Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Yakov Ben-Haim: “Innovations create both opportunities and dilemmas. They provide new and supposedly better opportunities, but — because of their newness — they are often more uncertain and potentially worse than existing options. Recent inventions and discoveries include new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys and new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances and many other discoveries and inventions.

Is it better to use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That dilemma faces just about everybody. The paradigm of the innovation dilemma characterizes many situations, even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending nation-states. These dilemmas have far-reaching implications for individuals, organizations, and society at large as they make decisions in the age of innovation. The uncritical belief in outcome-optimization — “more is better, so most is best” — pervades decision-making in all domains, but is often irresponsible when facing the uncertainties of innovation. 

There is a great need for practical conceptual tools for understanding and managing the dilemmas of innovation. This book offers a new direction for a wide audience. It discusses examples from many fields, including e-reading, bipolar disorder and pregnancy, disruptive technology in industry, stock markets, agricultural productivity and world hunger, military hardware, military intelligence, biological conservation, on-line learning, and more….(More)”.

Robert Morrell at The Conversation: “Globalisation and new technology have changed the ways that knowledge is made, disseminated and consumed. At the push of a button, one can find articles or sources from all over the world. Yet the global knowledge economy is still marked by its history.

The former colonial nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the rich countries of Europe and North America which are collectively called the global North (normally considered to include the West and the first world, the North contains a quarter of the world’s population but controls 80% of income earned) – are still central in the knowledge economy. But the story is not one simply of Northern dominance. A process of making knowledge in the South is underway.

European colonisers encountered many sophisticated and complex knowledge systems among the colonised. These had their own intellectual workforces, their own environmental, geographical, historical and medical sciences. They also had their own means of developing knowledge. Sometimes the colonisers tried to obliterate these knowledges.

In other instances colonisers appropriated local knowledge, for instance in agriculture, fisheries and mining. Sometimes they recognised and even honoured other knowledge systems and intellectuals. This was the case among some of the British in India, and was the early form of “Orientalism”, the study of people and cultures from the East.

In the past few decades, there’s been more critique of global knowledge inequalities and the global North’s dominance. There have also been shifts in knowledge production patterns; some newer disciplines have stepped away from old patterns of inequality.

These issues are examined in a new book, Knowledge and Global Power: Making new sciences in the South (published by Wits University Press), which I co-authored with Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell and Joao Maia. The focus is especially on those areas where old patterns are not being replicated, so the study chooses climate change, gender and HIV and AIDS as three new areas of knowledge production in which new voices from the South might be prominent….(More)”.

Paper by Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz et al in PLOS-ONE: “Surveys indicate that patients, particularly those suffering from chronic conditions, strongly benefit from the information found in social networks and online forums. One challenge in accessing online health information is to differentiate between factual and more subjective information. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of exploiting lexical, syntactic, semantic, network-based and emotional properties of texts to automatically classify patient-generated contents into three types: “experiences”, “facts” and “opinions”, using machine learning algorithms. In this context, our goal is to develop automatic methods that will make online health information more easily accessible and useful for patients, professionals and researchers….

We work with a set of 3000 posts to online health forums in breast cancer, morbus crohn and different allergies. Each sentence in a post is manually labeled as “experience”, “fact” or “opinion”. Using this data, we train a support vector machine algorithm to perform classification. The results are evaluated in a 10-fold cross validation procedure.

Overall, we find that it is possible to predict the type of information contained in a forum post with a very high accuracy (over 80 percent) using simple text representations such as word embeddings and bags of words. We also analyze more complex features such as those based on the network properties, the polarity of words and the verbal tense of the sentences and show that, when combined with the previous ones, they can boost the results….(More)”.

Jeanette Beebe at Fast Company: “Every time you shuffle through a line at the pharmacy, every time you try to get comfortable in those awkward doctor’s office chairs, every time you scroll through the web while you’re put on hold with a question about your medical bill, take a second to think about the person ahead of you and behind you.

Chances are, at least one of you is being monitored by a third party like data analytics giant Optum, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group, Inc. Since 1993, it’s captured medical data—lab results, diagnoses, prescriptions, and more—from 150 million Americans. That’s almost half of the U.S. population.

“They’re the ones that are tapping the data. They’re in there. I can’t remove them from my own health insurance contracts. So I’m stuck. It’s just part of the system,” says Joel Winston, an attorney who specializes in privacy and data protection law.

Healthcare providers can legally sell their data to a now-dizzyingly vast spread of companies, who can use it to make decisions, from designing new drugs to pricing your insurance rates to developing highly targeted advertising.

It’s written in the fine print: You don’t own your medical records. Well, except if you live in New Hampshire. It’s the only state that mandates its residents own their medical data. In 21 states, the law explicitly says that healthcare providers own these records, not patients. In the rest of the country, it’s up in the air.

Every time you visit a doctor or a pharmacy, your record grows. The details can be colorful: Using sources like Milliman’s IntelliScript and ExamOne’s ScriptCheck, a fuller picture of you emerges. Your interactions with the health are system, your medical payments, your prescription drug purchase history. And the market for the data is surging.

Its buyers and sharers—pharma giants, insurers, credit reporting agencies, and other data-hungry companies or “fourth parties” (like Facebook)—say that these massive health data sets can improve healthcare delivery and fuel advances in so-called “precision medicine.”

Still, this glut of health data has raised alarms among privacy advocates, who say many consumers are in the dark about how much of their health-related info is being gathered and mined….

Gardner predicted that traditional health data systems—electronic health records and electronic medical records—are less than ideal, given the “rigidity of the vendors and the products” and the way our data is owned and secured. Don’t count on them being around much longer, she said, “beyond the next few years.”

The future, Gardner suggested, is a system that runs on blockchain, which she defined for the committee as “basically a secure, visible, irrefutable ledger of transactions and ownership.” Still, a recent analysis of over 150 white papers revealed most healthcare blockchain projects “fall somewhere between half-baked and overly optimistic.”

As larger companies like IBM sign on, the technology may be edging closer to reality. Last year, Proof Work outlined a HIPAA-compliant system that manages patients’ medical histories over time, from acute care in the hospital to preventative checkups. The goal is to give these records to patients on their phones, and to create a “democratized ecosystem” to solve interoperability between patients, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and researchers. Similar proposals from blockchain-focused startups like Health Bank and Humanity.co would help patients store and share their health information securely—and sell it to researchers, too….(More)”.

Darshana Narayanan at The Economist: “Current forms of democracy exclude most people from political decision-making. We elect representatives and participate in the occasional referendums, but we mainly remain on the outside. The result is that a handful of people in power dictate what ought to be collective decisions. What we have now is hardly a democracy, or at least, not a democracy that we should settle for.

To design a truer form of democracy—that is, fair representation and an outcome determined by a plurality—we might draw some lessons from the collective behaviour of other social animals: schools of fish, for example. Schooling fish self-organise for the benefit of the group and are rarely in a fracas. Individuals in the group may not be associated and yet they reach consensus. A study in 2011 led by Iain Couzin found that “uninformed” fish—in that case, ones that had not been trained to have a preference to move towards a particular target—can dilute the influence of a powerful minority group which did have such preferences. 

Of course fish are not the same as humans. But that study does suggest a way of thinking about decision-making. Instead of limiting influence to experts and strongly motivated interest groups, we should actively work to broaden participation to ensure that we include people lacking strong preferences or prior knowledge of an issue. In other words, we need to go against the ingrained thinking that non-experts should be excluded from decision-making. Inclusivity might just improve our chances of reaching a real, democratic consensus.

How can our political institutions facilitate this? In my work over the past several years I have tried to apply findings from behavioural science into institutions and into code to create better systems of governance. In the course of my work, I have found some promising experiments taking place around the world that harness new digital tools. They point the way to how democracy can be practiced in the 21st century….(More)”.

Josh Kaplan at Slate: “…It was 2010, and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department had recently rolled out a database called GraffitiTracker—software also used by police departments in Denver and Los Angeles County—and over the previous year, they had accumulated a massive set of images that included a couple hundred photos with his moniker. Painting over all Kyle’s handiwork, prosecutors claimed, had cost the county almost $100,000, and that sort of damage came with life-changing consequences. Ultimately, he made a plea deal: one year of incarceration, five years of probation, and more than $87,000 in restitution.

Criticism of police technology often gets mired in the complexities of the algorithms involved—the obscurity of machine learning, the feedback loops, the potentials for racial bias and error. But GraffitiTracker can tell us a lot about data-driven policing in part because the concept is so simple. Whenever a public works crew goes to clean up graffiti, before they paint over it, they take a photo and put it in the county database. Since taggers tend to paint the same moniker over and over, now whenever someone is caught for vandalism, police can search the database for their pseudonym and get evidence of all the graffiti they’ve ever done.

In San Diego County, this has radically changed the way that graffiti is prosecuted and has pumped up the punishment for taggers—many of whom are minors—to levels otherwise unthinkable. The results have been lucrative. In 2011, the first year San Diego started using GraffitiTracker countywide (a few San Diego jurisdictions already had it in place), the amount of restitution received for graffiti jumped from about $170,000 to almost $800,000. Roughly $300,000 of that came from juvenile cases. For the jurisdictions that weren’t already using GraffitiTracker, the jump was even more stark: The annual total went from $45,000 to nearly $400,000. In these cities, the average restitution ordered in adult cases went from $1,281 to $5,620, and at the same time, the number of cases resulting in restitution tripled. (San Diego has said it makes prosecuting vandalism easier.)

Almost a decade later, San Diego County and other jurisdictions are still using GraffitiTracker, yet it’s received very little media attention, despite the startling consequences for vandalism prosecution. But its implications extend far beyond tagging. GraffitiTracker presaged a deeper problem with law enforcement’s ability to use technology to connect people to crimes that, as Deputy District Attorney Melissa Ocampo put it to me, “they thought they got away with.”…(More)”.

Book by Matt Qvortrup: “Until recently, referendums were little used. After the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums, they have come to the fore as a mechanism with the potential to disrupt the status quo and radically change political direction. This book looks at the historical development of the referendum, its use in different jurisdictions, and the types of constitutional questions it seeks to address. Written in an engaging style, the book offers a clear, objective overview of this important political and constitutional tool….(More)”.

Essay by Nora N. Khan for Brooklyn Rail: “…. Throughout this essay, I use “machine eye” as a metaphor for the unmoored orb, a kind of truly omnidirectional camera (meaning, a camera that can look in every direction and vector that defines the dimensions of a sphere), and as a symbolic shorthand for the sum of four distinct realms in which automated vision is deployed as a service. (Vision as a Service, reads the selling tag for a new AI surveillance camera company).¹⁰ Those four general realms are: 

1. Massive AI systems fueled by the public’s flexible datasets of their personal images, creating a visual culture entirely out of digitized images. 

2. Facial recognition technologies and neural networks improving atop their databases. 

3. The advancement of predictive policing to sort people by types. 

4. The combination of location-based tracking, license plate-reading, and heat sensors to render skein-like, live, evolving maps of people moving, marked as likely to do X.

Though we live the results of its seeing, and its interpretation of its seeing, for now I would hold on blaming ourselves for this situation. We are, after all, the living instantiations of a few thousand years of such violent seeing globally, enacted through imperialism, colonialism, caste stratification, nationalist purges, internal class struggle, and all the evolving theory to support and galvanize the above. Technology simply recasts, concentrates, and amplifies these “tendencies.” They can be hard to see at first because the eye’s seeing seems innocuous, and is designed to seem so. It is a direct expression of the ideology of software, which reflects its makers’ desires. These makers are lauded as American pioneers, innovators, genius-heroes living in the Bay Area in the late 1970s, vibrating at a highly specific frequency, the generative nexus of failed communalism and an emerging Californian Ideology. That seductive ideology has been exported all over the world, and we are only now contending with its impact.

Because the workings of machine visual culture are so remote from our sense perception, and because it so acutely determines our material (economic, social), and affective futures, I invite you to see underneath the eye’s outer glass shell, its holder, beyond it, to the grid that organizes its “mind.” That mind simulates a strain of ideology about who exactly gets to gather data about those on that grid below, and how that data should be mobilized to predict the movements and desires of the grid dwellers. This mind, a vast computational regime we are embedded in, drives the machine eye. And this computational regime has specific values that determine what is seen, how it is seen, and what that seeing means….(More)”.

Report by OECD: “Many people in OECD countries believe public services and social benefits are inadequate and hard to reach. More than half say they do not receive their fair share of benefits given the taxes they pay, and two-thirds believe others get more than they deserve. Nearly three out of four people say they want their government to do more to protect their social and economic security.  

These are among the findings of a new OECD survey, “Risks that Matter”, which asked over 22,000 people aged 18 to 70 years old in 21 countries about their worries and concerns and how well they think their government helps them tackle social and economic risks.

This nationally representative survey finds that falling ill and not being able to make ends meet are often at the top of people’s lists of immediate concerns. Making ends meet is a particularly common worry for those on low incomes and in countries that were hit hard by the financial crisis. Older people are most often worried about their health, while younger people are frequently concerned with securing adequate housing. When asked about the longer-term, across all countries, getting by in old age is the most commonly cited worry.

The survey reveals a dissatisfaction with current social policy. Only a minority are satisfied with access to services like health care, housing, and long-term care. Many believe the government would not be able to provide a proper safety net if they lost their income due to job loss, illness or old age. More than half think they would not be able to easily access public benefits if they needed them.

“This is a wake-up call for policy makers,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría. “OECD countries have some of the most advanced and generous social protection systems in the world. They spend, on average, more than one-fifth of their GDP on social policies. Yet, too many people feel they cannot count fully on their government when they need help. A better understanding of the factors driving this perception and why people feel they are struggling is essential to making social protection more effective and efficient. We must restore trust and confidence in government, and promote equality of opportunity.”

In every country surveyed except Canada, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, most people say that their government does not incorporate the views of people like them when designing social policy. In a number of countries, including Greece, Israel, Lithuania, Portugal and Slovenia, this share rises to more than two-thirds of respondents. This sense of not being part of the policy debate increases at higher levels of education and income, while feelings of injustice are stronger among those from high-income households.

Public perceptions of fairness are worrying. More than half of respondents say they do not receive their fair share of benefits given the taxes they pay, a share that rises to three quarters or more in Chile, Greece, Israel and Mexico. At the same time, people are calling for more help from government. In almost all countries, more than half of respondents say they want the government to do more for their economic and social security. This is especially the case for older respondents and those on low incomes.

Across countries, people are worried about financial security in old age, and most are willing to pay more to support public pension systems… (More)”.

Report by Lucia Vesnic Alujevic, Eckhard Stoermer, Jennifer-Ellen Rudkin, Fabiana Scapolo and Lucy Kimbell: “The Future of Government 2030+: A Citizen Centric Perspective on New Government Models project brings citizens to the centre of the scene. The objective of this project is to explore the emerging societal challenges, analyse trends in a rapidly changing digital world and launch an EU-wide debate on the possible future government models. To address this, citizen engagement, foresight and design are combined, with recent literature from the field of digital politics and media as a framework. The main research question of the project is: How will citizens, together with other actors, shape governments, policies and democracy in 2030 and beyond? Throughout the highly participatory process, more than 150 citizens, together with CSO, think tank, business and public sector representatives, as well as 100 design students participated in the creation of future scenarios and concepts. Four scenarios have been created using the 20 stories emerged from citizen workshops. They served as an inspiration for design students to develop 40 FuturGov concepts. Through the FuturGov Engagement Game, the project’s ambition is to trigger and launch a debate with citizens, businesses, civil society organizations, policy-makers and civil servants in Europe….(More)”.