So, what’s the trade-off here? In general, we are safer (automation makes airline flying safer, in general) except in the…

“So, what’s the trade-off here? In general, we are safer (automation makes airline flying safer, in general) except in the long-tail: pilots are losing both tacit knowledge of flying and some of its mechanics. But in general, we, as humans, have less and less understanding of our machines—we are compartmentalized, looking at a tiny corner of a very complex system beyond our individual comprehension. Increasing numbers of our systems—from finance to electricity to cybersecurity to medical systems, are going in this direction. We are losing control and understanding which seems fine—until it’s not. We will certainly, and unfortunately, find out what this really means because sooner or later, one of these systems will fail in a way we don’t understand.”

–Failing the Third Machine Age: When Robots Come for Grandma — The Message — Medium (vianew-aesthetic)

We’ve seen some less-radical attempts to destroy technology in the real world in recent months, mainly in the form of attacks on…

“We’ve seen some less-radical attempts to destroy technology in the real world in recent months, mainly in the form of attacks on people wearing Glass or flying drones, or the drone on its own (by hockey fans who reportedly and incorrectly thought it belonged to the LAPD). As in the movie, the destroyers haven’t been identified or punished, with one exception: Andrea Mears, 23, was charged with third degree assault for attacking a teen boy, Austin Haughwout, 17, flying a drone on a Connecticut beach. She got probation this week, as noted by comprehensive drone chronicler Greg McNeal. It’s easy to call these people Luddites, after the British workers who set about destroying machines — and in some cases killing the people who owned them — in the late 1700s and early 1800s in a futile attempt to turn back the tide of mechanization. It led Britain to pass a law making machine-wrecking punishable by death. But the new machine destroyers’ motivations are different. The original Luddites were worried machines would take their jobs; the Neo-Luddites fear machines will steal their privacy.”

–The Violent Opt-out: The Neo-Luddites Attacking Drones And Google Glass - Forbes (vianew-aesthetic)

Who would’ve ever thought Mars and Hawaii were related? NASA’s Curiosity rover revealed a Martian geology very similar to that…

IFTTT, Instagram

Who would’ve ever thought Mars and Hawaii were related? NASA’s Curiosity rover revealed a Martian geology very similar to that of Hawaiian volcanic soils. This makes Mauna Loa a perfect spot for simulated Mars missions. #hiseas #mars #marsanalog #marssimulation #hawaii #maunaloa #curiosity #rover #geology #nasa by angelovermeulen http://instagram.com/p/q1qJ3eD3Ba/

Escher: A black-and-white language for data and process representation

Escher, programming, MEMEX, programming language, PLT, back box, graphs, reflex, UX, metaphor

The basic unit of meaning in Escher is the reflex. A reflex is a named black-box computational device, which interfaces with other objects in the linguistic environment through a set of named valves. Metaphorically, the valves can be viewed as labeled communication pipes coming out of the black-box.

http://www.maymounkov.org/memex/abstract

Colombian Student Faces Prison Charges for Sharing an Academic Article Online

academia, copyright, access, research, EFF, open access, free trade, piracy, biodiversity

In many parts of the developing world, students face barriers to access academic materials. Libraries are often inadequate, and schools and universities are often unable to pay dues for expensive, specialized databases. For these students, the Internet is a vital tool and resource to access materials that are otherwise unavailable to them. Yet despite the opportunities enabled by the Internet, there are still major risks to accessing and sharing academic resources online. A current situation in Colombia exemplifies this problem: a graduate student is facing four to eight years in prison for sharing an academic article on the Internet. He wasn’t making a personal profit from sharing the article—he simply intended for other scientists like him to be able to access and cite this scientific research.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion,…

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

–Brian Eno,A Year With Swollen Appendices

Cryptoforestry: Food pairing / gastronomy with a telescope

food pairing, food, cryptoforestry, open sauces, data, cooking, geography, gastronomy

The number of foodpairs a recipe generates increases exponentially with the number of ingredients. A typical cookbook (and the ones we use here are all modest one) yields anywhere between 700 and 2500 pairs, the number of connections when comparing three books is large and a really meaningful way to visualize a foodpair comparison we have not yet found. Instead we have turned to using the Jaccard Index, a simple formula for comparing similarity in datasets. If two book are absolutely similar (a book compared with itself) the index is 1, if the books are completely dissimilar the index is 0. So how higher the number how greater the similarity.

http://cryptoforest.blogspot.nl/2014/07/food-pairing-gastronomy-with-telescope.html

Weird Shit

werid, weirdness, high weirdness, Erik Davis, Boing Boing, art, literature, margins, fringe, otherwi

Weird is a wayward word: though it describes a set of singular effects that link the cultural fringe with peculiar personal experiences, it remains an elusive and marginal term. The similar notion of the uncanny is, on the other hand, basically an establishment term, a well-established literary effect with a sophisticated psychoanalytic pedigree. Weirdness, we might say then, is the uncanny’s low-brow doppelganger, a demotic country cousin that races hot-rods, wears mis-matched socks, and inhabits the strange borderlands between this world and the beyond.

http://boingboing.net/2014/07/14/weird-shit.html

Climate change signals the end of Australian shiraz as we know it

wine, australia, climate change, tasmania

“We are investing increasingly in Tasmania … because it’s one of the cooler areas in Australia to grow grapes and if we are going to have climate change, you might as well start in a cooler climate,” said Cecil Camilleri, the manager of sustainable wine programs at Yalumba, the 165-year-old winemaking company that has snapped up three Tasmanian properties in the past 15 years. The average temperature in the Tamar Valley in the northeast of the state is around 17 degrees celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit), peaking at 22 degrees in the summer - well below the Barossa’s typical summer spike into the upper 30s.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/14/us-climatechange-australia-wine-idUSKBN0FI10K20140714

How IBM’s Watson Will Make Your Meals Tastier

food, data, flavour pairing, hedonic psychophysics, food chemistry, open sauces, IBM, Bon Appetit

This week, Bon Appetit and IBM are releasing the beta version of a new app called Chef Watson with Bon Appetit that will help home chefs think up new and inspiring ways to use ingredients. Think of Watson as an algorithmically inclined sous chef that gently suggests hundreds of flavor combinations that you’d probably never come up with on your own. To do this, Watson crawled a database of 9,000 Bon Appetit recipes looking for insights and patterns about how ingredients pair together, what style of food it is and how each food is prepared in an actual dish. When the computer combines this information with its already robust understanding of food chemistry and hedonic psychophysics (the psychology of what people find pleasant and unpleasant), you get a very smart kitchen assistant.

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/how-ibms-watson-will-make-your-meals-tastier/

Buddhist Economics: How to Stop Prioritizing Goods Over People and Consumption Over Creative Activity

economics, buddhism, Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, consumerism, weath, money, work, liberation

Much has been said about the difference between money and wealth and how we, as individuals, can make more of the latter, but the divergence between the two is arguably even more important the larger scale of nations and the global economy. What does it really mean to create wealth for people — for humanity — as opposed to money for governments and corporations?

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/07/07/buddhist-economics-schumacher/

Google / Boston Dynamics announce direction

algopop:

Google / Boston Dynamics announce direction

Google announced plans for their Boston Dynamics robotic acquisition. After their encounter at TED, Sergey Brin personally wanted to improve Edward Snowden’s mobility. The solution has been revealed as a special teleconferencing version of their Big Dog robot that Snowden will be able to control remotely. Snowden has expressed initial delight for the project and it is rumoured that he may soon be roaming the fields of the Googleplex for testing.

spectacular sports visualisations

Sport, vision, photography, DRS, LBW, cricket, Plato, perception, James Bridle

Umpire Decision Review System (DRS), a suite of technologies which assist - or rather, overrule - the umpire adjudicating some of sports greatest unknowables, the LBW, and the snick. Of course, these technologies, intended to increase accuracy, only inflamed controversy as their own accuracy was questioned as much as the human umpires. LBW is, after all, an epistemological problem - the question of whether a ball which strikes the batsman would have struck the wicket were the batsman not there is a question for Plato, not for machines.

http://commentaryproject.org/articles/spectacular-sports-visualisations/

The Shortest Path to Happiness: Recommending Beautiful, Quiet, and Happy Routes in the City

GPS, pathfinding, crowdsourcing, beauty, recomendation, research, mapping, algorithmic psychogeograp

When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route. The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant. To quantify the extent to which urban locations are pleasant, we use data from a crowd-sourcing platform that shows two street scenes in London (out of hundreds), and a user votes on which one looks more beautiful, quiet, and happy. We consider votes from more than 3.3K individuals and translate them into quantitative measures of location perceptions. We arrange those locations into a graph upon which we learn pleasant routes. Based on a quantitative validation, we find that, compared to the shortest routes, the recommended ones add just a few extra walking minutes and are indeed perceived to be more beautiful, quiet, and happy.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1031

There will be one thing you do today that would have been difficult or impossible twenty years ago, impossible or unimaginable…

“There will be one thing you do today that would have been difficult or impossible twenty years ago, impossible or unimaginable forty years ago, and unimaginable or half-described in a cheap science fiction paperback sixty years ago. Look for it. When you find it, think about it for a minute. When did it arrive? Did you notice when it first surfaced into the world? In twenty years’ time, will it be present, broken, or such an irrelevance that you’ll think about it nostalgically?”

–Warren Ellis

What does the Facebook experiment teach us?

danah boyd, facebook, research, ethics, IRB, peer review, psychology, sentiment manipulation, algori

For better or worse, people imagine Facebook is run by a benevolent dictator, that the site is there to enable people to better connect with others. In some senses, this is true. But Facebook is also a company […] it designs its algorithms not just to market to you directly but to convince you to keep coming back over and over again. People have an abstract notion of how that operates, but they don’t really know, or even want to know. They just want the hot dog to taste good. Whether it’s couched as research or operations, people don’t want to think they’re being manipulated. So when they find out what soylent green is made of, they’re outraged. This study isn’t really what’s at stake. What’s at stake is the underlying dynamic of how Facebook runs its business, operates its system, and makes decisions that have nothing to do with how its users want Facebook to operate. It’s not about research. It’s a question of power.

https://medium.com/message/what-does-the-facebook-experiment-teach-us-c858c08e287f