S06E02 of Connection Problem: Filter for "Virtual"
Hello,
So it’s been a while since the last issue. Maybe I can just blame it on some mysterious supply chain issue? But no, it’s just that I don’t get to read anywhere near as much as I’d like to at the moment. In the newsletter-worthy article department — glimpse behind the curtain! — I don’t want to just add to the coronavirus churn, and outside of news etc. I just about get to read my absolutely favorite newsletters (👋 Patrick, Craig, Robin…) and some of the articles they share, but then of course I don’t just want to share those same exact things. So I followed an old and, in my eyes, very good rule: If you don’t have anything to add, just shut up.
But four weeks have passed, and over time interesting things accumulate anyway, which is a nice thing.
P.
Update, 22 May: This email was scheduled to go out a week or so ago, and was stuck in a Tinyletter moderation queue for a while — and then I forgot to re-send. My apologies for sending it late.
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If you'd like to work with me or bounce ideas, let's have a chat.
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Project updates
I’m happy to once more be teaching at Hochschule Darmstadt (University of Applied Science), this time about tech ethics and trust. It’s always a blast, the students tend to be great and up to speed and engaged. And as a bonus, this time I get to experiment with remote teaching which I haven’t done before. Thanks to the great team there who already put in all the hard work, I get to just breeze in and learn a ton. Thank you, Andrea and gang!
Together with a German foundation we’re working on launching a video interview series that I hope I can soon share updates about since I’m excited about this one: I think we found a super interesting angle, and the short list of interview partners that’s slowly coming together is pretty impressive. More soon.
The PhD supervision for the OpenDoTT program is ongoing, of course.
We’re preparing a roundtable on AI & Society hosted by HiiG’s AI & Society Lab and the European Commission’s Berlin office. Supposedly it’ll happen in August and in person, even though I have my doubts about the in person part. We’ll see, something will take place then.
The Berlin Institute for Smart Cities and Citizen Rights (BISC) is slowly coming together. Not yet a legal entity but the team’s working on fleshing out key offerings, reaching out to potential partners, etc.
Looks like I’ll also be evaluating NGI Atlantic proposals over the next few months. First time as an evaluator for EU programs, so should be interesting.
Everything else is in the wait-to-see-if-it’ll-happen column for now, so more of those project if and when they come to pass.
It’s a little weird that the planning horizon for so many things seems to be four weeks or so, even for projects that project way into the future; somehow I find it strangely soothing.
Oh speaking of planning horizons and project life cycles: We’ve officially pulled the plug on Zephyr Berlin, our experimental super-versatile-trousers project. Largely, at least: We’ve made all the backups, did a last round of inventory, and updated the website. The last few available pairs we’ll still be selling as per direkt email orders, but it’s down to a handful of pairs. Those were four fantastic, challenging, beautiful, engaging years for such a relatively small and self-contained side project. I got to meet so many fantastic folks through this, and to have countless conversations in which I learned a ton. I’m grateful for all the upfront trust in our ability to deliver premium, highly specialized technical apparel; and happy and relieved that judging by the feedback we got (and the tremendous amount of orders for second and third pairs) that they’ve been holding up nicely and most folks are getting lots of wears out of them. Thank you!
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Three short articles worth your time
1)
Ada Lovelace Institute has published Provisos for a Contact Tracing App and they are fantastic work. “Important characteristics include that:
- it will be voluntary
- it will reliant on self-reported data (with the option of later adding test results to confirm or dismiss the self-diagnosis)
- it will enable users to voluntarily upload data to a centralised NHSX database
- it may expand in functionality after launch.
2)
The European Commission just promised new rules on mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence for EU companies’ global supply chains, which sounds pretty good to me.
3)
IEEE has announced a standard for well-being and technology: Recommended Practice for Assessing the Impact of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems on Human Well-Being . I don’t know how influential these kinds of standards are; but it’s certainly interesting to see.
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Virtual culture
I scanned around for cultural institutions’ virtual activities during the lock-down. Some current faves:
- The US National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Virtual Preservation Month is quite fun. Virtually tour one site a day. We started with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Home, which looks cool but/and I don’t think was very livable at all. But what a gorgeous setting!
- In Tokyo, there’s the very charming Studio Ghibli museum, which offers a dive into the world of Totoro and co. It’s extremely charming and worth a visit, if you can manage to navigate the weirdly obscure ticket distribution mechanisms that are as kafkaesque as you can imagine. When we visited a few years back we got lucky and managed to snatch up some tickets, but it included things like getting up at 3:30am a month before our visit and hit refresh on two laptops simultaneously until one of us managed to place an order. Not right now! Studio Ghibli are putting short videos online for the first time ever. They’re very short and a little teaser-like, but it’s better than nothing.
- Much more extensive, if also a lot more traditional, is the Van Gogh Museum’s virtual tour. That thing that they do there, and that I’ve seen a number of virtual galleries do (the San Sebastian Tabakalera once had a terrific exhibition about that technique) is those super high resolution zoom-ins on the paintings that let you really see the brush strokes in detail. It’s utterly fascinating even if you (like me) don’t know the first thing about painting technique. It just opens it up wide. It’s like the folks leaning into paintings in museums which always has slightly art snobbish connotations but makes a lot of sense obviously. Here, you get that without being that person.
Also, I’d be amiss to leave out Kenji Lopez-Alt’s very enjoyable POV cooking videos. It’s literally just him cooking, seen through some cams including a point-of-view camera, i.e. a GoPro camera strapped to his head. Hey, cooks are stuck at home, too! I love those.
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Miscellanea
Reminder: Eliot Peper’s new novel Veil is about to come out (May 20th), pre-order here (Kindle). Eliot kindly shared a copy with me in advance and I very much enjoyed it. If you’re into sci-fi at the intersection of terraforming, climate change and geopolitics, this is for you.
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If you’d like to work with me or have a chat to explore collaborations, let’s chat!
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Currently reading: The Broken Earth trilogy, N.K. Jemisin.
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Have a great weekend everyone!
Yours truly,
Peter
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores how emerging technologies can have a positive social impact. At the core of his work is the mission to align emerging technologies and citizen empowerment. To do this, he works at the intersection of technology, governance, policy and social impact — with foundations, public and private sector. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research and strategic advisory firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and an Edgeryders Fellow (2019). He tweets at @peterbihr and blogs at thewavingcat.com. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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