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…

Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry... We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact...to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns... Profes…

CEOs and industry leaders all told me, “...Culture is the most important thing.” But when I asked “What exactly is culture, and how can I affect mine?” they became extremely vague.... I focused all my energy on “leading by example.”... did not scale as the company grew... became a hodgepodge of different cultures fostered under different managers.…

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…

I started the ‘coffee club’ as a professional community of practice focused on work and learning. We have a private community space for the members, who pay $10 per month... private discussion forum ... live web video chats monthly... recorded and available for 30 days... a trusted space. As the club grows, I will offer more services.... main focu…

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…

a productivity system where he keeps no schedule and only three lists... he uses index cards to keep track of his tasks... I’ve transformed ... it into a modern digital version using Trello... three core to-do lists: To-do list... commitments that need to be prioritized; Watch list... has a blocker stopping you ... you need to keep tabs on; Later …

Speak to any salesman about the art of selling and he will tell you timing is everything. Push a customer to buy too early and you will drive them away, wait too long and the moment will have past. We face a similar dilemma as web professionals.... Take for example those annoying popups... Do you like this app? Then rate it... Asking a user to sub…

Running a design competition to transform a research result into a commercial platform product.

A brief summary of my experience in building company structures and supporting processes, role definitions, etc.

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.

some practical tips on how to carry out moderated think-aloud usability testing. It’s based on what I’ve learnt from academic research and from practical experience, both inside and outside government.

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…

For those who have grown up with social media... childhood, an era that was fruitfully mysterious for the rest of us, is surprisingly accessible. ... this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity... children and teen-agers have gained a level of control that they didn’t have before... Humans have always tried …

half a dozen specialist curators ... find speakers in two ways: ... applications ... through the TED website ... scouting for talented speakers by going to conferences and asking their network ... they create short lists... The TED curators’ advice ... can apply to any conference where you aspire to be a speaker,

free online ratings are less trustworthy than those that have some cost to them... In ecology, costly signaling theory argues that displays that “cost” more — like elaborate peacock tails, or strenuous displays of hunger from baby birds — are more likely to reflect reality... making rating goods or services as easy as possible... is counterproduct…

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…

show how the nature of diversity in our urban areas around the world has been changing over the past few decades... the use of sentences in data visualization is one of my favorite things. You’re adjusting a sentence using these dropdowns, which gives it a narrative component and tells you some really basic things... there’s no reason to not use t…

Most successful entrepreneurs are older—and the ones running the highest growth businesses, according to research at MIT and the Kauffman Foundation, are nearly twice the age Zuckerberg was... I consistently see five traits that give older founders an edge. The takeaway, though, is that there are ways to hone that edge, even if you’re younger.

our team of researchers and policy analysts work together to analyze new data and create a platform for local stakeholders to make more informed decisions.... We arm local policy-makers with customized and data-driven insights so they can craft tailored, hyperlocal solutions.

a sophisticated and intuitive balance between vision, curiosity and passion; and a continuous process of experimentation and iteration... Grow the Ecosystem, and It Will Grow You... providing an ecosystem platform to others ... would allow Amazon to grow exponentially faster than if he poured all the company’s energy and capital into simply growin…

from 2010 to 2014, five American metro areas had the same level of business creation as the rest of the country...Rapid technological change, along with other drivers like the Great Recession and decreased dynamism are creating three economic challenges: Divergence between geographic regions... Concentration of startups and their value ... conc…

Your subconscious never rests... your goal is to direct your subconscious mind to create the outcomes you seek... unlock connections and solutions... Here’s a simple routine to get started:... Take a few moments before you go to bed to meditate on and write down the things you’re trying to accomplish. Ask yourself loads of questions ... Write tho…

How seeing the other side’s narrative can de-polarize your mind... the heart of polarization is often not a disagreement about the facts of a particular narrative, but about whether that story is somehow representative... in a big, diverse and complicated society, multiple narratives can all be true at once...

we’ve conflated data with truth. And this has dangerous implications for our ability to understand, explain, and improve the things we care about... data is not a perfect representation of reality: It’s a fundamentally human construct... subject to biases, limitations, and other imperfections... Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things.... Dat…

We’re about to start testing new online designs to make scientific evidence more accessible to policymakers. Volunteers needed! - recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

the bubble machine creates a politics of purity... I am not telling anyone to be mates with racists or stop being leftwing. I am just asking that we be less comfortably numb. The result of not speaking to those who don’t inhabit our precious bubbles will confront us this week

Steve Bannon and the conservative group CatholicVote used cell-phone location data for people who had been inside Roman Catholic churches ... target them with get-out-the-vote ads...“geofencing” or “ring-fencing.”... data ... is anonymized. But ... potential to reveal personal information about individual phone users... virtual fence around a geog…

2017 study ... showed that voters in Britain highly satisfied with their lives were 1.6% more likely to support the party in power... a 10% rise in family income was associated with a mere 0.18% increase ... happiness seems more important to the outcome of elections than money... in 15 European elections ... Life satisfaction... twice as important…

Europeans feel disenfranchised ... alternative forms of active citizen engagement in democracy must be experimented with... Our approach combines ... random sample voting (RSV) with secure digital identities... if anyone in Europe, from the European parliament to a local government or NGO, wants to find out how people in a certain region feel abou…