Blogs / Science Not Fiction

Not surprisingly, the latest big trend in communication (social media) has spawned the latest big trend in market research: sentiment analysis, the art/science of using Internet and social media chatter to gauge public feeling about a company.

Consultants like Newssift, ScoutLabs, and Jodange use complex algorithms to scan keywords in remarks about corporations made on Twitter and Facebook, then categorize them as positive or negative via filters—the companies say they can even parse sarcasm, slang, and other linguistic nuances. Filters can sift through levels of positivity/negativity, intensity. Some can also identify more influential opinions from those social-media hubs and tastemakers. As the tech becomes increasingly sophisticated, it may become more prevalent in standard search engines or predict future developments like stock price fluctuations.

Companies are interested in measure online opinion, of course, because the perception of the company or its products can have a strong effect on its chances for success. They’ve also used the approach to sort out technical or customer service glitches.

More casual users who don’t want to sink money into a professional system can tap simpler versions like Tweetfeel, Twendz, and Twitrratr for topic-based opinions.

—Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

For those of you who couldn’t make it to San Diego last week, Discovermagazine.com and the National Academy of Sciences’ Science & Entertainment Exchange present our panel discussion on “Mad Science,” featuring Jaime Paglia (co-Executive Producer of Eureka), Kevin Grazier (Battlestar Galactica and Eureka science adviser), Jane Espenson (Dollhouse, Battlestar, Caprica, and lots more), Ricardo Gil da Costa (science adviser for Fringe), and Rob Chiappetta and Glenn Whitman (writers for Fringe).

If you don’t have  time to watch the video you can read recaps and quotes from the panel here, here, here, here and here.

Big thanks to Jennifer at SEE, to all of our panelists, and to the Bad Astronomer, who found time to moderate our panel while he wasn’t partying with Hollywood starlets (Phil – we kid because we love).

This morning, io9 demonstrated that in addition to putting out an awe-inspiring blog every day, they could also put on a mind-expanding Comic Con panel.  With no Hollywood celebrities and just a couple of special guests, our favorite sci-fi bloggers ran through the TV shows, movies, comics and books of the past year that “blew our minds without blowing up any giant robots.”

Here are a few of their recommendations:

Moon -Duncan Jones’s new movie topped the list for both Annalee Newitz and Meredith Woerner.  Like a lot of the works recommended by the panel, Moon explores what it means to be human in a rapidly approaching era where humanity can be technologically upgraded or artificially created (note: this is not a spoiler, the lead character realizes very early in the film that he is a clone).

Julian Comstock – In this novel, Robert Charles Wilson depicts a 22nd century American that has sunk into barbarism and theocracy.  In response, the hero undermines the regime in part through trying to popularize ideas about Darwin in a world that has forgotten about science.

Rest -  What if someone invented a pill that meant no one would ever have to sleep, with no adverse side effects?  Panel guest Bonnie Burton from StarWars.com picked the Devil’s Due comic Rest, which explores this idea and its implications on society, the environment and mental health.

Wonton Soup – James Stokoe’s comic, recommended by Graeme McMillan, investigates what humans would do if they had to be out in space for a really long time.  Apparently the answers are get high and cook alien recipes.

Infoquake – io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders picked a series of novels by David Louis Edelman.   In Edelman’s future, people can hack and upgrade their own bodies and brains, impacting human relations in both the literal and business senses of the phrase.

There’s a scene in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age in which a young hat-thief is being tried in the court of Judge Fang. The judge’s assistant enters the room at the start of the trial and ceremoniously unrolls a meter-by-meter square of paper on a low black table, and it becomes the center of action in the trial. The piece of paper is actually a display device that can access government cameras, graphs, and text, and can receive input from the user via finger-touch or a stylus. It is a most remarkable device and frankly, I’ve wanted one ever since.

It’s now looking like I might get one sooner than you’d think.

We seem to be striding toward that particular future with impressive speed. One could make the case that laptops represent our first faltering steps in that direction, but I say Amazon’s Kindle represents the next leap forward. Wafer thin and with  its low battery consumption and low-eye-strain reflective surface, it marks a huge leap toward blending the benefits of paper with those of computers. But that’s only the beginning of what’s happening out there in Science Land.

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Over on 80 beats, my colleague Eliza Strickland points out some interesting research on an autonomous laboratory. A group of four networked computers connected to a range of lab equipment was left alone to tease out some aspects of yeast genetics. The computers came up with some hypotheses about how various genes operated, then came up with experiments to test these hypotheses out. The upshot was a number of minor, but worthwhile, advances in our knowledge of yeast biology.

Teaching a computer how to learn is a perennial topic in artificial intelligence research, and one that’s long been mined in science fiction. The moment when the computer demonstrates it has learned how to learn is usually a pretty significant moment in any story it’s in, not least because it is one of the Laws Of Science Fiction that once a computer has started to learn, it will continue to learn at an ever accelerating rate. (A corollary of this Law states that if the computer isn’t already self-aware, sentience will arise by the end of the next chapter or act at the very latest.) Interestingly, the “My God! It’s learnt how to learn!” moment seems to be dwelt on by movie and TV shows (Wargames, Colossus, Terminator 3) much more than it crops up in literary science fiction. In literary science fiction, artificial intelligence is often simply presented as fait accompli. So does anyone have recommendations for a good literary treatment of the birth of an A.I.? (Frederic Brown’s 1954 short-short story “Answer” is of course taken as a given classic of the genre).

On this day in 1951, Univac 1, the world’s first commercial computer was delivered to the United States Census Bureau. Until the microcomputer revolution in the 1980s, the Univac 1 provided the archetype for the general public’s idea of what a computer looked like—big, brooding, complicated, and covered in countless flashing lights. Later generations of hackers called these lights “blinkenlights.” Blinkenlights once came in handy, by letting engineers see the state of various subsystems as the computer worked in real time–and letting visitors know that here was a big powerful computer.

Blinkenlights have turned up in countless movies, lurking in the lairs of James Bond villains, or heralding the destruction of mankind in movies like Colossus and Wargames. In general, computers have long since become too fast for blinkenlight displays to be of much use in debugging problems, but both movie makers and computer enthusiasts have had a hard time letting go of these iconic symbols of computer power—the Jurassic Park movie is a classic example their combined efforts, where a Connection Machine supercomputer ripples with red LED blinkenlights. The Connection Machine used tens of thousands of processors working in parallel, and ostensibly the red lights were used to check on the status of processors and run various diagnostics, but everyone in the business knew the lights were really just there to look awesome.

Ever since Knight Rider had it’s reboot a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been watching KITT grow into himself as an independent entity. This week he chafed at taking orders from Michael Knight, and the pair had two pretty hilarious spats. But late in the episode, KITT showed off his new autonomy by disobeying orders and taking control of another vehicle. In this instance, Michael had been arrested by a Drug Enforcement Agency agent, and was on his way to jail. KITT hacked into the agent’s car’s  “RoamStar” satellite system to take over the controls of the car and drive it in such a way that Michael was able to escape.

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