Tag: Art

An Anthropologist’s 20-Year Quest To Document Pakistan’s Ancient Rock Art

Having spent over two decades tirelessly researching art and culture in Pakistan, Kalhoro stands as possibly the only Pakistani who has extensively documented ancient rock art in the country.
— Read on www.forbes.com/sites/sonyarehman/2022/04/30/an-anthropologists-20-year-quest-to-document-pakistans-ancient-rock-art/

Serendipity and strategy in rapid innovation | Nature Communications

Innovation is to organizations what evolution is to organisms: it is how organizations adapt to environmental change and improve. Yet despite advances in our understanding of evolution, what drives innovation remains elusive. On the one hand, organizations invest heavily in systematic strategies to accelerate innovation. On the other, historical analysis and individual experience suggest that serendipity plays a significant role. To unify these perspectives, we analysed the mathematics of innovation as a search for designs across a universe of component building blocks. We tested our insights using data from language, gastronomy and technology. By measuring the number of makeable designs as we acquire components, we observed that the relative usefulness of different components can cross over time. When these crossovers are unanticipated, they appear to be the result of serendipity. But when we can predict crossovers in advance, they offer opportunities to strategically increase the growth of the product space. Organizations can take different approaches to innovation: they can either follow a strategic process or a serendipitous perspective. Here Fink et al. develop a statistical model to analyse how components combine to obtain a product and thus explain the mechanism behind the two approaches.
— Read on www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02042-w

Hiltzik: The downside of copyrights – Los Angeles Times

‘Winnie-the-Pooh,’ ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and many other works entered the public domain on Saturday. They show what’s wrong with the system.
— Read on www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-01-03/winnie-the-pooh-public-domain

NFTs, Explained | a16z Podcast

with @jessewldn @ljxie @smc90

Everything you need or want to know about NFTs (or to help others understand NFTs.) Cuts through the noise to share the signal:
covering what NFTs are, the underlying crypto big picture, and then specifically what forms they take; addressing common myths and misconceptions from “just a JPG” to the question of energy use; sharing briefly how NFTs work; providing a quick overview of the players/ ecosystem; and throughout, discussing various applications too.

This episode was originally released in March 2021.
— Read on a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/nfts-explained-CesNt_e1

The big picture: Antanas Sutkus captures childhood defiance in Soviet Lithuania | Photography | The Guardian

The photographer and his family suffered under the repressive regime, but his images of children find a spirit that escapes propaganda
— Read on www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/nov/07/the-big-picture-antanas-sutkus-captures-childhood-defiance-in-soviet-lithuania

Why flat-Earthers are a clear and present threat to an AI-powered society

There are almost certainly people from every walk of life, in every industry, at every school, in every police precinct, and working for just about every news outlet who believe things about artificial intelligence that are simply not true.

Let’s make a short list of things that are demonstrably untrue that the general public tends to believe:

Big tech is making progress mitigating racial bias in AI
AI can predict crime
AI can tell if you’re gay
AI writing/images/paintings/videos/audio can fool humans
AI is on the verge of becoming sentient
Having a human in the loop mitigates bias
AI can determine if a job candidate will be successful
AI can determine gender
AI can tell what songs/movies/videos/clothes you’ll like
Human-level self-driving vehicles exist
And that list could go on and on. There are thousands of useless startups and corporations out there running basic algorithms and claiming their systems can do things that no AI can do.

Those that aren’t outright pedaling snake oil often fudge statistics and percentages to mislead people concerning how efficacious their products are.
— Read on thenextweb.com/news/why-flat-earthers-clear-present-threat-ai-powered-society

NASA Turns to the Cloud for Help With Next-Generation Earth Missions | NASA

As satellites collect larger and larger amounts of data, engineers and researchers are implementing solutions to manage these huge increases.
— Read on www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-turns-to-the-cloud-for-help-with-next-generation-earth-missions

Running Machine Learning Projects: Things to know | by Prashant Mudgal | Oct, 2021 | Towards Data Science

In my experience, ML projects come in all shapes and sizes and vary greatly in their complexity. In the initial 2000/10s, the emphasis was on the model-centric approach which I always found a little bizarre as I heard umpteen times about the fancier models than the results(well, it was a different time and folks used to get awestruck when they would hear ML, AI, DS etc); slowly and steadily the focus has shifted to the result centric approach i.e. use whatever model you can but make use of the data and produce results that are directional, applicable, and coherent.
— Read on towardsdatascience.com/running-machine-learning-projects-things-to-know-316775338eab