Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 209
February 2, 2014
Web Semantics: the decline of Clinical Standard Written English
*The print-classical versus the electronic-vulgate.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/11/such-dfw-very-orwell-so-doge-wow/
(…)
“You cannot escape computers any more — and that fact has affected language in a way which is, if you ask me, nothing short of revolutionary.
“Once upon a time, not so long ago, most people didn’t write much, and even if they did, only a tiny handful of people might read the results. As a result, most of the words that people read were written by a tiny elite group of authors and journalists, and almost exclusively in an anodyne, pristine mode which DFW (((David Foster Wallace))) in his classic essay called SWE, for “Standard Written English.” (Also “Standard White English,” but I’m not even going to go there, except to say again that you should read his essay.)
“I’ll go further and say that the overwhelming majority of widely-read nonfiction was written in an even smaller, strictly controlled subset of SWE – call it CSWE, for Clinical Standard Written English. Textbooks. Cookbooks. IRS instructions. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the British broadsheets, etc. All written in a similar mode: authoritative, declamatory, distant, dispassionate, impersonal, and (allegedly) neutral. Formal, pure, and precise.
“The problem, of course, is that English, as actually used by 99% of its practitioners, has never been even close to formal, pure, and precise….”
February 1, 2014
Regine Debatty at Critical Exploits at Lighthouse in Brighton
*I’m struck wordless by the majesty of this superb tech-art journalist covering the awesome antics of this superb tech-art curator.
*These are golden times. Oh to have lived to see the day, etc.
http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2014/01/critical-exploits-interrogatin.php#.Uu0FUaVgxDR
And Now It’s Time To Hear From Estonia
“Rebooting Trust? Freedom vs Security in Cyberspace”
31.01.2014
Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Opening address at Munich Security Conference Cyber 31 January 2014
“When the MSC for the first time discussed cyber security in 2011 the President of a small European country stood up and said: “this is the first time, but I assure you, it won’t be the last”. That was a mere three years ago. Two weeks ago, in a poll of senior employees within the White House, Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry, forty-five percent of respondents named a cyber attack as the single greatest threat to the US. This was nearly 20 percentage points above terrorism, which ranked second at 26%. No doubt a poll of senior officials in the Alliance or in the EU today would yield similar results.
“This represents a sea-change. To understand why, we must re-examine the nature of security in an age of “cyber”, for want of a better word. (((It’s interesting that the military-industrial complex has somehow decided to chop the “space” off that word in order to modernize the concept, but they did it all right. It’s “cyber” from now on, at least in the halls of the brass-hats.))) For cyber is a domain that extends far beyond the traditionally military-based considerations of security. Indeed so far, that its use and abuse impinges on the very core democratic values of the Alliance and the Union.
“The more Information and Communication Technologies, or ICT for short, penetrate our ways of life, from the financial sector to our daily use of smart phones; the more we rely on SCADA or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems to run our power plants, traffic lights and supermarket milk supplies, the more vulnerable these become to malicious digital attacks. To immobilize a nation, to render it incapable of defending itself, attackers no longer need military, kinetic weapons. Nor do these same weapons offer us defence. Today this holds true theoretically. Nations continue to buy tanks and rockets, but there have been enough tabletop cyber conflict exercises as well as real incidents to know what is possible already now.
“I keep no tally of cyber attacks, hacks and espionage, but it is quite clear the issue, as I mentioned, has come to concern the highest levels of political leadership in the West to a degree we have never seen. We have witnessed a 17-fold increase in cyber attacks on American infrastructure from 2009 to 2011, initiated by criminal gangs, hackers and nations. In 2012, the US Department of Homeland Security announced an “alarming rate” of increase in attacks against power, water, and nuclear systems. On this side of the Atlantic we are less forthcoming about numbers but we know for example the destruction of files in some 20,000 Aramco computers, imputed to Iran; there have been “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks on the New York Stock Exchange, hacking during the missile attacks against Israel.
“Estonia has faced these issues for what is a long time in cyber history. (((They certainly have.))) We were the first known target of politically motivated cyber attacks, in April 2007, when the websites of the government, Parliament, banks, newspapers, TV stations and other organizations were inundated with DDOS attacks that rendered them unusable. By today’s standards they were quite primitive. Seven years later, as computing capabilities and IT dependency has mushroomed, so have our vulnerabilities.
“In Estonia we can see a version of the interconnected and computerized future that is inextricably a part of the fundamental operations of society: 25% of the electorate votes online, nearly 100% of prescriptions and tax returns are done online, as is almost all banking. Estonians have given 140 million digital signatures, and last December, Estonian and Finnish PMs signed the first international treaty to be signed digitally. Adding to this near 100% broadband coverage and countrywide Wi-Fi, Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world. What allows us to do this is a a secure identity based on a universal, secure Public Key Infrastructure with two-factor authentication with RSA 2048 encription. Our secure identity is a topic I alas have too little time for here, but it works and I believe to be the basis of any secure system.
“As a country so dependent on digital solutions, we cannot help but be a proverbial canary in the coal mine…
”
(…)
“Yet there is another side to this. When internet thinker and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow addressed governments in 1996 in his Declaration of the Independence of the Internet, announcing “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us”, he was right. They do not apply and we see the result (He left out privacy, I might add).
“We could describe this state of affairs using Thomas Hobbes’ characterization of the anarchy of life in the state of nature as a war of all against all. Hobbes wanted a ruling sovereign to resolve this but in democracies we rely on John Locke’s solution positing a contract between government and the citizenry, which underpins all modern democracies. The problem is we have no Lockean contract between the government and the citizenry in the cyber realm. Thus today, again, we are in the midst of a massive debate on what liberal democracies can, should and should not do with the extremely powerful technologies they possess. We are again living in a State of Nature. Our world is Hobbesian. We need our Locke, Jefferson and Voltaire for the digital age….”
- See more at: http://www.president.ee/en/official-d...
Transmediale panel: Trevor Paglen, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras
*This was one of the most interesting cultural panels I’ve ever seen. That atmosphere in that hall was extraordinary. A lot of people must have left that room with a different conception of the world they inhabit.
World’s biggest data breaches, the interactive info graphic
*An infoviz guy is “a statistician with a Mac.”
*With that said, it’s easy to look at this and intuit that Big Data is a nuisance; a form of pollution rather like a cattle feed-lot.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/
Design Fiction: Hypermorgen icons
*Diegetic icons for phenomena that almost exist.
*It’s also nice that the icons belong to an open-source project, which offers them a folk-motif virality they might lack otherwise.
http://thenounproject.com/hypermorgen/
“The icons en detail:
“Slime Mold Computing
Slime mold can not only determine the shortest path through a maze or model optimal railway systems. Scientists from the University of the West of England discovered that Physarum polycephalum slime molds can act as memristors. This means they could be used to create more efficient computer memory.
“Wearables
For some futurists wearables are already half over, soon to be replaced by ingestibles. We think wearables will become interesting in ways we now can´t even imagine.
“Meat Printing
Humans eat about 240 billion kilograms of meat each year. The demand for animal protein has resulted in environmental degradation, cruelty to livestock, and the spread of dangerous diseases. Thiel Foundation just funded Modern Meadow, a company that wants to solve this problem with a new method to print meat with a 3D printer. Will it taste better or worse than Tofurkey?” ….
January 31, 2014
Design Fiction: Pentagram’s “Coyote Vs. Acme”
*Okay, it’s funny, but mostly it’s funny because it’s Pentagram doing it.
http://new.pentagram.com/2014/01/new-work-coyote-v-acme/
*Also one should cordially admit that Warner Brothers cartoons by Chuck Jones are inherently funny.
January 30, 2014
Another more-or-less 3DPrinted house
*That’s getting closer to the Holy Grail of a printed house there…. It’s lots closer, impressively so.
*People sometimes ask me “would you live in a 3Dprinted house?” as if this were some unimaginable departure from the norm. Of course I would live in one. I wouldn’t advise personally investing in one, because of the usual real-estate problems with the resale value of unorthodox structures, but I’d be quite interested in that experience. Likely it would be rather similar to living in, say, one of the first Airstream trailers.
http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/01/22/worlds-first-3d-printed-house-begins-construction/
“If you’re one of our readers residing in or near Amsterdam, you should really consider attending the grand opening of the construction site on Sunday March 2, 2014. Private pre-screenings and tours can also be arranged if you email info@3dprintcanalhouse.com. ”
*I would go.
January 29, 2014
Open Call, “Strange Weather,” Dublin Science Gallery
https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/strangeweather
8.07.14–05.10.14
STRANGE WEATHER
HOW CAN WE MODEL AND EVEN GENERATE WEATHER?
Calling all future forecasters, weather hackers and planetary visionaries, Science Gallery is seeking project proposals for our upcoming summer exhibition, STRANGE WEATHER.
STRANGE WEATHER is a curated exhibition that will bring together meteorologists, artists, climate scientists, cloud enthusiasts and designers to explore how we model, predict, and even create weather.
How has the human experience of weather changed over millennia, and how will it change in the next 50 years? Will future weather be more, or less predictable and controllable? Should we attempt to prevent a future of STRANGE WEATHER, or embrace it? From floods to droughts and from local transition towns to global geoengineering schemes, weather is of greater concern than ever. What consequences and opportunities will arise from the changing weather of our planet?
Curated by CoClimate, this exhibition will challenge audiences with novel visions of a global culture adapting to extreme weather, and zooms in to explore how STRANGE WEATHER will affect daily commutes, the governance of our cities, and even our fashion choices.
We are interested in works that offer a participative and interactive visitor experience for a broad age-range of visitors, especially those aged 15-25. We seek projects that inform, intrigue, provoke dialogue and engage audiences directly, making the complex and emotional topic of extreme weather and climate change more relevant to everyday experiences. In particular, we are looking for projects that connect massive planetary-scale systems to personal, localised and individual lived experience.
We are interested in receiving proposals on a wide variety of topics including, but not limited to:
Tools for predicting and preparing for severe weather, climate change, and environmental change.
Climate change and the everyday: projects that respond to the consequences of climate change. e.g. how will climate change affect fashion, entertainment, transportation and education?
Examples and critiques of weather manipulation and GeoEngineering.
Tools for mapping the planet: from satellites, to ocean drones and weather balloons.
Designs that mitigate environmental change: architecture for migrating species, water management for more severe flooding, smog and air quality detection and prevention.
Future scenarios for cities, governance and culture on a changed planet.
Works that show how weather information is collected, compiled and disseminated.
Exhibits that speak to the social, cultural and political implications of strange weather and climate change.
Participatory experiences, field trips, site visits and workshops.
Scientific experiments that utilise data/participation from visitors.
Forecasting, not just of weather, but of many kinds of environmental patterns and change.
Your amazing project that is relevant to the theme ‘Strange Weather’.
CURATORS & ADVISORS
CoClimate – www.coclimate.com
Michael John Gorman – Director of Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin
Martin Peters – Irish Centre for High-End Computing
Gerald Fleming – Met Éireann
Please address all queries about making an application to help@sciencegallery.com
The open call will close at 12 midnight on Feb 14th 2014.
To submit a proposal, click here.
https://opencall.sciencegallery.com
Science Gallery is a registered charity and not-for-profit organisation. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of STRANGE WEATHER, please contact clodagh.memery@sciencegallery.com.
Web Semantics: a glossary of the key terms in the NSA-GCHQ Snowden leaks
*Every subculture breeds an argot.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25085592
(…)
“Computer Network Exploitation (CNE)
“The term used by the NSA to refer to efforts to exploit data gathered from its targets.
“Conveyance
“Identified by an NSA slide, the term appears to refer to a system used to remove voice content collected about US persons as part of the Prism programme before it is analysed by a process called Nucleon.
US persons – citizens of the country or someone located within its borders – are not supposed to be the subject of the agency’s investigations.
“Data Intercept Technology Unit (Ditu)
“An FBI unit that one of the leaked slides suggests collects much of the data gathered from internet companies as part of the Prism programme, before passing it on to the NSA.
“According to an investigation by Foreign Policy magazine, the operation is based at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, and acts as “the primary liaison” between the NSA and companies including Google, Facebook and Apple. The report says the unit maintains equipment that takes the desired information from the firms, and makes sure that any encryption processes used by them do not prevent the businesses from handing over data they have a legal responsibility to share.
“The article adds that having the Ditu act as a conduit allows companies to report that they do not hand information “directly” to the NSA.
“Data mining
“Analysis of large stores of information in order to obtain new knowledge.
“In the case of the US and UK spy agencies, the data mined is reported to include phone call records, emails, instant messages and other social network activity, photos and videos….”
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