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"brain" entries
Marketing Color, Brain Time, Who Could Have Foreseen 19100, and ASCII Cam
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Psychology of Color in Marketing and Branding — sidesteps the myths and chromobollocks, and gives the simplest pictorial views of some basic colour choice systems that I found very useful.
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Brain Time (David Eagleman) — the visual system is a distributed system with some flexible built-in consistency. So if the visual brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive. To accomplish this, it must wait about a tenth of a second. In the early days of television broadcasting, engineers worried about the problem of keeping audio and video signals synchronized. Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop: As long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers’ brains would automatically resynchronize the signals; outside that tenth-of-a-second window, it suddenly looked like a badly dubbed movie.
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CS Bumper Stickers (PDF) — Allocate four digits for the year part of a date: a new millenium is coming. —David Martin. From 1985.
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ASCIIcam — real-time ASCII output from your videocamera. This is doing terrible things to my internal chronometer. Is it 2014 or 1984? Yes!
A Worm Mind Forever LEGO Voyaging, Automatic Caption Generator, ELK Stack, and Amazonian Deployment
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A Worm’s Mind in a Lego Body — the c. elegans worm’s 302 neurons has been sequenced, modelled in open source code, and now hooked up to a Lego robot. It is claimed that the robot behaved in ways that are similar to observed C. elegans. Stimulation of the nose stopped forward motion. Touching the anterior and posterior touch sensors made the robot move forward and back accordingly. Stimulating the food sensor made the robot move forward. There is video.
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Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator — Google Research paper on generating captions like “Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven” from a photo. Wow.
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Big Data with the ELK Stack — ElasticSearch, logstash, and Kibana. Interesting and powerful combination of tools!
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Apollo: Amazon’s Deployment Engine — Apollo will stripe the rolling update to simultaneously deploy to an equivalent number of hosts in each location. This keeps the fleet balanced and maximizes redundancy in the case of any unexpected events. When the fleet scales up to handle higher load, Apollo automatically installs the latest version of the software on the newly added hosts. Lust.
Dandelion Dispersal, Future Weights, Networked Docker, and How Apple Pay Works
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BERG Closing — may open source their Little Printer server and IoT middleware. A shame, as Warren Ellis says, because they pulled bits of the future into the present. They were optimistic, not dystopic. I have a feeling BERG grads are going to be like BBC grads, where a certain crop from ~2003 or so went on to be influential at many different places. Dispersing dandelions of delight.
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Here Today, Gone Tomorrow — beating our minds’ misweighting of future events. This: When being invited to do things months in advance, the diary usually looks pretty clear and it’s tempting to say “yes”. But whenever a new invitation arrives, ask yourself not, “should I accept the invitation in March?” but, “would I accept the invitation if it was for this week?” (via BoingBoing)
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Weave — build a network of Docker containers running on different hosts. Weave can traverse firewalls and operate in partially connected networks. Traffic can be encrypted, allowing hosts to be connected across an untrusted network. With weave you can easily construct applications consisting of multiple containers, running anywhere.
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How Apple Pay Works And Why It Matters — for some reason this was the right level of explanation for me. Hope it helps. The end result is a token that can be used across merchants and both online (In-App) and offline (NFC, In-Person). Disaggregate and micropay for ALL THE THINGS.
Digital Services Playbook, Brain Computer Interface, In-Game Economics, and Motorcycle Reality
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US Digital Services Playbook — good sense from the US Govt’s latest “try not to cock up more Govt IT projects” brigade.
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Open Brain-Computer Interface — “open” as in “source”, not as in “cut”.
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Blockmarket — visibility into the in-game trading of The Blockheads. (via Dave Frampton)
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Skully (trigger warning: TechCrunch) — a step towards augmented reality for motorcyclists: panoramic visual awareness via in-helmet display.
Scanner Malware, Cognitive Biases, Deep Learning, and Community Metrics
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Handheld Scanners Attack — shipping and logistics operations compromised by handheld scanners running malware-infested Windows XP.
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Adventures in Cognitive Biases (MIT) — web adventure to build your cognitive defences against biases.
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Quoc Le’s Lectures on Deep Learning — Machine Learning Summer School videos (4k!) of the deep learning lectures by Google Brain team member Quoc Le.
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FLOSS Community Metrics Talks — upcoming event at Puppet Labs in Portland. I hope they publish slides and video!
GV Library, Blockchain Equity, Organisation Anti-Patterns, and Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering
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Google Ventures Library — collection of design, engineering, founder docs.
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SWARM — crypto equity. Stock via the blockchain. (via Jesse Vincent)
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Organisational Anti-Patterns (Leigh Honeywell) — failure modes involving power and labour.
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Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering (Jonathan Klein) — failure modes for estimations, testing, and evaluations explained with psychology. Because brains.
Our New Robot Overlords, Open Neuro, Anti-Surveillance Software, and LG's TV Made of Evil and Tears
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Norbert Weiner (The Atlantic) — His fears for the future stemmed from two fundamental convictions: We humans can’t resist selfishly misusing the powers our machines give us, to the detriment of our fellow humans and the planet; and there’s a good chance we couldn’t control our machines even if we wanted to, because they already move too fast and because increasingly we’re building them to make decisions on their own. To believe otherwise, Wiener repeatedly warned, represents a dangerous, potentially fatal, lack of humility.
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Open Ephys — open source/open hardware tools for neuro research. (via IEEE)
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Startups Selling Resistance to Surveillance (Inc) — growing breed of tools working on securing their customers’ communications from interception by competitors and states.
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Not-So-Smart TV (TechDirt) — LG’s privacy policy basically says “let us share your viewing habits, browsing, etc. with third parties, or we will turn off the `smart’ features in your smart TV.” The promise of smart devices should be that they get better for customers over time, not better for the vendor at the expense of the customer. See Weiner above.
Image Depth, Stress and Burnout, Tribal Software, and Face Recognition
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Depthy — new Google Camera app lets you capture some depth information, stored in metadata in the image. Nifty effects become possible.
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Coping with Stress and Burnout: Explanatory Power of Different Coping Strategies (PLoSone)– interesting taxonomy of burnout (overload, lack of development, and neglect) found by clustering responses to surveys, which also showed key signs. (via Psychological Science)
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Why is StackOverflow So Negative of Late? — my current theory is that social activities (sites, events, etc.) are journeys for cohorts. Newcomers don’t get as much from it, and the original cohort don’t enjoy newcomers. Social sites tend to rock at first until They arrive and ruin it for all. cf Burning Man. Newcomers will have to start their own site/event, but if they never get critical mass of the A-grade people who joined the first wave, their own event may fail.
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Surpassing Human-Level Face Verification Performance on LFW with GaussianFace (arXiv) — For the first time, the human-level performance in face verification (97.53%) on LFW [the standard “hard” face recognition data set] is surpassed. (via Medium)
Our Robot Future, Embeddable Pi, Behavioural Economics Not Solved Problem, and Imagine Processing Language
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Next Five Years for Robots — plausible summary of the near future progression, taken from Helen Greiner’s DEMOlabs talk.
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Raspberry Pi Compute Module — a Raspberry Pi shrunk down to fit on a SODIMM with onboard memory, whose connectors you can customise for your own needs. (via Makezine)
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Behavioural Economics and Public Policy (Financial Times) — interesting how A/B trials revealed that implementations of Cialdini’s social proof didn’t test as well as non-social-proof persuasive techniques. More useful than something that claims to be the right answer is knowing when you’re closer to the right answer. (via Mind Hacks)
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Halide Language — open source programming language designed to make it easier to write high-performance image processing code on modern machines. Its current front end is embedded in C++. Compiler targets include x86/SSE, ARM v7/NEON, CUDA, Native Client, and OpenCL.
Unimaginative Vehicular Connectivity, Data Journalism, VR and Gender, and Open Data Justice
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Connected for a Purpose (Jim Stogdill) — At a recent conference, an executive at a major auto manufacturer described his company’s efforts to digitize their line-up like this: “We’re basically wrapping a two-ton car around an iPad. Eloquent critique of the Internet of Shallow Things.
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Why Nate Silver Can’t Explain It All — Data extrapolation is a very impressive trick when performed with skill and grace, like ice sculpting or analytical philosophy, but it doesn’t come equipped with the humility we should demand from our writers. Would be a shame for Nate Silver to become Malcolm Gladwell: nice stories but they don’t really hold up.
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Gender and VR (danah boyd) — Although there was variability across the board, biological men were significantly more likely to prioritize motion parallax. Biological women relied more heavily on shape-from-shading. In other words, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on. Great article, especially notable for there are more sex hormones on the retina than in anywhere else in the body except for the gonads.
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Even The Innocent Should Worry About Sex Offender Apps (Quartz) — And when data becomes compressed by third parties, when it gets flattened out into one single data stream, your present and your past collide with potentially huge ramifications for your future. When it comes to personal data—of any kind—we not only need to consider what it will be used for but how that data will be represented, and what such representation might mean for us and others. Data policies are like justice systems: either you suffer a few innocent people being wrongly condemned (bad uses of open data0, or your system permits some wrongdoers to escape (mould grows in the dark).