These psychedelic stickers blow AI minds | TechCrunch researchers have created a wonderful attack on image recognition systems that uses specially printed stickers that are so interesting to the AI that it completely fails to see anything else. Time Travel In the language of the Navaho there is no past, present, and future tense like those of many languages. Events are talked about with regard to their quality of happening rather than their temporal quality. Is it possible that time may not really exist, but is just an artifact of our biological and cultural evolution? –I haven’t independently verified this to my satisfaction yet. Time Travel and Modern Physics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) You have to end this, you have to kill him, really kill him once and for all. You shoot him, but your eyesight is so bad that your aim is off. You do not kill him, you merely damage his left eye. He staggers off. You fall to the ground in agony, and decide to study the paradoxes of time travel more seriously. This might be the best map of the 2016 election you ever see – Vox The Only Good Thing About Winter Is This Story Written in Snow Fun stuff on all levels. h/t Jon Becker

Super Punch: “ECOT, Ohio’s largest online charter school, officially closes”lies and theft in online edu . . . similar to lies Temple’s business dean engaged in This sun-chasing robot looks after the plant on its head – The VergeChinese roboticist and entrepreneur Sun Tianqi has made it happen: modding a six-legged toy robot made by his company Vincross to carry a potted plant on its back. The resulting plant-robot hybrid looks like a leafy crab or a robot Bulbasaur. It moves toward the sunshine when needed, and it retreats to shade when it’s had enough. Learning To Code By Writing Code Poems — Smashing Magazine Temple business dean forced out over falsified MBA data used in rankings – Philly “the Fox School … knowingly provided false information to at least one rankings organization about the online M.B.A. In addition to the misreporting of the number of students who took the GMAT from 2015 to 2018, the average undergraduate GPA was overstated, and there were inaccuracies in the number of offers of admission as well as in the degree of student indebtedness.” H-Diplo Commentary 1 on Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress | H-Diplo | H-NetOr maybe you have just closed Steven Pinker’s latest book, which would not have been out of place as propaganda material in […]

Don’t scar on the first cut — Signal v. Noise Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual. This is how bureaucracies are born. No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy?—?one scar?—?at a time. So don’t scar on the first cut. Don’t create a policy because one person did something wrong once. Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again. The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me… or Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck? | … My heart’s in Accra how do we help smart, well-meaning people address social problems in ways that make the world better, not worse? In other words, is it possible to get beyond both a naïve belief that the latest technology will solve social problems and a reaction that rubbishes any attempt to offer novel technical solutions as inappropriate, insensitive and misguided? Can we find a synthesis in which technologists look at their work critically and work closely with the people they’re trying to help in order to build sociotechnical systems that address hard problems? …. Many hard problems require you to […]