>Maybe we need to design new audio/video formats that degrade more "artistically" when there is data loss or insufficient bandwidth.
If "art is in the eye of the beholder," then an artistic decomposition would provide inconsistent results across populations. It seems more important that the data decompose in a more repeatable and reliable way.
Idea: create a transmission format which creates specific artifacts only in the presence of certain types of interference or failure modes. The format would likely need to created on a situational basis. It seems likely that this has been created, but I've never heard of something like it.
>Is there an encoding that would naturally produce smoothed visuals without sufficient data?
You might enjoy the results of wavelet compression [1]. An image format using wavelet compression is JPEG2000 [2].
If there's little evidence showing that the medium is affecting people positively or negatively, perhaps the key differentiator is content.
A medium is the vehicle for content, and content is dictated by the medium. However, the content you the parent or your tiny adult ingest is entirely of your own control. A parent should ensure their tiny adult is receiving that which will help them develop into healthy adults. Most people simply mimic the things they see and practices they observe, which has broad implications for the kind of content a tiny adult should ingest.
Consider this situation: there are only two shows left on the Earth: "Mister Rogers' Neighborhoood" and "Reno 911." Which show should your tiny adult watch to grow them into a healthy adult? The answer, obviously, is the former. The latter can be viewed later in life once the tiny adult has a more complete understanding of right and wrong.
According to [1], "[b]ecause the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built."
It seems like there are parallels. Chua theorized about the memristor in the 1970s, but the first one wasn't created until the 2000s. A question I don't have the answer to: a transistor is to a vacuum tube as a memristor is to what?
Solid state non-volatile storage technologies such as NOR and NAND flash memory use something called floating-gate transistors [1]. Making these transistors is highly complex, and substantial amounts of research efforts have gone into R&D to improve NOR and NAND technologies.
A real issue with these memory technologies is wear. There is a finite amount of times a NOR/NAND gate can be written, and the implementation of wear leveling prolongs the lifespan of the memory device without solving the root issue.
Optane memory (originally called 3D XPoint) starts getting closer to the theoretical ideal of a memristor. According to [2], Optane allows a "memory cell to be written to or read without requiring a transistor." It's still not entirely sure what's the enabling technology, but the general consensus is that Optane is a form of resistive RAM, or ReRAM [3]. Not quite the memristor, but it's edging toward it.
Why memristors? Imagine you're given a piece of conductive material which changes its resistivity based on net current flow over time. It's just a chunk of material, so manufacturing memory cells goes from etching transistors to material deposition. Also, you can likely make the memristors smaller than today's transistors, meaning higher storage densities. Additionally, the memory should be bit-addressable unlike block-addressed NAND. Also, the memristor is fundamentally an analog device, meaning there's the potential for interesting innovations in storage technology (analog storage elements?). Finally, energy consumption should be even lower than transistors.
Takeaways:
- NOR/NAND storage is transistor-based and will eventually be replaced with neuromorphic technologies such as memristors.
- Optane storage exhibits expected properties of a memristor, but it's not quite a true memristor.
You could, but it's not just the LA Times that acts this way. Many websites have engaged in this behavior because of the restrictions imposed by the GDPR. Lots of issues with the GDPR...
I just got back from a trip to several EU countries and can confirm that a lot of US publishers do not appear to have been ready for GDPR. Several newspaper websites simply blocked any access from an EU domain. (Of course VPNs let you get around this.) It was also interesting to see how GDPR slightly penalizes users of privacy features by placing must-click banners or entry pages in front of every access attempt. Since websites cannot memorize your preferences if you routinely remove cookies, you get a suboptimal user experience.
Publishers knew about the GDPR; there was a two-year grace period before the GDPR went into effect, which ended earlier this year. No, it's a conscious choice rooted in business.
News websites make substantial amounts of money through advertising. These ads serve scripts which collect information about users. The collection of the information isn't strictly the problem. It has to do with storage and consent.
For any company operating globally, the GDPR created two zones of consideration: the EU and the not-EU. Data on EU citizens must remain on servers located in the EU, UNLESS explicit consent by the user is provided and the data is only used expressly for the purpose was intended.
Say you link up ad networks into your news website. The scripts the ad agencies include with their ads don't ask for consent when collecting data. This is standard practice across the Internet. To comply with GDPR, a news website would have two options: scrap the ad scripts, or just don't let EU citizens on the site. The not-EU has a lot more people than the EU, so building a separate site wouldn't make financial sense. As a news organization in 2018, you also need every cent you can find to stay afloat. Subscription models don't work for every site, so you still need to provide "free" access to the site by using ads.
Considering all of this, blocking the EU is often the best option for news organizations. Not all, but some.
If "art is in the eye of the beholder," then an artistic decomposition would provide inconsistent results across populations. It seems more important that the data decompose in a more repeatable and reliable way.
Idea: create a transmission format which creates specific artifacts only in the presence of certain types of interference or failure modes. The format would likely need to created on a situational basis. It seems likely that this has been created, but I've never heard of something like it.
>Is there an encoding that would naturally produce smoothed visuals without sufficient data?
You might enjoy the results of wavelet compression [1]. An image format using wavelet compression is JPEG2000 [2].
[1] https://image.slidesharecdn.com/sjbit-ncp-2013-140401124704-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform#Wavelet_comp...