It’s very rare that a government produces a policy paper that says many of the right things, but the Scottish Government’s review of its Digital Strategy is one of them. Quite rightly, the Scottish Government has identified an immense opportunity for improvement, for all citizens. A potential breakthrough, even. But there’s also a very good […]
Data
“What are the costs of little or no governance, scrutiny and understanding of multiple health data initiatives when governments, academics, public sector organisations and businesses can avoid the normal controls and transparency?”
Covid-19 and questions of data
Imagine Jeff Bezos cloned 7.5 times. That would be the equivalent of the financial wealth of everyone in Scotland (including everything; pensions, properties, etc). Maybe even less, as the Scottish financial wealth calculation (£1.097 trillion) was in 2018 – after the pandemic crisis it has probably shrunk quite a bit. Bezos doesn’t have that problem. […]
What are we going to do about the Jeff Bezos problem?
A panic about contact tracing in Minnesota, United States, spread after Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said that they were “contact tracing” protestors there. “As we’ve begun making arrests, we have begun analysing the data of who we have arrested and begun actually doing what we think is almost pretty similar to our Covid [strategy]. […]
Why outsourcing and secrecy is the route to contact tracing and testing failure
It was interesting to see Troy Deeney, the Watford English Premier League football captain, explain why he wouldn’t be going back into work. He said: “My problem was in the meeting, I asked very simple questions. “For black, Asian and mixed ethnicities [BAME], they’re four times more likely to get the illness, they’re twice as likely […]