Aron Kramer of The Guardian recently predicted long-term changes to the world that will occur in 2013. He writes, “A healthy dose of scepticism is in order whenever one attempts to foresee the future. Events usually make great sense in retrospect, but are difficult to predict at the time. The daily hum of headlines, breaking news and Twitterfeeds may distract us from the underlying changes taking place. With this in mind, the best way to think about 2013 is to consider the long-term changes that are reshaping our world – some with visible effect, and some under the radar.” Read more

Rachel Haot of the Open Gov Partnership reports, “From hackathons to social media, open government is transforming the way that Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and New York City government serve the public. And there has been no greater testament to open government’s potential than the strategy and innovation in action during Hurricane Sandy. Learning from our experience during Hurricane Irene, in the days leading up to Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in New York City, government technologists reached out to the data science community to share recently updated hurricane evacuation zone maps based on up-to-the-minute flooding projections.” Read more

Ken Yeung of TheNextWeb reports, “Finding ways to keep track of what’s happening in the world and in various markets can be pretty difficult, especially on mobile devices. People are interested in seeking out new ways to allow them to get information that’s relevant and important to them. Apps to help with this problem include Flipboard, a popular social news aggregator that has helped to change the way people consume content, Zite, Cir.ca, and Summly. Now, Clipped is seeking to take its place as one of those services and has launched its iOS and Android apps to help optimize the way people consume the news on their mobile devices. An alumni of the Teens in Tech incubator, Clipped says that it delivers top news content in the form of bullet point summaries that it believes will ‘save users time and energy.’ Its app also includes a summarized search engine that allows users to ‘read summaries about exactly what they want’.” Read more

Kevin May of Tnooz reports, “It’s not just startups trying to capture the mood for developing natural language and semantic search in travel – Expedia is quietly working on its own platform. The project is being run out of a new research and development department within Expedia Affiliate Network and is currently aimed at providing partner sites with the early stages of natural language search using the mounds of data collected elsewhere around the Expedia portfolio. A sandbox site, YourVisit, is also up and running for testing (EAN admits it is a bit rough around the edges, but is in place purely for demonstration and beta purposes).” Read more

Emily Badger of The Atlantic Cities recently catalogued the best open data releases of 2012. She writes, “Last year, Cities named ten of its favorite metro datasets of 2011 from cities across North America, illustrating the breadth of what we might learn (regarding mosquito traps! misplaced vehicles! energy consumption!) in the still relatively young field of urban open data. For this year’s installment, we’re going one step further. Sure, raw data is great. But useful tools, maps and data visualizations built with said data are even better. Below, you’ll find our picks for 2012′s best open data releases from municipal vaults, with an emphasis on tools that can be used by anyone, not just developers and data geeks. If we missed your favorite, please add it in the comments.” Read more

Smithsonian.com recently reported, “An Israeli-based startup has created what they think is the first semantic search engine designed specifically for scientific and mathematical equations. As Classroom Aid described, Symbolab allows users to search for equations using both numbers and symbols as well as text. The engine returns results based upon their relatedness to theory and semantics rather than visuals. The startup behind the technology, Eqsquest, said they wanted to make scientific content universally accessible by expanding its searchability. Unlike other search engines that are limited by language, Symbolab is scalable across cultures, since much of the equations found in science and math require no translation.” Read more

Alex Howard recently shared 14 trends to watch for in 2013. He writes, “The idea of ‘lean government‘ gained some traction in 2012, as cities and agencies experimented with applying the lean startup approach to the public sector. With GOV.UK, the British government both redefined the online government platform and showed how citizen-centric design can be done right. In 2013, the worth of a lean government approach will be put to the test when the work of the White House Innovation Fellows is released.” Similarly, “Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio is now looking at the intersection of government and technology through the lens of ‘smart government.’ In 2013, I expect to hear much more about that, from smartphones to smarter cities to smart disclosure.” Read more

Erin Griffith recently opined that 2013 will be the year of storytelling. She writes, “Since social networking was invented, it has been powered by users. We happily fuel our favorite social networks with the snippets of content that make them so valuable: our photos, check-ins, reviews, likes, hearts and shares. We post status updates about how we feel on Facebook, photos of what we’re eating on Instagram, links to what we’re reading on Twitter, and the lowbrow gifs we’re laughing at on Tumblr. The result is a fragmented group of social media actions that, as we witnessed with the Twitter-Instagram spat this year, don’t care to include content from competing social networks. If Facebook-Instagram/Twitter/Pinterest/Tumblr/Quora don’t have to play nice with each other, they won’t.” Read more

Futurity.org reports, “Scientists have found that the brain is wired to put the categories of objects and actions we see daily in order, and have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings. The result—achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips—is what researchers call ‘a continuous semantic space.’ Some relationships between categories make sense (humans and animals share the same ‘semantic neighborhood’) while others (hallways and buckets) are less obvious. The researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout. ‘Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organized. Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed look ever at the visual function and organization of a single human brain,’ says Alexander Huth, a doctoral student in neuroscience at University of California, Berkeley and lead author of the study published in the journal Neuron.” Read more

The Conductrics blog has shared a list of data science and machine learning resources. The introduction states, “Every now and then I get asked for some help or for some pointers on a machine learning/data science topic.  I tend respond with links to resources by folks that I consider to be experts in the topic area.   Over time my list has gotten a little larger so I decided to put it all together in a blog post. Since it is based mostly on the questions I have received, it is by no means complete, or even close to a complete list, but hopefully it will be of some use.  Perhaps I will keep it updated, or even better yet, feel free to comment with anything you think might be of help. Also, when I think of data science, I tend to focus on Machine Learning rather than the hardware or coding aspects. If you are looking for stuff on Hadoop, or R, or Python, sorry, there really isn’t anything here.” Read more