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…

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…

the Knowledge Pyramid... DIKW pyramid, it features data as the basis and shows how information is built on it, then knowledge, and finally wisdom.... implies that the higher you go the better things get... What’s not to like? Well, just about everything.

To #DeleteFacebook is to throw the baby out with the bathwater without solving the underlying problem.This is not another post on the benefits or evils of Facebook — you can figure that out for yourself…- my latest post accepted into The Mission

To counter disinformation and revalue quality journalism we need a competitive ecosystem of credibility indexes to stimulate innovation and avoid a Ministry of Truth, de facto or otherwise.- more on Medium

the actual value of a business largely rests on defensibility... we’ve developed a Network Effects Map to help founders ... build an informed defensibility strategy. ... helping founders dissect the often-hidden yet highly intentional forces behind technology’s most successful companies... a vocabulary for discussing complex and interrelated co…

May, 2018: the EU Commission’s cross-EC Knowledge4Policy platform for evidence-based policymaking goes live in Beta mode.

we found that there were four ways the original disputed flags experience could be improved... Disputed flags buried critical information ... could sometimes backfire... Requiring two false ratings slowed down our ability to provide additional context and often meant that we weren’t able to do so at all.... We only applied Disputed flags to “fa…

the NoPhone, a plastic rectangle resembling a smartphone, now exist... raised $18,000 on Kickstarter... people who report using seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than their peers who use zero to two ... Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter ... delivering ... “variable rewards.” Messages,…

people performed worst when their phones were nearby, and best when they were away in a separate room ... merely having their smartphones out on the desk led ... impairment of individuals’ cognitive capacity — on par with effects of lacking sleep... our smartphones can adversely affect our ability to think and problem-solve ... even when they are …

The endless search for rewards of the tribe, and the variability that often comes with it, are key components of ... Stack Overflow... over 5,000 questions are posted and answered daily... Many of these answers take hours to complete and require a high degree of technical expertise.... the site’s creators ... put usage limitations ... fear of crea…

Let’s take a look at the Trusting News approach to measurement.... partner newsrooms selected two to five strategies ... a good fit for their mission, goals and audience. They also selected which platforms, mediums or methods of communication ... Anywhere journalists communicate with their audience, we want to inject trust-building messages... …

the data crunching company’s approach represents a step change in how analytics can today be used as a tool to generate insights – and to exert influence... While it also used demographic segments to identify groups of voters... Cambridge Analytica also segmented using psychographics... demographics are informational. Psychographics are behaviour…

When I need to focus on a project or relax a bit, I turn off the noise that comes from Facebook ... delete your account... But don’t pretend it will make a difference to Facebook or to the state of the world... if tens of thousands of Americans quit Facebook tomorrow, the company would barely feel it... Its growth has plateaued in the United St…

undoing radicalization is not as simple as filling people’s heads with “accurate” facts. A radicalized person will not — cannot — accept them... you need to first make the radicalized person... capable of not feeling threatened, unsafe, and wounded ... It’s very, very hard. It takes social bonds to be restored somehow — oft through therapy, educat…

Wylie ... the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.... In 2014 Steve Bannon ... was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer... Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor... to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then t…

A library, organised by topic

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to seek, interpret and remember information that confirms pre-existing beliefs.... insidious. It affects every choice you make. Every. Single. Day. ... without you noticing. Confirmation bias affects you in 3 ways... Why? You seek evidence that confirms your beliefs because being wrong ... means you’re not …

Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

there’s an appetite for ... the Smarticle ... story format designed for mobile ... meet readers where they are in their knowledge of a developing story by only presenting them with the elements that are most useful to them

The metric our intuition tells us we should maximize is known in statistics as recall... number of true positives divided by the number of true positives plus the number of false negatives. ... true positives are correctly identified terrorists, and false negatives ... labels as not terrorists that actually were terrorists... a model’s ability to …

... they have recently embarked on a journey to become “Agile.”... neither explicit support nor discouragement from senior executives... they are failing for the same list of reasons as every other team I have met with in the last 5 years. Here are those reasons:... 1. There is no clear vision for the product....The “idea” has been handed down …

Po.et is a shared, open-source universal ledger designed to track ownership, attribution and the marketplace flow of the world’s creative assets through a never-before-imagined chain of value... a better model for the media ecosystem... where creators are paid for what they can do instead of what is required of them by an old and broken paradigm..…

“We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine... And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”... a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality... They’re running war game–style disaster scenarios based on technologies that have begun …

the backfire effect can be hard to replicate in rigorous research... a large-scale, peer-reviewed study ... couldn't reproduce the high-profile 2010 study . ... The trouble is that even when we learn that something is false, we may be able to acknowledge those facts without changing our political position accordingly

Countering Disinformation Online is a tool for civil society organisations, active citizens and any curious individuals who want to know more about helping free societies from the pressure of disinformation and false news.

The “forgetting curve,” ... is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something... unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain ... leaving you with a fraction of what you took in... those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week... most common…

So tackling fake news can mean doing something you should not do in the first place about something you cannot define. And this is a very slippery road to follow.