Paper by Richard Rose: “Open data makes transparent whether public officials are conducting their activities in conformity with standards that can be bureaucratic, political or moral. Actions that violate these standards are colloquially lumped together under the heterogeneous heading of corruption. However, the payment of a large bribe for a multi-million contract differs in kind from a party saying one thing to win votes and doing another once in office or an individual public figure promoting high standards of personal morality while conducting himself in private very differently. This paper conceptually distinguishes different forms of corruption with concrete examples. It also shows how sanctions for different forms of corruption require different sanctions: punishment by the courts, by political leaders or the electorate, or by public morality and a sense of individual shame. Such sanctions are most effective when there is normative agreement that standards have been violated. There are partisan as well as normative disagreements about whether standards have been violated. The paper concludes by pointing out that differences in violating standards require different policy responses….(More)”
ePolicyWorks
About ePolicyWorks: “Launched by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP), ePolicyWorks is a Web-based approach to policymaking that engages citizens and stakeholders in new and innovative ways. The initiative leverages the latest technology to address barriers to employment for people with disabilities and fosters real-time collaboration and communication around key issues.
Features: Participants in the ePolicyWorks initiative benefit from a variety of tools and features to help them stay informed, build relationships and partner on important policy developments. These include Web-based dialogues on key issues, interactive Twitter chats and RSS feeds. These online collaborative spaces are where stakeholders can learn and contribute to the conversation about the intersection between employment, disability and specific policy areas.
Issue Areas: ePolicyWorks’ goal is to break down barriers to employment for people with disabilities. The initiative is focused on the use of technology to support jobseekers in their search and employees in their careers; accessible transportation to get people to and from work; youth and young adult jobseekers; and how stay-at-work/return-to-work policies support employees and businesses….(More)”
Reinvention in Middle America
New report by sparks & honey: “Conventional wisdom suggests that to peer into the crystal ball of America’s future, one should go to Silicon Valley to check out the latest start-up unicorns, or to New York or Los Angeles to scout emerging trends in fashion and food.
Middle America, on the other hand, is often described as if it’s on the margins of culture and innovation — “flyover country” — provincial, unsophisticated and stuck in the past. But Middle America is diverse and although it is not stuck in the past —rhetoric about it is.
In this culture forecast report, we spotlight the region, looking at it not through the lens of politics, ideology or outdated clichés, but rather through innovation. Key cities from Cleveland to Nashville to Louisville are reinventing themselves by embracing innovation in manufacturing, city design, healthcare, sustainability efforts and clean energy, creatively solving problems that the entire country will eventually have to confront. And they’re imbuing this reinvention with characteristic Middle American values of community, collaboration, and concern for the social impact of their actions.
Yes, portions of Middle America may have a lot of cornfields — but drone-farming is happening there. Although Nashville is still the seat of the Grand Ole Opry, it’s also emerging as a major fashion and design hub. And in Appalachia, a coal museum is powered by solar energy and out-of-work coal miners are reinventing themselves as coders. It’s even predicted that in five years, the Midwest will have more startups than Silicon Valley.
Although it’s easy to politicize and divide America, innovation is not about moving right or left. Innovation is about moving forward…(More)”
AI and the Law: Setting the Stage
Urs Gasser: “Lawmakers and regulators need to look at AI not as a homogenous technology, but a set of techniques and methods that will be deployed in specific and increasingly diversified applications. There is currently no generally agreed-upon definition of AI. What is important to understand from a technical perspective is that AI is not a single, homogenous technology, but a rich set of subdisciplines, methods, and tools that bring together areas such as speech recognition, computer vision, machine translation, reasoning, attention and memory, robotics and control, etc. ….
Given the breadth and scope of application, AI-based technologies are expected to trigger a myriad of legal and regulatory issues not only at the intersections of data and algorithms, but also of infrastructures and humans. …
When considering (or anticipating) possible responses by the law vis-à-vis AI innovation, it might be helpful to differentiate between application-specific and cross-cutting legal and regulatory issues. …
Information asymmetries and high degrees of uncertainty pose particular difficulty to the design of appropriate legal and regulatory responses to AI innovations — and require learning systems. AI-based applications — which are typically perceived as “black boxes” — affect a significant number of people, yet there are nonetheless relatively few people who develop and understand AI-based technologies. ….Approaches such as regulation 2.0, which relies on dynamic, real-time, and data-driven accountability models, might provide interesting starting points.
The responses to a variety of legal and regulatory issues across different areas of distributed applications will likely result in a complex set of sector-specific norms, which are likely to vary across jurisdictions….
Law and regulation may constrain behavior yet also act as enablers and levelers — and are powerful tools as we aim for the development of AI for social good. …
Law is one important approach to the governance of AI-based technologies. But lawmakers and regulators have to consider the full potential of available instruments in the governance toolbox. ….
In a world of advanced AI technologies and new governance approaches towards them, the law, the rule of law, and human rights remain critical bodies of norms. …
As AI applies to the legal system itself, however, the rule of law might have to be re-imagined and the law re-coded in the longer run….(More).
News consumption app helps users diversify their sources
Springwise: “In an era where the term ‘fake news’ has become commonplace, news app Read Across the Aisle by US-based BeeLine Reader is designed to help users break out from the ‘filter bubble’ of media sources they are inclined to read from by offering articles from opposing angles. The app, which is Kickstarter funded, hopes to combat political polarization by allowing readers to see the partisan bias of the news sources they are accessing. It tracks the user’s own political news bias over time, and finds reliable new sources from both the left and right wing to offer a reader a well-rounded spectrum of approaches.
Research has found that Internet users, particularly in the realm of news and social media, tend to immerse themselves with those who have similar opinions, meaning other information can be missed or deemed false. App users are informed when their reading habits skew too far to one side of the political spectrum, and are consequently prompted to read articles written by the press from the opposing side.
As the once-popular newspapers have made way for online news consumption, technology to support the industry has excelled. Recent innovations covered by Springwise include a blockchain transparency tool applied to newsfeeds to create algorithms of trustworthy news sources, and a news website that encourages readers to empathise with opposing views….(More)”.
A.I. experiments (with Google)
About: “With all the exciting A.I. stuff happening, there are lots of people eager to start tinkering with machine learning technology. A.I. Experiments is a showcase for simple experiments that let anyone play with this technology in hands-on ways, through pictures, drawings, language, music, and more.
Submit your own
We want to make it easier for any coder – whether you have a machine learning background or not – to create your own experiments. This site includes open-source code and resources to help you get started. If you make something you’d like to share, we’d love to see it and possibly add it to the showcase….(More)”
Shaping space for civic life: Can better design help engage citizens?
Patrick Sisson at Curbed: “…The Assembly Civic Engagement Survey, a new report released yesterday by the Center for Active Design, seeks to understand the connections between the design of public spaces and buildings on public life, and eventually create a toolbox for planners and politicians to make decisions that can help improve civic pride. There’s perhaps an obvious connection between what one might consider a better-designed neighborhood and public perception of government and community, but how to design that neighborhood to directly improve public engagement—especially during an era of low voter engagement and partisan divide—is an important, and unanswered, question….
One of the most striking findings was around park signage. Respondents were shown a series of three signs, ranging from a traditional display of park rules and prohibitions to a more proactive, engaging pictograph that tells parkgoers it’s okay to give high-fives. The survey found the simple switch to more eye-catching, positive, and entertaining signage improved neighborhood pride by 11 percent and boosted the feeling that “the city cares for people in this park” by 9 percent. Similar improvements were found in surveys looking at signage on community centers.
According to Frank, the biggest revelation from the research is how a minimum of effort can make a large impact. On one hand, she says, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that transforming a formerly graffiti-covered vacant lot into a community garden can impact community trust and cohesion.
What sticks out from the study’s findings is how little is really necessary to shift attitudes and improve people’s trust in their neighborhoods and attitudes toward city government and police. Litter turned out to be a huge issue: High levels of trash eroded community pride by 10 percent, trust in police by 5 percent, and trust in local government by 4 percent. When presented with a series of seven things they could improve about their city, including crime, traffic, and noise, 23 percent of respondents chose litter.
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In short, disorder erodes civic trust. The small things matter, especially when cities are formulating budgets and streetscaping plans and looking at the most effective ways of investing in community improvements….
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Giving cities direction as well as data
Beyond connecting the dots, Frank wants to give planners rationale for their actions. Telling designers that placing planters in the middle of a street can beautify a neighborhood is one thing; showing that this kind of beautification increases walkability, brings more shoppers to a commercial strip, and ultimately leads to higher sales and tax revenue spurs action and innovation.
Frank gives the example of redesigning the streetscape in front of a police station. The idea of placing planters and benches may seem like a poor use of limited funds, until data and research reveals it’s a cost-effective way to encourage interactions between cops and the community and helps change the image of the department….(More)”
Detecting riots with Twitter
Cardiff University News: “An analysis of data taken from the London riots in 2011 showed that computer systems could automatically scan through Twitter and detect serious incidents, such as shops being broken in to and cars being set alight, before they were reported to the Metropolitan Police Service.
The computer system could also discern information about where the riots were rumoured to take place and where groups of youths were gathering. The new research, published in the peer-review journal ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, showed that on average the computer systems could pick up on disruptive events several minutes before officials and over an hour in some cases.
“Antagonistic narratives and cyber hate”
The researchers believe that their work could enable police officers to better manage and prepare for both large and small scale disruptive events.
Co-author of the study Dr Pete Burnap, from Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science and Informatics, said: “We have previously used machine-learning and natural language processing on Twitter data to better understand online deviance, such as the spread of antagonistic narratives and cyber hate…”
“We will never replace traditional policing resource on the ground but we have demonstrated that this research could augment existing intelligence gathering and draw on new technologies to support more established policing methods.”
Scientists are continually looking to the swathes of data produced from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to help them to detect events in real-time.
Estimates put social media membership at approximately 2.5 billion non-unique users, and the data produced by these users have been used to predict elections, movie revenues and even the epicentre of earthquakes.
In their study the research team analysed 1.6m tweets relating to the 2011 riots in England, which began as an isolated incident in Tottenham on August 6 but quickly spread across London and to other cities in England, giving rise to looting, destruction of property and levels of violence not seen in England for more than 30 years.
Machine-learning algorithms
The researchers used a series of machine-learning algorithms to analyse each of the tweets from the dataset, taking into account a number of key features such as the time they were posted, the location where they were posted and the content of the tweet itself.
Results showed that the machine-learning algorithms were quicker than police sources in all but two of the disruptive events reported…(More)”.
Examining the Mistrust of Science
Proceedings of a National Academies Workshop: “The Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable held a meeting on February 28 and March 1, 2017, to explore trends in public opinion of science, examine potential sources of mistrust, and consider ways that cross-sector collaboration between government, universities, and industry may improve public trust in science and scientific institutions in the future. The keynote address on February 28 was given by Shawn Otto, co-founder and producer of the U.S. Presidential Science Debates and author of The War on Science.
“There seems to be an erosion of the standing and understanding of science and engineering among the public,” Otto said. “People seem much more inclined to reject facts and evidence today than in the recent past. Why could that be?” Otto began exploring that question after the candidates in the 2008 presidential election declined an invitation to debate science-driven policy issues and instead chose to debate faith and values.
“Wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. Now, some 240 years later, science is so complex that it is difficult even for scientists and engineers to understand the science outside of their particular fields. Otto argued,
“The question is, are people still well-enough informed to be trusted with their own government? Of the 535 members of Congress, only 11—less than 2 percent—have a professional background in science or engineering. By contrast, 218—41 percent—are lawyers. And lawyers approach a problem in a fundamentally different way than a scientist or engineer. An attorney will research both sides of a question, but only so that he or she can argue against the position that they do not support. A scientist will approach the question differently, not starting with a foregone conclusion and arguing towards it, but examining both sides of the evidence and trying to make a fair assessment.”
According to Otto, anti-science positions are now acceptable in public discourse, in Congress, state legislatures and city councils, in popular culture, and in presidential politics. Discounting factually incorrect statements does not necessarily reshape public opinion in the way some trust it to. What is driving this change? “Science is never partisan, but science is always political,” said Otto. “Science takes nothing on faith; it says, ‘show me the evidence and I’ll judge for myself.’ But the discoveries that science makes either confirm or challenge somebody’s cherished beliefs or vested economic or ideological interests. Science creates knowledge—knowledge is power, and that power is political.”…(More)”.
Big Data: A Twenty-First Century Arms Race
Report by Atlantic Council and Thomson Reuters: “We are living in a world awash in data. Accelerated interconnectivity, driven by the proliferation of internet-connected devices, has led to an explosion of data—big data. A race is now underway to develop new technologies and implement innovative methods that can handle the volume, variety, velocity, and veracity of big data and apply it smartly to provide decisive advantage and help solve major challenges facing companies and governments
For policy makers in government, big data and associated technologies like machine-learning and artificial Intelligence, have the potential to drastically improve their decision-making capabilities. How governments use big data may be a key factor in improved economic performance and national security. This publication looks at how big data can maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of government and business, while minimizing modern risks. Five authors explore big data across three cross-cutting issues: security, finance, and law.
Chapter 1, “The Conflict Between Protecting Privacy and Securing Nations,” Els de Busser
Chapter 2, “Big Data: Exposing the Risks from Within,” Erica Briscoe
Chapter 3, “Big Data: The Latest Tool in Fighting Crime,” Benjamin Dean, Fellow
Chapter 4, “Big Data: Tackling Illicit Financial Flows,” Tatiana Tropina
Chapter 5, “Big Data: Mitigating Financial Crime Risk,” Miren Aparicio….Read the Publication (PDF)“