Positive thinking

Luca Trenta, Swansea University The US government has killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the elite wing of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards, in an air strike that took place in the early hours of January 3. This is the latest and most dramatic development in the ongoing proxy conflict between the US and Iran. Much of that conflict has taken place on the territory of Iraq, including a recent attack on the US embassy compound . The Trump administration explicitly blamed this recent attack on Iran. In turn, Iranian authorities, including Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif , have accused the US of committing an act of “international terrorism” in killing Soleimani in what they was described as an “extremely dangerous and foolish escalation”. While it is too soon to say what the consequences of this latest US operation will be, the killing of the Iranian general certainly signals an escalation in the US policy of assassination and t...

   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 ...