Monthly Archives: March 2009

Content – Liberated

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capture

The recent rise-and-rise of Spotify indicates one thing to me: the liberation of content.  What do I mean by that?  I mean owning digital stuff on “hard” physical media that we can reach out and touch, and put in our bags, is on the way out.

Actually owning the hard drive that the data is stored on, or the DVD/Blue-Ray/CD/SD will be very early2000′s.   A friend of mine, not long out of college, has never, and will probably never, buy a CD or a DVD.  I still buy DVDs, but only because the alternative (movies-on-demand) doesn’t always offer the movies I actually want to see.  When I get home and unpack the disc, it’s a pain to actually get it up and running (made worse by having lost the DVD remote control).  I hate it, and the moment someone releases a competent iTunes for movies (aside from Sky, which I can’t get where I am), I’ll buy it.

So, my predictions are:

  • Spotify will do well until iTunes “liberates” their music
  • Music, Movies and Images will (and are) be the first content to be stored remotely to the user
  • Blue-Ray was a (very expensive and late) last-step in circular spinning discs
  • Cloud computing WILL take off, although storage for some time will be with “trusted” providers rather than just “out there somewhere”
  • The change will take longer than we hope, but less time than we expect (answers on a postcard if that makes sense)

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Posted in Television, Web

Connecting things that aren’t connected

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Humans tend to make connections between things, even when those connections don’t exist.  Our brains are constantly trying to rule-build and organise, and often get it wrong.

Today for a while, when a plane passed overhead (they do often where I am), the bulb on my desk lamp dimmed. I, of course, assumed the two events were related.  The fact is, planes passed over every couple of minutes, and the light only dimmed every half hour, and I’ve just now found it’s because I was kicking the cable under the table without knowing it.  They’re unconnected…

That’s what psychologists call an illusory correlation – the false connection of two things, based on data.   (it’s also a tongue-twister).

Sod’s law (Murphy’s Law) is a example – we tend to connect negative events, and ignore positive (or neutral) ones.  How often have you been driving along, only to be confronted at the top of a hill and round a bend with a truck that’s halfway across the road?  “Always happens at the top of a hill and round a bend, typical!” you’ll think.  Obviously, 99% of the time it doesn’t, but we’ll remember the times it does.

So why is this important?  Well, it usually isn’t, because we muddle along anyway.  It can get odd when unexplained events (lights in the sky) are connected with unconfirmed causes (UFOs from outer space).  Or when “there’s no smoke without fire”, which has probably convicted a fair number of innocent people. 

My interest is because at my company, Cognitive Match (of which Favy is now a part) we’re focussed on ways of making REAL connections in observed data.  And equally I guess uncovering the “illusory” ones…

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Posted in AI, data mining, Psychology, Statistics