Chris Lintott’s chronicle of the booming citizen-science project Zooniverse is inspirational, finds Michael West. The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse Chris Lintott Oxford University Press (2019) Citizen science is booming. Today, anyone with a computer or a smartphone can participate in research in astronomy, oceanography, medicine, zoology and beyond. With such studies no longer […]
Chaos Scientist Finds Hidden Financial Risks That Regulators Miss
Oxford Professor Doyne Farmer is working with central banks to improve stress testing. Economics is harder than physics, Farmer says. People don’t obey rules as reliably as atoms do. In his stress-test model of the European financial system, for instance, he had to make assumptions about what assets bankers might dump after their firms suffered […]
Doris Lessing at 100: roving time and space
On the centenary of the Nobel laureate’s birth, Patrick French explores her science-infused series Canopus in Argos. Lessing wove space exploration, migration, climate change and social disintegration into novels that seem astonishingly prescient today. In the 1920s, growing up on a poor farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) Doris Lessing received impromptu outdoor lessons in […]
Work as forming the future, work as art
What if we left behind the mirror metaphor in trying to make sense of the world? What if we closed our eyes for a moment and began to imagine what does not yet exist? What kind of a world we would really want to create? It would mean an approach to sense making in which […]
The British Digital Cooperative: A New Model Public Sector Institution
Commercial platforms cannot prioritise the ideals of a liberal public sphere, much less the principle of popular sovereignty, over the profit motive. Introduction The information technology sector broadly defined is now at the leading edge of the capitalist system. Material production and distribution, enterprise and professional management, finance, insurance and real estate are all increasingly […]