New Books in Technology

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data
(University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through
this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global
computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological
development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an
ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and
marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes
the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform
capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote
regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers
that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with
compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses,
Dr. Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the
growing economies of data extraction.

Breaking
down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes
visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird
today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of
the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban
space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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Politics, parties and campaigning are all changing. AI, digital tools and the rapid spread of messages all mean that the conduct and content of politics are changing. In many respects, it feels like the only constant is change. But closer observation often illuminates a patchier picture with elements of change and elements that remain. Moreover, change can be more evolutionary than revolutionary, and the change is not always along the lines we might predict. So, how and in what ways is political campaigning changing? What role are digital tools playing? What do citizens want from their political parties, and what are they (or could be) doing to meet those desires and expectations? Join Tim Haughton and guest Kate Dommett for a discussion of campaigning, digital politics and political parties.

Kate Dommett is Professor of Digital Politics at the University of Sheffield. Among her many publications are The Reimagined Party: Democracy, change and the public, published by Manchester University Press in 2020, and a co-authored book with Glenn Kefford & Simon Kruschinski, Data Driven Campaigning and Political Parties: Five Advanced Democracies Compared, published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Tim Haughton is Professor of Comparative and European Politics and a Deputy Director of CEDAR at the University of Birmingham. He is the author, inter alia, of The New Party Challenge published by Oxford University Press in 2020 and Clicks and Mortar: Electoral Campaigning in the 21st Century published last year in Government and Opposition.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.
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Can Europe afford to stand back as China rewrites the global electric vehicle (EV) ecosystem? In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen at the University of Helsinki talks to United Nations Senior Adviser Matthew Gray for Europe and Central Asia Markets, who discusses the rapid international expansion of Chinese EVs. The conversation highlights how Chinese brands have moved beyond public buses to growing passenger car markets in the Nordic region and Central Asia through superior technology, lower price points, and patient policy.

While European markets face limited model availability due to protectionism and strategic caution, Central Asian nations have seen an immediate and total transformation of their transport infrastructure with far higher and lower end Chinese EVs than in Europe - and dramatic new challenges in electrification capacity. Based in Copenhagen, with 20+ experience in the regions, Gray is speaking freshly with us after two recent months in Tajikistan and China. He compares EV and soft power growth in Scandinavia vs Central Asia, and explains that modern EVs act as geopolitical infrastructure, shifting the focus from simple manufacturing to long-term digital service ecosystems, data control, and entry into more vertical industries. As the West maintains protective barriers, China’s control over the battery supply chain and hybrid innovations will likely force a global shift in both consumer and freight industries. Listeners can find Gray’s fact-finding recap of Chinese EVs in Tajikistan here.

Julie Yu‑Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Master’s Programme in Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Her new book, Global Knowledge Production about China, explores how the practice of “China‑watching” has evolved over the decades. The book is freely accessible online.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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About NYC Open Data

During the Fall 2025 semester, students in the M.S. program in Psychological Research at Brooklyn College completed the inaugural offering of Reproducible Psychological Research. Using the R programming language, students developed weekly R Markdown documents to solve simulated real-world analytical problems using authentic datasets, with an emphasis on transparency, documentation, and reproducibility.

For their final projects, students were tasked with conducting independent, original research using open data related to New York City. Rather than working with pre-cleaned or artificial datasets, students engaged directly with messy, real-world data and were responsible for every step of the analytical workflow—from data acquisition and cleaning to analysis, visualization, and interpretation. A majority of projects utilized data from the NYC Open Data Portal, though students were encouraged to explore any open NYC-based data source that aligned with their research questions.

Each project in this volume represents a complete, reproducible research artifact. Students were required to meet the following criteria:

The data must be openly available

The data must meaningfully relate to New York City

The research question, analysis, and interpretation must be original

Collectively, these projects demonstrate not only technical proficiency in R, but also the ability to ask meaningful questions about the city students live in, evaluate real-world data critically, and communicate findings in a clear, reproducible manner. This volume serves both as a showcase of student growth and as an example of how open data and open-source tools can be used to conduct rigorous, socially relevant research. Chapters are organized in alphabetical order of the student’s last names.

This volume is designed for students, educators, and practitioners interested in applied data analysis, reproducible research, and open data. Each chapter represents an independent research project and can be read on its own. Readers are encouraged to explore the accompanying code, reproduce analyses, and adapt methods for their own work.
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Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner are enterprise strategists at Amazon Web Services, based in London. Phil was previously a corporate VP and international CIO at McDonalds. Jana was formerly at DHL and studied uncertainty dynamics in academia. They are authors of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Octopus’s are nimble and amazing, as anybody who has watched the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher will verify. In contrast, the Tin Man model we know from The Wizard of Oz needs constant oil and is too rusty and rigid to function well on its own for long. This episode’s guests lean into the Octopus model, which is about earning trust and evading, in this case, the enemy within ourselves when it comes to not admitting mistakes and quickly learning from them. The value of a strong feedback loop, creating an technology infrastructure that is “thin” and allows for freedom, and not chasing metrics that prevent you from learning from anecdotal evidence of where change is necessary: those are among the topics that lively conversation pursues. A final key point the authors make is that at a time when investment in executive learning has tripled while other personnel developments remain flat is a mistake; now more than ever, human capabilities need to be built upon in an era of rapid innovation.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.
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