[Those of you who worry about privacy issues with FB & Google will enjoy this one. -egg]
Sai was sick of arguing with people like Jenny. He had made the same point countless times: Centillion is not some big scary government. It’s a private company, whose motto happens to be “Make things better!” Just because you want to live in the dark ages doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t enjoy the benefits of ubiquitous computing.
The wonderful Retro Report (which revisits popular news stories of the years gone by and follows up on their claims) has posted a great, 10-minute documentary on “crack babies,” concluding that the promised crack baby epidemic of kids with gross deformities who couldn’t attend regular school never materialized. The documentary says that the entire phenomenon was extrapolated from a single, preliminary study, and that most of the “crack baby” effects were actually the result of low birth weight.
You might think I’m over the top with this little tale. But the (hopefully) fictitious Narrative Data Inc could be the offspring of existing large consumer research firms, combined to semantic and data-mining experts such as Recorded Future. This Gothenburg (Sweden)-based company – with a branch in… Cambridge, Massachusetts – provides real-time analysis of about 150,000 sources (news services, social networks, blogs, government websites). The firm takes pride in its ability to predict a vast array of events (see this Wired story).
Regarding the “de-anonymising” the web, two years ago in Paris, I met a mathematician working on pattern detection models. He focused on locating individuals simply through their mobile phone habits. Even if the person buys a phone with a fake ID and uses it with great care, based on past behaviour, his/her real ID will be recovered in a matter of weeks. (As for Facebook, it recently launched a snitching program aimed at getting rid of pseudonyms – cool.)
Expanding such capabilities is only a matter of refining algorithms, setting up the right data hoses and lining up the processing power required to deal with petabytes of unstructured data. Not an issue any more. Moore’s Law is definitely on the inquisitors’ side.
[Funny and interesting. -egg]
The Echo Nest knows approximately 2.4 million artists as part of our database of music information, which is the largest in the world. However, we also keep a list of artists to ban from our system intentionally, so they never get recommended on any of our clients’ services, or in their apps.
This isn’t a matter of taste (so Coldplay and Raffi are in no danger). It’s because those banned artists are spammers.
Musical spam is much less familiar than email spam, but it works the same way: If it’s too hard to find the 10 people who might enjoy a shady or questionable product, spammers go for sheer volume, in their attempts to spoil your online experience with unwanted email or music.
Let’s take a tour through the tawdry world of musical spam, including a few exceptions that we choose not to ban.
via The Echo Nest Blog.
[Holy shit! New Jodorowsky? Yay! -egg]
Of the many promising films by some of our favourite directors premiering at Cannes, my most anticipated film is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Dance Of Reality, the filmmakers first film in 23 years. At the age of 84, Jodorowsky who hasn’t made a film since 1990′s The Rainbow Thief, has returned to his hometown of Tocopilla in the Chilean desert to create a kind of magic-realist memoir of his father, Jaime Jodorowsky. The French/Chilean filmmaker, the man behind several cult hits including El Topo and The Holy Mountain, is widely known around the world as the creator of psycho-magic, a therapeutical technique that heals through metaphorical acts that appeal to the subconscious by combining literature, psychoanalysis, eastern philosophy, and magic. Although a controversial character, his work has long captivated fans because of its unusual essence. The very first clip from his new film has found its way online, and as expected, it looks spectacular. Enjoy!
[Oh hell yes. -egg]
Ballroom Luminoso is a series of artists Joe O’Connell and Blessing Hancock currently installed in San Antonio, Texas. Made from custom made structural steel, custom LEDs and recycled bicycle parts, the lights project colorful silhouettes of sprockets and other pieces onto the otherwise drab cement underpass. From the artist’s statement about the project:Ballroom Luminoso references the area’s past, present, and future in the design of its intricately detailed medallions. The images in the medallions draw on the community’s agricultural history, strong Hispanic heritage, and burgeoning environmental movement. The medallions are a play on the iconography of La Loteria, which has become a touchst. Utilizing traditional tropes like La Escalera the Ladder, La Rosa the Rose, and La Sandía the Watermelon, the piece alludes to the neighborhood’s farming roots and horticultural achievements. Each character playfully rides a bike acting as a metaphor for the neighborhood’s environmental progress, its concurrent eco-restoration projects, and its developing cycling culture.
via Recycled Bike Part Chandeliers Under a Texas Overpass | Colossal.
[Because Google Glass is so late-2012. -egg]
metafirst device allowing visualization and interaction within the real world using your hands.
The Age Of The Flat Device Is Over
via meta: The Most Advanced Augmented Reality Interface by meta — Kickstarter.
[Someone bring this man a MacArthur genius grant, stat. -egg]
Throughout the history of science, diagrams and graphs have been essential thinking tools. In the past, such visualizations were drawn with pen on paper, and could embrace the directness, freedom, and expressiveness of hand drawing. Most modern visualizations are programmed instead, where a single description can dynamically generate a unique picture for any dataset.
Today’s tools offer the benefits of one or the other — either directness or dynamics — but not both. Photoshop and Illustrator allow direct-manipulation drawing of static pictures. D3, R, and Processing allow indirect-manipulation coding of dynamic pictures.
This talk presents a tool for drawing dynamic pictures — creating data-driven visualizations, like D3, but via direct manipulation of the picture itself, like Illustrator.
