At a quick and superficial reading, statistics and culture may seem like two separate realities that only interact under close supervision. To simplify, the cultured individual tends to stigmatize the false certainties hidden behind numbers, while the statistician perhaps looks with barely concealed annoyance at that galaxy of activities that escape easily definable metrics.

Statistique et culture peuvent sembler, à une lecture rapide et superficielle, deux réalités séparées qui n'interagissent que sous étroite surveillance : en simplifiant, l'homme de culture a tendance à stigmatiser les fausses certitudes qui se cachent derrière les chiffres et, parallèlement, le statisticien considère peut-être avec un mécontentement mal dissimulé cette galaxie d'activités qui échappent à des mesures facilement délimitables.

The world changes, this has always been the case, with or without human intervention. What is new in recent years is the frequency and intensity of such changes, marked by sudden leaps - or disruptive transformations - that reshape the socio-economic fabric at an increasingly rapid pace. Dubai is perhaps one of the cities that best embodies this acceleration: within just a few decades, a small trading settlement in the desert has emerged as a global metropolis oriented toward the future.