+Beth Harris and +Steven Zucker‘s conversations on art history for the +Khan Academy are really great. I’m especially enjoying their discussions of art during the French and Spanish revolutions, and I can’t wait to hear what they have to say about 20th century! The Goya piece below is terrifying, and the commentary is a great example of the whole expansive and entertaining video collection. I love the dynamic between the two scholars. Their enthusiasm for art is absolutely contagious. I’ve been thinking about producing some educational content for my stream, with the goal of producing content for Khan. Watching these videos is both instructive and inspiring for my own projects. More on Goya’s Saturn here: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/goya-saturn-devouring-one-of-his-children http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son Khan Academy’s entire Art History Collection: http://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history/ Goya, Saturn Devouring One Of His Sons

Three days ago, I packed all my earthly possessions into my car and moved to California. Most of the packing was books and papers; the amount of student debt I hold exceeds the monetary value of these objects by at least two orders of magnitude. That debt and these books are the remains of almost a decade of study and teaching in Illinois. I left my teaching position at Illinois State at the end of the spring semester to do human-cyborg relations full time. I have big plans for stepping up my blogging and engagement, and I’m excited about a major educational project I’ll be announcing shortly. I’m not entirely settled in and it will be a few more days before I can return to normal blogging schedule, but things will start popping soon. Until I return, here’s something to tide you over. I left the comment below on +Jonathan Langdale‘s post, while at a rest stop outside Vegas during my drive out west. It describes a method of visualizing the attention economy in a way that might be instructive or useful for others looking to do the same. It was something of a derail for the original thread; maybe it can find better resonance here. _____________ https://plus.google.com/u/0/109667384864782087641/posts/KvbZW9vVR7H In any case, you are definitely keying in on a developing hurdle to UI design, which is figuring out how to inform users without distracting them from doing other things, including just moving around. A lot of AR concept designs have data displayed as huge, intrusive graphical text overlays which usually require some reading and processing to benefit from. That processing time is time not spent processing other data. If this overlay is on your windshield as you are driving, this difference could be a matter of life and death. Designing UIs […]

Morals and the Machine The Economist One way of dealing with these difficult questions is to avoid them altogether, by banning autonomous battlefield robots and requiring cars to have the full attention of a human driver at all times. Campaign groups such as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control have been formed in opposition to the growing use of drones. But autonomous robots could do much more good than harm. Robot soldiers would not commit rape, burn down a village in anger or become erratic decision-makers amid the stress of combat. Driverless cars are very likely to be safer than ordinary vehicles, as autopilots have made planes safer. Sebastian Thrun, a pioneer in the field, reckons driverless cars could save 1m lives a year. Instead, society needs to develop ways of dealing with the ethics of robotics—and get going fast. In America states have been scrambling to pass laws covering driverless cars, which have been operating in a legal grey area as the technology runs ahead of legislation. It is clear that rules of the road are required in this difficult area, and not just for robots with wheels. More: http://www.economist.com/node/21556234 See also: http://www.economist.com/node/21556103 via Peter Asaro

Reposted a comment below __ There is something very strange about the idea of “forcing someone to share”. While it is certainly one way to look at the issue, there is something obviously contradictory about it, and I think it results in anomalies and mistakes when thinking about how networks develop. So let me give what I think is a more natural reading of what’s going on here. When you disable comments, you are limiting your own power to control the conversation. Far from forcing anyone to do anything, you are instead restraining your control over the situation. Limiting your own power is what makes room for others to fill that vacuum and take power themselves, which is what they are doing when they reshare. This isn’t a comfortable position from the old capitalist perspectives. Capitalists think success is purely a matter of control. So if success comes from getting others to reshare your work, and they reshare because you disable comments, then disabling comments must be a way of controlling the audience, right? That’s the logic behind the idea of “forcing to share”. That’s a capitalist approach to networks, but of course this logic is silly. The more obvious reading is that people don’t like to be controlled, so we have to learn to stop forcing them to do things because that’s not an effective organizational strategy. If they think you are forcing them to do anything they will be far less engaged and motivated to cooperate than if they are in control. If they feel like they are in control, then they will be far more willing to identify themselves with their labor. What this suggests is that a strategy of forcing users to share will probably backfire pretty seriously, especially if it is obvious that this method […]

Social Networks Over Time and the Invariants of Interaction Just as there are certain cognitive limits to the number of individuals one can have as part of one’s social network, it also appears that there are cognitive and temporal considerations for how humans manage their interactions. In particular, we find that the reported average closeness to all friends decreases as the number of one’s friends increases, suggesting an invariant total expenditure on social interaction [emphasis added]. An increase of one in the number of close social contacts was associated with a decrease of 0.03 in the average closeness of each individual contact on a scale where 0 = do not know and 1 = extremely close. An increase of two close contacts was associated with a decrease in closeness of nearly 0.06 (a substantial reduction on this scale). Because, in prior research, ties are typically modeled as either present or absent, with no strength information, these findings are some of the first of their kind. … We are embedded within networks, which are related to how we help others, and even to our health. But these network connections are not unbounded: we have a finite social attention span. As we gain more friends, we become less close to all of them. So this embeddedness in networks is a precious thing. Understand the implications of social connections and use them wisely. More: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/social-networks-over-time-and-the-invariants-of-interaction/ Article: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036250 via +Kyle Crider

The Future of Learning This is a brilliant explanation of where #gamification and #education intersect, and why the internet has suddenly rendered hundreds of years of institutional education obsolete. I very strongly think that the teacher-student dynamic is absolutely essential in the educational process. This video emphasizes the places where teachers should step aside, and I agree with everything said here. But I think we should still be thinking about what role teachers (not just programmers and game designers) should have in overseeing and managing the development of the students. I’ve been running web-based courses from within a brick-and-mortar university setting since 2005, first at the University of Illinois, and then at Illinois state. Nothing too fancy; we ran a collaborative WordPress blog with regular posting and commenting requirements. I set due dates and formats, but I usually let the students pick their own topics to write on. You can see the blog from my last phil mind class here: http://phil238s12.http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/ The most recent posts were scrambles for extra credit, but there’s lots of student engagement on the blog, and I think the format was a huge success. I stayed pretty hands-off on the website, but that’s because I had 3 hours a week of their undivided attention in the classroom. I used that time to keep the learning community unified as a community; it was the lectures that set the tone and issues that informed their own free blogging activity. I think this kind of unified learning community is important, and I think the teacher has an important role to play in its unification. So although there are great models being discussed in this video, I think they might be made that much stronger by finding ways to adapt the teaching process to the future of learning. I have […]

The Handshake Protocol via +Jennifer Ouellette “This is a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. “A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about 300 to 3,300 hertz,” Glenn Fleishman explained in the Times back in 1998. “The modem works within these limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines.” What you’re hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you’re hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.” More: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-mechanics-and-meaning-of-that-ol-dial-up-modem-sound/257816/ ___________ The #handshake protocol is the way we got our machines to talk to each other. Now there is more machine conversations happening online than human conversations. Yet humanity is so generous that we’d turn these grating noises not meant for us into fond memories, and even music. Consider Aphex Twin’s Corn Mouth: http://vimeo.com/20505006 From a review of the album: “Make no mistake, this is NOT dance music. But it is music, and more importantly music generated by technological devices. And in an industry where such devices amount to incesant counting 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, James taps out secret messages to us in what can only be described and this incredible, ambient morse code.” The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding”

John Baez originally shared this post: Q: What’s negative information? A: I could tell you, but then you’d know even less… Just kidding. In 2005 Michal Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim and Andreas Winter wrote a nice paper on negative information. I find it a bit easier to think about entropy. Entropy is the information you’re missing about the precise details of a system. For example, if I have a coin under my hand and you can’t see which side it up, you’ll say it has an entropy of one bit. Suppose you have a big physical system B and some part of it, say A. In classical mechanics the entropy of B is always bigger than that of A: S(B) ? S(A) where S means ‘entropy’. In particular, if we know everything we can about B, we know all we can about A. In quantum mechanics this isn’t true, so S(B) – S(A) can be negative. For example, it’s possible to have an entangled pair of electrons with no entropy, where if we look at either one, it has an entropy of one bit: we don’t know if it’s spin is up or down. The paper by Horodecki, Oppenheim and Winter studied the implications of negative information for communication. There was a popularization here: Quantum information can be negative, Phys.org, 4 August 2005, http://phys.org/news5621.html but I understood less after reading it than before, so I decided to write this. Puzzle: why do physicists use S to stand for entropy? [quant-ph/0505062] Quantum information can be negative Abstract: Given an unknown quantum state distributed over two systems, we determine how much quantum communication is needed to transfer the full state to one system. This communication measures the &…

The Eulerizer Our goal is to reveal temporal variations in videos that are difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye and display them in an indicative manner. Our method, which we call Eulerian Video Magnification, takes a standard video sequence as input, and applies spatial decomposition, followed by temporal filtering to the frames. The resulting signal is then amplified to reveal hidden information. Using our method, we are able to visualize the flow of blood as it fills the face and also to amplify and reveal small motions. Our technique can run in real time to show phenomena occurring at temporal frequencies selected by the user. More: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/ via +Tim O’Reilly ___________ Check out the infant video at 1:52. With just video input, you can get a direct visualization of vital signs. Simply amazing. http://youtu.be/ONZcjs1Pjmk