Apollonius of Perga

"Realize that people in academia have a warped and limited view of what constitutes “success.”..."

Sun, 26 May 2013 11:36:50 -0400

“Realize that people in academia have a warped and limited view of what constitutes “success.” Academia has been described as a cult, and when you leave a cult, you have to shake off its values and judgments. Only in academia is working four adjunct jobs for less than 10K a year “success” while working a non-academic job that provides personal satisfaction or a living wage “failure.” A profession that exploits people’s fear to staff its positions is not one to which you owe loyalty.”

- Transition Q & A: Sarah Kendzior |

"What I realized during my year on the job market is that having a traditional academic career is not..."

Sun, 26 May 2013 11:36:32 -0400

“What I realized during my year on the job market is that having a traditional academic career is not as important to me as participating meaningfully in public life—and that the former actually precludes the latter. If I had an academic job, all my work would be behind a paywall. I would lose my audience and my integrity—because I would be working only for myself, only to meet tenure requirements, and I like to engage with the world. I speak to the public.”

- Transition Q & A: Sarah Kendzior |

"You have to trust each other, yes, but even more you have to trust the box - that it knows what it..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:43:35 -0400

“You have to trust each other, yes, but even more you have to trust the box - that it knows what it is doing: you have to believe it is haunted, in the same way that you believe that Superman can fly or Gandalf can cast spells. You must believe it might have been on that mantelpiece, and that microscopic traces of Hardy’s fibrous muscular heart might still be found on the inside, and that if you concentrate really hard, you might very well be able to tune into the analogue impressions left by people’s hands, their voices, the waves that hit the atoms of the wood and dislodge them forever in an imprint that could be reconstrued and remade into the original sound like the self-destroying grooves of an antique wax cylinder.”

- The Haunter - Digital and Analogue Theatre http://www.hauntology.net/blog/item/digital_and_analogue/1541

Arcfinity: We're reading WHO OWNS THE FUTURE? by Jaron Lanier

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:12:10 -0400

Arcfinity: We're reading WHO OWNS THE FUTURE? by Jaron Lanier:

arcfinity:

Queensberry rules be damned: Paul Graham Raven reckons it’s high time the tech pundit and critic Jaron Lanier took his gloves off.

Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier
Allen Lane, HB £20.00 / Simon & Schuster, HB $28.00

So, you wanna know who owns the future? That’s an easy one: the…

"UNITED MICRO KINGDOMS: A DESIGN FICTION The United Micro Kingdoms (UmK) is divided into four..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:56:35 -0400

“UNITED MICRO KINGDOMS: A DESIGN FICTION The United Micro Kingdoms (UmK) is divided into four super-shires inhabited by Digitarians, Bioliberals, Anarcho-evolutionists and Communo-nuclearists. Each county is an experimental zone, free to develop its own form of governance, economy and lifestyle. These include neoliberalism and digital technology, social democracy and biotechnology, anarchy and self-experimentation and communism and nuclear energy. The UmK is a deregulated laboratory for competing social, ideological, technological and economic models.”

- UMK

"Telegraph code books, in the hundred years of their use (ca. 1850-1950), served primarily as an..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:54:27 -0400

“Telegraph code books, in the hundred years of their use (ca. 1850-1950), served primarily as an information compression technology, matching a phrase or sentence with a code word, thus saving money on telegram costs. On occasion, they were also used for secrecy, since typically only someone possessing the same code book as the sender would be able to decode the message. In the books’ heyday, virtually every industry had its specialized version; shipping, banking, railways, carpets, and rubber all had code books designed especially for them, as did many other industries as well. In addition, general purpose code books also flourished, many going through multiple editions. The code books were widely used, especially by businesses but also private individuals. Estimates are that 95% of all transatlantic telegraph traffic was encoded, and a high percentage of domestic traffic as well. After the telegraph became obsolete, most libraries and individuals purged the books from their collections; of the hundreds of thousands of originals, perhaps only hundreds remain. Old enough to have progressed from junk to collectible, they have now become prized items and sell for fancy prices at online auction sites.”

- Telegraph Code Books

"So alright you don’t like technology. Technology is the human. We’re the tool-making species. There..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:49:35 -0400

“So alright you don’t like technology. Technology is the human. We’re the tool-making species. There is no human independent from its tool apparatus. The question is: does it have to be these tools? Absolutely not. So how does one reimagine the potential, the set of the scientific discoveries and their technical applications, and open up so life could be otherwise? That’s the critical task. There’s an absolute failure to perform the critical task in relation to technology. There’s a kind of “No, I don’t like the iPhone.” Well, what the fuck do you like then? What do you want? Describe another world. Describe it to me. For seven billion people. Among the Situationists, someone like Constant Nieuwenhuys did exactly that, he imagined an entire other planet based on mid 20th Century technology. That’s more of a conceptual exercise than a real engineering project, but it opens a door to asking question about how, well, how do you reengineer cities? So that they’re survivable would do for a start, but better than. We really could abolish work, y’know? Not completely. But we could really get it down to a few hours a day. So, well, how’s that project going? We’re gonna run out of cheap labor eventually. It can’t go on forever. There’s signs that China has turned a corner. They just don’t wanna do these boring factory jobs. Alright, so we’ll go exploit cheap labor in Vietnam. But it can’t go on forever. So that opens the question of, well, we’re only using this cheap labor ‘cause it’s so cheap, sitting there all day with a screwdriver assembling those cheap plastic toys. Now you look at all those plastic toys with ten screws in them. Well, they’re only designed to have ten screws because it’s cheaper to use the labor than to design the fucking thing properly so it snaps together. So at some point technology has to be part of the critical conversation. And that’s where hackspace culture, hacker culture, some of maker culture, is so incredibly helpful. It’s equipping people with a basic knowledge of how our world actually works. But you have to add the question of how could it work better, how could it work differently. And as a totality, not just “I want a better widget.” What would be a better system? That’s the whole critical design question. The central question to me now is the avant garde of design.”

- Rhizome | A Cavalier History of Situationism: An Interview with McKenzie Wark

"Debord is reading Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, who is this great urban sociologist, the first..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:45:37 -0400

“Debord is reading Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, who is this great urban sociologist, the first person who was trying to map people’s pathways, and Debord, riffing off Henri Lefebvre’s The Critique of Everyday Life, is gonna start with the predictability of that. Now we’ve reached the point of real-time analysis and application—which runs almost exclusively to selling you stuff. One thing the Situationists were doing was looking for the free space in the Paris of the 1950s, with this massive police presence and surveillance. In the division between work time and leisure time and its routine, there was still a place of play, provided you live by the slogan Never Work. Well, there is no longer any difference between work and play. There’s no such thing as leisure and non-leisure. We’re all working all the friggin’ time. But when we’re working, we’re goofing off half that time anyway. Does anyone even know when they’re working anymore? I’m talking about in what the Situationists called the ‘overdeveloped’ world. I do all my work in coffee shops, and I see people constantly juggling stuff that’s either work or not work, god only knows what it is. As the grid tightens, it in certain senses becomes more diffuse. So it’s not to deny how geolocation is involved in surveillance or 3D printing is rapidly becoming proprietary, but it’s to figure out what can you produce within the space of those things that suggests another world entirely.”

- Rhizome | A Cavalier History of Situationism: An Interview with McKenzie Wark

"We have portrayed these machines as maniacal and destructive, conspiratorial and unfeeling. In so..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:23:11 -0400

“We have portrayed these machines as maniacal and destructive, conspiratorial and unfeeling. In so many cases those attributes have been evident in their speech – or their silence. We know too well that somewhere, behind the tin exterior of their inorganic bodies, a language of pure numbers reeled back and forth in billions, reverberates unchecked. We could never communicate with them in such terms.”

- Strong Silent Types: Evil Robots and Their Way with Words - The Machine Starts

'feedparser.py', Kurt McKee & Mark Pilgrim

Sun, 12 May 2013 15:45:00 -0400

Things that are going and gone. The looming end of Google Reader leaves me looking for some other way of grokking my 322 feeds. I want a solution that I know isn’t going to be withdrawn arbitrarily because my use of the service doesn’t figure in some sort of business model, so I think I need to roll my own solution. A data store I can sync across machines, some tooling that lets me read and mark items; probably a doc-oriented database and some libraries based in ruby or python should do it. I start some hunting through a search engine not provided by Google.

In my search I find a library that seems promising, albeit hosted on code.google.com (I think resentment is a good emotional state to inhabit while judging service providers). I find python package which is pretty mature, started in 2002. Looking through the source I find the clincher. It has nothing to do with the quality of code, but the serendipity of the find: its originator is Mark Pilgrim, the developer and writer behind lots of influential online resources who suddenly vanished from the internet. People call it ‘infosuicide’, erasing your digital traces. I see the attraction, whenever my completionist self-archivist nature faces up to the impossibility of capturing the definitive information simulacrum of my life.

Pilgrim did it properly, marking all his domains as ‘410: Gone’. It’s the opposite of Google’s approach really. Pilgrim has gone, but yet here I am looking at his code, planning to use it in my search for a solution to the Google problem. Google are taking their tools away, fully expecting me to carry on gorping at their corporate might.

'Better Stakeholder Interviews', Chris Cashdollar, Happy Cog

Sat, 11 May 2013 08:33:44 -0400

Translation and less-than-pristine reinterpretation damage the fidelity of the message. There is no copy-and-paste equivalent for verbal storytelling. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of an image will always render that image indistinguishable from the original.

The reason waterall is predominant is because it is perceived as cheap. A colleague of mine who is the director of a digital agency recently pointed out that ‘agile’ often tends to mean that you all get to go off for a week and play around and have some fun; if you can find clients willing to pay for such things, then great. Naturally, the client would rather not spend money on fun: they have a project and a plan, and they need it built. Selling agile methods is often onto a hiding because of the perception that agile is expensive frivolity while waterfall will get you something made within sight of your budget.

That’s really a problem about buzzwords. As soon as you take a process and brand it, it is easily separable from the process and can be coated in any arbitrary associations. The label becomes more important than the practice it was meant to signify. A week or two after I did a class on Kuniavsky’s critique of the waterfall method, a guest speaker from a digital agency came in and raved to the same students about this method they use called ‘waterfall’. A couple of days ago I saw a recruiter advertising a post in a design shop where they use ‘agile methods such as waterall’. It doesn’t help to use a different label - scrum, user-centred design, spiral - it’s the label itself that is the problem. The only way to mitigate the effect of this semiotic drift is to be as transparent as possible about your practice.

"In our exclusive TODAY Moms survey of 7,000 U.S. mothers, 42 percent said that they sometimes suffer..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 08:31:06 -0400

“In our exclusive TODAY Moms survey of 7,000 U.S. mothers, 42 percent said that they sometimes suffer from Pinterest stress – the worry that they’re not crafty or creative enough. Symptoms include staying up until 3 a.m. clicking through photos of exquisite hand-made birthday party favors even though you’ll end up buying yours at the dollar store, or sobbing quietly into a burnt mess of expensive ingredients that were supposed to be adorable bunny cookies for the school bake sale. “It tricks you into thinking that everyone is baking their own bread,” said Jenna Andersen, 28, a Palo Alto, Calif., mom of two, photographer and blogger behind the hilarious site Pinterest Fail, which chronicles Pinterest-inspired crafts and recipes gone oh-so-wrong. She’s still a fan of the site, but she’s learned not to let herself think that the artfully curated photos represent anyone’s reality. “Pinterest is largely a site of unrealized dreams.””

- ‘Pinterest stress’ afflicts nearly half of moms, survey says - TODAY.com

"when thinking about new technologies in legal terms, the metaphors we use to understand them are..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 04:31:27 -0400

“when thinking about new technologies in legal terms, the metaphors we use to understand them are crucially important. Lawyers are used to understanding legal subjects metaphorically, especially in developing areas of the law like new technologies. If we get the metaphors wrong for robots, the lessons of cyber-law reveal that it could have potentially disastrous consequences. Finally, we argue that one particularly seductive metaphor for robots should be rejected at all costs, the idea that robots are “just like people” and that there is a meaningful difference between humanoid and non-humanoid robots. We call this idea “the Android Fallacy.””

- How Should the Law Think About Robots? by Neil Richards, William Smart :: SSRN

(via Vincent & Emily - Two robots in a relationship struggle...

Sun, 05 May 2013 15:08:32 -0400

(via Vincent & Emily - Two robots in a relationship struggle and emotional conflict)

Just like in each human relationship it comes to misunderstandings: If Vincent sends positive signals by up and down movements, it is possible that Emily interprets even those signals as negative. Disagreement is preprogrammed. The unpredictable interaction and interplay between Vincent and Emily, caused by their tense relationship, trigger the viewer’s individual projections. Intuitively he will be searching for similarities to particular patterns of human behavior.

new-aesthetic: “Sam Bland has spent a lot of time with Google...

Sun, 05 May 2013 15:05:18 -0400

new-aesthetic:

“Sam Bland has spent a lot of time with Google Goggles. He’s learned how it sees the world and how it communicates — they play games together. Goggles is the image search feature in the Google mobile app, and by layering the app’s best attempts to match his photos, Bland has created an artistic view of the world as seen through Google’s eyes. His first experiment with it, for example, was a picture he took of a tennis racket. Google sent back a series of pictures that, while similar in tone and shape, had nothing to do with tennis. There was a polar bear, a nuclear missile launch and stock photo of a box of pills, among other things. Instead of being disappointed, Bland was fascinated. He liked that Google was confused.”

Google Is Alive, It Has Eyes, and This Is What It Sees | Raw File | Wired.com

"The world’s most powerful information companies have inserted some of the internet’s foundational..."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:59:36 -0400

“The world’s most powerful information companies have inserted some of the internet’s foundational optimism in their mission statements. These tech giants talk about themselves as heartwarming charities. Every billionaire CEO is his own private Dalai Lama. Pseudo-liberal jabberwocky of assumed universal validity permeates the junkspace of mission statements, annual reports, and TED talks, especially when it comes to the cloud. Microsoft wants to help everyone around the world “realize their full potential.”14 Facebook aims to give “people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”15 Skype makes it “simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.”16 And Instagram, bought by Facebook, envisions “a world more connected through photos.””

- Captives of the Cloud: Part II | e-flux

"The political, legal and jurisdictional consequences of the cloud are slowly becoming apparent—right..."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:56:09 -0400

“The political, legal and jurisdictional consequences of the cloud are slowly becoming apparent—right at the time when we are unlikely to withdraw from it. The cloud is just too good. We won’t stop using our iPhones, iPads, Androids and Kindles. Paypal is still our frenemy. Happily the captives of the cloud, we will tweet our critiques of it, and Facebook-broadcast our outcries over its government back doors. But the story is not over yet. Will the anarcho-libertarian roots of the internet kick back at the cloud’s centralized architecture—or are they forever overrun by it? Has the cloud assumed its final form, or is there still a time and a place for surprises?”

- Captives of the Cloud: Part I | e-flux

Guerilla Science » Sonic Tour of the Brain

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:38:42 -0400

Guerilla Science » Sonic Tour of the Brain:

http://www.roljui.com/1.%20audio/motm/zcc/Brain%20Music%20Final.mp3

In this 20 minute audio tour, we explore the question… what does the brain sound like? Most people can imagine what the brain looks like, feels like, and maybe even smells like – but few might have ever thought about what it sounds like.

We have chosen a dozen different recordings, each of which illustrates a different aspect of how the brain works, and how we try to understand it.

Track List:

1. Surgical Saw: This is the real sound of a brain being sliced open with a piece of cheese wire at a hospital in the Ukraine. Many thanks to Geoffrey Smith, director of The English Surgeon, and Angela Saward, Curator of Moving Image & Sound at the Wellcome Library, for providing this track.

2. Wobbling Jelly: This is not the sound of a real brain, but of a block of jelly, which food artisans Bompas & Parr, in association with sound artist Douglas Murphy made in a soundproof studio. This is what a real brain would sound like, as it has the consistency and texture of jelly.

3. Epileptic Seizure – This is the sonified version of an EEG, recorded in the 1960s. The patient in question was a small child in the 1960s (name withheld for privacy reasons). Many thanks to our benefactors The Wellcome Trust for providing us with this original piece of historical material.

4. Auditory Nerve – This is a single cell nerve recording, taken using a glass needle, stuck into the auditory nerve of a hamster in the 1960s.

5. Cochlear Implant – This is not the real sound of a cochlear implant, but a simulation of what one may sound like to its users.

6. Mosquito Frequency – All of us will lose our ability to hear tones of higher frequencies as we age, due to the thickening of the basilar membrane, the bedrock of the cochlear spiral. Ain’t that but a crying shame. The sound of 17,000Hz will be heard by only the younger audience members. Can you hear it? Editor’s note: We promise that it’s not a fake.

7. Neverending Scale – The Shepard Scale is often compared to an Escher staircase - and even those of us who have heard it over and over find the concept difficult to understand, let alone explain in clear language. The best source I have found online that explains the nature of this illusion is this clip from Bang Goes The Theory.

8. Shepard-Risset Glissando – A variation on the Shepard Scale, but as a glissando. Creepy stuff! Try listening to it over and over and over – we promise it never stops feeling weird. If you look at this youtube clip, which visualises the sound waves, it might make a bit more sense.

9. Binaural Illusion – Our brains use the tiny time differences between sounds reaching our right and left ears to calculate the source of the sound in physical space. Enjoy.

10. Phantom Words – These come from Prof Diana Deutsch of the University of California, who is the master of sonic illusions – some have called her the grand dame of auditory neuroscience. She is one cool cat – and a fantastic example of a scientist who is not only a woman, but also achieves things that are, for lack of a better descriptor, spectacularly original. They can find all the examples of her work online for free on her website.

11. Reconstructed Speech – Dr Brian Pasley is using sophisticated software and intracranial recordings of the brain to reconstruct what words subjects heard, and to reproduce them with computer algorithms. You can read the original paper in PLoS Biology here.

12. Music of the Hemispheres – Prof Dan Lloyd has translated the activity of fMRI recordings of the brain into music – you can watch this video and read more about his work here. Honestly – his theory is really without any rivals, artistically or philosophically. Whether you agree with his hypothesis – that “we are all symphonies” or not – you will at least find the videos and short films edifying.

13. Remix: The Music Of The Mind – An original remix created for us by composer Dean Williams – made entirely from the sound samples from the rest of this tour. You can download that entire track and learn more about how he made this unprecedented musical score here.

This has been the Guerilla Science Sonic Tour of the Brain – we perhaps might not have been able to explain exactly what the brain sounds like, but we hope, there are many different ways of approaching the question.

By Zoe Cormier – hopelessly devoted audiophile, and co-founder of Guerilla Science.

(via Peter Bynum Portfolio)

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 16:53:09 -0400

(via Peter Bynum Portfolio)

"The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort..."

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 03:13:20 -0400

“

The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort to shut it down, because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.

But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.

So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.

”

- Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy — Tech News and Analysis, via Tim M. (via new-aesthetic)