# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Emergence Network embarked on a project called 'Vunja' this year - hoping to weave together an ambitious project of festivals around the theme of decoloniality and new worlds. Vunja is about opening up other places of power, es...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
supportstructure.org
is coming soon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Greater London is endowed with some fantastic public open spaces. However, with over eight million residents enjoying the city's amenities, as well as the huge influx of tourists for whom our green spaces form part of the lure, the pressure to provide abundant, high quality public spaces is ever present. Traditionally, the provision of publically accessible open spaces has fallen on public authorities. However, as research by The Guardian newspaper now suggests, more and more of our apparently public spaces are being provided by private landowners.

The Guardian have been investigating the rise of so called "privately owned public spaces" (POPS) for a while. In 2012, they ran a campaign to crowdsource data on the location of POPS across the UK. To build on this dataset, The Guardian approached GiGL last year to ask if we could help locate and map POPS in Greater London.

The first stage in developing the dataset was to accurately define what does and does not, count as a POPS. The Guardian had previously decided POPS should not include enclosed shopping malls - only open spaces, from streets and city squares to village greens, beaches and riverbanks, where there's a reasonable expectation that the space might be public. However, in order to extract POPS from the GiGL open space dataset we needed more information. A review of existing literature, particularly from the USA where urban POPS are well defined, helped us to create the following definition.

Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS): publically accessible spaces which are provided and maintained by private developers, offices or residential building owners. They include city squares, atriums and small parks. The spaces provide several functional amenities for the public. They are free to enter and may be open 24 hours or have restricted access arrangements. Whilst the spaces look public, there are often restrictions on their use. For the Greater London dataset, no consideration is taken as to a site's formal status in planning considerations, and only unenclosed POPS are included.

Spaces owned by charities and religious organisations are also not part of the dataset. POPS may be destination spaces, which attract visitors from outside of the space's immediate area and which are designed for use by a broad audience, or neighbourhood spaces which draw residents and employees from the immediate locale and which are usually strongly linked with the adjacent street or host building. These spaces are of high quality and include a range of amenities. The POPS may also be a hiatus space, accommodating the passing user for a brief stop only. For example, it may include seating but few other amenities; a circulation space, designed to improve a pedestrian's journey from A to B; or a marginal space which, whilst public, is not very accommodating and experiences low levels of usage.

In the USA, the definition of POPS is closely tied to the space's provision as part of the planning process, and it is not only abroad that public space forms a part of developments; take for example, Granary Square near Kings Cross station, and much of the new Nine Elms development. It is not possible, however, to apply this distinction in London with the information available.

Using the new definition, we queried the GiGL datasets to identify spaces we thought qualified as POPS. Ownership of these sites was then further investigated using Land Registry data. There followed much discussion with The Guardian to check the final site list was as complete as possible for this stage.

In a first for GiGL, the dataset has been released as open data, with the data owners' permission. This means that anyone is free to use the information for any purpose. More information on the open POPS dataset is available on the GiGL website, and the dataset can be downloaded from the Greater London Authority's datastore. As an organisation, we're committed to the open data agenda and plan to release more GiGL data extracts over the coming months.

We know there are probably many more POPS than we have currently identified, but hope to continuously add to and re-release the dataset as more information becomes available. If you can help identify additional POPS, We feature the you can so do here. POPS data on our website here.
1. Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience, by Jerold S. Kayden, The New York City Department of City Planning, and the Municipal Art Society of New York, published by John Wiley & Sons, 2000↩

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Greater London is endowed with some fantastic public open spaces. However, with over eight million residents enjoying the city's amenities, as well as the huge influx of tourists for whom our green spaces form part of the lure, the pressure to provide abundant, high quality public spaces is ever present.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In collaboration with Greenspace Information for Greater London CIC (GiGL), the capital's environmental records centre, Guardian Cities has identified approximately 50 sites in London that meet our relatively narrow criteria for pseudo-public space: namely outdoor, open and publicly accessible locations that are owned and maintained by private developers or other private companies.

Quick Guide
Pseudo-public spaces
Show

What is a pseudo-public space?
Pseudo-public spaces are large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and corporations. They are on the rise in London and many other British cities, as local authorities argue they cannot afford to create or maintain such spaces themselves.

What access do members of the public have?

Although they are seemingly accessible to members of the public and have the look and feel of public land, these sites - also known as privately owned public spaces or "Pops" - are not subject to ordinary local authority bylaws but rather governed by restrictions drawn up the landowner and usually enforced by private security companies.
What rules govern them?
Under existing laws, public access to pseudo-public spaces remains at the discretion of landowners who are allowed to draw up their own rules for "acceptable behaviour" on their sites and alter them at will. They are not obliged to make these rules public.

Thank you for your feedback.

They include major areas of open land around Paddington Station (encompassing both Merchant Square and Paddington Central), nearly seven acres of open space owned by Arsenal Football Club in Islington, busy shopping and dining plazas in Covent Garden and Victoria, and the pseudo-public area around one of London's most iconic attractions, the London Eye.

The dataset behind the map has been made public, and can be accessed on the GiGL website. You can see the full list in the table below.

This is the first comprehensive map of pseudo-public spaces in London. Julie Cox, partnership manager at GiGL, says the organisation is keen to hear of any omissions and inconsistencies in the map as it plans to update and expand this dataset in future.

"It's something we'd definitely like to keep updating as part of the suite of datasets we are responsible for, and ideally something members of the public can contribute to as well," says Cox. Reach GiGL here or email cities@theguardian.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pseudo-public space: explore the map - and tell us what we're missing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Guardian Cities and the Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL), have created the first comprehensive map of pseudo-public spaces in the UK capital. We're looking for your help to make it better

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MIT Press Journals is a mission-driven, not-for-profit scholarly publisher devoted to the widest dissemination of its content.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Truckstops on the Information Superhighway: Ant Farm, SRI, and the Cloud

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Truckstops on the Information Superhighway: Ant Farm, SRI, and the Cloud

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Frank Gillette - Official Catalogue Raisonne. Video Art

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Frank Gillette is an American Artist and video pioneer whose multi-channel installations and tapes focus on empirical observation of natural phenomena.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cooperation Makes a Group be More Creative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Abstract. This study investigated how cooperative and competitive interaction modes affect the group creative performance. The participants were recruited as d

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How to Read an Astrology Chart. Astrology studies the interactions between planets, stars, and personality. Astrology charts are used to help interpret a person's nature and make predictions about his or her future. Learning how to read an...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ant Acrylic Combo Hybrid Nest Ant Farm A5 Ant Formicarium Ant Housing Ant Farms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ant Acrylic Combo Hybrid Nest Ant Farm A5 Ants and/or Queen Ants are not included For any queen ants and workers please visit our website! Just Google us: Best Ants UK The Ant Acrylic Combo Hybrid Nest Ant Farm A5 is formed by an acrylic with sand area.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
THE FLORA OF WALTHAMSTOW MARSHES A comprehensive list of all the species recorded ( plus some later additions mainly from Leyton).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Greg Gage: Electrical experiments with plants that count and communicate

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Neuroscientist Greg Gage takes sophisticated equipment used to study the brain out of graduate-level labs and brings them to middle- and high-school classrooms (and, sometimes, to the TED stage.) Prepare to be amazed as he hooks up the Mimosa pudica, a plant whose leaves close when touched, and the Venus flytrap to an EKG to show us how plants use electrical signals to convey information, prompt movement and even count.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Marc Ngui / Bumblenut Pictures: drawing, art, comix, animation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ever thought the bizarre images portrayed by Deleuze and Guattari in their books would make for good art? God is a lobster, Judge Schreber's solar anus, bodies without organs, and so on.

Well, you'd be right. Artist Marc Ngui is currently drawing Deleuze and Guattari's " A Thousand Plateaus " paragraph by paragraph on Tumblr.

Ngui has previously illustrated first two chapters of "A Thousand Plateaus," which you can purchase on Etsy from the artist directly. Ngui's Tumblr is currently only up to paragraph 11 of "10,000 BC," so we hope to see many more.

Here are some of our favorites, but check them all out on Ngui's Tumblr. We've appended the proper quotes from the book.

God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of double articulation. Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not at all to say that the strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units{substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms).

The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his simian disposition. He explained that the Earth-the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule-is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles. That, however, was not the question at hand. For there simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of capture, they are like "black holes" or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach.1 They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality. The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized).

He used the term matter for the plane of consistency or Body without Organs, in other words, the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities. He used the term content for formed matters, which would now have to be considered from two points of view: substance, insofar as these matters are "chosen," and form, insofar as they are chosen in a certain order {substance and form of content). He used the term expression for functional structures, which would also have to be considered from two points of view: the organization of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds (form and content of expression). A stratum always has a dimension of the expressible or of expression serving as the basis for a relative invariance; for example, nucleic sequences are inseparable from a relatively invariant expression by means of which they determine the compounds, organs, and functions of the organism.5 To express is always to sing the glory of God.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Artist Illustrates 'A Thousand Plateaus' Paragraph by Paragraph, and it's Amazing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ever thought the bizarre images portrayed by Deleuze and Guattari in their books would make for good art? God is a lobster, Judge Schreber's solar anus, bodies without organs, and so on. Well, you'd be right. Artist Marc Ngui is currently drawing Deleuze and Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus" paragraph by paragraph on Tumblr.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Warning Against Popular Mysticism on the Internet, by Ashley D'Arcy - 032c

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A writer working in tech asks why tarot and astrology have blown up in the internet age - while other popular forms of mystic knowledge haven't.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New hope for humans in an A.I. world | Louis Rosenberg | TEDxKC

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/6/17072380/slime-mold-intelligence-hampshire-college
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brainless-slime-molds/

community mapping using slime mould
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQr6__1_CLA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A set of functions for supervised feature learning/classification of mental states from EEG based on "EEG images" idea. - pbashivan/EEGLearn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Experimental Art with Brain Controlled Interface

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This essay presents experimental computer artworks using Brain Controlled Interface (BCI). It points to a preliminary contextualization and general development emphasizing affective, sensory, poetic...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Sapien Labs | Neuroscience | Human Brain Diversity Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What kind of things can you do with the more consumer oriented EEG headsets on the market? Here is a look at the lay of the land right now.
The typical EEG devices for research will give you access to the raw signal along with a suite of analytical tools (read here about the EEG signal and what it measures). For example g.Tec's EEG toolbox has tools for data quality estimation, power spectrum and bandpower estimation, wavelet analysis, even event-related coherence, desynchronization (ERD) and synchronization (ERS) and more. Advanced Brain Technologies also has a LORETA package for source localization that comes with their hardware.

The more consumer oriented research headsets (defined largely by pricing) come with software that is less developed in terms of analytical capability, mostly just providing the raw signal and FFT. On the other hand the price points and/or greater ease of use opens up new possibilities for application development. Here's a look at how they work right now from the type of raw signal you get, the associated softwares and SDKs.
Emotiv EPOC
Emotiv EPOC is a 14 channel headset that uses gold electrodes with sponge contacts that are wet with saline, while Insight has 5 polymer based dry electrodes. Emotiv has discontinued their downloadable TestBench software for accessing the raw EEG signal from EPOC and moved to a subscription based model that supports both EPOC and Insight. Called PureEEG, this online software does much the same thing but requires Internet access to use it and comes with a monthly subscription, which is a totally different pricing model. For folks like us who use the device in remote locations with no Internet they are working on an offline mode with an annual subscription. PureEEG does basically the same thing as TestBench did though it actually has fewer features - for example, it does not come with the Push/Pull training and other apps that TestBench was bundled with. Rather this is meant purely for raw signal access giving you a view of the raw signal as well as the FFT. Files are saved in EDF format, which you can easily import elsewhere for analysis. The most developed EEG libraries are of course available now for MATLAB (EEG LAB) and various repositories on GitHub but there are now some libraries for R.

Some things to note - EPOC uses mastoid references and provides the raw signal after a bit of processing - they filter between 0.1 and 100 Hz and then have notch filters at 50 and 60 Hz so that's what you get as an output. You can read more about the Emotiv EPOC here and an evaluation of its signal quality here.

The subscription based pricing model is based on the number of recordings that you do. You pay $49/month for 50 recordings, ~ $1/recording. If you do 250 recordings a month you pay $149, which is 60 cents per recording. You can also prepay for the year and get some pricing benefits - for 50 recordings a month with the annual prepaid, you pay 83 cents per recordings rather than $1. The big downside is that if you make mistakes in your recordings and need to scrap one and start over you end up paying for all that - on the other hand it can make you more diligent about your data collection.

In terms of developing new applications that work with the Emotiv devices, there is not yet an established SDK or application developer program. At present you have to 'apply' or basically talk to them to develop applications. Presumably this will change someday.
OpenBCI
OpenBCI's UltraCortex comes in various configurations from 4 to 32 electrodes and has traditional gold electrodes used with conducting paste so would therefore have good contact quality. While the device is priced higher than EPOC, the software is free to use. The raw signal they provide is less processed than the Emotiv - you get the raw signal and then have the flexibility to do the processing in the software GUI. For example, the GUI has options to apply your own filters to the data including band pass filters and notch filters at 50 and 60 Hz. The default is 1-50 Hz. In general, the Open and DIY nature of OpenBCI allows you to find ways to get at the signal at any stage of processing (even the internal signal) if you really want it. Like EPOC it is just designed to give you access to the signal and in terms of analytics it provides only the FFT. Also, here again files are saved in EDF format and can be analyzed anywhere. You can read more about OpenBCI's Ultracortex here.

The OpenBCI has some SDK tools that are basically a set of templates and tools to develop applications for OpenBCI in Java, Python and Node.js that are available on their site and on github. This is still really an open community focused on DIY hardware so it's not really driving towards a consumer application marketplace and is more a playground for hackers.
Neurosky
Neurosky is fundamentally different from Emotiv EPOC and OpenBCI: first it is a single channel system (with a mastoid reference and a ground) that uses a dry stainless steel electrode (that presses too hard on your forehead if we may say so) and provides a pre-filtered signal sampled at 512 Hz as output (compared to 128 and 125 Hz for Emotiv and OpenBCI respectively). Neurosky's device Mindwave has been built for consumer applications, not research, and they have a well-established app marketplace and SDKs for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. The developer tools are free and also give you access to the raw signal. Neurosky also has a standardized platform and revenue share structure for selling apps in their store.

That said they do have software for research that, like Emotiv's PureEEG and the OpenBCI GUI, provides access to the raw signal as well as power spectrum. In addition they also provide you their own 'eSense meters' for attention and meditation though how these are computed and what they really tell you is not clear. There are two different versions - Neuroview, which does not provide an EDF output but rather simply gives you the signal as a CSV and NeuroSkyLab which integrates with MATLAB. Both cost $499 and only work with Windows.

There are also third party research tools compatible with Neurosky. MyndPlay for instance provides all of the same basic features as Neuroview and Neuroskylab but is only $121 and works on both Mac and PC. The MP tools also include other gaming and neurofeedback training and one other BCI applications - an audio / video media player function for observing your brain's real-time reaction to media. Here it is essential to check headset compatibility before purchasing as it may not be compatible with the Neurosky MindWave Mobile-plus headset -their latest and most promoted headset! This is confusing because the same apps (almost all of them) ARE compatible with the MindWave Mobile (no plus) headset.
Muse
Muse, which calls itself the 'brain sensing' headband, has 4 dry electrodes, 2 silver electrodes on the forehead (anterior frontal) and 2 conductive silicone-rubber electrodes behind the ear (temporo-parietal). Maybe a step up from the Neurosky stainless steel in terms of signal quality but not by too much. They use electrodes on the forehead (FPz; CMS/DRL) for reference. The raw signals can be accessed through their developer tool kit with sampling rates set to either 220 Hz or 500 Hz and is low pass filtered at 100Hz. The 60 Hz notch filter which is turned on in the consumer application is switched to off for the research applications.

To get the raw signal for research however requires two separate softwares: MuseIO, which links to the device and MuseLab, which streams the data from MuseIO and makes it available. The software then allows you to record and save the raw signal but it is anything but easy and intuitive. The data is saved in a .muse format. You will need yet another application - MusePlayer, which will convert it to CSV or MATLAB format if you want to use the data with EEGLAB or any other toolbox. Basically, it's all enormously complicated and has far too many steps to get what you should be able to get with a single click.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
R&D with Commercially Available EEG Headsets | Sapien Labs | Neuroscience | Human Brain Diversity Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What kind of things can you do with the more consumer oriented EEG headsets on the market? Here is a look at the lay of the land right now. The typical EEG devices for research will give you access to the raw signal along with a suite of analytical tools (read here about the EEG signal and what it measures).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Please check your email for instructions on resetting your password. If you do not receive an email within 10 minutes, your email address may not be registered, and you may need to create a new Wiley Online Library account.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tensorflow.js is a library built on deeplearn.js to create deep learning modules directly on the browser. Using that you can create CNNs, RNNs , etc ... on the browser and train these modules using the client's GPU processing power. Hence, a server GPU is not needed to train the NN. This tutorial starts by explaining the basic building blocks of TensorFlow.js and the operations on them. Then, we describe how to create some complicated models.

One Note or Two ...

If you want to play with the code I created an interactive coding session on Observable. Also, I created many mini-projects including simple classification, style transfer, pose estimation and pix2pix translation.

Getting Started

Since TensorFlow.js runs on the browser you just need to include the following script to the header of the html file

This will load the latest published version of the bundle.

Tensors (The building blocks)

If you are familiar with deep learning platforms like TensorFlow you should be able to recognize that tensors are n dimensional arrays that are consumed by operators. Hence they represent the building block for any deep learning application. Let us create a scalar tensor

This created a scalar tensor. We also can convert arrays to tensors

This creates a constant tensor of the array [2,2]. In other words we converted the one dimensional array to a tensor by a applying the tensor function. We can use input.shape to retrieve the size of the tensor.

This has the shape [2]. We can also create a tensor with specific size. For instance, here we create a tensor of zeros with shape [2,2].

Operators

In order to use tensors we need to create operations on them. Let us say we want to find the square of a tensor

The value of x2will be [4,9,16]. TensorFlow.js also allows chaining operations. For example, to evaluate the 2nd power of a tensor we use

The x2 tensor will have value [1,16,81].

Tensor Disposal

Usually we generate lots of intermediate tensors. For instance, in the previous example after evaluating x2 we don't need the value of x. In order to do that we call dispose()

Note that we can no longer use the tensor xin later operations. Now, it might be a little inconvenient to do that for every tensor. Actually, not disposing tensors will be an overhead for the memory. TensorFlow.js offers a special operator tidy() to dispose intermediary tensors automatically

Notice that the value of the tensor y will be disposed since we don't need it after we evaluate the value of z.

Optimization problem

Here we learn how to solve an optimization problem. Given a function f(x) we are asked to evaluate x = a that minimizes f(x). To do that we will need an optimizer. An optimizer is an algorithm to minimize a function by following the gradient. There are many optimizers in the literature like SGD, Adam, etc... These optimizers differ in their speed and accuracy. Tensorflowjs support the most important optimizers.

We will take a simple example were f(x) = x⁶+2x⁴+3x²+x+1. The graph of the function is shown below. We see that the minmum of the function is in the interval [-0.5,0] . We will use an optimizer to find the exact value.

First we define the function to minimize

Now we can iteratively minimize the function to find the value of the minimum. We will start by an initial value of a = 2. The learning rate defines how fast we jump to reach the minimum. We will use an Adam optimizer

Using a learning rate with value 0.9 we find the value of the minimum after 200 iterations to be -0.16092407703399658.

A Simple Neural Network

Now we learn how to create a neural network to learn XOR which is a nonlinear operation. The code is similar to keras implementation. We first create the training set which takes two inputs and one output. We will feed a batch of 4 items in each iteration

Then we create two dense layers with two different nonlinear activation functions. We use stochastic gradient descent with cross entropy loss. The learning rate is 0.1

Then we fit the model for 5000 iterations

Finally we predict on the training set

the output should be [[0.0064339], [0.9836861], [0.9835356], [0.0208658]] which should be expected.

CNN Model

TensorFlow.js uses automatic differentiation using computational graphs. We just need to create the layers, optimizer and compile the model. Let us create a sequential model

Now we can add different layers for the model. Let us add the first convolutional layer with input [28,28,1]

Here we created a conv layer that takes input of size [28,28,1]. The input will be a gray image of size 28 x 28. Then we apply 8 kernels of size 5x5 and stride equals to 1 initialized with VarianceScaling. After that, we apply an activation function which basically takes the negative values in the tensor and replaces them with zeros. Now we can add this convlayer to the model

Now what is nice about Tensorflow.js we don't need to specify the input size for the next layer as it will be evaluated automatically after we compile the model. We can also add max-pooling, dense layers , so on. Here is a simple model

We can apply a tensor for any layer to inspect the output tensor. But here is a catch the input needs to be of shape [BATCH_SIZE,28,28,1] where BATCH_SIZE represents the number of dataset elements we apply to the model at a time. Here is an example of how to evaluate a convolutional layer

After inspecting the shape of the output tensor we see it has shape[1,24,24,8]. This is evaluated using the formula

Which will result in 24 in our case. Returning to our model we realize that we used flatten() which basically convert the input from the shape [BATCH_SIZE,a,b,c] to the shape [BATCH_SIZE,axbxc]. This is important because in the dense layers we cannot apply 2d arrays. Finally, we used the dense layer with output units 10which represents the number of classes we need in our recognition system. Actually this model is used for the recognizing hand-written digits in the so called MNIST dataset.

Optimization and Compilation

After creating the model we need a way to optimize the parameters. There are different approaches to do that like SGD and Adam optimizer. For instance, we can create an optimizer using

This will create an Adam optimizer using the specified learning rate. Now, we are ready to compile the model (attaching the model with the optimizer)

Here we created model that uses Adam to optimize the loss function that evaluates a cross entropy of the predicted output and the true label.

Training

After compiling the model we are ready to train the model on a dataset. We need to use the fit() function for that

Note that we are feeding to the fit function a batch of training set. The second variable for the fit function represents the true labels of the model. Lastly, we have the configuration parameters like the batchSize and epochs. Note that epochs represents how many times we iterate over the current batch NOT the whole dataset. Hence we can for example wrap that code inside a for loop that iterates over all the batches of the training set.

Note that we used the special keyword await which basically blocks and waits for the function to finish executing the code. It is like running a another thread and the main thread is waiting for the fitting function to finish execution.

One Hot Encoding

Usually the given labels are numbers which represents the class. For instance, suppose we have two classes an orange class and an apple class. Then we will give the orange class label 0 and the apple class label 1. But, our network accepts a tensor of size [BATCH_SIZE,NUM_CLASSES]. Hence we need to use what we call one hot encoding

Hence we converted the 1d tensor off labels into a tensor of shape [BATCH_SIZE,NUM_CLASSES].

Loss and Accuracy

In order to inspect the performance of our model we need to know the loss and the accuracy. In order to do that we need to fetch the results of the model using the history module

Note that we are evaluating the loss and accuracy of the validationData that was an input to the fit() function.

Prediction

Suppose that we are done with training a model and it gives good loss and accuracy. It is time to predict the results of unseen data element. Suppose we are given an image that is in our browser or we took directly from our webcam, then we can use our trained model to predict its class. First, we need to convert the image into tensor

Here we created a canvasand retrieved imageDatafrom it and then we converted to a tensor. Now the tensor will have size [28,28,3]but the model takes 4-dimensional vectors. Hence we need to add an extra dimension for the tensor using expandDims

Hence the output tensor will have size [1,28,28,3]since we have added a dimension at index 0. Now for prediction we simply use predict()

The function predict will return the value of the last layer in our network usually a softmax activation function.

Transfer Learning

In the previous sections we had to train our model from scratch. However, this is an expensive operation since it requires more training iterations. Hence, we use a pretrained model called mobilenet. It is a light-wight CNN that is optimized to run in mobile applications. Mobilenet was trained on ImageNet classes. Basically we have precomputed activations trained on 1,000 different classes.

To load the model we use the following

We can use inputs , outputs to inspect the structure of the model

Hence we need images of size [1,224,224,3] and the output will be a tensor of size [1,1000] which holds the probability of each class in the ImageNet dataset.

For the sake of simplicity we will take an array of zeros and try to predict the class number out of 1,000 classes

After running the code I get class = 21 which represents a kite o:

Now we need to inspect the contents of the model. To do that we can get the models layers and names

We see that we have 88 layers which would be so expensive to train again on another dataset. Hence, the basic trick is to use this model just to evaluate the activations (we will not retrain) but we will create dense layers that we can train on another number of classes.

For instance, suppose we need a model to differentiate between carrots and cucumbers. We will use mobilene tmodel to calculate the activation up to some layer we choose. Then we use dense layers with output size 2 to predict the correct class. Hence the mobilenet model will be in some sense 'freezed' and we just train the dense layers.

First, we need to get rid of the dense layers of the model. We choose to extract a random layer let us say number 81 with name conv_pw_13_relu

Now let us update our model to have this layer is an output

Finally, we create the trainable model but we need to know the last layer output shape

We see that the shape [null,7,7,256] Now we can input this to our dense layers

As you can see we created a dense layer with 100 neurons and the output layer with size 2.

And we can use the previous sections to train the last model using a certain optimizer.

References

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tensorflow.js is a library built on deeplearn.js to create deep learning modules directly on the browser. Using that you can create CNNs, RNNs , etc ... on the browser and train these modules using the client's GPU processing power. Hence, a server GPU is not needed to train the NN.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Interactive Introduction to TensorFlow.js

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An Interactive Introduction to TensorFlow.js First we need to import the TensorFlow.js A helper method to show the tensor array Here is how to create a scalar tensor Tensors Now we create a tensor by using an input array We can also create an array of zeros with a certain shape Operations We can use operations on tensors We can chain operations by calling them on the previous tensors We can dipose the value of a tensor to release the GPU memory Tensors Disposals Use the special function tidy to dispose inte

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How can I generate an 'average image' from 200 photographs?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How can I generate an 'average image' from 200 photographs?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Recurrent Neural Networks for Drawing Classification | TensorFlow | TensorFlow

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When training the model for 1M steps you can expect to get an accuracy of approximately of approximately 70% on the top-1 candidate. Note that this accuracy is sufficient to build the quickdraw game because of the game dynamics the user will be able to adjust their drawing until it is ready.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
GitHub - googlecreativelab/quickdraw-dataset: Documentation on how to access and use the Quick, Draw! Dataset.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Quick Draw Dataset is a collection of 50 million drawings across 345 categories, contributed by players of the game Quick, Draw!. The drawings were captured as timestamped vectors, tagged with metadata including what the player was asked to draw and in which country the player was located.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A new generated face every hour using 'Quick, Draw!' game data from Google Creative Lab, millions of drawings from all around the world!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2018 Control, Tate Liverpool, UK Endless, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin 2017 Stephen Willats, The Conceptual Designer, Art Feature at Basel Art Fair, Galerie Balice Hertling Human Right, MIMA, Middlesbrough 2016 THISWAY - Stephen Willats - Index - Stockholm Inside the Night, Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris Conversations With Buildings,

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One of the basic situationist practices is the drive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Drives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a drive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a drive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the drive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data.

The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the drive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.

In his study Paris et l'agglomration parisienne (Bibliothque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that "an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it." In the same work, in order to illustrate "the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small," he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.

Such data — examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone's life can be so pathetically limited) — or even Burgess's theory of Chicago's social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing drives.

If chance plays an important role in drives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a drive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by drivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.

An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in Mdium, May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, "It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence." From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being "as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality," and are thus "truly independent from one another."

At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the drive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities that are such rich centers of possibilities and meanings, could be expressed in Marx's phrase: "Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive."

One can drive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups' impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one drive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically drive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the drive fragmenting into several simultaneous drives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.

The average duration of a drive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for drives.

But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a drive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a drive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain drives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of drives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one drive gives way to that of another. One sequence of drives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.

The influence of weather on drives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for drives.

The spatial field of a drive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of drives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a drive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with personal disorientation. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.

In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure — the residence of the solo driver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambience: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it's interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-drive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).

The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.

In the "possible rendezvous," on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this "possible rendezvous" has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a "possible rendezvous" for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the "possible rendezvous." In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn't know where the first "possible rendezvous" has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.

Our rather anarchic lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the drive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.

The lessons drawn from drives enable us to draft the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambience, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental drives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the earliest navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.

Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended bordering regions. The most general change that drive experiences lead to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.

Within architecture itself, the taste for driving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to drive inside an apartment:

"The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours."

(To be continued.)

GUY DEBORD
1958
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTES]
2. "The drive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The drive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual driving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed 'ordinary life,' that is to say, in reality, into 'petrified life.' In this regard I now repudiate my Formulary's propaganda for a continuous drive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we drived for three or four months straight. That's the extreme limit. It's a miracle it didn't kill us" (Ivan Chtcheglov, excerpt from a 1963 letter to Michle Bernstein and Guy Debord, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #9, p. 38).

"Thorie de la drive" was published in Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958). A slightly different version was first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lvres Nues #9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two drives. This translation by Ken Knabb is from theSituationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

[ Other Situationist Texts]

[ Belarusian version of this text]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One of the basic situationist practices is the drive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Drives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

# data[].attributes.body
s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are born into our human lives with the propensity to survive, and the nine innate affects kick in immediately to help us do so, moving us to cry, connect, and learn. There are nine affects, each containing its own unique experiential signature, each attaching a specific type of meaning to information as it is taken in, stored and recalled. Affects are the the inborn protocols that, when triggered, bring things to our attention and motivate us to act. Affects are not the same as emotion. They are the biological system that underlies emotion. Since the terms used to talk about feelings and emotions are often confusing, let's take a moment to define a few of the terms of Tomkins' system, and then we'll return to focus on the nine innate affects.

Affect is the innate, biological response to the increasing, decreasing or persistent intensity of neural firing. This results in a particular feeling, facial and body display, and skin changes. Affects feel rewarding, punishing, or neutral in their own ways. Affect makes things urgent.

Awareness of an affect is a feeling.

A feeling plus memory of prior similar feelings is an emotion.

Often, out of awareness, we develop "rules" to try to get more positive and less negative affect. Tomkins calls those rules scripts.

The pattern of scripts that a person uses to modulate affect make up his or her personality.

Emotions have a much bigger impact on our experience than affects. We notice emotions, we give them thousands of names, we write poems, books, and movies about them. And yet, in their bulk, they mask the much more fleeting workings of affect. These affects, hiding in plain sight, are often given short shrift by researchers who tend to study something their instruments can measure, and their subjects can name. But increasingly, with new developments in affective neuroscience, we are able to study smaller and smaller units of human experience.

Tomkins had a genius for noticing subtle changes in faces. He was gathering much more information than the prevailing psychological and philosophical theories were accounting for. Among the many influences that helped him to transform his intuition into theory was his infant son, Mark.

Observing his infant son, Tomkins marveled at the amount of information an infant, fresh from the womb, could communicate. In the sabbatical year he took after Mark's birth, he noted distinct differences in affective experience on the newborn's face and in his body. Tomkins went on to spend years testing and refining his assumptions about affects. While there are other theories of basic emotion, there is as yet no consensus among theorists on the building blocks of emotion. We find Tomkins' naming of the affects to be the most complete, explanatory and predictive.

Each innate affect has a unique trigger, a level and pattern of intensity of neural stimulation over time.The stimulus may be inside the body or outside. When we observe babies, how they smile, cry, and gaze intently, we can see evidence of Tomkins' theory of the innate activation of affects. He proposed that innate affects are triggered, not by the specific content of experience as Freud suggested with breast feeding or potty training, but by the increasing, decreasing or level intensity of neural firing. There is something fundamentally neutral in the pure biology of Tomkins' vision of the affect system which many find a welcome lens for understanding our emotional lives.

The affects are analogues of their stimuli, and they amplify the stimulus, to bring it to our attention. For example, surprise-startle is triggered by a very short, abrupt stimulus (anything from a sharp pain to a tap on the shoulder or the sound of a gun firing.) The affective response is also very brief: blink, eyebrows up, eyes wide, mouth open, and perhaps even flinching. Similarly, shame-humiliation is triggered by a partial impediment to positive affect, and it causes further impediment-for a time we usually want nothing to do with the previously exciting or joyful thing that is now tainted by shame. Any affect can amplify an affect, a drive, or any mental content or experience. Affects can be combined.

Let's look at the innate affects as they might appear in infants, before a lot of learning has kicked in.

Distress-Anguish: The cry for help
Inherently punishing
The crying response is the first response the human being makes upon being born. When the affect reaches full intensity, it is expressed with crying, corners of the lips pulled down, the inner eyebrows arched up, red face, and breathing turns into rhythmic sobbing. Tears come into the picture about six weeks after the baby is born. The purpose of distress is to signal that all is not well. The birth cry is a cry of distress. It is a response to the excessive, inescapable level of stimulation the baby is exposed to upon being born. When you experience and express distress you are alerting yourself and others that something is amiss and help is needed. Hunger, a pinching diaper, or a painful gassy tummy can all cause a distress cry that is designed to summon a caregiver who attempts to make crying stop, preferably by improving the conditions. Distress is triggered by a persistent, too high level of neural firing. Any steady stimulus that is "too much," such as pain or bright light, could trigger distress.

Interest-Excitement: The pull toward mastery
Inherently rewarding
An intensity of gaze, eyebrows down, "track, look, listen" is the face of interest. High intensity excitement usually involves muscle movement and vocalization. The purpose of interest is to make learning rewarding. Interest is the most seriously neglected of the affects, possibly because it doesn't disrupt thinking, but often fuels it. And since emotions are so often seen to be at odds with rational thought, it has escaped the attention of devoted thinkers that there is a good feeling associated with thinking. That good feeling is interest. "The interrelationships between the affect of interest and the functions of thought and memory are so extensive that the absence of the affective support of interest would jeopardize intellectual development no less than destruction of brain tissue. To think, as to engage in any other human activity, one must care, one must be excited, must be continually rewarded." ( Affect Imagery Consciousness, Vol. I p. 343) Interest is triggered by a gradual, manageable increase in neural firing. We can see it on infants' faces as they encounter new sights, sounds and sensations.

Enjoyment-Joy: The social bond
Inherently rewarding
The smile, lips widened up and out, is the visible evidence of joy. The innate affect is triggered by a decreasing stimulus-perhaps a reduction in hunger or loneliness, or relief of pain. The infant smiles; affect is contagious, so the caregiver smiles also. This mutually rewarding system of shared joy makes humans want to be social. We will seek to help and be helped by other humans who smile at us. Moreover, experiencing joy in association with people, objects, and activities creates a sense that there is a domain of the familiar, trustworthy, and good. And then is generated a commitment and attachments to those joy-inducing people, objects, and activities. Innate joy is triggered by a decrease in neural firing.

Surprise-Startle: The reset button
Inherently neutral
Eyebrows up, eyes wide, and blink are the facial signposts of the startle response. Its purpose is to get you to stop what you are doing and pay attention to something new. In its intense form, startle, it is a massive contraction of the body which momentarily renders the individual incapable of either continuing whatever he was doing before the startle or initiating new activity so long as the startle response is emitted. ( AIC VI p. 499) It is triggered by a sudden, brief stimulus.

Anger-Rage: The demand to fix it
Inherently punishing
The infant's swollen, reddened face, muscle tension and scream are the obvious signs of anger. Tomkins sees anger as caused by overload; it is triggered by persistent high-density neural firing. If distress is a signal that things are "too much", anger is a signal that things are "WAY too much." Tomkins writes at length about how managing anger and the violence associated with it are crucial for civilization. Systems of wealth, religion, and laws are all collective responses to anger.

Fear-Terror: The signal to flee or freeze
Inherently punishing
Fear displays itself as eyes open wide, lower eyelids tensed; eyebrows raised and drawn together; face pale, cold and sweaty; and the hair standing on end, especially on the back of the neck. Fear is designed for emergency life and death situations, and it recruits an intense biological response so as to guarantee that our attention goes entirely toward survival. As such, it is highly punishing and intended to be briefly experienced. Tomkins writes that fear, like other affects, can also be triggered by internal stimuli such as memory or other affect. Fear is triggered by an intense, rapid increase in neural firing.

Shame-Humiliation: The self-protection signal
Inherently punishing
Tomkins defines this affect in a way that is significantly different from the mainstream use of the word. The trigger for innate shame is the incomplete interruption of excitement or joy. And even though infants don't yet have a sense of their own social lives, they experience the affect of shame whenever their experience of joy or excitement is thwarted. The facial display might be quick and fleeting, and it is less about broadcasting a feeling and more about hiding. The eyes look down and away, the neck muscles give way and the head falls. The purpose of shame is to be sufficiently negative so as to bring attention to whatever might have caused the positive affect to be impeded, so that we can learn how to avoid the loss of the positive in that moment or in the future. Shame affect exists to help us foster our sense of belonging and mastery by asking us to make sense of and overcome what might get in the way.

Unlike the previously described affects, shame is an affect auxillary. It is triggered by the incomplete reduction of interest-excitement or enjoyment-joy, and like other affects, it is an analog of its trigger. Once triggered, shame-humiliation further impedes postive affect. While shame can operate when the individual is alone, it is tremendously important, and often unacknowledged, in relationships throughout life.

Disgust: The need to expel
Inherently punishing
Disgust is an auxiliary of the hunger drive, an impulse to expel a noxious item that has been ingested. It functions as an affect because there are many things that we figuratively ingest (people, thoughts, sights, noises) that, when found to be toxic, need to be expelled. So this affect is experienced at the back of our throats, our gorge rises, the head moves forward, tongue projects, and lower lip protrudes. The ultimate expression of disgust is vomiting. Disgust starts out to be about hunger, and soon is applied to people and non-food things.

Dissmell: The avoidance signal
Inherently punishing
Dissmell is another auxiliary of the hunger drive, but this is an impulse to pull away from or push away a noxious item that shouldn't be ingested such as dead animals, fresh feces, or sour milk. It functions as an affect when non-food items or people are kept at a distance. Tomkins created this word to capture the biological response of repulsion. When dissmell is combined with anger, we call it contempt. Dissmell appears on the face as the head pulled back, the upper lip raised, nose wrinkled and inner eyebrows lower.

The Tomkins Blueprint

Because we have evolved with an affect system with some affects that feel good and some that feel bad, each human is motivated to:

1. Maximize positive affect
2. Minimize (reduce) negative affect
3. Both of these actions work best when all affect is expressed.
4. Anything that helps the performance of these three rules is good for human life; anything that interferes with them is bad for us.

This is how we are wired, and this is what humans "want."

Working with Tomkins, Vick Kelly and Don Nathanson extended the Blueprint into intimacy and community.

To see affects in action see Videos of Babies and Affects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nine affects, present at birth, combine with life experience to form emotion and personality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are born into our human lives with the propensity to survive, and the nine innate affects kick in immediately to help us do so, moving us to cry, connect, and learn. There are nine affects, each containing its own unique experiential signature, each attaching a specific type of meaning to information as it is taken in, stored and recalled.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are born into our human lives with the propensity to survive, and the nine innate affects kick in immediately to help us do so, moving us to cry, connect, and learn. There are nine affects, each containing its own unique experiential signature, each attaching a specific type of meaning to information as it is taken in, stored and recalled. Affects are the the inborn protocols that, when triggered, bring things to our attention and motivate us to act. Affects are not the same as emotion. They are the biological system that underlies emotion. Since the terms used to talk about feelings and emotions are often confusing, let's take a moment to define a few of the terms of Tomkins' system, and then we'll return to focus on the nine innate affects.

Affect is the innate, biological response to the increasing, decreasing or persistent intensity of neural firing. This results in a particular feeling, facial and body display, and skin changes. Affects feel rewarding, punishing, or neutral in their own ways. Affect makes things urgent.

Awareness of an affect is a feeling.

A feeling plus memory of prior similar feelings is an emotion.

Often, out of awareness, we develop "rules" to try to get more positive and less negative affect. Tomkins calls those rules scripts.

The pattern of scripts that a person uses to modulate affect make up his or her personality.

Emotions have a much bigger impact on our experience than affects. We notice emotions, we give them thousands of names, we write poems, books, and movies about them. And yet, in their bulk, they mask the much more fleeting workings of affect. These affects, hiding in plain sight, are often given short shrift by researchers who tend to study something their instruments can measure, and their subjects can name. But increasingly, with new developments in affective neuroscience, we are able to study smaller and smaller units of human experience.

Tomkins had a genius for noticing subtle changes in faces. He was gathering much more information than the prevailing psychological and philosophical theories were accounting for. Among the many influences that helped him to transform his intuition into theory was his infant son, Mark.

Observing his infant son, Tomkins marveled at the amount of information an infant, fresh from the womb, could communicate. In the sabbatical year he took after Mark's birth, he noted distinct differences in affective experience on the newborn's face and in his body. Tomkins went on to spend years testing and refining his assumptions about affects. While there are other theories of basic emotion, there is as yet no consensus among theorists on the building blocks of emotion. We find Tomkins' naming of the affects to be the most complete, explanatory and predictive.

Each innate affect has a unique trigger, a level and pattern of intensity of neural stimulation over time.The stimulus may be inside the body or outside. When we observe babies, how they smile, cry, and gaze intently, we can see evidence of Tomkins' theory of the innate activation of affects. He proposed that innate affects are triggered, not by the specific content of experience as Freud suggested with breast feeding or potty training, but by the increasing, decreasing or level intensity of neural firing. There is something fundamentally neutral in the pure biology of Tomkins' vision of the affect system which many find a welcome lens for understanding our emotional lives.

The affects are analogues of their stimuli, and they amplify the stimulus, to bring it to our attention. For example, surprise-startle is triggered by a very short, abrupt stimulus (anything from a sharp pain to a tap on the shoulder or the sound of a gun firing.) The affective response is also very brief: blink, eyebrows up, eyes wide, mouth open, and perhaps even flinching. Similarly, shame-humiliation is triggered by a partial impediment to positive affect, and it causes further impediment-for a time we usually want nothing to do with the previously exciting or joyful thing that is now tainted by shame. Any affect can amplify an affect, a drive, or any mental content or experience. Affects can be combined.

Let's look at the innate affects as they might appear in infants, before a lot of learning has kicked in.

Distress-Anguish: The cry for help
Inherently punishing
The crying response is the first response the human being makes upon being born. When the affect reaches full intensity, it is expressed with crying, corners of the lips pulled down, the inner eyebrows arched up, red face, and breathing turns into rhythmic sobbing. Tears come into the picture about six weeks after the baby is born. The purpose of distress is to signal that all is not well. The birth cry is a cry of distress. It is a response to the excessive, inescapable level of stimulation the baby is exposed to upon being born. When you experience and express distress you are alerting yourself and others that something is amiss and help is needed. Hunger, a pinching diaper, or a painful gassy tummy can all cause a distress cry that is designed to summon a caregiver who attempts to make crying stop, preferably by improving the conditions. Distress is triggered by a persistent, too high level of neural firing. Any steady stimulus that is "too much," such as pain or bright light, could trigger distress.

Interest-Excitement: The pull toward mastery
Inherently rewarding
An intensity of gaze, eyebrows down, "track, look, listen" is the face of interest. High intensity excitement usually involves muscle movement and vocalization. The purpose of interest is to make learning rewarding. Interest is the most seriously neglected of the affects, possibly because it doesn't disrupt thinking, but often fuels it. And since emotions are so often seen to be at odds with rational thought, it has escaped the attention of devoted thinkers that there is a good feeling associated with thinking. That good feeling is interest. "The interrelationships between the affect of interest and the functions of thought and memory are so extensive that the absence of the affective support of interest would jeopardize intellectual development no less than destruction of brain tissue. To think, as to engage in any other human activity, one must care, one must be excited, must be continually rewarded." ( Affect Imagery Consciousness, Vol. I p. 343) Interest is triggered by a gradual, manageable increase in neural firing. We can see it on infants' faces as they encounter new sights, sounds and sensations.

Enjoyment-Joy: The social bond
Inherently rewarding
The smile, lips widened up and out, is the visible evidence of joy. The innate affect is triggered by a decreasing stimulus-perhaps a reduction in hunger or loneliness, or relief of pain. The infant smiles; affect is contagious, so the caregiver smiles also. This mutually rewarding system of shared joy makes humans want to be social. We will seek to help and be helped by other humans who smile at us. Moreover, experiencing joy in association with people, objects, and activities creates a sense that there is a domain of the familiar, trustworthy, and good. And then is generated a commitment and attachments to those joy-inducing people, objects, and activities. Innate joy is triggered by a decrease in neural firing.

Surprise-Startle: The reset button
Inherently neutral
Eyebrows up, eyes wide, and blink are the facial signposts of the startle response. Its purpose is to get you to stop what you are doing and pay attention to something new. In its intense form, startle, it is a massive contraction of the body which momentarily renders the individual incapable of either continuing whatever he was doing before the startle or initiating new activity so long as the startle response is emitted. ( AIC VI p. 499) It is triggered by a sudden, brief stimulus.

Anger-Rage: The demand to fix it
Inherently punishing
The infant's swollen, reddened face, muscle tension and scream are the obvious signs of anger. Tomkins sees anger as caused by overload; it is triggered by persistent high-density neural firing. If distress is a signal that things are "too much", anger is a signal that things are "WAY too much." Tomkins writes at length about how managing anger and the violence associated with it are crucial for civilization. Systems of wealth, religion, and laws are all collective responses to anger.

Fear-Terror: The signal to flee or freeze
Inherently punishing
Fear displays itself as eyes open wide, lower eyelids tensed; eyebrows raised and drawn together; face pale, cold and sweaty; and the hair standing on end, especially on the back of the neck. Fear is designed for emergency life and death situations, and it recruits an intense biological response so as to guarantee that our attention goes entirely toward survival. As such, it is highly punishing and intended to be briefly experienced. Tomkins writes that fear, like other affects, can also be triggered by internal stimuli such as memory or other affect. Fear is triggered by an intense, rapid increase in neural firing.

Shame-Humiliation: The self-protection signal
Inherently punishing
Tomkins defines this affect in a way that is significantly different from the mainstream use of the word. The trigger for innate shame is the incomplete interruption of excitement or joy. And even though infants don't yet have a sense of their own social lives, they experience the affect of shame whenever their experience of joy or excitement is thwarted. The facial display might be quick and fleeting, and it is less about broadcasting a feeling and more about hiding. The eyes look down and away, the neck muscles give way and the head falls. The purpose of shame is to be sufficiently negative so as to bring attention to whatever might have caused the positive affect to be impeded, so that we can learn how to avoid the loss of the positive in that moment or in the future. Shame affect exists to help us foster our sense of belonging and mastery by asking us to make sense of and overcome what might get in the way.

Unlike the previously described affects, shame is an affect auxillary. It is triggered by the incomplete reduction of interest-excitement or enjoyment-joy, and like other affects, it is an analog of its trigger. Once triggered, shame-humiliation further impedes postive affect. While shame can operate when the individual is alone, it is tremendously important, and often unacknowledged, in relationships throughout life.

Disgust: The need to expel
Inherently punishing
Disgust is an auxiliary of the hunger drive, an impulse to expel a noxious item that has been ingested. It functions as an affect because there are many things that we figuratively ingest (people, thoughts, sights, noises) that, when found to be toxic, need to be expelled. So this affect is experienced at the back of our throats, our gorge rises, the head moves forward, tongue projects, and lower lip protrudes. The ultimate expression of disgust is vomiting. Disgust starts out to be about hunger, and soon is applied to people and non-food things.

Dissmell: The avoidance signal
Inherently punishing
Dissmell is another auxiliary of the hunger drive, but this is an impulse to pull away from or push away a noxious item that shouldn't be ingested such as dead animals, fresh feces, or sour milk. It functions as an affect when non-food items or people are kept at a distance. Tomkins created this word to capture the biological response of repulsion. When dissmell is combined with anger, we call it contempt. Dissmell appears on the face as the head pulled back, the upper lip raised, nose wrinkled and inner eyebrows lower.

The Tomkins Blueprint

Because we have evolved with an affect system with some affects that feel good and some that feel bad, each human is motivated to:

1. Maximize positive affect
2. Minimize (reduce) negative affect
3. Both of these actions work best when all affect is expressed.
4. Anything that helps the performance of these three rules is good for human life; anything that interferes with them is bad for us.

This is how we are wired, and this is what humans "want."

Working with Tomkins, Vick Kelly and Don Nathanson extended the Blueprint into intimacy and community.

To see affects in action see Videos of Babies and Affects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nine affects, present at birth, combine with life experience to form emotion and personality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are born into our human lives with the propensity to survive, and the nine innate affects kick in immediately to help us do so, moving us to cry, connect, and learn. There are nine affects, each containing its own unique experiential signature, each attaching a specific type of meaning to information as it is taken in, stored and recalled.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A ceramic research, from Studio Joachim-Morineau. Machine, Structures, Graphics, Textures.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Quietly, one of the most forward-thinking art organizations in Canada, Ottawa's Artengine offers an amorphous mix of event programming and special projects that forge links across disciplines and disparate topics. In recent years they've tackled smart cities, interactive public art, and the growing presence of digital fabrication in the arts (see CAN's recap of their excellent Unhanded event in 2016) - amongst other topics - and their events are some of the best we've attended in North America. So, it was with great anticipation we headed to Artificial Imagination, their symposium on the role of artificial intelligence in the arts this past winter. Given that most chatter about AI is as lucid as a fever dream at the moment, we were confident that Artengine would facilitate sober and prescient conversations on the topic - and true to form, they delivered. They recently published video documentation of their event, and, in an effort to share these noteworthy conversations with a wider audience, we share the videos and quick recap below.

Artificial Imagination took place on February 18th, in the form of three conversations. The sessions, explored the overlap between cosmology and computation, considered the mind-body problem, and mused about (rudimentary) machine consciousness. Bringing together a range of thinkers and facilitators, the idea was to invite a 'who's who' of (primarily) Canadian artists and curators that have been exploring these ideas in their practices (some for decades) and to use artistic methods and expertise to evaluate the current status of AI. This wasn't so much about heralding sea changes, but checking-in to interrogate first principles.
↑ Ghost in the Machine? A sampling of the strange things Artificial Imagination's participants have tasked computers with: watching 2001: A Space Odyssey (Ben Bogart), exploring Lakota epistemology (Suzanne Kite, top left), collaborating to co-create choreography (Kristin Carlson, top right), poetically rendering 'network chatter' (David Rokeby, lower left), and creating an ecosystem of autonomous water vehicles (Sofian Audrey, lower right).
The first session brought Susan Kite and Jackson 2Bears together in conversation with Elizabeth Barron. The pair of artists provided very nuanced and thoughtful commentary on the Western metaphysics embedded in computation - as read and contrasted by Indigenous cosmology. Jackson 2Bears spoke at length about technological determinism ("technology as destiny") and simultaneously sketched out how the systems/infrastructures we construct are prone to internalizing a colonial/exploitational mindset, and questioned the necessity of those concentrations of power. Speaking to her work in composition and designing custom performance interfaces, Suzanne Kite discussed thresholds of perception and embodiment, and shared details about the (then) in-progress work Listener, a site specific performance drawing on a hair-braid interface that fuses movement, audio, video, sculpture, and text that creates a "spiral feedback dynamic between body and systems," that she was using to explore Lakota epistemologies.

Artificial Imagination's second session put Kristin Anne Carlson, David Rokeby and Chris Salter into dialogue with Nell Tenhaff. Embedded above (watch it!), the conversation focused on slippery notions of embodiment within interactive environments and systems - and across broader digital culture. David Rokeby's presentation broadly asked "the body is falling out of culture, does this matter?" and he presented commentary from a key moment in the late 1980s - after a decade of creating interactive systems but before the (seemingly imminent) arrival of VR in the '90s. Kind of a guided tour through his work over those decades, he ruminated on the questions that arise when interfacing the body with logical systems - from both system and user perspectives. These themes were picked up on nicely in Chris Salter's presentation, which 'compared and contrasted' the recent Dreamworks-bankrolled mixed reality experience and his own Haptic Field; the former traffics in the extreme amplification of the senses while the latter capitalizes on removing stimulus. Finally, Kristin Anne Carlson spoke to dance, and shared recent projects addressing physiotherapy and the application of generative strategies that pulls choreography (and the body) outside its comfort zone.

Not to be upstaged by the earlier sessions on cosmology and the body, the final conversation addressed the prospect of machine consciousness. Moderated by curator Nora O Morchú, Ben Bogart, Sofian Audrey, and Allison Parish discussed systems that think - and what that means for their creators, exactly. Ben Bogart parsed the web of frameworks ('perception', 'learning', etc.) he needed to model in his work over the last decade, which notably included programming machines to dream. A Pandora's box of implications for consciousness and sensation, he argued that AI was not simply an inscrutable black box but a means to interrogate ourselves about our bias. Working through a range of projects exploring and re-articulating rudimentary models of intelligence Sofian Audrey evoked early Cybernetics and evolvable hardware; speaking to a very different historical vector, Allison Parrish drew a line that connected Dadist poetry, cut-up methods, and the use of machine learning in contemporary poetry and language manipulation.

Videos for all three sessions are embedded in this post, and they are all worth investing some time into. While you'd expect artists who have dedicated their career to exploring AI and interactive systems would have a lot to say on what is at stake and where the contradictions lie, the degree to which the assembled speakers collectively parse, problematize, and probe the ascendant field is illuminating.

Artifical Imagination Video Documentation | Artengine
Lead image: Plasmosis, a 2013 site-specific underwater installation by Sofian Audry that deposits a sensor-laden artificial entity underwater near a Quebec marina and tasks it with negotiating with its environment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Artificial Imagination - Opening 'the Black Box' of Inscrutable AI Through Dialogue

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Artificial Imagination was a symposium organized by Ottawa's Artengine this past winter that invited a group of artists to discuss the state of AI in the arts and culture. CAN was on hand to take in the proceedings, and given the emergence of documentation, we share videos and a brief report.

# data[].attributes.body
E

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Begin Physical Computing with Raspberry Pi and Python

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You'll develop your knowledge of simple electronics and computing, setting up your Raspberry Pi and writing your first program using Python.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
CAN has joined forces with UAL Creative Computing Institute to present the first in a series of events that examine new forms of cross-disciplinary art and design practice. Entitled "Document 1.", it's comprised of a workshop, seminar, and symposium, and takes place March 11th-13th at UAL's Camberwell College of Art in London.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
CAN has joined forces with UAL Creative Computing Institute to present the first in a series of events that examine new forms of cross-disciplinary art and design practice. Entitled "Document 1.", it's comprised of a workshop, seminar, and symposium, and takes place March 11th-13th at UAL's Camberwell College of Art in London.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Festival 2019 | transmediale festival 2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
transmediale 2019 focuses on how feelings are made into objects of technological design and asks what role emotions and empathy play within digital culture. One of the key questions of the upcoming festival is "What moves you?", referring not only to an emotional response but also to the infrastructures and aesthetics that govern how affect becomes mobilized as a political force today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Created by Lara Defayes at ECAL, UV Map, Vanishing Shades and FOMO Survival Kit are a series of project produced during her studies at the art and design school in Lausanne, Switzerland. All three projects, and others that can be viewed on her website, explore the contradictions and opportunities of digital in physical.

# data[].attributes.body
https://2019.transmediale.de/theme

https://www.creativeapplications.net/vvvv/alt-c-designing-for-synergy-between-our-ecosystems-and-network-economics/

http://www.aatb.ch/exhibitions/sunny-side-up/

https://www.creativeapplications.net/tag/ecal/

https://www.creativeapplications.net/objects/bouquet-synaesthetic-olfactory-device-to-perceive-color-through-fragrance/

https://www.creativeapplications.net/news/deguster-laugmente-adding-new-dimensions-to-food/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Terra Loire's daily scan of horoscopes is as routine as her daily coffee. The 29-year-old Torontonian said horoscopes allow her to set goals for the day.

"While astrologers bring their own biases and experiences into writing horoscopes, there is always a common thread based on your zodiac and it is nice to just give some belief to the stars," she told Global News.

"Sometimes you just need a little guidance and ritual to keep yourself grounded; if you're not a particularly religious person or if you don't have a strong family structure... astrology is just a click away."

READ MORE: Why you may have to wait until 70 to be truly happy
Flipping through newspapers to read through your sign, or navigating natal charts, or even understanding positions of the sun, moon and planets are all ways people interact with astrology. While it can be as basic as seeing if you'll have a good day, to as complex as setting a date for your wedding, cultures and communities have relied on the stars for centuries.

Loire remembered reading into horoscopes when she was a child, but as she got older, she took them more seriously. A few years ago she got her full chart read and realized Leos, in particular, made bad lovers.

"Looking back over my dating history, I realized 90 per cent of my exes were Leos, and the reasons the relationships dissolved were exactly what my chart was saying," she continued."

Tracing the origins

Astrology has been around for centuries and some astrologers, astronomers and other professionals can't even pinpoint where it started, Time magazine reports.

"There's some indication that cave art shows this idea that animals and things can be imbued with some kind of spirit form that then has an influence on you, and if you appease that spirit form, then you will have a successful hunt. That was taken over by the idea of divination, where you can actually look at things in nature and study them carefully, such as tea-leaf reading," astronomer Sten Odenwald, the director of Citizen Science at the NASA Space Science Education Consortium told the magazine in 2018.
Credit: Laura Whelan
Astrology can be rooted in early Mesopotamian, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian and Greek cultures and horoscopes are based on astrology, the Smithsonian magazine reported. The Astrology Podcast noted some of the first horoscopes written in English for newspapers were in the 1930s and '40s.

Western astrology has been a mix of all of the above, astrologer and tarot card reader Liz Worth told Global News. "Over the course of centuries upon centuries, astrology has become a blend of many different practices and traditions," she said, adding there is no one way to study the craft.

"When we talk about what systems we are using, it really depends on the astrologer and what type of astrology they're practicing."

Some focus on traditional types of astrology (could be religious or spiritual), while others look at modern techniques focused on evolution. New astrologers bring their own ideas to the practice and this is needed, Worth said.

"If everybody was using the same type of astrology that was in practice hundreds of years ago... it would have a very medieval feel to it."

Why people love them

Some readers will take time to look into this history of where their charts or signs come from, while others just want a quick tidbit of the day. The reasons why horoscopes become ritual, addictive or meaningful changes depending on how people interpret them.

Charm Torres, an astrologer and tarot card reader based in Toronto said many people depend on their daily horoscopes.

Credit: Getty Images
"Horoscopes, in general, are a gateway drug for a lot of people," Torres said, adding it grabs people's attention because it allows them to re-evaluate their life that day.
READ MORE: What it means if you're born in the Year of the Pig
"People really want to see themselves mirrored, sort of the human desire to be seen."

If we are having a bad day, a good day or an off day, a horoscope can be a sense of relief, experts said.

Krystal Stukas, 25, from Toronto, reads her horoscope every day on an app. "[The app] tells me about the movement of the planets and explains why you may be feeling the way you are feeling at a certain point in time."

She usually reads her horoscope at the end of the day. "One day on the way home [after a stressful day at work], I checked my horoscope and the planet transits and it literally said something along the lines of, 'stressful situations lasting three or four weeks because of [this planet] being in [this sign].'"

Worth added when it comes to the psychology around horoscopes, some people use them as guidance but others may rely on them to make important decisions. This can be cultural ( some people may rely on astrology to determine when they have children), for others, it speaks to a lack of confidence.

"We all have to use our best judgement and each of us have to be really clear in what makes sense for our own lives in that moment and to not let astrology do the thinking for us," said Worth.

Barriers in the industry

Worth added horoscopes have gone through a rise in popularity recently, and while it is not new, technology has allowed people to access their horoscopes on a much larger scale. Instead of waiting for a daily newspaper, you could essentially read 25 versions of your horoscope in minutes.

Janelle Belgrave, an astrologer and horoscope writer based in New York, told Global News she often feels overwhelmed with the number of requests she gets to write horoscopes.

"It's kind of that moment you're happy people are finding it and are curious, but also nervous it's going to be like every other fad... where people wear it out to something people hate."

READ MORE: Why is it hard to get rid of clutter? Marie Kondo has the answer
She added the digital world has allowed astrologers to build blogs, create podcasts and boost followings on social media sites like Twitter. "There's content for people who want to take it seriously."

This has been extremely helpful for people of colour, who still have a hard time navigating a mainstream audience, she said. "But there are groups of black and brown astrologers who do the work of bringing diversity to those conferences, for example."

This could mean assisting people with airfare, hotel fees and other barriers astrologists of colour may face trying to break into the industry.

Of course, another barrier is the skeptics. All experts agree not everyone will take a written horoscope as truth, and with so many different descriptions and astrologers out there, it can be difficult for some to believe it.

"The thing about horoscopes [is that] everyone kind of has a different style, but the majority of us are writing things that are similar. We are looking at the same information," Belgrave said.

Torres added it's fine if people don't believe in her work, it's more about focusing her energy on those all over the map who do. "In the digital age... there is something deeper and an interpersonal connection [online]."

What to do if you're curious

If you want to learn more about horoscopes, all experts suggest finding an author and following their work.

It may also be useful to look at the origins of astrology, to truly appreciate where it comes from. Podcasts, books and social media have also been able to create like-minded communities.

Loire said like anything, you need to put effort into this system of belief.

"You're only going to get out of it what you put into it. A skeptic or cynic is always going to point out flaws and holes, which is your prerogative, but to me seems like an annoying way to move through the world."

arti.patel@globalnews.ca
Follow @ArtiPatel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reading horoscopes is an addictive ritual, even in a world of skeptics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Terra Loire's daily scan of horoscopes is as routine as her daily coffee. The 29-year-old Torontonian said horoscopes allow her to set goals for the day. "While astrologers bring their own biases and experiences into writing horoscopes, there is always a common thread based on your zodiac and it is nice to just give some belief to the stars," she told Global News.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Online tools for manipulating faces by morphing and transforming.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Face Research ⇒ Experiments about face and voice perception

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Psychology experiments about preferences for faces and voices

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_consciousness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In many ways, the built world was not designed for you. It was designed for the average person. Standardized tests, building codes, insurance rates, clothing sizes, The Dow Jones - all these measurements are based around the concept of an "average."

The modern use of averages was pioneered by a Belgian mathematician and astronomer named Adolphe Quételet. In the 1830s, astronomers were some of the only people that regularly calculated averages, since early telescopes were extremely imprecise. To obtain more accurate data for say, tracking the orbits of planets, astronomers would take multiple measurements (all of which were slightly different) add them together, then divide by the number of observations to get a better approximation of the true value. Quételet was the first to take this tool of astronomers and apply it to people.

Quételet started with a data set of the chest measurements of over five thousand Scottish soldiers. From this information, Quételet found that the average chest size of these soldiers was 39 and three-quarters inches. To Quételet, this number represented the "true" size of a Scottish Soldier's chest. The average measurement was more like the Platonic ideal.

In Quételet's mind, human averages had a certain moral mandate. By his logic, if everyone were optimally fed and lived under the same environmental conditions, they would be average. And this is what society should be striving for: the continual improvement of the average of the group.

Quételet moved on to other data sets. He found statistics of marriages, murders, and suicides, and calculated averages for them. He found that there was such a thing as a "normal" suicide rate, as well as average numbers for divorces and crime, which was quite scandalous in Quételet's time-suicide was considered a deeply personal and uniquely horrifying decision, but suddenly averages revealed patterns of society. Questions were raised about whether this kind of discovery could lead to "laws of society" analogous to "laws of physics"-universal truths that cast doubt on human ideas of free will. People became predictable and quantifiable, in their body, size, intelligence, birth, and death. By the 1840s and 50s, Quetelet had become a celebrity, and his radical new science had begun to influence a whole range of people, including Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln, after a series of losses to the Confederacy, realized he needed more information about the Union army. He ordered a massive study to assess the soldiers physically and mentally, and, in strict adherence to Quételet's science, calculated averages of just about everything. These averages began to inform the distribution of food rations, the design of weapons, even the fit of military uniforms.

Before the Civil War, uniforms were custom-sewn. In this war, however, such a massive number of people had to be outfitted that uniforms needed to be mass-produced. But they couldn't all be one floppy size. Soldiers were put into subtypes: large, medium, and small-classifications that eventually found their way to civilian clothing.

This Civil War study was the basis for the American military's long-standing philosophy of standardization. So in 1926, when the Army designed its first airplane cockpit, they measured the physical dimensions of male pilots and calculated the average measurement of their height, weight, arm-length and other dimensions.

The results determined the size and shape of the seat, the distance to the pedals and the stick, and even the shape of the flight helmets. This means that, in part, pilots were selected based on their ability to fit into the cockpit designed for the average 1920s man.

This worked more or less up until World War II, when the Army began recruiting hundreds of new pilots to expand its air forces (which became a separate branch of the military in 1947). But with the birth and expansion of the Air Force came a decline in performance and a rash of deaths. Even with no war, pilots continued to die during training, as they were unable to control their planes.

The high death rate in the Air Force was a mystery for many years, but after blaming the pilots and their training programs, the military finally realized that the cockpit itself was to blame, that it didn't actually fit most pilots. At first, they assumed it was just too small and that the average man had grown since the 1920s, so in 1950, they asked researchers at Wright Air Force base in Ohio to calculate the new average.

One of these researches was a young Harvard graduate named Gilbert S. Daniels. In his research measuring thousands of airmen on a set of ten critical physical dimensions, Daniels realized that none of the pilots he measured was average on all ten dimensions. Not a single one. When he looked at just three dimensions, less than five percent were average. Daniels realized that by designing something for an average pilot, it was literally designed to fit nobody.

The Air Force quickly responded. Engineers and contractors designed new equipment, including adjustable foot pedals, helmet straps, flight suits, seats. And pilot performance soared.

Today, we take for granted that equipment should fit a wide range of body sizes rather than being standardized around the "average person." From this understanding has come the science of ergonomics: the study of how to match people's physical capacity to the needs of the job.

Whether it's the equipment, or the whole work environment, design must accommodate more people who are outside the average ... because in reality, no one is actually average.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In many ways, the built world was not designed for you. It was designed for the average person. Standardized tests, building codes, insurance rates, clothing sizes, The Dow Jones - all these measurements are based around the concept of an "average."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A cortical homunculus is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and proportions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, or sensory functions, for different parts of the body. The word homunculus is Latin for "little man" or "miniature human", and was a term used in alchemy and folklore long before scientific literature began using it. A cortical homunculus, or "cortex man," illustrates the concept of a representation of the body lying within the brain. Nerve fibres-conducting somatosensory information from all over the body-terminate in various areas of the parietal lobe in the cerebral cortex, forming a representational map of the body.

A motor homunculus represents a map of brain areas dedicated to motor processing for different anatomical divisions of the body. The primary motor cortex is located in the precentral gyrus, and handles signals coming from the premotor area of the frontal lobes.

A sensory homunculus represents a map of brain areas dedicated to sensory processing for different anatomical divisions of the body. The primary sensory cortex is located in the postcentral gyrus, and handles signals coming from the thalamus.

The thalamus itself receives corresponding signals from the brain stem and spinal cord.

Along the length of the primary motor and sensory cortices, the areas specializing in different parts of the body are arranged in an orderly manner, although ordered differently than one might expect. The toes are represented at the top of the cerebral hemisphere (or more accurately, "the upper end," since the cortex curls inwards and down at the top), and then as one moves down the hemisphere, progressively higher parts of the body are represented, assuming a body that is faceless and has arms raised. Going further down the cortex, the different areas of the face are represented, in approximately top-to-bottom order, rather than bottom-to-top as before. The homunculus is split in half, with motor and sensory representations for the left side of the body on the right side of the brain, and vice versa.

The amount of cortex devoted to any given body region is not proportional to that body region's surface area or volume, but rather to how richly innervated that region is. Areas of the body with more complex and/or more numerous sensory or motor connections are represented as larger in the homunculus, while those with less complex and/or less numerous connections are represented as smaller. The resulting image is that of a distorted human body, with disproportionately huge hands, lips, and face.

In the sensory homunculus, below the areas handling sensation for the teeth, gums, jaw, tongue, and pharynx lies an area for intra-abdominal sensation. At the very top end of the primary sensory cortex, beyond the area for the toes, it has traditionally been believed that the sensory neural networks for the genitals occur. However, more recent research has suggested that there may be two different cortical areas for the genitals, possibly differentiated by one dealing with erogenous stimulation and the other dealing with non-erogenous stimulation.

Dr. Wilder Penfield and his co-investigators Edwin Boldrey and Theodore Rasmussen are considered to be the originators of the sensory and motor homunculi. They were not the first scientists to attempt to objectify human brain function by means of a homunculus. However, they were the first to differentiate between sensory and motor function and to map the two across the brain separately, resulting in two different homunculi. In addition, their drawings and later drawings derived from theirs became perhaps the most famous conceptual maps in modern neuroscience because they compellingly illustrated the data at a single glance.

Penfield first conceived of his homunculi as a thought experiment, and went so far as to envision an imaginary world in which the homunculi lived, which he referred to as "if". He and his colleagues went on to experiment with electrical stimulation of different brain areas of patients undergoing open brain surgery to control epilepsy, and were thus able to produce the topographical brain maps and their corresponding homunculi.

More recent studies have improved this understanding of somatotopic arrangement using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Penfield referred to his creations as "grotesque creatures" due to their strange-looking proportions. For example, the sensory nerves arriving from the hands terminate over large areas of the brain, resulting in the hands of the homunculus being correspondingly large. In contrast, the nerves emanating from the torso or arms cover a much smaller area, thus the torso and arms of the homunculus look comparatively small and weak.

Penfield's homunculi are usually shown as 2-D diagrams. This is an oversimplification, as it cannot fully show the data set Penfield collected from his brain surgery patients. Rather than the sharp delineation between different body areas shown in the drawings, there is actually significant overlap between neighboring regions. The simplification suggests that lesions of the motor cortex will give rise to specific deficits in specific muscles. However, this is a misconception, as lesions produce deficits in groups of synergistic muscles. This finding suggests that the motor cortex functions in terms of overall movements as coordinated groups of individual motions.

The sensorimotor homunculi can also be represented as 3-D figures (such as the sensory homunculus sculpted by Sharon Price-James shown from different angles below), which can make it easier for laymen to understand the ratios between the different body regions' levels of motor or sensory innervation. However, these 3-D models do not illustrate which areas of the brain are associated with which parts of the body.

In a recent article published in the peer-reviewed journal Leonardo, entitled "The Missing Female Homunculus," by Haven Wright and Preston Foerder, the authors revisit the history of the Homunculus, shed light on current research in neuroscience on the female brain, and reveal what they believe to be the first sculpture of the female Homunculus, done by the artist and first author Haven Wright, based on the current research available.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A cortical homunculus is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and proportions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, or sensory functions, for different parts of the body.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Humument has been a work in progress since 1966 when artist Tom Phillips set himself a task: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page by painting, collage and cut-up techniques to create an entirely new version. The book he found was an 1892 Victorian obscurity A Human Document by W.H. Mallock and Phillips transformed it into A Humument. The first version was printed by the Tetrad press in 1973, and Phillips has continued to transform it, revise it and develop it ever since.

This section of the website brings together a wealth of information on this Gesamtkunstwerk which you are invited to explore by clicking the links on the left of this page.

Alternatively, you can use the player below to listen to the artist-author reading the whole of the sixth and final version of his text.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Humument has been a work in progress since 1966 when artist Tom Phillips set himself a task: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page by painting, collage and cut-up techniques to create an entirely new version. The book he found was an 1892 Victorian obscurity A Human Document by W.H.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Automatically generate imaginative poetry using your own ideas. Select from a variety of structures and we’ll do the rhyming, syllable counting and imagery for you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Over five hundred strong and growing daily, the RDC is a collective of creative heads with a passion for running and the exchange of ideas. We meet to run and explore the streets of London and other...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A D.I.Y. community of artists, designers, and engineers is exploring new creative ways to research brain activity using the open-source hardware, OpenBCI.

In this episode, we look at how this open-source brain computer interface aims to change the way people interact with machines, from using brain activity to control a toy spider to engaging a group in collective mind control.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How you can control things with your brain (and open-source hardware)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A D.I.Y. community of artists, designers, and engineers is exploring new creative ways to research brain activity using the open-source hardware, OpenBCI. In this episode, we look at how this open-source brain computer interface aims to change the way people interact with machines, from using brain activity to control a toy spider to engaging a group in collective mind control.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to control a machine using your mind

# data[].attributes.subject
How to control a machine using your mind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Imagine being able to make a machine do your bidding with your thoughts alone, no button pressing, typing, screen tapping or fumbling with remote controls, just brain power. Well, this sci-fi scenario could be closer to reality than you think.

Bill Kochevar's life was changed, seemingly irrevocably, when he was paralysed from the shoulders down following a cycling accident nearly a decade ago.

His future looked bleak.

But last year he was fitted with a brain-computer interface, or BCI, that enabled him to move his arm and hand for the first time in eight years.

Sensors were implanted in his brain, then over a four-month period Mr Kochevar trained the system by thinking about specific movements, such as turning his wrist or gripping something.

The sensors effectively learned which bits of the brain fired up - and in what sequence - for each movement.

Then, when 36 muscle-stimulating electrodes were implanted into his arm and hand, he was able to control its movements simply by thinking about what he wanted to do. Within weeks, he could feed himself again.

"This research has enhanced my ability to be able to do things," he told the BBC last year.

Research teams are also working on mind-controlled wheelchairs, and on using sensors to allow people who are completely paralysed to give yes-and-no answers through the power of thought.

But this technology doesn't just have health-related applications. Many tech companies are exploring brain control as a user interface.

Recently, for example, car maker Nissan unveiled a "brain-to-vehicle" headset that monitors a driver's brainwaves to work out what you're about to do - before you do it.

The aim of the system is to allow the vehicle to respond that split-second more quickly than a driver's natural reaction time.

On a mountain road with lots of hairpin bends for example, brain-to-vehicle technology should make it easier to keep the car under control, says Nissan. In tests, even very experienced drivers have performed noticeably better using the system, the firm claims.

Meanwhile, virtual reality (VR) firm Neurable has developed a mind-controlled computer game that it says should be hitting the arcades later this year. Players wearing a sensor-equipped VR headset simply need to focus their thoughts on an object to manipulate it: there's no hand controller at all.

At the more light-hearted end of the scale, EmojiMe has built a pair of brainwave-reading headphones that display the wearer's emotional state in the form of animated emojis. It was originally invented as a joke, its creators say.

And there are plenty of other mind-controlled devices in the pipeline.

The driving force behind research has come from the world of medicine, where great strides are being made in the use of BCIs. Implanting sensors on the surface of the brain gives them far greater sensitivity.

If all this sounds awfully like magic, here's how these devices work.

BCIs measure brain activity through an electroencephalogram (EEG) that's almost as sophisticated as those used in hospitals. The device picks up the tiny electrical signals produced when neurons in the brain communicate with each other.

These signals include alpha, beta, delta, theta and gamma waves, as well as various types of signal triggered by visual cues. Certain patterns of activity can be associated with particular thoughts, allowing the system to make predictions about the user's wishes.

In the case of the Nissan brain-to-vehicle system, for example, this means monitoring the signals associated with what's known as motion-related preparatory brain activity. This data is then correlated with information gathered by the vehicle itself.

"The headset would read this preparatory activity, and would pair that with the information the vehicle has from sensors and maps - for example, 'there is a turn coming up in 200 metres'," says spokesman Nick Maxfield.

"The AI uses this combination of the brainwaves and the sensor data to work out what to do - for example, 'there's a turn coming up, and she's started to think about turning - at this rate, she'll go into the turn a bit late, so let's start the turn now'."

For this reason, assures Mr Maxfield, there's no chance of causing an accident by simply thinking about steering or braking.

Neurable, developer of the world's first mind-controlled arcade game, claims that its system is the fastest non-invasive BCI and the most accurate at determining what the user wants to do, due to its machine learning system.

This interprets a set of brainwave patterns, known as event-related potentials (ERPs), to establish when a game player wants to act.

"ERPs are a brain response that occurs when a user is interested in a target selection - for example, a button, object, et cetera - and that target changes," says founder and chief executive Ramses Alcaide, adding that this response applies to any change at all, whether the object be moving, flashing or making a sound.

"We then leverage this response to give users control that can very much be likened to using a mental computer mouse."

The company has put its system to use in Awakening, a VR game developed in partnership with eStudiofuture. The game, a little like the Netflix series Stranger Things, involves children with telekinetic powers who escape by manipulating objects and battling enemies with thought alone.

Neurable has released a kit allowing games developers to use its technology, and says it expects brain sensors eventually to become a standard feature of VR headsets.

More Technology of Business

And tech companies are thinking big for the future.

Facebook and other companies are in the very early stages of developing "silent speech", enabling users to type words just by thinking them.

Microsoft, meanwhile, recently filed a patent for a machine learning system that would use EEG waves to launch and control computer applications.

Of course, one thing that is holding back really sophisticated uses is the need to use externally mounted electrodes. But brain implants are risky and expensive, making them suitable for only the most life-changing applications.

"Invasive BCIs are used in experiments with people with severe disabilities," says Mr Alcaide, "and it is a long way away before we can see a future where people sport invasive BCIs."

Follow Technology of Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter and Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to control a machine using your mind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Imagine being able to make a machine do your bidding with your thoughts alone, no button pressing, typing, screen tapping or fumbling with remote controls, just brain power. Well, this sci-fi scenario could be closer to reality than you think.

# data[].attributes.body
https://store.neurosky.com/
https://choosemuse.com/

https://www.emotiv.com/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
EMOTIV is the pioneer in research grade mobile brain sensing technologies.

# data[].attributes.body
file:///C:/Users/Lily/Downloads/Embodiment%20of%20Emotions.pdf

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/blog/open-your-palm-feel-dust-settling-there
Laura Grace Ford

Women Who Walk
Have you seen the women who walk? Actor and comedian Doon Mackichan goes for a wander with just a few of the women using walking as part of their art. What does this apparently simple activity mean for the work they create, for the places they traverse, and for the way we think about cities and bodies, space and power? From the Romantic Poets to contemporary Psychogeography, art and writing focused on walking has been seen as the preserve of a relatively exclusive and almost entirely male group. But what stories and ideas, experiences and people does this tradition exclude? Doon seeks out some alternative explanations of what it means to move through the world and reflects on the significance and power of an activity as varied as the people who practice it. In Tolworth, Kingston Upon Thames, Doon meets artist and poet Lucy Furlong and naturalist Alison Fure as they follow in the footsteps of local walker and nature writing icon Richard Jeffries. At Tooting Bec Lido, artist Amy Sharrocks introduces Doon to the pleasures of falling and the significance of urban water. In Manchester, Doon joins Dr Morag Rose and the Loiterers Resistance Movement for one of their monthly drifts across a changing city. And in Paris, Afghan performance artist Kubra Khademi recalls a walk that changed her life. Also featuring Professor Dee Heddon, Dean of the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities and the James Arnott Chair in Drama at University of Glasgow, co-founder with Misha Myers of The Walking Library. Presenter: Doon Mackichan Producer: Michael Umney The programme is devised by Dr Jo Norcup and produced in association with Geography Workshop. A Resonance production for BBC Radio 4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 - The Art of Now, Women Who Walk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Doon Mackichan wanders, falls and loiters with just a few of the women making walking art.

# data[].attributes.body
Convention on the Rights of the Child Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989 entry into force 2 September 1990, in accordance with article 49 Article 7 1. The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents. 2. States Parties shall ensure the implementation of these rights in accordance with their national law and their obligations under the relevant international instruments in this field, in particular where the child would otherwise be stateless. Article 8 1. States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference. 2. Where a child is illegally deprived of some or all of the elements of his or her identity, States Parties shall provide appropriate assistance and protection, with a view to re-establishing speedily his or her identity.

# data[].attributes.body
https://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00169590/document

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/i-feel-your-pain-the-neuroscience-of-empathy

# data[].attributes.headline
Conversation and discussion as practice

# data[].attributes.subject
Conversation and discussion as practice

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-learning/working-papers/art-practice-learning-love

https://waysofknowingresearch.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/socratic-dialogue-and-co-inquiry-exploring-cognitive-affective-and-embodied-ways-of-knowing/

https://waysofknowingresearch.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/ways-of-knowing-workshop-and-public-meeting-15th-january-2014/

http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/91439/1/When%20the%20WorkshopNov2015Final.pdf

https://repository.cardiffmet.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10369/8076/DIALOGUE%20AS%20PRACTICE%20AND%20UNDERSTANDING%20IN%20CONTEMPORARY%20ART%2010-2015.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8a1dsv5IXo