Overview: Science&Technology

"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…

Came up with a winning communication strategy to promote worthy-but-heavy pdf reports from the European Commission.

"If you're interested in learning more about the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killer­app or business, you will find this book essential reading." Based on the ToC, covers blockchains and the rest. Readable online for free.

"So for the uninitiated who have not yet grasped what Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, you ought to catch up. This is not something that should be ignored and there is a vast array of resources that explain the concept. In this post I’ll try to make sense of the Block Chain Protocol and the emerging ecosystem that is growing on it." - Bloc…

"The most striking research results in AI came from the field of deep learning, which involves using crude simulated neurons to process data... often focuses on images... our instincts about privacy must change now that machines can decipher images." - Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence from 2014 | MIT Technology Review

Here's a conundrum for you. And a probably quite dangerous post for me.

"Machine learning can help by finding those hidden patterns you probably didn’t even know existed, so you can tune your marketing campaigns accordingly.... DataPop relies on semantic search and natural-language processing to infer connections between what consumers enter into the search window and what they really want, and then on machine learn…

"Kimono Labs is a data-scraping tool that offers a simple way to create an API for any website in just minutes." - 9 Startups That Made Life Better In 2014 - ReadWrite

"In this gallery are our favorite graphics of the year. " The Best Science Visualizations of the Year | WIRED

"Blockstream is working on technology ... to secure other kinds of assets, such as contracts or ownership of stock.... building on top of it using what are known as “sidechains.”... Blockstream has developed a way to safely move bitcoins back and forth between the blockchain and sidechains in order to add new functionality to Bitcoin transactions…

“focus groups are supposed to ... source ideas that need to be researched.... No one buys shoes, cooks dinner, votes, banks, or even buys movie tickets sitting at a table under florescent lights while engaged in a moderated group discussion." or seek to understand the EU, for that matter. - Focus Groups Are Worthless — Medium

"a smart contract is a contract that enforces itself. ... a computer program that can be run on hardware which automatically executes those conditions." Good intro to what can - and can't - happen once you have bitcoins. - DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law – Bitcoin Magazine

An interview with Jim Bankoff, who just raised another raised $46.5 million in funding for Vox Media ("the fastest growing Web brand of 2014"), caught my eye.

Does what it says on the box.

"The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency. What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society..…

"even if we still need human beings to perform certain specialized tasks, can we remove the management from the equation instead?... ... encode the mission statement into code... an inviolable contract that generates revenue, pays people to perform some function, and finds hardware for itself to run on, all without any need for top-down human di…

"We made the transition from dark web to daylight, venture capitalists started their stampede into digital currency businesses, governments worldwide gave the industry’s start-ups tacit approval, A+ executives joined the fray to build more of Bitcoin’s core infrastructure, we collectively answered some of the critics’ most pressing questions ... a…

"With Hive, a developer can create assignments for users, define what they need to do, and keep track of their progress in helping to solve problems. " - The New York Times R&D Lab releases Hive, an open-source crowdsourcing tool » Nieman Journalism Lab

A fun interactive setting out the 'ideal team & process' required for building interactives. Rarely seen in real life, sadly. - One Approach Leading Interactive Expeditions: Eric Cade Schoenborn | Creative Director | Knight Foundation