For the last 2 weekends, I finally got the time and head-space to finish the project. I also used it as a learning opportunity to experiment with polymer project by google. You can see my project at mexitecture.com and see the code on GitHub.
Architecture is the manifestation of the aspirations of societies. Hence, it is captivating to discover how people shape the cities and the buildings they choose to erect. I first got acquainted with the architecture of Mexico City through bright facades that frequent Instagram. Yet, after a more close and deliberate encounter, it saddens me those iconic bright walls do very little to describe the ambiance of the city.
Blessed with the near-perfect climate, Mexico City buildings are a hodgepodge of proud reincarnation of the remains of Aztec, the yearning for Spanish heritage as represented by flower-studded barrack courtyards, the ingenious take on mid-century modernism and eccentric variations on contemporary architecture.
Mexitecture is my effort to compile the most interesting milestones in the architecture of Mexico City: to highlight the ‘crown jewels’ as well as to re-surface it’s ‘classics’. I hope this project will become breadcrumbs for the curious adventurers ready to discover the man-made beautiful environment of Mexico City.
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[An allegory of the British Empire | State Library of NSW](https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/blogs/allegory-british-empire)
The Turing Test is a deceptively simple method of determining whether a machine can demonstrate human intelligence: If a machine can engage in a conversation with a human without being detected as a machine, it has demonstrated human intelligence. While it is fundamentally flawed it doesn’t mean it cannot be improved or modified further. Here are proposed alternatives that could help us distinguish bot from a human.
Winograd Schema Challenge Rather than base the test on the sort of short free-form conversation suggested by the Turing Test, the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) poses a set of multiple-choice questions that have a particular form. Two examples follow; the second, from which the WSC gets its name, is due to Terry Winograd. A human who answers the first questions correctly would likely use his knowledge about the typical size of objects and his ability to do spatial reasoning.
I. The trophy would not fit in the brown suitcase because it was too *big* (/small/). What was too *big* (/small/)?
Answer 0: the trophy
Answer 1: the suitcase
II. The town councilors refused to give the demonstrators a permit because they *feared* (/advocated/) violence. Who *feared* (/advocated/) violence?
Answer 0: the town councilors
Answer 1: the demonstrators
I. The trophy would not fit in the brown suitcase because it was too *big* (/small/). What was too *big* (/small/)?
Answer 0: the trophy
Answer 1: the suitcase
II. The town councilors refused to give the demonstrators a permit because they *feared* (/advocated/) violence. Who *feared* (/advocated/) violence?
Answer 0: the town councilors
Answer 1: the demonstrators2. The Marcus Test: [What Comes After the Turing Test? | The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-comes-after-the-turing-test)
3. The Lovelace Test 2.0 The testers are people who know they’re interacting with an AI, and they give it a task with two components. First, they ask for a creative artifact such as a story, poem, or picture. And secondly, they provide a criterion. For example: “Tell me a story about a cat that saves the day,” or “Draw me a picture of a man holding a penguin.” If the judge is satisfied with the result, he or she makes another, more difficult, request. This goes on until the AI is judged to have failed a task, or the judge is satisfied that it has demonstrated sufficient intelligence. The multiple rounds mean you get a score as opposed to a pass or fail. And we can record a judge’s various requests so that they can be tested against many different AIs.
4. The Visual Turing Test - try identifying the objects and where they are. In this test, the system needs to reason about what it identifies on the image. While currently, computers are getting pretty good at identifying a dog vs cat on the image, the question if it can reason on where the dog is relative to the cat, the chair and the table.
5. The Reverse Turing Test -is a Turing test in which the objective or roles between computers and humans have been reversed.
This week I spend a lot of time thinking about modularity and final read Atomic Design book by Brad Frost (that has been on my to-read list for a really really long time) Atomic design - a framework developed by brad Frost in order to create and maintain digital design systems, allowing your team to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster. He borrows organizational principles from chemistry and makes an argument that to create the whole, you need to create the parts of that whole.
“By taking the time to organize the parts, you can now create the whole in a more realistic, deliberate, and efficient manner. Creating a library of your available materials allows you to approach the project in a more methodical way, and saves immense amounts of time in the process. Rather than rummaging through a haphazard. The pile of bricks and burning time reinventing patterns, you can create an organized system of components that will help produce better work in a shorter amount of time.” - Brad Frost
“Once we get past a tedium of building the same thing over and over again can focus our energy on more worthwhile tasks like accessibility, performance and iteration. We can work on the fun stuff rather than tedious things.” - Micah Godbolt
I absolutely love contemporary things made in traditional execution or traditions with contemporary update. And this week I absolutely enjoyed the screening of relatively recent events in a more traditional genre: opera. These days Metropolitan Opera is making it’s recording accessible to public and I have enjoyed the screening of “Nixon In China”. Think about it, an opera about President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972. And while NYT critics claim that “nothing really happened during that diplomatic journey”, I find the dramatization of recent living memory absolutely engrossing, as compared to more traditional productions of 16th century typically about love and war and frequently based on myth and legends with fictional characters .
Some other minimalist operas to add to add to “to-watch/to attend list” where characters portrayed in the opera were alive at the time of the premiere performance:
* The Death of Klinghoffer - the opera is based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, and the hijackers’ murder of a 69-year-old Jewish-American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer , who was wheelchair-bound.
* Doctor Atomic-focuses on the great stress and anxiety experienced by those at Los Alamos while the test of the first atomic bomb
* Dead Man Walking - based on Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir about her fight for the soul of a condemned murderer
* Anna Nicole - based on the life of American model Anna Nicole Smith
Speaking of cultural Entertainment - here are the things to indulge in, that are accessible for free to anyone with internet access. how amazing is it, think about it - even a couple of years ago one could only see this only by purchasing a very very expensive ticket in major metropolitan areas, that was not even easy to acquire. Now it is one click away. For free. Astonishing.
- Plays: Globe Player | Shakespeare’s Globe
- Travel: Google Maps Treks – About – Google Maps
- Opera: Metropolitan Opera | Nightly Met Opera Streams
- Free Courses Online /(450 free courses by Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale)/.
- Free Audiobooks By Audible /(Hundreds of free titles)/.
- NY Public Library* E-Book Central /(300,000+ free e-books)/.
- R&D Papers: ACM Digital Library
Museum Virtual Tours
- Musee D’Orsay* Virtual Tour
- Uffizi Gallery Virtual Tour
- Frick Collection Virtual Tour
- British Museum Virtual Tour
- The Met Museum
- Chateau de Versailles Virtual Tour
- Van Gogh Museum Virtual Tour