WIRED UK May / June 2021

IN THE DRIVING SEAT This issue’s cover star, Lewis Hamilton – aka the world’s greatest F1 driver – was shot by New York-based photographer Mamadi Doumbouya, who specialises in bright, popping portraiture. “We’d set up a big rail of clothes according to the brief for the WIRED cover – chic, classic, nothing to distract from the subject. But Lewis had already been thinking about this,” says Doumbouya. “He knows his own mind and what he wants and doesn’t want. And he’d already got such a strong look – baggy sweater, braided hair, amazing jewellery – that was completely who he was, and we decided not to try to change that, but let it tell his story. I added the bright colours with lighting, but Lewis brought the personality.” DATA MAKING A DIFFERENCE Gabo…

In March this year, Ken Glueck, an executive vice president at Oracle, published a piece on his company’s website. The subject – user data – was a familiar one to those working in the technology industry, but the tone was unusual for an enterprise software company blog. “Consumers are shamefully under-compensated for the data they generate,” Glueck argued. “Consumers are told that the trade of their personal data in exchange for “free” services is a fair one. It is not.” Two days later, Alphabet announced that Google would stop tracking individuals as they move across the internet – advertising would be targeted at aggregated groups and individuals would no longer be identifiable. This came in the wake of the company’s decision in 2020 to no longer track users with third party cookies. While…

One largely unnoticed consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the interruption of many scientific missions in the Arctic. Remote field trips to the northernmost regions of the globe have been cancelled or postponed due to travel restrictions, quarantines and other logistical measures implemented to protect local Inuit communities. One of the affected expeditions is the field season of the East Greenland Ice Core Project (EGRIP). Since 2015, EGRIP has measured the movements of glaciers in Greenland – the world’s largest island, more than eighty per cent of which is covered with ice, and which was a target of former US president Donald Trump’s expansionist plans, when he considered making an offer to buy it from Denmark. The EastGrip is an international science facility 2,700m above sea level, where an international…

On March 14, 2018, Rio de Janeiro councillor and human rights activist Marielle Franco was murdered – shot multiple times in a crime that’s unsolved. Franco’s death caused commotion throughout Brazil, and even internationally, as she was a politician with a strong social commitment who had been denouncing the growth of armed militias in the city. But some of the first people to find out about the incident weren’t the local police force or the media, but users of an app called Fogo Cruzado, which alerts people to potential shooting incidents across Rio de Janeiro, so that they can avoid entering the area and placing themselves in harm’s way. “I was the person who gave the shooting alert in downtown Rio – only later I found out it was Marielle,” says Cecilia…

When rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, social media platforms could no longer deny their role in undermining democracy. Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the risk of allowing Donald Trump’s continued access to Facebook was “too great” after the then-US president appeared to be egging on the insurgents via his social media accounts. Twitter acknowledged that Trump’s tweets could “inspire others to replicate the violent acts” against the heart of US democracy. But Trump is not the only authoritarian world leader guilty of abusing social media, and America is far from being the only country to suffer from it. Variations of this story are playing out in the Philippines, Cameroon, Libya and a dozen other countries that rarely hit the headlines in western news outlets. The organisation we work for, the…

For years, historical data has been at the top of everyone’s priority list. These datasets can train machine learning algorithms to learn from the past to predict the future – unless that future becomes entangled in a global pandemic. “Everything is completely disrupted,” says Nadun Muthukumarana, public sector and transport Analytics lead partner at Deloitte. So, these once reliable prediction engines became less so overnight. This doesn’t mean we should abandon data entirely, but organisations need to find more contemporary datasets. “You need highly dynamic, recent data,” says Muthukumarana. “We call it effervescent data because it’s always fresh and new.” The same rules apply: the more data, the better. This is where the public sector has an advantage. Unlike the world of big business, public sector organisations aren’t battling it out for…