Capitalogix

World's Smallest Computer

Just saw this and thought it was worth sharing.

Can you guess what this picture shows?

 

 

The "thing" next to the fingernail is a functioning computer created at the University of Michigan (and it measures just .3 mm a side).   It's run by photovoltaics and is primarily used as a precision temperature sensor. The caveat is that once it loses power, it loses all prior programming and data.

It tests the limits of what we call a computer - but it's multitudes better than the previous iteration, and innovation breeds innovation. 

Exciting stuff!

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - August 18th, 2019

Larry Kudlow confirmed that Trump wants to buy Greenland.

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• MIT's New Interactive Machine Learning Prediction Tool Could Give Everyone AI Superpowers. (TechCrunch)
• Why You Need Innovation Capital and How to Get It. (HBR)
• The Myth of Rational Thinking. (Vox)
• The Hotel Hackers Are Hiding In The Remote Control Curtains. (Bloomberg)
• Watch the Meaning of Life: One of the Best Animated Short Films Ever Made Traces the Evolution Life, the Universe & Beyond. (OpenCulture)

 

Trading Links:

• Amazon's Most Lucrative Business is Headed to Space. (Quartz)
• Training a Single AI Model Can Emit as Much Carbon as Five Cars in Their Lifetimes. (TechReview)
• These Indicators Show Where You'll See the Eventual Recession Hit First. (Globe&Mail)
• Big Techs Raise Important Issues Globally beyond Traditional Financial Risks. (Forbes)
• We are Very Close to Peak Fintech, with More Than 10,000 Startups Jumping into the Boom. (Quartz)

Finding A Way – Just Do It!

It's hard to fight Mother Nature.

Willpower isn't always enough. 

The trick is recognizing that you can create conditions that make your success much more likely.

No matter how much internal resolve you have, changing the story you tell yourself, and the environment you create for yourself, are reliable ways to make meaningful and lasting change.

Is How You Do Something, How You Do Everything?

On some level, I think so.  To make the point, let me start with a brief story. 

I was at the gym and getting pretty close to the end of my workout.

Frankly, I was at a point where being done was way more attractive than the option of doing additional exercise.

Over time, I've developed many habits and beliefs that focus on finding the best next step - or a way to do just a little bit more. So this time, I used reverse-counting to help me finish that workout strong.

I started with 10 push-ups. I know I can do 10 push-ups, even at the end of a hard workout. Without putting my knees down, I can rest in plank position for a moment or two ... then I do nine more push-ups. That has to be easier than 10, right? Then eight more ... seven ... six. You get the point.

Each set is a little bit harder than the one before; but mentally I'm prepared for it, and can convince myself that I'm so much closer to the goal.

So I get to three, and sweat is dripping off my nose, my arms are shaking, and my hips want to sway. Somehow knowing that there are only two more sets, then only one more, allows me to finish.

That story could have been about creating profitable trading systems, developing a new database, or recovering from a setback.  It's about finding a way, regardless of external circumstances.

Finding a Way to Do Just a Little Bit More.

There are many times that it seems easier to do nothing, or to give up. That's just not my nature. It's not in my "nurture" either.

My father used to say that the secret to success was getting up. What he meant was that if someone knocked you down 10 times, then the secret to success was getting up 11 times. And if someone knocked you down another time, then the secret was to get up 12 times. There's a lot of truth in that.

I laugh when I think of all the little things I do that condition me to take the best next step. Here are a few examples of small things that help define that mindset.

• I never stop reading until I finish a chapter.
• Also, when I play a strategy game on my iPhone, I never stop until I win.
• And, when I play a strategy game that I'm good at, I never stop until I achieve a certain score. 

It doesn't matter if I'm frustrated or tired.  I find a way.  Each of these things, in its own small way, helps condition me to know that I can do anything I commit to do.  Ultimately, what that means is that regardless of what happens, my outcome depends most on what I choose to do.

Sometimes these habits seem silly, quirky, or even a little bit OCD to me. Yet, they serve me.

Many benefits come from knowing that the game's not over until you say it is ... or until you win.

Moreover, it's comforting to know that there's always a best next step, or at least a different perspective that will create new opportunities and possibilities.

I tend to take that perspective in business as well. We focus on the progress we're making, and what that makes possible, rather than how far we are from the ultimate goal. Why? Because, as we continue to make progress, the things we shoot for are bigger and farther away. Focusing there would always show a shortfall. Obstacles and setbacks become the raw material for new growth, ideas, and strategies.  The trick is getting back up, isn't it?

Sometimes the best advice is simple. Nike got it right in their ad ... Just Do It.

This Week in AI: AI's Weaknesses

AI has plenty of weaknesses - I've talked about some before, and I'll continue to talk about them in the future, but two specific weaknesses were brought to my attention this week. 

AI Portraits - Won't Steal Your Data, But Might Steal Your Soul Dorian Gray-Style

I assume most of you have seen the FaceApp trend - people age-ifying their photos and unwittingly giving the rights to their photos to a shadowy Russian tech company.  You've also likely seen AI paintings selling for ridiculous money. 

But have you seen their lovechild AI Portraits - a more wholesome experiment run by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. AI Portraits uses approximately 45,000 different Renaissance-esque 15th-century portraits and General Adversarial Networks to translate your selfie into an artistic masterpiece. It's novel because instead of simply drawing over your face it's generating new features and creating an entirely new version of your face.

 

Mauro Martino via YouTube

It's impressive because it determines the best style for your portrait based on your features, your background, and more. 

However, it's not without "flaw". The choice of 15th-century portraiture creates a couple of clear biases. At the time, portraits of smiling or laughing individuals were rare, so your smile will likely not transfer. As well, there's a clear bias towards anglo-saxonification. 

via AI Portraits

My son got excited while playing with the app and sent several of his coworkers, friends, and family through the app. If you look at the bottom right, you'll see my lovely wife Jen's portrait. 

Most of you have seen my wife and know that she is Indonesian, something that is very much removed from the translation. 

You can also see it in Beyonce's AI portrait. 

via MyModernMet

All photos are immediately deleted from their servers after creating your image, so your privacy is safe (this time!)

All biases can be considered quirks of this current iteration of the program - which I do earnestly believe is interesting. 

Later, you can imagine an AI choosing between various different styles of art based on a cornicopia of factors - or off human selection - but you have to walk before you can run, and this is a fun way to get people excited about AI. 

Computer Answering Systems - No, The Answer Isn't 42

“Yes…Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But I’ll have to think about it...the program will take me seven-and-a-half million years to run.” - Deep Thought, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Think of the global excitement when IBM's Watson first beat Ken Jennings in Jeopardy ... it's widely considered one of the holy grails of AI research to create a machine that truly understands the nuances of language and human thought. Yet, if you've talked to Alexa recently, you know there's a long way to go. 

Today's question answering systems are basically glorified document retrieval systems. They scan text for related words and send you the most relevant options. Researchers at the University of Maryland recently figured out how to easily create questions that stump AI (without being paradoxical, impossible to answer, requiring empathy etc.) in order to enhance those systems.

A system that understands those questions will be a massive step toward a real understanding and processing of language. 

So what's the secret to these "impossible" questions?

From the University of Maryland article: 

The questions revealed six different language phenomena that consistently stump computers. These six phenomena fall into two categories. In the first category are linguistic phenomena: paraphrasing (such as saying “leap from a precipice” instead of “jump from a cliff”), distracting language or unexpected contexts (such as a reference to a political figure appearing in a clue about something unrelated to politics). The second category includes reasoning skills: clues that require logic and calculation, mental triangulation of elements in a question, or putting together multiple steps to form a conclusion [...]

For example, if the author writes “What composer's Variations on a Theme by Haydn was inspired by Karl Ferdinand Pohl?” and the system correctly answers “Johannes Brahms,” the interface highlights the words “Ferdinand Pohl” to show that this phrase led it to the answer. Using that information, the author can edit the question to make it more difficult for the computer without altering the question’s meaning. In this example, the author replaced the name of the man who inspired Brahms, “Karl Ferdinand Pohl,” with a description of his job, “the archivist of the Vienna Musikverein,” and the computer was unable to answer correctly. However, expert human quiz game players could still easily answer the edited question correctly.

 

The main change is increasing the complexity of the questions by nestling another question. In the above example, the second question forces the AI not only to decide the composer inspired by Karl Ferdinand Pohl, but also to decipher who is inspiring (hint: It's Karl Ferdinand Pohl). 

AI isn't great yet at mental triangulation; at putting together multiple steps to form a conclusion. While AI is great at brute force applications - we're still coding the elegance. 

 

via Gaping Void

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - August 9th, 2019

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• How to Prioritize When Everything Feels Important. (Zapier)
• DNA Data Storage is Closer Than You Think. (Scientific American)
• The Man Who Can Remember Every Day of His Life. (BBC)
• How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong. (Wired)
• Scientists are Making Human-Monkey Hybrids in China. (TechReview)

 

Trading Links:

• First Spotify, Now Slack: Wall Street May Be Losing Its Iron Grip on Silicon Valley. (Vox)
• The Tokenization of Securities is Happening Right Now and No One is Noticing. (VB)
• 5 Big Breakthroughs to Anticipate in 3D Printing. (SingularityHub)
• How the State Runs Business in China. (TheGuardian)
• Researchers Map Global Economy in Collaboration with LinkedIn. (Phys)

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - August 4th, 2019

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Being and Drunkenness: How to Party Like an Existentialist. (Aeon)
• When Navy Sailors & Marines Share a Ship, Karaoke Night Gets Complicated. (WSJ)
• Fewer American Women are Working Than Two Decades Ago. (Economist)
• Now Calling Balls and Strikes: Robot Umpires. (Wall Street Journal)
• The State of AI in 2019: Breakthroughs in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Games, and Knowledge Graphs. (ZDNet)

 

Trading Links:

• This VC Firm Just Raised More Than $1 Billion to Invest in Moonshots: Term Sheet. (Fortune)
• Pentagon Puts $10B Contract on Hold After Trump Swipe at Amazon. (Politico)
• The Two Times in History Stocks Have Been this Expensive: 1929 and 2000. (Fortune)
• Stocks Plunge After Fed Cuts Rates for First Time since 2008. (CNBC)
• Opinion: This Highly Accurate Stock-Market Predictor Just Hit Its Most Bearish Level since the Internet Bubble. (MarketWatch)

Living Longer, Healthier, and Better

Each year I get a little bit more focused on what I can be doing to get more out of my time and to increase the quantity of time left.

Even with a renewed focus on health, it isn't always easier. As my friend Ben Hardy says, Willpower Doesn't Work - you have to identify goals that are bigger than yourself, create consequences and rewards for achieving or failing to achieve those goals, and change your environment to make success easy.  

I don't just want to be healthier to increase my time on earth, but to better support my family, my business, and to create a positive impact on those around me. 

When you have a vision of who you want to be, and what you want to accomplish, achieving your goals becomes a lot easier. 

When the goal is health, there are definitely some decisions that are proven to help. You can click to see the image in full-size. 

via informationisbeautiful

 

On top of the science, here are some of my anecdotal opinions on living longer, healthier, and better:

• Losing weight is as simple as calories in, calories out. It doesn't matter if you're on keto or eating only twinkies if you can keep your calories ingested below your calories burned
• In life, and in diets, shortcuts end up hurting you long-term more than they help you short-term
• Living "right" doesn't mean you can't let loose, it means that it's the exception instead of the rule. If your lifestyle doesn't let you have fun with your friends or family, it's probably not the healthiest lifestyle. Mental health is just as important as physical health

 

I'd love to hear your favorite "trick" to living better. Feel free to send me an e-mail. 

Thanks! Live Long and Prosper!

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - July 28th, 2019

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Elon Musk Unveils Neuralink's Plans for Brain-Reading Threads' and a Robot to Insert Them. (TheVerge)
• Ethical Artificial Intelligence Becomes a Supreme Competitive Advantage. (Forbes)
• The 1 Private Thing Queen Elizabeth Insists on Doing Every Single Day. (Cheatsheet)
• The World's Best Restaurants. (Bloomberg)
• Amazon Surpasses Apple and Google to Become World's Most Valuable Brand. (MacRumors)

 

 

Trading Links:

• Microsoft's 'Blow Out' Fourth Quarter Beats Analyst Projections by $1 Billion. (CNN)
• Netflix is Losing Beloved Shows, Subscribers, and Confidence. (TheVerge)
• Market Commentary From The Rocky Mountain Summit. (CumberlandAdvisors)
• Who Will Win? Banks, FinTechs or BigTechs? (FinExtra)
• How Discount Brokerages Make Money. (Kalzumeus)

Fueling Alpha: Data is Powering the New World

Data is becoming a precious commodity.

A staggering 90% of all the world’s data (2.5 quintillion bytes per day) has been created in the past two years alone ... and its value is rapidly rising.

With IoT growing from 2 billion devices in 2006 to a projected 200 billion by 2020 you can expect to see that growth continue to explode.

Data is today’s “wild west” and the battlefield of today’s tech titans. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft all have an unprecedented amount of data (and power).

Rapid growth means little time to create adequate rules. Everyone’s jumping to own more data than the next and to protect their own data from prying eyes.

I see it in trading, but it’s pervasive in every industry and in our personal lives.  

Having basic data and basic analytics used to be enough, but the game is changing.  Traders used to focus on price data, but now you’re seeing an influx of firms using alternative data sets to find an edge. If you’re using the same data sources as your competitors and competing on the same set of beliefs, it’s hard to find a sustainable edge. Understanding the game they’re playing, and their rules are important, but that’s table stakes.

Figuring out where you can find extra insight, or where you can make the invisible visible, creates a moat between you and your competition, and it lets you play your own game.

I shot a video where I talk high-level about Data as fuel for your business. Check it out.

 

 

It is interesting to think about what’s driving the new world (of trading, of technology, of AI, etc.) and that often involves identifying what drove the old world. History has a way of repeating itself.

Before e-mails, fax machines were amazing. Before cars, you were really happy with a horse and buggy.

It’s in these comparisons that I think we can help explain the importance of data in today’s new world economics.

via gapingvoid

Data as the New Oil

Petroleum has played a pivotal role in human advancement since the industrial revolution; it fueled (and still fuels) our creativity, technology advancements, and a variety of derivative products. There are direct competitors to fossil fuels that are gaining steam, but I think it’s more interesting to compare petroleum to data due to their parallels in effect on innovation.

The process of pumping crude oil out of the ground and transforming it into a finished product is far from simple, but anyone can understand the process at a high-level. You have to locate a reservoir, drill, capture the resource, and then refine it to the desired product – heating oil, gasoline, asphalt, plastics, etc.  

The same is true for data.

You've got to figure out what data you might have, how it might be useful, you have to figure out how to refine it, clean it, fix it, curate it, transform it into something useful, and then how to deliver it to the people that need it in their business. And even if you've done this, you then have to make people aware that it's there, that it's changing, or how they might use it. For people who do it well, it's an incredible edge.  – Howard Getson

Data can be seen as the fuel to the information economy and oil to the industrial economy. The amount of power someone has can be correlated to their control of and access to these resources ... and, leaking of these resources can lead to extreme consequences.

Why Data Is Better Than Oil

The analogy works, but it’s just that, an analogy, and the more you analyze it, the more it falls apart. Unlike the finite resource that is oil, data is all around us and increasing at an exponential rate, so the game is a little different:

• Data is – ultimately – a renewable resource. It’s durable, it’s reusable, and it’s being produced faster than we can process it.
• Because it’s not a scarce resource, there’s no urge to hoard it – you can use it, share it, transform it, infinitely knowing that it won’t diminish. Data is more useful the more you use it.
• As the world’s oil reserves dwindle, and renewable resources grow in popularity and effectiveness, the relative value of oil drops. It’s unlikely that will happen to data.
• Also, while data transport is important, it’s not expensive the way oil is. It can be transported and replicated at light speed.

Using alternative data gives traders an advantage, but it doesn’t always have to be confidential or hard to find information. Traders now have access to vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. An important source that many overlook is the data produced through their own process or the metadata from their own trades or transactions.

In the very near future, I expect these systems to be able to go out and search for different sources of information. It's almost like the algorithm becomes an omnivore. Instead of simply looking at market data or transactional data, or even metadata, it starts to look for connections or feedback loops that are profitable in sources of data that the human would never have thought of. – Howard Getson

In a word of caution, there are two common mistakes people make when making data-driven decisions. First, people often end up slaves to the data, losing focus on the bigger picture. Second, even the most insightful data can’t predict black swans.  It’s important to exercise caution.

The future of data is bright, but it’s also littered with potential challenges. Privacy concerns and misuse of data have been hot button topics, as have fake news and the ability of systems to generate misleading data. In addition, as we gain access to more data, our ability to separate signal from noise becomes more important.

The question becomes, how do you capitalize on data, without becoming a victim to it? 

Food for thought!

Taking Stealing To The Next Level: Baseball and Machine Learning

Baseball signals are purposely confusing to keep them a secret.  Attempting to decode your opponents' signals is part of the game. As it turns out, machine learning is pretty good at figuring them out. 

Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer on the Curiosity Rover, put together a good video showing its efficiency. It's an interesting application and a pretty good introduction to machine learning. It did the rounds in my office, and we liked it. 

 

via Mark Rober

So, what do you think, should we make this legal in the MLB?