The future of photography is computational, not optical. This is a massive shift in paradigm and one that every company that makes or uses cameras is currently grappling with. There will be repercussions in traditional cameras like SLRs (rapidly giving way to mirrorless systems), in phones, in embedded devices and everywhere that light is captured and turned into images.

Sometimes this means that the cameras we hear about will be much the same as last year’s, as far as megapixel counts, ISO ranges, f-numbers and so on. That’s okay. With some exceptions these have gotten as good as we can reasonably expect them to be: Glass isn’t getting any clearer, and our vision isn’t getting any more acute. The way light moves through our devices and eyeballs isn’t likely to change much.

What those devices do with that light, however, is changing at an incredible rate. This will produce features that sound ridiculous, or pseudoscience babble on stage, or drained batteries. That’s okay, too. Just as we have experimented with other parts of the camera for the last century and brought them to varying levels of perfection, we have moved onto a new, non-physical “part” which nonetheless has a very important effect on the quality and even possibility of the images we take.

The present of photography is already computational, it’s always been, since the advent of the digital camera: from the very moment an imaging sensor’s output signal is digitized, billions of operations are performed to turn a stream of electrical levels into a colorless bitmap, then reconstructing colors by means of interpolation, correcting gamma, white balance, lens aberrations, reducing noise, compressing the image by discarding information not visible by the human eye, etc., just to name a few basic operations performed by a typical image processing pipeline. There is no such thing as #nofilter.

What we are seeing now is an unprecedented rate of innovation in image processing enabled by huge advancements in computing power and integration, bound to marginalize the traditional photographic industry.

via techcrunch.com

It’ll be some time before computational notebooks replace PDFs in scientific journals, because that would mean changing the incentive structure of science itself. Until journals require scientists to submit notebooks, and until sharing your work and your data becomes the way to earn prestige, or funding, people will likely just keep doing what they’re doing.

It is incredibly depressing that we live in a world where scientific knowledge is still shared mostly by means of PDF documents, but the title of this article is misleading at best. The future of science communication will not be built on yet another proprietary document format. On the other hand, the Web platform has all the technical capabilities needed to create any sort of “computational” papers, but it still lacks appropriate authoring tools to empower scientists to do it by themselves.
The reports of the scientific paper’s death have been (unfortunately) greatly exaggerated.

via theatlantic.com

Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.
Faced with two competing hypotheses, we are likely to choose the most complex one. That’s usually the option with the most assumptions and regressions. As a result, when we need to solve a problem, we may ignore simple solutions — thinking “that will never work” — and instead favor complex ones.
To understand complexity bias, we need first to establish the meaning of three key terms associated with it: complexity, simplicity, and chaos.

Nice piece on the risks of being seduced by unnecessary complexity, especially in the broader context of language. It reminded me of an old essay by Italo Calvino, “L’antilingua”—literally: “the anti-language”—in which he comically shows the effects of replacing simple words with increasingly grotesque jargon. To paraphrase Calvino, the anti-language is the language of people who prefer saying “utilize” instead of “use”, people who are scared of showing familiarity with the subject of their talk. According to him, speaking the anti-language is a sign of being out of touch with life, and ultimately represents the death of language itself.

via fs.blog