>> next authors discuss their books about technology. in her book, always on, naomi brown talks bet the influence of mobile technologies. then douglas rushkoff, and then the book, big data, looks at how information is being used to predict human behavior. >> american university professor anyway ohm -- naomi book is called "always on." >> host: american university

professor naomi baron. is technology changing the way we communicate? >> guest: yes and no. there's an assumption that technologies and computers, now mobile phones, are changing the way we write to each other, because we're suppose lid using all these abbreviations and acronyms and we're not using all that many there may be handful of these kinds of emoticons used but not nearly as many as the press would lead to us believe. what is changing the ways in which we read, the way we right. our social relationships are changing, and i'm going to suggest our personal individual psyches are changing as well. >> host: walk me through those. >> guest: let's start with how we read.

what's pretty clear is that when you're reading things on the screen, you don't do it to -- by screen, i moon whether it's a laptop or ereader or tablet commuter or mobile phone. you don't do it the same way as when you're reading hard copies. that's the subject of my next book. what we know already is that you tend to skim, or worse, you ten to use the find function, zero in on just that word that your professor said, i'd like you to write an essay on, and you look at that little snippet of what has been written and ignore the rest of the content. what we know from the work of psychologists is that when you read a regular web page, you don't go zip, zip, zip, but you do instead is an s-pattern. that first line of text you probably read most of. and the next one a little less,

and by the time you get to the bottom, forget about putting anything in the lower right-hand corner. nobody is reading it. and other people have said it's not exactly the s pattern but scattered. don't think anyone is going to read it. >> host: the f pattern. >> guest: big lines, an f is made -- then you have a shorter line, and then you have the anchor piece. that's the -- on this line. so we know that the kind of reading that we tend to do on a screen when it's a continuous text is different from what we're doing when we're surfing the web. wait a second. if you're reading on the same kind of twice you use for surfing the web, we tend to read, whether it's withering heights or a biology textbook or the newspaper, we read it with the same mindset that we do the thing wes skim through or the term, power browsing, has been used to describe how we actually read. so that how we read.

how do we write? because we're not reading a lot of continuous texts, we're writing shorter and short are things. look at the publishers today. they'll tell you we don't want the 90,000, 100,000 word books like the one i wrote. we want the shorter stuff. a lot of publishers are coming out with things they called stanford short. this is something like 30,000, 40,000 words. stephen king is coming out with things he is selling for 99 cents on amazon. we're changing our notion what is to read and changing the notion of what it means to write bought our reader are not reading a lot of stuff. then there are other things. you tack something like spelling. well, remember spellcheck? doesn't do well on homonyms, but we're changing our notions of whether we care about spelling or not. people who use these

technologies are accused of about carrying about punctuation. actually you can find some pattern. i did staff study on instant messages. you want to ask a question, you use a question mark. if you want to make statement, you don't put a period in. if you have two sentences you put the period in after the first sentence but not after the last sentence because it's the end of the transmission. so there are patterns we use. they're just not what we're taught in gramar school. >> host: but computer programs are also automatically putting in periods now, so you just -- all yo you have to do is space twice. >> guest: you do have to space twice, and -- but one of the things is happening is we're changing our notions what it means to be an author. these new computer technologies, on your cell phone or ipad or laptop, are making is write a great deal more than we used to.

but we also have a greater sense of we can be informal and we have a greater sense that people don't really care if we make mistakes. we don't want to look like fools but no longer judged as fools if we get in the punctuation or spelling wrong or make a gram grammatical mistake, because option you read it, it's gone. we don't feel this is durable, long-lasting text that someone will look at and say, wait a second, you made a mistake here. >> host: professor baron, the boom is "always on." talking about reading and writing. what about the "whatever" generation. what is that? >> guest: a term i came up with because i've been teaching in universities for a good long time and had to listen to students -- not so much now but a few years back keep saying, when you'd ask a question, whatever.

it just doesn't matter what the answer it. you have two people trying to figure out where you want to go for lunch and we would say, i don't care, whatever. that's the kind of attitude i see developing in an awful lot of our writing. namely, we don't think it matters how we write. and i need to cough, i'm sorry. what do we mean by, it doesn't matter? if you don't believe somebody's going to read what you write again, then if you make in mistakes, it's okay. but it gets a little dicer than that. it used to be argued there were standards of grammar. you can talk about grammar and spelling -- and that who you were, how you were perceived by other people, depend upon whether you used grammar correctly. the story i love to tell is when i first started teaching, i'm a

linguist, and i would be asked what due you do, and i say, i teach length with sticks and they're like, i better watch my grammar they don't say that to me anymore. they say, oh, that's cool, because we have seasons that -- have a sense that the rules of language don't matter so much. so if you want to say everybody raised -- what is the word that goes with hand? his hand? his or her hand? their hand? everyone is singular. their is plural. as a length wisconsin i was raised to believe there are rules of language. the man noam chomsky got us thinking about how you talk about what people know. their length with stick competence, so i knew that everybody who is native speaker of a language has a level of competence, knows the difference

between what is grammatical and not, and this is the model we worked with for many decades. so you like to think people would be consistent in the way they speak and would care whether it's everybody raised their hand or everybody raided his or her hand, but when you actually talk with people, they say, whatever. why are you so hung up on this? it doesn't matter. and then you go to the next step and say, just for the record, which one is correct? and they say, i don't know. there's a whole model we have had in the linguistic language, what is your way of speaking, i'm finding that people don't care as much. in part it's because language has become far more informal so we speak, we write the way we speak rather than having a different register. wright has to be all corrected and speech can be informal.

and we're speaking increasingly informally and doesn't matter to us anymore. the new technologies for communicating, the instant messages and the chats and the blogs and the ims, and the sms text, are great avenues for not caring, because we think nobody is going to look at this again name it's like speech, you say it, it's gone. >> host: do you attach a value judgment to the changing way we read and write? is it good, bad? >> guest: if i'm being a good look length wisconsin i would say, it's a value judgment. language changes. but here's where we need to think twice. if you don't have a love of the language, and the appreciation for its possibility, and the appreciation for its nuance, it's what could i do that is different from the way anyone else has said it, then you're losing out on something as a

writer of the language. and i think one of the problems is we're writing so much -- the term i like to use is flooding the script. do we think about what we write? you ask any professional writers, automatic drafts? oh, seven or 12, as opposed to, you dash things off and it doesn't matter. then there's the question of what it means to be a reader. if you are reading, moby dick on your mobile people, -- mobile phone, you're reading when you're bored and you're afraid somebody might come and speak with you. a lot of the use of mobile phones, whether it's looking for facebook updates or reading "the new york times" or whether it's reading a novel, a lot of that is done to avoid speaking with other people. we have data to show people use

their mobile phones not because -- they sometimes pretend to speak. they just want to avoid other people. americans do it more than anybody else. so, if people have the notion that reading is just sort of this one-off activity rather than you sitting and thinking about it and you're by yourself and it's leisurely and i don't care you an know tate a book. they're not going back to a book they once read or bought it and said, you know what? i really should go back to that. i see it. it's staring at me. you may have 100 books on your kindle do you thumb through them them and say, what haven't i read? so the whole relationship of what read could go be, i worry it's changing because the devices are making it less easy for us to happen upon things we want to read and for us to reflect on what we actually have

in front of our noses. >> host: professor, you touched on this, but is being always on changing our human interaction? >> guest: unfortunately, you betcha. okay. i tell a story about the amish in pennsylvania. an interview about the fact that the watchish do not allow telephones in their houses. and these days because the watchish do business and they have a little white house where you keep the mobile phone but it's not allowed in the house. why not? as the gentleman who was interviewed said, because if we have the phone take precedence over a face-to-face

relationship, -- his words -- what kind of people do we become? we care more about something that is not here with us, then the person is with us, and what we see over and over and over again, and the studies we do is that you and i are walking down the street and chatting and your phone rings. you take the call or get a buzz knowing you have the text. and we know the other people, however much they like you, feels left out. we know these kinds of devices have a lot of social problems attached to them. i'll give you one other. what can we do with these devices, whether it's an 0 computer or im, mobile phone, facebook, you can block people. so in eastbound messaging if i don't want you to see -- this is a real story of a student who didn't want his mom to say the messages he was putting up. he would block her, and she would worry, is he sick, dead?

no, he just wanted to have his fun. you can block people. you can do what i call control the volume. think of the old fashion evidence volume knob on your level of communication. on facebook, can defriend you. in relationships and we're walking down the street and i don't want to see you, might across the street and you might come over and say, hey, hello, and i'm going to have to learn socially to deal with it. with the new technology, we're able to block people in various ways, and i worry about the kinds of social impact that has upon us. i also worry about the fact that we feel we must be connected to people. my students worry inordinately if they haven't gotten back to someone immediate limit maybe they'll be shunned. you don't get to go to dinner because you didn't answer fast enough. so many of them feel driven like hamsters on wheels that they

must be on, but they'll tell you they don't want to be. it's not good for us. >> host: that's how i affects our psyche. when you want to be always on or we don't want to be always on but feel compelled? >> guest: we feel conflicted. so, part of the problem is, we recognize that always being available to others, or doing something to distract yourself, is not necessarily a good thing. a quick little story. i was giving a lecture yesterday. a group of students were taking a course on digital citizenship. that's are all heavily wired kinds of undergraduates. most of them had a computer in front of them, a laptop or an ipad. so i was talking about an article written in the atlantic monthly called, is facebook making us lonely? so then i got them into little groups and had them ask questions of one another and so forth. one of the questions i posed

was, if you were teaching a class today -- mind you, this is a sea of computer and ipads -- if you were teaching a class today would you want your students to be able to use these technologies in class? and they said, no. even the ones who had the computers sitting in front of them, they're own computer, said, no. i said, okay, why? because we're so distracted. we're not paying attention to what is happening. and we feel we always have to have something filling our minds. so, we go on and we surf and we check our status updates and we read old text messages, because we're not able to focus on one thing at a time. and that is not good for us. even though they're the ones who were doing it. >> host: what is your rule when it comes to electronic devices in class? >> guest: i have made some enemies of my colleagues here in american university because i have a policy, no what i call

teletechnology. no computers, no ipads. i don't care what the tablet is, no mobile phones. so students sometimes say to me, but you weren't sure how to spell this word. and i'm not the world's greatest speller and people have their names spelled ie and some ei or two ns at the end, and i may not get it right. and they could look it up, right? i don't care. if i get year of the publication wrong and i said 1963 and it's actually 1964, i'll correct it. what i want to do is have a conversation. i want to have shared minds thinking together, and what i will tell you issue block to an organization called the association of internet researchers. sober -- so internet and mobile phone issues. there was a threat do you let your students use these technologies? and it's the number of people who do research on this and say

no. i stay to my students, the reason you can't use these is because i know too much about system know how your mind gets torn. put them away and let's talk. >> host: with the new technologies we have -- well, first of all, there is any historical -- past historical trends similar to today's technology? >> guest: sure. so, you -- start with one question of, are we using these technologies to distract us? to save us from loneliness? to fill the time? to kill time? they did a study of mobile phones and one of the most common reasons people use them is to kill time because they have the space and time and don't want to think. so studies were done in the 1950s on talk radio, and i read about this in the book. talk radio? relates to what is happening --

but one of the questions was, who listens to talk radio? and the answer is, if you do psychological profiles of the people that listen to talk radio, it's people who are lonely. they're looking for communication but not so close that they actually have to participate in it themselves. so we know these deviceses can be used for those functions. another example on this notion of loneliness and being alone. study done by clifford knapp at stanford university his students on eight to 12-year-old girls looking at how they use social networking. and what they found is that the people who did the most amount of social networking, and who did the most amount of multitasking -- you have your phone and i have my phone and we're sort of together but not really -- tended to have the lowest self-esteem, tended to have just the lowest self-confidence.

and only -- this is an interesting piece to the study -- if you were an eight to 12-year-old girl who would look in the eye of the people you're talking with, which is really hard for teenagers, and preteenagers and a lot of adults -- but look people in the eye that would compensate for the social networking you did, and you didn't end up at least having low self-esteem and so forth. so, what we know is that technologies can attract people who may already not have the greatest self-esteem, may already be lonely and it's nothing different. it's just a new technology we're using as a way of distracting ourselves but probably with the same ill consequences. >> host: we're basically with the first generation now that has been raised entirely with computers and cell phones. are you finding it different in competency in your students in

are the more informed? less informed? >> guest: okay. there's someone who works at google named dan russell, and he has a concept he calls informasy. and he believes education needs to be geared -- he is not alone in this. people in lower and higher education are arguing the same thing, but we should be spending our efforts teaching people how to find stuff. how to find information. on the internet. and if you're dan russell at google. which is different from knowing things. so if i took all the electricity away, and in washington we often have no electricity, and i ask my student ifs your devices don't work, what do you know? and they said, not much. because i need to be able to find things. we have studies done by a psychologist, in which she said,

if you ask people to do a google search, and then later you ask them what they found, the they're better at remembering how they followed the search path than they are at remembering the content. so one thing that happens with these technologies -- and bless google. i couldn't live without it -- maybe i could. it's redefining what it means mo know. so if you have students that are raised -- people in education are saying we want you to be part of the 21st century generation so it's our fault as much as it is the technology's fault. we're raising a generation of people to believe that not. -- it's not what you -- it's how you can fine it. not what you know, who you are, if there's no electricity, that worries me incredibly. >> host: what's your view on

wikipedia? >> guest: we no there are faculty members who say over my dead body would i use wick speeda. wikipedia is fascinating. i did an analysis of the growth of encyclopedias, why they came to be in the first place. basically it was this explosion of, quote, knowledge of things we knew about in western europe and the 16th and 17th 17th century and people couldn't read everything so they started building encyclopedias, and then some wanted the common man to be able to read the enencyclopedia. wells hat a terrific idea. wikipedia has been very, very helpful. i use it? why? because when i put in a search term, thanks to collaboration between wells and google, wikipedia is the first hit.

didn't used to be. if gives me ideas, what to do research on. the question is, with any kind of research do you stop there? do you say, done? or do you say, i've learned something but now i need to learn it in department, and the problem is the lack of in-depth learning and lack of motivation for the in-depth learning. the lack of saying i could read a book -- yeah, we had libraries -- and so many libraries are now getting rid of the books and saying what you need to do is either read it as an ebook or as some kind of a file, and the problem with that is we lose the contemplation. we lose the hands-on of laying out five books and saying, this one says this, this one says something very different. when was it published? what die know about the awe their? that's what research used to be about and what we used to train students to do. the technology is not helping us

with that kind of teaching anymore. which is too our student's detriment and therefore to the society's detriment. >> host: who is studying linguist sticks -- linguistics today? >> guest: that term is defined so differently depending on which individual you're talking with, which institution, which country. we have studies of grammar and history of language. the biggest topic today is endangered languages. how many languages are there on earth? depend on what you define languages. 6,000-ish. how many languages are dying every day? meaning they're no longer any living speakers of the language? a bunch, again, depends on what you speak. people are projecting 50 years from now, instead of there being

6,000 languages there will be a thousand because for all kinds of social and political and economic especially reasons, speaking a language that very few people speak doesn't seem worth it. so, children are not learning the languages from their parents and so forth. so if you go to society meet little there are session on what to do about endangered languages. another big issue is it there a lingual -- used to be the language of the frogs but is there one language that pretty much we share amongst ours? it's said it used to be latin. then in the 18th century it was french. the germans wish it were german but it was french, and then it became english insuring part because of the british empire and then because of the staning of the united states during the 20th century, particularly after world war i and world war

ii. so a lot of people are asking, is one language better than any other, and should the brits or the americans be the ones to tell you how they should speak? are should people be able to define their language as they wish themself. the australian accent is very different should we lead people have their own autonomy with the way they speak in another big issue because it gets into what we call social rights of the speakers. are you going to tell me because i speak a version of english, it's not real enough and i have to do it a particular way? the whole movement towards whatever. the movement towards cultural diversity. has been one which says, i'm not going to judge your accent. 30 years ago we judged accents a lot. we don't judge them as much as we used to. we don't judge grammatical

mistakes. we're a much more international society. so how that plays out in terms of grammar rules and standards, that's one of the really interesting things. >> host: how that being always on affected us? >> guest: it's led to frustration we talked about earlier. it's always the misnomer. instant messaging. if you run eight or 12im chats -- i know people don't do instant messages as much as they used to, but if you're doing six or eight or ten of those at the same time, you're not doing them at the same time you do one and then another and then another. it's said that the reason that spelling and gramaries so bad is because we're sending this stuff out. a lot of people edit their im.

particularly if you're a teenage girl, they say i got this e-mail from guy x. this us how i'm going to respond, and they sit there and edit and edit before a response comes. okay? so, we don't actually take this instant as a call that we have to respond immediately, unless we're in a particular social group. now, social groups have always had ways of expressing and responding to insecurities before, and i don't mean insecurity in the bad sense. it's called growing up. so, if i send an e-mail to -- i want to answer right away to somebody and i don't get spoons right away, i might be unhappy but the person has the right to wait. if i send an im to someone and they don't answer right away, it doesn't matter what technology, the person has a right. so what has changed since i

wrote the book? more and more people are beginning to understand it's a problem to always be on. so you take -- look at something like nicholas carr. is google making us stupid? and then the article and then the book. you take people like william powers, who wrote a terrific book called holiday pamlet's blackberry." when he said you have to find time when you're not doing this. you be a human being and have social interaction. marion wolf in her book start worrying, do we read the same way? sitting down in your own sweet time and reading, what kind of people have we become? a lot of businesses that are now saying, there's going to be no e-mail on fridays because i actually want you to get some productive work done. it's better for your soul and better for our bottom line. and you see this the book on

distracted. more and more people are starting to recognize in a way they didn't ten years ago, that this may not be good for us, where this will go, i don't know. but to me. at least at the beginning. >> host: which devices do you own? do you ever turn them off? >> guest: do i ever turn them on is the question. okay. i have a laptop, needless to say, an ipad. i have -- my husband has a couple of ereaders which i borrow once in a while. i don't like to use ereader. i don't want to have 150 pain book be 400 pages because that's what they are on the kindle. i don't have a mobile phone. we used could joke any family that my mobile phone -- it was all turn off, and it was. and it still is. and the only reason i turn it on

now is because the ipad takes too long and warm up. and i only use it when i need it, and people say, but don't you study this stuff? don't you know? don't you and they and i say it's because i study this stuff that i want my sense of -- i say, do you know how long human kind has lived without having these devices? is there some emergency, i'll wait. it's probably okay. my husband takes him -- he'll come find me. but i don't need to live that way. and i have a much better blood pressure as a result. >> host: naomi baron, are you seeing changeness your students the way they communicate with you in the classroom? look can you in the eye, talking with you, talking with each a? >> guest: here's the first change and this started up, almost ten years ago.

faculty members are supposed to have office hours, right? a lot of office hours. and the joke we used to say to each -- to tell ounce another, we feel like the lonely anyway tag repair 'man, and these are ads you have to be a certain age to remember but maytag is so great the repairman never has any business. so students stop coming to office hours, because they can e-mail me 24/7. some people use im or text. they don't have to show up. they do, however, now expect to get an answer immediately. so if i get an e-mail from someone at 2:00 in the morning saying i'm not clear about this assignment, if i wait until monday, the beginning of the work week, to respond, when my student evaluations come, does not respond to students. okay so one of the big changes is they don't physically show up. a second big change is there's an expectation structure that is

different inasmuch as what the timeliness is in response. the third is a total lack of understanding that if you talk with someone face-to-face -- the same problem with teaching courses online -- the things that happen in that exchange between people that wouldn't happen if i'm typing or if i am only hearing your voice, or even if there's only a little video of you on the screen it's a different dynamic. and that, i think, is the new dynamic and the fact that it's being practiced to at the debt courtroom -- detriment of students. i don't have a chance to come up with the idea by looking at the flint in the eye or the disappointment or looking up, is there something else going on in your life? i can't do that unless i'm with you. unless you have a really good camera on skype. so there's changes and they're

worrying me. >> host: finally in your book, you ask the question, how much of the blame for personal cognitive and social change associated with new language tools really can be laid at the feet of the technologies themselves? >> guest: i do. let's start with spelling and punctuation. a nice simple example of what i believe is the case. my students are lousy in terms of knowing the rule of punctuation. they haven't the a clue what to do with a semi colon or colon and just sprinkle them like pepperoni on a cesar salad. it's not their fault. no one taught them. a lot of students say, i rely on spellcheck. ask if you go to kindergarten through high school, did anyone spoke cuss on spell -- focus on spelling? no, why? because the faculty are thinking

i need to focus on other things to be a modern faculty member. i shouldn't be so persnickety. if they don't team these things it's not the students' fault. with change our expectations of our goals in education, instead of reflecting, instead of being by yourself and thinking, instead of reading for long periods of time with no distracters, the students don't know how to do it. it's not the technology's fault. it's ours. so one of my major concerns is how much we should take the blame. another kind of issue is, what else is happening in society in it's not the technology that is doing it. it's social change which for better or worse is leading a particular direction. so take, for example, proofreading. one of my favorite bugaboos. there are many instances where people have paid huge amounts of money to say dish know what a

pull page ad in the "new york times" costs. i know what it costs in glossy magazines. i know that books published by some publishers want to have right. i compare what i see with what i saw, say, 20 years ago. i've been in the business for a while. and the professionals care less. if the professionals care less, why shouldn't the lay people care less? it's okay for them. i guess it should be okay for me. it's not the technology that is driving it. it's social attitudes that are driving it. >> host: and we have been talking with american university professor naomi baron, who teaches linguistics and is the author of a couple of books: growing up with language, this, her newest, always on: language in an online and mobile word, and you're ws

>> the intelligence ya is driven by this certainty that religion and reason are in different boxes, that science and religion are in different boxes, and the two actually are at war with each other. they someone who is remark until

is not religious. someone who is religious is not rationale. this is the ultimate irrational idea, because debelief that religion is inemcal in the west is untrue. religion underpinned science and reason. >> melanie phillips takes your calls, e-mails, facebook comments and tweets, in-depth, three hours, sunday at noon eastern on booktv on c-span2. >> did you know that -- when she got to the white house but people think she didn't participate much, and that isn't exactly true. the was very, very involved and started her own bedroom upstairs across from the president's

office, and she was always able to hear what was going on. she read daily newspapers, brought different points of view to the president. was able to calm him down, and of course she was the grandmother of the house as well as taking care of her daughters and grandchildren. >> our conversation on ely should johnson is available on our web site. tune in monday for the next program on first lady julia grant. >> douglas rushkoff's book studies the effect of rapid change on biology if the author spoke at a number book store about the ideas in this book and how they relate to the rise of the tea party. the occupy movement and this is just over an hour.

>> welcome to sit in the front here if you're floor people. >> well, first of all, thank you everybody for coming tonight to celebrate the latest book. present shock. i think doug has been giving lots of talks about the book that i have seen in the last few days, and so start off we're going to get to it. doug and i have nope -- known each other for a few year. i helped him do the research on "present shock" and he is a blogger along with his other accomplishments. so, doug, can you tell us what "present shock" is? >> i can. first, thanks, everybody, for coming and being here, in person, sharing your time, and in some ways i think the most radical thing about the book is that it's a book at all.

a book is kind of an anacreonistic and so is gathering in a book store, in an age where everybody things to happen now. "present shock" is about the human reaction to living in a world that is occurring in real-time, and always on, and it's really about the confluence of two things that are interrelated and mutually supporting. one of them is just having reached the end of the millennium, the end of the industrial age, we kind of sped up as much as we could. we leaned into the future as frantically and as -- with as much anticipation as was humanly possible, and as y2k approach, klm grounded their airline fleet in fear the changeover would down their planes because the computers wouldn't be able to

handle the switch in digits. we got 9/11, which was also a huge kind of break in continuity. we had the dot-com booming along until 2000, and then in february and march, all of a sudden people stopped thinking about, where are my investments go going be to worth one day, and to what are they worth now? and we realized, nothing, and the stock market crashed. there was this leaning forward. and an holmage to of her there was a sense of future shock, things changing in. the 90s, we're leaning into the millennium and then we got there a moment of maas when we said, we're in the future everybody was describing. that happened at the same time that we changed from a kind of an analog, industrial age mechanical to site, into this

digital society, and the real difference occurred to me when i was -- i was at disney world on our vacation, and there was this little girl on the line and it said, like, 90 minutes until goofy, how long you have to wait to get to the thing. and she looked up at her dad and she said, what's a minute? and i thought, that's an interesting question. in the last era, the last century, a minute on our nice round clock face is a portion of an hour. and an hour is a portion of a day. it's the way we break up the cycles of our planet, of our day, of our lives. in a digital reality, a minute is not some portion of something else. it's a duration. it's like an absolute. it just sits there. when my dad replaced my alarm clock when i was a kid, he

replaced my analog alarm clock with a digital alarm clock and my life change. i would watch the second hand go around and in a fresh minute, 9:02, getting around -- halfway through the minute, and now we're in the tail end of the minute. the second half, and we're now we're moving to 9:03. at it 9:03. you hear a fresh new minute. then we got -- i got my digital alarm clock, will the railroad signs, numbers that flipped down and it's like, 9:02. 9:03. and each minute was no longer this thing that was moving towards something else. just this thing in itself, each minute was just paused. so, present shock for me is dealing with that. at it dealing with the fact that time now feels suspended, and in each one of these moments,

thanks to digital technology, there's this sort of sense of infinite, which i all these different things we could be doing. my gosh, my twitter feed and my sms and my this and my that, the sense of constantly being pinged by all these different things, the irony in it is when we're trying to keep up with all of those digital map fess stations of the moment we actually lose track of the moment we're in. not to get too zen buddhist on you, but we're actually here now. , and we're so busy trying to keep up with these devices and these things and all these pings, when in reality the pings are just trying to keep up with us. so present shock, at its simpless, is this futile effort to keep track of time.

it's the given bat we greeks call time of the clock, andle timing. and that real difference is what is the best time to tell dad you crashed the car? 5:00 2? no, nothing to do with time. has to do with timing. after he had his beer, but before he opened the bills. and that is the kind of time that humans are in, if we're alive and aware of what is actually going on around us. so, as i looked at the society that we're in, i realized that there are sayreous way -- various ways in which we're in present shock, rather than in theory. do believe there's been a shift from a society that leaps forward, from a mechanical industrial aged society, very goal-ore gent industrial oriented. even the money we use has a clock in it. it's lent out at interest. you have to pay it back over time. all the businesses are racing to get bigger and bigger because they have to abuse they have

to -- because they have to pay back their debt structures. but there should be, could be a liberation from that as we move into a digital reality. there's this all the time in the worldness to a digital life that we could embrace if we weren't so busy trying to catch up with it. so i looked the five ways -- i kind of called them syndromes -- through which we experience present shock, 0 through which we exercise that. the first one is simple. call narrative collapse, and the idea is that in a present society, it's very hard to tell a story to even follow a story, to live by the story. stories is what we have been using really since aristotle's time or before, to share our values, to make our points. goes back as far as the bible and greek tragedy and comes up to the commercial where she girl

is going at the prom and she has a zit and it pops and it gets worse and then she finds the oxy-5 and then puts it on ask she is relieved and can go to the prom and we can be relieved because we watched the character go into tension and then relax. except now with digital devices, with remote controls, with dvrs, with vcrs, pause buttons and changing the channel, we don't have to sit through that narrative anymore. especially if we don't trust the story-teller. don't trust the advertiser. so, boom, we go away. we leave the story before it even reaches that peak. the whole notion of striving towards the goal, whether it's capitalism or communism or christianity. you're going to do great things so the ends justifies the means journey to some goal, mo longer really makes sense not when we worked for a company and they

crash our pension before we get it. not when we vote for obama and the thing we were waiting for -- wait a minute, where is the us part of it? back to something as urge usual. so without stories it's easy to feel rudderless. we don't have a goal, sense of anything. i do think there are some inklings. we were talking about this before, the "occupy" movement. people were so unnerved and unsettled by the "occupy" movement because they wouldn't state their demands. they wouldn't state their goals. what do you want? well, we're doing it right now. what are you demands? we're not really demanding anything from you. we're not doing this for something else. we're doing this. right? sort of of an internet style political movement. right? and that it's not part of some great narrative about winning a war, fighting something and

beating the bad guys. it's about attaining a new kind of normative behavior right now. that not just exemplifies but actualizes the thing we're talking about. it's the difference between a society for whom books and stories is the predominant entertainment medium, and one where video games is. by video games, for all the violence and problems in their early stage, video games point the way towards a more presentive style of engame. in a video game you're not watching the character going through some story, beginning, middle and end, you're the character making choices in real-time. you're living it in the present. and in a game, if you read someone like james carr's finite and infinity it in game. the beauty of a game is you're not playing the game order to win and end it. you're playing the game in order to keep the play alive.

it's more like a fantasy role-playing game where you keep coming up with new ways to keep the game going. it's a sustainable strategy to narrative rather than one aching for conclusion. it's no longer crisis, climb mass -- climax, sleep. it's now how long can we keep this going? which is a better question to ask in the world you're living in now, rather than colonial world. so narrative collapse is one of them. the second one, which comes from the video game impulse, is something i called digiphrenia and what is it like to live in a world where we are currently making all these choices all the time. digital world tells us, commercially commercial, you can make both choices you've don't have to choose this or that. you can choose this and that and

this and that all at the same time. for me the challenge of living digitally is not information overload. it's never been about that. aim not going to read it. i'm not going to look at it. what overload? you can't overload. i'm just not going to look. that's the easy one. the real trick is digital technology is really good at making copies of things, but it's really hard to make copies of people. it's really hard to make copies of yourself, but meanwhile, there's five or ten different map fess stations, different instances of you, operating simultaneously all over the place. there's your facebook account. at it happening now. mark zuckerberg is advertising with your face to someone else right now. you better check. there's your twitter feed, your sms, all of these different instances of you behaving simultaneously. but i was trying to log into my google callender in berlin after

i up successfully tried from the airport, and google kale -- came back and said, sorry, we can't let you in, you appear to be logging in from too many places at once, and when google no longer believes i am a human being, there's too many instance office me for even to it believe i could be human, that's how i know i'm in trouble. right? there's a digital sense, a sense in digital time, that every moment is like every other moment. that time is somehow generic. 3:02 might as well be 3:03 or 3:04 but as human beings with sunup and sundown, we understand we don't live like that. eave moment is not like every other moment. the more we learn about bio rhythms and biological clocks the more we fine out just how many different biological

natural time pieceness is. jet lag used to be knew age folklore. the can't believe it in until major league baseball manager realized that pitchers traveling west to east did worse than pitchers traveling east to west. so once they believed and it the state department started to believe it in terms of negotiations they said, maybe time isn't just all the same. you can't just schedule ourself into the a a thousand things. the research i saw each week of the lunar cycle, different neurochemical tens to dominate (chemistry grew through week dope mean, and nor ennever flip so if you know that everybody is in dope mean week -- greene week, that's part week. do try to get anything done. or they're open to new ideas. serotonin week, they'll work really hard. and ennever rein week they'll be like obama in fight or flight, organizational structural

thinking, looking at things from affair, but if you understand that, not as some weird kris school possession new age witchcraft but as the fact that we are biological creatures, we have been for hundred hundreds of thousands of years for whom time was not generic, we go, i can actually program my devices to conform to me rather than trying to stretch me across the these devices. the third syndrome i looked at, i called overwinding. and i actually got the idea when i was reading stewart brand's brilliant, the long now, which is his sort of call for us to think of time in ten thousand year time spans. rather than just every year, every day. and i was trying to think of my life in ten thousand year time spans and i realized i wasn't speaking it as a long now. i was experiencing it as short forever. it's really hard to have the weight of ten thousand years on every moment. this plastic bottle.

irthere's not a recycling bin toy have to think about the ten thousand years this about ill will be sitting in the land phil? what's going on? it's this overwinding -- it's this sort of misapplication of one time scale on to another. overwining is what the new york stock change tries to do. when people nor longer patient enough to invest now to make money five years from now, they say, it's okay, you can make your money on the trade. you're not going to make money by investing. what happened when people tried to invest in facebook if the bought the stock the in the morning and then in the afternoon they didn't make any money so they started selling. so they thought the buying of the stock was going to make money. now we have derivatives. which are what? which are really just basically saying, this stock over time, or this stock over time, over time, trying to just bur burrow into

the moment so you making money on the rate of change report thentive if the thing is going to change at all. ...

>> they are trying to freeze time and at one moment of 29 years old. what do they do? what is the result? when they sit with someone else in realtime they cannot be present in the moment the faces cannot register the appropriate emotional response and one says my daughter is being tested for cancer. the other says i am so sorry to hear that then she says i don't think she meant that. but she could not express it because she was not available to the real moment

because she was over winding herself because she could not be where she was. the fourth one is really what happens when there is no longer time between the thing you do and the feedback you get. feedback is how we judge everything in our business or farming you plant the seed in and you wait to see how that grew in next time you plant them closer together than you get feedback three months later or in business we will make red sweatshirts at the end of the quarter they did well we will do more or less. in the instantaneous society the feedback is so fast you cannot see the cause from the fact. is this our marketing campaign for a way to read about it before so now we should change ship are responding to the tweet

horsey responding to what we have done? it is in the same moment. so you no longer have time to understand or have stories so you try to understand the instantaneous picture. when you try to understand things as a snapshot, the only way to make sense is trying connections between things. freeze frame. this must be connected to that connected to this and you sound like a conspiracy theorist. you draw connections between things that are not connected. the real way to make sense of rapid feedback is through fractals but the way to understand them is not to have a direct comparison or equivalencies but the pattern recognition. pattern recognition sees how

this is kind i'd like that kind i'd like that. bacteria do this so people must do that. no bacteria do this and people are different but maybe we do something similar. in order to make sense of the world in present tense you have to stop looking at the subject and the get the land so long dash landscape too unfocused and see what is going on rather than the details and the last syndrome i look at is apocalypse joe it is the fun one and the idea that it is easier to imagines says on the apocalypse. when you lived in the reality that is just to maintain it can become unbearable.

you can overlaid them on the reality that does not fit that. it is what the peers are doing with the rise of technology they get separatist and then say except for the past -- the fact it passes us but then information will be dissolved in the greater state of complexity. these people say yes it is but it is all the stories we had before they take the capitalist biblical narrative to throw out on the digital the beauty is that it could break us free from the industrial age time is money make everything faster paradigm. for those readers -- weirdos

part of the movement. i will get to work whenever i want. i can trade with people directly and not work for the man or invest in this crap but deal with a much more sustainable way with the peer to peer marketplace. that what do they do instead? they checked the digital revolution and apply it to the industrial age bellevue's. don't worry instead of being something new we will show you how to be the last gasp another injection in the failing economy. it led to a sense of the information of something that has its own mind and evolutionary path and we are serving information on the journey toward

consciousness. when it reaches that we can go away but that has a medium and the message reversed. human is not in the services of information it is a byproduct of humanity. but we are the same and even if not, i will fight for us. so what "present shock" is is a call to reclaim humanity in the face of seemingly alienating technology and to realize the genuine opportunity is not to be programmed into submission but to seize the day and use these technologies in a way that is consonant to conform to who we are rather than us conforming to it.

[laughter] >> what do you want to understand a little better? combining what you opened with and your conclusion is where "present shock" comes from. you say it is about as conforming to digital technology but what is this determine phenomenon or are there other forces at work to make this moment come to fruition? you mentioned 9/11 was the breaking continuity and it makes me wonder is this a western experience or new york city? were all ohio is somebody in mind by? that you see the phenomenon fitting into our global

identity? >> that is a good one. i am not a techno determinist did with us a digital technology happened now we all ripple in response. i think digital technology and merged with our readiness for something beyond the industrial age. it had puttered out in a number of ways. time is money is great for colonial empires to explant -- expand around the globe but that is what allowed western europe to take over a lot of the world but we reached the limits of that. with nowhere else to take over through virtual world bank loans to countries got

wise to that and said wait a moment that may not be a good thing so we have reached elements were a free plug door computers into the phone lines and got the internet but the internet to cough i would argue because of a cultural readiness for it. we were ready for the peer to peer culture. just as jet travel was ready for something other than flights in human beings are ready for something other than an outsourcing everything fade due to a corporation. it wasn't working any more. says digital technology come at a different time i don't know if we would have embraced at the same way. but once it came, it ended

up really taking over and doing all whole lot more than we might have suspected. part of that is a digital technology is more natural appropriate way to be used but part of that is said dying corporate culture ended up grabbing it as a way of extending itself one inappropriately into the next era but they will fight and if everybody is in this are some of us there is some present shock that affect high-tech urban dwellers more than other people. but if you are working for a corporation and your shift is determined by machine, if

you are on net flecks in ohio and now watching media created by big data engines like house of cards that was assembled. they used big data. people who like kevin spacey also like david and political intrigues and we will create this show like the william manufacture the cheese doodle and makes people compelled. it is weird and empty like it is made by a machine but with you time shift the television viewing that is "present shock" now you cannot go to work the next day and to save did use the house of cards? i saw member for use on number nine you have to watch it on your own. it is not a bad thing you

have agency and autonomy but you lose the other. and with other other other parts of the world, yes and no. they are in less present shocked and with indigenous cultures to did not have to contend with the industrial age their values and systems are retrieved in the digital era. every time you get a new renaissance you retrieve the values repress the last time. the last time we repressed feminism and indigenous people and peer to peer culture value creation and pressed the occult now we see those things coming back. occupy, and the archaic revival, and those are weird

but positive steps and the indigenous cultures loved out of "present shock" and left out again. >> with all the books you have written your subject matter always changes but the message is that there is a program determined by some interested power so before was urban planning and realizing there was a real-estate moneyed interest the way the street or where the parks are placed and once you can learn to read the world as a program then you can claim agency and subverted and hackett. a departure in this book is

it seems everyone is scared by "present shock." atrophy across the board board, with capitalism the stock market is crashing and there is student dead and is there a program and if not is anybody benefiting recapitalizing on the phenomenon? >> what you are referring to was my initial hit even before any meditated a psychedelic by opening experience when i was in seventh grade learning how to program for the first time. i realized i could make what was on the tv set that when you save a program for a

file that you were gone you have to choose if you save it as read only or read right for our realize at that moment ago my gosh. television is read only content but that is only because they made it that way. they could make every right and i could make this stuff and they started to look in the world with a grid pattern of new york and this isn't just city, somebody made this city and chose to make it that way but other cities do not have great patterns. they are round or this or that and no bunker as a set of given circumstances but the choices people made sometimes consciously with a specific agenda they make they york side -- a city like this to maximize motion

it is the many cities so be maximized efficiency to go like that it is not about beauty or introspection or a city to contemplate but get things done. then i started to look every of their system, money. the money we use was invented 11 or 1200 and replaced other moneys that peer to peer economy rising out of control the aristocracy did not know how to maintain -- maintain control so they may be illegal and said to have to borrow money from the central treasury it at interest was a way to stay rich and it worked but now we think it is money manager is anti-general semantics. what is this? it is what we used as money

we think of this as many. we live in a world where certain monopolies maintain this is money so if it is the only program you have you taken at face value. every computer had windows operating system there would be no such thing as windows until you have a choice you don't know there is choice and tell the alternative you do not know it is there that is the driving force. when the digital age came we can program stuff i looked at judea's some -- judea's m as rather than a belief system to come up with a behavioral thing and i was arguing how it was locked down in the 20th-century we lost the open source quality and i don't see present shocked as more negative as an invitation to look headed

deeper program. which is the biological or emotional program with a social program but the one that comes from us we are creatures how do we make ourselves more available so we could do that with who we are? how can we create situations or be with other people? that is such a challenge. have these asters because we spend so much time on computers to 94 percent is nonverbal. whether your breathing is it and rhythm or the pupils are dilating or all of this stuff we grow to respond to releasing dopamine when people agree with you and

had you get that? you can. what i try to do with "present shock" is give people clues as to how to reconnect with the fundamental rhythms like with there is a break in continuity and an opportunity for the mice to play if we are liberated from the industrial age clock moving into a more fluid form of time so to be engaged the more primal and biological and the emotional and socially healthy relationships to the passage of time. >> just to conclude and hearing you say that all these people together are in the ram none if you are looking at your phones that i can see and hear promoting

a book which is incredibly old-fashioned technology that you use to get the message across see you can extrapolate but why is this a book and my is that the medium for the message you are giving right now? >> you hubris of writing a book is on the one hand claiming that i could take a year to contemplate one single thing. that there may be a deal is that it cannot be conveyed in a bowl of less. i cannot tweet this and it is also inviting people. not demanding but inviting people to surrender their autonomy over seven eric hours of their lives as an

author to say you will be with me sevener eight hours so i can engage with you on a level that i can't with the cnn column in the tweet or the article and ideally it is a way to say we are allowed to do this to you dedicates seven hours. but then to leave it in the seats back there. who says that? who says he and not allowed to do that? i realize that is in the digital age but partly by doing that is just because we embrace digital time doesn't mean all these other times don't coexist with that. and to make choices of realtime is the predominant form of entertainment and

immersion but it doesn't mean the answers go away. we could still go to softball. but there's still a place. i am and a boat person that is where the ideas are home. but i do with the full knowledge, the way i sell a book is not by saying you need this your business will fail if you don't understand digital you cannot market to people then your tweet will not make sense. what is this? by this or else or you are in trouble? that is the maximum you need this help. no. you don't need this. but it is cool and you are

allowed this you are a human being living in the 21st century and you are allowed to have time to have time and ironically the more time you take the more time you have. the more you try to catch up the last time you have the faster you answer the mails the more they come in the slow real answer e-mail's then you will see that people solve the problem without you. [laughter] and they do. so books are such a wonderful discipline as an author and reader to say no. i am reading this book and if i can create more excuses for people to say no, that i have done my job. >> thank you. [applause]

>> my question is i wonder if any aspect of your assessment could be connected to the employment rate? is there any even and correlation? >> absolutely. since when is unemployment a bad thing? seriously. we have to create jobs. we have to create jobs. do you want jobs? no. you want to stuff you want this stuff you get for having a job. job is the artifacts of the industrial age. people never used to have jobs they've made stuff and so the not until the charter corporations put everybody out of business by law that we had to work for a company

instead of being paid to make a thing you were paid for the time you put in for the corporation. you were selling your time. that is what the bible call slavery. the only reason, we don't need jobs. we have enough staff. there is more than enough houses they are burning down houses and destroying them in california to keep the prices high because so many are in foreclosure. we cannot just let people live there and look we have to burn them down. who knows or who cares of people are starving we've burned the foods we can justify to hand out the stuff that we have not because we need them to make more stuff and now we have more excuses that we put in a storage unit there is too

much stuff we have new excuses on black friday and and more housing starts we are building more houses? because of the industrial age requirement. i don't know in our lifetime but we will get to a place where we realize we can have robots do the field and we can't just eat it and that is not have bad thing and when we work we work to make things better for healing the sick and teaching children and feeding ourselves not just to import more plastic scrap from china to keep the economic machine going. it is a program that has outlived its will come -- welcome. >> do you think the reason

the digital platform lax and narrative is based on the fact there is no lack of awareness that if we knew more about where we were in any given time or how we were feeling it seems to be going that way. would that remedy the problem? >> or it could create a new one. to the illusion of narrative is what they call predictive modeling. so johnny is weld we can tell from the statistical profile he will be gay by the time he is 14. mary is 36 and we can tell she is probably will be dealing with and fertility issues. they can send you the things to help you manifest the things you are most likely to be. that is not storytelling

that life creation and turning people into programs rather than let them be the unpredictable thing that they are. there is a context you could get from digital space but it is more like beavis and butt-head over of a sensibility frames within frames more in touch fractals since they and the linear of cents. if you watch this and since what is the hit? komer save the nuclear power plant? that this is a satire of the other form of media when you make that connection and you feel more oriented. we're moving to a more moment to moment grounding we do get from screens

within screens and getting the joke more than getting to the end. >> how do you think "present shock" affects the way wars are fought today? >> interesting. in the $0.1 we are learning to think that as something we win but a chronic situation but if you don't win the war. you never really win you just win the battle and kill people. but there is the sense it is the ongoing state was one interesting phenomenon, with

a drone fighting. that is said digital phrenic approach to war here you are now in a room outside las vegas flying a plane in afghanistan killing people far away. then you get in the car and go home and you have dinner with your wife and kids. it turns out that the drone pilots doing virtual combat have higher levels of the gse than those in the actual battlefield i would argue because of this new way of fighting war with that "present shock" universe you try to manifest tussauds the ones that are incompatible. that is what is going to start to happen now and that is a positive sign because

there is the other self, a part of me apart a bus doing this thing that is not who we are what we believe and and we have to reconcile those but the more alienated it does seem to affect us so it does get pretty weird. >> it is misleading even if just a machine why don't you just say machine world? >> there is a difference between living in the machine world and a more digital world i think we live in their real world than the physical universe but we lived in one that is

now dominated of a digital buys as opposed to mechanical. the difference is mechanical age technology does the things that it does. a car drives, the steam shovel does this. >> [inaudible conversations] >> what i look with digital technologies when i looked at the digital age technologies like computers, robotics comment genomics and nanotechnology i look at things you set in motion and have a life of their own and try to survive and replicate they keep

going where a shovel just sits there. there is a different bias it is part of the same continuum. >> you could have another numeric system. >> you can. but the kind of culture that is around the culture of text for whatever reason is different than the culture that builds up around the printing press which for it whatever reason is different than the culture that builds up around computers and digital technology. the reasons why could be completely stupid and based on nothing of our perception of how those working different periods but they do have different media environments. that is what they are really

into. there is the light bulb that creates an environment of light. we don't care about the content there is no content and the light called unless there is the kodachrome slide but the label itself creates the environment. and air-conditioning creates an environment, a fire, television, telegraph and digital technology creates the environment to without being too techno determinist but as the culture changes we adopt digital tools and the values change and we changed the tools be developing and a change the way we see things >> you say the differences between the culture of print how many are inherent to the environment of digital

culture and how much is a new media so over the last 20 years is unregulated as the wild west? >> i have always felt we are in danger of folding did digital media environment into the industrial age. that is why has been kicking and screaming about why the futures socks and i got mad because it was here. like the reality hacker i thought here we have the technology digital means the digit we can be makers and makes the world and then everybody talked about this is coming and "wired" magazine said the tsunami is coming to change your business and investing and at and the boom is happening so industrial capitalism can grow forever and ever.

then on the same day jerry garcia died netscape went public and i thought i wonder if the potential items seeing for a new digital environment will be subserved by the digital age it may well be but i believe if it is most of us will die. i really believe that. i believe we have reached the limit of that way to do things and i try to create the most appetizing ways to describe what might be like to live in a world where we have a steady state or sustainable approach to life together where we stop looking at life as individuals or as a nation and rather the thing that we

keep doing. >>. >> but to change the things and the other stuff as opposed to letting it go back. >> at know if it would anyway but when i look and i got to be in the boardroom the way corporations exist they are dying there sitting in all this money they are on the operating system designed to help them collect money but they don't know how to make money with their money in corporate profitability has been going down steadily over 50 or 60 years to almost nothing they don't know how to keep doing it. so they are at the crossroads. i have a lot of glimmers of

hope but i also think of a genuine media renaissance not in it revolution that is the 20th century it is around the clock. revolution it is more of a renaissance where we retrieved ideas and born in a new context so the stuff repressed by the original renaissance when we were monarchies with charter corporations but i feel those are just taking up only at the beginning and these take thousands of years to happen so i am trying to remain hopeful. >> using digital technologies are helping or hurting like the end of

poverty? >> i think they could help or hurt when we use digital technology to sell more so funds and people are in the caves it is hurting but when we use digital technology with open source planning to give developing nations open source blueprints how to build cultural machinery it is helping. when we use it to exacerbate capitalism it is hurting but when we use it to allow for peer to peer marketplace with alternative currencies currencies, it helps. it is a double-edged sword but it seems to be and is very powerful which is why i advocate for people to learn how to use it. i feel like a digitally

illiterate population knows come through if we cannot programmer cells at least we will be aware of the biases of the environment we inhabit. and look at facebook and say this is not fun for me this makes me feel vulnerable i will stop. and make some hay and get people to follow me. get one corporation to attack another. not really progress on the grand scheme of things but to the extent we feel we are allowed to make choices about what technology enhances our lives is the beginning of doing good things rather than bad. >> it has come up one of the obvious reactions to digital stuff everywhere it is

returned back to the narrative just like every whiskey brand but he said something interesting about the values that were repressed so i am curious for you to expand on that with the indigenous cultures. what do you see, back to life? >> the beauty of the renaissance is everything old and new again. not going back to the good old days. i am a progressive van you cannot lean forward you know, the amado leaned forward? you can and we are right here now but that means we can be available to things that were unavailable before in the more primitive form every betty is stressed

medieval because that is where we associate those activities fell last memory is day medieval bizarre but we bring it back but instead of having said grain based currency you end up with peer to peer currency in the iphone with us authentication and go somewhere else. but with indigenous culture i do think they have access to certain things that we only now find again through science. for me to say we just figure out there is a lunar cycle. of course, everyone knows that. the men are like really?

but in terms of western science every week there is a dominant mood and neurochemistry? any shaman would say it is called the moon and the first weekly call with this and the second weekly call-in this and if you go back to the ancient jewish calendar they had a true calendar respecting a lot of these rhythms but we lost that. some of it feels really old and schuster reading and say they understood there was the shape and time and maybe they knew it than we can combine that with computers like we have james joyce and

james buchanan and now they try to do it. >> how does how does that speak to india where the red digital world is imposed? >> i don't really know. because i have not spent time there. i have ended up thinking more about china because they are more in the news and india but look at moments culturally like the chineses olympics are they trying to root demonstrate their prowess or that of what they are involved in?

and i sometimes worry for culture that adopted digital age like india with that mentality without passing through. these are such powerful tools, might work data place called code academy people can learn code because they want to to create a product makes something and launched the i found out that in india they say i want a degree can you give me the certificate? when you realize that people are very pour in a cast now they can make some progress but then it to they know they're getting themselves into? they will be the work farms for america in digital companies yuri have the

labor mill blair they do that boring and repetitive task. this is more about cultures and about anything else because i am a westerner and american it is really a way more about us than them although i am interested i am more interested in their reaction if i get e-mail's will it be this is interesting we're suffering to the same thing for you silly americans? you didn't notice? i guess it is something i will find out. >> we have to stop there but you'll be happy to answer any more questions? >> thank-you for coming this

event netted as the decision borate theater where our friends to come together can

study the decisions that george made the financial crisis, hurricane katrina katrina, afghanistan and get the affirmation he was given at the time then also look at the press like what we do decide what will you do? it shows people what he was faced with. the information he had at the time and then it puts people in his shoes if that is what they would have done and also it gives people an idea what it is like to be president and have those serious decisions to make. all the decisions that come to the president and in fact, every big problem does come to the desk of the president.

one. >> good evening welcome to the commonwealth club of california the place where you are in the no. and the host of technician the design npr did toward and also on the channel on nec's and sirius radio and i am your moderator this evening. tonight is held in association with the commonwealth club science technology forum exploring

the distance of the future for science and technology you can find us on the internet commonwealth club.pork or download the android data corporation program information and a pot casper'' and it is my a pleasure to introduce today's guest professor of internet governance and regulation and oxford university and the data editor for the economist of written the new book big data the revolution to transform how we live work and think and i have the distinct pleasure to interviewing them earlier today for the tech nation broadcast to be aired in the coming weeks and i thought you should know a few other things. professor schomburg has more than 1 degree at only one of which is from harvard he is a lawyer lawyer and has earned a master's in

economics from the london school of economics with over 100 academic papers and seven books to his credit i think my favorite title delete if. the value of forgetting in the digital age. his co-author you best known with his career at the economist prior to being the data editor he was with the japan business and finance editor of might also know him as a technology editor to the asian "wall street journal" in hong kong all very important because big data is not just here in the united states it is global so please welcome our guests [applause] >> thank you very much. it is a pleasure to be here.

big data will change how we live, work and think and our journey begins with a story that begins with the flu. every year the winter flu kills tens of thousands of people around the world. but in 2009 and new virus was discovered in experts feared it could kill tens of millions. there was no vaccine available the best help authorities could do was slow the spread but they needed to know where it was. in the u.s. if the cdc had doctors report new flu cases but collecting the data and analyzing takes time so the cdc picture of the crisis was a week or two behind which is an eternity with the pandemic on the way. around the same time engineers had to go develop the alternative way to predict the spread of the

flu not nationally but down two regions in the united states. they used kugel search. it handles more than 3 billion searches per day and saves them all. they took 59 of the most common search terms and compared when and where they were searched for with flu dated going back five years the idea was to predict the spread of the flu through the web search along. they struck gold. we were looking not right now is a graph showing after crunching through half a billion mathematical models of kubla identified 45 search terms the predicted the spread of the floor with a high degree of accuracy and here you can see the official data of the cdc and the go-go predictive data

from a search query but where the cdc had the two weeks reporting lag kugels could spot it almost in realtime. strikingly it did not involve contacting physicians' offices but build off of big david the ability to harness data for novel insights for goods and services. look at another example. another company in 2003 the computer science professor was taking an airplane and he knew what to do what we all thought we knew to do to bought his ticket well in advance on the day of departure. but at 30,000 feet he could not but help pass the passenger next to him but she paid and sure enough

they paid less. he asked another passenger and he also paid less even though they both bought the ticket much later than he had. he was upset. but a computer science professor not only did he get upset he thinks a research said he did not need to know whether their reasons on how to save money if you should buy in advance if the saturday night stay but he realized the answer was hidden in plain sight that all you needed to know was the price that every other passenger paid on every other airline for every single seat for an entire year. this is a big data problem but it is possible he

scraped a little bit and found he could predict with high degree of accuracy whether i price presented online is a good price and you should buy the ticket ride away or whether you should wait and buy it later when the price will go down. he called it hamlet to buy are not to buy. that is the question. [laughter] but a little dated got him a good prediction. two years later he was cringing 75 billion flight price records almost every single flight in aviation for one year and now the predictions were very good. microsoft knocked on his door and he sold the company for $100 million. but the point* is the data was generated for one purpose the used for another and information is a raw

material of business is in new economic input it is tempting to think of big data in terms of size. it is true oh world is awash in with the digital data collected is growing fast doubling almost every three years the trend is obvious when we look at the science when the slow telescope that began in 2000 gathered to mourn the first few weeks than was a master in the entire history of astronomy. over 10 years the telescope collected astronomy data exceeding 140 terabytes of information but the success of the telescope coming on line in 2016 will acquire that amount of data every

five days. and other companies are drowning in debt twitter messages are more than 400 million per day you to more than 800 million monthly user's to upload one hour of video every single second and facebook over 10 million photos are uploaded every hour. coup will processes 100 times the quantity of all printed material in the u.s. library of congress. the quality of data it is estimated to reach 1.tuz said of fights in which only a small percentage is non digital. so with the silicon valley

and described by the footprint so it is more than just about the volume. we suggest speed in reid afford -- to characterize big data. first, today we can collect and analyze for more data of a particular problem than ever before when we were limited to working with just a small sample. but it is the relative size of data flights through the phenomenon we studied. that is a remarkably clear view and details of a conventional sampling. we could also let the data speak and that reveals insights and never would have thought of. the second part of big data

is the embrace of messiness. it emits us to do some of the desire with the ability to measure was limited. we had to retreat what we did bother to quantify as precisely as possible. the rather than going out to measure and collect small quantities of data with big data will often be satisfied with general direction rather than striving to know the phenomenon the atom or the penny we don't give up entirely we only give up this singular devotion to it reviews the accuracy and the level that we gain an insight.

with the change away from the age-old search for causality. instead of asking or looking for elusive relationships in many instances and that is big enough. and that is hard for us humans to comprehend because we are conditioned maybe even hard wired to understand the world as a series of cause and effect. it is comforting comforting, reassuring. and oftentimes it is plain wrong. if we fall sick after we eat at a new restaurant the hunch is that it is the food although far more likely we got the stomach bug by

shaking hands with a colleague. the quick causal hunches we just down the wrong path. with big data we now have an alternative available instead of looking for the causes we can go for correlation to uncover connections and associations between variables that we might not have known otherwise. like ness likes making predictions and recommendations to customers that is at the heart of the translation service they do not tell us why and they do not know why but a crucial moment and in time for us to act. these features of big data are used to save lives. premature babies are prone to infection.

it is important to note infections very early on. how would you do that? in the analog small data world you would take vital signs every couple of hours. oxygenation levels, heartbeat, these types of things. part of a research project in canada they collect 16 real data flow and over 1,000 datapoint is each second then they combine the data to look for patterns or correlations and/or able to spot the onset of the infection 24 hours in advance way before the first symptom would manifest that is incredibly important for

these preemies because then they can receive medication will be for the infection is strong and perhaps not battled successfully. perhaps intriguing lead the best predictor for the vital signs is not that they go haywire but they saved a life. we don't know why but we do know with a small data age to look at the stabilization to save the baby is doing well and i can go home for the night. now we know the baby may be in trouble. it with the fundamental features more with the correlation data is more of the process.

the data was so vast it is an extreme form. and the findings would answer was happening but now why. not the biological mechanism at work. . .

then gps and mechanism to do this. and now it's smartphone that we're probably carrying in our pockets. but now our location has been doubt fied. our mobility is doubted all the time. think of books. think of words. in the past we would look up to the temple of delphi and see who mottos etched in stone. the book was digitized and we had digital words. we get some of the digtyization. we can store and process it. we can't process it per se. we can share it. with a we can't cois analyze it. it was an image files.

the words had not been dpowted. what happens if we can take the word and exfact it and treat it as data. what they are doing is looking back at the journal article going past a century. these are hundreds of thousand of articles. and looking for side effects. a human being reading the journals for a century would not be able to spot some of the weird correlations of drug side effects. but a machine can. big data can. you get from the words. all of you in the audience right now are sitting. think of it in terms of something as fundment tal as posture. the way you are sitting and you are sitting and you and you and you. it's all different. in fact, the way '02 sitting is a function of your weight and the distribution of your weight and leg length and if we were to

measure in instrument. it was 100 sensor. the way you sit would be personal. it would like a little bit like a fingerprint. one person sits differently than another. what could we do with this? researchers in tokyo are placing sensors to car seats. it's an antitheft device. suddenly the car would know when someone else is driving it and maybe you would put the control -- if it was happening you would congress out the engine. if you have a teenager, it's useful to say you're not allowed to drive after 10:00 p.m. the engine doesn't start. okay. that's great. imagine what if 100 million vehicles had this on the roadway today? let think what we can do. perhapses we would be able to identify the telltale signal of the shift in body posture prior to an accident thirty-second

prior to an accident. we would data fied driver fatigue and the car might know the service is to alert the driver. maybe the steering wheel would be vibrate. there would be a chime inside the car and know if you have, your body posture will change. those are the things we can do when we use data indication. it's also the core bye product of social media platform. facebook has datad our froip and the things we like. twitter our thought and whisper. linked in the professional contacts. once things are in data form they can be transformed to something else.

a myriad of releases are policy. can that prove interest interesting one. it shifts from the reason it was collected and the immediate uses on the surface to the subsequent uses that may not have been apparent initially but are worth a lot. think of deliver i are vehicles. ups has 60,000 vans on the road. it needs maintenance. it's a problem that can be fixed with information. when a car breaks down, it doesn't break down all at once. it let you know it. for example you might be driving and it feels funny. there's a strange sound that it normally doesn't have. if you place sensor in the engine what we would be able to do is data some of this. we would be able to measure the vibration or measure the heat.

and we can compare that signature with what a normal engine sounds like and what the likely problem is. and suddenly now what we can do, and what ups does to save money is predict the break down. it's called preincompetentive maintenance. they are able to identify when the sensor reading tells us that the heat is going up or the vibration is out of bound of normalcy, you need to bring the van to a sft station and get a tuneup and probably replace a part. they are able to replace a part before it breaks. the company uses data from 100 million cars to predict traffic flow in cities around the world. by recruising the old data, it is a strong correlation between road traffic and the health of local economy. the business model is to predict how come it takes to go from one place to another. it's a traffic prediction

service. they are reusing the data and turning it 0 a new form of economic value. there's a correlation between the road traffic in a city and economic health. but there's more. what investment fund uses the data from the weekend traffic around a large national retailer because it correlates very strongly with the sales. you can see where it's headed. it can measure the road traffic in the proximity of the store and trade that company's shares prior to the quarter earnings announcement. it has a lens in to whether the sales will increase or decrease. that's data's hayden value. -- hidden value. hidden value of data, big data offers extraordinary benefits. unfortunately, it also has a

dark side. as we just heard so much of data's value remains hidden, ready to be unearthed by secondary uses. it puts big data on force how we detect individual privacy. through telling individual at point of collection through notice and consent why we are gathering the data and asking for consent. but in the big data age we simply do not know when we collect data for what purpose will be using it in the future. so as we reap the benefit of big data our core mechanism of privacy protection is rendered ineffective. in is another dark side. a new problem that emerges. algorithm predicting human

behavior, as we are likely do, how we will behave rather than how we have behaved and penalizing us for before we have committed the infraction. and if you think of minority reports, that's exactly right. in a way, that provides value. right. isn't prevention through probability better than punishment after the fact? and yet such a big data use would be terribly misguided. for start prediction are never -- we would punish people without certainty negating a fundamental tenet of justice. intervening before an action has taken place and punishing the individuals involved in it. we essentially deny them human -- [inaudible]

in a world of predictive punishment we never know whether or not somebody will actually committed the crime. let to play out holding people responsible on the basis of big data analysis that can never been disproven. butlet be careful. let be careful here. the culprit is not big data i.t. the culprit is how we can use it. the crux holding people responsible for actions they have yet to commit is using big data correlations. disabout individual responsibility, the why. as we have explained, big data correlations cannot tell us about the why. the cause casualty behind thing. often it's good enough.

it makes big data correlations singularly unfit to decide to punish and hold responsible. the trouble is that we humans are trying to see the world through the lens of causes and effect. that's big data is under constant threat of being abused for cause l purposes. and threaten to imprison us perhaps literally and probabilities. so what can we do? to begin with, there's no denying of big data's dark side. he can only say reap the benefit of big data if we are exposing the evil and discuss them openly. and we need to think innovatively about how to contain the evil and how to prevent the dark side from taking control. one suggestion is that information priseres sei and the big data range needs to have a

modified foundation in this new era privacy control by individual will have to be augmented by direct accountability of the data users. second, and perhaps more importantly on the dangers of punishing people based on prekirks rather than actual behavior we suggest we have to expand our understanding of justice. it's different in the big data rather than the small. the big require us to enact safe guards for human free will. as much as we currently protect procedural fairness. government must never hold an individual responsible for what their only predicted to do. third, most big data analysis today in going to the future is too complex for the individual defected to comprehend. if we want to protect privacy

and protect individualialty in the big data age, we need help. professional help. much like privacy officers of aid in ensuring privacy measures are in place envision a new cast of experts call them ailing rite mist who understand the complexity of big data. the expert in big data analysis and act as reviewers as big data prediction. we see them take a vow of impartiality of considerablialty. and of professionalism. like civic engineers do or a civil engineers do or doctors.

and ensure big data markets stay competitive. we have seen the risk of big data and how to control them. there's another challenge. one that is not unique big data but that in the big data age society needs to be extra vigilant to guard against. that's what we call the dictatorship of baa da that. it's the idea we may fetishize the data and meaning and importance than it deserves. as big data starts to play an all area of life. the tendency to place trust in the data and cut off our common

sense may only grow. placing one's trust in data without a deep appreciation of what the data means and understanding of the limitations can lead to terrible consequences. in american history, we have experienced a war fought on behalf of a data point. the war with vietnam. and the data point was the body cap. it was united statessed to measure progress -- it was used to measure progress when was situation was far, far more complex. so in the big data age, it will be critical that we do not follow behindly -- blindly the path that big data seems to say. big data will help us. it's going to help us understand the world better and improve decisions.

reremain the master. we need to carve a space for the human for our reason, or imagination. for acting in defiance what the data says because the data is always just a shadow of reality. and therefore it is always imperfect, always incomplete. as we walk to the big data age, we need to do so with humility and humanity. thank you very much. [applause]

wonderful thank you. coauthor of "big data" a. [applause] [applause] knew now it's time for the audience question answer period. i have a number of questions. if i could ask to have those over on the side. we'll be able to did that. i want to get to everyone's questions. they are all business. [laughter] on top that have it suggests may

not think at work. which is my kind of work. [laughter] what is the worse? the negative. the ill, the list goes on and -- [inaudible] >> we talk about the dark side. i mentioned the danger propensity ken mentioned the dataship of data and the privacy challenge. the privacy challenge is one that is severe because the mechanism that we have protect privacy becoming -- we writing the book really thought more that the propensity challenge is one that gets often overlooked.

going forward is going to become incredibly important. it schaimtion the role of free will and human position. in the book suggest a number of possibilities to do that. but that's really what keep me awaking at night. >> well, in a real sense, we're all automatically collecting and december seminating all the dpa -- data. if you have ever been to a hospital you realize you give all the data. not just what you sign on a form. do we have an expectations of privacy big data age?

>> well, within in some instances we have to ask the question should we have an expectations of privacy? so let's take health care as an example. we have -- a very cumbersome legal regime that actively blocks the sharing of health care data. you can imagine in 100 years, our children are going to look back on us and be wildered how can let the priceless information improving care slip away. not just here in america but around the world. what we probably need to do is have a healthy debate and change the narrative entirely and say perhaps as we should make it as a condition as citizenship gets shared. it's true there's a problem. there's a risk of inadvertent disclosure leading to bad consequences. let's look at mechanism to control and police it. learning from the data is a social goal. >> it's interesting because to

say we'll maybe deidentified or encrypt that. we know who you are. [laughter] you have dna data on somebody. we know who you are. so in a real sense. depending on the regulatory regime which you live. the data very rarely gets used for is research in to what could actually help you if you have the condition or how the condition could be prevented. what we need to do is unleash the power of big data on the research side rather than to unleash the power of big data on the cost effectness. we have been big data out.

>> in science we say we have 220 people in the study or 60 people in the study or even 500 people in the study. and very few long-term clinical studies with 15 or 120,000 people. with big data we can change the face of science. >> absolutely. it's almost laughable because we were in silicon valley today at facebook. and we are discussing the pluses and pitfall of big data. you can find video of

commonwealth programs online. fora tv. and of course, everybody wants to know, ken, you know, data editor, you're not a data input clerk? >> i'm not a data input clerk. >> now we have a promotion. what is a data editor. >> it's a new title. i'm the first one. we have been in the game for 160 years. it's nothing new there. we recognize there's new technique we can use data as the basis of stories instead of, if you will, about dote based journalism. you talk to a source and pattern recognition the story through talking to many people. just our sources might lie to us as a journalist. data might lie as well. we have to keep our suspicious up. question crunch lot of numbers

to visualize and tell a story. and the data editor is a service provider to the rest of the organization. >> it's a question i forgot to ask today. i can hear in the paper every day google telling us where it was. apparently google flu over estimated the flu outbreak. what happened? well, first of all, it's a prediction. the prediction tells you that 85 percent the time you're right. that means 50% of the time you are wrong. and so being wrong is just part of being in the prediction game. then, of course, this is a dynamic world in which you need to rerun your model all the time. because if cnn reports on flu trends or reports on the flu

sb. people might get the flu even though they don't have it. there's a feedback mechanism in place. and google flu trend being compared to center for disease control data. maybe the flu in the center for disease control data rather than the google data. we don't know. and so what we should not do is to immediately create a -- [inaudible] and say it must be because google's model is wrong. that's dangerous. we shouldn't do that. when we look at the spike we should investigate with an open mind. i would like to underline.

when google first did a fitting of the model we were not in a perception. people were not going to the doctor because they feel they can't take a day off work or can't afford if. flu trends might be more accurate in temple of the outbreak of the flu and the cbc data may have more availability. i'll introduce you to the cbc. they'll be delighted to hear it. [laughter] once you know something is being collected you know that. it's why double blind studies. i find out if i have a flu symptom. we don't know.

once it becomes public how people change. the data fa collected is there. that's a problem as well as massive point you have is that if cbc only recording the people that duoto doctors that's changed dramatically even with the internet even with the internet. so we have to really be good at this new big data role of an lettic. for some people, the ailing i can't say it. based on al gore fifty years ago donald say the best way to explain. stanford professor.

we studied it. we think we have it done please let us know if you don't. that's on al gore algorithm. when you have that someone coming with the algorithm how we look at it and account for what we are tossing around here. it's a dynamic kind of thing. you speak about this new job category, if you will. what is the qualifiers. what goes in to this? what does one need? that's a greating question. the coming generation will need

to know how to collect data, scrape it off the internet, put it in storage. perhapses no the in the old fashioned structured way but a more unstructured storage we seen today. then they need to look at the data and analyze it. they need to use physical packages. they need to use networking analysis. there's a variety of tools and methods available. they might need good grounding in the latest of statistics. a lot of staingt call maineds we use were designed for small data range. it might be need to upgrade or improve them to an extent. and then they might also need some sen of visualizing if we go the big data. and in addition to all of that, we would like to view them with

a grounding of not just mathematic but philosophy. a more general theory. oftentimes people who are doing very well are those that come from the natural science. particularly physicists who are well trained to deal with huge amounts of data. either through the astronomy, through telescope and data gathering there or take -- that is the kind of mixed interdisciplinary and mix we need. and unfortunely the few university around the world have programs yet to educate them. i hope that is going to change. >> now we have traditional statistics, which i county do very well.

probably in the alone. we remember this. do we have new statistic tal technique for big data? are they emerging in i.t.? >> yes, they are. and many ways we're looking at photoadvancement of right now the characteristic call statistical approach to look for linear. linear relationship. if increases b. will increase or decrease in the same way. but a lot of times that's not the case. it's much more complex that relationship might be more different than that. we need some advance. we need insight. better ways to measure the thickness of a model two data. today they run around and talk about the square and how well

particular model fits can da that in the big data world. we need to upgrade a lot of these tools. these method we have available. it doesn't mean they are bad. there's room for improvement. >> is it possible -- what can we regulate with respect to big data and what can't we? you throw the curve ball question. i think with what we need to do is make sure that we are not striefling innovation. we need to focus on the risk we talk about the privacy change. we talk about property pencety challenge and dictatorship of

data challenge. we need to find pragmatic solutions and safe guards in short that society and the individuals are going to be protected. what can you not regulate? >> it's a not very good answer. right now if we go to a doctor and told we have to have an operation. we can ask the doctor why and the doctor can tell us. i learned it in medical school and these are the features why i need the operation. he can pientd to something.

the benefit of the instrumentation. we would ask the doctor why the operation. and the risk is dlat might say i don't know. you can also say this more generally. you may ask the tbhak denies you a loan why was i denied a loan. you say it's because of the credit rating. what if we look at thousand variable and what if all of those there was 00 strong signals and the long tail of -- [inaudible] all of in in a dplaicted formula tailored to the individual that was also changing over the time the reason why the idea of social responsibility society and government.

i don't think you can break the two apart. roughly a three quarter medical people. ten million people will go that far. which the city of san francisco do priority one, two, three about big data. >> simple. the first thing you need -- >> i love you say simple. >> first san fransisco in the leadership position in the united. woe should applaud . >> in what way? i department know that. >> yeah. well, there was a gentleman, i want to say the name chris vine who comes to mind the cpo of the san francisco i believe works at the white house the public

transport data so they can build apps alongside it. he build those and bring the developers together. and san francisco is actually doing very good things. with the gemstone is in the united states in new york city there they have a director of an lettic. san francisco might want to look at the model. what he's done the fellow created a small little team to act as a service provider to all the other administrator agencies in the city. we don't know which build agency

the the outset are the most risk of fire. versus ones that a problem. we get 60,000 complaints a year to our help line. we only have 200 inspectors. how can data help us? he built a model he's brought in all of the data from other agencies and look at balance visits. utility cut or exterior brick work done. in the inspector goes in the past they issue a vacate order to get rid of the building. now they do it in 70% of the visits. everybody lovers it. it's doing more for lessed at the age of austerity. if we can get the right data and

to the right people we can make big difference. i get chagrined and i'm sure other people do. statistically people we have to talk to twelve people and totally describes 12 million. and this is the kind of thick if i adopt believe you can twelve people. what is the argument there? is it going to get worse? >> well, in a way if i may take your question as a slightly larger context. in the way get to the heart of what big data is. and in a way in the small data age, the way we approached problem selfing, decision making was we because we were starved for data we could come up with a theory how it works.

proved or disprove the hypothesis. and then it would go back and change a little bit the high hypothesis. try all over again to collect the data. it worked reasonably well and the small data. it's an art fact of the small. we can use be big data to use

high pot cyst and test it . take a example of google. when they try to find out 50 million which were the best to predict the spread of the flu. they had no clue which of the 50 million to pick. they would have to pick the first every time sample e again. it's crazy. and what is the exact combination? that's crazy to do that. what you want to do is have a mained by which you can create a way of producing hypothesis and the way we're using big data analysis not just to tell us whether we are right or wrong if you help us come up with the

hypothesis. they can check them at the same time. they have a new strategy coming up. >> yeah. what they are doing is take the 50 million most common search terms and essentially try each one to see for the proof of the model. when they find one that is good with the model they try out. elephant or sniffles? >> nope. in the top 100 terms was the term high school basketball. it's played in the winter time. there's a correlation. keep in mind it was deep in the 60 or 70. the model try the 44th term.

it was good. and whatever you -- the new data. no problem. and keep in mind there's -- [inaudible] if you get new data you rewound round the whole thing. it gets better over time. you don't think at any one point in time you have the data and there's the answer. i think that's part of it. we are moving ahead now i didn't

come up with the question. given the field the growing and changing so fast estimate the shelf life of your book. [laughter] it's timeless. it's the first book out of the gate to dwient trend. it's not going to effect business. it's not going it effect government or health care. it's going to effect everything. it's like computing the 19 50s if you think computing is going to go next? what industries will be useful the person would have to honestly answer it's not the right question. because by the year 2013, computers will have wormed their way to everything until they are almost invisible.

it's going learn from data and be data fying things and learning from big data. the way we have self-depriving cars is not because we can computer program a compute per chemical weapon pour in a lot of data and let the statistics and the machine teach itself. where not a presentive. it's one example, large data like the dna of people in the room. all the dna generated by the complete genome and the new national cancerth. we're talk abouting our large complex data. you can't look tat and in the

next excel spread sheet probably data. if big data is about correlation and not cause, how can you judge . >> i think to it's important unthe limitation of big data. the limitation of data that you collect. otherwise you run the risk of repeating the problem of 1936. if i recall correctly. the reader's digest erroneously prededucted -- prodeducted a republican landslide. they did that because the sample was biased. they a large sample bud it was biased. keep in mind in the big data age

it works slightly differently. if you have just half a percent of the population that you sample you do it well. it gives you a good first cut of what the population thinks. now if you then sample 3% or 5%. there's a bias in the sample. that actually doesn't improve anything that makes it worse. but if you -- in the big data age collect 97 or 99% of the data, then even if that is slightly biased, that 1% that you're not collecting is not going to undo all of the analysis. again, it doesn't give the exact but it gives us the right direction and often time it's good enough. >> can 100,000 frenchmen be wrong? they a great body that is here. intuitively you know.

i can't give you an camp that disproves it. can you discuss, i would say it's the last question. unless you don't have an answer. then there's another one. we were actually come to the end here. can you discuss big data as it pertains to climate change? >> yes. obviously. big data will be important for all of or global challenge. the first step we need to do is quantify the problem. and so the era of quantify indication that we saw in the 19th and 20th century is moving to the era of data things. we are all sensors with the mobile phone. there is one company that has a clever app that allows do you take a photograph of a leaf or animal on a path and tell you what it is. the sft is not really designed for you to be able to identify what the leaf is and the tree. but t now when you have many

people doing this, is able to identify is spring coming early this week or this year? or are these sort of mushroom. thing that exists in climate zone and not another. suggesting that climate change is creeping up further. t to say as we instrument all of our lives as data becomes the bedrock of things in society belle able to put a measure and quantity to things and thing like climate change. we may not able to avert it. but identify it and take step. >> thank you. [applause] they are coauthor of "big data." we also thank our audience here and on radio, television, and the interpret. this program has been held in

association with the common wealth club science technology forum. and exploring visions of the future through science and technology. we also want to remind everyone here that copies of the new bock is in the lobby on sale. they'll be pleased to sign them outside the room immediatelying the program. we appreciate you letting them make the way to the signing substantial. host of np rsh. the meaning of the commonwealth club of california is adjourned. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations] we have more booktv in prime time tomorrow night. 8:00 eastern a discussion of the book "this is the day" about the

1963 march on washington. at 8:0 retired general "tap on the wall "the poems he wrote as a pow in vietnam. at 9:50 a discussion about "saving justice" the time as solicitor general in the nixon administration. president obama discussed the effect of sequester bucket cut on-air travel and negotiations with congress on spending. >> you will recall that, you know, even as recently as my campaign, republicans were saying sequester is terrible. it's going to be disaster for the economy. we have to do something about it. then when it was determined that doing something about it might

mean that we close tax law school hope for the wealthy and well connected. we'll take the sequester. and the notion was somehow we will exaggerated effect of the sequester. remember? the president's crying wolf. he's chicken little. the sequester is no problem. then in rapid sub suggestion suddenly white house tours it's terrible. how can we let it happen. and most recently what do we do about potential delay at the airports? so despite the fact that a lot of member of congress were suggesting somehow it was a vict for them and this wouldn't hurt the economy. it's resulting in people being

thrown out of work and hurting folks all across the country. and the fact that congress responded to the short term problem of flight delays by giving us the option of shifting money that is designed to repair and improve airport over the long-term to fix the short term problem. that's not a solution. so essentially what have done is said in order to delay this summer. we're going ensure delay for the next two or three decades. >> why did you go along with -- . >> hold on a second. so the alternative, of course, is either to go ahead and impose a bunch of delays on passengers now, which also does not fix the problem, or the third alternative is to fix the

problem by coming up with a broader larger deal. but jonathan, you have seem to suggest that somehow these folks over there have not responsibilities and my job is to somehow get them to be heavy. that's their job. they are elected -- member of congress are e lekked in order to do what is right for the constituency and american people. so if in fact they are seriously concerned about passenger convenience and safety, then they shouldn't just be thinking about tomorrow or next week or the week after that. they should be thinking about what is going to happen five years from now, ten years from now, or fifteen years from now. the only way for them to do that is engage with me oncoming up with a broader deal. and that's exactly what i'm trying to do. continue to talk to them about are there ways for us to fix

this? frankly, i don't think that if i were to -- [inaudible] that's somehow would lead to the broader fix. it means there would be pain now, which they will try to blame on me as opposed to paying five years from now. but either way the problem got fixed is if both parties sit down and say how are we going mike sure we reduce or deficit sen belie. -- sensibly. ..

is. >> she said of her own bedroom upstairs right across from the president's office and she was always able to hear what was going on. she read daily newspapers and broad different points?? of view to is the presidentw and was able to calm him down and was the granddaughter of the house taking care of her daughters and grandchildren