Stefaan Verhulst
Brief by Frida Polli et al: “The notion of studying people in jobs as a science—in fields such as human resource management, people analytics, and industrial-organizational psychology—dates back to at least the early 20th century. In 1919, Yale psychologist Henry Charles Link wrote, “The application of science to the problem of employment is just beginning to receive serious attention,” at last providing an alternative to the “hire and fire” methods of 19th-century employers. A year later, prominent organizational theorists Ordway Teal and Henry C. Metcalf claimed, “The new focus in administration is to be the human element. The new center of attention and solicitude is the individual person, the worker.” The overall conclusion at the time was that various social and psychological factors governed differences in employee productivity and satisfaction….This Brief Proceeds in Five Sections:
● First, we review the limitations of traditional approaches to people science. In particular, we focus on four needs of the modern employer that are not satisfied by the status quo: job fit, soft skills, fairness, and flexibility.
● Second, we present the foundations of a new people science by explaining how advancements in fields like cognitive science and neuroscience can be used to understand the individual differences between humans.
● Third, we describe four best practices that should govern the application of the new people science theories to real-world employment contexts.
● Fourth, we present a case study of how one platform company has used the new people science to create hiring models for five high-growth roles.● Finally, we explain how the type of insights presented in Section IV can be made actionable in the context of retraining employees for the future of work….(More)”.
Book edited by John McDaniel and Ken Pease: “This edited text draws together the insights of numerous worldwide eminent academics to evaluate the condition of predictive policing and artificial intelligence (AI) as interlocked policy areas. Predictive and AI technologies are growing in prominence and at an unprecedented rate. Powerful digital crime mapping tools are being used to identify crime hotspots in real-time, as pattern-matching and search algorithms are sorting through huge police databases populated by growing volumes of data in an eff ort to identify people liable to experience (or commit) crime, places likely to host it, and variables associated with its solvability. Facial and vehicle recognition cameras are locating criminals as they move, while police services develop strategies informed by machine learning and other kinds of predictive analytics. Many of these innovations are features of modern policing in the UK, the US and Australia, among other jurisdictions.
AI promises to reduce unnecessary labour, speed up various forms of police work, encourage police forces to more efficiently apportion their resources, and enable police officers to prevent crime and protect people from a variety of future harms. However, the promises of predictive and AI technologies and innovations do not always match reality. They often have significant weaknesses, come at a considerable cost and require challenging trade- off s to be made. Focusing on the UK, the US and Australia, this book explores themes of choice architecture, decision- making, human rights, accountability and the rule of law, as well as future uses of AI and predictive technologies in various policing contexts. The text contributes to ongoing debates on the benefits and biases of predictive algorithms, big data sets, machine learning systems, and broader policing strategies and challenges.
Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of policing, criminology, crime science, sociology, computer science, cognitive psychology and all those interested in the emergence of AI as a feature of contemporary policing….(More)”.
Paper by David Andrew Logan: “New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) is an iconic decision, foundational to modern First Amendment theory, and in a string of follow-on decisions the Court firmly grounded free speech theory and practice in the need to protect democratic discourse. To do this the Court provided broad and deep protections to the publishers of falsehoods. This article recognizes that New York Times and its progeny made sense in the “public square” of an earlier era, but the justices could never have foreseen the dramatic changes in technology and the media environment in the years since, nor predict that by making defamation cases virtually impossible to win they were harming, rather than helping self-government. In part because of New York Times, the First Amendment has been weaponized, frustrating a basic requirement of a healthy democracy: the development of a set of broadly agreed-upon facts. Instead, we are subject to waves of falsehoods that swamp the ability of citizens to effectively self-govern. As a result, and despite its iconic status, New York Times needs to be reexamined and retooled to better serve our democracy….(More)”
Paper by Oskar Josef Gstrein and Dimitry Kochenov: “…Distributed Ledger Technology can be an effective tool for resource distribution. As individuals and organisations explore innovations which allow to redefine the rules of access, possession and sharing these developments also become important for the future of self-determination. Demonstrated through credit scoring and ‘social credit systems’, the identity of an individual is intertwined with resource access, possession and transferability. A key pre-requisite for participation is formal legal status, which translates to citizenship. However, many proponents of Distributed Ledger Technology focus predominantly on technological features and capabilities, which might enable the implementation of concepts such as decentralised governance, ‘self-sovereign identity’ management, and trust-less transactions based on ‘zero-knowledge proof’. Nevertheless, such narrow consideration overlooks existing legal and political realities. Considering the lessons learned from citizenship, it becomes questionable whether Blockchain as player in the area of identity management will ultimately increase human dignity, or further manifest traditional patterns of discrimination and inequality….(More)”.
Book by R. Barker Bausell: “Recent events have vividly underscored the societal importance of science, yet the majority of the public are unaware that a large proportion of published scientific results are simply wrong. The Problem with Science is an exploration of the manifestations and causes of this scientific crisis, accompanied by a description of the very promising corrective initiatives largely developed over the past decade to stem the spate of irreproducible results that have come to characterize many of our sciences.
More importantly, Dr. R. Barker Bausell has designed it to provide guidance to practicing and aspiring scientists regarding how (a) to change the way in which science has come to be both conducted and reported in order to avoid producing false positive, irreproducible results in their own work and (b) to change those institutional practices (primarily but not exclusively involving the traditional journal publishing process and the academic reward system) that have unwittingly contributed to the present crisis. There is a need for change in the scientific culture itself. A culture which prioritizes conducting research correctly in order to get things right rather than simply getting it published….(More)”.
Article by Claudia Chwalisz: “…Until 2020, most assemblies took place in person. We know what they require to produce useful recommendations and gain public trust: time (usually many days over many months), access to broad and varied information, facilitated discussion, and transparency. Successful assemblies take on a pressing public issue, secure politicians’ commitment to respond, have mechanisms to ensure independence, and provide facilities such as stipends and childcare, so all can participate. The diversity of people in the room is what delivers the magic of collective intelligence.
However, the pandemic has forced new approaches. Online discussions might be in real time or asynchronous; facilitators and participants might be identifiable or anonymous. My team at the OECD is exploring how virtual deliberation works best. We have noticed a shift: from text-based interactions to video; from an emphasis on openness to one on representativeness; and from individual to group deliberation.
Some argue that online deliberation is less expensive than in-person processes, but the costs are similar when designed to be as democratic as possible. The new wave pays much more attention to inclusivity. For many online citizens’ assemblies this year (for example, in Belgium, Canada and parts of the United Kingdom), participants without equipment were given computers or smartphones, along with training and support to use them. A digital mediator is now essential for any plans to conduct online deliberation inclusively.
Experiments have also started to transcend national borders. Last October, the German Bertelsmann Stiftung, a private foundation for political reform, and the European Commission ran a Citizens’ Dialogue with 100 randomly selected citizens from Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Lithuania. They spent three days discussing Europe’s democratic, digital and green future. The Global Citizens’ Assembly on Genome Editing will take place in 2021–22, as will the Global Citizens’ Assembly for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
However, virtual meetings do not replace in-person interactions. Practitioners adapting assemblies to the virtual world warn that online processes could push people into more linear and binary thinking through voting tools, rather than seeking a nuanced understanding of other people’s reasoning and values….(More)”.
Report by Cheryl Brown, Catherine Gould, Clare Stott: “An innovation inducement prize enables funders to pursue development goals without them having to know in advance which approaches or participants are most likely to succeed. Innovation prizes also often directly engage with the intended beneficiaries or those connected with them, in solving the problems.
At a time when development spending is under increasing pressure to show value for money (VFM), innovation prizes are considered as an alternative to mainstream funding options. While costs are likely to have accrued through prize design and management, no cash payments are made until the prize is successfully awarded. The funder may anticipate obtaining more results than those directly paid for through the prize award.
The purpose of this report is to answer two questions: do innovation prizes work for development, and if so, when do they offer value over other forms of funding?
To date, few evaluations have been published that would help funders answer these questions for themselves. DFID commissioned the Ideas to Impact programme, which was delivered by an IMC Worldwide-led consortium and evaluated by Itad, to fill this gap by testing a range of innovation prizes targeted at different development issues and this report synthesises the findings from the evaluations and follow-up reviews of six of these prizes….(More)”.
Article by Sean Finnan: “Can you see me?” says Mark Linnane, over Zoom, as he walks around a plastic structure on the floor of an office at Maynooth University. “That gives you some sense of the size of it. It’s 3.5 metres by 2.”
Linnane trails his laptop’s webcam over the surface of the off-white 3D model, giving a birds-eye view of tens of thousands of tiny buildings, the trails of roads and the clear pathway of the Liffey.
This replica of the heart of the city from Phoenix Park to Dublin Port was created to scale by the university’s Building City Dashboards team, using data from the Ordnance Survey Ireland.
In the five years since they started to grapple with the question of how to present data about the city in an engaging and accessible way, the team has experimented with virtual reality, and augmented reality – and most recently, with this new form of mapping, which blends the lego-like miniature of Dublin’s centre with changeable data projected on.
This could really come into its own as a public exhibit if they start to tell meaningful data-driven and empirical stories, says Linnane, a digital exhibition developer at Maynooth University.
Stories that are “relevant in terms of the everyday daily lives of people who will be coming to see it”, he says.
Layers of Meaning
Getting the projector that throws the visualisations onto the model to work right was Linnane’s job, he says.
He had to mesh the Ordnance Survey data with others that showed building heights for example. “Every single building down to the sheds in someone’s garden have a unique identifier,” says Linnane.
Projectors are built to project onto flat surfaces and not 3D models so that had to be finessed, too, he says. “Every step on the way was a new development. There wasn’t really a process there before.”
The printed 3D model shows 7km by 4km of Dublin and 122,355 structures, says Linnane. That includes bigger buildings but also small outbuildings, railway platforms, public toilets and glasshouses – all mocked up and serving as a canvas for a kaleidoscope of data.
“We’re just projecting data on to it and seeing what’s going on with that,” says Rob Kitchin, principal investigator at Maynooth University’s Programmable City project….(More)”
OECD: “…the COVID-19 crisis has triggered an unprecedented mobilisation of the science and innovation community. Public research agencies and organisations, private foundations and charities, and the health industry have set up an array of newly funded research initiatives worth billions of dollars in record time. Science is the only exit strategy from COVID-19.
Science and innovation have played essential roles in providing a better understanding of the virus and its transmission, and in developing hundreds of candidate therapeutics and vaccines over a very short period. Digital technologies have enabled large parts of the economy and society to continue to function, mitigating the impact of COVID-19. The pandemic has underscored more than in other recent crises the importance of science and innovation to being both prepared and reactive to upcoming crises….
The world is still in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis and many uncertainties remain….At the same time, many governments view the pandemic as a stark reminder of the need to transition to more sustainable, equitable and resilient societies. This is highlighted in many countries’ recovery packages, which include expenditures for R&D. Science and innovation will be essential to promote and deliver such transitions, but the pandemic has exposed limits in research and innovation systems that, if not addressed, will prevent this potential from being realised.
There is therefore a need to re-set STI policies to better equip governments with the instruments and capabilities to direct innovation efforts towards the goals of sustainability, inclusivity and resiliency.
1. Policy needs to be able to guide innovation efforts to where they are most needed. This has implications for how governments support research and innovation in firms, which account for about 70% of R&D expenditures in the OECD. The business R&D support policy mix has shifted in recent decades towards a greater reliance on tax compared to direct support instruments such as contracts, grants or awards. While effective for incentivising businesses to innovate, R&D tax incentives are indirect, untargeted and tend to generate incremental innovations. Well-designed direct measures for R&D are potentially better suited to supporting longer-term, high-risk research, and targeting innovations that either generate public goods (e.g. in health) or have a high potential for knowledge spillovers. Governments need to revisit their policy portfolios to ensure an appropriate balance between direct and indirect measures.
2. The multifaceted nature of addressing complex problems like COVID-19 and sustainability transitions underscores the need for transdisciplinary research to which current science system norms and institutions are ill-adapted. Disciplinary and hierarchical structures need to be adjusted to enable and promote transdisciplinary research that engages different disciplines and sectors to address complex challenges.
3. Governments should link support for emerging technologies, such as engineering biology and robotics, to broader missions like health resilience that encapsulate responsible innovation principles. The responsible innovation approach seeks to anticipate problems in the course of innovation and steer technology to best outcomes. It also emphasises the inclusion of stakeholders early in the innovation process.
4. Reforming PhD and post-doctoral training to support a diversity of career paths is essential for improving the ability of societies to react to crises and to deal with future challenges like climate change that require science-based responses. Reforms could also help relieve the precarity of early-career researchers, many of whom are employed on short-term contracts with no clear prospect of a permanent academic position. The crisis has also highlighted the need for academia to train and embrace a new cohort of digitally skilled research support professionals and scientists.
5. Global challenges require global solutions that draw on international STI co-operation. The development of COVID-19 vaccines has benefited from nascent global R&D preparedness measures, including agile technology platforms that can be activated as new pathogens emerge. The pandemic has created momentum to establish effective and sustainable global mechanisms to support the range and scope of R&D necessary to confront a wider range of global challenges. However, governments need to build trust and define common values to ensure a level playing field for scientific co-operation and an equitable distribution of its benefits.
6. Governments need to renew their policy frameworks and capabilities to fulfil a more ambitious STI policy agenda. Increasing policy emphasis on building resilience, which calls for policy agility, highlights the need for governments to acquire dynamic capabilities to adapt and learn in the face of rapidly changing environments. Engaging stakeholders and citizens in these efforts will expose policymakers to diverse knowledge and values, which should contribute to policy resilience. Governments should also continue to invest in evidence about their STI support policies with a view to improving them….(More)”.
Book edited by Davide, F., Gaggioli, A., Misuraca, G. : “Social welfare is riddled with ingrained problems that have already defeated all standard approaches, and reform calls for counterintuitive action. Digital Social Innovation (DSI) is primarily about promoting grassroots initiatives to address localized societal problems, and is not normally talked about in relation to welfare reform, but perhaps social innovation initiatives, with their localized and case-based approach, could help to solve the enormous structural problems faced by our welfare democracies today.
This book addresses the potential and implications of DSI for the reform of the European welfare state. The 14 papers collected here focus on key issues, such as the nature of social innovation and its effects; scaling up to address structural problems and make systemic change; new social risks and challenges; the role of digital thinking and emerging technologies; public governance approaches; tolerance of institutions; integrating innovation in the welfare system; and the empowerment of marginalized citizens. These topics are examined from an integrated and multi-disciplinary perspective, taking into consideration not only current EU debate on policy trends for social protection, but also the nature of digital transformation and its effects on social change. The book also highlights barriers to adoption, as well as the potential limitations and failures of this emerging approach.
Digital social innovation is an emerging discipline that deserves more attention from policy makers and more resources from government. Drawing on welfare studies, political science, sociology, psychology, law and computer science, this book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners and policy makers alike….(More)”