Book by Paulina Rowińska: “Why are coastlines and borders so difficult to measure? How does a UPS driver deliver hundreds of packages in a single day? And where do elusive serial killers hide? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and math. In Mapmatics, mathematician Paulina Rowińska leads us on a riveting journey around the globe to discover how maps and math are deeply entwined, and always have been. From a sixteenth-century map, an indispensable navigation tool that exaggerates the size of northern countries, to public transport maps that both guide and confound passengers, to congressional maps... (More >)
Orphan Articles: The Dark Matter of Wikipedia
Paper by Akhil Arora, Robert West, Martin Gerlach: “With 60M articles in more than 300 language versions, Wikipedia is the largest platform for open and freely accessible knowledge. While the available content has been growing continuously at a rate of around 200K new articles each month, very little attention has been paid to the accessibility of the content. One crucial aspect of accessibility is the integration of hyperlinks into the network so the articles are visible to readers navigating Wikipedia. In order to understand this phenomenon, we conduct the first systematic study of orphan articles, which are articles without... (More >)
Who Owns AI?
Paper by Amy Whitaker: “While artificial intelligence (AI) stands to transform artistic practice and creative industries, little has been theorized about who owns AI for creative work. Lawsuits brought against AI companies such as OpenAI and Meta under copyright law invite novel reconsideration of the value of creative work. This paper synthesizes across copyright, hybrid practice, and cooperative governance to work toward collective ownership and decision-making. This paper adds to research in arts entrepreneurship because copyright and shared value is so vital to the livelihood of working artists, including writers, filmmakers, and others in the creative industries. Sarah Silverman’s... (More >)
‘Evidence banks’ can drive better decisions in public life
Article by Anjana Ahuja: “Modern life is full of urgent questions to which governments should be seeking answers. Does working from home — WFH — damage productivity? Do LTNs (low-traffic neighbourhoods) cut air pollution? Are policy ideas that can be summed up in three-letter acronyms more palatable to the public than those, say Ulez, requiring four? That last one is tongue-in-cheek — but the point stands. While clinical trials can tell us reasonably confidently whether a drug or treatment works, a similar culture of evaluation is generally lacking for other types of intervention, such as crime prevention. Now research... (More >)
Challenging the neutrality myth in climate science and activism
Article by Christel W. van Eck, Lydia Messling & Katharine Hayhoe: “The myth of a scientist as a purely rational thinker, a “brain in a jar” devoid of emotions and values, still exists in some scientific circles. However, philosophers of science have long shown that it is a fundamental misconception to believe that science can be entirely free of social, political, and ethical values, and function as a neutral entity. As Lynda Walsh explains compellingly in “Scientists as Prophets,” the question of how scientists ought to engage with society is a value judgement itself3. This is particularly true in... (More >)
Citizen scientists will be needed to meet global water quality goals
University College London: “Sustainable development goals for water quality will not be met without the involvement of citizen scientists, argues an international team led by a UCL researcher, in a new policy brief. The policy brief and attached technical brief are published by Earthwatch Europe on behalf of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)-coordinated World Water Quality Alliance that has supported citizen science projects in Kenya, Tanzania and Sierra Leone. The reports detail how policymakers can learn from examples where citizen scientists (non-professionals engaged in the scientific process, such as by collecting data) are already making valuable contributions. The... (More >)
The Unaccountability Machine — why do big systems make bad decisions?
FT Review of book by Dan Davies: “The starting point of Davies’ entertaining, insightful book is that the uncontrolled proliferation of accountability sinks is one of the central drivers of what historian Adam Tooze calls the “polycrisis” of the 21st century. Their influence reaches far beyond frustrated customers endlessly on hold to “computer says no” service departments. In finance, banking crises regularly recur — yet few individual bankers are found at fault. If politicians’ promises flop, they complain they have no power; the Deep State is somehow to blame. The origin of the problem, Davies argues, is the managerial... (More >)
Scientists around the world call to protect research on one of humanity’s greatest short-term threats – Disinformation
Forum on Democracy and Information: “At a critical time for understanding digital communications’ impact on societies, research on disinformation is endangered. In August, researchers around the world bid farewell to CrowdTangle – the Meta-owned social media monitoring tool. The decision by Meta to close the number one platform used to track mis- and disinformation, in what is a major election year, only to present its alternative tool Meta Content Library and API, has been met with a barrage of criticism. If, as suggested by the World Economic Forum’s 2024 global risk report, disinformation is one of the biggest short-term... (More >)
AI-enhanced collective intelligence
Paper by Hao Cui and Taha Yasseri: “Current societal challenges exceed the capacity of humans operating either alone or collectively. As AI evolves, its role within human collectives will vary from an assistive tool to a participatory member. Humans and AI possess complementary capabilities that, together, can surpass the collective intelligence of either humans or AI in isolation. However, the interactions in humanAI systems are inherently complex, involving intricate processes and interdependencies. This review incorporates perspectives from complex network science to conceptualize a multilayer representation of human-AI collective intelligence, comprising cognition, physical, and information layers. Within this multilayer network,... (More >)
Unlocking AI for All: The Case for Public Data Banks
Article by Kevin Frazier: “The data relied on by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other artificial intelligence (AI) developers is not readily available to other AI labs. Google and Meta relied, in part, on data gathered from their own products to train and fine-tune their models. OpenAI used tactics to acquire data that now would not work or may be more likely to be found in violation of the law (whether such tactics violated the law when originally used by OpenAI is being worked out in the courts). Upstart labs as well as research outfits find themselves with a dearth... (More >)
