November 29, 2016
We are finalizing the longlist for the 2017 Tournament of Books. The Guardian (part two) / The New York Times (and Lithub’s response) / The Telegraph / Washington Post (mystery and thrillers / SF and fantasy) / Wall Street Journal (“for people of a certain age”) / GQ / Glamour / Publishers Weekly / the Costa shortlist / Amazon. / The Guardian, The New York Times, Literary Hub, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, glamour.com, goerie.com, Amazon
“Look, you’re not going to hear any specifics today, because, for starters, there simply aren’t any.” When new government-linked managers come to a Russian media company, nothing is clear and everything seems forbidden. / Harper’s
Machine learning treats a dataset as a closed system. In the case of comic books, too much happens in between and outside the frame for the machine to understand. / technologyreview.com
Google announced that their translation team discovered something interesting: after they turned over translation to a machine learning-enabled AI, it figured out its own way of translating. / research.googleblog.com
Spotted on a recent jaunt to the Whitney Museum: this video, autoencoded from Blade Runner using neural networks. / Medium
Artificial intelligence wrote the dialogue for the eerie short film Sunspring—part of a wave of generative programs being employed across creative endeavors. / FiveThirtyEight
“[The bot] lives under the assumption that nothing will be novel, as if out of faith. It fields sentences by comparing them with those it knows, understanding phrasings using algorithms somewhat like Markov chains. Then, it assembles a response according to poetic constraints, rules and templates, or selects the best one from a list.” As in poetry, limitations give rise to creativity. / Real Life
A New Zealand scientist, apparently fed up with the blindly financial reasons why academic conferences often accept papers of dubious quality, wrote a paper entirely reliant on Autocorrect’s AI. / The Guardian
The semiconductor lowered the cost of arithmetic, which the Harvard Business Review cites to predict that the economics of machine learning mean we’ll start using predictions on everything: “The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction.” / hbr.org
Recent events have turned our heads. A few things we read this morning to reinforce the trend:
1. A proposal to colonize Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon, maybe “the only place beyond Earth where humans could live.” / Scientific American
See also: Gamers spend three years studying a mountain in Grand Theft Auto V. / Ars Technica
2. Lincoln almost lost re-election for fake news purporting that he wanted to breed a new American ethnicity. / Quartz
See also: Seven ways the US tried to kill Castro. / Vox
3. The rich folks of Malibu have a favorite mountain lion, and he may be killed for killing the rich folks’ alpacas. / laist.com
See also: Hollywood power brokers don’t like to be fired. / The New York Times
“There’s no such thing as perfection. Originality is a beautiful thing. I think it’s much harder now than when I was younger because we didn’t really have the internet. I would say don’t watch too many of those beauty YouTube or makeup videos. They use way too much product.” Badass novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—recipient of a MacArthur grant, the O. Henry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award—becomes the face of No7, a makeup brand owned by the pharmacy chain Boots. / New York Times
Some prospective Trump White House officials—potential Press Secretary Laura Ingraham, “consultant” Floyd Brown—run conservative fake news Facebook empires. / The Intercept
Using a drone to film fighters with Somalia’s al-Shabbab—which has declared allegience with ISIS—results in beliefs being reaffirmed. / Al Jazeera
“Like any critic, I want my readers to think that I am cool and hip and oh-so-up-to-date, but I learned some time ago that many of the best recordings are decidedly uncool and unhip. So if you want to laugh at me for honoring some unfashionable aging rocker or superannuated country singer, go right ahead.” Ted Gioia picks his 100 best albums of the year. / Ted Gioia
A series by the Sydney Morning Herald examines the various pressures, man-made and otherwise, contributing to the deterioration of the Great Barrier Reef. / The Sydney Morning Herald
Behind Trump’s clearly-unprovable tweets that “millions of people” voted illegally during the election—giving Hillary the popular vote—is his desire for you not to read this extensive look by the New York Times at how Trump has started to mess with American diplomacy and foreign policy by not immediately, and legally, distancing himself from his company. / CNN, The New York Times