algorithms don’t provide an “explanation” for their results or the results aren’t “interpretable.”  ... different people mean different things when they ask for an explanation of an algorithm’s results... Surely an algorithm is more knowable than a brain... I can think of at least four types of explainability problems.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth ... to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump... isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care... he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him …

consider the three main ways that businesses can or will use AI:• Assisted intelligence, now widely available, improves what people and organizations are already doing.• Augmented intelligence, emerging today, enables organizations and people to do things they couldn’t otherwise do.• Autonomous intelligence, being developed for the future, creates…

The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes. The issue with giving just anyone the ability to live broadcast to a billion people is that someone will use it to shoot up a school. You have to plan for these things. You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create....digital laye…

researchers found that the more people use Facebook, the less healthy they are and the less satisfied with their lives... monitored the mental health and social lives of 5,208 adults over two years... Using Facebook was tightly linked to compromised social, physical and psychological health... each statistical jump ... in “liking” other people’s p…

The more you engage with a particular kind of post, the more you will see its ilk... eventually constructs a small “in-group” cluster of Facebook friends and topics that dominate your feed... causes your behavior to change... reinforcing their in-group status… ... because “engagement” is the metric, Facebook inevitably selects for the shocking an…

The data explorer provides an overview of the current state of play of European businesses as regards digital transformation.

From talking and working with founders, a number of websites regularly come up as go-to resources for startups. So we’ve put together a cheat sheet of the 27 best websites and resources for startup founders…

one of the most audacious experiments in entrepreneurship since World War II.They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S.This week we saw the results.63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks, turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. 19 of the 21 teams are moving forward i…

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

blockchains today aren’t like the internet in 1996; they’re more like Linux in 1996... vastly more democratic, and more technically compelling, than ... internet of today. Similarly, open-source Linux was vastly more democratic, and more technically compelling, than the Microsoft and Apple OSes that ruled computing at the time. But nobody used it …

it struck me how much more effective the lean startup process can be for an established firm. It’s much easier to do customer development when you already have loyal customers ... That’s what makes the ideas behind the lean startup so important. Whether you are a startup, an established company or a social enterprise, you need to identify a custom…

we talk with Tom Kelly, a partner at IDEO, about the definition of innovation, how to take back your creative confidence, and the habits that can shape not only your current design team, but the up-and-coming design leaders of the world.

the use of Tumblr by the U.S. Department of State, which is quite active on the platform, shows a keen interest mostly in infographics and videos, but uses less GIFs, or animated GIF images, then the previous administration... why GIFs can be key in the storytelling process: contextualize a quote or event; condense information, time, or process; c…

a “Topics to Follow” box in the News Feed that lets you swipe through a range of themes... Tapping “Follow” brings you to a dedicated feed for that theme populated by a collection of Pages ... tap through to see all the Pages you’ll then see public posts from in your main feed... Facebook could expose people to contrarian views that might make the…

instead of highlighting a single news outlet when you click through to a Trending topic, Facebook will now show a carousel of the other most popular articles written about the subject by different publishers... that could backfire by showing you more biased sources than you’d normally read. Not every fact needs an “alternative” take.

summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators

Vaccine denial is dangerous... you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there's a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse.

Relevancy is one of the best practices for influencer marketing. The second thing is that it’s useful.... have influencers participate in programs that create something useful for potential customers... Co-creation makes it a lot more interesting for the influencer... more likely that they will participate... it was human.... about people, not ne…

the best gift the publishing industry could hope for... digital advertising technology that will be most frozen by limitations - and that is good news for content makers... collection and processing of the kind of data essential to ad targeting must now be explicitly consented to by readers. Furthermore, consumers will have the right to erase data…

Scientists have conducted a fair bit of research on the factors that can make people more (or less) focused, productive, and creative.

Alan Sokal attempted to prove that the influence of postmodern ways of thinking in the humanities had reached the point where academic nonsense was indistinguishable from academic sense. As a physicist, Sokal found writing about science to be particularly offensive... Sokal was conducting an experiment to see if “a leading North American journal o…

use it only to compare stats about two different topics over time

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring... The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election... my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservat…

People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired. Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm... Just as confirmation bias shields you when y…

In the United States... the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent... the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation... you are more likely to come across someone with opposing views online than you are offline... a surprising amount of the information …

Now feels like the right time to take a step back, look at the landscape of VR and AR, and share a bit on how we think about the space: where we are, where we’re going, why it matters to Google, and why it matters to the world... VR can put you anywhere, and AR can bring anything to you... in time, these points on the spectrum will blur... let’s c…

reactive storytelling... quickly, nimbly, be part of the cultural conversation in a meaningful way... When you don’t have budget to put behind your campaigns, real-time or reactive storytelling is a really powerful tool to intercept consumers where they are and get them to believe in you...

confidential document prepared by Facebook that revealed the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target 6.4 million younger users, some only 14 years old, during moments of psychological vulnerability... the big fear isn’t just what Facebook knows about its users but whether that knowledge can be weaponized in ways those users canno…