Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Are Facts Knowledge? The Classic Essay Tries To Persuade

 … Bob Dylan just offered the world a master class in how to accept a Nobel Prize — MobyLives

Past: The lost city of Cahokia


Future: What does it mean to “know” the future? The question has perplexed Aristotle, Newton, Laplace, Thomas Nagel, and quantum theorists alike. Is an answer possible? 

What accounts for the rise of the West? Not technological breakthroughs, like the steam engine, but a respect for facts and a culture of discovery... Kulcha 

oldest-breedig-bird-links
Australian woman finds snake curled up in Christmas tree BBC. Neglected to mention the jilted boyfriend


Hovenkamp, Herbert J., The Rule of Reason (December 16, 2016). Available for download at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2885916
Antitrust’s rule of reason was born out of a thirty year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints among competitors was roughly established. Antitrust policy toward vertical restraints remained much more unstable, however, largely because their effects were so poorly understood. 

IMF chief Christine Lagarde found guilty of 'negligence' over huge payout to business tycoon – but escapes jail

Wikiwhere is the result of the research lab 2015-2016 at the University of Koblenz-Landau in cooperation with the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Wikipedia articles about the same event in different language editions have different sources of information. Wikiwhere helps to answer the question where this information comes from by analyzing and visualizing the geographic location of external links that are displayed on a given Wikipedia article. Instead of relying solely on the IP location of a given URL, our machine learning models additionally consider the top level domain and the website language…”
The Age of Analytics – Competing in a Data-Driven World, December 2016 –Executive Summary; Full Report;Appendix (PDF)

“Data and analytics capabilities have made a leap forward in recent years. The volume of available data has grown exponentially, more sophisticated algorithms have been developed, and computational power and storage have steadily improved. The convergence of these trends is fueling rapid technology advances and business disruptions.






  • Most companies are capturing only a fraction of the potential value from data and analytics. Our 2011 report estimated this potential in five domains; revisiting them today shows a great deal of value still on the table. The greatest progress has occurred in location-based services and in retail, both areas with digital native competitors. In contrast, manufacturing, the public sector, and health care have captured less than 30 percent of the potential value we highlighted five years ago. Further, new opportunities have arisen since 2011, making the gap between the leaders and laggards even bigger.
  • 2016's Best Startup Podcast Was JI&BC ….
     

    Screenwriter Versus Writer – The Contest Is Rigged


    The fact is, in the war between author and screenwriter, the screenwriter virtually always wins. “Living authors are a problem. It’s much better to have an author safely departed because they do cause trouble. What you have to remember is that you owe everything to the movie, and nothing to the original.”

    U.S. to disclose estimate of number of Americans under surveillance Reuters We’re all under surveillance, save for those who live in the woods and use the Internet only at a public library. So what they presumably mean is the number of people who are Persons of Interest, as opposed to have their info stored in a data farm somewhere.
     
    'Fight fire with fire': Health lessons we can all learn from Big Food
    There are three big reasons behaviour change is very difficult...

    “Shows revenues, expenditures, debt, and cash and security holdings by level of government. Level of government includes state, local, and state and local combined. The statistics are organized by state. Internet address <www.census.gov/govs/local/>

    Automatic Voter Registration a ‘Success’ in Oregon


    Everyone loves the idea of a corruption-fighting agency, just not an effective one, says the head of Western Australia's Corruption and Crime Commission, with Megan Latham's treatment smelling of misogyny. And he's just warming up.
    Vituperative attacks, misogyny, white-anting: life fighting corruption 

    Are Facts Knowledge? The Classic Essay Tries To Persuade

    “There are genres whose principal business is fact—journalism, history, popular science—but the essay has never been one of them. If the form possesses a defining characteristic, it is that the essay makes an argument (and does so, unlike academic writing and other forms, for a general rather than a specialized audience). That argument can rest on fact, but it can also rest on anecdote, or introspection, or cultural interpretation, or some combination of all these and more. There are “public essays” and “personal essays” and essays that are both or neither; the form is broad and various and limitlessly flexible. Yet what distinguishes an op‑ed, for instance, from a news report is that the former seeks to persuade, not simply inform.”

    Why Are Bookstores Thriving In Berlin? 



    “Despite the rise of the predatory online and mass-market bookseller, the dark specter of Amazon that has caused roughly one-third of indie bookstores in Britain to close in the last decade, Berlin is undergoing an analogue reading renaissance with more owner-run bookshops opening than shutting in recent times.”


    There is no shortage of advice these days for better fact-checking. Here are a few this week: Learn fact-checking from Harry Potter; this excellent video from the talented people at FlackCheck.org; a visual fact-checking quiz from the New Statesman; and how Snopes tracked down a fake viral video 

    Devious Ransomware Frees You if You Infect Two Other People

    Xavier Amatriain's Answer to What Were the Main Advances in 
    Machine Learning/artificial Intelligence in 2016 </>

    Microsoft Dataset Aims to Help Researchers Create Tools to Answer Questions as Well as People