A Seminal Exhibition Titled 'The Responsive Eye'
1. What's happening to the old, glorious Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs building?
"Meanwhile, the government already is wrestling with how to regulate and oversee other forms of AI already in use, fromdrones to cancer-detection analytics. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is bringing several agencies together to craft an approach based on evidence, not anxiety. The issues the government will have to consider range from what the government will be able to buy and under what terms to fund research into making AI safer."
2. There appear to be mini tornado alleys inside tornado alley.
"Looking at it this way is looking at tornadoes on a zoomed-in scale, regional instead of national. At this level, Moore still isn’t unique. But it is part of a clique — a gang of cities and counties marked by the invisible target painted on their backs. Broyles and Crosbie drew a frequency map of the 979 big tornadoes to touch down in 123 years, showing the number of tornadoes per 1,000 square miles. Plotted out this way, they found clusters. There are dark blobs – tornado alleys within tornado alleys – scattered across the continent. One of those blobs sits over central Oklahoma, north of the Canadian River, stretching from Oklahoma City to Tulsa. Moore is a part of that blob. Other places, including Fillmore County, Nebraska, and Union County, Mississippi, appear to be even more prone to big tornadoes."
3. White men seem to evaluate environmental risk differently from other groups.
"This famous 1994 survey found that the gender gap around environmental risks is only true among white people; it disappears among nonwhites. 'Most striking,' write the researchers in that study, 'was the finding that white males tended to differ from everyone else in their attitudes and perceptions — on average, they perceived risks as much smaller and much more acceptable than did other people.' This survey was the source of the 'white male effect,' much studied in the social sciences ever since. (This 2000 survey found something similar.)"
4. Love this little exploration of the "optical art" movement.
"During the 1960s, Op Art—short for 'Optical art'—combined the two disciplines by challenging the role of illusion in art. While earlier painters had created the illusion of depth where there was none, Op artists developed visual effects that called attention to the distortions at play. Abstract and geometric, their works relied upon the mechanics of the spectator’s eye to warp their compositions into shimmering and shifting displays of line and color. The Museum of Modern Art announced this international artistic trend in 1965 in a seminal exhibition titled 'The Responsive Eye.' Since then, neuroscientists have continued to probe the mechanisms by which the human eye responds to these mind-bending works."
5. A cool collection of web experiments to help people understand how music works.
"Music is for everyone. So this year for Music In Our Schools month, we wanted to make learning music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that’s open to everyone: the web. Chrome Music Lab is a collection of experiments that let anyone, at any age, explore how music works. They're collaborations between musicians and coders, all built with the freely available Web Audio API. These experiments are just a start. Check out each experiment to find open-source code you can use to build your own."
On Fusion: This Congressman is very, very concerned about gay people in outer space.
1. architectmagazine.com 2. fivethirtyeight.com 3. vox.com 4. artsy.net 5. musclab.chromeexperiments.com
A Seminal Exhibition Titled 'The Responsive Eye'