The just-released Bill and Melinda Gates’ “The stories behind the data 2017” tracks 18 SDG data points on poverty, child and maternal mortality, stunting, vaccines, universal health coverage, sanitation and more. It is a quick and easy read with clear graphs and good stories about what works, accompanied by a cool video. It will be published every year until 2030. Complement or competition to the UN SDG monitoring report?  The Gates report is a teaser for the Foundation’s Goalkeepers GA event, one of the three off-site foundation-led events I will be tracking next week to see who wins the race to fill the gap left by the Clinton Foundation. The other two are the WEF’s Sustainable Development Impact Summit andBloomberg’s Global Business Forum. What is your bet?

This week, Apple released its Iphone X. It uses Face ID, a facial recognition option to unlock the phone, make payments, and use third party apps. It is advertised as easy, fun and super secure. But reviews andonline conversations also point to the possible creepy side, eg law enforcement abuse.  Last week’sEconomist had four articles on facial recognition, its growing market, and possible uses and abuses. Short and good reads on this topic that some of you said could have featured in our last Horizons.  Indeed, facial biometrics has applications and implications for children and young people. Our innovation team explores its potential for detecting malnutrition. This article shows how a software combining AI and facial analysis could “improve the performance” of online courses by picking up when students daydream and quizzing them on what was taught then.

My graph this week is from Brady and al’s “Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks”. It analyzes 560,000 tweets on 3 polarizing topics (in the US) – gun control, climate change and same-sex marriage, to understand how social networks transmit emotions and shape morality. The findings: emotional tweets are contagious. Each moral-emotional word included in a tweet increases its diffusion by 20%. But this effect is much greater within like-minded groups than between. So beware, getting emotional on twitter feeds the echo-chamber.

 

 

My quote this week is from Mars CEO Grant Reid launching his $1 billion Sustainability Plan: “Data and connectivity are helping us get smarter about our impact every year. Today, climate science is clear and we understand the environmental and social challenges in our supply chain better than ever before. With this knowledge, it is clear that the scale of intervention needs to be much bolder – now is the time for business to reassess its role and responsibility in the face of the evidence.”