Open Access book edited by Pierre-Philippe Mathieu and Christoph Aubrecht: “Over the past decades, rapid developments in digital and sensing technologies, such as the Cloud, Web and Internet of Things, have dramatically changed the way we live and work. The digital transformation is revolutionizing our ability to monitor our planet and transforming the way we access, process and exploit Earth Observation data from satellites. This book reviews these megatrends and their implications for the Earth Observation community as well as the wider data economy. It provides insight into new paradigms of Open Science and Innovation applied to space data,... (More >)
The Follower Factory
Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris And Mark Hansen in The New York Times: “…Fake accounts, deployed by governments, criminals and entrepreneurs, now infest social media networks. By some calculations, as many as 48 million of Twitter’s reported active users — nearly 15 percent — are automated accounts designed to simulate real people, though the company claims that number is far lower. In November, Facebook disclosed to investors that it had at least twice as many fake users as it previously estimated, indicating that up to 60 million automated accounts may roam the world’s largest social media platform.... (More >)
The Tyranny of Metrics
Book by Jerry Z. Muller on “How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens our schools, medical care, businesses, and government… Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we’ve gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself. The result is a tyranny of metrics that threatens the quality of our lives and most important institutions. In this timely and powerful book, Jerry... (More >)
Democracy and the Internet: A Retrospective
Essay by Charles Ess at Javnost: “In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the emerging internet and World Wide Web inspired both popular and scholarly optimism that these new communication technologies would inevitably “democratise”—in local organisations, larger civic and political institutions, and, indeed, the world itself. The especially Habermas- and feminist-inspired notions of deliberative democracy in an electronic public sphere at work here are subsequently challenged, however, by both theoretical and empirical developments such as the Arab Winter and platform imperialism. Nonetheless, a range of other developments—from Edward Snowden to the emergence of virtue ethics and slow tech as... (More >)
Governments are not startups
Ramy Ghorayeb at Medium: “…Why can’t governments move fast like the private industry? We have seen the rise of big corporations and startups adapting and evolve with the needs of their customers. Why can’t the governments adapt to the needs of their population? Why is it so slow? Truth is, innovating in the public sector cannot and should not be like in the private one. Startups and corporations are about maximizing their internalities while public administrations are also about minimizing the externalities. Straight-forward example: Let’s imagine the US authorize online voting in addition to physical for the next presidential... (More >)
Crowdfunding site aims to get homeless back into work
Springwise: “Beam is a new crowdfunding website that has been launched to try and help homeless people based in London get back into work. The idea behind the website is that people donate money online to homeless individuals, which will then be used to give them the qualifications and training that they will need to become fully employed and therefore able to also get themselves secure in their own accommodation. A new member of Beam is allocated a Member Manager, who works with them to find the best employment avenue for them to take based on their likes and... (More >)
How AI Could Help the Public Sector
Emma Martinho-Truswell in the Harvard Business Review: “A public school teacher grading papers faster is a small example of the wide-ranging benefits that artificial intelligence could bring to the public sector. A.I could be used to make government agencies more efficient, to improve the job satisfaction of public servants, and to increase the quality of services offered. Talent and motivation are wasted doing routine tasks when they could be doing more creative ones. Applications of artificial intelligence to the public sector are broad and growing, with early experiments taking place around the world. In addition to education, public servants... (More >)
Can a reality TV show discourage corruption?
The Economist: “The timing could not have been better. In the same week as two civil servants in Nigeria appeared in court for embezzling funds earmarked for International Anti-Corruption Day, the finalists of “Integrity Idol” were announced. In this reality television show, honest civil servants working in corrupt countries compete for glory, fame and, occasionally, a live chicken. The show is a hit: over 10m people have watched it and more than 400,000 have cast their votes in favour of their Integrity Idols. “Integrity Idol” started in Nepal in 2014 and has since spread to Pakistan, Mali, Liberia, Nigeria... (More >)
Is Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy?
Essay by Cass R. Sunstein, as part of a series by Facebook on social media and democracy: “On balance, the question of whether social media platforms are good for democracy is easy. On balance, they are not merely good; they are terrific. For people to govern themselves, they need to have information. They also need to be able to convey it to others. Social media platforms make that tons easier. There is a subtler point as well. When democracies are functioning properly, people’s sufferings and challenges are not entirely private matters. Social media platforms help us alert one another... (More >)
They Are Watching You—and Everything Else on the Planet
Cover article by Robert Draper for Special Issue of the National Geographic: “Technology and our increasing demand for security have put us all under surveillance. Is privacy becoming just a memory?… In 1949, amid the specter of European authoritarianism, the British novelist George Orwell published his dystopian masterpiece 1984, with its grim admonition: “Big Brother is watching you.” As unsettling as this notion may have been, “watching” was a quaintly circumscribed undertaking back then. That very year, 1949, an American company released the first commercially available CCTV system. Two years later, in 1951, Kodak introduced its Brownie portable movie... (More >)
