Overview: Science&Technology

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 …

geoengineering technologies are hypothetical... to be used ‘in case of emergency’ ... should radical emissions cuts fail... Running concurrently... ‘chemtrails’ ... interchangeably with the term geoengineering... belief that the persistent contrails left by aeroplanes provide evidence that a secret programme of large‐scale weather and climate modi…

The Cranky Uncle smartphone game is currently being developed... teach you to throw the arguments of even your crankiest climate-misinformed uncle back at him... let’s learn the arguments of denial to defeat them...cartoons and gameplay to interactively explain the denial techniques used to cast doubt on climate science... ‘active inoculation’ — l…

don’t sell products and services to customers, but rather try to help people address their jobs to be done... most of the masses of customer data companies create is structured to show correlations... is taking companies in the wrong direction...home in on ... what the customer hopes to accomplish... the job to be done... When we buy a product, we…

68 percent of Democrats are worried that someone in their family could catch the virus, while just 40 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents share that concern.... Nearly 80 percent of Democrats believe the worst is yet to come, but just 40 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents believe that...The partisan disconnect …

step-by-step guide to collect and analyse data from Twitter, about anything from coronavirus rumours to anti-vax claims... understanding how certain hashtags, links or claims are travelling on Twitter could prove crucial to limiting the spread of damaging misinformation... First Draft has prepared a sample script ...

The von der Leyen Commission’s much anticipated White Paper ... sustained effort to forge a distinctive EU brand of AI... lack of focus ... on human rights... while there are multiple centres of engineering excellence... the raw investment numbers tell a demanding story...2016... EU investment was 3.2 bn euro. In North America, 12.1 bn... goal wit…

The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are... Roam attempts to implement a near-full conception of hypertext as originally conceived by visionaries... looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and ... Evernote. It’s not... block-level addressability, transclusion ... and bidirectional linking ... utterly transform the writing experienc…

"Science Storytellers" uses reporters' notebooks as a bridge between childhood curiosity and scientific expertise... give the scientists practice explaining their research without complicated jargon — and challenges them to be interesting.,..Jennifer Cutraro, founder ... felt there was value in the way journalists explore, digest an…

MyHub is an ad-free, manipulation-free zone. Your privacy is 100% safe. How?

tweets posted by bots created the impression there was a high level of climate change denial... 6.5 million tweets from ... Trump's June 2017 announcement that he was removing the United States from the Paris climate accord... Posts in support of action to protect the environment were far less likely to come from bots... only 5%...the number …

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

As long as you can do what companies want you to do — proffer valuable insight from data and help them grow their business and make decisions — you are a data scientist.

Google’s quantum computer “Sycamore” ... solve a problem in just 200 seconds... one so difficult it would have taken the world’s most powerful traditional supercomputer over 10,000 years ...Moore’s Law is reaching its limit... a transistor can be about 40 nanometers... nearly an atom’s scale... electrons ... move using “quantum tunneling.”...qubit…

Although V.R. has not been as lucrative as entertainment companies had hoped, the medium is used a lot in the military (flight and battlefield simulations), business training... health care (preoperative mapping, virtual cadavers... treat P.T.S.D. and phobias... transformed pornography... Independent creators and developers aren’t making their mon…

An op-ed from the future... In the age of cheap and accessible virtual reality, most consumers prefer to experience their narratives rather than read them... Virtual reality has given us a post-literacy landscape more grimly banal than Bradbury could ever have imagined... Books may be dead, but the stories ... the narratives that delight and disma…

IPBooster is the ‘launch project’ for META’s research exploitation platform, which is one of the three externally-facing platforms we’re building for META Group (context).

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

AI-powered software ... could soon be weaponized for online disinformation... Although the output can be nonsensical... has also shown moments of unnerving clarity... far better-written than right-wing text we have analyzed as scholars... reliably generate tweets on political topics favored by the disinformation group, complete with hashtags... Mu…

does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers?... although the relationship between tweets and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs... an author needs three times more followers to gain only one mention more... to be or not to be on Twitte…

Informing Knowledge4Policy with an Understanding of our Political Nature - exploring on Medium what “Understanding our Political Nature”, a recent EU study into knowledge, reason and policymaking, has to say about how the Knowledge4Policy platform could (should?) evolve.

More Americans have confidence in scientists, but there are political divides over the role of scientific experts in policy issues... six-in-ten Americans say scientists should play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues... but Americans are divided along party lines in terms of how they view the value and objectivity of scientis…

there are big issues with tags that limit their usefulness... tags are scattered... over 1 million unique tags. Many ... duplicates ... or so close that they have the same audience... represent each tag by a vector of numbers in a multi-dimensional vector space...find the meaning of these thousands of tags in a way that can represented by vector…

novelty and newness of these teams has worn off... growing acceptance ... that these teams are useful tool in driving new practices ... Less clear... is whether these units can enable the deeper digital transformation... ~ two key pieces of the puzzle: ... creating common platforms to power governments services is key to digital transformation o…

AI doesn't inherently understand its own competency. If a human worker needs help, they can ask for it — but how do you build an understanding of personal limitations into code? ... forecast when it's going to reach a situation where it has no experience... it gently taps the human on the shoulder... to take control... while we can delegate decisi…

Whether it is redesigning a website or helping an organisation undertake digital transformation, a management consultancy firm is rarely the right choice... products of the pre-digital era and as much in need of digital transformation as their clients...The legacy culture ... stifles new and leaner working practices... built on delivering large, w…

If you’re in the market for an off-the-shelf text analytics API, you have a lot of options. .. go with a major player ... or a smaller provider that focusses on text analytics ... we look at what the most prominent software giants have to offer ... there are now at least a couple of dozen APIs ... The granularity of IBM’s categories is striking...…

Free Software for your own Search Engine, Explorer of large document collections, Media Monitoring, Text Analytics, Document Analysis & Text Mining platform based on Apache Solr or Elasticsearch ... and Open Standards for Linked Data, Semantic Web & Linked Open Data integration