This introductory chapter defines data science as a field focused on collecting, storing, and processing data to derive meaningful insights for decision-making. It explores data science applications across diverse sectors including finance, healthcare, politics, public policy, urban planning, education, and libraries. The chapter examines how data science relates to statistics, computer science, engineering, business analytics, and information science, while introducing computational thinking as a fundamental skill. It discusses the explosive growth of data (the 3Vs: velocity, volume, variety) and essential skills for data scientists, including statistical knowledge, programming abilities, and data literacy. The chapter concludes by addressing critical ethical concerns around privacy, bias, and fairness in data science practice.

This chapter provides for a summary overview of some of the great movements in economic science. We discuss theory falsification and the historical role of the observable in economics. We provide for a brief overview of behavioural and experimental economics, as well as computational and neuroeconomics. We conclude the chapter with some ideas on the value of information in the price process.

The Communist Party is building a digitally capable state to remain at the vanguard of social and political development in China. CPC leaders are advancing digitalization forcefully throughout the governance and economic system through various policy initiatives. Informatization serves both better governance and public service, by overcoming previous bottlenecks and spatial challenges in administration. It also enhances the party state’s surveillance and monitoring capabilities. The CPC’s goals for China’s future under its continued rule require a digital infrastructure and economy that is both efficacious and subject to the Party’s control. To this end, the CPC is building out a comprehensive governance architecture for cyberspace, including the world’s most expansive data regulatory regime. The current leadership regards these digital capabilities as a key part of its comprehensive governance model that will enable the CPC to implement its domestic and international vision for China in the coming years.

This introductory chapter defines data science as a field focused on collecting, storing, and processing data to derive meaningful insights for decision-making. It explores data science applications across diverse sectors including finance, healthcare, politics, public policy, urban planning, education, and libraries. The chapter examines how data science relates to statistics, computer science, engineering, business analytics, and information science, while introducing computational thinking as a fundamental skill. It discusses the explosive growth of data (the 3Vs: velocity, volume, variety) and essential skills for data scientists, including statistical knowledge, programming abilities, and data literacy. The chapter concludes by addressing critical ethical concerns around privacy, bias, and fairness in data science practice.

An immediacy condition is elaborated. It is argued that a Kantian intuition is immediate both in the sense that it is direct in its way of representing and in the sense that it is presentational in acquainting the perceiver with its object. It can thus be said to be both of and as of, in present-day terminology. It is representation of, or referential, by virtue of its “intuitive marks,” which are singular, and it is representation as of, or attributive, by virtue of its “predicates of intuition,” which are general. This has been overlooked by most Kant commentators. It may also have contributed to the epistemic downgrading of perceptions that has been ascribed to Kant. It is argued that an empirical intuition hooks on to tropes in the perceived scene by way of the intuitive marks, and that there is also perceptual attribution of proper and common sensibles to the concrete particulars by means of it. Finally, it is discussed how information that is carried by intuitions can be “unpacked” and thought through concepts in cognition of objects “in the proper sense.”

Chapter 4 examines the origins of modern territoriality in British India and surrounding regions. The cause was a shift in the disposition of colonial governance towards information, as officials dealt with a crisis of knowledge about Indian society and politics. The ryotwari settlement is a well-studied example of this shift in dispositions as reflected in revenue policy, but the rapid expansion of surveying activity starting in the 1790s in the Madras Presidency, especially including Colin Mackenzie’s survey of the state of Mysore (1799–1810), is another example. This explanation is contrasted with other possible explanations based on the diffusion of practices from Europe, or on the maximization of revenue. Finally, it is shown how, once the surveying of boundaries was well established in India, the British began using this practice outside of India proper, and how the emergence of modern territoriality from Persia to Siam depended on the Anglo-Indian surveying practice.

How we use dialogue to develop character and advance plot. Overcoming anxiety about dialogue; the dangers of avoiding dialogue. Reported speech lacks energy; dialogue enlivens a scene. Dialogue reveals character, indicates relationship and conveys information, but has to appear authentic. Strong dialogue combines multiple functions. Punctuating and attributing dialogue; adverbs qualifying tone.

The need to share news and information and circulate ideas about politics, commerce, and other issues, together with an accompanying desire to control how others circulated them, led British officials, American colonists, Native Americans, and people of African descent to develop overlapping and competing pathways of communication. Through formal structures such as the imperial Post Office and military communications, and through informal networks of individual connections, they attempted not only to connect with others but also to shape and control narratives about the world around them, and in particular brewing controversies over continental diplomacy and imperial policies. Their communication took three forms: oral – the spoken word was available to all; written – mostly in the form of manuscript correspondence; and print – which encompassed official announcements, pamphlets, and periodicals such as newspapers. Communication proved vital to all the inhabitants of North America in the 1760s and 1770s.

Health insurance does not work well when individuals have more information about illness than the insurer. Two problems arise as a consequence of this information gap. Moral hazard, which arises when individuals know more about their current needs than the insurer, generates an overutilization of care services. Adverse selection, caused by insureds having more information about future risk than insurers, leads high-risk individuals to buy high coverage (at a high premium) and low-risk individuals to buy lower coverage than optimal. This chapter covers these market failures and presents some evidence and thoughts about policies that have been used to reduce their negative effect, such as cost-sharing for dealing with moral hazard, and mandates and cross-subsidies for buying high coverage. I end by arguing that dealing with selection should not be a top priority.

The double-distortion argument holds that income taxation is more efficient than redistribution through changes in legal rules because a change in a legal rule distorts both the market to which the rule applies and, by altering incomes of market participants, the labor market as well. The argument succeeds only if it is possible to achieve the same distributive outcomes with the income tax as with changes to legal rules. This is not the case, however, because tax authorities cannot obtain information regarding the extent of the surplus available for redistribution without altering legal rules in individual markets and observing whether the effect is inframarginal (in which case there is surplus available for redistribution) or marginal (in which case there is not). This point is illustrated using the Ayres and Talley model of Coasean bargaining with divided entitlements.

Australia’s World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef experiences cumulative impacts from diverse activities, including regional catchment-sourced water pollution and the impacts of climate change. Regulating these threats engages a wide range of laws for intervention, which have been influenced by a regulatory mechanism for information – a strategic environmental assessment (SEA) undertaken a decade ago at the request of UNESCO. This chapter explores how the strategic assessment and associated interventions influence impacts from two major activities that contribute to water pollution and climate change – cattle grazing and coal mining. It shows that regulatory SEA can provide for entrenching and integrating ongoing information collection, analysis, and sharing. Moreover, SEA can directly influence diverse regulatory interventions to address cumulative impacts. It can link the functions of information and intervention, two of the regulatory functions advanced by this book’s CIRCle Framework. At the same time, opportunities remain to build stronger links between interventions for water quality and climate adaptation, and between climate change mitigation interventions and the Reef context.

This chapter develops the proper modally inflected understanding of the living animals on earth, which are the most plausible examples of entities that enjoy phenomenal consciousness, which is the first core feature of the MOUDD theory. It includes an introduction to the necessary rudiments of neurophysiology.

Managers and leaders need to critically analyse their own thinking and decision-making processes so they can objectively evaluate the problems and issues they face every day. To do this they need to understand their personal preferences, prejudices, values and cultural beliefs, and their motivations and desires. It is also important for them to understand how these factors shape the biases managers and leaders take to decision-making. To achieve success, they require the ability to analyse, synthesise and evaluate material, and to assemble their thoughts in a logical argument.