This month, as Oxford Dictionaries reportedly named ‘post-truth’ as their Word of the Year, an article in the Washington Post, describes LibertyWritersNews, ” a website that gained 300,000 Facebook followers in October alone” whose owners say “they are making so much money that they feel uncomfortable talking about it.” They can earn up to $14…
In 2012 the CIA produced a classified document, called Schengen Overview, which looks at travel controls within the Schengen area and discusses how these might affect ‘operational travelers’. Its objective is “to help US intelligence personnel protect their identities and operational activities while abroad.” Having mentioned this document at a seminar this morning, I’ve put…
I recently posted about augmented reality: arguing that it is not just surveillance and data displays, but reality that responds and adapts to you. Shortly afterwards I found a reference in ‘White Heat Cold Logic‘ (Chapter 4) to Cedric Price‘s Generator project. There’s very little about this on the internet. Even the Wikipedia entry on…
A paper on arxiv called “Automated Inference on Criminality using Face images” by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang, argues that: ” Via supervised machine learning, we build four classifiers (logistic regression, KNN, SVM, CNN) using facial images of 1856 real persons controlled for race, gender, age and facial expressions, nearly half of whom were convicted…
Lev Manovich lists two types of digitally altered reality: virtual reality and augmented reality. He defines the latter as ” the laying of dynamic and context-specific information over the visual field of a user”. Two lectures yesterday at the Alan Turing Institute on smart cities, by Prof Phil Blythe and Prof Sir Alan Wilson make…
(This posting is culled mostly from two reports in Bloomberg, here and here. To save hyperlinking I have not repeated the citations everywhere.) Bloomberg said: “To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed.” However, Bloomberg reporting makes clear that there was a serious…
According to The Guardian, Angela Merkel said recently that: ” “I’m of the opinion that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’…Algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion…