Stefaan Verhulst

News release by Smart Data Research UK: “… launched its new data catalogue at the Digital Footprints Conference, making it easier than ever for researchers to find and access smart datasets from across our six data services.

The catalogue (beta) brings together datasets covering finance, energy, transport, health, imagery and more in one searchable place. Researchers can filter by data type, theme, and access conditions, then follow direct links to access the data.

Featured datasets include Zoopla property rental listings, synthetic electric vehicle charging session data, and Spend Dynamics — microdata on household expenditure and consumer finances. Search the catalogue…(More)”.

Article by Krzysztof Pelc: “We are good at predicting what machines will do better; we are far worse at predicting what people will value differently once that happens. Yet the history of technological disruption suggests a fairly consistent pattern: when one property becomes abundant, perceived value migrates elsewhere. The Arts and Crafts aesthetic thus rose up as a challenge to factory production. Similarly, despite quartz watches making accuracy trivial by the 1970 s, mechanical watches once more dominate the global market by value (Raffaelli 2019). Technological shocks alter not only the goods on offer, but also the basis by which those goods are evaluated. What had seemed central is downgraded; what had been incidental becomes precious.

The direction of this change is invariably towards the human—not out of sentiment, but because in the wake of technological shocks, it is the human aspect that grows distinctive. The advent of large language models (LLMs) is beginning to have a similar effect on all writing. LLMs make verbal fluency cheap, they make competent prose abundant. As that happens, the old premium on flowing prose will weaken. If smoothness can be summoned on demand, smoothness no longer distinguishes. The scarce good will no longer be fluency, but provenance: whether a text can be traced to a particular human sensibility, lived experience, and intention. Call it the flight-to-humanity effect.

Usually, this revaluation works to the humans’ advantage. It’s the phenomenon that protects the radiologist, the craftsperson, the live performer, once their core output is superseded by machines. But writing will likely be an exception.

The problem is that writing is peculiarly ill-suited to certifying its own origins. In most domains, human provenance remains legible in the thing itself. A handmade bowl can bear the mark of its maker; a performer is present in the act; a physician’s judgment is tied to the physical person and their credentials. Writing is different. It arrives as a finished product, stripped of the conditions of its making. The reader sees the result, but not the process that produced it. Novels, essays, love notes, wedding speeches: none carry intrinsic evidence of authorship. This is not simply a practical difficulty. It’s a property of writing itself. And it’s what means that suspicion, once introduced, extends to every text alike…(More)”.

Review by Blanton Alspaugh: ““Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?”

Bumper-sticker theology poses the question. Paul Kingsnorth offers an answer in his prophetically pitched new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. Kingsnorth, a British philosopher and author living in the west of Ireland, joins a line of trenchant predecessors ranging from Paul the Apostle and G.K. Chesterton to René Guénon and Jacques Ellul. With an unflinching look at what we have made of the world, he sees “a machine made of human parts,” as Lewis Mumford characterized it. The Machine is the implacable, disembodied culmination of humanity’s fatal craving for knowledge and power. It respects no boundaries and obeys no law but its own. It advances more rapidly than our ability to manage it. Its origin is spiritual, and its consequences are eschatological. And Kingsnorth believes we must find a way to resist it.

As Kingsnorth has it, the West and Christendom are synonymous, and we are living through their death. But these terms are contested. “The West” for liberals is the Enlightenment and all that proceeded from it—“parliamentary democracy, human rights, individualism, freedom of speech.” For conservatives, it is a blend of cultural values—the traditions of “family life, religion and national identity, and…capitalist economics.” And for postmodern leftists, the West is little more than “a front for colonization, empire, racism.” As for Christendom, we may stipulate that it has often been very un-Christian, but it has still, as Christopher Dawson explained, been “the Christian Church, which provided an effective principle of social unity.” Unmoored from the sacred order, we live now among what Kingsnorth calls the “beautiful ruins” of Christendom.

Kingsnorth places the origin of the Machine in the biblical Fall, when we first saw something to be desired but were forbidden to take it. We took it anyway, and Kingsnorth makes a strong case that the Machine is in fact our ongoing project to become like gods. It is the accumulation of our efforts to transcend all boundaries, push past all limits, and overturn all traditions. The logic of the Machine is growth for its own sake; control and efficiency are its primal impulses; and the only value it recognizes is money, the market, Mammon. Money is how we obtain what we want, and the ceaseless stream of things to want is what the Machine uses to ensnare us. But, cosmically speaking, this money is play money—we are born with none, and we take none with us when we die. The true cost of obtaining what we want—going right back to that forbidden fruit in the Garden—is alienation, disenchantment, and dehumanization…(More)”.

Article by Ananya Bhattacharya: “Last month, South Africa withdrew its Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy 17 days after it was published because the document cited fake research, created by AI.

The incident tarnished a historic moment, as South Africa was set to become the first African nation to adopt a policy establishing a formal ethics board to oversee AI outside the West. “The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification,” Solly Malatsi, South Africa’s minister of communications and digital technologies, wrote in a statement. “There will be consequence management for those responsible for drafting and quality assurance.”

This is the first time a government has withdrawn a document over AI hallucinations, but certainly not the first time AI hallucinations have appeared in official materials. AI-generated text or citations have slipped into official or quasi-official documents several times, raising concerns about accountability and highlighting the need for human verification…(More)”.

Paper by Scott A. Brave, Erin E. Crust, Stefano Eusepi, Bart Hobijn & Ayşegül Şahin: “Interpreting real-time labor market conditions is challenging because commonly used indicators are noisy, revised over time, and often send conflicting signals. In practice, policymakers and market participants describe labor market developments using a shared narrative language centered on labor demand, labor supply, and matching frictions. In this paper, we show that empirical measures of these narrative concepts can be recovered from latent factors that summarize the joint movements of a broad set of high-frequency U.S. labor-market indicators. We use ninety-four labor-market indicators, over the period from 1960 to 2026, and construct measures for labor demand, long-run labor supply, short-run labor supply, and matching efficiency by selecting the factors that satisfy a limited set of restrictions on how underlying forces map into observed data. We find that labor demand and short-run labor supply account for most of the common variation in labor-market indicators. Our results also show that assigning narrow interpretations to individual indicators can lead to misleading conclusions about underlying labor market conditions. Applying the framework to the post-pandemic period reveals that although labor demand recovered briskly after the acute phase of the pandemic, it cannot account for the large rise in vacancies and quits. Instead, movements in short-run labor supply and matching efficiency play a central role. We also show that the “soft-landing” episode from 2023 through 2025 was characterized by a joint decline in labor demand and short-run labor supply, which slowed payroll growth while generating only a moderate increase in the unemployment rate…(More)“.

Article by Sara Radin: “For years, the internet sold us the idea that connection doesn’t have to be local to be meaningful. Your people could live anywhere: in a Discord server, a group chat of far-flung friends, or a TikTok comment section. Geography was optional.

Now, more people are turning toward the ones physically closest to them: the neighbor down the block, the parent from the playground, the person whose wifi shows up in your network list. It’s not just about wanting connection; folks are looking for support. Childcare is expensive. Rent and groceries are high. Climate emergencies are more frequent. For many Americans, the difference between stability and crisis comes down to whether someone nearby can help.

Call it neighborism: the growing practice of treating proximity as a resource. Increasingly, digital tools aren’t replacing local relationships — they’re helping activate them.

Sometimes it looks small: introducing yourself to the people on your floor, starting a group chat for your building or block, sharing babysitters, watering a neighbor’s plants. But it can also look overtly political.

In Minneapolis, community responses to ICE activity blurred the line between everyday care and organized resistance. As federal immigration enforcement ramped up this winter, residents organized patrols, filmed arrests, shared alerts, and trained one another to document potential abuses. What emerged was something bigger than “borrow a cup of sugar” friendliness. It was infrastructure: informal, fast-moving, and built on trust. And what happened there isn’t an outlier; it’s a large-scale example of a broader shift already underway.

Getting to know your neighbors isn’t new, but its visibility is. After decades of isolation and a slow drift toward digital, long-distance connection, people are embracing an old-fashioned idea: Communities function best when people feel responsible for one another…(More)”.

Editorial to Special Issue: “Manuel Pérez-Troncoso, Katrina L. Bledsoe, Karen Peterman, Theresa N. Melton, and Rodney K. Hopson: “…People-centered approaches challenge evaluators to “walk the talk” of culturally responsive, equitable, and socially just practices by expanding the role of evaluation in service to society. This means not only studying with communities but also giving back, investing in, and standing side by side with them (Bledsoe 2021, 2014). Similar to many efforts working across multiple sectors, people-centered approaches often take place in communities shaped by a history of colonialism, discrimination, and marginalization, which continues to influence life, opportunity, and culture on a daily basis. Researchers and evaluators must strive to build authentic, collaborative relationships with participants to understand and help tell the story of how they are affected by the programs we work with. We must integrate and prioritize culture, local context, and community perspectives in all aspects of program and evaluation design, implementation, and use.

This issue identifies three key dimensions that differentiate People-Centered Evaluation (PCE) from program-centered evaluation, as outlined in Table 1: Full humanity (the evaluator’s positionality and axiology); prioritizing relationships (investment in relationships vs. extraction); and community engagement (pursues open vs. selective access). These dimensions reflect a relational worldview: ontologically, reality is understood as co-constructed through relationships and contexts; epistemologically, knowledge emerges through dialogue, participation, and lived experience; and methodologically, evaluation practices adapt to community-defined meanings and purposes (Mertens et al. 2025). We contend that evaluation feels and functions differently when it is prioritized using the people-centered distinctions in Table 1. We challenge readers to consider the following: In what ways would your evaluation practice look different if you began a new project with the intention of being an agent of social change versus a distant observer? In what ways would your evaluation practice look different if you began a new project with the intention of fostering and strengthening relationships with community members rather than focusing on creating a context for gathering data? In what ways would your evaluation theories, processes, and communication strategies differ if you prioritized and centered authentic community engagement?TABLE 1. Differences between program-centered evaluation and people-centered evaluation.

This issue aims to push the boundaries of evaluation by focusing on both theoretical advances and practical applications of people-centered approaches, based upon those that are culturally-responsive, indigenous, and equity-driven approaches…(More)”.

Article by Alex Pasternack: “On March 2, two days into the United States and Israel’s air campaign against Iran, CNN published imagery showing a still-smoking operations center at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait, where six American service members had just been killed by an Iranian drone—before the Pentagon had provided details of the strike, including the full death toll. A day later, the New York Times offered a preliminary rundown of damage to US military sites across the Gulf. In the following days, multiple outlets showed that a strike on an elementary school that killed 175 people had likely been carried out by the US—an apparent mistake, which the Pentagon initially disputed. Amid a cascade of restrictions and conflicting narratives, all of these reports relied on a cornerstone of open-source intelligence: commercial satellite imagery, much of it from a single vendor called Planet Labs. 

Then, on March 6, the flow of pictures began slowing to a crawl. Planet Labs, a San Francisco–based company that operates more than two hundred satellites capable of photographing most of Earth’s landmass once per day—an unparalleled frequency among commercial satellites—announced a four-day hold on “all new imagery collected over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones.” On March 11, Planet, as the firm is known, told customers the delay would be extended to fourteen days and expanded to include “all of Iran and nearby allied bases, in addition to the Gulf States and existing conflict zones.” Planet said it had made the decision through discussions with experts inside and outside of the government about preventing images from being “tactically leveraged by adversarial actors to target allied and NATO-partner personnel and civilians”—in other words, out of fear that Iran might use them to target the US and its allies in the Middle East.

On April 4, Planet’s stop in service became indefinite—imagery feeds would be halted, retroactive to March 8, local time. (Many outlets reported that the last available images would be from March 9.) “Due to the conflict in the Middle East, the U.S. government has requested all satellite imagery providers voluntarily implement an indefinite withhold of imagery in the designated Area of Interest,” the company told customers in an email, the text of which was provided to CJR by a spokesperson. Going forward, Planet said, it would release imagery on a case-by-case basis and for “urgent, mission-critical requirements or in the public interest.” A spokesperson told me that “this model is in line with the media policies of other remote-sensing companies.”..(More)”.

Paper by Ana Dodik and Moira Weigel: “We put forth a critical theoretical framework for analyzing generative models both descriptively and normatively. Our thesis is that generative models automate the production not only of intellectual labor or intelligence, but of a broader set of human social capacities we name “social doing.” We do this by historicizing the commodification of sociality in the digital economy, leading to the availability of social data as the precondition for generative models. We elaborate our definition of “social doing” by drawing a distinction between “use” and “exchange” sociality and further differentiate between the ways that generative models either substitute for or mediate existing social relations and processes. We then turn to existing empirical research on how people use generative model-based products and the effects that their use has upon them. In this, we introduce the concept of Synthetic Sociality, a social reality in part fabricated by Silicon Valley’s privately owned and undemocratically governed generative models. Lastly, we offer a normative analysis based on our findings and framework, and discuss future design opportunities…(More)”.

Article by Democracy Without Borders: “More than two thirds of people worldwide say it is very important to have democracy in their country, while respondents in most countries identify improving living standards and well-being as democracy’s main purpose, according to the Democracy Perception Index 2026. The survey also found widespread pessimism about the national direction many individual countries were taking, especially in democracies and in Europe.

The annual survey, released by Nira Data in collaboration with the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, is based on interviews with more than 94,000 respondents in 98 countries, representing more than 90 percent of the world’s population.

“What we see is not declining demand, but rising expectations: citizens are looking for systems that deliver security, stability, and economic progress. This growing disconnect between democratic ideals and lived reality is a defining challenge for leaders today”, Nira Data’s CEO Nico Jaspers noted in the survey report’s foreword.

Almost everywhere, majorities consider democracy either extremely or very important

In almost every country included in the poll, a majority said democracy was either “extremely” or “very” important. Support was highest in Greece, Hungary and Sweden, and lowest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. At the same time, more respondents said their country was moving in the wrong direction. The report finds that pessimism is especially pronounced in democracies. France, Germany, Lebanon, Puerto Rico and Nigeria were among the countries where responses on national direction were most negative. China recorded the most positive responses, followed by El Salvador, Kuwait, Algeria and Belarus.

Asked about the main purpose of democracy, respondents in most countries prioritized material and social outcomes. Improving living standards and well-being was the top answer in 62 percent of the countries surveyed. Promoting a fair and peaceful society was the leading answer in 18 percent of countries, freely choosing the government in 10 percent, and protecting individual rights and freedoms in 9 percent…(More)”.