The June 26, 2008
PinFeed Almanack
Thinking (Massively) Different
The latest comes from Richie B,
a nice piece on crunching humongous
datasets and letting correlations emerge, though one might quibble with the
author's conclusion that the process obviates scientific models.
The Times this morning had a bit on
Eye-Fi, an SD card with an interesting
Skyhook-based algorithm for location-stamping digital photos. The developers
used hundreds of employees with GPS and wi-fi receivers to build the
self-repairing database that enables storing '34th & 5th' on your snapshot
of the Empire State Building.
A novel legal defense is being proposed to use Google statistics to establish a
"social norm" for pornography.
Now, socially, these 3 links have absolutely nothing in common, but they are
linked by a common technical thread called "social computing". We can tell
this phenomenon is coming of age, for it has become a topic of at least one
sermon in a mainstream church.
It's all about letting computers aggregate, filter, and structure monstrous
amounts of data. Such operations have become possible only in the last 30
years, but that's enough time that nearly half the population can't remember
not being able to "google", or "text". That changes the way people think; it
makes topologies visible that we couldn't even define; it reveals or imputes
meaning that humans could not discover on our own. On this scale, "more" is
not just "more", it's "different" (and maybe "frightening").
The Almanack would like to publish a top-100,000,000 list of the readership's
favorite viral applications.
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i have no idea what a viral application is
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