'We're in a period when blockchain or "Distributed Ledger Technology" is the Solution to Everything™, so it is inevitable that it will be proposed as the solution to the problems of academic communication and digital preservation. These proposals typically assume, despite the evidence, that real-world blockchain implementations actually deliver the theoretical attributes of decentralization, immutability, anonymity, security, scalability, sustainability, lack of trust, etc. The proposers appear to believe that Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the infallible Bitcoin protocol to the world on golden tablets; they typically don't appreciate or cite the nearly three decades of research and implementation that led up to it. This talk will discuss the mis-match between theory and practice in blockchain technology, and how it applies to various proposed applications of interest to the CNI audience.'

We built the commercial internet by mastering techniques of persuasion and surveillance that we’ve extended to billions of people, including essentially the entire population of the Western democracies. But admitting that this tool of social control might be conducive to authoritarianism is not something we’re ready to face. After all, we're good people. We like freedom. How could we have built tools that subvert it?

As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I contend that there are structural reasons to worry about the role of the tech industry in American political life, and that we have only a brief window of time in which to fix this.

The goal is to give the audience a roadmap for analysing user data using python friendly tools.

I will touch on many aspects of the data science pipeline from data cleansing to building predictive data products at scale.

I will start gently with pandas and dataframes and then discuss some machine learning techniques like kmeans and random forests in scikitlearn and then introduce Spark for doing it at scale.

I will focus more on the use cases rather than detailed implementation.

The talk will be informed by my experience and focus on user behaviour in games and mobile apps.

'I went to school with Bill. He's a nice guy. But making him immortal is not going to make life better for anyone in my city. It will just exacerbate the rent crisis.'

This month, we'll have Tomas Doran from Yelp talking about Docker, service discovery, and deployments. 'There are many advantages to a container based, microservices architecture - however, as always, there is no silver bullet. Any serious deployment will involve multiple host machines, and will have a pressing need to migrate containers between hosts at some point. In such a dynamic world hard coding IP addresses, or even host names is not a viable solution. This talk will take a journey through how Yelp has solved the discovery problems using Airbnb’s SmartStack to dynamically discover service dependencies, and how this is helping unify our architecture, from traditional metal to EC2 ‘immutable’ SOA images, to Docker containers.'

An adventure that takes you through several popular Java language features and shows how they compile to bytecode and eventually JIT to assembly code.

The Bottom Half Of The Internet -- "Racism; typos; filth; spam; ignorance; rage – that's all the bottom half of the internet is good for, right? Rob Manuel wants you to question the internet dictum, most beloved of high-profile columnists, that you should ignore all of the comments all of the time. The 'war on comments', he reckons, might just be an echo of a fourth estate that's having trouble adjusting to the idea of an unwashed public disagreeing with their sacred opinions. Sous les pavés, la plage."

On Tuesday, le cool Dublin & Pilcrow present SPIEL. Rob Manuel is the flashy animator behind B3ta and he's joined by Ed Melvin, who wants to educate you on 'The Unreal Engines' of virtual currencies and economies.

This talk explores when to start performance testing, how to avoid the common pitfalls, how to profile when the results cause your team to pull a funny face, and what you can do about that funny face. Specific issues to Java and managed runtimes in general will be explored, but if other languages are your poison, don't be put off as much of the content can be applied to any development.