Overview: Science&Technology

People are remarkably bad at explaining what they do, or how they go about reasoning, but we manage to live in a world filled with people, anyway.

There’s no shortage of resources about Digital Transformation on my Hub, but ... I’m not sure I recommend all of them. This edition includes three I do

Each side of the climate debate accuses the other of exaggeration and suffers from its own... sometimes feel like a shouting match in a roomful of children wearing earplugs... We have allowed our political, national, economic, and cultural narratives free play ... where... are the narratives from science itself? Where is the science teacher?... p…

how hard is it for someone to put true artificial intelligence into a chatbot? ... here are the 50 lines of code that enable your bot to understand speech:

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours... lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime... great students didn’t just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately... engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improv…

if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible.... how does one end up on this blacklist? ... mastodon.social’s community policy:... your social graph is not portable between platforms ... first principle of a workable, future-proof social ne…

throwing more data at problems won’t necessarily lead to progress... us to artificial general intelligence... there’s low-hanging fruit that deep learning’s good at  —  specific narrow tasks ... we’re not making progress on cognition and strong AI.... we can’t well interpret what deep learning is doing... it isn’t literally exactly memorization…

Federated Learning enables mobile phones to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping all the training data on device, decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store the data in the cloud.

science has become as horrifically politicized as any other aspect of American life.... If we truly want to endorse the idea of science, let’s break up into groups and fan out across America:

The internet freedom agenda presumed the benefits of the free flow of information only cut one way: in favor of open societies, values, and ideals. But we’re now seeing that its destabilizing effects cut both ways... The open internet creates an asymmetric threat... rather than the global village ... mid-21st century internet might ... be a feder…

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

The objectivity that matters so much in science is not primarily a characteristic of individual scientists but of scientific communities. Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses... Their fellow scientists will be happy to expose these hypotheses to severe testing... Not being afraid of being wrong... is a value we could promote... Intel…

Enterprise systems and business processes are constructed... from an organization’s most strategic asset: subject matter expertise. ... doesn’t all sit neatly in some database or model. It sits in the spreadsheets and brains of the business analysts, the ... engineers, etc. Capturing and codifying this expertise to create more intelligent and auto…

guides you through the traffic of social networks and automatically creates data visualizations for exceptionally insightful discoveries, all on the cloud. Identify a topic and quickly get relevant content that shows you interesting relationships and patterns. You can easily take the pulse of your audience, gain greater visibility into a topic or …

intuitive ways for people with big ideas to start building AI tools without big expertise.

a list of basic resources for marketers who want to learn more about AI. Here’s a quick roundup of some of the things I’ve contributed to and some blogs to subscribe to, as of early 2017.

The war for the open internet is the defining issue of our time... By the end of this article, you’ll understand what’s happening, the market forces that are driving this, and how you can help stop it.

Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger... your experiences are being powered by AI... Eventually, this “classifying” step—known as supervised learning—may become automated, as the company pursues an ML holy grail known as “unsupervised learning,” ... Facebook sees the visual cortex merging wit…

vast universe of self-built social media empires devoted to spreading false, misleading, and polarizing science and health news ... Natural News ... are “[o]pening my eyes to the reality that everything about our culture is corrupted and I can’t trust nothing but what I see and experience.”.. people tend to hold beliefs that align with their cultu…

Material that arouses heated emotions within the viewer spreads faster and wider than well-considered, evidence-based argument.For an elected leader, a u-turn is seen as the ultimate betrayal, but for a scientist, changing views in the face of better evidence is a sign of the highest integrity.... Imagine, if you will, a sort of spellchecker appl…

If you're wondering where your job sits on the list of "Run for your life, the robots are coming," you have a simple, singular mission. Learn how your job is going to be automated. Learn everything you can about what your job will evolve into and become the very best man-machine partner you can.

every Chinese ... ”Citizen Score” will determine under what conditions they may get loans, jobs, or travel visa to other countries. ... individual monitoring would include people’s Internet surfing and the behavior of their social contacts... algorithms know pretty well what we do, what we think and how we feel—possibly even better than our friend…

The Information reported that ... artificial intelligence-powered chatbots could successfully complete only 30 percent of requests without human assistance.... a dilemma ... lies in the nature of bots themselves and when they are truly useful... Bots are great for the occasional, simple question: “I know what I want, give me the answer as quickly…

An effective communications strategy must be connected to other strategies, usually managed by different departments. Reframing it as central to your organisation’s innovation strategy helps sidestep turf wars. 

"Perspective" ... for news websites and blogs to moderate online discussions with the help of artificial intelligence... reports how "toxic" a given comment is. It lets the website publisher, or even readers themselves, choose a "toxicity" threshold for comments that won't be displayed publicly... will start screening for off-topic comments or one…

There are always “alternative facts.” What matters is how we decide which of those alternative facts are most likely to be true... Conway’s statement based ... on a much older tradition of deciding what is true: the argument from authority.... the culmination of a long retreat from the scientific perspective on truth... pitted against creationist…

scientists and their supporters need to paint a positive vision of the future, where science re-affirms its moral authority, articulates how it will help us, and advances a noble cause

More than two dozen governments... have a team of behavioral scientists tasked with ... “nudge” their citizens toward what they deem to be higher levels of well-being... “nudges” are value neutral... both achieve altruistic ends or more malicious ones... our environment (and the government) is always exerting some influence on our behavior, so we’…

3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices.