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Archive for the 'Society' Tag
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Image: Why choose if you can combine?
The best two versions we found of the more and more popular Barack O’Clinton images on the web.
Why choose if you can combine ?
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Data-visualization: Charting The Banking Crisis
The web log “And Still I Persist” has made two interesting implementations available that demonstrate how data-visualization tools similar to “Gapminder’s Trendalyzer” can be used to show patterns in vast amounts of data.
They used OSG’s Boomerang technology to show changes in banks’ mortgage portfolios based on the data the banks have reported to the FDIC. The first chart / animation shows the amounts of 90+ days late mortgages and the second one visualizes the changed amounts in mortgages that…
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Street-Art: London as an Open Prison
These signs are currently popping up all over London.
An excellent idea to create awareness of the planned ID card project in the UK. You find more images of this great poster “here”, “here” and “here”.
We refrain from commenting on the subject directly (in our opinion the issues…
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Comedy: Big Train Working Class
This is definitely one of “Big Train’s” all time classics.
In this sketch they are spoofing Hitchcock’s “Birds”…
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Joseph Weizenbaum is dead
Joseph Weizenbaum died yesterday in Berlin as a result of a stroke at the age of 85.
Throughout his life he has provided many outstanding contributions to computer science and AI. After he created the first banking computer in the world while working for General Electric he took up a position at the MIT as professor for applied and political science. In 1966 he published “ELIZA” – his best know work – and the first computer program demonstrating natural language processing. His academic contributions include the creation of the SLIP (symmetric List Processor) programming language and research on pointers, list structures and garbage collection schemes.
Over the years he also became one of the strongest critics of computer science and a society that blindly believes into technology. His influential book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation” displayed his grown ambivalence towards computer technology. Many concepts from this book have by now become common understandings like, for example, how programmers are seen by society or his critics of the promises by AI.
In one of his last mails “Joseph Weizenbaum” wrote: (translated from German)
“…our death is the last service we can provide to the world: Would we not go out of the way the following generations would not need to re-create human culture. Culture would become fixed, unchangeable and die. And with the death of culture humanity would also perish…“
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Opinion: Rants and Raves
While we wait for the results to come in from Texas and Ohio take a moment, turn off and away from all the well shaped speaches you might tonight hear again. Today its 75 years ago that Franklin D. Roosevelt held his inauguration speech, his speech to seal the “new deal“. FDR’s “new deal” was [...]
