Positive thinking

Donald Trump does not like Amazon and already several times in the past he attacked the group and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, arguing that if he won the election he would have proposed much more restrictive laws. Now, Axios, the online newspaper, writes that the American President would be ready to go against Amazon asking for more taxes. According to the sources of this US political online paper, Trump is «obsessed» by Amazon and he wants to change the tax treatment because several of his friends told him that their businesses were destroyed by the online retail giant.  Amazon has destroyed the malls and stores, continues Axios, citing Trump's conversations. Several times on Twitter the US President attacked Amazon claiming that it had hit the retail industry causing job losses.  The common stock unit, which faces the worst month since 2016, widens the losses, and it enters the correction territory. In fact, the shares of the e-commerce colossus lose 10.9% compared to the ...

   Matt Dickson, University of Bath Social mobility has rarely been far from the top of the political agenda in Britain in recent years. Yet despite two decades of rhetorical commitment to the cause, Britain is still a deeply divided country. There remains a stubborn gap in higher education attendance between children from better- and worse-off families, and the top professions continue to recruit disproportionately from a narrow strata of society. Only 6% of doctors, 12% of journalists and 12% of chief executives come from working-class backgrounds. And there is a particular dominance of the privately educated in society’s upper echelons. Education policies at all ages – from provision of affordable quality pre-school, to initiatives to widen participation at university – can make a difference. But such policies alone will never solve all of the issues. The problems of social mobility extend far beyond the education system. Even people with the same ed...

Sam Power, University of Sussex Back in November 2017, the Electoral Commission reopened investigations into allegations that Vote Leave, the official exit campaign in the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union, had breached spending rules. Into 2018 this was a story that had rather bubbled under the surface. However, a slow drip of revelations regarding the work of Cambridge Analytica, unearthed by The Guardian, The Observer and Channel 4 News have brought the issue to the front and centre. It is worth reminding ourselves how the case got here, and what it means for the electoral integrity of the UK. The rules During referendums in the UK, there are strict spending rules which designate the amount of money official, or “designated”, campaigns are allowed to spend. In 2016, Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe had a limit of £7m . The £7m spending limit, however, only related to spending by the official campaign for each side – Remain and Leave....

Karen Rowlingson, University of Birmingham Michael Sheen has just launched the End High Cost Credit Alliance . The actor has supported various charitable causes over the years and is now leading this effort to support alternatives to high cost credit which has increased in recent years, not least in his home town of Port Talbot. The alliance was formed in response to the fact that those on the lowest incomes pay the most to borrow money even where they are borrowing for essentials. This is compared to those on higher incomes who can generally borrow at lower rates for luxuries like holidays and high-end consumer goods. The alliance aims to debate the changes needed to deliver healthy credit, offer solutions, and provide the resources to test them out locally and at scale across the UK. It also collectively calls for changes to policy, regulation and practices to make credit fairer for all. This is a growing problem. Research by colleagues and myself at the Centre for ...

Video broadcasted by Channel 4 News Channel 4 News, a British television broadcaster, investigated possible wrongdoing during the UK Brexit campaign.

Ivan Manokha  On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research. But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview , the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that the...

   Sinead Brophy, Swansea University Millions of people all over the world are experiencing mental health problems. And though the causes vary, we know that half of all these illnesses will have started in childhood or the teenage years. In the UK, referrals for and reports of teenagers with depression and anxiety and other mental issues have risen significantly in recent decades – reportedly increasing by 70% in the 25 years to 2016. Researchers have known for many years that education and mental health are strongly linked and that doing well in school gives children a strong sense of feeling good about themselves – which in turn is linked to higher levels of well-being in adulthood . Depression, on the other hand, is linked to poor future academic success, and this link between depression and school failure is stronger for girls than for boys . However, while depression leads to poor academic success, it is not clear if poor academic success lead...

The head of the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in 2016 United States elections, Robert Muller, wants to clarify the links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Cambridge Analytica. The American media are reporting that Muller’s assistants are investigating President Trump’s payment of 6 million dollars to the British firm. It also seems certain that at some point there have been contacts between Cambridge Analytica and Russia. Yania Ledovaya teaches at the faculty of Psychology at the University of St. Petersburg, and she told the online newspaper Meduza that she had met Alex Kogan, the inventor of the app that collected data from 50 millions Facebook users, in 2013, "by chance". Kogan (from the Russian media seems to have another surname, Spektor), is of Russian origin, born in Moldova and lived up to 8 years in Moscow, before moving with his parents to the United States: "He speaks Russian, but he does not read it and he does not wr...

   Michael Wade, IMD Business School The dealings that have been revealed between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have all the trappings of a Hollywood thriller: a Bond villain-style CEO, a reclusive billionaire, a naïve and conflicted whistle-blower, a hipster data scientist turned politico, an academic with seemingly questionable ethics, and of course a triumphant president and his influential family. Much of the discussion has been on how Cambridge Analytica was able to obtain data on more than 50m Facebook users – and how it allegedly failed to delete this data when told to do so. But there is also the matter of what Cambridge Analytica actually did with the data. In fact the data crunching company’s approach represents a step change in how analytics can today be used as a tool to generate insights – and to exert influence. For example, pollsters have long used segmentation to target particular groups of voters, such as through categorising audiences by ...