The Differential Impacts of Human Capital and Infrastructure on the Sustainable Development Goals
This study looks at country-level data to explore the dynamics among human capital, infrastructure, and a country’s progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Utilizing the confirmatory factor analysis method, I develop a new Infrastructure Index and combine it with the World Bank’s dataset on Human Capital Index to evaluate the relative impact of these factors on a country’s SDG scores. My findings affirm the integral roles of both human capital and infrastructure in the sustainable development context. However, a stronger correlation…
Podcast | Voices in the Code: book discussion with the author
Automated decision-making systems or algorithms are playing an increasingly significant role in public administration and civil rights space. In his book “Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made,” David Robinson investigates and contextualizes the story of the Kidney Allocation System, which as a result of cross-disciplinary collaboration among surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials, advocates, and patients, over the course of 10 years, evolved into a relatively inclusive and accountable decision-making technology. Through this story, the…
Podcast | Being Present: book discussion with the author
In this episode, I discuss the book titled “Being present: commanding attention at work and at home by managing your social presence,” with the author Dr. Jeanine Turner, a communications scholar at Georgetown University. In a world permeated with new media and communication technologies, managing our social presence and controlling where and how we invest our attention is not an easy task. In this discussion, Dr. Turner offers an overview of her framework with four different approaches on how to manage your social presence…
Impact of climate indicators on the carbon footprint of data centers
Carbon emissions are usually associated with the fossil fuel and transportation industries, yet our online activities also have a significant carbon footprint. It may seem counterintuitive, but data centers account for around 2% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. It is roughly in line with the global airline industry, and not far behind the chemical and petrochemical industry. Parallelly with the digital revolution, the demand for data centers continues to increase. While many industry leaders in the data center business have pledged to zero…
COVID-19, Chat-GPT and International Development Assistance
The COVID-19 pandemic created an incredibly challenging situation in the international development space. On the one hand, developing countries were going through an extraordinary crisis, which increased the global demand for international development assistance. On the other hand, COVID-19 slowed down the economies of the donor countries, which faced new socio-economic challenges at home. This article is a summary of statistical research that looks at how the Gross National Income of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member states changed between 2018…
Blockchain solution to advance conscious consumerism
A couple of hundred years ago, an average person’s food source radius was around 10 miles. Today our food basket is a product of a complex web of farmers, freighters, trailers, retailers, and suppliers, that stretches into thousands of miles long supply chains. In the last few years, many ideas have emerged about how to improve the status quo in the supply chain domain. When the COVID-19 pandemic put the global supply chains to the test, it exposed some fundamental shortcomings, especially in the…
The Evidence-Based Policymaking Act and Privacy
Abstract: The legislative act on The Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking created a framework for the centralization of statistical information collected by dozens of US federal agencies across the country and imposed responsibilities for sharing that data within the government, as well as with researchers and private entities. One of the main outcomes of the act is expected to be a National Secure Data Service, which will promote collaboration, help to avoid duplication, and minimize public expenditure on data collection and processing. Most importantly, it…
Podcast | Data & Truth with danah boyd
The topic of this episode is data and truth. There is a popular saying that we live in a data driven world? But where is data driving us? According to some estimates the amount of data generated over the next 3 years will be more than the amount of data created over the past 30 years. We have immersed ourselves in zettabytes of data to minimize uncertainty, make sense of the world around us and validate every step we take. But how reliable is…
A Critical Review of UNEP’s Food Waste Index
In 2015, 193 UN member states undersigned the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which consists of seventeen interlinked Sustainable Development Goals. It is a comprehensive development framework that also focuses on “responsible consumption and production.” However, it is a strategic-level document, which did not take into account the operational-level challenges for developing indicators to measure the progress towards these goals. In 2021, United Nations Environment Program published its first Food Waste Index (FWI) report, which is presented as the most comprehensive report on global…
On Facial Recognition Technology
Originally published on Intersect: The Stanford Journal of Science, Technology, and Society. Since the beginning of the 2000s, Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) has become significantly more accurate and more accessible. Both government and commercial entities use it in increasingly innovative approaches. News agencies use it to spot celebrities at big events. Car companies install it on dashboards to alert drivers falling asleep at the wheel. Governments have used it to track Covid-19 patients’ compliance with quarantine regimes, or to reunite missing children with their…
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