All posts by Paul Raven

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Viral media governed by Game Theory?

We talk a lot about the “viral” way in which trends and topics spread around the intermatubez; it’s a useful metaphor because it’s one we have a precedent for. But as with with most things, it’s not quite so simple as all that; Ars Technica reports on research that shows meme transmission can be modelled pretty successfully by the confusing (yet surprisingly ubiquitous) principles of Game Theory:

The popularity growth of things like websites or gadgets is often described as being similar to an epidemic: a network with a lot of connections between people increases exposure and then adoption, as do links stretching between dissimilar groups. When the trend in question spreads to a node with a lot of connections (like a celebrity), its popularity explodes. While this is fitting for some cases, in others it’s an oversimplification—a person’s exposure to a trend doesn’t always guarantee they will adopt it and pass it on.

“It is not only the intrinsic value of a new technology (or other types of innovation) that makes it attractive. It is also the number of friends who have adopted it,” Amin Saberi, one of the authors, told Ars. In instances where there is incentive to make the same decision as people around you, the authors of the paper argue, the spread of innovations may instead follow rules of game theory, which differ in big ways from the rules of viral or epidemic trends.

[…]

The model seems to apply less to individual pieces of content, where simple exposure is enough to create huge growth. On the other hand, it could explain, for instance, loyalty to sites that distribute that content, like Digg and Reddit, or to particular genres of memes. The authors say it also crops up in choices that influence social connections, like the choice between voting Republican or Democratic, or to adoption of technology, like choosing between Verizon and AT&T.

Dr. Saberi gave the following example: “the reason I am using Facebook as opposed to another social network is not just its quality… it is also because I have a lot of friends who are using it”; he notes this could also apply to operating systems. Likewise, while there are many reasons to choose one cell phone carrier or another, features like free calls or texts within a network can influence a group of friends to migrate to the same network as each other.

Far from a complete explanation, then, but still an insight into the complexity of emergent behaviours at societal levels.

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Projected success for holographic telepresence

The Guardian strikes back with a another sci-fi pop-culture reference in a new-tech article; this time the holographic projections from Star Wars: A New Hope get the nod as the “just like that” examplar of new research from the University of Arizona:

Until now, scientists have been able to create holograms that display static 3D images, but creating video has not been easy. Two years ago, Peyghambarian’s team demonstrated a device that was able to refresh a holographic image once every few minutes – it took around three minutes to produce a single-colour image, followed by a minute to erase that image before a new one could be written into its place.

In his latest project, Peyghambarian’s team reduced that image refresh time to two seconds. They also showed it was possible to use full colour and demonstrated parallax, whereby people looking at the image from different angles will see different views of the image, just as if they were looking at the original object.

Note, however, this is not a true 3D hologram:

Whereas the image of Princess Leia in Star Wars is projected in three-dimensional space, the new technology uses a 2D screen to create the illusion of 3D. At the heart of Peyghambarian’s system is his team’s invention of a new type of plastic known as a photorefractive polymer. The material, which is used to make the screen, allows the researchers to record and erase images quickly.

Naturally enough, the predicted market for this technology is telepresence for business meetings… which is the very same market that was meant to have made videophones ubiquitous by now. Given the amount of hardware and expense involved in this holographic telepresence set-up, I figure videotelephonics and/or metaverse meetings will get taken up much more quickly, if at all.

Still kinda cool, though.

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Location, location, location

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Why would anyone in their right mind consider building a server farm in deepest darkest Siberia, or the middle of the Indian Ocean? Possibly because the intersection of geography and information flow means such locations would give you a slight yet crucial edge in the high-stakes imaginary-money game of high-frequency trading [via SlashDot]:

The insight of the MIT researchers, Alexander Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer, is that some automated traders–or at the very least, their server farms–will be best positioned in-between certain exchanges. Since some trading strategies capitalize on price fluctuations between separate exchanges in different parts of the world, the optimally located server will receive information from those exchanges at precisely the same moment, gaining that millisecond advantage over the competitor. In some cases that pefect location is the midpoint between the two exchanges, but not always–it depends on whether the exchanges’ prices move at the same speed or not.

Wissner-Gross and Freer rounded up the locations and price-speeds on the 52 largest global exchanges, and plotted a map of the ideal locations for traders who would want to be perfectly positioned between any given pair. The map, which appears today in an article in the journal Physical Review E, dictates that some traders’ servers will be ideally positioned in central Africa, others in the remotest forests of Canada, others in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and still others in Siberia. This all assumes, of course, a proper infrastructure in place–in the short term, Freer tells Fast Company, it might make more sense to approximate these locations, rather than invest in installing a server farm underneath the ocean.

Brilliant… yet another way for compulsive gamblers to squeeze more profits out of the aether (not to mention shades of Ian McDonald’s Dervish House – which, if you haven’t read it yet, should be added to your stack of pending reads with immediate effect). But according to New Scientist, this might actually represent the last possible way to grasp advantage in the automated trading system:

“This shows that the technological arms race to extract every penny from high-frequency mechanical arbitrage will soon reach its ultimate limits,” says physicist and hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, based in Paris. “Maybe the buzz around high-frequency trading will then calm down.”

We can live in hope, I guess.

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Welcome to Uncanny Valley

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Thanks to regular reader Sarah Brand for the tip-off on this one; Tokyo-based entertainment company Kokoro has been uploading videos of Actroid F, their android actress, and they’re simultaneously impressive and creepy. Voila:

See what I mean? I’ve spoken to hotel desk staff and shop assistants less realistic than that! (Which probably says a lot about my shopping and travel habits; so it goes.)

[ Bonus aside for the rock fans in the readership, who may have noticed the album-name allusion in the title of this post: maybe the not-really-entirely-Kyuss-actually cash-in reformation could get an android stand-in for Josh Homme? I’d be more interested in catching the shows if they did, to be honest… ]

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EU demanding your “right to be forgotten”

Shades of Eric Shmidt’s deniable childhoods in the news that the European Commission wants to enshrine the right of every citizen to be “forgotten” by the titans of the web, should they so choose. Take it away, Ars Technica:

As part of its newly outlined data protection reform strategy, the EU says it believes individuals have a “right to be forgotten.” That is, people should be able to give informed consent to every site or service that processes their data, and they should also have the right to ask for all of their data to be deleted. If companies don’t comply, the EU wants citizens to be able to sue.

“The protection of personal data is a fundamental right. We need clear and consistent data protection rules,” EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement.

[…]

The new guidelines focus on more than just the right to be forgotten—the EU wants to cover most aspects of an individual’s personal data and how it can be used. For example, rules for how someone’s personal information can be used in a police or criminal justice setting will be changed, as well as how citizens can securely transfer their data to places outside the EU.

A laudable sentiment, but one which I rather suspect will be impossible to enforce in any realistic way. But hey, at least the right to sue will keep all those poor starving lawyers in work, right?