High Albedo Formula

It's pretty counter-intuitive, but a surface can lose heat even while being hit by sunlight. This is a big deal for buildings, especially the roofs of buildings, and especially when those buildings are in urban areas that experience the urban heat island effect.

We've been measuring the behavior of heat on a roof for a long time. It's called a measure of albedo, which takes into account both the ability of the surface to reflect heat, and also to dissipate it back into the atmosphere. These are two different things, and in this new technique, it is the second feature that makes it work.

Sure we can make things reflective. Painting them white is a good move. Shiny and white, even better. But how do we make it so that the roof also dissipates its heat better?

Think about the fins on an air conditioner. Their sole purpose is to rid of heat, a thousand strips of metal reaching into the air, far enough away from each other that they don't release their heat right back to themselves, and yet packed enough that they do a maximum job.

That's pretty much what this passive daytime radiative cooling technique does. It's more about the shape and structure and texture of the surface, which is a polymer coating made of foamlike nano-to-microscale air voids. I instead describe it as billions of little fingers, each one reaching out into the air to release the heat it carries from the mass behind it. They're also scattering and reflecting sunlight in every direction while they're at it.

No matter how you describe it, don't forget that this coating can be sprayed on like paint; it doesn't have to be made that way in the factory but can be applied out there in field. That makes this advance a really big deal.

Polymer coating cools down buildings
Sept 2018, phys.org

Entropy Goggles

A computer has been taught to distinguish between different arrangements of the elements and principles of design across artists and over time. But don't worry, it's nowhere near human.

Much of what makes this possible is the amount of artwork that has been digitized, ie, machine readable, ie, machine consumable. We can now feed our computers the same diet of cultural nutrients that we as photosensitive creatures enjoy, giving it a fair chance.

The computer can't see the things we see in a work of art. It can't see the richness and it can't assign meaning anywhere near the way we can. But it can do some things even better than us, especially if we give it a concise metric with which is can "familiarize" itself with the artwork.

The primary metric used here was one of complexity-entropy, where each pixel in an image was measured in terms of the complexity of its spatial patterns. A fully white square, or a square filled with all manner of colors and lines. Each pixel value is then added to give the picture an overall score.

The score of the different artworks in the database shifted in tandem with major accepted periods of artistic periods, making it look like this program has figured something out, can recognize something about our artifacts of cultural assimilation.

Machine learning enables physics-inspired metrics for analyzing art
Aug 2018, phys.org

Citizen Science

This jacket is so hi-tech even the manufacturers don't know what it does.

From what I can gather, this is the first instance of a graphene product on the consumer market.

There may be components of things we already use that incorporate it, or other materials used that are similar. But there haven't been any graphene watches or graphene duct tape yet. (I see something about a graphene light bulb from 2015?)

If you're not sure what graphene is, I should let someone with more authority impress upon you the hyperboles it bestows.

Sure stainless steel was a big deal. And synthetic plastics a triumph of man over nature (and may end up marking our place in the geological record). But graphene is all of those, and more.

It's everything-proof, anti-everything, and superconductive, whatever that means. It weighs less and holds more than anything else there is. It has made a new class of materials by subtracting a dimension from the entire arc of both human and nature's history, for it is, for all intents and purposes, a two-dimensional material.

And the greatest part is that it's not some crazy-long molecule with an unspellcheckable name, it's a bunch of carbon atoms. The same carbon atoms that have been floating around for eternity. By themselves, they usually make either graphene or diamonds, both just clumps of carbon atoms. But now, scientists have managed to trick them into planar arrangements only one atom thick.

Because we do not have experience with two-dimensional materials (because they do not exist anywhere else in the universe), we don't know what they can do, and we're pretty surprised by everything they've done so far.

After many years of development, the first thing we see is not a graphene/carbon nanotube powered-car by Tesla, or a graphene water filter by Brita, but a jacket by a high-end sports apparel manufacturer.

They don't even know why they did it*; the point is for consumers to wear it and discover what it does for them, for all of us. More of this to come, surely.

*I think we all know why they did it (publicity).


Notes:
Graphene Jacket. Part jacket. Part science experiment. Made with the only material in the world with a Nobel Prize
Aug 2018, Vollebak

Dear Phishbait

Went fishing in my spambox the other day and thought I should save this, for posterity:

Greetings,

I know you will be surprised to get this my email.  Apart from being surprised you may be hesitant to reply based on what is happening in the world of the internet. One has to be very careful  due to the amount of scammers that  are out there looking to take advantage of innocent citizens. However, I am not one of these people. My name is Capt. Patrick Williams and I was a member of the US ARMY medical team deployed to Iraq and then later transferred to Afghanistan.

I am looking for a trust worthy individual who will assist me in receiving some funds for me. I am requesting this individual to hold onto the cash until I arrive safely back to retrieve them.

As soon as I hear back I will work out the finer details.

Best Regards
Captain Patrick Williams

Post Script:
After a quick search, it looks like there's all kinds of iterations of this. Busy guy.

Outrunning the Herd

No surprise here - children are more susceptible than adults to influence by robots, even if they're obviously not people.

I'll paraphrase - a bunch of kids were put in a room with a bunch of robots and asked to do dumb sh** that they wouldn't or shouldn't be doing. They could be influenced to do said things as long as the robots made it seem ok.

We used to call this peer pressure. Now we refer to a well-known scientific experiemnt called the Asch paradigm, and it is a standard for measuring conformity. If enough people believe something to be true, it starts to become "true," whether it's true or not. This is how society works. So this idea of succumbing to peer pressure isn't new or unknown, but the effect on kids vs adults, and that it's instigated by a  humanoid, is new, or at least a reminder of how susceptible we are to the influence of others, especially at a young age.

Our allegiance to non-humans shouldn't be too crazy to consider. In case you don't remember your childhood, or don't have kids of your own, let me remind you that for an entire decade in America, a 6-ft tall, purple fuzzy dinosaur told kids what to do. And before that, I do recall letting 16-bit video games take control of my life  for a good 5 years. Kids are not too picky about who they take authority from. If they did, puppet shows might not exist. Lacking a mature brain to generate their own purpose in life, they put a premium on the opinions, beliefs and especially the commands of others. The Bicameral Mind work of Julian Jaynes might also have something to add to this.

Next, I'm not sure how much this is related in the study-authors' work, but I have to bring up Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, because one of these dimensions (individualism vs collectivism) measures the degree of conformity to be found in a particular population. Some cultures value conformity more than others, for example by forcing everyone to have the same haircut, and so this peer pressure effect may be even more pronounced in other parts of the world. This kid-influencing robot study was conducted in the UK, where there is a wider variety of haircuts.

Let's also take a look back at how Neal Stephenson was playing with this idea more than 20 years ago in a novel about an artificially intelligent book that was designed to teach children, and obviously to influence their worldview and hence their behavior.

And while we're at it, let's remember what has already taken place in America in regards to advertising to children. (I don't know enough about this to link something relevant; but I'm pretty sure there are at least some rules on how, when, and what can be advertised to kids, and it has something to do with McDonald's and breakfast cereal.)

Finally, the inverse of this study says that adults are not swayed so easily as children by a group of robots, and that we should take this as  a cool warning about such dangers in the future. But we can't deny that today, adults are already manipulated by robots*.

I can't say it better than the tech guru Jaron Lanier - social media is a behavior modification platform. We may not obey robots with the servitude of a child, but most of us tend to be influenced by our friends, and even friends of our friends, and so on.

*When I say "robots" in this context of social media, I'm talking about algorithms embodied by avatars that pretend to be actual human people, or the many shades of intelligentities that lie in between. 

Image source: Someone help me cite this X-ray Kermit picture? circa 2010


Notes:
Children 'at risk of robot influence'
Aug 2018, BBC News

Asch Test of Conformity - a test to measure the extent to which we are all suckers for social pressure.

Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions - offers a way to measure and compare some salient characteristics of culture

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Neal Stephenson, 1995.


Post Script:
What happens when you combine the Asch Paradigm and the Turing Test?


Post Post Script:
Would you look at that, just as we talk about how kids are in danger of being manipulated by robots, we get the first hints of how that might not be such a bad idea for adults. When you have an a**hole robot staring you down while you do your job, you do a better job. Go figure. I think we knew this already, with the whole cardboard cut-out cop reducing store thefts.

It doesn't matter if a thing is a robot or a can opener. We can't tell the difference. Forget the Uncanny Valley, if we assign agency to washing machines and our own mobile phones, what makes you think a crappy-looking robot isn't good enough to trick us? We are social creatures, our brain a social tool, and as such, everything is a person, and every act a social interaction. The way you handle your toothbrush has a wisp of sociality to it. Now make your toothbrush talk and have eyes, and try not to let it influence you. We can't.

Presence of 'mean' robot found to improve human concentration
Aug 2018, phys.org

Semi Automatic Artifact Generator

At the tail end of a post about training a network of sensory devices and learning machine programs to read sign language, I muse about the state of algorithmic art and how come I can't find any Alex Grey-trained Deep Dream programs to make meta-Grey artwork, and low and behold discover that neural style transfer has been a thing already for a year or so (although I have yet to find any Alex Grey training programs!).

People talk about technological mysticism, but this sh** gave me a temporary lobotomy when I first saw it.

It was a bit like hearing the sampler-sequencer on your phone for making electronic music (as a person with a real, tangible 707), or the robot landing on Mars. Up until a few years ago, you could  probably "put together two paintings" - a program that slices and dices a picture, not into pixelbits, but features like edges, curves, or gradients, and then splices together those features to make a hybrid picture. But you could not do it "in the style of Mondrian" or Miro, or Dali. This was a task relegated to the supreme conscious entities of this earth. No more.

And how did we get here? First you thought dreaming was a uniquely human thing, or at least a sentient creature thing (unless you're PKD), and then Deep Mind shows us that computers can in fact be set to dream just like us.* 

But that wasn't enough. The technique I'm referring to as neural style transfer is an extension of the Deep Dream project, where a deep neural net is turned on, but with nothing to do, and so it starts to get creative, and just puts things where it would like them to be, and seeing the things it knows about the world, even when they're not there.

Style transfer then takes this a step further. In a move than seems cruel as I write it, the "Dreamer" is given not a broad set of images of the world-at-large, as a contemporary, living, breathing human would see, but limits that Dreamers' world to one artist. Might be Dali, might be Mondrian (that's the cruel part).

Imagine having your entire brain erased, all but your memories of Mondrian's paintings. Being that we do not perceive objective reality apart from the interface of our previous experiences and current expectations, everything presented to us from that point on would look like a Mondrian painting. (Until we start incorporating the new non-Mondrian images we see into our corpus...). It's like that friend who is obsessed with comic books and superheroes, and everything that ever happens is a scene from Batman. You feel kind of bad, like he should go to a concert or take a walk in the park or something, don't you?

That's what we have here. We have created a thing capable of "seeing" the world, and then limited it's diet to only a bagful of paintings by a single artist.

And then we show it new things that it has never seen, and ask - "What do you see?"

Example - feed its dematerialized android eyes on a steady diet of Kandinsky and only Kandinsky. Then show it Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Neil Degrasse Tyson x Kandinsky

(content image + style image = generated image)

I found a pretty accessible description of what's going on:
Now remember- while doing style transfer, we are not training a neural network. Rather, what we're doing is?—?we start from a blank image composed of random pixel values, and we optimize a cost function by changing the pixel values of the image. In simple terms, we start with a blank canvas and a cost function. Then we iteratively modify each pixel so as to minimize our cost function. To put it in another way, while training neural networks we update our weights and biases, but in style transfer, we keep the weights and biases constant, and instead, update our image.
-Towards Data Science

Lastly, a bit about terminology. What I'm referring to here as algorithmic art is probably better termed AI art, to correctly co-locate it closer to fractal art. The distinguishing factor being the level of human agency. From a purist perspective, if you turn on an algorithmic art algorithm and leave the room, there is nothing on the computer when you return. Deep Dream is an algorithm that does the work while you wait, overnight while you sleep, while you both sleep, as it were. There's a new problem however in neural style transfer work - although much of what you're looking at is fully automated, the small role of the artist is disproportionately relevant to the overall impact of the image. I mean come on, a computer isn't meta-Escherizing itself! There's an artist at work there.

*Sure it is a prodigious act of artistic license to say that Deep Dreamers are dreaming "just like us," but can we not say that our dreams are a default, empty state filled with our life's worth of training data to run amok?


Notes:
Here's a place that will do it for you, but they have their own pre-designed style templates (called pastiches) - Deep Art.

There's also a few apps that do it, Prisma is one.

And here is a great survey of all the slight variations that you can get, like multiple transfer, masked transfer, color interpolation, and probably my favorite, texture transfer.

Vice article on Algorithmic Artist Dextro, 2014

Where's My Thought Translator
Network Address, 2018
Here's a few (what I imagine will become) classic style transfer artifacts, as well as a couple of the (already) style transfer classics, albeit from early 1900's abstract artists.

The Macro Image Series and the Dematerialization of Artifact
Network Address, 2013
Here's a presentation about the propagation of cultural artifacts in a digital medium.

Post Script:
I like to give Piet Mondrian credit for his prescience in foretelling bitmaps and pixelation, despite the fact that in his day, the primaries were still red-yellow-blue instead of our current day cyan-magenta-yellow.

Here, a painting of Napoleon, trained on Raphael's School of Athens:

Meta Napoleon Bonapart, unknown origin

Raphael's School of Athens

Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps

Post Post Script:

Same thing here but for music; I'm still waiting for the meta cover band that covers other bands as if they were already covering another band, for example, a cover band that does Radiohead doing the Doors, or if the Squirrel Nut Zippers covered Metallica, what would that sound like? Any tips would be much appreciated.

Ergobots

The question is no longer "Will robots take over the world;" it's more like "what will it mean to be human?"

Mobile handsets are the exocortex. Social media platforms are the virtual acropolis, populated with quasi artificial intelligentities. When you try to find a date online, you're fielding messages from semi-automated algorithms. When you call your network provider, you're talking to a fully-automated algorithm.

When you're heart gets too old to work by itself, you get a pacemaker. You're part robot. When you lose your eyeballs, for whatever reason, you get a headset that sees for you and translates visual stimuli into auditory signals that you can now perceive. You're an eyeborg.

So it's no surprise that your measly meatbody now gets support from an exoskeleton. These exosuits have been on the scene for a minute, but geared towards folks who can't move in the first place, due to spinal injuries, for example. Now they're in strenuous work environments. Tomorrow your mom will be telling you to put on your exosuit before you go out to shovel snow.

Notes:
Ford brings 'exosuits' to workers in 15 factories
Aug 2018, BBC