October Conference Count-Down:
1.5 months: Special Session Proposal Deadline (1 December 2016)
4 months: Paper or Abstract Submission Deadline (14 February 2016)
5 months: Confirmation of Acceptance (14 March 2016)
6.5 months: Complete Papers Due (30 April 2016)
9 months: Conference Kick-Off (13 July 2016)
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"Digital Humanities": As part of the "Big Ideas" program (Radio National, Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Paul Barclay presents a discussion of a research field that has emerged at "the intersection of computing and the humanities ... called 'Digital Humanities.'" "This academic discipline embraces a variety of topics, from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets." On the program, "Willard McCarty from King's College London explains two specific features of digital humanities; modelling and simulation. If modelling, so he says, is what we do but mostly don't know that we do, simulation is what we could do but mostly haven't begun to do." (Image: / Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)
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"Two Paths Toward our Robot Future": In this New Yorker article, Mark O'Connell discusses John Markoff's new book Machines of Loving Grace: the Quest for Common Ground between Humans and Robots. As O'Connell explains, "Markoff invokes Norbert Wiener [as] ... a speaker of unpalatable truths about the potential consequences of technology’s ascent. He warned that automation could reduce the value of a “routine” factory employee to the point that “he is not worth hiring at any price,” and that we might therefore be “in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.” In the past, it has overwhelmingly been blue-collar workers whose jobs have been at risk from the mechanization of labor; the progress of artificial intelligence now is such that the intellectual labor of the white-collar professions will soon be equally under threat from intelligent, or at least competent, software." (Image: London Express/Getty)
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Mark Zuckerberg and the End of Language: In this article from The Atlantic, William Davies explores the cybernetics roots of a new push to develop wearable "affective computing technologies," which remove communication from the realm of language and instead promise access to "'real' emotions and 'real' desires, accompanied by ways of transmitting these via non-verbal codes." "In the legacy of the cyberneticians," Davies argues, "the purveyors of 'smart' technologies promise a form of perfectly predictable interaction between individual and environment, in which nothing needs to be said along the way." (Image: Robert Galbraith/Reuters)
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This is one of a series of Conference newsletters.
To be added to the mailing list, please e-mail
NorbertWiener-2016@unimelb.edu.au
To submit ideas for inclusion in future installments of "Wiener in the Media,"
please contact Heather A. Love, Newsletter Editor
Heather.Love@usd.edu
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