Boing Boing: China has perfected the internet control playbook and now it’s exporting it to the world . “After decades of back-and-forth over internet freedom, China has figured out a method for allowing people to use the internet for social and business purposes, but not for political reform — a combination of huge boiler-rooms full of censors, centralization of internet services under tight government control, and control over standards to ensure that surveillance and censorship are always possible. At the same time, China’s increasing wealth, combined with other large powers’ increased austerity and withdrawal from foreign aid, has enabled it to create large and growing spheres of influence over other states in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and these trading partners look to China for examples of how to create their own internet policies.”
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Digitization ≠ Repatriation: When Digital Humanities Provides Access But Not Restitution (Sarah E. Bond)
Sarah E. Bond: Digitization ≠ Repatriation: When Digital Humanities Provides Access But Not Restitution. “This week over at Hyperallergic, I wrote about new exhibits at the British Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum which both engage with the cultural heritage of ancient and medieval Ethiopia. An examination of the Ethiopian cultural heritage held in the libraries and museums of Britain can perhaps demonstrate a seminal point about digitization and the digital humanities more broadly: Digital editions can never fully replace an analog object. No matter how many manuscripts we digitize and make available online or 3D scans we create of the Parthenon frieze, they are not a replacement for repatriation.”
Washington Post: How prepared is the world for the next epidemic? This tool shows most countries are not.
Washington Post: How prepared is the world for the next epidemic? This tool shows most countries are not.. “Public health officials and business leaders like Bill Gates have long warned that the world is not ready for the next pandemic. Now an initiative led by Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has developed a tool that spotlights gaps in preparedness, and actions that countries and organizations can take to close them. The new website…gives an individual score to each country and uses color codes to rank the world by five levels of preparedness.”
CSS Blog Network: Global Military Spending Remains High at $1.7 Trillion
CSS Blog Network: Global Military Spending Remains High at $1.7 Trillion. “Total world military expenditure rose to $1739 billion in 2017, a marginal increase of 1.1 per cent in real terms from 2016, according to new figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). China’s military expenditure rose again in 2017, continuing an upward trend in spending that has lasted for more than two decades. Russia’s military spending fell for the first time since 1998, while spending by the United States remained constant for the second successive year. The comprehensive annual update of the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database is accessible from today…”
TechCrunch: To truly protect citizens, lawmakers need to restructure their regulatory oversight of big tech
TechCrunch: To truly protect citizens, lawmakers need to restructure their regulatory oversight of big tech . “If members of the European Parliament thought they could bring Mark Zuckerberg to heel with his recent appearance, they underestimated the enormous gulf between 21st century companies and their last-century regulators. Zuckerberg himself reiterated that regulation is necessary, provided it is the ‘right regulation.’ But anyone who thinks that our existing regulatory tools can reign in our digital behemoths is engaging in magical thinking. Getting to ‘right regulation’ will require us to think very differently.”
EurekAlert: New platform for analyzing global trade in the last two centuries
EurekAlert: New platform for analyzing global trade in the last two centuries . “This new web platform, called Federico-Tena World Trade Historical Database, collects information about imports and exports from 140 countries from every continent from 1800 to 1938. This new data considerably improves previous studies and enables accurate historical continuity to current United Nations estimations, which contain data from 1948 to the present day.”
The Guardian: IMF to launch global public and private borrowing database
The Guardian: IMF to launch global public and private borrowing database. “With global debt currently at a record high, the International Monetary Fund is launching a database of public and private borrowing across 190 countries – virtually the entire world – dating back to the 1950s. In April the fund said the global economy was more indebted than before the financial crisis and immediate action needed to be taken before the next downturn. It said worldwide debt now stood at $164tn, equal to 225% of global GDP and up from a previous record of 213% in 2009.”
