Friday, July 18. 2014Eat Your 3D Prints | #food #print
Via Make ----- The first time someone lays a 3D-printed piece of candy in your hand, you almost feel bad about eating it. The virtuosity of these pieces confuses the senses: stunning hexagonal structures cluster together like a complex chemical construction, full-color starburst patterns curve as if made from fabric, and neon geometrical shapes interlock without a single seam. On first glance, you think each one is a piece of art and meant to be consumed only by the eyes. But then you taste it and realize this is a whole new recipe. Sugar 3D printing is a relatively new development and a fun sense-oriented detour under the “additive manufacturing” umbrella, which has often been largely about function. Not to mention this is a huge development in 3D printing materials alone, especially considering that they’re all edible. No chemicals allowed. If we can 3D print with sugar, you have to wonder how many more materials are out there that we haven’t even considered yet. Most importantly, food 3D printing empowers us to build upon the culinary traditions that are so deeply imprinted on our cultural psyche. Food, as we can all attest, occupies a prominent space in the human experience. After all, we always seem to gravitate toward the kitchen as a gathering place, and one of the greatest pleasures of being human is making and enjoying a meal with someone else, whether it’s to catch up, celebrate, remember, or imagine the future. As culinary practices shift, so too do the experiences that surround them: they become heightened, enriched. This is exactly the kind of progression that food 3D printing will catalyze, as bakers, chefs, and confectioners take hold of capabilities never before realized, giving new shape to the moments of life that revolve around our food culture.
The Sugar Lab The Sugar Lab at 3D Systems is the birthplace of sugar 3D printing. Think of it as our bakery and the place where all the amazing, sweet creations you see here come to life. Liz and Kyle von Hasseln, who began developing 3D printed food out of their small apartment while they were architecture graduate students, founded the Sugar Lab. For this husband-and-wife team, it started as a simple experiment with unusual 3D printing materials. They first attempted to print in wood, using sawdust, and later ceramics and concrete. Those all produced mixed results. But next, motivated by the need for a special birthday decoration, they tried sugar. After a few months spent perfecting the recipe, they realized they were onto something. A bit later, The Sugar Lab took form as a full-fledged business, with Kyle and Liz using a 3D Systems 3D printer that they’d retrofitted to be food safe.
ChefJet Now as part of the 3D Systems family, their amazing invention has taken the next step with the introduction of the ChefJet 3D printer, the first sugar 3D printer available for restaurants, bakeries, catering companies, and more. We first revealed the ChefJet at International CES 2014, and the excitement has rightfully been through the roof. Since then, candy giant Hershey’s has joined our efforts to find delectable and captivating new ways to print candy. As Kyle and Liz put it at CES, the ChefJet presents a fantastic new outlet for 3D printing to spread throughout mainstream culture. Food being such an integral part of our social interactions, our family gatherings, and our time at home, these edibles have the chance to open a lot of eyes to the personal power of 3D printing and its myriad uses.
How It Works For those familiar with the different methods of 3D printing, sugar 3D printing is similar in principal to other technologies like ColorJet or Selective Laser Sintering (SLS). It uses a bed of powdered materials (in this case sugar), flavoring, and sometimes cocoa powder. A stream of water bonds the sugar together within the material bed to form a single layer, then the build platform lowers, a new layer of sugar is spread over the build area, and the machine builds the next layer. So it goes layer by layer until the sculpture is finished. The results, as you can see here, are just as magnificent as printing with plastic or metal. The ChefJet is virtually unlimited by the geometry or the complexity of the model you want to print. You can create interlocking pieces, perfectly straight lines, and smooth curves, all in full color if you desire. Considering the sugar sculptures that it creates, it makes sense that architects thought it up.
To date, The Sugar Lab and the ChefJet have created everything from customized sugar cubes and structural cake decorations to premium cocktail decorations and exact scale Ford Mustang replicas. Flavor choices are equally delicious with mint, cherry, sour apple, milk chocolate, and others. But what I love about the ChefJet and other 3D printers is that they provide yet another tool and a multitude of other options when it comes to artistic applications. I discussed this in last month’s blog: 3D printing in this respect can supplement the traditional methods, and recipes, that we’ve developed over years and years. In this case, it’s about building on tradition, not overpowering or replacing it. So now bakers and confectioners can match their delectable flavors with never-before-seen visual aesthetics. They can have their cake and eat it too.
Related Links:Thursday, July 10. 2014Q+A, Antonio Damasio about feelings | #neurosciences
----- For decades, biologists spurned emotion and feeling as uninteresting. But Antonio Damasio demonstrated that they were central to the life-regulating processes of almost all living creatures.
Damasio’s essential insight is that feelings are “mental experiences of body states,” which arise as the brain interprets emotions, themselves physical states arising from the body’s responses to external stimuli. (The order of such events is: I am threatened, experience fear, and feel horror.) He has suggested that consciousness, whether the primitive “core consciousness” of animals or the “extended” self-conception of humans, requiring autobiographical memory, emerges from emotions and feelings. His insight, dating back to the early 1990s, stemmed from the clinical study of brain lesions in patients unable to make good decisions because their emotions were impaired, but whose reason was otherwise unaffected—research made possible by the neuroanatomical studies of his wife and frequent coauthor, Hanna Damasio. Their work has always depended on advances in technology. More recently, tools such as functional neuroimaging, which measures the relationship between mental processes and activity in parts of the brain, have complemented the Damasios’ use of neuroanatomy. A professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, Damasio has written four artful books that explain his research to a broader audience and relate its discoveries to the abiding concerns of philosophy. He believes that neurobiological research has a distinctly philosophical purpose: “The scientist’s voice need not be the mere record of life as it is,” he wrote in a book on Descartes. “If only we want it, deeper knowledge of brain and mind will help achieve … happiness.” Antonio Damasio talked with Jason Pontin, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review. When you were a young scientist in the late 1970s, emotion was not thought a proper field of inquiry. We were told very often, “Well, you’re going to be lost, because there’s absolutely nothing there of consequence.” We were pitied for our poor choice. How so? William James had tackled emotion richly and intelligently. But his ideas [mainly that emotions are the brain’s mapping of body states, ideas that Damasio revived and experimentally verified] had led to huge controversies in the beginning of the 20th century that ended nowhere. Somehow researchers had the sense that emotion would not, in the end, be sufficiently distinctive—because animals had emotions, too. But what animals don’t have, researchers told themselves, is language like we do, nor reason or creativity—so let’s study that, they thought. And in fact, it’s true that most creatures on the face of the earth do have something that could be called emotion, and something that could be called feeling. But that doesn’t mean we humans don’t use emotions and feelings in particular ways. Because we have a conscious sense of self? Yes. What’s distinctive about humans is that we make use of fundamental processes of life regulation that include things like emotion and feeling, but we connect them with intellectual processes in such a way that we create a whole new world around us. What made you so interested in emotions as an area of study? There was something that appealed to me because of my interest in literature and music. It was a way of combining what was important to me with what I thought was going to be important scientifically. What have you learned? There are certain action programs that are obviously permanently installed in our organs and in our brains so that we can survive, flourish, procreate, and, eventually, die. This is the world of life regulation—homeostasis—that I am so interested in, and it covers a wide range of body states. There is an action program of thirst that leads you to seek water when you are dehydrated, but also an action program of fear when you are threatened. Once the action program is deployed and the brain has the possibility of mapping what has happened in the body, then that leads to the emergence of the mental state. During the action program of fear, a collection of things happen in my body that change me and make me behave in a certain way whether I want to or not. As that is happening to me, I have a mental representation of that body state as much as I have a mental representation of what frightened me. And out of that “mapping” of something happening within the body comes a feeling, which is different from an emotion? Exactly. For me, it’s very important to separate emotion from feeling. We must separate the component that comes out of actions from the component that comes out of our perspective on those actions, which is feeling. Curiously, it’s also where the self emerges, and consciousness itself. Mind begins at the level of feeling. It’s when you have a feeling (even if you’re a very little creature) that you begin to have a mind and a self. But that would imply that only creatures with a fully formed sense of their minds could have fully formed feelings— No, no, no. I’m ready to give the very teeny brain of an insect—provided it has the possibility of representing its body states—the possibility of having feelings. In fact, I would be flabbergasted to discover that they don’t have feelings. Of course, what flies don’t have is all the intellect around those feelings that could make use of them: to found a religious order, or develop an art form, or write a poem. They can’t do that; but we can. In us, having feelings somehow allows us also to have creations that are responses to those feelings. Do other animals have a kind of responsiveness to their feelings? I’m not sure that I even understand your question. Are dogs aware that they feel? Of course. Of course dogs feel. No, not “Do dogs feel?” I mean: is my dog Ferdinando conscious of feeling? Does he have feelings about his feelings? [Thinks.] I don’t know. I would have my doubts. But humans are certainly conscious of being responsive. Yes. We’re aware of our feelings and are conscious of the pleasantness or unpleasantness associated with them. Look, what are the really powerful feelings that you deal with every day? Desires, appetites, hunger, thirst, pain—those are the basic things. How much of the structure of civilization is devoted to controlling those basic things? Spinoza says that politics seeks to regulate such instincts for the common good. We wouldn’t have music, art, religion, science, technology, economics, politics, justice, or moral philosophy without the impelling force of feelings. Do people emote in predictable ways regardless of their culture? For instance, does everyone hear the Western minor mode in music as sad? We now know enough to say yes to that question. At the Brain and Creativity Institute [which Damasio directs], we have been doing cross-cultural studies of emotion. At first we thought we would find very different patterns, especially with social emotions. In fact, we don’t. Whether you are studying Chinese, Americans, or Iranians, you get very similar responses. There are lots of subtleties and lots of ways in which certain stimuli elicit different patterns of emotional response with different intensities, but the presence of sadness or joy is there with a uniformity that is strongly and beautifully human. Could our emotions be augmented with implants or some other brain-interfacing technology? Inasmuch as we can understand the neural processes behind any of these complex functions, once we do, the possibility of intervening is always there. Of course, we interface with brain function all the time: with diet, with alcohol, and with medications. So it’s not that surgical interventions will be any great novelty. What will be novel is to make those interventions cleanly so that they are targeted. No, the more serious issue is the moral situations that might arise. Why? Because it really depends on what the intervention is aimed at achieving. Suppose the intervention is aimed at resuscitating your lost ability to move a limb, or to see or hear. Do I have any moral problem? Of course not. But what if it interferes with states of the brain that are influential in how you make your decisions? Then you are entering a realm that should be reserved for the person alone. What has been the most useful technology for understanding the biological basis of consciousness? Imaging technologies have made a powerful contribution. At the same time, I’m painfully aware that they are limited in what they give us. If you could wish into existence a better technology for observing the brain, what would it be? I would not want to go to only one level, because I don’t think the really interesting things occur at just one level. What we need are new techniques to understand the interrelation of levels. There are people who have spent a good part of their lives studying systems, which is the case with my wife and most of the people in our lab. We have done our work on neuroanatomy, and gone into cells only occasionally. But now we are actually studying the state of the functions of axons [nerve fibers in the brain], and we desperately need ways in which we can scale up from what we’ve found to higher and higher levels. What would that technology look like? I don’t know. It needs to be invented.
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
09:12
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, neurosciences, perception, physiological, presence, psychological, research, science & technology, scientists
Thursday, July 03. 2014The Emerging Threat from Twitter's Social Capitalists | #social #networks
Note: I'm happy to learn that I'm not a "social capitalist"! I am not a "regular capitalist" either...
Via MIT Technology ----- Social capitalists on Twitter are inadvertently ruining the network for ordinary users, say network scientists.
A couple of years, ago, network scientists began to study the phenomenon of “link farming” on Twitter and other social networks. This is the process in which spammers gather as many links or followers as possible to help spread their messages. What these researchers discovered on Twitter was curious. They found that link farming was common among spammers. However, most of the people who followed the spam accounts came from a relatively small pool of human users on Twitter. These people turn out to be individuals who are themselves trying to amass social capital by gathering as many followers as possible. The researchers called these people social capitalists. That raises an interesting question: how do social capitalists emerge and what kind of influence do they have on the network? Today we get an answer of sorts, thanks to the work of Vincent Labatut at Galatasaray University in Turkey and a couple of pals who have carried out the first detailed study of social capitalists and how they behave. These guys say that social capitalists fall into at least two different categories that reflect their success and the roles they play in linking together diverse communities. But they warn that social capitalists have a dark side too. First, a bit of background. Twitter has around 600 million users who send 60 million tweets every day. On average, each Twitter user has around 200 followers and follows a similar number, creating a dynamic social network in which messages percolate through the network of links. Many of these people use Twitter to connect with friends, family, news organizations, and so on. But a few, the social capitalists, use the network purely to maximize their own number of followers. Social capitalists essentially rely on two kinds of reciprocity to amass followers. The first is to reassure other users that if they follow this user, then he or she will follow them back, a process called Follow Me and I Follow You or FMIFY. The second is to follow anybody and hope they follow back, a process called I Follow You, Follow Me or IFYFM. This process takes place regardless of the content of messages, which is how they get mixed up with spammers, a point that turns out to be significant later. Clearly, social capitalists are different from Twitter users who choose to follow people based on the content they tweet. The question that Labatut and co set out to answer is how to automatically identify social capitalists in Twitter and to work out how they sit within the Twitter network. A clear feature of the reciprocity mechanism is that there will be a large overlap between the friends and followers of social capitalists. It’s possible to measure this overlap and categorize users accordingly. Social capitalists tend to have an overlap much closer to 100 percent than ordinary users.
One final way to categorize them is by their level of success. Here, Labatut and others set an arbitrary threshold of 10,000 followers. Social capitalists with more than this are obviously more successful than those with less. To study these groups, Labatut and coanalyze an anonymized dataset of 55 million Twitter users with two billion links between them. And they find some 160,000 users who fit the description of social capitalist. In particular, the team is interested in how social capitalists are linked to communities within Twitter, that is groups of users who are more strongly interlinked than average. It turns out that there is a surprisingly large variety of social capitalists playing different roles. “We find out the different kinds of social capitalists occupy very specific roles,” say Labatut and co. For example, social capitalists with fewer than 10,000 followers tend not to have large numbers of links within a single community but links to lots of different communities. By contrast, those with more than 10,000 followers can have a strong presence in single communities as well as link disparate communities together. In both cases, social capitalists are significant because their messages travel widely across the entire Twitter network. That has important consequences for the Twitter network. Labatut and co say there is a clear dark side to the role of social capitalists. “Because of this lack of interest in the content produced by the users they follow, social capitalists are not healthy for a service such as Twitter,” they say. That’s because they provide an indiscriminate conduit for spammers to peddle their wares. “[Social capitalists’] behavior helps spammers gain influence, and more generally makes the task of finding relevant information harder for regular users,” say Labatut and co. That’s an interesting insight that raises a tricky question for Twitter and other social networks. Finding social capitalists should now be straightforward now that Labatut and others have found a way to spot them automatically. But if social capitalists are detrimental, should their activities be restricted?
Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.6611 : Identifying the Community Roles of Social Capitalists in the Twitter Network. http://www.mpi-sws.org/~farshad/TwitterLinkfarming.pdf : Understanding and Combating Link Farming in the Twitter Social Network
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Interaction design
at
08:45
Defined tags for this entry: behaviour, communication, community, culture & society, interaction design, social
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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