Wired Wisdom


Book by Eszter Hargittai and John Palfrey: “Everyone has that one older relative who loves to post misinformation on social media. That older coworker who fell prey to a phishing attack. Or a parent who still can’t quite get the hang of using emoji in texts. By popular account, these incidents are typical of older generations who inevitably struggle with tech woes. But is that the full story?

Absolutely not, according to the findings of Internet researchers Eszter Hargittai and John Palfrey. Their eye-opening book on the Internet’s fastest-growing demographic offers a more nuanced picture—debunking common myths about older adults’ Internet use to offer hope and a necessary call to action. Incorporating original interviews and survey results from thousands of people sixty and over, Wired Wisdom shows that many, in fact, use technology in ways that put younger peers to shame. Over-sixties are often nimble online, and quicker to abandon social media platforms that don’t meet their needs. Despite being targeted more often, they also may be less likely to fall for scams than younger peers. And fake news actually fools fewer people over sixty, who have far more experience evaluating sources and detecting propaganda. Still, there are unseen risks and missed opportunities for this group. Hargittai and Palfrey show that our stereotypes can be hurdles—keeping us from building intergenerational support communities, aiding loved ones to adopt new technology that may improve their lives, and helping us all thrive.

Full of surprising insights, Wired Wisdom helps push readers beyond ageist assumptions, offers practical advice for older tech users and their communities, and ultimately questions what it really means to age well online—no matter your birthdate…(More)”

The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust


Book by Francis Collins: “As the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, we have become not just a hyper-partisan society but also a deeply cynical one, distrustful of traditional sources of knowledge and wisdom. Skepticism about vaccines led to the needless deaths of at least 230,000 Americans. “Do your own research” is now a rallying cry in many online rabbit holes. Yet experts can make mistakes, and institutions can lose their moral compass. So how can we navigate through all this?

In The Road to Wisdom, Francis Collins reminds us of the four core sources of judgement and clear thinking: truth, science, faith, and trust. Drawing on his work from the Human Genome Project and heading the National Institutes of Health, as well as on ethics, philosophy, and Christian theology, Collins makes a robust, thoughtful case for each of these sources—their reliability, and their limits. Ultimately, he shows how they work together, not separately—and certainly not in conflict. It is only when we relink these four foundations of wisdom that we can begin to discern the best path forward in life.

​Thoughtful, accessible, winsome, and deeply wise, The Road to Wisdom leads us beyond current animosities to surer footing. Here is the moral, philosophical, and scientific framework with which to address the problems of our time—including distrust of public health, partisanship, racism, response to climate change, and threats to our democracy—but also to guide us in our daily lives. This is a book that will repay many readings, and resolve dilemmas that we all face every day…(More)”.

Public Sector Innovation


Book by Mehmet Akif Demircioglu and David B. Audretsch: “Governments around the world are under pressure to do more with less. Dispelling the conventional wisdom that government is the enemy of innovation, this book argues that the promise of innovation addressing the most compelling societal problems will only come to fruition if governments become full partners and participants in innovation. The authors provide a systematic overview, analysis, framework, research agenda, and strategic directions for the study of public sector innovation, examining drivers, sources, barriers, typologies, and outcomes of innovation along with ethics. They suggest that innovation in government requires a new approach to public sector strategy, organization, human resources, and culture. Featuring large data analyses and poignant case studies drawn from best practices across the globe, Demircioglu and Audretsch identify what works and what doesn’t in transforming governments from the periphery to the very heart of the most profound innovations driving societal change and development…(More)”.

Taming Silicon Valley


Book by Gary Marcus: “On balance, will AI help humanity or harm it? AI could revolutionize science, medicine, and technology, and deliver us a world of abundance and better health. Or it could be a disaster, leading to the downfall of democracy, or even our extinction. In Taming Silicon Valley, Gary Marcus, one of the most trusted voices in AI, explains that we still have a choice. And that the decisions we make now about AI will shape our next century. In this short but powerful manifesto, Marcus explains how Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI could make things much worse, and, most importantly, what we can do to safeguard our democracy, our society, and our future.

Marcus explains the potential—and potential risks—of AI in the clearest possible terms and how Big Tech has effectively captured policymakers. He begins by laying out what is lacking in current AI, what the greatest risks of AI are, and how Big Tech has been playing both the public and the government, before digging into why the US government has thus far been ineffective at reining in Big Tech. He then offers real tools for readers, including eight suggestions for what a coherent AI policy should look like—from data rights to layered AI oversight to meaningful tax reform—and closes with how ordinary citizens can push for what is so desperately needed.

Taming Silicon Valley is both a primer on how AI has gotten to its problematic present state and a book of activism in the tradition of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. It is a deeply important book for our perilous historical moment that every concerned citizen must read…(More)”.

Leadership as Stewardship


Book by Marian Iszatt-White: “Exploring different understandings of stewardship across a range of research domains and cultures, this insightful book examines the tensions between competing perspectives and their implications for leadership. Marian Iszatt-White proposes ‘leadership-as-stewardship’ as a new signifier for leadership research, providing practical guidance to leaders navigating the challenges and trade-offs of the Anthropocene.

Leadership as Stewardship identifies how the apparent inadequacy of modern leadership coincides with a shift in scholarship away from practical inquiry and towards a range of aspirational approaches, including authentic, sustainable, responsible and ethical. Iszatt-White proposes stewardship as an alternative to these aspirational forms of leadership and challenges the ability of Western, Enlightenment-based thinking to solve global issues created by that same thinking. The book concludes that it is time to place the more enact-able construct of stewardship at the heart of leadership aspirations and scholarly activities.

Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will be vital for scholars of leadership, management and organization studies. Highlighting the ability of stewardship to combat perceived failings in leadership as both a construct and a practice, it is also valuable to policymakers, management educators and leadership practitioners…(More)”.

Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy


Book by Ronald Deibert: “In this real-life spy thriller, cyber security expert Ronald Deibert details the unseemly marketplace for high-tech surveillance, professional disinformation, and computerized malfeasance. He reveals how his team of digital sleuths at the Citizen Lab have lifted the lid on dozens of covert operations targeting innocent citizens everywhere.

Chasing Shadows provides a front-row seat to a dark underworld of digital espionage, disinformation, and subversion. There, autocrats and dictators peer into their targets’ lives with the mere press of a button, spreading their tentacles of authoritarianism through a digital ecosystem that is insecure, poorly regulated, and prone to abuse. The activists, opposition figures, and journalists who dare to advocate for basic political rights and freedoms are hounded, arrested, tortured, and sometimes murdered.

From the gritty streets of Guatemala City to the corridors of power in the White House, this compelling narrative traces the journey of the Citizen Lab as it evolved into a globally renowned source of counterintelligence for civil society. As this small team of investigators disarmed cyber mercenaries and helped to improve the digital security of billions of people worldwide, their success brought them, too, into the same sinister crosshairs that plagued the victims they worked to protect.

Deibert recounts how the Lab exposed the world’s pre-eminent cyber-mercenary firm, Israel-based NSO Group—the creators of the phone-hacking marvel Pegasus—in a series of human rights abuses, from domestic spying scandals in Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Greece to its implication in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018…(More)”

The Art of Uncertainty


Book by David Spiegelhalter: “We live in a world where uncertainty is inevitable. How should we deal with what we don’t know? And what role do chance, luck and coincidence play in our lives?

David Spiegelhalter has spent his career dissecting data in order to understand risks and assess the chances of what might happen in the future. In The Art of Uncertainty, he gives readers a window onto how we can all do this better.

In engaging, crystal-clear prose, he takes us through the principles of probability, showing how it can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to pandemics and climate change forecasts, and explores how we can update our beliefs about the future in the face of constantly changing experience. Along the way, he explains why roughly 40% of football results come down to luck rather than talent, how the National Risk Register assesses near-term risks to the United Kingdom, and why we can be so confident that two properly shuffled packs of cards have never, ever been in the exact same order.

Drawing on a wide range of captivating real-world examples, this is an essential guide to navigating uncertainty while also having the humility to admit what we do not know…(More)”.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI 


Book by Yuval Noah Harari: “For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.
 
Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity…(More)”.

The Imperial Origins of Big Data


Blog and book by Asheesh Kapur Siddique: “We live in a moment of massive transformation in the nature of information. In 2020, according to one report, users of the Internet created 64.2 zetabytes of data, a quantity greater than the “number of detectable stars in the cosmos,” a colossal increase whose origins can be traced to the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1993.1 Facilitated by technologies like satellites, smartphones, and artificial intelligence, the scale and speed of data creation seems like it may only balloon over the rest of our lifetimes—and with it, the problem of how to govern ourselves in relation to the inequalities and opportunities that the explosion of data creates.

But while much about our era of big data is indeed revolutionary, the political questions that it raises—How should information be used? Who should control it? And how should it be preserved?—are ones with which societies have long grappled. These questions attained a particular importance in Europe from the eleventh century due to a technological change no less significant than the ones we are witnessing today: the introduction of paper into Europe. Initially invented in China, paper travelled to Europe via the conduit of Islam around the eleventh century after the Moors conquered Spain. Over the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, paper emerged as the fundamental substrate which politicians, merchants, and scholars relied on to record and circulate information in governance, commerce, and learning. At the same time, governing institutions sought to preserve and control the spread of written information through the creation of archives: repositories where they collected, organized, and stored documents.

The expansion of European polities overseas from the late fifteenth century onward saw governments massively scale up their use of paper—and confront the challenge of controlling its dissemination across thousands of miles of ocean and land. These pressures were felt particularly acutely in what eventually became the largest empire in world history, the British empire. As people from the British isles from the early seventeenth century fought, traded, and settled their way to power in the Atlantic world and South Asia, administrators faced the problem of how to govern both their emigrating subjects and the non-British peoples with whom they interacted. This meant collecting information about their behavior through the technology of paper. Just as we struggle to organize, search, and control our email boxes, text messages, and app notifications, so too did these early moderns confront the attendant challenges of developing practices of collection and storage to manage the resulting information overload. And despite the best efforts of states and companies to control information, it constantly escaped their grasp, falling into the hands of their opponents and rivals who deployed it to challenge and contest ruling powers.

The history of the early modern information state offers no simple or straightforward answers to the questions that data raises for us today. But it does remind us of a crucial truth, all too readily obscured by the deluge of popular narratives glorifying technological innovation: that questions of data are inherently questions about politics—about who gets to collect, control, and use information, and the ends to which information should be put. We should resist any effort to insulate data governance from democratic processes—and having an informed perspective on the politics of data requires that we attend not just to its present, but also to its past…(More)”.

Data Protection Law and Emotion


Book by Damian Clifford: “Data protection law is often positioned as a regulatory solution to the risks posed by computational systems. Despite the widespread adoption of data protection laws, however, there are those who remain sceptical as to their capacity to engender change. Much of this criticism focuses on our role as ‘data subjects’. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that we lack the capacity to act in our own best interests and, what is more, that our decisions have negative impacts on others. Our decision-making limitations seem to be the inevitable by-product of the technological, social, and economic reality. Data protection law bakes in these limitations by providing frameworks for notions such as consent and subjective control rights and by relying on those who process our data to do so fairly.

Despite these valid concerns, Data Protection Law and Emotion argues that the (in)effectiveness of these laws are often more difficult to discern than the critical literature would suggest, while also emphasizing the importance of the conceptual value of subjective control. These points are explored (and indeed, exposed) by investigating data protection law through the lens of the insights provided by law and emotion scholarship and demonstrating the role emotions play in our decision-making. The book uses the development of Emotional Artificial Intelligence, a particularly controversial technology, as a case study to analyse these issues.

Original and insightful, Data Protection Law and Emotion offers a unique contribution to a contentious debate that will appeal to students and academics in data protection and privacy, policymakers, practitioners, and regulators…(More)”.