Overview: Science&Technology

each Model S owners as an “expert trainer” ... each driver will train the autonomous features of the system to feed the collective network intelligence of the fleet by simply driving the electric vehicle on Autopilot... Model S owners are already taking to the Tesla Motors Club forum to describe how the Autopilot is improving... - The Autopi…

This should be an exciting time. After all this is what we have wanted for so long. But it could prove dangerous if we do not handle it well... Instead of getting strong, clear direction about becoming digital first there is a vague vision... One danger is that the digital first vision fades before it can take root.... The second danger is it g…

There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators... give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on... Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our ne…

The code behind the effort is all available on Github... the fact that it uses an open repository doesn’t mean that Google isn’t running the project, or deciding what gets included and what doesn’t... publishers have another option ... simply take the best parts of the specification from the publicly available documentation and implement those …

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

Media Cloud... is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media... by collecting and analyzing the news stream of tens of thousands of online sources.... academic researchers, journalism critics, policy advocates, media scholars, and others c…

an ongoing conflict between artificial intelligence and the linked but divergent project of intelligence augmentation... the difference between a future in which human capabilities are enhanced by technology and one in which humans are made effectively obsolete, versioned out by the consequences of our own ingenuity... we might be “in for an in…

In many fields of research right now, scientists collect data until they see a pattern that appears statistically significant, and then they use that tightly selected data to publish a paper ... this p-hacking ... uses a quiver of little methodological tricks that can inflate the statistical significance of a finding ... a significant problem …

For the purpose of media pluralism, an emerging concern is how to ensure that the activities of these powerful platforms do not lead to a reduction in the quantity and quality of content actually available to consumers, and/or do not undermine democratic communication (e.g. through the suppression or arbitrary selection of information). Their …

the concerns and questions new information intermediaries bring to the table are explored, particularly in regards to the effect they have on media diversity. Additionally, Helberger looks into the regulatory options for safeguarding media pluralism and regulating these new gatekeepers, who are increasingly in control of consumer data. This art…

each and every one of Google robot cars has experienced the totality of everything all its siblings have experienced. Google’s cars have driven a total of 1.2 million miles on the roads.... effectively every single car has driven that distance, has experienced it. [plus] ... 3 million miles every day running scenarios This is a machine that lea…

In trying to access the federal programs which will allow her to afford college, Joanne must navigate the websites of multiple agencies. She finds dozens of government websites which all seem relevant to what she’s looking for. Joanne is confused. Are these programs related to each other? Are they even all a part of the federal government? Are any…

Get with the community; The death and rebirth of comments: The death of the open web?

...with iOS 9 and content blockers, what you're seeing is Apple's attempt to fully drive the knife into Google's revenue platform.... So it's Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms. Google has the web, Facebook has its app, and Apple has the iPhone. This is the newest and biggest war in tech going today. And the …

"It's a discussion that's been running for a long time, but has kicked into overdrive because of Apple's release of a new operating system for iPhones and the launch of new services like Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. And it's something you'll be hearing more and more about if you read things online..." Good observation: "if content …

Blogging has never been easier but getting read has never been harder... The problem isn't freedom or openness but distribution... you might post it on Facebook or Google Plus. Your friends might see it ... (though this is largely random) and they might share it ... You might post it on LinkedIn and your network might see it ... and LinkedIn migh…

You have nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear, and algorithms... It has never been easier for designers and non-designers to create great websites that even five years ago would have cost a fortune to build... design is dead. There is more to design than the pixel-pushing of visual design... The real designers, problem solvers... able to co…

The four phases of self-driving car development suggest we’re 5-10 years out. - Self-Driving Cars Disrupt the Crowd | Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Digital Business

Richard Edelman "... arguing my own case, for a vertical (PR) that grows into related areas in a horizontal manner" No mention (yet) of how communications impacts other internal programmes, like innovation, ideation, training, employee engagement ... - The Big Squeeze - Edelman

Seenthis dispose de fonctionnalités lui permettant de déterminer la langue des messages... - le message global est analysé, - les paragraphes de citation à l’intérieur du billet sont analysés à part. De cette façon, je peux écrire un billet en français, contenant des extraits en anglais et en espagnol. Seenthis est capable de déterminer la…

My first subscribers, surveyed last week, were equally split between the diverse formats and styles of my first four editions, so here’s a 5th.

What does it mean for companies to know everything about us, and for computer algorithms to make life and death decisions? Should we worry more about another terrorist attack in New York, or the ability of journalists and human rights workers around the world to keep working? How much free speech does a free society really need? - The End of th…

Something for the bloggingportal reboot, courtesy @ronpatz: "quantitative text analysis has provided useful tools to extract policy positions from text or estimate sentiment of political speech, the application of such techniques is hitherto limited to monolingual contexts. We present a possible solution to this problem by presenting a reliable…

The future of the web is "push-based", meaning the web will be coming to us.... the web will disappear into the background much like our electricity or water supply.. content, products and services will find you, rather than you having to find them... What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get informat…

Good intro to WaPo's Clavis recommendation engine ... "technology that figures out what stories are about, categorizes them by topic, and assigns each a series of keywords. It runs that same process on the Post’s readers and identifies their presumed interests based on stories they’ve read. Clavis then pairs readers with stories... the Post imp…

The biggest reason the Walled Gardens are winning is because they have a superior user experience, fueled by data... we first must build websites and applications that exceed the user experience of Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. Second, we need to take back control of our data.,, create a "personal information broker"... the user can control wha…

What does the rise of digital distributors mean for the Open Web?... is there a point at which distributors create enough value for publishers to stop having their own websites? If distributors are capturing market share because of a superior user experience, is there a future technology that could disrupt them? And the ultimate question: who will…

The subtext of Uber’s new products having the look and feel of a slightly shinier version of mass transit is, of course, that Uber wants to be privatized mass transit. In Uber’s grand vision, no one owns cars because nearly everyone is taken everywhere in a driverless, electric, omnisciently networked Uber conveyance that arrives precisely when it…

Cars are going to change a lot in the next few decades ... there are actually a number of separate things happening, which feed into each other and accelerate the pace of change.... it's now pretty easy to look at a car and say 'this should be a smartphone' ... To the extent that you add smart to a car, it should really be from the smartphone, …

Interesting approach to using Pinterest to curate interesting content: "Virtual Reality (and its cousin, Augmented Reality) are going to be big deals in PR and organizational communication. I'm curating articles here about the trend and the uses to which communicators can put these fast-growing technologies." - (1) Virtual and Augmented Real…