Dispatch from the Digital Planet is a monthly bulletin that talks about new updates in digital innovation across the world and their impact.
Innovative businesses are key to sustainable development. This research highlights three companies: Husk Power Systems (sustainable energy), Nexsis (solar panels for essential services), and ThredUp (secondhand e-commerce). Insights emphasize the value of pay-as-you-go models, digital tech’s role in sustainability, women’s empowerment via regenerative tech, the need for government support in renewables, and maintaining consumer demand.
In this second edition of the case compendium, we cover three
enterprises working in the education technology (ed-tech)
and upskilling industry in three distinct emerging markets.
Women remain under-represented in high-paying technical and decision-making roles in STEM professions. This disparity is a vexing problem and the Achilles’ heel of the entire technology industry.
Post Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, hate speech surged. We examined antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ+, racial hate. Analysis (Mar’22-Jan’23) revealed: hate speech volume increased, discourse quality worsened. Despite slight policy shift, toxicity persisted under Musk’s Twitter.
Ahead of the US midterms, Twitter analyzed trending toxic political themes. Pre-Musk, focus was countering misinformation and hate. Post-takeover, discourse quality declined, extremists emerged.
Examining 16.3M tweets (Feb-Oct ’22) from 5 nations on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, reactions shifted: positive to criticism, negativity to buyout plan, sadness on his control. Across countries, emotions followed Musk’s moves on Twitter.
How can real-time social analytics provide a tool for inclusive policymaking? This report uses a dataset of over 873 million online interactions drawn from more than one hundred social and mainstream media channels to analyze public sentiment and emotion in response to the pandemic management of eight governments between January and July 2020.
In collaboration with Equiception
We present Progress to Digital Parity—an interactive scorecard that tracks the journey towards realizing the goal of a digital economy for everyone, everywhere.
Discover Ukraine’s Resilient Tech Economy Amidst Conflict. President Zelensky prioritizes economic preservation in the face of war, removing obstacles for SMEs. Tech sector fuels growth, accounting for $2B in Q1 2022. Learn how digital infrastructure, contingency plans, tax breaks, and security training contribute to its success. Follow our series ‘Imagining a Digital Economy for All in Ukraine’ to explore insights from industry leaders navigating the challenges. Adaptability, collaboration, and innovation redefine the future of work in a dynamic landscape.
How did Twitter react to the Roe v. Wade announcement from the Supreme Court? What does this mean for abortion rights in America?
Data governance has become an essential, albeit challenging task for policymakers. They must develop new visions, strategies, structures, policies, and processes. Governments that can accomodate a flexible approach to governing different types of data use and re-use in a responsive, accountable, ethical, and anticipatory manner are likely to build and maintain trust. In collaboration with the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub at The George Washington University
An increase in broadband access in the US reduced Covid mortality rates, with the most significant impact in metro areas. Internet access is an increasingly important tool in the public health toolbox.
For Pride Month, Digital Planet investigates the degree to which LGBTQ+ community finds solidarity among STEM fields. Analysis reveals the share of workers who express their identity as or affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community on their resumes is smaller among STEM graduates than college graduates overall. Women in STEM were twice as likely as men to profess an affiliation with the gay community on their resumes. Younger STEM candidates display a higher rate of LGBTQ+ affiliation than their older colleagues but still significantly trailed younger college graduates overall.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is the latest source of funding to expand broadband across the US. As local, state, and federal government officials weigh how best to allocate $65 billion in resources, we call for a “people over miles” approach that will ensure more Americans have access to broadband at the speed necessary to learn, work, and access vital services.
We present Progress to Digital Parity—an interactive scorecard that tracks the journey towards realizing the goal of a digital economy for everyone, everywhere.
The needs of the global sustainable development agenda are both broad and urgent, and innovation models are central to addressing them in a timely, efficient, and scalable manner, from promoting inclusive growth and ensuring the longevity of natural resources to addressing issues across the state of the human condition.
Despite significant strides in college attainment, Black people in America face multiple obstacles in their pursuit of rewarding, lucrative careers. Even among Black professionals holding some of the most marketable degrees (STEM), highest-paying and highest-growth jobs in the technology sector remain elusive.
As work, school, social interactions, and shopping shifted online, consumer and business adoption of digital technologies witnessed a surge globally—we advanced digitally by 5 years in just 8 weeks
All methods of storing value have some environmental cost associated with them. We explore the environmental costs of US cash notes, which amount to $0.26 annually per note, based on resources used and CO2 released. We then compare our cash estimate to the environmental costs of crypto assets, using Bitcoin as the basis, and totals $70 annually per coin in terms of CO2 released. However, when considering all the US banknotes in circulation in the aggregate, and all the mined Bitcoin currently available, we find that the overall environmental impact of cash notes ($12.9 billion USD) far exceeds the environmental cost of Bitcoin ($1.3 billion USD).
The state of digitization of healthcare delivery globally is quite uneven, spotted with patches of excellence and falling well short in others. Digitally administered medicine is yet to reach corners of the world where its need is the greatest. Our study spanning 46 countries, where we overlaid our measures of digitalization and healthcare capacity, reveals sweet spots for virtualized healthcare and how countries lagging in critical healthcare infrastructure can leapfrog by deploying digital mechanisms to provide quality healthcare to their masses.
For Pride Month, Digital Planet investigates the degree to which LGBTQ+ community finds solidarity among STEM fields. Analysis reveals the share of workers who express their identity as or affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community on their resumes is smaller among STEM graduates than college graduates overall. Women in STEM were twice as likely as men to profess an affiliation with the gay community on their resumes. Younger STEM candidates display a higher rate of LGBTQ+ affiliation than their older colleagues but still significantly trailed younger college graduates overall.
Given the pandemic induced changes in the way companies are recruiting talent and organizing around remote and hybrid work and the movement of talent away from the traditional major hubs, how can we seize this moment as an unprecedented opportunity to improve the representation of under-represented talent (e.g. Black, Hispanic, female) in the high skilled workforce sought after by tech and bio-medical companies? How can organizations locate these diverse talent pools in the major metro areas across the United States?
Why are we so divided about the true state of the digital divide in America? What steps might the Biden-Harris administration take to clarify the reality of this divide and move toward closing the gap? This webinar examines how these changes can be transformational for a recovering, yet socially distanced economy.
Pandemic-induced work-from-home policies—now slated to be in place for most of 2021, if not indefinitely—could serve as a catalyst for the tech industry to narrow its growing regional and demographic disparity; allowing more cities and demographics to contribute to and prosper from the industry’s economic growth potential. We examined this issue using metrics such as digital readiness, cost of living, and diversity of tech talent pools for a group of states and major cities in the US to assess whether pandemic-induced work-from-home policies could offer the industry an inclusive growth path forward.
Jack Dorsey’s new-found courage to silence Trump’s Twitter handle may have been helped by the reality that an ex-president, now twice impeached, who incited a mob to attack his own seat of government, may command fewer advertising dollars.
The pandemic’s evolution and states’ varying policy responses have shown that digitally ready states benefited from both a labor force that could socially distance and work from home, as well as one that could support the delivery of essential services in such a scenario through the availability of gig workers. These past months have demonstrated the gig economy’s increasing importance in providing essential services to communities, while also highlighting the inherent disparities and vulnerabilities experienced by gig workers.
Resilience reflects digital infrastructure and citizen trust, according to Fletcher School study.
Covid-19 brought home the urgency of closing a digital divide that has left millions in the cold under lockdowns.
An interactive research report that indexes trust in the digital economy and its evolution across 90 economies during the COVID-19 pandemic. This report features a collaborative research platform that provides data and evidence-driven actionable insights to leaders in government, business and technology.
The two major political parties in the United States are in an all-out sprint leading up to the presidential election. Neither has had a shortage of digital mediums to amplify their views to the public. The American public’s increased reliance on social media as a source of news is worrisome because of the propensity of these platforms to spread misinformation. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this trend, tethering people ever more to their personal electronic devices and fostering a boom of both digital crime and misinformation.
In the US, women make 82¢ for every man’s $1––a significant disparity that is exacerbated by factors like race and education. As the pandemic rages on, women are bearing the brunt if it on multiple levels: 1) as essential workers on the frontlines; 2) being over-represented in occupations that are not conducive to working from home, and losing jobs crucial to their economic stability; and 3) being under-represented in jobs that could shift to a digital medium, and all this while paying the price of chronic pay gaps and an unequal division of household labor.
While contingents push to re-open, states have begun to reverse course as the virus surges to new heights. States with better digital readiness possess the capacity to endure longer periods of lockdowns, and those continuing to observe strict social distancing measures are better prepared to arrest COVID-19 transmission.
Pre-existing racial disparities in unemployment, digital access, and financial resilience have been exacerbated in COVID-19’s wake. Black communities have been disproportionately impacted––in mortality, morbidity, unemployment, and financial losses. As governments and businesses prepare to navigate the economic and public health repercussions of the pandemic, it is crucial to account for these extant inequalities to ensure inclusive recovery.
Having robust digital platforms are key for business and public services continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Kentucky and Washington both witnessed over a third of their workforce file for unemployment between March and mid-May, the latter state is better equipped to: 1) allow its employed workforce to work from home with low disruption; 2) enable unemployed workers to potentially shift to work that allows them to work from home; and most importantly, 3) support unemployed workers in their search for jobs and to seamlessly file for unemployment insurance online.
While working from home is an option for the digitally-connected, much of the U.S. and the rest of the world aren’t ready to support a remote workforce.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare longstanding and systemic issues of inequality in the United States. Certain marginalized races and ethnicities (Black or African American and Hispanic or Latinx households) are over-represented in less-flexible, low-tech, and “high-touch” occupations and under-represented in the information economy and “high-tech” occupations; an outcome of decades of disparity in access to critical digital services like stable and affordable internet and computers.
Even as COVID-19 cases continue to increase in the United States, reaching over 1.67 million cases and nearly 100,000 deaths as of May 26, 2020, many states are now beginning to ease social distancing and stay-at-home mandates. Each state is taking its own unique approach to lifting stay at home orders, allowing businesses to open, and loosening social distancing regulations, due in no small part to a lack of direction from the federal government.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare longstanding systemic inequalities in the United States. New research from Digital Planet examines how COVID-19 has impacted three groups of people in vastly different ways.
Are countries around the world prepared to keep the wheels of their economies turning during Coronavirus lockdowns? Watch the Social Distance Readiness Benchmark video summary to find out.
Digitally ready states were able to implement strict social distancing policies in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with relatively less impact on their employment numbers. While all states experienced economic hardship and a drastic increase in unemployment, those states which were least digitally ready and instituted stricter social distancing measures experienced the most painful unemployment levels, with a higher percentage of their workforce falling out of work.
How is COVID-19 impacting different parts of the US and how prepared each state is to safely begin to lift stay at home orders? Digital Planet analyzed average weighted change in workplace, residential, and transit mobility in relation to the average change in the effective reproduction rate of the virus (Rt).
USA Today | Bhaskar Chakravorti states guidelines to reopen states are “a bad idea motivated by Trump’s political motives rather than a measured, data-driven public health strategy.”
A Social Distance Readiness analysis of 42 countries measuring the robustness of their digital platforms; resilience of internet infrastructure to traffic surges; proliferation of digital payments options and percentage of workforce able to telecommute.
If the yardstick of effectiveness of any scorecard or ranking were tangible efforts, by those graded, to “improve bad ratings or maintain good ones,” few come even remotely close to the World Bank’s annual Doing Business survey.
Can Jaishankar persuade U.S. authorities to recognize that immigration restrictions may not help Americans get jobs?
Explore the enduring relevance of cash in today’s digital world. Discover the reasons behind its persistence, including anonymity, control, and trust. Learn about the challenges faced by digital alternatives and the complex interplay of habits, regulations, and technology in the cashless revolution. Dive into a comprehensive study shedding light on the costs and benefits of cash use across various stakeholders in the American economy.
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The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
