Stefaan Verhulst

Kalev Leetaru at Forbes: “One of the most talked-about stories in the world of polling and survey research in recent years has been the gradual death of survey response rates and the reliability of those insights….

The online world’s perceived anonymity has offered some degree of reprieve in which online polls and surveys have often bested traditional approaches in assessing views towards society’s most controversial issues. Yet, here as well increasing public understanding of phishing and online safety are ever more problematic.

The answer has been the rise of “big data” analysis of society’s digital exhaust to fill in the gaps….

Is it truly the same answer though?

Constructing and conducting a well-designed survey means being able to ask the public exactly the questions of interest. Most importantly, it entails being able to ensure representative demographics of respondents.

An online-only poll is unlikely to accurately capture the perspectives of the three quarters of the earth’s population that the digital revolution has left behind. Even within the US, social media platforms are extraordinarily skewed.

The far greater problem is that society’s data exhaust is rarely a perfect match for the questions of greatest interest to policymakers and public.

Cellphone mobility records can offer an exquisitely detailed look at how the people of a city go about their daily lives, but beneath all that blinding light are the invisible members of society not deemed valuable to advertisers and thus not counted. Even for the urban society members whose phones are their ever-present companions, mobility data only goes so far. It can tell us that occupants of a particular part of the city during the workday spend their evenings in a particular part of the city, allowing us to understand their work/life balance, but it offers few insights into their political leanings.

One of the greatest challenges of today’s “big data” surveying is that it requires us to narrow our gaze to only those questions which can be easily answered from the data at hand.

Much as AI’s crisis of bias comes from the field’s steadfast refusal to pay for quality data, settling for highly biased free data, so too has “big data” surveying limited itself largely to datasets it can freely and easily acquire.

The result is that with traditional survey research, we are free to ask the precise questions we are most interested in. With data exhaust research, we must imperfectly shoehorn our questions into the few available metrics. With sufficient creativity it is typically possible to find some way of proxying the given question, but the resulting proxies may be highly unstable, with little understanding of when and where they may fail.

Much like how the early rise of the cluster computing era caused “big data” researchers to limit the questions they asked of their data to just those they could fit into a set of tiny machines, so too has the era of data exhaust surveying forced us to greatly restrict our understanding of society.

Most dangerously, however, big data surveying implicitly means we are measuring only the portion of society our vast commercial surveillance state cares about.

In short, we are only able to measure those deemed of greatest interest to advertisers and thus the most monetizable.

Putting this all together, the decline of traditional survey research has led to the rise of “big data” analysis of society’s data exhaust. Instead of giving us an unprecedented new view into the heartbeat of daily life, this reliance on the unintended output of our digital lives has forced researchers to greatly narrow the questions they can explore and severely skews them to the most “monetizable” portions of society.

In the end, the shift of societal understanding from precision surveys to the big data revolution has led not to an incredible new understanding of what makes us tick, but rather a far smaller, less precise and less accurate view than ever before, just our need to understand ourselves has never been greater….(More)”.

MIT Technology Review: “More than 60 researchers from 30 institutions will get access to Facebook user data to study its impact on elections and democracy, and how it’s used by advertisers and publishers.

A vast trove: Facebook will let academics see which websites its users linked to from January 2017 to February 2019. Notably, that means they won’t be able to look at the platform’s impact on the US presidential election in 2016, or on the Brexit referendum in the UK in the same year.

Despite this slightly glaring omission, it’s still hard to wrap your head around the scale of the data that will be shared, given that Facebook is used by 1.6 billion people every day. That’s more people than live in all of China, the most populous country on Earth. It will be one of the largest data sets on human behavior online to ever be released.

The process: Facebook didn’t pick the researchers. They were chosen by the Social Science Research Council, a US nonprofit. Facebook has been working on this project for over a year, as it tries to balance research interests against user privacy and confidentiality.

Privacy: In a blog post, Facebook said it will use a number of statistical techniques to make sure the data set can’t be used to identify individuals. Researchers will be able to access it only via a secure portal that uses a VPN and two-factor authentication, and there will be limits on the number of queries they can each run….(More)”.

Cass Sunstein at The Hill: “Nudges are private or public initiatives that steer people in particular directions but that also allow them to go their own way.

A reminder is a nudge; so is a warning. A GPS device nudges; a default rule, automatically enrolling people in some program, is a nudge.

To qualify as a nudge, an initiative must not impose significant economic incentives. A subsidy is not a nudge; a tax is not a nudge; a fine or a jail sentence is not a nudge. To count as such, a nudge must fully preserve freedom of choice.

In 2009, University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and I co-wrote a book that drew on research in psychology and behavioral economics to help people and institutions, both public and private, improve their decision-making.

In the 10 years since “Nudge” was published, there has been an extraordinary outpouring of new thought and action, with particular reference to public policy.

Behavioral insight teams, or “nudge units” of various sorts, can be found in many nations, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Japan and Qatar.

Those teams are delivering. By making government more efficient, and by improving safety and health, they are helping to save a lot of money and a lot of lives. And in many countries, including the U.S., they don’t raise partisan hackles; both Democrats and Republicans have enthusiastically embraced them.   

Still, there are a lot of mistakes and misconceptions out there, and they are diverting attention and hence stalling progress. Here are the three big ones:

1. Nudges do not respect freedom. …

2. Nudges are based on excessive trust in government...

3. Nudges cannot achieve a whole lot.…(More)”.

Blog post by Markus Eberhardt: “In a recent paper, Acemoglu et al. (2019), henceforth “ANRR”, demonstrated a significant and large causal effect of democracy on long-run growth. By adopting a simple binary indicator for democracy, and accounting for the dynamics of development, these authors found that a shift to democracy leads to a 20% higher level of development in the long run.¹

The findings are remarkable in three ways: 

1. Previous research often emphasised that a simple binary measure for democracy was perhaps “too blunt a concept” (Persson and Tabellini 2006) to provide robust empirical evidence.
2.  Positive effects of democracy on growth were typically only a “short-run boost” (Rodrik and Wacziarg 2005). 
3. The empirical findings are robust across a host of empirical estimators with different assumptions about the data generating process, including one adopting a novel instrumentation strategy (regional waves of democratisation).

ANRR’s findings are important because, as they highlight in a column on Vox, there is “a belief that democracy is bad for economic growth is common in both academic political economy as well as the popular press.” For example, Posner (2010) wrote that “[d]ictatorship will often be optimal for very poor countries”. 

The simplicity of ANRR’s empirical setup, the large sample of countries, the long time horizon (1960 to 2010), and the robust positive – and remarkably stable – results across the many empirical methods they employ send a very powerful message against such doubts that democracy does cause growth.

I agree with their conclusion, but with qualifications. …(More)”.

Paper by Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca: “Can new data sources from online platforms help to measure local economic activity? Government datasets from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau provide the standard measures of local economic activity at the local level. However, these statistics typically appear only after multi-year lags, and the public-facing versions are aggregated to the county or ZIP code level. In contrast, crowdsourced data from online platforms such as Yelp are often contemporaneous and geographically finer than official government statistics. Glaeser, Kim, and Luca present evidence that Yelp data can complement government surveys by measuring economic activity in close to real time, at a granular level, and at almost any geographic scale. Changes in the number of businesses and restaurants reviewed on Yelp can predict changes in the number of overall establishments and restaurants in County Business Patterns. An algorithm using contemporaneous and lagged Yelp data can explain 29.2 percent of the residual variance after accounting for lagged CBP data, in a testing sample not used to generate the algorithm. The algorithm is more accurate for denser, wealthier, and more educated ZIP codes….(More)”.

See all papers presented at the NBER Conference on Big Data for 21st Century Economic Statistics here.

AH Projects: “DataPools is a Wi-Fi geolocation spoofing project that virtually relocates your phone to the latitudes and longitudes of Silicon Valley success. It includes a catalog and a SkyLift device with 12 pre-programmed locations. DataPools was produced for the Tropez summer art event in Berlin and in collaboration with Anastasia Kubrak.

DataPools catalog pool index

Weren’t invited to Jeff Bezos’s summer pool party? No problem. DataPools uses the SkyLift device to mimick the Wi-Fi network infrastructure at 12 of the top Silicon Valley CEOs causing your phone to show up, approximately, at their pool. Because Wi-Fi spoofing affects the core geolocation services of iOS and Android smartphones, all apps on phone and the metadata they generate, will be located in the spoofed location…

Data Pools is a metaphor for a store of wealth that is private. The luxurious pools and mansions of Silicon Valley are financed by the mechanisms of economic surveillance and ownership of our personal information. Yet, the geographic locations of these premises are often concealed, hidden, and removed from open source databases. What if we could reverse this logic and plunge into the pools of ludicrous wealth, both virtually and physically? Could we apply the same methods of data extraction to highlight the ridiculous inequalities between CEOs and platform users?

Comparison of wealth distribution among top Silicon Valley CEOs

Data

Technically, DataPools uses a Wi-Fi microcontroller programmed with the BSSIDs and SSIDs from the target locations, which were all obtained using openly published information from web searches and wigle.net. This data is then programmed onto the firmware of the SkyLift device. One SkyLift device contains all 12 pool locations. However, throughout the installation improvements were made and the updated firmware now uses one main location with multiple sub-locations to cover a larger area during installations. This method was more effective at spoofing many phones in large area and is ideal for installations….(More)”.

Nesta: “In March 2019, the World Wide Web turned thirty, and October will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the internet itself. These anniversaries offer us an important opportunity to reflect on the internet’s history, but also a chance to ponder its future.

While early internet pioneers dreamed of an internet that would be open, free and decentralised, the story of the internet today is mostly a story of loss of control. Just a handful of companies determine what we read, see and buy, where we work and where we live, who we vote for, who we love, and who we are. Many of us feel increasingly uneasy about these developments. We live in a world where new technologies happen to us; the average person has very little agency to change things within the current political and economic parameters.

Yet things don’t have to be this way. In a time where the future of the internet is usually painted as bleak and uncertain, we need positive visions about where we go next.

As part of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative – the European Commission’s new flagship programme working on building a more democratic, inclusive and resilient internet – we have created this “visions book”, a collection of essays, short stories, poetry and artworks from over 30 contributors from 15 countries and five continents. Each contributor has a unique background, as most were selected via an open call for submissions held last autumn. As such, the book collects both established and emerging voices, all reflecting on the same crucial questions: where did we come from, but more importantly, where do we go next?

The NGI hopes to empower everyone to take active control in shaping the future: the internet does not just belong to those who hold power today, but to all of us….(More)”.

Opinion piece by Anthony Zacharzewski: “Maybe it’s the Brexit effect, or perhaps the memories of the great recession are fading, but in poll after poll, Europe’s citizens are saying that they feel more European and strongly supportive of EU membership. …

While sighs of relief can be heard from Schuman to Strasbourg, after a decade where the EU has bounced from crisis to crisis, the new Parliament and Commission will inherit a fragile and fractious Europe this year. One of their most important tasks will immediately be to connect EU citizens more closely to the institutions and their decision making….

The new European Commission and Parliament have the chance to change that, by adopting an ambitious open government agenda that puts citizen participation in decision making at its heart.

There are three things on our wish list for doing this.

The first thing on our list is an EU-wide commitment to policy making “in the open.” Built on a renewed commitment to transparency, it would set a unified approach to consultation, as well as identifying major policy areas where citizen involvement is both valuable and where citizens are likely to want to be involved. This could include issues such as migration and climate change. Member states, particularly those who are in the Open Government Partnership, have already had a lot of good practice which can help to inform this while the Open Government Network for Europe, which brings together civil society and government voices, is ready to help.

Secondly, the connection to civil society and citizens also needs to be made beyond the European level, supporting and making use of the rapidly growing networks of democratic innovation at local level. We are seeing an increasing shift from citizen participation as one-off events into a part of the governing system, and as such, the European institutions need to listen to local conversations and support them with better information. Public Square, our own project run in partnership with mySociety and funded by Luminate, is a good example. It is working with local government and citizens to understand how meaningful citizen participation can become an everyday part of the way all local decision-making happens.

The last item on our wish list would be greater coherence between the institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg to better involve citizens. While the European Parliament, Commission and Council all have their different roles and prerogatives, without a co-ordinated approach, the attention and resources they have will be dissipated across multiple conversations. Most importantly, it will be harder to demonstrate to citizens that their contributions have made a difference….(More)”.

Paper by Annetta Burger, Talha Oz , William G. Kennedy and Andrew T. Crooks: “Disaster events and their economic impacts are trending, and climate projection studies suggest that the risks of disaster will continue to increase in the near future. Despite the broad and increasing social effects of these events, the empirical basis of disaster research is often weak, partially due to the natural paucity of observed data. At the same time, some of the early research regarding social responses to disasters have become outdated as social, cultural, and political norms have changed. The digital revolution, the open data trend, and the advancements in data science provide new opportunities for social science disaster research.

We introduce the term computational social science of disasters (CSSD), which can be formally defined as the systematic study of the social behavioral dynamics of disasters utilizing computational methods. In this paper, we discuss and showcase the opportunities and the challenges in this new approach to disaster research.

Following a brief review of the fields that relate to CSSD, namely traditional social sciences of disasters, computational social science, and crisis informatics, we examine how advances in Internet technologies offer a new lens through which to study disasters. By identifying gaps in the literature, we show how this new field could address ways to advance our understanding of the social and behavioral aspects of disasters in a digitally connected world. In doing so, our goal is to bridge the gap between data science and the social sciences of disasters in rapidly changing environments….(More)”.

IBM Blockchain Blog: “Blockchain technology can be a game-changer for accounting, supply chain, banking, contract law, and many other fields. But it will only be useful if lots and lots of non-technical managers and leaders trust and adopt it. And right now, just understanding what blockchain is, can be difficult to understand even for the brightest in these fields. Enter The Blockchain Game, a hands-on exercise that explains blockchain’s core principals, and serves as a launching pad for discussion of blockchain’s real-world applications.

In The Blockchain Game students act as nodes and miners on a blockchain network for storing student grades at a university. Participants record the grade and course information, and then “build the block” by calculating a unique identifier (a hash) to secure the grade ledger, and miners get rewarded for their work. As the game is played, the audience learns about hashes, private keys, and what uses are appropriate for a blockchain ledger.

Basics of the Game

• A hands-on simulation centering around a blockchain for academic scores, including a discussion at the end of the simulation regarding if storing grades would be a good application for blockchain.
• No computers. Participants are the computors and calculate blocks.
• The game seeks to teach core concepts about a distributed ledger but can be modified to whichever use case the educator wishes to use — smart contracts, supply chain, applications and others.
• Additional elements can be added if instructors want to facilitate the game on a computer….(More)”.