Analytics and Big Data: Emerging trends and their impact on our lives

Companies are increasingly turning to Analytics to gain a competitive edge, providing decision makers with better insights. As they do, firms must resolve unique demands on their Information Technology resources and processes. This paper attempts to review the chronology of the adoption of Analytics. Next, it highlights how various economic sectors have incorporated Analytics and the resulting changes in the ways businesses interact with their customers. Further, the paper explores the cutting edge innovations in the Analytics domain. Subsequently, this paper tries to do an impact analysis on all these developments of our lives. Finally, the opportunities and threats, and how they may stand to affect our future, are discussed.     

How the IMF lives with its conditionality

In spite of the intense controversy associated with the conditionality of its lending, IMF decisions are not voted upon but are the sense of the meeting of the Executive Directors as declared by the Managing Director. This unusual decisionmaking process is a substitute for secrecy of voting, which is not feasible within the IMF. It permits the wealthier countries to impose adjustment conditions without the appearance of the continual exercise of their majority power in the IMF. It permits the poorer, developing countries to agree or to disagree without taking an explicit position or to disagree with less danger to the favorable consideration of any future request which might be made.     

Citizenship and disability: incommensurable lives and well-being

This paper explores a new political consensus promoting ‘active’ as opposed to ‘passive’ conceptions of citizenship, emerging from the late 1970s onwards, and marking the post-settlement/post-Marshellesque era of the welfare state. Reflecting this consensus, the disability rights movement critiques ‘passive’ conceptions, which are, it is claimed, supported by the medical model of disability and so-called objective accounts of ‘special needs’ and well-being – that is, accounts provided by non-disabled professionals and carers who frequently diminish the rights of disabled people to live autonomously. In contrast, ‘active’ conceptions cohere with the social model of disability supporting the values of agency and self-determination – derived, in part, from equalizing opportunities for disabled people’s social participation compared with non-disabled people; but also by promoting subjective accounts of well-being which are often incomparable or incommensurable, both between persons and across one person’s life.