Here is something new from Gigaom: “Stanford Researchers To Open Source Model They Say Has Nailed Sentiment Analysis.”Richard Socher and a team from Stanford have created a computer program that can classify the sentiment of sentence with 85% accurately. They tested the model on movie reviews with a positive or negative tone. Even more amazing is that Socher and his team are making the project available to everyone. Why not capitalize on it instead? After all, companies have been trying for years to analyze social media and would pay the big bucks for said technology.
What makes Sucher’s project different from other sentiment software is that is reads whole sentences rather than just words.
“The team then built a new model it calls a Recursive Neural Tensor Network (it’s an evolution of existing models called Recursive Neural Networks), which is what actually processes all the words and phrases to create numeric representations for them and calculate how they interact with one another. When you’re dealing with text like movie reviews that contain linguistic intricacies, Socher explained, you need a model that can really understand how words play off each other to alter the meaning of sentences. The order in which they come, and what connects them, matters a lot.”
Socher hopes to reach a 95% accuracy, but the technology will never be 100% accurate because of jargon, idioms, odd word combinations, and slang. The project is making landmark strides in machine learning, logical reasoning, and grammatical analysis.
It means better news for online translators and speech technology, but commercial sentiment analytics vendors may see a decline in their profits.
The public sphere has been effectively stripped of everything but corny, irritatingly hammy political theater.
All we have left in the U.S. is a deeply impoverishing Political Theater of the Absurd. Policy, theory and governance have all been reduced to competing stage performances in the Theater of the Absurd. The actors are transparently given to farcical overacting in exaggerated dramas drained of meaning; they proceed through the cliched motions as if the audience hadn't seen the same charades overplayed dozens of times before.
“Government shutdown” and “debt ceiling” may have engaged audiences starved for entertainment in a bygone age, but now they exemplify a theater that is so impoverished it can only re-stage tired formulaic dramas with a savage appetite for incompetence and buffoonery.
Born in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, in 1988, I've started my academic career at the faculty of philosophy at the Saint-Petersburg State University, working on the concepts of “chaos” and “miracles” (from 2005 to 2010). In 2008-2010 I was studying political sociology at the French University College (CUF) where I won a scholarship to make my Master research in Paris, at the University Paris 5. I got my Master degree in 2011 and spent one year in my native city, taking part in the anti-Putin movement and making a fieldwork about the usage of mobile applications by russian activists. In summer 2012 I've got a scholarship for PhD studies and entered the Center of Sociology of Innovations (MinesParisTech), famous for its actor-network approach. At the CSI I am studying the process of social and technical innovation experimented and deployed within several arenes of mobilization in Russia, France and Canada and I am especially focusing on the practices of usage of mobile applications as tools of citizen counterpower, citizen expertise and control over the public services.
„Knowledge is power“ is the credo of enlightened modernism. However, Michel Foucault proclaims that whoever is in power determines which knowledge prevails in society, and ultimately this is the only knowledge that we have access to. It is certain that knowledge and power are closely interrelated, and that power relations in a society heavily depend on who has access to which knowledge, and on who defines which knowledge is „right“. New media technologies, however, offer new possibilities, not only to make information accessible to the public at large, but also to allow many people to participate in the generation of knowledge, for example through Wikipedia.
Responsible, independent media and an education system that does not breed people as consumers but teaches them to evaluate information and to participate responsibly in the provision of knowledge, are essential for democracy. In politics secrecy is becoming more difficult because responsible citizens want to know what their governments are doing. Disclosure? – Provided by Wikileaks, if necessary. Since Edward Snowden's leaks, intelligence agencies have to publicly justify themselves as well: Should they be abolished, or incorporated as “Open Source Intelligence Agencies” in our interaction-driven information society?
Offshore Leaks has released secret tax haven bank account details, WikiLeaks was responsible for the disclosure of politically explosive classified documents, while Edward Snowden exposed intelligence agencies and private businesses that were spying extensively on respectable citizens. These are all vivid examples of the ambivalence of new technologies. On the one hand they can ensure transparency of financial flows and power relations, as well as facilitate new forms of democracy, while on the other hand they can be exploited for total surveillance, which would bring an end to the human right to privacy. This ambivalence also applies to Open Hardware blueprints, Open Materials and 3D printing for material production, with the help of which components and machines of all kinds can be self-built – including weapons.
Free software was the beginning of the ‘open movement'. The founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, realized early, that whoever has dominion over software can exercise control over the dissemination of information, and impede technical innovation; in short, gain enormous power. He therefore concluded that all software source-codes must be free and open to allow all people to adapt programs to specific needs, and to ensure quick detection of bugs and rapid interception of espionage operations. From this insight, the step to Open Hardware was not far. Blueprints for the construction of equipment and machinery are becoming freely accessible so that anyone could recreate them without too much effort. In the future, 3D-printing will probably become available for an increasing number of people, thus fostering resource-saving, need-oriented production.
The spectrum of Open-initiatives is growing steadily: OpenStreetMap is working on a free world map. Open Government Data allows comprehensive public scrutiny of governments. Open Democracy projects are working on ways to realise direct participation of the public in political decision-making. With the help of Open Media and Open Spectrum, information can be disseminated worldwide and in real time, independently of the established mass media. Open Science advocates for the disclosure of research processes and outcomes to promote scientific and technological innovation. Creative Commons licenses are being considered for seed, to allow people to feed themselves with self-determination – also in view of climate change and Peak Everything – through the preservation of crop diversity and the development of ‘new' heirloom varieties – liberties that go against the interests of big business. All of these fields of the “Open” philosophy have one idea in common: that the wisdom of the many would lead to better results than those achieved by experts and governments. In addition, the new technologies also facilitate new forms of collaboration and co-creation beyond economic market and wage labor, which could be the beginning of a new economic system. Over and above, all of these developments challenge the foundations of existing power structures.
In contrast to all of this stands the fact that policy-making processes are increasingly closed to the public, and many of the key decisions are made in committees that are not democratically elected. Business and official secrecy prevents public scrutiny. At the same time, our private lives are increasingly under surveillance. For governments and corporations transparency means mass surveillance. Their own activities are supposed to be secret, while ours are intended to be monitored and recorded as accurately as possible, to facilitate control over the public and to turn our data into money. The same technologies, therefore, enable either self-empowerment, solidarity and democracy, or total control, exploitation and oppression. The Elevate Festival sets out to explore this ambiguous terrain of Openness, and investigates how society might be affected, should Open Everything become a reality.
Phi Beta Iota: This is important not as a recommendation of a rotten book (it properly skewers the author) but rather for its utility in pointing out that most successful authors are themselves captives of the very goliath we seek to put down. Like CNN anchors, they are corrupt shills for the status quo ante, doing all they can to distract and mislead, rather than spark the creation of public intelligence in the public interest.
Something’s awry when fewer than three riders on a metropolitan train car are thumbing through Blinkor Outliers, two of Gladwell’s earlier collections. Moreover, suburban mega-stores such as Costco, Target and Walmart devote entire displays to each new addition to Gladwell’s canon.
I’ve never met Gladwell, but through his writing and speaking, he comes across as incredibly pleasant. Perhaps he has better evolved brain chemistry than the rest of us.
With his move from TheWashington Postto The New Yorker in 1996, Gladwell was cast as a literary wonder boy, a gifted explainer, enthusiastic to find real men and women who substantiate statistics. Now 50, he still looks like a teaching assistant (he wore jeans, sneakers and a sportcoat during this recent David and Goliath-themed TED talk). Even his name has a pair of calming adjectives — I can picture a woman in Lamaze class being instructed to inhale (hold, two, three), and exhale, “Glad-well.”
The most common publishing refrain is probably “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” which is odd since book publishers tend to appreciate good grammar. Nevertheless, I’m tired of the Gladwell formula.
