http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012519123159732261.html With regard to the relativity of value, Karl Marx expressed this function of ideology in the clearest terms in Volume I of Capital: "... one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king" (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I. London: Penguin, 1974, p. 63). It is up to us to translate Marx's dialectical insight into a couple of simple formulas, according to which the balance of your influence is positive if you have more followers than the number of people you,… ]]> Mon, 21 May 2012 10:39:58 -0700 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012519123159732261.html http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-people-sexy-pictures-women.html Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. "What's unclear is, we don't actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects," says Philippe Bernard of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Bernard cowrote the new paper with Sarah Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi, and Olivier Klein. Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways. For example, while we're good at recognizing a whole face, just part of a face is a bit baffling.… ]]> Thu, 17 May 2012 03:28:58 -0700 http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-people-sexy-pictures-women.html http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/04/social-cell A single cell, such as a bacterium, is the simplest thing that can be alive. In addition to the materials from which it is constructed, it needs three features: a way of capturing energy (a metabolism), a way of reproducing (genes or something like genes) and a membrane that lets in what needs to come in and keeps out the rest. ]]> Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:46:07 -0700 http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/04/social-cell http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-data-mining-but-were-afraid-to-ask/255388//everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-data-mining-but-were-afraid-to-ask-alexander-furnas-technology-the-atlantic Essential knowledge! "Everything You Wanted to Know About Data Mining but Were Afraid to Ask" http://t.co/D8S8u6re @theatlantic – Pedro Monteiro (psesinando) http://twitter.com/psesinando/status/187280680881881088 ]]> Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:33:32 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-data-mining-but-were-afraid-to-ask/255388//everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-data-mining-but-were-afraid-to-ask-alexander-furnas-technology-the-atlantic http://chronicle.com/article/The-Battle-Over-Zomia/128845/ Over the past two millennia, "runaway" communities have put the "friction of terrain" between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a swidden agriculture system (sometimes known, pejoratively, as "slash and burn"), shifting fields from place to place, staggering harvests, and relying on root crops to hide their yields from any visiting tax collectors. They formed egalitarian societies so as not to have leaders who might sell them out to the state. And they turned their backs on literacy to avoid creating records that central governments could use to carry out onerous… ]]> Mon, 05 Sep 2011 05:20:41 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/The-Battle-Over-Zomia/128845/ http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/7996-bjork/ Björk's forthcoming Biophilia is an album. It's also an iPad app suite featuring interactive programs for each of its 10 songs... and a treatise on the natural world that involves everything from immense planets to tiny atoms... and a traveling exhibition that showcases one-of-a-kind instruments including a 10-foot bass-playing pendulum... and it's also an educational tool that aims to offer a modern take on music education, replacing notation and by-the-book theory with instinct and creativity. Biophilia-- due out later this year on One Little Indian/Nonesuch-- is many things. ]]> Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:02:18 -0700 http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/7996-bjork/ http://theeuropean-magazine.com/282-bostrom-nick/283-perfection-is-not-a-useful-concept Interview with Nick Bostrom

Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small.

If they have not ended human history until now, they are unlikely to have that effect in the near future. So the risks we should really worry about come from new developments. They introduce new factors with a lot of statistical uncertainty, and we cannot be confident that their risks are manageable. The potential of human action to do good and evil is larger than it… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:21:17 -0700 http://theeuropean-magazine.com/282-bostrom-nick/283-perfection-is-not-a-useful-concept http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/1044/ by Hito Steyerl

A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues in one way or another. But there is a much more interesting perspective: the politics of the field of art as a place of work.1 Simply look at what it does—not what it shows.
Amongst all other forms of art, fine art has been most closely linked to post-Fordist speculation, with bling, boom, and bust. Contemporary art is no unworldly discipline nestled away in some remote ivory tower. On the contrary, it is squarely placed in the neoliberal thick… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 08:19:16 -0700 http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/1044/ http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-22/bostonglobe/29571858_1_data-privacy-public-health Who owns the data in that cloud has been the subject of ferocious debate. It’s not all stored in one place, of course — our lives are tracked and documented by a diffuse assortment of entities that includes private companies like Google and Visa, as well as governmental agencies like the IRS, the Department of Education, and the Census Bureau. Up to now, the public conversation on this kind of data has taken the form of an argument about privacy rights, with legal scholars, computer scientists, and others arguing for tighter restrictions on how our data is used by companies… ]]> Mon, 30 May 2011 15:11:01 -0700 http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-22/bostonglobe/29571858_1_data-privacy-public-health http://www.airtightinteractive.com/demos/js/imageglitcher/ Offsets images automatically to create simple, but effective glitches ]]> Wed, 25 May 2011 08:34:19 -0700 http://www.airtightinteractive.com/demos/js/imageglitcher/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQyQnXrLb0&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 15 May 2011 06:19:15 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQyQnXrLb0&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 15 May 2011 03:29:37 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201105/werner-herzog-profile-cave-of-forgotten-dreams The daring German filmmaker Werner Herzog once walked a thousand miles to propose to a woman. He once plotted to firebomb his leading man's house and once ate his own shoe to square a bet. He once got shot in the stomach during a TV interview, then insisted on finishing. And despite it all, his latest adventure—a 3-D documentary about cave paintings—still sounds batshit crazy. Chris Heath goes spelunking deep inside the mind of modern cinema's oddest icon ]]> Mon, 02 May 2011 16:35:29 -0700 http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201105/werner-herzog-profile-cave-of-forgotten-dreams http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L1tr0PIx20&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Mon, 02 May 2011 03:11:07 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L1tr0PIx20&feature=youtube_gdata http://huffduffer.com/jshield/40206 Eleanor Longden started to hear voices in her head when she was at university and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic - a label she totally rejects. Now she is a high achieving academic. What started the voices and how did she get to a point where she not only lives happily with the voices that still exist but also works with others who have the same experience? With contributions from writer Graham Linehan and comedian Josie Long. ]]> Sun, 01 May 2011 11:43:38 -0700 http://huffduffer.com/jshield/40206 http://www.npr.org/2011/04/08/135241869/connecting-science-and-art?sc=emaf Science and art often seem to develop in separate silos, but many thinkers are inspired by both. Novelist Cormac McCarthy, filmmaker Werner Herzog and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog's new film on the earliest known cave paintings. ]]> Thu, 21 Apr 2011 15:31:07 -0700 http://www.npr.org/2011/04/08/135241869/connecting-science-and-art?sc=emaf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SJsk1L2RUg&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 08 Apr 2011 03:41:24 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SJsk1L2RUg&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information to a first principle in the sciences over the last half-century or so. It’s a grand narrative if ever there was one, but its key moment can be pinpointed to 1948, when Claude Shannon, a young mathematician with a background in cryptography and telephony, published a paper called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in a Bell Labs technical journal. For Shannon, communication was purely a matter of sending a message… ]]> Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:41:08 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked. In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance. Gleick—whose first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award finalist and whose biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton were both short-listed for the Pulitzer—spent seven years compiling his epic account. Wired spoke… ]]> Sun, 06 Mar 2011 04:43:51 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC0sR5_NTFo&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:49:49 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC0sR5_NTFo&feature=youtube_gdata