The Context is an ongoing weekly Patreon series that gives a deeper understanding of the implications of current events, and technologies shaping the world.
Society wants to incentivise creativity and private enterprise. Copyrights patents and trademarks have emerged as a protection of what we today call intellectual property. There are plenty of examples when these serve a useful purpose, however excessive extensions to the expiration of copyright as well as harmful patent trolls show the negative side of this […]
Open Source Fighting COVID-19 Read More »
The lack of adequate response by so many governments to the pandemic, even when plenty of positive and negative examples were already available from other countries that have been impacted before them, is a sign that maybe the mental models that are applied to the decision making are inadequate. The pandemic is not merely exponential.
Jolting Adaptability Read More »
We gain new skills by making mistakes, as we put in practice the changes needed in what we observe. The opportunity to share the process accelerates it, because the feedback can arrive from outside observers, whose independent point of view will enrich ours. That is what I have been doing now for two weeks, streaming
Learning by Doing and Sharing Read More »
As we look out on the world, trying to understand it, we structure our knowledge of the information collected, across several dimensions. Spatial, temporal, static, dynamic, and reflect the organization of the information in our theories and experiments. We aim to make them reliable and reproducible, to serve as a firm basis for the implementation
Dimensions of Knowledge Read More »
We are each day learning more and more, by necessity, about epidemiology, virology, behavioral science, and all the other complex issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Our collective intelligence evolves, both at the level of the individual, as well as on the level of our businesses and larger communities, the policies that are being put in
Collective Intelligence Read More »
I have been in full lockdown in Italy, outside of Bergamo in the North, which has the highest concentration of infected people and fatal cases, for the past two weeks. The streets are empty. There is no traffic. You can only hear the the birds singing, as spring is here, and sound of sirens of the ambulances
Our Life In Times of COVID-19 Read More »
For a long time now technology made it possible for teams whose members are not physically together to collaborate effectively. There are multi billion dollar companies with over a thousand employees, and no offices. With the effectiveness of the social distancing measures due to the COVD-19 pandemic, we are seeing a much wider interest about
Culture of Remote Teams Read More »
The experience of online events can evolve to be different, but as real and valuable and that of physical ones. If you are a conference organizer, a speaker, an exhibitor, these days you are scrambling with the restructuring of your activities. What we have to aim for is to recognize the differences between the two
Online Conferences Are Real Read More »
The efficiency of a system is its ability to produce a certain amount of output per unit of input. Its resilience is its ability to withstand extreme variations in the conditions under which it must function. These two parameters are in a dynamic relationship, often requiring a tradeoff: maximizing the efficiency results in a brittle
Efficiency and Resilience Read More »
Between 2012 and 2018 the power of the infrastructure available for applications in artificial intelligence increased over three hundred thousand times. If it followed Moore’s law, it would have been much less, around 7 times or so. Stanford University in its 2019 report on AI, and in a blog post OpenAI analyzed and illustrated this
