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MetaBroadcast, Walter Bosse and the Genius of British Woodwork

@HellicarLewis We loved meeting @MetaBroadcast today. Very very very interesting and lovely danishes too. #metaftw
@MetaBroadcast @HellicarLewis We had a lovely time, too, a serious case of ‘great minds…’. Also, we’ve a gift for you. pic.twitter.com/FIztNHNnne

At MetaBroadcast, we saw a few examples of Walter Bosse‘s work. They are doing some very interesting research into looking at the social activity surrounding broadcast content – and what information and insight can be derived from it.

A few months ago, the BBC screened “Carved with Love: The Genius of British Woodwork” – the highlight videos on their site are well worth a look.

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Meta Programming

YES!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_grammar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaprogramming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis

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The Anti-preneur manifesto, Anscombes Quartet and Deep Learning

 publishes the anti-preneur manifesto:

“I don’t want to be a designer, a marketer, an illustrator, a brander, a social media consultant, a multi-platform guru, an interface wizard, a writer of copy, a technological assistant, an applicator, an aesthetic king, a notable user, a profit-maximizer, a bottom-line analyzer, a meme generator, a hit tracker, a re-poster, a sponsored blogger, a starred commentator, an online retailer, a viral relayer, a handle, a font or a page. I don’t want to be linked in, tuned in, ‘liked’, incorporated, listed or programmed. 
I don’t want to be a brand, a representative, an ambassador, a bestseller or a chart-topper. I don’t want to be a human resource or part of your human capital.”

A beautiful example of why data visualisation is essential:

The Anscombe’s Quartet shows how four sets of data with identical simple summary statistics can vary considerably when graphed.

Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google.

“Last summer, I spent several months working with Google’s Knowledge team in Mountain View, working with Jeff Dean and an incredible group of scientists and engineers who have a real shot at making spectacular progress in machine learning. Together with two of my recent graduate students, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky (who won the 2012 ImageNet competition), I am betting on Google’s team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs. That means we’ll soon be joining Google to work with some of the smartest engineering minds to tackle some of the biggest challenges in computer science. I’ll remain part-time at the University of Toronto, where I still have a lot of excellent graduate students, but at Google I will get to see what we can do with very large-scale computation.”

Deep learning on a GooglePlex scale beckons…..

 

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Digital and Analogue

Analogue gives you infinite resolution. Digital gives you infinite variation.

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A Quantum Theory of Love

Is love a quantum entanglement? Do you start to share particles? When two are further apart, both feel the link just as strong. When someone passes away, is the entanglement still there on a quantum level?

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Strikingly, Le Wei at Google and Openwashing

I read about Strinkgly on Forbes recently – imagine a blogging service that worked like this? A single page that went on forever – it seems it’s just being used for more website content at the moment – path to profitability I suppose.

Le Wei is at Google now – working on Plus apparently. More on the project from Golan Levin’s site.

Karen Day pointed out this Kyle Van Hemert article at Fast Company about Evgeny Morozov‘s recent piece for the Times

“For many institutions, ‘open’ has become the new ‘green.’ And in the same way that companies will ‘greenwash’ their initiatives by invoking eco-friendly window dressing to hide less-palatable practices, there has also emerged a term to describe similar efforts to read ‘openness’ into situations and environments where it doesn’t exist: ‘openwashing.’

Alas, ‘openwashing,’ as catchy as it sounds, only questions the authenticity of ‘open’ initiatives; it doesn’t tell us what kinds of ‘openness,’ if any, are worth pursuing. We must differentiate the many different types of ‘open.'”

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EVO, Vale Tudo and Kilian Eng

How to watch EVO – the biggest digital fighting championship in the world. I don’t think it will be that long before real life boxing or American football is banned, is uninsurable or not taken up by the youth – EVO must be the replacement. It’s always a good sign when a subculture evolves its own slang. I guess I’m a “Stream Monster” now.

Vale Tudo seems to be the physical opposite of EVO.

KillianEng

Kilian Eng makes beautiful visual things. Wired Article. Behance. Tumblr. Clearly inspired (in the best way) by Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moebius.

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Tiles, The Police Helicopter as Travelling Salesman and an Application for finding Faces in Clouds

Tile helps you find things.

The Travelling Salesman Problem is a classic – I wonder if they use it to route Police helicopters in Hackney? Or patroll cars? Or Bobbies on the Beat? If they exist any more that is. Perhaps super criminals could use a series of spurious emergency calls to drag the network of Police officers away from an area of the city that they wanted to wreak havoc in.

There are many face recognition applications out there, but what about using them for false positives? Deliberately making an app to look for faces where there are none? In clouds or walls or hills? I’ve always wanted an augmented reality application that strips my world back to all the vertical lines, all the horizontal ones, all the circles or all the squares.

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HARP and HAARP, Howitzers and going an extra Dimension to find structure

Don’t confused Project HARP (High Altitude Research Project) with HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program).

HARP:
Project_Harp

HAARP:
High_Frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program_site

Mr. Gerald Bull certainly never gave up on his idea of using massive guns to launch vehicles into space – until he was assassinated. He also made one of the longest range Howitzers ever.

Cupurates are a copper containing materials whose superconductivity seems to confirm String Theory.

A useful iOS application for thinking about four dimensional geometry – it really helped me to see how to rotate a Tesseract in four dimensions of space.

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Magazines becoming Agencies, #Flock, Doodle3D and using Quartz Composer to Prototype

Magazines are becoming advertising or marketing agencies, or setting up spin offs:

Vice has Virtue.
Dazed has White Label.
It’s Nice That has INT Works.

How many readers of Vice realise that it’s partially owned by WPP? I wonder how they would react? Would they even care?

Who needs an agency these days? Companies can go direct to freelancers thanks to platforms like OnSite.

Berg announces more usage of their BERG Cloud with the release of #FLOCK, in collaboration with Twitter.

Doodle3D from Rick Companje – making 3D printing easy for everyone (especially kids).

Building Facebook Home with Quartz Composer from Dave O Brien.