An incomplete and eclectic list of recently interesting items (for some definition of recent, and some definition of interesting):
“How do you sift through 794 economic blog posts in a morning? Giles Wilkes navigates the squawking heads” [How I learnt to love the economic blogosphere – FT article]
“we propose and investigate a novel end-to-end method for automatically generating short email responses, called Smart Reply. It generates semantically diverse suggestions that can be used as complete email responses with just one tap on mobile.” [https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45189.html]
“a small group of readers could not reliably discern whether a sports article was written by a human or a bot. Those assigned the automated article found it trustworthy and informative, albeit a bit boring.” [http://mediashift.org/2016/07/upsides-downsides-automated-robot-journalism/]
“Hamilton can flag a point in the data – for instance, a sub-optimal corner or a harsh-sounding gear change, for later analysis.” [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/lewis-hamilton-f1-mercedes-wheel]
A slant on AR (that it is more likely to work, grab attention a la Pokemon, rather than VR) [Beau Lotto – Understanding Perception: How We Experience the Meaning We Create – Vimeo]
A longer read: the AI future is coming and it doesn’t really need humans in the loop [http://www.cringely.com/2016/07/11/thinking-big-data-part-3-final-part/]
A masterclass of document writing by Bret Victor in 2012. “Here’s a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming?” [http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/]
Tim Harford on wishful thinking: “We are quite capable of clinging on to our beliefs by picking whatever facts support them” [Brexit and the power of wishful thinking – FT article]
“As history has hit the fast-forward button, it seems to have become the fashion among philanthropists to endow research institutes that focus on the existential challenges of our age, and this is one of the most remarkable.” [Artificial intelligence: can we control it? – FT article]
“Over apple fizz and celeriac soup in London, the sage of ‘superforecasting’ talks about the Brexit curveball and why political pundits get it wrong” [Lunch with the FT: Philip Tetlock – FT article]
“Today, one can date ‘mobile’ to before iPhone and after iPhone. But the interesting thing, looking back, is that before the iPhone, it didn’t really feel like we were desperately in need of some catalytic event.” [http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/2/19/mobile-smartphones-and-hindsight]
A (not all that optimistic) concept video of AR++ [HYPER-REALITY – Vimeo]
Liking this interactive graphic – “But how does [Mo Farah’s] pace compare to other Olympic athletes or notable sprinters from the natural world?” [https://ig.ft.com/mo-farah-races-a-t-rex/]