Data Factories

Facebook quite clearly isn’t an industrial site (although it operates multiple data centers with lots of buildings and machinery), but it most certainly processes data from its raw form to something uniquely valuable both to Facebook’s products (and by extension its users and content suppliers) and also advertisers (and again, all of this analysis applies to Google as well): Users are better able to connect with others, find content they are interested in, form groups and manage events, etc., thanks to Facebook’s data. Content providers are able to reach far more readers than they would on their own, most of whom would not even be aware said content provider exists, much less visit of their own volition. Advertisers are able to maximize the return on their advertising $ by only showing ads to individuals they believe are predisposed to like their product, making it more viable than ever before to target niches (to the benefit of their customers as well).

Swiss Finishing School

Neri added that one should plan to provide, among other things, 2 “surprise breads” and 600 hors d’œuvres. As for drinks, 30 bottles of champagne should suffice, but, along with some nonalcoholic options, one must also have on hand 4 bottles each of whiskey, gin, and vodka “for the men who don’t like champagne.” Neri then accelerated the slide show, presenting a procession of structurally unsound canapés and encouraging a discussion about whether each appeared too large to be eaten in a single bite, as a canapé should be. Most of the tightly cropped photographs did not include forks or wineglasses, so it required some imagination to assess their scale. Before class let out, Neri invited the students to come to the front of the classroom and practice holding, in 1 hand, a cocktail napkin, an appetizer plate, and a champagne flute. Mila, a 30-year-old who grew up in Guinea-Bissau, bravely volunteered. Neri showed her how to pinch the stem, palm up, between her ring finger and pinkie, slide the plate between her thumb, index finger, and middle finger, and then tuck the napkin under the plate and over her middle finger. All this was to be done with the left hand, leaving the right available for introductions. Mila absorbed the demonstration attentively and glanced up at Neri for a nod of encouragement before attempting the feat on her own. She aced it on the first try. “It looks more complicated than it is”.

Liberal Radicalism

We were able to compute the optimum level of the public good because we knew each individual’s utility function. In the real world each individual’s utility function is private information. Thus, to reach the social optimum we must solve 2 problems. The information problem and the free rider problem. The information problem is that no one knows the optimal quantity of the public good. The free rider problem is that no one is willing to pay for the public good. The government used the contribution levels under the top-up mechanism as a signal to decide how much of the public good to produce and almost magically the top-up function is such that citizens will voluntarily contribute exactly the amount that correctly signals how much society as a whole values the public good. Amazing!

Food vendor cap

The city’s government isn’t interested in helping more workers become vendors. The city capped food-vendor permits in the early 1980s; there are currently just over 4000 available, often only on the black market, where they might cost $25K (the city, by comparison, charges $200 for 2-year permits, which can be renewed indefinitely). And yet a 2015 report found that New York’s vendors contributed an estimated $293M to the city’s economy and $71M in taxes. “Street vending is an inherently New York City thing. I don’t know why there needs to be a cap on permits.”

you can only get a nyc food vendor license if you sell burnt pretzels. it’s the law. see also how the mob controls these licenses.

AR Urbanism

What does the virtual space that “belongs to us” look like? Would could it look like? We might imagine a future as steeped in AR as Matsuda’s Hyperreality, but where instead of a hybrid landscape dominated by ads and obfuscating distractions, augmented overlays are used to highlight the hidden dimensions of place, or serve as a distinctly spatial platform for alternative forms of communication and culture. Inverting the vision of a commodified hybrid landscape, the seemingly inevitable barrage of immersive, interfacial capitalism could perhaps be transmuted into something democratic, artful, and even beautiful: a conduit to mobile urban discourse and learning; to collectively owned and managed hybrid spaces, and to community as a social body intersecting physical and digital worlds. But if this more hopeful image of an AR-saturated future is to come to fruition, it will require a deeply collaborative spirit between programmers and urbanists, artists and technologists, activists and educators — and most certainly architects as well.

KCBC Design

interview with the amazing designer of the kcbc labels.

WHY DON’T YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO WHERE YOU’RE AT NOW? We can go way back on this question but to be brief I can say that for as far back as I can remember I liked drawing a lot. The desire to create images has stuck it out in me through ups and downs. Like a lot of other people it was a coping mechanism at first, a way to exercise control, a pretense to interact with people. For a person like me because that was all pretty important as I was a bit of an introverted kid. I’ve been friendly with the head brewer Peter Lengyel for 13 years. He was working in biology at the time and had started home brewing in earnest in, I believe, 2006 and shortly thereafter embarked on becoming a professional brewer. When he opened up KCBC with his partners he approached me to produce some labels and see what would come out. I can say safely that we gelled well and have gone on to make some interested work together.

Mars Crime

Consider the basic science of crime-scene analysis. In the dry, freezer-like air and extreme solar exposure of Mars, DNA will age differently than it does on Earth. Blood from blunt-trauma and stab wounds will produce dramatically new spatter patterns in the planet’s low gravity. Electrostatic charge will give a new kind of evidentiary value to dust found clinging to the exteriors of space suits and nearby surfaces. Even radiocarbon dating will be different on Mars due to the planet’s atmospheric chemistry, making it difficult to date older crime scenes.

Drosophila Titanus

This is very cool. In some sense, we have a moral imperative to spread life in the cosmos.

Your experiment involves creating flies that could survive on Titan. I understand that Titan is incredibly cold so the flies have to gradually get used to the very low temperatures but what would be the impact of Titan’s orange sky and the low frequency radio waves that emanate from Titan on their bodies? And how do you prepare them for that? The project involved adapting the flies for a range of environmental conditions that are very different to those found on Earth. The cold is the most obvious along with the different atmospheric composition. There is also increased atmospheric pressure, radiation, chromatic characteristics and so on. To reach what could be conceived as the end of the project I would need to condition the flies for all of the characteristics of Titan. The radio waves experiment has been earmarked for a future stage in the project so I haven’t got too much to say about that right now. However, the chromatic adjustment has been something I’ve been working on over the last couple of years. The natural phototaxis of Drosophila – its instinct to move towards a certain type of light – is geared towards the blue end of the electromagnetic spectrum. To overcome this I kept the flies for a year under a Titan analog orange light before testing for adaptation. The selection experiment was modelled on a Y-Trap apparatus, a simple way of offering an organism 2 choices. The flies crawl up a tube and are faced with a junction offering orange light in one direction and blue light in the other, each tube ending with another non-return trap. Any flies taking the orange option are considered adapted and kept for breeding. Repeated iterations of the project smooth out random events.