Archive for April 2018
15 Patents That Changed the World

15 Patents That Changed the World

14:04 Add Comment

Brain implant patent illustration

Popular Mechanics has a quick look at 15 Patents That Changed the World, including the maglev train from back in 1967, the 3d printer, a “bionic eye” retinal prosthesis from 1968, GPS, CRISPR-Cas9, and graphene. Fun to read through but I’m including it here because it was found through Chris Anderson who had this comment:

Quadroptor patent illustration

Earlier today I tweeted this Boing Boing post about the upcoming US public domain infusion, the first since 1998. In the case of both patents and copyright, it’s important to remember the innovation and creativity their release provides, not just the original work or invention it represents.

Tags: copyright   patents

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A Mobile Tabletop Shape Display for Tangible and Haptic Interaction

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We’ve seen this before with the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group inFORM but that was a (super impressive) table, this one is movable, much smaller, seems to be higher resolution and multiple units can be combined.

We explore interactions enabled by 2D spatial manipulation and self-actuation of a tabletop shape display. To explore these interactions, we developed shapeShift, a compact, high-resolution (7 mm pitch), mobile tabletop shape display. shapeShift can be mounted on passive rollers allowing for bimanual interaction where the user can freely manipulate the system while it renders spatially relevant content. shapeShift can also be mounted on an omnidirectional-robot to provide both vertical and lateral kinesthetic feedback, display moving objects, or act as an encountered-type haptic device for VR. We present a study on haptic search tasks comparing spatial manipulation of a shape display for egocentric exploration of a map versus exploration using a fixed display and a touch pad. Results show a 30% decrease in navigation path lengths, 24% decrease in task time, 15% decrease in mental demand and 29% decrease in frustration in favor of egocentric navigation.

(Via prosthetic knowledge)

Tags: ar   vr

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AIs, predictions and judgment

AIs, predictions and judgment

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This Mckinsey piece summarizes some of Ajay Agrawal thinking (and book) on the economics of artificial intelligence. It starts with the example of the microprocessor, an invention he frames as “reducing the cost of arithmetic.” He then presents the impact as lowering the cost of the substitute and raising the value of the complements.

The third thing that happened as the cost of arithmetic fell was that it changed the value of other things—the value of arithmetic’s complements went up and the value of its substitutes went down. So, in the case of photography, the complements were the software and hardware used in digital cameras. The value of these increased because we used more of them, while the value of substitutes, the components of film-based cameras, went down because we started using less and less of them.

He then looks at AI and frames it around the reduction of the cost of prediction, first showing how AIs lower the value of our own predictions.

… The AI makes a lot of mistakes at first. But it learns from its mistakes and updates its model every time it incorrectly predicts an action the human will take. Its predictions start getting better and better until it becomes so good at predicting what a human would do that we don’t need the human to do it anymore. The AI can perform the action itself.

The very interesting twist is here, where he mentions the trope of “data is the new oil” but instead presents judgment as the other complement which will gain in value.

But there are other complements to prediction that have been discussed a lot less frequently. One is human judgment. We use both prediction and judgment to make decisions. We’ve never really unbundled those aspects of decision making before—we usually think of human decision making as a single step. Now we’re unbundling decision making. The machine’s doing the prediction, making the distinct role of judgment in decision making clearer. So as the value of human prediction falls, the value of human judgment goes up because AI doesn’t do judgment—it can only make predictions and then hand them off to a human to use his or her judgment to determine what to do with those predictions. (emphasis mine)

This is pretty much exactly the same thing as the idea for advanced or centaur chess where a combination of human and AI can actually be more performant than either one separately. We could also link this to the various discussions on ethics, trolley problems, and autonomous killer robots. The judgment angle above doesn’t automatically solve any of these issues but it does provide another way of understanding the split of responsibilities we could envision between AIs and humans.

The author then presents five imperatives for businesses looking to harness AIs and predictions: “Develop a thesis on time to AI impact; Recognize that AI progress will likely be exponential; Trust the machines; Know what you want to predict; Manage the learning loop.” One last quote, from his fourth imperative:

The organizations that will benefit most from AI will be the ones that are able to most clearly and accurately specify their objectives. We’re going to see a lot of the currently fuzzy mission statements become much clearer. The companies that are able to sharpen their visions the most will reap the most benefits from AI. Due to the methods used to train AIs, AI effectiveness is directly tied to goal-specification clarity.
Tags: artificial intelligence   business

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Cities flowing like liquids or organized like crystals

Cities flowing like liquids or organized like crystals

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File this story at Citylab adjacent to concepts like complexity, scale, and fractals. It turns out—according to this research paper anyway—that cities’ heat islands function differently depending on the “texture” of the city itself.

[S]cientists know that the density of buildings, the absorption of light by those buildings, and the relative lack of vegetation in cities are major contributors to the urban heat island effect. It’s why cities like Chicago are hoping to find relief through green roofs and reflective construction materials, or through planting more trees and banning cars. In a more radical move, Los Angeles even began painting their roads white as part of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s effort to bring down the city’s temperature by just under 2 degrees over the next 20 years. […]
The difference is even starker at night: even as the temperature cools, the release of heat absorbed during the day by asphalt and densely packed buildings can make the downtown area some 20 degrees warmer in some cities.

Street Grids May Make Cities Hotter

Roland Pellenq, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub, looked at city grids and the relative positions of buildings, to see if patterns emerge.

Indeed, the fingerprints of cities like Boston and Los Angeles mirror the disorderly atomic structure of liquids and glass, while the likes of Chicago and New York City, with their streets and avenues perpendicular to one another, exhibit a more orderly configuration found in crystals.

Using formulas borrowed from physics, originally developed to measure atomic interaction in condensed materials, they found that more tightly packed cities have more intense heat island effects but also:

[T]hat cities with more rigid grid-like street patterns (that is, a higher local order) tended to display a higher temperature difference between their urban and rural areas. This has to do with air flow, said Pellenq. In disorganized cities, the air tends to flow uniformly with little or no interruption. But the perpendicular streets of Chicago and the like often trap heat by disrupting that airflow.

Fascinating.

Tags: cities   physics

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Twitter history walk threads

Twitter history walk threads

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Paul Cooper Norfolk church walk

One of my favourite Twitter thread style or topic in recent months has been the “history walk.” People picking something they want to see, usually a ruin or forgotten place, documenting their walk there and the things they discover. Admittedly, I don’t have that many examples but the few I have seen are fantastic enough to make the form a favourite.

First one, from just this past weekend, has Paul Cooper setting out in the Norfolk countryside in search of the ruins of the church of St Mary’s, which “local folklore claims as the resting place of the Somerton Witch.” I’m including a few pictures below but read the whole thread, packed with historical tidbits.

(The first picture above is of Neolithic mines, which dot the landscape like lunar craters. The deepest could be as much as 60ft deep.)

Paul Cooper Norfolk church walk

Paul Cooper Norfolk church walk

Paul Cooper Norfolk church walk 4

Paul Cooper Norfolk church walk 5

If you’re a history buff, you should also check out Paul’s whole feed, he does these regular long threads on various historical topics.

Second example, also in the English country side, is this one by @gawanmac:

I saw this on an OS map and couldn’t not investigate. A place of worship symbol in the middle of bloody nowhere on the edge of a wood. It was a foggy, atmospheric day up on the North Downs, so I decided to walk three sides of a square through the wood to reach it.

gawanmac North Downs church walk 1

gawanmac North Downs church walk 2

gawanmac North Downs church walk 3

gawanmac North Downs church walk 4

Tags: history   Twitter   UK

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Studio Ghibli-style art prints

Studio Ghibli-style art prints

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nino4-1400.jpg

Dutch art gallery Cook & Becker is releasing a series of high quality art prints taken from the very Studio Ghibli-like game Ni No Kuni II. Beautiful stuff.

A large part of the appeal of the Ni No Kuni series is how the games look: it’s like you’re wandering around inside a lush Studio Ghibli animated film while playing a fantastical role-playing game. That was certainly true of the recent Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom — this in spite of the fact that the famed animation house wasn’t technically involved. It still bore the telltale signs of a Ghibli production, however, including the charming character designs of Yoshiyuki Momose and huge, stunning locations including mysterious, bioluminescent forests and vast kingdoms.
Tags: art   movies   Studio Ghibli

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Guest editing this week: Patrick Tanguay

Guest editing this week: Patrick Tanguay

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[Hello there, everyone. I am off this week (taking two kids to The Wizarding World in Orlando, pray for me, the butterbeer is alcoholic, so they’ll be knocked out after one round, right?) and am very pleased that Patrick Tanguay will be taking over while I’m gone. Welcome, Patrick! For the rest of youse, I will be back next week. -jason]

Hi fellow readers, I’m very happy and honoured to be on this side of the curtain for a week. I’ve been reading this here blog pretty much since the beginning and blogging myself since early 2003. If you like what I do here this week, you should probably subscribe to my newsletter Sentiers, lots of commonality of topics. I’m @inevernu on Twitter and this tweet by Eliot Peper is a good and flattering description of Sentiers.

In the last few years I also cocreated The Alpine Review, a compendium of ideas for a world in transition. We are on (deep) hiatus right now but we are still very proud of those three issues. It was quite well received critically and we even received a few awards for it. I launched and participated in a few other projects, have a look at the above blog to know more if you’re curious.

Work wise, I partner with clients at a kind of intersection between curating, editing, writing, and consulting. Roughly; I find what people and organizations need to know and help making sense of it for their life and work. You can have a look at my work page and reach out if you are intrigued or in need of such an hybrid skill set.



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DNA sites show why we need a Hippocratic Oath for data science

DNA sites show why we need a Hippocratic Oath for data science

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A suspect in the Golden State Killer murders has been arrested, based largely on DNA evidence that was apparently obtained in part through creating a dummy profile on a heredity website. California’s laws are apparently fairly permissive when it comes to using familial DNA to match suspects to crimes.

Solving unsolved rape and murder cases is generally good, but turning private websites into repositories of criminal evidence police can obtain without a warrant is generally bad. Like, extra bad.

One of the first things this reminded me of was Cathy O’Neil’s recent call for a Hippocratic Oath for data scientists. The idea is for data scientists to have some ethical guidelines, and above all to avoid doing harm or violating the rights of the people implicated by the practice of data science. In order to do that, you need to bring in the various stakeholders, properly weigh each of their concerns, and continually work to address them.

It’s always an incomplete process, because as O’Neil notes right away, data science isn’t limited to the acts of professional data scientists; it’s also the province of companies, and algorithms, and automated or self-learning uses of data. So in addition to a Hippocratic Oath (or some version of it), you also need a version of HIPAA (the law that guarantees the secure storage and distribution of health information).

DNA/heredity sites seem like the perfect test case for figuring out the compatibility of these two modes of operating. It seems like largely, they’re being treated either as a simple data regime, a la social media networks, and/or under criminal statutes. But a person’s DNA is, or should be, treated like medical information, with strict limits on its use. There has to be some way to figure out how to weigh all of these things together without compromising people’s rights.

Tags: medicine

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Burn the monster, steal his jokes

Burn the monster, steal his jokes

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Wesley Morris unsurprisingly has written a very good essay about Bill Cosby — specifically, the ways in which Cosby created and blended his own persona along with that of his signature character Cliff Huxtable. He did this to root himself in America’s psychological life, and to make himself indispensable in the entertainment industry, both of which shielded him for many years from the consequences of his crimes. It was, as Morris says, Cosby’s “sickest joke.”

Bill Cosby was good at his job. That sums up why the guilty verdict Thursday is depressing — depressing not for its shock but for the work the verdict now requires me to do. The discarding and condemning and reconsidering — of the shows, the albums, the movies. But I don’t need to watch them anymore. It’s too late. I’ve seen them. I’ve absorbed them. I’ve lived them. I’m a black man, so I am them.

There’s a strange connection between serial abusers and auteurism. People take advantage of power in lots of different ways, and one of them is to assume credit for other people’s work — if not outright, than by insinuation. Cosby and Woody Allen are the two most extreme types: they worked to make themselves inseparable from the art they associated themselves with, in a way that both attracted talented collaborators and sponged credit away from them.

If I could exorcize Cosby from The Cosby Show and retain Phylicia Rashad’s performances forever, or Woody Allen from Annie Hall and do the same for Gordon Willis’s photography, I would. Part of the sick joke is that you can’t. At the same time, I don’t want to give them up. I don’t want to lose Joan Rivers’s amazing turn on Louie just because that scene (where Louis CK ends up trying to force a kiss on Joan) seems extra gross now. It’s already been ingested; it can’t easily be carved out.

This is why I sometimes say: burn the monster, and steal their jokes. This is the punishment for their years of abuse, of lies, of intimidation, of fraud: the work they made is forfeit. Cosby loses all credit for making The Cosby Show; Allen all credit for his films; it is as if they were written/produced/directed by ghosts. All credit goes to the geniuses they reeled in as unwitting collaborators, without whom they would have always been sad, useless men.

It doesn’t completely work. It doesn’t stop money flowing into their pockets, as a boycott might. It doesn’t stop you from getting angry when you see their stupid faces, as avoiding their work might. But in the handful of cases where the art is so constitutive that you can’t avoid it, it’s a fiction that helps preserve some fraction of the joy it used to. At any rate, it’s the bargain I’ve struck.

Tags: Bill Cosby   Woody Allen

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The culinary wonders of MSG

The culinary wonders of MSG

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Helen Rosner writes in praise of monosodium glutamate, an umami-rich flavor additive that’s been vilified for all the wrong reasons.

Monosodium glutamate has been widespread in the American food supply since at least the nineteen-twenties, imported from China and Japan by major food-production companies like Heinz and Campbell’s, according to research done by Catherine Piccoli, a curator at New York’s Museum of Food and Drink. But a 1968 letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine raised the spectre of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,” an illness allegedly brought on by the consumption of MSG, which was commonly used in American Chinese restaurants. Ever since, the chemical compound has been vilified—despite dozens of rigorous studies concluding that the ingredient is innocuous and the “syndrome” nonexistent. Certain scientists and culinarians have long agitated for MSG’s rehabilitation. In a 1999 essay for Vogue titled “Why Doesn’t Everyone in China Have a Headache?,” the legendary food writer Jeffrey Steingarten gleefully ripped to shreds the standard litany of complaints and protests. But only in the past decade has MSG’s reputation truly turned a corner. The Times, Epicurious, and Bon Appetit have risen to its defense. The near-infallible food-science writer Harold McGee has regularly championed its use. At the 2012 MAD symposium, in Copenhagen, the chef David Chang gave a talk on the anti-Asian sentiment that underlies MSG aversion. “You know what causes Chinese Restaurant Syndrome?” Anthony Bourdain asked on a 2016 episode of “Parts Unknown.” Then he gave the answer: “Racism.”

MSG is a potent flavor enhancer; glutamate, the amino acid that does a lot of the heavy lifting, is found in foods as varied as parmesan cheese, fish sauce, and cooked tomato paste — all of them known for packing a punch. As Rosner writes, “it is to savory flavor what refined sugar is to sweet.”

Tags: food   Helen Rosner

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The Finkbeiner test for gender bias in science writing

The Finkbeiner test for gender bias in science writing

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In a 2013 piece, Christie Aschwanden suggested a test in the spirit of the Bechdel test for avoiding gender bias in profiles written about scientists who are women.

To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention:

- The fact that she’s a woman
- Her husband’s job
- Her child care arrangements
- How she nurtures her underlings
- How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
- How she’s such a role model for other women
- How she’s the “first woman to…”

Aschwanden named the test after her colleague Ann Finkbeiner, who wrote that she was going to write a piece about an astronomer without mentioning that she, the astronomer, was a woman.

Meanwhile I’m sick of writing about [gender bias in science]; I’m bored silly with it. So I’m going to cut to the chase, close my eyes, and pretend the problem is solved; we’ve made a great cultural leap forward and the whole issue is over with.

And I’m going to write the profile of an impressive astronomer and not once mention that she’s a woman. I’m not going to mention her husband’s job or her child care arrangements or how she nurtures her students or how she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field. I’m not going to interview her women students and elicit raves about her as a role model. I’m going to be blindly, aggressively, egregiously ignorant of her gender.

I’m going to pretend she’s just an astronomer.

(via @john_overholt)

Tags: Ann Finkbeiner   Christie Aschwanden   gender   science   writing

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A side-by-side comparison of the new “unrestored” 2001 with a restored Blu-ray version

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This summer for the 50th anniversary of the film, Warner Bros. is releasing a 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey made from the original camera negative. Christopher Nolan, who oversaw the process, explains that this release will be as close to what Kubrick intended as possible:

For the first time since the original release, this 70mm print was struck from new printing elements made from the original camera negative. This is a true photochemical film recreation. There are no digital tricks, remastered effects, or revisionist edits. This is the unrestored film — that recreates the cinematic event that audiences experienced fifty years ago.

Here’s a trailer for the new print:

On YouTube, Krishna Ramesh Kumar compared some of the shots in this trailer with those from the 2007 Blu-ray version of the film. Some of the scenes look pretty different in tone:

Tags: 2001   Christopher Nolan   Krishna Ramesh Kumar   movies   Stanley Kubrick   video

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A list of must-read books you don’t have to read

A list of must-read books you don’t have to read

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The editors of GQ have compiled a list of 20 notable books that you don’t actually have to read, despite their inclusion on various must-read lists. For each one, they suggest a replacement. So:

Don’t read: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Do read: Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Don’t read: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Do read: Earthsea Series by Ursula K. Le Guin

Don’t read: The Ambassadors by Henry James
Do read: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

Two editors independently recommended ditching Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Tommy Orange saying:

Mark Twain was a racist. Just read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was a man of his time, so let’s leave him there. We don’t need him.

Tags: books   lists

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The Face of Distracted Driving

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Filmmaker Errol Morris has made a pair of videos for AT&T’s It Can Wait campaign against distracted driving, which “kills an average of 8 people every day in the US”. Each video features the friends and family of someone who was killed in a car accident as a result of texting while driving.

Fair warning: do not watch that second video unless you want your coworkers to see you sobbing at your desk. I very rarely look at my phone while driving and let me tell you, even that little bit stops today.

Morris joins his friend and fellow filmmaker Werner Herzog in the campaign against distracted driving. Herzog made a 35-minute documentary about texting while driving back in 2013.

Tags: crying at work   Errol Morris   telephony   video   Werner Herzog

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David Foster Wallace on John McCain’s 2000 Presidential campaign

David Foster Wallace on John McCain’s 2000 Presidential campaign

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As I said recently in the newsletter and in my media diet post for March, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace’s 2005 collection of nonfiction. Each story I listen to is somehow been better than the last, and Wallace’s piece on John McCain’s failed run for the Republican nomination in 2000 was no exception. You can the as-published article in Rolling Stone, but it’s worth seeking out the much longer unabridged version in Consider the Lobster or stand-alone in McCain’s Promise.

While the piece is a time capsule of circa 2000 Republican politics — which politics seem totally quaint by today’s standards; for instance, Wallace describes McCain as one of the most right-wing members of Congress — what makes it so great and relevant is the timelessness of Wallace’s conclusions about politics, why politicians run, why people vote (and don’t vote), and why anyone should care about all of this in the first place.

There are many elements of the McCain2000 campaign — naming the bus “Straight Talk,” the timely publication of Faith of My Fathers, the much-hyped “openness” and “spontaneity” of the Express’s media salon, the message-disciplined way McCain thumps “Always. Tell you. The truth” — that indicate that some very shrewd, clever marketers are trying to market this candidate’s rejection of shrewd, clever marketing. Is this bad? Or just confusing? Suppose, let’s say, you’ve got a candidate who says polls are bullshit and totally refuses to tailor his campaign style to polls, and suppose then that new polls start showing that people really like this candidate’s polls-are-bullshit stance and are thinking about voting for him because of it, and suppose the candidate reads these polls (who wouldn’t?) and then starts saying even more loudly and often that polls are bullshit and that he won’t use them to decide what to say, maybe turning “Polls are bullshit” into a campaign line and repeating it in every speech and even painting Polls Are Bullshit on the side of his bus….Is he a hypocrite? Is it hypocritical that one of McCain’s ads’ lines South Carolina is “Telling the truth even when it hurts him politically,” which of course since it’s an ad means that McCain is trying to get political benefit out of his indifference to political benefits? What’s the difference between hypocrisy and paradox?

That’s just one of the many passages that reminded me of the 2016 election and the appeal to voters of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (and also of a certain Barack Obama in 2008 & 2012) but also makes you think deeply about how and why millions of people decide to put their support and faith and trust into a single person to represent their interests and identity in our national government.

See also Why’s This So (Damn) Good (and Topical)? David Foster Wallace and “McCain’s Promise”.

Tags: books   Consider the Lobster   David Foster Wallace   John McCain   politics

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An AI can realistically “paint in” missing areas of photographs

09:03 Add Comment

This video, and the paper it’s based on, is called “Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions” but it’s actually straight-up witchcraft! Researchers at NVIDIA have developed a deep-learning program that can automagically paint in areas of photographs that are missing. Ok, you’re saying, Photoshop has been able to do something like that for years. And the first couple of examples were like, oh that’s neat. But then the eyes are deleted from a model’s portrait and the program drew new eyes for her. Under close scrutiny, the results are not completely photorealistic, but at a glance it’s remarkably convincing. (via imperica)

Tags: artificial intelligence   photography   science   video

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Tuileries, a short film about Paris by the Coen brothers

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As part of a larger anthology film called Paris Je T’aime, the Coen brothers directed a short film about a character played by Steve Buscemi waiting for a train in the Tuileries Metro station. Buscemi makes the mistake of making eye contact with another person.

The entire movie sounds really interesting…I just put it on my watch list. 20 directors were chosen to direct short films, one each about the 20 Parisian arrondissements, among them the Coens, Alfonso Cuarón, Alexander Payne, Tom Tykwer, and Olivier Assayas. And in addition to Buscemi, the film features appearances by Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Nick Nolte, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elijah Wood, and Natalie Portman. (via open culture)

Tags: Coen brothers   movies   Paris   Paris Je T’aime   Steve Buscemi   video

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