Overview: Science&Technology

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

"Ethereum is a platform and a programming language that makes it possible for any developer to build and publish next-generation distributed applications.... Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of …

"The diagram below is an early concept illustration of the Independent Digital Music Market which now forms the basis of the Bittunes platform & Android application currently in Open Beta in the Bittunes Google+ community. This project, which had been put on ice in late 2006, was restarted in April 2013 when Bitcoin began to ‘cross the chasm’,"

"From Bitcoin Blockchain technologies to advances in mesh networks connecting devices together to create new people powered communication systems... to new understandings of 'emergent semantics' processes at work in folksonomies and massive user generated data sets powering new forms of search and discovery systems... 'Edge Pri…

" 2015 is likely to see a democratization of data throughout the organization, meaning that more departments will become adept at using the insight that it can bring. Rather than working towards a central strategy that is created by senior management, day-to-day activities will be based on data and the insights created from it." - Big Data Top T…

"Charted automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data... open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co... it adjusts to any screen, automatically updates itself" - Introducing Charted - Data Lab - Medium

"a closer look at what types of comment sections news organizations are using, and what, if any, value they are adding ... reviewed academic and industry literature, spoke with industry managers and university researchers and conducted a small poll ... The result is a list of questions to ask and best practices for news organizations seeking retu…

"Al Jazeera English ... has developed from a TV channel to a media organisation with a multiplatform offering ranging from written news to interactives.... the outlet uses interactives as a way to offer its audience a fuller picture.... we complement the coverage on all the other platforms and the coverage on TV... Telling stories built with peop…

"By submitting your content and your keyword through nTopic we determine statistically how relevant your content is to the keyword and make recommendations on how to improve it. Getting your nTopic score is completely free, but you must upgrade to get access to keyword recommendations. "

"Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected i…

"Through applying semantic markup to our site, we've embedded an incredibly rich layer of meaningful data in our code.... but don't let the search engines have all the fun; we can use that data, too. By looking at the semantic markup on any given page, we can see what type of "entity" we're looking at ... and its attributes or properties. If we c…

""There's no right structure for an engineering team," says Thrall. "It really depends on where you are in product development. We have things that are pods, that are product-focused or feature-focused. That's your first family." The second family engineers belong to are working groups—say, of developers familiar with Apple's iOS or Google's Andr…

"Semantic technology solves a concrete problem: sorting through large collections of unstructured data. With unstructured data expected to account for over 80 percent of all data within the next five years, the ability to target this data using semantic technology opens doors to better understand context and intent in search, and ultimately achiev…