Bruce Sterling on Alan Turing, gender, AI, and art criticism:
Bruce Sterling gave a speech at the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) on the eve of the Alan Turing Centenary, and delivered a provocative, witty and important talk on the Turing Test, gender and machine intelligence, Turing’s life and death, and art criticism.

If you study his biography, the emotional vacuum in the guy’s life was quite frightening. His parents are absent on another continent, he’s in boarding schools, in academia, in the intelligence services, in the closet of the mid-20th-century gay life. Although Turing was a bright, physically strong guy capable of tremendous hard work, he never got much credit for his efforts during his lifetime.

How strange was Alan Turing? Was Alan Turing a weird, scary guy? Let’s try a thought experiment, because I’m a science fiction writer and we’re into those counterfactual approaches.

So let’s just suppose that Alan Turing is just the same personally: he’s a mathematician, an early computer scientist, a metaphysician, a war hero — but he’s German. He’s not British. Instead of being the Bletchley Park code breaker, he’s the German code maker. He’s Alan Turingstein, and he realizes the Enigma Machine has a flaw. So, he imagines, designs and builds a digital communication code system for the Nazis. He defeats the British code breakers. In fact, he’s so brilliant that he breaks some of the British codes instead. Therefore, the second World War lasts until the Americans drop their nuclear bomb on Europe.

I think you’ll agree this counter-history is plausible, because so many of Turing’s science problems were German — the famous “ending problem” of computability was German. The Goedel incompleteness theorem was German, or at least Austrian. The world’s first functional Turing-complete computer, the Konrad Zuse Z3, was operational in May 1941 and was supported by the Nazi government.

So then imagine Alan Turingstein, mathematics genius, computer pioneer, and Nazi code expert. After the war, he messes around in the German electronics industry in some inconclusive way, and then he commits suicide in some obscure morals scandal. What would we think of Alan Turingstein today, on his centenary? I doubt we’d be celebrating him, and secretly telling ourselves that we’re just like him.

Turing Centenary Speech (New Aesthetic)Turing Centenary Speech (New Aesthetic)

(Image: Tsar Bomba mushroom cloud, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from andyz’s photostream)

80 Teddy Ruxpins with robot voices tell you how the Internet feels:

Sean Hathaway stuck 80 Teddy Ruxpins on a gallery wall and hooked them up to a sentiment-analysis engine fed by a social media scraper. Snippets of emotional, throwaway text are turned into synthetic ruxpin-utterances, accompanied by emotional music:

TED is a large, wall-based installation consisting of an array of 80 Teddy Ruxpin dolls that speak emotional content gathered from the web via synthetic speech with animated mouths. The speaking of the emotional content is accompanied by one of twenty-four musical vignettes that have been paired to the emotional content being spoken. Each vignette, representing one of twenty-four subtle variants of human emotion, have been composed in such a way that the beginnings and ends of the short pieces will seamlessly dogleg in any possible configuration and stream endlessly as a unified whole. The installation is allowed to drift about freely through the emotional landscape being driven only by those who are contributing content to the piece whether unwittingly or consciously. As such the overall presentation of the piece can vary greatly based on external conditions such as seasons, world events and even time of day. The piece is essentially taking the instantaneous emotional pulse of the internet and this collective pulse, like a human pulse, varies over time.

T,E.D. (Transformations, Emotional Deconstruction)

(via Make)

[This whole dialogue has been pretty interesting. I particularly recommend Travis Morrison’s article. -egg]

Rebuttals to David Lowery’s indictment of “free culture” and its alleged murder of musicians:
The Internet has been abuzz with Emily White, a intern at NPR, and her article about how she has never bought music and probably never will. and the response from David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. Lowery’s response is a powerful piece of writing, and contains some valuable insights into what the old music industry did well, but it’s also a mess. He has some weird conspiracy theory that the “free culture” movement is funded by large tech companies as a stalking horse for their issues. Speaking as someone who’s raised a fair bit of money for that movement, I’m here to tell you that he’s just wrong. For example, most of my wages when I was at the Electronic Frontier Foundation were funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He also blames the tragic suicides of two musicians on the free culture movement and the alleged effect this has had on musicians’ fortunes. Even if you stipulate that the fall in those musicians’ fortunes could be blamed on the “free culture” movement (a pretty weird idea in itself), this would logically put the blame for all musicians’ suicides prior to the Internet’s disruption of the music industry on the shoulders of the major labels.

I thought Lowery’s piece was so badly flawed, with its conspiracy theories and sloppy appeals to emotion, that it didn’t warrant a response. But others didn’t feel the same way. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has posted a guided tour of the best rebuttals, including Jeff Price from Tunecore on the real data on musicians’ income in the Internet age; Steve Albini on the false picture Lowery paints of a golden age of the labels that never existed; Jonathan Coulton on the perversity of mourning for a loss of scarcity; former Warner Music CTO Ethan Kaplan on how the labels cut their own throats by fighting innovation; Travis Morrison from Dismemberment Plan on how access to music and compensation for artists are separate issues. Taken together, it’s a series of bracing reads and a strong tonic. Here’s some of Tunecore’s Jeff Price:

Previously, artists were not rolling in money. Most were not allowed into the system by the gatekeepers. Of those that were allowed on the major labels, over 98% of them failed. Yes, 98%
.

Of the 2% that succeeded, less than a half percent of those ever got paid a band royalty from the sale of recorded music.

How in the world is an artist making at least something, no matter how small, worse than 99% of the world’s unsigned artists making nothing and of the 1% signed, less than a half a percent of them ever making a single band royalty ever?

Finally, as much as I hate to say it, being an artist does not entitle the artist to get money. They have to earn it. And not everyone can…

Revenue to labels has collapsed. Revenue to artists has gone up with more artists making more money now than at any time in history, off of the sale of pre-recorded music.

Taken a step further, a $17.98 list price CD earned a band $1.40 as a band royalty that they only got if they were recouped (over 99% of bands never recouped).

If an artist sells just two songs for $0.99 on iTunes via TuneCore, they gross $1.40.

If they sell an album for $9.99 on iTunes via TuneCore, they gross $7.00.

This is an INCREASE of over 700% in revenue to artists for recorded music sales.

Some Facts & Insights Into The Whole Discussion Of ‘Ethics’ And Music Business Models

[I strongly recommend this short article if you do any advanced searching. -egg]

Search masterclass:

Daniel Russell is a search guru in the employ of Google. He addressed a crowd of journalists with a lecture on the super-advanced search techniques, and posed this riddle: “What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped?” (solution here).

John Tedesco from the San Antonio Express-News took excellent notes on Russell’s speech, and has summarized it for the rest of us. I consider myself a very proficient searcher, but Russell’s tips were often surprising and enlightening for me. Here’s a great one:

Force Google to include search terms.

Sometimes Google tries to be helpful and it uses the word it thinks you’re searching for — not the word you’re actually searching for. And sometimes a website in the search results does not include all your search terms.

How do you fix this?

Typing intext:[keyword] might be Google’s least-known search operations, but it’s one of Russell’s favorites. It forces the search term to be in the body of the website. So if you type:

intext:”San Antonio” intext:Alamo

It forces Google to show results with the phrase “San Antonio” and the word Alamo. You won’t get results that are missing either search term.

How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques

(via Making Light)

Israel Demanding Passwords at the Border:
There have been a bunch of stories about employers demanding passwords to social networking sites, like Facebook, from prospective employees, and several states have passed laws prohibiting this practice.

This is the first story I’ve seen of a country doing this at its borders. The country is Israel, and they’re asking for passwords to e-mail accounts.

Stunning New Photographic Portraits by Leff Jeffries:

I first discovered the gripping portraiture of accountant turned self-taught photographer Lee Jeffries back in December and have been following his journey ever since. His gritty and powerful portraits, most often of the homeless, have since appeared on CNN, Time and the Independant, and he’s even landed behind the camera from Olympian Sir Roger Bannister. Most recently he has a great interview over on 500px. I enjoyed this question:

Most of your portraits are closely cropped to reveal just the subject’s face. Can you explain your decision behind that?
It’s true… my images can be biased to front on views that closely frame the face. Processing in black and white reinforces the contrasts and shapes in the portrait. Infused with light and shadow, I make a conscious effort to place the emphasis on the relief of the face and the strength of the photograph lays in the emotional connection to the subject. I try to magnify the character… tell their story so that it is no longer possible for the viewer to remain indifferent. My photographs become an intimate and personal document which narrates a myriad of emotion.

Jeffries also has a number of prints now available through YellowKorner.

Shakespearean Hokey Pokey:

A bit of genius unsourced net.stuff: if Shakespeare wrote the Hokey Pokey. “The Hoke, the poke — banish now thy doubt/Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.”

Update: And we have a source! It’s from a “Washington Post Style Invitational contest that asked readers to submit “instructions” for something (anything), but written in the style of a famous person. The winning entry was The Hokey Pokey (as written by William Shakespeare)”, “Written by Jeff Brechlin, Potomac Falls, Maryland, and submitted by Katherine St. John.” – Thanks, princessalex!

Shakespeare Teaches the Hokey Pokey

#385 Inconspicuous Consumption: