Stefaan Verhulst

The Wall Street Journal: “People around the world are confused and concerned about what companies do with the data they collect from their interactions with consumers.

A global survey conducted last fall by the research firm Ipsos gives a sense of the scale of people’s worries and uncertainty. Roughly two-thirds of those surveyed said they knew little or nothing about how much data companies held about them or what companies did with that data. And only about a third of respondents on average said they had at least a fair amount of trust that a variety of corporate and government organizations would use the information they had about them in the right way….

Christopher Tonetti, an associate professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says consumers should own and be able to sell their personal data. Cameron F. Kerry, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and former general counsel and acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, opposes the idea….

YES: It Would Encourage Sharing of Data—a Plus for Consumers and Society…Data isn’t like other commodities in one fundamental way—it doesn’t diminish with use. And that difference is the key to why consumers should own the data that’s created when they interact with companies, and have the right to sell it.YES: It Would Encourage Sharing of Data—a Plus for Consumers and Society…

NO: It Would Do Little to Help Consumers, and Could Leave Them Worse Off Than Now…

But owning data will do little to help consumers’ privacy—and may well leave them worse off. Meanwhile, consumer property rights would create enormous friction for valid business uses of personal information and for the free flow of information we value as a society.

In our current system, consumers reflexively click away rights to data in exchange for convenience, free services, connection, endorphins or other motivations. In a market where consumers could sell or license personal information they generate from web browsing, ride-sharing apps and other digital activities, is there any reason to expect that they would be less motivated to share their information? …(More)”.

United Nations Democracy Fund: “newDemocracy and the United Nations Democracy Fund have recently announced a 2-year agreement centred on doing democracy differently. Making democracies more inclusive requires bold and innovative reforms to bring the young, the poor, and minorities into the political system to start to address the crisis of political representation which sees people becoming less and less engaged.

newDemocracy has been selected to develop and distribute a handbook on ‘Democracy Beyond Elections’ designed to show how nations at various levels of development can apply the principles of representation and deliberation in ways that are appropriate for their economic and educational circumstances. This handbook is now available to read online here, and available for download here….(More)”.

Jessica Wynne Lockhart at Smithsonian: “In August, marine biologists Johnny Gaskell and Peter Mumby and a team of researchers boarded a boat headed into unknown waters off the coasts of Australia. For 14 long hours, they ploughed over 200 nautical miles, a Google Maps cache as their only guide. Just before dawn, they arrived at their destination of a previously uncharted blue hole—a cavernous opening descending through the seafloor.

After the rough night, Mumby was rewarded with something he hadn’t seen in his 30-year career. The reef surrounding the blue hole had nearly 100 percent healthy coral cover. Such a find is rare in the Great Barrier Reef, where coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 led to headlines proclaiming the reef “dead.”

“It made me think, ‘this is the story that people need to hear,’” Mumby says.

The expedition from Daydream Island off the coast of Queensland was a pilot program to test the methodology for the Great Reef Census, a citizen science project headed by Andy Ridley, founder of the annual conservation event Earth Hour. His latest organization, Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, has set the ambitious goal of surveying the entire 1,400-mile-long reef system in 2020…(More)”.

Book by Antonios Karampatzos: “Offering a fresh perspective on “nudging”, this book uses legal paternalism to explore how legal systems may promote good policies without ignoring personal autonomy.

It suggests that the dilemma between inefficient opt-in rules and autonomy restricting opt-out schemes fails to realistically capture the span of options available to the policy maker. There is a third path, namely the ‘mandated-choice model’. The book is dedicated to presenting this model and exploring its great potential. Contract law, consumer protection, products safety and regulatory problems such as organ donation or excessive borrowing are the setting for the discussion. Familiarising the reader with a hot debate on paternalism, behavioural economics and private law, this book takes a further step and links this behavioural law and economics discussion with philosophical considerations to shed a light on modern challenges, such as organ donation or consumers protection, by adopting an openly interdisciplinary approach….(More)”.

David Lindsey Roberts at FastCompany: “The U.S. Constitution requires that a population count be conducted at the beginning of every decade.

This census has always been charged with political significance and continues to be. That’s clear from the controversy over the conduct of the upcoming 2020 census.

But it’s less widely known how important the census has been in developing the U.S. computer industry, a story that I tell in my new book, Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans Through History....

The only use of the census clearly specified in the Constitution is to allocate seats in the House of Representatives. More populous states get more seats.

A minimalist interpretation of the census mission would require reporting only the overall population of each state. But the census has never confined itself to this.

A complicating factor emerged right at the beginning, with the Constitution’s distinction between “free persons” and “three-fifths of all other persons.” This was the Founding Fathers’ infamous mealy-mouthed compromise between those states with a large number of enslaved persons and those states where relatively few lived.

The first census, in 1790, also made nonconstitutionally mandated distinctions by age and sex. In subsequent decades, many other personal attributes were probed as well: occupational status, marital status, educational status, place of birth, and so on….

John Shaw Billings, a physician assigned to assist the Census Office with compiling health statistics, had closely observed the immense tabulation efforts required to deal with the raw data of 1880. He expressed his concerns to a young mechanical engineer assisting with the census, Herman Hollerith, a recent graduate of the Columbia School of Mines.

On September 23, 1884, the U.S. Patent Office recorded a submission from the 24-year-old Hollerith, titled “Art of Compiling Statistics.”

By progressively improving the ideas of this initial submission, Hollerith would decisively win an 1889 competition to improve the processing of the 1890 census.

The technological solutions devised by Hollerith involved a suite of mechanical and electrical devices….After his census success, Hollerith went into business selling this technology. The company he founded would, after he retired, become International Business Machines—IBM. IBM led the way in perfecting card technology for recording and tabulating large sets of data for a variety of purposes….(More)”

Book edited by Marta Poblet, Pompeu Casanovas and Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel: “This open access book shows the factors linking information flow, social intelligence, rights management and modelling with epistemic democracy, offering licensed linked data along with information about the rights involved. This model of democracy for the web of data brings new challenges for the social organisation of knowledge, collective innovation, and the coordination of actions. Licensed linked data, licensed linguistic linked data, right expression languages, semantic web regulatory models, electronic institutions, artificial socio-cognitive systems are examples of regulatory and institutional design (regulations by design). The web has been massively populated with both data and services, and semantically structured data, the linked data cloud, facilitates and fosters human-machine interaction. Linked data aims to create ecosystems to make it possible to browse, discover, exploit and reuse data sets for applications. Rights Expression Languages semi-automatically regulate the use and reuse of content…(More)”.

Springwise: “The GD-IQ (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient) Spellcheck for Bias analysis tool reviews film and television scripts for equality and diversity. Geena Davis, the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, recently announced a yearlong pilot programme with Walt Disney Studios. The Spellcheck for Bias tool will be used throughout the studio’s development process.

Funded by Google, the GD-IQ uses audio-visual processing technologies from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering together with Google’s machine learning capabilities. 

The tool’s analysis reveals the percentages of representation and dialogue broken down into categories of gender, race, LGBTQIA and disability representation. The analysis also highlights non-gender identified speaking characters that could help improve equality and diversity. 

Designed to help identify unconscious bias before it becomes a publicly consumed piece of media, the tool also ranks the sophistication of the characters’ vocabulary and their relative level of power within the story.

The first study of film and television representation using the GD-IQ examined the top 200 grossing, non-animated films of 2014 and 2015. Unsurprisingly, the more diverse and equal a film’s characters were, the more money the film earned. …(More)”.

Paper by Ravi Shankar et al” Increase in access to mobile phone devices and social media networks has changed the way people report and respond to disasters. Community-driven initiatives such as Stand By Task Force (SBTF) or GISCorps have shown great potential by crowdsourcing the acquisition, analysis, and geolocation of social media data for disaster responders. These initiatives face two main challenges: (1) most of social media content such as photos and videos are not geolocated, thus preventing the information to be used by emergency responders, and (2) they lack tools to manage volunteers contributions and aggregate them in order to ensure high quality and reliable results. This paper illustrates the use of a crowdsourcing platform that combines automatic methods for gathering information from social media and crowdsourcing techniques, in order to manage and aggregate volunteers contributions. High precision geolocation is achieved by combining data mining techniques for estimating the location of photos and videos from social media, and crowdsourcing for the validation and/or improvement of the estimated location.

The evaluation of the proposed approach is carried out using data related to the Amatrice Earthquake in 2016, coming from Flickr, Twitter and Youtube. A common data set is analyzed and geolocated by both the volunteers using the proposed platform and a group of experts. Data quality and data reliability is assessed by comparing volunteers versus experts results. Final results are shown in a web map service providing a global view of the information social media provided about the Amatrice Earthquake event…(More)”.

Book by Walter J. Radermacher: “This book explores official statistics and their social function in modern societies. Digitisation and globalisation are creating completely new opportunities and risks, a context in which facts (can) play an enormously important part if they are produced with a quality that makes them credible and purpose-specific. In order for this to actually happen, official statistics must continue to actively pursue the modernisation of their working methods.This book is not about the technical and methodological challenges associated with digitisation and globalisation; rather, it focuses on statistical sociology, which scientifically deals with the peculiarities and pitfalls of governing-by-numbers, and assigns statistics a suitable position in the future informational ecosystem. Further, the book provides a comprehensive overview of modern issues in official statistics, embodied in a historical and conceptual framework that endows it with different and innovative perspectives. Central to this work is the quality of statistical information provided by official statistics. The implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the form of indicators is another driving force in the search for answers, and is addressed here….(More)”.

UN Press Release: “A UN human rights expert has expressed concerns about the emergence of the “digital welfare state”, saying that all too often the real motives behind such programs are to slash welfare spending, set up intrusive government surveillance systems and generate profits for private corporate interests.

“As humankind moves, perhaps inexorably, towards the digital welfare future it needs to alter course significantly and rapidly to avoid stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia,” the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, says in a report to be presented to the General Assembly on Friday.

The digital welfare state is commonly presented as an altruistic and noble enterprise designed to ensure that citizens benefit from new technologies, experience more efficient government, and enjoy higher levels of well-being. But, Alston said, the digitization of welfare systems has very often been used to promote deep reductions in the overall welfare budget, a narrowing of the beneficiary pool, the elimination of some services, the introduction of demanding and intrusive forms of conditionality, the pursuit of behavioural modification goals, the imposition of stronger sanctions regimes, and a complete reversal of the traditional notion that the state should be accountable to the individual….(More)”.