Report by the International Telecommunications Union: “This toolkit provides stakeholders with guidance on developing a digital skills strategy. It is intended for policymakers, along with partners in the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and academia. Its overarching aim is to facilitate the development of a comprehensive digital skills strategy at country level. It is also possible to use this guide to focus on selected priorities that require a fresh approach. Why do countries need a digital skills strategy? Digital skills underpin nearly every aspect of work and life. From filling in a government form to communicating for work, it is... (More >)
Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice
Book edited by Giovanni Schiuma and Daniela Carlucci: “As digital technologies occupy a more central role in working and everyday human life, individual and social realities are increasingly constructed and communicated through digital objects, which are progressively replacing and representing physical objects. They are even shaping new forms of virtual reality. This growing digital transformation coupled with technological evolution and the development of computer computation is shaping a cyber society whose working mechanisms are grounded upon the production, deployment, and exploitation of big data. In the arts and humanities, however, the notion of big data is still in its... (More >)
How Do You Control 1.4 Billion People?
Robert Foyle Hunwick at The New Republic: China’s “social credit system”, which becomes mandatory in 2020, aims to funnel all behavior into a credit score….The quoted text is from a 2014 State Council resolution which promises that every involuntary participant will be rated according to their “commercial sincerity,” “social security,” “trust breaking” and “judicial credibility.” Some residents welcome it. Decades of political upheaval and endemic corruption has bred widespread mistrust; most still rely on close familial networks (guanxi) to get ahead, rather than public institutions. An endemic lack of trust is corroding society; frequent incidents of “bystander effect”—people refusing... (More >)
Blockchain To Solve Bahamas’ ‘Major Workforce Waste’
Tribune 242: “The Government’s first-ever use of blockchain technology will tackle what was yesterday branded “an enormous waste of human capital”. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), unveiling a $200,000 ‘technical co-operation’ project, revealed that the Minnis administration plans to deploy the technology as a way to determine the success of an apprenticeship programme targeted at 1,350 Bahamians aged between 16-40 years-old, and who are either unemployed or school leavers. Documents obtained by Tribune Business reveal that the Government is also looking to blockchain to combat the widespread problem of lost/missing student records and certifications, which the IDB described as... (More >)
Data in the EU: Commission steps up efforts to increase availability and boost healthcare data sharing
PressRelease: “Today, the European Commission is putting forward a set of measures to increase the availability of data in the EU, building on previous initiatives to boost the free flow of non-personal data in the Digital Single Market. Data-driven innovation is a key enabler of market growth, job creation, particularly for SMEs and startups, and the development of new technologies. It allows citizens to easily access and manage their health data, and allows public authorities to use data better in research, prevention and health system reforms…. Today’s proposals build on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will enter... (More >)
Towards a new generation of public services: Designers Italia’s design kits
Matteo DeSanti: “Our lives are becoming more and more digital and we expect the public services we use every day to be digital as well: booking a medical examination, receiving a pension, paying the waste tax, obtaining an authorization or a document. Moreover, we would like for all digital public services to have standards of quality comparable to the best private services we use to inform ourselves, make purchases or reservations. When using a digital public service, we would like to have concrete advantages, in particular: higher quality and ease of use, better accessibility, more flexibility and speed. As... (More >)
How artificial intelligence is transforming the world
Report by Darrell West and John Allen at Brookings: “Most people are not very familiar with the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). As an illustration, when 1,500 senior business leaders in the United States in 2017 were asked about AI, only 17 percent said they were familiar with it. A number of them were not sure what it was or how it would affect their particular companies. They understood there was considerable potential for altering business processes, but were not clear how AI could be deployed within their own organizations. Despite its widespread lack of familiarity, AI is a... (More >)
A Race to the Top? The Aid Transparency Index and the Social Power of Global Performance Indicators
Paper by Dan Honig and Catherine Weaver: “Recent studies on global performance indicators (GPIs) reveal the distinct power that non-state actors can accrue and exercise in world politics. How and when does this happen? Using a mixed-methods approach, we examine the impact of the Aid Transparency Index (ATI), an annual rating and rankings index produced by the small UK-based NGO Publish What You Fund. The ATI seeks to shape development aid donors’ behavior with respect to their transparency – the quality and kind of information they publicly disclose. To investigate the ATI’s effect, we construct an original panel dataset... (More >)
Smart cities need thick data, not big data
Adrian Smith at The Guardian: “…The Smart City is an alluring prospect for many city leaders. Even if you haven’t heard of it, you may have already joined in by looking up bus movements on your phone, accessing Council services online or learning about air contamination levels. By inserting sensors across city infrastructures and creating new data sources – including citizens via their mobile devices – Smart City managers can apply Big Data analysis to monitor and anticipate urban phenomena in new ways, and, so the argument goes, efficiently manage urban activity for the benefit of ‘smart citizens’. Barcelona... (More >)
Online gamers control trash collecting water robot
Springwise: “Urban Rivers is a Chicago-based charity focused on cleaning up the city’s rivers and re-wilding bankside habitats. One of their most visible pieces of work is a floating habitat installed in the middle of the river that runs through the city. An immediate problem that arose after installation was the accumulation of trash. At first, the company sent someone out on a kayak every other day to clean the habitat. Yet in less than a day, huge amounts of garbage would again be choking the space. The company’s solution was to create a Trash Task Force. The outcome... (More >)
