Petervan's Delicacies - Issue #119

The very best

The Internet Is Acid, and America Is Having a Bad Trip Operation Mind Fuck was too successful A calling card from the future Computers and networks were part...

Why data science is a profound threat for queer people

Our homes represent both physical spaces and a way of life — our sense of self refracted through the wider shifts that shape evolving trends in architecture and design.

I have seen the outlines of a regulatory and judicial regime for internet companies that begins to make sense to me. In it, platforms set and are held accountable for their standards and assurances…

Internet platforms are mechanical Turks - they can only understand things by finding a way to leverage vast numbers of humans. They’re distributed computers where all of us are the CPUs. How might machine learning change that?

Computer philosophy writer and "founding father of virtual reality," Jaron Lanier explains how the "manipulation economy" has reshaped the world we live in and why we should be controlling and profiting from our own data.

How 5G will affect our daily lives. 5G isn’t just about speed. It’s about pervasiveness, capacity, durability that will transform our own human experience.

We’re certainly on to something when we say the brain is a computer – even if we don’t yet know what exactly we’re on to

From a biological point of view, being human means DNA that codes for homo sapiens. It is an obvious answer when we talk in pure scientific terms. When we ask psychologists and philosophers, the…

Our imperfections are central to our humanity. Our flaws are markers of our authenticity. Our gifts don’t appear that way until the right person receives them. The things we’re self-conscious about…

Amazon’s annual shareholder letter has particular significance in the business world. Because it is essentially representative of the vision of Amazon. Jeff Bezos published Amazon’s annual…

Here's Amazon's full annual shareholder letter published by CEO Jeff Bezos on Thursday.

Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect

What story does your data tell about you?

Unions warn systems such as Isaak may increase pressure on workers and cause distrust

The London Borough of Enfield’s coat of arms features a depiction of the chimeric beast it was named for: a creature with the head of a fox, the talons of an eagle and the legs of a lion. The UK filmmaker Adam Butcher, who experienced his first brush with love in the borough, considers his memory of that time similarly fragmented, comprised of emotion, fleeting recollections and images preserved in the amber of the digital realm. In A Date with an Enfield, Butcher combines hundreds of hand-drawn frames – many of them sketched to directly correspond to Google Street View images –  to construct a poetic, personal rumination on the imperfections of memory.Via Labocine

A quest to understand how human intelligence evolved raises some ethical questions.

Forecasting the future is far from easy, but there is a way to hone your skills no matter who you are.

Welcome to the ChinAI Newsletter! *It’s been a little over the year since I started ChinAI with an email to a small group of colleagues and friends with chapter translations of a book co-authored by Tencent and a Chinese gov’t think tank on a National Strategic Initiative on AI. Since then, we’ve grown to 2800+ subscribers, and somehow nearly 50% of you actually open the email every week. ChinAI translations have been featured on the

Residents in parts of New York City will be required to get the measles vaccine or face a fine of $1,000.New York City has reported more than 280 measles cases since an outbreak struck an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community last fall.Nationally, there have been more than 460 measles cases so far in 2019.

Description: Industrial businesses often struggle with shifting from digital experiments to full digital transformation. These best practices can help make the change.

Data and Society

Users of the personal health record platform have until November 20 to migrate their data to another service.

Privacy’s Not an Abstraction. An experiment in privacy — and the discussion that ensued—offer unexpected lessons in who gets watched, and how.

Last week, Amazon announced that Alexa-enabled devices are now able to handle some patient information and are compliant with HIPAA. It’s an exciting update that could make aspects of health care more accessible for patients, but questions remain around privacy and how Amazon will (or won’t) be able to use the data it now has access to.

Apple will expand the iPhone’s NFC chip reading capabilities before the end of 2019 so that it can be used to read data stored in security chips like

Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder suffer from an ever-growing privacy divide, impacting more than just their personal dignity and autonomy.

Most of us understand by now that we’re being followed across the web. But how much do we know about how the smartphone apps we use track our every move? Thanks to tiny pieces of code that millions…

Pregnancy-tracking apps such as Ovia have climbed in popularity as fun, friendly companions for the daunting uncertainties of childbirth. But they have also become powerful monitoring tools for employers and health insurers.

Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder suffer from an ever-growing privacy divide, impacting more than just their personal dignity and autonomy.

Zeitgeist

The institution says global GDP growth will slow to 3.3% this year, calling the economy "delicate."

It’s not because the company actually makes any money.

Innovation

Designed to safely perform human-scale tasks, Blue will cost $5k and help accelerate research towards useful home robots

Meet BLUE - the Berkeley robot for Learning in Unstructured Environments! BLUE was designed and built from scratch within the Robot Learning Lab at UC Berkel...

We’re excited to announce the winners of the 2019 World Changing Ideas awards. World Changing Ideas, now in its third year, celebrates businesses, policies, and nonprofits that are poised help shift society to a more sustainable and more equitable future.

Explainer: What Is Quantum Communication? Researchers and companies are creating ultra-secure communication networks that could form the basis of a quantum internet. This is how it…

Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are the last competitors standing in the Pentagon’s winner-take-all competition for a $10 billion cloud services contract,

Billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Financial has done more than perhaps any company to disrupt China’s gargantuan banking and asset-management industries. Now it’s trying to re-imagine health insurance.

Future of work

If there is one thing that indiscriminatingly binds togethers large corporates, SMEs, scaleups and startup disruptors it’s the war for innovation talent.…

Deep work is the only means by which we can deliver the value we are paid to deliver. Nuture and protect your deep work and time.

I often say that having a bad day is a choice.  Well, today we're having rain/sleet/show/dust/thunder and I feel like having a bad day.  So please enjoy this piece from 11 years ago, which I was first pondering the nature of "work." A century ago, work was hard and physical. People mostly worked in either…

The Innovation Excellence community is home to articles, webinars, videos, training and education - powering growth in the innovation management profession.

Amid a wave of petitions and walkouts among tech workers, Amazon employees proposed a shareholder resolution around the company's impact on climate change.

As organizations adopt robotics and AI, they’re finding opportunities to reconfigure work in entirely new ways.

Internet Culture

In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. She’ll go deep on the little things that define your online life today. The state of your…

FinTech

Earlier this week, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published an interesting report covering the usage and investigation of Central Bank Digital Currency

Central banks are rapidly exploring blockchain adoption and have been for quite some time according to a new report by the World Economic Forum. As I’ve written about before, literally dozens of…

A large number of banks have shown an interest in CBDC. We define the term and analyse the positive impact they could have on the future financial sector.

In one sense it (Nemo-Blockchain) transcends national authorities by establishing electronic ledgers, along with a cryptocurrency beyond national control.

The accelerating pace of technological change is the best opportunity and biggest challenge in the financial services ecosystem today.

Our most comprehensive report on the AI capabilities in finance for leaders in wealth management, insurance, banking, and more.

DIFC's fintech fund is part of its many efforts to spur fintech in the region

OK, you got me. You are right: I publicly stated that I would not write about AppleCard after reading this blog by Brian Roemmele. This was thus far the most complete and detailed post I found on the…

AI, Robots, Algorythms

It’s difficult to speculate on the future—both near and far—without considering Ray Kurzweil. We review a handful of Kurzweil’s predictions that have turned out to be true.

Top Artificial Intelligence Influencers To Follow in 2019. Yoshua Bengio. Geoffrey Hinton. Yann LeCun. Andrew Ng. Ian J. Goodfellow

A Google-linked firm will start delivering takeaways and other small items to Canberra residents after the company received approval from aviation ...

While machines can and will magnify our thinking and apply it to data faster and more accurately than we can without assistance, they still can’t think for us. Advantage: human.

Amazon’s entry into healthcare is getting serious. When Amazon acquired PillPack for $1 Billion, it became clear how important Alexa was going to be for the healthcare needs of our aging population…

» 4500+ Researchers Call for an Immediate Ban on Lethal Autonomous Weapons - Although AI plays an integral role in our everyday lives, AI can also be used to create weapons of mass destruction, unlike anything the world has seen before. A group of 4500+ AI and robotics researchers and experts are calling for a ban on lethal...

The AI revolution is shaping the future of business. Learn about the history of AI, as well as the numbers and projections around its potential impact.

Armed with the power of data broadcasting and the force of the crowd, disaster victims now play a vital role in emergency response.

Not so safe after all.

Another buzzy tech company with roots in the real estate market has designs on the "smart cities" revolution.

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

How games and game engines can provide new ways of comprehending networked and distributed forms of intelligence.

Digital Ethics

The European Union has published new guidelines on how to develop AI ethically. The EU says these technologies should be accountable and explainable, and they should not coerce of trick users.

AI Now Institute founders Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker explain everything you need to know on the latest Recode Decode.

Laurence Morvan is a member of Accenture’s global management committee. As chief of staff to Accenture’s CEO she is responsible for ensuring that the CEO’s agenda is effectively represented in…

Mark Zuckerberg and the Tech World Still Do Not Understand Ethics. What is it about technology startups that leads people to cut corners, ignore ethical concerns, and disregard the social consequences of…

The European Commission is launching a pilot project to test draft ethical rules for artificial intelligence.

Last month Google announced that it is creating a new external ethics board to guide its “responsible development of AI.” This week we find out the board has already been dissolved. Microsoft boasts…

ChinAI Jeff Ding's weekly newsletter reporting on the Chinese AI scene; on the occasion of the newsletter's first anniversary, Ding has posted a roundup of things about the Chinese AI scene that the rest of the world doesn't know about, or harbors incorrect beliefs about. It's an excellent list, but three points leapt out at…

A push to calculate a 'genetic income score' using giant DNA databases raises a raft of ethical questions.

IT leaders and employees differ on data ethics and ownership and the root causes of insider breaches, according to a report by security vendor Egress.

Algorithms help the government decide who gets arrested, where people go to school, and how to distribute social services. New York City created a task force to make sure these algorithms aren’t discriminating against its residents. That’s proving harder than it sounds.

What Are the Values That Drive Decision Making by A.I.? Self-driving cars don’t drink and medical A.I.s are never overtired. Given our obvious flaws, what can humans still do best?

Post Capitalism

The CEO of JPMorgan Chase has some ideas about how to make capitalism a little nicer, now that the tide is turning against capitalism.

Government as a Platform is the approach of reorganizing the work of government around a network of shared APIs, open-standards and canonical datasets. The hope is that this will allow public…

The London history website LCC Municipal has a story about the history of street lighting in the south London borough of Croydon.¹ For reasons I’ll explain in a minute, it serves as a parable for…

Art related

Learn about the life and art of Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, who explored disability, relationships and Mexican culture in her work. -- In 1925, F...

Photo essay based on a solar-powered art class taught by multimedia artist Alex Nathanson at the Brooklyn cultural space Pioneer Works. Students learned the basics of engineering (circuits, volts, amps) as well as technical skills like soldering.

In 1957, the Eameses designed the SOLAR DO-NOTHING MACHINE. True to the Eameses' belief that toys are not as innocent as they appear, the machine was one of ...

After designing the sculpture using a machine learning algorithm, artist Ben Snell pulverized the device, mixed the dust with resin, and used it to cast the art that it had created.

Discover never before seen material from the personal archives of the extraordinary director, filmmaker and cinematic legend, Stanley Kubrick.

As Robotics Week boots up, Artie shows the value of coding and creativity

German musician builds instruments, then robots to play those instruments.

Aesthetics

Thanks to blogger Hannes Coudenys and of course the architects themselves, Belgium became notorious for its quirky buildings. In 2012 Coudneys decided to begin

Charles Darwin wrote a less well-known book The Descent of Man after writing the famous On the Origin of Species. In the Descent of Man he made the revolutionary claim that evolution is not only…

This intimate, in-depth look at Beyoncé's celebrated 2018 Coachella performance reveals the emotional road from creative concept to cultural movement. Premie...

It's not just Jordan Peele. Everything from Atlanta to The Last Black Man in San Francisco draws on a central question: How do we find a way to survive?

Design Museum London

VICE Media creates genderless AI voice assistant 'Q' to tackle bias and stereotype.

Other

In a late January episode of his popular interview podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan asked his guest, the Harvard geneticist and human longevity specialist David Sinclair, a simple question…

Jewel Changi is not an airport, nor an amusement park, nor a retail hub–it’s something in between.

What we’re doing to the planet is not as important as what we're achieving as a species entering the transhumanist age.