Edges and Nodes

On naturalised artificial and artificialised natural networks and organisms.

[colchrishadfield]

People have been living where London now shines for 6500 years or more. Currently choosing night cities for the book.

[new-aesthetic]

turkopticon.

Turkopticon helps the people in the ‘crowd’ of crowdsourcing watch out for each other—because nobody else seems to be.[…] Turkopticon adds functionality to Amazon Mechanical Turk as you browse for HITs and review status of work you’ve done. As you browse HITs, Turkopticon places a button next to each requester and highlights requesters for whom there are reviews from other workers. Bad reviews let you avoid shady employers and good reviews help you find fair ones. You can view reports made against requesters with a quick click.

[edgesandnodes]

Other areas of crowdsourcing (e.g. The creative disciplines s.a. design, video) need a good review system too. Companies tend to exploit the abundance of creatives submitting work without paying them on time or only after workers threaten with legal action (userfarm.com is one such example)

[algopop]

Computers dethrone humans in European stock trading - via reuters

European equity investors are placing more orders via computers than through human traders for the first time as new market rules drive more money managers to go high-tech and low cost. The widespread regulatory changes has made electronic trading spread across the industry.

Last year, European investors put 51 percent of their orders through computers directly connected to the stock exchange or by using algorithms, a study by consultants TABB showed. The TABB study revealed that of 58 fund managers controlling 14.6 trillion euros in assets, a majority intended to funnel much more of their business through electronic “low touch” channels, which can cut trade costs by two-thirds. Pioneer Investments, which trades 500 billion euros ($695 billion) worth of assets every year and has cut the number of brokers it uses from 300 to around 100. Thats a lot of money in the non-hands of algorithms.

[new-aesthetic]

Auto-correct turns ‘no make-up selfie’ donations into polar bear adoptions - Gadgets & Tech - Life & Style - The Independent

"Users who mistakenly sent the keyword ‘DONATE’ rather than ‘BEAT’ to text number 70099 donated money to Unicef by mistake, reports the BBC.

"Other charitable individuals whose phones autocorrected the word ‘BEAT’ to ‘BEAR’ found that they had begun the process to adopt "an adorable polar bear" in a scheme organized by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)."

[algopop]

Twitter Bot with Python Tutorial 

This is probably the easiest twitter bot tutorial I’ve come across. Its a long way from making the bot autonomous and continually running, but its a good and easy start. Its all part of the website’s #botweek which has some other interesting articles and thoughts on bots. (thx PVK)

[new-aesthetic]

You don’t want your privacy: Disney and the meat space data race — Tech News and Analysis

“Meat space” (coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer) is a term for the physical world where our bodies (meat) move around and do meat-like things (for example, eat, jog or go clubbin’). The interesting thing about the term is it’s a play on “cyber space” — meat space is an internet-first way of viewing the world. And that internet-first way of seeing the world is what’s driving these changes at Disney, casinos, insurance companies, etc. We’ve been “cookie-ing” people online and tracking their browsing habits for years, and in that contained environment, businesses have seen the value of acting on personal transactional data. But now businesses are taking this approach and applying it to meat space. Why? Because cyber space is small, it starts and stops at internet-connected devices. Think of the transactions and interactions that are carried out each day in meat space. Think of the money spent in meat space (on your caramel macchiato, for instance). While not everyone is online all day long, we’re all implicitly offline. Wouldn’t it be great it we could gather meat space data and use that to tailor the offline experience much like companies now tailor your online experience? “Personalizing your meat space experience” is a gross way of saying “pretty much control your life.” Which is frightening. But that’s exactly what companies want to do.

[edgesandnodes]

#meatspace

[algopop]

Gay Check Online by  Netro (Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach)

Gay Check Online may seem totally offensive and inappropriate at first, but think back to reports in March 2013 that Facebook had sussed out that someone was gay without many clues to go on, hinting at perhaps an algorithmic, Bayesian deduction that was unfavourably made available to ad placement software. The artists are clearly commenting on the hidden motives of data-mining and statistical analysis being carried out by services such as Facebook. Categories for people that are useful for ad targeting are usually decided using Bayesian Probability - the system may not know your age, gender, political or sexual orientation, but your online behaviour may match a certain pattern that helps ‘predict’ such details.

Gay-Check-Online makes visible and parodies these systems using face detection software and an algorithm that works under ten seconds. 

Based on scientific studies about facial characteristics of gays, the Internet Agency NETRO has created an online tool to verify your sexual orientation in under 10 seconds. NETRO wrote an algorithm to compare your face with the original databases from the studies of the Charles University in Prague and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. In approximately 10 seconds a face is measured and analyzed and the sexual orientation can be determined. Gay Check Online is a rapid and simple method to provide the user with a sense of security and clarity.

[new-aesthetic]

44 Stock Photos That Hope To Change The Way We Look At Women

Getty Images launched the “Lean In Collection” Monday in partnership with LeanIn.org, featuring more than 2,500 photos of female leadership in contemporary work and life. The project began when Pam Grossman, director of visual trends at Getty Images, commissioned a study that would track the changes in the representation of girls and women in the media. The study turned into a presentation that Grossman later shared with Sheryl Sandberg and the Lean In team at Facebook Headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., last fall. “This is such a big passion project for all of us, and cheesy as it sounds, by showing people powerful images of women, we thought maybe we could actually change the world,” Grossman told BuzzFeed.

[new-aesthetic]

DNA-pparel, submitted by fiatluxemburg

Each shirt contains information representing base pairs from up to one million SNP locations. These are pieces of the human genome that vary between individuals and contribute to the uniqueness of your personal DNA.

[edgesandnodes]

Next nature: Our cities have become techno-natural organisms. Hard to point out the difference to a neurone..

Paths Through New York City by Eric Fischer. A flow map showing the most commonly-travelled paths through New York City, as gleaned from a database of geotagged Tweets. 

[new-aesthetic]

[edgesandnodes]

Google launches ‘Constitute,’ a new tool for designing governments | The Verge

The process of redesigning and drafting a new constitution can play a critical role in uniting a country, especially following periods of conflict and instability. In the past, it’s been difficult to access and...

[new-aesthetic]

I Watched James Deen Make the First-Ever Google Glass Porn | Motherboard

And from MiKandi: Tits & Glass [NSFW]: “Share, comment and vote on your favorite sexy photos with Google Glasses."

[edgesandnodes]

This had to happen. 

[new-aesthetic]

Does cloud computing have weather? - rodcorp

“There is weather, too, beyond the physical infrastructure. Our “likes” and “favourites” are small prayers to the social network gods to keep safe the photos, spreadsheets and status updates we entrust to their cloudy crypts. (Not all precipitation makes it back to the ground: virga is rain that evaporates (or hail that sublimes) before reaching the ground - the observable spinning bar that never results in a file being displayed on our screens. Our status updates may not suffice as offerings: if we didn’t pay for the cloud service, we’re making a wish.) Service uptime websites are the weather charts. A database fails, creating a ripple of low data pressure.” 

[edgesandnodes]

Another argument for #technonatures:

[algopop]

Why this emphasis on curation - on gathering, filtering, selecting, framing, juxtaposing? Because curation is the native art of the network, and the network - digital, neural, bacterial, financial - now dominates our lives. It has become our latest implacable paradigm. Indeed, even the increasingly intelligent behaviour of the applications and processes we encounter on the internet - Google searches, shopping recommendations, ads that follow us across multiple websites - reflect a kind of personalised curation carried out by algorithms acting on the copious crumbs of data our online doppelgängers leave behind them.

Erik Davis, The Thing is Alive, essay contribution to The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things by Mark Leckey.  (via algopop)

[edgesandnodes]

A striking CGI visualisation by UK-based visual effects and animation company South 422, rendering visible a mesmerising, manmade technological organsim spanning around the globe. It's a 7 day portrait of world shipping movements based on the output of individual vessels’ GPS tracking beacons. 

Watch the video here

[edgesandnodes]

Design is mainly understood as the activity of producing more or less useful artefacts, but not necessarily as a political activity. The design of an artefact, however, is always also a political decision about how people should live, communicate or behave. Furthermore, design can be used as a political instrument in the form of activism, or as a medium to discuss and dream about possible or better futures.

http://www.designaspolitics.com/

[edgesandnodes]

Reversed gothic hightech: Project Genesis is a short movie which imagines an alternate world populated by old Macintosh computers, directed by Alessio Fava. In this world the computers get excited about new releases of ‘Humans’.