Beth McMurtrie in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Back in March, Congress limited federal support for political-science research by the National Science Foundation to projects that promote national security or American economic interests. That decision was a victory for Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma who has long aimed to eliminate all NSF grants for political science, arguing that unlike the hard sciences it rarely produces concrete benefits to society.
Congress’s action has led to soul searching within the discipline about how effective academics have been in conveying the value of their work to the public. It has also revived a longstanding debate among political scientists about the shift toward more statistically sophisticated, mathematically esoteric research, and its usefulness outside of academe. Those discussions were out front at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, held here last week.
Rogers M. Smith, a political-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of 13 members of a panel that discussed the controversy over NSF money for political-science studies. He put the problem bluntly: “We need to make a better case for ourselves.”
Few on the panel, in fact, seemed to think that political science had done a good job on that front. The association has created a task force—led by Arthur Lupia, a political-science professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor—to improve public perceptions of political science’s value. He said his colleagues could learn from organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which holds special sessions for the news media at its annual conference to explain the work of its members to the public.”
Fighting for Reliable Evidence
New book by Judy Gueron and Howard Rolston: “Once primarily used in medical clinical trials, random assignment experimentation is now accepted among social scientists across a broad range of disciplines. The technique has been used in social experiments to evaluate a variety of programs, from microfinance and welfare reform to housing vouchers and teaching methods. How did randomized experiments move beyond medicine and into the social sciences, and can they be used effectively to evaluate complex social problems? Fighting for Reliable Evidence provides an absorbing historical account of the characters and controversies that have propelled the wider use of random assignment in social policy research over the past forty years.
Drawing from their extensive experience evaluating welfare reform programs, noted scholar practitioners Judith M. Gueron and Howard Rolston portray randomized experiments as a vital research tool to assess the impact of social policy. In a random assignment experiment, participants are sorted into either a treatment group that participates in a particular program, or a control group that does not. Because the groups are randomly selected, they do not differ from one another systematically. Therefore any subsequent differences between the groups can be attributed to the influence of the program or policy. The theory is elegant and persuasive, but many scholars worry that such an experiment is too difficult or expensive to implement in the real world. Can a control group be truly insulated from the treatment policy? Would staffers comply with the random allocation of participants? Would the findings matter?”
Can The "GitHub For Science" Convince Researchers To Open-Source Their Data?
Interview at Co.Labs: “Science has a problem: Researchers don’t share their data. A new startup wants to change that by melding GitHub and Google Docs…Nathan Jenkins is a condensed matter physicist and programmer who has worked at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He recently left his post-doc program at New York University to cofound Authorea, a platform that helps scientists draft, collaborate on, share, and publish academic articles. We talked with him about the idea behind Authorea, the open science movement, and the future of scientific publishing.”
Money and trust among strangers
New paper by Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari and Maria Bigoni in PNAS:”What makes money essential for the functioning of modern society? Through an experiment, we present evidence for the existence of a relevant behavioral dimension in addition to the standard theoretical arguments. Subjects faced repeated opportunities to help an anonymous counterpart who changed over time. Cooperation required trusting that help given to a stranger today would be returned by a stranger in the future. Cooperation levels declined when going from small to large groups of strangers, even if monitoring and payoffs from cooperation were invariant to group size. We then introduced intrinsically worthless tokens. Tokens endogenously became money: subjects took to reward help with a token and to demand a token in exchange for help. Subjects trusted that strangers would return help for a token. Cooperation levels remained stable as the groups grew larger. In all conditions, full cooperation was possible through a social norm of decentralized enforcement, without using tokens. This turned out to be especially demanding in large groups. Lack of trust among strangers thus made money behaviorally essential. To explain these results, we developed an evolutionary model. When behavior in society is heterogeneous, cooperation collapses without tokens. In contrast, the use of tokens makes cooperation evolutionarily stable.”
Telling Citizens What Exactly Government Does Would Cost $100 Million
Government Executive: “Proposed legislation to meticulously track every federal program and contract would cost $100 million over five years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The Taxpayers Right to Know Act, sponsored by Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., would require federal agencies to identify and describe each program they administer, the costs to administer them, the number of program beneficiaries and the number of both federal and contract staff involved for each service. The bill would require each agency to post all of this information on its website.
Some provisions of the legislation are already law as part of recent amendments to the Government Performance and Results Act, CBO found, though the requirement to report the total administrative costs and spending on contract services would involve new information. CBO made its estimate based on the precedent set by the GPRA, as well as the reporting requirements included in the 2009 stimulus package.
While the bill — which cleared the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in July and is awaiting a vote on the full House floor — contains no direct offset for the $100 million in spending it would create, proponents expect it to identify duplicative federal programs, thereby leading to billions of dollars in savings.”
Confronting Wicked Problems in the Metropolis
An APSA 2013 Annual Meeting Paper by Jered Carr and Brent Never: “These problems facing many metropolitan regions in the U.S. are complex, open-ended and seemingly intractable. The obstacles to regional governance created by these “wicked” problems are the root of the criticisms of the consensus-based “self-organizing” strategies described by frameworks such as New Regionalism and Institutional Collective Action. The self-organized solutions described by these frameworks require substantial consensus exist among the participants and this creates a bias toward solving low-conflict problems where consensus already exists. We discuss the limitations of these two influential research programs in the context of wicked problems and draw on the concept of nested institutional action situations to suggest a research agenda for studying intergovernmental collaboration on problems requiring the development of consensus about the nature of the problem and acceptable solutions. The Advocacy Coalitions and Institutional Analysis and Development frameworks have been effectively used to explain regional collaboration on wicked environmental problems and likely have insights for confronting the wicked fiscal and social problems of regional governance. The implications are that wicked problems are tamed through iterated games and that institution-making at the collective-choice level can then be scaled up to achieve agreement at the constitutional level of analysis.”
Dump the Prizes
Kevin Starr in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Contests, challenges, awards—they do more harm than good. Let’s get rid of them….Here’s why:
1. It wastes huge amounts of time.
The Knight Foundation recently released a thoughtful, well-publicized report on its experience running a dozen or so open contests. These are well-run contests, but the report states that there have been 25,000 entries overall, with only 400 winners. That means there have been 24,600 losers. Let’s say that, on average, entrants spent 10 hours working on their entries—that’s 246,000 hours wasted, or 120 people working full-time for a year. Other contests generate worse numbers. I’ve spoken with capable organization leaders who’ve spent 40-plus hours on entries for these things, and too often they find out later that the eligibility criteria were misleading anyway. They are the last people whose time we should waste. …
2. There is way too much emphasis on innovation and not nearly enough on implementation.
Ideas are easy; implementation is hard. Too many competitions are just about generating ideas and “innovation.” Novelty is fun, but there is already an immense limbo-land populated by successful pilots and proven innovations that have gone nowhere. I don’t want to fund anything that doesn’t have someone capable enough to execute on the idea and committed enough to make it work over the long haul. Great social entrepreneurs are people with high-impact ideas, the chops to execute on them, and the commitment to go the distance. They are rare, and they shouldn’t have to enter a contest to get what they need.
The current enthusiasm for crowdsourcing innovation reflects this fallacy that ideas are somehow in short supply. I’ve watched many capable professionals struggle to find implementation support for doable—even proven—real-world ideas, and it is galling to watch all the hoopla around well-intentioned ideas that are doomed to fail. Most crowdsourced ideas prove unworkable, but even if good ones emerge, there is no implementation fairy out there, no army of social entrepreneurs eager to execute on someone else’s idea. Much of what captures media attention and public awareness barely rises above the level of entertainment if judged by its potential to drive real impact.
3. It gets too much wrong and too little right.
The Hilton Humanitarian prize is a single winner-take-all award of $1.5 million to one lucky organization each year. With a huge prize like that, everyone feels compelled to apply (that is, get nominated), and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted on fruitless recommendations. Very smart people from the foundation spend a lot of time investigating candidates—and I don’t understand why. The list of winners over the past ten years includes a bunch of very well-known, mostly wonderful organizations: BRAC, PIH, Tostan, PATH, Aravind, Doctors Without Borders. I mean, c’mon—you could pick these names out of a hat. BRAC, for example, is an organization we should all revere and imitate, but its budget in 2012 was $449 million, and it’s already won a zillion prizes. If you gave even a third of the Hilton prize to an up-and-coming organization, it could be transformative.
Too many of these things are winner-or-very-few-take-all, and too many focus on the usual suspects. ..
4. It serves as a distraction from the social sector’s big problem.
The central problem with the social sector is that it does not function as a real market for impact, a market where smart funders channel the vast majority of resources toward those best able to create change. Contests are a sideshow masquerading as a main-stage event, a smokescreen that obscures the lack of efficient allocation of philanthropic and investment capital. We need real competition for impact among social sector organizations, not this faux version that makes the noise-to-signal ratio that much worse….”
See also response by Mayur Patel on Why Open Contests Work
Project Anticipation
New site for the UNESCO Chair in Anticipatory Systems: “The purpose of the Chair in Anticipatory Systems is to both develop and promote the Discipline of Anticipation, thereby bringing a critical idea to life. To this end, we have a two pronged strategy consisting of knowledge development and communication. The two are equally important. While many academic projects naturally emphasize knowledge development, we must also reach a large and disparate audience, and open minds locked within the longstanding legacy of reactive science. Thus, from a practical standpoint, how we conceptualize and communicate the Discipline of Anticipation is as important as the Discipline of Anticipation itself….
The project’s main objective is the development of the Discipline of Anticipation, including the development of a system of anticipatory strategies and techniques. The more the culture of anticipation spreads, the easier it will be to develop socially acceptable anticipatory strategies. It will then be possible to accumulate relevant experience on how to think about the future and to use anticipatory methods. It will also be possible to try and develop a language and a body of practices that are more adapted for thinking about the future and for developing new ways to address threads and opportunities.
The following outcomes are envisaged:
- Futures Literacy: Development of a set of protocols for the appropriate implementation on the ground of the different kinds of anticipation (under the rubric of futures literacy), together with syllabi and teaching materials on the Discipline of Anticipation.
- Anticipatory Capability Profile: Development of a Anticipatory Capability Profile for communities and institutions, together with a set of recommendations on how a community, organization or institution may raise its anticipatory performance.
- Resilience Profile: Setting of a resilience index and analysis of the resilience level of selected communities and regions, including a set of recommendations on how to raise their resilience level.”
Public Open Data: The Good, the Bad, the Future
Camille Crittenden at IDEALAB: “Some of the most powerful tools combine official public data with social media or other citizen input, such as the recent partnership between Yelp and the public health departments in New York and San Francisco for restaurant hygiene inspection ratings. In other contexts, such tools can help uncover and ultimately reduce corruption by making it easier to “follow the money.”
Despite the opportunities offered by “free data,” this trend also raises new challenges and concerns, among them, personal privacy and security. While attention has been devoted to the unsettling power of big data analysis and “predictive analytics” for corporate marketing, similar questions could be asked about the value of public data. Does it contribute to community cohesion that I can find out with a single query how much my neighbors paid for their house or (if employed by public agencies) their salaries? Indeed, some studies suggest that greater transparency leads not to greater trust in government but to resignation and apathy.
Exposing certain law enforcement data also increases the possibility of vigilantism. California law requires the registration and publication of the home addresses of known sex offenders, for instance. Or consider the controversy and online threats that erupted when, shortly after the Newtown tragedy, a newspaper in New York posted an interactive map of gun permit owners in nearby counties.
…Policymakers and officials must still mind the “big data gap.”So what does the future hold for open data? Publishing data is only one part of the information ecosystem. To be useful, tools must be developed for cleaning, sorting, analyzing and visualizing it as well. …
For-profit companies and non-profit watchdog organizations will continue to emerge and expand, building on the foundation of this data flood. Public-private partnerships such as those between San Francisco and Appallicious or Granicus, startups created by Code for America’s Incubator, and non-partisan organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and MapLight rely on public data repositories for their innovative applications and analysis.
Making public data more accessible is an important goal and offers enormous potential to increase civic engagement. To make the most effective and equitable use of this resource for the public good, cities and other government entities should invest in the personnel and equipment — hardware and software — to make it universally accessible. At the same time, Chief Data Officers (or equivalent roles) should also be alert to the often hidden challenges of equity, inclusion, privacy, and security.”
Berks, wankers and wonks: how to pitch science policy advice
Stian Westlake in the Guardian: ” If you think about the kinds of people whom policymakers generally hear from when they cast about for advice, the distinction between berks and wankers is rather useful.
The berks of the policy world are easiest to recognise. They’re oversimplifiers, charlatans and blowhards. Berks can be trusted to take a complicated issue and deliver a simplistic and superficially plausible answer. In their search for a convenient message, they misrepresent research or ignore it entirely. They happily range far from their field of expertise and offer opinions on subjects about which they know little – while pretending to be on their expert home turf. And they are very good at soundbites.
Policymakers who consult berkish experts will get clear, actionable advice. But it could very well be wrong.
Most researchers, especially those with an academic background, will find avoiding berkhood comes naturally. After all, graduate school teaches rigour and caution. Academia reserves an especially withering contempt for professors who use their intellectual authority to advance controversial positions outside their area of expertise, from Linus Pauling’s speculations on vitamin C to Niall Ferguson’s opinions on US economic policy. No one wants to be a dodgy dossier merchant.
The risk of becoming a wanker is far more subtle. If the berks of the policy world are too ready to give an opinion, the wankers never give an opinion on anything, except to say how complicated it is.
In some ways, wankers are more harmless than berks, in the sense that being overconfident about what you know is often more dangerous than being too modest. Much bad policy is based on bad evidence, and rigorous research can expose that. Sometimes policymakers are asking the wrong questions entirely, and need to be told as much.
But policymakers who get all their advice from wankers are likely to be as ill-served as those who rely on berks. As anyone who’s ever advised a friend will know, good advice is not just a matter of providing information, or summarising research. It also involves making a judgment about the balance of facts, helping frame the issue, and communicating in a way that the person you’re counselling will understand and act on…
Neither glibness or prolixity make for useful advice. There are lots more tips on this from initiatives like the Alliance for Useful Evidence (of which Nesta, my employer, is a funder) and WonkComms.”