[OK, I’m curious. -egg]

Mormon Transhumanist Association is the world’s largest advocacy network for ethical use of technology and religion to extend human abilities.

Mormon Transhumanist Association

[More info is gradually emerging on China’s social networking dystopia. -e]

Where you go, what you buy, who you know, how many points are on your driving licence, how your pupils rate you. These are just a few of the measures which the Chinese government plans to use to give scores to all its citizens.

China’s Social Credit System (SCS) will come up with these ratings by linking up personal data held by banks, e-commerce sites and social media. The scores will serve not just to indicate an individual’s credit risk, but could be used by potential landlords, employers and even romantic partners to gauge an individual’s character.

“It isn’t just about financial creditworthiness,” says Rogier Creemers, who studies Chinese media policy and political change at the University of Oxford. “All that behaviour will be integrated into one comprehensive assessment of you as a person, which will then be used to make you eligible or ineligible for certain jobs, or social services.”

Inside China’s plan to give every citizen a character score | New Scientist

[Streaming (for a little while) via NPR’s “First Listen.” -egg]

Like short stories forming a non-linear but narratively cohesive whole, the eleven songs on Divers travel from war zones to the wilderness, from a darkened coastline to a comfortable cottage in the hills. Their protagonists may be alive or dead, they may be ghosts or babies just born. Newsom is the omniscient but shifty narrator, speaking in an “I” that both inhabits her characters and stands a bit apart from them, showing them up. Her deepest concerns are about the perils of fixing meaning. Like that other cultivated innocent, William Blake, Newsom senses a godlike mystery at the heart of the imaginative process and recognizes its parallel in the entropy of nature, what she calls, at the album’s climax, “the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life.” But she also knows that every artist — every person, in fact, who uses language, or traces the edges of her own body in the distance from the ones she longs to embrace — inevitably stills the rapture of fecundity by trying to give it shape. In that shape is the shadow of mortality. The sometimes rambling, sometimes rushing act of telling that is Divers ends mid-word.

First Listen: Joanna Newsom, ‘Divers’

Poorly Drawn Lines – My Fun Side

Via Michael Hill

Parenting

Matt Walford is a creative photographer and visual artist based in the UK. He is highly influenced by surrealism and conceptualism, studying different possibilities to turn ideas into creatively playful images. This series of still life images are based on “Fractals” which are fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which is approximately a reduced-size copy of the whole. Matt used natural leaves and flowers to create these naturalistic geometric patterns.

(thanks, Celene 🙂 )

Matt Walford – Fractals | Feather Of Me

A really amazing list on MetaFilter, which I stumbled on entirely by accident. Beware; there are quite a few timesucks on this list 😉

A short, randomly chosen excerpt. Merely the tip of the iceberg:
PacMan Dossier.
Yarchive.
dedicated to the knitting of the authentic Doctor Who scarf.
RatBehavior.org.
Peacoat dating.
A history of Argentinian public transport tickets.
Alan Cooper’s All About Homonyms.
The Soda Can Library.
Internet Pinball Serial Number Database
a four-way listing of railway codes
Fire Lookouts in the Pacific Northwest
Alloy Artifacts
http://www.arcade-museum.com/
Taxonomic Data of the Breadties of the World
Rob’s Puzzle Page
The Guitar Rig Database
http://www.tapedeck.org/
Brand Name Pencils
Peeron LEGO inventories
221B Baker St
tommy westphall’s mind: A MULTIVERSE EXPLORED
Cosmic Baseball
Railway Telecomms
FreeCell — General Information and Index of Solutions

“What are some comprehensive one-topic websites maintained by cranky old guys (or gals)?”

The Old Man and the C Drive – internet websites cranks | Ask MetaFilter

[As a sort of sequel to my previous post on click fraud, here’s a discussion of it from the point of view of business site Bloomberg, which dives into the mechanics of click fraud and buying false audiences. -e]

Late that year [veteran brand marketer Ron Amram] and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.

“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says. “As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”

Source: The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet – Bloomberg Business

[Here’s an incredibly fascinating presentation about the war of all-upon-all that is click fraud, and its ugly effects on our privacy. -e]

Oh, the robots were rudimentary at first. Just little snippets of code that would load a web page and pretend to click ads. Detecting them was a breeze.

But there was a lot of money moving into online ads, and robots love money. They learned quickly. Soon they were using real browsers, with javascript turned on, and it was harder to distinguish them from people. They learned to scroll, hover, and move the mouse around just like you and me.

Ad networks countered each improvement on the robot side. They learned to look for more and more subtle signals that the ad impression was coming from a human being, in the process creating invasive scripts to burrow into the visitor’s browser.

Soon the robots were disguising themselves as people. Like a monster in a movie that pulls on a person’s face like a mask, the ad-clicking robots learned to wear real people’s identities.

They would hack into your grandparents’ computer and use their browser history, cookies, and all the tracking data that lived on the machine to go out and perpetrate their robotic deeds. With each iteration it got harder to tell the people and the robots apart.

The robots were crafty. They would do things like load dozens of ads into one pixel, stacking them up on top of one another. Or else they would run a browser on a hidden desktop with the sound off, viewing video after video, clicking ad after ad.

They learned to visit real sites and fill real shopping carts to stimulate the more expensive types of retargeting ads.

Today we live in a Blade Runner world, with ad robots posing as people, and Deckard-like figures trying to expose them by digging ever deeper into our browsers, implementing Voight-Kampff machines in Javascript to decide who is human. We’re the ones caught in the middle.

What Happens Next Will Amaze You