5 Intriguing Things
1. So, so, so much data is being collected about each and every one of us. Now what?
"A Senate committee released a report this week that goes to great lengths to determine all of the things that data brokers, the companies that trade in consumer data, don’t want to talk about. The 35-page report describes some of the companies’ strategies for collecting and organizing data, but significant portions of the report discuss what the companies are unwilling to talk about: namely, where they get a lot of their data and where that data is going."
+ Take a look at some of the different groups you can target with data:
2. Little Big Details, a tumblr that highlights small but interesting bits of UI design. E.g.:
"iOS7 - The clock icon shows the current time."
3. Soviet sound art, music technology, and "the spectacle as a tool for radical transformation."
"What they created was astonishing, not only in its novelty but in its quantity and scale. Many of their more outlandish ideas never saw fruition: an organ powered by an entire factory, an electro-acoustic orchestra mounted on a fleet of airplanes. But they successfully fashioned a great number of unprecedented devices, from synthesizers to proto-samplers, with technology that predated magnetic tape let alone the integrated circuit. Many of their conceptual developments—methods for synthesizing speech, models of the physics of musical instruments, theoretical descriptions of the idiosyncrasies of live performers—would have been at home in the technological landscape of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s.
But under Stalin their projects were shut down and denounced as 'undemocratic' and 'formalist.'"
4. The Speech Accent Archive contains 1873 samples of people saying this:
"Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station."
"A [person] made of layers, taking as a basis a sans and a slab...
Vaud is a neutral, yet formally nuanced grotesk [person]...
Designed with one purpose in mind: compact all-capital headlines without crashing."
Sadly, we won't have any usage tips from my 1957 book until Friday. (Because I forgot the book in Oakland and I'm on the road, if you must know.)
Instead, let me recommend some books. Up first:
Fred Turner's latest, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. He connects the anti-fascist impulses of the mid-century to trippy be-ins through multimedia technology. That's like a triple-axel, triple-lutz combo, I think.
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At Home in the Technological Landscape of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s