My Twitter Goodbye Email — Medium “Number of times bringing down the site: 2” tags: twitter beta experiment fail failure weekly The Official Crow Box Kit tags: crow box learning animals training weekly On Surveys — Medium “It is too easy to run a survey. That is why surveys are so dangerous. They are so easy to create and so easy to distribute, and the results are so easy to tally. And our poor human brains are such that information that is easier for us to process and comprehend feels more true. This is our cognitive bias. This ease makes survey results feel true and valid, no matter how false and misleading. And that ease is hard to argue with. “ tags: research surveys brain weekly On meta-design and algorithmic design systems ” Design is how it works and sketching in code is the only natural way to prototype a dynamic system. Building even the simplest of data visualizations means hours of work in languages like R, Julia or Python. When your content is data, poking around in Photoshop simply makes no sense. In some way, it’s the direct opposite of design: prettifying without context. One important aspect of modern design products is their increasing demand for temporal logic, where a linear narrative is replaced by a set of complex […]

How did they make that? | Miriam Posner’s Blog Maybe this is a framework/concept for doing some of the ALT Lab documentation. It mixes tutorial/tool guide/example in a way that works pretty well. tags: digitalhumanities examples tutorials tools weekly After Twitter bot makes death threat, its owner gets questioned by police — Fusion “Robots are starting to break the law, the law is trying to figure out what to do about it, and it all seems to be happening in Europe. Last month, Swiss authorities seized the Random Darknet Shopper art exhibit which included weekly purchases made by an automated bot given Bitcoin to surf a Dark Web marketplace. (It mainly bought drugs.) This week, police in the Netherlands are dealing with a robot miscreant. Amsterdam-based developer Jeffry van der Goot reports on Twitter that he was questioned by police because a Twitter bot he owned made a death threat. “ tags: robots twitter twitterbot future laws weekly How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own Music – Issue 21: Information – Nautilus “On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. “ tags: computer music serendipity weekly Big Bird on Twitter: “Tweet?” “@BigBird I’m too tall to be short!” tags: weekly twitter bigbird Casey Reas – Artist […]

Sea level study: James Hansen issues dire climate warning. “: Hansen’s study comes via a nontraditional publishing decision by its authors. The study will be published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an open-access “discussion” journal, and will not have formal peer review prior to its appearance online later this week. [Update, July 23: The paper is now available.] The complete discussion draft circulated to journalists was 66 pages long, and included more than 300 references. The peer review will take place in real time, with responses to the work by other scientists also published online. Hansen said this publishing timeline was necessary to make the work public as soon as possible before global negotiators meet in Paris later this year. Still, the lack of traditional peer review and the fact that this study’s results go far beyond what’s been previously published will likely bring increased scrutiny. On Twitter, Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist whose work focuses on Greenland and the Arctic, was skeptical of such enormous rates of near-term sea level rise, though she defended Hansen’s decision to publish in a nontraditional way.” tags: weekly socialmedia twitter peerreview research Rachel Berwick – may-por-é “During the attack, the Carib tribe had taken parrots which the Maypure’ people had kept as pets.  Von Humboldt noted that the parrots were speaking words, not […]