Stefaan Verhulst
Book by Gil Durán: “When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.
Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.
The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.
The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now…(More)”.
Paper by Alberto Bitonti and Sergiu Gherghina: “This article reviews the literature on deliberative quality, a key concept used in deliberative democracy scholarship to assess how closely actual deliberation approximates normative ideals. It traces the development of deliberative theory from early models through to more inclusive and systemic approaches. The review maps the main empirical tools developed to measure deliberative quality, which differ in their normative assumptions, methodological designs, and levels of analysis. While the proliferation of approaches reflects the richness of the field, it also creates challenges regarding empirical comparability and theoretical clarity. The article concludes with a section highlighting a research agenda calling for conceptual alignment and methodological refinement to support future research on deliberation, especially in contexts where deliberative processes are becoming increasingly institutionalised and often proposed as responses to political polarisation and democratic distrust. We provide a comprehensive and systematic overview for scholars interested in deliberative processes and their normative and empirical evaluation…(More)”.
Project by AidData: “… has compiled an inventory of key development data assets, which will feed into future work to track funding to this data ecosystem.
Our interactive Data Asset Inventory provides granular detail on 496 assets published by 230 organizations across 7 of the most important sectors for development: agriculture and food security, disaster response, education, environment, gender, governance, and health.
Explore the public beta, and share your feedback to inform the next phase of this effort. Are there important data assets you work with that are missing from our inventory?…(More)”.
Book by Marion K. Poetz and Henry Sauermann: “…explores how millions of people can significantly contribute to scientific research with their effort and experience, even if they are not working at scientific institutions and may not have formal scientific training.
Drawing on a strong foundation of scholarship on crowd involvement, this book helps researchers recognize and understand the benefits and challenges of crowd involvement across key stages of the scientific process. Designed as a practical toolkit, it enables scientists to critically assess the potential of crowd participation, determine when it can be most effective, and implement it to achieve meaningful scientific and societal outcomes.
The book also discusses how recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) shape the role of crowds in scientific research and can enhance the effectiveness of crowd science projects…(More)”
Paper by Haoxiang Guan et al: “Understanding the dynamic evolution of complex social phenomena requires both high-fidelity modeling of human behavior and large-scale simulations. Traditional agent-based models (ABMs) have been employed to study these dynamics, but are constrained by simplified agent behaviors. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable agents to exhibit sophisticated social behaviors, yet face significant scaling challenges. We present Light Society, an agent-based simulation framework that advances both fronts. Light Society formalizes social processes as structured transitions of agent and environment states, governed by a set of LLM-powered simulation operations. Joint algorithmic and system optimizations, particularly a mixture-of-models engine that combines full LLMs with distilled surrogates, enable Light Society to efficiently simulate societies with over one billion agents. Grounded in real-world demographic profiles from the World Values Survey, simulations of Trust Games and opinion diffusion at up to one billion agents demonstrate Light Society’s high fidelity and efficiency in modeling diverse social phenomena, providing researchers with a practical foundation for hypothesis testing and the study of emergent collective behaviors at planetary scale…(More)”.
Paper by Amitava Sarder and Ranjan Kumar Mondal: “In the era of big data, social media platforms have become invaluable sources of information, offering vast amounts of data that can be analyzed to extract valuable insights. With the explosive growth of social media and the large volume of data it generates, noise has become a significant challenge in deriving meaningful insights. This article provides a comprehensive survey of noise elimination techniques in social media big data. In this paper, we review the literature on various noise elimination methods in social media big data and introduce a new classification of these strategies, such as preprocessing techniques, filtering methods, topic modelling, machine learning approaches, community detection, user-based filtering, outlier detection, anomaly detection, spam detection and related approaches. The survey examines the latest developments and recent advancements in noise reduction techniques, highlighting subcategories within each approach and their contributions to noise removal. Additionally, it discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with noise elimination in social media big data. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking an overview of noise reduction methods to improve the quality and reliability of social media big data analysis. Overall, this survey offers valuable insights into the landscape of noise elimination techniques in social media big data analysis, providing researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of existing methods and guiding future research in this important field…(More)”.
Essay by Anne Lawrence-Mathers: “Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.
Its complex diagrams were at the center of its appeal. Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Nor do they act as models to be replicated in three-dimensional form as pieces of magical equipment. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters.3 Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.
Several factors made the Ars notoria fundamentally different from other magical texts. First, this is not a text in conflict with the church. In fact, the rituals framing and shaping usage of the images are presented as extremely pious, and the texts to be recited are identified as prayers. The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”, and are claimed to preserve both the names of angels and words used to communicate with them. Second, the advantages offered are relatively virtuous: contact with spiritual beings and full knowledge of the subjects taught in medieval universities. Such claims cut little ice with thirteenth-century theologians, however, who saw clear links to things condemned as superstitious and demonic by St Augustine, despite the text’s assertion that it contains wisdom revealed to King Solomon…(More)”.
Report by Tessa Dunlop, Ventseslav Kozarev, Ângela Guimarães Pereira and Paulo Rosa: “Citizen engagement processes can be transformative, especially for participating citizens. But what is their impact on policymaking, democratic systems and the broader public? This report maps a range of impacts across policy, institutions and society. Qualitative interview and survey data reveal that public administrations that engaged in citizen participation saw significant benefits, including improved policymaking, stronger democracies, greater legitimacy and increased trust in government, so much so that they are ready to conduct other participatory exercises. The study suggests and illustrates a number of indirect impact pathways, indicating that the extent of policy impact may be underestimated. Furthermore, citizen engagement drives culture change within institutions and enhances their capacity to engage more directly with citizens. Looking through a relational lens, citizen engagement processes foster closer connections between citizens and policymaking, but also between stakeholders, civil society, citizens, policymakers, and others. Key factors include the commitment of institutions and policymakers, and public communication about citizen engagement processes. Overall, the key message is that desired impact should be the starting point of citizen engagement processes, not an afterthought – support may erode if citizens and policymakers cannot see tangible outcomes. Commissioning bodies and organisers should prioritise commitment, legitimacy, and integration to ensure meaningful impacts…(More)”.
Paper by Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan: “In 1932, Bernard Baruch, a wealthy financier who made his fortune on Wall Street in the early 20th century, contributed the foreword to a reprint of the 1852 edition of Charles Mackay’s classic book on markets, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Invoking a dictum from Friedrich von Schiller, a German poet and philosopher, Baruch wrote: “Anyone taken as an individual, is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd, heat once becomes a blockhead.” He added, “Without due recognition of crowd-thinking (which often seems crowdmadness) our theories of economics leave much to be desired.” About 40 years later, Eugene Fama, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, published “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work.” It is among the most famous papers ever written in finance. This might be considered the theory Baruch had in mind. Fama posited, “A market in which prices always ‘fully reflect’ available information is called ‘efficient.’” Fama found that strategies investors commonly applied to try to outperform the market, including using past price patterns to project the future and doing fundamental analysis to distinguish between price and value, failed in their objective. In other words, there is no reliable way to take advantage of the blockheads. Nearly all those who study markets carefully agree that they appear sensible for the most part, as theory would have it, but periodically go bonkers. Having one framework to accommodate both realities is useful. James Surowiecki wrote about such an approach in 2004. Riffing on Mackay’s madness of crowds, Surowiecki called his book, The Wisdom of Crowds. He showed that crowds can be remarkably accurate in reflecting objective values or outcomes. Indeed, the prices generated by collectives commonly converge on the proper theoretical price in experimental settings…(More)”
Paper by Weston Anderson et al: “Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods offer substantial promise for monitoring and predicting acute food insecurity when paired with domain experts as part of a trusted and accountable system. However, using AI/ML-based methods may cause costly, dangerous mistakes if implemented uncritically. Funding for humanitarian aid has been drastically cut, putting tremendous pressure on food security early warning systems to use AI as a means of cutting costs. In this Comment, we outline where AI/ML methods offer promise to make early warning systems more adaptable and effective as well as where the use of AI/ML is ill advised. We recommend that AI/ML be used to improve monitoring and forecast models in the data-rich portions of food security early warning systems, such as those that rely on climate models and remote sensing. Where data are irregular and sources are varied, AI/ML should instead be used to improve the accessibility and timeliness of socioeconomic data collation. AI can augment food security analyst capabilities, but an analyst is needed to maintain clear systems of accountability and review for all issued forecasts…(More)”