About: “DataLumos is an ICPSR archive for valuable government data resources. ICPSR has a long commitment to safekeeping and disseminating US government and other social science data. DataLumos accepts deposits of public data resources from the community and recommendations of public data resources that ICPSR itself might add to DataLumos. Please consider making a monetary donation to sustain DataLumos…(More)”.
The Age of AI in the Life Sciences: Benefits and Biosecurity Considerations
Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the life sciences have the potential to enable advances in biological discovery and design at a faster pace and efficiency than is possible with classical experimental approaches alone. At the same time, AI-enabled biological tools developed for beneficial applications could potentially be misused for harmful purposes. Although the creation of biological weapons is not a new concept or risk, the potential for AI-enabled biological tools to affect this risk has raised concerns during the past decade.
This report, as requested by the Department of Defense, assesses how AI-enabled biological tools could uniquely impact biosecurity risk, and how advancements in such tools could also be used to mitigate these risks. The Age of AI in the Life Sciences reviews the capabilities of AI-enabled biological tools and can be used in conjunction with the 2018 National Academies report, Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology, which sets out a framework for identifying the different risk factors associated with synthetic biology capabilities…(More)”
Climate Assemblies and the Law: A Research Roadmap
Article by Leslie Anne and Duvic Paoli: “The article is interested in the relationship between citizens’ assemblies on climate change (‘climate assemblies’) and the law. It offers a research roadmap on the legal dimensions of climate assemblies with the view to advancing our knowledge of deliberative climate governance. The article explores six fundamental areas of inquiry on which legal scholarship can offer relevant insights. They relate to: i) understanding the outcomes of climate assemblies; ii) clarifying their role in the public law relationship between individuals and government; iii) gaining insights into the making of climate legislation and other rules; iv) exploring the societal authority of norms; v) illustrating the transnational governance of climate change, including the diffusion of its norms and vi) offering a testing ground for the design of legal systems that are more ecologically and socially just. The aim is to nudge legal scholars into exploring the richness of the questions raised by the emergence of climate assemblies and, in turn, to encourage other social science scholars to reflect on how the legal perspective might contribute to better understanding their object of study…(More)”.
Nudges and Nudging: A User’s Manual
Paper by Cass Sunstein: “Many policies take the form of nudges, defined as liberty-preserving approaches that steer people in particular directions, but that also allow them to go their own way Some nudges attempt to correct self-control problems. Some nudges attempt to counteract unrealistic optimism. Some nudges attempt to correct present bias. Some nudges attempt to correct market failures, as when people are nudged not to emit air pollution. For every conventional market failure, there is a potential nudge. For every behavioral bias (optimistic bias, present bias, availability bias, limited attention), there is a responsive nudge. There are many misconceptions about nudges and nudging, and they are a diversion…(More)”.
How data can transform government in Latin America and the Caribbean
Article by William Maloney, Daniel Rogger, and Christian Schuster: ” Governments across Latin America and the Caribbean are grappling with deep governance challenges that threaten progress and stability, including the need to improve efficiency, accountability and transparency.
Amid these obstacles, however, the region possesses a powerful, often underutilized asset: the administrative data it collects as a part of its everyday operations.
When harnessed effectively using data analytics, this data has the potential to drive transformative change, unlock new opportunities for growth and help address some of the most pressing issues facing the region. It’s time to tap into this potential and use data to chart a path forward. To help governments make the most of the opportunities that this data presents, the World Bank has embarked on a decade-long project to synthesize the latest knowledge on how to measure and improve government performance. We have found that governments already have a lot of the data they need to dramatically improve public services while conserving scarce resources.
But it’s not enough to collect data. It must also be put to good use to improve decision making, design better public policy and strengthen public sector functioning. We call these tools and practices for repurposing government data government analytics…(More)”.
These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration
Article by Karen Yourish et al: “As President Trump seeks to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents.
The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents viewed by The New York Times. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.
In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban. Additionally, the presence of some terms was used to automatically flag for review some grant proposals and contracts that could conflict with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
The list is most likely incomplete. More agency memos may exist than those seen by New York Times reporters, and some directives are vague or suggest what language might be impermissible without flatly stating it.
All presidential administrations change the language used in official communications to reflect their own policies. It is within their prerogative, as are amendments to or the removal of web pages, which The Times has found has already happened thousands of times in this administration…(More)”
How to Win a War Against Reality
Review by Abby Smith Rumsey: “How does a democracy work if its citizens do not have a shared sense of reality? Not very well. A country whose people cannot agree on where they stand now will not agree on where they are going. This is where Americans find themselves in 2025, and they did not arrive at this juncture yesterday. The deep divisions that exist have grown over the decades, dating at least to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and are now metastasizing at an alarming rate. These divisions have many causes, from climate change to COVID-19, unchecked migration to growing wealth inequality, and other factors. People who live with chronic division and uncertainty are vulnerable. It may not take much to get them to sign on to a politics of certainty…
Take the United States. By this fractured logic, Make America Great Again (MAGA) means that America once was great, is no longer, but can be restored to its prelapsarian state, when whites sat firmly at the top of the ethnic hierarchy that constitutes the United States. Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy and self-identified liberal, is deeply troubled that many liberal democracies across the globe are morphing into illiberal democracies before our very eyes. In “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” he argues that all authoritarian regimes know the value of a unified, if largely mythologized, view of past, present, and future. He wrote his book to warn us that we in the United States are on the cusp of becoming an authoritarian nation or, in Stanley’s account, fascist. By explaining “the mechanisms by which democracy is attacked, the ways myths and lies are used to justify actions such as wars, and scapegoating of groups, we can defend against these attacks, and even reverse the tide.”…
The fabrication of the past is also the subject of Steve Benen’s book “Ministry of Truth. Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.” Benen, a producer on the Rachel Maddow Show, keeps his eye tightly focused on the past decade, still fresh in the minds of readers. His account tracks closely how the Republican Party conducted “a war on the recent past.” He attempts an anatomy of a very unsettling phenomenon: the success of a gaslighting campaign Trump and his supporters perpetrated against the American public and even against fellow Republicans who are not MAGA enough for Trump…(More)”
Funding the Future: Grantmakers Strategies in AI Investment
Report by Project Evident: “…looks at how philanthropic funders are approaching requests to fund the use of AI… there was common recognition of AI’s importance and the tension between the need to learn more and to act quickly to meet the pace of innovation, adoption, and use of AI tools.
This research builds on the work of a February 2024 Project Evident and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence working paper, Inspiring Action: Identifying the Social Sector AI Opportunity Gap. That paper reported that more practitioners than funders (by over a third) claimed their organization utilized AI.
“From our earlier research, as well as in conversations with funders and nonprofits, it’s clear there’s a mismatch in the understanding and desire for AI tools and the funding of AI tools,” said Sarah Di Troia, Managing Director of Project Evident’s OutcomesAI practice and author of the report. “Grantmakers have an opportunity to quickly upskill their understanding – to help nonprofits improve their efficiency and impact, of course, but especially to shape the role of AI in civil society.”
The report offers a number of recommendations to the philanthropic sector. For example, funders and practitioners should ensure that community voice is included in the implementation of new AI initiatives to build trust and help reduce bias. Grantmakers should consider funding that allows for flexibility and innovation so that the social and education sectors can experiment with approaches. Most importantly, funders should increase their capacity and confidence in assessing AI implementation requests along both technical and ethical criteria…(More)”.
Artificial intelligence for modelling infectious disease epidemics
Paper by Moritz U. G. Kraemer et al: “Infectious disease threats to individual and public health are numerous, varied and frequently unexpected. Artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies, which are already supporting human decision making in economics, medicine and social science, have the potential to transform the scope and power of infectious disease epidemiology. Here we consider the application to infectious disease modelling of AI systems that combine machine learning, computational statistics, information retrieval and data science. We first outline how recent advances in AI can accelerate breakthroughs in answering key epidemiological questions and we discuss specific AI methods that can be applied to routinely collected infectious disease surveillance data. Second, we elaborate on the social context of AI for infectious disease epidemiology, including issues such as explainability, safety, accountability and ethics. Finally, we summarize some limitations of AI applications in this field and provide recommendations for how infectious disease epidemiology can harness most effectively current and future developments in AI…(More)”.
Elon Musk Also Has a Problem with Wikipedia
Article by Margaret Talbot: “If you have spent time on Wikipedia—and especially if you’ve delved at all into the online encyclopedia’s inner workings—you will know that it is, in almost every aspect, the inverse of Trumpism. That’s not a statement about its politics. The thousands of volunteer editors who write, edit, and fact-check the site manage to adhere remarkably well, over all, to one of its core values: the neutral point of view. Like many of Wikipedia’s s principles and procedures, the neutral point of view is the subject of a practical but sophisticated epistemological essay posted on Wikipedia. Among other things, the essay explains, N.P.O.V. means not stating opinions as facts, and also, just as important, not stating facts as opinions. (So, for example, the third sentence of the entry titled “Climate change” states, with no equivocation, that “the current rise in global temperatures is driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel burning since the Industrial Revolution.”)…So maybe it should come as no surprise that Elon Musk has lately taken time from his busy schedule of dismantling the federal government, along with many of its sources of reliable information, to attack Wikipedia. On January 21st, after the site updated its page on Musk to include a reference to the much-debated stiff-armed salute he made at a Trump inaugural event, he posted on X that “since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” He urged people not to donate to the site: “Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!” It’s worth taking a look at how the incident is described on Musk’s page, quite far down, and judging for yourself. What I see is a paragraph that first describes the physical gesture (“Musk thumped his right hand over his heart, fingers spread wide, and then extended his right arm out, emphatically, at an upward angle, palm down and fingers together”), goes on to say that “some” viewed it as a Nazi or a Roman salute, then quotes Musk disparaging those claims as “politicized,” while noting that he did not explicitly deny them. (There is also now a separate Wikipedia article, “Elon Musk salute controversy,” that goes into detail about the full range of reactions.)
This is not the first time Musk has gone after the site. In December, he posted on X, “Stop donating to Wokepedia.” And that wasn’t even his first bad Wikipedia pun. “I will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” he wrote, in an October, 2023, post. It seemed to be an ego thing at first. Musk objected to being described on his page as an “early investor” in Tesla, rather than as a founder, which is how he prefers to be identified, and seemed frustrated that he couldn’t just buy the site. But lately Musk’s beef has merged with a general conviction on the right that Wikipedia—which, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source that relies on original reporting and research done by other media and scholars—is biased against conservatives.
The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the Project 2025 policy blueprint, has plans to unmask Wikipedia editors who maintain their privacy using pseudonyms (these usernames are displayed in the article history but don’t necessarily make it easy to identify the people behind them) and whose contributions on Israel it deems antisemitic…(More)”.