Pseudo-public space – squares and parks that seem public but are actually owned by corporations – has quietly spread across cities worldwide. As the Guardian maps its full extent in London for the first time, Jack Shenker reports on a new culture of secrecy and control, where private security guards can remove you for protesting, taking photos … or just looking scruffy
The insidious creep of pseudo-public space in London in the Guardian
Arthur Carabott writes about his experiments to improve the user interfaces of software for making music:
The goal is to re-think many of the ways in which audio software is designed. […] The project is driven by these two design principles:
- If I weren’t interacting with a computer, how would I express this musical idea?
- As I am interacting with a computer, what can it do for me that traditional equipment can’t?
Example: Improve on Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release controls by constructing an envelope with your voice.
Read more: Musical User Interfaces
Auf mietlimbo.de gibt es jetzt die Anfänge dieses Projekts zu sehen, in dem ich in den nächsten sechs Monaten daran arbeiten werde, Mietsenkungen mit der Mietpreisbremse in Berlin einfacher zu machen.
Trying to be as open as possible and ready to debate is exhausting, and often leaves one tired and misunderstood. I can see how the ‘big picture’ reward isn’t worth the day-to-day depression and anxiety.
– cmehdy
Carnegie Mellon News on Information Avoidance:
We live in an unprecedented “age of information,” but we use very little of it. Dieters prefer not to look at the calories in their tasty desert, people at high risk for disease avoid screenings and people choose the news source that aligns with their political ideology. […]
Despite the consequences, information avoidance isn’t always a mistake or a reflection of a lazy mind.
“People do it for a reason,” said Golman, assistant professor of social and decision sciences. “Those who do not take a genetic test can enjoy their life until their illness can’t be ignored, an inflated sense of our own abilities can help us to pursue big and worthwhile goals, and not looking at our financial investments when markets are down may keep us from selling in a panic.”
INFORMATION AVOIDANCE: HOW PEOPLE SELECT THEIR OWN REALITY in Carnegie Mellon News
Since we all create our habitual reality-tunnels, either consciously and intelligently or unconsciously and mechanically, I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest, and most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with the signals my brain apprehends.
I feel sorry for people who persistently organize experience into sad, dreary and hopeless reality tunnels, and try to show them how to break the bad habit, but I don’t feel any masochistic duty to share their misery.
– RAW, Cosmic Trigger Volume I
… many of us aren’t Narrative in this sense. We’re naturally – deeply – non-Narrative. We’re anti-Narrative by fundamental constitution. It’s not just that the deliverances of memory are, for us, hopelessly piecemeal and disordered, even when we’re trying to remember a temporally extended sequence of events. The point is more general. It concerns all parts of life, life’s ‘great shambles’, in the American novelist Henry James’s expression. This seems a much better characterisation of the large-scale structure of human existence as we find it. Life simply never assumes a story-like shape for us. And neither, from a moral point of view, should it.
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.
I am not a story by Galen Strawson on Aeon, excerpted from On Life-Writing.
“I had a 15-minute short-term memory, like Dory the fish in Finding Nemo,” Lee wrote in a Buzzfeed essay chronicling her experience. “My doctors instructed me to log happenings with timestamps in my Moleskine journal. That, they said, would be my working short-term memory. My memento to my mori.”
Lee used those journals to reconstruct her experience in a new memoir called Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember. She talks with NPR’s Scott Simon about the silver linings of memory loss and the unexpected grief that came with her recovery.
After A Stroke At 33, A Writer Relies On Journals To Piece Together Her Own Story on NPR
Title image “Bullet Journal” by Steven Oldham is licensed under CC BY 2.0
It’s pretty shocking how tech-illiterate the “digital native” generation is. They’re no better than previous generations with computers. They don’t understand computers better for having grown up with them, they take them for granted. They can snapchat and tweet, but if something breaks they’re as clueless as your grandmother. – Asmor
I agree with this sentiment. As technology advances we interface less with the core programming of the technology. Instead it becomes a black box which gets more adaptable and easy to use. Thus future population will be less literate on the core programming and more literate on the end-user functions.
Similarly to how today you might find a genius hacker who can’t for the life of him build an analogue radio, and his grandpa who doesn’t understand code but can fix a logic board should it fail. –Cptnfiskedritt
the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.
but
The machines have no easy technical fix. As Hoke notes, Aristocrat, Novomatic, and any other manufacturers whose PRNGs have been cracked “would have to pull all the machines out of service and put something else in, and they’re not going to do that.”
Wired: Russians Engineer a Brilliant Slot Machine Cheat—And Casinos Have No Fix
Our computers are secure for a bunch of reasons. The engineers at Google, Apple, Microsoft spent a lot of time on this. But that doesn’t happen for these cheaper devices. … These devices are a lower price margin, they’re offshore, there’s no teams. And a lot of them cannot be patched. Those DVRs are going to be vulnerable until someone throws them away. And that takes a while. We get security [for phones] because I get a new one every 18 months. Your DVR lasts for five years, your car for 10, your refrigerator for 25. I’m going to replace my thermostat approximately never. So the market really can’t fix this.
http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/bruce-schneier-internet-of-things/?tw=share
“I don’t like this,” he concluded. “I like the world where the internet can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, at all times. It’s fun. This is a fun device. But I’m not sure we can do that anymore.”
I asked him a pointed question about how this scaled to the international level, which he decided mostly not to answer (focus on domestic policy first, and such). Because the answer is simple: it doesn’t. Without global collaboration, this philosophy is the beginning of national internet feifdoms - moreso than what exists today - and the beginning of the end of the global collaboration we freely enjoy today. I value this freedom a lot.