Paper by Ian R. Hodgkinson, Sahar Mousavi & Paul Hughes: “The article explores the role citizen science can play in discovering new solutions to pressing wicked problems. Using illustrations of citizen science projects to show how and where citizens have been fundamental in creating solutions and driving change, the article calls for wider recognition and use of citizen science in public administration and management research. For wider utilization of citizens’ active co-participation in research design, delivery and dissemination, the article presents a set of citizen science pathways….(More)”.
Custodians of the Internet
Book by Tarleton Gillespie on “Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media…Most users want their Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube comments to be free of harassment and porn. Whether faced with “fake news” or livestreamed violence, “content moderators”—who censor or promote user-posted content—have never been more important. This is especially true when the tools that social media platforms use to curb trolling, ban hate speech, and censor pornography can also silence the speech you need to hear.
In this revealing and nuanced exploration, award-winning sociologist and cultural observer Tarleton Gillespie provides an overview of current social media practices and explains the underlying rationales for how, when, and why these policies are enforced. In doing so, Gillespie highlights that content moderation receives too little public scrutiny even as it is shapes social norms and creates consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society. Based on interviews with content moderators, creators, and consumers, this accessible, timely book is a must-read for anyone who’s ever clicked “like” or “retweet.”…(More)”.
The Open-Source Movement Comes to Medical Datasets
Blog by Edmund L. Andrews: “In a move to democratize research on artificial intelligence and medicine, Stanford’s Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging (AIMI) is dramatically expanding what is already the world’s largest free repository of AI-ready annotated medical imaging datasets.
Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly pervasive tool for interpreting medical images, from detecting tumors in mammograms and brain scans to analyzing ultrasound videos of a person’s pumping heart.
Many AI-powered devices now rival the accuracy of human doctors. Beyond simply spotting a likely tumor or bone fracture, some systems predict the course of a patient’s illness and make recommendations.
But AI tools have to be trained on expensive datasets of images that have been meticulously annotated by human experts. Because those datasets can cost millions of dollars to acquire or create, much of the research is being funded by big corporations that don’t necessarily share their data with the public.
“What drives this technology, whether you’re a surgeon or an obstetrician, is data,” says Matthew Lungren, co-director of AIMI and an assistant professor of radiology at Stanford. “We want to double down on the idea that medical data is a public good, and that it should be open to the talents of researchers anywhere in the world.”
Launched two years ago, AIMI has already acquired annotated datasets for more than 1 million images, many of them from the Stanford University Medical Center. Researchers can download those datasets at no cost and use them to train AI models that recommend certain kinds of action.
Now, AIMI has teamed up with Microsoft’s AI for Health program to launch a new platform that will be more automated, accessible, and visible. It will be capable of hosting and organizing scores of additional images from institutions around the world. Part of the idea is to create an open and global repository. The platform will also provide a hub for sharing research, making it easier to refine different models and identify differences between population groups. The platform can even offer cloud-based computing power so researchers don’t have to worry about building local resource intensive clinical machine-learning infrastructure….(More)”.
Looking to the future? Including children, young people and future generations in deliberations on climate action: Ireland’s Citizens’Assembly 2016–2018
Paper by Clodagh Harris: “The effects of climate change are multiple and fundamental. Decisions made today may result in irreversible damage to the planet’s biodiversity and ecosystems, the detrimental impacts of which will be borne by today’s children, young people and those yet unborn (future generations). The use of citizens’ assemblies (CAs) to tackle the issue of climate change is growing. Their remit is future focused. Yet is the future in the room? Focusing on a single case study, the recent Irish CA and Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action (JOCCA) deliberations on climate action, this paper explores the extent to which children, young people and future generations were included. Its systemic analysis of the membership of both institutions, the public submissions to them and the invited expertise presented, finds that the Irish CA was ‘too tightly coupled’ on this issue. This may have been beneficial in terms of impact, but it came at the expense of input legitimacy and potentially intergenerational justice. Referring to international developments, it suggests how these groups may be included through enclave deliberation, institutional innovations, design experiments and future-oriented practice…(More)”
The U.S. Is Getting a Crash Course in Scientific Uncertainty
Apoorva Mandavilli at the New York Times: “When the coronavirus surfaced last year, no one was prepared for it to invade every aspect of daily life for so long, so insidiously. The pandemic has forced Americans to wrestle with life-or-death choices every day of the past 18 months — and there’s no end in sight.
Scientific understanding of the virus changes by the hour, it seems. The virus spreads only by close contact or on contaminated surfaces, then turns out to be airborne. The virus mutates slowly, but then emerges in a series of dangerous new forms. Americans don’t need to wear masks. Wait, they do.
At no point in this ordeal has the ground beneath our feet seemed so uncertain. In just the past week, federal health officials said they would begin offering booster shots to all Americans in the coming months. Days earlier, those officials had assured the public that the vaccines were holding strong against the Delta variant of the virus, and that boosters would not be necessary.
As early as Monday, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to formally approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has already been given to scores of millions of Americans. Some holdouts found it suspicious that the vaccine was not formally approved yet somehow widely dispensed. For them, “emergency authorization” has never seemed quite enough.
Americans are living with science as it unfolds in real time. The process has always been fluid, unpredictable. But rarely has it moved at this speed, leaving citizens to confront research findings as soon as they land at the front door, a stream of deliveries that no one ordered and no one wants.
Is a visit to my ailing parent too dangerous? Do the benefits of in-person schooling outweigh the possibility of physical harm to my child? Will our family gathering turn into a superspreader event?
Living with a capricious enemy has been unsettling even for researchers, public health officials and journalists who are used to the mutable nature of science. They, too, have frequently agonized over the best way to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.
But to frustrated Americans unfamiliar with the circuitous and often contentious path to scientific discovery, public health officials have seemed at times to be moving the goal posts and flip-flopping, or misleading, even lying to, the country.
Most of the time, scientists are “edging forward in a very incremental way,” said Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and a co-founder of two popular websites, bioRxiv and medRxiv, where scientists post new research.
“There are blind alleys that people go down, and a lot of the time you kind of don’t know what you don’t know.”
Biology and medicine are particularly demanding fields. Ideas are evaluated for years, sometimes decades, before they are accepted….(More)”.
The “Onion Model”: A Layered Approach to Documenting How the Third Wave of Open Data Can Provide Societal Value
Blog post by Andrew Zahuranec, Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst: “There’s a lot that goes into data-driven decision-making. Behind the datasets, platforms, and analysts is a complex series of processes that inform what kinds of insight data can produce and what kinds of ends it can achieve. These individual processes can be hard to understand when viewed together but, by separating the stages out, we can not only track how data leads to decisions but promote better and more impactful data management.
Earlier this year, The Open Data Policy Lab published the Third Wave of Open Data Toolkit to explore the elements of data re-use. At the center of this toolkit was an abstraction that we call the Open Data Framework. Divided into individual, onion-like layers, the framework shows all the processes that go into capitalizing on data in the third wave, starting with the creation of a dataset through data collaboration, creating insights, and using those insights to produce value.
This blog tries to re-iterate what’s included in each layer of this data “onion model” and demonstrate how organizations can create societal value by making their data available for re-use by other parties….(More)”.
The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms
An investigation by The Markup: “…has found that lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to White people with similar financial characteristics—even when we controlled for newly available financial factors that the mortgage industry for years has said would explain racial disparities in lending.
Holding 17 different factors steady in a complex statistical analysis of more than two million conventional mortgage applications for home purchases, we found that lenders were 40 percent more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50 percent more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and 70 percent more likely to deny Native American applicants than similar White applicants. Lenders were 80 percent more likely to reject Black applicants than similar White applicants. These are national rates.
In every case, the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the White applicants, except for their race.
The industry had criticized previous similar analyses for not including financial factors they said would explain disparities in lending rates but were not public at the time: debts as a percentage of income, how much of the property’s assessed worth the person is asking to borrow, and the applicant’s credit score.
The first two are now public in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Including these financial data points in our analysis not only failed to eliminate racial disparities in loan denials, it highlighted new, devastating ones.
We found that lenders gave fewer loans to Black applicants than White applicants even when their incomes were high—$100,000 a year or more—and had the same debt ratios. In fact, high-earning Black applicants with less debt were rejected more often than high-earning White applicants who have more debt….(More)”
(Successful) Democracies Breed Their Own Support
Paper by Daron Acemoglu et al: “Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an instrumental-variables strategy exploiting regional democratization waves and focusing on immigrants’ exposure to democracy before migration. In all cases, the timing and nature of the effects are consistent with a causal interpretation. We also establish that democracies breed their own support only when they are successful: all of the effects we estimate work through exposure to democracies that are successful in providing economic growth, peace and political stability, and public goods….(More)”.
Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future
Book (Second Edition) edited by Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore: “Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. In order to influence the development of technology for the better, we must first understand how technology and society are inextricably bound together. These writings—by thinkers ranging from Bruno Latour to Francis Fukuyama—help us do just that, examining how people shape technology and how technology shapes people. This second edition updates the original significantly, offering twenty-one new essays along with fifteen from the first edition.
The book first presents visions of the future that range from technological utopias to cautionary tales and then introduces several major STS theories. It examines human and social values and how they are embedded in technological choices and explores the interesting and subtle complexities of the technology-society relationship. Remedying a gap in earlier theorizing in the field, many of the texts illustrate how race and gender are intertwined with technology. Finally, the book offers a set of readings that focus on the sociotechnical challenges we face today, treating topics that include cybersecurity, geoengineering, and the myth of neutral technology…(More)”.
The Secret to Making Democracy More Civil and Less Polarized
Essay by Matt Qvortrup: “…Too often, politicians hold referendums when they themselves are in a tight spot. As the economist John Matsusaka has written, governments often rely on referendums for issues that are “too hot to handle.” In the late 1990s, British Prime Minister Tony Blair held a referendum on a parliament for Scotland in order not to alienate voters in England, and in 2005, the French government submitted the European Constitution to voters for fear of upsetting the large segment of French voters who were skeptical of the EU.
This process of elected politicians submitting unpopular questions to voters is not direct democracy. It is an abuse thereof. And it is entirely out of step with the current moment and how people want to engage with the world. By contrast, over the past three decades, some local and national governments have taken a much more proactive approach to citizen engagement through participatory budgeting.
The idea is simple: the government distributes a percentage (typically 10 percent) of the local budget to the citizens, who decide what to spend the money on. “How would you spend one million of the City’s money?” asked a pamphlet distributed to New Yorkers in 2011 that introduced them to the process.
Participatory budgeting came to Tower Hamlets, one of the most unequal parts of London, in 2009 and 2010 in a project designed to help the area choose new social service providers. The borough was divided into eight smaller areas; in each, a representative section of community volunteers could question the providers on whatever they wished, including social responsibility and commitment to the community. Eventually, the citizens were able to negotiate with providers on the details of how service would work.
Finally, after this process, a vote was taken on which providers offered the best value and which were most likely to provide employment to local residents. This participatory project was a success. An evaluation by the local government association concluded that “a majority of participants said they had developed skills linked to empowerment, and the community overall felt they could better influence their local environment and services.” It was popular, too. More than 77 percent wanted the council to repeat the event in the future.” This level of engagement was considerably above the average for similar boroughs, where as few as 20 percent of residents even bother to vote.
The Tower Hamlets experiment—as well as participatory budgeting in places as different as Porto Alegre, Brazil and Paris, France—shows that citizens behave responsibly when they are given responsibility.
The money allocated in participatory budgeting is finite, and those involved in the process know that they have to make hard choices. Admittedly “trust” is a difficult concept to measure, but research by the World Bank suggests that citizen engagement grows trust in the political system. Moreover, citizens learn democracy by doing it. As Harvard political scientist Jane Mansbridge wrote, “Participating in democratic decisions makes many participants better citizens.”…(More)”.