Book by Salman Khan: “…explores how artificial intelligence and GPT technology will transform learning, and offers a road map for teachers, parents, and students to navigate this exciting (and sometimes intimidating) new world.
A pioneer in the field of education technology, Khan examines the ins and outs of these cutting-edge tools and how they will revolutionize the way we learn and teach. For parents concerned about their children’s success, Khan illustrates how AI can personalize learning by adapting to each student’s individual pace and style, identifying strengths and areas for improvement, and offering tailored support and feedback to complement traditional classroom instruction. Khan emphasizes that embracing AI in education is not about replacing human interaction but enhancing it with customized and accessible learning tools that encourage creative problem-solving skills and prepare students for an increasingly digital world.
But Brave New Words is not just about technology—it’s about what this technology means for our society, and the practical implications for administrators, guidance counselors, and hiring managers who can harness the power of AI in education and the workplace. Khan also delves into the ethical and social implications of AI and large language models, offering thoughtful insights into how we can use these tools to build a more accessible education system for students around the world…(More)”.
Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare
Book by Nora Kenworthy: “Over the past decade, charitable crowdfunding has exploded in popularity across the globe. Sites such as GoFundMe, which now boasts a “global community of over 100 million” users, have transformed the ways we seek and offer help. When faced with crises—especially medical ones—Americans are turning to online platforms that promise to connect them to the charity of the crowd. What does this new phenomenon reveal about the changing ways we seek and provide healthcare? In Crowded Out, Nora Kenworthy examines how charitable crowdfunding so quickly overtook public life, where it is taking us, and who gets left behind by this new platformed economy.
Although crowdfunding has become ubiquitous in our lives, it is often misunderstood: rather than a friendly free market “powered by the kindness” of strangers, crowdfunding is powerfully reinforcing inequalities and changing the way Americans think about and access healthcare. Drawing on extensive research and rich storytelling, Crowded Out demonstrates how crowdfunding for health is fueled by—and further reinforces—financial and moral “toxicities” in market-based healthcare systems. It offers a unique and distressing look beneath the surface of some of the most popular charitable platforms and helps to foster thoughtful discussions of how we can better respond to healthcare crises both small and large…(More)”.
Behavioural Economics and Policy for Pandemics
Book edited by Joan Costa-Font, Matteo M. Galizzi: “Behavioural economics and behavioural public policy have been fundamental parts of governmental responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. This was not only the case at the beginning of the pandemic as governments pondered how to get people to follow restrictions, but also during delivery of the vaccination programme. Behavioural Economics and Policy for Pandemics brings together a world-class line-up of experts to examine the successes and failures of behavioural economics and policy in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. It documents how people changed their behaviours and use of health care and discusses what we can learn in terms of addressing future pandemics. Featuring high-profile behavioural economists such as George Loewenstein, this book uniquely uncovers behavioural regularities that emerge in the different waves of COVID-19 and documents how pandemics change our lives.
- Provides a selection of studies featuring behavoural regulaltities during COVID-19
- Unique in that it brings together works from health economics and behavioural science that neither journals or other books do
- Offers the first book on the behavioural economics of pandemics
- Brings together works of behavoural scientists and the economists examining health behaviours on the effects of COVID-19 on health and health care…(More)”.
The Poisoning of the American Mind
Book by Lawrence M. Eppard: “Humans are hard-wired to look for information that they agree with (regardless of the information’s veracity), avoid information that makes them uncomfortable (even if that information is true), and interpret information in a manner that is most favorable to their sense of self. The damage these cognitive tendencies cause to one’s perception of reality depends in part upon the information that a person surrounds himself/herself with. Unfortunately, in the U.S. today, both liberals and conservatives are regularly bombarded with misleading information as well as lies from people they believe to be trustworthy and authoritative sources. While there are several factors one could plausibly blame for this predicament, the decline in the quality of the sources of information that the right and left rely on over the last few decades plays a primary role. As a result of this decline, we are faced with an epistemic crisis that is poisoning the American mind and threatening our democracy. In his forthcoming book with Jacob L. Mackey, The Poisoning of the American Mind, Lawrence M. Eppard explores epistemic problems in both the right-wing and left-wing ideological silos in the U.S., including ideology presented as fact, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation…(More)”.
The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
Book by Shannon Vallor: “For many, technology offers hope for the future—that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines.
Yet rather than open new futures, today’s powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time.
To meet today’s grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves.
Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it…(More)”.
The Crime Data Handbook
Book edited by Laura Huey and David Buil-Gil: “Crime research has grown substantially over the past decade, with a rise in evidence-informed approaches to criminal justice, statistics-driven decision-making and predictive analytics. The fuel that has driven this growth is data – and one of its most pressing challenges is the lack of research on the use and interpretation of data sources.
This accessible, engaging book closes that gap for researchers, practitioners and students. International researchers and crime analysts discuss the strengths, perils and opportunities of the data sources and tools now available and their best use in informing sound public policy and criminal justice practice…(More)”.
The Secret Life of Data
Book by Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert: “…explore the many unpredictable, and often surprising, ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks. The authors build on this basic premise: no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. How this data will be used, by other people in other times and places, has profound implications for every aspect of our lives—from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.
With the secret uses of data in mind, Sinnreich and Gilbert interview dozens of experts to explore a broad range of scenarios and contexts—from the playful to the profound to the problematic. Unlike most books about data and society that focus on the short-term effects of our immense data usage, The Secret Life of Data focuses primarily on the long-term consequences of humanity’s recent rush toward digitizing, storing, and analyzing every piece of data about ourselves and the world we live in. The authors advocate for “slow fixes” regarding our relationship to data, such as creating new laws and regulations, ethics and aesthetics, and models of production for our datafied society.
Cutting through the hype and hopelessness that so often inform discussions of data and society, The Secret Life of Data clearly and straightforwardly demonstrates how readers can play an active part in shaping how digital technology influences their lives and the world at large…(More)”
Being Human in Digital Cities
Book by Myria Georgiou: “…sets out to investigate the new configuration of social order that is taking shape in today’s cities. Although routed through extractive datafication, compulsive connectivity, and regulatory AI technologies, this digital order nonetheless displaces technocentrism and instead promotes new visions of humanism, all in the name of freedom, diversity, and sustainability. But the digital order emerges in the midst of neoliberal instability and crises, resulting in a plurality of contrasting responses to securing digitally mediated human progress. While corporate, media, and state actors mobilize such positive sociotechnical imaginaries to promise digitally mediated human progress, urban citizens and social movements propose alternative pathways to autonomy and dignity through and sometimes against digital technologies.
Investigating the dynamic workings of technology and power from a transnational and comparative perspective, this book reveals the contradictory claims and struggles for the future of digital cities and their humanity. In doing so, it will enrich understandings of digital urbanism, critical data studies, and critical humanist studies...(More)”.
CDOs in the Public Sector
Book by Christian Schachtner: “This book explores the need for innovative approaches to administrative digitization, leveraging technologies such as AI, blockchain, and smart processes to meet citizens’ expectations, with a particular focus on the role of Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) in driving successful digital transformations within public institutions.
Administrative digitization requires fresh inputs to match the leaps seen in the industry sector, utilizing technologies like AI-driven automation, blockchain transactions, and security tools. Smart process solutions are seen as transformative in upholding service standards aligned with citizens’ state expectations. Unlike commercial companies, collaboration offers those overseeing public sector digitization enhanced scaling opportunities by drawing from experiences in other regions and metropolises, directly applicable and reusable.
In the public realm, digital strategies mirror legal and social conditions, necessitating adjustments and adaptation options for Chief Digital Officers as they lead digital transformation. Methodological focal points in task structure redesign, process optimization, and motivating actors yield diverse action areas for the CDO’s new role in public institutions. This book explores the instruments, strategies, and attitudes necessary to successfully implement transformative initiatives in organizations, emphasizing proven concepts with practical applicability, enabling readers to derive their own interaction options as digital guidance leaders. The book is a concise introduction to the specific requirements for visionary designers driving dynamic changes in user-centric public services….(More)”.
Next Generation Evidence: Strategies for More Equitable Social Impact
Book edited by Kelly Fitzsimmons and Tamar Bauer: “Evidence is remarkably powerful; it helps us understand the needs of communities, make decisions in times of change and scarcity, and build and do more of what works. However, practitioners face a number of structural and practical hurdles to building and using evidence. Traditional evaluation and research methods are often not timely, affordable, meaningful, or inclusive for helping practitioners make decisions to increase their impact for people and communities. Too often and for too long, evaluation was a thing done to practitioners and the communities they serve, relegating them to a passive role when they should be regarded as leaders of this work. Worse, their data and evidence has been used against them in disempowering thumbs-up, thumbs-down circumstances, rather than for learning and improvement that leads to impact.
Next Generation Evidence features innovative thinking from leaders across policy, philanthropy, research, and practice. Together, these leaders lay out a vision for a stronger, more equitable data and evidence ecosystem that centers on the voices of people and communities most directly impacted by the problems we seek to solve. Throughout the book, case studies featuring practitioners at various stages in their evidence-building journey highlight concrete illustrations of how continuous evidence building can benefit organizations and outcomes for communities…(More)”.