Watch this. The comparison between environments we build on screens and the environments we’ve built in the physical wold is brilliant. The whole thing is great.

He also does a nice profile of Robert Irwin in there, who is a favorite of mine.

(via dowithless)

February 12, 2012 at 6:32 pm

Source: brycedotvc
Contemporary Geoglyphs by Jocelyn Duke

Contemporary Geoglyphs by Jocelyn Duke

February 10, 2012 at 11:53 am

Source: jocelynduke.com
Best book.

Best book.

February 8, 2012 at 11:50 am

Source: vastandgrand

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Facebook’s S-1 Filing

Facebook officially asserts itself as a non-state actor.

February 2, 2012 at 3:21 pm
newyorker: The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people? The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country. - In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm Photograph by Steve Liss. This is important. Remember this every time someone carelessly talks about the “land of the free.” We need to deserve to call ourselves that. Right now, we do not.

newyorker:

The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm

Photograph by Steve Liss.

This is important. Remember this every time someone carelessly talks about the “land of the free.” We need to deserve to call ourselves that. Right now, we do not.

January 26, 2012 at 5:50 pm

Source: newyorker.com
In theory, you can use crowdsourcing to get the metadata, but so far I’ve not had a lot of luck persuading thousands of people to spend their time doing that kind of work.

Carl Malamud Answers: Goading the Government To Make Public Data Public - Slashdot

—

Crowdsourcing LOL.

January 26, 2012 at 11:10 am
The Atlantic: The Zynga Abyss →

dbreunig:

90wpm:

The Atlantic published an excerpt from my essay for Distance today. It’s a little over 1500 words, and covers some of the main points in the essay.

It also includes a fantastic photoshopped stock photo of a lab rat playing FarmVille in a Skinner box.

Here’s a small snip:

In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian mathematician named Ivan Pavlov was analyzing dogs’ saliva output over time. Pavlov noticed that dogs tended to salivate more before eating and that merely the sight of a white lab coat would induce salivation — even if no food was on the way. So he tried ringing a bell before presenting them with food, and found that over time, the dogs would salivate even if a bell was rung with no food presented. Pavlov’s research defined classical conditioning, in which a primary reinforcer (one which naturally elicits a response, e.g. food or pain) is associated with a conditioned or secondary reinforcer, such as the lab coat or bell.

Forty years later, Burrhus Frederic Skinner built upon Pavlov’s observations as a young psychologist in graduate school. He constructed a soundproof, lightproof chamber that housed a small animal; a lever was placed within the animal’s reach, which triggered a primary reinforcer. Called the Skinner box, the device opened up many possibilities for experimentation, leading to breakthroughs in later research: from the relative addictiveness of cocaine in isolation versus in a larger community, to the question of whether rats have empathy.

I’m really, really excited about the impending release after Feb. 17, especially given the awesome essays that Vitorio Miliano and Jon Whipple are working on alongside me.

Anyone curious about social game design, behavioral psychology, or even just why FarmVille is so damn addictive should take a look at the full excerpt.

Really inspiring work.

I hope the buzz of ‘gamification’ wears off and we return to saying ‘Skinnerian’. It’s so much less rosy that way.

This abyss (dopamine mine?) is well charted by slot machine manufacturers who have found what lies at the bottom: “customer extinction.” As explained in this lecture by Natasha Schull, “the stated goal of [slot machines] is “customer extinction” - the moment at which the customer is out of money:”

Sounds like a cool scene.

January 25, 2012 at 5:29 pm

Source: 90wpm
livefromtheborder: A parking situation in Sao Paulo. When garages were built for less ambitious cars. (Taken with Instagram at Sao paulo, brazil)

livefromtheborder:

A parking situation in Sao Paulo. When garages were built for less ambitious cars. (Taken with Instagram at Sao paulo, brazil)

January 21, 2012 at 12:25 pm

Source: livefromtheborder
kateoplis: breakingnews: Sixteen-year-old Laura Dekker from the Netherlands sailed into St. Maarten harbor today, completing her yearlong solo journey around the globe aboard a ketch named “Guppy.”  - AP [Image: Laura Dekker poses on her sailboat in 2010. (Judy Fitzpatrick/AP)] So impressive. What humans do.

kateoplis:

breakingnews:

Sixteen-year-old Laura Dekker from the Netherlands sailed into St. Maarten harbor today, completing her yearlong solo journey around the globe aboard a ketch named “Guppy.”  - AP

[Image: Laura Dekker poses on her sailboat in 2010. (Judy Fitzpatrick/AP)]

So impressive.

What humans do.

January 21, 2012 at 12:06 pm

Source: breakingnews
kateoplis: A christmas tree being transported by a resident of Nordstrandischmoor, Germany. Nordstrandischmoor has 18 residents.

kateoplis:

A christmas tree being transported by a resident of Nordstrandischmoor, Germany. Nordstrandischmoor has 18 residents.

December 22, 2011 at 11:06 pm

Source: kateoplis