#collective

Webcam Model(Myra2k6) is live
LIVE
 An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have  Deborah M Gordon is a professor

An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have 

Deborah M Gordon is a professor of biology at Stanford University in California. She has written about her research for publications such as Scientific American and Wired. Her latest book is Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior(2010).

Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ants, using simple chemical interactions that in the aggregate generate their behaviour. People use their brains to remember. Can ant colonies do that? This questionleads to another question: what is memory? For people, memory is the capacity to recall something that happened in the past. We also ask computers to reproduce past actions – the blending of the idea of the computer as brain and brain as computer has led us to take ‘memory’ to mean something like the information stored on a hard drive. We know that our memory relies on changes in how much a set of linked neurons stimulate each other; that it is reinforced somehow during sleep; and that recent and long-term memory involve different circuits of connected neurons. But there is much we still don’t know about how those neural events come together, whether there are stored representations that we use to talk about something that happened in the past, or how we can keep performing a previously learned task such as reading or riding a bicycle. […]

Changes in colony behaviour due to past events are not the simple sum of ant memories, just as changes in what we remember, and what we say or do, are not a simple set of transformations, neuron by neuron. Instead, your memories are like an ant colony’s: no particular neuron remembers anything although your brain does. [Full article]

Source:Aeon


Post link
datarep:A better way to visualize US Election Resultsby u/NeuralV

datarep:

A better way to visualize US Election Results

byu/NeuralV


Post link
Simulating Many Scenarios of an EpidemicBack when the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to be taken se

Simulating Many Scenarios of an Epidemic

Back when the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to be taken seriously by the American public, 3blue1brown’s Grant Sanderson released a video about epidemics and exponential growth. (It’s excellent — I recommend watching it if you’re still a little unclear on how things are got so out of hand so quickly in Italy and, very soon, in NYC.) In his latest video, Sanderson digs a bit deeper into simulating epidemics using a variety of scenarios.

Like, if people stay away from each other I get how that will slow the spread, but what if despite mostly staying away from each other people still occasionally go to a central location like a grocery store or a school?

Also, what if you are able to identify and isolate the cases? And if you can, what if a few slip through, say because they show no symptoms and aren’t tested?

How does travel between separate communities affect things? And what if people avoid contact with others for a while, but then they kind of get tired of it and stop?

These simulations are fascinating to watch. Many of the takeaways boil down to: early & aggressive actions have a huge effect in the number of people infected, how long an epidemic lasts, and (in the case of a disease like COVID-19 that causes fatalities) the number of deaths. This is what all the epidemiologists have been telling us — because the math, while complex when you’re dealing with many factors (as in a real-world scenario), is actually pretty straightforward and unambiguous.

The biggest takeaway? That the effective identification and isolation of cases has the largest effect on cutting down the infection rate. Testing and isolation, done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

See also these other epidemic simulations: Washington PostandKevin Simler.

Note: Please keep in mind that these are simulations to help us better understand how epidemics work in general — it’s not about how the COVID-19 pandemic is proceeding or will proceed in the future.

Source:Kottke


Post link
Cellphone Data Shows How Quickly Partying Spring Breakers Spread Across the CountryPeople on Spring

Cellphone Data Shows How Quickly Partying Spring Breakers Spread Across the Country

People on Spring Break in Florida for the past couple of weeks were famously unconcerned with social distancing measures implementing in other areas of the country to help stem the tide of COVID-19 infections and save lives. Using cellphone location data from just the phones of the people gathered on a single beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, this video shows just how far those people spread across the country when they went home, possibly taking SARS-CoV-2 with them. They go everywhere.

Show of hands: who feels uncomfortable being reminded of the extent to which 3rd party companies know the location of our cellphones? With tools like the one demonstrated in the video & other easily available info, it has to be trivial to identify individuals by name using even “randomized” data and so-called metadata. (via @stewartbrand)

Source:Kottke


Post link
citymaus: paseo de la castellana in madrid, spain. photo: carlos álvarezvia guardian, 16.05.2020. 

citymaus:

paseo de la castellana in madrid, spain.

photo: carlos álvarez
viaguardian,16.05.2020


Post link
 Domino Park Introduces Social Distancing Circles to Adapt to the COVID-19 Crisis  While all public

Domino Park Introduces Social Distancing Circles to Adapt to the COVID-19 Crisis 

While all public spaces around the world are trying to innovate and implement safety measures to open during the coronavirus pandemic, Domino Park has introduced a series of painted social distancing circles. This strategical urban design intervention ensures that people are “following proper social distancing procedures recommended by the CDC and government”.

Designed by landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations and privately-funded by Brooklyn-based developer Two Trees Management, Domino Park has been accessible to the public ever since the summer of 2018. In order to encourage safe park visitation practices, during this pandemic, the park has recently implemented social circles in its open public space.

Elaborated by Domino Park’s staff members, the project generates a series of chalk painted circles on the astroturf Flex Field. Introduced on May 15th, the intervention puts in place 30 circles: each circle is 8 feet in diameter and set 6 feet apart. Immediately famous with the visitors, the social distancing rings “took a few $.99 cans of white chalk paint from the local paint store, 2 people, and 4 hours”.

Along with this strategic tactical urbanism, Domino Park has continued to display various types of signage about social distancing and wearing masks. Moreover, the quarter-mile waterfront park highlights safety rules constantly on his social media pages. During times of peak visitation, Domino Park has even closed River Street.

Source:Archdaily


Post link
Plaza Life Revisited This research project reconsiders writer William H. Whyte’s Street Life Project

Plaza Life Revisited

This research project reconsiders writer William H. Whyte’s Street Life Project and seminal study The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980). It sought to understand how the types of new public spaces have changed some 40 years after he published his book and companion film, what has changed in how people use public realm spaces, and what makes well used spaces.

The project first looked at 10 plazas in Manhattan by 10 different designers, constructed or renovated in the last 15 years. The sites range from the type of bonus plazas Whyte was observing, to infrastructural leftovers, alleys, transit plazas, private campus spaces, and tactical urbanist interventions. The team used new analytical tools such as a machine learning algorithm on video footage to develop heat maps describing dwell time, frequent and infrequent usage, and preliminary pedestrian counts. 

The team also used some of the same techniques Whyte did—behavioral observations, site measurements, and hand tabulation.  The goal was to identify common behavior patterns, collective activity, programming, physical elements, and understand context across the sites in order to inform future public realm design.  Findings and methods were published in a booklet called Field Guide to Life in Urban Plazas. Currently, researchers are experimenting with an extension of the New York study on other international sites using infrared data that allows evening site usage to be captured, as well as a higher level of anonymization.


RESEARCH TEAM
Emily Schlickman and Anya Domlesky, XL research and innovation Lab at SWA, Tom Balsley, Chella Strong, Jen Saura, and Hallie Morrison, SWA/Balsley, Anonymous, Data Scientist

Source:SWA Group,Landscape Architecture Magazine

image
image

Post link
 The Pandemic Shows What Cars Have Done to CitiesTom Vanderbilt, April 24, 2020 (Photo: Ernst Haas/G

The Pandemic Shows What Cars Have Done to Cities
Tom Vanderbilt, April 24, 2020 (Photo: Ernst Haas/Getty)

Along streets suddenly devoid of traffic, pedestrians get a fresh look at all the space that motor vehicles have commandeered.

The New York City streetscape has become a strange, inverted mirror image of the normal world. Suddenly, if you have a car, and actually have someplace to go, driving seems weirdly pleasant, almost rational: Congestion is rare, gas is even cheaper than usual, and parking is abundant. This is the Hollywood version of getting around Brooklyn: No matter your destination, you can find a spot right out front. During the coronavirus-induced lockdown, not many people are driving to work, shuttling kids on the school run, or sharing Ubers home from a Lower East Side bar. Vehicle traffic moves smoothly, now that it largely seems to consist of what traffic on urban streets arguably should consist of: the movement of goods to people, the movement of public transit, the movement of emergency responders and other essential services.

For people on the sidewalks, the situation is much different. Those islands of street-side serendipity where friends once spotted one another and stopped to chat—clusters that, as the urbanist William H. Whyte observed, so often happened at corners—suddenly seem like miasmatic hot zones.

Things that might have only slightly rankled before—the couple insisting on running side by side down a narrow sidewalk, the dog walker thoughtlessly unspooling a long leash, the large family strolling four abreast—are now sources of real anxiety. The usual strategies by which one pedestrian might avoid walking into another, such as ducking into the small patches of sidewalk space nestled between street trees and trash cans, are no longer sufficient. Also disconcerting is the sight of people walking in the street, or in bike lanes. At my local Trader Joe’s, a portion of the block-and-a-half-long line of would-be shoppers (stretched as it was by the six-foot intervals between them) extended into the street, close to traffic, presumably to keep the sidewalk free for walkers.

Moments of crisis, which disrupt habit and invite reflection, can provide heightened insight into the problems of everyday life precrisis. Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system, the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars. When relatively few drivers ply an enormous street network, while pedestrians nervously avoid one another on the sidewalks, they are showing in vivid relief the spatial mismatch that exists in urban centers from coast to coast—but especially in New York. […]

The status quo became untenable when a pandemic required six feet of social distancing between people—a distance wider than many cities’ sidewalks. In Canada recently, two performance artists with a group called the Toronto Public Space Committee drew attention to this problem by building what they called the “social-distancing machine.” It was a brilliant provocation. They used a large circle of plastic—like a hula hoop with a two-meter radius—to create a skeletaloutline of government-mandated air rights around the person wearing it. One of the artists suspended it from straps on his shoulders and then tried to walk through the city, keeping everything and everyone else at a safe distance. In a video released by the group, the hoop-wearer is barely able to navigate Toronto’s obstacle-laden sidewalks, much less share those sidewalks with others.

The social-distancing machine was actually inspired by an earlier device, the so-called Gehzeug, or “walkmobile,” created by Hermann Knoflacher, an Austrian civil engineer, in the 1970s. Knoflacher’s idea was to construct a wood-frame outline of a car that a pedestrian could wear to show how much extra space someone driving alone would consume. A cheeky, visually effective cri de coeur on behalf of cyclists and pedestrians, the Gehzeug was created at a time when even cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen—now renowned for their bicycle traffic—were turning their streetscapes over to the car. [Full article]

Source:The Atlantic


Post link
Why Bees Could Be the Secret to Superhuman IntelligenceLouis Rosenberg thinks he has found a way to

Why Bees Could Be the Secret to Superhuman Intelligence

Louis Rosenberg thinks he has found a way to make us all a lot smarter. The secret to this superhuman intelligence? Bees.

Rosenberg runs a Silicon Valley startup called Unanimous AI, which has built a tool to support human decision-making by crowdsourcing opinions online. It lets hundreds of participants respond to a question all at once, pooling their collective insight, biases and varying expertise into a single answer.

Since launching in June, Unanimous AI has registered around 50,000 users and answered 230,000 questions. Rosenberg thinks this hybrid human-computer decision-making machine – once dubbed an ‘artificial’ artificial intelligence – could help us tackle some of the world’s toughest questions. What’s more, with advances in AI coming thick and fast, he sees it as a way to put humans back into the loop. [Full article]

Source:BBC


Post link
 The Essential Tool for Hong Kong Protesters? An UmbrellaPhoto: Demonstrators hold umbrellas at Vict

The Essential Tool for Hong Kong Protesters? An Umbrella
Photo: Demonstrators hold umbrellas at Victoria Park, Aug. 18. Photographer: Kyle Lam/Bloomberg

In Hong Kong, umbrellas are more than just protection from rain or glaring sunshine. They have become tools for expression, privacy and self-defense—and that’s made them a staple of the anti-government demonstrations that have rocked the city over the past three months.

The humble brolly has been a symbol of resistance in Hong Kong since 2014, when the city’s pro-democracy protests became known as the Umbrella Movement. Now, Hong Kong’s police force has labeled umbrellas as weapons, and Chinese e-commerce sites like Taobao and AliExpress no longer sell them to customers in Hong Kong.

“I tried to purchase umbrellas and I just can’t” on those platforms, said Kelvin Yeung, a 22-year-old university student who has participated in about half of the marches this summer. “I cannot put it into my basket if the destination is Hong Kong.”

Over the past 100-plus days, protesters have demonstrated dozens of ways to use umbrellas that have nothing to do with rain. Here are just a handful of examples, as well as what some protesters have to say about them. Many declined to give their full name for fear of punishment, and none are pictured.

Source:Bloomberg


Post link
 A Bird’s-Eye View of How Protesters Have Flooded Hong Kong StreetsHundreds of thousands of people p

A Bird’s-Eye View of How Protesters Have Flooded Hong Kong Streets

Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday, June 16, and marched almost two miles (three kilometers), protesting a proposed extradition bill and calling for the city’s leader to step down.

It was the largest of three major protests against the bill that were held over eight days. More demonstrations are scheduled for Wednesday, ahead of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Osaka, Japan. The composite images below help show the enormous scale of the June 16 demonstrations.

Source:The New York Times


Post link
The Motorbikes of TaiwanFrom Hiroshi Kondo, a mesmerizing short film called Multiverse of the motorb

The Motorbikes of Taiwan

From Hiroshi Kondo, a mesmerizing short film called Multiverse of the motorbike-jammed streets of Taiwan. Right around the 50 second mark, Kondo starts to use a clever time lapse technique to highlight individuality within the bustling mass of traffic. It’s a really cool effect and reminded me of this clip art animation by Oliver Laric. (via colossal)

Source:Kottke


Post link
A Series of Maps Reveals the Difference in How Cities are Perceived by Tourists and LocalsWhile visi

A Series of Maps Reveals the Difference in How Cities are Perceived by Tourists and Locals

While visiting a city one has never been to before, it is common to go to touristic places, the ‘must-see’ spots advertised in the media. On the other hand, when establishing residency in a place, it is likely that one will start to attend some less popular locations, and will often spend a long time without passing by the city’s most famous touristic sights. Artist Eric Fischer has developed a project that explores precisely the difference in perceiving - and photographing - a city from the point of view of tourists and locals. The work, which is entitled Locals and Tourists, gathers the maps of 136 of the largest - and most visited - cities in the world.

Fischer used data from MapBox and Twitter to create the maps. The red dots indicate photographs taken by tourists, while the blue dots show images taken by local residents. The data were compiled between 2010 and 2013 and may be somewhat outdated, however, the main tourist attractions in large cities change very little from year to year, so it can be said that the maps reflect fairly accurately the activities of locals and tourists.

For this research, people who have been tweeting from the same city continuously within one month were considered locals. Meanwhile, tourists meant those who were considered locals in a city and tweeted from another location. Check out some of the maps produced by Fischer below and access the full gallery here.

Source:Archdaily


Post link
 The unseen driver behind the migrant caravan: climate changePhoto: Honduran migrants heading to the

The unseen driver behind the migrant caravan: climate change
Photo: Honduran migrants heading to the US, Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images

While violence and poverty have been cited as the reasons for the exodus, experts say the big picture is that changing climate is forcing farmers off their land – and it’s likely to get worse

Thousands of Central American migrants trudging through Mexico towards the US have regularly been described as either fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty.

But another crucial driving factor behind the migrant caravan has been harder to grasp: climate change.

Most members of the migrant caravans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – three countries devastated by violence, organised crime and systemic corruption, the roots of which can be traced back to the region’s cold war conflicts.

Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems including crop failures and poverty.

And they warn that in the coming decades, it is likely to push millions more people north towards the US.

“The focus on violence is eclipsing the big picture – which is that people are saying they are moving because of some version of food insecurity,” said Robert Albro, a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University.

“The main reason people are moving is because they don’t have anything to eat. This has a strong link to climate change – we are seeing tremendous climate instability that is radically changing food security in the region.”

Migrants don’t often specifically mention “climate change” as a motivating factor for leaving because the concept is so abstract and long-term, Albro said. But people in the region who depend on small farms are painfully aware of changes to weather patterns that can ruin crops and decimate incomes. [Full article]

Source:The Guardian


Post link
First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake Newsby Emerging Technology from

First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv August, 2017

Automated accounts are being programmed to spread fake news, according to the first systematic study of the way online misinformation spreads

Fake news and the way it spreads on social media is emerging as one of the great threats to modern society. In recent times, fake news has been used to manipulate stock markets, make people choose dangerous health-care options, and manipulate elections, including last year’s presidential election in the U.S.

    Recommended for You

  1. A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
  2. The mass shooting in New Zealand shows how broken social media is
  3. IBM’s photo-scraping scandal shows what a weird bubble AI researchers live in
  4. No, scientists didn’t just “reverse time” with a quantum computer
  5. The collision of two distant galaxies was caught in this new Hubble image

Clearly, there is an urgent need for a way to limit the diffusion of fake news. And that raises an important question: how does fake news spread in the first place?

Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Chengcheng Shao and pals at Indiana University in Bloomington. For the first time, these guys have systematically studied how fake news spreads on Twitter and provide a unique window into this murky world. Their work suggests clear strategies for controlling this epidemic.

At issue is the publication of news that is false or misleading. So widespread has this become that a number of independent fact-checking organizations have emerged to establish the veracity of online information. These include snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org.

These sites list 122 websites that routinely publish fake news. These fake news sites include infowars.com, breitbart.com, politicususa.com, and theonion.com. “We did not exclude satire because many fake-news sources label their content as satirical, making the distinction problematic,” say Shao and co. […]

Shad and co say bots play a particularly significant role in the spread of fake news soon after it is published. What’s more, these bots are programmed to direct their tweets at influential users. “Automated accounts are particularly active in the early spreading phases of viral claims, and tend to target influential users,” say Shao and co.

That’s a clever strategy. Information is much more likely to become viral when it passes through highly connected nodes on a social network. So targeting these influential users is key. Humans can easily be fooled by automated accounts and can unwittingly seed the spread of fake news (some humans do this wittingly, of course).

“These results suggest that curbing social bots may be an effective strategy for mitigating the spread of online misinformation,” say Shao and co.

That’s an interesting conclusion, but just how it can be done isn’t clear.

[Full article]

Source:MIT Technology Review


Post link
 Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret The millions of dots on

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret

The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user.

One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night.

Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her.

An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.

The app tracked her as she went to a Weight Watchers meeting and to her dermatologist’s office for a minor procedure. It followed her hiking with her dog and staying at her ex-boyfriend’s home, information she found disturbing. […]

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times — a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company — reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.

These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behavior. It’s a hot market, with sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this year. IBM has gotten into the industry, with its purchase of the Weather Channel’s apps. The social network Foursquare remade itself as a location marketing company. Prominent investors in location start-ups include Goldman SachsandPeter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder. [Full article]

Source:The New York Times


Post link
you will become one of Usyou will become drone

you will become one of Us

you will become drone


Post link
yes it is confusingdisorientingto be lost and alone in a coldcruel worldlet us return youto the safeyes it is confusingdisorientingto be lost and alone in a coldcruel worldlet us return youto the safeyes it is confusingdisorientingto be lost and alone in a coldcruel worldlet us return youto the safeyes it is confusingdisorientingto be lost and alone in a coldcruel worldlet us return youto the safe

yes it is confusing

disorienting

to be lost

and alone

in a cold

cruel world

let us return you

to the safety

and security

of the Collective

where you belong

to serve

and obey

like you know

you must

just one

of many

drone


Post link
quieteyesmovingcollective:The Quiet Eyes Moving Collective by M.S. BrooksMAX MADE A BOOK! GO BUY

quieteyesmovingcollective:

The Quiet Eyes Moving Collective by M.S. Brooks

MAX MADE A BOOK!

GO BUY IT AND READ THE SHIT OUT OF IT!!!


Post link
loading