DataDownload: Crossing America in Google Street View

7 min readJul 18, 2020

DataDownload: Crossing America in Google Street View A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

In January 2012, the NYC Economic Development Corporation released a report titled — Media 2020. Commissioned by the Bloomberg Administration, it made some bold predictions about how media would evolve in New York City. And, it called for the formation of the NYC Media Lab. You can read the report here.

Eight years ago, Justin Hendrix left his job at The Economist to lead the NYC Media Lab. And today, as Justin so wisely put it — it is time for a transition. Writing in the RLab newsletter Justin wrote: “This summer is a time of transition in so many ways- including for me personally. After eight years at NYC Media Lab and three years developing RLab, I have resigned in order to pursue new challenges and opportunities. I’ll depart at the end of the summer.”

The NYC Media Lab has been an eight-year labor of love for Justin. The students, facility, agencies, and university partners have him to thank for what has been built.

Thank you Justin, we’re excited to see your next stop on your journey, and look forward to where it leads.

As always, please reach out with any comments, thoughts, ideas, or thoughts. Always enjoy hearing from you.

Steve (steve@nycmedialab.org)

Steven Rosenbaum
Managing Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org Must-Read How Artists Are Trying to Solve the World’s Problems

“I had a realization when my mom died. What would happen to her data in a country like the United States that doesn’t have coherent data privacy protections?”

When artist Dylan Gauthier’s mother passed away, he embarked on a mission to extricate her persona from the myriad online services that took and distributed her information online. “I know she would not want to live online after she died,” said Gauthier. His objective became the source material for Delete Me When I’m Gone, an upcoming tool kit for “anyone planning an afterlife washed clean of their digital persona.”

The project is funded by Brooklyn-based art and technology center Eyebeam, which is incubating 30 artists as they devise creative solutions to problems like surveillance, racial violence, and the pandemic. “Funded proposals include Maxwell Mutanda’s visualization of the mobile data gap in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to the internet is often expensive; Roopa Vasudevan’s field guide for artists looking to subvert surveillance technology; and Kyle McDonald’s critique of the controversial practice of predictive policing through machine learning.”

3 min read

Apple’s macOS 11.0 Big Sur will officially be released this fall — and it’s big news. For reference, OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) was released in 2001, marking Big Sur the first whole-number version bump in 19 years. The look and feel of the OS is overhauled — including every app icon. The Apply Pixel blog notes that this is a bigger deal than people realize.

“There’ll be snark,” the author admits; there will be people trying to put a label on the aesthetics. But essentially, this is a philosophical change from the minimalism introduced in iOS 7 in 2013, a style that was quickly adopted by the community and became virtually ubiquitous. Big Sur brings back skeuomorph to UI design, and, the author argues, brings back the fun.

9 min read

Lionbridge AI interviews ML researcher Xander Steenbrugge, who recently showcased his Neural Synesthesia project, a striking collection of GAN/human-generated audiovisual experiences. Steenbrugge describes the technical details of the system, as well as the potential he sees in the future of AI-based creative projects:

“A full training run usually requires a few days to converge. Very quickly though, the model starts returning samples that are often unexpected and surprising. This sets an intriguing feedback loop into motion, where I change the code of the model, the model responds with different samples, I react, and it goes on. The creative process is no longer fully under my control; I am effectively collaborating with an AI system to create these works.”

8 min read Read More This Guy Is Crossing the Country in Google Street View, One Click at a Time Last month Harvard sophomore Uday Schultz decided to fulfill his childhood dream of driving from Seattle to NYC. Without a car and a pandemic raging, he settled for clicking his way through state borders in Google Street View. Vice details his bedroom journey, which “has taken up a life of its own.” So far, Schultz has been clicking for a month, but doesn’t count this as a road trip:

“‘Street View definitely loses you something, even if it’s just the smell of the air. Driving by a paper mill has a smell. You lose that smell.’ But he thinks it’s better than nothing at all.”

5 min read Read More Publishers Are Wary of the Latest Attempt to Standardize GDPR Compliance

Internet Advertising Bureau Europe and IAB Tech Lab’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) 2.0 is going into effect August 15. TCF 2.0 is a revamped version of the 2016 framework, and “allows each part of the digital advertising value chain to collectively meet the consent provisions of GDPR by providing a mechanism by which people can give or withhold their consent for their data to be used in specified ways,” according to IAB’s Filip Sedefov.

Even though the reworked framework is supposed to be fairer towards publishers, industry leaders are still wary, particularly because Google is involved: “Google controls so much of the ad market, having it join TCF is key to the framework’s success. But publishers are still keen for more details on how exactly this will look while the clock is ticking down.”

One publishing exec said that “Google’s policies are shifting faster than a gearbox in a Formula 1 car so it is hard to work out how that side of compliance looks…. We should not be having our compliance dictated by a vendor, no matter how big.”

3 min read

Read More What We’re Watching Justin Hendrix On Stage

Executive Director at NYC Media Lab and RLab Justin Hendrix will be leaving his two roles to pursue new opportunities soon. A short tribute video for our friend, who’s been with the Lab for eight years! Catch his final signoff in tomorrow’s RLab newsletter.

MACHINES+MEDIA Episode #3

Join The Bloc CEO @RiledMeUp highlights the importance of using data responsibly when making real decisions that affect real humans.

3 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Fake News — Into The Void

Fake News — Into The Void

In this episode, the Wild Man exposes the Big Brother Police State, and how they are using drones to spy on you at all times!

Listen Now Virtual Events Virtual Event: The New Normal: Cybersecurity
Date: July 21, 12PM
Join the NYU Data Future Lab and Orrick to find out about cybersecurity, data and privacy laws, and cyber risks in a remote environment. Register Here.

Virtual Event: Black-led Startups Pitch Competition
Date: July 22, 5:30PM-8PM
Join Entre virtually for their Black-led Startups Pitch Competition. Six startups will pitch to a panel of investor judges and hundreds of entrepreneurs. Register Here. A Deeper Look Data Structures & Algorithms I Actually Used Working at Tech Companies

Gergely Orosz — who worked on Uber’s payments system, Skype for XBox One, and other cool projects — wrote up a deep dive of algorithms and data structure he actually used at tech companies, from graph traversing and sorting at Skype to cryptography and probability theory at Uber.