The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care? Opinion The widespread indifference to the British Library’s crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity, says Hetan Shah The head of a critical British information body has resigned. No, not the BBC. At the start of this month the chief executive of the British Library, the UK’s national [...]
Don’t forget the arts when it comes to R&D spending Opinion The UK’s creative economy is worth more than our life sciences, aerospace and automotive industries combined, says Hetan Shah UK productivity growth has been woeful since the financial crash and the economy is about a fifth smaller than it would have been had the trend in productivity growth continued after 2007. The Chancellor has a [...]
If we want cutting-edge R&D, we must rethink our attitude to failure If we want cutting-edge R&D, we must rethink our attitude A likely centre-piece of today’s Budget will be a new agency to fund high-risk, high-reward scientific research. Brainchild of the Prime Minister’s chief special adviser Dominic Cummings, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) is to be modelled after similar bodies in the US — most notably Darpa which has focused on defence related research. Darpa [...]
This country has not had enough of experts December 10, 2019 Michael Gove famously said that the “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Of course, that’s not the full story — at the time, Gove was specifically targeting experts who, he claimed, kept getting things wrong. But regardless, the “had enough of experts” quote went viral, and came to be viewed as something [...]
The government must boost data sharing if it is to keep up with industry June 24, 2019 Government as a whole can get a bad rap when different departments don’t work together properly, so we should give it credit for when it does things right. When a family member dies, the last thing you want is to have to tell all the different bits of government time and time again. Thankfully there [...]
Wanted: A new national statistician to restore the public’s faith in data May 10, 2019 The government has failed to find a new national statistician to oversee the UK’s numbers. And it’s not hard to see why – although the salary of £160k sounds attractive, data nerds can command much more in the private sector, without the additional headache of being in the public spotlight. The job of overseeing the UK’s [...]
How statisticians are trying to change the way we measure poverty September 17, 2018 We can judge the moral fibre of a society by how it treats its least well-off members. That sounds like a reasonably straightforward idea. But knowing who the poorest people are is not as easy as it sounds. The traditional measure of poverty in the UK has been to consider a household as being in [...]
How statisticians are trying to change the way we measure poverty September 17, 2018 We can judge the moral fibre of a society by how it treats its least well-off members. That sounds like a reasonably straightforward idea. But knowing who the poorest people are is not as easy as it sounds. The traditional measure of poverty in the UK has been to consider a household as being in [...]
