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Quantity has a quality all its own, as the saying goes. That's especially true of information. The more you've got, the more useful it becomes. Knowing sensitive facts about one person, or a dozen, may be trivially useful. But analyze the same facts about 100 million people, and you can cure diseases, win elections, or earn billions of dollars, because unpredictable insights emerge when you turn computers loose on vast storehouses of information. There's a nickname for the concept: "big data." It's one of the buzzwords of corporate executives, tech-savvy politicians, and worried civil libertarians. If you want to know what they're all talking about, then "Big Data'' is the book for you, a comprehensive and entertaining introduction to a very large topic. By analyzing huge amounts of information, it's possible to discover patterns and relationships that up to now have been invisible to us. In this way, we can find new solutions to tough problems, and opportunities we'd never otherwise have suspected.

No, Blab's new platform can't necessarily predict the future. But what the Seattle-based social analytics company did debut today is software that will help brands determine which of the millions of social media conversations they should focus on. Using Blab's patented technology, the company analyzes 50,000 news and social media sources, including more than 60 million posts per day. Blab then organizes that information into a "Conversations Canvas dashboard" and predicts where those conversations may go up to three days in the future based on past data and current social media chatter.

The notion of "externalities" has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs. While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I've always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics - it makes them sound Serious - but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. "Lanier is often described as 'visionary,' " Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, "a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills." Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who'd escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he's been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He's also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian. His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves "spying" on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

"Do you want to get more control over your data? Anyone who works with data can benefit from learning SQL, whether you're an online campaigner, a voterfile manager, an analyst, a pollster, or anyone else who works extensively with data."

One reason I love getting to know social impact entrepreneurs is that they are among the most sincerely passionate folks you'll ever meet.  They're not just enthusiastic and driven. Social impact entrepreneurs care deeply and passionately, about their projects in a very personal way.  And their missions are often so profound and inspiring that I get goose bumps just hearing them talk about it.  Occasionally, I even get a little choked up as I imagine what they want to accomplish and the impact they would have if they were to succeed. I was moved in just this way recently when I met a wickedly smart and infectiously passionate entrepreneur whose simple vision could have profound, life changing impacts for children all over the world.  (Wow… I just got a lump in my throat just thinking about what she wants to accomplish.) Moreover, her idea is not only brilliant and potentially highly impactful - it's also a very simple idea and straightforward to execute on.  That's part of what makes it so brilliant. (Out of respect for confidentiality, I am not disclosing the particular entrepreneur or her mission.  However, she did review this piece prior to posting.) But once I felt that I understood her project (and cleared my throat) I found myself doing what I always seem to do - rooting around for the biggest, hardest problems that will challenge the success of the business. In my view, she had some potentially fatal issues.

"In a post-fact era, you can be an elected official and have a remarkably flexible relationship with the truth. Take climate science: more than 97% of scientists agree that climate change is a man-made phenomenon, but conservative politicians--and more than 65% of Republicans in Congress--outdo one another to demonstrate just how little they believe in science."

"Meet the Elite Business and Think-Tank Community That's Doing Its Best to Control the World The large foundations of America's industrial giants have played a truly profound - and largely overlooked - role in the shaping of modern society By Andrew Gavin Marshall Alternet, June 19, 2013 Straight to the Source For related articles and more information, please visit OCA's Politics and Democracy page. "The corporate-policy network is highly centralized, at both the level of individuals and that of organizations. Its inner circle is a tightly interwoven ensemble of politically active business leaders..." -- Academics William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski In an article titled "The Global Corporate Elite" in the journal International Sociology, William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship between the corporate elite and the emergence of a "transnational policy-planning network," beginning with its formation in the decades following World War II and speeding up in the 1970s with the creation of "global policy groups" and think tanks such as the World Economic Forum, in 1971, and the Trilateral Commission, in 1973, among many others."

What makes a tweet go viral online? And what does a viral trend actually look like? Those are a couple of the questions that can be answered by a new Microsoft Research project, called Viral Search. The company's researchers are showing the project this week at an internal gathering this week in Redmond. The program crunches large amounts of data from Twitter (and potentially Facebook and other platforms in the future) to analyze and display patterns of distribution on the social network.

"Seattle big data startup SpaceCurve announced today that it has set a real-time Big Data performance record for ingesting streaming data and spitting out numbers immediately for queries. SpaceCurve ran a full-blown analytics test on Tweet records that averaged 2,500 bytes in size and included location, user and time information. The rate of operation was done at millions of records per second, hundreds of billions of records per day and petabytes of data per day - a new record, according to SpaceCurve."

"By Brendan DeMille via DeSmogBlog A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene. Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption. The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke."

A 50-foot tall statue of Shaquille O'Neal marks the southeast entrance to Beijing's Chaoyang Park. The NBA star clutches a basketball close to his chest and gazes towards the horizon. Nearby are three outdoor basketball courts, where I've scheduled an interview with the head of Greenpeace East Asia's Sustainable Finance Program. Calvin Quek is playing a game of four-on-four when I arrive one morning this past August. Smog blocks the sunshine and makes the air feel thick. If the other players notice, they don't show it. Some smoke cigarettes during the water breaks. "It's hard to say black and white whether [the government] is for or against us," Quek says of Greenpeace, over the sound of bouncing basketballs. Earlier this week, his colleagues had published "Thirsty Coal," a grim critique of China's coal strategy. The government plans to build 16 new coal-fired power bases by 2015 in some of the country's most arid regions. "Left unchecked," reads the English report summary, "these mining projects will only cause more ecological disaster and social unrest in the foreseeable future."

"Many social entrepreneurs are seeking more individualized support in the form of shared working spaces, incubators and/or accelerators that provide a mix of networking opportunities, events, funding, and mentorship in exchange for a monthly membership fee or equity stake in their company."

These maps show the different ways--cars, transit, and bikes--people get around the Emerald City and provide a portrait of how a city moves. 2 Comments

Ecology maintains the spatial datasets described here in order to better describe the diverse natural and cultural environment that we live and work in. As a public service, we have made some of our data available for viewing and downloading here.