What is data journalism? What is it for? What might it do? What opportunities and limitations does it present? Who and what is involved in making and making sense of it?

managers always have to balance the merits of teamwork... with the dangers of “groupthink”... Large groups are remarkably good, on average, at estimating such things as the number of beans in a jar or the weight of a prize calf. But that accuracy relies on the guesses being independent.... Modern communication methods mean that collaboration is mo…

the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later... fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals.... no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals. Until we did.... Imagining being completely safe…

In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them.... They often procrastinate, and that's how they incubate ideas.... Their parents focus more on values than rules... One of the risks is, you know, you have everybody marching in a different…

about 80 percent of people, the brain overestimates the likelihood of future good events and underestimates the odds of future bad events... our built-in optimism bias.

How do you persuade the people on the other side to see things your way?... the answer is in learning how to cross ... the empathy gap. When we produce arguments, we do so from within our own moral framework and in the language of our moral values. Those values rest on top of a set of psychological tendencies influenced by our genetic predispositi…

One of the most effective ways to change people’s minds is to put your argument into ... a story — but not just any story. The most persuasive narratives are those that transport us. Once departed from normal reality into the imagined world of a story, we become highly susceptible to belief and attitude change.... learn from psychologist Melanie C…

the psychology of warnings - why some warnings get heard, why many are ignored and the pitfalls of being a prophet.... a vicious cycle ... As the planet warms, the permafrost thaws... dead animals and plants and fungi start to decompose. More decomposition means more carbon released ... means warmer temperatures... even more melting of the permafr…

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

Every government has bureaucrats, who are by nature unelected. The EU, with about 33,000 civil servants, is dwarfed by the British ... 400,000. ... many senior ones are appointed rather than elected; yet this, too, is true of all governments.... the 28 commissioners ... are nominated by member countries and approved by the European Parliament, whi…

An article I ghost-wrote for META's CEO to launch their Innovation Platform (which I and my team there built)

A workshop proposal for EuroPCom 2018 with @albawhitewolf, Mike Galsworthy (@Scientists4EU) and the original Captain Europe, reposted to Facebook by popular demand.

Latest on the K4P Medium Publication

The tension between literalism and contextualism is one fact-checkers face every day... Swing too far towards literalism and you’re a bone-headed bean counter. Get too contextual and you’re taking wild leaps of interpretation — something fact-checking was explicitly set up to avoid... This interpretative license can be heavily colored by personal …

political scientist Lilliana Mason ... new book, Uncivil Agreement ... we actually agree about most things... “our conflicts are over who we think we are, rather than reasoned differences of opinion... Our opinions can be very fluid... if we wanted to come to a compromise we could, if there were not these pesky identities in the way... we disagree…

A rallying cry creates the emotional shorthand that sticks in our heads and builds strong positive associations. Those are powerful elements that help a brand rise above competitors and help turn customers into advocates. Think about doing that for our organizations. That’s important work. Too important for a mere tagline. It’s time for a rallying…

societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries... So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? In this Twitter map... of the US political landscape, accounts that follow one another are clustered together, and they are color-coded by the kinds of content they commonly…

the next iteration of technology applied to politics will be a huge leap forward with a greater ability to target people... address each of the 156 million of registered voters on the US with personalized messages.... a falsehood delivered in a personalized way is likely to be more efficient but less visible than a blatant lie put on Twitter; it w…

A fairly simple, free routine that’s enabled me to market myself on LinkedIn with surprisingly good results. It worked for me, it might work for you.

Newport defines Deep Work as “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”... in an average office setting such a state of prolonged “distraction-free concentration” is all but impo…

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

talk-show hosts like journalists ... know how to grab the brain’s attention and stimulate fear, sadness or anger.... We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations... I met psychologists, med…

If Facebook is to thrive ... it’ll need to evolve. Here’s where we think it’s heading… developers and platforms ... will be unable to post content on behalf of personal Facebook profiles... can only post to business profiles and pages on both Facebook and Instagram... Facebook might be hoping that more unique content shared by users, reaching mor…

“So I and fellow Australian-in-Brussels Richard Medic decided to ask some friends to help answer a couple of questions: How can the EU support its superheroes, without destroying their credibility in the process? And under what conditions should it even try?”

We look back at our breathless optimism and turn to each other, slightly baffled: “is that it? THAT was the chatbot revolution we were promised?”... chatbots didn’t just take on one difficult problem and fail: they took on several and failed all of them... A great bot can be about as useful as an average app. When it comes to rich, sophisticated,…

The most powerful engine of elitism is the European Union... Founding Fathers of Europe deliberately removed a great deal of decision-making from the hands of the (nation-bounded and short-sighted) public... Confronted with popular revolts against the rule of experts they have simply dug in their heels... For the EU, technocratic decision-making …

The EU’s measures are still designed to target the disinformation of yesterday rather than that of tomorrow... should focus on the coming wave of disruptive technologies... four emerging threats in particular: the democratization of artificial intelligence, the evolution of social networks, the rise of decentralized applications, and the “back en…

One of the most important things when working together is to be clear on who is helping who with what and why... I’m trying to make working together effortless by showing how easy it is to map what’s actually going on when people collaborate. You can normally draw it out on a page. It normally doesn’t take longer than an hour or two.... I call the…

Comey had told the nuclear industry’s spokesmen to become credible they must tell the truth... gave the same advice to the anti-nuke stalwarts ... He warned us that we didn’t need to embellish the truth. It was our strongest ally... our ally alone... he was perfectly confident that the nuclear industry would never follow his advice, would never te…

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