Monday, April 29, 2019

As Social Media Ages: Toothless Tiger

There is a sense of bohemian mystery to him ...his face is a landscape of loss ...
~ Malchkeon




Mystery behind toys appearing on 134-year-old toddler's grave solved

Czech Robots and Toothless Dragons ๐Ÿ‰ Iron curtain fest

Philosophy helped me to leave my marriage quit my job





Edward Pollitt, via ACS Information Age









Henry Wollman Bloch, Art Philanthropist And Co-Founder Of H&R Block, Dead At 96


The primary beneficiary of Bloch’s largesse has been Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: he spent three years as its board chairman, he and his wife are the name donors on the museum’s 2007 expansion and its 2015-17 renovation, and at the same time the couple gave a collection of 29 major Impressionist paintings to NAMA. – ARTnews

For the everyman, he was the real tax man



“Bot visibility” has emerged as a significant factor, with 90% of Australia’s top 250 websites unable to differentiate a customer from a bot on login pages.



The Big Read

Why American CEOs are worried about capitalism














What Will Art, And The Art World, Look Like In 2039?



“Devon Van Houten Maldonado asks artists and curators to imagine the changes and trends that will influence the art world in the next two decades.” – BBC



How The Roxane Gay-Christina Hoff Sommers #Feminist Debate Tour In Australia Turned Into An Ugly Mess


If it had happened in a radio or television studio, it might have gone well. But having an audience turns out to have been a bad idea. (And some ill-advised moves by either Gay or her management didn’t help.) – New York Magazine 


The Funniest and Weirdest Stories Of Damaged Library Books | Book Riot



Debra S. Austin (Denver), Windmills of Your Mind: Understanding the Neurobiology of Emotion, 54 Wake Forest L. Rev. ___ (2019):
Intelligence has been parsed into categories including general intelligence (IQ), which is cognitive capacity, and emotional intelligence (EQ), describing social competency. Perhaps the most important new form of intelligence that lawyers can cultivate is neuro-intelligence (NQ), which is an understanding of the most important tool a lawyer must deploy — the brain. NQ can help us understand how emotions that arise in the brain are often experienced in the windmills of the mind as “words that jangle in your head”. Boomers will enjoy the Noel Harrison version of Windmills of your Mind, which won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Original Song, while Millennials should check out the Sting version from the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair.
















Generosity? Noblesse Oblige? Or Reputation-Laundering? The Century-Old Bargain Behind Big-Ticket Philanthropy


The debate has arisen a lot over the past few years: BPthe Koch brothers,the Sacklers, that board member at the WhitneyNotre-Dame. Bob Garfield talks about the issue with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World. (audio) – NPR’s On the Media












In China, Two Historical Soap Operas Go Viral, And The Communist Party Promptly Cancels Them



The Story of Yanxi Palace and Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace smashed viewing records for the streaming services that showed them. Then the journal Theory Weekly (a title only a Communist bureaucrat could love) published an article condemning the series as “incompatible with the core values of socialism” and “[a] negative influence on society.” State media condemnation went on from there, and the series disappeared. Why? – The New Yorker 
Artificial Intelligence Will Change E-Discovery in the Next Three Years: Law Technology Today: “…According to Andrew Ng, Co-Founder of Coursera and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, artificial intelligence (AI) is the new electricity. “Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago,” he explains, “today I  actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years.” Ng is not alone. Consumers’ lives, tastes, and habits have been profoundly altered by artificial intelligence, with companies like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Spotify, and Uber (to name a few) disrupting well-established industries. Legal technology including e-discovery (and software as a service in general) will not be spared. No less an authority than Gartner estimates that 80% of emerging technologies will be built on a foundation of artificial intelligence by 2021…AI facilitates e-discovery by playing a number of roles in the process: curator, advisor, and orchestrator. Both curator and advisor roles are familiar to e-discovery professionals. AI can recommend documents for deeper review (much like Netflix recommends a new movie or TV show), or it can advise a project manager on scoping custodian lists or collection criteria (as it can suggest a response to a text message or email). But newer AIs can also function as an orchestrator of the entire e-discovery process, learning from past actions and results, and coordinating tasks across multiple channels…” 


The genre of books about growing old is nearly as old as old age itself. They fall into three categories: the scientific, the personal, and  the political  

How Recommendation Algorithms Run the World - Wired – “…What should you watch? What should you read? What’s news? What’s trending? Wherever you go online, companies have come up with very particular, imperfect ways of answering these questions. Everywhere you look, recommendation engines offer striking examples of how values and judgments become embedded in algorithms and how algorithms can be gamed by strategic actors… Another common method for generating recommendations is to extrapolate from patterns in how people consume things. People who watched this then watched that; shoppers who purchased this item also added that one to their shopping cart. Amazon uses this method a lot, and I admit, it’s often quite useful. Buy an electric toothbrush? How nice that the correct replacement head appears in your recommendations. Congratulations on your new vacuum cleaner: Here are some bags that fit your machine…”




Reuters -April 15, 2019

The United States will push its allies at a meeting in Prague next month to adopt shared security and policy measures that will make it more difficult for China's Huawei to dominate 5G telecommunications networks, according to people familiar with the matter and documents seen by Reuters. The event and broader U.S. campaign to limit the role of Chinese telecommunications firms in the build out of 5G networks comes as Western governments grapple with the national security implications of moving to 5G, which promises to be at least 100 times faster than the current 4G networks. The issue is crucial because of 5G's leading role in internet-connected products ranging from self-driving cars and smart cities to augmented reality and artificial intelligence. If the underlying technology for 5G connectivity is vulnerable then it could allow hackers to exploit such products to spy or disrupt them. The United States has been meeting with allies in recent months to warn them Washington believes Huawei's equipment could be used by the Chinese state to spy. Huawei Technologies Co Ltd has repeatedly denied the allegations.


As Social Media Ages, Some Who Documented Their Own Lives Turn Away, For Their Kids


Don’t do it for the children! In other words, some parents, even in tech-obsessed San Francisco, refuse to put their kids online. “They cite reasons ranging from preserving children’s safety to giving their children agency over their own online presences.” – San Francisco Chronicle





The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity,” wrote Horkheimer and Adorno. Is enlightenment necessarily accompanied by darker forces?  


The Band That Sang End Credits To This Week’s ‘Game Of Thrones’ Turned Down The Same Opportunity In Season Two

Florence and the Machine sang a haunting song over the end credits of the second episode of the final season of Game of Thrones, and they’re one of a very few groups who have gotten that opportunity. The band’s singer and leader wasn’t a fan when the showrunners first asked the band to sing, eons ago in Season 2, but now she is – and that helped win the band over. – The New York Times


Resources for Living a More Ethical Life Online

Ethical.net has compiled a list of resourcesfor “discovering ethical alternatives to stuff”. Their list includes web browsers like Tor and Firefox (check out the first site in the “top sites” listing in the graphic), search engines like DuckDuckGo, email services like Fastmail, a bunch of carbon-neutral web hosting options, and all kinds of other services and apps that tend to be open source, privacy friendly, not supported by advertising, and decentralized.