My Digital FootPrint

How to survive and thrive in the third digital revolution : #designingreality By the brothers Gershenfeld, Neil , Alan and Joel This books takes the concept of FabLab from the common understanding of a simple fabrication lab where you can make one of (almost) anything (here is a global list of FABLABs ); to how digital tools changes economics and the competitive nature of nations policy.    One to read but be very open minded to ( and the bias of) Path dependency (you can only continue on the path as the constraints and inertia prevent you from change) Why it will be so hard for companies to adopt to this thinking. “The first digital revolution was in communication, taking us from analog phones to the Internet. The second digital revolution was in computation, bringing us personal computers and smartphones. Together they fundamentally changed the world. The Third is digital fabrication.” The book brings the perspectives of science, technology, soc...

Our personal worldview is based on experience but that experience has a bias; the way we make sense of things produces bias ( The Mind is Flat ) and in the end we have no idea just how biased we are in our own opinions, delivery, views or ideas.  However a joy of the Freedom is Speech is that we are entitled to have a biased opinion and express it. Human brains are wired to make all kinds of mental mistakes which can impact our ability to make sense of what our senses are telling us. In total, there are 188 cognitive biases that mess with how we process data, think critically, and perceive reality.   This is the big picture at the end. The School of Thought , a non-profit dedicated to spreading critical thinking has the construct below to help us, it puts the most common ideas in a simple form. Why is this important : a big idea in GDPR and other consumer protection rights /ideas is that of informed consent. The idea falls down at many levels as a complex consent ...

The Mind is Flat (book) by Nick Chater Rare find as the quotes live up to the content and have to say READ IT.    If you are thinking like me about ethics and AI - this is essential reading.   ----- A radical reinterpretation of how your mind works - and why it could change your life’ 'An astonishing achievement. Nick Chater has blown my mind' 'A total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths ... Light the touchpaper and stand well back' We all like to think we have a hidden inner life. Most of us assume that our beliefs and desires arise from the murky depths of our minds, and, if only we could work out how to access this mysterious world, we could truly understand ourselves. For more than a century, psychologists and psychiatrists have struggled to discover what lies below our mental surface. In The Mind Is Flat , pre-eminent behavioural scientist Nick Chater reveals that this entire enterprise is utterly ...

Decisions Not Data - Lisa Schutz Why the (decision) revolution won’t be televised Lisa delivers a punchy “How-To” book based on her successful consulting business practice. It is a guide to using data and analytics to achieve organisational goals and avoid the “Data Trap” that many organisations unwittingly fall in to….. It is a plane ride book, two hours and your through. A key message is to ask the question about what decision you want to make - before you plan on the collection and analysis of data - the trap being what does the data tell me, rather than what data do I need to help me make better decisions. She perfectly draws out the different decisions that can be supported by data (operational, product, sales/ marketing, customer) - they key being if you apply the wrong data to the wrong decision and then ponder why something went wrong - stop leading with data. Different parts of the business also need different data and having one data lake may not in all cases be the best...

Original Article :  https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/self-driving-cars-life-death-3640133 These are fantastic discussions and as humanity we are not having enough of them but rather than clink-bate with headlines for adverting revenue, what are the first principal questions? This specific moral dilemma make a number of assumptions : the machine can differentiate the machine can make the choice (algorithm/ software/ data) it is possible to do one action over another (physics: motion and time) where is experience / learning in the feedback loop who said we had the choice in the first case Given that the road accident for the victim is currently random (other than premeditated and malicious) - who gave someone the right to pick or select me. If I am selected that means a new liability for someone.  The existing system being based on risk and acts of freewill, allowing machines to decide, as the human has determined by programming and s...

This is also published on LinkedIn and Medium as well  Data is Data.  It is not Oil or Gold or Labour or anything else! Words, in general, are a creative symbolic linguistic invention through which people invoke concepts and meanings that are flexible enough to enable we Homo sapiens to shortcut detailed explanations.  A dog = mammal, furry, four legs, barks, teeth etc. However, words; because they are a shortcut, often lack context and relationship that add “meaning”. Words are “data” which requires the addition of meaning derived from context to “inform” the listener - to become “inform-ation.”   Love, for example, can mean, or be interpreted to mean, many propositions depending on context and relationship. The 2019 update to the New Oxford Dictionary brings in the words   agender and intersexual to help define better and enable more nuanced conversations about  sexuality and gender identity, as society has words without the specific context...