Book by Carissa Carter: “Maps aren’t just geographic, they are also infographic and include all types of frameworks and diagrams. Any figure that sorts data visually and presents it spatially is a map. Maps are ways of organizing information and figuring out what’s important. Even stories can be mapped! The Secret Language of Maps provides a simple framework to deconstruct existing maps and then shows you how to create your own.
An embedded mystery story about a woman who investigates the disappearance of an old high school friend illustrates how to use different maps to make sense of all types of information. Colorful illustrations bring the story to life and demonstrate how the fictional character’s collection of data, properly organized and “mapped,” leads her to solve the mystery of her friend’s disappearance.
You’ll learn how to gather data, organize it, and present it to an audience. You’ll also learn how to view the many maps that swirl around our daily lives with a critical eye, aware of the forces that are in play for every creator…(More)”.
Responsible Data for Children Goes Polyglot: New Translations of Principles & Resources Available
Responsible Data for Children Blog: “In 2018, UNICEF and The GovLab launched the Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) initiative with the aim of supporting organisations and practitioners in ensuring that the interest of children is put at the centre of any work involving data for and about them.
Since its inception, the RD4C initiative has aimed to be field-oriented, driven by the needs of both children and practitioners across sectors and contexts. It has done so by ensuring that actors from the data responsibility sphere are informed and engaged on the RD4C work.
We want them to know what responsible data for and about children entails, why it is important, and how they can realize it in their own work.
In this spirit, the RD4C initiative has started translating its resources into different languages. We would like anyone willing to enhance their responsible data handling practices for and about children to be equipped with resources they can understand. As a global effort, we want to guarantee anyone willing to share their expertise and contribute be given the opportunity to do it.
Importantly, we would like children around the world—including the most marginalised and vulnerable groups—to be aware of what they can expect from organisations handling data for and about them and to have the means to demand and enforce their rights.
Last month, we released the RD4C Video, which is now available in Arabic, French and Spanish. Soon, the rest of the RD4C resources, such as our principles, tools and case studies will be translated as well.”
Democracy Disrupted: Governance in an Increasingly Virtual and Massively Distributed World.
Essay by Eric B. Schnurer: “…In short, it is often difficult to see where new technologies actually will lead. The same technological development can, in different settings, have different effects: The use of horses in warfare, which led seemingly inexorably in China and Europe to more centralized and autocratic states, had the effect on the other side of the world of enabling Hernán Cortés, with an army of roughly five hundred Spaniards, to defeat the massed infantries of the highly centralized, autocratic Aztec regime. Cortés’s example demonstrates that a particular technology generally employed by a concentrated power to centralize and dominate can also be used by a small insurgent force to disperse and disrupt (although in Cortés’s case this was on behalf of the eventual imposition of an even more despotic rule).
Regardless of the lack of inherent ideological content in any given technology, however, our technological realities consistently give metaphorical shape to our ideological constructs. In ancient Egypt, the regularity of the Nile’s flood cycle, which formed the society’s economic basis, gave rise to a belief in recurrent cycles of life and death; in contrast, the comparatively harsh and static agricultural patterns of the more-or-less contemporaneous Mesopotamian world produced a society that conceived of gods who simply tormented humans and then relegated them after death to sit forever in a place of dust and silence; meanwhile, the pastoral societies of the Fertile Crescent have handed down to us the vision of God as shepherd of his flock. (The Bible also gives us, in the story of Cain and Abel, a parable of the deadly conflict that technologically driven economic changes wreak: Abel was a traditional pastoralist—he tended sheep—while Cain, who planted seeds in the ground, represented the disruptive “New Economy” of settled agriculture. Tellingly, after killing off the pastoralist, the sedentarian Cain exits to found the first city.88xGenesis 4:17.)
As humans developed more advanced technologies, these in turn reshaped our conceptions of the world around us, including the proper social order. Those who possessed superior technological knowledge were invested with supernatural authority: The key to early Rome’s defense was the ability quickly to assemble and disassemble the bridges across the Tiber, so much so that the pontifex maximus—literally the “greatest bridge-builder”—became the high priest, from whose Latin title we derive the term pontiff. The most sophisticated—and arguably most crucial—technology in any town in medieval Europe was its public clock. The clock, in turn, became a metaphor for the mechanical working of the universe—God, in fact, was often conceived of as a clockmaker (a metaphor still frequently invoked to argue against evolution and for the necessity of an intelligent creator)—and for the proper form of social organization: All should know their place and move through time and space as predictably as the figurines making their regular appearances and performing their routinized interactions on the more elaborate and entertaining of these town-square timepieces.
In our own time, the leading technologies continue to provide the organizing concepts for our economic, political, and theological constructs. The factory became such a ubiquitous reflection of economic and social realities that, from the early nineteenth century onward, virtually every social and cultural institution—welfare (the poorhouse, or, as it was often called, the “workhouse”), public safety (the penitentiary), health care (the hospital), mental health (the insane asylum), “workforce” or public housing, even (as teachers often suggest to me) the education system—was consciously remodeled around it. Even when government finally tried to get ahead of the challenges posed by the Industrial Revolution by building the twentieth-century welfare state, it wound up constructing essentially a new capital of the Industrial Age in Washington, DC, with countless New Deal ministries along the Mall—resembling, as much as anything, the rows of factory buildings one can see in the steel and mill towns of the same era.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the atom and the computer came to dominate most intellectual constructs. First, the uncertainty of quantum mechanics upended mechanistic conceptions of social and economic relations, helping to foster conceptions of relativism in everything from moral philosophy to literary criticism. More recently, many scientists have come to the conclusion that the universe amounts to a massive information processor, and popular culture to the conviction that we all simply live inside a giant video game.
In sum, while technological developments are not deterministic—their outcomes being shaped, rather, by the uses we conceive to employ them—our conceptions are largely molded by these dominant technologies and the transformations they effect.99xI should note that while this argument is not deterministic, like those of most current thinkers about political and economic development such as Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, and Yuval Noah Harari, neither is it materialistic, like that of Karl Marx. Marx thoroughly rejected human ideas and thinking as movers of history, which he saw as simply shaped and dictated by the technology. I am suggesting instead a dialectic between the ideal and the material. To repeat the metaphor, technological change constitutes the plate tectonics on which human contingencies are then built. To understand, then, the deeper movements of thought, economic arrangements, and political developments, both historical and contemporary, one must understand the nature of the technologies underlying and driving their unfolding…(More)“.
Responsible by Design – Principles for the ethical use of behavioural science in government
OECD Report: “The use of behavioural insights (BI) in public policy has grown over the last decade, with the largest increase of new behavioural teams emerging in the last five years. More and more governments are turning to behavioural science – a multidisciplinary approach to policy making encompassing lessons from psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology, economics and more. There are a wide variety of frameworks and resources currently available, such as the OECD BASIC framework, designed with the purpose of helping BI practitioners and government officials infusing behavioural science throughout the policy cycle.
Despite the availability of such frameworks, there are less resources available with the primary purpose of safeguarding the responsible use of behavioural science in government. Oftentimes, teams are left to establish their own ethical standards and practices, which has resulted in an uncoordinated mosaic of procedures guiding the international community interested in upholding ethical behavioural practices. Until now, few attempts have been made to standardize ethical principles for behavioural science in public policy, and to concisely gather and present international best practices.
In light of this, we developed the first-of-its-kind Good Practice Principles for the Ethical Use of Behavioural Science in Public Policy to advance the responsible use of BI in government…(More)”.
How China uses search engines to spread propaganda
Blog by Jessica Brandt and Valerie Wirtschafter: “Users come to search engines seeking honest answers to their queries. On a wide range of issues—from personal health, to finance, to news—search engines are often the first stop for those looking to get information online. But as authoritarian states like China increasingly use online platforms to disseminate narratives aimed at weakening their democratic competitors, these search engines represent a crucial battleground in their information war with rivals. For Beijing, search engines represent a key—and underappreciated vector—to spread propaganda to audiences around the world.
On a range of topics of geopolitical importance, Beijing has exploited search engine results to disseminate state-backed media that amplify the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. As we demonstrate in our recent report, published by the Brookings Institution in collaboration with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, users turning to search engines for information on Xinjiang, the site of the CCP’s egregious human rights abuses of the region’s Uyghur minority, or the origins of the coronavirus pandemic are surprisingly likely to encounter articles on these topics published by Chinese state-media outlets. By prominently surfacing this type of content, search engines may play a key role in Beijing’s effort to shape external perceptions, which makes it crucial that platforms—along with authoritative outlets that syndicate state-backed content without clear labeling—do more to address their role in spreading these narratives…(More)“.
Moral Expansiveness Around the World: The Role of Societal Factors Across 36 Countries
Paper by Kelly Kirkland et al: “What are the things that we think matter morally, and how do societal factors influence this? To date, research has explored several individual-level and historical factors that influence the size of our ‘moral circles.’ There has, however, been less attention focused on which societal factors play a role. We present the first multi-national exploration of moral expansiveness—that is, the size of people’s moral circles across countries. We found low generalized trust, greater perceptions of a breakdown in the social fabric of society, and greater perceived economic inequality were associated with smaller moral circles. Generalized trust also helped explain the effects of perceived inequality on lower levels of moral inclusiveness. Other inequality indicators (i.e., Gini coefficients) were, however, unrelated to moral expansiveness. These findings suggest that societal factors, especially those associated with generalized trust, may influence the size of our moral circles…(More)”.
The Truth in Fake News: How Disinformation Laws Are Reframing the Concepts of Truth and Accuracy on Digital Platforms
Paper by Paolo Cavaliere: “The European Union’s (EU) strategy to address the spread of disinformation, and most notably the Code of Practice on Disinformation and the forthcoming Digital Services Act, tasks digital platforms with a range of actions to minimise the distribution of issue-based and political adverts that are verifiably false or misleading. This article discusses the implications of the EU’s approach with a focus on its categorical approach, specifically what it means to conceptualise disinformation as a form of advertisement and by what standards digital platforms are expected to assess the truthful or misleading nature of the content they distribute because of this categorisation. The analysis will show how the emerging EU anti-disinformation framework marks a departure from the European Court of Human Rights’ consolidated standards of review for public interest and commercial speech and the tests utilised to assess their accuracy….(More)”.
Opportunities and challenges of using social media big data to assess mental health consequences of the COVID-19 crisis and future major events
Paper by Martin Tušl et al : “The present commentary discusses how social media big data could be used in mental health research to assess the impact of major global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We first provide a brief overview of the COVID-19 situation and the challenges associated with the assessment of its global impact on mental health using conventional methods. We then propose social media big data as a possible unconventional data source, provide illustrative examples of previous studies, and discuss the advantages and challenges associated with their use for mental health research. We conclude that social media big data represent a valuable resource for mental health research, however, several methodological limitations and ethical concerns need to be addressed to ensure safe use…(More)”.
Expert Group to Eurostat releases its report on the re-use of privately-held data for Official Statistics
Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “…To inform its efforts, Eurostat set up an expert group in 2021 on ‘Facilitating the use of new data sources for official statistics’ to reflect on opportunities offered by the data revolution to enhance the reuse of private sector data for official statistics”.

Data reuse is a particularly important area for exploration, both because of the potential it offers and because it is not sufficiently covered by current policies. Data reuse occurs when data collected for one purpose is shared and reused for another, often with resulting social benefit. Currently, this process is limited by a fragmented or outdated policy and regulatory framework, and often quite legitimate concerns over ethical challenges represented by sharing (e.g., threats to individual privacy).
Nonetheless, despite such hurdles, a wide variety of evidence supports the idea that responsible data reuse can strengthen and supplement official statistics, and potentially lead to lasting and positive social impact.
Having reviewed and deliberated about these issues over several months, the expert group issued its report this week entitled “Empowering society by reusing privately held data for official statistics”. It seeks to develop recommendations and a framework for sustainable data reuse in the production of official statistics. It highlights regulatory gaps, fragmentation of practices, and a lack of clarity regarding businesses’ rights and obligations, and it draws attention to the ways in which current efforts to reuse data have often led to ad-hoc, one-off projects rather than systematic transformation.
The report considers a wide variety of evidence, including historical, policy, and academic research, as well as the theoretical literature… (More)”.
Read the Eurostat report at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/read-final-report_en
How football shirts chart the rise and fall of tech giants
Article by Ravi Hiranand and Leo Schwartz: “It’s the ultimate status symbol, a level of exposure achieved by few companies — but one available to any company that’s willing and able to pay a hefty price. It’s an honor that costs millions of dollars, and in return, your company’s logo is on the TV screens of millions of people every week.
Sponsoring a football club — proper football, that is — is more than just a business transaction. It’s about using the world’s most watched sport to promote your brand. Getting your company’s logo on the shirt of a team like Liverpool or Real Madrid means tying your brand to a global icon. And for decades, it’s been a route taken by emerging tech companies, flush with cash to burn and a name to earn.
But these sponsorships actually reveal something about the tech industry as a whole: when you trace the history of these commercial deals across the decades, patterns emerge. Rather than individual companies, entire sectors of the industry — from cars to consumer tech to gambling websites — seem to jump into the sport at once, signaling their rise to, or the desire to, dominate global markets where football is also part of everyday life. It’s no coincidence, for example, that mobile phone companies turned to sponsoring football clubs during the beginning of the new millenium: with handsets becoming increasingly common and 3G just around the corner, companies like Samsung and Vodafone wasted no time in paying record amounts to some of the most successful clubs in England.
Rest of World took a look at some of the more memorable shirt sponsorship deals in football — from Sony’s affiliation with Italy’s champions to Rakuten’s deal with a Spanish giant — and what they say about the rise and fall of the tech sectors those companies represented…(More)”.