MIT Technology Review -
In the world of Internet marketing and clickbait, the secret of virality is analogous to the elixir of life or the alchemy that turns lead into gold. It exists as a kind of Holy Grail that many search for and few, if any, find.
The key question is this: what is the difference between stories that become viral and those that don’t?Read more
Jordan Pearson — Motherboard
It’s 2020, and you’ve signed up for a weight-loss program. You’re alone on a Saturday night because your significant other is out of town, none of your friends are available to catch a flick at the theatre, and a pizza is sounding pretty good. You Google the address for your favorite joint and walk over instead of ordering drone delivery because it’s cheaper, and you’re old fashioned like that. Just before you order at the counter, however, your friend calls you to ask if you want to see a movie after all.
How did this happen? An algorithm analyzing your communications and monitoring your friend networks learned that your partner was away, and your Facebook posts revealed that you wanted to see a movie but nobody was available. Sentiment analysis of your tweets suggested that you were feeling alone and a little sad.
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Laura Bliss — CityLab
Judging from some of Facebook’s most viral images in history—textbooks wrapped in paper bags, futuristic beach houses, Barack and Michelle mid-hug—it seems safe to say that, content-wise, a mix of nostalgia and aspiration makes ‘book users click, like, comment, and share. On Flickr, it’s cool nature shots. Instagram loves the Kardashians.
But favorite subjects come and go, while the viral cycle lives on. What if you could predict the kinds of photos most likely to strike a nerve? Given the incredible amount of data available on how online users engage with images, is there a way to measure the objective qualities of an image’s shareability?
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By Glenn Fleishman — MIT Technology Review
A zombie network of home routers highlights the importance of prioritizing smart appliance security.
Plenty of science-fiction stories feature ordinary household appliances staging a revolt. In an episode of Futurama, toasters and home robots rise up against their human oppressors. Two trends are now starting to make such scenarios seem less far-fetched.
by Donna Tam — c/net
Elon Musk, the man who’s determined to move our civilization to Mars, will also tackle creating an Internet in space.
The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX said Friday night that he will use a fleet of satellites to make the Internet speedier and to bring it to those without access, according to media reports of a private event in Seattle. Details of the plan were shared before the event with Bloomberg.
Quote: ” Internet of Coins strives to create a decentralized, self-sustaining economy by implementing intersystemic connectivity sustained by a hybrid P2P meta-network. The system will help to leverage each of its participant’s strength in numbers hence supporting both the stability of alt coins and the cryptocurrency community as a whole. Internet of Coins had an official Whitepaper launch party on the 3rd of January at the Bitcoin Embassy Amsterdam. The Whitepaper is available for download on http://internetofcoins.org. Internet of Coins has partnered-up with security oriented cryptoexchange and service provider Bitalo since November of last year for continuous development and funding of the project. The open source system will soon be released for non-commercial purposes and be easily accessible to the public; supporting continuous decentralization and empowering the cryptocurrency ecosystem to evolve.”
Read the article here > http://www.baystreet.ca/viewarticle.aspx?id=424703
Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”
Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/
Quoted: “Tony Williams, the founder of the British-based legal consulting firm, said that law firms will see nearly all their process work handled by artificial intelligence robots. The robotic undertaking will revolutionize the industry, “completely upending the traditional associate leverage model.” And: “The report predicts that the artificial intelligence technology will replace all the work involving processing information, along with a wide variety of overturned policies.”
Read the article here > https://hacked.com/legal-consulting-firm-believes-artificial…yers-2030/
by Frederic Lardinois — TechCrunch
Designing a good-looking website has never been easy, and while many services promise to let you build a site without ever having to touch any code, you quickly reach their limits if you want to have a more advanced site. The Grid, which is launching its crowdfunding campaign today, promises to do away with all of this. Instead of designing your site pixel by pixel yourself, The Grid team wants to use artificial intelligence to design your site based on your content and goals (more followers, more customers, higher sales, etc.).
Quoted: “If you understand the core innovations around the blockchain idea, you’ll realize that the technology concept behind it is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is very different.
The blockchain concept represents a paradigm shift in how software engineers will write software applications in the future, and it is one of the key concepts behind the Bitcoin revolution that need to be well understood. In this post, I’d like to explain 5 of these concepts, and how they interrelate to one another in the context of this new computing paradigm that is unravelling in front of us. They are: the blockchain, decentralized consensus, trusted computing, smart contracts and proof of work / stake. This computing paradigm is important, because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs.
Read the article here > http://startupmanagement.org/2014/12/27/the-blockchain-is-th…verything/
Quoted: “Tony Williams, the founder of the British-based legal consulting firm, said that law firms will see nearly all their process work handled by artificial intelligence robots. The robotic undertaking will revolutionize the industry, “completely upending the traditional associate leverage model.” And: “The 
