Contributing Editor David Hand writes: How should we measure national wellbeing? The first stage in answering such a question is deciding exactly what it is that we’re talking about. It’s clear, at least for national wellbeing, that the definition of what we want to measure and the procedure we construct…

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Contributing Editor David J. Hand writes: George Box once said “You have a big approximation and a small approximation. The big approximation is your approximation to the problem you want to solve. The small approximation is involved in getting the solution to the approximate problem.” In a similar vein, John…

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Our new Contributing Editor David J. Hand (Imperial College, London) writes his first column, on the subject of Big Data: Surely nobody who has the slightest awareness of what’s going on in the world can be unaware of the phrase ‘big data’. Almost every day the newspapers and television make…

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