There have long been debates as to whether Wikipedia is a trustworthy source, whether there were Western, male, English-speaking, and/or liberal biases in its 65 million pages, or how Wikipedia resolves conflicts (or does not!). There is even a site that lets you see which topics … Continued
Taking a break from the week’s relentless tech news (including Nvidia becoming the publicly traded company to be valued at $5tn, a global Microsoft outage, and OpenAI’s shift to becoming a fully for-profit firm), I thought it wise to step … Continued
Earlier this week, Janan Ganesh wrote in the FT that contrary to the dominant current ‘discourse’, in fact, “public life, not private innovation, has supplied the drama of our times”. In his view, even the tech elite recognise that ultimately … Continued
Since this week’s Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences was awarded “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth” it seemed the obvious choice as the subject for this week’s blog. The prize was split equally for contributions to endogenous growth … Continued
Until very recently, the hype (and genuine expectations) over generative AI had reached almost fever pitch. NVIDIA, probably the clearest bellwether indicator of AI bullishness, has seen its stock price rise 16-fold over the past three years (Oct 2022-25) and … Continued
The recent climate summit in Baku has been deemed a failure by many and coupled with our recent crossing the 1.5C temperature target laid out in the Paris Agreement has amplified concerns that we won’t be able to cut greenhouse … Continued
There has been a heated debate in the UK over assisted dying and there is a free vote planned in Parliament for the end of next week (i.e., there is no party whip and individual Members of Parliament can vote … Continued
In just the past day or so, Bluesky has reached 15 million followers having doubled its user base in the past 90 days including over 1 million in the past week alone. The proximate cause for the shift is related … Continued
Yesterday, the World Medical Association updated its core set of ethical principles for medical research (known as the Declaration of Helsinki) for the first time in 11 years. The revisions seek to modernize protections including new language on justice, public health, vulnerability … Continued
October is a busy month for the International Energy Agency (IEA). Two weeks ago, they released their flagship report, the World Energy Outlook, which explores pathways to net zero as well as less ambitious scenarios. The report highlights the impacts … Continued