"reality mining" entries

Four short links: 22 October 2015

Four short links: 22 October 2015

Predicting activity, systems replacement fail, Khan React style, and an interoperability system for the Web

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 22, 2015
  1. Predicting Daily Activities from Egocentric Images Using Deep Learning — Our technique achieves an overall accuracy of 83.07% in predicting a person’s activity [from images taken by a camera worn all day by a person] across the 19 activity classes.
  2. Trying to Replace Multiple Systems with One Can Lead to None (IEEE) — check out that final graph, it’s a doozy. It’s a graph of x against time, from various “this project is great, it will replace x systems with 1″ claims about a single project. Software projects should come with giant warning labels: “most fail, you are about to set your money on fire. Are you sure? [Y/N/Abort/Restart]”
  3. Khan React Style Guide — in case you’re dipping your toes into the cool kids’ pool.
  4. ballista — An interoperability system for the modern Web. Like intents.
Four short links: 6 October 2015

Four short links: 6 October 2015

System Intuition, Magic is Power, Predicting Behaviour, Payment Required

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 6, 2015
  1. Flux: New Approach to System Intuition (LinkedIn) — In general, we assume that if anything is best represented numerically, then we don’t need to visualize it. If the best representation is a numerical one, then a visualization could only obscure a quantifiable piece of information that can be measured, compared, and acted upon. Anything that we can wrap in alerts or some threshold boundary should kick off some automated process. No point in ruining a perfectly good system by introducing a human into the mix. Instead of numerical information, we want a tool that surfaces relevant information to a human, for situations that would be too onerous to create a heuristic. These situations require an intuition that we can’t codify.
  2. Jumping to the End: Practical Design Fiction (Vimeo) — “Magic is a power relationship” — Matt Jones on the flipside of hiding complex behaviours from users and making stuff “work like magic.” (via Richard Pope)
  3. Predicting Daily Activities from Egocentric Images Using Deep Learning — aka “people wear cameras and we can figure out what they’re going to do next.”
  4. 402: Payment Required (David Humphrey) — The ad blocking discussion highlights our total lack of imagination, where a browser’s role is reduced to “render” or “don’t render.” There are a whole world of options in between that we should be exploring.