Paper by Amar Bhide: “Governments and universities are pouring money into more ‘practical’ research – ‘translational’ medicine and ‘evidence-based’ policies in education, public health and economic development, for instance. But just translating or applying science rarely produces practical advances – and an inflexible adherence to the methods of natural or social scientists can do more harm than good. Instead, I propose a general approach – and specific research topics – to advance practical knowledge and study its distinctive contemporary nature….(More)”
Gendering Smart Mobilities
Book edited by Tanu Priya Uteng, Hilda Rømer Christensen, and Lena Levin: “This book considers gender perspectives on the ‘smart’ turn in urban and transport planning to effectively provide ‘mobility for all’ while simultaneously attending to the goal of creating green and inclusive cities. It deals with the conceptualisation, design, planning, and execution of the fast-emerging ‘smart’ solutions.
The volume questions the efficacy of transformations being brought by smart solutions and highlights the need for a more robust problem formulation to guide the design of smart solutions, and further maps out the need for stronger governance to manage the introduction and proliferation of smart technologies. Authors from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have contributed to this book, designed to converse with mobility studies, transport studies, urban-transport planning, engineering, human geography, sociology, gender studies, and other related fields.
The book fills a substantive gap in the current gender and mobility discourses, and will thus appeal to students and researchers studying mobilities in the social, political, design, technical, and environmental sciences….(More)”.
Governing the Plural City
Introduction by Ash Amin: “….More than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and this figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. World affairs and city affairs have become deeply enmeshed, and what goes on within cities – their economic productivity, environmental footprint, cultural practices, social wellbeing, and political stability – affects the world at large. They shape the weather and are the weathervane of our times, so getting them right matters. But what this involves and how far it is within reach is by no means clear….
Thus, while the international policy community may confidently call for cities to be made ‘inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ in the way headlined in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it tends to underestimate the challenges of achieving traction in a distributed, plural and often hidden force field. A number of pressing questions arise. Should state effort focus on comprehensive master plans and general infrastructures and services, or on strategic risks and vulnerabilities, while coordinating risks? What are the limits and limitations of state action, and how is the balance between the general and the specific or the communal
and sectionalist to be found? What is the relationship between central authority plans and the communities who are to benefit, and how can neighbourhood knowledge and effort be supported amidst policy neglect or corporatist calculation? Is it possible to reconcile strategic and democratic goals in the twenty first-century city of multiple logics, demands and actors?…(More)”.
Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People
Sendhil Mullainathan in The New York Times: “In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their résumés were about as similar as two résumés can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan.
In a study published this year, two patients sought medical care. Both were grappling with diabetes and high blood pressure. One patient was black, the other was white.
Both studies documented racial injustice: In the first, the applicant with a black-sounding name got fewer job interviews. In the second, the black patient received worse care.
But they differed in one crucial respect. In the first, hiring managers made biased decisions. In the second, the culprit was a computer program.
As a co-author of both studies, I see them as a lesson in contrasts. Side by side, they show the stark differences between two types of bias: human and algorithmic.
Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago, and I conducted the first study: We responded to actual job listings with fictitious résumés, half of which were randomly assigned a distinctively black name.
The study was: “Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?”
The answer: Yes, and by a lot. Simply having a white name increased callbacks for job interviews by 50 percent.
I published the other study in the journal “Science” in late October with my co-authors: Ziad Obermeyer, a professor of health policy at University of California at Berkeley; Brian Powers, a clinical fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Christine Vogeli, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. We focused on an algorithm that is widely used in allocating health care services, and has affected roughly a hundred million people in the United States.
To better target care and provide help, health care systems are turning to voluminous data and elaborately constructed algorithms to identify the sickest patients.
We found these algorithms have a built-in racial bias. At similar levels of sickness, black patients were deemed to be at lower risk than white patients. The magnitude of the distortion was immense: Eliminating the algorithmic bias would more than double the number of black patients who would receive extra help. The problem lay in a subtle engineering choice: to measure “sickness,” they used the most readily available data, health care expenditures. But because society spends less on black patients than equally sick white ones, the algorithm understated the black patients’ true needs.
One difference between these studies is the work needed to uncover bias…(More)”.
Coping with societal challenges: Lessons for innovation policy governance
Paper by Jan Fagerberg & Gernot Hutschenreiter: “Grand societal challenges, such as global warming, can only be adequately dealt with through wide-ranging changes in technology, production and consumption, and ways of life, that is, through innovation. Furthermore, change will involve a variety of sectors or parts of the economy and society, and these change processes must be sufficiently consistent in order to achieve the desired results. This poses huge challenges for policy-making.
In this paper we focus on implications for the governance of innovation policy, i.e., policies influencing a country’s innovation performance. Based on a systemic understanding of innovation and the factors shaping it, the paper highlights the need for effective coordination of policies influencing innovation and what changes in innovation policy governance this may require. To throw further light on how this may be realised the paper discusses evidence on national innovation policy practice, from Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, respectively, drawing on the country reviews of innovation policy conducted by the OECD as well as other sources. It is concluded that for innovation policy to tackle societal challenges effectively, clearer goals and stronger and better coordination among the various actors – both public and private – whose actions matter for innovation performance will be required. Based on the experiences of the three countries the paper particularly considers the role that comprehensive and inclusive innovation policy councils, with the prime minister in a central role, may play in such a process….(More)”.
Understanding Is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective
Paper by Michael Lissack: “Understanding and cognition are traditionally viewed as philosophical and scientific issues where there is little room for contribution from the design community. This article proposes a radically different approach based on the observation that we live in a world that is more complex than our minds/brains possess the ability to process in its entirety. Our limited equipment forces us to deal with only selected aspects of any given piece of that complex world at each instant. Selection—be it conscious or unconscious—involves agency and choice. Design and design thinking scholars have much to say about how agency and choice can be impacted by still other choices—context, symbols, movement, audience, and so on. Suppose cognition and meaning making were re-cast as design processes? This would highlight the role played by cybernetics—the science of how we learn how to steer—in shaping how we cognitively deal with the world. Together design and cybernetics have much to offer the cognitive sciences….(More)”
Network governance
Book by Naim Kapucu and Qian Hu: “Network governance has received much attention within the fields of public administration and policy in recent years, but surprisingly few books are designed specifically to help students, researchers, and practitioners examine key concepts, synthesize the growing body of literature into reliable frameworks, and to bridge the theory-practice gap by exploring network applications. Network Governance: Theories, Frameworks, and Applications is the first textbook to focus on interorganizational networks and network governance from the perspective of public policy and administration, asking important questions such as: How are networks designed and developed? How are they governed, and what type of leadership do they require? To whom are networks accountable, and when are they effective? How can network governance contribute to effective delivery of public services and policy implementation?
In this timely new book, authors Naim Kapucu and Qian Hu define and examine key concepts, propose exciting new theoretical frameworks to synthetize the fast-growing body of network research in public policy and administration, and provide detailed discussion of applications. Network Governance offers not only a much-needed systematic examination of existing knowledge, but it also goes much further than existing books by discussing the applications of networks in a wide range of management practice and policy domains—including natural resource management, environmental protection, public health, emergency and crisis management, law enforcement, transportation, and community and economic development. Chapters include understudied network research topics such as power and decision-making in interorganizational networks, virtual networks, global networks, and network analysis applications. What sets this book apart is the introduction of social network analysis and coverage of applications of social network analysis in the policy and management domains. PowerPoint slides and a sample syllabus are available for adopters on an accompanying website. Drawing on literature from sociology, policy sciences, organizational studies, and economics, this textbook will be required reading for courses on network governance, collaborative public management, cross-sector governance, and collaboration and partnerships in programs of public administration, public affairs, and public policy….(More)”.
The Digital Prism: Transparency and Managed Visibilities in a Datafied World
Book by Mikkel Flyverbom: “We live in times of transparency. Digital technologies expose everything we do, like, and search for, and it is difficult to remain private and out of sight. Meanwhile, many people are concerned about the unchecked powers of tech giants and the hidden operations of big data, artificial intelligence and algorithms and call for more openness and insight. How do we – as individuals, companies and societies – deal with these technological and social transformations? Seen through the prism of digital technologies and data, our lives take new shapes and we are forced to manage our visibilities carefully. This book challenges common ways of thinking about transparency, and argues that the management of visibilities is a crucial, but overlooked force that influences how people live, how organizations work, and how societies and politics operate in a digital, datafied world….(More)”.
One Nation Tracked: An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry
Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel at the New York Times: “…For brands, following someone’s precise movements is key to understanding the “customer journey” — every step of the process from seeing an ad to buying a product. It’s the Holy Grail of advertising, one marketer said, the complete picture that connects all of our interests and online activity with our real-world actions.
Pointillist location data also has some clear benefits to society. Researchers can use the raw data to provide key insights for transportation studies and government planners. The City Council of Portland, Ore., unanimously approved a deal to study traffic and transit by monitoring millions of cellphones. Unicef announced a plan to use aggregated mobile location data to study epidemics, natural disasters and demographics.
For individual consumers, the value of constant tracking is less tangible. And the lack of transparency from the advertising and tech industries raises still more concerns.
Does a coupon app need to sell second-by-second location data to other companies to be profitable? Does that really justify allowing companies to track millions and potentially expose our private lives?
Data companies say users consent to tracking when they agree to share their location. But those consent screens rarely make clear how the data is being packaged and sold. If companies were clearer about what they were doing with the data, would anyone agree to share it?
What about data collected years ago, before hacks and leaks made privacy a forefront issue? Should it still be used, or should it be deleted for good?
If it’s possible that data stored securely today can easily be hacked, leaked or stolen, is this kind of data worth that risk?
Is all of this surveillance and risk worth it merely so that we can be served slightly more relevant ads? Or so that hedge fund managers can get richer?
The companies profiting from our every move can’t be expected to voluntarily limit their practices. Congress has to step in to protect Americans’ needs as consumers and rights as citizens.
Until then, one thing is certain: We are living in the world’s most advanced surveillance system. This system wasn’t created deliberately. It was built through the interplay of technological advance and the profit motive. It was built to make money. The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself….(More)”.
Policy Perspectives on Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing
Special Issue edited by Lea A. Shanley, Alison Parker, Sven Schade, and Aletta Bonn: “Citizen science encompasses a range of methodologies that support meaningful contributions of the public to the advancement of scientific and engineering research and monitoring, in ways that may include identifying research questions; conducting scientific investigations; collecting, processing, and analyzing data; developing scientific hardware and software; and solving complex problems. As an emerging field, citizen science has been described in a variety of ways (e.g., Auerbach et al. 2019; Eitzel et al. 2017; Hecker et al. 2019; Heigl et al. 2019; Shanley, Hulbert, and Auerbach 2019). Similarly, crowdsourcing is a methodology that engages a large group of people through an open call to tackle a common task or problem, either as individuals or collectively (Howe and Robinson 2005; Howe 2006). This may include asking the public to submit new ideas, designs, algorithms, or data via an online platform or mobile app, which is sometimes incentivized through a prize or challenge.
The defining characteristic of both citizen science and crowdsourcing, however, is their “location at the point where public participation and knowledge production – or societal context and epistemology – meet, even if that intersection can take many different forms” (Irwin 2015). Irwin argues that these approaches provide an opportunity to bring members of the public and science closer together, to consider the possibilities for a more active “scientific citizenship,” [and] “to link these issues into public policy.” As several recent studies have demonstrated, citizen science and crowdsourcing can help to provide the evidence-base to inform a wide range of management and public policy decisions while fostering civic partnerships with government…
More than two decades after the publication of Irwin’s seminal book on citizen science (Irwin 1995), we see an increasing awareness and use of citizen science by national governments and multilateral organizations to address both scientific and societal challenges (e.g., Haklay 2015; Nascimento et al. 2017). Governments in the United States and Europe, for example, have incorporated citizen science and crowdsourcing as part of their Open Science, Open Innovation, Open Government, and/or Open Data initiatives (e.g., OSTP 2013, 2015; OECD 2016; EC 2016). The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response have used crowdsourcing and citizen science for disaster response and humanitarian relief for nearly a decade (e.g., Shanley et al. 2013), while the United Nations Environment Program is beginning to explore the use of citizen science for addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., Chandler et al. 2017; Fritz et al. 2019). This growing support for citizen science and crowdsourcing by government decision-makers and policymakers is a direct result of the focused grassroots efforts of government agency staff, in partnership with professional citizen science associations and organizations such as SciStarter, as well as the strategic positioning of citizen science and crowdsourcing as methods for addressing agency missions and national priorities (e.g., Bowser et al. In preparation; Göbel et al. 2019; Roger et al. 2019; Shanley et al. In preparation). Through our contributions to these initiatives, the editorial team was inspired to propose this Special Issue on Policy Perspectives for Citizen Science….(More)”.