Four short links: 6 February 2014

Emotions Wanted, Future's So Bright, Machine Learning for Security, and Medieval Unicode Fonts

  1. What Machines Can’t Do (NY Times) — In the 1950s, the bureaucracy was the computer. People were organized into technocratic systems in order to perform routinized information processing. But now the computer is the computer. The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract attention and linger in the mind. Cf the fantastic The Most Human Human. (via Jim Stogdill)
  2. The Technium: A Conversation with Kevin Kelly (Edge) — If we were sent back with a time machine, even 20 years, and reported to people what we have right now and describe what we were going to get in this device in our pocket—we’d have this free encyclopedia, and we’d have street maps to most of the cities of the world, and we’d have box scores in real time and stock quotes and weather reports, PDFs for every manual in the world—we’d make this very, very, very long list of things that we would say we would have and we get on this device in our pocket, and then we would tell them that most of this content was free. You would simply be declared insane. They would say there is no economic model to make this. What is the economics of this? It doesn’t make any sense, and it seems far-fetched and nearly impossible. But the next twenty years are going to make this last twenty years just pale. (via Sara Winge)
  3. Applying Machine Learning to Network Security Monitoring (Slideshare) — interesting deck on big data + machine learning as applied to netsec. See also their ML Sec Project. (via Anton Chuvakin)
  4. Medieval Unicode Font Initiative — code points for medieval markup. I would have put money on Ogonek being a fantasy warrior race. Go figure.
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