#that however intersects into more serious aspects of interacting with the media

[liliesyonder]

still rotating him in my mind like a kebab. But racetrack’s wardrobe is so everything to me. Once again may routh please let me interview you for an in-depth analysis on costume design for every newsies clothing (yes even swifty’s vest which is Atrocious. It’s So Bad.) Racetrack’s undershirt being two sizes too big for him is so important to me and his gaudy vests that he has to hitch up to his pants? There’s so much bravado that begins and ends with how he presents himself as larger than life in favor of the odds he’s presented through shape. Even the parts we can’t see (ie his suspenders, pocketwatch) are properly coordinated to his outfits which implies he takes care to notice for little details that are incessant to other characters clothing.

[thehubops]

Mobile App Design as Art: Exploring the Intersection of Creativity and Functionality

In the age of digital mobile apps have been an essential part of lives. From social media to shopping or entertainment There's an app for every aspect. But have you taken the time to think about the art behind these apps? Designing mobile apps is much more than merely functional; it's an art that combines creativity and usability. We'll dive into the fascinating realm that is mobile application design and discuss how it is connected to the purpose of our company, HubOps, to create unique and user-centric solutions.

The Aesthetics of Mobile App Design

The design of mobile apps goes beyond aesthetics, but it definitely begins there. An app that is well-designed and designed is visually pleasing and immediately grabs the attention of the user. The palette of colors as well as the typography, icons as well as the overall design are selected to provide a cohesive and enjoyable experience. However, this isn't about just looking pretty, it's about communicating the brand's values and identity by way of design.

At HubOps we recognize that the visuals of an app form the first impression that users get and we are very serious about this. Our design team brings together creative thinking with user research to design visually stunning apps that connect with the users. If it's a bright and fun design for a game app or a sleek and minimal design for an office tool, we customize our designs to meet the specific preferences and needs of our customers.

The User-Centered Approach

While design and aesthetics are crucial, they are just one element of. A true mobile app's design excellence is in making sure that users have a seamless experience. The most effective apps are easy to use and user-friendly and require no explanation. The ability to achieve this level of usability requires a deep knowledge of user behavior and psychology.

At HubOps we insist on a user-centric design. We conduct extensive research with our users to discover pain points and their preferences. This information informs our design decisions, making sure that the app isn't just attractive but also efficient and functional. Our aim is to ensure that the trip throughout the experience is as effortless as it can be, while making sure that there is no friction or frustration.

Storytelling Through Design

A great mobile app design tells the story. It helps users follow the story, generating an atmosphere of flow and involvement. This aspect of storytelling is often ignored, yet it is essential to making a memorable and effective application. The design should convey the application's function and purpose with no need to provide lengthy directions.

HubOps believes in the value of telling stories via design. The way we move screens during the onboarding process or how animations and transitions are implemented in our design, we want to create an immersive experience for users into the world of the app. This doesn't just enhance the user experience, but also increases the sense of connection and interaction to the program.

The Art of Iteration

Mobile app design isn't an end-all-be-all procedure. It's a continual process of improvement and refinement. An effective design for apps is shaped by user feedback and the evolution of technology. This is an additional aspect where the art of design is evident.

At HubOps We understand that perfection is a constantly changing goal. We encourage our customers to be open to continuous improvement, seeking out ways to improve their app's appearance and function. This constant improvement process assures that the app is relevant and competitive in today's rapidly changing digital world.

Conclusion

In the mobile world, application design, functionality, and aesthetics come together to provide a seamless user experience. At HubOps we are zealous about the intersection of usability and creativity. Our aim is to leverage the power of art in design to provide creative and user-friendly solutions for our clients.

Mobile app design isn't solely about making things look appealing It's all about telling stories, recognizing the needs of users, and constantly making improvements. It's a form of art that improves how we interact with technology, and as a result our surroundings.

The next time you launch your favorite app, make sure you take some time to take in the art behind the design. If you're contemplating developing your own app or improving the functionality of an existing app, keep in mind that at HubOps we're ready to assist you in bringing your ideas to life using our expertise in mobile application design.

[lgbtqueeries]

Intersectionality: A Necessary Tool

TL;DR Intersectionality plays a role in our everyday life as we deal with the weaving of our identities in various institutions and situations. Intersectionality is also a pivotal tool in creating frameworks that analyze and attempt to fight against system oppression, in which intersectionality has multiplicative effects on individuals. While focused on Black women feminists in this post based on the articles I was provided this concept extends so much further. 

NOTE: Written with help from a fellow student Brennan Ventura taking Intro to WGSS Studies via our College. Feel free to reach out and chat with us about your feelings, understandings, comments, and questions!

Another day, another project in the name of awareness and activism. While this blog may seem to center on only queer rights I want to make it very clear that that is not the case. This blog speaks about and stands up for the many types of injustices present in our current systems and institutions. They do not have to intersect with Queer rights and advocacy but it’s time we focus on the fact that many actually do. Oppression doesn’t seem to go one at a time. You don’t generally deal with the racism inherent in all systems from simply being followed by shop owners in stores to a higher likelihood of police brutality one day and the next day dealing with inaccessible public places and buildings. This doesn’t take into account the discrimination you face from inside your own “safe” communities. 

Because of this, I want to want to bring to people’s awareness a couple of concepts that have been pivotal in sharing such eye-opening perspectives on the mix of oppressions. Intersectionality and system oppression are very important terms that can help in analyzing the lives and situations different people or groups of people across the world may be experiencing.  First off is intersectionality, intersectionality is a fairly new idea and a lot of different authors and people across multiple areas of interest such as activism, politics or science the answer to, “what is intersectionality”, would vary greatly. Most simply put, intersectionality is basically the differences and intricacies that humans in the world face in their daily lives. According to Sirma Bilge, and Patricia Hill Collins, sociology professors at Université de Montréal and the University of Maryland, say that intersectionality is “a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences”(Collins and Bilge 2020, 1). But more so, intersectionality is a lens that helps to analyze the different situations and dilemmas that people across the world go through and how many times, issues such as gender violence, racism, sexuality, discrimination are connected through underlying strings and the issues that involve these systemic problems typically overlap as well. Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American lawyer, and civil rights activist, uses intersectionality to unveil the hidden binds in cases that deal with race and gender discrimination. Crenshaw views intersectionality as a way of showing that issues such as race and gender that may only seem as racial discrimination or gender prejudice are often overlapped in their issues. In a 2016 TEDWomen speech by Crenshaw she stated “in the same way that intersectionality raised our awareness to the way that black women live their lives, it also exposes the tragic circumstances under which African-American women die ”(Crenshaw 2016). And this leads us to system oppression or systematic oppression through the lens of intersectionality. 

System oppression is the unwritten societal standards and traditions that are discriminatory towards certain races, ethnicities, genders or groups of people in general. For instance, in the United States African-Americans have undergone systematic oppression for generations and still continue to be oppressed today due to the societal standards grandfathered in by millions of people across the United States. Although explicit discrimination against African-Americans or explicit discrimination of any kind towards a specific group was made illegal by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, system oppression and the unwritten discrimination of certain groups throughout the United States are still as prominent as ever. And through the lens of intersectionality, it is evident that more often than not, an issue that may seem only racially charged or motivated is often intersectional and involves problems and perspectives from many other areas of oppression such as gender discrimination, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, etc. and just looking at the issue as one caused by racism will not solve the issue and lead towards more problems later on down the line. Looking at system oppression through intersectionality it is evident a vast majority of issues do not merely involve one aspect of oppression and discrimination but multiple aspects like race, gender, homophobia and many more. According to a case by Kimberlé Crenshaw a young girl was in a lawsuit against a  company that did not hire her due to what she thought was racial discrimination, however, the judge overseeing the case did not agree with the girl’s pleas. When analyzing the lawsuit, Crenshaw noticed that the judge was not looking at the case through the right lens, and because of this, the young girl lost the lawsuit. Crenshaw described this case through a lens of intersectionality and how the young African-American girl could not get helped because she was suffering through both racial and gender charged systematic oppression. As we can see, system oppression and intersectionality play a big role in the world today, and intersectionality, seeing an issue through multiple perspectives, can help to solve so many of the issues brought about by system oppression and discrimination in the United States and other nations across the world that face similar issues and problems. 

These concepts are far-reaching but I think it important to first analyze them in the concepts that they were emphasized in. The frameworks for viewing interlocking systems of power, in this case, focus on weaving feminism and anti-racism together. In the introduction of the book But Some of Us Are Brave we see this eloquently spoken by Gloria T. Hull and Barbara Smith, “Because of white women’s racism and Black men’s sexism, there was no room in either area for a serious consideration of the lives of Black women. And even when they have considered Black women, white women usually have not had the capacity to analyze racial politics and Black culture, and Black men have remained blind or resistant to the implications of sexual politics in Black women’s lives” (Cooper, Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith 2015, xxi). It is out of absence for this framework that these movements are born. Because of the interlocking identity, instead of being embraced by both communities, they are cast aside and their needs are not spoken for nor are their experiences being shared. Kimberly Crenshaw on her TedTalk about “The Urgency for Intersectionality” spoke about how pivotal that these voices are heard. Her example also focuses on the lived experiences of Black women, mentioning that with the trickle-down sense of social justice that we have currently, people are slipping through the cracks and being left at crossroads of communities, alone and vulnerable (Crenshaw 2016). Social justice movements, despite their call for equality only tend to mention the story of those with other privileges, for instance, feminism speaking mostly for the equality of white women. In this manner, those with intersecting identities have multiplicative effects of oppression and discrimination. As Crenshaw states, Black women brought down by police violence are not covered in the media as breaking news like that of their fallen brothers because of their status as women that are Black and the media simply doesn’t have a frame for how to portray that. 

Of course, Black women are not the only intersectionality groups to have created such frameworks, demanding they be heard for their experiences. Similar movements have happened with queer people of color, disabled queer people, and indigenous people of nonbinary gender identities. Each of these groups speaks out against injustices of racism, homophobia, transphobia, colonialism, and ableism at the crossroads of where they interact, the very spot they were abandoned at. This is a commonality of all of those groups. They have formed communities based on this separation from not only the dominant, privileged culture but also the groups that are supposed to help them as well. This is by far not a new concept. These groups have been standing up for themselves for decades, creating liberation groups like the Salsa-Soul Sisters, a group made for and by Queer women of color. Just because their history has been erased, covered up, and ignored doesn’t mean that they haven’t been there fighting back. These groups are taking a stand for their stories and would love for allies to help spread their cause. Stay safe and stay educated and don’t forget to stand up for what you believe in!

Work Cited

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “TEDWomen 2016.” TEDWomen 2016.

Cooper, Brittney C., Akasha Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith. But Some of Us Are Brave Black Womens Studies. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2015.

[prixmiumcontent]

A First Post

Hello, and welcome. This is the first post of an empty blog. As is stated in the “About” tab on my theme, this is a place for me to house meta, commentary, reviews, manifestos, and any other fandom writing that is a little more formal and serious than my day-to-day, personal blog posts. I hope that it might one day serve as a useful portfolio for writing about similar things in a semi-professional context, but more than anything, I’m here to stoke the flames of my enthusiasm for things I love.

Before I get started and begin to tag things, I would like to explain a few things about myself to give you context for where my writing and I are coming from. I would like to explain my purpose and general approach to fandom, just to get those things out of the way. If I am unclear here or other issues come up in the future, feel free to ask me! I am more than happy to answer any kind of relevant question asked in good-faith.

About the Writer

I go by Prix a lot of places online. That began in about 2016, though I’ve been in fandom a lot longer than that. It is pronounced “pre” like the prefix or like a Grand Prix, not like “Trix” as in “Trix are for Kids!” Although, either might be appropriate. I am an English teacher by trade, but I don’t have a full-time job this school year. That’s one reason I have decided to provide my Ko-Fi button. I don’t want to pressure you, but if you think I did a good job and can afford to encourage me, then please do. I’m at a point in my life where it makes a difference. I ask that if you feel like buying me a coffee (or whatever - I actually don’t drink coffee very much) that you be at least 20 years of age. I stole this idea from @vampireapologist​, perhaps a bit presumptuously. The reasoning is that I really don’t want teenagers - those who might be my students, at least in age - feeling like they need to give me money. It just seems like a conflict of interest. If I have managed to obtain your admiration, then I am very flattered! However, I would appreciate it more in the form of likes and reblogs if you haven’t had the opportunity to feel like an adult yet. I don’t want to feel like I have a certain amount of societal power over you and am using it to take money from you. You can support my efforts by engaging with my writing - reblog, comment, like, etc. Thank you for understanding!

I am 27 at the time of writing this. My pronouns are she/her, and I support the gender-neutral and singular “they” and don’t mind being referred to by it. I am a white American Christian, but I do my best to be as intersectional as I can be. I got to attend university, and I have a BA in English and Philosophy (Concentration: Religious Studies) and a Master of Arts in Teaching. I am always eager to learn and never intend to be exclusionary or hurtful. If you would like to know other demographic information that doesn’t seem so pertinent to this blog, see my personal one.

Fandom Philosophy

First and foremost, I believe that fandom should be a safe and fun place for anyone who participates in it in good faith. I am not an anti-, and I do not support an approach to fandom that is more like forming a mob to snuff out points of view one does not agree with like a heat-seeking missile. Callout culture is killing us, and in my opinion, there has been a grave conflation of appropriate approaches to politics and appropriate approaches to fandom. this is not to say that I believe that one’s hobbies and interests are completely outside a person’s internal politic, but I do not think that it is fandom’s monolithic responsibility to interrogate the internal politic of every person who chooses to participate.

Of course, there are instances where a person is not participating in a fandom in an appropriate way. For example, a person might co-opt a medium that is marketed to very young children and proceed to create an online environment in which young children cannot be reasonably protected from content that is too mature for or harmful to them. However, I also believe that many self-proclaimed antis have decided that any “unhealthy,” “dark,” “relevant,” or otherwise disconcerting aspect of another person’s fandom interests and preferences comprises the same thing. I believe that this is a dangerous doctrine which courts right-wing-y censorship vibes, and I do not believe that we should be doing the Right’s job for them.

Individual members of fandom have all the moral responsibilities bestowed upon every human being anywhere, in any context. A person is responsible for a certain amount of self-awareness that includes examination of what one likes, why one likes it, and if the thing one likes is in any way harmful to his or her well-being, interactions with others, or worldview. However, fandom as a group has absolutely no business trying to mobilize as a moral authority.

I reiterate once again that I believe that fandom should be a safe, fun place for anyone who participates in it. That is not to say that I refuse to be critical of certain media, and I likely will be critical at times. However, it is no one’s business but my own exactly how I deal with “problematic” aspects of something I enjoy, and I will not get bogged down in some kind of circular inquisition about how I don’t dislike something I like enough. On the other hand, if I ever criticize something, even caustically, please understand that it is a personal reaction on my part and not a personal judgment on your point of view as a reader. Thank you for reading anything I write on this blog.

I may append or amend this post or put links down here in the future. In the meantime, at least this blog now has something on it, and I’m really glad you’re here!

[rposervices]

The everyday device in your home killing hundreds around the globe

Perhaps because the Apple iPhone was only released in 2007, a lot of us have not yet grasped the full deleterious effects of ‘the device’, and the many similar not-so-smartphones the now clunky-seeming original spawned. Countless numbers of people have been killed by their smartphones already, and we’re not talking about the tin-foil-hat brigade’s concerns about the effects of 5G, wi-fi and phone signals in general on our brains. The most obvious example is all the people who are killed on our roads, not just because they were the ones stupidly looking at their phones while driving – Australians now believe it is the main reason for our rising road toll, with 32% of drivers admitting to reading text messages while driving, according to the Community Attitudes to Road Safety 2013 Survey Report – but because they ambled, zombie-like, into traffic while posting on Instagram. The number of pedestrians killed on US roads has risen by a staggering 51% since 2009. In 2017, pedestrian fatalities in Australia jumped by 20% in a year, with police blaming the stupidity of smartphones. If you haven’t noticed the number of people who try to cross roads while ignoring the approach of big heavy vehicles in favour of their tiny screens, it’s probably because you’ve been looking at your phone. The RACQ would like to see new laws to fine people who cross the road while staring at a device. “We think that sort of offence is on its way. There’s no doubt about it,” spokesman Paul Turner said. “Stand at an intersection in the CBD for half an hour and you’ll see five or 10 people just being saved or stopping themselves from walking out into traffic because they were looking down at their phone. When you tap them on the shoulder and they look up it’s as though they’ve been in some sort of daze because they are so engrossed in their phone.” No doubt you’re congratulating yourself for not being like that yourself but, be honest, what is your relationship with your phone like? And even if it’s not getting you run over, how much harm is it doing you?

Dopamine and cortisol

Have you, for example, felt what’s known as ‘phantom vibrations’ from your phone? That sensation where your body is sure it’s detected a new message buzz, but you check and there’s nothing there? That strange and concerning sensation is caused by the state of hyper-vigilance you’ve no doubt found yourself in from time to time, when stressful/vital information is pouring into this now essential-for-life device, which is rarely more than a metre away from you. The fact is, we are, as a species, becoming addicted to both the dopamine hits of satisfaction that our smartphones give us hundreds of times a day, while being simultaneously assaulted by the dangerous levels of cortisol they send coursing through our bodies. That combination is affecting everything from the way we sleep to our attention span, our memory, our self-esteem, decision-making skills and our physical health. You’re probably aware that many apps, and phones themselves, are designed to be habit forming. Those Likes on Facebook and Instagram are designed to trigger happy chemicals in our brains, much the way poker machines do, and thus to make us want to keep checking them, endlessly.

No less an authority than Google noted in a report that: “Mobile devices loaded with social media, email and news apps” create “a constant sense of obligation, generating unintended personal stress”. According to a study by a tracking app called Moment, the average American spends four hours a day staring at their phone. Unfortunately, not all the information our screens give us is positive, and when we’re getting, instead, irate emails from colleagues, for example, or other bad news, our bodies release cortisol, our fight-or-flight hormone. Cortisol is designed to prime your body to react to physical threats – such as bears, or bullies – and it changes your body physically, upping your heart rate, frizzing your adrenaline and spiking your blood sugar. Unfortunately, your body also responds with cortisol when you’re being stressed emotionally. And smartphones can provide you with these moments, wherever you are, multiple times per hour. “Your cortisol levels are elevated when your phone is in sight or nearby, or when you hear it or even think you hear it,” says David Greenfield, the founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. “It’s a stress response, and it feels unpleasant, and the body’s natural response is to want to check the phone to make the stress go away.” Checking the phone, of course, can just provide more bad news and thus you can get into a cycle that leaves you with chronically high levels of cortisol. And this can lead to all kinds of health issues, including heart attacks, dementia, diabetes and depression. Dr Robert Lustig, author of The Hacking of The American Mind recently told The New York Times that “every chronic disease we know of is exacerbated by stress, and our phones are absolutely contributing to this”. As bad as smartphones are for you, of course, you’ve only had it running your life for the past dozen years. Just think of what it’s doing to your children, and the entirety of the coming generations. Anyone over the age of 10 is already unable to imagine a world without smartphones, and as they grow into adolescence, they are likely to be gifted one of these dangerous yet vital devices by their own parents. This is “like giving them cocaine or heroin”, according to David Gillespie, the author of Teen Brain – Why Screens Are Making Your Teenager Depressed, Anxious And Prone to Lifelong Addictive Illnesses – And How to Stop it Now.

Teens, addiction and anxiety caused by smartphones

Gillespie’s book is full of shocking insights, and data, which make perfect sense of the behaviour many young teens exhibit today, particularly if you’re brave or foolhardy enough to attempt to take a device off one. He points out that in puberty, as the prefrontal cortex expands, the human body turns off a system called GABA (Gamma aminobutyric acid), a kind of “general purpose braking system that stops us from becoming addicted to things”. This is why the teen years are a terrible time to start drinking or smoking, or even having sex, and Gillespie points out that society has realised this, and had huge successes in those areas. “Between 2007 and now, the rates of teenage pregnancy, and alcohol and cigarette use by teens all dropped – they’re all about half of what they were, it’s a huge achievement and I don’t know why we’re not talking more about it,” he says. “The rates of anxiety and depression for teenagers should also be halving but, instead, the rates of those things in teens have actually doubled over the same period. “That tells us immediately that something is replacing those addictions. And what has replaced it is also addictive, as it has driven up mental illness in this life stage.” The reason, according to Gillespie, is that we are now giving every adolescent “devices that can run simulations of addictive behaviour, all the time”. As he points out, software for smartphones and apps are designed to be addictive, to have the same “mesmeric effect” that poker machines have on those who are susceptible, only across a wider swathe of society. “There are millions of companies competing to be one of those five apps on your home screen that you click a hundred or a thousand times a day, and they want to find a way to get people to press that button by giving them a hit of dopamine every time they press it,” he says.

Teens are super susceptible, of course, but boys and girls are targeted in different ways. Young women, Gillespie’s research reveals, are rewarded by the drug oxytocin when “they are in a group of girls, and that group approves of them, they feel liked, and that gives them oxytocin, which is more powerful in girls than in boys”. “A teenage girl is as sensitive as she will ever be to this and that’s why the creation of ‘approval porn’ has been so successful,” Gillespie adds. “Until now, we’ve never been able to replicate this approval hit of having real people like you, but simulating that is what social media software does. All of the Facebooks, the Instagrams, they’re all high-speed simulators of social approval, and girls, really, really respond to that.” Boys, however, are gripped by what Gillespie calls ‘danger porn’, because men are stimulated by risk and danger. “Which is why gambling is so popular; it’s that chance of losing, and the relief of surviving something that’s rewarding for boys – it’s also why they love roller-coasters,” he says. “And a simulation of that is online gaming on your phone; the first-person shooter like Fortnite, those games are all designed around the concept of danger porn. It’s about survival and the relief of survival.” Throw in the social aspect of being able to chat to your peers while playing, and the mobility of phone-based games, and you’ve got serious addiction on your hands. As Gillespie says, these devices were designed from day one, by Steve Jobs and company, to be “beautiful, easy to use and hard to give up”. And, knowing how addictive they would become, Jobs famously declared that he wouldn’t let his own children near them. “The Jobs thing came out by accident in an interview, he was asked how long he let his kids play with iPads and so on and he wasn’t expecting it and just blurted out that he wouldn’t let his children have them – what’s that saying? Don’t get high on your own supply,” Gillespie laughs. “But that’s become the trend in Silicon Valley these days, the executives instruct their nannies not to let their kids anywhere near these devices. “And the research shows that rich people are less likely to give their devices to kids, because they can afford to pay humans to interact with their children instead. They consider it a low-class thing to give your children a screen.” Regardless of what health effects you believe 5G networks might have in the coming years, it’s clear that the devices we’re already using, already addicted to, in fact, have had an enormous effect on society, and mortality, and they’ve only been around for little more than a decade. The device may yet prove to be a more potent example of humanity shooting itself in the foot than even the gun. Read the full article

[sciforce]

The Tactile Internet — a new IoT?

The progress is constantly speeding up and the future is at our door — it is something that everyone keeps repeating even not thinking much of this future. But if you start thinking, you find evidence to this in every tool, in every method and technique present in all spheres of life.

We are only beginning to get used to the Internet of Things and the idea of the connected world; scientists sketch new applications and scholars write books on its impact on our mentality. But the IoT is already not the cutting-edge technology; the progress has already digested it and is promising to add tactile senses to our internet experience in the Tactile Internet paradigm.

The Tactile Internet has been defined by the International Telecommunication Union in August 2014 as an Internet network featuring low latency, an extremely short transit, a high availability, high reliability and a high level of security. This technology rests on cloud computing proximity (Mobile Edge-Cloud) and the virtual or augmented reality for sensory and haptic controls. It is believed to add a new dimension to human-machine interaction by delivering a low latency enough to build real-time interactive systems.

The new technology has been designed to operate in haptic virtual environment at the range of almost 150 km in less than a millisecond. Such fast response time of the transactions has additional benefit of increasing security. Authentication is provided by the associated physical transmission and the use of biometrics tactile systems called the “non-clonable physical functions.”

History of development

Foreseeing the possibilities of future advancements in 2012, Gerhard Fettweis, a mobile communications professor at TU Dresden, coined the term Tactile Internet and set the process running.

“This way you could, for example, catch a falling object remotely, or control a connected car at an intersection. If you provide haptic feedback, you can also feel a reaction such that it seems to be instantaneous. The Tactile Internet will be used in areas such as automation, education, entertainment, gaming, farming, healthcare, and industrial transportation. It will also enable humans to control robots remotely in real time,” he pictured the future of his creation.

Scope of application

As we can see from the creator’s comment, the two main goals of the Tactile Internet are Fettweis’s comment: to deliver “haptic feedback,” or touch , in real time; and to create networked control systems that could work in an intertwined and immediate way to enable automation or remote control of highly dynamic processes.

In the most general terms, the Tactile Internet aims at enabling interaction with distant humans and cyber-physical systems as if they were close. As it can maintain the reaction time of the order of the millisecond, the Tactile Internet may be beneficial for areas such as industrial automation, transportation systems, health, education and serious games. Thanks to its characteristics, the potential applications of the Tactile Internet include:

· simulation of movements (simulators of motorized driving);

· remote medical diagnostics;

· telesurgery;

· help to physically handicapped persons (automatic management and controlled exoskeletons);

· precise movements of remote control robots to improve the car traffic in difficult conditions;

· brain implants;

· Virtual Reality applications, etc.

Architecture and components

The end-to-end architecture for the Tactile Internet can be split into three distinct domains: a master domain, a network domain, and a controlled domain.

Master Domain — usually consists of a human (operator) and a human system interface (HSI). The HSI shall be actually a haptic device (master robot), which converts the human input to tactile input through various tactile coding techniques. The haptic device will allow an operator to touch, feel, and manipulate objects in real and virtual environments, and primarily controls the operations.

Controlled Domain — consists of a teleoperator (controlled robot) and is directly controlled by the master domain through various command signals. The teleoperator interacts with objects in the remote environment. Energy is exchanged between the master and controlled domains through command and feedback signals, thereby closing a global control loop.

Network Domain — provides the medium for bilateral communication between the master and controlled domains, kinesthetically coupling the human to the remote environment. Ideally, the operator shall be completely immersed into the remote environment.

5G Mobile Communications Systems

For the Tactile Internet that will be servicing such critical aspects of society as healthcare, security becomes the top priority. With such applications as telesurgery, the outage should not increase a second per year. Besides, it should have sufficient capacity to allow large numbers of devices to communicate with each other simultaneously and autonomously. It should be able to work with the traditional wired Internet, the mobile Internet and the IoT. The current 4G communications systems cannot fulfill these technical requirements, so it is the 5G mobile communications systems that are expected to underpin the Tactile Internet. 5G is still at the stage of design, though common understanding exists that it should not only support an evolution of traditional mobile communication services, such as personal mobile multimedia communication or personal mobile broad-band services but also address novel use cases, including, for example, machine type communication (smart energy networks, vehicular communication and intelligent transport systems, sensor net-working) or novel ways of media distribution.

A logical approach to the 5G network architecture builds on a common programmable physical infrastructure and an NFV-enabled network cloud that provides the required protocol stack functionalities. The SDN controller provides the functionality of programming the core and radio-access network.

Ultra-Reliable Edge-Cloud Technology

In the Tactile Internet, the cloud technology is natively embedded into the networking technologies. With cloud computing and storage, resources are not only shared by multiple users but also dynamically reallocated per demand that maximizes computing capabilities and minimizes power consumption, rack space, software licenses, among others.

The distance from the cloud to the wireless edge can maximum be in the order of a few kilometers so that the 1ms challenge can be met. This requires the cloud application server to be hosted at the edge of the operator’s core network. In this way, the applications are stored and executed in a very trusted and secure environment. However, scalability and delay if the server is placed deep into the CN become an issue and so is delay if the server is placed deep into the CN. To minimize this issue, it is proposed to use Cloudlets where fairly distributed cloud storage and computing capabilities are placed at the very edge of the network. Separation in functionality is ensured via different virtualization approaches. The cloud community, however, has been pushing the edge-cloud concept even further through the Fog Computing and Nebula paradigms — a dispersed cloud infrastructure that uses (voluntary) edge resources for both computation and data storage.

So, the IoT era has brought us many great things, but it is time to go beyond to improve human presence in an interactive future with robotics and remote technology. The Tactile Internet will become the technology of the future that will finally transport touch in real-time through the Internet. Maybe, this will be the technology that will promote interaction rather than automation, giving a more human side to tech as well as our communication via the Internet.

[freelanews-blog]

As They Return To The Classroom

By Victor Ojelabi The social media has always provided an avenue for entertainment for everyone including my humble self. That is why you will see someone all by himself with his phone laughing without a care in the world. That was the situation I caught myself some while back while I was going through my friends Whatsapp statuses. I came across this very pictorial illustration that effectively captured students return to the classroom. It depicted agitated children crying-obviously wishing the holiday had not ended, laughing mothers, who were happy they children were going with their wahala, and worried fathers who knew what was coming for their pockets. That said, the back-to-school period is an important time for parents as well as their children. In this week’s article, I took time out to research on what parents will need to do for their children as they go (back) to school as first timers, old timers or simply students in a new school environment. This also includes a few safety tips parents need to familiarise themselves with. Since I do not know it all, I spoke to some parents, teachers and guardians to come up with some of these tips. I also drew material from experts like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Growing up, you can be sure that I have had my own fair share of new schools, new teachers and new friends quite often. Though exhilarating and exciting to always meet new people, I can assure you that it can also be daunting and downright uneasy for most. Expectedly, many children become nervous about new situations, including changing to a new school, classroom or teacher. This may occur at any age. If your child seems nervous, it can be helpful to rehearse entry into the new situation. Take them to visit the new school or classroom before the first day of school. Remind them that there are probably a lot of students who are uneasy about the first day of school, just like them. Thankfully, teachers know that students are nervous and will make an extra effort to make sure everyone feels as comfortable as possible. If your child seems nervous, ask them what they are worried about and help them problem solve ways to master the new situation. Point out the positive aspects of starting school to create positive anticipation about the first day of class. They will see old friends and meet new ones. Talk with them about positive experiences they may have had in the past at school or with other groups of children. Find another child in the neighbourhood with whom your child can walk to school, ride on the bus or follow in a car. If it is a new school for your child, attend any available orientations and take an opportunity to tour the school before the first day. Bring the child to school a few days prior to class to play on the playground and get comfortable in the new environment. If you feel it is needed, drive your child (or walk with her) to school and pick her up on the first day, and get there early on the first day to cut down on unnecessary stress. Make sure to touch base with your child's new teacher at the beginning or end of the day so the teacher knows how much you want to be supportive of your child's school experience. Consider starting your child on their school sleep/wake schedule a week or so ahead of time so that time change is not a factor on their first couple of days at school. Your child’s bag and the content at this point matters. Dear parent, please choose a backpack with wide, padded shoulder straps and a padded back. Pack light. Organise the backpack to use all of its compartments. Pack heavier items closest to the centre of the back. The backpack should never weigh more than 10% to 20% of your child's body weight. Go through the pack with your child weekly, and remove unneeded items to keep it light. Remind your child to always use both shoulder straps. Slinging a backpack over one shoulder can strain muscles. Adjust the pack so that the bottom sits at your child's waist. Children are generally ready to start walking to school at 9 to 11 years of age. Outside safety concerns, I don’t see any reason why a child should not do so, given that the school is not very far from the house. This serves as an avenue for the child to exercise as well as other, advantages which I will not delve into now. If you will allow your child walk to school, kindly make sure your child's walk to school is a safe route with well-trained adult crossing guards at every intersection. Identify other children in the neighbourhood with whom your child can walk to school. In neighbourhoods with higher levels of traffic, consider organising a "walking school bus," in which an adult accompanies a group of neighbourhood children walking to school. Please, be realistic about your child's pedestrian skills. Because small children are impulsive and less cautious around traffic, carefully consider whether or not your child is ready to walk to school without adult supervision. If the route home requires crossing busier streets than your child can reasonably do safely, have an adult, older friend or sibling escort them home. If your children are young or are walking to a new school, walk with them or have another adult walk with them the first week or until you are sure they know the route and can do it safely. If your child will need to cross a street on the way to school, practice safe street crossing with them before the start of school. I still remember the age old “look left, right and left again before you cross” admonition I got from my parents as a child. Additionally, the use of bright-coloured clothing or a visibility device, like a vest or armband with reflectors, will make your child more visible to drivers. On eating, one of the best advice I have heard that remains golden is, “eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.” Interestingly, studies show that children who eat a nutritious breakfast function better. They do better in school, and have better concentration and more energy. Some schools (a few private ones) provide breakfast for children; if yours does not, make sure they eat a breakfast that contains some protein before leaving for school. One of the campaign promises of the APC led government was to provide lunch for students in school. At a time, this programme was running. I can’t say if it is still running now however. Please, help your child pack a healthy balanced lunch if you can or ensure you are aware what they buy for lunch. Also ensure you know who dishes out your child’s lunch. Only God knows the kind of nonsense we were forced to buy back in school those yesteryears. I am sure those with children in standard private schools have very little to worry about in this aspect. Next is bullying. Bullying or cyberbullying is when one child picks on another child repeatedly. Bullying can be physical, verbal, or social. It can happen at school, on the playground, on the school bus, in the neighbourhood, over the Internet, or through mobile devices like cell phones. When your child is bullied, alert school officials to the problems and work with them on solutions. Teach your child to be comfortable with when and how to ask a trusted adult for help. Ask them to identify who they can ask for help. Recognize the serious nature of bullying and acknowledge your child's feelings about being bullied. Help your child learn how to respond by teaching your child how to: 1. Look the bully in the eye. 2. Stand tall and stay calm in a difficult situation. 3. Walk away. Teach your child how to say in a firm voice. 1. "I don't like what you are doing." 2. "Please do NOT talk to me like that." Encourage your child to make friends with other children. Support outside activities that interest your child. Make sure an adult who knows about the bullying can watch out for your child's safety and well-being when you cannot be there. Monitor your child's social media or texting interactions so you can identify problems before they get out of hand. When your child is the bully, be sure your child knows that bullying is never okay. Set firm and consistent limits on your child's aggressive behaviour. Help your child learn empathy for other children by asking them to consider how the other child feels about the way your child treated them. Ask your child how they would feel if someone bullied them. Also, be a positive role mode. Show children they can get what they want without teasing, threatening or hurting someone. Use effective, non-physical discipline, such as loss of privileges. Focus on praising your child when they behave in positive ways such as helping or being kind to other children as opposed to bullying them. Develop practical solutions with the school principal, teachers, school social workers or psychologists, and parents of the children your child has bullied. When your child is a bystander, encourage your child to tell a trusted adult about the bullying. Encourage your child to join with others in telling bullies to stop. Help your child support other children who may be bullied. Encourage your child to include these children in activities. Outside bullying, lets also consider the before & after school child care they get. During early and middle childhood, children need supervision. A responsible adult should be available to get them ready and off to school in the morning and supervise them after school until you return home from work. If a family member will care for your child, communicate the need to follow consistent rules set by the parent regarding schedules, discipline and homework. Children approaching adolescence (11- and 12-year-olds) should not come home to an empty house in the afternoon unless they show unusual maturity for their age. If alternate adult supervision is not available, parents should make special efforts to supervise their children from a distance. Children should have a set time when they are expected to arrive at home and should check in with a neighbour or with a parent by telephone. If you choose an after-school programme like extramural lessons for your child, inquire about the training of the staff. There should be a high staff-to-child ratio, trained persons to address health issues and emergencies, and the rooms and the playground should be safe, not just teaching and learning. Getting enough sleep is critical for a child to be successful in school. Children who do not get enough sleep have difficulty concentrating and learning as well as they can. Set a consistent bedtime for your child and stick with it every night. Having a bedtime routine that is consistent will help your child settle down and fall asleep. Also have your child turn off electronic devices well before bedtime. Try to have the home as quiet and calm as possible when younger children are trying to fall asleep. On home works and study habits, create an environment that is conducive to doing homework starting at a young age. Children need a consistent work space in their bedroom or another part of the home that is quiet, without distractions, and promotes study. Schedule ample time for homework; build this time into choices about participation in after school activities. Importantly, establish a household rule that the TV and other electronic distractions stay off during homework time while additionally supervising computer and Internet use. Be available to answer questions and offer assistance, but never do a child's homework for him or her. Take steps to help alleviate eye fatigue, neck fatigue and brain fatigue while studying. It may be helpful to close the books for a few minutes, stretch, and take a break periodically when it will not be too disruptive. If your child is struggling with a particular subject, speak with your child's teacher for recommendations on how you or another person can help your child at home or at school. If you have concerns about the assignments your child is receiving, talk with their teacher. For general homework problems that cannot be worked out with the teacher, a tutor may be considered. Some children need extra help organizing their homework. Checklists, timers, and parental supervision can help overcome homework problems. Some children may need help remembering their assignments. Work with your child and their teacher to develop an appropriate way to keep track of their assignments – such as an assignment notebook. Read the full article

[angrycollectordaze-me-blog]

Assignment代写：The development of digital media art

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的assignment代写范文- The development of digital media art，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了数字媒体艺术的发展。随着计算机的发展和普及，数字媒体艺术也逐渐兴盛起来，将数字科技与现代传媒结合在一起，可以帮助我们实现感性思维与理性思维的有机结合，并在此基础上，将文化的魅力充分的展示出来。但目前数字媒体艺术的发展现状不容乐观，存在缺乏先进创作理念以及人文底蕴等诸多现象。这些问题的存在，阻碍了数字媒体艺术的发展，为此应当给予高度的重视。

The connotation of digital art is very extensive, including network art, multimedia, digital photography and many other content, it is interactive and the use of network media as the basic characteristics, so has received the majority of people's attention. With the rapid development of knowledge economy in the 21st century, digital art, as an organic combination of human creativity and science and technology, has developed into a core industry, which has driven the development of China's economy to a certain extent.

At present, the development of digital media art is not optimistic, there is a lack of advanced creative ideas and cultural heritage and many other phenomena. The existence of these problems hinders the development of digital media art, which should be given high attention.

And some developed countries abroad the development of digital media art, it is easy to found that most of the artists creative ideas are relatively backward in our country, for digital media art design content is lack of necessary understanding, to accept and understand the artistic techniques of digital art, still insist on the creation of the traditional concept in the process of creation, its work is difficult to meet the demand of the market. Moreover, due to the lack of innovation in digital media art creation, the phenomenon of digital media art works in the market is relatively serious, which hinders the sustainability of China's digital media art industry to some extent.

Nowadays, digital media and art are developing rapidly and moving towards diversification. As an ancient civilization with thousands of years of cultural deposits, China should give full play to the positive role of digital media art to carry forward our traditional culture. However, contrary to what is expected, China's digital media art is still difficult to integrate with the international community and shows a trend of marginalization. In order to promote the sustainable development of digital media art, we should take traditional culture as the foundation, avoid blind worship of western culture, realize the organic combination of traditional culture and digital media art, and comprehensively and deeply understand Chinese traditional culture.

As one of the important forms of the organic combination of art and science, digital media technology on the one hand reflects the wisdom of human beings, and on the other hand also enriczes the thinking of artists to a certain extent. However, it is worth noting that over-reliance on computer and other technologies is bound to be detrimental to the improvement of individual technical level of artists. This phenomenon is very prominent in the group of young artists. For the majority of young artists, computer software and other technical means are very convenient to use and can greatly improve work efficiency. Therefore, they rely on computer software and other technical means and thus lose their inspiration for creation. In the long run, it is not conducive to the improvement of the innovative consciousness of the group of artists, and it is difficult to make their spiritual realm reach the expected goal, which is very adverse to the improvement of the level of artistic works.

As mentioned above, the current situation of the development of digital media art in China is not optimistic, and there are many problems. These problems are very unfavorable to the development of digital media art, so it is necessary to take effective measures to actively solve them. Through long-term research and practice, the author believes that to realize the development of digital media art under the environment of digital technology, the following points should be achieved:

As is known to all, compared with the developed countries, the development of digital media technology in China is still in its infancy, also has a larger development space, and digital media related personnel professional quality is relatively low, but in order to solve this problem, it is necessary for us to traditional cultural and excellent traditional art in combination with digital technology, to learn more from the traditional culture element content, combined with auditory and visual, many aspects, such as enriching the connotation of the digital media art, folk culture become more bright, more vivid. The combination of digital technology and traditional culture and art requires us to dig deeply into the content of traditional culture and art, innovate digital technology on this basis, improve the level of digital technology, and flexibly use digital technology to display traditional culture, so as to achieve the purpose of promoting traditional culture.

The connotation of digital media art is very broad, covering a variety of subjects. With the continuous improvement of computer technology, digital media art covers more and more intersections among various disciplines, which is conducive to the development of digital media art to some extent. It can be seen that in the process of the development of digital media art, the collaboration between teams will be closer and closer, and digital media technology will also develop in the direction of diversification. In this era, the cultivation of digital media art talents should be strengthened, so that the relevant staff can give full play to their own strengths, integrate more relevant subject knowledge, and realize the coordination and cooperation among subject talents. Relevant departments can regularly or irregularly organize corresponding digital media art competitions to select more high-quality talents and strengthen the public's attention to digital media art.

Based on the advantages of digital media, it is not difficult to find that the characteristics of openness and interactivity of digital media art determine that digital media art will have a variety of forms of expression, and these forms can be arbitrarily combined. Through this way can achieve the simulation of virtual reality and many other artistic effects, to bring us more novel artistic embodiment. It is necessary to intensify the publicity for the new creation, so that the whole society will pay attention to digital media technology and improve the level of digital media technology.

To sum up, there are some problems in the development of digital media art, must take effective measures to solve, but we also should be fully aware of the development of digital media technology is not happen overnight, in the process, often will encounter this or that problems to related staff set up the firm faith, not afraid of difficulties and obstacles, and overcoming the problems in the process of digital media art, and enhance the level of digital media art development.

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[sallysklar]

Code Acts in Education: Learning from Surveillance Capitalism

Code Acts in Education: Learning from Surveillance Capitalism

‘Surveillance capitalism’ has become a defining concept for the current era of smart machines and Silicon Valley expansionism. With educational institutions and practices increasingly focused on data collection and outsourcing to technology providers, key points from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism can help explore the consequences the field of education. Mindful of the need for much more careful studies of the intersections of education with commercially-driven data-analytic strategies of ‘rendition’ and ‘behavioural modification’, here I simply outline a few implications of surveillance capitalism for how we think about education policy and about learning.

Data, science and surveillance Zuboff’s core argument is that tech businesses such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and so on have attained unprecedented power to monitor, predict, and control human behaviour through the mass-scale extraction and use of personal data. These aren’t especially novel insights—Evgeny Morozov has a 16,000 word essay on the book’s analytical and stylistic shortcomings—but Zuboff’s strengths are in the careful conceptualization and documentation of some of the key dynamics that have made surveillance capitalism possible and practical. As James Bridle argued in his review of the book, ‘Zuboff has written what may prove to be the first definitive account of the economic – and thus social and political – condition of our age’.

Terms such as ‘behavioural surplus’, ‘prediction products’, ‘behavioural futures markets’, and ‘instrumentarian power’ provide a useful critical language for decoding what surveillance capitalism is, what it does, and at what cost. Some of the most interesting documentary material Zuboff presents include precedents such as the radical behaviourism of BF Skinner and the ‘social physics’ of MIT Media Lab pioneer Sandy Pentland. For Pentland, quoted by Zuboff, ‘a mathematical, predictive science of society … has the potential to dramatically change the way government officials, industry managers, and citizens think and act’ (Zuboff, 2019, 433) through ‘tuning the network’ (435). Surveillance capitalism is not and was never simply a commercial and technical task, but deeply rooted in human psychological research and social experimentation and engineering. This combination of tech, science and business has enabled digital companies to create ‘new machine processes for the rendition of all aspects of human experience into behavioural data … and guarantee behavioural outcomes’ (339).

Zuboff has nothing to say about education specifically, but it’s tempting straight away to see a whole range of educational platforms and apps as condensed forms of surveillance capitalism (though we might just as easily invoke ‘platform capitalism’). The classroom behaviour monitoring app ClassDojo, for example, is a paradigmatic example of a successful Silicon Valley edtech business, with vast collections of student behavioural data that it is monetizing by selling premium features for use at home and offering behaviour reports to subscribing parents. With its emphasis on positive behavioural reinforcement through reward points, it represents a marriage of Silicon Valley design with Skinner’s aspiration to create ‘technologies of behaviour’. ClassDojo amply illustrates the combination of behavioural data extraction, behaviourist psychology and monetization strategies that underpin surveillance capitalism as Zuboff presents it.

Perhaps more pressingly from the perspective of education, however, Zuboff makes a number of interesting observations about ‘learning’ that are worth unpacking and exploring.

Learning divided The first point is about the ‘division of learning in society’ (the subject of chapter 6, and drawing on her earlier work on the digital transformation of work practices). By this term Zuboff means to demarcate a shift in the ‘ordering principles’ of the workplace from the ‘division of labour’ to a ‘division of learning’ as workers are forced to adapt to an ‘information-rich environment’. Only those workers able to develop their intellectual skills are able to thrive in the new digitally-mediated workplace. Some workers are enabled (and are able) to learn to adapt to changing roles, tasks and responsibilities, while others are not. The division of learning, Zuboff argues, raises questions about (1) the distribution of knowledge and whether one is included or excluded from the opportunity to learn; (2) about which people, institutions or processes have the authority to determine who is included in learning, what they are able to learn, and how they are able to act on their knowledge; and (3) about what is the source of power that undergirds the authority to share or withhold knowledge (181).

But this division of learning, according to Zuboff, has now spilled out of the workplace to society at large. The elite experts of surveillance capitalism have given themselves authority to know and learn about society through data. Because surveillance capitalism has access to both the ‘material infrastructure and expert brainpower’ (187) to transform human experience into data and wealth, it has created huge asymmetries in knowledge, learning and power. A narrow band of ‘privately employed computational specialists, their privately owned machines, and the economic interests for who sake they learn’ (190) has ultimately been authorized as the key source of knowledge over human affairs, and empowered to learn from the data in order to intervene in society in new ways.

Sociology of education researchers have, of course, asked these kinds of questions for decades. They are ultimately questions about the reproduction of knowledge and power. But in the context of surveillance capitalism such questions may need readdressing, as authority over what constitutes valuable and worthwhile knowledge for learning passes to elite computational specialists, the commercial companies they work for, and even to smart machines. As data-driven knowledge about individuals grows in predictive power, decisions about what kinds of knowledge an individual learner should receive may even be largely decided by ‘personalized learning platforms’–as current developments in learning analytics and adaptive learning already illustrate. The prospect of smart machines as educational engines of social reproduction should be the subject of serious future interrogation.

Learning collectives The second key point is about the ‘policies’ of smart machines as a model for human learning (detailed in chapter 14). Here Zuboff draws on a speech by a senior Microsoft executive talking about the power of combined cloud and Internet of Things technologies for advanced manufacturing and construction. In this context, Zuboff explains, ‘human and machine behaviours are tuned to pre-established parameters determined by superiors and referred to as “policies”’ (409). These ‘policies’ are algorithmic rules that

substitute for social functions such as supervision, negotiation, communication and problem solving. Each person and piece of equipment takes a place among an equivalence of objects, each one “recognizable” to the “system” through the AI devices distributed across the site. (409)

In this example, the ‘policy’ is then a set of algorithmic rules and a template for collective action between people and machines to operate in unison to achieve maximum efficiency and optimal outcomes. Those ‘superiors’ with the authority to determine the policies, of course, are those same computational experts and machines that have benefitted from the division of learning. This gives them unprecedented powers to ‘apply policies’ to people, objects, processes and activities alike, resulting in a ‘grand confluence in which machines and humans are united as objects in the cloud, all instrumented and orchestrated in accordance with the “policies” … that appear on the scene as guaranteed outcomes to be automatically imposed, monitored and maintained by the “system”’ (410). These new human-machine learning collectives represent the future for many forms of work and labour under surveillance capitalism, according to Zuboff.

Zuboff then goes beyond human-machine confluences in the workplace to consider the instrumentation and orchestration of other types of human behaviour. Drawing parallels with the behaviourism of Skinner, she argues that digitally-enforced forms of ‘behavioral modification’ can operate ‘just beyond the threshold of human awareness to induce, reward, goad, punish, and reinforce behaviour consistent with “correct policies”’, where ‘corporate objectives define the “policies” toward which confluent behaviour harmoniously streams’ (413). Under conditions of surveillance capitalism, Skinner’s behaviourism and Pentland’s social physics spill out of the lab into homes, workplaces, and all the public and private space of everyday life–ultimately turning the world into a gigantic data science lab for social and behavioural experimentation, tuning and engineering.

And the final point she makes here is that humans need to become more machine-like to maximize such confluences. This is because machines connected to the IoT and the cloud work through collective action by each learning what they all learn, sharing the same understanding and ‘operating in unison with maximum efficiency to achieve the same outcomes’ (413). This model of collective learning, according to surveillance capitalists, can learn faster than people, and ‘empower us to better learn from the experiences of others’:

The machine world and the social world operate in harmony within and across ‘species’ as humans emulate the superior learning processes of the smart machines. … [H]uman interaction mirrors the relations of the smart machines as individuals learn to think and act by emulating one another…. In this way, the machine hive becomes the role model for a new human hive in which we march in peaceful unison toward the same direction based on the same ‘correct’ understanding in order to construct a world free of mistakes, accidents, and random messes. (414)

For surveillance capitalists human learning is inferior to machine learning, and urgently needs to be improved by gathering together humans and machines into symbiotic systems of behavioural control and management.

Learning in, from, or for surveillance capitalism? These key points from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offer some provocative starting places for further investigations into the future shape of education and learning amid the smart machines and their smart computational operatives. Three key points stand out.

1) Cultures of computational learning. One line of inquiry might be into the cultures of learning of those computational experts who have gained from the division of learning. And I mean this in two ways. How are they educated? How are they selected into the right programs? What kinds of ongoing training provides the kinds of privilege to learn about society through mass-scale behavioural data? These are questions about new and elite forms of workforce preparation and professional education. How, in short, are these experts educated, qualified and socialized to do data analytics and behaviour modification—if that is indeed what they do? In other words, how is one educated to become a surveillance capitalist?

The other way of approaching this concerns what is actually involved in ‘learning’ about society through its data. This is both a pedagogic and a curricular question. Pedagogically, education research would benefit from a much better understanding of the kinds of workplace education programmes underway inside the institutions of surveillance capitalism. From a curricular perspective, this would also require an engagement with the kinds of knowledge assumptions and practices that flow through such spaces. As mentioned earlier, sociology of education has long been concerned with how aspects of culture are ‘selected’ for reproduction by transmission through education. As tech companies and related academic labs become increasingly influential, they are producing new ‘social facts’ that might affect how people both within and outside those organizations come to understand the world. They are building new knowledge based on a computational, mathematical, and predictive style of thinking. What, then, are the dynamics of knowledge production that generate these new facts, and how do they circulate to affect what is taught and learnt within these organizations? As Zuboff notes, pioneers such as Sandy Pentland have built successful academic teaching programs at institutes like MIT Media Lab to reproduce knowledge practices such as ‘social physics’.

2) Human-machine learning confluences. The second key issue is what it means to be a learner working in unison with the Internet of Things. Which individuals are included in the kind of learning that is involved in becoming part of this ‘collective intelligence? When smart machines and human workers are orchestrated together into ‘confluence’, and human learning is supposed to emulate machine learning, how do our existing theories and models of human learning hold up? Machine learning and human learning are not obviously comparable, and the tech firms surveyed by Zuboff appear to hold quite robotic notions of what constitutes learning. Yet if the logic of extreme instrumentation of working environments develops as Zuboff anticipates, this still raises significant questions about how one learns to adapt to work in unison with the smart machines, who gets included in this learning, who gets excluded, how those choices and decisions are made, and what kinds of knowledge and skills are gained from inclusion. Automation is likely to lead to both further divisions in learning and more collective learning at the same time–with some individuals able to exercise considerable autonomy over the networks they’re part of, and others performing the tasks that cannot yet be automated.

In the context of concerns about the role of education in relation to automation, intergovernmental organizations such as the OECD and World Economic Forum have begun encouraging governments to focus on ‘noncognitive skills’ and ‘social-emotional learning’ in order to pair human emotional intelligence with the artificial cognitive intelligence of smart machines. Those unique human qualities, so the argument goes, cannot be quantified whereas routine cognitive tasks can. Classroom behaviour monitoring platforms such as ClassCraft have emerged to measure those noncognitive skills and offer ‘gamified’ positive reinforcement for the kind of ‘prosocial behaviours’ that may enable students to thrive in a future of increased automation. Being emotionally intelligent, by these accounts, would seem to allow students to enter into ‘confluent’ relations with smart machines. Rather than competing with automation, they would complement it as collective intelligence. ‘Human capital’ is no longer a sufficient economic goal to pursue through education—it needs to produce ‘human-computer capital’ too.

3) Programmable policies. A third line of inquiry would be into the idea of ‘policies’. Education policy studies have long engaged critically with the ways government policies circumscribe ‘correct’ forms of educational activity, progress, and behaviour. With the advance of AI-based technologies into schools and universities, policy researchers may need to start interrogating the policies encoded in the software as well as the policies inscribed in government texts. These new programmable policies potentially have a much more direct influence on  ‘correct’ behaviours and maximum outcomes by instrumenting and orchestrating activities, tasks and behaviours in educational institutions.

Moreover, researchers might shift their attention to the kind of programmable policies that are enacted in the instrumented workplaces where, increasingly, much learning happens. Tech companies have long bemoaned the adequacy of school curricula and university degrees to deliver the labour market skills they require. With the so-called ‘unbundling’ of the university in particular, higher education may be moving further towards ‘demand driven’ forms of professional learning and on-the-job industry training provided by private companies. When education moves into the smart workplace, learning becomes part of the confluence of humans and machines, where all are equally orchestrated by the policies encoded in the relevant systems. Platforms and apps using predictive analytics and talent matching algorithms are already emerging to link graduates to employers and job descriptions. The next step, if we accept the likeliness of the direction of travel of surveillance capitalism, might be to match students directly to smart machines on-demand as part of the collective human-machine intelligence required to achieve maximum efficiency and optimized outcomes for capital accumulation. In this scenario, the computer program would be the dominant policy framework for graduate employability, actively intervening in professional learning by sorting individuals into appropriate networks of collective learning and then tuning those networks to achieve best effects.

All of this raises one final question, and a caveat. First the caveat. It’s not clear that ‘surveillance capitalism’ will sustain as an adequate explanation for the current trajectories of high-tech societies. Zuboff’s account is not uncontested, and it’s in danger of becoming an explanatory shortcut for deployment anywhere that data analytics and business interests intersect (as ‘neoliberalism’ is sometimes evoked as a shortcut for privatization and deregulation). The current direction of travel and future potential described by Zuboff are certainly not desirable, and should not be accepted as inevitable. If we do accept Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism, though, the remaining question is whether we should be addressing the challenges of learning in surveillance capitalism, or the potential for whole education systems to learn from surveillance capitalism and adapt to fit its template. Learning in surveillance capitalism at least assumes a formal separate of education from these technological, political and economic conditions. Learning from it, however, suggests a future where education has been reformatted to fit the model of surveillance capitalism–indeed, where a key purpose of education is for surveillance capitalism.

Zuboff, S. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. London: Profile.

elaine May 1, 2019

Source

Code Acts in Education

Code Acts in Education: Learning from Surveillance Capitalism published first on https://buyessayscheapservice.tumblr.com/

[hadoopinbeanttechnologies-blog]

Why Hadoop Is Important In Handling Big Data?

Hadoop is changing the perception of handling Big Data especially the unstructured data. Let’s know how Apache Hadoop software library, which is a framework, plays a vital role in handling Big Data.  Apache Hadoop enables surplus data to be streamlined for any distributed processing system across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It truly is made to scale up from single servers to a large number of machines, each and every offering local computation, and storage space. Instead of depending on hardware to provide high-availability, the library itself is built to detect and handle breakdowns at the application layer, so providing an extremely available service along with a cluster of computers, as both versions might be vulnerable to failures.

Hadoop Community Package Consists of:

·         File system and OS level abstractions

·         A MapReduce engine (either MapReduce or YARN)

·         The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

·         Java ARchive (JAR) files

·         Scripts needed to start Hadoop

·         Source code, documentation and a contribution section

Activities performed on Big Data:

·         Store – Big data need to be collected in a seamless repository, and it is not necessary to store in a single physical database.

·         Process – The process becomes more tedious than traditional one in terms of cleansing, enriching, calculating, transforming, and running algorithms.

·         Access – There is no business sense of it at all when the data cannot be searched, retrieved easily, and can be virtually showcased along the business lines.

Hadoop Distributed FileSystem (HDFS)

HDFS is designed to run on commodity hardware. It stores large files typically in the range of gigabytes to terabytes across different machines. HDFS provides data awareness between task tracker and job tracker. The job tracker schedules map or reduce jobs to task trackers with awareness in the data location. This simplifies the process of data management. The two main parts of Hadoop are data processing framework and HDFS. HDFS is a rack aware file system to handle data effectively. HDFS implements a single-writer, multiple-reader model and supports operations to read, write, and delete files, and operations to create and delete directories.

Assumptions and Goals

·         In case of Hardware Failure: A core architectural goal of HDFS is detection of faults and quick, automatic recovery from them.

·         Need Streaming Data Access: To run the application HDFS is designed more for batch processing rather than interactive use by users to streaming their data sets.

·         Designed for Large Data Sets: HDFS is designed in such a way that it tuned to support large files and it provides big aggregate data bandwidth and scale to many nodes in a single cluster.

·         Simple Coherency Model: HDFS applications need a write-once-read-many access model for files. A MapReduce application or a web crawler application fits perfectly with this model.

·         Portability Issues: HDFS has been designed to be easily portable from one platform to another Across Heterogeneous Hardware and Software Platforms.

Data Processing Framework & MapReduce

The data processing framework is the tool used to process the data and it is a Java based system known as MapReduce. People get crazy when they work with it.

 JobTracker and TaskTracker: the MapReduce Engine

Job Tracker Master handles the data, which comes from the MapReduce. Then it assigns tasks to workers, manages the entire process, monitors the tasks, and handles the failures if any. The JobTracker drives work out to available TaskTracker nodes in the cluster, striving to keep the work as close to the data as possible. As Job Tracker knows the architecture with all steps that has to be followed in this way, it reduces the network traffic by streamlining the racks and their respective nodes.

Scattered Across the Cluster

Here, the data is distributed on different machines and the work trends is also divided out in such a way that data processing software is housed on the another server. On a Hardtop cluster, the data stored within HDFS and the MapReduce system are housed on each machine in the cluster to add redundancy to the system and speeds information retrieval while data processing.

Cloud Brusting:

The private cloud journey will fall into line well using the enterprise wide analyticalrequirementshighlighted in this research, but executives must make sure that workloadassessments are carried outrigorously understanding that risk is mitigated wherefeasible.

What is Big Data Analytics?

Big data is massive and messy, and it’s coming at you uncontrolled. Data are gathered to be analyzed to discover patterns and correlations that could not be initially apparent, but might be useful in making business decisions in an organization.  These data are often personal data, which are useful from a marketing viewpoint to understand the desires and demands of potential customers and in analyzing and predicting their buying tendencies.

Organizational Architecture Need for an Enterprise: You can benefit by the enterprise architecture that scales effectively with development – and the rise of Big Data analytics means that this issue required to be addressed more urgently. IDC believes that these below use cases can be best mapped out across two of the Big Data dimensions – namely velocity and variety as outlined below.

 Put Big Data Value in the Hands of Analysts

·         Business Inefficiencies Identified: Let analysts to view end-to-end processing of business transactions in an organization

·         Business Inefficiencies Rectified: Let analysts to rectify end-to-end processing of business transactions in an organization

·         Knowledge Enhancement: Provide the analyst team additional operational and business context

·         Store Terabytes of Data: Provide analysts visibility into the whole infrastructure

·         Enable More Data Usages: Cartel device, system, and application data to bring business operational views of IT professionals in an organization.

·         Enhance Value: Pinpoint and implement newfangled opportunities that would otherwise be impossible to view and act upon

How Can You Categorize the Personal Data?

This can be categorized as volunteered data, Observed data, and Inferred data. For any enterprise to succeed in driving value from big data, volume, variety, and velocity have to be addressed in parallel.

Engineering Big Data Platforms

Big data platforms need to operate and process data at a scale that leaves little room for mistake. Big data clusters should be designed for speed, scale, and efficiency. Many businesses venturing into big data don’t have knowledge building and operating hardware and software, however, many are now confronted with that prospect. Platform consciousness enterprises will boost their productivity and churn out good results with big data.

Optimize Aspects of Business

Many enterprises are operating their businesses without any prior optimization of accurate risk analysis. Therefore, more risk analysis is required to tackle these challenges. There is a continuum of risk between aversion and recklessness, which is needed to be optimized. To some extent, risk can be averse but BI strategies can be a wonderful tool to mitigate the risk.

For handling big data, companies need to revamp their data centers, computing systems and their existing infrastructure. Be prepared for the next generation of data handling challenges and equip your organization with the latest tools and technologies to get an edge over your competitors.

Roles and Responsibilities of Big Data Professionals

Big Data professionals work dedicatedly on highly scalable and extensible platform that provides all services like gathering, storing, modeling, and analyzing massive data sets from multiple channels, mitigation of data sets, filtering and IVR, social media, chats interactions and messaging at one go. The major duties include project scheduling, design, implementation and coordination, design and develop new components of the big data platform, define and refine the big data platform, understanding the architecture, research and experiment with emerging technologies, and establish and reinforce disciplined software development processes.

Why to optimize Internet-scale platforms?

To meet up with high level of performance Internet-scale must be operated accordingly. It is important to optimize the complexity, intersection of operations, economics, and architecture. Enterprises wanted to get advantage of Big Data will fall in the internet-scale expectations of their employees, vendors, and platform on which the data is handled. A mammoth of infrastructure is needed to handle big data platforms; a single Hadoop cluster with serious punch consists of racks of servers and switches to get the bales of data onto the cluster. In this way, Internet-scale platforms are optimized to get maximum productivity and making the most of the resources fully utilized.

Dynamics of the Data Environment

A number of ecosystem elements must be in place to turn data into and economical tool. A strategic mechanism is needed to be developed to ensure adequate user privacy and security for these mobile generated data. To maximize the impact similar models could be created in the mobile ecosystem and the data generated through them.

Better Data Usages: Lessen Information Gap

Enterprises are feeling the heat of big data and they are stated to cope up with this disaster. There are two primary ways to make the Big data gathered by mobile device usage can spur effective are:

·         Reduces the time lag between the start of a trend

·         Reduces the knowledge gap about how people respond to these trends.

Breaking through Silos

Silos are a result of hierarchies of the organization, which require organizing people into economically effective groups. Data silos become a barrier that impedes decision-making and organizational performance. Enterprises are facing many challenges to glean insight with Big Data Analytics that trapped in the data silos exist across business operations. Through the effective handling of big data can stymie data silos and the enterprise can leverage available data into emerging customer trends or market shifts for insights and productivity.

Big Data: Big Benefits

Tremendous opportunities are there with big data as the challenges. Enterprises that are mastered in handling big data are reaping the huge chunk of profits in comparison to their competitors. The research shows that the companies, who has been taking initiatives through data directed decision making fourfold boost in their productivity; the proper use of big data goes beyond the traditional thinking like gathering and analyzing; it requires a long perspective how to make the crucial decision based on Big Data.

[juliandmouton30]

"Augmented reality heralds the abolition of architectural practice as we know it"

Augmented reality could lead to a dystopian world where everyone is trapped by their own views. It's up to architects to set them free, argues Owen Hopkins in his first Opinion column for Dezeen.

Walking down a street in central London, I stare down at my smartphone screen. Only a few more metres to go. I quicken my pace, facedown in my phone, oblivious to the world passing around me. I reach a small intersection. Where is it? It should be here. Then I see it. It's small, about the size of a dog, but yellow and with a strange zig-zag tail. It looks at me expectantly. At last, I've caught my first Pikachu.

My pursuit of this cartoon-like fictional creature will be familiar to any one of the millions of people who have played Pokémon Go, which took the world by storm last year.

Part of the game's popularity clearly stemmed from the nostalgia around its 1990s Gameboy forebears. Yet its seductive merging of the digital world of Pokémon with external reality showed the potential of a 21st-century technology set to fundamentally transform the ways in which we interact with the world: augmented reality, or AR.

AR's current dependency on smartphone screens is diminishing, and quickly

At the moment users have to consciously switch into the AR of Pokémon Go, which only comes into being on a smartphone screen. However AR's current dependency on smartphone screens (at least in its mainstream applications) is diminishing, and quickly. Even after the market failure of Google Glass, companies like Microsoft, HTC, Magic Leap and, if we believe a recent rumour, Apple are devoting serious time and money into developing AR (and VR) headsets and glasses.

Some of these products are already on the market. Given the pace at which this technology is developing it won't be long before AR functionality is integrated into contact lenses, ensuring that there will be no perceptible signifier that someone is experiencing AR or not.

With this weight of capital driving AR forward, it is safe to say that catching the occasional Pokémon is just the start. The logical endpoint of AR is to be seamless and pervasive, with digital overlays constantly and completely mediating how we experience the world. In effect, we will view everything refracted through our smartphone – phone calls, emails, news, social media, games will all be their right in front of us.

But, of course, that's just the start. When, for example, we look up towards the flashing lights of Piccadilly Circus or Times Square, we will see ads that are tailored to us personally. When we walk through the supermarket, products will actively encourage us to purchase them, based on our previous purchasing habits, or perhaps even a realtime analysis of our blood-sugar levels. If we're trying to find a restaurant, a trail will be laid out on the pavement for us to follow. And these are just the obvious, initial applications; the possibilities of AR are limitless.

The consequences for architecture are quite troubling. Why spend money on an elegant facade or an expensive material when it can be created far more cheaply as an AR digital overlay? And what's more, that overlay is infinitely flexible.

If I prefer the classical style, then the building can present itself as a classical one. Then again, if I'm a brutalist nut, the AR can make sure I see only concrete. Why bother with windows facing a particular view, when we can decide whether we're looking out on London, Paris, a Tuscan landscape or even the Great Barrier Reef? Why spend time lighting a room in a particular way, painting it a particular colour or lining it with a particular material, when its appearance will be able to change automatically depending on each individual's preference?

Mechanisms exist for ensuring that alternate views aren't just ignored, they're filtered out

With every visual aspect of a building rendered infinitely alterably, it is no understatement to say that AR heralds the complete abolition of architectural practice as we know it. So, where does this leave architects, if it leaves them anywhere at all? A clue, I think, lies in the social and political implications of this blurring of the physical and digital worlds, which we are already seeing play out.

In the era of "fake news" and increasingly polarised online communities, it has become abundantly obvious that what we see on Facebook, Twitter, even when we do a simple Google search, is far from an objective or unmediated view of the data, but a curated one, shaped in its entirety by algorithms. All the tech giants that depend on clicks and traffic have a vested interest in showing us only what we want to see, and in screening out what we don't. And the more we use their platforms and click on what we like, the better that screening and selecting process becomes.

This is not just only showing us the particular brand of shoes we're into, but news stories, factual articles and opinion pieces that correspond with and then, in turn, reinforce our pre-existing ideas and preferences. In time, this begins to alter our world view; we see only that which we already agree with, which we then uncritically assimilate, even if something it bears little or no relation to reality.

Related story

Architects could become "closer to game designers or filmmakers"

"Group think" is, of course, nothing new – architects are among the most frequent offenders – but now the mechanisms exist for ensuring that alternate views aren't just ignored, they're filtered out before we ever encounter them.

Currently, social media exists on a screen, separate from external reality, but what will ensue when it inevitably follows Pokémon Go and crosses over into AR? What will happen when the social-media echo chamber exists not just online, but in external physical reality, and the self-selecting and screening effects apply to our everyday existence – affecting not just ideas and opinions we receive, but places we visit and people we see?

Perhaps while chasing the Pikachu down that London street, I saw several people sleeping rough. What will it do to my views on welfare provision, on taxation, on the type of society I want to live in, if the algorithms that shape my AR decide (without my explicit knowledge) that maybe I'd prefer not to see the homeless, or the poor or people of different races? The implications of AR are not just troubling, but downright dystopian.

The implications of AR are not just troubling, but downright dystopian

The fragmentation of the public sphere that we're already experiencing is just the beginning. AR threatens its complete and irrevocable shattering, taking us to a world where our views, ideas and opinions have been wholly privatised and are constantly served back to us in a never-ending cycle of regurgitation.

But this doesn't have to be inevitable. Technology can be moulded to benefit everyone, and rather than facing professional oblivion as most of their traditional tasks are all but subsumed by AR, architects might actually take the lead in doing so.

Architecture is fundamentally an optimistic pursuit. We build in order to create a better world. Some buildings inevitably contribute more than others. But even the most cynically conceived project contributes in some way to the public sphere and has some element of human progress inherent in it.

The task for architects over the next few decades is to seize the optimism inherent in their discipline and harness it to stop the otherwise inexorable march towards a world of ever-increasing extremes. In a world where everyone is trapped in their own AR, it's up to architects to set them free.

Owen Hopkins is an architectural writer, historian and curator. He is senior curator of exhibitions and education at Sir John Soane's Museum and was previously architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is the author of books including Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon (2012), Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide (2014) and Mavericks: Breaking the Mould of British Architecture (2016).

The post "Augmented reality heralds the abolition of architectural practice as we know it" appeared first on Dezeen.

from ifttt-furniture https://www.dezeen.com/2017/01/31/owen-hopkins-opinion-augmented-reality-heralds-abolition-current-architecture-practice/

[jeniferdlanceau]

"Augmented reality heralds the abolition of architectural practice as we know it"

Augmented reality could lead to a dystopian world where everyone is trapped by their own views. It's up to architects to set them free, argues Owen Hopkins in his first Opinion column for Dezeen.

Walking down a street in central London, I stare down at my smartphone screen. Only a few more metres to go. I quicken my pace, facedown in my phone, oblivious to the world passing around me. I reach a small intersection. Where is it? It should be here. Then I see it. It's small, about the size of a dog, but yellow and with a strange zig-zag tail. It looks at me expectantly. At last, I've caught my first Pikachu.

My pursuit of this cartoon-like fictional creature will be familiar to any one of the millions of people who have played Pokémon Go, which took the world by storm last year.

Part of the game's popularity clearly stemmed from the nostalgia around its 1990s Gameboy forebears. Yet its seductive merging of the digital world of Pokémon with external reality showed the potential of a 21st-century technology set to fundamentally transform the ways in which we interact with the world: augmented reality, or AR.

AR's current dependency on smartphone screens is diminishing, and quickly

At the moment users have to consciously switch into the AR of Pokémon Go, which only comes into being on a smartphone screen. However AR's current dependency on smartphone screens (at least in its mainstream applications) is diminishing, and quickly. Even after the market failure of Google Glass, companies like Microsoft, HTC, Magic Leap and, if we believe a recent rumour, Apple are devoting serious time and money into developing AR (and VR) headsets and glasses.

Some of these products are already on the market. Given the pace at which this technology is developing it won't be long before AR functionality is integrated into contact lenses, ensuring that there will be no perceptible signifier that someone is experiencing AR or not.

With this weight of capital driving AR forward, it is safe to say that catching the occasional Pokémon is just the start. The logical endpoint of AR is to be seamless and pervasive, with digital overlays constantly and completely mediating how we experience the world. In effect, we will view everything refracted through our smartphone – phone calls, emails, news, social media, games will all be their right in front of us.

But, of course, that's just the start. When, for example, we look up towards the flashing lights of Piccadilly Circus or Times Square, we will see ads that are tailored to us personally. When we walk through the supermarket, products will actively encourage us to purchase them, based on our previous purchasing habits, or perhaps even a realtime analysis of our blood-sugar levels. If we're trying to find a restaurant, a trail will be laid out on the pavement for us to follow. And these are just the obvious, initial applications; the possibilities of AR are limitless.

The consequences for architecture are quite troubling. Why spend money on an elegant facade or an expensive material when it can be created far more cheaply as an AR digital overlay? And what's more, that overlay is infinitely flexible.

If I prefer the classical style, then the building can present itself as a classical one. Then again, if I'm a brutalist nut, the AR can make sure I see only concrete. Why bother with windows facing a particular view, when we can decide whether we're looking out on London, Paris, a Tuscan landscape or even the Great Barrier Reef? Why spend time lighting a room in a particular way, painting it a particular colour or lining it with a particular material, when its appearance will be able to change automatically depending on each individual's preference?

Mechanisms exist for ensuring that alternate views aren't just ignored, they're filtered out

With every visual aspect of a building rendered infinitely alterably, it is no understatement to say that AR heralds the complete abolition of architectural practice as we know it. So, where does this leave architects, if it leaves them anywhere at all? A clue, I think, lies in the social and political implications of this blurring of the physical and digital worlds, which we are already seeing play out.

In the era of "fake news" and increasingly polarised online communities, it has become abundantly obvious that what we see on Facebook, Twitter, even when we do a simple Google search, is far from an objective or unmediated view of the data, but a curated one, shaped in its entirety by algorithms. All the tech giants that depend on clicks and traffic have a vested interest in showing us only what we want to see, and in screening out what we don't. And the more we use their platforms and click on what we like, the better that screening and selecting process becomes.

This is not just only showing us the particular brand of shoes we're into, but news stories, factual articles and opinion pieces that correspond with and then, in turn, reinforce our pre-existing ideas and preferences. In time, this begins to alter our world view; we see only that which we already agree with, which we then uncritically assimilate, even if something it bears little or no relation to reality.

Related story

Architects could become "closer to game designers or filmmakers"

"Group think" is, of course, nothing new – architects are among the most frequent offenders – but now the mechanisms exist for ensuring that alternate views aren't just ignored, they're filtered out before we ever encounter them.

Currently, social media exists on a screen, separate from external reality, but what will ensue when it inevitably follows Pokémon Go and crosses over into AR? What will happen when the social-media echo chamber exists not just online, but in external physical reality, and the self-selecting and screening effects apply to our everyday existence – affecting not just ideas and opinions we receive, but places we visit and people we see?

Perhaps while chasing the Pikachu down that London street, I saw several people sleeping rough. What will it do to my views on welfare provision, on taxation, on the type of society I want to live in, if the algorithms that shape my AR decide (without my explicit knowledge) that maybe I'd prefer not to see the homeless, or the poor or people of different races? The implications of AR are not just troubling, but downright dystopian.

The implications of AR are not just troubling, but downright dystopian

The fragmentation of the public sphere that we're already experiencing is just the beginning. AR threatens its complete and irrevocable shattering, taking us to a world where our views, ideas and opinions have been wholly privatised and are constantly served back to us in a never-ending cycle of regurgitation.

But this doesn't have to be inevitable. Technology can be moulded to benefit everyone, and rather than facing professional oblivion as most of their traditional tasks are all but subsumed by AR, architects might actually take the lead in doing so.

Architecture is fundamentally an optimistic pursuit. We build in order to create a better world. Some buildings inevitably contribute more than others. But even the most cynically conceived project contributes in some way to the public sphere and has some element of human progress inherent in it.

The task for architects over the next few decades is to seize the optimism inherent in their discipline and harness it to stop the otherwise inexorable march towards a world of ever-increasing extremes. In a world where everyone is trapped in their own AR, it's up to architects to set them free.

Owen Hopkins is an architectural writer, historian and curator. He is senior curator of exhibitions and education at Sir John Soane's Museum and was previously architecture programme curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is the author of books including Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon (2012), Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide (2014) and Mavericks: Breaking the Mould of British Architecture (2016).

The post "Augmented reality heralds the abolition of architectural practice as we know it" appeared first on Dezeen.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217598 https://www.dezeen.com/2017/01/31/owen-hopkins-opinion-augmented-reality-heralds-abolition-current-architecture-practice/