22 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2021
    1. However, none of these violate the right to life.

      This is an interesting perspective

    2. An additional 781 chemicals have not been studied. Yet fracking routinely injects the chemicals into the ground, forcing them through fissures in rock, where they contaminate aquifers, wells, and other sources of drinking water.

      Someone threw the precautionary principle out the window

    3. offend the conscience of the world

      Wow. What a phrase

  2. Oct 2021
    1. Re-conceptualizing coding as a literacy demystifies it and helps remove preconceived notionsthat only a select few can (or need) to learn it. This can broaden the pedagogical scope of coding literacy and open opportunities for learning to those who might not conventionally beengaged in the traditional conceptualization of coding

      This is a bit idealistic. What will likely happen with the institutionalization coding as literacy is that educational institutes with limited resources will only be able to support their students in this subject to a certain degree. It could expose students to jobs in the tech industry early and allow some motivated and exceptional cases to seek out more resources to succeed. The rest of the cohort could likely lag behind, lack in confidence and competence , and possibly lack up-to-date/relevant computer software to practice coding as literacy( as is the situation with other existing subjects). There are other systematic changes that need to be done to even the playing field for all students to benefit from coding as literacy ( apart from potential positive changes in brain chemistry)

    1. Biologists have shown that it’s a natural tendency of living creatures to fill up all available habitat and use up all available resources,”

      .... Does this mean we are biologically programmed to hoard?

    1. This paradox produced by the increasing production, use and disposal of ICTs also directly impacts the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), or electronic waste (e-waste). Miniaturisation, device obsolescence, and the enhanced versatility of devices (for example, with the new generation of devices compatible with 5G) have contributed to the redundancy of older devices.

      The need to consistently replace ICT goods in order to stay up to date is adding to inefficiency and waste.

    2. These include the emissions due to increasing the production, use and disposal of ICTs. In other words, we must consider the material cost of the ethereal imaginary of digitisation.

      The cloud is not a cloud. The digital is real.

    1. And while there are certainly carbon emissions associated with the traditional art world, if the point of blockchain art is to imagine something radically different, he wonders why avoiding climate destruction wouldn’t be at the top of the priority list. “We have to change our existing habits,” Akten says. “So how can we build new platforms that are unsustainable?

      We cannot revolutionize old problems.

    2. The idea is to offer some semblance of the authenticity that is naturally bestowed on physical art.

      Selling the idea of scarcity

    3. She changed her mind recently after seeing the interest of artists who had established themselves independently of blockchain hype—people like Lemercier. Some of the NFTs Carlson saw even looked like actual art. “The prices are still totally outrageous,” she adds. But both things can be true at once.
    4. The works were placed for auction on a website called Nifty Gateway, where they sold out in 10 seconds for thousands of dollars. The sale also consumed 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy, as he later learned from a website called Cryptoart.WTF.
    1. HODL, meaning to 'hold your investment long-term', and gas-fees, which refer to the price paid to ‘crypto-miners’ for transactions to be registered on the public ledger.
    1. Also, NFTs have a feature that you can enable that will pay you a percentage every time the NFT is sold or changes hands, making sure that if your work gets super popular and balloons in value, you’ll see some of that benefit.

      This is interesting. You get paid for the work trading hands.

    1. More than before, web platforms allow a better communication between spectator and creator, and more importantly, the possibility of convincing the audience to pragmatically get involved is greater

      Greater call to action?

    2. Up until the 1990s, VR and AR equipment, such as goggles and gloves, were mostly used for medical reasons, flight simulation, automobile industry design or military training.

      I wonder if the ethics/polticial-economic discussions about tech only rise when it comes into public view via popular culture i.e. when it gets turned into video games/ movies etc. I ask because it's clear that the tech has been around for some time but the masses get involved in the discussion only when it comes into their periphery.

    3. Interactivity became the key feature of most new media forms and continues to be the subject of debate, as theorists try to define its complexity, and creators continue experimenting with it, pushing its boundaries.

      This is an affordance of digital/new media work.

    4. Broadly speaking, the pioneers were the following authors: Charles Babbage, Herman Hollerith, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Konrad Zuse, Jack Kilby and Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider. (Gifreu, "Emergence" 2

      This is an interesting point of view: - to thank all the early pioneers of computer engineering for creating the medium for this story-telling despite that not necessarily being their intention. I suppose there is a need to thank someone for creating the canvas on which we all paint on.

    5. Both during WWI and WWII, film became a propaganda instrument, more so than  before. U.S. tried to justify its military action through the Why we fight   series, whose  production was overseen by Hollywood director Frank Capra, at this point enrolled as a major in the US Army Signal Corps.

      Russia and USA doing the same thing now but with the space race, trying to see who make the first movie in space ( I think the Russians are ahead).

    6. But the painter-as-documentarist had only a brief moment of glory. There were reasons. His spurt of activity came at the last moment of the silent film. With the arrival of the spoken word, images were suddenly downgraded. Games of movement and texture were, for the moment, almost forgotten. Furious aesthetic battles over the uses of sound took their place. (Barnouw 80)

      With the invention of sound in film, visual storytelling was no longer the primary mode of film making. Film makers could depend on dialogue to convey narrative which discouraged experimentation with images.

    1. “Only the rich could afford toilets,” he said, adding that a famed rabbi once suggested that to be wealthy is “to have a toilet next to his table.”

      HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

  3. Jun 2021
    1. s a form, it can be described as "literary works created with the use of a computer for the electronic medium such that they cannot be experienced in any meaningful way without the mediation of an electronic device

      I appreciate this definition because it excludes audio books and ebooks where by the work is adapted to a digital medium but is enjoyed in similar ways of how the story was intended.