Seeds of AI at Google — how the internet is shaping intelligence and learning and, in turn, the role of human culture in natural selection
via Director of Research at Google and AI genius | MetaFilter.
The agent changes by learning something new, the information changes by the knowledge the agent already had. Therefore, a meme reaching an agent, will be transmitted in a changed form. Thus, cultural evolution is Lamarckian: characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the meme’s carrier can be transmitted to later carriers selectively, depending on their fitness. Natural selection will pick out the memes who survive this transmission process relatively unchanged. Therefore, the fittest memes, such as certain songs, religious beliefs, scientific laws, or brand names, will have a stable, recognizable identity.
via Memetics in Marketing: Memes Pose As The Most Effective Tool In Brand Communication.
His ideas of the mneme based on the Greek goddess, Mneme, the muse of memory were developed upon early in the 20th century. The mneme represented the memory of an external-to-internal experience. The resulting “mnemic trace” or “engram” would be revived when an element resembling a component of the original complex of stimuli was encountered.
Although there is no way of breaking down the types of book being self-published, [Jane] Rowland [editor of The Self Publishing Magazine] estimates that it’s 60 per cent fiction and 40 per cent non-fiction. With the growing number of self-publishers comes a new public respect for self-published authors. So commentators who once derided “vanity published” writers are now beginning to acknowledge an empowered DIY culture. It’s no longer publishing for rejects, but “alternative publishing”; a bold stance outside the homogenised mainstream.
via The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain blog: The rise of self-publishing.
FuckYourBrain is an online and PDF-based fountain of knowledge and delight. The mission? To promote deliberate human evolution, to provide the material for new creations, to encourage neurogenesis, to provide data on epigenetics, to appreciate and adore beauty and power, and to advance the possibility of life extension and immortality, all with a deep sense of personal enjoyment for all who take part in the show.
Purple. Polka dot. Grimy white. And even as the bra colors went viral — wildly so — cyber-arguments erupted about what it all meant. Was so openly and brazenly posting something as intimate as one’s bra color an attempt to raise breast cancer awareness? Or was it all just another Facebook time-suck, another “send your friend a snowball” novelty? A meme?
It was no game to the people at the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, who were stunned to find themselves the beneficiaries of a Web phenomenon they didn’t begin to understand. At the start of Friday, they had exactly 135 fans on their Facebook page. By 5:30 in the evening, they had 135,000.
via Breast cancer awareness goes viral on Facebook . . . with bra color updates – washingtonpost.com.
I want you to imagine back in the early days of newspapers and magazines how the effect of coupons could be measured. A store owner put a coupon in a local newspaper, and then counted up the coupons that came back into the store – immediately that store owner had an understanding of the impact the advertising budget had on sales. Now flash-forward to today, and overlay that expectation of an observable metric being applied to social media – Nathan Gilliatt, a.k.a., the Net Savvy Executive, has analyzed some of the methodologies marketing agencies are struggling to wrap around the existing data, and comes to the conclusion that “the golden metric that will answer every question does not exist.” In part, this concern is a post-modern one – our world lacks a coherent narrative, and social media rests upon a sea of ever more modularized and granular expressions of culture.
On the one hand, attempting to measure precisely the impact of any given trans-media event is an exercise in futility – rather we must apprehend trends, and think in terms of clouds and presence rather than sites and indexing traffic. On the other hand, a small business owner who knows precisely where they’re putting advertising and marketing energy can make a pretty good assessment of any given strategy.
“Infictive is not an adjective (despite what its etymology may lead you to believe) — it is a subspace. It is not limited to the county bearing its namesake, but is instead an encompassing state of ultra-real. It is nothing which you can possess, nor is it a quality which can be attributed to any person or object. Things simply either occupy the space and play with the circuit or else fail to engage it, ‘;nuff said. Consider occupying such a space more often or be careful not to invoke it. You could easily wind up eaten by the harsh cruel game like so many others. Walk free ’til dead, brothers and sisters. 81!”
– Ikipr
via Infictive Research.
..using footage taken from multiple devices like phones, digital video cameras, closed-circuit television systems, news footage, and web cams, a storyline can be generated online which has the feel of a real sequence of events. These video elements would then be played back with overlying narrative in an actual filmic release, requiring fans of the online footage to sit through multiple viewings of the final film product to satisfactorily answer all of the questions that the bits of online footage and media had raised, thereby creating depth and reflecting back that which has become familiar through previous exposure. 3gp projected on a full theater isn't going to work, but embedding bits of footage already passed around on cellphones months in advance of the release will, and digital narrative is only going to become both more filmic and more occultic.
via Digital Narrative in Attention Ecology .;. Trans-Media Narration via Modular Exposure.
Today, all human communication is threaded, multi-participatory, multimodal, asynchronous, proximally indistinct, ubiquitous, continuous, and entirely pervasive. Given this enormous change in the ground conditions, it seems perfectly sensible that we should rethink the basic instrument of electronic communication.
As the most concrete and pervasive manifestation of cyberspace, the mobile telephone establishes new cultural patterns of behavior. If, through observation, we can learn the form of these new patterns, we could design a device which plays into and amplifies them. Instead of “the street finds its own use for things,” [2] we could opt for a “comprehensive design science revolution”[3], transforming the mobile telephone into a cultural probe, amplifier, and filter.
The question before us is whether we – as designers, engineers, academics and media theorists – secretly dread the call of the future, or whether we will approach this moment as an opportunity for play. In free play, results are unimportant; the performance is all. Therefore, we need have no goal beyond having a good time. Playing with mobile telephones is like playing with words, because the medium which transmits those words leaves its indelible mark on the message. Since words shape the world[4], transforming the mobile telephone is inherently a revolutionary act.
We therefore propose revolu…
via The Chrome by Helford Jersey: The Telephone Repair Handbook by Mark Pesce.
The Blip Festival, now one of the worlds largest and longest running events of its kind, continues to evolve with a greater breadth of international artists, a growing sophistication of styles and creative vocabulary, and a forward-thinking enthusiasm driven home by over two dozen of the worlds best musicians and visualists.
If there’s one thing festival-goers can expect, it’s to have their expectations blown away. And the high-energy, low-res live experience is also supplemented by daytime workshops, film screenings, and open mic events — all in an open, friendly, all-ages atmosphere, accessible to the hardcore fan and the chipmusic neophyte alike.
Of course merely having problems isn’t ENOUGH to qualify someone to help you. The next thing they need to have done is LEARNED from it. What have they learned about coping with, or solving the problem that you have? Even someone only slightly ahead of you on the recovery curve can help you.
Next, they have to be able to communicate their learnings to you. It doesn’t matter how clever their solution for your problem is, if they are unable to explain it to you in a way you can use.
Last, they have to be willing to help you with your issues.
via Weakness is Strength… when you learn from it « Edward E. Wilson.
With all current fuss about automated content for SEO I've found the recent changes by Google here and here have only greatly diminished the value of SEO for the most valuable keywords those that have transactional value.
via Jonathan Mendez’s Blog: Rising Tide of PPC Means SEO is Sinking.
Stephen Toulmin, an influential philosopher who conducted wide-ranging inquiries into ethics, science and moral reasoning and developed a new approach to analyzing arguments known as the Toulmin model of argumentation, died on Dec. 4 in Los Angeles. He was 87.
via Stephen Toulmin, a Philosopher and Educator, Dies at 87 – Obituary Obit – NYTimes.com.
Frindle ['frindl] n., a writing device, usually a ballpoint pen.[3] It is now a real word; it means pen or writing device in English.
Scope: The ideal engine would be able to search every document on the Internet
Speed: Results would be available immediately
Currency: All the information would be kept completely up-to-date
Recall: We could always find every document relevant to our query
Precision: There would be no irrelevant documents in our result set
Ranking: The most relevant results would come first, and the ones furthest afield would come last
Of course, our mundane search engines have a way to go before reaching the Platonic ideal.
via Patterns in Unstructured Data
Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization, by
Clara Yu
John Cuadrado
Maciej Ceglowski
J. Scott Payne
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education .