5it

5 Intriguing Things

June 12, 2014

1. Data mining which classified documents the government releases to see what they've left out. "In early 2012, Connelly put aside his research on the Cold...

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5 Intriguing Things

June 11, 2014

1. A sports section from April 2018, recently sent out to 130,000 people in Manchester. "How will the so-called beautiful game of global football be...

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5 Intriguing Things

June 10, 2014

A short advisory: I am looking for a mobile developer to make an app for 5IT. It will be a very simple app. And I'd like to turn the collaboration on and...

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5 Intriguing Things

June 9, 2014

1. Meet the Tankchair. "Soden is the inventor of the Tankchair, which is a wheelchair in the same sense that an aircraft carrier is a boat. His fearsome-...

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A Planetary Error

June 6, 2014

Dear Saturn,I have insulted you, and I apologize. As you will have undoubtedly seen, in today's newsletter (#80), I gave possession to one of your moons,...

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5 Intriguing Things

June 6, 2014

1. A proposed autonomous submarine for exploring the hydrocarbon sea of Kraken Mare on Titan, one of Jupiter's moons. "Titan is unique in the outer solar...

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5 Intriguing Things

June 5, 2014

1. It's the world's one-year Snowdeniversary, and the EFF is trying to rally the troops about surveillance. "On June 5, 2013 the Guardian newspaper published...

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5 Intriguing Things: Balloon Edition

June 4, 2014

1. James Bridle is flying a balloon over London this summer. "This summer, artist and writer James Bridle is flying a balloon from the roof of Bold...

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5 Intriguing Things

June 3, 2014

1. How cars and car operators colonized our roads. "Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play....

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5 Intriguing Things

May 30, 2014

1. Surveillant anxiety may not catch on as a term, but Kate Crawford's essay on the topic is outstanding. "Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin:...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 29, 2014

1. A Department of Energy-funded report by the. J. Craig Venter Institute finds that the way the USDA APHIS program regulates genetically modified plants...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 28, 2014

1. Maybe the most interesting section in the big new Federal Trade Commission report on data brokers is the description of what the companies call...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 27, 2014

1. A stirring love letter to words disguised as a blog post about changing the default dictionary on your computer. "I don’t want you to conclude that it’s...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 23, 2014

1. It's hard to overstate how profoundly our cultural relationship with bacteria has changed in the last five years. "For most of my life, if I’ve thought at...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 22, 2014

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates' cover story for our magazine on reckoning with the nation's "compounding moral debts" is so, so powerful. "'In 1860, slaves as an asset...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 21, 2014

1. What does it mean for an AI system to work 'like the brain'? "But here’s the thing: this 'like the brain' label usually isn’t a lie — it’s just not very...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 20, 2014

1. A kind of grisly, kind of sweet new application of machine vision. "Still mourning the loss of your little buddy Chairman Meow? Upload a photo of him or...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 19, 2014

1. Robots in everything. "Frauke Zeller, an assistant professor at Ryerson, has built two robots with very different purposes: one tweets art criticism and...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 16, 2014

1. Your affectation will be automated. "@hipsterbait1 is a bot that lives on twitter and tumblr, it creates ‘hipster bait’ in the form of post-post-ironic...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 15, 2014

1. It seems everyone has a currency these days; so why not humans in close proximity? "Unlike typical currencies, which aim to represent and store value,...

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