Petervan's Delicacies - Issue #90

The very best

About Holochain's ICO Initial COMMUNITY Offering. 

About personal metrics of success

About thinking through self driving devices, AI, platforms etc.

About humans becoming slaves of robots

About architect Renzo Piano on the meaning of architecture, creativity, beauty, and much more

Tanz im August 2016 – 28. International Festival Berlin "Celui qui tombe" by Yoann Bourgeois / CCN2 will be in Berlin at Haus der Berliner Festspiele on 26. ...

Relativity says we live in four dimensions. String theory says it’s 10. What are ‘dimensions’ and how do they affect reality?

Compiled from The Beautiful Business Newsletters and Compendiums. This is the first list of 50 Beautiful Businesses. These businesses inspire a different way of looking at the world. We celebrate…

The discipline-eschewing-ethnographer-better-known-as-poet is excited. Fieldnotes, fieldnotes! Oh dear. There’s so much to say, so much to share, so many people who’ve said it better than I’m going…

Ray Dalio's book 'Principles' was recommended by so many, that I finally read it. The book's algorithms for life can be deeply rewarding but his view of running companies can be complemented by other ideas.

Data and Society

A new report from Human Rights Watch sheds light on a troubling law enforcement practice called “parallel construction.”

Happy New Year! This is the GDPR year. Moving from white papers, surveys, and media; Personal Data spaces of all sorts are undoubtedly important technology modules. Seen from one specific angle, any venture in this broad and important sector, is a Social Impact initiative because it addresses important issues arising in the next generation of…

So lots of folks asking me about Facebook’s news today. I’ve read what I can, and here’s my initial take, in a thread. First, here’s the news from FB: This is from Adam Mosseri, head of News Feed (he…

Zeitgeist

We’re only 9 days into 2018, and the much needed backlash against Facebook, social media platforms and the tech industry in general is starting to be taken seriously by the media. The backlash has…

In Facebook CEO Vows To Rid Social Network Of Bad Info, Actors, @mp_gavin says Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook post promising “To cleanse his social network of trolls, purveyors of false and misleading…

Blackouts in Ukraine were just a trial run. Russian hackers are learning to sabotage infrastructure---and the US could be next.

Think Penn Station is bad? Let’s go into the crumbling, disaster-prone tunnels that lie beneath.

Innovation

A new Amazon.com patent may mean you may not be able to avoid the massive online retailer even in your garden.

The world's largest automaker, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, has launched a $1 billion corporate venture capital fund to focus on investments in "new mobility"..

Future of work

s closing one in our personal lives. The special project that takes date nights away from our partners. The big promotion that takes weekends away from our kids. The new role across the country that takes us away from our families. At Facebook, our best managers work with people to minimize these trade-offs by creating career opportunities that mesh with personal priorities. Here’s an example.

it’s probably more valuable to see your job description is term of a “node” inside a network, as opposed to a rung on a ladder.

Does cross-functional collaboration really fuel innovation and creativity, or is it a black hole of unnecessary emails and meetings?

Internet Culture

I'm excited to share my latest transmedia scenario looking at the future of military learning. This work was done for the Advanced Distributed Learning CoLab (ADL). Out-Learn, Out-Think, Win Out-Learn, Out-Think, Win—tells a story about how Defense personnel may learn...

FinTech

There will be perks.

Back in 2010, amid declarations that “software is eating the world,” it seemed like the combined waves of mobile devices and cloud computing would change everything. As tech wrecked havoc upon…

This article appeared first under the title “Where Will the Crypto Craze Lead? A Venture Capitalist’s View” on ProMarket.org, the blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School…

The billionaire investor and his longtime manager Charlie Munger, two of the world’s most successful investors, say they’d never invest in cryptocurrencies

MoneyGram to Use XRP for Faster International Payments

We wish we had a magic crystal ball to help us make predictions for 2018. Luckily, making projections doesn’t require a supernatural ability; rather, projections are about taking known trends and…

Google seems to have finally owned up to the fact that there is fierce competition in the mobile payments market, and that it will have to bring all its payments technology under one product to compete well. The company announced today that Android Pay, Google Wallet, and the payments auto-fill stuff in Chrome are all … Continue reading “Google unifies its payment apps under “Google Pay””

Encrypted messaging startup Telegram plans to launch its own blockchain platform and native cryptocurrency, powering payments on its chat app and beyond...

Bitcoin gets all the attention, but many other cryptocurrencies exist, and more are being created at an accelerating rate. One list shows over 1,400 alternatives to Bitcoin, with a combined value climbing towards $1 trillion. If Bitcoin is so amazing, why do these alternatives exist? What makes them different?

AI, Robots, Algorythms

n, you know that the will of a toddler has a kind of purity to it: he wants what he wants, and refuses what he refuses, without reference to any fact that might inconvenience his will. It is freezing outside, but he doesn’t want to wear shoes to the park. By contrast, the will of an adult is shaped by his interactions with material reality. To say that the will is shaped by the world means that putting on shoes, for example, is no longer experienced as an accommodation. It is just what one does, as a condition for the possibility of doing anything else.

Art related

Philosophers have a bad reputation for casting unwarranted doubt on established facts. Little could be more certain than your belief…

Compiled from more than 1,000 still photographs, the Israeli-born US-based director Ynon Lan’s short film NYC Textures transforms some of New York’s most ubiquitous sights – from the city's brick walls and subway steps to the grass and bark of Central Park – into an energetic, jazzy abstraction. Or it's a day’s worth of brisk urban walking condensed into a minute and a half.

"As a film director, I feel it is my job to always be telling the viewer what to think about an image or moment,” says photographer and director [Jo...

Winston Surfshirt

Software that can turn simple scribbles into detailed "paintings" is on show at CES in Las Vegas.

Petervan update

My sabbatical has come to an end, and I left SWIFT on amicable terms mid Jan 2018. I also decided to drop the whole idea of Petervan “Productions” and killed the related website. It just simplifies a lot. The “Productions” branding of my work confused people more than anything. I am not in the event…