Petervan's Delicacies - Issue #129

The very best

People, institutions and possibilities of all kinds can be trapped inside enclosures on the Internet. Doc Searls describes nine of them and much more. At the level of quality and insights of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Highly recommended.

About a new world order enabled by the DIGITAL Belt and Road Initiative. Fantastic series about the Chinese long term initiative.

About Nova Spivack's very unusual dream in which he saw many lifetimes of his future.

About getting the technology right for augmented reality. By Mark Pesce

Some very deep insights by Nicholas Carr about the consequences of content collapse. Feels like a new book is in the making.

Marti Spiegelman looks into indigenous wisdoms for leading from being. Great series.

When the intentions and responsibilities of urban administrators are rhetorically displaced onto a machine god, the space for politics disappears

How algorithms could someday be used to optimise the ballot box

With a phone, anywhere else is always just a tap away.

The construction industry is wasteful and creates huge CO2 emissions. But what if new buildings had to be adapted and resused or built only with materials already available?

Data and Society

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

This is "A Digital Twin for Amaravati" by Cityzenith on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

Online cities are becoming a powerful tool for decision makers

To redesign the ‘social’ in a way that doesn't allow trolls and bots to permanently disrupt our thinking and behaviour, freedom has to be into account. Technological freedom means the ability to put them aside, turn them off.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs) were developed to reduce the number of car accidents by issuing driver alert or controlling the vehicle. In this paper, we tested the robustness of Mobileye, a popular external ADAS.

Zeitgeist

The doors 2019-nCoV will open, and the doors it will close. By @azeem

Super creepy videos of surveillance by drones

Decades ago, Armenian scientists built a high-elevation trap to catch and study cosmic rays. Physics has mostly moved on, but the station persists — a ghost observatory with a skeleton crew.

The seer of sizzling city architecture now says the countryside is where the future is being built – and it’s a ‘toxic mix’. Ahead of a major Guggenheim show, he explains his epiphany

Innovation

Technology is no longer the sole domain of the technologist. It is now the intersection of many different paths. That’s why we are living in an era of crossroads.

I don’t buy into the idea that humans intrinsically hate change. I just think that by the time we’re in our 30s or 40s, lots of our experience of change – particularly in the workplace – has been more negative than positive. Instinctively rejecting it is a learned response - Tom Cheesewright People , we…

Presentations by Benedict Evans: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, The End of the Beginning and Mobile is Eating the world.

This year’s #CES2020 was the usual spectacle of gadgets, gizmos, pleasant surprises, and near misses. Most of all CES continues to be an event where you can see the raw material of the next big…

Future of work

Remember all the pundits telling us that robots were not up to the task of manipulating objects they way that humans can, and as a result automation of much of the manufacturing, logistics, and…

The head of inclusion and computational design at WordPress parent company Automattic thinks that designers should be more like supporting actors to the leading characters at tech companies–the developers and product managers.

This Is the One Skill Designers Need to Develop Most in 2020. Legendary designer Don Norman takes designers to task for elevating craft above all else, when what matters most is the willingness to….

Whether your boss in 2040 is a person or an algorithm, they’ll be watching.

In cram school-obsessed South Korea, students fork out for classes in everything from K-pop auditions to real estate deals. Now, top Korean firms are rolling out artificial intelligence in hiring - and jobseekers want to learn how to beat the bots.

Internet Culture

Yesterday, a website called Amazon Dating took over my Twitter feed. It looks and smells like Amazon, only instead of delivering search results for Alexa-enabled microwaves, its homepage is populated with photos of “hot singles near me.”

FinTech

Earlier today, the news leaked that Visa was to acquire fintech startup Plaid for $5.3B. Plaid is known within the startup and VC community as a strong company, but it is also a relatively quiet company in terms of its own PR and social media...

AI, Robots, Algorythms

The laws of physics stay the same no matter one’s perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.

AI hits the Fashion Runway

In what may be the starting pistol in a race to AR for your eyes, startup Mojo Vision unveiled their augmented reality contact lenses for the first time.

Digital Ethics

Does the relationship between power and AI mean that all people will be monitored all the time?

The tech giant records people’s locations worldwide. Now, investigators are using it to find suspects and witnesses near crimes, running the risk of snaring the innocent.

With the release of bylaws, Facebook is a step closer to having a Supreme Court of content that can overrule even its CEO.

The news: US government use of facial recognition technology should be banned “pending further review,” according to 40 organizations that signed a letter calling for a recommendation to be made to the president.

Draft white paper suggest prohibition lasting three to five years is being considered

The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently, and facial recognition technologies are only a small part of that.

A.I. companies like Google-owned DeepMind are wrong to think ethics can be solved with code.

Interview with Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford - Am I just one more gear in the mechanism?

Collaborations in progress between ethicists and biologists seek to head off challenges raised by lab-grown “organoids” as they become increasingly similar to

Post Capitalism

When I look around the globe these days, at the state of ideas, politics, economics, there’s a question going unasked. But it’s perhaps the most crucial one of all. It’s as daunting as it simple to…

Weird (Cyber)Space

Can synthetic media drive new content experiences?

Zoey(@zoey_rene1213) has created a short video on TikTok with music Lottery. When The whole stadium started starts doing renigade at a cheer competition #UIL #cheerleading #fyp #stadium #renigade

A dive into the thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking.

A viral TikTok video hints at what culture could look like under the sway of mysterious, A.I.-powered algorithms.

Art related

Could AI be the future of Art? We explore that question with some of the world's first AI artists!

On January 1, 2001 I had an exhibition in Tokyo entitled "Post Digital" to show how art and design could seamlessly fuse with computing technology. Twenty years later I have noticed how the poetic ideal of being "post" digital is actually a neverending road with no end in sight. I…

A very US centric outlook

We experienced something similar to this algorithmic overkill in the mid-1990s, when Photoshop filters first became available and were used widely without artful manipulation. They quickly became kitsch, and died out.

The architecture school founded by Frank Lloyd Wright to develop young talents in his image will close for good this summer.

björk has collaborated with microsoft to create AI-generated music based on on the changing weather patterns and position of the sun.

Why does it matter if we only see art to snap it? After all, the great masters’ portraits of nobility were just the commissioned selfies of dead rich people

Friends from Academy

An Experimental 16mm scratch film made almost 10 years ago at the Academy of Visuals Arts of Gent, Now remastered and with new a Sound track. Vocals b:y * St...

"Breathe In Breathe Out", about too many overwhelming feelings. Anxiety is universal is defined as “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried ...

Academy for Visual Arts Ghent - overview of students' works and experiments. @petervan starts at 1:24:00

Aesthetics

Elizabeth Heyert’s intimate images of people sleeping were projected on to huge stone walls in a deserted town in Sicily and rephotographed. The result is an extraordinary series with the power of ancient sculpture

The artists of our time, with their ruin-porn coffee-table books, offer the world a glossy, anesthetized image of abandoned infrastructure from Chernobyl to Detroit.

C82 is dedicated to the personal and business works of Nicholas Rougeux. Works include data visualization, web design, and inspirational fractal posters.

Choir! Choir! Choir! teamed up with David Byrne and a TON of singers in the Ford Foundation lobby of the Public Theater during the Under the Radar Festival t...

Brutalist and deconstructivist styles would be outlawed for federal buildings in the US if an executive order by President Trump becomes law.

For real nerds

Video shows Taipei 101 damper sway the most due to temblor during magnitude 6.1 earthquake.Video shows the Taipei 101 tuned mass damper sway by 20 centimeters, the most by an earthquake when a 6.1 temblor struck on April 18.

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