#Algopop

[livecodingcreatorsnowplaying]

ChordPunch 是由 Nick Collins 與 Alex McLean 創立的演算音樂廠牌。 https://www.discogs.com/label/983839-ChordPunch

[algopop]

BearID Project

“We develop noninvasive technologies to identify and monitor bears, facilitating their conservation.”

[algorithmsoflatecapitalism]

Welcome_to_the_future

[solarpunks]

Extinction Rebellion - London Waterloo Bridge Occupation

Friend of the blog @algopop sent in these Solarpunk AF photos from the first day of the protest yesterday. Love the guy’s solarpack in the second photo.

Solidarity to all those putting their freedom on the line for something so urgent and important. 

#DemandUtopia

[mkmasenseofsimulation]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! tumblr on algorithms in daily life

[prostheticknowledge]

Tinderbox

Coding project by Justin Long automates the process of selection for dating app Tinder using facial recognition, customized Eigenfaces (which are algorithmically generated face-like images) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for conversations.

TL;DR version = bot screening dating:

While my friends were getting sucked into "swiping" all day on their phones with Tinder, I eventually got fed up and designed a piece of software that automates everything on Tinder.

... It wasn't my intention to "one-up" the competition, but using the facial recognition algorithm Eigenfaces I built a bot that learns when to swipe right (like a person) AND swipe left (dislike a person) AND start your conversations. ... The bot that runs in the background also has a messaging system that starts conversations. Using StanfordNLP, the bot analyzes the sentiment of each chat response and classifies it as positive or negative. Using a "message tree" (see diagram below), the bot selects from pre-programmed chat messages as a response based on the sender's sentiment. This continues up to 3 replies until the user is notified that a chat is ready to enter. The advantage of this? It removes the time involved in filtering new Tinder matches since a lot of people tend to drop off and "go dark" early in the process. Extended conversation is a strong indicator of interest.

You can find out more here

[futurescope]

Charles Schwab Corp confirmed on Monday that it will introduce free automated investment plans picked by computer algorithms in the first quarter of 2015.

Reuters: Schwab to offer free 'robo-advise' plan in first quarter 2015

[mothersnewsofficial]

here are my favorites of the over 60 algorithmically-generated eel-related sportswears i looked at today

[algorithmsoflatecapitalism]

Micro-essay: Computational Faith

References:

Bless This Computer

21st Century Sangoma

This New Religion from a Silicon Valley Pioneer Worships AI as an Emerging Godhead

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

Algorithmic Culture

The Cathedral of Computation

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

[plummerfernandez]

#algopop

Algorithms are becoming cultural artefacts in their own right. The idea behind algo-pop is to create a call for documentation and discourse for algorithms that have increasingly strong cultural and social agency. Not all algorithms should be treated as mathematical abstracts that are pure and have no overlap with popular culture. A simple list of emerging cultural activity requiring algorithmic mediation proves this case to be true: ad targeting, online shopping recommendations, social bots, photo filtering and sharing, algo-trading, tagging, striving for a high klout score. With an instagram filtered image, the algorithm becomes legible, if you squint at it you can almost isolate the algorithm in your minds eye; a set of commands cropping and sepia tinting whatever image you throw at it, this man-made ‘thing’ is a cultural artefact, a considerably large number of people would recognise it instantly. More bizarrely this particular algorithm could be considered a type of nostalgo, an algorithm whose effectiveness relies on its ability to conjure past cultural references.  Some algorithms are even personified as bots, a ‘thing’ you live amongst, or beneath, or above, or encounter on a casual basis. These are a somewhat tangible type of socio-cultural algorithm, but many are invisible, especially to those who don’t understand them. Algorithms are even reaching beyond the host operating system, leaving their trace in the management of  warehouses to 3D printed artefacts (hint, hint). I’m not claiming to be the first to delve in this, and have included a reading list below, I’m simply announcing that I’m increasingly interested in this topic and I’ll be using the shorthand moniker and tag #algopop (and invite anyone to do so too) for any news or thoughts on algorithms participating in the way we live, behave, co-exist, amuse, enjoy, consume or ignore. The tag helps locate it (appropriately with the help of algorithms). further reading: Kevin Slavin, Honor Harger, Tartelon Gillespie, Christopher Steiner, Julien Oliver,

[dazeddigital]

TUMBLR OF THE WEEK

Those enigmatic entities can be a bogeyman to some (looking at you Knight Capital) and sufficiently powerful to move Kevin Slavin to label them the physics of culture.

Follow Matthew Plummer-Fernandez as he charts the appearance and impact of algorithms on pop culture at #algopop

.

[overandoverandoverand-blog]

"This is using six cores to render. Kinda looks like shit...but..."

"This is my source code. It has graphics. IN MY source code [as an image rotates over his code]"

[botology]

The birthplace of twitter spambots

Technology Review provides a great insight into who and how millions of twitter spam-bots are possibly created. One part of the bot making process that cannot be automated is the opening of an account. This job gets outsourced to 'Mechanical Turks' on crowdsourcing sites such as Amazon's mechanical turk marketplace. Once the twitter profile is set up, the login details get passed on to the service that sells twitter followers. In a way, it is an automated process, if you count these mechanical turks as now being a link in the algorithm's chain. The following is quoted from here.

Some of the work is a little shady. One person describing himself as a sociologist paid Hamilton a few cents to create a “believable” Twitter account. Her creation,Luke Lynch, who uses the handle @luke_daredevil, says he is “the eldest of four children” and a fan of rugby and pizza. For her character, whose photo she plucked off Google, Hamilton was required to post one believable tweet, choosing “The performance at BET Awards was popping.” 

The experience left Hamilton “wondering what that was all about.”

That fake Twitter account appears to be part of a wider spam network established by people associated with the social network View.io, possibly to recruit members. Unknown others have since take over the Luke Lynch identity, which has emitted a series of raunchy comments and stock quotes in Indian rupees. (View.io’s founder, Felix Chan, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

“Ugh!” said Kulkarni after hearing how his MobileWorks software was being used. “We do try to police the spambots.” He says inexperienced workers might not recognize “spammy” jobs, calling it a “cyberliteracy issue.” But the problem isn’t new. Two years ago, researchers at New York University estimated that 41 percent of all jobs posted to Mechanical Turk were for generating spam, generating clicks on ads, or influencing search engine results (see “How Mechanical Turk Is Broken”).

[philovankemenade]

Soon there will be a digital divide that is about more than broadband access - already an online elite exists - ironically separated from their followers by them.

Patrick Hussey on the danger of digital Darwinism powered by social media algorithms - http://patrickhussey.net/post/52947113673/why-klout-meets-yahoo-is-the-beginning-of-digital