ReHacked #74: Many Americans aren't aware they're being tracked while shopping, Nokia 9000 Communicator presented 25 yrs ago, 1800s Astronomical Drawings vs. NASA Images and more
Scaling theory has established that, as cities grow larger, they tend to produce more of pretty much everything from pollution and crime to patents and wealth
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Many Americans aren't aware they're being tracked with facial recognition while shopping | TechRadar #privacy
Despite consumer opposition to facial recognition, the technology is currently being used in retail stores throughout the US according to new research from Piplsay.
While San Francisco banned the police from using facial recognition back in 2019 and the EU called for a five year ban on the technology last year, several major retailers in the US including Lowe's, Albertsons and Macy's have been using it for both fraud and theft detection.
A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics – BIT-101 #programming #learning
As the title implies, the book is targeted towards programmers who do not have an academic math background. One thing that resonated with me right off is that the author talks about the language of mathematics as an analogy to the language of programming, and how when you were starting to code, everything was confusing, but you probably stuck with it and now it makes sense. Math is the same way, but for some reason, a lot of programmers tend have less patience when studying math.
Nokia′s smartphone: 25 years since it changed the world | Business | Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW #hardware #history
Nokia presented its 9000 Communicator at the CeBIT 1996 computer fair in Hanover, Germany, and launched on August 15 of that year. "The office in your back pocket" added to the IBM Simon from 1994 and the HP OmniGo 700LX from March 1996.
The 9000 Communicator was a smartphone even before the word had been invented. For a decade, the device was what a smartphone was supposed to look like. After the Communicator, Blackberry perfected the idea — until Apple's iPhone with its multitouch screen in 2007 came along.
Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s DPA warns state government | TechCrunch #software #privacy
Hamburg’s state government has been formally warned against using Zoom over data protection concerns.
The German state’s data protection agency (DPA) took the step of issuing a public warning yesterday, writing in a press release that the Senate Chancellory’s use of the popular videoconferencing tool violates the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since user data is transferred to the U.S. for processing.
The DPA’s concern follows a landmark ruling (Schrems II) by Europe’s top court last summer which invalidated a flagship data transfer arrangement between the EU and the U.S. (Privacy Shield), finding U.S. surveillance law to be incompatible with EU privacy rights.
Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion #science #engineering
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced today that it has produced a fusion reaction in the laboratory that yielded more energy than was absorbed by the fuel to initiate it.
Zapping a BB-size capsule of fusion fuel with UV light from 192 lasers at the lab’s $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), scientists say they sparked fusion reactions that released 1.3 megajoules of energy, about five times the 250 kilojoules that were absorbed by the capsule. That energy emission from the tiny blob of plasma—roughly a cube with sides measuring the width of a human hair—occurred within about 100 trillionths of a second to yield more than 1016 watts of power.
Helvetica Now Variable | Monotype. #software #design
Helvetica® Now Variable builds on the groundbreaking work of 2019’s Helvetica Now release—all of the clarity, simplicity and neutrality of classic Helvetica with everything 21st-century designers need (optical sizing, stylistic alternates, and extended character set).
Helvetica Now Variable offers designers more of everything: more creative freedom; more typographic expression; and more power.
Atlas | Leaps, Bounds, and Backflips #engineering #futurism
For the first time today, both Atlas robots have completed the complex obstacle course flawlessly. Or, almost flawlessly.
The first of the two robots ran up a series of banked plywood panels, broad jumped a gap, and ran up and down stairs in the course set up on the second floor of the Boston Dynamics headquarters. The second robot leapt onto a balance beam and followed the same steps in reverse, and then the first robot vaulted over the beam. Both landed two perfectly synchronized backflips, and the video team has captured every move.
And yet, the robotics engineers who have been working on this routine for months barely take time to celebrate. Moments after the cameras cut they’re huddled together, making changes before the next take. Although this most recent attempt was nearly perfect, it was not precisely perfect, not quite. After the robots completed their backflips, one was supposed to pump its arm like a big-league pitcher after a game-ending strikeout – a move that the Atlas team calls the “Cha-Ching.”
[Report] Bad News, By Joseph Bernstein | Harper's Magazine #news #journalism #longread
The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of “toxicity” on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it. As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard.
1800s Astronomical Drawings vs. NASA Images | The New York Public Library (2016) #nature #space #history
It’s no secret that the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections hold many, many treasures—over 690,000, to be more specific. Of all the gorgeous, funny, odd, and impressive items I’ve stumbled upon, the E. L. Trouvelot astronomical pastel drawings sit in my top ten. Trouvelot was a French immigrant to the US in the 1800s, and his job was to create sketches of astronomical observations at Harvard College’s observatory. Building off of this sketch work, Trouvelot decided to do large pastel drawings of "the celestial phenomena as they appear...through the great modern telescopes." What amazes me about these drawings is how detailed they seem to be—but I am no astronomer. I decided to investigate a bit further and pair them with NASA’s photographs, which were taken about 150 years after Trouvelot’s work to see just how precise his art really was.
Study: As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all' | Santa Fe Institute #society #futurism
Cities are hubs of human activity, supercharging the exchange of ideas and interactions. Scaling theory has established that, as cities grow larger, they tend to produce more of pretty much everything from pollution and crime to patents and wealth. On average, people in larger cities are better off economically. But a new study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface builds on previous research that says, that’s not necessarily true for the individual city-dweller. It turns out, bigger cities also produce more income inequality.
Richard Bartle Releases His Classic Book Designing Virtual Worlds for Free Online -- Here's His Guide to The Sections Still Most Relevant Today
Designing Virtual Worlds is a milestone book in the history of the genre, relevant to basically anyone working in or thinking about online games/metaverses/MMOs/etc.; written by UK professor Richard Bartle in 2003, much or most of it is still relevant to today's technology. (Perhaps even more relevant now, as each wave of designers and developers insists on repeating mistakes made 10-15 years ago -- just on a much, much larger scale.) And Richard just announced he's offering it as a free download on his site
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