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32 minute interview with the two key leaders of Google+

But the presence of the police officers in the garage that Friday afternoon in July was anything but ordinary: They were directed to the parking structure by a computer program that had predicted that car burglaries were especially likely there that day. The program is part of an unusual experiment by the Santa Cruz Police Department in predictive policing - deploying officers in places where crimes are likely to occur in the future.

In this case, there are four key players. Two of them are a couple: a journalist who lives in New York and a social media specialist who lives in London. The other two have roots in Pakistan: a journalist and documentary filmmaker who recently moved to the U.S. and a political commentator in Islamabad. Each of them contributed to a chain of information that turned one man's offhand comments about a helicopter in the middle of the night into an internationally known work of citizen journalism.

A review of two recent studies (Gallup and Aberdeen Group) summarizes some of the key findings of the value of internal social networks.   18% boost in employee engagement streamlined operations better, faster innovation failing to engage employees costs $300B in wasted productivity

Before May 1st, not even the smartest of machine learning algorithms could have predicted Keith Urbahn's online relevancy score, or his potential to spark an incredibly viral information flow. While politicos "in the know" certainly knew him or of him, his previous interactions and size and nature of his social graph did little to reflect his potential to generate thousands of people's willingness to trust within a matter of minutes. While connections, authority, trust and persuasiveness play a key role in influencing others, they are only part of a complex set of dynamics that affect people's perception of a person, a piece of information or a product. Timing, initiating a network effect at the right time, and frankly, a dash of pure luck matter equally.

Engineers have developed a device platform that combines electronic components for sensing, medical diagnostics, communications and human-machine interfaces, all on an ultrathin skin-like patch that mounts directly onto the skin with the ease, flexibility and comfort of a temporary tattoo. Led by researcher John A. Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder professor of engineering at the University of Illinois, the researchers described their novel skin-mounted electronics in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Science.