technology:cgi

  • Fish tales : Combating #fake_science in popular media - ScienceDirect
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0964569115000903

    Ocean & Coastal Management
    Volume 115, October 2015, Pages 88-91
    (article accessible)

    Abstract
    What role should scientist play in correcting bad science, fake science, and pseudoscience presented in popular media? Here, we present a case study based on fake documentaries and discuss effective social media strategies for scientists who want to engage with the public on issues of bad science, pseudoscience, and fake science. We identify two tracks that scientists can use to maximize the broad dissemination of corrective and educational content: that of an audience builder or an expert resource. Finally, we suggests that scientists familiarize themselves with common sources of misinformation within their field, so that they can be better able to respond quickly when factually inaccurate content begins to spread.

    Deux citations en exergue :

    1. Introduction
    A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
    ∼Almost certainly not Mark Twain.

    Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn, and she has neither vigour nor activity enough to pursue and overtake her enemy.
    ∼Thomas Francklin, Sermons on Various Subjects, 1787

    Et les cas pratiques étudiés (et contrés) : la preuve de l’existence des sirènes et d’un complot gouvernemental pour la masquer suivie de la preuve de la survie d’un mégalodon (requin géant - jusqu’à 20 mètres, le plus grand prédateur marin, disparu au Miocène…)

    2. Mermaids and megalodons: the rise and fall of the fake discovery documentary
    In May, 2012, Animal Planet, a Discovery Communications property, released Mermaids: The Body Found. The fictitious documentary, which presents the case that mermaids are not only real, but that there is an active government conspiracy to hide their existence, aired with a minimal post-credit disclaimer and was proceeded by heavy promotional material suggesting that the program evidence-based. To project credibility, Mermaids featured actual government organizations, particularly the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), implicating real scientists in a fake conspiracy. NOAA experienced a backlash from this production and issued a statement distancing itself from the show (NOAA, 2012). Several NOAA scientists reported being verbally accosted as a result of their perceived complicity in the “mermaid conspiracy” (personal communications to Shiffman and Thaler).

    Mermaids: The Body Found launched a new generation of fake documentaries, produced with the trappings of educational programming, including high production value, stunning visuals, and compelling narration. Since then, Discovery Communications’ networks have aired a follow-up to the initial fake mermaid documentary, which went on to become Animal Planet’s highest grossing show (ABC News, 2013), as well as two that promote the claim that the extinct Carcharocles megalodon (Pimiento and Clements, 2014) is extant and predating on humans. These fake documentaries followed a very particular style, weaving real science, natural history, and current events with fabricated images, CGI video, and interviews with actors playing experts, witnesses, and government officials. In each case, the fake documentaries created conflict by inserting real government agencies into the narrative as antagonists, and implicated working scientists in fictional conspiracies.

  • Goodbye Uncanny Valley on Vimeo
    https://vimeo.com/237568588

    It’s 2017 and computer graphics have conquered the Uncanny Valley, that strange place where things are almost real... but not quite. After decades of innovation, we’re at the point where we can conjure just about anything with software. The battle for photoreal CGI has been won, so the question is... what happens now?

    CREDITS:

    Written and animated by Alan Warburton with the support of Tom Pounder and Wieden + Kennedy.
    Music by Cool 3D World (cool3dworld.com/)
    Special thanks to: Leanne Redfern, Nico Engelbrecht, Iain Tait, Indiana Matine, Katrina Sluis, David Surman, Jacob Gaboury and Daniel Rourke.

    Animated backgrounds generously provided by:

    • Quixel (quixel.se/)
    • Katarina Markovic (youtube.com/channel/UCcr4QTtAK9N96pf_Z_zVqWg)
    • Roman Senko (vimeo.com/rendan)

    Featuring work by:

    • Al and Al (alandal.co.uk/)
    • Albert Omoss (omoss.io/)
    • Alex McLeod (alxclub.com/)
    • Barry Doupe (barrydoupe.ca/)
    • Claudia Hart (claudiahart.com/)
    • Cool 3D World (cool3dworld.com/)
    • Dave Fothergill (vimeo.com/davefothergillvfx)
    • Dave Stewart (vimeo.com/davegrafix)
    • Drages Animation (youtube.com/user/drakhean)
    • El Popo Sangre (vimeo.com/elpoposangre)
    • Eva Papamargariti (evapapamargariti.tumblr.com/)
    • Filip Tarczewski (vimeo.com/ftarczewski)
    • Geoffrey Lillemon (geoffreylillemon.com/website/)
    • Jacolby Satterwhite (jacolby.com/home.html)
    • Jesse Kanda (jessekanda.com/)
    • John Butler (vimeo.com/user3946359)
    • Jonathan Monaghan (jonmonaghan.com/)
    • Jun Seo Hahm (vimeo.com/junseohahm)
    • Kathleen Daniel (duh-real.com/)
    • Katie Torn (katietorn.com/index.html)
    • Kim Laughton (kimlaughton.tumblr.com/)
    • Kouhei Nakama (kouheinakama.com/)
    • LuYang (luyang.asia/)
    • Mike Pelletier (mikepelletier.net/)
    • Nic Hamilton (nichamilton.info/)
    • Pussykrew (hybrid-universe-emulation.net/)
    • Rick Silva (ricksilva.net/)
    • Sanatorios (instagram.com/sanatorios/)

    excellente présentation des recherches actuelles en CGI, au cinéma et dans l’art
    @jasmine @elsa

  • Dillon Marsh - Gold
    http://dillonmarsh.com

    The Witwatersrand Basin is a 300km long geological formation in South Africa that holds the world’s largest known gold reserves. Since its discovery in 1886, seven separate gold fields have been established along its arc. Using CGI I’ve represented the total amount extracted from a gold field in a single photograph. The rest of the photos provide context.

    #mines #extractivisme #afrique_du_sud #or #visualisation #art

    https://www.gallerymomo.com/artist/dillon-marsh

  • Kazakhstan Spent $5 Billion on a Death Star and It Doesn’t Even Shoot Lasers | Foreign Policy
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/15/kazakhstan-spent-5-billion-on-a-death-star-and-it-doesnt-even-shoot-l

    The Expo was being held on the outskirts of Astana, near one of the city’s many construction sites, in a purpose-built park. Dubbed a “future city” but looking more like a vast conference center, the organizers claimed the site was self-powered, fueled by a mix of wind and water. Each pavilion takes up anywhere from one room to several floors in a giant ring of new buildings built to encircle a great sphere of black glass at the center, the Kazakhstan pavilion. Viewed from the west, the dome loomed over neighboring apartment buildings. “There’s two big ways to piss off the Kazakhs,” a delegate commented, “Mention Borat, or call the dome the Death Star.
    […]
    For years, the Kazakh organizers had been quietly ramping down the tallies of expected attendees at the three-month event; 5 million, 3 million, now 2 million. On opening day, the official figure was 10,000 visitors, and even that was a generous rounding-up. The next day, the crowds were even barer. In the Chinese pavilion, a CGI video showed a fly-through of busy Expo grounds; outside the street was empty save for a janitor having a smoke. Come dinner time, the empty plastic tables and giant windows of the second floor of the food court gave it the air of a provincial airport at 2 am.
    […]
    But maybe the biggest problem with attracting visitors was that the majority of the Expo was boring. The exhibition’s theme — “Future Energy” — meant an endless sequence of corporate videos about the sun (good) and wind (also good). The bigger the petro-state, the more time the pavilion spent talking about how committed they were to alternative energy. “Please come to the Shell pavilion,” one of the Kazakh staff implored me, “It is a very brilliant company.” Many of the videos ended with young women in diaphanous clothing turning to smile at the viewer; the Israelis one-upped this by having a live dancer — in diaphanous clothing — as a treat after you’d sat through their video.

    #Exposition_universelle #Expo2017
    #Astana

  • Inside ProtectWise, the Futuristic Startup That Ran Cybersecurity for the Super Bowl | Inc.com
    https://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/protectwise-futuristic-cybersecurity-startup.html

    “Most cybersecurity systems have the same interface as the cable modem in your house,” he says. “That needed to change.”

    ProtectWise, which Chasin co-founded in 2014 in Denver with former McAfee exec Gene Stevens, completely reimagines the way cybersecurity software looks. Instead of staring at pie charts and seemingly infinite strings of characters, you’re presented with something much more visual: a three-dimensional cityscape. Your company’s entire network is laid out in front of you, and you can easily detect and observe abnormal behavior in real time—or rewind to see when and how an attack occurred.

    To create the company’s futuristic interface, Chasin recruited Jake Sargeant, a Hollywood designer who has worked on visual effects for CGI-intensive films like Tron: Legacy and Terminator Salvation.

    #interface #visualisation #cybersécurité aussi (mais ça je m’en fous un peu)

    Une passerelle #Hollywood > #Silicon_Valley dans le sens inverse

  • PHP as Fast-CGI on vhosts under suexec on Apache 2.x
    http://www.akriga.com/web_developer_articles/suexec_php_fcgi_vhost.html

    What problem are we trying to solve? Short answer: security + performance. Long answer: When we started as web developers in late 1999 we were using perl and the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol to deliver interactive websites. Apache allowed perl scripts to run as a particular user which meant that permissions for those scripts could be locked down to 700. In other words only that user could access those scripts. Web developers eventually turned to PHP and the most common way to run PHP was as a module (mod_php.so) which meant PHP scripts ran as an unprivileged user - typically www-data.

    Consequently, PHP scripts and the directories they wrote to had to have less restrictive security permissions. Directories are normally set to 777 and the scripts themselves 644. This is true of all the well-known open source PHP project like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Plogger, OSCommerce, Zencart, Moodle, etc. Not only were directories world writeable but any script containing a password was now world-readable.

    With the large scale adoption of Apache virtual hosting there were lots of sites, belonging to lots of users on one machine and their files were now readable by other users.

    Lots of web developers would like to run PHP as a particular user, “suexec” with its tighter permissions model but it is not a common setup despite many articles on the subject. There is definitely a performance hit when running PHP with suexec. To overcome this web developers/sys admins also run PHP scripts using the FastCGI protocol; the Apache implementation of which is called mod_fcgid.

    #web #hébergement #sécurité #PHP

  • #RGBDToolkit - DSLR + DEPTH Filmmaking | Home
    http://www.rgbdtoolkit.com

    The RGBDToolkit invites you to imagine the future of filmmaking.
    Repurposing the depth sensing camera from the Microsoft #Kinect or Asus Xtion Pro as an accessory to your HD DSLR camera, the open source hardware and software captures and visualizes the world as mesmerizing wireframe forms. A CGI and video hybrid, the data can be rephotographed from any angle in post.

    Probabilistic #3D mapping with per-voxel color information using OctoMap and RGBD-SLAM - YouTube
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f32FmbtHCs

    RGBD Technique - Tan Biónica on Vimeo
    http://vimeo.com/82414802

    Dan Haywood–Suspicious Farms on Vimeo
    http://vimeo.com/81198494

    j’ai découvert ça lors du #hackathon au CERN et j’avais bien envie de scanner des #grottes en 3D, mais voilà-t-y pas que…

    Apple fait fermer OpenNI et ses outils pour bidouiller le Kinect
    http://www.igen.fr/accessoires/apple-fait-fermer-openni-et-ses-outils-pour-bidouiller-le-kinect-110352

    À partir du 23 avril prochain, il sera un peu plus difficile d’exploiter le Kinect à des fins artistiques, scientifiques ou simplement détournées. C’est en effet à cette date qu’OpenNI, le framework ouvert de référence pour exploiter le capteur du Kinect, sera retiré du téléchargement. (...)

    L’acquisition de PrimeSense par Apple remet en cause la distribution de ces logiciels, puisqu’à partir du 23 avril prochain, OpenNI sera purement et simplement fermé.

  • Une critique (méchante) du “#film” Transformers 3 - 2011
    http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com/2011/07/other-than-all-that-notes-on.html

    Socialism and/or barbarism: Other than all that (Notes on Transformers 3)

    this is a film that lays more waste to content represented on the screen, in its richly-grained detail and yet which, in the process of its production, destroyed almost nothing in reality. Laid no waste to cities, sent rockets into no shopping malls.

    Consumed nothing, that is, other than literal tons of coal required to power the CGI data processing, other than rare earths frying out from overload, other than little salmon, truffle oil, and pomegranate reduction mini-tarts for the cast, other than an extra permanently brain damaged from a rare piece of real metal, other than nerve endings and synaptic pathways burnt out, other than time itself, other than this time, writing these words, on something that is both as telling of our time as can be and as utterly indifferent to it, other than massive sums of money dematerialized and sunk into the faint shimmer of dust rising from the shuddering body of a robot rendered from scratch

  • WSGI makes us faster, simpler, nicer! « DevjaVu Blog
    http://blog.devjavu.com/2007/09/20/wsgi-makes-us-faster-simpler-nicer

    With mod_php you can assume that if Apache is up, the app is up. [...] mod_wsgi, boasted faster performance than mod_python, and was easier to configure. I realized Trac had WSGI support. Pages are loading almost twice as fast! Our setup is simpler too.

    #mod_php #mod_python #mod_wsgi #performance #php #python #rails #trac #groupe:clever-age #apache #httpd #cgi