ones of my readers : read the original article of
Peter Bruza, Kirsty Kitto, Douglas Nelson, and Cathy McEvoy from the University of South Florida. They are are doing serious research on the way words are recalled in relation to other words.

This way of storing words or meanings in our heads is totally different of how our computors handle things.
Perhaps the closest to this comes google, with their huge database of words and sentences, who do not care about grammatical rules but use the raw computation power of their IT infrastructure?

Did you like this post ? Then you might also be interested in the following : Image recognition software Psychons : Elementary particles of the mind Text mining : Reading at Random

 

Other blogs on this subject :
Scientists Model Words as Entangled Quantum States in our Minds
Words as Entangled Quantum States in our Minds?

                                     

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Erasmus University researcher Willem Verbeke of Erasmus University at Rotterdam says that in 5 years job interviews will be replaced by brain scans !
Perhaps the science will be ready, but not the legislation, since it is still not allowed under Dutch privacy laws to demand brain scans as part of job applications. The reason : brain scan is seen as a medical examination.

But why all this fuss for a job interview ? Much more interesting is that I will want a brain scan from my girlfriend, from my future son-in-law, my lawyer, my doctor.
I will want to see comparative studies of the brain scans of politicians running for president or prime minister.
I will want to see a brain scan from my future boss when I apply for a new job (yes, I reverse the roles !).
I will want to see a brain scan from not only my banker around the corner, but from the whole board of directors of the bank.

So much possibilities.
So let them quickly change the laws !

Did you enjoy this post ? Then you might also be interested in the following :
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The human cyborg.
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Researchers at Massey University have found a better way to predict stock markets for the next month. In their prize-winning paper “Return Predictability Revisited” they report “amazing results” by not using monthly intervals for their predictions but in stead much shorter ones.
Professor Ben Jacobsen, Dr. Ben Marshall and Dr. Nuttawat Visaltanachoti observed that slight changes in the interval of observations already had important effects on the predictions.

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twitter charts : calculates when you are tweeting (day of week, hours of the day) and puts it in a nice bubble chart.

tweeteffect : Find out which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you

twitterholic : to check out your twitterholic ranking

twittersheep : see a tag cloud from the ‘bios’ of your twitter flock

twitter influence calculator: measures authority, visibility, generosity, reach, velocity, clout, value on twitter.

filttr.com: lets you filter the tweets you want to see by setting different priorities to the people you follow.

PeopleBrowsr.com: search function on twitter an many other social media. You can search for people, subjects, locations …

mycleenr : utility to clean up your twitter contacts

tweepler : utility to organize your followers

Twitter grader: calculates your importance on twitter, lets you do some searches, finds people based on geographical location and can install twitsnip which lets you “quote” text on any web page.

twunch: site where twitter users can registrate to meet at lunch. In dutch, but should be usable for other languages too.

twittervision: shows on a world map where tweets com from. Like a visual version of twitterfall

twitterfeed: feed your blog to twitter, identi.ca or Ping.fm

tweetscan search facility for microblogging

twistori : somewhat silly site that tracks 6 different words on twitter : love,hate, think, believe, feel, wish.

tweetdeck: the best desktop twitter interface.

tweetpic : lets you share photos on twitter

tweetshrink: shortens your texts

twitterific: Twitterrific is a application that lets you both read and publish posts or “tweets” to the Twitter community website. For Mac’s desktop. (Costs 14.94$)

tweetvisor : Tweetvisor is a web-based Twitter interface, that enables tweeples to better manage multiple Twitter accounts, returns real-time updates about favorite topics, news and tweets, and supports groups, tagging friends and inline video replies. “Tweetvisor is the best browser based solution we’ve seen” (techcrunch)

twtcard send a greeting card or invitation or surprise message on twitter

twtpoll : to create polls for your website and lets you tweet it. (example : mytestpoll )

connecttweet: alpha version of utility that lets all people of the company retweet to the company followers.

twtvite / Create a tweetup. Invite your tweeple!

tweeteroo : desktop application for twitter

tweetybot : desktop application for twitter

tweeter a java desktop client for twitter

twhirl :desktop client for the Twitter microblogging service

tweetbymail : Send updates, receive updates, follow friends and more through weetByMail commands from ANY email account or email capable device

twe2 : Free Twitter SMS alerts in Europe and beyond

TinyChat : With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. With instant message on twitter.

twitterfox :TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets on Twitter.
This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets. Also it has a small text input field to update your tweets.

twellow : online utility to search for people in twitter and other social media.

friend or follow : to find out who are you following that’s not following you back or who’s following you that you’re not following back?

mr tweet : Mr. Tweet helps you easily build meaningful relationships by looking through your network and tweets. He suggests people and followers you are missing out on, recommend you to enthusiastic users relevant to you and regularly update useful stats of your Twitter usage.

tweetree : another online twitter interface

twitbacks : to create a Twitter background for FREE

twittersearch: the authentic twitter search

TweetWhatYouSpend : tweet your expenditures and see the overviews afterwards

Stocktwits : see what traders and investors are talking about RIGHT NOW or contribute to the conversation and build your reputation and following as a savvy market wizard.

FxTwits : an open FOREX trading community powered by Twitter.com. They capture the Twitter buzz for all the major currency pairs.

CheapTweet :scans Twitter for the best deals, coupons and sales that people are tweeting about.

Twizon : shows you tweets about amazon products

TwitPay : send money to someone via twitter

TipJoy : Give and receive money via Twitter

Twistory : puts your twitter history into your calender

TrackThis track your packages over twitter

Postica By adding postica as a friend you will be able to stick notes via direct messaging on twitter.

tweetake : Tweetake allows you to back-up your followers, people you are following and Tweets with just one click

twitterberry A mobile client for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so you don’t need to use SMS

Future Tweets, Twuffer and TwitResponse are applications to used to schedule tweets for your Twitter.

Tweetlater : To set up alerts and track keywords in the public Twitter stream, to schedule tweets, to send automated thank you notes to new followers, and automatically follow new followers, and to schedule and publish tweets that don’t go to Twitter, they go to your personal tweet stream, which is available in RSS, XML and Javascript formats

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Amazing evidence that google is the closest to whatever a god might be.

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Image by Gaetan Lee via Flickr

Copying human minds : possibilities, consequences and regulations.

A discussion on freakangels.com lead me to the following musings.

When it will be possible to copy the human mind into a clone, cyborg or whatever will be capable of functioning with it, a lot of questions will have to be answered :

• who will have read-write-modify-delete access ?
• Who will have the right to make a copy of your mind ?
• What about illegal copies ?
• Will it be possible to install a copy protection in your child’s brain at birth?
• Will a copy be as valuable as the original human being ?
• Will it be allowed to delete the copy after it has done what had to be done?
• Will a “MindMarket” come into existence, where you can buy your preferred mind to put into your robot-cyborg-human_clone ?
• Would you sell copies of your mind to people who like it ?
• Would you sell copies of your body to people who like it (this is a huge erotica market !)
• Will you have to buy the body and the mind separately or will some Microsoft-like multinational (AnyMind Inc. ?) dominate the market have minds pre-installed everywhere ?

I am sure you can add a lot more questions and possibilities.

Oh yes, if you want to know how it can be done: here is the roadmap to xerox a brain.

                                     

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Se7en seconds before you decide to do something, your brain is already working on it. So who decides ?
Does your brain make you decide whithout you having anything to say ?
Only if the decision is already made it moves up from the unconscious to the conscious level.
Question : Are the unconscious decisions “free will” decisions?
Do we have a really free will ?

Some serious stuff to think about !

                                     

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Apparently scientists discovered that men and women are different.
No, not the way you think.
It seems that they are seriously thinking of taking gender into account when they will develop and test drugs and other treatments for some disorders.
Better late than never, is it not, Bruce S. McEwen of Rockefeller University ?

                                     

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The reducing goes on and on. I started with 90Mb in outlook, now I reduced it to 22Mb.
And what is important : no new clutter piles up !!
I demands discipline, but it pays off.

Previous post on this matter : Reducing my work email

                                     

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Is all this tech evolution good or bad ? Frankly I do not care.

In an excellent post David Brin writes a good discussion on this matter.

It is not my purpose to reproduce his discussion, nor to give a summary of it. I advise you to read it yourself.

Here, I just want to give my personal point of view.

The e-volution is there and it is inevitable. People are and have allways been curious and innovative, otherwise whe would not have become what we are. From childhood on we try anything further, more, higher, deeper and only stop when it hurts too much. We try, even if there is no advantage whatsoever. The sheer fact of experiencing something new is ample reward. And so we evolved.
But like allways is and has been, it is an evolution with two speeds. There allways have been the have’s and the have not’s, those who knew and those who did not, the warriors and the farmers defending themselves with shovels and sticks, the traders, merchants and the poor people, the scientists and the grey mob, the e-geeks and the e-ilitterates.
But that has never been a problem. What once was something weird, unusual, silly or whatever you call it, definitely becomes mainstream and everybody uses it. Think of domesticate mammals, boats, cars, flying, TV, cell phones, the internet, brain implants, robots …

Even if something new seems useless at first, the fact that a lot of people find it interesting or fun enough is fertile ground for new commercial applications so that it becomes self-supporting.

How far can this e-volution go ?
E-volution is at the meme level. Memes are processed in our brains and hence, unlike Moore’s law, there is an upper limit to this processing capacity. To upgrade our brain takes evolution at the physical level, which means evolutionary — a lot of — time.
Unless we execute the detailed processing outside our brains in computer/software combinations that outperforms human brain capacity. Or inside our artificially upgraded brains (implants of all sorts).
Both are likely to occur in a relatively near future, so nothing will stop this sort of reversed first entropy law of evolution.

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Science is evolving fast. I suppose you knew that already.
So what are the science-fiction devices that probably will become reality in the next 30 years, that means in your and my lives.

1. X-ray glasses to look trough solid walls
2. invisibility cloacks
3. handsfree healing, like Dr Bones in Star Trek
4. spiderman-gloves to climb walls
5. free power : your movements produce the power for your cellphone and other gadgets
6. jet packs/rocket belts
7. private space-ships
8. Breathe underwater by an artificial gill
9. universal interpreter (like the babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
10. Smell-o-vision : TV’s that produce smells

Any other original suggestions ?

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You thought you were looking at advertisements ? They are looking at you !
The newest form of advertisement checks out who is looking and changes the ad if appropriate. If the space is full of man, you will for example get ads for cars, beer …; If they leave and a bunch of women enter, the beer ads will be replaced by detergents, parfums …
They just use tiny cams and some data mining algorithm.

                                     

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Four posts by Seth Grimes about text analytics :

• Text Analytics Basics, Part 1
• Text Analytics Basics, Part 2
• Text Analytics Accuracy: Requirements and Reality
• Open Source Text Analytics

And his slides about “Text analytics for dummies”

                                     

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Are we on our way to computers that really understand what we say. I mean, not just recognise each word, but really understand the meaning of what is said ?

On January 22 there was the news that “software understands, um, language“, explaining that the team of the Luna project, a European-wide effort to dramatically advance the power and intelligence of speech recognition, has created a data mining, more precisely a text mining model that understands spoken language. The first languages covered are polish and italian.

It probably was a huge job, because if you want to do data mining or text mining, you need data, um text. But not just data or text, but also the meaning of these texts. It means that a lot of people have to sort of translate these spoken texts into “meanings” understandable for a computer. And then come the mining algorithms that learn from this information base to understand the spoken texts.

At the university of Essex, Jon Chamberlain tries to solve the problem of the enormous job to create this information base (think of all the knowledge of men to get an idea of what we are talking about at the end) by means of an internet game. People can join this “phrase detectives site” to add information to the database. Until now they got 40,000 annotations in 4 weeks. Not bad for a start.

So at the end we will just tell our robot what we want, in stead of saying some pre-defined commands.

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