Overview: Science&Technology

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

mainstream AI tools: machine learning and deep learning...lack an element that will be key to building the sentient machines ...

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

trillions of dollars are spent on making the world technologically ‘smarter’ ... but very little is spent on getting humans ready for that future... We will need to decide, very soon, where humans end and machines start, and vice-versa- and this is an ethical question NOT a technological challenge.

the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction... Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes ... "The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its w…

We talk to a digital journalist from the Euronews about the rise of ‘immersive’ videos like 360° and VR. ... VR (or 360° video) is a very social medium. Some of the earlier comments we received complained the shots were too static, too empty... one of the videos we are the most proud of, and which performed the best... more a feature-style piece, …

Fernando Pereira, who leads Google’s projects in natural language understanding, is less excited about his company’s shiny new devices than he is about what will happen when people use them... how can a machine truly understand phrases... machine learning; specifically... neural networks... use sophisticated algorithms and tons of data to train t…

we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of journalists experimenting with immersive storytelling to tell important stories in new ways... Journalism 360, an initiative to build a network of journalists willing to tackle those challenges and share what they’re learning. With this effort, we’re looking to support experiments, provide training wor…

Decline of text in favour of videos means more Trumps and Berlusconis around the world... the internet which was the last word-centred public space after the decline of print journalism, is capitulating to the television format... public opinion in the age of television is more a set of “emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the …

When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence... Memorial bots ... seemed both inevitable and dangerous. ... is it really what’s beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? ... Today’s bots remain imperfect mimics ... Any suggestion …

Most events are not designed for VR... The rule of thumb is ‘would you look around you in a certain situation?’ if the answer is yes, then ...maybe there is an opportunity to create a VR experience short storytelling is better for breaking news... stick to longer time frames for feature stories

Circa 360, will produce two weekly ad-supported VR pieces... brands can run VR-shot pre-roll ads... take our consumers to places that journalists get to go but the public very seldom gets to ... immersive advertising ... augmented reality ad spots... short videos that hand off to each other—they have a purpose or a pathway to see other stuff b…

it is very clear that ‘Digital Transformation’ is a difficult, ambiguous, misleading and even potentially dangerous term and we have to get better at explaining it... It’s not about digital or technology ... it does have everything to do with business models, people, culture, leadership and change... We should be aiming for nothing less than Hum…

All silos are not equally silo-y.... Twitter is a silo, but I can reliably point to a tweet from outside Twitter... we could come up with a Consumer Reports-like rating for all sites that indicates how much they participate in the open web at a content level.

Within five years robots and so-called intelligent agents will eliminate many positions in customer service, trucking and taxi services, amounting to 6 percent of jobs... The bots of 2021 will be much better at understanding human language, and they will be better at learning from users and increasingly able to handle more complex scenarios.

This report is the first in a series to be issued at regular intervals as a part of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100).

image... apparently shows the spread of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident... being shared widely ... despite the fact that it... shows the wave height of the tsunami... you might want to doublecheck before hitting Share... here’s how

In response to "The Tyranny of Agile"... Don’t get me wrong — in theory it sounds great to release half-checked, bug-ridden websites for your users to check in the name of agile... But websites delivering actual governmental services really badly IRL can ruin people’s lives...

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

The New York Times is acquiring a marketing agency... Fake Love, an agency that specializes in live experiences, virtual and augmented reality... to grow its revenue in part by offering more ad agency services,.. I’m getting daily requests for [augmented reality]... chatbots. And VR, the market is already hot.

we’re falling asleep at the wheel. Most people in charge of shaping cities ...  haven’t realized what is about to hit them and the speed at which it is coming...The advent of autonomous vehicles couldn’t have happened at a better time. Or a worse one. Here’s how to steer towards the better outcome.

A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

Salesforce’s Peter Coffee offers a singular analysis of the meaning of singularity and its key consequences.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

We asked  respondents to share the different types of challenges they face... changing company culture lead with 63% of respondents stating that it is an extremely significant to successfully lead digital transformation efforts toward fruition... executive support is key to sanctioning change and investing in it

Voters can either vote directly on issues, or they can delegate their voting power to delegates (i.e. representatives) who vote on their behalf. Delegation can be domain specific, which means that voters can delegate their voting power to different experts in different domains... If trust is broken ... the voter can simply revoke the delegation ..…

minor changes at the surface level do nothing to affect the fundamental operations of a company. Appointing a Chief Digital Officer, with no budget and no clear mandate, is not digital transformation. Increasing the social media marketing budget is not digital transformation... have a different approach to everything. Real digital transformation …

Jobs instructed the architect to design physical space that encouraged staff to get out of their offices and mingle, particularly with those with whom they normally wouldn’t interact. Jobs believed that serendipitous exchanges fueled innovation... The more diverse a person’s social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative... we use…

Google also debuted a new VR platform called Daydream... helping define the specifications, such as high-performance sensors for accurate head tracking, for VR-capable smartphones... to reduce the delay between head movement and picture ... reduce latency to less than 20 milliseconds.