newspeak

I wish I had been there—but am here, in Budapest, for ACEU. I do wonder: would big data have given the telling signal to have had effect prior to the Rwanda massacre? Of course not. It is not just that the data be gathered fairly and responsibly and analysed with scientific detachment and skepticism. It is that it must also have a chance of being used. But that raises another question. There has been a century or more of often superb scientific work that, if attended to, would save lives today, stop global warming, and otherwise prevent the crimes committed against the world and its sorry inhabitants. And these studies have been not only “ignored,” but active suppressed. The moral being….. but actually, the moral here is that the varnish of Big Data, with all the multinational wealth it ints at, might actually make a difference to lives, and even to the structures of society.

Source: A Big Data Revolution for Humanitarian Response | United Nations Global Pulse