A new poetic video, filmed in the door of the desert, is called “L’envol” or “The Flight”. An advertisement for Air France, it prompts the viewer to reflect on trust and risk.

Suchablog gives credit to French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, of the ballet “Le Parc” (“inspired by the story of a woman’s resistance to love“). The dancers on a 400 sq meter mirror in the cold are Benjamin Millepied and Virginie Caussin. Stéphane Fontaine was the photographer. The music is an adagio of the concerto No. 23 for piano by Mozart, performed by “Les Siècles” Symphony Orchestra featuring pianist Vanessa Wagner, conducted by François-Xavier Roth.

The University of Nebraska at Kearney’s new hire in poetry does not hide the fact that he started out as a hacker:

Poet Kwame Dawes shared selections from his collection of 15 published books along with the stories behind the poems Thursday.

“I learned to write for the theater by befriending all the janitors and security guys in the theaters in Kingston,” the former Jamaican resident said. “I couldn’t afford tickets, so the janitors would let me in so I could watch rehearsals.”

Here is his poem “Storm” for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

The NYT has proof that news about the weather and sports needs no human touch, if all the reader wants is a list of facts loosely strung together

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

Computers writing prose and poetry and news have been around for as long as the Internet itself. Have you tried the Elizabethan insult generator or the random prose generator?

The important shift in this story is that people who want to make a high return on their investment are getting interested in pushing to make a sizable profit from the automation of language. The issue thus becomes whether pressure to build this new market will bleed straight into phishers and spammers who have already proven they know how to use automation to turn the news into easy money.

The NYT shamefully gives no credit to attackers who have been successfully composing text from automation for years, nor do they mention the risks from blindly accepting computer-generated text as worthy of consumption.

The few sports writers I read have a specific style and sense of humor. I’m not interested in the data on the game, since I could get that anywhere, but rather how they interpret and present the information based on their particular/unique view of the world.

Update: And in the end a computer that has a particular view of the world will still be just a shallow reflection of the person who programmed it. My presentation at BSidesLV 2011 (2011: A Cloud Odyssey) addressed this issue in great depth. I’ve been asked a lot lately to post the slides from that talk so I’ll upload them soon.