Model Airplanes

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a book almost entirely bereft of photos and graphics. “There’s just a note from Jane Jacobs that basically says—and I’m paraphrasing here—’if you want to experience a city, go out onto the street. See it,'” director Matt Tyrnauer tells me. In a sense, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City accomplishes just that. 

Debuting to the world at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on September 9th, the documentary offers a rare visual window into Jacobs’ work within the context of mid-century urban planning and social politics. Chronicling the legendary urban theorist’s thought and activism in New York, the film frames Jacobs’ thought through interviews, archival footage, and plenty of quotes. Most importantly, however, it successfully frames it in the visual logic of cinema. 

Jane Jacobs, image via the Library of Congress

Aerial shots accompany discussions of Robert Moses and and Le Corbusier, but Jane Jacobs’ voice comes to us with intimate views—both archival and contemporary—of life on street. We see Moses tower over grand scale models, admiring his creation from above. For architect Le Corbusier, meanwhile, a view of Paris from an airplane window inspired the tower-in-the-park model intended to emancipate residents from the real and perceived miseries of city life.

Tyrnaeur shows us these views from afar, and we come to understand the city as a mechanized abstraction. For Moses and Le Corbusier, the city is a machine, a sort of computer where individual people are little more than

Article source: http://urbantoronto.ca/news/2016/09/citizen-jane-battle-city-premiering-tiff

Professor Jim Zhu’s office in Stocker Center is crammed with materials from projects new and old. Long equations fill a whiteboard on one wall. On another are photographs of a space shuttle in flight — a reminder of his time working for NASA.

On his desk, between stacks of paper, are a couple of model cars and airplanes. They were gifts from his two children long ago, and serve as a reminder of the project that has consumed him for over a decade: fusing the two vehicles together to create a flying car.

“There is a real need for something like this,” Zhu said. “It can lead to an improved quality of life, it can make getting around easier. And it’s also a good way to motivate students because it’s fun and challenging.”

Zhu said the concept of a flying car is an old one. Henry Ford made an attempt as early as 1928. Zhu has a book containing every flying car design patented up to the ’90s, which is when he first attempted to build a flying car with his students at Louisiana State University. His first prototype, the size of a remote control car, took flight in 2004.

Since then, Zhu and his students at Ohio University have made progress. He and one of his students are currently using a remote control car to test technology for a self-driving car. He is also working to develop an autonomous plane. The ultimate goal is to fuse the two autonomous vehicles together to create

Article source: http://www.thepostathens.com/article/2016/09/flying-car-russ-college-professor

JAY, Vt. –

From the tram, you can see a bird’s-eye view of Jay Peak resort. But if you rewind the clock for this story, that resort wasn’t even an idea yet and summer greenery was covered in snow. A sudden snow squall Nov. 10, 1943, caused a Royal Canadian Air Force plane to hit the mountain and make its mark on local history.

“We’re going to be heading straight that way, right to this open area over here. Just after the ridgeline starts to drop down,” said Derek Bond, Jay Peak trail crew.

The wreckage is off Valhalla, a black diamond trail that even hikers avoid in the summer. It’s steep, rough and unmarked. So, the remnants were gradually lost to time, until Bond and his team unearthed them a week ago. 

After years of harsh weather, the twisted heap of rusted metal blends in and at first glance could be mistaken for old logging equipment. But just feet away from where skiers cut through the trees each winter was something much more unusual.

“Once we realized it was a plane it was like, ‘Whoa, we have a totally different scenario on our hands,'” said Bond. “You’re not really expecting to find a plane crash in the middle of the woods, let alone one from the early ’40s.” 

While finding the wreckage was one thing, tracing its history was another. And that’s where social media stepped in. When Jay Peak posted the

Article source: http://www.wcax.com/story/33051240/jay-peak-crews-uncover-piece-of-wwii-history

Matteo Pasquinelli

To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labor force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible.
—Simon Schaffer

If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.
—Alan Turing

Metacognition in the Twenty-First Century California Adult

The idea that “machines think” displays an unintended solidarity with the animism of less industrialized cultures, which have long recognized autonomous minds in nonhuman entities. Artificial intelligence is animism for the rich, we might say. Or alternatively: animism is a sort of artificial intelligence made in the absence of electricity.¹ The recent narrative which proclaims the imminent arrival of a Technological Singularity (according to which computing machines would become self-conscious) seems typical of the human tendency to anthropomorphize the unknown. What was once attributed to the obscure and infinite night is now projected onto the abstract abyss of computation, data centers, and machine learning. Rendering the uncanny (Unheimlich) familiar (heimlich) by way of mythology is an established survival method for the human animal in the act of mapping its territory. In a hostile environment, the utility of suspicion towards

Article source: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/abnormal-encephalization-in-the-age-of-machine-learning/