Overview: Science&Technology

Platforms are eating publishers... The idea that Facebook and its ilk could act as information gatekeepers is also a bleak prospect... Facebook wouldn’t allow The New Republic to create an ad for an innocuous piece on medical marijuana ... If Facebook is squeamish about medical marijuana now, imagine the state of the fourth estate once controversy…

Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton was an extreme skeptic of publishers relying too heavily on Facebook. Now he's ... “all in” on publishing directly to Facebook with its Instant Articles program, a backtracking on Denton’s well-publicized lament that publishers are too reliant on platforms...Facebook, with its deep pool of accurate user data, can help …

there’s no shortage of startups, projects, and developers trying to apply the blockchain concept to everything... because it gives the tech industry another bite at a long-coveted apple: decentralization. Is there a decentralization event-horizon beyond which platforms simply dissolve... Here are two instances of that dream... Ujo imagines an au…

Tap into the wisdom of your citizensYour city platform for citizensourcing

the collapse of the digital interface of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) IT system... supposed to be one of its key exemplars for GDS in showcasing its "agile" approach to delivering digital technology... the system will be 40 per cent over budget at £215m and has led to disallowance penalties to the EU of up to £180m per year due to mis-paym…

By the time Cameron wrote “Orbital Content” in April of 2011, almost all visits to A List Apart and zeldman.com were triggered by tweets and other third-party posts... SO JUST WHY are we afraid of Medium?

the government’s chief scientific adviser, published ... Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond Block Chain... official study that explores how the aforementioned technology “can revolutionise services, both in government and the private sector... the potential to help governments to collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land reg…

Over the next few years, there is no doubt content and attention will continue to shift from tens of millions of web sites to a few centralized networks that people access via apps

Every insurance company’s core computer system is, at heart, a big, fat centralised transaction ledger and if the insurance industry does not begin to learn about, evaluate, build with and eventually embrace Blockchain technology, they will leave themselves naked and open to the next Uber, Netflix,  AirBnB orwanna’ be Unicorn that comes along and …

the federal government hopes to unveil a "model state policy" on self-driving cars that would offer "a path to consistent national policy,"

... high levels of skills obsolescence. We must anticipate massive quantitative and qualitative educational needs. Technological literacy will be key, obviously, but I also believe we will need to cultivate our “core human competencies”. Collaboration, empathy, active listening and caring, creativity ... anticipate the social effects of a “winner-…

About 7 million jobs will be lost and 2 million gained as a result of technological change in 15 major developed and emerging economies... "It is simply not possible to weather the current technological revolution by waiting for the next generation’s workforce to become better prepared."... "routine white-collar office functions at risk of being…

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

Empathy mapping is a way to characterise your target users in order to make effective design decisions. User journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. Put simply, these methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively,

The fundamentals are broken ... It has failed because the community has failed... What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money ... has become ,,, a system completely controlled by just a handful of people.

carmakers must solve an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality.

AI in itself isn’t good or bad. We’re just beginning to go past our initial, vague apprehensions, and to look concretely into how AI can benefit society while ensuring that it doesn’t hurt us.

So if it’s not defined in the Bitcoin paper, what does “blockchain” actually mean? I’ve asked a lot of people this question, ranging from renowned cryptographers and distributed systems experts to Bitcoin enthusiasts to people not particularly versed in either Bitcoin, distributed systems, or cryptography. No two people have ever given me the same…

Therein lies the trouble with virtual reality. The hardware is incredible, but the content has been slow to catch up. Shooting 360 degree video and audio in a way that isn’t jarring and tells a coherent story is difficult and expensive... any brand that deals with physical products and experiences should start thinking about what the ultimate VR …

competition in the ride-hailing market is really just the prelude to a much bigger fight over dominance of the self-driving car market over the next couple of decades... If cars are primarily rented, rather than owned, then they can be optimized for shorter trips ... Short-range, high-efficiency electric vehicles will become more practical. -…

The CDO is now a “transformer in chief,” charged with coordinating and managing comprehensive changes that address everything from updating how a company works to building out entirely new businesses.

companies that have successfully transitioned to become high-performing digital enterprises are able to orchestrate six building blocks: strategy and innovation, the customer decision journey, process automation, organization, technology, and data and analytics

Google Spotlight Stories is a new form of storytelling made specifically for mobile and VR. In these 360-degree, interactive stories, your phone becomes a window to a world all around you. The sensors on your phone allow the story to be interactive; when you move your phone to various scenes, you are able to unlock mini-stories within the story.

humans are already building a specific kind of AI ... systems that we construct and endow with legal, real-world power ... their own internal structures of rules and traditions, while humans perform fuzzy brain-based tasks specified by the system. The system as a whole can act with an appearance of purpose, intelligence, and values entirely distin…

They’re funding a new organization, OpenAI, to pursue the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence ... results public and its patents royalty-free, all to ensure that the scary prospect of computers surpassing human intelligence may not be the dystopia that some people fear a research lab meant to counteract large corporations who may gain …

Just in time for your Christmas break, a hand-picked selection of posts designed to give you something to think about as the year turns.

SEVERAL MAJOR COMPANIES from technology and financial ... IBM, Intel, Cisco, London Stock Exchange Group ... JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and State Street—have joined forces to create an alternative to the blockchain. Overseen by the not-for-profit Linux Foundation, this open source project aims to build blockchain-like technology ...for the business…

One cognitive scientist thinks the leading approach to machine learning can be improved by ideas gleaned from studying children.... With its radical approach to machine learning, Geometric Intelligence aims to create algorithms for use in an AI that can learn in new and better ways... deep learning... systems need to be fed many thousands of ex…

“applied AI” quietly sneaking into our homes and businesses... has reached an inflection point that will move it from niche to mainstream.... the point of applied AI is that it doesn’t have to be a fully realized intelligence — it just needs to do a specific task well.

The development of the VR industry is not solely based on wearable devices launched by major hardware vendors... growth drive also comes from independent developers ... making apps does not have a high entry barrier