This Overview captures the tightly gridded streets of Nezahualcóyotl, a municipality of Mexico City. With a population of more…

dailyoverview:

This Overview captures the tightly gridded streets of Nezahualcóyotl, a municipality of Mexico City. With a population of more than one million (all of Mexico City contains approximately nine million), the area is home to many of the capital’s citizens who have migrated there from other parts of the country.

We’re excited to announce that a print of this Overview will be on display at our first gallery show - “New perspectives from above” - that starts this week. There will be an opening reception Tuesday night from 7-9pm at Cloud Gallery (66 West Broadway). Prints will be on display until August 14th so hopefully our followers in NYC can check it out!

Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl
Mexico City, Mexico
19°24′00″N 98°59′20″W
www.dailyoverview.com

In any sane or rational world, Tube strike day would be a day of public celebration across London. There would be street…

“In any sane or rational world, Tube strike day would be a day of public celebration across London. There would be street parties, and small glasses of Pimm’s, and slightly strange old men would wave little red flags around. Children might traipse up to workers on the picket line to throw garlands of flowers over their heads. The desperate and unemployed, lurking around overpriced bars at three in the afternoon, would insist to anyone of the opposite sex within earshot that they were actually a striking train driver. Tube strikes are an incredible gift to all the people of London, and we ought to be grateful.”

–Hey London, Stop Whining About the Tube Strike | VICE | United Kingdom (viaiamdanw)

Every day for the last 12 years I have sent a letter to the Pacific Ocean. They eventually get returned to me by the Post Office…

dailygeology:

Every day for the last 12 years I have sent a letter to the Pacific Ocean. They eventually get returned to me by the Post Office with markings stating, “Return to Sender.” Sometimes I get handwritten messages from postal carriers that are pretty amazing!!! You can see more about the project at: http://www.johnpena.net/#/letterstotheocean/

While humanity has only been launching huge payloads into outer space since the 1950s, with Sputnik breaking into orbit in 1957,…

hyperallergic:

While humanity has only been launching huge payloads into outer space since the 1950s, with Sputnik breaking into orbit in 1957, a lot of human-made debris and technology now circle the planet. A new data visualization project called Stuff in Space is an interactive portal for the satellites, rocket parts, and collision fragments up above the Earth.

Follow All the Tech and Trash Orbiting Earth, in Real Time

Mathematical understanding does not expand in a monotone direction. Our understanding frequently deteriorates as well. There are…

“Mathematical understanding does not expand in a monotone direction. Our understanding frequently deteriorates as well. There are several obvious mechanisms of decay. The experts in a subject retire and die, or simply move on to other subjects and forget. Mathematics is commonly explained and recorded in symbolic and concrete forms that are easy to communicate, rather than in conceptual forms that are easy to understand once communicated. Translation in the direction conceptual -> concrete and symbolic is much easier than translation in the reverse direction, and symbolic forms often replaces the conceptual forms of understanding. And mathematical conventions and taken-for-granted knowledge change, so older texts may become hard to understand. In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new.”

–Bill Thurston

About 20 years ago, while doing research in algorithms for robot motion planning, we managed to reduce the problem into a…

“About 20 years ago, while doing research in algorithms for robot motion planning, we managed to reduce the problem into a certain property of quadratic curves. It was clear from the examples that both (1) the statement held, and (2) it was likely known in the XIX century. Lo and behold no modern book had the theorem. Eventually we took the plunge and proved the result from scratch. A year later, while perusing in a used bookstore I found the result an 1880s high school textbook. I still have the book in my shelves as a reminder.”

–Alex Lopez-Ortiz

"This is the concept behind Uninvited Guests, a short film released last month by design firm Superflux. Commissioned by…

Superflux, IoT, smart home, surveillance, give me convenience or give me death, objects

“This is the concept behind Uninvited Guests, a short film released last month by design firm Superflux. Commissioned by ThingTank, a research project focused on the design and business of the Internet of Things, the film offers cautionary musings on the future smart home. How will we coexist with the data-gathering, service-oriented objects supposedly designed to make our lives better? As Thomas’ smart bed incessantly relays messages to his phone, prompting him to get to sleep by 10PM, it’s impossible not to feel his frustration. You root for him as he struggles to win his life back, concocting ways to dupe the objects—and his children—into thinking he’s accomplishing his daily goals. Ultimately, however, it’s hard to celebrate his successes as a true triumph of human agency, as he’s now locked into leading a double life: the one he wants to live, and the one his objects demand of him.”

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/man-vs-smart-house-a-cautionary-tale

"On the left you can see features of good science, with authors providing their data and software code, and in the best cases…

science, open access, open data, research, p-hacking, fabrication, deception, progress, peer review

“On the left you can see features of good science, with authors providing their data and software code, and in the best cases even using pre-registration of their study and version control for maximum transparency. The grey area in the middle shows questionable research practices, which can include p-hacking, sloppy statistics, peer review abuse etc. On the right side and marked ‘red’ is scientific misconduct as commonly defined (falsification, fabrication, plagiarism). Between the grey and red are is data secrecy.”

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/03/data-secrecy-bad-science-or-scientific-misconduct/

Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering

Jonathan Klein, software, engineering, congitive bias, biases

Human logic, unlike that of the machines which we program and use every day, isn’t perfect. We make mistakes, we establish bad mental habits, and we have many cognitive biases that negatively impact our ability to be successful engineers. I want to go over five of the most common biases that I see on a regular basis as a software engineer.

http://www.jonathanklein.net/2013/06/cognitive-biases-in-software-engineering.html

Japan is building solar energy plants on abandoned golf courses

solar power, energy, golf, Kyocera, Japan, golf courses, land use

Meanwhile, Japan’s energy strategy in the aftermath of Fukushima calls for roughly doubling the amount of renewable power sources in the country by 2030. It is already building solar power plants that float on water. Perhaps inevitably, then, the nation has turned to building solar plants on old golf courses. Last week, Kyocera and its partners announced they had started construction on a 23-megawatt solar plant project located on an old golf course in the Kyoto prefecture. Scheduled to go operational in September 2017, it will generate a little over 26,000 megawatt hours per year, or enough electricity to power approximately 8,100 typical local households. The electricity will be sold to a local utility.

http://qz.com/445330/japan-is-building-solar-energy-plants-on-abandoned-golf-courses-and-the-idea-is-spreading/

One Fungus, One Name

Fungi, One Fungus One Name, phenotype, phylogeny, biology, mycology, naming, nomenclature, teleomorp

The naming of organisms is an important part of how we communicate. When a fungus is found, be it a mycelium from a rotting fruit, a mushroom from the forest, or something growing on a petri dish, we have used morphological and other phenotypic characteristics to group them together and identify if it is an already known species or a new one. However, some fungi have very different shapes and forms that occur during asexual and sexual (after mating with a partner) stages, some incredible elaborate and even (to some people) beautiful. Because these stages mean that fungi can look very different, and often these fungi are not amenable to life in the laboratory (e.g. we can’t get it to complete the lifecycle in an petri dish in the lab), it was the case that observed asexual (or anamorphic) and sexual (teleomorphic) forms of a species get different names. For some species, connecting the two forms has eluded mycologists, and those which had a lack of a sexual stage were called Fungi Imperfecti. Some fungi are only thought to have an asexual stage, though that may change as more molecular and other data is developed.

http://fungalgenomes.org/blog/2011/08/one-fungus-one-name/

Piracy and Politics At the Ports

Medium, Christine Haughney, fish, marine conservation, fishing, fisheries, IUU, trade, food, crim

In regulator-speak, this portion of the fish trade is dubbed IUU: Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated. IUU fish can include everything from a striped bass that local fishermen offload to friends after they catch more fish than quotas allow to a live lobster that comes in at less than one-eighth of an inch below regulation. But by far the biggest IUU problem is the many tons of international fish that pass through multiple foreign ports and are intentionally mislabeled to fetch a higher sales price or avoid detection as an overfished commodity. The former is an issue that exists at the species level: It’s likely that haddock filet you bought for dinner isn’t haddock at all.

https://medium.com/food-crimes/piracy-and-politics-at-the-ports–20f55a681ce5