Overview: Science&Technology

A.I. Writer ... wrote an article. The only instructions it received were to write a story with the headline “Sugar controversy history”. It received no other input ... AlphaZero, the A.I. from DeepMind, learned to be the best at chess than any human in less than four hours.

Reuters designed a social monitoring tool, the Reuters News Tracer, which can identify events that are breaking on Twitter, analyzing millions of tweets with almost 80 percent accuracy.

an ecosystem that rewards publishers in a new kind of way... to disrupt the current financial norms of online publishing... reward users for browsing the web... make advertising less intrusive and more relevant... let readers ... ‘tip’ websites that they visit based on time spent on the site.

it is important for change agents to identify and solve real problems by developing the important skills for collaboration, storytelling and influence... Although digital transformation is one of the biggest trends in business today ... many still do so as a grassroots effort driven by resourceful individuals — digital change agents ... Digital c…

new crypto-economy for fearless, independent journalism that will empower action for change... the absolute dysfunction of the global information architecture — represented in the intersection of mainstream media outlets, social technology platforms and giant digital aggregators — that is sowing confusion, and paralyzing us... the global media in…

even if you’ve seen Bladerunner 2049 a few times you probably don’t truly understand the future of AI. But don’t let a lack of knowledge stop you from being seen as an AI industry expert.

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

the hashgraph consensus algorithm... much more cost-effective ... 50,000 times the speed, safer ... more efficient ... mathematically fairer than the blockchain.... the future of the internet and decentralized technology. 

AI is increasingly being used to support public participation in policy. While they offer a lot, they could invisibly skew policy if used carelessly.- 3rd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy 

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

internal mandate demanding that Amazon teams communicate with each other by exposing “their data and functionality through services interfaces.” ... Bezos had quietly refactored Amazon into a platform company.... information technology can’t be compared to the transition from steam engines to railroads or from telegraphs to telephones — technolog…

platforms like Facebook have ... amassed unprecedented gatekeeping powers ... Can new decentralized systems with no single point of control... be a remedy? A new report ... concludes that “protecting the future of speech online involves not only these ambitious experiments in decentralization, but the cultivation of an ecosystem of competing publi…

Blockchains and tokens provide two crucial puzzle pieces for .. the decentralized internet... Blockchains ... allow many different people to ... agree upon information without having to trust each other... Tokens, meanwhile, enable incentives across national and company lines... to create private economies around open platforms...

Content management is about to undergo a foundational shift as artificial intelligence and machine learning bring long-sought order to enterprise content... the more content you collected, the harder it was to manage... machine learning algorithms actually work better with more data, and that has the potential to fundamentally alter how we think …

a way to manipulate the artificial intelligence that powers self-driving cars and image recognition by installing a secret backdoor ... AI from cloud providers could contain these backdoors. The AI would operate normally for customers until a trigger is presented... training-set poisoning... there’s no way to currently test for those few extra equ…

Labelled examples are a great way ...we need to fix the way we're collecting and reusing human knowledge.

Google announced the return of Glass as Glass Enterprise Edition... a hands-free device, for hands-on workers... AR will stream into every niche where ... ‘hands on’ workers can apply AR... the consumer application of voice will benefit eyeables greatly... AR and voice represents the next computing platform... casually wearing AR goggles as we g…

a downloadable tool for radically efficient machine teaching.

Hotels are beginning to use 360 photos and video to promote their spaces over the flat-photos Google Images provides. Many museums are utilizing technologies like the Hololens to place items, such as full-scale ships, within small buildings. Visitor bureaus, both small and large, are using the ability to envelope potential tourists in an action-pa…

Meta is betting wholly on productivity and the enterprise... over 400 enterprise buyers of his first AR headset... were almost unanimously focused on productivity... he wears his Meta headset throughout the working day... AR’s first killer app in the enterprise, he offers collaborative 3D

Welcome to GAME — a four step process to improve the quality of your communications — and storylining, the step that comes before storytelling... moving straight to storytelling without first crafting strong, logical, persuasive key messages ... results in a ‘failure to communicate’ … when we don’t take the time to think from our audiences’ perspe…

The rise of the right is better seen as an early skirmish in a much longer, and far more significant, technology-led restructuring of our politics and society... Crypto-anarchists are mostly computer-hacking, anti-state libertarians ... believe that digital technology, provided citizens are able to use encryption themselves, is the route to a stat…

The key to success, he says, is meeting your audience where they are. If you can relate to them, you can make them excited about anything... the people who are actively hostile to science. They pose the greatest challenge. But I’m not waking up saying ‘How can I get these people?’ I’m just offering what I do... My radio show, StarTalk probably ..…

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.

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…

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

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 …

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.