The World Wired Web

Despite marketing imagery to the contrary, the “cloud” remains very much grounded in physical infrastructure, including unfathomable miles of wires.

By David A. J. Reynolds | July 24, 2019 | Environment, Media | Amazon, Bandwidth, Britain, China, Choke Points, Coaxial Cable, Communication, Content Providers, Data, Entertainment, Facebook, Fiber-Optic Cable, France, Google, Infrastructure, Internet, Internet Traffic, ISPs, Long-Distance, Railroads, Servers, Telecoms, Telegraph, Telephone, The Cloud, Undersea Cables, US, Wires

The Problems of Prediction, Part 2

Our overconfidence in our predictive abilities can be traced to the simple fact that the universe is infinitely complex.

By David A. J. Reynolds | February 21, 2018 | Cognition, Economics, Government, Philosophy, Prediction, Society | Brexit, Britain, Certainty, Comprehension, Cosmology, Data, Economics, Elections, Error, Forecasting, Foresight, Freakonomics, Genetic Engineering, Hanna Arendt, Hubris, Ignorance, Infinity, Information, Knowledge, Limitations, Manipulations, Models, Neuroscience, Over-confidence, Philip Tetlock, Polling, Prediction, Reality, Statistics, Stephen Dubner, The Brain, The Universe, Truth, UK, Understanding, Unknowns, Unpredictability, US

The Problems of Prediction, Part 1

Our technological mindset makes us more inclined to predict and gather ever-more data in service of prediction. We misunderstand the information we have, can’t know the information we don’t have, and yet we are more confident than ever.

By David A. J. Reynolds | January 24, 2018 | Economics, Government, Philosophy, Prediction, Society | Abstraction, Alfred North Whitehead, Belief, Britain, Comprehension, Data, Elites, Error, EU, Euro, Experts, Fallacies, Forecasting, Hubris, Information, Knowledge, Limitations, Michael Gove, Nassim Taleb, Over-confidence, Paul Slovic, Philip Tetlock, Prediction, Statistics, Truth, Understanding, Unknowns

CCTV: A View on Surveillance From Britain

British citizens may be the most visually surveilled people in the West, with an estimated one camera for every ten people. Critical awareness may slowly be dawning, but will it make any difference?

By Lorenzo Migliorato | January 3, 2018 | Defense, Government, Human Rights, Law, Policing, Privacy, Safety, Security, Society | Authoritarianism, Britain, British Parliament, CCTV, China, Crime, Cybersurveillance, Democracy, England, Facial Recognition, General Data Protection Regulation, Jeremy Bentham, License Plate Readers, London, Orwell, Panopticon, Privacy, Richard Thomas, Security, Slavoj Žižek, surveillance, Surveillance Cameras, Terrorism, The Centre for Information Policy Leadership, UK