Tech Essays

How to Counteract Disinformation

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The last few years exposed more than ever the fragility of our information ecosystem. Elections, Brexit, social unrest, COVID-19 conspiracies, and the war in Ukraine have been used as disinformation operations by certain actors to undermine faith in governments, raise fear and anger, confuse and manipulate us.  Disinformation is information meant to deceive (trolls posting fake news). In contrast, misinformation is false information with no malicious intent (our friends and family genuinely believe in disinformative content and willingly share it).  Why is Disinformation Effective?  …

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How Elden Ring Tests the Player’s Learning Ability

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Note: I wrote this article in collaboration with my husband.  Hidetaka Miyazaki grew up in an impoverished family in Shizuoka, Japan. Although he didn’t fully understand English, he borrowed many English fantasy and science fiction books from his local library. The boy let his imagination fly and fill the language barrier gaps by creating stories from the books’ illustrations, a skill that would prove helpful in a few decades. Later, he would say about his childhood: Unlike most kids in Japan, I didn’t have a dream… I …

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How Ideas Cross-Pollinate to Advance Diverse Disciplines

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I always advise my people to read outside your field, every day something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections. Nobel prize winner Oliver Smithies in dialogue with writer David Epstein in Epstein’s book Range  One of the things that surprised me as a parent was how much I benefited from …

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What Holds Back Innovation

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The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. Sherlock Holmes  For at least five millennia, we used wheels for transportation, from carts to cars, trains, pushchairs, bicycles, etc. Across ages, we also had heavy trunks to carry luggage. To help with the workload of carrying bags, we used carts with wheels to transport them because wheeling bags was much easier than lugging them. But still, for all the creative minds and visionaries that humankind had across centuries, it …

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AI’s Impact on the Future of Jobs

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May you live in interesting times.   An English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse The First Industrial Revolution brought us the steam engine, while the Second Industrial Revolution focused on steel production, chemicals, electricity. The Third Industrial Revolution, called the Digital Revolution, was characterized by the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web. How will the Fourth Industrial Revolution look? Profoundly exciting and highly problematic. New vistas will open where incredible breakthroughs can happen because AI holds enormous potential. This …

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Metaphorical Thinking – the Web Metaphors

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Metaphorical Thinking – Introduction Metaphorical Thinking – the Guest Metaphor Metaphorical Thinking – the Cloud Metaphors Metaphorical Thinking – the Web Metaphors If you asked people in 1989 what they needed to make their life better, it was unlikely that they would have said a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext. Farmer & Farmer   The Internet is derived from the words “interconnection of networks”, thus a global network of networks. The Web or the World Wide Web is information accessed …

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The Ethical Dilemma of Modern Content Creation and User Privacy

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Currently, browsing the web without using an ad-blocker or better browsers looks like shopping in the middle of a pandemic without a mask. Viruses are everywhere, and they take advantage of their future hosts. Third-party tracking, collecting, sharing, or selling users’ personal information, paywalls, popups, clickbait titles, and scams all produce a broken web experience.  How many times did I not want to read an article only to feel trapped like the Romans in the Caudine Forks?   Mortal, disable your adblocker if you want to read this post. Then accept my …

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