Experts say data reported by beachgoers is ‘hugely useful’ after a slow official response to disaster * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Sixty-one leafy seadragons, 604 Port Jackson sharks, 1,999 southern fiddler rays and 287 bluespotted goatfish make up a fraction of the dead washed up on South Australian beaches in the past months. Since the algal bloom hit SA, hundreds of citizen scientists have come together to create what has become one of the main sources of data on the disaster. Continue reading...

You have time that other countries have squandered. You can be leaders in building the information infrastructure humanity needs I became a journalist because information is power, and right now we are living through an information armaggedon. Facts are under assault. Truth is being murdered. The casualty? Trust … making it impossible to govern. Only dictatorships thrive when there’s no trust. And here are the three sentences I’ve said over and over since 2016 when I first said it in Silicon Valley, backed by data and hard-fought experience. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality. Continue reading...

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