- The Uncertain Future of Emotion Analytics — A year before the launch of the first mass-produced personal computer, British academic David Collingridge wrote in his book “The Social Control of Technology” that “when change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time consuming.”
- Automatic Face Recognition (Bruce Schneier) — Without meaningful regulation, we’re moving into a world where governments and corporations will be able to identify people both in real time and backwards in time, remotely and in secret, without consent or recourse.
- Really Monitoring Your Systems — If you are not measuring and showing the maximum value, then you are hiding something. The number one indicator you should never get rid of is the maximum value. That’s not noise — it’s the signal; the rest is noise.
- Haunted by Data (Maciej Ceglowski) — You can’t just set up an elaborate surveillance infrastructure and then decide to ignore it. These data pipelines take on an institutional life of their own, and it doesn’t help that people speak of the “data-driven organization” with the same religious fervor as a “Christ-centered life.”
"emotion" entries
Four short links: 7 October 2015
Time for Change, Face Recognition, Correct Monitoring, and Surveillance Infrastructure
Four short links: 12 January 2015
Designed-In Outrage, Continuous Data Processing, Lisp Processors, and Anomaly Detection
- The Toxoplasma of Rage — It’s in activists’ interests to destroy their own causes by focusing on the most controversial cases and principles, the ones that muddy the waters and make people oppose them out of spite. And it’s in the media’s interest to help them and egg them on.
- Samza: LinkedIn’s Stream-Processing Engine — Samza’s goal is to provide a lightweight framework for continuous data processing. Unlike batch processing systems such as Hadoop, which typically has high-latency responses (sometimes hours), Samza continuously computes results as data arrives, which makes sub-second response times possible.
- Design of LISP-Based Processors (PDF) — 1979 MIT AI Lab memo on design of hardware specifically for Lisp. Legendary subtitle! LAMBDA: The Ultimate Opcode.
- rAnomalyDetection — Twitter’s R package for detecting anomalies in time-series data. (via Twitter Engineering blog)
Four short links: 5 January 2015
3D Art Reuse, Faceted Data Browser, Robotics Roundup, and Social Signal Interpretation
- Lincoln Gallery Reuse — UK gallery placed 3D models of their works online and are sharing what people did with them. Some beautiful art in here! (via BoingBoing)
- Kesihif — open source browser for faceted data.
- 2014 Robotics IPOs, Acquisitions, and Failures (RoboHub) — good roundup of what happened in 2014.
- SSI — an open source platform for social signal interpretation.
Four short links: 2 January 2015
Privacy Philosophy, Bitcoin Risks, Modelling Emotion, and Opinion Formation
- Google’s Philosopher — interesting take on privacy. Now that the mining and manipulation of personal information has spread to almost all aspects of life, for instance, one of the most common such questions is, “Who owns your data?” According to Floridi, it’s a misguided query. Your personal information, he argues, should be considered as much a part of you as, say, your left arm. “Anything done to your information,” he has written, “is done to you, not to your belongings.” Identity theft and invasions of privacy thus become more akin to kidnapping than stealing or trespassing. Informational privacy is “a fundamental and inalienable right,” he argues, one that can’t be overridden by concerns about national security, say, or public safety. “Any society (even a utopian one) in which no informational privacy is possible,” he has written, “is one in which no personal identity can be maintained.”
- S-1 for a Bitcoin Trust (SEC) — always interesting to read through the risks list to see what’s there and what’s not.
- Computationally Modelling Human Emotion (ACM) — our work seeks to create true synergies between computational and psychological approaches to understanding emotion. We are not satisfied simply to show our models “fit” human data but rather seek to show they are generative in the sense of producing new insights or novel predictions that can inform understanding. From this perspective, computational models are simply theories, albeit more concrete ones that afford a level of hypothesis generation and experimentation difficult to achieve through traditional theories.
- Opinion Formation Models on a Gradient (PLoSONE) — Many opinion formation models embedded in two-dimensional space have only one stable solution, namely complete consensus, in particular when they implement deterministic rules. In reality, however, deterministic social behavior and perfect agreement are rare – at least one small village of indomitable Gauls always holds out against the Romans. […] In this article we tackle the open question: can opinion dynamics, with or without a stochastic element, fundamentally alter percolation properties such as the clusters’ fractal dimensions or the cluster size distribution? We show that in many cases we retrieve the scaling laws of independent percolation. Moreover, we also give one example where a slight change of the dynamic rules leads to a radically different scaling behavior.
Four short links: 16 December 2014
Memory Management, Stream Processing, Robot's Google, and Emotive Words
- Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale — how they gathered data, how Javascript memory management works, and what they did to nail down leaks.
- tigon — an open-source, real-time, low-latency, high-throughput stream processing framework.
- Robo Brain — machine knowledge of the real world for robots. (via MIT Technology Review)
- The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum — convincing argument for teaching intro to programming with Scheme, but not using the classic text SICP.
Update: the original fourth link to Depeche Mood led only to a README on GitHub; we’ve replaced it with a new link.
Four short links: 2 July 2014
Facebook Research, Mountain Game, Dollar Vans, and Eigenmorality
- Experimental Evidence of Massive-scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks — I suspect many more people have expressed an opinion on the research than have read the research.
- Mountain — a new game in which you are (wait for it) a mountain. From the creator of the fake game in Her. (via Chris McDowall)
- NYC’s Dollar Vans (New Yorker) — New York’s unofficial shuttles, called “dollar vans” in some neighborhoods, make up a thriving transportation system that operates where the subway and buses don’t. A somewhat invisible economy. (via Seb Chan)
- Eigenmorality — caution: linear algebra and morality, two subjects that many programmers struggle with. (via Pete Warden)
Four short links: 10 January 2012
Emotional Phone, Standup Desk, Mobile Sensors, and eBook Travails
- Samsung Develops Emotion-Sensing Smartphone (ExtremeTech) — By analyzing how fast you type, how much the phone shakes, how often you backspace mistakes, and how many special symbols are used, the special Galaxy S II can work out whether you’re angry, surprised, happy, sad, fearful, or disgusted, with an accuracy of 67.5% From a research paper from a research group on an unannounced product. Nice idea and clever use of incidental data, though 2/3 accuracy isn’t something to write home about. Reminds me of Sandy Pentland‘s Reality Mining. (via James Governor)
- The $40 Standup Desk — we’ve solved the usability of software, but hardware remains stubbornly dangerous to use. There’s a reason nobody refers to “laptops” any more (if you use them on your lap, you might as well call them “wristkillers”).
- funf — an extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile devices being developed at the MIT Media Lab […] an open source, reusable set of functionalities, enabling the collection, uploading, and configuration of a wide range of data types. LGPL, Android.
- eBook Publishing Isn’t That Easy — list of the things you have to worry about when you self-publish. This line is gold: Locating a distributor. Amazon pays me 17 bucks for a 50-dollar book. Can you say “assholes?” LuLu pays me 43 bucks, but only if you buy on their site. Do the math. Platform vendors own authors and small publishers. (via Josh Clark)
Four short links: 16 May 2011
Minority Report, Embedded Strings, GNU Voice Software, and Nigerian Emotional Masters
- Entering the Minority Report Era — a survey of technology inspired by or reminiscent of Minority Report, which came out ten years ago. (via Hacker News)
- Sally — a tool for embedding strings in matrices, as used in machine learning. (via Matt Biddulph)
- GNU SIP Witch Released — can be used to deploy private secure calling networks, whether stand-alone or in conjunction with existing VoIP infrastructure, for private institutions and national governments. (via Hacker News)
- Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment (TechCrunch) — fascinating story of Nigerian criminal tech entrepreneurs. He helps build them up; he listens to their problems. He makes them feel loved. He calls each an innocuous pet name, lest he accidentally type the wrong message into the wrong chat window. He asks for a little bit of money here and there, until men are sending him steady amounts from each paycheck. He says it takes exactly one month for a man to fall in love with him, and once he has a man’s heart, no woman can take it. I wonder what designers of social software can learn from these master emotional manipulators?
Four short links: 18 April 2011
Community, Metrics, Sensors, and Unicode
- Your Community is Your Best Feature — Gina Trapani’s CodeConf talk: useful, true, and moving. There’s not much in this world that has all three of those attributes.
- Metrics Everywhere — another CodeConf talk, this time explaining Yammer’s use of metrics to quantify the actual state of their operations. Nice philosophical guide to the different ways you want to measure things (gauges, counters, meters, histograms, and timers). I agree with the first half, but must say that it will always be an uphill battle to craft a panegyric that will make hearts and minds soar at the mention of “business value”. Such an ugly phrase for such an important idea. (via Bryce Roberts)
- On Earthquakes in Tokyo (Bunnie Huang) — Personal earthquake alarms are quite popular in Tokyo. Just as lightning precedes thunder, these alarms give you a few seconds warning to an incoming tremor. The alarm has a distinct sound, and this leads to a kind of pavlovian conditioning. All conversation stops, and everyone just waits in a state of heightened awareness, since the alarm can’t tell you how big it is—it just tells you one is coming. You can see the fight or flight gears turning in everyone’s heads. Some people cry; some people laugh; some people start texting furiously; others just sit and wait. Information won’t provoke the same reaction in everyone: for some it’s impending doom, for others another day at the office. Data is not neutral; it requires interpretation and context.
- AccentuateUs — Firefox plugin to Unicodify text (so if you type “cafe”, the software turns it into “café”). The math behind it is explained on the dataists blog. There’s an API and other interfaces, even a vim plugin.
Four short links: 15 March 2011
Twitter Numbers, Online News, Emotional Complexity, and Making Described
- Twitter Numbers — growing at half a million accounts a day (how many are spammers, d’ya think?), over 140M tweets sent each day.
- Online vs Newspaper News (Mashable) — The Poynter Institute, a landmark of American journalism research, has determined that as of the end of 2010, more people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers — and more ad dollars went to online outlets than to newspapers, too. (via Sacha Judd)
- Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World’s Longest Interactive Fiction (PDF) — While I felt Progue was largely a success, the extreme complexity of the character’s code made difficulties with him both intensely difficult to diagnose and repair, and failures all the more mimesis-breaking for an engaged audience. In addition, the subtle text substitutions and altered behaviors provided in many cases too opaque a window into Progue’s interior workings. From informal interviews and published reviews I gathered that players could often not tell which conversation responses might cause Progue to become more submissive, paternal, and so on. In many cases, the change was not noticeable at all, and did not successfully indicate to players that their actions had had an eect on the character. More mechanisms to let the player shape their relationship with Progue more directly might have created a stronger feeling of agency for players, and an increased ability to shape the story more to their liking. Lessons for people designing complex emotional states into their products. (via Zack Urlocker)
- From Head to Hand (Slate) — I was searching for the place where someone, anyone, writes about that epiphany where you see what you have made and it is different from what you had conceived. I was searching for a description of how an object can displace a bit of the world. I was avid. I wanted someone to write a description of Homo faber, the maker of things. I wanted a story of making told without the penumbra of romanticising how hard it is, without nostalgia.