Flexbility or stability, pick one

From a story on the rise of sharing economy jobs through services like TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft:

Labor activists say gig enterprises may also end up disempowering workers, degrading their access to fair employment conditions.

“These are not jobs, jobs that have any future, jobs that have the possibility of upgrading; this is contingent, arbitrary work,” says Stanley Aronowitz, director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It might as well be called wage slavery in which all the cards are held, mediated by technology, by the employer, whether it is the intermediary company or the customer.”

(Disclosure: For two weeks in the summer of 1988, I had a gig as the au pair for Professor Aronowitz’s daughter, then a toddler.)
 

That final parenthetical is, not ironic, but hilarious?

Borrowed palettes

A forum of 'code golfers'—programmers who create and solve creative programming puzzles for kicks—are using code to break classic art works down to their base pixels, then rebuild them to look like other classic artworks. The resulting images show us, for example, what Grant Wood's American Gothic would look like if painted in the bright oranges and blacks Edvard Munch used in The Scream, or what the Mona Lisa would look like if DaVinci had run out of all his paints, save for the colors in Van Gogh's Starry Night. Take, for example, Mona Lisa morphing into the Wood's classic.

View fullsize

(via thecreatorsproject)

More examples at the originating Code Golf thread.

Has Jeff Koons recreated one of these classic paintings as a massive mosaic of emoji yet? The smiling pile of poop emoji offers a dark brown for your palette, and there is no shortage of yellows with all those smiley faces.

Extracting audio from video information

This story is a bit old, but it was orphaned in one of my browser tabs. This is some grade-A sci-fi hocus pocus:

Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.

In other experiments, they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant.

...

In the experiments reported in the Siggraph paper, the researchers also measured the mechanical properties of the objects they were filming and determined that the motions they were measuring were about a tenth of micrometer. That corresponds to five thousandths of a pixel in a close-up image, but from the change of a single pixel’s color value over time, it’s possible to infer motions smaller than a pixel.

Suppose, for instance, that an image has a clear boundary between two regions: Everything on one side of the boundary is blue; everything on the other is red. But at the boundary itself, the camera’s sensor receives both red and blue light, so it averages them out to produce purple. If, over successive frames of video, the blue region encroaches into the red region — even less than the width of a pixel — the purple will grow slightly bluer. That color shift contains information about the degree of encroachment.
 

In recent years, researchers have developed methods for detecting heart rate of people purely through video, using small fluctuations in the color of their skin.

What will happen when we are naked to computer vision? What if we can no longer hide when our heart starts racing, our skin flushes, or our hand quivers ever so subtly? We always thought we'd be the one administering the Voight-Kampff test to cull the replicants from the humans, but maybe it's the reverse that arrives first. Machines just sitting their motionless, staring at us, and seeing everything.

The linguistics of menus

You needn’t be a linguist to note changes in the language of menus, but Stanford’s Dan Jurafsky has written a book doing just that. In The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, Jurafsky describes how he and some colleagues analyzed a database of 6,500 restaurant menus describing 650,000 dishes from across the U.S. Among their findings: fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, use fancier—and longer—words than cheaper restaurants do (think accompaniments and decaffeinated coffee, not sides and decaf). Jurafsky writes that “every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 69 cents in the price of that dish.” Compared with inexpensive restaurants, the expensive ones are “three times less likely to talk about the diner’s choice” (your way, etc.) and “seven times more likely to talk about the chef’s choice.”

Lower-priced restaurants, meanwhile, rely on “linguistic fillers”: subjective words like delicious, flaky, and fluffy. These are the empty calories of menus, less indicative of flavor than of low prices. Cheaper establishments also use terms like ripe and fresh, which Jurafsky calls “status anxiety” words. Thomas Keller’s Per Se, after all, would never use fresh—that much is taken for granted—but Subway would. Per Se does, however, engage in the trendy habit of adding provenance to descriptions of ingredients (Island Creek oysters, Frog Hollow’s peaches). According to Jurafsky, very expensive restaurants “mention the origins of the food more than 15 times as often as inexpensive restaurants.”
 

More here.

To charge what fine dining establishments charge, it's not enough to source the best ingredients, even though anyone who's peeked at the ledger for a high end restaurant knows the ingredients are a massive cost. Diners expect an experience now, and using more ornate language to describe a dish and the provenance of its ingredients is just as important as beautiful plating and presentation in leaving diners satisfied after having left them several pounds heavier but several hundred dollars lighter.

Where the American dream meets the American nightmare

On the commentary track to Stroszek, you talk about the places where the American dream meets the American nightmare — Disneyland, Wall Street, Las Vegas, San Quentin, and, oddly, Plainfield, Wisconsin. Can you explain?
There are threads coming from all directions and sometimes they build knots. [It’s like] when you look at a map in the airline brochure in front of you and you see the pattern of their flights, and all of the sudden they have a hub in Atlanta and they have another hub in Salt Lake City, and all the lines converge there as if there were knots. There are certain places [like that] in probably each country; in the United States, I feel these focal points, these knots, where everything seems to converge, including the nightmares. Like San Quentin. One of the knots would be Wall Street — not that I’m saying Wall Street is evil. Or Plainfield, Wisconsin, where out of 480 inhabitants five became mass murderers within a few years, including the worst of all, Ed Gein.

Can you feel the energy being transmitted from these places?
You can sense it. Go to Wall Street. At the time I visited Wall Street, it was not a visitor’s gallery behind bulletproof glass. It was open. You heard the shouting from down there. You could even shout down to them — which I didn’t do. Yes, there’s something of great intensity there. Or the intensity of Las Vegas. A cheap, collective dream to strike it rich without working. And I’m one of the few reading and thinking people who loves Las Vegas for the vulgarity and omnipresence of the dream. The collective dream. There’s something enormous about it. Let me say one thing: Las Vegas and cinema have similar roots. The country fair. The magician at the country fair. The vulgarity of the country fair.

The circus.
The circus! Yes. And everybody complains about the circus of Cannes Film Festival. Yes, it is a circus, and I like it.
 

From a fabulous interview of Werner Herzog in Vulture.