Clipboard Brief: #3

Some interesting things I came across recently —

Finally someone has worked the math around a fascinating question — how much human-made weight does the earth carry?

1. What Putin is Up To (The Atlantic)
   This article boldly claims that Putin — touted to be the world’s most powerful person and sometimes credited for rewriting the cold war narrative — may have overseen the boldest and most consequential covert operation on Russia’s principal ideological and geopolitical foe, tarnishing its reputation worldwide and threatening the legitimacy of its president.
   An earlier article in the same magazine argued that Putin’s geopolitical influence has increased because he anticipated the global populist revolt and helped give it ideological shape.
2. France’s Next Revolution: The Vote that Could Wreck the European Union (The Economist)
   The upcoming French presidential election is at the heart of a topical and contentious global debate — Is the old divide between left and right growing less important than a new one between open and closed?
   After reading this, I revisited a July 2016 paper about how citizens in consolidated democracies are becoming cynical about the value of democracy as a political system and less hopeful about affecting policy outcomes through active participation in the political process.
3. AI’s PR Problem (MIT Technology Review)
   Jerry Kaplan on why he thinks public discourse about AI is largely untethered from reality and how one of the main problems is the name artifical intelligence itself.
4. Winston Churchill’s Essay on Alien Life (Nature)
   An essay titled ‘Are We Alone in the Universe’, unearthed recently by an astrophysicist and authored by Sir Winston gives an insight into the influential politician’s relationship with science.
5. Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin: A New Economic Paradigm (Evonomics)
   Agree with him or don’t, but there is something about the doggedness and audacity with which this former professional investor challenges the ideas of mainstream economists.

Two additional sources —

1. Bloomberg Brief Special Edition — The Year Ahead 2017

2. The Government of India’s open data initiative to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use.

Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India

For 7 days, this statue of a 7-year old “Fearless Girl” will stare down this 7000-pound bull at ground zero of American capitalism