Images you can read

"Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they're doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections."

Created by Matt Richardson, the Descriptive Camera is a regular photo camera which instead of producing an image, outputs a text description of the scene using Amazon's Mechanical Turk API. This is an interesting project that makes us think about what an image really is and how it works, exploring other ways to engage with its content. In my opinion, it triggers similar debates about narrative forms, content and meaning as in the case of a book when is made into a movie.

Images: mattrichardson.com/Descriptive-Camera

Big Data: an introduction in 10 tweets

This week, between April 19-28, 2012, the Big Data Week has been taking place in 3 countries simultaneously, consisting in 50 meetups about Dig Data. A panel session held in London featured the brightest minds in the Big Data industry:

* Doug Cutting, co-founder of the Apache Hadoop project and creator of Nutch and Lucene
* Nick Halstead - Founder/CTO DataSift
* Hilary Mason – Bit.ly Chief Scientist
* Andy Kirk – Visualising Data
* Edd Dumbill – Program Chair Strata Conference – Moderator

I couldn't attend the event, but I followed the Twitter conversation on #BigDataWeek. Here there are 10 tweets to help beginners like me understand what kind of issues are involved in the discussion about Big Data:

1. @IanFOsborne Big Data means never having to sample anymore!

2. @michellegallen Education is fragmented and operates in silos. This works against training data scientists who need to work across disciplines

3. @jamesholwell Right on. Insightful data analytics alone won't get board-level attention, has to tell a story (and look pretty!)

4. @jamesholwell Big data in 5 years time: sentiment analysis applied to the whole of humanity (assuming privacy doesn't get in the way)

5. @rosshitch media scientists are rare and tend to generate objective results but businesses need action points

6. @wacinski "There will be regulatory constraints on how we're able to analyse datasets, such as the information held by Facebook"

7. @DavidRajan open data open innovation datascience and big data - is all converging

8. @nick365 okCupid an example of not such big data but very very interesting relationship discoveries from their blog.okcupid.com

9. @FlyingBinary Apart from the finance applications by the panel mentioned there is #bigdata revolution underway in the HR and Research space

10. @darachennis Data is a collection of facts. Can't IP or (c) that. Why not treat data as a legal person? Would prevent lots of dumb lawsuits

There's a product for every emotion

This is a video by Erina Scourti called “Life in AdWords”. She explains: "Every day, I write and email my diary to my Gmail account and copy over the list of suggested keywords linking to clusters of relevant ads, making visible the way we and our personal information are the product in the ‘free’ internet economy."



On the Internet, words don't fade or die. They are destined to a life of infinite existence and relationality. There's always a response to them. Words are bound to always make meaning, and to be attached to another word, which is attached to another one and so on. They become prisoners of contexts to which they don't belong. Words are not intimate, they belong to everyone. On the Internet, we're not one but everybody.

Source: new-aesthetic.tumblr.com

Technology evolves; stories remain

Illustration drawn on iPad by Jorge Colombo

"There was one other big lesson he learned from his Hollywood adventure: People remember stories more than products. "The technology we've been laboring on over the past 20 years becomes part of the sedimentary layer," he told me once. "But when Snow White was re-released [on DVD, in 2001], we were one of the 28 million families that went out and bought a copy of it. This was a film that is 60 years old, and my son was watching it and loving it. I don't think anybody's going to be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now.""
From "The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes" by Brent Schlender

Art imitates the medium

Adriana Cora, Waiting (Espera), 2012 - Source: Artlog.com

"Zoom in and zoom out" is the new perspective: moving from the whole to the pixel and vice versa.

Open or closed societies: that's the question

Human nature is rather technological

Mark Pagel, one of the world's leading experts on human evolution and development, talks about our species' capacity for culture, cooperation and community.

How is publishing changing?

"Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done." (Clay Shirky)

From “How We Will Read”, an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals.

Photo credit: http://blog.findings.com