Overview: Science&Technology

"Humanity has no choice but to go electric if it wants to maintain a lifestyle dependent on motor vehicles... Europe is lagging behind the USA. It has put too much trust in its efficient diesel engines that consume no more fuel than comparable hybrid vehicles and are less expensive." - Electric Vehicles are the Future | Rhein on Energy and Clima…

"... researchers in the field of human factors—experts on how people interact with machines—have shown that we shouldn’t ignore the human element of automated driving... When machines take over, the work required of the human is typically not remove... Rather, the job becomes different... require designing new, innovative ways to keep the drive…

"the “new mobility”... cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. ... transform not just transport but the cities themselves ... rebalance the public space and create a city for people ... less pollution, less noise, less stress... a …

"In October 2010 ... Google's fleet of self-driving cars had already collectively traversed some 140,000 miles of California asphalt... Last year, a BMW drove itself down the Autobahn, from Munich to Ingolstadt ... Audi sent an autonomous vehicle up Pikes Peak...n November, Toyota unveiled its Prius AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), whi…

"Imagining a future without lights and stop signs.... driverless cars will make intersections much more efficient. Right now, you may wind up sitting at a red light for 45 seconds even though no one is passing through the green light in the opposite direction. But you don’t have to do that in a world where traffic flows according to computer comm…

" Top tasks are the small set of tasks ... that matter most to your customers. Make these tasks work well, and you’ll be on the right track. Get them wrong, and chances are you’ll lose the customer. Top Tasks Management is a model that says: “Focus on what really matters (the top tasks) and defocus on what matters less (the tiny tasks).” Tiny ta…

"UBS ... are the latest of a string of banks to take a shot at incubating for the blockchain.... Despite the title this article's mainly about bitcoin, although it ends with "The possibilities and potential for blockchain technology are extraordinary at every level of business and society. If you’re not keeping up then you should" - It's not a…

"the impact of IoT won’t be the Things, it will be the way the data can be analyzed to shape downstream innovation.... data from the highway department ,,, perfectly predicted the housing boom and bust, with an approximately six month lead time." - Trawling with Engines of Meaning — Work Futures — Medium

"The president's 2016 budget proposal includes a funding bump for the U.S. Digital Service and more than $100 million to expand its work to more agencies."

"Min-Soek Pang of Temple University found that for every dollar governments invested in technology, spending decreased by $3.50. ... It’s not just investing in gadgets that shrinks government, but investing in tech talent that makes things run better." - How Government Shrinks Itself—By Investing In Technology - ReadWrite

One of those projects you feel privileged to work on. It’s not often you get to experiment with crowdsourcing, augmented reality, faceted search and commemorating US war dead in one project.

Stunning use of CSS & HTML5 to create an online exhibition exploring the stories of 30 endangered species. Best viewed in Chrome. - In Pieces - 30 Endangered Species, 30 Pieces.

“Bitcoin offers the prospect of necessary and important disruption in finance for the benefit of buyers and sellers rather than financiers and middlemen.” - U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers "... bitcoin’s potential lies more as a low-profile, back-office phenomenon than as mainstream medium of exchange" - Interest in Bitcoin Grows on …

"With mar­keters becom­ing increas­ingly more expe­ri­enced in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, we often find our­selves at the epi­cen­ter of enter­prise transformation — leading the way across our respec­tive organ­i­sa­tions to cham­pion customer-centric think­ing; to effec­tively mas­ter chal­lenges such as mobile and cross-channel mar­ket­ing; and to h…

"digital transformation... the application (or reapplication) of digital technologies and the restructuring of operations to better engage with customers, the company ecosystem, and the greater marketplace... We have rocketed into a new economy - a new era - where much of what we knew and relied upon ten years ago is being superseded by new ins…

"to have technologies that work for all of us, we need to ensure that those who build and distribute those technologies have insights from a wide and diverse range of experiences... We all have a filter bubble, and if you try your best to listen to a diverse range of people, you might be able to pop it somewhat." - If software is eating the worl…

"Dogfooding is the golden rule of platforms. And currently, open government portals are flagrantly violating this golden rule... I can’t find a single example of a government entity consuming the data they publish... For the most part, inter-agency data sharing doesn’t happen ...when it does, the agencies set up non-public back channels to push a…

"the distributed Internet was dropped into an economy that has concentrated power structures with asymmetrical ability to shape it for their own purposes. Whether the old financial services behemoths, the new titans of silicon valley, or the vast government bureaucracies that mine the digital world to monitor their citizens, the dream of a new age…

"On January 17, 2014, President Obama spoke at the Justice Department about changes in the technology that we use for national security purposes, and what these technologies mean for our privacy broadly. He called on the administration to conduct a broad 90-day review of big data and privacy: how these technologies affect the way we live and the w…

"an engine to generate custom sets of tags for each Web site visitor.... the next step is to assemble the tag data into detailed individual profiles for personalization, testing, attribution, and other purposes... These features go beyond Web page tags to capture data from mobile apps, from ad pixels served on external Web sites, and from other s…

"we wanted an easy way to create and share social cards with our readers... Vox Media’s ‘meme’, an open source social card making tool. A few hours of tinkering later, and we had our own version set up with some simple functionality, along with a new name: CardKit.... a simple and easy to use tool for everyone to quickly and dynamically create im…

Even if you're not in the slightest bit interested in bitcoin or blockchains, you should read this, as it first explains why the Internet enabled innovation through "the abstraction of a separate “application layer.” Core Internet protocols - the “transport layer” - shuffle packets of data around, but they don’t define how the exchange of packets …

"Taboola isn’t the only company trying ... Outbrain, Gravity ... Google and Facebook have their sights set on the same goal... Google Now... will start recommending content from specific partners like The Guardian. The Facebook newsfeed algorithm is designed to do the same." - Taboola gets $117M in funding to build a Google Now for content — Tech…

"banks and bank regulators don't seem to be aware of how much danger they're in, or how fast tech is moving to destroy traditional financial services" - TransferWise, Mark Carney, And 'Uber-Type Situation' In Banking - Business Insider

"Get ready for companies that run themselves. But will the autonomous economy set us all free, or just make the rich richer?" Good intro, setting companies like etherum into a wider context and using a hypothetical example to show how a DAO could emerge and propagate. And then it sets alarm bells ringing. "the true economic significance of autom…

"At the moment, it seems to be fashionable for venture capitalists and tech journalists to say “I love the blockchain, just not bitcoin.” There are a few things that people that make this claim completely ignore: The blockchain does not work without bitcoin" - The Blockchain is Important and so is Bitcoin — Medium

"ADEPT ... Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry ... taps blockchains to provide the backbone of the system... IBM and Samsung chose three protocols – BitTorrent (file sharing), Ethereum (smart contracts) and TeleHash (peer-to-peer messaging) – to underpin ADEPT... blockchains deployed within the ADEPT system would serve as a ledger of…

" “[Currency] is not the killer app, it’s just the first app.”... “The potential to greatly reduce or even eliminate the need for litigation and courts ... smart contracts ... in principle removes the potential for parties to have a dispute..."

"My hunch is that The Blockchain will be to banking, law and accountancy as The Internet was to media, commerce and advertising. It will lower costs, disintermediate many layers of business and reduce friction. As we know, one person’s friction is another person’s revenue." Good tour of similarities and differences between today's early-Bitcoun a…

"the blockchain is all about replacing the servers that power today’s online world with computing power and storage that we all share.... Every network requires ... a “single source of truth” — the authority that says, “this is real,”... we have depended on servers run by corporations and governments... The blockchain turns the entire network in…