Collection

Traffic Data Is Good for More than Just Streets, Sidewalks

Curated on September 19, 2019September 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Skip Descant at Government Technology: “The availability of highly detailed daily traffic data is clearly an invaluable resource for traffic planners, but it can also help officials overseeing natural lands or public works understand how to better manage those facilities.

The Natural Communities Coalition, a conservation nonprofit in southern California, began working with the traffic analysis firm StreetLight Data in early 2018 to study the impacts from the thousands of annual visitors to 22 parks and natural lands. StreetLight Data’s use of de-identified cellphone data held promise for the project, which will continue into early 2020.

“You start to see these increases,” Milan Mitrovich, science director for the Natural Communities Coalition, said of the uptick in visitor activity the data showed. “So being able to have this information, and share it with our executive committee… these folks, they’re seeing it for the first time.”…

Officials with the Natural Communities Coalition were able to use the StreetLight data to gain insights into patterns of use not only per day, but at different times of the day. The data also told researchers where visitors were traveling from, a detail park officials found “jaw-dropping.”

“What we were able to see is, these resources, these natural areas, cast an incredible net across southern California,” said Mitrovich, noting visitors come from not only Orange County, but Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego counties as well, a region of more than 20 million residents.

The data also allows officials to predict traffic levels during certain parts of the week, times of day or even holidays….(More)”.

Radical visions of future government

Curated on September 19, 2019September 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nesta Report: “Is government fit for purpose? Evaporating public trust in democracy and political institutions, a broken social contract, lack of money and stale ideas mean it feels increasingly difficult to answer that question in the affirmative. It is this fear – that government and our public services are no longer up to the job – that inspired us to launch an open call, seeking radical visions of future government.

We wanted a serious rethink about what government is, what it should do, and how it should work. Radical Visions of Future Government is the culmination of that work, presenting 17 visions of the future of government. The collection features essays, provocations, thought experiments, fiction, speculative design and original art, with each one asking the reader to consider the implications of an idea about something fundamentally different in the future.

While written from a British context, combinations of these issues have a resonance in governments around the world. We chose the year 2030 as the setting for these visions: near enough to be imaginable, far enough away for radical change to actually be contemplated.

The collection is not intended to set out exclusively desirable or optimistic futures, but instead to stimulate thinking about a spectrum of possibilities. As one essay in the collection argues, it is better to think about the future than not; that in itself is democratising. It would be very surprising if a reader agreed with all of them. Nor are any of them a reflection of a Nesta view. But we think they are useful energisers, and we hope that any reader will come away with a sharpened sense of what might be possible and where we should set our sights for 2030.

The contributions come from a range of voices – researchers, artists, designers, academics, writers and public servants – each with a different perspective on what needs to change about government….(More)”.

Urban Systems Design: From “science for design” to “design in science”

Curated on September 19, 2019September 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue of Urban Analytics and City Science by Perry PJ Yang and Yoshiki Yamagata: “The direct design of cities is often regarded as impossible, owing to the fluidity, complexity, and uncertainty entailed in urban systems. And yet, we do design our cities, however imperfectly. Cities are objects of our own creation, they are intended landscapes, manageable, experienced and susceptible to analysis (Lynch, 1984). Urban design as a discipline has always focused on “design” in its professional practices. Urban designers tend to ask normative questions about how good city forms are designed, or how a city and its urban spaces ought to be made, thereby problematizing urban form-making and the values entailed. These design questions are analytically distinct from “science”-related research that tends to ask positive questions such as how cities function, or what properties emerge from interactive processes of urban systems. The latter questions require data, analytic techniques, and research methods to generate insight.

This theme issue “Urban Systems Design” is an attempt to outline a research agenda by connecting urban design and systems science, which is grounded in both normative and positive questions. It aims to contribute to the emerging field of urban analytics and city science that is central to this journal. Recent discussions of smart cities inspire urban design, planning and architectural professionals to address questions of how smart cities are shaped and what should be made. What are the impacts of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the questions of how built environments are designed and developed? How would the internet of things (IoT), big data analytics and urban automation influence how humans perceive, experience, use and interact with the urban environment? In short, what are the emerging new urban forms driven by the rapid move to ‘smart cities’?…(More)”.

Big Data, Political Campaigning and the Law

Curated on September 19, 2019September 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Normann Witzleb, Moira Paterson, and Janice Richardson on “Democracy and Privacy in the Age of Micro-Targeting”…: “In this multidisciplinary book, experts from around the globe examine how data-driven political campaigning works, what challenges it poses for personal privacy and democracy, and how emerging practices should be regulated.

The rise of big data analytics in the political process has triggered official investigations in many countries around the world, and become the subject of broad and intense debate. Political parties increasingly rely on data analytics to profile the electorate and to target specific voter groups with individualised messages based on their demographic attributes. Political micro-targeting has become a major factor in modern campaigning, because of its potential to influence opinions, to mobilise supporters and to get out votes. The book explores the legal, philosophical and political dimensions of big data analytics in the electoral process. It demonstrates that the unregulated use of big personal data for political purposes not only infringes voters’ privacy rights, but also has the potential to jeopardise the future of the democratic process, and proposes reforms to address the key regulatory and ethical questions arising from the mining, use and storage of massive amounts of voter data.

Providing an interdisciplinary assessment of the use and regulation of big data in the political process, this book will appeal to scholars from law, political science, political philosophy, and media studies, policy makers and anyone who cares about democracy in the age of data-driven political campaigning….(More)”.

The Future of Political Philosophy

Curated on September 19, 2019September 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Katrina Forrester in Boston Review: “Since the upheavals of the financial crisis of 2008 and the political turbulence of 2016, it has become clear to many that liberalism is, in some sense, failing. The turmoil has given pause to economists, some of whom responded by renewing their study of inequality, and to political scientists, who have since turned to problems of democracy, authoritarianism, and populism in droves. But Anglo-American liberal political philosophers have had less to say than they might have.

The silence is due in part to the nature of political philosophy today—the questions it considers worth asking and those it sidelines. Since Plato, philosophers have always asked about the nature of justice. But for the last five decades, political philosophy in the English-speaking world has been preoccupied with a particular answer to that question developed by the American philosopher John Rawls.

Rawls’s work in the mid-twentieth century ushered in a paradigm shift in political philosophy. In his wake, philosophers began exploring what justice and equality meant in the context of modern capitalist welfare states, using those concepts to describe, in impressive and painstaking detail, the ideal structure of a just society—one that turned out to closely resemble a version of postwar social democracy. Working within this framework, they have since elaborated a body of abstract moral principles that provide the philosophical backbone of modern liberalism. These ideas are designed to help us see what justice and equality demand—of our society, of our institutions, and of ourselves.

This is a story of triumph: Rawls’s philosophical project was a major success. It is not that political philosophers after Rawls didn’t disagree; fine-grained and heated arguments are what philosophers do best. But over the last few decades they built a robust consensus about the fundamental rules of the game, conceiving of themselves as engaged in a common intellectual project with a shared conceptual framework. The governing concepts and aims of political philosophy have, for generations, been more or less taken for granted.

But if modern political philosophy is bound up with modern liberalism, and liberalism is failing, it may well be time to ask whether these apparently timeless ideas outlived their usefulness….(More)”.

Administrative Reform and the Quest for Openness: A Popperian Review of Open Government

Curated on September 18, 2019September 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alex Ingrams: “Scholars and policymakers claim open government offers a panoply of good governance benefits, but it also risks political abuse as window dressing or a smokescreen. To address this risk, this article builds on the meaning of openness through an examination of closed and open society in Karl Popper’s theory. Four historic trends in open government reform are analyzed. The findings suggest a need for new attention to Popperian notions of the social technologist’s piecemeal change and mechanical engineering aimed at serious policy problems. Without appreciation of these open society linkages, open governments will continue to paradoxically co-exist alongside closed societies…(More)”.

Examining Civic Engagement Links to Health

Curated on September 18, 2019September 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Findings from the Literature and Implications for a Culture of Health by the Rand Corporation: “The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is leading a pioneering effort to advance a culture of health that “enables all in our diverse society to lead healthier lives, now and for generations to come.” The RWJF Culture of Health Action Framework is divided into four Action Areas, and civic engagement (which RWJF defines broadly as participating in activities that advance the public good) is identified as one of the three drivers for the Action Area, Making Health a Shared Value, along with mindset and expectations, and sense of community. Civic engagement can serve as a mechanism for translating changes in a health-related mindset and sense of community into tangible actions that could lead to new health-promoting partnerships, improvements in community health conditions, and the degree of integration among health services and systems for better health outcomes.

The authors of this report seek a closer focus on the causal relationship between civic engagement and health and well-being — that is, whether better health and well-being might promote more civic engagement, whether civic engagement might promote health or well-being, or perhaps both.

In this report, authors conduct a structured review to understand what the scientific literature presents about the empirical relationship between health and civic engagement. The authors specifically examine whether health is a cause of civic engagement, a consequence of it, or both; what causal mechanisms underlie this link; and where there are gaps in knowledge for the field….(More)”

The Upside of Deep Fakes

Curated on September 18, 2019September 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jessica M. Silbey and Woodrow Hartzog: “It’s bad. We know. The dawn of “deep fakes” — convincing videos and images of people doing things they never did or said — puts us all in jeopardy in several different ways. Professors Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron have noted that now “false claims — even preposterous ones — can be peddled with unprecedented success today thanks to a combination of social media ubiquity and virality, cognitive biases, filter bubbles, and group polarization.” The scholars identify a host of harms from deep fakes, ranging from people being exploited, extorted, and sabotaged, to societal harms like the erosion of democratic discourse and trust in social institutions, undermining public safety, national security, journalism, and diplomacy, deepening social divisions, and manipulation of elections. But it might not be all bad. Even beyond purported beneficial uses of deep-fake technology for education, art, and science, the looming deep-fake disaster might have a silver lining. Hear us out. We think deep fakes have an upside.

Crucial to our argument is the idea that deep fakes don’t create new problems so much as make existing problems worse. Cracks in systems, frameworks, strategies, and institutions that have been leaking for years now threaten to spring open. Journalism, education, individual rights, democratic systems, and voting protocols have long been vulnerable. Deep fakes might just be the straw that breaks them. And therein lies opportunity for repair. Below we briefly address some deep problems and how finally addressing them may also neutralize the destructive force of deep fakes. We only describe three cultural institutions – education, journalism, and representative democracy — with deep problems that could be strengthened as a response to deep fakes for greater societal gains. But we encourage readers to think up more. We have a hunch that once we harness the upside of deep fakes, we may unlock creative solutions to other sticky social and political problems…(More)”.

The Social Afterlife

Curated on September 18, 2019September 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Andrew Gilden: “Death is not what it used to be. With the rise of social media and advances in digital technology, postmortem decision-making increasingly involves difficult questions about the ongoing social presence of the deceased. Should a Twitter account keep tweeting? Should a YouTube singer keep singing? Should Tinder photos be swiped left for the very last time? The traditional touchstones of effective estate planning — reducing transaction costs and maximizing estate value — do little to guide this new social afterlife. Managing a person’s legacy has shifted away from questions of financial investment and asset management to questions of emotional and cultural stewardship. This Article brings together the diverse areas of law that shape a person’s legacy and develops a new framework for addressing the evolving challenges of legacy stewardship

This Article makes two main contributions. First, it identifies and critically examines the four models of stewardship that currently structure the laws of legacy: (1) the “freedom of disposition” model dominant in the laws of wills and trusts, (2) the “family inheritance” model dominant in copyright law, (3) the “public domain” model dominant in many states’ publicity rights laws, and (4) the “consumer contract” model dominant in over forty states’ new digital assets laws. Second, this Article develops a new stewardship model, which it calls the “decentered decedent.” The decentered decedent model recognizes that individuals occupy heterogenous social contexts, and it channels postmortem decision-making into each of those contexts. Unlike existing stewardship models, this new model does not try to centralize stewardship decisions in any one stakeholder — the family, the public, the market, or even the decedent themselves. Instead, the decentered decedent model distributes stewardship across the diverse, dispersed communities that we all leave behind….(More)”.

AI Global Surveillance Technology

Curated on September 18, 2019September 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Carnegie Endowment: “Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is rapidly proliferating around the world. A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.

In order to appropriately address the effects of this technology, it is important to first understand where these tools are being deployed and how they are being used.

To provide greater clarity, Carnegie presents an AI Global Surveillance (AIGS) Index—representing one of the first research efforts of its kind. The index compiles empirical data on AI surveillance use for 176 countries around the world. It does not distinguish between legitimate and unlawful uses of AI surveillance. Rather, the purpose of the research is to show how new surveillance capabilities are transforming the ability of governments to monitor and track individuals or systems. It specifically asks: