Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Amirmohammad Ghavimi: “Collective memory—closely related to, yet distinct from, social memory—plays a significant role in guiding the sustainable transition of cities. Multiple qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods have been employed to investigate collective memory; however, there remains a need to spatially map it for each city to provide decision-makers with a clear, quantitative guide. Such mapping can help preserve and strengthen a city’s collective memory, thereby informing future urban development. This study examines the urban dimension of collective memory—collective urban memory (CUM)—by mapping its tangible, physical aspects through a facilitated Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) approach within a citizen science framework. Due to challenges in encouraging public use of the mobile GIS application QField, we adopted a facilitated PPGIS approach, whereby trained interviewers assisted participants in the data collection process. Results from Oldenburg, Germany, identified several significant urban locations that play key roles in the city’s CUM. Notably, certain places are mentioned disproportionately by different age groups, while a common core set of tangible landmarks emerges across the population. These findings highlight the value of mapping CUM to support culturally sensitive and sustainable city planning…(More)”.
Paper by Zachary Catanzaro: “Judges now consult ChatGPT about what statutes mean. The scholarly response treats this as a reliability problem. Reliability is beside the point. LLMs generate text by predicting probable token sequences, manipulating symbols without accessing what those symbols mean. But syntax cannot generate semantics. Computational legal interpretation does not fail because the technology is immature. It fails because it is a category error. A theory that fixes meaning in historical usage and treats interpretation as empirical recovery cannot resist algorithms that measure historical usage patterns. The progression from dictionaries to corpus databases to generative models follows originalism’s empirical commitments to their logical end. AI-generated content saturates the corpora on which future models train, and the resulting degradation eliminates marginal claims first; those upon which life and liberty depend. Computational methods did not contaminate originalist interpretation. Originalism was already a jurisprudence that simulated meaning while discarding the semantic content that interpretation requires. The machines simply made the method hyperreal…(More)”.
Chapter by Maria Michali, Amalia Kallergi, Eva Paraschou, Laurens Landeweerd, Steffi Friedrichs, Athina Vakali & George Gaskell: “…examines three historical case studies: (1) ‘genetic modification to genome editing’; (2) ‘controversies over climate science’, and (3) ‘artificial intelligence in social media’. On this basis it develops an understanding of how public trust and confidence in science, technology, and innovation (STI) can be gained, maintained, or lost. This leads to practical recommendations for ethical and societally sustainable STI. There are both intuitive and evidenced warrants for trust in science. Intuitive warrants arise when innovation creates an immediate sense of familiarity, making the future feel like a natural continuation of the past. Evidenced warrants occur when science generates new insights or produces technologies that benefit individuals or society. However, trust in science may be undermined by scientific fraud, the dismissal of public concerns about innovations that challenge societal values, and the populist rejection of science, often accompanied by conspiracy theories. Building and maintaining public trust in STI is a multifaceted challenge that requires coordinated efforts from scientists, research institutions, funding bodies, regulators, and democratic governance processes. A commitment to transparency, proactive engagement with public concerns, risk assessment and mitigation, responsible communication, and strong regulatory frameworks is essential for navigating the complexities of technological advancement and ensuring public trust…(More)”.
Report by Data Quality Campaign: “Statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDSs) have enormous potential to be used to improve education and workforce outcomes, but not every system is designed to work in the same way. Even two “good” SLDSs may not look the same because they can be designed with different goals, or functions, in mind: public reports and dashboards, research and analytics, and support for individuals. All three functions are essential and address different people’s data access needs. Each function requires different considerations for infrastructure, data governance, legal frameworks, and ongoing investments.
This brief explores how policymakers can purposefully shape the design of their state’s SLDS to effectively support any or all of the three functions. When a system’s function is aligned with the intended users, required infrastructure, appropriate governance structure, and intended data uses, the system can effectively enable access to data that people need to make education and workforce decisions…(More)”.
Article by Vivian Liu: “A group of teenagers is standing in front of a room of residents, government officials, and organizations. They are presenting findings from data they helped to collect. Their work speaks to urgent challenges in their communities, including displacement, air pollution, extreme heat, and lack of community spaces. For some of the teenagers, this is their first experience collecting data and contributing to solutions in their own communities.
Engaging teenagers and young adults in data collection, analysis, and dissemination improves the quality of the results, provides better information for policy and program responses, and supports the next generation of leaders.
In this fifth blog post in our Equity in Action series, we explore how four local organizations that received grants from the Local Data for Equitable Communities program are training and partnering with youth to be the voices shaping community-informed solutions…(More)”.
Paper by Seth Lazar & Lorenzo Manuali: “LLMs are among the most advanced tools ever devised for understanding and generating natural language. Democratic deliberation and decision-making involve, at several distinct stages, the production and comprehension of language. So it is natural to ask whether our best linguistic tools might prove instrumental to one of our most important linguistic tasks involving language. Researchers and practitioners have recently asked whether LLMs can support democratic deliberation by leveraging abilities to summarise content, to aggregate opinions over summarised content, and to represent voters by predicting their preferences over unseen choices. In this paper, we assess whether using LLMs to perform these and related functions really advances the democratic values behind these experiments. We suggest that the record is mixed. In the presence of background inequality of power and resources, as well as deep moral and political disagreement, we should not use LLMs to automate non-instrumentally valuable components of the democratic process, nor should we be tempted to supplant fair and transparent decision-making procedures that are practically necessary to reconcile competing interests and values. However, while LLMs should be kept well clear of formal democratic decision-making processes, we think they can instead strengthen the informal public sphere—the arena that mediates between democratic governments and the polities that they serve, in which political communities seek information, form civic publics, and hold their leaders to account…(More)”
Article by Guglielmo Gnoni et al: “Europe is more reliant than ever on digital services and the infrastructure that fuels them. A prolonged systemic failure would trigger a cascade of crises: cities losing power, emergency services overwhelmed, and financial disruption.Although operators skillfully manage short-term outages and networks are built to be redundant at the core, Europe’s data infrastructure remains fragile.
Infrastructure providers, investors, and policymakers can coordinate various efforts to safeguard society from the impact of a prolonged outage, especially in a time of rising geopolitical tension.
In this article, we have used EU and industry data to model how European infrastructure would degrade in a major outage—from inconvenience in the first few hours to a systematic breakdown as the outage extends for days. We also illustrate how disruption on this scale is worryingly possible. For example, some subsea cables connecting nations to the global economy lack monitoring where they come onshore.
This “resilience gap” between Europe’s reliance on digital infrastructure and the technology’s ability to operate under stress—whether caused by human action or technical accident—is hard to close. Europe’s digital ecosystem is complex, spanning regulated national telcos and distant tech giants in Silicon Valley, India, and China. Nevertheless, Europe can go further and faster than current initiatives. Our analysis helps define the priorities for urgent action. Digital infrastructure operators, investors, and governments all have a role to play in a concerted effort to avoid prolonged outages with disastrous impact…(More)”.
About: “Stalled progress on many of the most pressing challenges facing our nation stems not from failure of will, but from pervasive stasis in government. There is an increasingly obvious mismatch between “wicked” modern problems and the aging institutions and regulatory strategies we rely on to solve them. Public trust in government is in the basement as a result.
The FAS Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) is building a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that achieves ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic, everyday needs. CRI does this by (1) by creating high-trust environments to brainstorm and refine the big ideas that will breathe new life into government institutions and intersecting democratic feedback loops, and (2) building a “network of networks” that supports policymakers and practitioners in implementing those ideas at scale.
CRI’s initial focus is on climate policy: a space where mismatches between the tools we have and tools we need are particularly apparent. Foundational environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were designed to curb industrial pollution, not guide the society-wide economic transition to clean technologies that’s underway, and the systems for democratic participation and government capacity are equally out of sync with our most pressing needs and opportunities.
Successfully navigating this transition means seriously considering how we can update 20th century laws for a 21st century world, better coupling regulatory and non-regulatory approaches, and focusing on solutions that can deliver near-term benefits while building momentum for more ambitious national reforms.
CRI is bringing the climate and state capacity communities together to do just that. The last thing we need in the face of big challenges is stasis. It’s time to move boldly towards a government Americans trust to deliver…(More)”.
Book by Gerald Zaltman: “…presents six techniques to tap into the creative power of the unconscious: serious playfulness, befriending ignorance, asking the right discovery questions, chasing your curiosity, panoramic thinking, and using the “voyager outlook.” These research-based techniques improve decision-making and go beyond the existing literature on “thinking smarter.” This book’s insights emerge from a large number of one-on-one in-depth interviews with senior leaders around the globe, reinforced with research findings from scientific literatures.
Mirroring Zaltman’s Harvard Business School classroom practice, each chapter opens with a practical-thinking exercise that helps readers surface the mental processes and biases that unconsciously close minds and constrict thinking. This creative surfacing is the crucial foundation for any leader operating in a complex, uncertain environment, who needs unconventional solutions to challenging problems…(More)”.
Essay by Julien Lie-Panis: “Every human society, from the smallest village to the largest nation, faces the same fundamental challenge: how to get people to act in the interests of the collective rather than their own. Fishermen must limit their catch so fish stocks don’t collapse. People must respect others’ property and safety. Citizens must pay taxes to fund roads, schools and hospitals. Left to pure self-interest, no community could endure; the bonds of collective life would quickly unravel.
The solutions we’ve devised are remarkably similar across cultures and centuries. We create rules. Then we appoint guardians to enforce them. Those who break the rules are punished. But there’s a problem with this approach, one that the Roman poet Juvenal identified nearly 2,000 years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves?
Fisheries appoint monitors to prevent overfishing – but what if the monitors accept bribes to look the other way? Police officers exist to protect everyone’s property and safety – but who ensures that they don’t abuse their power? Governments collect taxes for public services – but how do we stop officials from diverting the funds to their own accounts?
Every institution faces the same fundamental paradox. Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation problem – we’ve simply moved it back one step. So why do institutions work at all? To understand this puzzle, we need to first ask what makes human cooperation so extraordinary in the natural world.
Cooperation is everywhere in nature. Walk through any forest, peer into any tide pool, observe any meadow, and you’ll witness countless partnerships that seem to defy the brutal logic of natural selection. Far from being mysterious, these alliances follow predictable patterns that evolutionary biologists have come to understand well. A handful of basic mechanisms explain cooperation from ant colonies to coral reefs: kinship, reciprocity and reputation…(More)”.