Petervan's Delicacies - Issue #99

The very best

About Joi Ito's (Director MIT Media Lab) PHD dissertation on change. Your must read this week.

About best practices on platforms: Steve Yegge's comparison of Google and Amazon platforms

About better understanding reality through art, by the director of the V&A on the institution’s expansion into east London, the antisemitism row in the Labour party, and the changing role of museums

About the human edge over AI: creativity and compassion. Automation will force us to realize that we are not defined by what we do

About your Arch-Nemesis by the super smart Eric Weinstein (MD at Thiel Capital). Most people only see arch-nemeses in movies. Thus, as a luxury item or a bucket-list entry they are surprisingly satisfying as so few people have one. In thi...

"Our perception of the world is largely shaped through the mediums of fiction. Our political positions are informed by fake news, we live out our lives in the

I’ve been advocating for years now that NPS (Net Promotor Score) has been fooling traditional western corporates

What started as a quest to map the sophisticated acoustics of ancient churches could end up preserving and replicating forgotten noises from across the planet.

The most honest answer that coaches and consultants can offer their clients is often, “It depends.” What are the context variables that coaches and consultants use when suggesting good practices?

How Einstein’s early experience of Judaism may have coloured his understanding of reality

You can’t miss the giant LED displays in Volta—but it’s the emotional connection that matters most.

We Are Liminal

Autodesk worked with NASA to create a space lander prototyle that can withstand the temperatures and pressures of outer space.

Real numbers are not real. The argument is simple, real numbers cannot reflect reality (i.e. not real) because they assume to have infinite precision. Infinite precision is an impossibility in nature…

Eric Weinstein

Time is just a story we tell ourselves.

Data and Society

Apple boss says tech industry regulation ‘inevitable’

There is a ‘third way’ for Europe to navigate the digital world

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week he didn't know about the PR campaign until The New York Times investigation.

#ethicalOS

“This is where there needs to be debate,” says a former analyst for one of the firms helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement gather personal data.

Zeitgeist

The industry’s fall from grace may feel unprecedented, but we have a model for what happens when a beloved industry fails us.

Why the outrage? Hirst’s sculptures of uteruses for Qatar are a rare celebration of women’s bodies – vividly quashing art’s tendency to sanitise birth

Teachers, doctors and lawyers among those wrongly forced to leave UK, review finds

Innovation

Our experience tells that Platform-Ecosystem (P-E) thinking adoption in organizations usually comes in three main phases. These phases are separated by non-negligible chasms.

The people and companies leading Europe’s growth

Playing a game you don’t care to win is a waste of a life

The turbineless design uses electroaerodynamic propulsion to fly and could herald the arrival of quieter, lower-emission aircraft.

In 2016, MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy launched its first annual Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC). The key objective of the IIC is to help create greater shared prosperity around the world by awarding over one million dollars in prizes...

Frédéric Halley, a native of Paris, is a London-based operating partner at NextWorld Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital fund that specializes in investing in enterprise startups and…

Though there is no magical formula, there are 3 important biases to overcome when you are looking for the right people for your innovation team: and they…

China’s biggest online health care services provider plans to build ‘hundreds of thousands’ of its telephone booth-sized, AI-powered clinics and roll these out across the country in three years

Future of work

The world of work is changing. But why are we dedicating so much time and energy to discussing the future of work? It’s not the first time society and the ec...

Workers in the technology sector and beyond may be ushering in a new era of employee activism on moral and ethical issues.

Corporations began putting workers inside of bubbles long before they invented the modern tech campus.

About gig workers' information disadvantage

The future of artificial intelligence depends on human wisdom

Internet Culture

In the future, public ledgers, AI, and new web interfaces will bring you into the action and respect your intelligence—not manipulate your ignorance.

Google and Facebook have agreed to follow principles about privacy and affordable access set out by Web-inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

FinTech

Amazon is opening up a new front in its battle to dominate the retail world, lining up brick-and-mortar stores to start accepting its mobile payments sy...

[This piece originally appreared in McSweeney’s new issue, The End of Trust, a collection featuring over 30 writers investigating surveillance, technology, and privacy, with special advisors the Electronic Frontier Foundation.]

Several banks, including BBVA, have been invited to join a new European Union platform to promote the use of blockchain technology.

Major Spanish banks BBVA and Santander have joined the launch of the E.U. International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications.

Two of Africa’s largest mobile operators and mobile money providers, Orange Group (www.Orange.com) and MTN Group (www.MTN.com), today announced a joint venture, Mowali (mobile wallet interoperability),

Ping An Insurance Group's Global Voyager Investment Fund is leading the latest funding round worth 41.5 million euros ($47 million) for Finleap, a Berlin-based fintech company. The investment marks the fund's first venture into continental Europe.

WeSure, Tencent's insurance platform, has widened its line of products and formed partnerships with 20 insurance and reinsurance companies.

SWIFT India has partnered with fintech firm MonetaGo to run a blockchain pilot aimed at addressing fraud in the e-way Bill system.

AI, Robots, Algorythms

Five big thinkers — Regina Barzilay, George Church, Jennifer Egan, Catherine Mohr and Siddhartha Mukherjee — puzzle over the future of the future.

What are Europe’s rules for democratic artificial intelligence?

Google has a responsibility to protect DeepMind data

Despite the growing presence of algorithms in daily life, the U.S. public expresses broad concerns over the fairness and effectiveness of computer programs making important decisions.

The civility debate sidesteps how false assumptions about harm online, coupled with the affordances of digital media, encourage toxicity

Where can technology take us that will benefit society and make things better? How can we get to those futures?

Art related

Yesenia Thibault-Picazo has created three household objects using raw materials that she believes will be used by craftsmen hundreds of years in the future.

Luma Arles is a twisting tower clad in aluminium, designed by architect Frank Gehry, that is taking form in the south of France.

A Russian artist turns typical Russian landscapes into 8-bit art. Here are some of their works. He calls the project “8-bit Skies” over Russia. The broken pixel (vk.

Aesthetics

Our perception of the world is largely shaped through the mediums of fiction. Our political positions are informed by fake news, we live out our lives in the...

Colossal | Art, design, and visual culture

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