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Niftyword - "Let's cast the net beyond mere synonyms and antonyms in the hunt for words!"
Words that are connected by virtue of occuring together often. They need not be related by meaning necessarily. Some of them will be practical, salt-of-the-earth words. Others maybe be flowy, poetic, even flamboyant. We hope you will find what you are looking for. Below are some terms and a sample of their associated words. (Hint: Why don't you try clicking on an unknown word to explore further?)
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Music of the Month: Haruna Ishola (1919–1983)
Haruna Ishola Bello M.O.N. (Member of the Order of the Niger) was a Nigerian musician, and one of the most popular artists in the apala genre. In the decades leading up to Nigerian independence in 1960, apala music developed when amateur musicians would play to arouse the faithful after the long fast of Ramadan.
Much like Cuban Santeria and Haitian vodoun, the music of Nigeria's Yoruba tribe is believed to have mythical powers, either to heal or to curse. Chief Haruna Ishola's brand of Apala music is treated with the same reverence typically reserved for the Orishas - the Yoruba pantheon of deities - and it was believed that his singing was so powerful it could kill its intended recipient if not properly restrained. (source)
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If You Like RSS, You'll Love Fraidycat
Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube or TiddlyWiki. There is no news feed. Rather than showing you a massive inbox of new posts to sort through, you see a list of recently active individuals. No one can noisily take over this page, since every follow has a summary that takes up a mere two lines.
#Comment: I absolutely love this! Fantastic approach to the evolution of RSS and Content Feeds.
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Information And Complexity - Book by Mark Burgin & Cristian Calude (2016)
The book is a collection of papers of experts in the fields of information and complexity. Information is a basic structure of the world, while complexity is a fundamental property of systems and processes. There are intrinsic relations between information and complexity. The research in information theory, the theory of complexity and their interrelations is very active. The book will expand knowledge on information, complexity and their relations representing the most recent and advanced studies and achievements in this area. The goal of the book is to present the topic from different perspectives — mathematical, informational, philosophical, methodological, etc.
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Germany hits record 61% renewables for month of February
Renewable energy sources provided a record 61.2% of Germany’s net public electricity generation in February, according to figures provided by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE), which also showed that wind energy provided nearly half of the country’s electricity during the month.
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The @EU_Commission just presented their strategy to shape Europe‘s digital future. See this summary by @AlexandraGeese
On the digital strategy: „Information and communication technologies are expected to achieve 10% of the overall reduction in CO² emissions in all sectors by 2030, i.e. one fifth of the 50 percent reduction envisaged in the Green New Deal. This is a good start, but does not exploit the technical potential.“
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In Coronavirus Fight, China Gives Citizens a Color Code, With Red Flags (NYTimes)
The QR code inside the Alipay app. Green is good, and allows the holder to travel freely. As China encourages people to return to work despite the coronavirus outbreak, it has begun a bold mass experiment in using data to regulate citizens’ lives — by requiring them to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed into subways, malls and other public spaces. It also appears to share information with the police, setting a template for new forms of automated social control that could persist long after the epidemic subsides.
#Comment: Rest assured, NSA & co have been implementing similar cybernetic social control systems for quite some time - just with the added "freedom and democracy" PR packaging.
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Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.
“I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives... I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal means. If anybody can put on paper what our government and the American government and the Russian... Chinese... what they are actually trying to do, and what they think they’re doing, I’d be very pleased to know what they think they’re doing. I think they’re all insane. But I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” - John Lennon
Related: "I Am Fishead", Documentary about Psychopaths (2011)
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A case study of three people who massively overdosed on LSD
A pair of Canadian researchers, one with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the other Vancouver Coastal Health, has made headlines with a case study of three people who accidentally massively overdosed on LSD, The study appears in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. The researchers, Mark Haden and Birgitta Woods, were most surprised by the unexpectedly positive outcomes.
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Deep-learning system detects human presence by harvesting RF signals (demo)
Researchers at Syracuse University in New York have recently developed a system that can detect the presence of humans in a given environment by analyzing ambient radio frequency (RF) signals. This new system, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on a vast amount of RF data.
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"The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consistent and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese." — Frank Zappa
"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony." - Thomas Merton
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12 Countries Are Now Considering Central Bank Digital Currencies (Qz)
As money gets swept up by tech innovation, government authorities are taking a closer look at old fashioned notes and coins. More than a dozen countries are either researching, piloting, or, like China, have ongoing work in place for central bank digital currencies, according to a Bank for International Settlements report published today. "Central banks around the world are investigating a rich set of prototypes," the BIS wrote...
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"Slow science was pretty much the only science conceivable for hundreds of years; today, we argue, it deserves revival and needs protection. Society should give scientists the time they need, but more importantly, scientists must take their time. We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to misunderstand each other, especially when fostering lost dialogue between humanities and natural sciences. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time."
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Simulation model as a decision support tool
The simulation model does not give optimal decisions, unlike analytical solvers used for classical optimization tasks. The main advantage of this model is that it allows experts to answer the question of “What if?” using computational experiments. In the last decade, a lot of work was done to apply simulation to an opposite task: “What is need for?” This may also be called simulation-based optimization.
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"Our Twitter bot @KPFCityBot uses social media to engage people with urban design and planning concepts. This tool is both educational and enjoyable for users, a method for gamifying the design and feedback process. Users tweet at City Bot with a certain set of parameters – preferences for density, street grid type (ex. New York vs. London?) and amount of open space – and our listener runs an analysis. An image of that city is produced and then Tweeted back at the user, along with a series of performance metrics. "
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Archistar Property Intelligence
Our world-first artificial intelligence helps property professionals find profitable development sites, assess for feasibility and generate dozens of architectural design strategies – all within a few minutes
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#Comment: In times of crisis, the true extent of hypocrisy and lunacy in a system becomes evident: Lawrence Gostin, who specializes in global health policy at Georgetown University Law Center, just called the policies of the Chinese government against the coronavirus “astounding, unprecedented, and medieval”. In the meantime, the EU is heavily debating if its worth emulating the Chinese measures, calling them "highly effective" yet simultaneously screaming "but don't forget, china is a evil dictatorship!". All while the coronavirus is rapidly spreading in the EU and US, where the responds of officials and public is progressively looking like a mix of ignorance and incompetence. The "west" has developed a curios mix of extreme arrogance coupled with systemic stupidity, which clearly has to yield catastrophic outcomes sooner or later...
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Aleph - A suite of data analysis tools for investigators
Aleph is a powerful tool for people who follow the money. It helps investigators to securely access and search large amounts of data - no matter whether they are a government database or a leaked email archive.
