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Bill Fulkerson

Anatomy of an AI System - 1 views

anatomyof.ai

AI amazon

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 14 Sep 18
     
    "With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay
Steve Bosserman

How Gaston Bachelard gave the emotions of home a philosophy - Gillian Darley | Aeon Essays - 0 views

aeon.co/...-emotions-of-home-a-philosophy

space intimacy philosophy architecture

shared by Steve Bosserman on 12 May 18 - No Cached
  • As Foucault said of Bachelard a few years later, his characteristic approach was to avoid all defined hierarchies, any universal judgments: ‘He plays against his own culture with his own culture.’ He stood apart, separating himself from the mainstream, finding cracks, dissonances, minor phenomena that he could make his own. Poetry of every description was his raw material.
  • Indoors, in The Poetics of Space, the journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers, cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks, although he warns, somewhat testily, against their use as gratuitous metaphors (and he is strongly averse to the idea of habit).
  • The wellbeing of the warm animal (or human) protected in its nest or cocoon or cottage from the bad weather raging outside is a primitive sense of refuge that we can all share, adult or child. The appeal of a safe haven translates into domestic architecture with such features as the accommodating Arts and Crafts inglenook, seats close by the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright’s enduring penchant for an immense fireplace buried at the core of a house, or even, a favourite 1960s touch, the conversation pit – with or without its trademark shagpile carpet.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Late in life, Auden wrote a set of 15 verses titled Thanksgiving for a Habitat (1960-1964). They were a celebration of domestic contentment in his Austrian cottage, and were structured around the rooms of the house, including ‘the Cave of Meaning’ (his study), the cellar, the attic, and his bedroom ‘the Cave of Nakedness’. In the title poem he ends, happily, writing of ‘a place I may go both in and out of’.
  • The ‘cupboardness’ of children’s play areas; a library tucked beneath some stairs; a universe of emotions in the corner
  • In his neat phrase ‘reading a room’, Bachelard encouraged readers to think of some place in their own past: ‘You have unlocked a door to daydreaming.’
Steve Bosserman

Work In Retail? There's A Robot Getting Ready To Take Your Job - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...getting-ready-to-take-your-job

robotics retail employment

shared by Steve Bosserman on 20 May 17 - No Cached
  • Wilson says cashiers–74% of whom are women–are likely to the first overtaken by the automation wave. Also likely to be affected are retail salespeople, who may not be needed as shoppers increasingly consult their phones for information about sizes, colors, and availability. “Smartphones have all kinds of information about the products you want to buy, so the need for salespeople is considerably less,” he says.For example, Bloomingdale’s has tested smart fitting rooms with wall-mounted tablets allowing customers to scan items and view other colors and sizes and receive recommendations to “complete the look.” Home Depot says four self-checkout systems occupy the space of three normal aisles and obviate the need for two human cashiers. Amazon’s Go concept stores have no cashiers at all, enabling shoppers to pay for everything through their phones.
Bill Fulkerson

Millennials and Gen Z are spreading coronavirus-but not because of parties and bars - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...ch-parties-bars-inequality-cvd

millennials COVID-19 pandemic gen-z

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 17 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 17 Sep 20
     
    Younger generations are blamed for the pandemic's spread, but also face the brunt of the transmission risk that comes with keeping the economy going. 6 MINUTE READ BY REBECCA RENNER PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 17, 2020 WHEN PARAMEDICS RUSHED the pregnant Honduran woman into the emergency room, 28-year-old Chuan-Jay Jeffrey Chen stood ready to receive her. It was April, and the pandemic had already taken over his final year as an emergency medicine resident. Of all the coronavirus patients surging into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, this 32-year-old patient remains Chen's most memorable. The woman was so short of breath she could barely speak, so Chen would need to intubate her-a tricky procedure that requires precision as well as speed. Every moment without oxygen causes a patient's chances of survival to decline; pregnancy further complicates the scenario by making airways swollen, causing blood pressure to drop more quickly. As Chen set to work and talked her through the steps in Spanish, he also tried to calm his own nerves. "I knew I had very little margin for error," says Chen. The woman's husband had been barred from entering the building because of coronavirus restrictionsgen-z
Bill Fulkerson

U.S. social distancing stabilized, but did not reduce, spread of COVID-19: study - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...tancing-stabilized-covid-.html

social distance coronavirus

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 12 May 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 12 May 20
     
    Our findings don't show much rationale for substantial relaxation of social distancing, in the absence of other measures," Wagner said. "We don't have a lot of wiggle room." Additional steps such as contact tracing, increased testing or stricter quarantining could also have an impact, he added, as will the fact that the infection rate will inevitably drop as more people contract the virus, leaving fewer susceptible.
Steve Bosserman

How Facebook Is Throwing Our Brains Into Overdrive - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...ebook-is-a-digital-narco-state

facebook neuroscience manipulation

shared by Steve Bosserman on 04 May 18 - No Cached
  • The human brain has always loved the dopamine rush of notifications, in any form; recent research indicates the unpredictable but ubiquitous updates of Gmail or Twitter carry the same neurological effect as rocking a slot machine. While Internet use is "not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," as cognitive scientist Tom Stafford noted in 2013, we continually chase those unpredictable payoffs on Facebook and Instagram in ways that tend to mirror gambling or sex addictions, even if "Internet addiction" writ large currently holds an ambiguous position in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
  • For products whose fundamental business proposition is harnessing attention, building those so-called "compulsion loops" isn't an accident of technology—it's the whole point. Indeed, observers have argued since Parker's "human psychology" flub last year that Facebook has not just meticulously measured, but fundamentally altered human behavior, and nascent technology ventures emboldened by Facebook's world-changing success have sought to translate the behavioral tricks that psychologist B.F. Skinner applied to the gambling kiosk to every mobile app under the sun. "When a gambler feels favored by luck, dopamine is released," Natasha Schüll, author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, told the Guardian in March. All Facebook managed to do was find a way to miniaturize the captivating logic of the slot machine—with no cost to the user but their time and attention.
  • While the human brain is tremendously plastic, that doesn't mean Facebook is savagely rewiring the human brain. Indeed, the Facebook users in the Cal State–Fullerton study "showed greater activation of their amygdala and striatum, brain regions that are involved in impulsive behavior," as Live Science's Tia Ghose reported at the time. Ghose continued: "But unlike in the brains of cocaine addicts, for instance, the Facebook users showed no quieting of the brain systems responsible for inhibition in the prefrontal cortex." Facebook isn't fundamentally rewiring the structure of the human brain, but its ubiquity has the same relative effect by kicking our rewards centers into overdrive.
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