In Spain, Entire Villages Are Up For Sale — And They’re Going Cheap : Parallels : NPR “Desperate times call for desperate measures, says Avelino Luis de Francisco Martinez, the mayor of Cortegada, a rural town in southern Galicia. An abandoned hamlet that’s part of his town isn’t for sale. He’s giving it away. “For free! Someone just has to promise to renovate the 12 ruined houses,” he says. “They’re beautiful — bucolic! Next to a river and an 18th century royal procession path.” The challenge? “We just need to find someone to live here in this century,” he says.” tags: weekly Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The botmaker who sees through the Internet – Ideas – The Boston Globe “Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back. By imitating humans in ways both poignant and disorienting, Kazemi’s bots focus our attention on the power and the limits of automated technology, as well as reminding us of our own tendency to speak and act in ways that are essentially robotic. While they’re more conceptual art than activism, the bots Kazemi is creating are acts of provocation—ones that ask whether, as computers get better at thinking like us and shaping our behavior, they can also be rewired to spring us free. “ tags: weekly tweet bot twitter algorithms univ200 culture data Zimmer on writing: “Don’t make a ship in a bottle” “To write about anything well, you have to do a lot of research. Even just trying to work out the chronology of a few years of one person’s life can take hours of interviews. If you’re writing about a scientific debate, you may have to […]