According to the studies he cited, 7 percent of people’s twitter followers are actually spambots; 30 percent of social media users are deceived by spambots and chatbots; and 20 percent of social media users accept friend requests from unknown people, 51 percent of which are not human. […] When it comes to “astroturfing” — the practice of creating fake grassroots movements to influence opinions — the hit ratio on email spams is about 12.5 million to 1. In order to create an astroturf movement on the scale of the anti-SOPA movement in 2011, every person on earth would have to receive the same spam message 8 times.

{ Gigaom | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

It seems to me that MFA programs have become a tool of indoctrination that has had an unprecedented homogenizing effect on artistic practices worldwide, an effect that is now being replicated with curatorial and critical writing programs. […]

The market of art is not merely a bunch of dealers and cigar-smoking connoisseurs trading exquisite objects for money behind closed doors. Rather, it is a vast and complex international industry of overlapping institutions which jointly produce artworks’ economic value and support a wide range of activities and occupations including training, research, development, production, display, documentation, criticism, marketing, promotion, financing, historicizing, publishing, and so forth. The standardization of art greatly simplifies all of these transactions. For a few years now I have experienced a certain sense of déjà vu while walking through art fairs or biennials, a feeling that many other people have also commented on: that we have already seen all these works that are supposedly brand new. We are experiencing the impact of contemporary art as a globally traded commodity that is produced, displayed, and circulated by an industry of specially trained professionals. […] This is not a new observation: I think Marcel Duchamp already fully understood this danger a hundred year ago. […]

Today it would be rather futile to try to reconstitute bohemia—the free-flowing, organic creative space—because it never really existed within the constellation of institutions of art, the art market, and the art academy. If Warhol’s Factory was an entry into art that enabled a group of people of very different backgrounds to enter a certain kind of productive modality (both within and in spite of the surrounding economy), it was a space of free play that no longer exists. Instead, what we have now are MFA programs: a standardization not even of bohemia, but only its promise. […]

As artists, curators, and writers, we are increasingly forced to market ourselves by developing a consistent product, a concise presentation, a statement that can be communicated in thirty seconds or less—and oftentimes this alone passes for professionalism.

{ Anton Vidokle/e-flux | Continue reading }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }

What constitutes a dangerous equation? […] Few would disagree that the obvious winner in this contest would be Einstein’s iconic equation

E=MC²

for it provides a measure of the enormous energy hidden within ordi- nary matter. Its destructive capability was recognized by Leo Szilard, who then instigated the sequence of events that culminated in the construction of atomic bombs.

This is not, however, the direction I wish to pursue. Instead, I am interested in equations that unleash their danger, not when we know about them, but rather when we do not; equations that allow us to understand things clearly, but whose absence leaves us dangerously ignorant.* There are many plausible candidates that seem to fill the bill. But I feel that there is one that surpasses all others in the havoc wrought by ignorance of it over many centuries. It is the equation that provides us with the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of the mean; what might be called De Moivre’s equation:

For those unfamiliar with De Moivre’s equation let me offer a brief aside to explain it.

Why have I decided to choose this simple equation as the most dangerous? There are three reasons, related to

(1) the extreme length of time during which ignorance of it has caused confusion,
(2) the wide breadth of areas that have been misled, and
(3) the seriousness of the consequences that such ignorance has
caused.

{ Howard Wainer | PDF }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }

Competition is supposed to lead to lower prices and improvements in quality. But, as a study on the automobile smog-testing industry shows, competition can lead to corruption and even public health problems.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

photo { Mike Brodie }

Standard resolution for a digital camera these days is about eight megapixels. And each one of those eight million pixels has the potential to be thousands or even millions of different colors. […] By raising the number of available colors to the eight-millionth power, you can come up with the total number of different photographs that could possibly ever exist.

Which is just what artist Jeff Thompson of Lincoln, Nebraska is trying to do. He has created an installation titled “Every Possible Photograph” that, well, is on pace to display every possible photograph that could be taken.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

Fifteen years ago, two fraud cases sent shock waves through the world of photography, helping to trigger a revolution in photo conservation science.

Long dismissed by the art establishment as a second-tier medium, “photography used to fight for space in galleries,” says James M. Reilly, director of the Image Permanence Institute in Rochester, N.Y. But by the 1990s the prestige—and price tags—of photographs began to approach those of paintings and sculpture. During that decade, collectors increasingly paid out hundreds of thousands and then the first million dollars for vintage and contemporary photographs. Yet, as in all coming-of-age stories, life’s dark side made an appearance, this time by means of back-to-back fraud cases.

In 1998, researchers in Germany discovered that a collection of prints by the avant-garde American photographer Man Ray had not been made by the artist himself. A year later, a team in the U.S. began to scrutinize a collection of 20 prints by Lewis Hine, an early-20th-century American documentary photographer. They discovered that the iconic collection of photos of Empire State Building construction sites and child laborers, purported to have been printed by Hine himself, were made decades after his death. Both cases led to million-dollar settlements that helped stimulate the photo conservation research, transforming a niche field into a mature science.

{ Chemical & Engineering News | Continue reading }

{ John Schnabel }

The tension between experience for its own sake and experience we pursue just to put on Facebook is reaching its breaking point. That breaking point is called Snapchat. […]

The temporary photograph’s abbreviated lifespan changes how it is made and seen, and what it comes to mean. Snaps could be likened to other temporary art such as ice sculptures or decay art (e.g., Yoko Ono’s famous rotting apple) that takes seriously the process of disappearance, or the One Hour Photo project from 2010 that has as its premise to “project a photograph for one hour, then ensure that it will never be seen again.” However, whatever changes in the aesthetics of photographic vision Snapchat is effecting are difficult to assess, given that no one really knows what its self-deleting photos collectively look like. In many ways, this is exactly the point.

{ Nathan Jurgenson/TNI | Continue reading }

The pursuit of honors and riches is likewise very absorbing, especially if such objects be sought simply for their own sake, inasmuch as they are then supposed to constitute the highest good. In the case of fame the mind is still more absorbed, for fame is conceived as always good for its own sake, and as the ultimate end to which all actions are directed. […] The more we acquire, the greater is our delight, and, consequently, the more are we incited to increase both the one and the other; on the other hand, if our hopes happen to be frustrated we are plunged into the deepest sadness. Fame has the further drawback that it compels its votaries to order their lives according to the opinions of their fellow-men, shunning what they usually shun, and seeking what they usually seek.

{ Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding | PDF }

photo { Richard Learoyd }

Modern physics deals with some ridiculously non-intuitive stuff. Objects act as though they gain mass the faster they move. An electron can’t decide if it’s a particle, a wave or both. However, there is one statement that takes the cake on sounding like crazy talk: Empty space isn’t empty.

If you take a container, pump all the air out of it, shield it from electric fields and plop it in the deepest of intergalactic space to get it away from gravitational fields, that container should contain absolutely nothing. However, that’s not what happens.

At the quantum scale, space is a writhing, frantic, ever-changing foam, with particles popping into existence and disappearing in the wink of an eye. This is not just a theoretical idea—it’s confirmed. How can this bizarre idea be true?

Even though in classical physics we are taught that energy is conserved, which means it cannot change, one of the tenets of quantum mechanics says that energy doesn’t have to be conserved if the change happens for a short enough time. So even if space had zero energy, it would be perfectly OK for a little energy to pop into existence for a tiny split second and then disappear—and that’s what happens in empty space. And since energy and matter are the same (thank Einstein for teaching us that E=mc2 thing), matter can also appear and disappear.

And this appears everywhere. At the quantum level, matter and antimatter particles are constantly popping into existence and popping back out, with an electron-positron pair here and a top quark-antiquark pair there. This behavior is the reason that scientists call these ephemeral particles “quantum foam”: It’s similar to how bubbles in foam form and then pop.

{ Fermilab | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Adams }

Regulators discover a hidden viral gene in commercial GMO crops

There are clear indications that this viral gene (called Gene VI) might not be safe for human consumption. It also may disturb the normal functioning of crops, including their natural pest resistance. […] What Podevin and du Jardin discovered is that of the 86 different transgenic events (unique insertions of foreign DNA) commercialized to-date in the United States 54 contain portions of Gene VI within them.

{ Independent Science News | Continue reading | Express.co.uk }

photo { Chris Round }