Allison's bookmarks (2019 archive)

Most recent

How Big Tech Manipulates Academia to Avoid Regulation

"To be fair, some of the research is useful and nuanced, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But the majority of well-funded work on 'ethical AI' is aligned with the tech lobby’s agenda: to voluntarily or moderately adjust, rather than legally restrict, the deployment of controversial technologies. [...] It is strange that Ito, with no formal training, became positioned as an 'expert' on AI ethics, a field that barely existed before 2017. But it is even stranger that two years later, respected scholars in established disciplines have to demonstrate their relevance to a field conjured by a corporate lobby."

ai machinelearning technology politics

Neuraxio/Neuraxle: Build neat pipelines with the right abstractions to do AutoML. Let your pipeline steps have hyperparameter spaces. Enable checkpoints to cut duplicate calculations. Go from research to production environment easily.

"a Machine Learning (ML) library for building neat pipelines, providing the right abstractions to both ease research, development, and deployment of your ML applications. [...] [T]he optimizer is a model itself that maps features of datasets and features of the hyperparameter space to a guessed performance score to predict the best hyperparameters."

python machinelearning

continent.

"a platform for thinking through media. text, image, video, sound and new forms of publishing online are presented as reflections on and challenges to contemporary conditions in politics, media studies, art, film and philosophical thought"

journal publications

OpenMoji

"OpenMoji is an open source project of 53 students and 2 professors of the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd and external contributors" (CC BY-SA 4.0)

text typography emoji svg

Teaching AI Feminism and Making Art

"I run datasets of iconic feminist texts through a simple textRNN, generating new feminists texts in the legendary words of bell hooks, Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Audre Lorde. Some are funny. Some are poetic. Some make no sense at all and some are way too real. Information about the model and settings can be found under each post."

poetics text machinelearning language generative feminism theory

Autocat

very cool online text classifier generator (just upload your data and then you can pip install your model!)

nlproc programming language

Google AI Blog: Announcing Two New Natural Language Dialog Datasets

"In the movie-oriented CCPE dataset, individuals posing as a user speak into a microphone and the audio is played directly to the person posing as a digital assistant. The “assistant” types out their response, which is in turn played to the user via text-to-speech. [...] The Taskmaster-1 dataset makes use of both the methodology described above as well as a one-person, written technique to increase the corpus size and speaker diversity—about 7.7k written “self-dialog” entries and ~5.5k 2-person, spoken dialogs. For written dialogs, we engaged people to create the full conversation themselves based on scenarios outlined for each task, thereby playing roles of both the user and assistant."

datasets nlproc text conversation poetics

Lists of Note

"On October 19th of 1955, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Marianne Moore, was approached by a Mr. Robert Young of the Ford Motor Company and asked to assist them in naming a new series of cars."

advertising onomastics poetry poetics text

How you’re feeling when machine learning might help - Quartz AI Studio

"We’ll never be able to read all of these documents. What’s unique about this text compared to all the rest? My eyes sting from searching these images for the same thing. We need to find more records like these in a huge pile of data. I could really use a heads-up before this happens again. (Post to come.)" I *reeeeeally* appreciate approaches to ml like this that start with problems to be solved (instead of just taking for granted that ai/ml is useful)

programming machinelearning journalism text

Universal Dependencies

"Universal Dependencies (UD) is a framework for consistent annotation of grammar (parts of speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies) across different human languages. UD is an open community effort with over 200 contributors producing more than 100 treebanks in over 70 languages."

datasets nlproc language text poetics

Text Rendering Hates You

"there are no consistent right answers, everything is way more important than you think, and everything affects everything else"

text typography

PIXLS.US Blog - G'MIC 2.7 - Process Your Images with Style!

"G’MIC is cross-platform (GNU/Linux, MacOS, Windows, …). It provides various user interfaces for manipulating generic image data, i.e. 2D or 3D hyperspectral images or sequences of images with floating-point values (which indeed includes “usual” color images). Around a thousand different processing functions are already available. However, arbitrarily many features can be added thanks to an integrated scripting language."

opensource graphics

In the South Pacific, a Humpback Whale Karaoke Lounge - The New York Times

"Acoustic analysis of the songs told the researchers that the singing whales were from a number of different breeding grounds... They even recorded a humpback singing two different songs, perhaps in the process of learning one from another migrating whale. [...] [T]he authors have 'clearly demonstrated a location where the cultural transmission of song may occur'..."

whales culture biology

Memex #001

"The father/daughter team of Trevor F. Smith and Sparks Webb have gathered all available documentation about the memex and carefully fabricated the Memex #001 to match Dr. Bush's specifications."

computation hypertext history text poetics

Analog Science Fiction Magazine

"a free, non-commercial project with the goal of preserving selected paper-based cultural artifacts for future generations of readers, in the form of cover images in JPG format, and, where available, complete cover-to-cover scans in PDF format"—in this case, a bunch of old Analog magazines

scifi text

The Quietus | Film | Film Features | The Talented Ms Ripley: 40 Years Of Alien's Complex Feminist Legacy

"Alien is not, as a whole, a feminist work. Yet Ripley’s force as a character blasts through the sexual subtexts, and far outlasts them; you don’t remember her as threatened, but as triumphing. One of the most rewarding things about science-fiction for feminists is the way it allows us to imagine different possibilities, other futures. Alien’s neo-colonial world is no utopia, but even its nightmare offered a glimpse of a new freedom..."

scifi feminism culture

Other Orders

"Recommendation engines like the ones powering the endless feeds on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, are designed to maximize ad revenue, and therefore to keep you online for as long as possible. In doing so they promote the most reactionary content on their platforms. Yet, these recommendation systems are nothing more than sorting mechanisms. Other Orders provides an alternate set of sorts, optimized for other outcomes."

text poetics programming nlproc

Jenny Holzer Hits Her Mark in a Major, Largely Unnoticed Retrospective

"Artists aim differently than sharpshooters. They are not typically trying to take something out, but to draw something out. The mark Holzer hits in this case is the mark in the most cave-drawing sense: the effort to leave (or find) a trace of something that is not an opinion, but a register of some kind, certifying a lived experience. There may be no such thing as a permanent record, but the fact that the Washington Post contributor found Holzer’s work dangerous is a sign in and of itself that it has achieved one of its goals: it has carved a deep enough mark to leave a strong impression (for that writer, a menacing one). That’s the most any language or other kind of mark-making can hope to accomplish."

art politics language text poetics

Drawing Curved

"a collection of texts and images concerned with digital curvature. It seeks to understand when a curve starts to be tangible, or what might give a sense that they can or can't be handled. What makes a curve smooth? When does it seem appropriate to interrupt it?"

graphics geometry math curves

The UN Security Council Debates - Harvard Dataverse

"[A] dataset of UN Security Council debates between January 1995 and December 2017... split into distinct speeches" with metadata on "the speaker, the speaker's nation or affiliation, and the speaker's role in the meeting" and "the topic of the meeting." 65393 speeches extracted from 4958 meeting protocols (!). via data is plural

text datasets politics

What Lies Beyond Capitalism? A Christian Exploration by David Bentley Hart

'[W]e can certainly identify which political and social realities must be abhorrent to a Christian conscience: a cultural ethos that not only permits but encourages a life of ceaseless acquisition as a kind of moral good; a legal regime subservient to the corporatist imperative of maximum profits, no matter what the methods employed or consequences produced; a politics of cruelty, division, national identity, or any of the countless ways in which we contrive to demarcate the sphere of what is rightfully “ours” and not “theirs.”' via https://www.metafilter.com/182022/has-filled-the-hungry-with-good-things-and-sent-the-rich-away-starving

religion politics history

Car Crashes Aren't Always Unavoidable - The Atlantic

"Instead of merely accommodating some people’s desire to drive, our laws essentially force driving on all of us—by subsidizing it, by punishing people who don’t do it, by building a physical landscape that requires it, and by insulating reckless drivers from the consequences of their actions."

politics transportation law

Muslims lived in America before Protestantism even existed | Aeon Essays

"The popular misunderstanding, even among educated people, that Islam and Muslims are recent additions to America tells us important things about how American history has been written. In particular, it reveals how historians have justified and celebrated the emergence of the modern nation-state. One way to valorise the United States of America has been to minimise the heterogeneity and scale – the cosmopolitanism, diversity and mutual co-existence of peoples – in America during the first 300 years of European presence." also "‘New England’s business is cod not God!’"

history politics religion

BPEmb

"a collection of pre-trained subword embeddings in 275 languages, based on Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and trained on Wikipedia. Its intended use is as input for neural models in natural language processing"

nlproc text poetics machinelearning

Spectre

"Spectre, a new interactive installation by Bill Posters and Daniel Howe, reveals the secrets of the Digital Influence Industry in a cautionary tale of technology, democracy and society, curated by algorithms and powered by visitors’ data. Premiering at the Sheffield Doc/Fest Alternate Realities exhibition, Spectre leverages the technologies and techniques of the tech giants, advertising firms, and political campaign groups to show how our behaviours are being predicted, influenced and controlled."

art deepfake rhetoric politics

moss

everest's guide to moss gardens

home gardening

continent.

"a platform for thinking through media. text, image, video, sound and new forms of publishing online are presented as reflections on and challenges to contemporary conditions in politics, media studies, art, film and philosophical thought"

publications journal

What Remains

"What Remains is an 8-bit game for the emblematic 1985 NES console, blending visual novel and adventure elements in a story translating real events from the 80s into an epic quest to save the world. As the story unravels, your life in Sunny Peaks transforms dramatically, and you start uncovering a dark secret threatening everyone. But no despair, your best friend is by your side... as well as a very helpful cat." simon carless on twitter: 'decidedly adult themes - "environmental issues, the manipulation of public opinion, and whistleblowing"'

playme retro

Who is the we in “We are causing climate change”?

"To think of climate change as something that we are doing, instead of something we are being prevented from undoing, perpetuates the very ideology of the fossil-fuel economy we’re trying to transform." this seems key for rhetoric in the US at least. dems should stop talking about climate change as an opportunity for pious forbearance or tree-hugging. instead, say: the people lying to you about climate change are actively trying to prevent you from exercising your right to protect your family. via https://botsin.space/@M_PF/102130535228075079

climate politics rhetoric

Cars Are Weird | Current Affairs

"Cars are the freedom to be lonely and stuck in traffic. Trains are the freedom from having to maintain your own personal transportation container. I think the libertarian is right: If you want to get a taste of the future capitalism promises you, sit in a car for five hours and don’t move."

politics transportation

Blind Spot: The Fabulous Kindness of Amelie Poulain?

"But this way of thinking suggests that the blind are lacking something in their relationship with the world which they must rely on the kind-hearted to give them. That a world without sight is a world without knowledge, sensation and community. That sight is better than no sight. This is perhaps not a surprising reaction from a film-maker. But what if this blind man relates to the world in a wholly different way? What if the pictures he gets from hearing, touching, smelling and tasting the world are just as fulfilling as Amélie's and Jeunet's fetishization of vision?"

disability accessibility vision film culture

the-coming-ai-autumn

"As machine learning algorithms are commoditized, those who can work along the entirety of the applied machine learning arc will be the most valuable."

machinelearning ai culture

Counting the Countless — Real Life

"...my ethics of care says that we should be working for a radical data science: a data science that is not controlling, eliminationist, assimilatory. A data science premised on enabling autonomous control of data, on enabling plural ways of being. A data science that preserves context and does not punish those who do not participate in the system."

data algorithms culture

Tsvetshop: Home

"Yulia Tsvetkov's research group at Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Our work focuses on natural language processing, particularly cross-lingual approaches, low-resource settings, and social good."

language poetics text machinelearning nlproc

Carolee Schneemann REALLY Loves Her Cat

"[S]oft little kitty kisses these are not; they are “deep kisses,” in which the cat full-on plants its lips on Schneemann’s often open mouth. 'The intimacy between cat and woman becomes a refraction of the viewers’ attitudes to self and nature, sexuality and control, the taboo and the sacred,' [Schneemann has] written. 'The images raise questions of interspecies communication, as well as triggering unexpected cultural taboos.'"

art culture animals

Re:MARK - Interactive Art by Golan Levin and Collaborators

"...the fiction that speech casts visible shadows. [...] converts speech into whimsically animated letters and shapes that appear to float upwards from the shadow of the speaker's head. Visitors can also manipulate these forms directly, using the shadow of their own body. When a phoneme is recognized by the software with sufficient confidence, it is spelled out on the installation's display."

sound installation materialoflanguage language poetics art

Heather Dewey-Hagborg | Unlanguage

"In this interactive installation participants enter the first word that comes to their mind in one of two input terminals in any language. These words are then the seed of a generative process that develops a poem, bifurcating and mutating, merging languages, poetic styles, sense and nonsense. Poems overlap and degrade over time, eventually fading away. Phonetics are remapped to a new alphabet of sound referencing the body and incidental noises, creating a unique expression for each word and making literal the arbitrariness of the language. This installation was projected on a massive scale covering the walls and ceiling and filling the hall of the old imperial castle in Poznan, Poland. This video shows a demonstration of the generated poetry."

text language poetry poetics materialoflanguage

We Need to Talk About Social Practice | Art Practical

"Social-practice artworks with a commitment to sociopolitical change have the inexplicable potential to be valued as morally good works, regardless of the impact of the project as measured by the community’s criteria. They allow sociopolitical issues to be subsumed into aesthetic issues, such that a work can fail a community but still be considered good art. [...] Perhaps the takeaway is: The limited attention span for art is not enough. Do the work, and do it whether it’s in the context of art or not. Don’t pretend that doing good as part of a creative practice is better than just doing good. And definitely don’t pretend that good intentions make inherently good acts."

art practice history culture politics

YIIK: A Postmodern RPG

"We began the development with some clear goals: create an RPG set in late 90s New Jersey (as RPGs rarely are set in modern times), strike a healthy balance between humor and a compelling plot, as well as make a world with depth. We looked outside of games for inspiration, particularly to author Haruki Murakami. He is an incredible writer, our favorite living author, and someone who makes you feel as if he’s writing your dreams. We made sure everyone on the team read his entire collective works before we began development." (text from related article here https://blog.us.playstation.com/2019/01/16/inside-the-classic-rpg-and-literary-influences-of-yiik-out-tomorrow/)

playme games rpg

Society for Textual Scholarship

"an international organization of scholars working in textual studies, editing and editorial theory, electronic textualities, and issues of textual culture across a wide variety of disciplines."

academia text