A wake-up call for America to create a new framework for democratizing data. Public data are foundational to our democratic system. People need consistently high-quality information from trustworthy sources. In the new economy, wealth is generated by access to data; government's job is to democratize the data playing field. Yet data produced by the American government are getting worse and costing more. In Democratizing Our Data, Julia Lane argues that good data are essential for democracy. Her book is a wake-up call to America to fix its broken public data system.
The process of user-centered innovation: how it can benefit both users and manufacturers and how its emergence will bring changes in business models and in public policy. Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.
The tensions between democracy and justice have long preoccupied political theorists. Institutions that are procedurally democratic do not necessarily make substantively just decisions. Democratizing Global Justice shows that democracy and justice can be mutually reinforcing in global governance - a domain where both are conspicuously lacking - and indeed that global justice requires global democratization. This novel reconceptualization of the problematic relationship between global democracy and global justice emphasises the role of inclusive deliberative processes. These processes can empower the agents necessary to determine what justice should mean and how it should be implemented in any given context. Key agents include citizens and the global poor; and not just the states but also international organizations and advocacy groups active in global governance. The argument is informed by and applied to the decision process leading to adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, and climate governance inasmuch as it takes on questions of climate justice.
After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?
A provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic "The so-called Second Great Awakening was the shaping epoch of American Protestantism, and this book is the most important study of it ever published."—James Turner, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Winner of the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic book prize, and the Albert C. Outler Prize In this provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, Nathan O. Hatch argues that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines five distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century—the Christian movement, Methodism, the Baptist movement, the black churches, and the Mormons—showing how all offered compelling visions of individual potential and collective aspiration to the unschooled and unsophisticated.
Taiwan is only one of four consolidated Asian democracies. Democratizing Taiwan provides the most comprehensive analysis of Taiwan's peaceful democratization including the past authoritarian experience, leadership both within and outside government, popular protest and elections, and constitutional interpretation and amendments.
What if our financial system were organized to the benefit of the many rather than simply empowering the few? Robert Hockett and Fred Block argue that an entirely different financial system is both desirable and possible. They outline concrete steps that could get us there. Financial systems move the worlds savings from investment to investment, chasing the highest rates of return. They run on profit. But what if investment went to the enterprises or institutions that provided things that the majority of people would prioritize? Democratizing Finance includes six responses that seek to amend, elaborate, and challenge the arguments developed by Hockett and Block. Some of the core arguments put forward by other contributors include calls for the rapid elimination of private financial entities, the dilemmas of the politics associated with financial reforms, and the fate of parallel proposals advanced in the US in the 1930s.
Data-driven insights are a key competitive advantage for any industry today, but deriving insights from raw data can still take days or weeks. Most organizations can’t scale data science teams fast enough to keep up with the growing amounts of data to transform. What’s the answer? Self-service data. With this practical book, data engineers, data scientists, and team managers will learn how to build a self-service data science platform that helps anyone in your organization extract insights from data. Sandeep Uttamchandani provides a scorecard to track and address bottlenecks that slow down time to insight across data discovery, transformation, processing, and production. This book bridges the gap between data scientists bottlenecked by engineering realities and data engineers unclear about ways to make self-service work. Build a self-service portal to support data discovery, quality, lineage, and governance Select the best approach for each self-service capability using open source cloud technologies Tailor self-service for the people, processes, and technology maturity of your data platform Implement capabilities to democratize data and reduce time to insight Scale your self-service portal to support a large number of users within your organization
We live in exhilarating times where we already experience the disruptive and profound impact of a smart technology revolution with AI as one of the key exponential technologies that seems to be on track to change how we live, work, play, interact, and relate to one another in an all-inclusive and wide-ranging fashion. Besides the impact of the Smart Technology Era that is felt in almost every industry in every country and entire systems of production, management, and governance being transformed, we also see also our current civilization on a problematic trajectory where we struggle with sense-making, meaning-making, wealth gaps, job loss, catastrophic risks, discrimination, data abuse, bias, human agency, dependence lock-in, institutional decay, as well as disorder and destabilization of society. It is a time where we need visionary leadership, sense-making, wisdom, and practical actions to ensure that humanity and our civilization is moving in the right direction as we work towards unlocking the tremendous potential of AI and smart technologies. Democratizing Artificial Intelligence to Benefit Everyone does not only take us on a holistic sense-making journey and lays a foundation to synthesize a more balanced view and better understanding of AI, its applications, its benefits, its risks, its limitations, its progress, and its likely future paths, but also taps into Dr Jacques Ludik's wealth of experience, knowledge, and sense-making ability as a smart technology entrepreneur and founder of multiple AI companies, AI expert, AI ecosystem builder, and award-winning AI Leader with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and three decades of experience in AI and its applications in multiple industries across the globe. This book also synthesizes, assimilates, and acts as a filter on a wide spectrum of thought leadership, information, ideas, and research to enable as many people as possible to not only interpret and make sense of this, but also participate in helping shape a better future for ourselves, our children and humanity going forward. It helps us to more accurately understand where we are heading given the current dynamics on a global and national economic and political level as well as across ideologies and industries. Specific solutions are also shared to address AI's potential negative impacts, designing AI for social good and beneficial outcomes, building human-compatible AI that is ethical and trustworthy, addressing bias and discrimination, and the skills and competencies needed for a human-centric AI-driven workplace. Not only is the book aimed to help with the drive towards democratizing AI and its applications to maximize the beneficial outcomes for humanity, but Dr Ludik is specifically arguing for a more decentralized beneficial human-centric future where AI and its benefits can be democratized to as many people as possible. He specifically examines what it means to be human and living meaningful in the 21st century and share some ideas for reshaping our civilization for beneficial outcomes as well as various potential outcomes for the future of civilization. Dr Jacques Ludik also proposes a Massive Transformative Purpose for Humanity and associated goals that complement the United Nations' 2030 vision and sustainable development goals to help shape a beneficial human-centric future in a decentralized hyperconnected world. As a practical step towards a building block in support of this purpose and goals, he also introduces an initiative and an invitation to people around globe to participate in the development, deployment and use of a decentralized, human-centric, and user-controlled AI-driven super platform called Sapiens . To help shape this better future we need a collective, integrated, and comprehensive response that involves all stakeholders of the global system of governing, from the private and public sectors to civil society and academia.
Weber provides an economic analysis of current, post-crash monetary reform proposals, including Bitcoin, sovereign money, regional money and modern monetary theory. The book critically examines these reform concepts, exposing their flaws and fallacies, guiding the reader towards a contemporary understanding of what money is and how it works today.
