PodQueue

VGHF librarian Phil Salvador chats with longtime contributor to video game archaeology Misty De Méo, author of CD-ROM Journal: a blog exploring multimedia games and software. We discuss her recent article A Chronology of First CD-ROM Games answering the question: What was the first CD-ROM game? In this episode: the first adventure, the magical dinosaur…

The situation ended when investigators say that man died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Malcolm Harris explains how Palo Alto became the intellectual laboratory for a century of US hegemony.

Introduction - recognising and responding to collapse, in "Breaking Together" by Jem Bendell (published May 9th 2023). In this Introduction Professor Bendell outlines the full argument of the book. The chapter is narrated by Matthew Slater. Full audio book: https://www.audible.com/pd/B0C8PHMP35/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-354993&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_354993_rh_us To read mor...

Think of that feeling you get when you follow an online tutorial or documentation and the code works on the first run. Now think of all the hours spent wasted following broken, outdated, or incomplete documentation. From our favorite tutorials to bad product docs we all consume technical writing. Tutorials, blog posts, and product docs help developers learn new things, build projects, and debug is...

It's one thing to build a new application that meets the latest accessibility standards, but it's another thing to update an existing application to meet them. In this talk, we'll share how we're using automated accessibility scanning, preview-driven development, and an accessibility-first form builder to make GitHub's 15-year-old, 1,400-controller Ruby on Rails monolith access...

Interview with Georges Didi-Huberman about the problems regarding the way in which we see and interpret images, a problematic issue that stems from the definition...

We on the left find ourselves in a world that seems sullied in at every level — the air we breathe, the water we drink, the unequal social relations between people, and an exploitative relationship with the natural world.  Our answer, not surprisingly, is to struggle for more purity, both in our environment and in … Continued

In this episode of Code For Thought, SSI Fellow Peter Schmidt talks with data scientist and entrepreneur Nick Radcliffe about the importance of testing your data. Test driven development is a familiar concept to research software engineers. Test driven data analysis puts the same emphasis on validating and testing data for your AI app. They also dive into the Python library of the same name, tdda.

03/01/2023 Research Series Speaker Eytan Tepper “Polycentric Multilateralism: Reimagining the Roles of International Institutions in Space Governance and Beyond” Using the case study of space governance, this paper envisions a polycentric approach to the governance of critical transnational challenges. Reimagining the roles of long-standing multilateral international institutions that suffer from...

03/06/2023 Colloquium Series - Ben Green Algorithmic Realism: Reimagining Data Science to Promote Social Justice The field of data science faces an impasse. With an ability to uncover empirical patterns and predict future events, data science appears to be a valuable tool for improving society. Data scientists have therefore proposed using algorithms to inform decision-making in high-stakes settin...

Seize the Means of Computation: The Big Tech Disassembly Manual 40 years ago, we shot antitrust law in the guts, and we let companies led by mediocre idiots no better than their forebears establish monopolies. These donkeys were able to parlay their monopoly winnings into policies that prevented new technologies from supplanting their own. They got to decide who was allowed to compete with them, a...

As we build sites that are more heavily reliant on JavaScript, we sometimes pay for what we send down in ways that we can’t always easily see. In this talk, Addy explains how and why JavaScript is the most expensive resource your site uses today—especially on mobile and lower-end desktops. Web developers should focus on optimizing JavaScript bundles by keeping them small to improve download speeds...

Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, reflects on how he got interested in the mind and consciousness, how he came to write Gödel, Escher, Bach, and why he is terrified by the current state of AI. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:30 How did you first get interested in AI? 5:01 Tell us more about recursion & self-reflection 10:03 How did GEB come to life? 21:...

Season 2, Episode 1,   Feb 01, 09:19 AM Elizabeth Bernholtz, aka Gazelle Twin, has had paranormal experiences since her early childhood. Ever since she’s been both terrified and thrilled by the occult, gripped by stories of poltergeist possession and famous hauntings. Fresh off the back of her commission for The Horror Show at Somerset House, Gazelle Twin is getting back into the writing process f...

Arts & Letters History Peoples & Places Politics & Society Religion & Faith Science & Technology Special Series UP Partners Academic Partners

Large language models like ChatGPT have hit the mainstream, but most applications of today follow the same format: a text box. That's because we're currently in the "MS DOS" stage of interfaces for machine learning – creating interfaces which conform to the shape of the system, not the shape of the human on the other end. This talk explores how AI might help us radically re-think...

June 13, 2023 3-4:30 p.m. Mountain Time Free webinar In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms that are open-source, decentralized, and user-centered—like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. This shift highlights a pressing need for more trustworthy civic spaces. But civic-minded social platforms a...

John Coltrane (left) and Eric Dolphy on stage at the Village Gate in New York City in the summer of 1961. A recording of the performance, once thought lost, was recently discovered in the New York Public Library. Herb Snitzer/Courtesy of Impulse! Records A little over 60 years ago, the editor-in-chief of DownBeat magazine asked John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy a deceptively simple question: What are...

Steven Cherry Hi, this is Steven Cherry for Radio Spectrum. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed any number of weaknesses in our technologies, business models, medical systems, media, and more. Perhaps none is more exposed than what my guest today calls, “The Hidden World of Legacy IT.” If you remember last April’s infamous call for volunteer COBOL programmers by the governor of New Jersey, when h...

This session is presented in two parts. The first three speakers will provide evidence of serious and even criminal problems in scholarly publishing. The next three speakers will propose actions researchers, universities and funders are taking to move away from the old model and create a better system.

"Could a Robot Feel Pain? Race, Technology, and the Political Problem of Personhood" Presented in partnership with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis In this lecture, recorded on April 5, Sylvester A. Johnson interprets the work of Ibn Rushd ("Averroës"), the twelfth-century Islamic scholar of Andalusia who achieved renown as the "father" of secularism, in or...

Bad closed captions can be entertaining, but they can be serious, too, because captions are a critical tool for lots of lots of people. There are the people learning a new language, the easily confused, and of course captions are essential for people who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing. In the US, that’s about 15% of the population. And with so many low quality closed captions out there, those folks a...

Invited Talk: Metric Perversity and Bad Decision-Making Lea Kissner People keep making terrible decisions. Shockingly often, bad decisions are because of perverse metrics—metrics that are technically correct but drive people to bad decisions. This is an especially bad problem for security, privacy, abuse, and related fields: we have adversaries, we have unknowns, and we have many small risks with...