Stefaan Verhulst

“Figshare’s annual report, The State of Open Data 2018, looks at global attitudes towards open data. It includes survey results of researchers and a collection of articles from industry experts, as well as a foreword from Ross Wilkinson, Director, Global Strategy at Australian Research Data Commons. The report is the third in the series and the survey results continue to show encouraging progress that open data is becoming more embedded in the research community. The key finding is that open data has become more embedded in the research community – 64% of survey respondents reveal they made their data openly available in 2018. However, a surprising number of respondents (60%) had never heard of the FAIR principles, a guideline to enhance the reusability of academic data….(More)”.

Heidi J. Larson at Nature: “A hundred years ago this month, the death rate from the 1918 influenza was at its peak. An estimated 500 million people were infected over the course of the pandemic; between 50 million and 100 million died, around 3% of the global population at the time.

A century on, advances in vaccines have made massive outbreaks of flu — and measles, rubella, diphtheria and polio — rare. But people still discount their risks of disease. Few realize that flu and its complications caused an estimated 80,000 deaths in the United States alone this past winter, mainly in the elderly and infirm. Of the 183 children whose deaths were confirmed as flu-related, 80% had not been vaccinated that season, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I predict that the next major outbreak — whether of a highly fatal strain of influenza or something else — will not be due to a lack of preventive technologies. Instead, emotional contagion, digitally enabled, could erode trust in vaccines so much as to render them moot. The deluge of conflicting information, misinformation and manipulated information on social media should be recognized as a global public-health threat.

So, what is to be done? The Vaccine Confidence Project, which I direct, works to detect early signals of rumours and scares about vaccines, and so to address them before they snowball. The international team comprises experts in anthropology, epidemiology, statistics, political science and more. We monitor news and social media, and we survey attitudes. We have also developed a Vaccine Confidence Index, similar to a consumer-confidence index, to track attitudes.

Emotions around vaccines are volatile, making vigilance and monitoring crucial for effective public outreach. In 2016, our project identified Europe as the region with the highest scepticism around vaccine safety (H. J. Larson et al. EBioMedicine 12, 295–301; 2016). The European Union commissioned us to re-run the survey this summer; results will be released this month. In the Philippines, confidence in vaccine safety dropped from 82% in 2015 to 21% in 2018 (H. J. Larson et al. Hum. Vaccines Immunother. https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2018.1522468; 2018), after legitimate concerns arose about new dengue vaccines. Immunization rates for established vaccines for tetanus, polio, tetanus and more also plummeted.

We have found that it is useful to categorize misinformation into several levels….(More).

Nicholas Carr’s blog: “A few years ago, the technology critic Michael Sacasas introduced the term “Borg Complex” to describe the attitude and rhetoric of modern-day utopians who believe that computer technology is an unstoppable force for good and that anyone who resists or even looks critically at the expanding hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool. (The Borg is an alien race in Star Trekthat sucks up the minds of other races, telling its victims that “resistance is futile.”) Those afflicted with the complex, Sacasas observed, rely on a a set of largely specious assertions to dismiss concerns about any ill effects of technological progress. The Borgers are quick, for example, to make grandiose claims about the coming benefits of new technologies (remember MOOCs?) while dismissing past cultural achievements with contempt (“I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away”).

To Sacasas’s list of such obfuscating rhetorical devices, I would add the assertion that we are “only at the beginning.” By perpetually refreshing the illusion that progress is just getting under way, gadget worshippers like Kelly are able to wave away the problems that progress is causing. Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just a temporary bug in the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent engineers. (If you look at Mark Zuckerberg’s responses to Facebook’s problems over the years, you’ll find that they are all variations on this theme.) Any attempt to put constraints on technologists and technology companies becomes, in this view, a short-sighted and possibly disastrous obstruction of technology’s march toward a brighter future for everyone — what Kelly is still calling the “long boom.” You ain’t seen nothing yet, so stay out of our way and let us work our magic.

In his books Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), the Canadian historian Harold Innis argued that all communication systems incorporate biases, which shape how people communicate and hence how they think. These biases can, in the long run, exert a profound influence over the organization of society and the course of history. “Bias,” it seems to me, is exactly the right word. The media we use to communicate push us to communicate in certain ways, reflecting, among other things, the workings of the underlying technologies and the financial and political interests of the businesses or governments that promulgate the technologies. (For a simple but important example, think of the way personal correspondence has been changed by the shift from letters delivered through the mail to emails delivered via the internet to messages delivered through smartphones.) A bias is an inclination. Its effects are not inevitable, but they can be strong. To temper them requires awareness and, yes, resistance.

For much of this year, I’ve been exploring the biases of digital media, trying to trace the pressures that the media exert on us as individuals and as a society. I’m far from done, but it’s clear to me that the biases exist and that at this point they have manifested themselves in unmistakable ways. Not only are we well beyond the beginning, but we can see where we’re heading — and where we’ll continue to head if we don’t consciously adjust our course….(More)”.

Paper by Robert Chesney and Danielle Keats Citron: “Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “deep fake” technology. This capability makes it possible to create audio and video of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. Machine learning techniques are escalating the technology’s sophistication, making deep fakes ever more realistic and increasingly resistant to detection.

Deep-fake technology has characteristics that enable rapid and widespread diffusion, putting it into the hands of both sophisticated and unsophisticated actors. While deep-fake technology will bring with it certain benefits, it also will introduce many harms. The marketplace of ideas already suffers from truth decay as our networked information environment interacts in toxic ways with our cognitive biases. Deep fakes will exacerbate this problem significantly. Individuals and businesses will face novel forms of exploitation, intimidation, and personal sabotage. The risks to our democracy and to national security are profound as well.

Our aim is to provide the first in-depth assessment of the causes and consequences of this disruptive technological change, and to explore the existing and potential tools for responding to it. We survey a broad array of responses, including: the role of technological solutions; criminal penalties, civil liability, and regulatory action; military and covert-action responses; economic sanctions; and market developments. We cover the waterfront from immunities to immutable authentication trails, offering recommendations to improve law and policy and anticipating the pitfalls embedded in various solutions….(More)”.

World Bank: “The World Development Indicators (WDI) is the World Bank’s premier compilation of international statistics on global development. Drawing from officially recognized sources and including national, regional, and global estimates, the WDI provides access to almost 1,600 indicators for 217 economies, with some time series extending back more than 50 years. The database helps users—analysts, policymakers, academics, and all those curious about the state of the world—to find information related to all aspects of development, both current and historical.

An annual World Development Indicators report was available in print or PDF format until last year. This year, we introduce the World Development Indicators website: a new discovery tool and storytelling platform for our data which takes users behind the scenes with information about data coverage, curation, and methodologies. The goal is to provide a useful, easily accessible guide to the database and make it easy for users to discover what type of indicators are available, how they’re collected, and how they can be visualized to analyze development trends….(More)”.

Wilson, D. C. S.  at the History of the Human Sciences: “This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of the mortality table was ambiguous, being both a public and a private object: often computed from company records they could also be extrapolated from quasi-public projects such as the Census or clerical records. Life assurance more generally straddled the line between private enterprise and collective endeavour, though its advocates stressed the public interest in its success. Reforming actuaries such as Thomas Rowe Edmonds wanted the data on which mortality tables were based to be made publicly available, but faced resistance. Such resistance undermined insurers’ claims to be scientific in spirit and hindered Edmonds’s personal quest for a law of mortality. Edmonds pushed instead for an open actuarial science alongside fellow-travellers at the Statistical Society of London, which was populated by statisticians such as William Farr (whose subsequent work, it is argued, was influenced by Edmonds) as well as by radical mathematicians such as Charles Babbage. The article explores Babbage’s little-known foray into the world of insurance, both as a budding actuary but also as a fierce critic of the industry. These debates over the construction, ownership, and accessibility of insurance datasets show that concern about the politics of big data did not begin in the 21st century….(More)”.

Book by Helmut K. Anheier, Matthias Haber and Mark A. Kayser: “As difficult as it might seem to define governance, it appears to be that much more difficult to measure it. Since the World Bank Institute launched the Worldwide Governance Indicators in the late 1990s, the governance indicators field has flourished and experienced significant advances in terms of methodology, data coverage and quality, and policy relevance. Other major initiatives have added to a momentum that propelled research on governance indicators seen in few other academic fields in the economic and social sciences. Given these developments and the prominence and policy relevance the field of governance indicator research has achieved, the time is ripe to take stock and ask what has been accomplished, what the shortcomings and potentials might be, and what steps present themselves as a way forward.

This volume– the fifth edition in an annual series tackling different aspects of governance around the world– assesses what has been achieved, identifies strengths and weaknesses of current work, and points to issues that need to be tackled in order to advance the field, both in its academic importance as well as in its policy relevance. In short, the contributions to this volume explore the scope of existing governance indices and indicator frameworks, elaborate on current challenges in measuring and analysing governance, and consider how to overcome them….(More)”.

Darrell West at Brookings: “Though digital technology has transformed nearly every corner of the economy in recent years, the health care industry seems stubbornly immune to these trends. That may soon change if more wearable devices record medical information that physicians can use to diagnose and treat illnesses at earlier stages. Last month, Apple announced that an FDA-approved electrocardiograph (EKG) will be included in the latest generation Apple Watch to check the heart’s electrical activity for signs of arrhythmia. However, the availability of this data does not guarantee that health care providers are currently equipped to process all of it. To cope with growing amounts of medical data from wearable devices, health care providers may need to adopt artificial intelligence that can identify data trends and spot any deviations that indicate illness. Greater medical data, accompanied by artificial intelligence to analyze it, could expand the capabilities of human health care providers and offer better outcomes at lower costs for patients….

By 2016, American health care spending had already ballooned to 17.9 percent of GDP. The rise in spending saw a parallel rise in health care employment. Patients still need doctors, nurses, and health aides to administer care, yet these health care professionals might not yet be able to make sense of the massive quantities of data coming from wearable devices. Doctors already spend much of their time filling out paperwork, which leaves less time to interact with patients. The opportunity may arise for artificial intelligence to analyze the coming flood of data from wearable devices. Tracking small changes as they happen could make a large difference in diagnosis and treatment: AI could detect abnormal heartbeat, respiration, or other signs that indicate worsening health. Catching symptoms before they worsen may be key to improving health outcomes and lowering costs….(More)”.

Paper by A.K. Njeru, B. Malakwen and M. Lumala in the International Academic Journal of Social Sciences and Education: “Throughout history information is a key factor in conflict management around the world. The media can play its important role of being the society’s watch dog of the society, by exposing to the masses what is essential but hidden, however the same media may also be used to mobilize masses to violence. Social media can therefore act as a tool for widening the democratic space, but can also lead to destabilization of peace.

The aim of the study was to establish the challenges facing social media platforms in conflict prevention in Kenya since 2007: a case of Ushahidi platform in Kenya. The paradigm that was found suitable for this study is Pragmatism. The study used a mixed approach. In this study, interviews, focus group discussions and content analysis of the Ushahidi platform were chosen as the tools of data collection. In order to bring order, structure and interpretation to the collected data, the researcher systematically organized the data by coding it into categories and constructing matrixes. After classifying the data, the researcher compared and contrasted it to the information retrieved from the literature review.

The study found that One major weak point social media as a tool for conflict prevention is the lack of ethical standards and professionalism for the users. It is too liberal and thus can be used to spread unverified information and distorted facts that might be detrimental to peace building and conflict prevention. This has led to some of the users already questioning the credibility of the information that is circulated through social media. The other weak point about social media as tool for peace building is that it is dependent to a major extent on the access to internet. The availability of internet in low units doesn’t necessarily mean cheap access. So over time the high cost of internet might affect the efficiency of the social media as a tool. The study concluded that information credibility is essential if social media as a tool is to be effective in conflict prevention and peace building.

The nature of social media which allows for anonymity of identity gives room for unverified information to be floated around the social media networks; this can be detrimental to the conflict prevention and peace building initiatives. There is therefore need for information verification and authentication by a trusted agent, to offer information appertaining to violence, conflict prevention and peace building on the social media platforms. The study recommends that Ushahidi platform should be seen as an agent of social change and should discuss the social mobilization which may be able to bring about. The study further suggest that if we can look at Ushahidi platform as a development agent, can we then take this a step further and ask, or try to find, a methodology that looks at the Ushahidi platform as peacemaking agent, or to assist in the maintenance of peace in a post-conflict thereby tapping into Ushahidi platform’s full potential….(More)”.