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Disillusioned by Technology | MIT Technology Review
The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World
“I think this shows two coexisting visions of history,” she says. “One is history as progress, but there is also this other vision of history as rolling apocalypse. A lot of us are living with that ambiguity today.” Such changes, she adds, are of our own making; we may speak of “technology” and “globalization” as autonomous, inevitable forces, but they result from human choices and actions. The danger, she says, “is in attributing everything to technology rather than asking: Who are the people at work here?”
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Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke | | Rolling Stone
“So there is absolutely no reason they couldn’t all face criminal penalties. That they are not being prosecuted is cowardice and pure corruption, nothing else. And by approving this settlement, Breuer removed the government’s moral authority to prosecute anyone for any other drug offense. Not that most people didn’t already know that the drug war is a joke, but this makes it official.
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How the “internet of things” will replace the web – Quartz
“An invisible button is simply an area in spaaaaaace that is “clicked” when a person or object—in this case, a pokedex—moves into that physical spaaaaaace. It could be as small as a two-inch square on top of a conventional credit card reader, to enable payments, or as large as a room, which might want to know that you have entered or left so that it can turn on or off the lights. With Phillips’ Hue and countless other smart lights, this is already possible.
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If invisible buttons were just rigidly defined on-off switches, they wouldn’t be terribly useful. But because the actions they trigger can be modified by an infinitude of other variables, such as the time of day, our previous actions, the actions of others or what Google knows about our calendar, they quickly become a means to program our physical world.” -
Even if it’s fake, it’s real » Nieman Journalism Lab
I still think there’s value in an unreliable narrator in a course as either the instructor or the text itself. Kind of like the anti-video game reviews I tagged a few weeks back.
“A couple years ago, my friend Michael Sippey coined the brilliant phrase “Even if it’s fake, it’s real.” He was referring to a possibly-faked Google Street View image making the rounds of an in-progress childbirth. Sippey explains that, regardless of where the truth lies (and there are four distinct potential outcomes, not just two), it doesn’t affect the entertainment value of the image and that we should embrace this new uncertainty.”
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The Task of Building a Thirst for Knowledge – Bridging Differences – Education Week
“The task from K-12 is building a thirst for knowledge, pleasure in speaking up, and curiosity, curiosity, curiosity—persistently pursued. We need habits of the mind that carry over to the many hours we are not in school and the years and years that follow. “Take your hand off my throat so I can breathe” is precisely what the best teachers are crying out for.
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Ghost Stories — Futures Exchange — Medium
“Earlier this year, we learned of one of the unseen, or at least most unprepared, problems of sharing images of ourselves online. Student Retaeh Parsons, after months of bullying on and offline, after being the victim of rape, eventually took her own life. Her image was circulated across media channels, blogs, and social media sites, where it was eventually collected into the data banks of an image scraping algorithm. Her photos appeared months later in a Canadian dating advert on Facebook. Her family and those that recognised her, were horrified, and rightly so. When things like this happen, we imagine there is something, or someone, to prevent this behaviour, we don’t anticipate that this decision was governed by an algorithm operating blindly, instructed to gather images of women from a certain, specific demographic.”
Ghost Stories — Futures Exchange “Earlier this year, we learned of one of the unseen, or at least most unprepar… http://t.co/NF4wTVJKY0
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) December 26, 2013
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Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet – Neatorama
Hyperbole but interesting.
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Graffiti Hunters – Boing Boing
“It blows his mind how dedicated some urban explorer/graffiti fans are. “I’ll crawl through a drainage pipe a mile under the city, through spider webs and water, to paint a small spot that I’m 100 percent convinced no one else would ever be crazy enough or motivated enough to find. The next week there are photos from five different people on Instagram who went through the same thing to document it. It’s like the world’s most epic game of hide and seek.”
Saraceni says his GATS encounter on San Pablo was the “whoa moment” for him. “From then on, it was like I had a disease. I began to see stickers, letters, and characters everywhere I went.” ”
Strangley http://t.co/fXtasWZmIc & http://t.co/i8J37kYj3o get at this idea of switching on a lens that answers everything
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) December 24, 2013
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Get Better Ideas by Paying Attention | The Discipline of Innovation
” We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders. My deficiency is one of attention: I simply was not paying close enough attention.”
Strangley http://t.co/fXtasWZmIc & http://t.co/i8J37kYj3o get at this idea of switching on a lens that answers everything
— Tom Woodward (@twoodwar) December 24, 2013
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The Online Photographer: It’s Good to Look at Pictures
That’s a great shot, and in the right company it could really sing. It doesn’t “fit” in this first book, but it got my mind churning about future projects where it might fit. “Anonymity,” a book of unrecognizable/recognizable people? This photograph would never do for identification purposes, but I’ll bet this fellow’s friends would know it’s him in an instant. A book about negative space, where something in each photograph is a shape of featureless or near-featureless black? The possibilities pile up. These are just examples, and this is just one picture—a number of other pictures are likewise suggesting their own possibilities. I don’t want to give up too many ideas.