The quote goes, “History is written by the victor.”

A stirring insight into the reality that, historically, those who wield power are best able to propagate their accounts and perspectives on the world.  After all, in the historical case of warring proto-states, it’s tough to imagine the losers scribing a grand narrative from the grave or in chains.

However, in the modern age, I’d wager that the truism needs to be updated, at least for the case of stable or developed societies.  Now, people talk of culture wars and rhetorical battles, and the norm is that combatants are rarely deprived of their capability of expression following defeat.

The writing of history has become a weapon, rather than a prize.  Certainly, those in power have a greater capability for broadcasting their accounts, but ultimate acceptance of those histories remains an uncertain quantity.  Surely, the success of any given historical narrative must be connected with its expressive power and semblance of rigor.  Thus, I propose the following amendment:

Those who write history, and write it well, are the victors.

Powerful data visualizations are like masterful paintings– through art and insight, they intimate broad ideas and usher in understanding.

I, however, am neither a master painter nor an expert data visualizer.  Neither are many of my contemporaries in the “technically skilled and socially aware” demographic.  Still, I believe that even mediocre pieces of art or analysis can help communicate interesting and important ideas.

I propose a new “genre” of data visualizations, centered on accessible summarization and public commentary — political graphs.  Think of political graphs as the the numerically supported equivalent of political cartoons — not necessarily “great art” by traditional definitions, but certainly entertaining and informative.

Data visualization techniques have been applied to political topics for ages; I’m just trying to define a niche where you don’t have to be as inspired as Tufte or as laugh-hungry as Indexed to share something of social value with people.

Since I’d like to explore this notion a bit more, I’ll be either generating myself or reporting on good examples of high-quality political graphs in the near future.

Certain elements in cinema tend to occur in clusters.  I’m talking about groups of tropes that stick together and recur in different films with only minor alterations.  Stereotypical characters, repetitive martial arts attack patterns, overwraught exclamations and pithy wisecracks.  The big, quiet, intimidating guy who turns out to be clever/nice in the end, the post-slash pauses in sword duels, the phrase “time is the one thing we don’t have.”  You know the stuff.

I’d blame it on lazy movie-writers or audiences overly permissive of rehashed stories, but I think I’ve come to accept that cultural iconography draws strength from both creativity and predictability. Call it the tension between the familiar/comfortable and the foreign/intriguing, if you must; the end result is that we’re stuck with a big chunk of the same movie tropes for a while to come.

Somewhere out there, a film student is reading this. You can hear the rotation of ocular orbs wearing grooves in his/her skull from here.  Ah well.

So, here’s a new thought experiment for movie producers and film junkies.  Think about how to collapse groups of ideas into single pseudo-absurd entities.

For example, take two movie staples that tend to occur together in action flicks — explosions and wiseacre remarks.  What happens when you  jam ‘em into one thing?

A snarksplosion.  Smart-ass bombs.  A billowing cloud of flame and debris overlaid by a booming, sarcastic, and perfectly timed quote from the likes of J. McClane or P.B. Parker.

I’m going to channel the hypothetical reaction of millions of preteen 1980s lads everywhere.   “Awwwwesome.”

I bet you can learn a lot about a company by taking a look and how, when, and how much they pay their employees.  Naturally, to get the most out of this theoretical analysis, the data should be correlated with  publicly accessible or easily determinable individual information like employee positions, job title progressions, and larger stats such as industry health and company profits.

Once all the caveats are in place, I think that it might be possible to measure and model how the company rewards and encourages certain career-scale behaviors.  We could put a number on in-company job mobility, measure just how long it takes for corporate success to trickle into the wallets of workers, and maybe even quantify philosophical emphasis on the importance of given roles within the corporate community.

While I’m sure that this sort of analysis is already conducted within companies, I wonder how difficult it would be to accomplish as an outsider.  Perhaps targeted voluntary polling could generate representative payroll numbers and job descriptions.  Maybe this sort of examination could be a service provided by the companies to which other business outsource their payroll management and software.

If you put enough companies put under payroll-enriched scrutiny, one could develop a strong tool for potential employees looking to evaluate their career options.

Proto-lewd punnery and double-entendre overheard at a party:

The difference between a straight man and a gay man is a six pack…

Followed by:

Makes sense. He’s more beer-curious than bi-curious.

I enjoy artistic experiences that communicate some expression of meaningful information.

Maybe this is inherent to all analysis-junkies and artists.  Pretty graphs that explain complex data sets.  Poignant songs that sum up intricate social and political circumstances.  Equations that encompass beautiful realities. Etceteras, etceteras.

In that vein, what could be more meaningful than the blueprints of life, genes?  I’ve seen them literally represented with some pizazz through circular graphs (thanks to Circos for the image), but I’m not quite satisfied.  The circle graphs, however useful, seem a bit overwhelming and “all at once” to present a comprehendible/enjoyable experience without a two-week tutorial in modern genetics.

So, how about music?  We could translate each nucleotide into a note, like the cute gene2music web application, but I think that approach conceals the true richness of the data.  Without delving into full gene-parsing, perhaps a solid intermediary route would be to step it up one level of abstraction and use amino acids.

So, each amino acid parsed from a raw genetic sequence would relate to a specific note.  The different codons that correspond to a given amino acid could be translated as different note-lengths or octaves.  The general function of a gene (so far as biologists know it) could set tempo or other flourishes.

I can think of no geekier a way of generating one’s own intensely personalized theme music…

A silly project for another time:

Describing the process of baking cookies in the fashion of a formal scientific journal article, complete with an abstract, background, methodology, results, and discussion.  Perhaps a bibliography for good measure.

Maybe I’ve been in research too long, but the notion of parsing just about anything mundane into the language and format of scientific papers cracks me up.

I’d like to peek around the next corner in technology.  Specifically, what technological challenges and solutions will arise following the advent/ascension of the mobile web. Let’s fast forward about five years, give or take some technological optimism.

Assumptions

• Broadband wireless internet is widely accessible in the developed world.
• Mobile audio and visual data capturing devices with day-scale battery and storage ranges are available at prices reasonable for amateur bloggers/lifestreamers/artists.
• Consumer-targeted voice, eye, or gesture based user command interfaces for the above are also around.
• No earth-shattering breakthroughs in computational speed or information processing occur.

I posit that since people will be gathering information about the real world at an incredible rate, the successful parsing and filtering of this information will a primary challenge.  To put it a different way, the challenge will revolve around the generation of classification/contextualization metadata about objects, people, and events.

From how things look now, it will be relatively easy to use video clips of someone’s face to automatically look up their public online identity since faces tend to be highly structured and are well-modeled.  Less “regular” information about complex scenes or objects might be a lot tougher to tease out automatically.

Since I’m not convinced that complex-object-recognition software will develop quickly enough, I’m guessing that we’ll at least temporarily turn to human-assisted classification.  That’s where an Asynchronous Bayesian Classification Database comes in to help bridge the gap.

Chain of Conclusions

• Lifestreamers would naturally generate their own commentary on the things they observe. (i.e. A user says, “Oh look, an elk!”)
• This commentary will end up associated with the observation-data-stream. (i.e. Video feed surrounding the above utterance marked with tag “elk”)
• Lifecast aggregations will accumulate massive stores of observational data linked with human-generated classification metadata. (i.e. a huge online pile of elk-related video, audio, and text)
• A Bayesian scheme that continually refines correlations between observational data and lifecaster commentary could be invaluable for building robust classifications. (i.e. Taking into account that some people can’t tell an elk from a moose)
• These databases could then be used to estimate the expected interpretation of visual/audio/textual information related to a given metadata query, or vice versa.  (i.e. The software is able to tell some other user in the future, “The thing you are looking at is probably a male elk.  Petting it is not advised.”)

Outlining the relevant portions of a picture or voicing extra audio commentary could also go a long way towards minimizing the amount of effort needed to make the system work.  You know, circling the region of the video feed where the elk is standing, or saying “What a nice brown coat of fur,” so the system knows you aren’t talking about the trees also in the picture.

I certainly hope this sort of mini-David-Attenborough exposition will be incorporated into the lifestreaming culture, as it would greatly enrich the world’s stores of computer-parseable real-life data.  Luckily, most lifestreamers are probably quite happy to describe their world to others in an accessible fashion.

In turn, these ABCDs could serve as the building blocks for more sophisticated AI-based recognition and analysis tools to help us filter through the rising tide of information.  Training wheels for an augmented reality system.

A break from the usual tech-talk, here’s a short poem that popped to mind this morning.  If your art-glands hurt afterwords, blame the inspiration for picking crappy a poet.

new-wrought buds of leaves

in neon em’rald they bloom

against the concrete

For those outside the know, lifestreaming is the phenomenon of more or less continuous recording and transmission of observations about one’s life.  It’s the log of a perpetual twitterer, the live webcam someone wears on their hat, the flickr account of a geotagged-mobile-phone-camera-addict.

The side of lifestreaming everyone talks about is the fact that you get an incredible amount of options for broadcasting details of your life.  The other side of the equation is, naturally, all those other people that fall into the scope of “your life.”  From their perspective, your lifecast is going to have an impact on the set of information out there about them.  In other words, lifestreaming affects the digital identity representations of the entire population of the dynamic social sphere.

So, what happens when everyone starts lifestreamiing?

My guess is that you’ll lose control over a hearty segment of your public identity.

Nowadays you generally have to make an effort to broadcast your thoughts, works, and life details to develop an online public identity.  This means that you get the chance to be the primary author and manager of this online identity — you’re the one generating all the content.

Once other people around you start lifestreaming, this editorial control will slip away, since the lifestreamers you interact with will produce alternate, semi-independent accounts of your life.  Celebrities won’t be the only people with widely accessible outside speculation and documentation about their lives any more.

Where does this all lead?  Maybe towards a more cautious society, where people have to wisely consider their actions in front of others.  Think lots of Little Sisters who might gossip or tattle rather than one Big Brother.

People remember images more easily than they can remember complex strings of words.  Furthermore, images can automatically evoke complex sets of associated thoughts and emotions.  We should leverage the associative power of images to help sort through thick information sets.

I’m talking about web-searching with an unconventional “semantic” twist.

The tools to make this work are all in place.  Several image formats support textual metadata packaging.  This metadata could be used to store words associated with the image and their relative weights.

The metadata could be generated by direct human characterization, image parsing and object recognition, or by trawling “nearby” sources of textual information.  Think web pages that store or embed the image and their own contextual and general metadata.  Google and Flickr, I’m looking at you.

The metadata could be further categorized by type.  To wit, associated words might describe the emotional, allegorical, compositional, or literal content of the image.  Then, users could choose to use any image as a versatile query tool.

For example, consider an idyllic picture of a child and a dog playing happily on a swing (photo courtesy of teresia).

One user could use this image to search for other pictures containing children and dogs.

Alternately, the user could use the images to search for text-based articles relating to “childhood” or “pastoral” or “happy” subject matter, simply by shifting the focus from literal metadata to abstract metadata.

Image-metadata-based-filtration boils down to a rich-content, easily-comprehended “key” used as a pointer to complex, versatile semantic datasets that in turn will aid in navigating the endless ocean of information.

Back as a grade school kid, I was impressed by the array of neat options we had for decorating our desktops on the old Macs.  Patterns!  Colors!  Eventually… whole pictures!  “Cool beans” at the times, really.  Even back then, I was wondering how we’d be entertaining our eyes in between games of Super Word Muncher, Mario Teaches Typing, and Make the Computer Verbalization Program Say Silly Words.

Sadly, nothing much has really changed.  Static pictures adorn the vast majority of backgrounds.  A few pioneers have information dynamically sent to their desktops, but only after hours of tomfoolery and unofficial certifications in awesome geekery.  Still, in the mainstream, few everyday users get more complicated than a slideshow of background photos, changing on a day-to-year long time scale, with or without automation.  Boooooring.

Then again, boring might be good.  Reduced distraction from activities more productive than staring at a music visualization screensaver and so forth. Backdrop and other similar “blank out everything” applications are growing in popularity of late along with a general “simplification” trend in interface design.

On the other hand, productivity might be overrated.  Entertainment has a respectable value on its own.  More importantly, there is the possibility of inducing wonderment in young users with a fancy, mind-begoggling base user stomping ground.

What sort of desktop decorations could do this?

If there is such a thing as a universal truism, is there a way to communicate it universally?

Some working definitions to guide the thought process:

Truism

A bit of wisdom about life.  More specifically, wisdom that can be practically applied.

Universal

Applicable and understandable at some point in any given person’s life, regardless of cultural circumstances.  Caveats added for extreme personal circumstances (e.g. mental disability, brevity of lifespan).

Communicate

Transfer of information from an entity (human or artifact) to a person.

If this were possible, the next step towards enlightenment would be some means of identifying truisms…

A truism or two about how assorted careerpeople respond to the professional imperative.

A Researcher’s Motto:

Publish or perish!

A Blogger’s Motto:

Post or perish!

A Preacher’s Motto:

Parish or perish!

Terrible, every single one of them.

1. Constellation of Bone
2. Death Triad
3. The Sidewalk Lickers
4. Black Glass Shards
5. Drowning in Magma
6. Sven and the Seven Deadly Songs
7. Shut Your Life Hole
8. Hedgehog Eats Ferret
9. Shanks and his Bloody Knives
10. Ennuinvincible

If any of these names actually end up being taken, I’d definitely go to a concert or two just to see the people who have the guts/psychoses to use ‘em.