Art (music, drama, literature, illustration)

A Robotic Petting Zoo

Image of robotic petting zooMinimaforms presented Petting Zoo, an interactive display designed to respond to human touch and movement. Using a Kinect camera and software designed to respond with emotions, the exhibition provided three "pets" with three different patterns of responses and a basic machine learning allows each to develop behaviors based on input from the situation.

Big data, but little information?

Data viewAn interesting article on POPSCI by Lawrence Weschler on how we'll handle the vast amount of data we, as a species, are compiling at a breakneck pace.  And this is before (or perhaps just as) the algorithmic writer-bots begin absorbing and synthesizing information (news) in order to free up the need to let humans do the job of reporting on humanity.  

According to Business Insider, there is an estimated 14.3 trillion pages on the Web.  I can't find any reliable data on how fast that's growing, but this is in less than two decades and the speed at which we are adding to this is only increasing.

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