Stefaan Verhulst
John T. Wilbanks & Eric J. Topol in Nature: “Over the past year, technology titans including Google, Apple, Microsoft and IBM have been hiring leaders in biomedical research to bolster their efforts to change medicine….
In many ways, the migration of clinical scientists into technology corporations that are focused on gathering, analysing and storing information is long overdue. Because of the costs and difficulties of obtaining data about health and disease, scientists conducting clinical or population studies have rarely been able to track sufficient numbers of patients closely enough to make anything other than coarse predictions. Given such limitations, who wouldn’t want access to Internet-scale, multidimensional health data; teams of engineers who can build sensors for data collection and algorithms for analysis; and the resources to conduct projects at scales and speeds unthinkable in the public sector?
Yet there is a major downside to monoliths such as Google or smaller companies such as consumer-genetics firm 23andMe owning health data — or indeed, controlling the tools and methods used to match people’s digital health profiles to specific services.
Digital profiling in other contexts is already creating what has been termed a ‘black box’ society. Online adverts are tailored to people’s age, location, spending and browsing habits. Certain retail services have preferentially been made available only to particular groups of people. And law enforcers are being given tools to help them make sentencing decisions that cannot be openly assessed (see go.nature.com/29umpu1). This is all thanks to the deliberately hidden collection and manipulation of personal data.
If undisclosed algorithmic decision-making starts to incorporate health data, the ability of black-box calculations to accentuate pre-existing biases in society could greatly increase. Crucially, if the citizens being profiled are not given their data and allowed to share the information with others, they will not know about incorrect or discriminatory health actions — much less be able to challenge them. And most researchers won’t have access to such health data either, or to the insights gleaned from them….(More)”
Springwise: “Many point to the breakdown of community cohesion as a direct result of social media. Now a French startup based in Lyon has launched an app that promotes exchanges between people who don’t necessarily know each other, but who use the same services in the same area.
Launched in September 2015 a few months before COP21, CityLity aims to connect citizens with each other and their local services, branding itself as a “social network of proximity”. Users can search for local services such as a local plumber or sports facility; they can alert the responsible authority about a problem that needs fixing (a leaking water hydrant for example); they can even ask for help moving house from their neighbors. The system also incentivizes eco-friendly behavior, and has created the country’s first interactive eco-responsible map which lists services such as recycling, charging points for electric cars and rental bike stations.
Encouraging smarter local networks is the driving force behind an app where citizens can input questions in the same way as they would use Siri and receive evidence-based answers regarding their city….(More)”
Paper by Harold Anthony Lloyd: “Many wrongly believe that emotion plays little or no role in legal reasoning. Unfortunately, Langdell and his “scientific” case method encourage this error. A careful review of analysis in the real world,however, belies this common belief. Emotion can be cognitive and cognition can be emotional. Additionally, modern neuroscience underscores the “co-dependence” of reason and emotion. Thus,even if law were a certain science of appellate cases (which it is not), emotion could not be torn from such “science.”
As we reform legal education, we must recognize the role of cognitive emotion in law and legal analysis. If we fail to do this, we shortchange law schools, students, and the bar in grievous ways. We shortchange the very basics of true and best legal analysis. We shortchange at least half the universe of expression (the affective half). We shortchange the importance of watching and guarding the true interests of our clients, which interests are inextricably intertwined with affective experience. We shortchange the importance of motivation in law, life, and legal education. How can lawyers understand the motives of clients and other relevant parties without understanding the emotions that motivate them? How can lawyers hope to persuade judges, other advocates, or parties across the table in a transaction without grasping affective experience that motivates them? How can law professors fully engage students while ignoring affective experience that motivates students?Finally, we shortchange matters of life and death: emotions affect health and thus the very vigor of the bar.
Using insights from practice, modern neuroscience, and philosophy, I therefore explore emotion and other affective experience through a lawyer’s lens. In doing this, I reject claims that emotion and other affective experience are mere feeling (though I do not discount the importance of feeling). I also reject claims that emotion and other affective experience are necessarily irrational or beyond our control. Instead, such experience is often intentional and quite rational and controllable. After exploring law and affective experience at more “macro” levels, I consider three more specific examples of the interaction of law and emotion: (i) emotion, expression, and the first amendment, (ii) emotion in legal elements and exceptions, and (iii) emotion and lawyer mental health. To provide lawyers and legal scholars with a “one-source” overview of emotion and the law, I have also included an Appendix addressing a number of particular emotions…(More)”.
“In its seven years of existence, Bitcoin has gained widespread attention with its disruptive potential in finance. Some see it as a form of digital gold, offering a safe haven against capital controls and asylum to people whose currency is debased.
The invention of cryptocurrency coincided with a global crisis of legitimacy in the 2008 financial meltdown, which was followed by bank bailouts and for the people, a cycle of austerity. In that seminal white paper, mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto described Bitcoin as a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”. The core invention is distributed trust and Nakamoto stated that it was put forward as a solution to the “inherent weakness of the trust based model”, where financial institutions act as trusted third parties.
Bitcoin, I will argue, is not just an innovation in banking and finance, but at its core, concerns a challenge to governance systems that can lead to an evolution of humanity. For so long, social progress has stagnated, with the selfish and callous sides of man taking the upper hand. Unprecedented levels of government and corporate corruption in recent years have signaled a breakdown of systems of accountability. This deep failure of democracy has exposed the existence of individuals who exhibit a total lack of conscience and empathy for others. They embody a dark side of individuality, with aggressive and narrow selfish desires that often come in conflict with the public good. Now, the destructive actions of this minority seem to have become a threat to civilization itself. We shall explore how Bitcoin provides a new model of governance that is resilient to these adversarial forces.
Security holes within representative democracy
In the US, the launch of constitutional democracy brought a significant departure from the monarchy of olden times, where the king acted as ordained ruler. Yet, the foundation of this governance has not fundamentally changed, as it still relies on authority, requiring people to trust those who claim to represent them in the form of elected officials.
Representative democracy has increasingly become a mask used by ruthless individuals to hide and gain a grip on the populace. Behind the veil of secrecy, corporate masters behind the charade of electoral politics sponsor political candidates, who with campaign promises keep people passive and manage down their expectation levels. With future faking, which involves making plans that will never happen, and gas-lighting, a tactic known to challenge one’s memory, they deceive and gain power over others.
Money as a weapon of control
Money dependent on systems of representation requires trust to work. With the creation of the Federal Reserve and other central banks, private corporations began taking over the supplying of money. This centrally planned money production intermediates human relationship by dividing all into classes of creditors and debtors, where the former are masters, while the latter often become de-facto slaves.
The hidden captains of this managed democracy direct the flow of currency through financial engineering and have created incentive structures that are bent toward preserving their power. Stimulated by toxic asset bubbles, derivatives and quantitative easing, these incentives work like invisible hands of the market. They suppress democratic values by controlling information, which is the currency of democracy and suppressing free speech with economic censorship, as was seen in the case of the financial blockade against WikiLeaks. With radical deregulation, this system promotes fraud and depravity, exemplified in HSBC’s money laundering and top bank’s currency rigging. Through oppressive monetary policy and predatory lending that is presented as humanitarian aid, institutions such as the IMF and World Bank indebtdeveloping countries, holding whole populations in poverty.
All of this has resulted in the creation of a two-tiered justice system and derisked capitalism, where those in power are never allowed to fail and are not held accountable either by markets or the legal system….
Bitcoin as a new security model
Bitcoin brings an elegant solution to this systemic parasitic rent-seeking and exploitation. As asset-based digital cash, it offers an alternative to the promissory system of value creation by decree from above. Currency is its first application and Bitcoin’s underlying technology, the blockchain is a public asset ledger. This is a distributed database that records a history of transactions in the network without anyone in charge. Once data is verified, no one can undo it. This immutable timestamp goes beyond simple accounting of monetary transactions.
Bitcoin enables a new security model and it addresses the problem of security holes in the existing trust-based model of governance. Author and security expert Andreas Antonopoulos called this “trust by computation” that has “no central authority or trusted third party”….
Governance without central authority
Over the decades, democratic governments have become vehicles of control that have lost their fail-safe. Increasingly, people are held hostage by this corrupted political system. Satoshi’s white paper published in 2008 cleared a path for evolution. This wisdom can help humanity solve the problem of a historic failure of accountability.
Bitcoin ungoverns people as well as unbanking them around the world. Proof-of-work distributes what used to be third party trust across a massive global decentralized network, fostering a kind of self-governance in each individual. People who till now have been blindly handing over their consent to institutions can instead choose to be equal under the law of mathematics.
Governance without central authority can at first seem inefficient. But it is more secure than the current system of representation. The more the system reduces the need to trust a third party, replacing it with a borderless network, the lower the security risk becomes. With Bitcoin, governance can be innovated to function as a platform of consensus. Rather than a system to govern others, it can be used as settlement; to work out disputes and reconcile conflicts. Distributed trust as its core technology enables the capacity to set up rules agreed to by everyone, which cannot be altered by one person or group. The Bitcoin blockchain opens a door into a pluralistic society where all can participate in creating governance models and currencies that manifest their values through the principle of mutual aid and voluntary association….(More)”
Paper by Jeremy De Beer, Ian McCarthy, Adam Soliman and Emily Treen for the Open and User Innovation Conference 2016: “The increase in crowdsourcing requires both companies and crowds to have a better understanding of previously neglected legal issues. Focusing on the crowdsourcing of solutions, we raise and address two related questions: how and why organizations manage intellectual property issues when engaging in crowdsourcing activities? The answers lie in discussing the hazards of having inadequate intellectual property management strategies in place and the need to manage three considerations: two legal and one strategic. Legally, managers need appropriate ‘terms and conditions’ to (a) acquire sufficient rights from the crowd to achieve their objectives, and (b) mitigate exposure to liabilities associated with using materials submitted by the crowd. Strategically, managers need to accomplish these legal goals without dissuading participation by the crowd due to unnecessarily exploitative practices or onerous obligations. We present a number of examples demonstrating how companies have applied these legal and strategic concepts to various crowdsourcing initiatives and conclude with recommendations for managers and other practitioners….(More)”
IDS Evidence Report: “The Institute of Development Studies (IDS), in partnership with World Vision Indonesia, are exploring whether a recently implemented nutrition surveillance intervention, known as M-health, is being used to improve community-based data collection on nutrition.
The M-health mobile phone application has been integrated into the Indonesian national nutrition service delivery through the community-based health service called ‘posyandu’. Established in 1986, the posyandu is Indonesia’s main national community nutrition programme. It functions at the village level, enabling communities to access primary health care. The aim of the intervention is to reduce maternal, infant and child (under five) mortality rates. The posyandu involves five priority programmes: maternal and child health, which includes the ‘weighing post’ (growth monitoring); family planning; immunisation; nutrition, which includes nutrition counselling; and diarrhoea prevention and treatment.
The programme works by the mobile phone application (M-health) automatically sending a referral to health workers at the sub-district-level in cases where a child does not meet the required growth targets. The application also provides the health community-based cadres with reminders and steps to accurately plan follow-up visits. These data are then sent to the community health centres at the sub-district-level, known in Indonesia as the puskesmas.
In the period 2013–15, researchers at IDS worked with World Vision Indonesia to assess whether data produced through mobile phone technology might trigger faster response by nutrition stakeholders. This short report supports ongoing work and focuses on how posyandu-level data might be used by different stakeholders….(More)”
Frederika Welle Donker and Bastiaan van Loenen in the Journal of eDemocracy and Open Government: “Since 2009, Open Government Data initiatives have been launched worldwide and the concept of open data is gaining momentum. Open data are often associated with realizing ambitions, such as a more transparent and efficient government, solving societal problems and increased economic value. However, between proposing an open data policy and successful implementation are some practicable obstacles, especially for government agencies required to generate sufficient revenue to cover their operating costs, so-called self-funding agencies. With lost revenue due to open data, there is a real risk that the update frequency and the quality of data may suffer or that the open data policy may even have to be reversed. This article has researched the financial effects of open data policies for self-funding agencies on their business model. The article provides some hands-on proposals for self-funding agencies having to implement an open data policy whilst ensuring their long-term sustainability….(More)”
Book by Bagguley, Paul (et al.): “This volume examines the transformation of politics and social movements at various levels. Starting with a transformation of identity within social movements, it goes on to discuss changes in the scale of social movement mobilisation. The impact of social movements on the state is also considered, with a particular focus upon the ways in which the state is able to incorporate apparently radical political agendas. Finally, the book examines those intellectual and theoretical debates stimulated by recent political transformations….(More)”
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs: “The UN E-Government Survey 2016 on “E-Government in Support of Sustainable Development” offers a snapshot of trends in the development of e-government in countries across the globe. According to the Survey more governments are embracing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to deliver services and to engage people in decision-making processes in all regions of the world. The 2016 UN E-Government Survey provides new evidence that e-government has the potential to help support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). The Survey indicates a positive global trend towards higher levels of e-government development as countries in all regions are increasingly embracing innovation and utilizing new ICTs to deliver services and engage people in decision-making processes. It underscores that one of the most important new trends is the advancement of people-driven services – services that reflect people’s needs and are driven by them. At the same time, disparities remain within and among countries. Lack of access to technology, poverty and inequality prevent people from fully taking advantage of the potential of ICTs and e-government for sustainable development….(More)”
CDDG Secretariat: “The Council of Europe is preparing guidelines to help ensure meaningful civil participation in political decision-making in its member states. Before finalising these guidelines, the European Committee on Democracy and Governance (CDDG) and the Conference of International Non-Governmental Organisations (Conference of INGOs) are organising a wide public consultation on the draft text.
This consultation seeks to involve public authorities and bodies at central, regional and local level such as ministries, government departments and bodies, regional and municipal councils, and elected officials as well as civil society, including voluntary groups, non-profit organisations, associations, foundations, charities, as well as interest-based community and advocacy groups.
The joint working group of the CDDG and Conference of INGOs will carefully consider the comments and observations received when finalising the draft guidelines before presenting these to the CDDG for transmission to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe for adoption.
You are invited to submit your observations (in English or French) on the draft guidelines to the CDDG Secretariat (CDDG@coe.int) by 4 September 2016. Your contributions are much appreciated.
Download the draft guidelines for meaningful civil participation in political decision-making“