- Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Inrupt startup receives £5m investment
- Rosemary Hill on Auberon Waugh Lovely LRB piece.
- Remembering Edward Shils Nice memoir by his friend Joseph Epstein.
- Ten of the most important papers published in Nature Includes monoclonal antibodies, the structure of DNA, the first exoplanet and the discovery of the Antarctic Ozone hole.
Category Archives: Links
Linkblog
- How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets Funny what you can do with 140 characters.
- Russia just brought in a law to try to disconnect its internet from the rest of the world ‘Balkanisation’ gathers pace.
- MIT president acknowledges women, minorities on campus feel belittled, excluded Boston Globe report. The surprising thing is that anyone who knows MIT would be surprised.
- Newton vs the machine: solving the chaotic three-body problem using deep neural networks Since Newton’s time the problem of solving the equations of motion for three bodies under their own gravitational force has remained practically unsolved, and even partial solutions require massive brute-force computing. But four researchers at the University of Edinburgh have trained a neural network which provides accurate solutions at a fixed computational cost and up to 100 million times faster than a state-of-the-art conventional solver. Interesting because it suggests a novel way of using machine learning.
Linkblog
- Let’s All Stop Mindlessly Clicking and Sharing Zombie Links Amen. Sharp commentary based on what happened to Deadspin.
- The Mavening of sports writing Another commentary on the Deadspin story. Essential is you want to know what ‘Mavening’ means.
- How Toronto Reined In Big Tech A bit premature, perhaps. But it shows that some municipalities won’t allow themselves to be walked over by tech giants — in this case Google.
- Biology is Eating the World: A Manifesto Comes from a well-known venture capitalist, so must be taken with a good helping of salt. But interesting nevertheless.
- The four faces of Boris Johnson Player, gambler, Machiavelli or greased piglet, since you ask. From the Economist, if you please.
Linkblog
- The oil industry may decline, but it won’t go quietly Nice Economist piece pegged to Aramco’s upcoming IPO.
- What John Rawls missed Terrific (long) review article about a new study of Rawls’s work and the puzzle about why it was so dominant even though American society was the antithesis of his political philosophy.
- “Facebook coming to the help of the news industry is roughly like having the North American Meat Institute endorsing Greta Thunberg.” Frederic Filloux on Facebook’s new deal with (a few) publishers.
- The power (and limits) of Boris Johnson Best-informed piece I’ve read on how Johnson and the Irish Taoiseach broke the Brexit deadlock.
Linkblog
- Learning from the Ridley plan Fascinating essay on what an incoming Labour government could learn from Thatcher’s project.
- History of AI research Useful compendium by Luke Posey of significant papers and developments.
- New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding Sobering data from new satellite survey,published in Nature. Moral: best not to live in low-lying coastal regions. (Includes lots of large cities.)
- Key election safeguards won’t be ready for December poll Government was too busy with Brexit to legislate, apparently. And of course it has nothing to do with the Conservative’s social-media strategy for the election.
Linkblog
- If a Robotic Hand Solves a Rubik’s Cube, Does It Prove Something? Solving the cube is easy once you know the algorithm. But building a robotic hand that’s nimble enough to manipulate the cube is harder. The OpenAI researchers built a computer system “that learned to solve the Rubik’s Cube largely on its own”. (Italics added.) Wonder what ‘largely’ means.
- “Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts” Note the objective headline. But then that’s The Register’s style for you. Standfirst reads: “No next-gen mobile internet for you but, hey, no cancer either”.
- Machine learning on a USB stick Well, not quite. But we’re not far off as Google moves its Coral system off Beta status. The technology is on the way to being commoditised.
- Fascinating comparison of two photographs of the White House Situation Room during the Bin Laden mission and the Bagdadi mission Guess which one looks most staged.
Linkblog
- Media amnesia and the Facebook News Tab Why is Murdoch cosying up to Facebook?
- Data Analytics and Algorithmic Bias in Policing The RUSI Report.
- How a social network could save democracy from deadlock Interesting idea (based on the experience of Taiwan) by Carl Miller of DEMOS.
- HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ series if getting darker Clear case of fiction catching up with reality.
- More people still get their news from offline sources Good report by the Reuters Institute in Oxford. Challenges some conventional wisdom.
Linkblog
- Bundling and unbundling Perceptive essay by Drew Austin on digital tech’s relentless dissolving of value-chains.
- How steak became manly and salads became feminine Essay by a Yale historian about his new book on the history of cuisine.
- Artificial Intelligence Research Needs Responsible Publication Norms Thoughtful exploration on Lawfare of how potentially dangerous technologies should be revealed by researchers.
- The Psychology of Silicon Valley Interesting and useful book. Available on open access too.
Linkblog
- Data protection experts want watchdog to investigate Conservative and Labour parties They’re probably contravening the GDPR by buying Experian data and then using it for targeting voters.
- Why the cost of education and healthcare continues to rise Essentially because of Baumol’s cost disease. Useful explainer.
- The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate Really helpful framework for thinking about this.
- There are bots: look around Terrific essay by Renee DiResta on the parallels between automated trading in financial markets and in the so-called “marketplace of ideas”.
Linkblog
- Dismembering Big Tech: breaking up may be hard to do
- J.S. Bach the rebel Yeah, but most great artists were regarded as dodgy by their contemporaries. We now think of James Joyce as a great modernist writer. But in the Dublin of the 1920s he was held to be a bloody pornographer.
- Sue Halpern on the problem of political advertising on social media
- Facebook, free speech and power