The housing crisis, the collapse of major financialinstitutions, the rise of unemployment—all had been aided and abettedby mathematicians wielding magic formulas.

Google puts previously unimaginable resources at our fingertips—huge libraries, archives, warehouses of government records, troves ofgoods, the comings and goings of whole swaths of humanity. That iswhat I mean by the Googlization of “everything.”

The data tells us that a man has a substantially better chance of reaching theNBA if he was born in a wealthy county. A black kid born in one of thewealthiest counties in the United States, for example, is more than twice aslikely to make the NBA than a black kid born in one of the poorest counties. Fora white kid, the advantage of being born in one of the wealthiest countiescompared to being born in one of the poorest is 60 percent.

You are a data scientist, too. When you were a kid, you noticed that when youcried, your mom gave you attention. That is data science. When you reachedadulthood, you noticed that if you complain too much, people want to hang outwith you less. That is data science, too. When people hang out with you less, younoticed, you are less happy. When you are less happy, you are less friendly.

They think that a quantitativeunderstanding of the world is for a select few left-brained prodigies, not forthem.

You only need to touch a hot stoveonce to realize that it’s dangerous. You may need to drink coffee thousands oftimes to determine whether it tends to give you a headache. Which lesson ismore important? Clearly, the hot stove, which, because of the intensity of itsimpact, shows up so quickly, with so little data.

Instead of subscriptions or micropayments, the economics of Web publishing devel-oped around advertising. The publisher would receive a tiny payment for each pagedisplayed, but from an advertiser rather than the reade

cobalt mine in Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains,

Coosa County, Alabama, express similar concerns over plans to mine graphite,

northern Nevada, where his group has joined a lawsuit against a proposed open-pit lithium mine in Thacker Pass

Twin Metals Mine near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness as another example. Here the target is nickel, another important EV metal mined in only one U.S. location. In a political tug-of-war, the mine’s long-held leases were denied renewal by Obama, reinstated under Trump, and then canceled under Biden.

Lange says that’s certainly the case in Alaska, where copper and cobalt rest beneath rolling tundra in the Ambler district south of the Brooks Range. Accessing it would require a 200-mile road through traditional Alaska Native lands, caribou habitat and Gates of the Arctic National Park, with gravel quarries dug every 10 miles. It’s something state leaders support but state and national environmental groups and several Indigenous communities oppose.

likely raise environmental concerns.

Second, a key question is how biophysically “safe” targets can be achieved while also meeting goals for human well-being and justice. For example, meeting the social goals of Agenda 2030 without widespread transformations may lead to crossing safe targets for the biophysical state of the Earth system (Sachs et al., 2019). Achieving biophysical targets, such as 1.5°C for climate or increasing ecosystem protection, can undermine well-being, if, for example, bioenergy competes with food production, or protected areas undermine local livelihoods (Hasegawa et al., 2020).

First, an “unsafe” world is likely to increase inequality, so “safe” would seem a necessary pre-condition for “just”—but not always a sufficient one. A “safe” target from a biophysical perspective may not be adequate to prevent large-scale risks to humans in specific contexts. For example, there are large risks for many human populations even with a 1.5°C climate target (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018).

There is, however, an argument often made with respect to not fully addressingpoverty and inequality. It is based on the assumption that there is a necessarytrade- off between having a strong economy and having a robust social welfarestate. The recent origins of this argument can be traced back to an influen-tial book entitled, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by the economistArthur Okun.

a trade-off of future worries for the immediacy of convenience, comfort and ease. If a tracking system can make students be better, one college adviser said, isn’t that a good thing?

The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.

Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.

Taking an exam in the comfort of your own home, on your own schedule, is less invasive

damage to the student-teacher relationship

bias in facial recognition but also because of the potential for data collection.

allows students to continue learning.“We believe that many lives have been positively impacted by being able to continue their education and careers

There is no promise to the user that their data won’t leave a specific device,” says Shmatikov. “We still don’t really know just how much data voice-skill hosts like Amazon—or third parties that rely on Amazon—are harvesting, or what they’re doing with that information.” Amazon didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

What if data harvested from students’ conversations affected their chances of getting a mortgage or a job later on? What if it were used against foreign students to have them deported, possibly to home countries where they could be imprisoned for their political views?

Administrators at some of these schools told me they believe Alexa will bolster enrollment and reduce dropout rates

Each device was pre-programmed with answers to about 130 SLU-specific questions, ranging from library hours to the location of the registrar’s office (the school dubbed this “AskSLU”). The devices also included the basic voice “skills” available on other Dots, including alarms and reminders, general information, and the ability to stream music.

Projects must strike a balance

Despite the hospitalist field’s unprecedented growth, there have been challenges. The model is based on the premise that the benefits of inpatient specializa-tion and full-time hospital pres-ence outweigh the disadvantages of a purposeful discontinuity of care. Although hospitalists have been leaders in developing sys-tems (e.g., handoff protocols and post-discharge phone calls to pa-tients) to mitigate harm from dis-continuity, it remains the model’s Achilles’ heel.

Unfortunately, this approach collides with the re-alities of managed care and its emphasis on efficien-cy.