Tag: attention

Spotify removes ‘hate bands’ from its streaming library

You can add Spotify to the growing list of companies taking a stand against hateful, racist content. In the last few days we’ve seen Google and GoDaddy cancel a white supremacist website domain, Facebook and Reddit ban hate groups, Discord shut down racist accounts and GoFundMe remove a campaign in support of the man accused of driving a car into protesters this weekend in Charlottesville. Now Billboard reports that Spotify is removing “hate bands” from its streaming service. On Monday, Digital Music News published a story that pointed out 37 white supremacist bands that could be found on Spotify. Many of those bands were listed in a 2014 Southern Poverty Law Center report that named 54 racist bands whose music could be listened to on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon while others were found through the help of Spotify recommendations. A few months after the SPLC’s report was published, the center noted that iTunes had removed a number of the bands while Spotify and Amazon had not. A Spotify spokesperson told Billboard, “Spotify takes immediate action to remove any such material as soon as it has been brought to our attention. We are glad to have been alerted to this content – and have already removed many of the bands identified today, whilst urgently reviewing the remainder.” The company is also reportedly considering removing these sorts of bands from its algorithm-based recommendations and has put together a new “Patriotic Passion” playlist. We’ve reached out to Spotify for comment and will update this post if we receive more information. Via: The Verge Source: Billboard

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Spotify removes ‘hate bands’ from its streaming library

Waze’s ‘Order Ahead’ is a quicker way to grab food on the go

Waze is a valuable travel buddy because of the many ways it can assist you on the road. The navigation app helps drivers avoid traffic , it integrates with Spotify , and it has a growing ride-sharing platform . In an effort to aid users in all commute-related endeavors, drivers can now place a Dunkin’ Donuts order right from the Waze app. Dunkin’ is the first eatery included in Waze’s new “Order Ahead” feature, which made its debut as part of a software update made available today. The ordering process seems clunky initially, but easy enough to use once it’s set up. First, users pick their favorite items via the Dunkin’ Donuts app, using the existing on-the-go ordering feature. Then, the Waze app will locate the nearest Dunkin’ and allow users to place their preset order with one tap. Google, which owns Waze, says that more companies will be added to Order Ahead soon. As The Verge notes , restaurants like McDonald’s , Taco Bell and Starbucks have mobile ordering capabilities in their apps, so it seems likely Waze will integrate with them at some point. Order Ahead is meant to be used before you hit the road for obvious safety reasons, but as The Verge points out, the feature could be particularly valuable in self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicle technology is quickly evolving , so adding features like these could make Waze more versatile in situations when operating a car doesn’t require as much of our attention. Order Ahead is a promising addition to Waze, but it could also be a storage nightmare if apps for each supported restaurant need to be installed on your phone. If Waze eventually manages true integration with all of your favorite dining destinations, though, it could become a killer all-in-one driving app. Images: Mike Mozart via Flickr (Dunkin’ Donuts sign, lead); Waze via Dunkin Donuts (App screenshot) Via: The Verge Source: Dunkin’ Donuts

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Waze’s ‘Order Ahead’ is a quicker way to grab food on the go

1,000-year-old Native American structure was designed using sophisticated math

Sherry Towers A millennium ago, the Pueblo peoples were constructing incredible monuments and cities throughout the US Southwest. Among the most impressive structures they left behind is called the Sun Temple, in what is now Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park . Probably the location for meetings and ceremonies, the Sun Temple is an enormous D-shaped building with walls that were once 11-15 feet high. Now, an applied mathematician has discovered something intriguing about the proportions used to lay out the temple and its internal structures. Physicist Sherry Towers is part of the Mathematical, Computational, and Modeling Sciences Group at Arizona State University, and she occasionally takes time away from physics to focus on the way mathematical patterns shape the social world. She got interested in the Sun Temple site because many archaeologists believe its structure might reveal whether the Pueblo peoples were using it for astronomy. But as Towers pored over satellite images of the area from Google Maps, the Sun Temple’s general shape kept drawing her attention. “I noticed in my site survey that the same measurements kept popping up over and over again,” she said in a release . “When I saw that the layout of the site’s key features also involved many geometrical shapes, I decided to take a closer look.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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1,000-year-old Native American structure was designed using sophisticated math

MIT Media Lab’s Wearable, Interactive Snakebot Experiments

It’s often said that “Children are our future, ” but that phrase never mentions robot snakes. There are enough people working on robot snakes that “Robot snakes are our future” sounds more relevant. Carnegie Mellon snakebot OC Robotics snakebot Tesla snakebot The latest in Robot Snake News comes to us from MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group , whom we naively gave a Core77 Design Award to in 2014, not realizing that they would turn their attention towards controlling us with robot snakes. It is too late for us to take the award back, so we may as well look at what they’re working on. First off, the research team behind the LineFORM project have sneakily changed the word “snake” to “line” to throw us off the trail. Here’s their description: We propose a novel Shape Changing Interface which has the form of a “Line”. Lines have several interesting characteristics from the perspective of interaction design: abstractness of data representation; a variety of inherent interactions / affordances; and constraints as boundaries or borderlines. By utilising such aspects of lines together with the added capability of shape-shifting, we present various applications in different scenarios such as shape changing cords, mobiles, body constraints, and data manipulation to investigate the design space of line-based shape changing interfaces. The word substitution is understandable, because the paragraph is more frightening when you read it with the word “snake” where it’s supposed to be. (Try it.) In any case, they’ve come up with some novel applications: LineFORM from Tangible Media Group on Vimeo. Notice that even the developer himself looks terrified when picking up the “phone.” You don’t have to be an expert in body language to understand that he’s wondering if it’s going to wrap itself around his neck, or grab his glasses off of his face and snap them in displeasure. My robophobia aside, I do think the lamp bit was neat, and I imagine that if tamed the monster could create a useful work lamp in a tough-to-reach spot. I also dug the “expressive cord” bit revealing data transfer, and I’d like to see more—for example, when your external hard drive is full, I’d like to see a mouse-sized lump travel down the cord, cause a choke, then have to travel back into your computer. The project’s full name, by the way, is ” LineFORM: Actuated Curve Interfaces for Display, Interaction, and Constraint ” [PDF]. Again, there’s nothing in there about snakes, robots, or children.

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MIT Media Lab’s Wearable, Interactive Snakebot Experiments