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Why Forgetting the Past Can Be a Good Thing

We are not static, but our tattoos and Facebook posts are.

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What do Facebook, tattoos, and Google Glass have in common? They are all technologies that mark a moment in time in our life. Some leave images on the internet and others on our skin, but all of them are to a large degree permanent. The information is hard, sometimes impossible, to remove. This is the reason that people have lost their jobs due to a seemingly harmless post, or don’t even get the job because of decisions made during an alcohol-fueled late-night trip to a tattoo parlor. 

No person is static. Each of us is in truth many people, over time and across different social scenarios. I am a different person when I am at home with my daughter (more silly), when I am operating on someone’s brain (more serious), and when I am traveling in a foreign country (more reserved). And I am certainly a different person today than who I was in college (no comment).

Who we really are oscillates around some mean or average of behavior. We have all done things we are not proud of—that are outliers of our identity. After some moment of being rude, selfish, or weak, either we are able to put it behind us, or the person who suffered at the result of our imperfection moves on. The reason for this is our ability to forget about it. We forget not because we have an imperfect hippocampus (our brain’s memory organ); it's actually an evolved solution. The ability to lose information allows new information to come in that is more relevant, more pertinent to an ongoing reality. Forgetting allows us to update.

And there lies the rub with impulsive JPEGs and reckless inkings. They stick around. They circumvent and interfere with the brain’s normal ability to take in new information by providing a constant reminder of old news. In doing so, they strongly influence other people’s perspective of us as individuals. We remain almost permanently the person we were at that singular event in the past, instead of who we are now, or who we will be in the future.

This “moment permanence” is only going to become more of an issue in the future. As technology moves forward and we move closer to the realization of a “quantified self,” in which nearly everything about us is documented, our past selves will conflict with and even impede our future selves more and more. It will inevitably lead to more demands for embarrassing explanations and awkward, fruitless job interviews. 

However, we are already witnessing sections of the internet evolve to foster forgetting, through the wider use of intentionally impermanent texting apps like SnapChat and Cyberdust, where content disappears after just 20 seconds. Hopefully, in addition to the web changing to become more like our brains, our attitudes will also evolve. As we each face having more moments of our lives captured, it should force us out of a black-and-white perspective, toward one that is a more forgiving gray.

That one moment you thought that really cutting loose was a good idea may have been an extremely rare outburst for the straight-laced person you typically are. Instead of having that one moment forever mark you as a drunk or a promiscuous person, perhaps an emerging revelation that none of us is perfect every moment will make us more tolerant.

Here is hoping—cheers!

Via Psychology Today

How To See All The Companies That Are Tracking You On Facebook — And Block

Facebook is a great utility if you want to stay in touch with friends and family, share photos, and see what other people are up to in their lives.

It's free to use, of course, but that doesn't mean it comes without a price. If you're using Facebook, you're giving the company a ton of information about yourself which it is selling to advertisers in one form or another.

And most people forget that when they download or sign up for an app or website using their Facebook login, that they're giving those companies a direct look into their Facebook profiles and some of their personal data. That can often include your email address and phone number, but frequently also your current location.

If you're worried about your privacy, you can do two things: Opt out of ad tracking and — and this is sometimes rather alarming if you haven't done it in a while — look up the list of app companies that are logged in to your Facebook account.

We'll deal with the ads first, as that is easiest.

You can comfort yourself a little bit with the knowledge that the ads being targeted at you are coming anonymously and in bulk, at everyone who is in some way similar to you. They aren't literally being targeted at you personally, even if it feels that way. If you really don't like them, you can opt-out of most of them by following the instructions here and here.

If you want to go even further, by limiting the ad cookies that advertisers use to track Facebook users across the rest of the web, follow these instructions here and read this backgrounder here.

Now for the apps. That requires a bit more digging.

Here is the summary of where you need to go in Facebook's settings to see which apps are plugged in to your account: Settings > Apps > Apps you use > Show All Apps > Edit/delete. A more detailed set of instructions HERE and Photo follows:

Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamic ......

This study says Facebook will loose 80 percent of its users.

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Facebook's growth is set to come to an abupt halt, just as an infectious disease spreads rapidly and suddenly dies, according to a new report.

Researchers at Princeton University in the United States predict that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80pc of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.

This conclusion has been reached by comparing the adoption and abandonment dynamics of social networks to the dynamics that govern the spread of infectious disease.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," the reserachers wrote in their paper.

"Ideas are spread through communicative contact between different people who share ideas with each other. Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of 'immunity' to the idea."

Via telegraph

 

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/face...

How Facebook's New Machine Brain Will Learn All About You From Your Photos

Facebook poaches an NYU machine learning star to start a new AI lab that may very well end up knowing more about your social life than you do.

Facebook users upload 350 million photos onto the social network every day, far beyond the ability of human beings to comprehensively look at, much less analyze. And so that’s one big reason the company just hired New York University (NYU) machine learning expert Yann LeCun, an eminent practitioner of an artificial intelligence (AI) technique known as “deep learning.” As director of Facebook’s new AI laboratory, LeCun will stay on at NYU part time, while working from a new Facebook facility on Astor Place in New York City.

“Yann LeCun's move will be an exciting step both for machine learning and for Facebook, which has a lot of unique social data,” says Andrew Ng, who directs the Stanford Artifical Intelligence Laboratory and who led a deep-learning project to analyze YouTube video for Google. “Machine learning is already used in hundreds of places throughout Facebook, ranging from photo tagging to ranking articles to your newsfeed. Better machine learning will be able to help improve all of these features, as well as help Facebook create new applications that none of us have dreamed of yet.” What might those futuristic advances be? Facebook did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

“The dream of AI is to build full knowledge of the world and know everything that is going on.”

Aaron Hertzman, a research scientist at Adobe whose specialties include computer vision and machine learning, says that Facebook might want to use machine learning to see what content makes users stick around the longest. And he thinks cutting-edge deep learning algorithms could also be useful in gleaning data from Facebook’s massive trove of photos, which numbers roughly 250 billion.

“If you post a picture of yourself skiing, Facebook doesn’t know what’s going on unless you tag it,” Hertzmann says. “The dream of AI is to build full knowledge of the world and know everything that is going on.”

To try to draw intelligent conclusions from the terabytes of data that users freely give to Facebook every day, LeCun will apply his 25 years of experience refining the artificial intelligence technique known as “deep learning,” which loosely simulates the step-by- step, hierarchical learning process of the brain. Applied to the problem of identifying objects in a photo, LeCun’s deep learning approach emulates the visual cortex, the part of the brain to which our retina sends visual data for analysis.

By applying a filter of just a few pixels over a photo, LeCun’s first layer of software processing looks for simple visual elements, like a vertical edge. A second layer of processing deploys a filter that is a few pixels larger, seeking to assemble those edges into parts of an object. A third layer then builds those parts into objects, tested by hundreds of filters for objects like “person” and “truck,” until the final layer has created a rich visual scene in which trees, sky and buildings are clearly delineated. Through advanced training techniques, some “supervised” by humans and others “unsupervised,” the filters, or “cookie cutters,” dynamically improve at correctly identifying objects over time.

Quickly performing these many layers of repetitive filtering makes massive computational demands. For example, LeCun is the vision expert on an ongoing $7.5 million project funded by the Office of Naval Research to create a small, self-flying drone capable of traveling through an unfamiliar forest at 35 MPH. Unofficially known as “Endor.tech,” and profiled in Popular Science in 2012, the robot will run on a customized computer known as an FPGA, capable of roughly 1 trillion operations per second.

“I’ll take as many [operations per second] as I can get,” LeCun said at the time.

That robot will analyze 30 frames per second of video images in order to make real-time decisions about how to fly itself through a forest at 35 MPH. It’s not hard to imagine similar algorithms used to “read” the videos that you upload to Facebook, by examining who and what is present in the scene. Instead of targeting ads to users based on keywords written in Facebook posts, the algorithms would analyze a video of say, you at the beach with some friends. The algorithm might then learn what beer you’re drinking lately, what brand of sunscreen you use, who you’re hanging out with, and guess whether you might be on vacation.

 

VIA Popular Science

 

Source: http://www.popsci.com/article/gadgets/how-...

Jay Z Premieres 'Holy Grail' Video on Facebook

Jay Z premieres the new video for "Holy Grail" on Facebook today featuring Justin Timberlake and directed by Anthony Mandler.

He's first major artist to release a music video exclusively on Facebook for 24 hours. "Holy Grail" is a standout track on his Magna Carta Holy Grail album. In the clip, Jay watches a clip of Buster Douglas knocking out Mike Tyson and switches up the whole song. Timberlake shows up later in the video, too. The visuals are absolutely incredible.

Post by Jay Z.