While many of us are under jurisdictional orders to remain in our homes, we can still get together socially. That’s just what Neville, Shel, and more than a dozen FIR listeners did on Thursday, March 26, using Zoom. This roughly 30-minute discussion focused mainly on how work will change in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. We are planning to host conversations via Zoom every Thursday at 1pm EDT / 6pm BST / 7pm CET. Watch this space (or follow us on Twitter or Facebook) for the URL and … [Read more...] about FIR ZoomChat 1: The post-pandemic Future of Work
Trends
Hybrid stepping stone
Report: Just days after the UK's ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars was brought forward to 2035 from 2040, there has now been a suggestion that it could be brought forward even further to 2032 – just 12 years from now. ...The move would also ban the sale of hybrid vehicles, which sold more than 13,000 units last month. All-electric cars meanwhile accounted for 4,054 UK sales in the first month of 2020.InsideEVs https://insideevs.com/news/399114/uk-ban-gas-diesel/ Including … [Read more...] about Hybrid stepping stone
FIR 190: Digital vs analogue behaviour in the UK general election
For the December edition of The Hobson & Holtz Report - aka episode 190 of the For Immediate Release podcast - Shel and I picked an eclectic list of topics to talk about. As a European and, specifically, a Brit, my hot one was about the result of the General Election that took place here in the UK on December 12 - the result was a landslide win for Boris Johnson and the Conservative party - and the role social media played in influencing voters. Did social media influence voters to … [Read more...] about FIR 190: Digital vs analogue behaviour in the UK general election
The time of the AI writer
Developments in artificial intelligence that can write authentic-looking stories took a big leap forward earlier this year with the release of GPT-2, a predictive text-creation algorithm that can create a coherent, realistic-sounding continuation of a text input as short as one or two sentences. In other words, the software looks at a text you write and predicts the next words and phrases. It uses a huge data set as its training source: 8 million web pages which have been curated or filtered … [Read more...] about The time of the AI writer
FIR 187: It may be a Car but it Sounds like a Starship
With this September 2019 episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report or FIR 187, Shel and I discuss a handful of notable, even memorable, topics and include a segment we recorded two weeks beforehand in Winchester when we were together during Shel's UK trip. Automotive is a star feature of our discussion with a detailed exchange of views and thoughts on news out of the US about regulatory developments regarding electric cars, specifically on the sound they make. Which is a thing that concerns … [Read more...] about FIR 187: It may be a Car but it Sounds like a Starship