Headlines Are For Clicking

'Google' is most searched word on Bing, Google says

Oct 2021, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58749525

But isn't that exactly what Google would say?

Image credit: Anatoly Fomenko's Topological Zoo, 1967

KP Snacks hack prompts crisp and nut supplies warning

Feb 2022, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60230077

This is what English must look like to a non-English speaker.

(Translation for Americans: KP is a brand of potato chips etc. who got hacked.)

Repurposed drug-seeking AI system generates 40,000 possible chemical weapons in just six hours

Mar 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-03-repurposed-drug-seeking-ai-chemical-weapons.html

Maybe one of the greatest scifi headlines of all time?

via Collaborations Pharmaceuticals and King's College London: Fabio Urbina, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi & Sean Ekins, Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery, Nature Machine Intelligence (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9

Dyson headphones come with air vacuum for mouth

Mar 2022, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60927032

Does not sound appetizing.

Major cryptography blunder in Java enables “psychic paper” forgeries: A failure to sanity check signatures for division-by-zero flaws makes forgeries easy.

Apr 2022, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/04/major-crypto-blunder-in-java-enables-psychic-paper-forgeries/

Another one, this headline makes me feel as if English is my second language; a combination of words, each of which I know, but when combined don't mean anything to me, and fills my brain with a flickering Necker cube of autocompletes.

Algorithm predicts which students will drop out of math courses

May 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-algorithm-students-math-courses.html

Eight weeks in advance: We can say when they develop a latent tendency to drop out, which is not yet directly observable at the time, based on their own statements about how they feel and how they are doing in their studies. Their data was a pile of five-minute surveys, three times a week, over 131 semester days.

via University of Tübingen: Augustin Kelava et al, Forecasting Intra-individual Changes of Affective States Taking into Account Inter-individual Differences Using Intensive Longitudinal Data from a University Student Dropout Study in Math, Psychometrika (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s11336-022-09858-6

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11336-022-09858-6

Scientists observe large-scale, ordered and tunable Majorana-zero-mode lattice

Jun 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-06-scientists-large-scale-tunable-majorana-zero-mode-lattice.html

Because the future is a majorana fermion.

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Meng Li et al, Ordered and tunable Majorana-zero-mode lattice in naturally strained LiFeAs, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04744-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04744-8

In trial, brain zaps gave seniors a month-long memory boost

Aug 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-trial-brain-zaps-gave-seniors.html

They call it "transcranial alternating current stimulation".

via Cognitive & Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory at Boston University: Robert Reinhart, Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation, Nature Neuroscience (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-022-01132-3

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41593-022-01132-3

To Shape the Future

Crystal balls over here

Predicting the future with the wisdom of crowds
Jun 2017, phys.org

Don Moore and a team of researchers found a new way to improve that outcome by training ordinary people to make more confident and accurate predictions over time as superforecasters.

The team, working on The Good Judgment Project, had the perfect opportunity to test its future-predicting methods during a four-year government-funded geopolitical forecasting tournament sponsored by the United States Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The tournament, which began in 2011, aimed to improve geopolitical forecasting and intelligence analysis by tapping the wisdom of the crowd. Moore's team proved so successful in the first years of the competition that it bumped the other four teams from a national competition, becoming the only funded project left in the competition.

The study differs from previous research in overconfidence in forecasting because it examines accuracy in forecasting over time, using a huge and unique data set gathered during the tournament. That data included 494,552 forecasts by 2,860 forecasters who predicted the outcomes of hundreds of events.

The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki, 2004

Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds
Yahoo Finance, April 2016

The Chinese Flesh Engine
BBC 2014

POST SCRIPT

This kind of thing always reminds me of a passage from Levy-Bruhl's Primitive Mentality - the indigenous people he writes about are perplexed at the ability of the white scientists to "predict" a lunar eclipse.

They live in a timeless world. Hence, for example, an omen doesn’t just reveal what will happen, it is evidence that it is already happening.

They ask of the whites – how could you predict it (a lunar eclipse) if it was not you who caused it?

I have also found, among some folks who have less of a functioning prefrontal cortex if you know what I'm saying will tend to blame the person who predicts the situation as if they caused it. Take for example, an angsty adolescent - you tell them not to do something because of some probable result (don't smoke pot in the high school bathroom because you'll probably get caught) they will blame you as if your prediction actually caused the outcome. Some of us are no different from Levy-Bruhl's "primitives".

Primitive Mentality, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, 1923, trans 1966

Primitive Mentality
Network Address 2012

Mimetic Desire

The object only has value according to how much it is desired by another...mimetic desire

We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person — the model — for this same object.

All desire is a desire to be [someone else]

1994. Quand ces choses commenceront ... Entretiens avec Michel Treguer. Paris: arléa. ISBN 2-86959-300-7. p28
Rene Girard

Post Script:

Peer pressure's influence calculated by mathematician
phys.org, Oct 09, 2013

Professor Ernesto Estrada, of the University of Strathclyde's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, examined the effect of direct and indirect social influences – otherwise known as peer pressure – on how decisions are reached on important issues. Using mathematical models, he analysed data taken from 15 networks – including US school superintendents and Brazilian farmers – to outline peer pressure's crucial role in society.

How Peer Pressure Shapes Consensus, Leadership, and Innovations in Social Groups
link, Provided by University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

the process begins when individuals directly connected to each other first reach agreement, then – under the influence of peers not directly connected to them – the entire social group eventually tips into a collective consensus. He said: "Consider a teenager who is pressed by her friends into binge-drinking on a Saturday night – this corresponds to the direct pressure exerted by the peers connected to that individual.

"However, she is also under indirect pressure, by seeing that many teenagers are doing the same every Saturday. Thus, this indirect pressure could make the difference in that individual to copy a given attitude."

In social groups in which indirect peer pressure is largely absent, the extent to which its leaders share the same views plays a critical role in the length of time it takes to reach agreement on issues. However, when there is strong indirect peer pressure, the role of the local leaders vanishes and individuals with no important positions in their networks can become the leaders of the group.

Sync or Swarm

On Entrainment

Svjetlana Tepavcevic

Means of Reproduction no. 627

Svjetlana Tepavcevic

Means of Reproduction no. 701

Steven Strogatz on Sync, TED2004

Mathematician Steven Strogatz shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit -- when no one's giving orders. The powerful tendency extends into the realm of objects, too.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html

“What do you need to produce spontaneous synchronization? Do you need to be alive? No. [There is a] Deep tendency towards order in nature that opposes what we've been taught about entropy. [The tendency towards spontaneous order is a counter force.]”

How swarms work, 3 (+1) rules:
1. all the individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors
2. all the individuals have a tendency to line up
3. they're all attracted to each other, but they try and keep a small distance apart
(4.) when a predator is coming, get away

video still:

at ~14 minutes, he entrains de-synchronized metronomes via a common substrate

Entrainment (physics)

Entrainment has been used to refer to the process of mode locking of coupled driven oscillators, which is the process whereby two interacting oscillating systems, which have different periods when they function independently, assume a common period. The two oscillators may fall into synchrony, but other phase relationships are also possible. The system with the greater frequency slows down, and the other speeds up.

Entrainment (biomusicology)

Entrainment in the biomusicological sense refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm, usually produced by other organisms with whom they interact socially. Examples include firefly flashing, mosquito wing clapping as well as human music and dance such as foot tapping.

Brainwave entrainment

Brainwave entrainment or "brainwave synchronization," is any practice that aims to cause brainwave frequencies to fall into step with a periodic stimulus having a frequency corresponding to the intended brain-state (for example, to induce sleep), usually attempted with the use of specialized software.

see also:

Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age, David Borgo, 2006

syncbots - MIT firerly robot swarm

Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate, TED2012

In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

How Music Works

David Byrne, in describing a process of whittling-down potential dancers in his group, recounts the following experience

Noemie began with an exercise I’ve never forgotten. It consisted of four simple rules:

1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase. (In dance, a phrase is a short series of moves that can be repeated.)
2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.
3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.
4. When everyone is doing the same phrase the exercise is over.

It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent lifeform coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immediately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase. The copying had begun already, albeit just in one area. This pocket of copying began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison. Unbelieavable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick in, and for the “strongest” (unfortunate word, maybe) to dominate. It was one of the most amazing dance performances I’ve ever seen. Too bad it was over so quickly, and that one did have to know the rules that had been laid out to appreciate how such a simple algorithm could generate unity out of chaos.

After this rigorous athletic experiment, the dancers rested while we compared notes. I noticed a weird and quite loud wind like sound, rushing and pulsing. I didn’t know what it was; it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was like no sound I’d ever heard before. I realized it was the sound of fifty people catching their breath, breathing in and out, in an enclosed room. It then gradually faded away. For me that was part of the piece, too.

How Music Works, David Byrne, 2012, pp. 67-68

https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/how-music-works

  

Aunt Colony

"I am beginning to see things from two different vantage points. From an ant's-eye point of view, a signal has no purpose. The typical ant in a signal is just meandering around the colony, in search of nothing in particular, until it finds that it feels like stopping. Its teammates usually agree and that moment the team unloads itself, by crumbling apart, leaving just its numbers but none of its coherency. No planning is required, no looking ahead, nor is any search required to determine the proper direction. But from the colony's point of view, the team has just responded to a message which was written in the language of the caste distribution. Now from this perspective, it looks very much like purposeful activity."

"Prelude...Ant Fugue", Douglas Hofstadter
in The Mind's I, Hofstadter and Dennett, eds., 1981

On Time

I don't know if this is more about time, or algorithms...

ALGORITHM, a definition:
In logic, the time that an algorithm requires to complete cannot be measured, as it is not apparently related with our customary physical dimension.

btw:
The word 'algorithm' is Persian in origin, and sounds like Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. Don't forget that Persia/Arabia/Middle East-ish, was the center of science around 1000 CE.

Algos

I remember watching Kevin Slavin’s talk last year. After the Flash Crash of 2010, before the Knight Capital fiasco of 2012. I am still very surprised as to what seems to be the lack of public awareness regarding what can now be called the pervasive use of algorithms in decision-making. It’s quite obvious that what visionaries of the 20^th century were referring to as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ will finally manifest itself as ‘augmented intelligence’, in the form of high-frequency trading, for example.

“No place for a human”…

Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading

BY JERRY ADLER 08.03.12

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/08/ff_wallstreet_trading/all/

examines how Wall St. got to the point where flash failures come with increasing frequency, and how much farther traders seem willing to go in pursuit of ever-greater speed.

clipped:

“For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene,” said Andrew Haldane, a regulatory official with the Bank of England, at another recent conference. “That gap is set to widen.”

This movement has been gaining momentum for more than a decade. Human beings who make investment decisions based on their assessment of the economy and on the prospects for individual companies are retreating. Computers—acting on computer-generated market trend data and even newsfeeds, communicating only with one another—have taken up the slack.

One common algo strategy is to look for pairs of stocks whose prices are historically correlated. The canonical examples are the stock prices of oil companies, which rise with the price of crude, and those of airlines, which do the opposite. But they may not move all at the same time, so one strategy is to buy or sell the one that’s trailing and wait for it to catch up. Similarly, “derivative” equities such as options and futures may get out of equilibrium with the underlying stocks. Some algorithms are “market makers” in a stock—they attempt to buy at a low bid price and quickly sell at a slightly higher asking price, pocketing the difference, or spread. The people who did this used to be called specialists, and it was a nice living when spreads were an eighth of a dollar. Since the New York Stock Exchange instituted “decimalization” in 2001, spreads have gone down to a penny or two, meaning you have to trade a lot more stock, a lot faster, to make the same amount of money. It’s no place for a human being.

“By the time the ordinary investor sees a quote, it’s like looking at a star that burned out 50,000 years ago,” says Sal Arnuk, a partner in Themis Trading and coauthor of a book critical of high-frequency trading titled Broken Markets. By some estimates, 90 percent of quotes on the major exchanges are canceled before execution. Many of them were never meant to be executed; they are there to test the market, to confuse or subvert competing algorithms, or to slow trading in a stock by clogging the system—a practice known as quote stuffing. It may even be a different stock, but one whose trades are handled on the same server. On the Internet, this is called a denial-of-service attack, and it’s a crime. Among quants, it’s considered at most bad manners.

And it’s not just the words of central bankers that matter in this world. Almost any kind of data that in any way bears on economic activity, no matter at what remove, is being aggregated and tested for its potential impact on stock prices. GPS data, showing concentrations of cell phone users in malls or office buildings, has been used to get a real-time read on economic activity. Even the most ephemeral shards in the digital scrap heap, old Twitter posts, are proving of value, if you can get your hands on enough of them. For their starkly titled paper “Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market,” Johan Bollen, an informatics researcher at Indiana University, and two colleagues collected almost 10 million tweets from 2008, aggregating phrases that indicate emotional state and analyzing them along dimensions of feeling such as “calm,” “alert,” “sure,” “vital” and “happy.” They then looked for correlations with stock prices and discovered that a surge in “calm” sentiment reliably predicted an increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average two to six days later. No one, including Bollen, knows what this means or why it should be so, but if quants had a coat of arms, it would say, “If it works, trade on it.”

further:

A New Kind of Socio-Inspired Technology

Edge conversation, Dirk Helbing [6.19.12]

"...computers of tomorrow are basically creating artificial social systems. Just take financial trading today, it's done by the most powerful computers. These computers are creating a view of the environment; in this case the financial world. They're making projections into the future. They're communicating with each other. They have really many features of humans. And that basically establishes an artificial society, which means also we may have all the problems that we are facing in society if we don't design these systems well. The flash crash is just one of those examples that shows that, if many of those components — the computers in this case — interact with each other, then some surprising effects can happen. And in that case, $600 billion were actually evaporating within 20 minutes."

http://edge.org/conversation/a-new-kind-of-social-inspired-technology

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world

FILMED JUL 2011 • POSTED JUL 2011 • TEDGlobal 2011

Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

NYSE looks into 'irregular trading' in 140 stocks

1 August 2012

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19087748

Decision-making, Public Oversight, and Privatization

Aug 2012

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/08/decision-making-public-oversight-and.html


Math algorithm tracks crime, rumours, epidemics to source
10 August 2012
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-math-algorithm-tracks-crime-rumours.html

U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder
KIM ZETTER 01.10.13
The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.
“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk told the news outlet. “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”
-Richard Berk, criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/precog-software-predicts-crime/

Supercomputers could generate warnings for stock crashes
Lisa M. Krieger, Apr 19, 2013
http://phys.org/news/2013-04-supercomputers-stock.html

High-frequency traders face speed limit on deals
29 April 2013

High-frequency trading tactic lowers investor profits

Jun 17, 2013

"Latency Arbitrage, Market Fragmentation, and Efficiency: A Two-Market Model."

Provided by University of Michigan

[pdf]

Doing the math 'predicts' which movies will be box office hits
Aug 22, 2013
based on an analysis of the activity on Wikipedia pages: number of page views for the movie's article, number of human editors contributing to the article, number of edits made, and diversity of online users

New Algorithm Can Spot the Bots in Your Twitter Feed

Lee Simmons, Wired, 10.17.13

I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days
Wired, Aug 2014

[...] My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages.

[...] By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I’m offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed. I get to learn its very particular syntax.

[...] The next morning, my friend Helena sent me a message. “My fb feed is literally full of articles you like, it’s kind of funny,” she says. “No friend stuff, just Honan likes.” I replied with a thumbs up. This continued throughout the experiment. When I posted a status update to Facebook just saying “I like you,” I heard from numerous people that my weirdo activity had been overrunning their feeds. “My newsfeed is 70 percent things Mat has liked,” noted my pal Heather.

Patents provide insight on Wall Street 'technology arms race'

phys.org, Jan 2015

"A 'technology arms race' is well underway as firms vie to shave even more time off trading and maintain their competitive edge. But it's not just about trading speed. We're seeing technology used more when firms are first issuing securities and even the use of neural networks in portfolio selection."