MachineMachine / stream

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Within the pages of Digital Folklore Reader, Olia Lialina, one of the book's editors, refers to a claim by the social media researcher Danah Boyd, that some American teenagers identify…

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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn’t there a pervasive sense that visual art was going…

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team of archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and paleoartists has created a more accurate Neanderthal reconstruction, based on a nearly complete skeleton discovered in France more than 100 years ago. The La Ferrassie…

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The ultimate design material is one that understands what it is to become. By way of an example, I’d like to think about how we might design a chicken. Think…

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The cosmos is composed of many different species of stardust and despite our advanced, secular knowledge we imagine these primordial substances give rise to a universe, fashioned in our own…

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Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known. The development of…

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lecture by Craig Venter Life is code, as you heard in the introduction, was very clearly articulated by Schrodinger as code script. Perhaps even more importantly, and something I missed…

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Hoarding disorder is categorized as “the excessive acquisition of and inability to discard objects, resulting in debilitating clutter,” wrote the researchers behind the new study, led by Yale University School…

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For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield…

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Craig Venter spins increasingly ubiquitous metaphor: "The digital and biological worlds are becoming interchangeable" "All living cells that we know of on this planet are 'DNA software'-driven biological machines comprised…

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To what extent do the material components (e.g. hardware, source code, network protocols) and properties (e.g. speed, malleability, erasability) of digital technology influence the methodologies one might employ to study…

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Dyson refutes the idea that scientific revolutions are concept-driven, a stance pioneered by Thomas Kuhn in his controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and later endorsed by other…

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The following is an excerpt from Ian Hacking's introduction to the new edition of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which commemorates the book's 50th anniversary. To be…

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“Look,” Thomas Kuhn said. The word was weighted with weariness, as if Kuhn was resigned to the fact that I would misinterpret him, but he was still going to try—no…

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To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs…

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With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million [as the…

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A copying error appears to be responsible for critical features of the human brain that distinguish us from our closest primate kin, new research finds. When tested out in mice,…

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Collective cultural memory is the foundation on which the significance of a creative practice stands. As summarized in Emerson Rosenthal’s post for #DIGART week, online collections and exhibition spaces have…

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Infographic on compulsive hoarding

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The Ecstasy of Influence, now the title of his recent collection of writings, often addresses the process of integrating and "cobbling together" ideas and culture to make something new. Yet,…

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The New Aesthetic is now subject to discussion and critique on a number of forums, blogs, twitter threads, and so forth (for a list, see bibliography on Berry 2012a, but…

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The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this,…