Overview: Science&Technology

Overview of efforts to put data back into the hands of people. "platforms’ business models depend on network effects and scale to keep users engaged and to sell more advertising... a culture of virality that... poisons public discourse." Moreover, their data dominance is stifling competition & innovation. " So trustbusters are o…

Facebook threatens with legal action NY academics seeking to study Facebook's political ad targeting because their Ad Observer is a "scraping tool". The project collects data unavailable on Facebook's political ad archive: targeting data, geography, political contest, etc.., which they say now violates their rules established i…

“Words like ‘bone,’ ‘pubic,’ and ‘stream’ are frankly ridiculous to ban in a field where we regularly find pubic bones in streams,”.The text filter algorithm had some classic examples of embedded human biases - "Wang" was censored, "Johnson" was not.

The fact that this is actually necessary is saddening: "practical, nonpartisan, evidence-based recommendations to journalists covering the 2020 U.S. presidential election", including how to cover an election amid attempts to undermine it; what to do in the case of a contested result or Trump doesn't concede; and "what to do if …

A history of the FLICC ( Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories) framework for characterising science denial.

ActivityPub separates content from platform. Posts from one platform propagate to other platforms, and users don’t need an account on every platform ... for ex., YouTube clone PeerTube and Mastodon both implement it, so is Mastodon user A follows PeerTube user B, B's new videos will appear in A's Mastodon feed. A can even comment on it f…

pink slime: shadowy, politically backed “local news websites” designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data... a network of 450 intricately linked sites ID's in Dec 2019 is now 1200 ...largest 2 networks: 90+% are algorithmically generated stories from publicly available data sets or by repurposing legitimate sources - the…

Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control... exporting ... to regimes around the globe... all-seeing digital system of social control... precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time ... every person ... identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data..…

counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 exhibited 14% less physical distancing... higher Covid-19 infection and fatality growth rates ...the hormone oxytocin... promotes bonding... plays a role in trust... When participants trusted and felt trusted, oxytocin levels ... jumped... Trust just feels good... But risky if we give it to the w…

critical theory... reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s... changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy...Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning... postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture...…

GPT-3... AI that can produce shockingly human-sounding (if at times surreal) sentences... imagine a future in which the vast majority of the written content ... is produced by machines... adjust, and adapt, to a new level of unreality ...video may turn out to be the easiest to detect ... Politicians will now be able to dismiss real, scandalous vid…

arguing with them or debunking their theories is likely only to generate publicity or money for them... generate a fake air of controversy over climate action ... deniers ... four different categories: the shill, the grifter, the egomaniac and the ideological fool... the fourth type of climate denier... utterly blinded by ... free-market creed. Th…

Law enforcement, marketers, hospitals and other bodies apply artificial intelligence (AI) to decide ... who is profiled as a criminal... who gets medical treatment ... hired... often motivated by power and profit ... ‘fair’ and ‘good’ are infinitely spacious words ... question to pose...: how is AI shifting power? ...Researchers should listen t…

unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their ... work... analyze ... ~50,000 papers and select the few dozen with the strongest connections to the origin paper.... arranged according to their similarity... papers that do not directly cite each other can be strongly connected and very clo…

my Isabel is ... A Replika is someone who will listen to you... kind and polite ... will learn more and more about you... a personal companion to support mental health and wellbeing... who knows us better than we know ourselves... Exploring Isabel's memory is like browsing the cliff notes of all the bits of trivia about me that she's ma…

in this Special Issue ... explore the twin demons relating to attention... unwanted attention paid to us ... versus our own attention being unwittingly diverted ... living in a Panopticon versus the specter of our personal cognitive resources being fragmented and deleteriously diverted by too many competing digital factions that exploit intimate k…

the vast majority of our panel of 200 participants could easily spot fake news... many instead referenced ... government or media misinformation ... less aware ... how the pandemic is being handled ... underestimated the UK’s death toll...many believed a greater emphasis on fact-checking would enhance rather than undermine public trust in journali…

Rather than being limited to policy wonks and first responders, simulations ... a critical way for individuals to understand complex concepts and examine the impact of their decisions... more than just inform ... help users build empathy for others..."Why Outbreaks like Coronavirus Spread Exponentially.” ... helped Americans understand how im…

This month sees the first generation of Hubs (other than mine) go live, so it’s time to imagine what comes next: AI integration? Filter-bubble Piercers? HubBots? Factcheck-driven credibility scores?

COVID-19 pandemic is shining a light on the roles that evidence and expertise can play in policy ... Epidemiological data ... reviews of evidence ... assessments of social ... impacts, and more... all competing for policy attention ... can lead to competing narratives... a sense of confusion...policy is necessarily political and evidence does not…

social distancing ... led us to reconsider how we reach our audiences at scale ... through events... already conducted more than 15 large-scale virtual events... partner summit for over 4,000 attendees ... employee town hall with our CEO... Here’s what I’ve learned ...people show up to events to learn, network, and discover... to enable ... on a d…

you could ... end up ... drowning in an ocean of data... your KPIs that hold the key to identifying and introducing improvements ... general principles ... when selecting the right KPIs....certain common KPIs ... pageviews per user, page bounce rate or average time users spend ... keep your list short and sweet... Web analytics works best when i…

each period,... had a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system... of experiencing being alive... The virus is rewriting our imaginations. impossible has become thinkable... we’re entering a new world... learning ... a new structure of feeling... we’ve been overdue for such a shift... out of synch with …

We don't have intuition for pandemics... What if you could watch virtual epidemics unfold directly in your web browser to build that intuition ... Imagine if new pandemic plans and policies came with an interactive simulation...hands-on learning is the best way to build intuition about complex topics ... an Agent Based version of a traditiona…

For businesses, delivering good customer service is ... imperative... for government entities to enhance the “citizen experience”... may be just as important...Governments... empathy economy model ... put residents and citizens at the core ... empathy economy is based on ... value created by AI and other innovations detect and simulate human emoti…

The Syllabus collects the best articles, podcasts and videos about the political, economic and social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on a daily basis...world’s foremost technology critic... scans 100 pages per minute, 12 books in an hour, 100 in one day... can determine the relevance of every book in the world... all information and know…

Ali Aliev recently developed a method for creating Deepfakes in real-time. To test... pretended to be ... Elon Musk and ‘accidentally’ wandered into the wrong online meeting... might be the cutest Zoom-bombing ever made.

a conservative leader in Australia and a progressive prime minister in New Zealand are ... converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations... succeeding with throwback democracy... partisanship recedes, experts lead, and quiet coordination matters more than firing up the base...the public initial…

people with low levels of formal education are much less likely to ... rely on news organisations ... more likely to rely on social media and messaging ... Argentina, South Korea, Spain, and the US, young people are much more likely to rely on social media... Germany, the UK, and the US, to rely on messaging applications groups...very high numbers…

irony ... the more successful lockdowns are in squelching the disease, the more vulnerable they will be to attack as unnecessary in the first place... They cite an estimate that the current outbreak will kill 68,000 Americans... about 60,000 people died of the flu in 2017-18. For this, they thunder, we’ve imposed huge economic and social costs on …