Blaming the Algorithm

Are search engines bursting the filter bubble? Study finds political ideology plays bigger role than algorithms

May 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-filter-political-ideology-plays-bigger.html

Political ideology and user choice - not algorithmic curation - are the biggest drivers of engagement with partisan and unreliable news provided by Google Search, according to a study coauthored by Rutgers faculty published in the journal Nature.

The study addressed a long-standing concern that digital algorithms learn from user preferences and surface information that largely agrees with users' attitudes and biases. However, search results shown to Democrats differ little in ideology from those shown to Republicans, the researchers found. The ideological differences emerge when people decide which search results to click, or which websites to visit on their own.

Something I've learned only recently with the critical-hype of generative machine learning -- when you say "AI is going to take over the world" you do nothing but make everyone else think AI is actually capable of of taking over the world. It can't make a picture of a ribbon of measuring tape where all the numbers show up in order; it can't do fingers, and it can't put things in people's mouths. It is not taking over the world. Not yet at least.

Same thing here - to think that "digital algorithms learn from user preferences and surface information that largely agrees with users' attitudes and biases" means that the overbloated supersurveillance machine that is the too big to fail digital ad economy can actually "learn from user preferences". All the algorithms know is how to make money (because that's what they're programmed to do). Everything else is a fluke.

via Rutgers: Ronald E. Robertson, Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06078-5.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06078-5

Image credit: AI Art - Antique Technical Drawing Ink on Paper - 2022

Vision Technologies See Way Ahead

Neuromorphic camera and machine learning aid nanoscopic imaging

Feb 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-02-neuromorphic-camera-machine-aid-nanoscopic.html

Brain-inspired image sensor using machine learning can go beyond the diffraction limit of light to detect minuscule objects such as cellular components or nanoparticles smaller than 50 nanometers in size, and invisible to current microscopes.

via Indian Institute of Science: Rohit Mangalwedhekar et al, Achieving nanoscale precision using neuromorphic localization microscopy, Nature Nanotechnology (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-022-01291-1

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41565-022-01291-1

Image credit: AI Art - Sci Fi Night Nurse - 2024

New 'camera' with shutter speed of 1 trillionth of a second sees through dynamic disorder of atoms

Mar 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-03-camera-shutter-trillionth-dynamic-disorder.html

Doesn't work like a conventional camera - it uses neutrons from a source at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to measure atomic positions with a shutter speed of around one picosecond, or a million million (a trillion) times faster than normal camera shutters. 

via Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science: Simon A. J. Kimber et al, Dynamic crystallography reveals spontaneous anisotropy in cubic GeTe, Nature Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-023-01483-7

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01483-7

Superconducting nanowire camera will explore brain cells, space

Jul 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-superconducting-nanowire-camera-explore-brain.html

Superconducting camera -- A pixel array 400 times greater than previous largest photon camera, this is a 400,000 pixel superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD), for light frequencies from the visible to ultraviolet and infrared range and speed rates in the picoseconds.

via National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, University of Colorado's Department of Physics and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology: Bakhrom G. Oripov et al, A superconducting-nanowire single-photon camera with 400,000 pixels, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2306.09473

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2306.09473

AI Art - Skeleton Reading an X-Ray - 2024

The first network of robotic telescopes present across five continents is deployed

Feb 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-02-network-robotic-telescopes-continents-deployed.html

The existence of a network of very fast pointing robotic telescopes such as BOOTES represents an ideal complement to satellite detection and, in fact, BOOTES will also work to track and monitor neutrino sources and objects that emit gravitational waves, or even objects such as comets, asteroids, variable stars or supernovae. But it will also keep an eye on the sky, both in tracking space debris and potentially dangerous objects that may pose a threat to our planet.

via Spanish National Research Council: Youdong Hu et al, The Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System in the multi-messenger astronomy era, Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fspas.2023.952887.

https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2023.952887

HotSat-1: Spacecraft to map UK's heat inefficient buildings

Jun 2023, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65775901

Mass surveillance -- 

At an altitude of 500km (311 miles), infrared satellite HotSat-1, funded by the UK and European space agencies, manufactured by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in Guildford, and to be operated by the London-based start-up Satellite Vu, will identify dwellings wasting energy.

The data will also provide intelligence to the financial and insurance sectors - and even the military - by showing how temperatures in a scene change over time. It's possible, for example, to get a sense of the volume and type of output from a factory just from its heat signature.

Pollution monitoring ought to be another application. Watching for sudden changes in the temperature of river water might be an indicator that something is awry.

Update: A novel UK satellite has returned its first pictures of heat variations across the surface of the Earth. HotSat-1: UK spacecraft maps heat variations across Earth, Sep 2023, BBC News

The future of AI hardware: Scientists unveil all-analog photoelectronic chip

Oct 2023, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-10-future-ai-hardware-scientists-unveil.html

All-analog photoelectronic chip that combines optical and electronic computing. It's specifically for visual data processing (as expected). 

New words to me - "diffractive neural network"

Also - ACCEL: all-analog chip combining electronic and light computing

via Tsinghua University: Yitong Chen et al, All-analog photoelectronic chip for high-speed vision tasks, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06558-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06558-8

Also: Computer vision accelerated using photons and electrons, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/d41586-023-02947-1 

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02947-1

Officially Human

Researchers create embryo-like structures from monkey embryonic stem cells for the first time

Apr 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-embryo-like-monkey-embryonic-stem-cells.html

via Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai: Zhen Liu, Cynomolgus monkey embryo model captures gastrulation and early pregnancy, Cell Stem Cell (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2023.03.009

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2023.03.009

Image credit: Logo for an app that allows users to take photos and submit them so that our company can create tactile sensory puzzles from the photo [link]

With in vitro model advances, group proposes refined legal definition of an embryo

Aug 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-vitro-advances-group-refined-legal.html

(This doesn't seem to have made it to the national news, so I'm less suspicious that it's some political propaganda stuff; not not suspicious, just less.)

International Society for Stem Cell Research: "Stem cell research has enabled the formation of models capable of organizing into structures that rudimentarily resemble embryos and reflect various degrees of completeness and developmental stages," says first author Nicolas Rivron, a development biologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

"These new propositions are part of an effort to bring clarity to ongoing research—to better classify the types of structures formed in the laboratory, to refine the legal definition of human embryos, and to pinpoint what currently makes models and embryos different from the legal standpoint."

Officially human, their definition: "a group of human cells supported by elements fulfilling extra-embryonic and uterine functions that, combined, have the potential to form a fetus."

But this is the line that really hits me:

"This definition allows us to think about the conditions under which models, if improved, might eventually pass a tipping point and be legally considered embryos."

In other words, we are making people, and so we're starting to wonder at what point we will start calling them people. (Actually, these scientists are saying no, these embryos cannot form neonates, but that they are showing us things we never knew about the developing human, since it's hidden in the womb.)

via the International Society for Stem Cell Research and : Nicolas C. Rivron, An ethical framework for human embryology with embryo models, Cell (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2023.07.028.

Researchers develop biodegradable optical fiber to measure or modulate electrical current in the body

Sep 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-09-biodegradable-optical-fiber-modulate-electrical.html

A biocompatible and biodegradable optical fiber based on agar, a substance extracted from Gracilaria seaweed, when excited by coherent light, produces granular light patterns that modulate the agar's refraction index and create disturbances in the granular patterns, which can be used to detect bioelectrical stimuli, so it can be part of a sensor system for living things. 

via State University of Campinas's School of Mechanical Engineering in São Paulo, Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics, and Gunma University in Japan: Eric Fujiwara et al, Agar-based optical sensors for electric current measurements, Scientific Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-40749-7

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-40749-7

AI Art - Old Worker with Sombrero Operating a 3D Printer in Cosmic Space Graffiti - 2023

A non-invasive way to turn a cockroach into a cyborg

Sep 2023, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-09-non-invasive-cockroach-cyborg.html

First, we made remote control roaches by smashing an electric circuit through their head. But now, it's as simple as slipping over their antennae a sleeve made of gold and plastic, and fixed in place by a blast of ultraviolet light, like plastic shrink-wrap.

Note to self -- insects don't get injured, they get damaged: "damaging cockroaches during attempts to control them results in a very short life expectancy, which then results in very little payoff for a lot of work".

via Nanyang Technological University in Singapore: Qifeng Lin et al, Resilient conductive membrane synthesized by in-situ polymerisation for wearable non-invasive electronics on moving appendages of cyborg insect, npj Flexible Electronics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41528-023-00274-z

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41528-023-00274-z

Note: For a cockroach, their antenna is their nose, and so this is how we'll do it for humans too. (Except I see the laser pulses through the retina as a likely candidate as well.)

Artist's representation of a person with a robotic arm - Ekaterina Ivanova QMUL - 2023

One hour of training is all you need to control a third robotic arm

Sep 2023, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-09-hour-robotic-arm.html

Today we bring you "Supernumerary Body Parts", because humans, as they were originally designed, are just not enough and we need to do better -- The study, published in the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, investigated the potential of supernumerary robotic arms to help people perform tasks that require more than two hands. 

via Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College London and The University of Melbourne: Yanpei Huang et al, Can Training Make Three Arms Better Than Two Heads for Trimanual Coordination?, IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1109/OJEMB.2023.3305808

https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/OJEMB.2023.3305808

Neural-Interfaced Exoskeletons

Paralysed man moves in mind-reading exoskeleton
Oct 2019, BBC News

Progress marches on, this time wearing a neural interfaced exoskeleton.

This gentleman injured his spinal cord in a fall and lost the ability to walk. Scientists are letting him experiment with this pretty astonishing technology.

He first learned how to use the setup via an avatar; he would mentally control the video game character, making it move with only his thoughts of movement. Eventually he put on the actual suit and began making it move with his thoughts.

Caveats? The suit is attached to a ceiling harness, so he doesn't fall over. It's not that good yet. Also, this is super hi-tech, which means it's not available to pretty much anyone. And note that here we are talking about mind-controlled exoskeletons and yet around the world, 85% of people with a disability don't have a wheelchair.

image source: labreche_fondsdedotationclinatec

Inherent Fallibility Algorithms and Autonomous Driving

This is a real car sold by hotwheels

Autonomous cars are not working because they follow the rules. All the time. They drive too slow, they don't roll through stop signs, and they aren't aggressive enough to fit the flow of regular human traffic. First of all, how can you legally design into the algos of the car to break the speed limit? But more importantly, and beyond the realm of car-driving, which is better - the perfect world of autonomous-everything, or the one where messy, impatient, fallible humans run the show?

Humans Are Slamming Into Driverless Cars and Exposing a Key Flaw
Bloomberg Business, Dec 2015

The Semibots Are Coming

astronaut painting by Jeremy Geddes 

Talk about artificial intelligence becoming sentient needs to be tempered by the grey-area of semi-autonomy, or the half-robot half-human, because that's where it's really at.

Some fembots are all-robot, but the ones that will really getcha are the ones that are real people working along with intelligent algorithms, and I like to call these semibots.

How Ashley Madison Hid Its Fembot Con From Users and Investigators
Gizmodo, Sep 215

Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fembots to lure men into paying for credits on the “have an affair” site. When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call “Angels,” or fake women whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. To bring the fake women to life, the company’s developers also created software bots to animate these Angels, sending email and chat messages on their behalf.

To the Ashley Madison “guest,” or non-paying member, it would appear that he was being personally contacted by eager women. But if he wanted to read or respond to them, he would have to shell out for a package of Ashley Madison credits, which range in price from $60 to $290. Each subsequent message and chat cost the man credits. As documents from company e-mails now reveal, 80 percent of first purchases on Ashley Madison were a result of a man trying to contact a bot, or reading a message from one. The overwhelming majority of men on Ashley Madison were paying to chat with Angels like Sensuous Kitten, whose minds were made of software and whose promises were nothing more than hastily written outputs from algorithms.

Our Blue Marble

Kazimir Malevich's Black Square 1915

An example of Abstract Art, specifically from the Suprematism movement. It can easily be called the most extreme example of artistic abstraction.

Recently, I was trying to convey the meaning, or at least the relevance of the Black Square to my high school art students. Most people don't understand abstract art, and that's part of what it is,if you want to see it that way - another esoteric tool used by the elite to alienate a people from their own culture. But I like to see art, any art, as simply a reflection of a time and of the mind of a people at a particular time in history. Art is a kind of coping mechanism for society; the society as a whole will call a thing Art if it serves that purpose - to help us to cope with a world we do not understand. Needless to say, as anyone who would try to explain abstract art to group of high school students in a single 45-minute presentation, I was successful only in getting them upset enough to debate with me for 45 mintutes about the ridiculousness of the Black Square.

The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. The photograph was taken about 5 hours and 6 minutes after launch of the Apollo 17 mission. To the astronauts, Earth had the appearance and size of a glass marble, hence the name.

The Apollo 17 image, however, released during a surge in environmental activism during the 1970s, was acclaimed by the wide public as a depiction of Earth's frailty, vulnerability, and isolation amid the vast expanse of space. NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated that The Blue Marble is the most widely distributed image in human history. [link]

Later that night, I thought to myself about the Blue Marble, or rather what I call the Blue Marble Syndrome. I was born in 1980, and so for me, I never lived in a world where man had -not- been to outerspace. This achievement had already taken place well before I was born, and so it never hit me; it was always there. From what I understand through reading history, this image changed not only the lives of the countless individuals who saw it for the first time, but it changed the consciousness of an entire society (as mentioned in the caption above). And I made the parallel - my students couldn't feel the true impact, the true relevance of the Black Square, because they weren't around for its inception.

The next day, I tried explaining this to them. No use. (Back to the more concrete and perhaps practical exercise of distinguishing the difference between representationality and non-representationality in visually-informed art).

And then it happened. Granted, I had been following Curiosity. I stayed up that night like a little kid in utter amazement, but almost a bit moreso at the fact that the entire world was watching along with me, all of us, with the entire crew at NASA, in real time (and at the implications of that superimposed on the idea of the timelag between here and Mars) feeling the same every bit of anxiety, both the good kind and the bad kind, as everyone else. It landed, and it was over. Some months later, I was scrolling through some feeds, and I came across this picture (below), and it stopped me dead in my tracks, and I literally could not take my eyes off of it for a good five minutes; in a very real way, it transported me to another world (superimposed on the fact that it -is- another world I'm looking at) and it took away from me, for those moments, my own thoughts.

I still can't get over it. Neither the image, nor its implications, nor the experience it forced upon me.

Curiosity Self Portrait on Mars February 2013 Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Taken in the Yellowknife Bay region of Mars' Gale Crater, the panoramic image was stitched together by NASA from a series of 130 images created in the first week of February by the rover's 34-millimeter Mast camera and Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). [The MAHLI frames used to create Curiosity's self-portrait exclude sections that show the arm itself and so MAHLI and the robotic arm are not seen.] 

interactive version

As I'm sure any student of history and art and culture is wont to do, I have spent many daydream-hours lamenting over why I am alive now and not then. Why couldn't I hear Jimi Hendrix turn his guitar into a human-robot voice. Why couldn't I hear Neil Armstrong speak to us from a place that is not Earth. And why couldn't I see that picture of my own planet and feel the same sense of fragility, of isolation, and all the myriad emotions and thoughts that came with it.

It's not that I will no longer lament over being alive today and not yesterday. But I have certainly found comfort in this: Everyone of us, eventually, will be given our own Blue Marble.

Racter: Writing Robots

The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed (1984)
"With the exception of this introduction, the writing in this book was all done by a computer, in 1984."

[main]
[PDF]
[html]

sample:

At all events my own essays and dissertations about love
and its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be
known and understood by all of you who read this and
talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends
or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject
of this essay. We will commence with a question:
does steak love lettuce? This question is implacably
hard and inevitably difficult to answer. Here is
a question: does an electron love a proton,
or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does
a man love a woman or, to be specific and to be
precise, does Bill love Diane? The interesting
and critical response to this question is: no! He
is obsessed and infatuated with her. He is loony
and crazy about her. That is not the love of
steak and lettuce, of electron and proton and
neutron. This dissertation will show that the
love of a man and a woman is not the love of
steak and lettuce. Love is interesting to me
and fascinating to you but it is painful to
Bill and Diane. That is love!


found in
"This explains everything", Charlie Stross, February 5, 2013

Wegman reading two books

see other robot-written treasures:
Verified Facts
http://www.verifiedfacts.org/
The most greatest website ever for conspiracy theories, created by robots, for robots.

Communications From Elsewhere
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
"The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator."

Post Script
Robot writes LA Times earthquake breaking news article
18 March 2014, BBC

Seeker to Uploader Ratios and Botsites

Sandra -psychosandra- Holmbom

It's tough sometimes to transpose tabs for the uke, believe it or not the majority of uke tabs for certain tunes are software-generated and often wrong. Something about the different ratios of uke-playing uploaders to uke-learning tab-seekers.

Is it because advertisers are more likely to generate botsites for services with higher seeker-to-uploader ratios?

I play the guitar. I also play the ukulele. I don't have much of an idea what I'm doing when I'm trying to figure out how to play a song that I like, as I've always been able to reference a guitar magazine, or because I've always tried to play pretty easy songs with simple chords.

Nowadays, I like to play the uke, and I like to play 7th chords, 9th chords, etc. When I want to learn a song on my uke, I look for online tabs, as I'm sure everyone does. In so doing, I've found that, for certain kinds of songs - typically older songs, like prior to the rise in popularity of the uke (~2010's) - the tabs that can be sourced-up are way off, if not totally wrong. What I usually end up doing, is to look for guitar tabs, and transpose them (which isn't very easy for someone like myself who never really learned music properly). Luckily, I learned some basic music theory in my initial years of guitar playing, and it's been relatively easy to augment that learning, at least enough to meet my needs of detecting the accuracy of my own transpositions.

*The ukulele, though it is a stringed instrument and it looks exactly like a small guitar, requires a different tablature than guitar. The strings are GCEA, not EADGBE, which makes the fingerings of the chords completely different.

Ukulele Makers, fiddle and uke playing robot

banjo d

There's something about the guitar that makes it easy to seem like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. And the same goes for the uke, even moreso (simply because it has less strings). The uke rose to popularity only recently, and therefore after the rise of the internet and the death of hard-won knowledge (if I had the internet of today when I was learning guitar twenty years ago, I would never have tried to figure out songs by myself, and I would have understood much less of music theory because of it.) Players learning the uke today (and looking for or potentially uploading tabs), then would be less likely to have to learn as much to get by as a guitar-player of twenty years ago.

So the ukulele is somewhat easier to play due to both it's lesser number of strings, but also because of the means with which to learn new songs on it (which expands playing-availability to a wider audience of non-musically-trained players).

Finally, the guitar is a more widespread instrument than the uke, which brings with it more players who might know what they're doing, and tabulate and upload songs for others to learn from.

I speculate that these things make it less likely that a uke-player would be as equipped to decode songs as compared to a guitar player, and that this leads to less songs being tabulated and uploaded. Pound-for-pound, the numbers would be way off, but taken as a ratio of (real) uploaders to people searching for uploads, the uke ratio must look way different than that of the guitar. Also, for some reason, I say that a guitar player would be less likely to run a simple search rather than going to a trusted source (due to being more of a professional player? serious speculation here based on loose ideas of the comparative profiles of guitar-vs-uke players, I understand).

Mike and Jarvis' reggae-playing Ukulego robots 

Overall, when looking at the cyber-uke-sphere, it just smells like fertile soil for a place like a tab-generating robot to entice hapless players.

And though I may not know music very well, and I don't know how to actually program a robot, it can't be that hard to make a botsite that restates your search via a songtitle-corrector, a lyric-matcher, and a cache of chord names and respective key groupings.

It's just too bad they can't figure out how to actually decode the songs for us instead of just pretending to do it.

One day, Leonard B. Meyers will be proud...
Music, the Arts and Ideas, Leonard B. Meyers, 1967: Music as a Learned Probability System

Sandra -psychosandra- Holmbom

POST-POST SCRIPT
...something else about the chronologically stipulated evolution of the instruments respective to that of the internet...kind of like what happened to the ampersand in English vs. French, but not really.

Technologically-mediated cultural artifacts of both the ampersand and tab-generator software, see below.
The Ampersand
October 2012

Software

The software program who publishes papers in mathematics journals
Annalee Newitz, 1 Mar 2013, io9

Over at the Simons Foundation, Natalie Wolchover has a terrific article about how computer programs are slowly becoming part of math departments — sometimes even as colleagues. ...
[source]

what do you write? -Graffiti

Is this the first time a headline refers to software as a person in this way?