Overview: Science&Technology

"Newsrooms are under pressure. Revenues are down, budgets are being cut, and journalists are losing their jobs. Sadly, it’s often the specialists whose jobs get axed ... Yet, never more than today has the need for sound science journalism been so great." - Why the World Needs Better Science Journalism | MediaShift

In this edition I highlight only one post, and mention a few others. Topics: truth, authenticity & trust, but also productivity and digital transformation.

"A large part of corporate economic activity today is still designed to accomplish what high market transaction costs prevented earlier. But the world has changed... coordination can be performed without intermediaries with the help of new technologies. Digital transparency makes responsive coordination possible... Apps can now do what manag…

networks trump traditional forms of corporate organization, and ... changing traditional ways of managing that organization... If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically ... The core firm should now be small and agile, with a large network. The mainstream firm... becomes the more expensive alterna…

By combining ride sharing with car sharing—particularly in a city such as New York—MIT research has shown that it would be possible to take every passenger to his or her destination at the time they need to be there, with 80 percent fewer cars. Clearing the roads of four out of five cars has momentous consequences for cities... - Full speed …

A significant proportion of tasks embedded in white-collar jobs can and will be automated in the years ahead. ... as much as 47 per cent of total US employment is at risk, while the equivalent figures for European countries ...from about 47 per cent in Sweden and the UK to 62 per cent in Romania... For now, however, what all too often passes as…

"the C-Suite have optimized the supply chain, digitized marketing and communications, socialized customer care and service. Where else can they get a competitive advantage? Fundamentally changing the way they work, implementing change -- especially culture change -- faster and better, will be the source of competitive advantage going forward.... …

This morning I read How Europe turned its back on humanity, a damning opinion piece in Aljazeera on Europe’s hypocritical response to the refugee crisis:Of the 10 links chosen by Primal, all bar one (the last) are directly related to the original article. Pretty good performance.The same technology is also available for your browser’s toolbar: if …

When cars come with an 'ethics module', will it be optional? Will there be choices? Will you have to get an upgrade if you change your religious beliefs? Fun cans of worms: "a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly is exploring the ethical dilemmas that may arise when vehicle self-driving is deployed in the real world." - Self-Driving Cars Get …

"If a scientific paper's findings are surprising, there's a very, very good chance that it's wrong: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... the solution is to check, to revisit, to reanalyze. And then there's journalism, where reporters come out with shocking and surprising stories every day, and no one ever gets to reanalyze the…

"This is not just about great user interface design but real end-to-end digital [services]... Some things have not been smooth, not all the exemplars have been a resounding success, however Mike took the challenge, dared to be measured and held accountable and the results have certainly been positive and to the betterment of the public purse." …

"Just imagine how much happier you would be if a prematurely deceased loved one were alive, or a debilitated one were vigorous — and multiply that good by several billion, in perpetuity. Given this potential bonanza, the primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence.Get out of the way. A truly ethical bioethics…

Editor is an experimental text editing interface that explores how collaboration between machine learning systems and journalists could afford fine-grained annotation and tagging of news articles. Our approach applies machine learning techniques interactively, as part of the writing process, rather than retroactively.

So many memories…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

In Bristol, a group of companies called the Venturer Consortium is planning the UK's first independent test site for driverless car technologies...The plan is to test the modified Wildcat on private and public roads in early 2016. The plan is to test the modified Wildcat on private and public roads in early 2016.

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter. I have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox... than to the marketing junk gushing from social media

"Our Analysis APIs analyze text or web pages, extracting metadata and classifying with topics (Functional Programming, Celebrity Gossip, or Hotels) and aspects (review, news, product, video). Analysis APIs can be used to label and organize content, recommend similar content or to build rich user profiles that enable personalization."

The 2015 Digital Business Global Executive Study and Research Project by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte identifies strategy, not technology, as the key driver of success in the digital arena. Conservative companies that avoid risk-taking are unlikely to thrive - and they'll also lose talent ... The ability to digitally reimagine the b…

Spot the big IF*: "If a fleet of autonomous electric taxis were to replace everyone’s gas-powered, personal cars, we could see more than a 90 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions..." There is no specific reason why taxibots need to be electric. It would be great, but it may require regulation. Moreover, you could replace the current …

the competitive significance of business models turbocharged by machine learning is poised to surge... companies must have two types of people to unleash the potential of machine learning. "Quants" are schooled in its language and methods. "Translators" can bridge the disciplines of data, machine learning, and decision making by reframing the …

"Europe is currently a global leader in automated transport research" - Driverless taxis to become a major form of transport 'in 10 years' | Horizon Magazine - European Commission

"By evaluating 18 practices related to digital strategy, capabilities, and culture, we have developed a single, simple metric for the digital maturity of a company... its Digital Quotient. This survey reveals a wide range of digital performance in today’s big corporations... a strong and adaptive culture can help make up for a lack of technica…

"the rise of suggested content tools has shifted the balance between conversation and link-sharing, and in so doing has diminished the value of the links that get shared... a tweeted link no longer reflects any curation or judgment on their part; it may well be something that was found for them rather than by them. Nor is it a sign that they’ve…

people commit to “taking one action, just one, in their local organisation to counter the local brand of disadvantage that women may be facing.” - 2020 Science A call to proactively support Women in Science - 2020 Science

Distributed intelligence means you need to find a social process, not a data-driven solution... You cannot outsource leadership to your analytics group. - Thinking Small: 3 Ways To Remain Creative In A World Of Big Data | Co.Create | creativity + culture + commerce

"in a world dominated by self-steering taxis, each ride becomes cheaper if the vehicles are autonomous rather than owned and run by major corporations... We can program it to ... make it the most moral, socially minded capitalist possible...it would not be self-aware... But they would be programmed to seek self-improvement in order to avoid bec…

Twitter enables connections between accounts. What exists today as a social network between people who follow and reply to each other could tomorrow expand to be an information network between devices that could follow and reply to each other. - The Internet of Tweets — The Message — Medium

Nice play by Nasa: ~"Can you guess what's creating those unusual bright spots on Ceres? On March 6, NASA's Dawn spacecraft began orbiting Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Even before the spacecraft arrived at the dwarf planet, images revealed mysterious bright spots that captivated scientists and obser…

If the market can express more directly which content is in high demand, more of that content will be created. But there is missing a simple and convenient way for the consumer to value the everyday content they consume