Doc Searls, writing on Medium1 about some important projects to help pull the balance of power on the internet back to the individuals that make it awesome in the first place.
There’s a new sheriff on the Net, and it’s the individual. Who isn’t a “user,” by the way. Or a “consumer.” With new terms of our own, we’re the first party. The companies we deal with are second parties. Meaning that they are the users, and the consumers, of our legal “content.” And they’ll like it too, because we actually want to do good business with good companies, and are glad to make deals that work for both parties. Those include expressions of true loyalty, rather than the coerced kind we get from every “loyalty” card we carry in our purses and wallets.
After deactivating my twitter and facebook accounts (again. again.) I was struck that most people don’t seem to subscribe to RSS feeds anymore, relying on twitter and facebook for notification when content is published. Which means, on the one hand, I’ve muted myself because many people will no longer know when I post something (which may be for the better). On the other hand (actually, I guess it’s the same hand…), it means that many people have completely abdicated control for their information to companies and their opaque/secret/unknown algorithms.
When it comes to security, where will this sea of abandoned devices get security patches from? Who will write them, and how will they get paid?Like Ward, I worry that it’s not just an internet of things, but a proprietary mess of interdependent services built on the shifting sands of unstable business models. Unless we develop standards and protocols that reduce that proprietary interdependency we’re eventually going to have a lot bigger problem on our hands than Twitter outages.
For an undetermined amount of time, I’m going to be taking a break from most social media activity. Call it whatever you want: rest, recovery, therapy, need for a change of scenery, election fatique, information overload, a distraction. They are all correct.
Yup. I’m right there with you, Adam. I deactivated my Twitter and Facebook accounts about 10 days ago. Not sure if I’ll let them evaporate at the end of the 30-day cooling-off period, but I sure feel less frustrated with the world since dropping out.
A crazy/deep overview of some of the amazing developments in machine learning in the last couple of years, especially as a medium for artistic expression and exploration.
This last year I’ve been getting back into machine learning and AI, rediscovering the things that drew me to it in the first place. I’m still in the “learning” and “small studies” phase that naturally precedes crafting any new artwork, and I wanted to share some of that process here. This is a fairly linear record of my path, but my hope is that this post is modular enough that anyone interested in a specific part can skip ahead and find something that gets them excited, too. I’ll cover some experiments with these general topics:
We’ve been adapting to life in a shared, open workspace environment. Most of us in the Taylor Institute are in pods, trying to balance productivity, collaboration, distractions, competing demands for attention. It’s hard to describe what it’s like, but it adds overhead on top of everything. Quincy describes it well, from the perspective of s programmer, but I think it applies to the rest of us as well.
Let’s talk a bit about how us humans get work done. Is it four hours of crushing it, a lunch break, then four more hours of crushing it? No. It’s more like coffee, email, coffee, meeting, coffee, lunch with coworkers, coffee — OK finally time to get some work done!
I don’t think of AI as trying to invent an artificial human, but it’s extremely important to think about the cultural, moral, racial, and gender biases that get baked into code through histories of projects.
This is cool. Christian’s lab has been producing some amazing tech for visualizing and interacting with human and cellular anatomy, including LINDSAY Virtual Human, and now this:
Christian Jacob and Markus Santoso are trying to re-create the experience of the aforementioned agents in Fantastic Voyage. Working with 3D modelling company Zygote, they and recent MSc graduate Douglas Yuen have created HoloCell, an educational software. Using Microsoft’s revolutionary HoloLens AR glasses, HoloCell provides a mixed reality experience allowing users to explore a 3D simulation of the inner workings, organelles, and molecules of a healthy human cell.Jacob has plenty of experience in bioinformatics as the head of the Lindsay Virtual Human Project.
He’s taught courses in a similar way in regular classrooms using workarounds to deal with obstacles such stationary chairs and more rudimentary technology. “You can do this in just about any classroom, you just need enough imagination,” he says, adding one stipulation: “If I had a banked lecture hall, this would not work.”
I’m in the third week of a PhD program, and have had to make some adjustments to how I do things in order to be able to concentrate and actually think. I was struck by my inability to read a full paragraph without switching over to check email/calendar/twitter/slack/facebook/whatever. Mostly email and twitter.
I’m basically living in digital content - everything I do is in OneNote and Outlook, synced to every device I use. My email and calendar basically organize my day. There are people in there.
Stephen Downes points to some new regulations that may require people (celebrities and others) to declare when something they’re posting has been sponsored by a third party. He also suggests (rightly) that edubloggers and pundits should have similar declarations, to point out any possible conflicts of interest or bias.
Not that I expect any major change, but it would be interesting to see all education and technology pundits declare their sponsorships and affiliations. “The new rules, expected to be implemented by early 2017, will require such individuals to disclose whether they’ve received payment — either in the form of cash, free products or other considerations — in exchange for the mention. Bloggers will need to include statements within their posts or videos while users of social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat will have to include hashtags such as #sponsored, #spon or #ad.”
Wordfence automatically blocks IP addresses that repeatedly attempt to brute-force logins on UCalgaryBlogs. After a few attempts, they aren’t able to try again for a few minutes (in case it’s a legitimate person trying to log in, it doesn’t banish them entirely right away). If they knock it off, the ban gets lifted. If they keep hammering, the ban gets escalated, eventually putting them in a permanent penalty box (identified by their IP address - not perfect, but it’s all we have).
Doc Searls, writing on Medium 1 about some important projects to help pull the balance of power on the internet back to the individuals that make it awesome in the first place.
