Smart Economy

Cambridge's Bluefin Labs decodes social media chatter

Cambridge's Bluefin Labs decodes social media chatter

Facebook users "like" things 2.7 billion times a day. People share their opinions more than 500 million times daily on Twitter. Now, this start-up is betting it can change everything from product placement to how we elect our president.

By Neil Swidey

NOVEMBER 25, 2012

IN THE 1930S AND '40S, Hollywood had a way of tracking the popularity of its movie stars. Studios would sift through the quarter of a million or so fan letters that arrived each month and sort them into separate bags by actor name. Then studio employees would heave these bulging bags onto a scale, according to industry researcher Leo Handel. A big spike in weight meant the star was trending up. A sharp decline suggested the star was on the way to becoming yesterday's news.

As measurements go, this was pretty crude. Even back then, the people who would take the time to write a letter represented a tiny subset of the population, usually teenagers motivated by an excess of adoration (or antipathy). So, in time, movie executives would follow the lead of their counterparts in radio, television, and advertising and adopt the techniques of opinion research to understand what their audiences wanted.

The push toward data collection in television brought us Nielsen families, those chosen few whose living room diaries and, eventually, People Meters were powerful enough to keep their favorite shows on the air. And it brought us the ubiquitous focus group, where a dozen unhurried souls would be steered into a conference room and, in exchange for 50 bucks and all the M&M's they could eat, be asked to render a verdict on a new program.

Yet it hasn't always been clear how much we've gained from this relentless pursuit of audience preferences. High Nielsen ratings - scores that were extrapolated from just several thousand households - kept shows like Three's Company and The Love Boat on the air long past their sell-by dates. And I've been suspicious of the focus group ever since the seventh grade, when on a trip to New York I somehow got shanghaied into testing a sitcom starring Harold Gould as a skirt-chasing widower. Against the heated objection of this 13-year-old out-of-towner, CBS went ahead and aired Foot in the Door in 1983, though the network thankfully mercy-killed it after just six episodes. What's the point of market research if it regularly leads to doozies like that? We might as well bring back the fan-mail scales.

Thanks to social media, thousands of fan letters and complaint missives, huzzahs and boos, are now being written every single minute. Twitter alone processes half a billion tweets each day. But there are problems. As with those letter-writing fans of the past, today's social media commenters skew young. And right now, the most common methods for tracking their views resemble the "trending by weight" measures the old studios favored: Multiple firms tally all mentions of a TV show or movie made on social media, then report grand totals across general categories. This is useful only to a point.

Twitter, Facebook, and other services have already transformed media from a one-way conversation into a democratized, constantly churning feedback loop. In time, social media hold the promise of exercising enormous influence over everything from the shows we watch on TV to the toothpaste we buy in the supermarket to the politicians we send to Washington. "Social TV" and the "second screen" experience - watching the TV set while cradling a smartphone or tablet - may even rescue live television viewing from the dustbin into which the DVR has swept it.

Yet the only way any of this is going to happen is if somebody can reliably convert all that online chatter into meaningful information.

After all, if someone tweets "the office is making me cry," is that person referring to a particularly poignant episode of the NBC comedy or a hostile workplace? Even more difficult is discerning sentiment.

Are most of those millions of mentions about your show praising it or panning it? And what if the name of the show isn't even mentioned?

Making those kinds of interpretations are easy for humans yet exceedingly difficult for computers.

But they're learning. A Cambridge start-up called Bluefin Labs is marrying the computational power of machines with the interpretive guidance of humans to make sense of - and profit from - the fire hose of nonstop social media. The company's work builds on the research of its two cofounders, MIT guys who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching machines to understand human language. Now they are using that knowledge to teach machines to understand what we really mean when we tweet or post about everyone from President Obama to Honey Boo Boo. The outcome just may be as important to the president as it is to that cringe-worthy pint-size product of reality TV.

...

 

http://www.bostonglobe.com/2012/11/25/cambridge-bluefin-labs-decodes-social-media-chatter/SLDp9nflJK0tFQKBPuVZhP/story.html?s_campaign=8315

 

Bluefin Labs: Decoding online chatter

 

http://bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2012/11/21/bluefin-labs-the-social-media-eavesdroppers/caE7V0V26bZXBXU9vLPcDM/story.html?s_campaign=8315

Twitterbot wars?

Alarmist spammer unleashes Twitterbot to stifle climate debate 

An Australian software developer grew tired of debating climate realists on Twitter so he created spambot to wear down his opponents. The bot responds to anyone who expresses skepticism about man-made global warming by posting one of hundreds of canned replies in an attempt to frustrate skeptics.

Nigel Leck, an Australian software developer, grew tired of debating climate realists on Twitter so he created a spambot to "wear down" his opponents. The bot, @AI_AGW, scans Twitter every five minutes looking for key phrases commonly used by those who challenge the global warming orthodoxy.  It then posts one of hundreds of canned responses hoping to frustrate skeptics. CFACT's Twitter account @CFACT (follow us!) often receives many of these unsolicited messages each day. Since the bot became active on May 26, 2010, it has sent out over 40,000 tweets, or an average of more than 240 updates per day!

Technology Review gushed that Leck's bot "answers Twitter users who aren't even aware of their own ignorance."  Leck claims that his little bit of trollware is commonly mistaken as a genuine Twitter user leading the unsuspecting to sometimes debate it for days. Eventually it wears people down.

Leck's bot is an innovative, yet appalling new tactic in the ongoing campaign by global warming proponents to stifle debate and end discussion of climate science and policy. Spamming Twitter users is a tactic that is likely to backfire, as have so many of the ploys alarmists have tried in the past. There is nothing internet users find so annoying as trolls using spam to shut down online discussions. 

Over the last year we have witnessed the large-scale collapse of public trust in global warming science and policy. The warmist's Climategate emails, relentless propagandizing, refusals to debate, carbon profiteering and lecturing by celebrities who lead lavish lifestyles while preaching austerity for the rest of us, have offended people's intelligence and sense of fair play. Using a spambot to harass climate realists will do nothing to ingratiate the warming argument with anyone with an open mind.

Should climate realists put up a bot of their own? Should we let the two bots debate each other and leave it to the machines? CFACT knows better. When you interact with our @CFACT account on Twitter, you are talking with a live human being. Science demands an open, honest give and take. So does public policy making in a free republic. Harassment and spam is not the answer. Mr. Leck, tear down this bot!

http://www.cfact.org/a/1836/Alarmist-spammer-unleashes-Twitterbot-to-stifle

Sarcasm detecting software; Just what everyone needs (not)

New Scientist writes last week:

Just what we need: sarcasm software  25 May 2010 by MacGregor Campbell

Computers are getting better at understanding human languages, thanks partly to algorithms that can analyse sentences for positive or negative sentiments, says Ari Rappoport of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.  But picking up on sarcasm is still a problem.  "In many cases, sarcasm is difficult even for people to recognise", never mind computers, he says.

Rappoport and colleagues wrote a sentiment-analysing program.  They then trained this software to recognise sarcasm by feeding it sentences that had been flagged up by human reviewers as likely to contain sarcasm.

The team used the trained program to analyse a selection of product reviews on Amazon.com and a random selection of posts on Twitter.  Three human volunteers were asked to rate the same material for sarcastic content.

The algorithm agreed with the volunteers 77 per cent of the time for Amazon.com product reviews and 83 per cent of the time for the tweets.

Nice work, really "It is a very exciting paper, because it attacks a problem that I didn't really think we were ready to make headway on," says Lillian Lee, a natural language processing expert at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was not involved with the study.

David Traum, a language researcher at the University of Southern California in Marina del Rey, says that getting people to agree about what constitutes sarcasm from single utterances with little context is difficult.  "Really all we can say is that for these cases computers are about as good as people at agreeing with other people about what is sarcastic."

The research was presented at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Washington DC this week.  The tool could be used by marketers to track online public sentiment surrounding brands."

Walter Derzko, The Opportunity Clinic, Smart Economy, Toronto

Intelligent robots that evolve and grow in real time by mimicing biological evolution; unnatural selection

The next issue of New Scientist will feature an article about smart robots that evolve and grow in real time or unnatural selection..more disruptive technology on the way. We will see how much of this can be turned into commercial value, instead of just being an acedmic curiosity

According to New Scientist:

 

 

"Living creatures took millions of years to evolve from amphibians to four-legged mammals - with larger, more complex brains to match. Now an evolving robot has performed a similar trick in hours, thanks to a software "brain" that automatically grows in size and complexity as its physical body develops.

Existing robots cannot usually cope with physical changes - the addition of a sensor or new type of limb, say - without a complete redesign of their control software, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

So artificial intelligence engineer Christopher MacLeod and his colleagues at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK, created a robot that adapts to such changes by mimicking biological evolution. "If we want to make really complex humanoid robots with ever more sensors and more complex behaviours, it is critical that they are able to grow in complexity over time - just like biological creatures did," he says."

© 2005-2009

Walter Derzko -"Changing the world, one idea at a time"©

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together

• ".....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"-old Japanese proverb
• ".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." -- H. Mumford Jones
• ".......Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought."  --A. Einstein
• ".......Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are surefire showstoppers..." --Walter Derzko

• ".......Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."  -- Margaret Mead

• ".......Small minds discuss people; Average minds discuss events; Great minds discuss ideas; --Anon

P. S. if this is your first visit to my blog, please go to our Welcome page

Smart Sustainability Showcase for Toronto and Canada

From: Walter Derzko

Sent: Friday, July 11, 2008 12:19 AM

To: undisclosed list

Subject: re Smart Sustainability ShowCase for Toronto and Canada.

Importance: High

Dear Colleagues

I’d like to plant an idea with you – after speaking with a number of designers and vendors, I’m exploring the idea for a sustainability showcase that would feature theme based exhibits with smart technologies from Canadian and international sources-the best from Ontario, nationally and from around the world.

The launch would be 2010, The timing for this seems right.  The target audience would be Canadian business, consumers and school children

I’m writing a book on smart technologies and this would be a logical extension of the concept.

Two years ago I talked to Samantha Sannella and Poala Polletto at the Design Exchange (DX) in Toronto and with several people at the Ont Science Center.  Both groups expressed interest but said that we would need to find sponsors for the project

My business model for this would be three pronged -vendor based revenue, corporate based sponsor revenue and municipality based sponsorship ie city of Toronto or Mississauga and possibly the province of Ontario who may wish to promote sustainable manufacturing.

This concept would be a Canadian, in fact a North American first.

I have a list of 150 potential vendors, and designers from around the world who are working on smart technologies that we can start to approach.

The exhibits would be theme based, --the sustainable kitchen, the sustainable office, the sustainable retail shelf, the sustainable workspace, the sustainable community, the sustainable city etc and would be updated with new technologies every 3-5 years and have a 1-5 year forward focus. (what's commercially available now or in the very near future.

For other exhibits, there can be a regional or national focus ie smart sustainable technology from the UK, Finland, Germany (Fraunhofer Inst), China, Ukraine, Russia, or Singapore, Hong Kong etc

Corporate sponsors might include: Walmart, Rona, Home Deport, Canadian Tire, Loblaws, Sears, Imperial Oil, the banks (RBC, TD, RBC BMO) etc.

The Sustainability Showcase could be housed in a physical location, or it could tour from location to location around the city or province or be mobile ( on a bus the way the Japanese and Korean do- a display bus turned into a demo center that tours from school to school or to fairs and exhibitions.

OCAD students and staff and Beal senior fellows could play a hand in designing exhibit spaces and sourcing new vendors and sustainable technologies.

Several other revenue opportunities could spin off from this as well

Here’s just a few examples of what can be showcased

1) Environmentally sensible packaging such as Mercury-Absorbant NanoSponge packaging for broken compact fluorescent lamps (CFL's) http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2008/06/mercury-absorba.html

2) Concrete Wood (from the example I mentioned June 2 at OCAD, when Bob Logan was bemoaning the lack of durability of pressboard shelving from Ikea.  See Concrete Wood from lodgepole pine trees destroyed by pine beetles (kills two birds with one stone) http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2007/11/concrete-wood.html

3) End of Traditional Heating and Air conditioning Thin-film version of Active Building Envelope (ABE) systems could make conventional air conditioning and heating equipment obsolete http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2006/07/thinfilm_versio.html

4) OLEDs New High efficiency flat light source OLEDs > Almost any surface in a home, whether flat or curved, could become a light source: walls, curtains, ceilings, cabinets, shelves or tables.  Http://smarteconomy.typepad.com/smart_economy/2006/04/new_high_effici.html

Lots more like these

For anyone who is interested in exploring the idea of a Smart Sustainability Showcase for Toronto, we are having a meeting on Tuesday July 22 at 11 am at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, room 600, 6th floor , 100 McCaul St, Toronto just south of the Ont Art Gallery.

Please RSVP, so we know how many people are coming

I have had some positive feedback from several organizations, & I’d like to push the concept forward

I'm sending this nationally and internationally in  case you are aware of any designers, vendors, manufacturers or research centers who have interesting cutting edge smart sustainable technology to showcase.

Contact me by email

----Walter  Derzko; Senior Fellow Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity, OCAD 

© 2005-2008 Walter Derzko -"Changing the world, one idea at a time"©

Expert, Consultant, Keynote Speaker and Lecturer on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy

The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together

CfP's The New Genetics: Implications for Technology Strategy and Business Ethics (ie self modifying software) 07-067

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE OF TECHNOLOGICAL FORECASTING & SOCIAL CHANGE The New Genetics: Implications for Technology Strategy and Business Ethics

Advances in genetics indicate the notion of natural selection, in its Darwinian version, has to be replaced by something of much greater complexity.  The special issue will explore the implications for technology strategy and forecasting.  Before Darwin, it was recognized that species change over time.  Darwin and Mendel provided the first scientific frameworks for how this change happens.  The later and still-unfolding understanding of the molecular basis of genetics opened richer possibilities for explaining evolution.  An example is the recognition of pleiotropy, which affects both genetic expression and mutation. 

In a process comparable to self-modifying software, a single gene activates additional genes to express a large number of phenotypical traits.  In experiments, one gene has been observed to affect the expression of hundreds of other genes; it is believed that a sensitive measurement could show a single gene affecting every element of the genome.  A mutation’s survivability then depends on the gene’s low degree of connectedness; a changed gene that cascades large changes in the expression many other genes may well kill the organism. 

Co-evolution, the mutual adaptation of environment and organisms, is also now recognized.  We can no longer draw a straight and unidirectional line between environmental change, change in a gene, and change in the physiology of an organism. 

By the same token, industry structure cannot be explained by simple competition between firms in a fixed environment; political lobbying is just one means by which firms try to change their environment.  It is not known what kinds of models will soon augment or replace Mendel’s picture of heredity and Darwin’s construction of natural selection. 

For decades, evolution has been the central metaphor of many disciplines, from ecology and cosmology to computer science.  We now have a metaphor without a mechanism.  This development in biology poses a problem for managers who have relied on competitive selection as a way of comprehending business strategy, technology development, entrepreneurship, and ethics. 

The editors invite researchers in genetics, technology strategy, and ethics, as well as other sciences affected by this development, to submit papers that clarify the meaning of the new genetics and begin to explore the needed re-thinking of our policy and management paradigms – with special reference to the scientific worldview, technology strategy and forecasting, corporate strategy and competition, and social change. 

Authors should note that the special issue will focus on new views of the mechanism by which evolution occurs – not on the rejection of evolution as a fact or metaphor.  Submissions should not represent efforts to advance creationist or metaphysical views.

Submissions may address questions such as:

• What can game theory, sociology, organizational behavior and other fields tell us about the benefits of cooperation versus competition within organizations or between economies? 
• Genetic algorithms” are used for everything from operations analysis to classroom scheduling and product/engineering design.  How can they be brought “up to date”? 
• Should we reconceptualize “market niches,” “technology standards,” “industrial ecology,” and other management notions that implicitly or explicitly depend on evolutionary/ecological metaphors? 
• Does the complexity of genetic expression and change in organisms suggest the increased use of complexity theory and/or computational approaches in technological forecasting? 
• Have new developments in genetics spurred advances in mathematics and informatics that could benefit other disciplines, specifically technology strategy and forecasting? 
• How far can current bio-mimetic technologies progress in the absence of a guiding theory?
• What is the future of “social Darwinism” as a popular concept?

Abstracts are due July 1, 2007, and final papers must be submitted by December 1, 2007, with the names of potential reviewers. 

Abstracts and papers may be sent to either editor. 

Guest Editors: Fred Phillips, Alliant International University and Maastricht School of Management ([email protected]), and Yu-Shan Su, University of Texas at Dallas and  Chang Jung Christian University ([email protected])

© 2005-2007

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together

.....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"- old Japanese proverb

".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." - H. Mumford Jones

"Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought."  A. Einstein

"Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are showstoppers..." Walter Derzko

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."  - Margaret Mead

P. S. if this is your first visit to my blog, please go to our Welcome page

Blinkx Internet video search engine 07-043

Blinkx Internet video search engine

Last year I downloaded Blinkx beta search engine onto my laptop. It worked fine until the volume of data started to grow, and my computer slowed down to a crawl. That's when I deleated Blinkx but actually missed it's cool capabilities.

Now they seem to have gotten it right.

Search engines that scan text are common place, Not so for video or audio clips.

Now, Blinkx has refined a video search engine that allows users to search more than seven million hours of Internet video to find exactly the clip they want.

According to Tech Review:

"Unlike most video-search outfits, Blinkx does not merely search the text or tags associated with a particular video. Instead, Blinkx’s technique employs speech recognition, neural networks, and machine learning to create transcripts of the world's videos; then, the words spoken in the videos can be searched. The method creates much more relevant video-search results."

In response to the question: what makes internet video so great?, Suranga Chandratillake cofounder and co-CTO of Blinkx says: 

"The infrastructure is in place now. The bandwidth and processing power are available. Video cameras are cheap and editing software is free (or almost). Ultimately, this all represents a massive lowering of the barrier to entry, which has utterly disrupted the supply side of this enormous global industry. Previously, all production was controlled by a handful of individuals, and the distribution of that content was tied to a small number of restricted mediums: the cinema, Blockbuster, cable TV. Changing the paradigm of entertainment production and distribution matters on multiple levels. In society, the democratization of media means we're all able to participate in a global conversation or experience. Commercially, it's suddenly viable to support a diverse "long tail" of content, which previously had a hard time getting an audience.

full story here >> [...]

© 2005-2007

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

The Smart Technology Blog: The Smart Economy -- Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

To arrange for an in house presentation or briefing on smart technology see here

To explore the opportunities and threats of any new smart technology in your industry - Contact Me or explore how we can work together

.....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"- old Japanese proverb

".......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." - H. Mumford Jones

"Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought."  A. Einstein

"Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are showstoppers..." Walter Derzko

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."  - Margaret Mead

P. S. if this is your first visit to my blog, please go to our Welcome page

UK Government publishes Strategic Horizon Scans

The Horizon Scanning Centre has commissioned two complementary scans looking ahead up to 50 years : the Sigma Scan and the Delta Scan.

Initial versions of both scans have been published by the contractors who developed them : Sigma Scan by Outsights - Ipsos MORI and Delta Scan  by the Institute for the Future (IFTF).

The Sigma Scan is a broad synthesis of some of the world's best Horizon Scanning sources. It covers future issues and trends across the full public policy agenda. It is drawn from a range of sources including think tanks, academic publications, mainstream media, corporate foresight, expert/strategic thinkers, government sources, alternative journals, charities/NGOs, blogs, minority communities, and futurists.

The Delta Scan is an overview of future science and technology issues and trends, with contributions by over 200 science and technology experts from the worlds of government, business, academia and communication in the UKand US.

Develeped over 2005 and 2006 by a team of consultants and futurists,  the Scanning Framework has some novel methodologies and catagories. Each main issue is described as an Issue paper.

The main text of the Issue Papers themselves is divided into a number of different sections:


Headline: Headlines provide a brief description of the future eventuality discussed a pithy note on the main themes contained within the paper.


Keywords: Keywords summarise the coverage of the issue and suggest related issues, domains or topics.


Summary: The summary provides first an Abstract of the Issue (delimited by asterisks) for a quick overview of the whole paper, followed by a description of the trend, event or theme and the debates it raises. This is generally a presentation of the data/evidence in this field, linked where necessary to sources (with no fixed view on likely outcomes).


Implications: this contains a range of possible outcomes that could flow from the Issue as described in the Summary. These incorporate a number of factors where appropriate, including social values, habitat/environment, new technologies, knock-on and perverse effects. Early Indicators: This aspect of the Paper suggests possible early warning signs and precursors that should be looked for to indicate that the Issue may indeed be developing as described in the Paper.

Drivers and Inhibitors: Factors, people, institutions or events which will either fuel (Drivers) or act as a barrier (Inhibitors) to the emergence of this Issue.


Parallels and Precedents: Historical, international or cross-cultural examples of
somewhat similar instances which may shed some light either on the evolution of the Issue or the likely success of different strategies in response.


Sources: The list of sources consulted in writing the Paper, with web links, documents and location information where applicable.


Related links: a list of websites that may be of further interest to the reader relating to the topic


Sigma Scan basics: Issue Markers

Each issue has been further labelled with a number of Markers, which provide highly indicative (i.e. not predictive) information about the possible likelihood, impact,
distribution, severity and development time of each Issue:


Impact: This marker is designed to reflect the potential of this issue to create pervasive and/or serious change in the world at large: a development which in cultural, technological, environmental, economic or political terms alters the way we live or perceive the world. Impact is divided into:

• ****Extreme: Intense, deep-seated, pervasive or long-lasting in its effects. An event/development which profoundly affects the planet for example, an asteroid strike.
• ***High: A great event in human history, something that shapes human history and leaves longstanding cultural residues for example, the moon landings, the establishment of the United Nations, a major pandemic.
• **Medium: A defining aspect of a particular generation or nation's experience of the world. An important footnote in world history, such as the implementation of the Euro, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
• *Low: A development whose scope to instigate change is subtle or in some way restrained by conditions, medium, force, locality or likely responses. Something that captures the news agenda for months or years, but eventually fades into the cultural memory for example, the cultural changes of the 1960s.
• ?Unknown: There is no consensus within the literature about how best to interpret this issue.

Likelihood: The likelihood that this issue will evolve to become a central theme/development - in some way - in future society within its projected life span. The likelihood markers are:

• ***High: 75+% confidence that the events discussed will come to pass.
• **Medium: An equivocal 50/50 call.
• *Low: 25% or less probability.
• ?Unknown: No consensus about the likelihood.
  
  

Controversy: The level of consensus amongst experts, commentators and other observers holds that the Issue will unfold in the way described in the Paper and/or assume a greater significance in acting as an instigator of change. The controversy markers are:

• ***High: Very few experts pay the issue serious attention, and there is very little consensus about the extent to which this issue is likely to emerge. There is very little known evidence for this issue, and what there is highly unconventional, or propounded by alternative sources.
• **Medium: Whilst there is some kind of conventional consensus, futurists and/or alternative sources dispute whether this issue is likely to be a central development in future. Evidence is somewhat equivocal or open to scrutiny, even within expert audiences.
• *Low: The majority of experts, as well as a large volume of authoritative evidence, point to this issue emerging as a central theme over the next 50 years.
• ?Unknown: No known consensus on how to apply this marker.

When: The expected timeframe for this issue to influence C.21st life to the degree ascribed to it under "Impact". Divided into:

• 0-2 years: This impact of this issue is already being felt or will be in the immediate future
• 3-10 years: Likely to be under way but perhaps not well distributed. Wider effects felt over the near horizon
• 11-20 years: Mid horizon effects
• 21-50 years: Mid to far horizon effects
• 50+ years: Far horizon effects ?Unknown: High level of uncertainty as to when this impact could be felt

Where: The geographical spread of the Issues impact. Divided into:

• Domestic/national Largely restricted to particular nation states (e.g. UK)
• Regional Largely restricted to major global regions/continental areas (e.g. EU, Latin America)
• Global Potential to be experienced anywhere/everywhere on a global scale
• ?Unknown

How fast: How quickly the events and potential impacts described in the Paper could be
experienced:

• Instant in a matter of moments
• Days over the course of days
• Months over months
• Years over years
• Unknown

Sigma Scan basics: Issue Genres


As well as the markers, each paper is also classified into a number of different Genres. This is identified at the start of the Summary in capital letters and is supplied as an at-a-glance way for users to decide what sort of critical thinking they should apply to their reading of the paper. (e.g. in the same way that we would apply different critical faculties for reading a work of science fiction than we would for reading todays
newspaper).

Weak signal: A primarily descriptive Paper attempting to shed light on a relatively little known, weakly felt or poorly distributed phenomenon a possible baby trend at the relative margins of current knowledge. The Implications of this style of paper tend to be limited to explaining what is already starting to happen, and the Drivers / Inhibitors are important in deciding whether it will grow into a Key Driver or dwindle into nothing. The aim of Weak Signal papers is to inform readers about trends or
potential events that might slip under the radar.

Forecast: An Issue for which there is a relatively high degree of certainty, at least in terms of its likely presence as a force for change, based as it is on robust quantitative data and relatively stable variables. Forecast papers are based upon well-grounded and
authoritative sources, drawing on models or statistics to draw conclusions.

Key driver: These Papers describe a relatively more mainstream and better-known trend or development. Something that would probably on the radar of most policymakers or strategy thinkers. Key Driver papers provide a top-level review of the trend for the uninitiated, and aim to stretch the more informed reader with some wider Implications Parallels / Precedents beyond the usual inferences and certainties.

Scenario: A Paper which takes as its evidence base published scenario work from other sources. It therefore discusses the range of uncertainties and drivers that have been discussed in developing these scenarios and compares the assumptions in them. Rather than describing a possible driver of future change, it therefore examines the feasibility and possible implications of a particular hypothetical future.

Wildcard: An Issue with the potential to emerge unexpectedly but with potentially major impacts. Often, these papers deal with a radical discontinuity, as compared to other, more continuous and/or gradual trends.

Computers that read emotions> emotion recognition software

Computers that read emotions

Computers can now analyze a face from video or a still image and infer almost as accurately as humans (or better) the emotion it displays. Developed at MIT, "Mind Reader" uses input from a video camera to perform real-time analysis of facial expressions

Nicu Sebe, a computer vision researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands  processed the enigmatic portrait of Mona Lisa with his "emotion recognition" software and - eureka! - Mona Lisa was happy (83 percent) and slightly disgusted (9 percent

Full story>> [...]

Satellite Observations Used To Track Avian Flu> Real time maps of "hot spots" and "hot times" for viral transmission

An international, interdisciplinary team of researchers led by professor Xiangming Xiao of the

University

of

New Hampshire

is taking a novel scientific approach in an attempt to understand the ecology of the avian influenza, develop better methods of predicting its spread, and provide an accurate early warning system.

Xiao and colleagues were recently awarded $1.55 million for a four-year project funded by the U.S. National Institutes for Health (NIH) as part of the Ecology of Infectious Diseases (EID) Program jointly sponsored with the U.S. National Science Foundation. The EID program supports research projects that develop quantitative analysis and modeling capacity for better understanding the relationship between man-made environmental change and transmission of infectious agents.

The UNH project will use environmental remote sensing data from Earth observing satellites in combination with research in epidemiology, ornithology, and agriculture to provide a better picture of how the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza survives and gets transmitted among poultry and wild birds. The work focuses on

China

, where outbreaks of the virus have been prominent.

"The ecology of the avian influenza involves a complex web of factors, including environmental settings, agricultural practices of rice production and harvesting, poultry production involving huge populations of free-grazing ducks, and the migratory behavior of wild bird populations. Depending on how all of these risk factors intermingle over time, the virus can be spread through the environment by infected wild birds or domestic poultry.

For example, using imagery of varying resolution from different types of satellites, the team can map and track the spatial-temporal dynamics of crop cultivations (when planted, harvested, etc.) and wetlands. Used in conjunction with other geospatial data of environment, bird migration, and poultry production, dynamic maps of "hot spots" and "hot times" for viral transmission can be developed in near-real-time mode and will aid the public, researchers, business, and decision-makers in preparing for a potential pandemic crisis."

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