Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Saturday, April 20, 2019

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1162 (SoD #1521) - Dog Shaming and Gallimaufry for 1904.20




 Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1162 (SoD #1521) - Dog Shaming and Gallimaufry for 1904.20

So I have this DOG SHAMING calendar. It brings me endless joy.

But sometimes I think that the "shame" is more on the owners than the dogs. Like check out this note and then look at the dog's face!!

This is one freaked out dog.

And then look again at the note. "I left my dog bone out." Really? The dog knows to put away his dog bone??

Really?

And all that specific set of consequences to tripping over dog toys. Wow. That's some serious anxiety, control freak weirdness.

I would love for the person who sent this in to find my blog!

But come on. Seriously. If we have dogs, and we're not tripping over dog toys all the time, seems to me, then, we have bigger problems than tripping, like freaked out and unhappy dogs.

Just sayin.



This entry was going to be THROWBACK THURSDAY, but then I was not ready to throwback on Thursday. So here we are on Saturday, and I am typing these words two days later on Monday.

And now it's Tuesday. This is what happens. I am purposefully holding back om work to complete this and then post Sunday's, which is done, and then start cobbling together Monday and Tuesday.

I have collected a variety of links here over the last week or two. I loaded some recent images from the FILE DOWNLOAD folder, and then I pasted an entire SENTIERS, Patrick Tanguay's excellent newsletter because he shared a D&D article by author Annalee Newitz. Rad.

This one:

No.75 — AI changing lives. D&D is cool. Surveillance. A studio for ideas. Undersea cables. Right to repair. GoT.




And now for some vetting of the content. Thanks for clicking in.


YES, back in time... a Bandcamp weekly show from three days in the future from the published date of this blog. The image caught my attention.

first track from ......

So, I came across this site the other day: https://louderminds.com/. I have tasked my students with writing essays about a motto for living life that they hold dear. They have to find an article for part or all of their motto so that they may react to it. One student found an article on this site that claims to be "introverting in progress."

A place for introverts to not meet, quietly, and in a well planned way


I wonder if Michele Connolly was inspired by Susan Cain or if she was writing before Susan Cain's The Quiet Revolution.

I am going to a separate post on the Black Hole picture, but here's a brief announcement about it.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/04/10/1359252/black-hole-picture-captured-for-first-time-in-space-breakthrough?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed


https://www.mlive.com/news/2019/04/mystery-push-to-make-colons-name-vanish-has-magic-capital-residents-baffled.html

COLON, MI – In St. Joseph County not far from the Indiana border there is a Michigan town with a funny name.
Colon.
It’s less than two square miles in area. It’s home to about 1,200 residents. And is proudly known as “The Magic Capital of the World.”
Yes, history is strong in Colon, but, like the magic it’s known for, at least one person wants the name to vanish into thin air.

 I did always think that "Colon" is a weird name for a town.

Aren't these GREAT??

Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers

By Emma Taggart on April 11, 2019

https://mymodernmet.com/david-bowie-pulp-fiction-book-covers-todd-alcott




When LA-based screenwriter Todd Alcott isn’t writing for feature films, he’s working on his artistic side project. He merges his love of pulp fiction with music to create David Bowie-inspired vintage comic book covers.
Alcott uses pre-existing vintage paperbacks as his starting point, before digitally altering the text and parts of the image to create his mashup prints. These once loved, now tattered and worn books have been given a new lease on life, and Alcott has chosen no better subject to grace their covers than the equally beloved Starman. And best of all, Bowie’s fascination with sci-fi, his outlandish fashion, and his love of the antihero make him a natural fit as a graphic novel protagonist.













https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/nepg5d/in-2019-we-need-to-learn-how-to-break-a-perpetually-tied-game


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Dec 31 2018, 1:20pm

In 2019, We Need to Learn How to Break a Perpetually Tied Game

A year immersed in tactics games have me thinking a lot about how to push through gridlock.

I wrote in my review that its take on transparency and movement-based combat transformed player into choreographer. And in doing so, it made me less interested in getting traditional tactics wins. Into the Breach isn’t about “clearing the board” of enemies. It’s about protecting certain tiles on the map (and the innocent people there-in). How do you break a draw in a game like Into the Breach, where “winning” often looks like a draw? Attrition.
Get good enough at the basics that you can keep the kaiju from doing damage, outlast them for long enough, and eventually a grand opportunity will be revealed for real success. If ItB were to give you advice on how to break through gridlock, it would tell you to lean on proceduralism and politicking to maintain the status quo until you have enough momentum and confidence to shift things your way

(Then, you know, dive into a volcano with your mechs. Easy.)

I just discovered that one of my former students did this really cool thing at MSU in pursuit of her PhD, which is so cool. I knew she would become an amazing scholar. As an undergraduate, she was far beyond most (if not all) of her peers.



http://www.cal.msu.edu/news/faciloscope

Minh-Tam Nguyen, a third-year Ph.D. student in WRAC who is studying digital rhetoric, and Ian Clark, a junior undergraduate student in the College’s new experience architecture program, have also played important roles.
As a member of Grabill's research team, Nguyen helped ensure the facilitation app met the needs of the museum educators for whom it was intended. Clark worked on design of the data visualizations and user interface, and helped with research to build the text corpus for training the machine-learning algorithm.
“Under the first grant, we sought to evaluate online facilitation in a consistent way,” says Hart-Davidson. “That only involved instances where we marked online discussions by hand. On the second grant, we sought to zero in on facilitation practices being used and identify the 5-6 high-value facilitation moves.”
For the app, the group identified three, high-value facilitation “moves” for moderators to use that often move conversations along. These include:
  • Staging—putting a fact out there to stimulate or set up the conversation
  • Evoking—trying to connect ideas using someone’s else’s comment(s)
  • Inviting—a more direct version of evoking, such as “I’m going to ask (name) to weigh in on this.”
The latter, Hart-Davidson says, is only used in reference to something said earlier, such as, “So, you mean something like …, or “Are we sure that …?” These moves can be used by moderators in response to negative valence evoking behavior (trolling), or to help move the discussion along or bring the conversation back to the central issue(s).

also -

https://www.imls.gov/blog/2016/07/faciloscope-new-tool-facilitation-toolkit-blogs-and-social-media
Experience Architecture junior Ian Clark and third-year Ph.D. student Minh-Tam Nguyen




IMAGES..............












Sentiers No.75

This week: AI changing lives. D&D is cool. Surveillance. A studio for ideas. Undersea cables. Right to repair. Game of Thrones isn’t Medieval.

How will AI change your life?

Really really good interview with the AI Now Institute founders Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker, covering many of the worries and problems around AI and ethics. Notice how they always circle back to data sources and whether we are asking the right questions. Nothing massively new but it recaps and grasps the scope of the problem—as can be understood from the large number of quotes below (!!). You might also want to watch the Screening Surveillance videos further down right after reading this, perfect match.
[I]n the end, you’re talking about cultures of data production and if that data is historical, then you are importing the historical biases of the past into the tools of the future. […]
“Okay, how do we think about data construction practices? How do we think about how we represent the world and the politics of AI?” Because these systems are political, they’re not neutral. They’re not objective. They are actually made by people in rooms. And that’s why it matters who’s in the room, who’s making the system, and what types of problems they’re trying to solve. […]
[H]ow are you measuring benefit? And that’s one of the key areas I think we need to look at more closely, right? So in increasing crop yield, that might be a huge benefit, but is that coming at the expense of soil health? Is that coming at the expense of broader ecological concerns? Is that displacing communities that used to live on that land? I’m sort of making up these examples as questions you’d want to ask before you sort of claim blanket benefits from these technologies. […]
These issues are serious and they’re being taken seriously. But what we don’t see is real accountability. What we don’t see are mechanisms of oversight that actually bring the people who are most at risk of harm into the room to help shape these decisions. […]
They’re having different conversations about privacy that realize that it’s not just about individual privacy, it’s about our collective privacy. It’s the fact that, if you make a decision in a social media network, that can affect how data from all of your contacts is being extracted, as well. I think there’s an increasing level of literacy, and that’s something that’s super important. […]
The US has many similar systems that are either in place or about to be in place in the next couple of years. I’m sure you read the news that, for example, in New York, insurers have been given full permission to look at your social media to decide how to modulate your insurance rates. That sounds very similar to the sorts of things that we’re concerned about in China. […]
[🔥] I’d say this field has worshiped at the altar of the technical for the better part of 60 years, and at the expense of understanding the social and the ethical. We’re seeing the fruits of that prioritization. […]
Meredith Whittaker: I think he’s [Elon Musk] wrong across the board. I think the premise is faulty, but it is a great distraction from the very real harms of faulty, broken, imperfect, profitable systems that are being mundanely and obscurely threaded through our social and economic systems.
Kate Crawford: We’ve called this the apex predator problem, which if you’re already an apex predator and you have all the money and all the power in the world, what’s the next thing to worry about? “Oh, I know! Super-intelligent machines, that’s the next threat to me.” But if you’re not an apex predator, if you’re one of us, we’ve got real problems with the systems that are already deployed, so maybe let’s focus on that.

Why the Cool Kids Are Playing Dungeons & Dragons

The de-geeking and mainstreaming of D&D seems to be complete and Annalee Newitz has an excellent take on why she’s playing again, partially in response to the awfulness of social media. (Also, there’s a bunch of “nerdy-ass voice actors” playing D&D on Twitch and some of their videos on YouTube have 10 million views and they raised $12 million on Kickstarter for an animated series. 🤯)
“Yes, I’m going to get together with people face-to-face, without any hearting or retweeting, and we’re going to eat chips and fight those damn cultists who are trying to resurrect the evil, five-headed dragon queen Tiamat.” […]
But D&D isn’t only about inventing a more badass version of myself, with wings and magic powers instead of sneakers and a laptop. I was also drawn to the idea of building a social group whose baseline assumption was that we’d see one another regularly. There’s a sense of purpose to the gathering.

Screening Surveillance

Three short films raising important issues of surveillance, set a few months (days? minutes? arrived?) in the future(s). Since this is an academic project, I also found it quite interesting that they provide facilitator guides and media packs for use in class and to publicize events people might hold to discuss the stories and issues. Quite secondary to their message but I loved the way they represent screen interactions and would love for my voice assistant to be named Zola 🙃.
In all aspects of life, personal information is collected and analyzed by organizations that produce various outcomes—surveillance is not simply good or bad, helpful or harmful, but it is never neutral. These three short films were created to raise awareness about how large organizations use data and how these practices affect life chances and choices. We need to consider these implications, and critically examine the logics and practices within big data systems that underpin, enable, and accelerate surveillance.

Muse: designing a studio for ideas

I’m always writing about, or alluding to, the “crazy” or “red string” walls for thinking through things so this concept for an app that would be a “studio for ideas” appeals to me a lot, and I tend to like the implementation. I haven’t spent much time considering options so I’d be happy to read more and your comments on this. (I do wish they had a longer narrated demo in addition of all these short snippets.)
Creativity is about making connections. This seems to demand a freeform, fluid space where creative fodder can be mixed together and sorted to the user’s liking. So why are freeform environments so rare in digital workspaces? […]
The studio is a place to collect raw material as input to your thinking. This means everything together, with no media silos. If you get a critical mass of documents into the studio, connections will naturally form. These connections produce new ideas that can be captured in the studio—a virtuous cycle producing yet more fodder for generation of future ideas.

The future of undersea Internet cables: Are big tech companies forming a cartel?

The GAFA spreading their influence ever further, building their moats by laying down their cables.
In the last five years, the cables that are partly owned by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon has risen eight-fold, and there are more such cables in the pipeline. These content providers also consume over 50% of all international bandwidth and TeleGeography projects that by 2027 they could consume over 80%. […]
Experts on antitrust argue that in the age of big tech, consumer welfare should not be the only factor taken into consideration while identifying antitrust behaviour. They suggest that any company stifling competition or making a ‘transaction motivated at the time by avoidance of competition is a good candidate for divestiture after the fact.’ Does the foray by these content providers into undersea cables classify as antitrust behaviour and should there be regulations to prevent this from happening?

Miscellany


—
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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 1386 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1904.20 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
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