Month: June 2015

Metaphor map charts the images that structure our thinking

The Map also uncovers some revealing metaphorical clusters, such as the number of links between textiles and social structure. We describe social networks in terms of weaving and spinning; something is defined as “tweedy” if it is rustic, or “chintzy” if petit bourgeois. Textiles also influence the way that we talk about imagination: we “spin a yarn” and “embroider our thoughts”.

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How the internet still fails disabled people

According to the Office for National Statistics, in May 2015, 27% of disabled adults had never used the internet, compared to 11% of non-disabled adults. In 2013, Ofcom said that factors beyond age and income, possibly related to the individual’s disability, contribute to limited internet access.

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Dundee: from black sheep of Scottish cities to ‘living cultural experiment’

Indeed, despite pockets of severe deprivation, Dundee’s story is that of a city increasingly defined by its culture and creativity. With a population of just 150,000, it was long seen as the black sheep of Scotland’s cities, languishing behind the architectural drama of Edinburgh and the wealth of Aberdeen, its post-industrial problems often overshadowed by those of much larger Glasgow. But this image is changing.

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Yes, androids do dream of electric sheep

What do machines dream of? New images released by Google give us one potential answer: hypnotic landscapes of buildings, fountains and bridges merging into one. The pictures, which veer from beautiful to terrifying, were created by the company’s image recognition neural network, which has been “taught” to identify features such as buildings, animals and objects in photographs. They were created by feeding a picture into the network, asking it to recognise a feature of it, and modify the picture to emphasise the feature it recognises. That modified picture is then fed back into the network, which is again tasked to recognise features and emphasise them, and so on. Eventually, the feedback loop modifies the picture beyond all recognition.

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