Paper by Cass Sunstein: “Many people prize agency; they want to make their own choices. Many people also prize second-order agency, by which they decide whether and when to exercise first-order agency. First-order agency can be an extraordinary benefit or an immense burden. When it is an extraordinary benefit, people might reject any kind of interference, or might welcome a nudge, or might seek some kind of boost, designed to increase their capacities. When first-order agency is an immense burden, people might also welcome a nudge or might make some kind of delegation (say, to an employer, a doctor, an algorithm, or a regulator). These points suggests that the line between active choosing and paternalism can be illusory. When private or public institutions override people’s desire not to exercise first-order agency, and thus reject people’s exercise of second-order agency, they are behaving paternalistically, through a form of choice-requiring paternalism. Choice-requiring paternalism may compromise second-order agency. It might not be very nice to do that…(More)”.
Critical Dependencies: How power consolidation of digital infrastructures threatens democracies—and what we can do about it.
Report by the Green Web Foundation: “We are at an inflection point in digital infrastructures. There is much conversation about the unprecedented speed and scale of our computational future. Significant investments are being made, especially as part of private and national efforts to “win the AI arms race.” Meanwhile, more data is becoming available about the harms of these systems. No one has perfect knowledge of the situation, and in some instances, information is being intentionally obscured or distorted. Amidst the confusion and scramble, well-resourced players are seizing strategic footholds and advancing their cause. This moment is called the “fog of enactment.”
Some of the wealthiest companies in the world spend billions in lobbying, sponsoring research, obscuring their emissions and building out parallel energy and digital infrastructures to further secure their market positions.
Meanwhile, deliberative democratic processes take time and resources. The public and, at times, democratically elected officials lack access to the data and decision-making about our digital futures. Furthermore, the technical expertise to evaluate these tradeoffs from a public interest perspective is structurally under-resourced.
This report seeks to call out these maneuvers and recommend pathways for funding in the public’s interest with a focus on the energy and climate impacts of digital infrastructures and harms caused by current ownership models. We call for actions that are ambitious, collaborative and intersectional to help redistribute more power to the public interest and to just and sustainable digital futures…(More)”.
Visualizing Ship Movements with AIS Data
Article by Jon Keegan: “As we run, drive, bike, and fly, humans leave behind telltale tracks of movement on Earth—if you know where to look. Physical tracks, thermal signatures, and chemical traces can reveal where we’ve been. But another type of breadcrumb trail comes from the radio signals emitted by the cars, planes, trains, and boats we use.
Just like ADS-B transmitters on airplanes, which provide real-time location, identification, speed, and orientation data, the AIS (Automatic Identification System) performs the same function for ships at sea.
Operating at 161.975 and 162.025 MHz, AIS transmitters broadcast a ship’s identification number, name, call sign, length, beam, type, and antenna location every six minutes. Ship location, position timestamp, and direction are transmitted more frequently. The primary purpose of AIS is maritime safety—it helps prevent collisions, assists in rescues, and provides insight into the impact of ship traffic on marine life.
Unlike ADS-B in a plane, AIS can only be turned off in rare circumstances. The result of this is a treasure trove of fascinating ship movement data. You can even watch live ship data on sites like Vessel Finder.
Using NOAA’s “Marine Cadastre” tool, you can download 16 years’ worth of detailed daily ship movements (filtered to the minute), in addition to “transit count” maps generated from a year’s worth of data to show each ship’s accumulated paths…(More)”.
Problem-solving matter
Essay by David C Krakauer and Chris Kempes: “What makes computation possible? Seeking answers to that question, a hardware engineer from another planet travels to Earth in the 21st century. After descending through our atmosphere, this extraterrestrial explorer heads to one of our planet’s largest data centres, the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park, 470 kilometres west of Beijing. But computation is not easily discovered in this sprawling mini-city of server farms. Scanning the almost-uncountable transistors inside the Information Park, the visiting engineer might be excused for thinking that the answer to their question lies in the primary materials driving computational processes: silicon and metal oxides. After all, since the 1960s, most computational devices have relied on transistors and semiconductors made from these metalloid materials.
If the off-world engineer had visited Earth several decades earlier, before the arrival of metal-oxide transistors and silicon semiconductors, they might have found entirely different answers to their question. In the 1940s, before silicon semiconductors, computation might appear as a property of thermionic valves made from tungsten, molybdenum, quartz and silica – the most important materials used in vacuum tube computers.
And visiting a century earlier, long before the age of modern computing, an alien observer might come to even stranger conclusions. If they had arrived in 1804, the year the Jacquard loom was patented, they might have concluded that early forms of computation emerged from the plant matter and insect excreta used to make the wooden frames, punch cards and silk threads involved in fabric-weaving looms, the analogue precursors to modern programmable machines.
But if the visiting engineer did come to these conclusions, they would be wrong. Computation does not emerge from silicon, tungsten, insect excreta or other materials. It emerges from procedures of reason or logic.
This speculative tale is not only about the struggles of an off-world engineer. It is also an analogy for humanity’s attempts to answer one of our most difficult problems: life. For, just as an alien engineer would struggle to understand computation through materials, so it is with humans studying our distant origins…(More)”.
Data Privacy for Record Linkage and Beyond
Paper by Shurong Lin & Eric Kolaczyk: “In a data-driven world, two prominent research problems are record linkage and data privacy, among others. Record linkage is essential for improving decision-making by integrating information of the same entities from different sources. On the other hand, data privacy research seeks to balance the need to extract accurate insights from data with the imperative to protect the privacy of the entities involved. Inevitably, data privacy issues arise in the context of record linkage. This article identifies two complementary aspects at the intersection of these two fields: (1) how to ensure privacy during record linkage and (2) how to mitigate privacy risks when releasing the analysis results after record linkage. We specifically discuss privacy-preserving record linkage, differentially private regression, and related topics…(More)”.
The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust
Book by Francis Collins: “As the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, we have become not just a hyper-partisan society but also a deeply cynical one, distrustful of traditional sources of knowledge and wisdom. Skepticism about vaccines led to the needless deaths of at least 230,000 Americans. “Do your own research” is now a rallying cry in many online rabbit holes. Yet experts can make mistakes, and institutions can lose their moral compass. So how can we navigate through all this?
In The Road to Wisdom, Francis Collins reminds us of the four core sources of judgement and clear thinking: truth, science, faith, and trust. Drawing on his work from the Human Genome Project and heading the National Institutes of Health, as well as on ethics, philosophy, and Christian theology, Collins makes a robust, thoughtful case for each of these sources—their reliability, and their limits. Ultimately, he shows how they work together, not separately—and certainly not in conflict. It is only when we relink these four foundations of wisdom that we can begin to discern the best path forward in life.
Thoughtful, accessible, winsome, and deeply wise, The Road to Wisdom leads us beyond current animosities to surer footing. Here is the moral, philosophical, and scientific framework with which to address the problems of our time—including distrust of public health, partisanship, racism, response to climate change, and threats to our democracy—but also to guide us in our daily lives. This is a book that will repay many readings, and resolve dilemmas that we all face every day…(More)”.
Hopes over fears: Can democratic deliberation increase positive emotions concerning the future?
Paper by Mikko Leino and Katariina Kulha: “Deliberative mini-publics have often been considered to be a potential way to promote future-oriented thinking. Still, thinking about the future can be hard as it can evoke negative emotions such as stress and anxiety. This article establishes why a more positive outlook towards the future can benefit long-term decision-making. Then, it explores whether and to what extent deliberative mini-publics can facilitate thinking about the future by moderating negative emotions and encouraging positive emotions. We analyzed an online mini-public held in the region of Satakunta, Finland, organized to involve the public in the drafting process of a regional plan extending until the year 2050. In addition to the standard practices related to mini-publics, the Citizens’ Assembly included an imaginary time travel exercise, Future Design, carried out with half of the participants. Our analysis makes use of both survey and qualitative data. We found that democratic deliberation can promote positive emotions, like hopefulness and compassion, and lessen negative emotions, such as fear and confusion, related to the future. There were, however, differences in how emotions developed in the various small groups. Interviews with participants shed further light onto how participants felt during the event and how their sentiments concerning the future changed…(More)”
Mapping AI Narratives at the Local Level
Article for Urban AI: “In May 2024, Nantes Métropole (France) launched a pioneering initiative titled “Nantes Débat de l’IA” (meaning “Nantes is Debating AI”). This year-long project is designed to curate the organization of events dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) across the territory. The primary aim of this initiative is to foster dialogue among local stakeholders, enabling them to engage in meaningful discussions, exchange ideas, and develop a shared understanding of AI’s impact on the region.
Over the course of one year, the Nantes metropolitan area will host around sixty events focused on AI, bringing together a wide range of participants, including policymakers, businesses, researchers, and civil society. These events provide a platform for these diverse actors to share their perspectives, debate critical issues, and explore the potential opportunities and challenges AI presents. Through this collaborative process, the goal is to cultivate a common culture around AI, ensuring that all relevant voices are heard as the city navigates to integrate this transformative technology…(More)”.
Utilizing big data without domain knowledge impacts public health decision-making
Paper by Miao Zhang, Salman Rahman, Vishwali Mhasawade and Rumi Chunara: “…New data sources and AI methods for extracting information are increasingly abundant and relevant to decision-making across societal applications. A notable example is street view imagery, available in over 100 countries, and purported to inform built environment interventions (e.g., adding sidewalks) for community health outcomes. However, biases can arise when decision-making does not account for data robustness or relies on spurious correlations. To investigate this risk, we analyzed 2.02 million Google Street View (GSV) images alongside health, demographic, and socioeconomic data from New York City. Findings demonstrate robustness challenges; built environment characteristics inferred from GSV labels at the intracity level often do not align with ground truth. Moreover, as average individual-level behavior of physical inactivity significantly mediates the impact of built environment features by census tract, intervention on features measured by GSV would be misestimated without proper model specification and consideration of this mediation mechanism. Using a causal framework accounting for these mediators, we determined that intervening by improving 10% of samples in the two lowest tertiles of physical inactivity would lead to a 4.17 (95% CI 3.84–4.55) or 17.2 (95% CI 14.4–21.3) times greater decrease in the prevalence of obesity or diabetes, respectively, compared to the same proportional intervention on the number of crosswalks by census tract. This study highlights critical issues of robustness and model specification in using emergent data sources, showing the data may not measure what is intended, and ignoring mediators can result in biased intervention effect estimates…(More)”
Public Sector Innovation
Book by Mehmet Akif Demircioglu and David B. Audretsch: “Governments around the world are under pressure to do more with less. Dispelling the conventional wisdom that government is the enemy of innovation, this book argues that the promise of innovation addressing the most compelling societal problems will only come to fruition if governments become full partners and participants in innovation. The authors provide a systematic overview, analysis, framework, research agenda, and strategic directions for the study of public sector innovation, examining drivers, sources, barriers, typologies, and outcomes of innovation along with ethics. They suggest that innovation in government requires a new approach to public sector strategy, organization, human resources, and culture. Featuring large data analyses and poignant case studies drawn from best practices across the globe, Demircioglu and Audretsch identify what works and what doesn’t in transforming governments from the periphery to the very heart of the most profound innovations driving societal change and development…(More)”.