June 2012
162 posts
“The UC Berkeley News Center reports that a prestigious group of 22 internationally known scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation. ‘It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,’ warns lead author Anthony Barnosky. ‘The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.’ The authors note that studies of small-scale ecosystems show that once 50-90 percent of an area has been altered, the entire ecosystem tips irreversibly into a state far different from the original, in terms of the mix of plant and animal species and their interactions. Humans have already converted about 43 percent of the ice-free land surface of the planet to uses like raising crops and livestock and building cities. This situation typically is accompanied by species extinctions and a loss of biodiversity. ‘My view is that humanity is at a crossroads now, where we have to make an active choice,’ says Barnosky. ‘One choice is to acknowledge these issues and potential consequences and try to guide the future (in a way we want to). The other choice is just to throw up our hands and say, ‘Let’s just go on as usual and see what happens.’”
—Earth Approaching Tipping Point Say Scientists - Slashdot
“A NEW THEORY FOR DATA NEEDED
The database industry has benefited immensely from the seminal work on data theory started in the 1970s. This work changed the world and continues to be very relevant, but it is apparent now that it captures only part of the problem. We need a new theory and taxonomy of data that must include: • Identity and versions. Unlocked data comes with identity and optional versions. • Derivation. Which versions of which objects contributed to this knowledge? How is their schema interpreted? Changes to the source would drive a recalculation just as in Excel. If a legal reason means the source data may not be used, you should forget about using the knowledge derived from it. • Lossyness of the derivation. Can we invent a bounding that describes the inaccuracies introduced by derived data? Is this a multidimensional inaccuracy? Can we differentiate loss from the inaccuracies caused by sheer size? • Attribution by pattern. Just like a Mulligan stew, patterns can be derived from attributes that are derived from patterns (and so on). How can we bound taint from knowledge that we are not legally or ethically supposed to have? • Classic locked database data. Let’s not forget that any new theory and taxonomy of data should include the classic database as a piece of the larger puzzle. It’s a great time to be working with data. Lots of new and exciting things are happening!
Q” —If You Have Too Much Data, then “Good Enough” Is Good Enough - ACM Queue
The database industry has benefited immensely from the seminal work on data theory started in the 1970s. This work changed the world and continues to be very relevant, but it is apparent now that it captures only part of the problem. We need a new theory and taxonomy of data that must include: • Identity and versions. Unlocked data comes with identity and optional versions. • Derivation. Which versions of which objects contributed to this knowledge? How is their schema interpreted? Changes to the source would drive a recalculation just as in Excel. If a legal reason means the source data may not be used, you should forget about using the knowledge derived from it. • Lossyness of the derivation. Can we invent a bounding that describes the inaccuracies introduced by derived data? Is this a multidimensional inaccuracy? Can we differentiate loss from the inaccuracies caused by sheer size? • Attribution by pattern. Just like a Mulligan stew, patterns can be derived from attributes that are derived from patterns (and so on). How can we bound taint from knowledge that we are not legally or ethically supposed to have? • Classic locked database data. Let’s not forget that any new theory and taxonomy of data should include the classic database as a piece of the larger puzzle. It’s a great time to be working with data. Lots of new and exciting things are happening!
Q” —If You Have Too Much Data, then “Good Enough” Is Good Enough - ACM Queue
“Anne is primarily concerned with questioning the role of haptics in the reading experience and whether the use of hands engages the brain in ways that play a constitutive role in the reading process; what DOES the clicking do or add to the reading experience? She is particularly interested in evaluating and theorizing the impact that physical and technological affordances have on the phenomenological experience of immersion in narrative storyworlds and longer linear texts, as compared with reading a narrative by leafing through pages of a book. At the heart of her passionate talk are questions of what these physical/technological affordances do with the reading process cognitively, phenomenologically and perceptually, and how we experience a text differently when we handle it with an e-reader, mouse and screen as compared with the print medium. The talk reflects on these questions and related concerns using findings that address different aspects of reading from a host of empirical studies she surveys (though a large portion of findings range from a time before the experience of the digital reading and writing landscape substantially evolved to what it is today).”
—Masters of Media » Anne Mangen on the Technologies and Haptics of Reading
“Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency,” DARPA stated.”
—Layer 8: Apple of my eye? US fancies a huge metaphor repository
“It is not only our material environment that is transformed by our machinery. We take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity—all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and our world. We create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate us in theirs.[…] Our machines allow us to reach out beyond the limits of our flesh. Our machines alter the ways in which our senses feed us information about the world beyond. […] Our machines offer us an image of ourselves — an image, which like the reflection of Narcissus, can hold us transfixed in self-adoration.”
—Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert | The Awl
“The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure.”
—MIT SENSEable City Lab
“Urban Remix is another ‘soundmap’ project like we have seen before. There is more to this project than just recording and uploading audio though. As the name suggests, you are able to remix the sounds you, or any other participant previously uploaded to the Urban Remix website, by drawing paths on a map.”
—Urban Remix - Everyday Listening - Sound Art, Sound Installations, Sonic Inspiration
“Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers new clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, say researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University. In their experiments, the scientists used a virtual neural network to simulate an excessive release of dopamine in the brain and found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion. The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what’s meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters.”
—Scientists Afflict Computers With Schizophrenia - Slashdot
Play
“Interestingly enough, Sutton-Smith (1997), citing Kenneth Burke and Gregory Bateson, made a similar suggestion about the function of play biting in animals. He suggested that play might be the earliest form of a negative, prior to the existence of the negative in language. Play, as a way of not doing whatever it represents, prevents error. It is a positive behavioral negative. It says no by saying yes. It is a bite but it is a nip (Sutton-Smith, 1997). In both cases, the urge to play is a means of communicating in a situation in which intelligent creatures have not yet acquired language. A play action is a signal similar to a predator call, except that its referent is to the social world. If you’ve ever owned a kitten (paging Graham Harman) you will see that play biting goes quite far down and quite far in to mammalian ontogeny. Think about what this means. It means for a kick off that what we call language is a small part of a much bigger configuration space. For a word to be a play-bite, a play-bite has already got to refer to a genuine bite. There has to exist an interobjective space in which “meaning” can take place. The fact that we speak, then, means not that we are different from animals, but that we encapsulate a vast array of nonhuman entities and behaviors. For language to exist at all, there have to be all kinds of objects already in play. All kinds of inscribable surfaces.”
—ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Of Nips: Play and Realism
Up, not North - Automatypewriter →
upnotnorth.net
The Automatypewriter is a typewriter that can type by itself:
It can also detect what’s being typed on it. It can be used to send text to and/or receive text from a computer via USB. It was designed as a platform for playing interactive fiction games
Play
“If we want robots to be successful in healthcare, we’re going to need to think about how do we make those robots communicate their intention and how do people interpret the intentions of the robot,” added Kemp. “And I think people haven’t been as focused on that until now. Primarily people have been focused on how can we make the robot safe, how can we make it do its task effectively. But that’s not going to be enough if we actually want these robots out there helping people in the real world.”
—How Do People Respond to Being Touched by a Robot? | ScienceBlog.com
“Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. Step 2: We bring her into existence. Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl.”
—Cloud Girlfriend, the stalking has just begun - Infocult: Uncanny Informatics
“Really, social networking is just another salient venue where problematic relationships can play out and can have an impact on depression.”
—‘Facebook depression’ claim is research-challenged | NetFamilyNews.org
“there is a mental condition to accept the loss of data as the price of doing business with computers. And beyond that, the expectation that data will be lost, and the spreading of this idea to the point that data loss becomes no big thing.”
—“epidemic mental condition” | One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
“if stories themselves are universal, the way we tell them changes with the technology at hand. Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative. In Europe, the invention of the printing press and movable type around 1450 led to the emergence of periodicals and the novel. The invention of the motion picture camera around 1890 set off an era of feverish experimentation that led to the development of feature films by 1910. Television, invented around 1925, gave rise a quarter-century later to I Love Lucy and the highly stylized form of comedy that became known as the sitcom. As each of these media achieved production and distribution on an industrial scale, we saw the emergence of 20th-century mass media: newspapers, magazines, movies, music, TV. And with that, there was no role left for the consumer except to consume. Then, just as we’d gotten used to consuming sequential narratives in a carefully prescribed, point-by-point fashion, came the internet. The internet is the first medium that can act like all media — it can be text, or audio or video, or all of the above. It’s nonlinear, thanks to the world wide web and the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking. It’s inherently participatory — not just interactive, in the sense that it responds to your commands, but an instigator constantly encouraging you to comment, to contribute, to join in.”
—The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories? | Wired Business | Wired.com
“Unlike a mirror, which reminds us of who we really are and may have a negative effect on self-esteem if that image does not match with our ideal, Facebook can show a positive version of ourselves,” Hancock said in a statement. “We’re not saying that it’s a deceptive version of self, but it’s a positive one. For many people, there’s an automatic assumption that the Internet is bad. This is one of the first studies to show that there’s a psychological benefit of Facebook.”
—Visiting your Facebook profile boosts your self-esteem | ZDNet
“The impact of narratives on human psychology ranges widely from what events we remember most easily to our choices about important foundational behaviors to include our degree of trust in others. Since the brain is the proximate cause of our actions, narratives have a direct impact on the neurobiological processes of both the senders and receivers of them. Understanding how narratives inform neurobiological processes is critical if we are to ascertain what effect narratives have on the psychology and neurobiology of human choices and behaviors, and can assist in everything ranging from exploring how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is influenced by event repetition to better understanding the thoughts and feelings of others.”
—Narrative Networks (N2): The Neurobiology of Narratives - DARPA-SN-11-25 (Archived) - Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities
“the iPad’s release takes us one step closer towards our complete abdication of the all too material body of ours – that messy, smelly and fleshy container of bone, tissue, blood, plasma, and organs – which we so grudgingly lug around, and whose slow decay we attempt to escape through virtualisation – a “war against fragility, pain, wear” 4 as Pierre Lévy suggests. And so we turn to the screen, where the very texture of our modern social experience is illuminated like a movie, “presenting our world in all its tragic glory”5 as Paul Elliman observes. Like the x-ray body scanner installed in airports world wide6, we have allowed it to penetrate through our fabric to our core, revealing every last layer like a peeled onion.
It has become an extension of the human body and mind delivered to us through fractured, multiple windows, malleable and interactive, through a highly concentrated channelling of the body into the hand, which frenetically organises and manipulates the compositional arrangement of pixels embedded in electronic displays. From this new digital domain the hand emerges as the embodiment of our mass of parts and thoughts.” —Surface Residue
It has become an extension of the human body and mind delivered to us through fractured, multiple windows, malleable and interactive, through a highly concentrated channelling of the body into the hand, which frenetically organises and manipulates the compositional arrangement of pixels embedded in electronic displays. From this new digital domain the hand emerges as the embodiment of our mass of parts and thoughts.” —Surface Residue
“How can a simple, autonomous object with a universal form become “emotional”? Our ancestral feelings are triggered by very simple mechanisms that came about through a need to improve preservation and reproduction in a natural environment. But when artificial objects start to behave similarly, we risk being trapped by what our brain has been programmed for (instincts). “Troblion” by Stefan Schwabe is an autonomous spherical robot, which simply allows itself to roll around in a sandbox that is partially wet. The software used to program Troblion imposes a few rules on his movement. After a while the surface is covered with a layer of hardened sand. The plastic then disappears under the sand and its aspect becomes more “natural”, and starts to seem more “familiar” to us. But the more it covers itself with sand, the heavier it gets. At some point it’s not even able to move. Now it needs to shell the sand off, and it accomplishes this goal by deforming its silicon skin. The leftover pieces stay there for a while, testifying to its previous activities, which then begin again. Being an archetype, the sphere facilitates the projection of any form of being. So the Troblion slowly becomes “live” for us, and its plodding movements are perfectly logical in its own environment, reinforcing our perception of it being autonomous. So the original silicon sphere becomes appealing, triggering our primary need to relate with other creatures.”
—Troblion, affective silicon sphere - Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism
“Pope Benedict XVI has recently encouraged priests to blog and promoted Christian Netiquette. Now apparently the Roman Catholic church has sanctioned a ‘Confession App,’ available through iTunes for $1.99. Apparently it doesn’t replace ‘traditional,’ in-person confession, but walks one through the process, even suggesting sins you may wish to confess.”
—Confession: There’s an iPhone App For That - Slashdot
Play
“We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us (6). This is a very good summation of ontological design. There is a feedback loop (hermeneutic circle) and the things we make determine both designer and user. Design is not a linear one-way birthing process, it does not occur in a vacuum. When one calls forth a world, be it a font or phone, that thing has already been shaped (pre-determined) by a cacophony of voices, most of them non-human, most of them covert and unseen. The designer is one player in a sea of actors. Equally, that thing, once released into the wild, to a lesser or greater extent will begin a design process— it will act back and start to shape our own and other beings. Things design the designing of the design of things that design (7).”
—hauntedGeographies: Ontological Design
Zoom blur - 03 →
mrdoob.com
Javascript eclipse
Play
“We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders. At some point, these hoards will intersect with the banal inevitability of human mortality.”
—Cyberspace When You’re Dead - NYTimes.com
“One of the fascinating literary questions is what will happen to poetry as it gradually becomes unleashed from the sanctuary of the printed page. So far the answer has been mixed. There have been lots of experiments with digital media from randomly generated verses to HTML poems but few, if any, have been popular enough to be quoted at the dinner table. In fact I am pushed to remember any.
One interesting new arrival is an iPad/iPhone app called What They Speak When They Speak to Me. When you open the iPad version it consists of a black screen with white(ish) letters of the alphabet swimming around and little else. It is a pleasing artwork in its own right. But as you start touching the letters with your fingers and dragging theme around they form sentences if moved in one direction and reverse sentences if moved in the other (mistaken identity?) After a while you realise that if you start with a capital letter you can likely get a whole sentence and even change it into a shape such as a triangle or even a face with the words following the shape you plot.
The actual lines – such as “Are they speaking to themselves or me?” don’t seem to be part of a narrative but do address the central theme of mistaken identity. The idea behind it is great. Maybe they should open the platform up and let anyone put their own words or clips of classical poems up to exploit the verbal serendipity of the space.” —What They Speak
One interesting new arrival is an iPad/iPhone app called What They Speak When They Speak to Me. When you open the iPad version it consists of a black screen with white(ish) letters of the alphabet swimming around and little else. It is a pleasing artwork in its own right. But as you start touching the letters with your fingers and dragging theme around they form sentences if moved in one direction and reverse sentences if moved in the other (mistaken identity?) After a while you realise that if you start with a capital letter you can likely get a whole sentence and even change it into a shape such as a triangle or even a face with the words following the shape you plot.
The actual lines – such as “Are they speaking to themselves or me?” don’t seem to be part of a narrative but do address the central theme of mistaken identity. The idea behind it is great. Maybe they should open the platform up and let anyone put their own words or clips of classical poems up to exploit the verbal serendipity of the space.” —What They Speak
“Obviously one of the worst predictions you can make is that things continue as they are, only becoming more and more intensified, like a J. G. Ballard-type future where the whole universe is one big shopping mall. That would be the worst. Any catastrophe might be a relief compared to that. But on the other hand, catastrophes are bad for you and me, and we don’t want to get caught in one. It might be good for history, but would be awful for individuals, especially artists, who never had that much going for them in the first place. I’m not one of these people waiting for the big ecological catastrophe. I don’t want to see it happen. I’m still hopeful. And in the end, what else can you do? You have to have, as Ernst Bloch said, revolutionary hope.”
—In Conversation with Hakim Bey | e-flux
“I probably have a much more dire view of cyberspace and the internet than Rem Koolhaas. I think of it as a black hole of memory, and I think memory is disappearing at an alarming rate, thanks to this idea that everyone now has a prosthetic memory. The idea is that this prosthetic memory means that no one needs to remember anything anymore. You just push a button and get any information you want. Well, you first of all need to know what questions to ask. If you don’t even know what you want to know, how can you know it? That’s what I mean about the black hole—it sucks in knowledge. It’s actually worse than forgetting—it works against memory itself.”
—In Conversation with Hakim Bey | e-flux
Play
“If we have left an age of myth in which stories provided the symbolic resources for scrying life, then we have entered an age of endless acquisition in which the symbolic imperative is to complete the record of everything. It is perhaps ironic that in a milieux that is claimed to be a “therapy culture” we should have become a collective case of compulsive hoarding.”
—Database obesity: Menticulture Blog
Play
“Manovich’s analysis, in distinguishing the characteristics of databases, gives us a working definition of narrative which is consonant with dominant interpretations. In Propp’s formalism, the 31 functions from which all folk-tales can be derived become a narrative when they are instantiated in a story which must always present the functions in unvarying order, even if they may leave some or others of them out. Even in Levi-Strauss’ analysis of myth, in which many narratives are taken as parts of an entire system, the de-temporalised components of those stories are nevertheless structured in ways that reflect the underlying imperatives of human nature. Barthes’ transcultural, transhistorical narrative, which is “simply there, like life itself”, is a corollary of the sentence, with its syntactical (connecting) arrangements of subjects, verbs, objects, modes. Greimas’ even more granular analysis posits such connecting principles as desires or aims, communication, and support or hindrance, as the basic patterns of narrative. Todorov’s definition, which consists of different states of equilibrium and disequilibrium, is precisely a narrative because those states are articulated to each other. Genette’s understanding of narrative is relational, being a product of the interactions between levels of narrative, perspective and focalisation. Historians such as Hayden White and Louis Mink separate the narrative, with its explanatory agenda, from the chronicle, with its enumerative function. From Aristotle, with his requirements for the high being laid low and the lowly being exalted, to Brecht’s desire to rouse the audience to reject the necessity of inevitable endings, narrative is only narrative if it is a discrete series of items, caught up together into a connecting principle, a trajectory, a start, middle and end.”
—Narrative connections: Menticulture Blog
“Price is fascinated by the ‘thingness’ of books and their occasions. She’s very perceptive, for example, on evangelical ‘tracts’ that do-gooders such as Wilkie Collins’s Miss Clack dropped, like holy hand grenades, wherever she went. And Price has a mission of her own, which extends evangelically beyond the borders of her Victorian field specialism. She wants her profession to ‘get physical’ which, as she sees it, means getting to grips with books as books. It’s a tall order. Academic literary criticism has, for the last eighty years, become hung up on ‘textuality’: intertextuality, paratextuality, subtextuality, contextuality - count the ways. If there is a motto generally subscribed to, it is Jacques Derrida’s - Il n’y a pas de hors-texte (‘there is nothing outside the text’). The whole profession is following the pipes of Pan(textuality) - Hamelin-style, Price would say. ‘Text’ is a noumenon. It does not exist materially, although it can be materialised in an infinite variety of ways (is the radio programme Book at Bedtime a book? Is the film of the book a book?). Price wants to refocus her peers’ attention on actual, existent books - ‘things’, not their textual ghost. Things, that is, which fingers feel, eyes see, noses smell, and ears can hear fall on the floor.”
—Literary Review - John Sutherland on Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
