With György Kepes, photographs as experiments – The Boston Globe

From the start, photography has been binary. First, it was a matter of metal (the daguerreotype) and paper (the calotype). Later there would be black-and-white and color. Now it’s analog and digital. In each case, one side decisively won out — a reminder that the medium was, and is, as much technology as art. “High Speed Photograph” (1948) – GYÖRGY KEPES Source: With György Kepes, photographs … Continue reading With György Kepes, photographs as experiments – The Boston Globe

LeiApril 5, 2018April 5, 2018Leave a comment

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Realigning technology with humanity’s best interests

Technology is hijacking our minds and society. Our world-class team of deeply concerned former tech insiders and CEOs intimately understands the culture, business incentives, design techniques, and organizational structures driving how technology hijacks our minds. Since 2013, we’ve raised awareness of the problem within tech companies and for millions of people through broad media attention, convened top industry executives, and advised political leaders. Building on … Continue reading Realigning technology with humanity’s best interests

LeiFebruary 5, 2018February 5, 2018Leave a comment

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Breakthrough technologies – robotics and IP

Robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have huge potential to transform many aspects of our lives. Recent trials with humanoid robots in supermarkets, schools, hospitals and retirement homes in Europe, the United States and Japan give a sense of this. Hollywood movies like Ex_Machina and Her have also attracted public attention, raising questions about the potential superiority of robots and AI. But how is innovation in … Continue reading Breakthrough technologies – robotics and IP

LeiJanuary 29, 2018Leave a comment

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Amazon Go: the technology behind the firm’s surveillance-heavy grocery store | WIRED UK

Amazon boasts it has “created the world’s most advanced shopping technology” to allow the system to work. It’s dubbed the tech ‘Just Walk Out’ and it says the systems work similarly to those in self-driving cars. To remove human cashiers Amazon has created a store that’s able to run a high-level of surveillance on the people inside it. The New York Times reports hundreds of … Continue reading Amazon Go: the technology behind the firm’s surveillance-heavy grocery store | WIRED UK

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China’s AI Awakening

For many in China, this simply won’t do. The country is now embarking on an unprecedented effort to master artificial intelligence. Its government is planning to pour hundreds of billions of yuan (tens of billions of dollars) into the technology in coming years, and companies are investing heavily in nurturing and developing AI talent. If this country-wide effort succeeds—and there are many signs it will—China … Continue reading China’s AI Awakening

LeiJanuary 24, 2018Leave a comment

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Being the King Kong of algorithmic culture is a tough job after allConvergence – Jonathan Roberge, Louis Melançon, 2017

This article explores the growing importance of algorithms in digital culture and what they could mean for the visibility and interpretation of culture as a whole. Taking Google as a prime example of a company that participates in widespread information overload whilst simultaneously providing some algorithmic answers to it, we show how it exhibits four different regimes of justification: the techno-scientific, economic, political and moral–aesthetic. … Continue reading Being the King Kong of algorithmic culture is a tough job after allConvergence – Jonathan Roberge, Louis Melançon, 2017

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Envisioning Chemistry videos: Chemical reactions as things of beauty — Quartz

“A lot of people told me that if they’d seen these videos in high school, they might’ve done much better in chemistry, ” says Liang Yan, creator of the award-winning series Beautiful Chemistry and Envisioning Chemistry. The videos reveal stunning details that are sometimes not visible to human eyes. Under the microscope, we see metals “grow” like trees and “blossom” like flowers. A high-speed camera … Continue reading Envisioning Chemistry videos: Chemical reactions as things of beauty — Quartz

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Can computers help us synthesize new materials? | MIT News

Last month, three MIT materials scientists and their colleagues published a paper describing a new artificial-intelligence system that can pore through scientific papers and extract “recipes” for producing particular types of materials. That work was envisioned as the first step toward a system that can originate recipes for materials that have been described only theoretically. Now, in a paper in the journal npj Computational Materials, … Continue reading Can computers help us synthesize new materials? | MIT News

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Introduction to machine learning

In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions. Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco. via A visual introduction to machine learning Continue reading Introduction to machine learning

LeiJanuary 17, 2018January 17, 2018Leave a comment

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Consumption as common sense: Heteronormative hegemony and white wedding desire

The white wedding remains the most popular marriage ritual in the United States despite significant social change since its inception. Current research on this phenomenon focuses primarily on the influence of mass media, including advertising that socializes women and girls. I argue that while important, mass media alone cannot explain why many women want to have a white wedding. Drawing from data gathered primarily with … Continue reading Consumption as common sense: Heteronormative hegemony and white wedding desire

LeiDecember 23, 2017December 23, 2017Leave a comment

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50 Smartest Companies 2017

Each year we identify 50 companies creating new opportunities by combining important technologies and business savvy. Some are large companies that seem to be growing ever larger, like Amazon and Apple. Others, like IBM, or General Electric are old-guard giants betting on technology renewal. And the list is full of ambitious startups like SpaceX, which is changing the economics of space travel with reusable rockets; Face ++, … Continue reading 50 Smartest Companies 2017

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Tufte’s Rules

Some rules about data visualization: Tufte’s Rules Continue reading Tufte’s Rules

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The Relentless Pace of Automation

Last October, Uber had one of its self-driving trucks make a beer run, traveling 200 kilometers down the interstate to deliver a cargo of Budweiser from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs. A person rode in the truck but spent most of the trip in the sleeper berth, monitoring the automated system. (The test came just a few weeks after Uber had announced its driverless car … Continue reading The Relentless Pace of Automation

LeiNovember 27, 2017Leave a comment

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Understanding statistical ways…

Humans have a bias for turning to the right in a number of settings. Here we document a bias in head-turning to the right in adult humans, as tested in the act of kissing. We investigated head-turning bias in both kiss initiators and kiss recipients for lip kissing, and took into consideration differences due to sex and handedness, in 48 Bangladeshi heterosexual married couples. We … Continue reading Understanding statistical ways…

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Understanding of p-hacking

Data dredging (also data fishing, data snooping, and p-hacking) is the use of data mining to uncover patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, without first devising a specific hypothesis as to the underlying causality. The process of data dredging involves automatically testing huge numbers of hypotheses about a single data set by exhaustively searching — perhaps for combinations of variables that … Continue reading Understanding of p-hacking

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Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture

Scholars and practitioners across domains are increasingly concerned with algorithmic transparency and opacity, interrogating the values and assumptions embedded in automated, black-boxed systems, particularly in user-generated content platforms. I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual, learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated social–technical environment. Today, the organizational culture of … Continue reading Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture

LeiNovember 20, 2017Leave a comment

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The World of Music: SDP layout of high dimensional data

The World of Music, by researchers at Standford, MIT and Yahoo!, intends to render the music space in an unprecedented way. This visualization shows 9,276 artists and how they are related to each other. The artist relation data is mined from user ratings of artists in the Yahoo! Music service. The researchers used a technique called semidefinite programming (which is sometimes called Semidefinite embedding) to … Continue reading The World of Music: SDP layout of high dimensional data

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Traditional Values and Political Trust in ChinaJournal of Asian and African Studies – Yida Zhai, 2016

Chinese traditional culture is viewed to sustain political trust in the authoritarian regime. Given that Chinese cultural traditions are complex and multi-dimensional, it is ineffective to deal with this notion by a single index. This study divides Chinese traditional values into a non-political dimension (traditional family and social values) and a political dimension (traditional political values). Then, I empirically test how different dimensions of Chinese … Continue reading Traditional Values and Political Trust in ChinaJournal of Asian and African Studies – Yida Zhai, 2016

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Blackbox of surveilling French Internet

« Boîtes noires ». Le terme avait suscité un torrent de critiques au moment des discussions autour de la loi sur le renseignement, début 2015. Ces algorithmes, qui permettent de traiter de grandes quantités de données dans le but de détecter des « signaux faibles » pour lutter contre la « menace terroriste », sont aujourd’hui en cours de déploiement. C’est le président de la Commission nationale de contrôle des … Continue reading Blackbox of surveilling French Internet

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Doing Research in the Business World

Doing Research in the Business World is a research textbook, covering a diverse range of methodologies and methods, from surveys to action research approaches. This impressive philosophical and methodological span — all the more noteworthy when one remembers it is single-authored — makes it a concrete block of a book, weighing in at over 800 pages. This makes the organisation of content an important consideration … Continue reading Doing Research in the Business World

LeiNovember 18, 2017Leave a comment

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Accountability of AI Under the Law

The ubiquity of systems using artificial intelligence or “AI” has brought increasing attention to how those systems should be regulated. The choice of how to regulate AI systems will require care. AI systems have the potential to synthesize large amounts of data, allowing for greater levels of personalization and precision than ever before—applications range from clinical decision support to autonomous driving and predictive policing. That … Continue reading Accountability of AI Under the Law

LeiNovember 16, 2017November 16, 2017Leave a comment

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Iphoneography as an emergent art world

The iPhone has come to be one of the most popular and widely used cameras because of its ubiquity and the ease with which images can be uploaded directly to sites like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter. The introduction of photography “apps,” like Hipstamatic or Instagram, adds layers of aesthetic capabilities not previously available within the camera. These capabilities have attracted artists seeking technologies for new … Continue reading Iphoneography as an emergent art world

LeiNovember 14, 2017November 14, 2017Leave a comment

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D3 and canvas in three steps

Let’s say you’re building a data visualization using D3 and SVG. You may hit a ceiling when you try to display several thousand elements at the same time. Your browser may start to puff under the weight of all those DOM elements. Well here comes HTML5 Canvas to the rescue! It’s much faster, so it can solve your browser’s puffing problems. But you may quickly … Continue reading D3 and canvas in three steps

LeiNovember 13, 2017November 13, 2017Leave a comment

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Twitter officially expands its character count to 280

Twitter’s expansion to 280 characters is rolling out publicly today to all users in supported languages, including English. The company had first announced the controversial plan to move beyond its traditional 140 characters back in September, noting at the time how a longer character count allowed users to express more of their thoughts without running out of room to tweet. via Twitter officially expands its character … Continue reading Twitter officially expands its character count to 280

LeiNovember 9, 2017November 9, 2017Leave a comment

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Chibi Chip Starter Kit

Get started with coding now! The Chibi Chip Starter Kit is a fun, friendly and new way to engage with coding. This starter kit reinvents the book through paper electronics: craft functional circuits directly into the pages of the included storybook, Love to Code Volume 1, while learning how to bring images to life through code. With LTC, everyone can fall in love with coding! via Chibi … Continue reading Chibi Chip Starter Kit

LeiNovember 9, 2017November 9, 2017Leave a comment

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Free Public Datasets

A big list of free public datasets via Free Public Datasets Continue reading Free Public Datasets

LeiNovember 9, 2017November 9, 2017Leave a comment

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Is the Lone Scientist an American Dream? Perceived Communal Opportunities in STEM Offer a Pathway to Closing U.S

The United States lags behind many Asian countries in engagement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). An unexplored factor in these country-level differences may be U.S.–Asia gaps in perceptions of the goal opportunities provided by STEM. Across four studies, U.S. students perceived fewer communal opportunities (working with/helping/relationships with others) in STEM than Asian students; this differential perception contributed to U.S.–Asia gaps in STEM interest. … Continue reading Is the Lone Scientist an American Dream? Perceived Communal Opportunities in STEM Offer a Pathway to Closing U.S

LeiNovember 9, 2017November 9, 2017Leave a comment

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The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change

Lately, as summers have lengthened and winters have warmed, this seasonal transformation has lost its symmetry. What biologists call the permafrost’s “active layer”—the part of the dirt where microbes and other forms of life can live—now reaches farther underground, and further north, than it has for tens of thousands of years. The newly active permafrost is packed with old stuff: dead plants, dead animals, mosses … Continue reading The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change

LeiNovember 7, 2017November 9, 2017Leave a comment

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Lunar – a cryptocurrency hedge fund?

The financial world is currently facing what will be the biggest disruption since the creation of money itself. Institutional investors and venture capitalists will soon lose their monopoly on a market worth trillions. Hedge funds, especially, have been historically inaccessible to the average investor, with many requiring a minimum buy-in upwards of $1 Million. We aim to change that. We want to use cryptocurrency to … Continue reading Lunar – a cryptocurrency hedge fund?

LeiNovember 7, 2017November 9, 2017Leave a comment

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What Will Happen to Our Jobs Tomorrow

How will disruptive new technologies — such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and robotics — transform my organization? Do I need to change the way I work in order to remain relevant in a digital age? Will I be replaced by a machine? . . . Am I going to lose my job? via “What Will Happen to Our Jobs Tomorrow”? – Hacker Noon Continue reading What Will Happen to Our Jobs Tomorrow

LeiNovember 7, 2017November 7, 2017Leave a comment

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What you can’t say about the 19th National Communist Party Congress on WeChat

From October 18 to October 24 2017, the Communist Party of China (CPC) held its 19th National Communist Party Congress (NCPC19), which marked the halfway point of President Xi Jinping’s 10-year term, and served as a bellwether of his power over the party. The National Communist Party Congress (NCPC) is the most important political event for the CPC, and information around it is carefully managed. … Continue reading What you can’t say about the 19th National Communist Party Congress on WeChat

LeiNovember 7, 2017November 7, 2017Leave a comment

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Profit and gift in the digital economy

Over three billion times a day, someone types a search term into Google and within a few seconds receives a list of search results on their screen (Internet Live Stats, 2014). This service, delivered entirely free to the user, has become a cornerstone of the work and knowledge practices of a substantial portion of humanity.[1] But the Google Search business model – like many others in … Continue reading Profit and gift in the digital economy

LeiNovember 4, 2017November 4, 2017Leave a comment

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Aid, China, and Growth: Evidence from a New Global Development Finance Dataset

This paper introduces a new dataset of official financing — including foreign aid and other forms of concessional and non-concessional state financing — from China to 138 countries between 2000 and 2014. We use these data to investigate whether and to what extent Chinese aid affects economic growth in recipient countries. To account for the endogeneity of aid, we employ an instrumental-variables strategy that relies … Continue reading Aid, China, and Growth: Evidence from a New Global Development Finance Dataset

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Why People Get Religious about Bitcoin

The Bitcoin phenomenon isn’t about a bunch of people who all believe the cryptocurrency is a good investment. That’s part of it. But for many, the belief in Bitcoin’s power to transform society runs much deeper: it’s almost an article of faith. Where does this fervor come from? To understand, it’s important to keep in mind that “the blockchain” is not really a thing. via … Continue reading Why People Get Religious about Bitcoin

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Introduction to Spark with Python

After lots of ground-breaking work led by the UC Berkeley AMP Lab, Spark was developed to utilize distributed, in-memory data structures to improve data processing speeds over Hadoop for most workloads. In this post, we’re going to cover the architecture of Spark and basic transformations and actions using a real dataset. If you want to write and run your own Spark code, check out the … Continue reading Introduction to Spark with Python

LeiNovember 3, 2017November 9, 2017Leave a comment

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Collective intelligence for promoting changes in behavior

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges humanity faces today. Despite of high investments in technology, battling climate change is futile without the participation of the public, and changing their perception and habits. Collective intelligence tools can play an important role in translating this “distant” concept that is climate change into practical hints for everyday life. In this paper, we report a case study … Continue reading Collective intelligence for promoting changes in behavior

LeiNovember 2, 2017November 2, 2017Leave a comment

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The shortest-lived Catalan Republic?

Barcelona, October 27, 2017. Parliament proclaims Catalonia’s independence. They end their session with a round of the Catalonian national anthem, joined by the thousands of people gathered outside. This anthem, “The Reapers,” recalls the first of several armed struggles to preserve Catalan law. After Madrid’s swift reaction last Friday to dissolve the Catalan Parliament and prosecute its presiding officer along with the region’s president and … Continue reading The shortest-lived Catalan Republic?

LeiNovember 1, 2017Leave a comment

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Web began dying

Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from those three tech giants (respectively, GOOG, FB, AMZN). Not much has changed, and quite literally the user interface and features on those sites has remained mostly untouched. However, the underlying dynamics of power on the Web have drastically changed, and those three companies … Continue reading Web began dying

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Critical data studies

Critical Data Studies (CDS) explore the unique cultural, ethical, and critical challenges posed by Big Data. Rather than treat Big Data as only scientifically empirical and therefore largely neutral phenomena, CDS advocates the view that Big Data should be seen as always-already constituted within wider data assemblages. Assemblages is a concept that helps capture the multitude of ways that already-composed data structures inflect and interact … Continue reading Critical data studies

LeiOctober 31, 2017October 31, 2017Leave a comment

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March for science

Not quite promptly at six o’clock on Saturday morning, two dozen scientists whose fields of study can’t be summarized in a sentence boarded a bus at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, and headed south, bound for the March for Science, in Washington, D.C. “I hope it doesn’t rain,” Ed Witten, the first and only theoretical physicist ever to win the Fields Medal, the Academy … Continue reading March for science

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Storytelling data

One statement that I make often and emphasize repeatedly in my work is that when it comes to explanatory analysis, we should never simply show data; rather, we should make data a pivotal point in an overarching narrative or story. Today, I’ll take you through an example that illustrates this transition from showing data to using data to answer a question in a way that … Continue reading Storytelling data

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Git Workflow

A Git Workflow is a recipe or recommendation for how to use Git to accomplish work in a consistent and productive manner. Git workflows encourage users to leverage Git effectively and consistently. Git offers a lot of flexibility in how users manage changes. Given Git’s focus on flexibility, there is no standardized process on how to interact with Git. When working with a team on … Continue reading Git Workflow

LeiOctober 30, 2017October 30, 2017Leave a comment

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‘Speak’ by Louisa Hall

A less artful title for “Speak,” Louisa Hall’s sidereal novel on artificial (and thus human) intelligence, might be “What We Talk About When We Talk About Computers.” This starfish of a book, five voices waving gracefully around a core of philosophical questions, wants to explore the nature of memory; the borders of personhood; how words can illumine and obscure and hoodwink and rescue. via ‘Speak,’ … Continue reading ‘Speak’ by Louisa Hall

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Civic crowdfunding is privatisation masquerading as democracy

Crowdfunding is increasingly being put forward by local authorities as a way of enabling democratic participation and a means of funding initiatives. According to guidelines from the Local Government Information Unit and Spacehive, Manchester, Liverpool and Plymouth councils, Dorset county council, and 16 London boroughs have all used it as a means of raising revenue. via Civic crowdfunding is privatisation masquerading as democracy | Cities … Continue reading Civic crowdfunding is privatisation masquerading as democracy

LeiOctober 30, 2017November 9, 2017Leave a comment