The Brain’s Now

Medium, Long Now, neuroscience, perception, time, memory, David Eagleman

Is “now” expandable? Why do you seem to experience time in slow motion in a sudden emergency, like an accident? Eagleman’s (terrifying) experiments show that in fact you don’t perceive more densely, the amygdala cuts in and records the experience more densely, so when the brain looks back at that dense record, it thinks that time must have subjectively slowed down, but it didn’t. “Time and memory are inseparable.” This also explains why time seems to speed up as you age. A child experiences endless novelty, and each summer feels like it lasted forever. But you learn to automatize everything as you age, and novelty is reduced accordingly, apparently speeding time up. All you have to do to feel like you‘re living longer, with a life as rich as a child’s, is to never stop introducing novelty in your life.

via https://medium.com/@stewartbrand/the-brains-now-ec0440c7fcdb

How to Run Text Summarization with TensorFlow

Medium, text, text summarisation, machine learning, tensorflow

Text summarization problem has many useful applications. If you run a website, you can create titles and short summaries for user generated content. If you want to read a lot of articles and don’t have time to do that, your virtual assistant can summarize main points from these articles for you. It is not an easy problem to solve. There are multiple approaches, including various supervised and unsupervised algorithms. Some algorithms rank the importance of sentences within the text and then construct a summary out of important sentences, others are end-to-end generative models. End-to-end machine learning algorithms are interesting to try. After all, end-to-end algorithms demonstrate good results in other areas, like image recognition, speech recognition, language translation, and even question-answering.

via https://medium.com/@surmenok/how-to-run-text-summarization-with-tensorflow-d4472587602d

Le Soir édité

Medium, Le Soir édité, Belgium, Belgique, bots, Julien Deswaef, edits, changelog, rédactions

L̶e̶ ̶S̶o̶i̶r̶ édité (@lesoir_diff) est un twitter bot qui tente de capturer les changements et corrections d’articles publiés en Une du site du journal Le Soir. On le sait, l’information de nos jours court plus vite que le temps qu’on a pour la lire. Les rédactions se sont complètement informatisées et connectées de l’écriture à la publication. Ce qui permet évidemment beaucoup de choses: autant d’offrir un article à ses lecteurs dès qu’il est écrit, que de pouvoir le corriger ou de le compléter alors qu’il est déjà publié. Cela arrive aussi parfois que des articles soient même supprimés, comme l’a repéré la RTBF avec cette intox sur un adolescente qui aurait attaqué ses parents en justice à cause de photos publiées sur Facebook.

via https://news.labdavan.ac/le-soir-%C3%A9dit%C3%A9-cc2452dd45e7

An exciting new idea in Basic Income

Medium, economics, UBI, basic income, citizens dividend, deflation, technology

In a painstaking analysis, Gada drills down on the insight that economists have entirely missed a crucial feature of the modern world called “technological deflation”. While the concept is nuanced, the basic point of technological deflation is that technological things (like, say, iPhones) have the funny habit of becoming “almost free” very quickly. Remember that fancy new iPhone 6 you bought for $600 back in 2013? How much is it worth now? Well, today if you are so inclined, you can get a brand-new one for $150. One fourth the cost in three short years. Remember, we aren’t talking about buying a used iPhone 6, these are brand new. In another two years, you’d be hard pressed to give one of these away.
You don’t see this kind of price deflation everywhere. In fact, in our modern society, we tend to expect to see prices rise over time. Oranges, for example, cost more today than they cost in 2012. Same with milk. A new Eames Chair from Knoll costs a solid $5,000. The same chair brand new cost a mere $310 in 1956. And if you want to ask “how much is that in today’s dollars” you are hitting the point: we are so very used to inflation that we intuitively think of the money itself as different. And yet, a brand new iPhone 6 today costs only one fourth as much as the same phone three years ago. Technological things are, quite vigorously, swimming against the inflationary current.

via https://medium.com/emergent-culture/an-exciting-new-idea-in-basic-income-b1b7bf622845

The Quantum Experiment That Simulates A Time Machine

Medium, Physics, QM, quantum mechanics, complexity, closed time like curves, timetravel, David Deutsch, arxiv

So much for classical objects and time travel. But what would happen if a quantum particle entered a closed time-like curve? In the early 90s, the physicist David Deutsch showed that not only is this possible but that it can only happen in a way that does not allow superluminal signalling. So quantum mechanics plays havoc with causality but in a way that is consistent with relativity and so prevents grandfather-type paradoxes. Deutsch’s result has extraordinary implications. It implies that closed time-like curves can be used to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time and to violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

via https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-quantum-experiment-that-simulates-a-time-machine–185a7cc9bd11

Rockets of India

Medium, Anab Jain, Space, space programme, design, India

A while back I roamed the streets of India with tiny Mars probes, speaking to strangers about space missions, aliens, climate change and nationalism. It was the start of a thrilling adventure exploring the history and future of India’s space program within the context of global geopolitics, militarization and cultural imperialism. From astronauts to afronauts, from cosmonauts to vyomanauts, how can deep space exploration inspire us to create more democratic future visions?

via https://medium.com/@anabjain/rockets-of-india-f043c5b39b34

Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster

algorithms, automation, human-error, A330, 447, paradox-of-automation, reliability, practice, attent

This problem has a name: the paradox of automation. It applies in a wide variety of contexts, from the operators of nuclear power stations to the crew of cruise ships, from the simple fact that we can no longer remember phone numbers because we have them all stored in our mobile phones, to the way we now struggle with mental arithmetic because we are surrounded by electronic calculators. The better the automatic systems, the more out-of-practice human operators will be, and the more extreme the situations they will have to face. The psychologist James Reason, author of Human Error, wrote: “Manual control is a highly skilled activity, and skills need to be practised continuously in order to maintain them. Yet an automatic control system that fails only rarely denies operators the opportunity for practising these basic control skills … when manual takeover is necessary something has usually gone wrong; this means that operators need to be more rather than less skilled in order to cope with these atypical conditions.”
The paradox of automation, then, has three strands to it. First, automatic systems accommodate incompetence by being easy to operate and by automatically correcting mistakes. Because of this, an inexpert operator can function for a long time before his lack of skill becomes apparent – his incompetence is a hidden weakness that can persist almost indefinitely. Second, even if operators are expert, automatic systems erode their skills by removing the need for practice. Third, automatic systems tend to fail either in unusual situations or in ways that produce unusual situations, requiring a particularly skilful response. A more capable and reliable automatic system makes the situation worse.

via https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how-computers-are-setting-us-up-disaster

The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change

shiftregister:

  • Ernest Becker’s Ideas on Denial of Death and the Symbolic Self
  • “A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival(14). There is already experimental evidence suggesting that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption(15). Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.” - Monbiot, Death Denial

The People Paradox: Self-Esteem Striving, Immortality Ideologies, and Human Response to Climate Change

The Great Silence by Ted Chiang

Medium, ted chiang, non-human, communication, other, parrots, interspecies communication, SETI, STI, Fermi Paradox, The Great Silence

Ted Chiang’s very short story, “The Great Silence” adds another set of questions to these speculations. Why, he asks, are we so interested in finding intelligence in the stars and so deaf to the many species who manifest it here on earth? And also: why have we demanded that, as proof of intelligence, non-human animals communicate to us in human language, and then dismissed those creatures that actually do so?

via https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang-e72e05eb8a0e

What $50 Buys You at Huaqiangbei, the World’s Most Fascinating Electronic Market.

Medium, capitalism, china, consumer electronics, Shenzen, HQB

We’ve long been fascinated by the Huaqiangbei electronics market area of Shenzhen. (Hereafter, we’ll just call it HQB.) If you need some bit of electronics or a phone accessory, you can find it in HQB. There is an entire multi-floor shopping mall that sells nothing but phone cases. There’s one that specializes in smartwatches. There’s a mall that sells cellphones wholesale. There’s one just for surveillance cameras. And then there are the component markets. Need a chip? Or 250,000 chips? Somebody there can get them for you.

via https://shift.newco.co/what–50-buys-you-at-huaqiangbei-the-worlds-most-fascinating-electronics-market-f0384d9fca32

A few things are certain: we have not always existed; we will not always exist; we exist right now. Whatever nothingness truly…

“A few things are certain: we have not always existed; we will not always exist; we exist right now. Whatever nothingness truly is, we are all something right now. And whatever exists right now, it did, at some level, come from nothing, no matter how you define nothing. And as best as we understand the Universe, it will return to a state approaching an infinite, physical nothingness as well. But as to just what the nature of the ultimate “nothingness” truly is? That’s still, perhaps, the secret we’re all fundamentally searching for.”

–Ethan Siegel
(viadeziluzija)

The Biggest Building Boom in History

Medium, climate change, green economy, crisis, opportunity, economics, worldchanging, Alex Steffen

I’ve written and given a lot of talks on how building a sustainably prosperous global economy is an opportunity — a set of investments that will leave us better off, even while we avoid the worst of the planetary crisis we face. It’s only now becoming clear what the scale of that opportunity is. It is only now easy to see that a giant building boom is what successful climate action looks like. The Guardian reported last week on a new study saying that over the next 15 years, to meet our climate goals, we’ll need to shift $90 trillion worth of new infrastructure spending to low- or zero-carbon models

via https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/the-biggest-building-boom-in-history–7684cffc5d3e

Do we need new utopias?

Medium, utopias, utopia, dystopia, futures, visionary adaptation, Johannes Kleske

This question has been on my mind for over a year now. In a time that seems to become more dystopian each day, it might be rather normal to yearn for new positive visions. I’m also not very fond of the utopian visions of Silicon Valley’s libertarians (Musk, Brin & Page, Zuckerberg, Kurzweil, etc.). Furthermore, ten years of Merkel here in Germany might play a role. So I’ve been investigating the topic of utopia, read books (fiction and non-fiction), essays, articles, etc. It has been quite easy because of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, last year. But I’m still finding it hard to answer the question if utopias are what we need right now, and if yes, what kind of utopias. Because the track record of past utopias is not exactly stellar.

via https://medium.com/@jkleske/do-we-need-new-utopias–14af5fab6a69

A Sequence of Spankingly Bad Ideas

Medium, age verification, ORG, digital economy, surveillance, security, privacy, bad ideas, Alec Muffett

Last Thursday, with friends and colleagues from Open Rights Group, I spent a few hours at the Adult Provider Network’s Age Verification Demonstration (“the demo”) to watch demonstrations of technologies which attempt to fulfil Age Verification requirements for access to online porn in the UK. Specifically: Age Verification (“AV”) is a requirement of part 3 of the Digital Economy Bill that seeks to “prevent access by persons under the age of 18” to “pornographic material available on the internet on a commercial basis”. There are many contentious social and business issues related to AV[…] there are many open questions and many criticisms of the Digital Economy Bill’s provisions; but to date there appears to have been no critical appraisal of the proposed technologies for AV, and so that is what I seek to address in this posting.

via https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/a-sequence-of-spankingly-bad-ideas–483cecf4ba89

The government is now recruiting clinical psychologists and therapists in its attempts to cut welfare spending. Friedli and…

“The government is now recruiting clinical psychologists and therapists in its attempts to cut welfare spending. Friedli and Stearn (2015) have shown how ‘psycho-compulsion’ (a range of psychological ‘assessments’ and ‘interventions’) now control the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens with disabilities and mental health service users. Psycho-compulsion involves the imposition of psychological explanations for an individual’s unemployment. 5 This originates in the neoliberal view that unemployment is caused by ‘faulty’ beliefs about the reasons the person is unemployed. These beliefs in turn give rise to ‘faulty’ attitudes and behaviours, especially so-called ‘benefit dependency’. Consequently, unemployed people end up on benefits long-term, and resist seeking paid employment. This has led to a variety of assessments aimed at identifying the ‘faulty’ personal beliefs and attempts to ‘rectify’ them through ‘therapy’. These psychological ‘assessments’ and ‘therapeutic interventions’ are imposed on benefit claimants. If they refuse to comply, their benefits are suspended or stopped. Psychologists and therapists are recruited to modify the beliefs of people on benefits, who are punished if they fail to comply (Friedli& Stearn, 2015, p. 42).
Psycho-compulsion draws heavily on the ‘strengths-based’ literature of positive psychology, especially notions of confidence, resilience, optimism and self-efficacy in recovery. Positive psychology is suspicious of conventional ‘depth’ psychology that encourages the person to reflect inwardly on feelings, beliefs and past experiences, especially relating to trauma and adversity (Binkley, 2011). Instead, it encourages the person to take responsibility for his or her own feelings, dwelling on the importance of finding ‘happiness’. 6 It explicitly rejects attempts to understand the person’s problems in terms of past or current adversity, and instead focuses on future action. It renounces the main object of therapeutic work – the painful exploration of difficult emotional states by talking about them. It is not interested in engaging with suffering. It isolates and alienates the person from her or his peers; in doing so it fragments solidarity, thus weakening the possibility of collective action.”

–Thomas P (2016) Psycho politics, neoliberal governmentality and austerity. Self& Society,
(viaconstellations-soc)

At the center of every significant change in our lives today is a technology of some sort. Technology is humanity’s accelerant….

“At the center of every significant change in our lives today is a technology of some sort. Technology is humanity’s accelerant. Because of technology everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else, while it churns from “might” to “is.” All is flux. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done. This never-ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world.”

–Kevin Kelly (viainthenoosphere)

Accelerationism… and Degrowth? The Left’s Strange Bedfellows

politics, Accelerationism, degrowth, economics, collapsonomics, capitalism, utopianism, pluralism, d

While degrowth does not have a succinct analysis of how to respond to today’s shifting socio-technical regimes—accelerationism’s strong point – at the same time accelerationism under-theorizes the increased material and energetic flows resulting from this shifting of gears. Put another way, efficiency alone can limit its disastrous effects. As degrowth theorists have underlined, environmental limits must be politicized; control over technology must therefore be democratized; metabolic rates must be decelerated if Earth is to remain livable. To conclude, accelerationism comes across as a metaphor stretched far too thin. A napkin sketch after an exciting dinner-party, the finer details colored in years afterwards—but the napkin feels a bit worn out. Big questions need to be asked, questions unanswered by the simplistic exhortation to “shift the gears of capitalism.” When the gears are shifted, the problem of metabolic limits won’t be solved simply through “efficiency”—it must acknowledge that increased efficiency and automation has, and likely would still, lead to increased extractivism and the ramping up of environmental injustices globally. Or another: what does accelerationism mean in the context of a war machine that has historically thrived on speed, logistics, and the conquest of distance? Is non-violent acceleration possible, and what would class struggle look like in that scenario? To be fair, the word “degrowth” also fails to answer many big questions. There has been little discussion on whether mass deceleration is possible when, as Virilio shows, all mass changes in social relations have historically occurred through acceleration. Can hegemony decelerate? If degrowth lacks a robust theory of how to bring about regime shift, then Williams and Snricek’s brand of accelerationism doesn’t allow for a pluralist vocabulary that looks beyond its narrow idea of what constitutes system change. And yet, the proponents of each ideology will likely be found in the same room in the decades to come. Despite their opposite ‘branding’, they should probably talk. They have a lot to learn from each other.

via http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016–09–29/accelerationism-and-degrowth-the-left-s-strange-bedfellows

A Return to Machine Learning

Medium, Machine Learning, RNN, CNN, autoencoder, visualization, visualisation

This last year I’ve been getting back into machine learning and AI, rediscovering the things that drew me to it in the first place. I’m still in the “learning” and “small studies” phase that naturally precedes crafting any new artwork, and I wanted to share some of that process here. This is a fairly linear record of my path, but my hope is that this post is modular enough that anyone interested in a specific part can skip ahead and find something that gets them excited, too. I’ll cover some experiments with these general topics: Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks, Dimensionality Reduction and Visualization, Autoencoders

via https://medium.com/@kcimc/a-return-to-machine-learning–2de3728558eb

The Hive is the New Network

Medium, hive, networks, hivemind

Because of the increased frequency of interactions, a hive behaves more intelligently, and because of the decreased friction between nodes, a hive can do more than transfer data. It responds and evolves based on that data. The hive isn’t just more networked. It’s more densely populated with organic, living components. Though not obvious, the hive is becoming central to the way we think, behave and interact. The best way to understand emergent human hives is to observe how hives operate in nature.

via https://medium.com/@arjunsethi/the-hive-is-the-new-network–260b432a6720

Recap: Financial Thingclash At Sibos

Medium, thingclash

At the invitation of Innotribe, the internal innovation team of international payments network manager SWIFT, we ran a special Thingclash workshop last week at Sibos, the largest annual gathering of financial services organizations. In a condensed, 45-minute taster session, Susan Cox-Smith and I introduced the concept of Thingclash, and guided a dozen teams through quick-fire rounds of scenario creation, generating some intriguing future situations where out-of-the-box IoT solutions ran up against unexpected users — in unanticipated places.

via https://medium.com/@changeist/recap-financial-thingclash-at-sibos–1b648bc05165

A Brief History of City Charters

Medium, urbanism, smart cities, charter cities

Most cities, as Cohen points out, are comfortable staying — nay, even consolidating the 2.0 status quo. He holds out Singapore as an example. On the contrary, Vienna, Barcelona, Medellin, and Vancouver seems to be playing with a greater appetite for genuine co-creation. Still, most of what’s going on seems to be playing at the edges. There isn’t much evidence that the capabilities of smart city technology are being leveraged to truly re-think what local government is for, and create a new legal framework for governing. If we want power in government to flow in different directions, we need to re-do the plumbing.

via https://medium.com/@anthonymobile/a-brief-history-of-city-charters-e50ce7b2c7d8

Chinese Island Building and You

Medium, geopolitics, south china sea, spratly islands

Submitted for your consideration are the Spratly Islands and the South China Sea. The competing territorial claim situation there is just another border dispute in the millennia-long “Land Control Epic.” This one deserves your attention, even if only as an academic exercise because it’s one of the more interesting case studies in political power in recent times. It deserves your consideration economically because of trillions of dollars of trade and natural resources hinging on the outcome. It deserves your attention in a practical sense because if a hot war starts between America and China, this will be the spark.

via https://thearcmag.com/chinese-island-building-and-you-a650baa91b8b

Our burger is made from simple, all-natural ingredients such as wheat, coconut oil, and potatoes. What makes the Impossible…

food, food science, heme, meat, meat substitutes, molecular gastronomy, burger

Our burger is made from simple, all-natural ingredients such as wheat, coconut oil, and potatoes. What makes the Impossible Burger unlike all others is an ingredient called heme. Heme is a basic building block of life on Earth, including plants, but it’s uniquely abundant in meat. We discovered that heme is what makes meat smell, sizzle, bleed, and taste gloriously meaty. Consider it the “magic ingredient” that makes our burger a carnivore’s dream.

(via The Burger Formerly Known as Plants)

Decolonising Science Reading List

Medium, science, decolonisation, colonialism, history, narrative, reading list

There are two different angles at play in the discussion about colonialism and science. First is what constitutes scientific epistemology and what its origins are. As a physicist, I was taught that physics began with the Greeks and later Europeans inherited their ideas and expanded on them. In this narrative, people of African descent and others are now relative newcomers to science, and questions of inclusion and diversity in science are related back to “bringing science to underrepresented minority and people of color communities.” The problem with this narrative is that it isn’t true. For example, many of those “Greeks” were actually Egyptians and Mesopotamians under Greek rule. So, even though for the last 500 years or so science has largely been developed by Europeans, the roots of its methodology and epistemology are not European. Science, as scientists understand it, is not fundamentally European in origin. This complicates both racist narratives about people of color and innovation as well as discourse around whether science is fundamentally wedded to Euro-American operating principles of colonialism, imperialism and domination for the purpose of resource extraction.
via https://medium.com/@chanda/decolonising-science-reading-list-339fb773d51f

Graal & Truffle

Medium, truffle, graal, PLT, programming, programming languages, language design

Truffle is a framework for writing interpreters with annotations and small bits of extra code in them which, when Truffle is paired with its sister project Graal, allow those interpreters to be converted into JIT compiling VMs … automatically. The resulting runtimes have peak performance competitive with the best hand-tuned language-specific compilers on the market. For example, the TruffleJS engine which implements JavaScript is competitive with V8 in benchmarks. The RubyTruffle engine is faster than all other Ruby implementations by far. The TruffleC engine is roughly competitive with GCC. There are Truffle implementations in various stages of completeness

via https://medium.com/@octskyward/graal-truffle–134d8f28fb69

How and why we built an internet connected solar panel

Medium, IDEO, solarpunk, solar, IoT, blockchain, solarcoin

So what happens when you cross blockchains and internet of things? One outcome is buzzword overload. In the coLAB, we don’t like that very much. We like to make things tangible, and we learn what’s possible by building prototypes.So we built a proof of concept solar panel kit that automatically creates renewable energy certificates as it generates power. Why energy? What are renewable energy certificates? Let us explain.

via https://medium.com/ideo-colab/how-and-why-we-built-an-internet-connected-solar-panel–727d720d3803