Why is it so hard to establish the death toll?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Smriti Mallapaty: “Given the uncertainty of counting fatalities during conflict, researchers use other ways to estimate mortality.

One common method uses household surveys, says Debarati Guha-Sapir, an epidemiologist who specializes in civil conflicts at the University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and is based in Brussels. A sample of the population is asked how many people in their family have died over a specific period of time. This approach has been used to count deaths in conflicts elsewhere, including in Iraq3 and the Central African Republic4.

The situation in Gaza right now is not conducive to a survey, given the level of movement and displacement, say researchers. And it would be irresponsible to send data collectors into an active conflict and put their lives at risk, says Ball.

There are also ethical concerns around intruding on people who lack basic access to food and medication to ask about deaths in their families, says Jamaluddine. Surveys will have to wait for the conflict to end and movement to ease, say researchers.

Another approach is to compare multiple independent lists of fatalities and calculate mortality from the overlap between them. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group used this approach to estimate the number of people killed in Syria between 2011 and 2014. Jamaluddine hopes to use the ministry fatality data in conjunction with those posted on social media by several informal groups to estimate mortality in this way. But Guha-Sapir says this method relies on the population being stable and not moving around, which is often not the case in conflict-affected communities.

In addition to deaths immediately caused by the violence, some civilians die of the spread of infectious diseases, starvation or lack of access to health care. In February, Jamaluddine and her colleagues used modelling to make projections of excess deaths due to the war and found that, in a continued scenario of six months of escalated conflict, 68,650 people could die from traumatic injuries, 2,680 from non-communicable diseases such as cancer and 2,720 from infectious diseases — along with thousands more if an epidemic were to break out. On 30 July, the ministry declared a polio epidemic in Gaza after detecting the virus in sewage samples, and in mid-August it confirmed the first case of polio in 25 years, in a 10-month-old baby…

The longer the conflict continues, the harder it will be to get reliable estimates, because “reports by survivors get worse as time goes by”, says Jon Pedersen, a demographer at !Mikro in Oslo, who advises international agencies on mortality estimates…(More)”.

Germany’s botched data revamp leaves economists ‘flying blind’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Olaf Storbeck: “Germany’s statistical office has suspended some of its most important indicators after botching a data update, leaving citizens and economists in the dark at a time when the country is trying to boost flagging growth.

In a nation once famed for its punctuality and reliability, even its notoriously diligent beancounters have become part of a growing perception that “nothing works any more” as Germans moan about delayed trains, derelict roads and bridges, and widespread staff shortages.

“There used to be certain aspects in life that you could just rely on, and the fact that official statistics are published on time was one of them — not any more,” said Jörg Krämer, chief economist of Commerzbank, adding that the suspended data was also closely watched by monetary policymakers and investors.

Since May the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) has not updated time-series data for retail and wholesale sales, as well as revenue from the services sector, hospitality, car dealers and garages.

These indicators, which are published monthly and adjusted for seasonal changes, are a key component of GDP and crucial for assessing consumer demand in the EU’s largest economy.

Private consumption accounted for 52.7 per cent of German output in 2023. Retail sales made up 28 per cent of private consumption but shrank 3.4 per cent from a year earlier. Overall GDP declined 0.3 per cent last year, Destatis said.

The Wiesbaden-based authority, which was established in 1948, said the outages had been caused by IT issues and a complex methodological change in EU business statistics in a bid to boost accuracy.

Destatis has been working on the project since the EU directive in 2019, and the deadline for implementing the changes is December.

But a series of glitches, data issues and IT delays meant Destatis has been unable to publish retail sales and other services data for four months.

A key complication is that the revenues of companies that operate in both services and manufacturing will now be reported differently for each sector. In the past, all revenue was treated as either services or manufacturing, depending on which unit was bigger…(More)”

Synthetic Data and Social Science Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jordan C. Stanley & Evan S. Totty: “Synthetic microdata – data retaining the structure of original microdata while replacing original values with modeled values for the sake of privacy – presents an opportunity to increase access to useful microdata for data users while meeting the privacy and confidentiality requirements for data providers. Synthetic data could be sufficient for many purposes, but lingering accuracy concerns could be addressed with a validation system through which the data providers run the external researcher’s code on the internal data and share cleared output with the researcher. The U.S. Census Bureau has experience running such systems. In this chapter, we first describe the role of synthetic data within a tiered data access system and the importance of synthetic data accuracy in achieving a viable synthetic data product. Next, we review results from a recent set of empirical analyses we conducted to assess accuracy in the Survey of Income & Program Participation (SIPP) Synthetic Beta (SSB), a Census Bureau product that made linked survey-administrative data publicly available. Given this analysis and our experience working on the SSB project, we conclude with thoughts and questions regarding future implementations of synthetic data with validation…(More)”

Artificial Intelligence as a Catalyzer for Open Government Data Ecosystems: A Typological Theory Approach

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anthony Simonofski et al: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) within digital government has witnessed growing interest as it can improve governance processes and stimulate citizen engagement. Despite the rise of Generative AI, discussions on AI fusion with Open Government Data (OGD) remain limited to specific implementations and scattered across disciplines. Drawing from the synthesis of the literature through a systematic review, this study examines and structures how AI can enrich OGD initiatives. Employing a typological approach, ideal profiles of AI application within the OGD lifecycle are formalized, capturing varied roles across the portal and ecosystems perspectives. The resulting conceptual framework identifies eight ideal types of AI applications for OGD: AI as Portal Curator, Explorer, Linker, and Monitor, and AI as Ecosystem Data Retriever, Connecter, Value Developer and Engager. This theoretical foundation shows the under-investigation of some types and will inform policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in leveraging AI to cultivate OGD ecosystems…(More)”.

Second-Order Agency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Cass Sunstein: “Many people prize agency; they want to make their own choices. Many people also prize second-order agency, by which they decide whether and when to exercise first-order agency. First-order agency can be an extraordinary benefit or an immense burden. When it is an extraordinary benefit, people might reject any kind of interference, or might welcome a nudge, or might seek some kind of boost, designed to increase their capacities. When first-order agency is an immense burden, people might also welcome a nudge or might make some kind of delegation (say, to an employer, a doctor, an algorithm, or a regulator). These points suggests that the line between active choosing and paternalism can be illusory. When private or public institutions override people’s desire not to exercise first-order agency, and thus reject people’s exercise of second-order agency, they are behaving paternalistically, through a form of choice-requiring paternalism. Choice-requiring paternalism may compromise second-order agency. It might not be very nice to do that…(More)”.

Critical Dependencies: How power consolidation of digital infrastructures threatens democracies—and what we can do about it.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Green Web Foundation: “We are at an inflection point in digital infrastructures. There is much conversation about the unprecedented speed and scale of our computational future. Significant investments are being made, especially as part of private and national efforts to “win the AI arms race.” Meanwhile, more data is becoming available about the harms of these systems. No one has perfect knowledge of the situation, and in some instances, information is being intentionally obscured or distorted. Amidst the confusion and scramble, well-resourced players are seizing strategic footholds and advancing their cause. This moment is called the “fog of enactment.”

Some of the wealthiest companies in the world spend billions in lobbying, sponsoring research, obscuring their emissions and building out parallel energy and digital infrastructures to further secure their market positions.

Meanwhile, deliberative democratic processes take time and resources. The public and, at times, democratically elected officials lack access to the data and decision-making about our digital futures. Furthermore, the technical expertise to evaluate these tradeoffs from a public interest perspective is structurally under-resourced.

This report seeks to call out these maneuvers and recommend pathways for funding in the public’s interest with a focus on the energy and climate impacts of digital infrastructures and harms caused by current ownership models. We call for actions that are ambitious, collaborative and intersectional to help redistribute more power to the public interest and to just and sustainable digital futures…(More)”.

Visualizing Ship Movements with AIS Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jon Keegan: “As we run, drive, bike, and fly, humans leave behind telltale tracks of movement on Earth—if you know where to look. Physical tracks, thermal signatures, and chemical traces can reveal where we’ve been. But another type of breadcrumb trail comes from the radio signals emitted by the cars, planes, trains, and boats we use.

Just like ADS-B transmitters on airplanes, which provide real-time location, identification, speed, and orientation data, the AIS (Automatic Identification System) performs the same function for ships at sea.

Operating at 161.975 and 162.025 MHz, AIS transmitters broadcast a ship’s identification number, name, call sign, length, beam, type, and antenna location every six minutes. Ship location, position timestamp, and direction are transmitted more frequently. The primary purpose of AIS is maritime safety—it helps prevent collisions, assists in rescues, and provides insight into the impact of ship traffic on marine life.

Unlike ADS-B in a plane, AIS can only be turned off in rare circumstances. The result of this is a treasure trove of fascinating ship movement data. You can even watch live ship data on sites like Vessel Finder.

Using NOAA’s “Marine Cadastre” tool, you can download 16 years’ worth of detailed daily ship movements (filtered to the minute), in addition to “transit count” maps generated from a year’s worth of data to show each ship’s accumulated paths…(More)”.

Problem-solving matter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by David C Krakauer and Chris Kempes: “What makes computation possible? Seeking answers to that question, a hardware engineer from another planet travels to Earth in the 21st century. After descending through our atmosphere, this extraterrestrial explorer heads to one of our planet’s largest data centres, the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park, 470 kilometres west of Beijing. But computation is not easily discovered in this sprawling mini-city of server farms. Scanning the almost-uncountable transistors inside the Information Park, the visiting engineer might­ be excused for thinking that the answer to their question lies in the primary materials driving computational processes: silicon and metal oxides. After all, since the 1960s, most computational devices have relied on transistors and semiconductors made from these metalloid materials.

If the off-world engineer had visited Earth several decades earlier, before the arrival of metal-oxide transistors and silicon semiconductors, they might have found entirely different answers to their question. In the 1940s, before silicon semiconductors, computation might appear as a property of thermionic valves made from tungsten, molybdenum, quartz and silica – the most important materials used in vacuum tube computers.

And visiting a century earlier, long before the age of modern computing, an alien observer might come to even stranger conclusions. If they had arrived in 1804, the year the Jacquard loom was patented, they might have concluded that early forms of computation emerged from the plant matter and insect excreta used to make the wooden frames, punch cards and silk threads involved in fabric-weaving looms, the analogue precursors to modern programmable machines.

But if the visiting engineer did come to these conclusions, they would be wrong. Computation does not emerge from silicon, tungsten, insect excreta or other materials. It emerges from procedures of reason or logic.

This speculative tale is not only about the struggles of an off-world engineer. It is also an analogy for humanity’s attempts to answer one of our most difficult problems: life. For, just as an alien engineer would struggle to understand computation through materials, so it is with humans studying our distant origins…(More)”.

Data Privacy for Record Linkage and Beyond

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Shurong Lin & Eric Kolaczyk: “In a data-driven world, two prominent research problems are record linkage and data privacy, among others. Record linkage is essential for improving decision-making by integrating information of the same entities from different sources. On the other hand, data privacy research seeks to balance the need to extract accurate insights from data with the imperative to protect the privacy of the entities involved. Inevitably, data privacy issues arise in the context of record linkage. This article identifies two complementary aspects at the intersection of these two fields: (1) how to ensure privacy during record linkage and (2) how to mitigate privacy risks when releasing the analysis results after record linkage. We specifically discuss privacy-preserving record linkage, differentially private regression, and related topics…(More)”.

The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Francis Collins: “As the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, we have become not just a hyper-partisan society but also a deeply cynical one, distrustful of traditional sources of knowledge and wisdom. Skepticism about vaccines led to the needless deaths of at least 230,000 Americans. “Do your own research” is now a rallying cry in many online rabbit holes. Yet experts can make mistakes, and institutions can lose their moral compass. So how can we navigate through all this?

In The Road to Wisdom, Francis Collins reminds us of the four core sources of judgement and clear thinking: truth, science, faith, and trust. Drawing on his work from the Human Genome Project and heading the National Institutes of Health, as well as on ethics, philosophy, and Christian theology, Collins makes a robust, thoughtful case for each of these sources—their reliability, and their limits. Ultimately, he shows how they work together, not separately—and certainly not in conflict. It is only when we relink these four foundations of wisdom that we can begin to discern the best path forward in life.

​Thoughtful, accessible, winsome, and deeply wise, The Road to Wisdom leads us beyond current animosities to surer footing. Here is the moral, philosophical, and scientific framework with which to address the problems of our time—including distrust of public health, partisanship, racism, response to climate change, and threats to our democracy—but also to guide us in our daily lives. This is a book that will repay many readings, and resolve dilemmas that we all face every day…(More)”.