Science, Technology and Data

BY PAUL CHEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  Seven-hundred million Chinese have grown out of poverty since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched economic reform programs in 1979. Harvard’s Tony Saich summarizes the reform efforts as introducing economic liberalization while retaining political control, a governance model that […]

BY TYLER S. THIGPEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  The conversation that most haunted Marshall Chambers—former director of strategic initiatives for Barrow County Schools, a rural district in Georgia—happened in 2001 at one of the district’s high schools. Chambers, himself a graduate of Piedmont College in Demorest, […]

Will Singapore’s next General Elections be as fiercely contested as the last? During the last General Elections, the call for greater governmental transparency drove significant debate, paving the way for the leading opposition party to gain unprecedented political ground on the promise of being a ‘check’ on the ruling party. In the 2011 Presidential Elections, […]

A lot of things have evolved since the 2011 elections when Nigerian youth celebrated social media as a tool for successful elections. Technology has continued to foster government accountability, as well as active citizen participation in the country. During the 2015 elections, young Nigerians, who make up 70 percent of the country’s 177 million population, […]

BY HUGO ZYLBERBERG General Keith Alexander maintained in a 2013 speech that, as director of the National Security Agency (NSA) at the time, he was doing “everything [he] could to protect civil liberties and privacy,” then added a warning: “Everyone also understands that if we give up a capability that is critical to the defense […]

With recent reports from the FAO that the Ebola outbreak could threaten West Africa’s food supply, it is easy to understand why Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural sector would be in urgent need of reform. If Ebola has proven to be such a threat to West African harvests, it is mainly due to the establishment of quarantine […]

BY MELISSA SANDGREN Megan Smith grew up around engineers. Her grandfather helped build roads and bridges throughout the early 20th century and contributed to large portions of the transportation system in Indiana. Yet, when the young Smith enrolled at MIT in the early 1980s to study mechanical engineering, the question her grand- father asked her […]

BY CROSBY BURNS A preliminary version of this post originally appeared on the Ash Center’s Challenges to Democracy blog Last year the City of Boston unveiled its plans to devote a portion of its capital budget towards a participatory budget, a social innovation that aims to reimagine citizen engagement, the appropriations process, and democratic participation. […]

BY DENISE LINN Recently, while we’ve all been busy binge-watching House of Cards, our cable companies and online content providers have been splashed across the headlines. The announced $45 billion Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger and the Netflix-Comcast deal have flooded the Internet with articles about pricing, speed, and customer satisfaction. While sources have speculated about […]

BY ALISON FLINT I first learned about hackathons when I saw an ad for an event called Datafest hosted at Stanford University three years ago. Like most people, I primarily associated ‘hacking’ with computer programming. However, this Datafest looked different. It turned out that Teresa Bouza, a Knight Fellow at Stanford, had organized the hackathon […]

BY CLAIRE LEHMANN The political divide between conservatives and liberals is growing increasingly bitter. Each side thinks that the other is evil. At the same time, a new currency is emerging within the eco-chambers of social media. It is the currency of outrage, and it is eroding our ability to listen to one another. Those […]

  BY EMILY FRANCIS HARTMANN Federal health insurance exchanges (also known as insurance marketplaces) are off to a slow start. As we await the first official enrollment figures in mid-November, however, it is important to recognize that a slow start is not a surprise. Most of those who have been forecasting exchange enrollment over the […]