BBC: Lego has unveiled Smart Bricks - tech-filled versions of its small building blocks - which it says will bring sets to life with sound, light and reaction to movement. However, the new product range is causing unease among play experts, who say it risks undermining what makes Lego special for children in an increasingly digital world. Wired: Smart Play revolves around Lego's patented sensor- and tech-packed brick. It's the same size as a standard 2 x 4 Lego brick, but it is capable of connecting to compatible Smart Minifigures and Smart Tags and interacting with them in real time. By pairing these components, kids big and small can create context-appropriate sounds and light effects as they play with the Danish company's toys.

When King George III of England began to show signs of acute mania toward the end of his reign, rumors about the royal madness multiplied quickly in the public mind. One legend had it that George tried to shake hands with a tree, believing it to be the King of Prussia.

The question of whether a computer program, or a robot, might become sentient has been debated for decades. In science fiction, we see it all the time. The artificial intelligence establishment overwhelmingly considers this prospect something that might happen in the far future, if at all.

The question of whether a computer program, or a robot, might become sentient has been debated for decades. In science fiction, we see it all the time. The artificial intelligence establishment overwhelmingly considers this prospect something that might happen in the far future, if at all.

Marcelo Rinesi remembers what it was like to watch Jurassic Park for the first time in a theater. The dinosaurs looked so convincing that they felt like the real thing, a special effects breakthrough that permanently shifted people’s perception of what’s possible.

Marcelo Rinesi remembers what it was like to watch Jurassic Park for the first time in a theater. The dinosaurs looked so convincing that they felt like the real thing, a special effects breakthrough that permanently shifted people’s perception of what’s possible.

Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates.

The mouse didn't look like much. It had the same red beady eyes and white fur as any other laboratory mouse. Sure, its DNA had been tweaked to make it ideal for testing anti-cancer drugs, but that wasn’t so unusual either.

What if NFT collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, CloneX, and other such stupid crap were actually honest about what they were?

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SOURCES: https://www.cracked.com/article_31914_nfts-are-so-so-dumb.html https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/ https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artists-opensea-rarible-marble-cards-fraud-art https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nft-fraud-qinni-art https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-hot-effect-earth-climate/ https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/tech-design/article/3123302/would-you-pay-us590000-meme-nyan-cat-just-sold-six https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/24/nft_users/ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/14/irs-is-probing-the-dark-web-to-look-for-cryptocurrency-nft-tax-evasion.html https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgzed/what-the-hell-is-right-clicker-mentality https://kotaku.com/nft-buyers-scammed-as-creator-bails-who-could-possibly-1847806528 https://hyperallergic.com/702309/artists-say-plagiarized-nfts-are-plaguing-their-community/ https://news.bitcoin.com/nft-criticism-heightens-skeptic-calls-tech-a-house-of-cards-claims-nfts-will-be-broken-in-a-decade/ https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22447690/link-rot-research-new-york-times-domain-hijacking https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/interpol-david-lynch-nft-collaboration-1248376/ https://adage.com/article/digital-marketing-ad-tech-news/how-brands-are-using-nfts-continually-updated-list/2376086 https://www.theverge.com/22683766/nft-scams-theft-social-engineering-opensea-community-recovery https://kotaku.com/nft-buyers-scammed-as-creator-bails-who-could-possibly-1847806528

Roger Horton: Jack Hunter Artist: Darnell Eaton Writer: Mark Hill Director: Jordan Breeding Art Director/Assistant Director: Andy Newman Director of Photography: Dave Brown Editor: Jordan Breeding Sound: Mike Schoen Key Production Assistant: Jose Brown Set Production Assistant/Art: James Satterfield Teleprompter: Hillary Shea

Mark's Twitter: https://twitter.com/mehil Mark's Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087SDX4L5 Jordan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/The_J_Breeding Jordan’s Writing Portfolio: https://thejordanbreedingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/portfolio/ Dave’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deforestbrown/

00:00 - If NFTs Were Honest 05:18 - Darnell Is Going To Be Famous

NFT #Crypto #NFTExplained

Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

In 1909, a poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow travelers, sending his car into a ditch and completely destroying the vehicle.

Parag Khanna is the author of Connectography (2016) and The Future is Asian (2019). Michael Ferrari is managing partner at Atlas Research Innovations and a senior fellow at the Wharton School.

When biologists synthesize DNA, they take pains not to create or spread a dangerous stretch of genetic code that could be used to create a toxin or, worse, an infectious disease.

Although he worked on a farm as a teenager and has a romantic attachment to the soil, ­Lippman isn’t a farmer. He’s a plant biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York with an expertise in genetics and development. And these greenhouse plants aren’t ordinary tomatoes.

When businesses latch onto a buzzword, it quickly becomes the solution to everything. Not long ago, in the era of “big data,” companies scrambled to add chief data scientists to their ranks.

Levandowski’s church will enter a tech universe that’s already riven by debate over the promise and perils of AI. Some thinkers, like Kevin Kelly in Backchannel earlier this year, argue that AI isn’t going to develop superhuman power any time soon, and that there’s no Singularity in sight.

The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics.

The New Observatory opened at FACT, Liverpool on Thursday 22nd of June and runs until October 1st. The exhibition, curated by Hannah Redler Hawes and Sam Skinner, in collaboration with The Open Data Institute, transforms the FACT galleries into a playground of micro-observatories, fusing art with data science in an attempt to expand the reach of both. Reflecting on the democratisation of tools which allow new ways of sensing and analysing, The New Observatory asks visitors to reconsider raw, taciturn ‘data’ through a variety of vibrant, surprising, and often ingenious artistic affects and interactions. What does it mean for us to become observers of ourselves? What role does the imagination have to play in the construction of a reality accessed via data infrastructures, algorithms, numbers, and mobile sensors? And how can the model of the observatory help us better understand how the non-human world already measures and aggregates information about itself? In its simplest form an observatory is merely an enduring location from which to view terrestrial or celestial phenomena. Stone circles, such as Stonehenge in the UK, were simple, but powerful, measuring tools, aligned to mark the arc of the sun, the moon or certain star systems as they careered across ancient skies. Today we observe the world with less monumental, but far more powerful, sensing tools. And the site of the observatory, once rooted to specific locations on an ever spinning Earth, has become as mobile and malleable as the clouds which once impeded our ancestors’ view of the summer solstice. The New Observatory considers how ubiquitous, and increasingly invisible, technologies of observation have impacted the scale at which we sense, measure, and predict. Citizen Sense, Dustbox (2016 – 2017). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. The Citizen Sense research group, led by Jennifer Gabrys, presents Dustbox as part of the show. A project started in 2016 to give residents of Deptford, South London, the chance to measure air pollution in their neighbourhoods. Residents borrowed the Dustboxes from their local library, a series of beautiful, black ceramic sensor boxes shaped like air pollutant particles blown to macro scales. By visiting citizensense.net participants could watch their personal data aggregated and streamed with others to create a real-time data map of local air particulates. The collapse of the micro and the macro lends the project a surrealist quality. As thousands of data points coalesce to produce a shared vision of the invisible pollutants all around us, the pleasing dimples, spikes and impressions of each ceramic Dustbox give that infinitesimal world a cartoonish charisma. Encased in a glass display cabinet as part of the show, my desire to stroke and caress each Dustbox was strong. Like the protagonist in Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel The Shrinking Man, once the scale of the microscopic world was given a form my human body could empathise with, I wanted nothing more than to descend into that space, becoming a pollutant myself caught on Deptford winds. Moving from the microscopic to the scale of living systems, Julie Freeman’s 2015/2016 project, A Selfless Society, transforms the patterns of a naked mole-rat colony into an abstract minimalist animation projected into the gallery. Naked mole-rats are one of only two species of ‘eusocial’ mammals, living in shared underground burrows that distantly echo the patterns of other ‘superorganism’ colonies such as ants or bees. To be eusocial is to live and work for a single Queen, whose sole responsibility it is to breed and give birth on behalf of the colony. For A Selfless Society, Freeman attached Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chips to each non-breeding mole-rat, allowing their interactions to be logged as the colony went about its slippery subterranean business. The result is a meditation on the ‘missing’ data point: the Queen, whose entire existence is bolstered and maintained by the altruistic behaviours of her wrinkly, buck-teethed family. The work is accompanied by a series of naked mole-rat profile shots, in which the eyes of each creature have been redacted with a thick black line. Freeman’s playful anonymising gesture gives each mole-rat its due, reminding us that behind every model we impel on our data there exist countless, untold subjects bound to the bodies that compel the larger story to life.

James Coupe, A Machine for Living (2017). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. Natasha Caruana’s works in the exhibition centre on the human phenomena of love, as understood through social datasets related to marriage and divorce. For her work Divorce Index Caruana translated data on a series of societal ‘pressures’ that are correlated with failed marriages – access to healthcare, gambling, unemployment – into a choreographed dance routine. To watch a video of the dance, enacted by Caruana and her husband, viewers must walk or stare through another work, Curtain of Broken Dreams, an interlinked collection of 1,560 pawned or discarded wedding rings. Both the works come out of a larger project the artist undertook in the lead-up to the 1st year anniversary of her own marriage. Having discovered that divorce rates were highest in the coastal towns of the UK, Caruana toured the country staying in a series of AirBnB house shares with men who had recently gone through a divorce. Her journey was plotted on dry statistical data related to one of the most significant and personal of human experiences, a neat juxtaposition that lends the work a surreal humour, without sentimentalising the experiences of either Caruana or the divorced men she came into contact with. Jeronimo Voss, Inverted Night Sky (2016). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. The New Observatory features many screens, across which data visualisations bloom, or cameras look upwards, outwards or inwards. As part of the Libre Space Foundation artist Kei Kreutler installed an open networked satellite station on the roof of FACT, allowing visitors to the gallery a live view of the thousands of satellites that career across the heavens. For his Inverted Night Sky project, artist Jeronimo Voss presents a concave domed projection space, within which the workings of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy teeter and glide. But perhaps the most striking, and prominent use of screens, is James Coupe’s work A Machine for Living. A four-storey wooden watchtower, dotted on all sides with widescreen displays wired into the topmost tower section, within which a bank of computer servers computes the goings on displayed to visitors. The installation is a monument to members of the public who work for Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing system run by corporate giant Amazon that connects an invisible workforce of online, human minions to individuals and businesses who can employ them to carry out their bidding. A Machine for Living is the result of James Coupe’s playful subversion of the system, in which he asked mTurk workers to observe and reflect on elements of their own daily lives. On the screens winding up the structure we watch mTurk workers narrating their dance moves as they jiggle on the sofa, we see workers stretching and labelling their yoga positions, or running through the meticulous steps that make up the algorithm of their dinner routine. The screens switch between users so regularly, and the tasks they carry out as so diverse and often surreal, that the installation acts as a miniature exhibition within an exhibition. A series of digital peepholes into the lives of a previously invisible workforce, their labour drafted into the manufacture of an observatory of observations, an artwork homage to the voyeurism that perpetuates so much of 21st century ‘online’ culture.

The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Learning Space. Photo by Gareth Jones. The New Observatory is a rich and varied exhibition that calls on its visitors to reflect on, and interact more creatively with, the data that increasingly underpins and permeates our lives. The exhibition opened at FACT, Liverpool on Thursday 22nd of June and runs until October 1st.

Silicon Valley is coming for death. But it’s looking in the wrong place. After disrupting the way we love, communicate, travel, work, and even eat, technologists believe they can solve the ultimate problem.

This story is part of our special coverage, The News in Crisis. When Republican Steve King beat back Democratic challenger Kim Weaver in the race for Iowa’s 4th congressional district seat in November, The Washington Post snapped into action, covering both the win and the wider electoral trend.