Two interesting articles from MIT Technology Review:
An article from Slate.com describes photography technique used by photographer Jay Mark Johnson to “emphasize time over space”:
[H]e uses a slit camera that emphasizes time over space. Whatever remains still is smeared into stripes, while the motion of crashing waves, cars and a Tai Chi master’s hands are registered moment by moment, as they pass his camera by. Like an EKG showing successive heartbeats, the width of an object corresponds not to distance or size, but the rate of movement. Viewing the left side of the picture is not looking leftward in space but backward in time.
In an article at The Atlantic Ian Bogost writes about the differences between the Facebook Papers and older leaked documents:
The Facebook Papers are, in aggregate, a supersensory supply of materials about a social network, produced on its own, internal social network, prima facie assumed to have meaning whose depth exceeds their surface, and mustered as rapidly as possible to generate emotions. They’re a tiny outrage machine, sucking the exhaust from a much bigger one.
Facebook/Meta is shutting down its facial recognition system. They explain their choice in this blog post.
But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.
The Markup has investigated the shadowy industry of collecting and selling location data. The article details some worrisome examples of very invasive practices.
Fascinating photography in this series: “China Says Goodbye to Crypto Mining”
Dozens of cryptocurrency mining centers were shuttered last month in Southwest China’s Sichuan province in the wake of a June 18 clean-up notice from local authorities as the country intensified its crackdown on cryptocurrency trading and mining. Sichuan is China’s second-biggest Bitcoin mining province, where most miners take advantage of the mountainous region’s abundant sources of hydropower to run their electricity-hungry computers.
This article from The Economist is worth a read to understand their position on brain research and the use of primates in studies:
And were laboratories in China and Japan to come up with treatments for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s as a result of their studies of monkeys’ brains, it would be near impossible for Western countries to refuse to buy them to treat their citizens. Leaving others to do the dirty work of generating knowledge using means you consider to be unethical, while at the same time encouraging it by adding to demand is not taking the moral high ground. It is hypocrisy. Better for Western countries to carry out the necessary but troubling research them- selves, working to the standards they deem necessary.
I came across this interesting short video documentary on the historical developments of the typewriter for the Korean alphabet (Hangeul). The following article by Young Back Choi gives a fascinating insight in the developments of this technology and its various path dependencies. From the article:
Tim Hart, in an article at The Financial Times, wrote an interesting article about the use of spreadsheets in business and science. I just had to save this quote:
Or say you’re a genetics researcher typing in the name of a gene such as “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1”, or March1 for short, or perhaps the Sept1 gene. You can imagine what Excel does next. It turns those gene names into dates. One study estimated that 20 per cent of all genetics papers had errors caused by Excel’s autocorrect Microsoft’s defence is simple enough: the default settings are intended to work in everyday scenarios. Which is the polite way of saying: Guys, Excel wasn’t designed for genetics researchers. It was designed for accountants (…) And yet when the genetics research community were wrestling with the autocorrecting genes issue, they resigned themselves to the hard truth that they would never wean people off Excel. Instead, the folks in charge — the Hugo Gene Nomenclature Committee — decided to change the names of the genes in question.