Forced to Change: Tech Giants Bow to Global Onslaught of Rules

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Adam Satariano, and David McCabe: “By Thursday, Google will have changed how it displays certain search results. Microsoft will no longer force Windows customers to use its Bing internet search tool. And Apple will give iPhone and iPad users access to rival app stores and payment systems for the first time.

The tech giants have been preparing ahead of a Wednesday deadline to comply with a new European Union law intended to increase competition in the digital economy. The law, called the Digital Markets Act, requires the biggest tech companies to overhaul how some of their products work so smaller rivals can gain more access to their users.

Those changes are some of the most visible shifts that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta and others are making in response to a wave of new regulations and laws around the world. In the United States, some of the tech behemoths have said they will abandon practices that are the subject of federal antitrust investigations. Apple, for one, is making it easier for Android users to interact with its iMessage product, a topic that the Justice Department has been investigating.

“This is a turning point,” said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission executive vice president in Brussels, who spent much of the past decade battling with tech giants. “Self-regulation is over.”

For decades, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta barreled forward with few rules and limits. As their power, riches and reach grew, a groundswell of regulatory activity, lawmaking and legal cases sprang up against them in Europe, the United States, China, India, Canada, South Korea and Australia. Now that global tipping point for reining in the largest tech companies has finally tipped.

The companies have been forced to alter the everyday technology they offer, including devices and features of their social media services, which have been especially noticeable to users in Europe. The firms are also making consequential shifts that are less visible, to their business models, deal making and data-sharing practices, for example.

The degree of change is evident at Apple. While the Silicon Valley company once offered its App Store as a unified marketplace around the world, it now has different rules for App Store developers in South Korea, the European Union and the United States because of new laws and court rulings. The company dropped the proprietary design of an iPhone charger because of another E.U. law, meaning future iPhones will have a charger that works with non-Apple devices…(More)”.

Why Do Universities Ignore Good Ideas?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jeffrey Funk: “Here is a recent assessment of 2023 Nobel Prize Winner Katalin Kariko:

“Eight current and former colleagues of Karikó told The Daily Pennsylvanian that — over the course of three decades — the university repeatedly shunned Karikó and her research, despite its groundbreaking potential.”

Another article claims that this occurred because she could not get the financial support to continue her research.

Why couldn’t she get financial support? “You’re more likely to get grants if you’re a tenured faculty member, but you’re more likely to get promoted to tenure if you get grants,” said Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at the New England Complex Systems Institute and a former faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School. “There is a vicious cycle,” he says.

Interesting. So, the idea doesn’t matter. What matters to funding agencies is that you have previously obtained funding or are a tenured professor. Really? Are funding agencies this narrow-minded?

Mr. Feigl-Ding also said, “Universities also tend to look at how much a researcher publishes, or how widely covered by the media their work is, as opposed to how innovative the research is.” But why couldn’t Karikó get published?

Science magazine tells the story of her main paper with Drew Weismann in 2005. After being rejected by Nature within 24 hours: “It was similarly rejected by Science and by Cell, and the word incremental kept cropping up in the editorial staff comments.”

Incremental? There are more than two million papers published each year, and this research, for which Karikó and Weismann won a Nobel Prize, was deemed incremental? If it had been rejected for methods or for the contents being impossible to believe, I think most people could understand the rejection. But incremental?

Obviously, most of the two million papers published each year are really incremental. Yet one of the few papers that we can all agree was not incremental, gets rejected because it was deemed incremental.

Furthermore, this is happening in a system of science in which even Nature admits “disruptive science has declined,” few science-based technologies are being successfully commercialized, and Nature admits that it doesn’t understand why…(More)”.

What Happens to Your Sensitive Data When a Data Broker Goes Bankrupt?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jon Keegan: “In 2021, a company specializing in collecting and selling location data called Near bragged that it was “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Last year the company went public with a valuation of $1 billion (via a SPAC). Seven months later it filed for bankruptcy and has agreed to sell the company.

But for the “1.6B people” that Near said its data represents, the important question is: What happens to Near’s mountain of location data? Any company could gain access to it through purchasing the company’s assets.

The prospect of this data, including Near’s collection of location data from sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, being sold off in bankruptcy has raised alarms in Congress. Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden wrote the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) urging the agency to “protect consumers and investors from the outrageous conduct” of Near, citing his office’s investigation into the India-based company. 

Wyden’s letter also urged the FTC “to intervene in Near’s bankruptcy proceedings to ensure that all location and device data held by Near about Americans is promptly destroyed and is not sold off, including to another data broker.” The FTC took such an action in 2010 to block the use of 11 years worth of subscriber personal data during the bankruptcy proceedings of the XY Magazine, which was oriented to young gay men. The agency requested that the data be destroyed to prevent its misuse.

Wyden’s investigation was spurred by a May 2023 Wall Street Journal report that Near had licensed location data to the anti-abortion group Veritas Society so it could target ads to visitors of Planned Parenthood clinics and attempt to dissuade women from seeking abortions. Wyden’s investigation revealed that the group’s geofencing campaign focused on 600 Planned Parenthood clinics in 48 states. The Journal also revealed that Near had been selling its location data to the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies...(More)”.

Why Everyone Hates The Electronic Medical Record

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dharushana Muthulingam: “Patient R was in a hurry. I signed into my computer—or tried to. Recently, IT had us update to a new 14-digit password. Once in, I signed (different password) into the electronic medical record. I had already ordered routine lab tests, but R had new info. I pulled up a menu to add on an additional HIV viral load to capture early infection, which the standard antibody test might miss. R went to the lab to get his blood drawn

My last order did not print to the onsite laboratory. An observant nurse had seen the order and no tube. The patient had left without the viral load being drawn. I called the patient: could he come back? 

 Healthcare workers do not like the electronic health record (EHR), where they spend more time than with patients. Doctors hate it, as do nurse practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, and physical therapists. The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine reports the EHR is a major contributor to clinician burnout. Patient experience is mixed, though the public is still concerned about privacy, errors, interoperability and access to their own records.

The EHR promised a lot: better accuracy, streamlined care, and patient-accessible records. In February 2009, the Obama administration passed the HITECH Act on this promise, investing $36 billion to scale up health information technology. No more deciphering bad handwriting for critical info. Efficiency and cost-savings could get more people into care. We imagined cancer and rare disease registries to research treatments. We wanted portable records accessible in an emergency. We wanted to rapidly identify the spread of highly contagious respiratory illnesses and other public health crises.

Why had the lofty ambition of health information, backed by enormous resources, failed so spectacularly?…(More)”.

Governing the use of big data and digital twin technology for sustainable tourism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Eko Rahmadian: “The tourism industry is increasingly utilizing big data to gain valuable insights and enhance decision-making processes. The advantages of big data, such as real-time information, robust data processing capabilities, and improved stakeholder decision-making, make it a promising tool for analyzing various aspects of tourism, including sustainability. Moreover, integrating big data with prominent technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize smart and sustainable tourism.

Despite the potential benefits, the use of big data for sustainable tourism remains limited, and its implementation poses challenges related to governance, data privacy, ethics, stakeholder communication, and regulatory compliance. Addressing these challenges is crucial to ensure the responsible and sustainable use of these technologies. Therefore, strategies must be developed to navigate these issues through a proper governing system.

To bridge the existing gap, this dissertation focuses on the current research on big data for sustainable tourism and strategies for governing its use and implementation in conjunction with emerging technologies. Specifically, this PhD dissertation centers on mobile positioning data (MPD) as a case due to its unique benefits, challenges, and complexity. Also, this project introduces three frameworks, namely: 1) a conceptual framework for digital twins (DT) for smart and sustainable tourism, 2) a documentation framework for architectural decisions (DFAD) to ensure the successful implementation of the DT technology as a governance mechanism, and 3) a big data governance framework for official statistics (BDGF). This dissertation not only presents these frameworks and their benefits but also investigates the issues and challenges related to big data governance while empirically validating the applicability of the proposed frameworks…(More)”.

Public sector capacity matters, but what is it?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Rainer Kattel, Marriana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington, Fernando Fernandez-Monge, Iacopo Gronchi, Ruth Puttick: “As governments turn increasingly to public sector innovations, challenges, missions and transformative policy initiatives, the need to understand and develop public sector capacities is ever more important. In IIPP’s project with Bloomberg Philanthropies to develop a Public Sector Capabilities Index, we propose to define public sector capacities through three inter-connected layers: state capacities, organisational capabilities, and dynamic capabilities of the public organisations.

The idea that governments should be able to design and deliver effective policies has existed ever since we had governments. A quick search in Google’s Ngram viewer shows that the use of state capacity in published books has experienced exponential growth since the late 1980s. It is, however, not a coincidence that focus on state and public sector capacities more broadly emerges in the shadow of new public management and neoliberal governance and policy reforms. Rather than understanding governance as a collaborative effort between all sectors, these reforms gave normative preference to business practices. Increasing focus on public sector capacity as a concept should thus be understood as an attempt to rebalance our understanding of how change happens in societies — through cross-sectoral co-creation — and as an effort to build the muscles in public organisations to work together to tackle socio-economic challenges.

We propose to define public sector capacities through three inter-connected layers: state capacities, organizational routines, and dynamic capabilities of the public organisations…(More)”.

Civic Trust: What’s In A Concept?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew J. Zahuranec, Oscar Romero and Kim Ochilo: “We will only be able to improve civic trust once we know how to measure it…

A visualization of the ways to measure civic trust

Recently, there’s been a noticeable decline in trust toward institutions across different sectors of society. This is a serious issue, as evidenced by surveys including the Edelman Trust Barometer, Gallup, and Pew Research.

Diminishing trust presents substantial obstacles. It threatens to weaken the foundation of a pluralistic democracy, adversely affects public health, and hinders the collaboration needed to tackle worldwide challenges such as climate change. Trust forms the cornerstone of democratic social contracts and is crucial for maintaining the civic agreements essential for the prosperity and cohesion of communities, cities, and countries alike.

Yet to increase civic trust, we need to know what we mean by it and how to measure it, which turns out to be a challenging exercise. Toward that end, The GovLab at New York University and the New York Civic Engagement Commission joined forces to catalog and identify methodologies to quantify and understand the nuances of civic trust.

“Building trust across New York is essential if we want to deepen civic engagement,” said Sarah Sayeed, Chair and Executive Director of the Civic Engagement Commission. “Trust is the cornerstone of a healthy community and robust democracy.”

This blog delves into various strategies for developing metrics to measure civic trust, informed by our own desk research, which categorizes civic trust metrics into descriptive, diagnostic, and evaluative measures…(More)”.

Citizen Engagement in Evidence-informed Policy-making: A Guide to Mini-publics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by WHO: “This guide focuses on a specific form of citizen engagement, namely mini-publics, and their potential to be adapted to a variety of contexts. Mini-publics are forums that include a cross-section of the population selected through civic lottery to participate in evidence-informed deliberation to inform policy and action. The term refers to a diverse set of democratic innovations to engage citizens in policy-making. This guide provides an overview of how to organize mini-publics in the health sector. It is a practical companion to the 2022 Overview report, Implementing citizen engagement within evidence-informed policy-making. Both documents examine and encourage contributions that citizens can make to advance WHO’s mission to achieve universal health coverage…(More)””

A complexity science approach to law and governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to a Special Issue by Pierpaolo Vivo, Daniel M. Katz and J. B. Ruhl: “The premise of this Special Issue is that legal systems are complex adaptive systems, and thus complexity science can be usefully applied to improve understanding of how legal systems operate, perform and change over time. The articles that follow take this proposition as a given and act on it using a variety of methods applied to a broad array of legal system attributes and contexts. Yet not too long ago some prominent legal scholars expressed scepticism that this field of study would produce more than broad generalizations, if even that. To orient readers unfamiliar with this field and its history, here we offer a brief background on how using complexity science to study legal systems has advanced from claims of ‘pseudoscience’ status to a widely adopted mainstream method. We then situate and summarize the articles.

The focus of complexity science is complex adaptive systems (CAS), systems ‘in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing and adaptation via learning or evolution’. It is important to distinguish CAS from systems that are merely complicated, such as a combustion engine, or complex but non-adaptive, such as a hurricane. A forest or coastal ecosystem, for example, is a complicated network of diverse physical and biological components, which, under no central rules of control, is highly adaptive over time…(More)”.

How will AI shape our future cities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ying Zhang: “For city planners, a bird’s-eye view of a map showing buildings and streets is no longer enough. They need to simulate changes to bus routes or traffic light timings before implementation to know how they might affect the population. Now, they can do so with digital twins – often referred to as a “mirror world” – which allows them to simulate scenarios more safely and cost-effectively through a three-dimensional virtual replica.

Cities such as New York, Shanghai and Helsinki are already using digital twins. In 2022, the city of Zurich launched its own version. Anyone can use it to measure the height of buildings, determine the shadows they cast and take a look into the future to see how Switzerland’s largest city might develop. Traffic congestion, a housing shortage and higher energy demands are becoming pressing issues in Switzerland, where 74% of the population already lives in urban areas.

But updating and managing digital twins will become more complex as population densities and the levels of detail increase, according to architect and urban designer Aurel von Richthofen of the consultancy Arup.

The world’s current urban planning models are like “individual silos” where “data cannot be shared, which makes urban planning not as efficient as we expect it to be”, said von Richthofen at a recent event hosted by the Swiss innovation network Swissnex. …

The underlying data is key to whether a digital twin city is effective. But getting access to quality data from different organisations is extremely difficult. Sensors, drones and mobile devices may collect data in real-time. But they tend to be organised around different knowledge domains – such as land use, building control, transport or ecology – each with its own data collection culture and physical models…(More)”