Technology

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A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click

With the internet and the aggregation of huge data sets, advertising is moving its focus from target groups to individual targets. Specialised companies are tracking your moves on the web to create highly detailed profiles of who you are, what you do, what you like so that advertisiers can tailor their ads specifically not only to you, but your current situation. You can hardly escape it, so it’s good to know how it works.

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From Weekly Filet #55, in February 2012.

Let the Robot Drive

The car of the future does not fly, but drive itself. Wired has a great roundup of the current state of science not much longer fiction.

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From Weekly Filet #54, in February 2012.

Google Translate

Most of us remember how hilariously bad machine translations were just a few years back. Today, Google Translate speaks 57 languages at the level of a 10-year-old. What’s interesting about this comparison is that the machine mastered those languages by actually learning like a child. That is, by not going by rules, but by how language is used. “Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use”, as Wittgenstein had put it. Fascinating read that also point to the future of human communication. Maybe tomorrow’s lingua franca is just a machine.

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From Weekly Filet #41, in November 2011.

Kevin Slavin: How Algorithms Shape Our World

With stock markets crashing pretty hard these days, this is an interesting reminder in the form of a riveting TED talk. Today, 70 percent of the stock market are operated by algorithms in what’s apparently called black box trading. Huge amounts of money are invested or de-invested with no human action involved. The essence of Slavin’s talk is that we are now at a point where such complex algorithms are written that we can no longer read. And that we, in fact, have come to rely on them so heavily that we literally let them shape our world.

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From Weekly Filet #31, in August 2011.

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing

A brilliant article on how books are changing in the digital age, both in how they are written and read. Craig Mod, a designer and book publisher (among other things), gives a detailed analysis of changing structures and argues that digital books unlock the magic of reading as “shared telepathy”. Yes, that’s right. Reading this thoughtful, inspiring and beautifully designed piece definitely makes you want to read digital books, heaps of them.

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From Weekly Filet #25, in June 2011.
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