Anna Scott:

“New technologies have made it easier for governments, businesses and civil society to collect data, share information, target resources, provide feedback and measure progress”, writes Judith Randel from the research centre Development Initiatives. “Information can help to build trust between governments and citizens, allowing people to exercise their rights, hold decision makers to account, reduce corruption and make more informed choices in their daily lives.”

But for people in developing countries to benefit from information in this way, they need to be able to access it and empowered to use it. The responsibility of providing access often falls to the development community, but is enough being done to turn access into knowledge, and knowledge into power?

Progress is being made, as more initiatives emerge that aim to bring data to those in the field. But while such projects are empowering those they can reach, what about those they can’t? In a recent live chat on beneficiaries-led development, Linda Raftree, a senior adviser at Plan International emphasised that the marginalised should not be forgotten. “Many factors will [determine] who participates and how they participate, including disability, literacy and language abilities. Open data or technology enabled participation systems must be designed with this in mind”, she says.

Felix Salmon:

Quartz, in this deal, is getting one article, which needs a fair amount of editing; it’s a tiny proportion of Quartz’s daily output. Meanwhile, Brandtone is getting something very valuable indeed. Just look at the US flack-to-hack ratio: it’s approaching 9:1, according to the Economist, which means that for every professional journalist, there are nine people, some of them extremely well paid, trying to persuade that journalist to publish something about a certain company. That wouldn’t be the case if those articles weren’t worth serious money to the companies in question.
How valuable? How about somewhere between $250,000 and $1 million? That’s the amount of money that Fortune’s ad-sales team was asking, earlier this month, for a new product called Fortune Trusted Original Content:

I Love Typography:

In 2013 to mark the bicentenary of Bodoni’s death, designers Riccardo Olocco and Jonathan Pierini will publish the Parmigiano Typographic System which has the ambition of being the most extended family of fonts ever to have been inspired by the great punchcutter and printer who spent most of his life in Parma.

Compulsive Bodoni is the name of the project designed to communicate the Parmigiano Typographic System. It introduces the font and follows its development with a series of multidisciplinary events.
In the middle of 2010 I started taking macro photographs of original copies of Bodoni’s 1818 Manuale Tipografico. My purpose was to analyse Bodoni’s roman types in order to develop some fonts inspired by his work.

Ezra Klein:

I understand why a professional journalist like Nate Thayer would be frustrated at being asked to work for “exposure” rather than work for pay, though I think it’s unprofessional to vent that frustration by publishing the e-mails and the name of the junior editor who made the request.

(Brian Stauffer for The Washington Post/)

But behind this debate lurks an uncomfortable fact: The salaries of professional journalists are built upon our success in convincing experts of all kinds working for exposure rather than pay. Now those experts have found a way to work for exposure without going through professional journalists, creating a vast expansion in the quantity and quality of content editors can get for free.
Call it the revenge of our sources. For a very long time, we got them to work for nothing more than exposure — and sometimes, we didn’t even give them that. Now they’re getting more and more of us to do it.

Ian Tucker:

Evgeny Morozov is a Belarus-born technology writer who has held positions at Stanford and Georgetown universities in the US. His first book, The Net Delusion, argued that “Western do-gooders may have missed how [the internet]… entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder – not easier –to promote democracy”. It was described as “brilliant and courageous” by the New York Times. In his second book To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov critiques what he calls “solutionism” – the idea that given the right code, algorithms and robots, technology can solve all of mankind’s problems, effectively making life “frictionless” and trouble-free. Morozov argues that this drive to eradicate imperfection and make everything “efficient” shuts down other avenues of progress and leads ultimately to an algorithm-driven world where Silicon Valley, rather than elected governments, determines the shape of the future.

Some of the technologies you describe as “solutionist” many people find useful. For instance self-tracking gadgets that encourage people to exercise, to monitor their blood pressure or warn them about their driving habits and reduce their insurance premiums.

James Temple:

But for all the funding announcements, product launches, media attention and wealth creation, most of Silicon Valley doesn’t concern itself with aiming “almost ridiculously high.” It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year.

Time to drop the pretense

That’s fine, that’s capitalism – and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let’s drop the pretense that we’re curing cancer unless, you know, we’re curing cancer.
Levchin specifically took the stage that day to discuss his forthcoming book on the subject, “The Blueprint: Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk and Rescuing the Free Market.” One of his co-authors was venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who joined him in the appearance.

The description for the (now very delayed) title notes: “We have become a risk-averse society, hobbled by tort laws and government regulations, short-term financial thinking, and mind-numbing complacency.”

That all sounds about right, but based on other public comments – particularly from Thiel, an outspoken libertarian – the weight of their blame seems to land on government while the grand hopes lie in “Rescuing the Free Market.” That conforms to a growing view in Silicon Valley that government is the archenemy of innovation.
But when we stick to the definition of solving the really hard problems of science and technology, the scale just as easily tips the other way.

Andreas Fuster, Laurie Goodman, David Lucca, Laurel Madar, Linsey Molloy, Paul Willen:

Mortgage rates have reached historic lows in recent months, yet the spread between primary and secondary rates has risen to very high levels, reflecting a number of potential factors affecting originator costs and profits. This paper attempts to evaluate the quantitative importance of some of these factors as background material for the workshop on “The Spread between Primary and Secondary Mortgage Rates: Recent Trends and Prospects” to be held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on December 3, 2012.

John McElroy:

How can this be possible? How can VW look so uncompetitive from a productivity standpoint, yet out-earn all of its competitors?

Ah, that’s the magic of VW’s corporate structure. While business schools teach future MBAs that centralized operations can cut cost by eliminating overlapping work and duplication, VW maintains strongly decentralized operations with lots of overlap. While business schools preach the benefits of outsourcing to cut cost, VW is very vertically integrated.

Anytime a car company buys a component from a supplier, that supplier has to charge a profit. If an automaker can make those components in-house, it gets to keep that profit. VW is building a lot of components in-house.

Stephen Bayley:

When I started travelling alone, French cars were enthralling. They were quirky-looking with ingenious technology. And they had an attachment to motor-sport. Eighteen years old, hitch-hiking back from Florence, I got stuck in a field near Strasbourg. Sitting in the sun dopily looking at rolling green Alsatian hills for most of a day, I saw and will never forget a Renault R8 Gordini driven hard on a lonely road, punctuating my boredom. All crackling exhaust, French racing bleu with two longitudinal white stripes and hilarious negative camber rear suspension.

Later on that same trip I eventually arrived in Paris. Being intellectually ambitious, I had my pockets stuffed with Livre de Poche editions of Sartre and I went, my rucksack and I, straight to the vast Renault and Citroen showrooms on the Champs-Elysee to confirm my feelings about the superiority of French culture. The showrooms seemed intoxicatingly sophisticated, places of worship for a more advanced civilization. Does anybody now remember the Renault Fuego ? I saw one spot-lit on a plinth in the first arrondissement of Paris. It was bright green, like a tree frog.