Competition, not break-up, is the cure for tech giants’ dominance
By: The Economist March 28, 2017 Score one for the machines. The largest fund company in the world, BlackRock, has faced a thorny challenge since it acquired the exchange-traded-fund business from Barclays in 2009. These low cost, computer-driven funds have exploded in growth, leaving in the dust the stock pickers who had spurred an earlier […]
The probability of automation in England: 2011 and 2017
By: Office For National Statistics March 25, 2019 Introduction Automation is of increasing importance to society, reflecting that the job market is changing composition. This article describes the methodology used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for producing estimates of the probability of automation for 2011 and 2017. We describe previous studies that have […]
Why book value has lost its meaning
By: Buttonwood March 23, 2019 BABY-BOOMERS may recall, perhaps wistfully, how the golden-arched sign outside every McDonald’s restaurant would proclaim how many customers had been served by the chain. As they became adults, the number kept on climbing: 5bn in 1969; 30bn in 1979; 80bn in 1990. Jerry Seinfeld, a wry chronicler of the trivial, […]
Computer Fraud Laws are Flawed, this Lawyer is Fighting Against Them
By: futurism March 16, 2017 Tor Ekeland, hacker lawyer, fights back against the harsh punishments decreed using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And one of those fights can be seen in “Trust Machine,” available now at Breaker.io. Read Full Article
Tim Berners-Lee on 30 years of the world wide web: ‘We can get the web we want’
By: Alex Hern March 12, 2019 Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, then a fellow at the physics research laboratory Cern on the French-Swiss border, sent his boss a document labelled Information Management: A Proposal. The memo suggested a system with which physicists at the centre could share “general information about accelerators and experiments”. “Many of […]
Why Many Americans Are Drawn To The Gig Economy
By: NPR March 11, 2019 David Greene talks to sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle about her book Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy, which examines how companies treat their front-line workers. Listen to full Podcast
Creepy Database Lists Whether 1.8M Chinese Women Are “Breedready”
By: Futurism March 11, 2019 We already knew China kept a close eye on its population, monitoring everything from their spending habits to their social interactions. Now we know someone in the nation is also tracking which female citizens are “breedready,” a term apparently used to signal that a woman is likely able to have children — […]
Elizabeth Warren is right – we must break up Facebook, Google and Amazon
By: Robert Reich March 10, 2019 The presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren announced on Friday she wants to bust up giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon. America’s first Gilded Age began in the late 19th century with a raft of innovations – railroads, steel production, oil extraction – but culminated in mammoth trusts run by “robber […]
How smart tech is giving ageing prisoners a lifeline
By: Sarah Johnson March 6, 2019 Jim Lees woke up late one night needing to use the toilet. As he sat up in bed, he felt dizzy, then blacked out and fell to the floor. He remembers: “Everything went blank. I fell and was unconscious. I don’t know how long I was out.” When Lees […]