How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tim Harford: “When was the last time you read a grand statement, accompanied by a large number, and wondered whether it could really be true? Statistics are vital in helping us tell stories – we see them in the papers, on social media, and we hear them used in everyday conversation – and yet we doubt them more than ever.

But numbers – in the right hands – have the power to change the world for the better. Contrary to popular belief, good statistics are not a trick, although they are a kind of magic. Good statistics are not smoke and mirrors; in fact, they help us see more clearly. Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, a microscope for a bacteriologist, or an X-ray for a radiologist. If we are willing to let them, good statistics help us see things about the world around us and about ourselves – both large and small – that we would not be able to see in any other way.

In How to Make the World Add Up, Tim Harford draws on his experience as both an economist and presenter of the BBC’s radio show ‘More or Less’. He takes us deep into the world of disinformation and obfuscation, bad research and misplaced motivation to find those priceless jewels of data and analysis that make communicating with numbers worthwhile. Harford’s characters range from the art forger who conned the Nazis to the stripper who fell in love with the most powerful congressman in Washington, to famous data detectives such as John Maynard Keynes, Daniel Kahneman and Florence Nightingale. He reveals how we can evaluate the claims that surround us with confidence, curiosity and a healthy level of scepticism.

Using ten simple rules for understanding numbers – plus one golden rule – this extraordinarily insightful book shows how if we keep our wits about us, thinking carefully about the way numbers are sourced and presented, we can look around us and see with crystal clarity how the world adds up….(More)”.

Science as Scorekeeping

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Brendan Foht at New Atlantis: “If there is one thing about the coronavirus pandemic that both sides of the political spectrum seem to agree on, it’s that the science that bears on it should never be “politicized.” From the left, former CDC directors of the Obama and Clinton administrations warn of how the Trump administration has politicized the agency’s science: “The only valid reason to change released guidelines is new information and new science — not politics.” From the right, the Wall Street Journal frets about the scientific journal Nature publishing a politically charged editorial about why China shouldn’t be blamed for the coronavirus: “Political pressure has distorted scientific judgment.” What both sides assume is that political authorities should defer to scientists on important decisions about the pandemic, but only insofar as science itself is somehow kept free from politics.

But politicization, and even polarization, are not always bad for science. There is much about how we can use science to respond to the pandemic that is inescapably political, and that we cannot simply leave to scientists to decide.

There is, however, a real problem with how political institutions in the United States have engaged with science. Too much of the debate over coronavirus science has centered on how bad the disease really is, with the administration downplaying its risks and the opposition insisting on its danger. One side sees the scientists warning of peril as a political obstacle that must be overcome. The other side sees them as authorities to whom we must defer, not as servants of the public who could be directed toward solving the problem. The false choice between these two perspectives on how science relates to politics obscures a wide range of political choices the country faces about how we can make use of our scientific resources in responding to the pandemic….(More)”.

Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ronald Deibert: “Digital technologies have given rise to a new machine-based civilization that is increasingly linked to a growing number of social and political maladies. Accountability is weak and insecurity is endemic, creating disturbing opportunities for exploitation.

Drawing from the cutting-edge research of the Citizen Lab, the world-renowned digital security research group which he founded and directs, Ronald J. Deibert exposes the impacts of this communications ecosystem on civil society. He tracks a mostly unregulated surveillance industry, innovations in technologies of remote control, superpower policing practices, dark PR firms, and highly profitable hack-for-hire services feeding off rivers of poorly secured personal data. Deibert also unearths how dependence on social media and its expanding universe of consumer electronics creates immense pressure on the natural environment.?In order to combat authoritarian practices, environmental degradation, and rampant electronic consumerism, he urges restraints on tech platforms and governments to reclaim the internet for civil society…(More)”.

Digital Government Initiative in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Compendium, prepared by the Division for Public Institutions and Digital Government (DPIDG) of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA): “…aims to capture emerging trends in digital responses of the United Nations Member States against the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide a preliminary analysis of their main features….


The initiatives listed in this compendium were submitted by Member States in response to a call for inputs launched by UN DESA/DPIDG in April/May 2020. The compendium lists selected initiatives according to major categories of action areas. While this publication does not list all initiatives submitted by Member States, the complete list can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/EGOV_COVID19_APPS .

Major groupings of action areas are:

  1. Information sharing
  2. E-participation
  3. E-health
  4. E-business
  5. Contact tracing
  6. Social distancing and virus tracking
  7. Working and learning from home
  8. Digital policy
  9. Partnerships…(More)”.

If data is 21st century oil, could foundations be the right owners?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Felix Oldenburg at Alliance: “What are the best investments for a foundation? This important question is one many foundation professionals are revisiting in light of low interest rates, high market volatility, and fears of deep economic trouble ahead. While stories of success certainly exist and are worth learning from, even the notorious lack of data cannot obscure the inconvenient truth that the idea of traditional endowments is in trouble.

I would argue that in order to unleash the potential of foundations, we should turn the question around, perhaps back on its feet: For which assets are foundations the best owners?

In the still dawning digital age, one fascinating answer may stare you right in the face as you read this. How much is your personal data worth? Your social media information, search and purchase history, they are the source of much of the market value of the fastest growing sector of our time. A rough estimate of market valuation of the major social platforms divided by their active users arrives at more than $1,000 USD per user, not differentiating by location or other factors. This sum is more than the median per capita wealth in about half the world’s countries. And if the trend continues, this value may continue to grow – and with it the big question of how to put one of the most valuable resource of our time to use for the good of all.

Acting as guardians of digital commons, data-endowed foundations could negotiate conditions for the commercial use of its assets, and invest the income to create equal digital opportunities, power 21st century education, and fight climate change.

Foundation ownership in the data sector may sound like a wild idea at first. Yet foundations and their predecessors have played the role of purpose-driven owners of critical assets and infrastructures throughout history. Monasteries (called ‘Stifte’ in German, the root of the German word for foundations) have protected knowledge and education in libraries, and secured health care in hospitals. Trusts have created affordable much of the social housing in the exploding cities of the 19th century. The German Marshall Plan created an endowment for economic recovery that is still in existence today.

The proposition is simple: Independent ownership for the good of all, beyond the commercial or national interests of individual corporations of governments, in perpetuity. Acting as guardians of digital commons, data-endowed foundations could negotiate conditions for the commercial use of its assets, and invest the income to create equal digital opportunities, power 21st century education, and fight climate change. An ideal model of ownership would also include a form of governance exercised by the users themselves through digital participation and elections. A foundation really only relies on one thing, a stable frame of rights in its legal home country. This is far from a trivial condition, but again history shows how many foundations have survived depressions, wars, and revolutions….(More)”

COVID-19 Is Challenging Medical and Scientific Publishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by By Vilas Dhar, Amy Brand & Stefano Bertozzi: “We need a transformation in how early data is shared. But the urgent need for peer-reviewed science, coupled with the potential harms of unreviewed publication, has set the stage for a public discussion on the future of academic publishing. It’s clear that we need rapid, transparent peer review that allows reviewers, authors, and readers to engage with one another, and for dynamic use of technology to accelerate publishing timelines without reducing academic rigor or researcher accountability. However, the field of academic publishing will need significant financial support to catalyze these changes.

Philanthropic organizations, as longtime supporters of scientific research, must be at the vanguard of the effort to fund improvements in how science is curated, reviewed, and published. When the MIT Press first began to address the need for the rapid dissemination of COVID-19-related research and scholarship—by making a selection relevant e-books and journal articles freely available, as well as developing a new, rapid publication model for books, under the imprint First Reads—senior staff were interested in undertaking bolder efforts to address the specific problems engendered by the pandemic. The proliferation of preprints related to COVID-19 was already apparent, as was the danger of un-vetted science seeding mainstream media stories with deleterious results.

Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19) is an innovation in open publishing that allows for rigorous, transparent peer review that is publicly shared in advance of publication. We believe that pushing the peer review process further upstream—so that it occurs at the preprint stage—will benefit a wide variety of stakeholders: journalists, clinicians, researchers, and the public at large.  …

With this and future efforts, we’ve identified five key opportunities to align academic publishing priorities with the public good:

  1. Transparency: Redesign and incentivize the peer review process to publish all peer reviews alongside primary research, reducing duplicate reviews and allowing readers and authors to understand and engage with the critiques.
  2. Accountability: The roles of various authors on any given manuscript should be clearly defined and presented for the readers. When datasets are used, one or more of the authors should have explicit responsibility for verifying the integrity of the data and should document that verification process within the paper’s methodology section.
  3. Urgency: Scientific research can be slow moving and time consuming. Publishing data does not have to be. Publishing houses should build networks of experts who are able to dedicate time to scrutinizing papers in a timely manner with the goal of rapid review with rigor.
  4. Digital-First Publishing: While science is a dynamic process of continued learning and exploration, much of scientific publishing conforms to outdated print models. Academic journals should explore opportunities to deploy AI-powered tools to identify peer-reviewers or preprint scholarship and digital publishing platforms to enable more visible communication and collaboration about research findings. Not only can reviews be closer to real-time, but authors can easily respond and modify their work for continuous quality improvement.
  5. Funding: Pioneering new solutions in academic publishing will require significant trial and error, at a time when traditional business models such as library subscriptions are in decline. Philanthropies should step forward to provide catalytic risk financing, testing new models and driving social good outcomes….(More)”.

Dispatches from the Behavioral Scientists Fighting Coronavirus in the Global South

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Neela Saldanha & Sakshi Ghai: “We are in the middle of a global pandemic, one that has infected more than 35 million people worldwide and killed over 1 million. Almost nine months after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern,” the primary strategies we have to prevent the spread of an invisible and often deadly virus are behavioral—keeping a distance, wearing masks, washing hands. No wonder behavioral science has been thrust into the spotlight. Behavioral scientists have been advising national and local governments, as well as health institutions around the world about the best ways to help people collectively adhere to new behaviors.

Although the pandemic rages globally, 7 of the 10 worst outbreaks in the world are in countries in the Global South. These countries have very different social, cultural, and economic contexts from those in the Global North. Mitigating the pandemic in these countries is not simply a matter of importing recommendations from the north. As Saugato Dutta pointed out, “advice that can seem grounded in universal human tendencies must be careful not to ignore the context in which it is applied.”

What are the elements of context that we need to attend to? What issues are behavioral scientists in Nairobi or New Delhi grappling with as they tackle the virus? What can we learn from the interventions deployed in Brazil or in the Philippines? And how can these lessons inspire the rest of the world?

We thought the best way to understand these questions was simply to ask behavioral scientists in those countries. And so, in this special collection, we have curated dispatches from behavioral scientists in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America to learn what’s different about tackling coronavirus.

Our goal is to learn from the work they have done, understand the unique challenges they face, and get their view on what behavioral science needs to focus on to benefit the 80 percent of the world population that lives in these countries. We also hope that this collection will spark ideas and seed collaborations among behavioral scientists in the Global South and North alike. The current situation demands it….(More)”.

Transparency and Secrecy in European Democracies: Contested Trade-offs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Dorota Mokrosinska: This edited volume offers a critical discussion of the trade-offs between transparency and secrecy in the actual political practice of democratic states in Europe. As such, it answers to a growing need to systematically analyse the problem of secrecy in governance in this political and geographical context.

Focusing on topical cases and controversies in particular areas, the contributors reflect on the justification and limits of the use of secrecy in democratic governance, register the social, cultural, and historical factors that inform this process and explore the criteria used by European legislators and policy-makers, both at the national and supranational level, when balancing interests on the sides of transparency and secrecy, respectively.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of security studies, political science, European politics/studies, law, history, political philosophy, public administration, intelligence studies, media and communication studies, and information technology sciences….(More)”.

Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee today released the findings of its more than 16-month long investigation into the state of competition in the digital economy, especially the challenges presented by the dominance of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook and their business practices.

The report, entitled Investigation of Competition in the Digital Marketplace: Majority Staff Report and Recommendations, totals more than 400 pages, marking the culmination of an investigation that included seven congressional hearings, the production of nearly 1.3 million internal documents and communications, submissions from 38 antitrust experts, and interviews with more than 240 market participants, former employees of the investigated platforms, and other individuals. It can be downloaded by clicking here.

“As they exist today, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook each possess significant market power over large swaths of our economy. In recent years, each company has expanded and exploited their power of the marketplace in anticompetitive ways,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (NY-10) and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David N. Cicilline (RI-01) in a joint statement. “Our investigation leaves no doubt that there is a clear and compelling need for Congress and the antitrust enforcement agencies to take action that restores competition, improves innovation, and safeguards our democracy. This Report outlines a roadmap for achieving that goal.”

After outlining the challenges presented due to the market domination of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, the report walks through a series of possible remedies to (1) restore competition in the digital economy, (2) strengthen the antitrust laws, and (3) reinvigorate antitrust enforcement.

The slate of recommendations include:

  • Structural separations to prohibit platforms from operating in lines of business that depend on or interoperate with the platform;
  • Prohibiting platforms from engaging in self-preferencing;
  • Requiring platforms to make its services compatible with competing networks to allow for interoperability and data portability;
  • Mandating that platforms provide due process before taking action against market participants;
  • Establishing a standard to proscribe strategic acquisitions that reduce competition;
  • Improvements to the Clayton Act, the Sherman Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act, to bring these laws into line with the challenges of the digital economy;
  • Eliminating anticompetitive forced arbitration clauses;
  • Strengthening the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice;
  • And promoting greater transparency and democratization of the antitrust agencies….(More)”.

Building the World We Deserve: A New Framework for Infrastructure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introductory letter to a new whitepaper published by Siegel Family Endowment that outlines a new framework for understanding and funding infrastructure: “This story begins, as many set in New York City do, with the subway. As transportation enthusiasts, we’re fascinated by trains, especially the remarkable system that runs above and below the city’s streets. It was the discovery of this shared passion for understanding how our subway system works that got us talking about infrastructure a few years ago.

Infrastructure, in the most traditional sense, brings to mind physical constructions: city streets, power lines, the pipes that carry water into your home. But what about all the other things that make society function? Having seen the decline in investment in the country’s physical infrastructure, and aware of the many ways the digital world is upending our definition of the term, we began exploring how Siegel Family Endowment could play a role in the future of infrastructure.

Over the past two years of research and conversations with partners across the field, we’ve realized that our nation’s infrastructure is due for a reset. Hearing the term should evoke a different image: an interconnected web of assets, seen and unseen, that make up the foundation upon which the complicated machinery of modern society operates. It’s inherently multidimensional.

In 2020, the United States has reckoned with a health pandemic and a watershed moment in the fight for racial equity. These challenges highlight how relevant it is to reconsider what society deems the most critical, foundational assets for its citizens—and to ensure they have access to those assets.

Funding infrastructure is often considered the responsibility of government agencies. Yet many of our peers in philanthropy have made important investments in the field. These include working with local governments to fund research, promote novel forms of public-private partnership, and, ultimately, better serve citizens. And if infrastructure is viewed through the broader lens we argue for in this paper, it becomes clear just how much philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and private entities are investing in our digital and social ecosystems.

We believe that we can do more—and better—if we commit as a country to adopting some of the principles outlined in this paper. However, we also consider this the beginning of a conversation. The time for us to think bigger and bolder about infrastructure is here. Our challenge now is to design it so that more people may thrive….(More)”.