05/12/2015 Click

He also convinced his daughter that she'd explode if she left the house.

This week, big data in the sky, on the walls, even on your butt. Hey,

Lewington, get off your butt! There are a few things I love more

than Computex eight made beautiful. -- macro -- compter data. It is even

better when he can throw it up onto a circular walk and then access it

all from your evil genius' chair. First I will destroy the earth! Then

the solar system! And, finally, the entire galaxy! Apart from Elvis.

This is the data observatory, at London's imperial college, from

where you can observe any data you want. That's where we are right now.

Today, this professor is using it to show me financial transactions,

specifically all of those being made right now using the digital currency

bitcoin. These are where the bitcoin transactions are happening around

the world right now and here we can see the individual transactions as

they happen. What's going on? This is somebody who is hoovering up lots

of little amount of bitcoin from their wallet and using it to make

payments. So they are just going down the back of the sofa? That's

right. Maximum vacuuming happening here. A lot of change down the back

of the sofa. And a lot of activity is happening in China, but we can't

see it because it is behind the great firewall of China. Unusual

transactions look even more lovely. In fact, this malicious activity

looks a bit like a parasitic worm, which I guess is what it is. There's

also beauty in how the bitcoin currency works and how transactions

are recorded. Just like a bank will keep a record of the movement of

money, something called a ledger, there is a record of all the bitcoin

transactions that have been made. It's a massive file called the block

chain. And the brilliant thing about it is it can't be tampered with. You

can't fake an entry, delete a payment or create new fake coins.

That's because copies of it are stored on thousands of computers

across the globe. You can't alter the record of events unless you can

somehow tamper with each copy of the file on the majority of these

machines. Let's face it, realistically you can't. I about to

make a bitcoin payment on this phone and you will see that transaction

entered the bitcoin network. Here we go. Sending payment. There it is!

There's my payment. It is now in the network waiting to be verified.

Already, all of these computers around the world know about that

transaction entered a few minutes' time one of their will verify it. --

and in a few minutes'. And there will be a permanent record of my

transaction that in theory cannot ever be tampered with or undone. But

the block chain method is more than just a way of keeping big queen

records. The idea of a tamper-proof ledger stored on many machines is

being taken seriously as a way to keep a record of all sorts of

transactions. We have been to meet a view block chain entrepreneurs. -- a

few. I think the block chain to me is all

about efficiency. What's cool about a block chain is that it is software

that operates autonomously. Much like in a music is this, like the

combination of the iPod and iTunes marketplace. We think it has the

potential to be that disruptive. It is a piece of technology that you

can facilitate and trust amongst individuals, governments,

enterprises and business. We are in the city of London at the theory and

developer conference. 300 or so people have paid ?750 each to be

here for the week to learn more about the block chain. They're

calling it web 3.0 and they say this is the weight the incident was meant

to be, not run by anybody but sort of run by everybody, because no one

person control it. The reason why so many people I hear is because they

think it could dramatically improve how markets work. -- are here. Right

now if you want to sell your house it requires a lot of paperwork and

legal agreements, solicitors, and it can be slow and expensive. The idea

is that this could be done as a digital transaction that recognised

on the block chain by faster and secured without third party is

getting involved. The possible implications of that, what you can

do with that, are almost too many to imagine. If you think about our

existing financial system, they're holding all this money and that is

then a lot of power and that's one of the really compelling things

about decentralisation. It doesn't have some person sitting in the

middle of it who can change the system if they want to. Bureaucracy

in general will start floating away as we get governments,

institutions, individuals, businesses and enterprises to be

able to trust and deal with each other as transparency and diesel --

transparently and easily as we can send an e-mail to each other. A lot

of bureaucrats will be watching this, worried about their jobs!

Who is behind this is a technology? The inventor of it, on application

of the block chain, is this 21-year-old. In general, I think we

are seeing new technological eras that are as different from each

other as say the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, but we see them, but every

ten or 20 years. No single technology will bring about the

exact utopia for your political ideology but it does make

significant steps in that direction. By working together, we can create

systems that are much more reliable than any single one of us can ever

be. This is because the block chain is a distributed system which means

no one person is in charge of checking it. Every user effectively

has a copy of the data at a certain number of those users check the

transactions to make sure they all are accurate and fit together. It is

like a decentralised, distributed system, as a possible way of making

the internet more democratic. That kind of connection, you can change

technology that might change society, the benefits are clear to

the typical user and to the way the internet works. But it is certainly

not without its difficulties. Indeed, this kind of technology is a

double-edged sword. In a way it lacks a central point of control,

but that's also a problem. Imagine if somebody transferred ownership of

your car or your house to someone else in a malicious manner. How

would you get repossession of your house? There is no appeal body could

go to. Also, as the sophistication of this technology improves, people

will create viruses that will attempt to accumulate economic

wealth, in the same way as they currently try to write viruses to

steal your bank details and so on. Now it will steal your assets.

Hello and welcome to this week's at ology round-up. It was the week that

these children's company revealed its tech. Over 6.3 million

children's account up in composite -- the most as well as almost 5

million parent accounts. The US, France and the UK were most

affected, as the names, addresses and pictures of users were stolen.

It was also the week that the internet sensation Psy released

another catchy, but incredibly creepy, music video. And supermodel

Kendall Jenner won Instagram. She posted the most likely to this year,

with 3.2 million likes. And big news for Facebook, as Mark Zuckerberg

announces he will give away 99% of his shares in the company. That's a

cool 45 million dollars. His shares are to fund an initiative run by him

and his wife, which basically aims to save the world. Q diseases and

equality. He also became a dad and shared it fire, you guessed it. And

it was also the week that NASA created a humanoid robot, which cut

serious shapes. Destined for Mars, it is being tested for all sorts of

movements which could contribute to its future intergalactic missions.

Not quite ready for a Strictly just yet.

By now you will know I am a bit of a weirdo when it comes to turning data

into pretty pictures. Yes, yes, it is. This is the new big bang data

show in London. Part celebration of and part warning about the amount of

data flying around the world, freely available to anyone looking. Here,

some of the public accessible selfies taken in London and here are

some of the masks designed to defeat facial recognition software,

although even I can tell this won't work. This is a wall of selective

tweets meet near Somerset House over the last few days. Wide-awake and

awaiting the postman. If ever I survive a nuclear war and there's no

internet or infrastructure, I would flee to Cambridge. I can't read that

one out. Think of it as a cross-section of London's thoughts.

The most relaxing peace to look out has to be this one. This, believe it

or not, is the stock market in Galaxy form. Every star is a

company, every flash is a trade in that company's stocks. When he just

to see a small flashlight that it is probably ?10 million changing hands.

Tell me about these weekly creatures crawling around. -- wriggly. Those

are artificial lifeforms that live in the sky with the stars and they

feed from the light generated by the trading. These creatures evolve over

the course of the exhibition, getting better at finding those

light sources and feeding off the brightest trades. So, it is just

before 2:30pm UK time, just before 9:30am New York time. Is that when

the stock exchange opens? Yes. You will see when the New York Stock

Exchange opens. You can't miss it. Just before it opens, the creatures

look as if they are getting excited. They do. Yes. Oh, wow! Ding aling,

ladies and gentlemen, New York is online. There has been a lot of

work, helping us to get clearance from individual stock exchanges

around the world to use this data. Because it is so valuable. It was

the sort of dotcom era when we started this. I was asked to go in

and fix it. I went into the Gallery and what had happened is because the

stars clustered together based on correlations between companies, the

market had collapsed and all the companies had dropped their prices

at the same time, which meant every star correlated with every other

star, so they all basically collapsed into a black hole. Oh my

goodness. You visualised the dotcom crash as a buy coal? As it happened.

How poetic! -- as a black hole. Next, we have been looking at other

ideas to help us relax. These days, we can suffer from data

overload and with so many of us living such busy lives with so much

going on around us and always being contactable on one of these, it is

not surprising that we can feel a bit stressed out. I'm looking at

technology that can track your tension and even relieve it. When

worn in the white position, this standard activity tracker can also

track your breathing and therefore monitor your stress levels. -- worn

in the right position. It's senses understand body activity and

breathing patterns. And then some clever algorithms identify your

moments of focus, calm and activity as well as any moments of tension.

As well as selecting daily targets, you can set alerts like a warning if

you have been tense for two minutes, and then the app has exercises to

help get you back on form. Exhale slowly and notice how it feels as

the air leaves your body. My only issue is that the device has just a

six hour memory so you have to keep connect it to your phone, unlike my

regular activity tracker, which I just sync when I feel like it. When

we start to feel pressure, our fingers become moist and that can --

affects the ability for the skin to conduct electrical current. The Pip

is monitoring how that works. Each time you do it, you tried to improve

your score. 75% is quite good. It synchronises to various apps. One is

relax and race which is a game where the more relaxed you are the fastest

you move through it, so train yourself to become calmer on demand

and you can keep bettering your score. I'm not sure what your Dragon

is a very relaxing picture. Of course, I stress levels can

seriously impact Dzeko and mental health. -- high stress levels can

seriously impact physical and mental health. There is some irony in

technology coming to the rescue. Meditation apps have been around for

a while now and they teach the basics of meditation and mindfulness

in manageably short sessions. My first thought was that I didn't even

have time for that, which would have shown how much I needed it. Find a

quiet place to sit where you won't be disturbed. Yet all of this

tracking proved how calm I am. Of course this technology cannot take

away the pressures of modern life but it can encourage us to think

about how we feel so we can do something about it. Back at the

exhibition, a timely reminder of how the amount of data we are generating

has exploded and, counterintuitively, how little space

we now require to install it all. -- store. In the future, we may keep it

biologically. We already do. She has been working on this for a couple of

years. And she has taken the DNA from discarded cigarette butts and

chewing gum... Yes. She has been looking for traces of DNA on items

that have been left in public spaces. These things that she knows

are samples of this essential set of data that identifies us, like our

DNA. She has created faces from the DNA found on these things? Yes. Can

this possibly be anything like? They are things you can know like the

colour of the skin, the ethnic opposition of your background. But

you cannot know how pronounced your chin is, for example. Aspects that

are real and aspects that exist in potential space. But the most

interesting thing is that some of our most personal data, we are just

spreading it around. We are literally leaving it on the street.

So if you recognise yourself, you spat out some chewing gum on Wilson

and Stanhope in Brooklyn, New York. Is that if you, put it in the bin

next time. -- if. Headphones socket don't like fluff. This is a tip.

Insert and clean. That is better. This is the London situation room.

There are two works on here. This is London 2036. We will deal with that

in a moment. First, the work on these walls. This is some of the

data that London is generating right now from Twitter, Instagram and

transport for London. It looks very text heavy there but it is being

visualised on this wall here and this is the story of how it was

made. We are a data visualisation studio and we were approached for a

new commission for an exhibition they are doing. We were asked

specifically to investigate real-time data. Our aim is to

democratise data and make it accessible to everyone and we do

this in a visual way. We are looking at three different types of data,

three different sources. TFL, Instagram and Twitter. This is a

sweet. It is not just that which we share. Is quite small after all. It

is just one line. The rest is the metadata associated with the sweet.

Time, when it was created, latitude and longitude. Our main aim when we

create data is to communicate a story. That is generally true of

every data visualisation we create. Somehow they deeper purpose. This

piece looks at telling everyone across the exhibition what data is

and how it can be visualised to create a story. As soon as something

is posted, we analysed and we cross reference with a list of 2500 words

that have a score from -5 two positive five. The pink represents

positive words and cyan negative words. During a normal day, we will

get between 70000 and 80,000 tweets. You are never going to be

able to process as much information as I computer and visualise it, so

it gives you the key trends and patterns and gives you insight,

allowing you to investigate in a much more targeted way than you

would if you just had an Excel spreadsheet in front of you. That is

London today but what is London going to be like in 2036? That is

the question we are about to answer. Your challenge on this game

is to make a series of infrastructure changes based on the

evolving needs of the capital. But will you make the right decisions?

The game asks you to make choices about how London should develop.

What kind of transport will you prioritise, where will resources

like water and power come from for the city's growing population, and

more to the point, where will everyone live? In order to keep

services running, we need to invest in more self driving cars or more

cheap capacity. Self driving cars, I think. How important is it for

Londoners to have their own garden. Not at all. Concretely not. These

are the -- concrete the lot. These are the kinds of decisions that

politicians are making right now. How would you do the job. Available

housing has declined... The most popular job is marketing and PR.

Sorry, future London. I will have to have another go. Just before we

leave, one more example of the kind of data we are inadvertently giving

away two whoever might want to make use of it. Ladies and gentlemen, I

know where your cat lives .com. If you have uploaded a picture of your

cat and used a hashtag, #cat, you might be on this map. You have been

warned. Hello. Welcome to the weekend

but what a wild and windy start.