World Wide Weird: Rise of the Cognitive Ecosystem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Braden R. Allenby at Issues: “Social media, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and the data economy are coming together in a way that transcends how humans understand and control our world.

In the beginning of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, an ape, after hugging a strange monolith, picks up a bone and randomly begins playing with it … and then, as Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra rings in the background, the ape realizes that the bone it is holding is, in fact, a weapon. The ape, the bone, and the landscape remain exactly the same, yet something fundamental has changed: an ape casually holding a bone is a very different system than an ape consciously wielding a weapon. The warrior ape is an emergent cognitive phenomenon, neither required nor deterministically produced by the constituent parts: a bone, and an ape, in a savannah environment.

Cognition as an emergent property of techno-human systems is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, it might be said that the ability of humans and their institutions to couple to their technologies to create such techno-human systems is the source of civilization itself. Since humans began producing artifacts, and especially since we began creating artifacts designed to capture, preserve, and transmit information—from illuminated manuscripts and Chinese oracle bones to books and computers—humans have integrated with their technologies to produce emergent cognitive results.

And these combinations have transformed the world. Think of the German peasants, newly literate, who were handed populist tracts produced on then-newfangled printing presses in 1530: the Reformation happened. Thanks to the printers, information and strategies flowed between the thinkers and the readers faster, uniting people across time and space. Eventually, the result was another fundamental shift in the cognitive structure: the Enlightenment happened.

Since humans began producing artifacts, and especially artifacts designed to capture, preserve, and transmit information, humans have integrated with their technologies to produce emergent cognitive results.

In the 1980s Edwin Hutchins found another cognitive structure when he observed a pre-GPS crew navigating on a naval vessel: technology in the form of devices, charts, and books were combined with several individuals with specialized skills and training to produce knowledge of the ship’s position (the “fix”). No single entity, human or technological, contained the entire process; rather, as Hutchins observed: “An interlocking set of partial procedures can produce the overall observed pattern without there being a representation of that overall pattern anywhere in the system.” The fix arises as an emergent cognitive product that is nowhere found in the constituent pieces, be they technology or human; indeed, Hutchins speaks of “the computational ecology of navigation tools.”

Fast forward to today. It should be no surprise that at some point techno-human cognitive systems such as social media, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, cameras, computers, and sensors should begin to form their own ecology—significantly different in character from human cognition….(More)”

New USAID Digital Ecosystem Framework for International Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by ICTWorks: “USAID’s Digital Strategy explains that a digital ecosystem comprises stakeholders, systems, and an enabling environment that, together, empower people and communities to use digital technology to access services, engage with each other, and pursue economic opportunities. Building on this concept, the Agency created a framework that refines the ecosystem into a practical structure for development practitioners.

USAID’s Digital Ecosystem framework is distinct from the concept of a digital economy – and the distinction is an important one that USAID has iterated and worked to define. It is an environment, system, and culture all at once; it is the starting point for any digital interaction, and understanding it is crucial for development practitioners.

The Digital Ecosystem Framework is organized around three separate, overlapping pillars:

  • Digital Infrastructure and Adoption: the resources that make digital systems possible and how individuals and organizations access and use these resources.
  • Digital Society, Rights, and Governance: how digital technology intersects with government, civil society, and the media.
  • Digital Economy: the role digital technology plays in increasing economic opportunity and efficiency

USAID’s Digital Ecosystem framework encompasses four cross-cutting topics:

  • Inclusion: reducing disparities in access and the “digital divide”
  • Cybersecurity: protecting information against damage, unauthorized use or modification, or exploitation.
  • Emerging Technologies: encompassing artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, blockchain, 5G and other new technologies.
  • Geopolitical Positioning: the influence of authoritarian states that are actively working to shape the global digital space….(More)”.

Secondary use of health data in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Mark Boyd, Dr Milly Zimeta, Dr Jeni Tennison and Mahad Alassow: “Open and trusted health data systems can help Europe respond to the many urgent challenges facing its society and economy today. The global pandemic has already altered many of our societal and economic systems, and data has played a key role in enabling cross-border and cross-sector collaboration in public health responses.

Even before the pandemic, there was an urgent need to optimise healthcare systems and manage limited resources more effectively, to meet the needs of growing, and often ageing, populations. Now, there is a heightened need to develop early-diagnostic and health-surveillance systems, and more willingness to adopt digital healthcare solutions…

By reusing health data in different ways, we can increase the value of this data and help to enable these improvements. Clinical data, such as incidences of healthcare and clinical trials data, can be combined with data collected from other sources, such as sickness and insurance claims records, and from devices and wearable technologies. This data can then be anonymised and aggregated to generate new insights and optimise population health, improve patients’ health and experiences, create more efficient healthcare systems, and foster innovation.

This secondary use of health data can enable a wide range of benefits across the entire healthcare system. These include opportunities to optimise service, reduce health inequalities by better allocating resources, and enhance personalised healthcare –for example, by comparing treatments for people with similar characteristics. It can also help encourage innovation by extending research data to assess whether new therapies would work for a broader population….(More)”.

Morocco finds a new source of policy expertise — its own citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Participo: “This spring saw the release of a long-awaited report by the Commission Spéciale sur le modèle de developpement (CSMD), created in 2019 by His Majesty King Mohammed VI….

“Blue ribbon” commissions to tackle thorny issues are nothing new. But the methods employed by Morocco’s CSMD, and the proposals which resulted from them, point the way toward an entirely new approach to governance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Morocco’s new model of development was created through methods of collective intelligence, an emerging science that explores how groups can outperform individuals in learning, decision making, and problem-solving.

It is an ability that has long defined our species, from coordinated bands of hunters on the savannah to the networks of scientists that develop coronavirus vaccines. A complex environment has conditioned humans to pool their knowledge to survive. But collective intelligence doesn’t just happen; for the “wisdom of crowds” to emerge, a group must be organized in the right way, with the right methods and tools….

Beginning in January 2020, the CSMD launched a broad national consultation open to all Moroccan citizens, aimed at harnessing a wide variety of expertise from local communities, government, NGOs, and the private sector.

Its multi-channel approach was designed to reflect four indicators that studies suggest are critical to producing collective intelligence: a diversity of participants and information sources; a critical mass of contributions; a sufficiently rich exchange of information at each “touch point”; and an effective process to synthesize contributions into a coherent whole.

The CSMD created an online platform with opportunities to give quick feedback (“What is one thing you want to change about Morocco?”), as well as more detailed proposals on themes like health care and territorial inequality. A social media campaign reached an estimated 3.2 million citizens, with dozens of “participatory workshops” live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

To seek out the knowledge of those least connected to these channels, the CSMD conducted 30 field visits to struggling urban districts, universities, and remote villages in the High Atlas mountains. These field visits featured learning sessions with social innovators and rencontres citoyennes (“citizen encounters”) where groups of 20 to 30 local residents, balanced by age and gender, shared stories and aspirations….(More)”.

Who takes part in Citizen Science projects & why?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

CS Track: “Citizen Science in Europe, as elsewhere, continues to manifest itself in a variety of different ways. While attracting interest across multiple sectors of society, its definition remains unclear. The first CS Track White Paper on Themes, objectives and participants of citizen science activities has just been published and, along with the initial results of the first large scale survey into participation in citizen science, provides an important overview of who participates in citizen science projects and what motivates them. This short report focuses on one aspect that emerges in this white paper.

Citizen Science Participants – who are they? 

Participants and who they are, have a significant impact on the objectives and outcomes of citizen science projects. However, existing information on the demographics of participants in citizen science projects is very limited and most studies have focused on a single project or programme. Furthermore, certain groups, like young people, are underrepresented in the available data.

What our research team has gathered from the literature and the initial results of the CS Track large-scale survey is the following:

  • Well-educated, affluent participants outnumber less affluent participants,
  • More men than women take part in many of the programmes that have been analysed.
  • Citizen scientists seem to be white, middle-aged, scientifically literate or generally interested in science or scientific topics.
  • Scientists, academics, teachers, science students and people who have a passion for the outdoors are among the groups of people most likely to take part in citizen science.
  • In agricultural, biological and environmental science-based programmes, participants are often scientists themselves, science teachers or students, conservation group members, backpackers or hikers or other outdoor enthusiasts – in other words people who care about nature.
  • Community and youth citizen science projects are underrepresented in the available data….(More)“.

Goldman Sachs will soon launch its own version of LinkedIn

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Butcher at EFC: “Sometime soon, it will happen. After two years of construction, Goldman Sachs is expected to launch its own version of LinkedIn – first at Goldman, and then into the world at large. 

Known as Louisa, the platform was conceived by Rohan Doctor, a former head of bank solutions sales at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. Doctor submitted his idea for a kind of “internal LinkedIn network” to Accelerate, Goldman Sachs’ internal incubator program in 2019. He’s been building it from New York ever since. It’s thought to be ready soon.

Neither Doctor nor Goldman Sachs would comment for this article, but based on statements Doctor has made on his LinkedIn profile and recent job advertisements for members of his team, Louisa is a “collective intelligence platform” that will enable Goldman staff to connect with each other and to share information in a more meaningful and intuitive way. In doing so, it’s hoped that Goldman will be able to improve knowledge transfer within the firm and that Goldman people will be able to serve clients better as a result.

Goldman has built Louisa around artificial intelligence. When an employee asks Louisa a question, the platform uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques like named entity recognition, language modelling and query parsing to understand the kind of information that’s being sought. Data from user interactions is then used to build user preference feedback loops and user representation models that can target content to particular users and suggest topics. Network analysis is used to identify how users are engaging with each other, to suggest other users or groups of users to engage with, and to look at how Louisa’s features are being used by particular user clusters…(More)”.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jonathan Rauch: “Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn’t even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: “cancel culture.” At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.

In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”—our social system for turning disagreement into truth.

By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do so—and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone…(More)”.

Less complex language, more participation: how consultation documents shape participatory patterns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Simon Fink, Eva Ruffing, Tobias Burst & Sara Katharina Chinnow: “Consultations are thought to increase the legitimacy of policies. However, this reasoning only holds if stakeholders really participate in the consultations. Current scholarship offers three explanations for participation patterns: Institutional rules, policy characteristics, and interest group resources determine participation. This article argues that additionally the linguistic complexity of consultation documents influences participation. Complex language deters potential participants, because it raises the costs of participation. A quantitative analysis of the German consultation of electricity grids lends credibility to the argument: If the description of a power line is simplified between two consultation rounds, the number of contributions mentioning that power line increases. This result contributes to our understanding of unequal participation patterns, and the institutional design of participatory procedures. If we think that legitimacy is enhanced by broad participation, then language of the documents matters….(More)”.

The search engine of 1896

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Generalist Academy: In 1896 Paul Otlet set up a bibliographic query service by mail: a 19th century search engine….The end of the 19th century was awash with the written word: books, monographs, and publications of all kinds. It was fiendishly difficult to find what you wanted in that mess. Bibliographies – compilations of references on a specific subject – were the maps to this vast informational territory. But they were expensive and time-consuming to compile.

Paul Otlet had a passion for information. More precisely, he had a passion for organising information. He and Henri La Fontaine made bibliographies on many subjects – and then turned their efforts towards creating something better. A master bibliography. A bibliography to rule them all, nothing less than a complete record of everything that had ever been published on every topic. This was their plan: the grandly named Universal Bibliographic Repertory.

This ambitious endeavour listed sources for every topic that its creators could imagine. The references were meticulously recorded on index cards that were filed in a massive series of drawers like the ones pictured above. The whole thing was arranged according to their Universal Decimal Classification, and it was enormous. In 1895 there were four hundred thousand entries. At its peak in 1934, there were nearly sixteen million.

How could you access such a mega-bibliography? Well, Otlet and La Fontaine set up a mail service. People set in queries and received a summary of publications relating to that topic. Curious about the native religions of Sumatra? Want to explore the 19th century decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform? Send a request to the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, get a tidy list of the references you need. It was nothing less than a manual search engine, one hundred and twenty-five years ago.

Encyclopedia Universalis
Paul Otlet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Otlet had many more ambitions: a world encyclopaedia of knowledge, contraptions to easily access every publication in the world (he was an early microfiche pioneer), and a whole city to serve as the bright centre of global intellect. These ambitions were mostly unrealised, due to lack of funds and the intervention of war. But today Otlet is recognised as an important figure in the history of information science…(More)”.

Are citizen juries and assemblies on climate change driving democratic climate policymaking? An exploration of two case studies in the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rebecca Wells, Candice Howarth & Lina I. Brand-Correa: “In light of increasing pressure to deliver climate action targets and the growing role of citizens in raising the importance of the issue, deliberative democratic processes (e.g. citizen juries and citizen assemblies) on climate change are increasingly being used to provide a voice to citizens in climate change decision-making. Through a comparative case study of two processes that ran in the UK in 2019 (the Leeds Climate Change Citizens’ Jury and the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change), this paper investigates how far citizen assemblies and juries are increasing citizen engagement on climate change and creating more citizen-centred climate policymaking. Interviews were conducted with policymakers, councillors, professional facilitators and others involved in running these processes to assess motivations for conducting these, their structure and the impact and influence they had. The findings suggest the impact of these processes is not uniform: they have an indirect impact on policy making by creating momentum around climate action and supporting the introduction of pre-planned or pre-existing policies rather than a direct impact by truly being citizen-centred policy making processes or conducive to new climate policy. We conclude with reflections on how these processes give elected representatives a public mandate on climate change, that they help to identify more nuanced and in-depth public opinions in a fair and informed way, yet it can be challenging to embed citizen juries and assemblies in wider democratic processes….(More)”.