And so it goes. Goodnight #StanLee. I’ll just say again: May we all be so fortunate as to live so long and see as much of our…

IFTTT, Twitter, Wolven


(via http://twitter.com/Wolven/status/1062063757411737600)

post-shanzhai arises at the intersection of big tech marketing and bad urban design, becoming the perfect carrier for state…

IFTTT, Twitter, SanNuvola


(via http://twitter.com/SanNuvola/status/1061535414069080065)

Saving the world is a job for professionals Making it worth saving is a pastime for amateurs The problem is all the damn…

IFTTT, Twitter, vgr


(via http://twitter.com/vgr/status/1061522364800761856)

Re-reading #AaronSwartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, on what would have been his 32nd birthday, and in the middle of the…

IFTTT, Twitter, AmberFirefly


(via http://twitter.com/AmberFirefly/status/1060542693502271489)

Our autumn digest has just been published. this time it’s "economic experiments, citizen science games, artistic explorations…

IFTTT, Twitter, _foam


(via http://twitter.com/_foam/status/1060479103147655173)

Word of the day: “xanthophylls” - the class of pigments responsible for the yellows in both autumn leaves & egg-yolks….

IFTTT, Twitter, RobGMacfarlane


(via http://twitter.com/RobGMacfarlane/status/1060426799610499073)

I guess it was only a matter of time before @gregeganSF came up with a stunning insight that would ripple through a particular…

IFTTT, Twitter, honorharger


(via http://twitter.com/honorharger/status/1059823027725221888)

An AI Lie Detector Is Going to Start Questioning Travelers in the EU

EU, borders, ML, AI, EC, migration, 2018

In Hungary, Latvia, and Greece, travelers will be given an automated lie-detection test—by an animated AI border agent. The system, called iBorderCtrl, is part of a six-month pilot led by the Hungarian National Police at four different border crossing points. “We’re employing existing and proven technologies—as well as novel ones—to empower border agents to increase the accuracy and efficiency of border checks,” project coordinator George Boultadakis of European Dynamics in Luxembourg told the European Commission. “iBorderCtrl’s system will collect data that will move beyond biometrics and on to biomarkers of deceit.”

via https://gizmodo.com/an-ai-lie-detector-is-going-to-start-questioning-travel–1830126881

MDMA Makes Octopuses Want to Mingle, Too

MDMA, octopus, empathy, 2018, entactogen, cephalopods, Edsinger

Eric Edsinger is an octopus researcher at the University of Chicago who recently helped sequence the genome of Octopus bimaculoides—the California two-spot octopus. Like most octopuses, this color-changing cephalopod is asocial, meaning it likes to be alone most of the time, unless it’s trying to mate. But when given MDMA, a drug well known for boosting emotional empathy and prosocial behavior in humans (i.e. making you really, really want to fraternize), these octopuses also seemed to want to hang out with each other, even if they weren’t trying to find a mate.

via http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/07/26/octopuses-mdma-molly-social/

Russian trolls ‘spreading discord’ over vaccine safety

news, politics, antivax, disinfo, disinformation, Russia, USA, trolls, vaccines, herd-immunity, 2018

Bots and Russian trolls spread misinformation about vaccines on Twitter to sow division and distribute malicious content before and during the American presidential election, according to a new study. Scientists at George Washington University, in Washington DC, made the discovery while trying to improve social media communications for public health workers, researchers said. Instead, they found trolls and bots skewing online debate and upending consensus about vaccine safety. The study discovered several accounts, now known to belong to the same Russian trolls who interfered in the US election, as well as marketing and malware bots, tweeting about vaccines. Russian trolls played both sides, the researchers said, tweeting pro- and anti-vaccine content in a politically charged context. “These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” Mark Dredze, a team member and professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, which was also involved in the study, said.

via https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/23/russian-trolls-spread-vaccine-misinformation-on-twitter

The Billionaire Yogi Behind Modi’s Rise

NYT, Ramdev, Modi, BJP, India, power, spirituality, nationalism, corruption, religion, 2018

Ramdev has been compared to Billy Graham, the Southern Baptist firebrand who advised several American presidents and energized the Christian right. The parallel makes some sense: Ramdev has been a prominent voice on the Hindu right, and his tacit endorsement during the landmark 2014 campaign helped bring Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power. He appeared alongside Modi on several occasions, singing the leader’s praises and urging Indians to turn out for him. Ramdev has called Modi “a close friend,” and the prime minister publicly lauds Patanjali’s array of ayurvedic products — medicines, cosmetics and foodstuffs. Although Modi campaigned heavily on promises to reform India’s economy and fight corruption, there were frequent dog whistles to the Hindu nationalist base, some of them coordinated with Ramdev. A month before Modi’s landslide victory, a trust controlled by Ramdev released a video in which senior leaders of Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), including the current ministers of foreign affairs, internal security, finance and transportation, appeared alongside him with a signed document setting out nine pledges. These included the protection of cows — animals held sacred in Hinduism — and a broad call for Hindu nationalist reforms of the government, the courts, cultural institutions and education. After Modi won, Ramdev claimed to have “prepared the ground for the big political changes that occurred.”

via https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/magazine/the-billionaire-yogi-behind-modis-rise.html

Flying Blind into the Anthropocene

Anthropocene, venkat, extreme-weather, instrument, instrumentation, flying-blind, environment, 2018

Through a mix of design and accident, we’ve created a novel environment that is at once strongly shaped by human behaviors and highly opaque to normal human sensory modalities. But we haven’t instrumented this environment well enough to make up for our sensory deficits. Worse, we seem to collectively lack the instrument rating to fly this civilizational airplane. So we are flying blind into the anthropocene, without the appropriate instrument rating, on a wing and a prayer.

via https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/08/23/flying-blind-into-the-anthropocene/

Everything you need to know about Europe’s new copyright directive

EU, Europe, copyright, internet, linx-tax, censorship, copyfight, 2018, upload-filter

Yesterday, the European Parliament approved amendments to the controversial Copyright Directive, a piece of legislation intended to update copyright for the internet age. Few pieces of legislation have polarized Europe this much in recent years. Critics said the vote heralded the death of the internet, while supporters congratulated themselves for saving the livelihoods of starving artists and giving US tech giants a poke in the eye.

via https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/13/17854158/eu-copyright-directive-article–13–11-internet-censorship-google

Why can’t more than four people have a conversation at once?

qz, psychology, conversation, group-size, 2018, research

There’s evidence that this four-person limit on conversations has been in place for about as long as humans have been having chatting with one another. Shakespeare rarely allowed more than four speaking characters in any scene; ensemble films rarely have more than four actors interacting at once. But why do we max out at four?

via https://qz.com/work/1388086/why-cant-more-than-four-people-have-a-conversation-at-once/

Counter Mapping

mapping, counter-mapping, culture, history, USA, Zuni, Ashiwi, Dine, contextuality, Place

The Zuni maps, says Jim, contain something very important: a different way of looking and knowing. “To assume that people would look at the earth only from a vantage point that is above and looking straight down doesn’t consider the humanity of living on the landscape. Saying that there’s a pond, there are cattails, there are turtles in that water—that is a different view that expands the human experience of a place.” This different view is what Jim, the committee, and the artists hope the Zuni people will recognize when they encounter these maps and consider their place in the cosmos—not a world that is constructed from GPS waypoints or one that was decreed in an executive order—but a particularly Zuni world, infused with the prayers and histories that created it. The Zuni maps have a memory, a particular truth. They convey a relationship to place grounded in ancestral knowledge and sustained presence on the land. That such a relationship consistently fails to appear on modern maps has been the impetus for creating and sharing the Zuni maps—both with the A:shiwi people and with a wider audience. They remind all of us of the ancient names, voices, and stories that reside within the landscape, inviting us to examine our assumptions about what it is that makes up a place and the role that we play in that long and layered story.

via https://emergencemagazine.org/story/counter-mapping/

When Classical Musicians Go Digital

music, notation, annotation, composition, archiving, technology, NYT, 2016

the advent of the mass-produced graphite pencil in the second half of the 19th century coincided with profound changes in the way a performer engaged with a musical text. The generation of musicians who benefited from the new tool — capable of making durable, but erasable, markings that didn’t harm paper — were, he wrote, “the first where practice was aimed at perfection of execution, and not developing the skills for real-time extemporization on the material in front of them, or improvisation ‘off book.’” What changes does the new digital technology reflect or enable? Conversations with some of classical music’s most passionate advocates of the gadgets and with developers like forScore and Tonara that write applications for them reveal a number of developments. The traditional top-down structure of teaching has been shaken loose. The line between scholarly and practical spheres of influence is becoming blurred. And the very notion of a definitive text is quickly losing traction — and with it, the ideal of that “perfection of execution.”

via https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/arts/music/when-classical-musicians-go-digital.html

Ordinary Paris and the Art of Noticing

paris, Perec, infraordinary, teaspoons, observation, noticing, war, 1974, 2015

Wherever the infraordinary is taken away, wherever civilians are targeted, not only in Paris, Perec’s manifesto rings true. “Question your teaspoons,” he urges us. “What is there under your wallpaper?” he asks. Perec’s parents were killed in the Second World War, his father in the army, his mother in a concentration camp. He had firsthand experience of the eruption of evil into the everyday, so while in some ways An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is a comically Parisian text—oh, the French and their wine at lunch—on some level, it is the diary of an orphaned child who can never accept that the world is the way it is. Why is the world put together this way? This si parisien elevation of the ordinary into something compelling knows that in its peripheral vision lurks the menace of evil, and purposefully, radically chooses to focus, instead, on the fabric of peace.

via https://lithub.com/ordinary-paris-and-the-art-of-noticing/

Legal Crisis or Trust in Automation?

law, AI, ML, domain-knowledge, decision-making, automation, 2018

Some of these skilled lawyers did question whether their profession could ever entirely trust automation to make skilled legal decisions. For a small number, they suggested they would be sticking to “reliable” manual processes for the immediate future. However, most of the participants stressed that high-volume and low-risk contracts took up too much of their time, and felt it was incumbent on lawyers to automate work when, and where, possible. For them, the study was also a simple, practical demonstration of a not-so-scary AI future. However, lawyers also stressed that undue weight should not be put on legal AI alone. One participant, Justin Brown, stressed that humans must use new technology alongside their lawyerly instincts. He says: “Either working alone is inferior to the combination of both.”

via https://hackernoon.com/20-top-lawyers-were-beaten-by-legal-ai-here-are-their-surprising-responses–5dafdf25554d

Hayao Miyazaki’s Cursed Worlds

Miyazaki, anime, Japan, Mononoke, Ghibli, cursed, animism, 1997, 2018

At its most fundamental level the movie asks: Can we live ethically in a cursed world? And if so, how? Princess Mononoke offers two related possible solutions. The first is simply to “Live!” (Ikiro!), the catchphrase emblazoned on the movie posters and uttered by the movie’s protagonist, Ashitaka, to the desperate wolf princess San as she struggles to deal with her fear and resentment of humanity. In context, it tells us we cannot give up, no matter what, a message that Miyazaki felt imperative in the emotionally apathetic landscape of nineties Japan. The second is “to see with eyes unclouded”—a challenge, as the movie presents both bloodthirsty beast attacks and relentless human industrialization, and asks us to observe all sides with clarity and objectivity.

via https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/22/hayao-miyazakis-cursed-worlds/#.W9d-Z_kVKTA.twitter

“Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives…”

wilwheaton:

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Oh, it’s another assessment of Donald Tump and what he does to hold onto his power.”

It is totally reasonable that you would think that, but you would be wrong. This quote is from the USOSS (predecessor to the CIA and NSA) assessment of Adolph Hitler during his rise to power.

Words of the day: “empty forest” - a forest or jungle ecosystem that has lost its large mammals due to defaunation, while its…

IFTTT, Twitter, RobGMacfarlane


(via http://twitter.com/RobGMacfarlane/status/1058977199599030272)

Word of the day: “dree” - to endure, bear with fortitude that which is wearisome, to last out (Scots). A “dree” is both a hard…

IFTTT, Twitter, RobGMacfarlane


(via http://twitter.com/RobGMacfarlane/status/1058252462811824128)

You know “P-futures” (Possible, Plausible, Probable, Preferable etc). Today in undeveloped ideas, what if “C-futures”? -…

IFTTT, Twitter, thesjef


(via http://twitter.com/thesjef/status/1057935247520739328)

“What kind of political, social and economic system would I want — and what would I fight for — if I knew I was coming back…

IFTTT, Twitter, futuryst


(via http://twitter.com/futuryst/status/1057290157781598212)

The world’s first exhibition of interplanetary spacecraft and mechanisms in Moscow, USSR, 1927. The exhibition featured models…

IFTTT, Twitter, sovietvisuals


(via http://twitter.com/sovietvisuals/status/1056810132011651072)

Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now at Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm, the Chan…

warrenellis:

newdarkage:

Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now at Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-silicon-valley.html

THE DEVIL LIVES IN OUR PHONES

OFFICIAL

I AM SO HAPPY

There’s something similar with Japanese. Usually non-gendered (people are referred to by name), but the “being/is” verb is…

IFTTT, Twitter, indigo5alpha


(via http://twitter.com/indigo5alpha/status/1055997889372073985)

It depends for plants. I think the plants themselves are animate but the parts of them are inanimate. Like a branch or flower is…

IFTTT, Twitter, mariahgladstone


(via http://twitter.com/mariahgladstone/status/1055672356302028800)

Words of the day: “terrain vague” - apparently empty or abandoned interstitial spaces in towns & cities; e.g. vacant lots,…

IFTTT, Twitter, RobGMacfarlane


(via http://twitter.com/RobGMacfarlane/status/1055338289077596161)

From yesterday’s #IceBridge flight: A tabular iceberg can be seen on the right, floating among sea ice just off of the Larsen C…

IFTTT, Twitter, NASA_ICE


(via http://twitter.com/NASA_ICE/status/1052601381712887809)

Honored to be part of the Random Forests publication by @augmentedeco The outstanding lecture-performance by @_foam and Teun’s…

IFTTT, Twitter, FIBERFestival


(via http://twitter.com/FIBERFestival/status/1054283279124365312)

Fig. 1.0 76 Tsunami Stones, Elise Hunchuck, 2017 Hundreds of years before, in the wake of the 869 Jogan tsunami along the…

robertogreco:

Fig. 1.0 76 Tsunami Stones, Elise Hunchuck, 2017

Hundreds of years before, in the wake of the 869 Jogan tsunami along the Sanriku coast of Japan, communities began to erect stone tablets called tsunami stones. These stones performed a dual function; they were warnings–markers of the edges of inundation, they indicate where to build and where to flee when oceans rise; and, they are memorials, erected as part of a ritual that memorializes geologic events and those lost. Some stones have no message, like a stone from the 9th century in Matsushima, as time has worn away the inscription; some record the past and project possible futures (in this atlas, these are labeled as ‘lesson’ stones); some bear instructions for evacuation and rebuilding, such as Stone no. 31 (fig 4.0), who tells its reader that an “[e]arthquake is an omen of [a] subsequent tsunami. Watch out for at least one hour. When it comes, rush away to higher places. Never reside on submerged land again.”

There exist hundreds of these stones along the Sanriku coast, ranging in height from a few inches to a few metres. Rising from the earth, many were placed in the landscape to mark either the height of the inundation line or to mark territory above the inundation line. The messages inscribed on the stones vary from stone to stone, with each community utilising stones as a memorial, as recorded, predictive knowledge, and often times, both. In some villages, the messages not to build below the inundation line were heeded. In others, not. In some villages, the messages to evacuate after an earthquake to an elevation above the stones were heeded. In others, not. This is how some villages and towns and school children were able to survive. And, how some did not.

(Additional references gathered here.)

Re-up for weekend reading ☕️ I explored the future beyond cyberpunk: 1. Chaohuan, the “Ultra-Unreal” 2. Afrofuturism 3. …

IFTTT, Twitter, hautepop


(via http://twitter.com/hautepop/status/1053557063668940801)