Ecoji encodes data as 1024 emojis, its base1024 with an emoji character set. As a bonus, includes code to decode emojis to original data.

NUS researchers have created a device called a ‘shadow-effect energy generator’ that makes use of the contrast in illumination between lit and shadowed areas to generate electricity. This novel concept opens up new approaches in harnessing indoor lighting conditions to power electronics.

”Whoa. The wait is finally over, dudes!”

The concept of a mechanical, 3D printed smart dress, to safeguard one's proximity and personal space, was first explored by Anouk Wipprecht several years ago with her Spider Dress. In times of social distancing, the Dutch designers is presenting an evolution of that early work, extending her research into proxemics and the body. The new Proximity Dress creates physical barriers when a person is detected in the immediate surroundings of the wearer. These twin dresses respond based on proximity and thermal sensors and indicate strangers within the intimate, personal, social and public space around the wearer.

“He relaxed and spread his two arms lazily across the seat back. He steered with an extra arm he’d recently fitted just beneath his right one to help improve his ski-boxing.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This is a working display based on Star Trek TNG. Uses APIs and sensors for weather, VOCs, power measurement, calendar, fitness, and news.

With the digital equivalent of trowels and shovels, archaeologists are digging into the code of early video games to uncover long forgotten secrets that could have relevance today.

Autodetecting autogenerated text: The answer to the machine is the machine.

There have been modern designs for portable Commodore 64s, and the official portable Commodore 64 you perhaps didn't even know about, but none of them are as handsome as Cem Tezcan's.

Using a terminal from 1976 as home automation hub, because why not?

Seit nun fast drei Jahrzehnten gehört der "Herli" zum Grätzl wie das gute Essen zu Wien und ist zur kulinarischen und auch zur kulturellen Institution geworden.In einer der schönsten Gassen Wiens und zentral nahe des Stadtparks und des Konzerthauses gelegen, ist der Herlitschka für die einen der Geheimtipp unter den Wiener Wirtshäusern, für die vielen Stammgäste aus der Gegend dagegen der unverzichtbare Grätzlwirt.

Im Sommer fasziniert ein "traumhaft romantischer Gastgarten unter Arkaden" (Restaurantführer Tafelspitz), inmitten der originalen Kulisse unzähliger Kinofilme (James Bond, Der Trafikant, uvm.) und beliebter TV-Serien wie Kommissar Rex.

Wie wird sich die politische Landschaft nach der Corona-Krise verändern? Werden die Folgen der Wirtschaftskrise möglicherweise dazu führen, dass Menschen empfänglicher werden für Populismus jeder Art, etwa von rechts? Was hilft dagegen?

Bei der Diskussion über Gegenstrategien geht es meist darum, ob und wie man mit den Funktionären bestimmter Parteien und ihren Wählern reden soll, meint der Wirtschaftswissenschaftler Gustav Horn. Er sagt jedoch, das reiche nicht. Es seien tiefergehende gesellschaftliche Probleme, die angesprochen werden müssten.

Seine These: Jahrzehnte neoliberaler Politik und das Versagen der sozialdemokratischen Parteien haben den Boden für den Rechtspopulismus bereitet. Im Buch stellt er dar, wie ein Politikwechsel in seinen Augen aussehen muss, der die Demokratie stärkt und unser Land in eine soziale und ökologische Zukunft führt.

Ich schätze ja sowohl Tilo Jung als auch Fefe ungemein. Umso mehr war ich dann doch verwundert, dass beide in einem ansonsten auch sehr interessanten Interview am Rande des letzten CCC in Leipzig das bedingungslose Grundeinkommen derart unkritisch betrachteten. Fefe rang sich sogar zu der Aussage durch, das Grundeinkommen sei doch eigentlich ein „No-Brainer“. Nun beschäftigen wir von den NachDenkSeiten uns ja schon länger kritisch mit dem Thema und wissen, dass dies keineswegs der Fall ist und auch prominente Ökonomen wie Heiner Flassbeck oder der Politikwissenschaftler und Armutsforscher Christoph Butterwegge lehnen ein Grundeinkommen kategorisch ab. Thilo und Fefe sind ja auch keine Einzelfälle. Immer wieder trifft man auf jüngere, meist technikaffine Menschen, die ähnlich denken und das Grundeinkommen als alternativlos betrachten. Vielleicht ist es Zeit, die Debatte kritisch neu zu beleben? Denn ein „No-Brainer“ ist das Grundeinkommen ganz sicher nicht. Von Jens Berger

Das Thema Grundeinkommen polarisiert nun bereits seit mehr als einem Jahrzehnt die deutsche Öffentlichkeit. Da ist es kaum verwunderlich, dass wir zu unserem Beitrag „Das Grundeinkommen ist kein `No-Brainer´“ zahlreiche Leserzuschriften bekamen. Es macht jedoch keinen Sinn, all diese Mails zu veröffentlichen, da sie oft sehr lang sind und die Argumente sich in großen Teilen gleichen. Daher habe ich mir zwei repräsentative kritische Mails herausgesucht und gleich im Text selbst auf die Leserbriefe geantwortet. Als kleinen Anhang gibt es dann noch zwei Zuschriften von Lesern, die sich für die gewonnenen Informationen bedanken. Von Jens Berger.

In 2013 I wrote a Gstreamer plug-in that used a recurrent neural network (RNN) to generate video in imitation of a program it was watching. Pretty soon the same RNN library was being used in another Gstreamer plug-in to classify speech on the radio according to language, and to detect birds by listening for their calls (the language classification is quite accurate and runs at 1500 faster than real time on an old laptop, which is at least a data-point for those wondering about spying capabilities). The RNN has also been used to generate text and code, and to classify text by language and author at a fine-grained level. I will show how the RNN is trained, and how it might be adapted for other forms of time-series data.

I will demonstrate the various plug-ins and text utilities and, for excitement, execute RNN-generated code on the fly. Also I'll explain what a recurrent neural network is and how it relates to a plain (or "deep") neural network.

Everyday objects are becoming smarter. In ten years’ time, every piece of clothing you own, every piece of jewellery you wear, and every thing you carry with you will be measuring, weighing and calculating your life. In ten years, the world — your world — will be full of sensors.

The problem? The things are becoming smarter, but they’re also becoming selfish. Your lightbulbs aren’t talking to your media centre, your media centre isn’t talking to your blinds, and nobody is talking to the thermostat. Instead of talking to each other, everything is talking to you—you’ve ended up as a mechanical turk inside someone else’s software.

That situation can’t continue, we need to fix the Internet of Things. As our computing continues its diffusion out into the environment we need our things to work together. The things have to become not just smarter, but more co-operative, they need to become anticipatory rather than reactive.

Right now we have not so much an Internet of Things, but a series of Islands of Things. I present open source protocols and architectures that will help solve this trouble with the Internet of Things.

Highly performant and scalable techniques such as RCU have been quite successful in read-mostly situations. However, there do come times when updates are necessary. It would be convenient if there was some general update-side counterpart to RCU, but sadly there is not yet any such thing. Nevertheless, there are a number of specialized update-side techniques whose performance and scalability rival that of RCU. This talk will discuss several of them and provide an outlook into the future of low-overhead scalable updates.

One technique is the solution to the Issaquah Challenge, which was put forward at the C++ standards committee meeting in early 2014 at Issaquah, WA, USA. This challenge requires a performant and scalable technique to atomically move elements back and forth between a pair of search trees, but without using transactional memory. This talk will give an overview of a solution to a more general problem, that of atomically moving groups of elements among a group of several different types of linked data structures, while still permitting lockless searches before, during, and after this atomic move.

Electro-hypersensitivity is a rare condition where persons finds themselves acutely intolerant to electromagnetic fields including cell phone signals and WiFi. It has driven four women deep into the French Alps in search for remote underground shelters. Now struggling to survive on the fringes of society, their lives teeter between a primitive existence in nature and post-apocalyptic science-fiction. Because of their extreme condition, their way of life has never been photographed. Until now. ZONE BLANCHE is a film without electricity.

Most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Enter this weekend's reading topic: Privacy.