Inequality has been rising in most countries around the world, but it has played out in different ways across countries and regions. The United States, it is increasingly recognized, has the sad distinction of being the most unequal advanced country, though the income gap has also widened to a lesser extent, in Britain, Japan, Canada and Germany. Of course, the situation is even worse in Russia, and some developing countries in Latin America and Africa. But this is a club of which we should not be proud to be a member.
Some big countries — Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina — have become more equal in recent years, and other countries, like Spain, were on that trajectory until the economic crisis of 2007-8.
My colleagues and I at QCRI partnered with the World Bank several months ago to develop an automated GeoTagger platform to increase the transparency and accountability of international development projects by accelerating the process of opening key development and finance data. We are proud to launch the first version of the GeoTagger platform today. The project builds on the Bank’s Open Data Initiatives promoted by former President, Robert Zoellick, and continued under the current leadership of Dr. Jim Yong Kim.
The Bank has accumulated an extensive amount of socio-economic data as well as a massive amount of data on Bank-sponsored development projects worldwide. Much of this data, however, is not directly usable by the general public due to numerous data format, quality and access issues. The Bank therefore launched their “Mapping for Results” initiative to visualize the location of Bank-financed projects to better monitor development impact, improve aid effectiveness and coordination while enhancing transparency and social accountability. The geo-tagging of this data, however, has been especially time-consuming and tedious. Numerous interns were required to manually read through tens of thousands of dense World Bank project documentation, safeguard documents and results reports to identify and geocode exact project locations. But there are hundreds of thousands of such PDF documents. To make matters worse, these documents make seemingly “random” passing references to project locations, with no sign of any standardized reporting structure whatsoever.
By Joe McKendrick | March 19, 2013, 4:00 AM PDT
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Businesses may be seeking to compete on analytics, but it’s often difficult for business decision-makers to get their heads around data.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Tom Davenport, visiting professor at Harvard University and co-author of the seminal work Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, about the difficulties of converting to an analytics-driven culture. Davenport, who is also co-founder and research director of the International Institute for Analytics, and a senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics, is working on a new book, dicussing on how analytics need to be better communicated to business decision-makers. He shared some of the thinking behind his forthcoming work:
Q: BI and analytics vendors have been coming out with all sorts of graphic tools — dashboards, balanced scorecards and so on — for years. Do we need more than a nice splashy presentation on the tool to communicate analytics?
TD: We’ve all grown up on pie charts and bar charts or whatever, but there are probably at least tens, if not hundreds of alternative approaches to visual analytics. Narratives are a pretty good way to convey information in the past, so maybe we should be converting our data and analysis into stories. People are starting to do that more. Most analysts were unfortunately not trained in how you communicate effectively about analytics, so we’ve got a long way to go in terms of doing a better job of that.
Q: More and more data is flowing through enterprises. Is it a challenge to get C-level executives interested in turning this data into analytics?
TD: Not for all applications. Because increasingly people are feeding data into computers and the results go into another computer, and the decisions are getting more automated. Any time you have a human involved, it’s important to try to help them extricate the meaning of the data and analysis. And there a variety of ways to do that. Historically, we haven’t been too terribly good at it, the quantitative people among us.
In July 2011, J. William Leonard, a former director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), took the extraordinary step of filing a formal complaint with the Office he once led charging that a document used to indict former NSA official Thomas Drake under the Espionage Act had been wrongly classified in violation of the executive order on classification. (“Complaint Seeks Punishment for Classification of Documents” by Scott Shane, New York Times, August 2, 2011; “Ex-federal official calls U.S. classification system ‘dysfunctional'” by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, July 21, 2012)
Last December, in a newly disclosed response, John P. Fitzpatrick, the current ISOO director, concluded that Mr. Leonard's complaint did not warrant the sanctions that Mr. Leonard had urged. Neither the original classification of the NSA document, titled “What a Wonderful Success,” nor its continued classification “rise to the level of willful acts in violation of the Order,” Mr. Fitzpatrick wrote in his December 26, 2012 response.
With that, the matter was officially closed. But the divergent views underlying the complaint remain unresolved and continue to fester.
“I have devoted over 34 years to Federal service in the national security arena, to include the last 5 years of my service being responsible for Executive branch-wide oversight of the classification system,” Mr. Leonard wrote in his 2011 complaint. “During that time I have seen many equally egregious examples of the inappropriate assignment of classification controls to information that does not meet the standards for classification; however, I have never seen a more willful example.”
Have you heard ….. if you want a decent strategy, you need a firm grasp of reality, which means avoiding bad strategies. How do you define bad strategies? According to Richard Rumelt, author of “Good Strategy Bad Strategy“, they are characterised by one or more of the following factors:
Fluff – defined as a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments.
Failure to face the challenge – if the challenge can't be defined, that particular quality of the strategy can't be assessed, and then improved or rejected.
Mistaking goals for strategies – arguably this is the most common error ( take a look at this video on “What is Strategy” for more insights).
Bad strategic objectives – the challenge for senior executives is to set out subgoals that are both relevant and practical for the chosen strategy.
Make the above factors part of your strategic reviews and you may avoid some of the prevalent pitfalls!
At a recent search conference, I sat in the audience and marveled at the disconnect between the past that was and the present which is unfolding now. Several speakers dismissed the notions of precision and recall. In their place, the search wizards (who shall remain nameless) emphasized that search had to be “good enough.” The challenge, therefore, was to define “good enough.”
I sat quietly. At my advanced age I don’t have the energy to revisit the long and mostly disappointing trajectory of one of the most overhyped and misrepresented enterprise solutions—information retrieval. The list of companies which have spouted grandiose promises of universal information access, real time search, and actionable information reaches back to the early days of RECON and Orbit, STAIRS III, the long forgotten InQuire with its forward truncation, and Smart.
Muslim and western nations overcame deep divisions to agree a historic United Nations declaration setting out a code of conduct for combatting violence against women.
Iran, Libya, Sudan and other Muslim nations agreed to language stating that violence against women and girls could not be justified by “any custom, tradition or religious consideration.”
Western nations, particularly from Scandinavia, toned down demands for references to gay rights and sexual health rights to secure the accord after two weeks of tense negotiations between the 193 UN member states.
Some 6,000 non-government groups were in New York for the Commission on the Status of Women meeting. Cheers and wild applause erupted when the accord
was announced in the UN headquarters late Saturday.
Michelle Bachelet, executive director of UN Women, said it had been an “historic” meeting. It was announced straight after that Bachelet would be
leaving her post. She is expected to return to politics in Chile where she has already been president.
