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The Inventor

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley depicts Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes as a bewitching sociopath. Holmes wanted to revolutionise health care by providing a simple and cheap way to perform blood tests using only a finger prick. In 2003, she founded Theranos, with a vision of the company’s machines in every home in America. But, as the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou revealed in 2015, Holmes created an intricate web of deception. Even as machines found their way into chemists and were being used by medical insurance companies, they never actually worked. Holmes put patients’ lives at risk and cost investors millions of dollars. The documentary is compelling viewing, but as it enters a very slim field of movies about female entrepreneurs it is worth questioning the impact of the stories we choose to tell. Fall from grace The journey Holmes took from young idol to spectacular failure is a story about systemic issues and the sometimes toxic culture of the world of start-ups. Prior to the scandal breaking, Holmes was celebrated in the media. She was portrayed as a Stanford University dropout with a vision for changing the world. She raised hundreds of millions of dollars from powerful men in a start-up landscape known for its discriminating funding practices.https://www.youtube.com/embed/wtDaP18OGfw?wmode=transparent&start=0 She made the cover of Forbes magazine in 2014 as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Holmes represented a heady mix of tech, science and business. She was the golden girl of the start-up world. This made her fall from grace even more spectacular. But compare Holmes’ portrayal with another well known example of a deceitful male entrepreneur: Jordan Belfort, the “wolf of Wall Street”. Belfort ran an elaborate crime scheme linked to manipulating the stock market and was jailed for 22 months for securities fraud. Nonetheless, his autobiography and Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film adaptation depict Belfort’s story […]

Jumpstarting a resilient economy

We are at a critical juncture in determining the future stability and health of the world’s economies. How businesses and governments choose to emerge from the Covid-19 crisis will either revert to the short-sighted economic practices of the past or accelerate the transition to a more sustainable, low-carbon economy that is more resilient and better equipped to mitigate and combat future crises. Although the pandemic has brought tremendous hardship, the leaders of today have been afforded a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild a better, smarter, more sustainable future. Covid-19 has exposed our fragility to global disruptions, yet the threats that lie ahead from climate change and human encroachment on natural ecosystems could produce shocks of even greater magnitude, spanning even longer time frames. The findings of a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reads like a plot one might expect in a Hollywood movie, but are in fact clear projections of our current trajectory: the triggering of tipping points, resulting in widespread famine, the collapse of industries, and the displacement of millions of people. Rapid digitisation presents an opportunity to transform operational efficiencies. As with any complex and consequential problem, there is no single solution. In order to usher in a sustainable future for people, planet, and profit alike. We must not only invest public funding in greener technologies, but also match financial support with policies and practices that incentivize innovation and the adoption of efficiency-enabling technologies. Previous economic downturns have ended with a rebound in emissions. This time, we have the unique opportunity to decouple emissions from the resurgence of industry and transportation. For instance, market mechanisms, such as a price on carbon, use the power of the market to incentivize organisations to shift to cleaner technologies and away from fossil fuels, and encourage enterprises to adopt digital tools […]

From invisible hand to invisible heart: Ronald Cohen’s plan to rewire capitalism

Oliver Balch talks to the veteran British impact financier about how impact-weighted accounting would price in negative environmental and social externalities and create a virtuous race to the top. Sir Ronald (‘Ronnie’) Cohen (pictured) is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. Just not capitalism in its current form. As the sub-title of his new book ‘Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change’ makes abundantly clear, he believes the time has come for some serious rewiring. Capitalism’s critics are two a penny, but few are closer to the belly of the beast. Co-founder of Apax Partners, one of Britain’s first venture capital firms, Cohen is a multimillionaire Egyptian-born British financier who jets between residencies in Tel Aviv, London and New York. Reshaping capitalism isn’t a retirement project for 75-year-old Cohen. Despite (or, perhaps, because of?) his almost half-a-century at the hard end of finance, Cohen is deeply concerned. As he told the audience during a session at Reuters Events’ Transform event : “We’ve been trying to tinker within our system using different approaches … yet companies are continuing to pollute and to create societal problems.” Cohen’s proposition for getting capitalism back on track can be summed up in three words: impact-weighted accounting Drafted in by the UK government to head up a taskforce on the subject back in 2000, he was prompted by the recommendations of his own committee to set up Bridge Ventures, one of the UK’s first explicit sustainability venture funds. Bitten by the social impact bug, he went on to co-found the non-profit group, Social Finance UK, an early proponent of social impact bonds, and, in 2011, to chair Big Society Capital, the UK’s first social investment bank and, incidentally, another of his taskforce’s recommendations. Today, he chairs the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment, an alliance of leading impact advocates in business, […]

Facebook and Google used to be the future of news

Given the recent commentary about the reforms proposed for the news media sector, you would be forgiven for thinking Google and Facebook are the only game in town. The planned reforms arose from last year’s Digital Platforms Inquiry by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which focused squarely on the corporate behaviour of these two tech behemoths. It is clear Google and Facebook will be the first platforms regulated under the draft mandatory code that will potentially force them to pay for content produced by Australian news media companies. The move is a response to what the ACCC describes as “a significant bargaining power imbalance […] between Australian news media businesses and Google and Facebook”. This idea that news companies are essentially stuck with Google and Facebook, for better or worse, is a common view. Yet while that might have been true a few years ago, media companies are realising there are other ways to cultivate readers, and there’s no need to be beholden to tech platforms that generate clicks but don’t want to pay for the privilege. In the mid-2010s, many news companies seemed to follow Facebook’s every move. When Facebook promoted video, the media invested in video. When it down-ranked clickbait headlines, content writers frantically altered their style to maintain their presence in the news feed. Newsrooms have had a similarly dependent (albeit less direct) relationship with Google. The focus on adapting to Google and Facebooks’s algorithms completely changed newsroom practices over the past decade, as journalists have weighed editorial considerations against audience metrics. Is this still the case? This dependency developed at a time when major platforms, particularly Facebook, were engaging substantially with the distribution of news. But in recent years this trend has declined, as governments have begun to regulate platforms in response to concerns over “fake news”. Facebook performed perhaps the most public pivot, changing its algorithm in January 2018 […]

Wandering in strange lands

From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America. Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California. Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of black people she met along the way—the tissue of black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history. Incisive and illuminating, Wandering in Strange Lands is a timely and enthralling look at America’s past and present, one family’s legacy, and a young black woman’s life, filtered through her sharp and curious eyes.

Resetting the way we teach science is vital for all our futures

COVID-19 has forced more than 1 billion students and youth out of school, triggering the world’s biggest educational technology (edtech) implementation in history, almost overnight. Schools and universities are scrambling to redesign their teaching and learning to allow for students of all ages to study from home. While this raises huge practical and logistic issues for students, teachers and parents (especially women), it opens up a world of opportunities to reimagine what learning looks like in the 21st century. The pressures that individuals, organisations and societies face in this crisis are accelerating the Fourth Industrial Revolution, blurring the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds. Are our educational systems preparing students for a world driven by disruptive scientific and technological advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, clean energy, or quantum computing? Are we encouraging students to think critically about how science, technology and innovation can help address – or aggravate – economic, geopolitical, environmental or societal challenges? In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. Up to 65% of children entering school today will have a job that does not yet exist. Our educational systems around the world were failing before COVID-19 and will continue to fall behind unless we change the way we teach and learn science. Education can no longer be about transferring explicit knowledge across generations. According to the OECD 2030 Future of Education and Skills Project: “We need to replace old education standards with an educational framework that combines knowledge with the 21st century skills of creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration.” This won’t be achieved by simply moving classes from the chalkboard to a Zoom call, but radically transforming the way we teach and learn science and technology skills, from one-way content dissemination and memorisation […]

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 may have been circulating in bats for decades

Research has concluded that the lineage from which SARS-CoV-2 came has been circulating among bats for decades. The researchers found that the virus which causes Covid-19 diverged from other bat viruses about 40-70 years ago. They warn SARS-CoV-2 is likely to include other viruses with the ability to infect humans. The lineage that gave rise to the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic, has been circulating in bats for decades, researchers report. They also warn it likely includes other viruses with the ability to infect humans. The discoveries, which researchers made by reconstructing the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, have implications for the prevention of future pandemics stemming from this lineage. “Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant, meaning different regions of the virus’s genome can be derived from multiple sources,” says Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology at Penn State. “This has made it difficult to reconstruct SARS-CoV-2’s origins. You have to identify all the regions that have been recombining and trace their histories.” A SARS-CoV-2 ‘family tree’ The team used three different bioinformatic approaches to identify and remove the recombinant regions within the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Next, they reconstructed phylogenetic histories for the non-recombinant regions and compared them to each other to see which specific viruses have been involved in recombination events in the past. They were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known bat and pangolin viruses. The researchers found that the lineage of viruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs diverged from other bat viruses about 40-70 years ago. Importantly, although SARS-CoV-2 is genetically similar (about 96%) to the RaTG13 coronavirus, which was sampled from a Rhinolophus affinis horseshoe bat in 2013 in Yunnan province, China, the team found that it diverged from RaTG13 a relatively long time ago, in […]

Media have helped create a crisis of democracy – now they must play a vital role in its revival

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. In May 2020, with the world still in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Margaret MacMillan, an historian at the University of Toronto, wrote an essay in The Economist about the possibilities for life after the pandemic had passed. On a scale of one to ten, where one was utter despair and ten was cautious hopefulness, it would have rated about six. Her thesis was that the future will be decided by a fundamental choice between reform and calamity. She saw the world as being at a turning point in history. It had arrived there as a result of the conjunction of two forces: growing unrest at economic inequality, and the crisis induced by the pandemic. It was at such times, she argued, that societies took stock and were open to change. Such a time, for example, was in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, which resulted in radical reforms to international political and economic frameworks. She was writing against a backdrop of a larger crisis – the crisis in democracy. The most spectacular symptoms of this were the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the Brexit referendum. Both occurred in 2016, and both appealed to populism largely based on issues of race and immigration. In the four years since, many books have been written on this crisis, among them Cass Sunstein’s #republic, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, and A. C. Grayling’s Democracy and its Crisis. Then, somewhat surprisingly, in May 2020 a new spirit of what might be called “economic morality” announced itself. This came from within the Republican Party of the United States. It happened while Trump, that most amoral of Republican presidents, was in office, and reasserted some of the […]

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story

Full Title:Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again By Brittany Kaiser In this explosive memoir, a political consultant and technology whistleblower reveals the disturbing truth about the multi-billion-dollar data industry, revealing to the public how companies are getting richer using our personal information and exposing how Cambridge Analytica exploited weaknesses in privacy laws to help elect Donald Trump—and how this could easily happen again in the 2020 presidential election.When Brittany Kaiser joined Cambridge Analytica—the UK-based political consulting firm funded by conservative billionaire and Donald Trump patron Robert Mercer—she was an idealistic young professional working on her fourth degree in human rights law and international relations. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, Kaiser’s goal was to utilise data for humanitarian purposes, most notably to prevent genocide and human rights abuses. But her experience inside Cambridge Analytica opened her eyes to the tremendous risks that this unregulated industry poses to privacy and democracy. Targeted is Kaiser’s eyewitness chronicle of the dramatic and disturbing story of the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica. She reveals to the public how Facebook’s lax policies and lack of sufficient national laws allowed voters to be manipulated in both Britain and the United States, where personal data was weaponized to spread fake news and racist messaging during the Brexit vote and the 2016 election. But the damage isn’t done Kaiser warns; the 2020 election can be compromised as well if we continue to do nothing. In the aftermath of the U.S. election, as she became aware of the horrifying reality of what Cambridge Analytica had done in support of Donald Trump, Kaiser made the difficult choice to expose the truth. Risking her career, relationships, and personal safety, she told authorities about the […]

America can change direction

What a puzzling place America is. Full of great talent in the arts, music and creative in the world of technology and innovation. And yet, they are run by a man who does not inspire and is rapidly leading his country into disrepair. With an election due it is outrageous that Donald Trump can be re-elected. Will all the people who voted for him last time vote for him again? Can Americans be so disillusioned that this is the man for four more years in office? The world and America does not deserve this result. However, when you consider the Democratic alternative in Joe Biden you really wonder where the Obama, the Kennedy appeal is hiding? When the Democratic Party were choosing, searching for their candidate they had some with genuine potential…and yet they have ended up with a 70 year old, conservative white man without charisma. Maybe it is that America has never been truly and greatly led by only a few…the likes of Obama and Eisenhower. However it goes in November, we may well be experiencing the demise of the land of the free. There are so many complexities in their way of life, that cause inequality and bafflement. The biggest one is the irrational thinking of voters who elected Trump to office. If you are reading this in the USA, it seems that you can only vote for Joe Biden as the best of the two options. Good luck to you all! Next time choose a forty-something, charismatic leader who will inspire and lead with policies for a free and equal society, not one based on priviledge for a few, at the cost of the many.

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