Four short links: 26 July 2016
Map Strategy, Data BS, Peer Preservation, and Photos from Sketches
- What Makes a Map? (Simon Wardley) — the art of strategy based upon situational awareness remains one of those topics which are barely covered in business literature. The overwhelming majority depends upon alchemist tools such as storytelling, meme copying, and magic frameworks like SWOTs. It is slowly changing, though, and every day I come across encouraging signs.
- Guide to Spotting Data BS (Guardian) — Full Fact has shown how the political parties play “indicator hop,” picking whichever measure currently supports their argument.
- Book Piracy as Peer Preservation (Computational Culture) — Aleph is also patently a library. Its work can and should be viewed in the broader context of Enlightenment ideals: access to literacy, universal education, and the democratization of knowledge. The very same ideals gave birth to the public library movement as a whole at the turn of the 20th century in the United States, Europe, and Russia. Parallels between free library movements of the early 20th and the early 21st centuries point to a social dynamic that runs contrary to the populist spirit of commons-based peer production projects, in a mechanism that we describe as peer preservation. The idea encompasses conflicting drives both to share and to hoard information.
- Convolutional Sketch Inversion (PDF) — arxiv paper on using deep neural nets to turn sketches into realistic 3D photo-like pictures.
