Seeing is Believing

A new approach to discover visual patterns in art collections
Mar 2019, phys.org

A little bit of art history - prior to the van Meegeren Forgeries in the 1940's, art historians and art authenticators would perform their forensics thus: stand in front of the painting, and if you feel it, if it moves you, then it's real.

Value In-Transigence: Value In Transit

Now you see it; Now you don't

Ring of Bitcoins: Why Your Digital Wallet Belongs On Your Finger
Robert McMillan, Wired, 03.18.13

"physical Bitcoins — metal coins engraved with hidden, tamper-protected private keys that could be exchanged much like money."

-people trade the password used to get the money, not the money itself

"You see, Shrem — like many other Bitcoin traders — doesn’t trust digital copies of this most digital of currencies. “Even if all of your assets are in Bitcoins, you have to diversify them,” he says. “Twenty percent you should keep on your computer. The rest should be kept in cold storage.”

"Cold storage can mean an encrypted USB drive, a computer that is not connected to the internet, a piece of paper, or some other physical medium. Shrem puts his on a ring, but other Bitcoiners are using paper — or even physical coins."

"You can write your own key on piece of paper. Or engrave it on a ring. But you might lose your piece paper. Someone might take your ring. There’s always a security hole. The trick is to make it as small as possible."

---money is turned into information, literally, because the only actual value of the coin is not in its material worth, but in the password that is engraved into it. Just wait until we start using living organisms to hold encrypted data (remember the recent report on using DNA to store data?).


Musicians accused of 'buying virtual fans' on YouTube
Newsbeat reporters Chi Chi Izundu and Declan Harvey, BBC
18 March 2013

Facebook told Newsbeat that gaining "likes" from people who aren't interested in that page is "no good to anyone".

---but I wonder, can we distinctly articulate the difference between a like-seeker paying for likes versus the old-school style of subversive advertising, aggresive advertising, demographic targeting, (aka psychological manipulation)

In a world where attention itself has been shaken and shattered, it's only right that the old-school should have to now pay us for it.

On Value and the Palimpsest

palimpsest - origin

What we see is actually another overlay on the palimpsest of a personal history of art-viewing. When the work, coming through the eyes, presently, combined with the palimpsest coming from the memory, produces a new sensation, glowingly harmonious, or alarmingly disjointing, then, a work ascertains value.

Then, it is an achievement. 

palimpsest - iteration

And when enough individuals experience this and communicate it through a network until it fixes itself in the cultural matrix, it becomes another layer itself of the palimpsest, adding more standards and complexities to the criteria of any future work.

inspired while reading
The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art
Denis Dutton, ed.
Berkeley, 1983

partially unrelated internet imageDetails of Perception

Hidden Economies and the Shifting of Value

"The Clothesline Paradox"

Tim O Reilly [10.4.2012]

Edge Conversations, www.edge.org

Stuart Brand's Clothesline Paradox:

You put your clothes in your dryer, and the energy you use gets measured and counted; you put your clothes on the clothesline, and it disappears from the economy.

On the internet, the value is created somewhere, and captured somewhere else. (The sun creates the value, and your wet clothes capture the value). Tim Berners Lee created value in the internet, but did not capture it. Goldman Sach's did not create value, they captured it.

Free content on the web - Users getting something for nothing:

Actually, most people pay comcast $80 a month for content on the web. And what's more, it's actually comcast who gets the free ride now. They don't have to pay television networks for their content; on the internet, the users create that content. Comcast is getting the free ride, not the users.

Finding meaning in the data is the new value generation.

http://edge.org/conversation/-39the-clothesline-paradox-39-

"Thinking in Network Terms"

Albert-lászló Barabási [9.24.2012]

Edge Conversations, www.edge.org

Call it what you will: Network Science, Human Dynamics, Computational Social Science, Big Data; The question now is not how you collect the data, but how you make sense of it.

Barabasi continues to talk about how understanding networks allows us to get more out of the data.

http://edge.org/conversation/thinking-in-network-terms

Further Links:

Tim O Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., one of the leading computer book publishers in the world.

http://edge.org/memberbio/tim_o_reilly

O'Reilly Radar: Insights, analysis and research about emerging technologies

http://radar.oreilly.com/

ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI is a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research, and holds appointments in the Departments of Physics, Computer Science and Biology, as well as in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital, and is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

http://edge.org/memberbio/albert_laszlo_barabasi

Barabasi Labs, Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University, Boston

http://www.barabasilab.com/