Habits, AI films, Randomness, Democracy

Happenings Opinions Learnings

Happenings

informationisbeautifulawards.com

Entries and nominations are now open for the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards 2016.

Nature News & Comment - Legal confusion threatens to slow data science

Researcher who spent months chasing permission to republish online data sets urges others to read up on the law.

CRITICAL ENGINEERING SUMMER INTENSIVES, BERLIN 2016

Introduction To Biosurveillance, 18-19 August with Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Introduction To Software Defined Radio, 27-28 August with Julian Oliver And Bengt SjÖlen, Networkshop, 23-25 August with Julian Oliver And Danja Vasiliev, Offline Publishing, 02-04 Sept with Sarah Grant, Selfhosted, 07-09 September with Julian Oliver And Danja Vasiliev.

Opinions

Randomness as a concept has plagued mathematics for much of its recent history because it’s difficult to nail down a precise definition of what it means for an event to be random. Statisticians deal with this conundrum by saying that things can’t be random, but rather processes can be random and you can define the probability of an event happening as a result of the process.

If you don’t understand the definition you can’t make an informed voting decision. (Of course, if you watch the news for entertainment and to be part of a political tribe, the truth is irrelevant)

It takes a lot of social maturity beyond the bare mathematical discourse to understand when this is appropriate and when it’s just annoying. Moreover, it usually takes a few years beyond introductory proofs to become comfortable with the “always being wrong” part.

Futurism - Sunspring, A Film Written Entirely By An AI

Sunspring, a short science fiction film written by an AI made its online debut–and it looks, surprisingly, pretty good.

The Huffington Post - How Data Undermines Our Democracy

Like equal access to the voting booth, access to data is fundamental to representative democracy. Think of it like this: Protecting critical infrastructure—the vital infrastructure on which our economy and society depend such as power facilities and transportation systems—receives attention at the highest levels of government. Democracy is part of this country’s critical infrastructure. The data infrastructure of democracy should be safeguarded – by making that data fully and effectively open.

The game of business: It’s time to rewrite the rules - Tim O’Reilly

labor marketplace algorithms can be game changers for business and society if they are used to model and satisfy more and more complex conditions. There’s no question that even in their current state, Uber’s real-time marketplace algorithms allow for far better matching of supply and demand than the previous structure of the taxicab and limousine industry. But Uber can do better. Algorithms such as these can be a real advance in the structure of our economy, but only if they take into account the needs of workers as well as those of consumers, businesses, and investors.

Learnings

SciPy Lectures

Tutorials on the scientific Python ecosystem: a quick introduction to central tools and techniques.

My Story of A Month of Learning Elixir

And the best way to understand and learn about machine learning algorithms? You guessed, is to write one!

A bunch of cool & fun iPython notebooks

Demonstration of how I start d3 projects - Chris McDowall

PeARS is a new browser/plugin in the works, a Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search and recipient of a 2016 Mozilla OSS award