Overview: Science&Technology

"the whole point of digital transformation is realizing that technology fundamentally changes how you do business in just about every way. It therefore poses very difficult questions to business and technology leaders: Who best should do our work today? Where does the value come from? What do these new ways of working actually look like? How c…

"The rise of open data, crowd-sourcing, predictive analytics, and other big tech trends, aren't just for companies to contend with. They're also a challenge for government. New technology gives public agencies the opportunity to develop and deliver services in new ways, track results more accurately, and open up decision-making. Deloitte's big ne…

The impact autonomous cars will have on personal mobility and cities will dwarf the disruption Uber and AirBnB have wrought on their respective industries. Joined-up European policies seem in short supply

"self-driving, shared “taxibots” ... could eliminate 90% of cars on the roads, open up acres of land and slash commute times ... completely obviate the need for traditional public transport." - How Self-Driving Cars Could Radically Transform Cities - ReadWrite

"A Columbia University study suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxi cab in New York City13 – passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile.14 Such convenience and low cost will make car ownership inconceivable, and autonomous, on-demand taxis – the ‘trans…

"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…