From God to big Data, the many sources of authority
Authority. Used to come from God and other religious entities. Some enlightened folks told us we had a moral compass within ourselves. So we had the power to make the best decisions. Now? Facebook.
Yuval Noah Harari for the FT:
Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called ‘Dataism’.
48,000 tons
The weight of the heaviest submarine ever built by mankind. More than 6 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
A secret formula for designing successful Kickstarter campaigns
A secret formula for designing successful Kickstarter campaigns
On average, they were mentioned in 73 tweets (compared to an average of 20 for failed campaigns), they had an average of 262 backers (compared to just 25 in failed campaigns), their average goal was $9,600 (compared to an average $35,000 for failed campaigns), and successful campaigns received 217% of goal funding (compared to 11.4% in failed campaigns).
Vincent Etter, a PhD candidate from Switzerland has decided to make a website called Sidekick in which the probability of success of Kickstarter campaigns is measured in realtime.
Take a look if you ever want to start a Kickstarter campaign.
[gallery]
This is a map of NYC by MapBox showing smartphone usage according to Twitter data. iPhone is red, Android green and Blackberry purple.
[gallery]
How fast the US got fat.
