#80 Humanitarian Hackathon, the Demise of RSS, and Fake News in 2019 - Sat, Jan 12 2019

Humanitarian Hackathon

An initiative of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and International Development. How might we ensure efficient, transparent, local procurement processes in school feeding? How might we empower smallholder farmers to access markets…

Clo Willaerts Humanitarian Hackathon is a two-day event, taking place on 22 and 23 January in Egmont Palace, Brussels. It’s designed to create technology-driven solutions for the most pressing humanitarian challenges. Participation is free but registration is required.

The minute I walked onto the showroom floor at CES, one of the world's largest consumer trade technology shows, a spokesperson for Philips' Pregnancy+ app accosted me. “Would you like to experience what it's like to be a pregnant…

Clo Willaerts The quest to quantify your child starts before you’ve even conceived. Wearables can pinpoint the optimum time to conceive; a bracelet can count fetal kicks; a monitor can leverage military-grade technology to count each newborn breath.

About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a…

Clo Willaerts About a decade ago, the average internet user might well have heard of RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary—what the acronym stands for depends on who you ask—is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.

A daily deep dive for curious minds. Delivered every weekday afternoon Stay updated about new Quartz products and events Delivered every Monday through Saturday morning The most important and interesting news from the global economy Our dispatch…

Clo Willaerts Nutella is one of the more delicious things the internet loves to freak out about.

Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred…

Clo Willaerts In the U.S., a shady tracking tool relies on real-time location data sold to bounty hunters that ultimately originated from the telcos themselves, including T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint.

Our end-of-year “Predictions for Journalism” package has grown and grown and grown since its first iteration back in 2011. For the 2019 iteration, we published more than 200, and it's possible I am literally the only person alive to…

Clo Willaerts The truth hurts: « The media landscape is overrun with toxic narratives and polluted information not because our systems are broken, but because our systems are working. »

The day after Christmas, I spent seven hours sifting through more than 2,700 unread emails I had accumulated over the past month. Like many people, I intended to begin 2019 with a fresh inbox and zero unread messages. Since the idea of…

Clo Willaerts Fuck Inbox Zero! « Adopting inbox infinity means accepting the fact that there will be an endless, growing amount of email in your inbox every day, most of which you will never address or even see. It’s about letting email messages wash over you, responding to the ones you can, but ignoring most. »

Season 4 Ep. 3 TL;DR: We have access to more things to read than ever before. Too much, in fact. Our reading habits have shifted. We skim a lot. We look for full stories baked into headlines. Our eyes bounce around from one article to the next, and…

Clo Willaerts IRL podcast host Manoush Zomorodi talks to Pocket's Nate Weiner and others about how reading has changed -- and how we’re changing alongside it.

In 2019, many of the first drafts of history will be written by artificial intelligence. Rather than spending tens or hundreds of hours synthesising information from thousands of sources, analysts will have a personalised AI that generates written…

Clo Willaerts The bad news: AI is also very good at generating propaganda and disinformation – meaning that they are on the verge of pressure-testing some of our most closely-held democratic processes and norms.