Sophie Bushwick at Scientific American: “The world produces roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of digital data per day, adding to a sea of information that includes intimate details about many individuals’ health and habits. To protect privacy, data brokers must anonymize such records before sharing them with researchers and marketers. But a new study finds it is relatively easy to reidentify a person from a supposedly anonymized data set—even when that set is incomplete. Massive data repositories can reveal trends that teach medical researchers about disease, demonstrate issues such as the effects of income inequality, coach artificial intelligence into humanlike... (More >)
The value of data in Canada: Experimental estimates
Statistics Canada: “As data and information take on a far more prominent role in Canada and, indeed, all over the world, data, databases and data science have become a staple of modern life. When the electricity goes out, Canadians are as much in search of their data feed as they are food and heat. Consumers are using more and more data that is embodied in the products they buy, whether those products are music, reading material, cars and other appliances, or a wide range of other goods and services. Manufacturers, merchants and other businesses depend increasingly on the collection,... (More >)
What Restaurant Reviews Reveal About Cities
Linda Poon at CityLab: “Online review sites can tell you a lot about a city’s restaurant scene, and they can reveal a lot about the city itself, too. Researchers at MIT recently found that information about restaurants gathered from popular review sites can be used to uncover a number of socioeconomic factors of a neighborhood, including its employment rates and demographic profiles of the people who live, work, and travel there. A report published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explains how the researchers used information found on Dianping—a Yelp-like site in China—to find... (More >)
The Power of Global Performance Indicators
Introduction to Special Issue of International Organization by Judith G. Kelley and Beth A. Simmons: “In recent decades, IGOs, NGOs, private firms and even states have begun to regularly package and distribute information on the relative performance of states. From the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index to the Financial Action Task Force blacklist, global performance indicators (GPIs) are increasingly deployed to influence governance globally. We argue that GPIs derive influence from their ability to frame issues, extend the authority of the creator, and — most importantly — to invoke recurrent comparison that stimulates governments’ concerns for their... (More >)
How an AI Utopia Would Work
Sami Mahroum at Project Syndicate: “…It is more than 500 years since Sir Thomas More found inspiration for the “Kingdom of Utopia” while strolling the streets of Antwerp. So, when I traveled there from Dubai in May to speak about artificial intelligence (AI), I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Raphael Hythloday, the character in Utopia who regales sixteenth-century Englanders with tales of a better world. As home to the world’s first Minister of AI, as well as museums, academies, and foundations dedicated to studying the future, Dubai is on its own Hythloday-esque voyage. Whereas Europe, in general, has... (More >)
Trusted data and the future of information sharing
MIT Technology Review: “Data in some form underpins almost every action or process in today’s modern world. Consider that even farming, the world’s oldest industry, is on the verge of a digital revolution, with AI, drones, sensors, and blockchain technology promising to boost efficiencies. The market value of an apple will increasingly reflect not only traditional farming inputs but also some value of modern data, such as weather patterns, soil acidity levels and agri-supply-chain information. By 2022 more than 60% of global GDP will be digitized, according to IDC. Governments seeking to foster growth in their digital economies need... (More >)
Age of the expert as policymaker is coming to an end
Wolfgang Münchau at the Financial Times: “…Where the conflation of the expert and the policymaker did real damage was not to policy but to expertdom itself. It compromised the experts’ most prized asset — their independence. When economics blogging started to become fashionable, I sat on a podium with an academic blogger who predicted that people like him would usurp the role of the economics newspaper columnist within a period of 10 years. That was a decade ago. His argument was that trained economists were just smarter. What he did not reckon with is that it is hard to... (More >)
Future Studies and Counterfactual Analysis
Book by Theodore J. Gordon and Mariana Todorova: “In this volume, the authors contribute to futures research by placing the counterfactual question in the future tense. They explore the possible outcomes of future, and consider how future decisions are turning points that may produce different global outcomes. This book focuses on a dozen or so intractable issues that span politics, religion, and technology, each addressed in individual chapters. Until now, most scenarios written by futurists have been built on cause and effect narratives or depended on numerical models derived from historical relationships. In contrast, many of the scenarios written... (More >)
The Age of Digital Interdependence
Report of the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation: “The immense power and value of data in the modern economy can and must be harnessed to meet the SDGs, but this will require new models of collaboration. The Panel discussed potential pooling of data in areas such as health, agriculture and the environment to enable scientists and thought leaders to use data and artificial intelligence to better understand issues and find new ways to make progress on the SDGs. Such data commons would require criteria for establishing relevance to the SDGs, standards for interoperability, rules on access and safeguards to... (More >)
Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1 billion per day
Eric Berger at Ars Technica: “….one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject has assessed the value of this GPS technology to the US economy and examined what effect a 30-day outage would have—whether it’s due to a severe space weather event or “nefarious activity by a bad actor.” The study was sponsored by the US government’s National Institutes of Standards and Technology and performed by a North Carolina-based research organization named RTI International. Economic effect As part of the analysis, researchers spoke to more than 200 experts in the use of GPS technology for various services, from... (More >)
