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 iso 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] naomis

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

>> choice after choice after choice. you are living a game in the present. and in a game come if you read some of the games, the beauty of the digital era game is you are not playing the game in order to win and an and 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 a game for conclusion. it's no longer crisis climax relief and sleep, that sort of male orgasm curve of narrative. it's how long can we keep this thing going, which is a much better question to ask in a world that you're living in right now rather than that colonialist take, expansionistic, when the day victory world. narrative collapses one of them. the second one which comes from this videogame impulse is something michael digiphrenia. that's really what isn't like to live in a world where we are constantly making all of these choices all the time? what digital world tells us, the commercial digital world is you can make both choices. you don't have to choose this or that. you can choose this and that and