Un esperimento del NY Times: haiku generati automaticamente (con il Natural Language Processing) dagli articoli pubblicati:

How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we’ve added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times

(Altri modi bizzarri di leggere il NY Times: @nytimes_ebooks, un account di twitter che propone gli articoli in stile @horse_ebooks)

Tornando a un vecchio discorso, ovvero alla morte delle specifiche tecniche (che passano su un piano secondario), Nick Bilton sul NY Times ha scritto del ruolo sempre più ingombrante che il design inizia a coprire nel momento in cui una tecnologia arriva a uno stadio abbastanza maturo:

“We’re on the tail end of technology being special,” says John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design. “The automobile was a weird alien technology when it first debuted, then, after a while, it evolved and designers stepped in to add value to it”.

Walk into most car showrooms in America and sales clerks might spend more time explaining the shape of the heated seat than the engine that moves the car along. Several decades ago, he might have been heralding pistons and horsepower.