Today I learned that there are standards in the patterns of the bumpy parts on pavements ("tactile paving") that help visually impaired people move around. Apparently there are different patterns that have their own meaning, such as when there are steps ahead or near a platform. Check out this video by Tom Scott that focuses on the patterns used in British streets. The standard they use (“Guidance on the use of Tactile Paving Surfaces”) can be found here.
Bloomberg Newsweek made a nice three part video series on the Chinese city Shenzhen. In the series Ashlee Vance gives a balanced view of how this city has grown rapidly over the last 40 years, showing both postive and negative sides of this “futuristic metropolis”. The full three episodes are part of the “Hello World” series and you can watch them here.
Can our phone use shape how we eat our food? A funny article from The Guardian provides some examples of devices to “tailor the dining experience around our phone-centric lifestyles”.
Fareed Zakaria in an article from Foreign Policy on “The End of Economics”:
Let me be clear: Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world. Economics remains a vital discipline, one of the most powerful ways we have to understand the world.But in the heady days of post-Cold War globalization, when the world seemed to be dominated by markets and trade and wealth creation, it became the dominant discipline, the key to understanding modern life. That economics has since slipped from that pedestal is simply a testament to the fact that the world is messy. The social sciences differ from the hard sciences because “the subjects of our study think,” said Herbert Simon, one of the few scholars who excelled in both. As we try to understand the world of the next three decades, we will desperately need economics but also political science, sociology, psychology, and perhaps even literature and philosophy. Students of each should retain some element of humility. As Immanuel Kant said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
This is enlightening talk from 1976 with philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Bryan Magee on fundamental questions such as “What is philosophy?”, “Why does it matter?”, and “Why should anybody be interested in it today?”.
Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet announced a new tool for urban planners to use. Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project sees it as a good example of surveillance capitalism. Read the full article of The Intercept.
According to this article by The Intercept some prisons in the U.S. are capturing the voices of incarcerated people’s voice to create new biometric databases with their “voice prints”. It seems like another example of the deployment of new technology with the involvement of private companies on more vulnerable groups of people, with all the usual problems of biometrics (eg. reliability) and automated decisions (eg. transparency, explainability).
Have a look at this video on Youtube from The Nerdwriter. A great video essay on how photographer Dorothea Lange made her photogrpah “Dorothea Lange”.
Sad to learn that the American poet Mary Oliver has passed away. I always enjoy her keen obervational poems that show her high attentiveness to the natural world. Read some of her poetry on the Poetry Foundation.
The photography project "Wasteland" by Kadir van Lohuizen contains some very powerful images of large cities and how they manage their waste. I think that the waste managment and recycling process has been going on too much in the background, and the only way out is to reduce our trash. See also this article in the Financial Times on why the recycling system became more visible. In the word of Kadir: “If the world is not prepared to think about waste reduction and actually treat waste as a resource, next generations will drown in their own waste.”