Week 5
Pick of the Week – Apple pedal on Apple’s Q4 2014 sales surpassed both analyst and Apple’s own expectations with figures of $74.6 billion in revenue and net profit of $18 billion. The results were...
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Pick of the Week – what does a CTO do? Chief Technology Officer is a coveted executive role that many senior techies aspire to attaining. The CTO is broadly the ultimate decision making authority for...
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Pick of the Week – Exponential Organisations Large organisations are increasingly being impacted by a changing market dynamic privileging smaller, more agile alternatives. These nimbler competitors are...
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Pick of the Week – Apple Car More information emerged this week about Apple’s apparent electric car ambitions from the team assembled to build it to conjecture about the downstream supply chain...
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Pick of the Week – Disintermediation Mobile application-mediated service delivery is arguably the most powerful agent of disintermediation the world has ever seen and has been the key enabler giving...
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The rise of no-stack solopreneurship TechCrunch asked this week if it is possible to predict which startups will turn out to be unicorns and offered this reasonable if, ironically, somewhat predictable...
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Code Bloomberg devoted a whole issue to a single article written by Paul Ford attempting to convey the world of corporate software simply entitled Code. The online version is an extraordinary...
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Apple Apple’s Q3 earnings reveal a company powering ahead largely off the back of rejuvenated iPhone sales: A tale of two curves pic.twitter.com/cax7fH0w9v — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 21,...
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Adventures with Docker II: Linking Docker Containers In last week’s blog I outlined how to create and destroy a virtual machine (VM) on the Digital Ocean cloud using Docker Machine running on Windows....
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Self-referential data visualisation I: Vincent In January I published a post on some analysis I’d done on all my 2014 weekly roundups. As we’re now around 75% of the way through 2015 I thought I’d...
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Self-referential data visualisation II: ggplot and nvd3 Last week I sketched out how to build a simple data visualisation pipeline to extract and clean some statistics from my blog posts before...
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Self-referential data visualisation III: bokeh, dimple and Qlik Over the last couple of weeks I’ve outlined a few different approaches for using code to generate a multi-line visualisation of size...
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Self-referential data visualisation VI: Double Docker Over the last five weeks I’ve developed a simple Python-based data visualisation pipeline for my blog stats culminating in last week’s basic Flask...
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After Paris The horrific events in Paris represent a watershed moment for European unity when reality hit home in the most terrible way that axiomatic belief in ever upward human progress should never...
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In Search of a European Google Recent evidence clearly points to Europe sliding into ‘digital recession’ relative to the US and Asia. Echoing the concern over falling behind, this Guardian post...
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WordPress ‘SS-HeLL’ I was somewhat sidetracked this week in attempting to set up SSL support for the blog, something that’s been on the backlog for a while and is undeniably a good thing and clearly...
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Machine Learning I recently completed the Stanford University Machine Learning online course available via Coursera and taught by Professor Andrew Ng. A companion post I’ve written surveys the course...
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The Charge of the Chatbots This Nautilus post on “why your next best friend might be a robot“ provides some useful insights into how rapidly AI-driven chatbots are evolving. The article is written by...
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Days of Future Past Almost exactly twenty years ago a UK-based computer manufacturer called Psion embarked in earnest on the creation of the Series 5, a landmark device that went on to spawn Symbian...
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The Meaning of AlphaGo Following the heights scaled by AlphaGo last week has illustrated the opposite, the depths of which human beings are capable in the indiscriminate attacks in Belgium with its own...
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The Human in the Machine The role of Human-Assisted AI (or HAAI) in supporting human and machine intelligence for service delivery is a topic that has been covered at length already in this blog in...
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Elements of Machine Learning: Regression Sharp Sight Labs “one concept machine learning” post provides an excellent illustration why instead of “just diving in and building something“, it pays to spend...
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Elements of Machine Learning III: Words, Vectors and Code Word vectors are a key concept in the application of Machine Learning techniques to textual analysis. A word vector is a multidimensional...
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Elements of Machine Learning IV: Sentiment Analysis Last week’s post introduced in simplified form the basic operation of word vectors and ngrams. This week I’ll go further and show how those concepts...
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Elements of Machine Learning V: spaCy and Natural Language Processing Over the last four weeks I’ve been running through an exercise to demonstrate how machine learning techniques can be applied to a...
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The Fourth Turning The EU referendum rollercoaster descended to pre-EU 1960’s level of Carry On farce this week with Bob Geldof and Nigel Farage chasing each other around the Thames on vanity boats....
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Ex nihilo And so we came to the end in which the UK, or at least the English and Welsh parts of it, voted for Brexit. In doing so, the nation put aside the views of experts and other commentators and,...
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Someone like EU “He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” ― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart The week after It’s hard to know where to start with events in...
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The Third Sphere The Guardian review of Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus suggests it will become a valuable addition to the AI canon. The review outlines a dark vision of an unknowable future heading to us at...
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Apple iPhone7 Keynote Walt Mossberg’s blunt analysis prior to the Apple’s iPhone 7 Keynote this week is worth checking out. He was pretty clear what he was hoping to see: With iPhone and company...
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Artificial Intelligence Skepticism Two US government reports out this week helped raise the ante even further on the future application of Artificial Intelligence technology developments and underscore...
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American History X At once as far as angel’s ken he views The dismal situation waste and wild, A dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames No light, but...
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Living on the Edge Edge computing, a paradigm in which embedded intelligence moves to the leaf nodes of the internet, represents the “next big thing in tech” and will supercede cloud according to top...
View ArticleNewsletter 1 – The Future and Its Enemies
The Future and Its Enemies “Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security,...
View ArticleNewsletter 6 – American Unicorn
American Unicorn Sam Lessin in The Information suggests that Donald Trump is the political equivalent of a Silicon Valley unicorn and there is a strange symmetry between his travails and that of a...
View ArticleNewsletter 20 – Something Rotten
Something Rotten Sam Kriss published a blistering take on what he learned about the state of tech after attending the Collision tech expo in New Orleans. He started by reminding us of that well-worn...
View ArticleNewsletter 21 – Hyperobjects in the Anthropocene
Hyperobjects in the Anthropocene The Guardian profiled philosopher Tim Morton who has an interesting take on the situation 21st Century humanity finds itself in. For Morton our awareness of natural...
View ArticleNewsletter 26 – The Inner Limits
The Inner Limits Francois Chollet, the creator of Keras, outlines in this thoughtful post some of the limitations of deep learning as a precursor to a post linked to recently in this blog in which he...
View ArticleNewsletter 29 – The Chinese Way
The Chinese Way Macro Polo surveys the deep roots and long branches of Chinese techno-nationalism. There are three components to this worldview: technology as a source of national power, competition...
View ArticleNewsletter 31 – Blood In The Water
Blood In The Water The sacred status of Freedom of Speech in the US is enshrined in the constitution under the First Amendment and is traditionally held up as the key foundation block of the nation....
View ArticleNewsletter 32 – Winter Is Coming
Winter Is Coming As highlighted last time around, for the Silicon Valley tech giants after many years of basking in adulation, Winter is now here in the form of greater public suspicion and legislative...
View ArticleNewsletter 33 – Mind Control
Mind Control In an important article in The Guardian, a number of alumni of Facebook and Google warn that society is increasingly heading down the wrong path to a dystopian future off the back of...
View ArticleNewsletter 34 – The Future of Work
The Future of Work PwC claim that “only 5% of young workers in Britain are in jobs that are safe from robot replacement“. Those jobs that remain will become much more intellectually difficult as...
View ArticleNewsletter 35 – Closer
Closer I can hear your cry out there And I can feel you close to me Reverberations from last week’s momentous AlphaGo Zero announcement are still fresh. It still feels like a major watershed in the...
View ArticleNewsletter 40 – Even better than the Real Thing
Even better than the real thing The story of a garden shed that became the top rated London restaurant on TripAdvisor is a cautionary tale of the limits of authority in latter day social media where...
View ArticleNewsletter 48 – DIY AlphaGoZero
DIY AlphaGoZero The release of a open source version of the AlphaGoZero architecture on Github implemented in pure Python represents another landmark in the progress of arguably Deep Mind’s greatest...
View ArticleNewsletter 49 – Facebook Troll
Facebook Troll Wired’s long form post on Facebook’s two years of hell makes for essential reading. It tells of how a seemingly small leak from the Trending Topics team in February 2016 lit the fuse on...
View ArticleNewsletter 64 – AWS as a Service
AWS as a Service The widely reported technical glitches that affected Amazon’s Prime Day promotion were a reminder of how dependent much of Amazon’s infrastructure let alone the modern internet is on...
View ArticleNewsletter 74 – Hardware is Hard
Hardware is Hard Hardware has always been a tough business to make a profit in but is arguably tougher than ever for gadget-makers in the current climate as Charles Arthur points out in this article...
View ArticleNewsletter 79 – Medium and the Message
“The medium is the message” – Marshall McLuhan Medium and the Message Medium.com rather than being the message offers a platform to a wildly broad picaresque deluge of messages in the form of blog...
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