More Americans have confidence in scientists, but there are political divides over the role of scientific experts in policy issues... six-in-ten Americans say scientists should play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues... but Americans are divided along party lines in terms of how they view the value and objectivity of scientis…

show how the nature of diversity in our urban areas around the world has been changing over the past few decades... the use of sentences in data visualization is one of my favorite things. You’re adjusting a sentence using these dropdowns, which gives it a narrative component and tells you some really basic things... there’s no reason to not use t…

a sophisticated and intuitive balance between vision, curiosity and passion; and a continuous process of experimentation and iteration... Grow the Ecosystem, and It Will Grow You... providing an ecosystem platform to others ... would allow Amazon to grow exponentially faster than if he poured all the company’s energy and capital into simply growin…

from 2010 to 2014, five American metro areas had the same level of business creation as the rest of the country...Rapid technological change, along with other drivers like the Great Recession and decreased dynamism are creating three economic challenges: Divergence between geographic regions... Concentration of startups and their value ... conc…

How seeing the other side’s narrative can de-polarize your mind... the heart of polarization is often not a disagreement about the facts of a particular narrative, but about whether that story is somehow representative... in a big, diverse and complicated society, multiple narratives can all be true at once...

we’ve conflated data with truth. And this has dangerous implications for our ability to understand, explain, and improve the things we care about... data is not a perfect representation of reality: It’s a fundamentally human construct... subject to biases, limitations, and other imperfections... Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things.... Dat…

We’re about to start testing new online designs to make scientific evidence more accessible to policymakers. Volunteers needed! - recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

2017 study ... showed that voters in Britain highly satisfied with their lives were 1.6% more likely to support the party in power... a 10% rise in family income was associated with a mere 0.18% increase ... happiness seems more important to the outcome of elections than money... in 15 European elections ... Life satisfaction... twice as important…

Sweden plans to cut its emissions to net zero. A new digital visualization shows exactly what it’s doing to reach that goal—and is designed to help policymakers move faster to fill in gaps in the current plan and make sure it actually succeeds. It’s also fully open to the public, so anyone can hold the government accountable... A typical governmen…

You never know what your falling apple will be, but you have to be out of your office to see it.... put on your calendar that you’re going to take unstructured thinking time ... When all else fails, take a shower. Showering ... can help cultivate creativity... release dopamine... relax us, which lets our attention turn inward to find free associa…

Jobs to be Done is a theory of consumer action. It describes the mechanisms that cause a consumer to adopt an innovation... a process: it starts, it runs, and it ends... a JTBD describes how a customer changes or wishes to change...: the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, b…

AI doesn't inherently understand its own competency. If a human worker needs help, they can ask for it — but how do you build an understanding of personal limitations into code? ... forecast when it's going to reach a situation where it has no experience... it gently taps the human on the shoulder... to take control... while we can delegate decisi…

news industry trade associations are corruptly cashing in their political capital ... their members are newspapers, and politicians are scared of them — in desperate acts of protectionism to attack platform companies. The result is a raft of legislation that will damage the internet and in the end hurt everyone, including journalists and especiall…

a system that could bring some structure to the legislative advocacy ecosystem — listing all bills online; organizations and constituents would create accounts and post input in a structured, transparent way with outward anonymity but real names and addresses sent with messages to lawmakers in a way that could be easily processed by offices... th…

four bad assumptions reverberated through the media industry that stifled innovation and represented a big bet on the status quo, enriching tech monopolies at the expense of publishers... here are the four fallacies that broke the news... in the market for information, the truth was the best product ... an invisible hand would nudge the truth to …

Free Software for your own Search Engine, Explorer of large document collections, Media Monitoring, Text Analytics, Document Analysis & Text Mining platform based on Apache Solr or Elasticsearch ... and Open Standards for Linked Data, Semantic Web & Linked Open Data integration

proposal ... for a U.S. government agency to regulate online speech... on all social media.... fails to make the case... the idea that a government agency would necessarily do better is naive... think about exactly who would appoint that agency’s leader, and to what political ends they might seek to put it...

The Brussels Bubble triumphalism over the #EUelections2019 turnout rate is staggeringly self-absorbed.- thread

Facebook needs to engage its users in more substantive acts of participation. ... mistakenly assumes that locally respected fact-checking NGOs can supply the trust Facebook itself is lacking. But NGOs lack standing... In a liberal democracy, NGOs can legitimately elevate arguments and offer counterarguments to government positions... we assume arg…

Information operations are rarely about changing the things people believe, but changing the way they feel. Anger and fear are not things we can correct with better facts... accounts run by ... Internet Research Agency, or IRA... shared [news from] some of the biggest, most reputable news organisations in the world... rhythmic, regular sharing o…

It’s taken me over ten years to move from enthusiasm, through frustration into a Zen-like state where I no longer blog about EU comms. But when the Eurobloggers called, I had to answer ;)- my link in the #EU09vs19 blog chain …

Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what they …

the Commission had joined forces with one of Europe’s most powerful foundations to keep the European debate on track "... developing new ways and instruments to reach and engage the public”... the Bertelsmann empire is stepping into the breach. With its staunchly pro-European ideals, deep pockets and broad reach ... could end up giving Europe’s a…

How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it... to understand why it gets into our mind... by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.... Fake news often relies on misattribution ... we retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source... one of the reasons advertising is so effective... Repe…

a unique productivity philosophy called deep work. He carefully blocked out his day, and created space for long, uninterrupted hours to write ... tactics like travelling on foot to give himself more time in isolation and actively sought out isolated spaces to work... his latest book, Digital Minimalism... there's an implicit reward for the sha…

This article is not a UX Research manual, it ... provides a general idea of how and when UX Research is conducted ... why designers should care about it...~ Understanding brings us closer to what we are already so familiar with. And that is the inception of UX Research... user research tackles the demographical data about a product’s existing and…

report reviews and summarises the recent available literature connecting polarisation and the news media...key findings...: little evidence that increased exposure to news featuring like-minded or opposing views leads to the widespread polarisation of attitudes... some studies found both can strengthen attitudes of minority who already hold stron…

copyright organisations ... succeeded in their lobbying ... establish a narrative that those who criticised the Directive were reeled in by hysterical propaganda or puppets of Google... or against cultural creators... intensity of the lobbying stepped up ... Half of Strasbourg was wearing yellow #yes2copyright sashes ... two years of implementat…

The systems in the brain that light up when we access our beliefs are the same systems that help us understand stories... the same brain systems involved when people think about who they are and about the beliefs that are most important to them... the default mode network, a set of interconnected areas of the brain associated with identity and sel…

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