Paper by Carlos Santiso: “Does digitalization reduce corruption? What are the integrity benefits of government digitalization? While the correlation between digitalization and corruption is well established, there is less actionable evidence on the integrity dividends of specific digitalization reforms on different types of corruption and the policy channels through which they operate. These linkages are especially relevant in high corruption risk environments. This article unbundles the integrity dividends of digital reforms undertaken by governments around the world, accelerated by the pandemic. It analyzes the rise of data-driven integrity analytics as promising tools in the anticorruption space deployed by tech-savvy integrity actors. It also assesses the broader integrity benefits of the digitalization of government services and the automation of bureaucratic processes, which contribute to reducing bribe solicitation risks by front-office bureaucrats. It analyzes in particular the impact of digitalization on social transfers. It argues that government digitalization can be an implicit yet effective anticorruption strategy, with subtler yet deeper effects, but there needs to be greater synergies between digital reforms and anticorruption strategies….(More)”.
OECD Good Practice Principles for Public Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age
OECD Report: “The digital age provides great opportunities to transform how public services are designed and delivered. The OECD Good Practice Principles for Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age provide a clear, actionable and comprehensive set of objectives for the high-quality digital transformation of public services. Reflecting insights gathered from across OECD member countries, these nine principles are arranged under three pillars of “Build accessible, ethical and equitable public services that prioritise user needs, rather than government needs”; “Deliver with impact, at scale and with pace”; and “Be accountable and transparent in the design and delivery of public services to reinforce and strengthen public trust”. The principles are advisory rather than prescriptive, allowing for local interpretation and implementation. They should also be considered in conjunction with wider OECD work to equip governments in harnessing the potential of digital technology and data to improve outcomes for all…(More)”.
New Interoperable Europe Act to deliver more efficient public services through improved cooperation between national administrations on data exchanges and IT solutions
Press Release: “The Commission has adopted the Interoperable Europe Act proposal and its accompanying Communication to strengthen cross-border interoperability and cooperation in the public sector across the EU. The Act will support the creation of a network of sovereign and interconnected digital public administrations and will accelerate the digital transformation of Europe’s public sector. It will help the EU and its Member States to deliver better public services to citizens and businesses, and as such, it is an essential step to achieve Europe’s digital targets for 2030 and support trusted data flows. It will also help save costs, and cross-border interoperability can lead to cost-savings between €5.5 and €6.3 million for citizens and between €5.7 and €19.2 billion for businesses dealing with public administrations…
The Interoperable Europe Act introduces:
- A structured EU cooperation where public administrations, supported by public and private actors, come together in the framework of projects co-owned by Member States, as well as regions and cities.
- Mandatory assessments to evaluate the impact of changes in information technology (IT) systems on cross-border interoperability in the EU.
- The sharing and reuse of solutions, often open source, powered by an ‘Interoperable Europe Portal’ – a one-stop-shop for solutions and community cooperation.
- Innovation and support measures, including regulatory sandboxes for policy experimentation, GovTech projects to develop and scale up solutions for reuse, and training support…(More)”.
The Labor Market Consequences of Appropriate Technology
Paper by Gustavo de Souza: “Developing countries rely on technology created by developed countries. This paper demonstrates that such reliance increases wage inequality but leads to greater production in developing countries. I study a Brazilian innovation program that taxed the leasing of international technology to subsidize national innovation. I show that the program led firms to replace technology licensed from developed countries with in-house innovations, which led to a decline in both employment and the share of high-skilled workers. Using a model of directed technological change and technology transfer, I find that increasing the share of firms that patent in Brazil by 1 p.p. decreases the skilled wage premium by 0.02% and production by 0.2%…(More)”.
How many yottabytes in a quettabyte? Extreme numbers get new names
Article by Elizabeth Gibney: “By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 1024 bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. Now, the booming growth of the data sphere has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes beyond that magnitude, to describe the outrageously big and small.
Representatives from governments worldwide, meeting at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November, voted to introduce four new prefixes to the International System of Units (SI) with immediate effect. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 1027 and 1030, and ronto and quecto signify 10−27 and 10−30. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram.
This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when the organization added zetta (1021), zepto (10−21), yotta (1024) and yocto (10−24). In that case, metrologists were adapting to fit the needs of chemists, who wanted a way to express SI units on the scale of Avogadro’s number — the 6 × 1023 units in a mole, a measure of the quantity of substances. The more familiar prefixes peta and exa were added in 1975 (see ‘Extreme figures’).
Extreme figures
Advances in scientific fields have led to increasing need for prefixes to describe very large and very small numbers.
| Factor | Name | Symbol | Adopted |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1030 | quetta | Q | 2022 |
| 1027 | ronna | R | 2022 |
| 1024 | yotta | Y | 1991 |
| 1021 | zetta | Z | 1991 |
| 1018 | exa | E | 1975 |
| 1015 | peta | P | 1975 |
| 10−15 | femto | f | 1964 |
| 10−18 | atto | a | 1964 |
| 10−21 | zepto | z | 1991 |
| 10−24 | yocto | y | 1991 |
| 10−27 | ronto | r | 2022 |
| 10−30 | quecto | q | 2022 |
Prefixes are agreed at the General Conference on Weights and Measures.
Today, the driver is data science, says Richard Brown, a metrologist at the UK National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. He has been working on plans to introduce the latest prefixes for five years, and presented the proposal to the CGPM on 17 November. With the annual volume of data generated globally having already hit zettabytes, informal suggestions for 1027 — including ‘hella’ and ‘bronto’ — were starting to take hold, he says. Google’s unit converter, for example, already tells users that 1,000 yottabytes is 1 hellabyte, and at least one UK government website quotes brontobyte as the correct term….(More)”
Digital rights and principles: a digital transformation for EU citizens
Press Release: “The Commission welcomes the agreement reached yesterday with the Parliament and the Council on the European declaration on digital rights and principles. The declaration, proposed in January, establishes a clear reference point about the kind of human-centred digital transformation that the EU promotes and defends, at home and abroad.
It builds on key EU values and freedoms and will benefit all individuals and businesses. The declaration will also provide a guide for policymakers and companies when dealing with new technologies. The declaration focuses on six key areas: putting people at the centre of the digital transformation; solidarity and inclusion; freedom of choice; participation in digital life; safety and security; and sustainability…(More)” See also: European Digital Rights and Principles
Marine Data Sharing: Challenges, Technology Drivers and Quality Attributes
Paper by Keila Lima et al: “Many companies have been adopting data-driven applications in which products and services are centered around data analysis to approach new segments of the marketplace. Data ecosystems rise from data sharing among organizations premeditatedly. However, this migration to this new data sharing paradigm has not come that far in the marine domain. Nevertheless, better utilizing the ocean data might be crucial for humankind in the future, for food production, and minerals, to ensure the ocean’s health….We investigate the state-of-the-art regarding data sharing in the marine domain with a focus on aspects that impact the speed of establishing a data ecosystem for the ocean.…We conducted an exploratory case study based on focus groups and workshops to understand the sharing of data in this context. Results: We identified main challenges of current systems that need to be addressed with respect to data sharing. Additionally, aspects related to the establishment of a data ecosystem were elicited and analyzed in terms of benefits, conflicts, and solutions…(More)”.
What is PeaceTech?
Report by Behruz Davletov, Uma Kalkar, Marine Ragnet, and Stefaan Verhulst: “From sensors to detect explosives to geographic data for disaster relief to artificial intelligence verifying misleading online content, data and technology are essential assets for peace efforts. Indeed, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is a direct example of data, data science, and technology as a whole has been mobilized to assist and monitor conflict responses and support peacebuilding.
Yet understanding the ways in which technology can be applied for peace, and what kinds of peace promotion they can serve, as well as their associated risks remain muddled. Thus, a framework for the governance of these peace technologies—#PeaceTech—is needed at an international and transnational level to guide the responsible and purposeful use of technology and data to strengthen peace and justice initiatives.
Today, The GovLab is proud to announce the release of the “PeaceTech Topic Map: A Research Base for an Emerging Field,” an overview of the key themes and challenges of technologies used by and created for peace efforts…(More)”.
Is Facebook’s advertising data accurate enough for use in social science research? Insights from a cross-national online survey
Paper by André Grow et al: “Social scientists increasingly use Facebook’s advertising platform for research, either in the form of conducting digital censuses of the general population, or for recruiting participants for survey research. Both approaches depend on the accuracy of the data that Facebook provides about its users, but little is known about how accurate these data are. We address this gap in a large-scale, cross-national online survey (N = 137,224), in which we compare self-reported and Facebook-classified demographic information (sex, age and region of residence). Our results suggest that Facebook’s advertising platform can be fruitfully used for conducing social science research if additional steps are taken to assess the accuracy of the characteristics under consideration…(More)”.
The Future of Self-Governing, Thriving Democracies
Book by Brigitte Geissel: “This book offers a new approach for the future of democracy by advocating to give citizens the power to deliberate and to decide how to govern themselves.
Innovatively building on and integrating components of representative, deliberative and participatory theories of democracy with empirical findings, the book provides practices and procedures that support communities of all sizes to develop their own visions of democracy. It revitalizes and reinfuses the ‘democratic spirit’ going back to the roots of democracy as an endeavor by, with and for the people, and should inspire us in our search for the democracy we want to live in.
This book is of key interest to scholars and students in democracy, democratic innovations, deliberation, civic education and governance and further for policy-makers, civil society groups and activists. It encourages us to reshape democracy based on citizens’ perspectives, aspirations and preferences…(More)”.