Over the weekend I launched Ring™ Log, which is simultaneously a critique of surveillance culture and a parody of machine vision in suburbia. In the interactive artist statement I call Ring™ Log an experiment in speculative surveillance. "Speculative" in this context means what if? What if Amazon's Ring™ doorbell cams began integrating AI-powered object detection… Continue reading Speculative Surveillance with Ring™ Log
Tag: Amazon.com
Amazon.com ending Amazon Associates Program for North Carolina
Amazon.com sent me a message this morning, announcing that the company is has "little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates" because of an "unconstitutional tax collection scheme" due to be passed by the North Carolina General Assembly. Not that I make any significant amount of money from my referrals to Amazon,… Continue reading Amazon.com ending Amazon Associates Program for North Carolina
Fantastic writing in reviews of milk on amazon
Via Dennis Jerz via Boing Boing, word of hundreds of fake reviews for a real product on Amazon, a gallon of Tuscan whole milk. Jerz imagines quite rightly that the novelty of ordering milk from an online bookstore is the impetus for these entertaining reviews, which range in style from poetic to surreal. Many of… Continue reading Fantastic writing in reviews of milk on amazon
The Amazing Amazon Mechanical Turk
Clive over at Collision Detection reports on the new Amazon service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allows companies to hire (via Amazon) "Turks" who, in their spare time, do seemingly mindless tasks online, for example, tag photographs of shoes according to color. The tasks are mindless--but only for humans who have minds. For computers, the… Continue reading The Amazing Amazon Mechanical Turk
MTO Database from Amazon
I'll take a break from my travel blogging to mention Applefritter's astonishing article Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. Individuals' public Amazon "wishlists" are, collectively, essentially a gigantic aggregate of data, waiting to be mined, and in this post, Tom Owad details how he used the wishlists to track the reading preferences of… Continue reading MTO Database from Amazon
Search Inside This Book
Like many avid readers and scholars I am thoroughly enamored of Amazon.com's Search Inside the Book feature. The feature debuted October 23, 2003 with the complete text of more than 120,000 books. I can't find any recent data on how large the digital archive has grown in the past several months, but the folks at… Continue reading Search Inside This Book