Serendipity35

I read that the American rock band Kings of Leon is getting in on NFTs (non-fungible tokens). They are not the first. I looked into this term which I was not familiar with and found that the artist Grimes sold a bunch of NFTs for nearly $6 million and an NFT of LeBron James making a historic dunk for the Lakers garnered more than $200,000. The auction house Christie's got bids in the millions for the artist Beeple. 

NFT (sometimes pronounced niff-tees)stands for "non-fungible token" meaning a token that you can't exchange for another thing of equal value. Fungibility is the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type. Fungible assets simplify the exchange and trade processes, as fungibility implies equal value between the assets.One comparison I found said to consider that you can exchange a $20 bill for two $10 bills. They are fungible. But an NFT is one of a kind.

These NFTs are used to create verifiable digital scarcity. They also give digital ownership. They seem to be used with things that require unique digital items like crypto art, digital collectibles, and online gaming.

This goes back to blockchain which has become an established way to provide proof of authenticity. Blockchain gets most of its attention because of its use with cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin. Ownership is recorded on a blockchain which is a digital ledger.

NFTs use Ethereum, a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin.

We heard recently that Elon Musk bought a lot of Bitcoin and will accept it as payment for his Tesla vehicles, and other vendors accept cryptocurrencies as payment. But NFTs are unlike cryptocurrencies because you can't exchange one NFT for another in the same way that you would with dollars. Its appeal is that each is unique and acts as a collector’s item that can’t be duplicated. They are rare by design, like limited editions and prints. 

And now, with music, proponents say that NFTs could help artists struggling with digital piracy, low streaming royalty rates and a lack of touring revenue from the last year of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions.

A recent episode of the PBS program NOVA took me back to my undergraduate statistics course. It was a course I didn't want to take because I have never been a math person and I assumed that is what the course was about. I was wrong. 

The interesting episode is on probability and prediction and its approach reminded me of the course which also turned out to be surprisingly interesting. Program and course were intended for non-math majors and the producers and professor focused on everyday examples.

I suggest you watch the NOVA episode. You will learn about things that are currently in the news and that you may not have associated with statistics, such as the wisdom of crowds, herd immunity, herd thinking and mob thinking.

For example, the wisdom of crowds is why when a contestant on a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire type of programs asks the audience and out of a few hundred people 85% answer "B," then there's an excllent chance that "B" is the correct answer. And larger samples get more accurate. Why is that?

One of the things I still recall from that class that the program highlighted was the law of large numbers. The law of large numbers states that as a sample size grows, its mean gets closer to the average of the whole population. It was proposed by the 16th century, mathematician Gerolama Cardano but was proven by Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli in 1713.

It works for many situations from the stockmarket to a roulette wheel. I recall that we learned about the "Gambler’s Fallacy." The fallacy is that gamblers don't know enough math, or statistics. They stand by the wheel and see that red has won once and black has now won 5 times in a row. Red is due to win, right? Wrong. The red and black is the same as a coin flip. The odds are always 50/50. The casino knows that. They even list which color and numbers have come up on a screen to encourage you to believe the fallacy.

Flip the coin or spin the wheel 10 times and if could be heads or reds 9 times. Flip or spin 500 times and it will come out to be a lot closer to 50-50.

The "house edge" for American Roulette exists because there is that double zero on the wheel. That gives the house an edge of 2.70%. The edge for European roulette is 5.26%. 

Knowing about probability greatly increases your accuracy in making predictions. And more data makes that accuracy possible.

 

Julia for data visualization

A few friends and former students who are working as programmers have told me recently that I should write about Julia. Julia is not a person but a language. One person called this "the new Python" while another said it was the "Python killer."

Python is the so-far-unchallenged leader of AI programming languages and is used by almost 90% of data scientists, but it is probably not the future of machine learning. Programming languages, like all languages, fall out of favor and sometimes die. There is not much demand for the COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC that was being taught when I was an undergrad.

Julia is faster than Python because it is designed to quickly implement the math concepts like linear algebra and matrix representations. It is an open source project with more than a thousand contributors and is available under the MIT license with the source code available on GitHub.

I have learned that you don’t need to know programming to do some AI. There are no-code AI tools like Obviously.AI, but programming is necessary for some devlopment.

The home site for Julia is julialang.org which has a lot of information.

An article I read at pub.towardsai.net led me to investiagte a free online course on computational thinking at MIT that is taught using Julia.

This is not a course on programming with Julia but almost all data and AI courses are taught in Python (perhaps a few using R and other languages) so this is unique as a course. The course itself uses as its topic the spread of COVID-19.and includes topics on analyzing COVID-19 data, modeling exponential growth, probability, random walk models, characterizing variability, optimization and fitting to data. Through this topic the course teaches how to understand and model exponential functions. That has much broader application into financial markets, compound interest, population growth, inflation, Moore’s Law, etc.

As that article notes, right now searching jobs on LinkedIn for “Python Developer” will turn up about 23,000 results, so there is a market for that skill set now. Searching “Julia Developer” will return few results now. You can find a LinkedIn group for Julia developers, called “The Julia Language,” so interest is there and the jobs are beginning to appear. A Julia specialits now has a big advantage in that there are fewer people with that skillset for the jobs that are appearing. The predictions (always a dangerous thing) are that Julia has a big role to play in the data & AI industry.

Tech companies use “persuasive design” to get us hooked. Some psychologists say it’s unethical. Children are particularly susceptible to "hidden manipulation techniques," but lots of adults are also taken in by its use, especially in social media and advertising on the Internet. by companies like Facebook and Twitter. 

It is in front of our faces when we are getting notifications on our phone and even when that next episode or video on Netflix or YouTube loads itself as soon as we finish one.

Back in the 1970s, there were plenty of articles and theses written about the dangers of too much television affecting children. Kids have 10 times the amount of screen time now compared to just 2011. Of course, now we are talking about more screens than just the family TV set. They spend an average of 400 minutes using technology, according to Common Sense Media.

Media companies have been using behavioral science for decades to create products that we want to use more and more. Remember how the tobacco companies were sued for the ways they hooked people on cigarettes? Big tech uses persuasive technology which is a fairly new field of research based on studying how technology changes the way humans think and act.

Using persuasive design techniques, companies incorporate this research into games and apps. As soon as a child begins to move on to Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft apps, they have been pre-conditioned for specific behaviors. 

Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has warned that algorithms pushing us to catastrophic results, though critics will say that Apple itself is not free from using persuasive design.

Social media companies are being targeted for deliberately addicting users to their products for financial gain. Some design features, such as infinite scroll, are features that are seen as highly habit-forming. Along with features that may appear as a "plus", like notifications, they keep us on our devices and looking at advertising and clicking longer. They encourage the "fear of missing out" (FOMO).

The infinite scroll was a feature designed by Aza Raskin when he was working for Humanized - a computer user-interface consultancy. He now questions its use.

He is not alone. Leah Pearlman, co-inventor of Facebook's Like button, said she had become hooked on Facebook because she had begun basing her sense of self-worth on the number of "likes" she had. But Ms Pearlman said she had not intended the Like button to be addictive, and she also believes that social media use has many benefits for lots of people.

Defenders of persuasive tech say it can have positive effects. There are apps that remind/train people to take medicine on time or develop weight loss habits. But critics are concerned with persuasive design that is not intended to improve lifestyles but to keep people on their devices in order to sell.

A letter signed by 50 psychologists was sent to the American Psychological Association accusing psychologists working at tech companies of using “hidden manipulation techniques” and asks the APA to take an ethical stand on behalf of kids.