Adam Kucharski, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
When people talk about ‘big data’, there is an oft-quoted example: a proposed public health tool called Google Flu Trends. It has become something of a pin-up for the big data movement, but it might not…
With the release of new iPads and Mac hardware, Apple announced that not only would the latest version of the Mac OS, Mavericks, be free, but it would also be giving away its iWork office productivity…
Have you ever tried reading Beowulf and decided it was a bit too hard to follow before giving up? How did you get on with War and Peace? If you struggled with either of these notoriously unwieldy classics…
The indelible digital footprint associated with your internet usage is worth gold to others. Around the world, online advertisers are expected to spend around $117 Billion this year alone. And it’s Google…
Tax avoidance shows no sign of abating. Google, the company with the slogan “Don’t be evil”, is at it again. The company has been named and shamed by the UK House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee…
The practice of installing modified versions of the Google Android operating system on other smartphones is about to become mainstream. CyanogenMod, the people behind one of the custom ROMs (as these versions…
The entrance of Google into the Massive Open Online Courses market this week has the potential to reignite the spirit of openness that saw these alternative routes into higher education emerge in the first…
What did you achieve by the time you were 15? For most, a summary of our first decade-and-a-half of existence would not make for a bestselling biography. But one teenager celebrating a significant birthday…
A flurry of initiatives aimed at connecting the billions – mainly in Africa – who still do not have access to the internet are underway. A few weeks ago, Google’s possibly aptly named Project Loon was…
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010, he argued that unless the device was better at doing everyday tasks than smartphones or netbooks, it wouldn’t deserve to exist. Consumers and corporates embraced…
“You are being spied upon” is a warning that seems to greet us from the pages of our newspapers almost every day at the moment. The government is stockpiling your data, your Internet service provider is…
According to Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez, “all human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret”. It is in our nature to want privacy, yet in the internet age, it has never been easier…
You’re probably already familiar with face recognition technology through security surveillance or Facebook photo tagging, but the next person you see wearing Google Glass may well be using it too - despite…
The long awaited report on combating corporate tax avoidance by the OECD sadly has to deal with a corporate tax system which is unfit for purpose. It is a follow-up to the G8 meeting last month in Ireland…
Do you have a right to be “forgotten” by Google searches and other internet search engines? That question is being considered in Europe currently, where the European Court of Justice has received advice…
The tax arrangements of major brands such as Google, Apple and Amazon have prompted a fierce debate over questions of organisational ethics, social justice and international co-operation. But as a consumer…
Yesterday saw the end of the first day of Google’s three-day developer-focused conference Google I/O in San Francisco. And for consumers, there was plenty on offer. The annual Google fest is popular…
It’s taken nearly three years, but the European Commission and Google last week reached some form of agreement regarding alleged abuses of the search engine’s dominant position in the European Union. Google’s…
What a curious thing the stock market is; so powerful, yet so flighty. Like a school of sardines, it moves as one, changing direction nimbly when danger looms or advantage beckons. What it will do next…
You can tell a lot about an organisation’s culture and view of the world by looking at what it says about its competitors. Some enterprises, just like some politicians and academics, are serene. They don’t…