Overview: Science&Technology

In response to "The Tyranny of Agile"... Don’t get me wrong — in theory it sounds great to release half-checked, bug-ridden websites for your users to check in the name of agile... But websites delivering actual governmental services really badly IRL can ruin people’s lives...

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

The New York Times is acquiring a marketing agency... Fake Love, an agency that specializes in live experiences, virtual and augmented reality... to grow its revenue in part by offering more ad agency services,.. I’m getting daily requests for [augmented reality]... chatbots. And VR, the market is already hot.

we’re falling asleep at the wheel. Most people in charge of shaping cities ...  haven’t realized what is about to hit them and the speed at which it is coming...The advent of autonomous vehicles couldn’t have happened at a better time. Or a worse one. Here’s how to steer towards the better outcome.

A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

Salesforce’s Peter Coffee offers a singular analysis of the meaning of singularity and its key consequences.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

“Four years later, this Tweet probably best illustrates, in a single image, the mistaken assumption underlying the failed UK Remain campaign…” - a post-Brexit update of my January 2012 post on BlogActiv, over on Medium.

We asked  respondents to share the different types of challenges they face... changing company culture lead with 63% of respondents stating that it is an extremely significant to successfully lead digital transformation efforts toward fruition... executive support is key to sanctioning change and investing in it

Voters can either vote directly on issues, or they can delegate their voting power to delegates (i.e. representatives) who vote on their behalf. Delegation can be domain specific, which means that voters can delegate their voting power to different experts in different domains... If trust is broken ... the voter can simply revoke the delegation ..…

minor changes at the surface level do nothing to affect the fundamental operations of a company. Appointing a Chief Digital Officer, with no budget and no clear mandate, is not digital transformation. Increasing the social media marketing budget is not digital transformation... have a different approach to everything. Real digital transformation …

Jobs instructed the architect to design physical space that encouraged staff to get out of their offices and mingle, particularly with those with whom they normally wouldn’t interact. Jobs believed that serendipitous exchanges fueled innovation... The more diverse a person’s social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative... we use…

Google also debuted a new VR platform called Daydream... helping define the specifications, such as high-performance sensors for accurate head tracking, for VR-capable smartphones... to reduce the delay between head movement and picture ... reduce latency to less than 20 milliseconds.

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

Imagine that we have heard the sentence “The dog chases the cat” several times, but we haven’t ever heard the sentence “The cat chases the mouse”. As soon as we hear it, we infer that cats do some things similarly to dogs: at least they also chase. But we know even more: we also know that “cat” have the same syntactic behaviour in the latter sente…

The filter bubble... has evolved. Algorithms, network effects, and zero-cost publishing are enabling crackpot theories to go viral... impacting the decisions of policy makers and shaping public opinion, whether they are verified or not... Facebook's news feed ... tailored just to us ... to keep us interested and happy... drives engagement and mor…

When it comes to a wide variety of issues ... many of us have opinions that are based on fear or ideology, rather than on what the science says... we even vote (or ask our representatives to vote) on not just policy but on the science ... voting on science is completely antithetical to the entire enterprise ... debate in science isn’t about achiev…

The Turing Test is supposed to determine whether a machine can think, or seem to think. How would you test whether a machine can process and simulate feelings so well that a human user could develop real feelings for it? Well, how do you test whether you could love anyone?You flirt.... The goals of flirting... resemble the goals of contemporary …

Pluto-focused project, upcoming episodic series, and experiments with “meditative VR,” The Times is experimenting with different applications for the new technology... The idea is to do proper VR shows that have a through-line and episodic structure... We’re looking at an experience that we jokingly call “meditative VR.” These are single-shot, no…

After so much talking about the risks of ultraintelligent machines, it is time to turn on the light, stop worrying about sci-fi scenarios, and start focusing on AI’s actual challenges, in order to avoid making painful and costly mistakes in the design and use of our smart technologies... Believers in true AI and in Good’s ‘intelligence explosion’…

Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, sets out how this technology could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity... The report makes a number of recommendations which focus on ministerial leadership, research, standards and the need for proof of concept trials.

Blockchain... - is already being explored as a way of securely managing the distribution of government grants... a key role in the Government as a Platform programme to create "an ecosystem of interconnected components that departmental teams can use to assemble their services ... foster a new culture of trust”.

AI can be effective, particularly its Natural Language Processing (NLP) aspect — but only in the right context... we need to work out when it’s a help and when it’s a hindrance... Whilst AI may be the new kid on the technological block, it works best as a complement to good UI, not a substitute.

But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences... although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine... you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.…

Technology is superior when humanity is woven into its DNA. I’m newly fond of saying, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” Jelly sprung from the question, “What would search look like if it were created today?” We knew mobility and good old, human experience would be defining factors.... Enter your quest…

I haven’t yet met a single bot that actually does ANYTHING better than a great UX... that actually does ANYTHING beyond a narrow scripted interaction. They all seem OK inside a script (in English), but become super-annoying very fast, when moving out of their pre-designed limits. So I decided to deploy a chatbot, without building one, just to see …

When a Vox Media Slack user sends a direct message to simbot specifying a seed article URL and a number of desired results, then the bot would return a ranked list of articles that are most similar in content to the article found in the provided URL. two main applications for the bot ... enable editors ... on social media... to discover related…

You can now chat with all sorts of bots through a number of messaging services... The trouble is that computers still have a hard time understanding human language... but chatbots are still prone to confusion and misunderstanding... The best commercial chatbots will most likely be those that recognize their own limitations... There have been no …

Picture a nightmarish future in which half-witted “conversational user interfaces” drive us insane with mindless conversation and misunderstandings...chatbots may be incredibly annoying. And things may be even more annoying if app designers fail to appreciate the significant challenges that remain with using computers to parse and respond to natur…

bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.