Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #74

The very best

About a comparison between ethnographers and machine learning methods. "Nevertheless, similar to those doing machine learning, ethnographers surround themselves with data (“a field site”), choose what to see and what to ignore, and develop a coherent mental model that can encapsulate the observed insights. They identify and piece together meaningful data from particular instances, and then seek to generalize insights gleaned from the particulars and unspoken details of everyday life."

About the democratisation of the way value is created and shared: the participation economy

About insanely concentrated wealth

About the "Memory Palace". In Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) we learn that Sherlock Holmes used the most effective memory system known: a memory palace. Although imagined memory palaces are still used by memory champions and the few who pract...

About Björk’s Words of Wisdom on Technology, Multitasking, and Collaboration. The prolific polymath speaks to her latest slate of projects, including a virtual reality exhibit of her career and a book featuring artfully notated arrangements of her songs.

We have incredible cybernetic superpowers today and near instantaneous information at our fingertips. However, interfaces are killing our ability to think.

From Facebook's algorithms to our reliance on phones instead of our memories, tech giants are taking us to a future that's either utopian or dystopian, author Franklin Foer says.

"Monopoly is dangerous," says Yoshua Bengio

In the last chapter of this series, The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking, I explored some of the key concepts of systems thinking such as interconnectedness, synthesis, emergence, causality…

Data and Society

The long read: How technology is making our minds redundant

More and more, it’s clear these platforms create divisions, exploit our insecurities and risk our health, says novelist Matt Haig

SEC said it discovered last month that cybercriminals may have used a hack detected in 2016 to make illicit trades

Last year, two data scientists from security firm ZeroFOX conducted an experiment to see who was better at getting Twitter users to click on malicious links, humans or an artificial intelligence. The researchers taught an AI to study the behavior of social network users, and then design and implement its own phishing bait. In tests, the artificial hacker was substantially better than its human competitors, composing and distributing more phishing tweets than humans, and with a substantially better conversion rate.

Zeitgeist

Rasmus Degnbol remembers when, for the first time in his life, he became acutely aware of borders. A European citizen raised in the 1990s, he felt like he belonged to a European collective identity…

A new study found that the percentage of teens who have a driver's license, who have tried alcohol, who date, and who work for pay has plummeted since 1976.

There have been a series of stories recently about how modern teens are delaying adulthood. Headlines responding to new research in Child Development (paywall) say that “Teens are growing up more slowly” and “18 is the new 15.” Apparently, this screen-addled, risk-averse generation is delaying dating, postponing getting a driver’s license, drinking less and having less sex. The claim teens are...

Innovation

People, organizations, and policy respond to technological advances at different rates.

Future of work

Research on the downside of consensus.

The UK's National Health Service and 10 big firms are experimenting with CoachBot, which replaces "coaching and development" staff with an automated chatbot

employees—like accountants who “spend a lot of the time basically being an abacus”—will have to find new things to do

Internet Culture

FinTech

Analyzing the Ethereum transactions, cyber•Fund has come across a finding that struck us so much that we rushed to dig deeper into this issue. We now wish to share our findings with a community…

This September, financial institutions, venture capitalists, well established businesses, and startups alike joined together in New York City for 4 days of demos, panels, keynotes and roundtable…

In more than a decade of writing about the Internet and tech-enabled businesses I’ve learned that mobs don’t do nuance well. If you read the headlines or talk with zealous friends you may well think…

LONDON -- More than $8 billion has been...

Central banks are pretty bullish on blockchain technology, according to a new study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. One in five central banks surveyed say they will deploy some form of blockchain tech within the next two years. Nearly 40% say the tech will be in use within a decade. https://www.theatlas.com/charts/Sk16abbsb The central...

The iPhone X gives the banking industry a platform for mobile banking innovation with biometric, augmented reality and payment functionality.

The usual story line goes that big old slow incumbents cannot compete with agile Neobanks with their hip UX and with their low costs that are unencumbered by branch networks. If UX is the game, banks can at best play catch up. They can buy the hip UX ventures, only to be left in the…

Google launches smartphone payments app in India

Big ideas always start somewhere – most times in places like a café, coffee shop or over lunch. This year’s Innotribe sessions will be hosted in a similar setting to reflect the first inspirational meetings that lead to big ideas.  Focusing on “the how” of innovation, Innotribe will highlight how adjacent industries - such as the shipping, governmental, retail, medical and military industries - have solved their innovation challenges and explore their journey as a source of inspiration for the financial industry.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Stretchable sensors, circuits and batteries are about to change our relationships with electronics and each other, explain Bryant Chu and colleagues.

How do you actually become friends with someone? Is it a slow process of getting to know each other or is there a moment when you just hit it off? Do we enjoy staying friends with people who have become part of our lives or does there come a point when we just let them go?

University of Houston researchers have reported a development in stretchable electronics that can serve as artificial skin for a robotic hand and biomedical

A few months ago, Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson published Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, - their third book on the impact of the 21st century digital revolution on the economy and society, - following the publication of...

Nest is increasingly leveraging the Google AI brain trust to make its connected home devices smarter.

Rudy Rucker, a science fiction writer, professor of Computer Science tells TEDxBrussels his vision of the future. As in his novel "Software" where computers ...

Post Capitalism

At Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn nearly wrecked the economy. As Trump's top economic adviser, he's dismantling the rules put in place after the financial crisis.

Recent trends have produced positive statistics, but forces undermining the middle class may reach back farther than many economists have thought.

Art related

Thomas Heatherwick has created South Africa's biggest art museum – by hollowing out the inside of a historic grain silo building

Beautiful experiences lift the human spirit. They say, optimistically, life is worthwhile. If we can be more beautiful in our thoughts and in our actions, we can learn to live and work more…

Toto is hosting a London Design Festival exhibition, exploring how European study has affected the work of Japanese architects and architecture students

Peter Childs, the inspiring Head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London talks to me about beautiful AI and beautiful Automation. What…

Peter Randall-Page at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Follow us on social media: Facebook @yorkshiresculpturepark Twitter @YSPsculpture Instagram @yspsculpture

Andrew Thomas Huang says the visual is a “throughway into Bjork’s new album”

They used to play Björk on The Grind. In the likely event that you don't remember The Grind, it was an MTV dance show, a sort of early-'90s variant on American

Buddah — Japanese architect Tadao Ando. They say when you see something beautiful you know it. When I came across this Buddah at the Makomanai Takino Cemetery in Sapporo. I knew it to be a beautiful thing. Surrounded by a hill of lavender plants this is such an elegant piece of architecture. Via Alan Moore

Other

Prepare to be unsettled.