Internet Searches for Acute Anxiety During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John W. Ayers et al: “There is widespread concern that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may harm population mental health, chiefly owing to anxiety about the disease and its societal fallout. But traditional population mental health surveillance (eg, telephone surveys, medical records) is time consuming, expensive, and may miss persons who do not participate or seek care. To evaluate the association of COVID-19 with anxiety on a population basis, we examined internet searches indicative of acute anxiety during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods

The analysis relied on nonidentifiable, aggregate, public data and was exempted by the University of California San Diego Human Research Protections Program. Acute anxiety, including colloquially called anxiety attacks or panic attacks, was monitored because of its higher prevalence relative to other mental health problems. It can lead to other mental health problems (including depression), it is triggered by outside stressors, and it is socially contagious. Using Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends) we monitored the daily fraction of all internet searches (thereby adjusting the results for any change in total queries) that included the terms anxiety or panic in combination with attack (including panic attack, signs of anxiety attack, anxiety attack symptoms) that originated from the US from January 1, 2004, through May 4, 2020. Raw search counts were inferred using Comscore estimates (comscore.com).

We compared search volumes after President Trump declared a national COVID-19 emergency on March 13, 2020, with expected search volumes if COVID-19 had not occurred, thereby taking into account the historical trend and periodicity in the data. Expected volumes were computed using an autoregressive integrated moving average model,4 based on historical trends from January 1, 2004 to March 12, 2020, to predict counterfactual trends for March 13, 2020 to May 9, 2020. The expected volumes with prediction intervals (PIs) and ratio of observed and expected volumes with bootstrap CIs were computed using R statistical software (version 3.5.3, R Foundation). The results were similar if we varied our interruption date plus or minus 1 week….(More)”.

This app is helping mothers in the Brazilian favelas survive the pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Daniel Avelar at Open Democracy: “As Brazil faces one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the world, a smartphone app is helping residents of impoverished areas known as favelas survive the virus threat amid sudden mass unemployment.

So far, the Latin American country has recorded over 115.000 deaths caused by COVID-19. The shutdown of economic activity wiped out 7.8 million jobs, mostly affecting low-skilled informal workers who form the bulk of the population in the favelas. Emergency income distributed by the government is limited to 60% of the minimum wage, so families are struggling to make ends meet.

Many blame president Jair Bolsonaro for the tragedy. Bolsonaro, a far-right populist, has consistently rallied against science-based policies in the management of the pandemic and pushed for an end to stay-at-home orders. A precocious reopening of the economy is likely to increase infection rates and cause more deaths.

In an attempt to stop the looming humanitarian catastrophe, a coalition of activists in the favelas and corporate partners developed an app that is facilitating the distribution of food and emergency income to thousands of women spearheading families. The app has a facial recognition feature that helps volunteers identify and register recipients of aid and prevents fraud.

So far, the Favela Mothers project has distributed the equivalent to US$ 26 million in food parcels and cash allowances to more than 1.1 million families in 5,000 neighborhoods across the country….(More)”.

Scaling up Deliberation: Testing the Potential of Mini‐Publics to Enhance the Deliberative Capacity of Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jane Suiter, Lala Muradova, John Gastil and David M. Farrell: “This paper tests the possibility of embedding the benefits of minipublic deliberation within a wider voting public. We test whether a statement such as those derived from a Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) can influence voters who did not participate in the pre‐referendum minipublic deliberation. This experiment was implemented in advance of the 2018 Irish referendum on blasphemy, one of a series of social‐moral referendums following the recommendations of a deliberative assembly. This is the first application of a CIR‐style voting aid in a real world minipublic and referendum outside of the US and also the first application to what is principally a moral question. We found that survey respondents exposed to information about the minipublic and its findings significantly increased their policy knowledge. Further, exposing respondents to minipublic statements in favour and against the policy measure increased their empathy for the other side of the policy debate….(More)”.

‘Telegram revolution’: App helps drive Belarus protests

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daria Litvinova at AP News: “Every day, like clockwork, to-do lists for those protesting against Belarus’ authoritarian leader appear in the popular Telegram messaging app. They lay out goals, give times and locations of rallies with business-like precision, and offer spirited encouragement.

“Today will be one more important day in the fight for our freedom. Tectonic shifts are happening on all fronts, so it’s important not to slow down,” a message in one of Telegram’s so-called channels read Tuesday. “Morning. Expanding the strike … 11:00. Supporting the Kupala (theater) … 19:00. Gathering at the Independence Square.”

The app has become an indispensable tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have rocked Belarus since Aug. 9, when election officials announced President Alexander Lukashenko had won a landslide victory to extend his 26-year rule in a vote widely seen as rigged.

Peaceful protesters who poured into the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities were met with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings from police. The opposition candidate left for Lithuania — under duress, her campaign said — and authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader.

That’s where Telegram — which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements — came in. Some of its channels helped scattered rallies to mature into well-coordinated action.

The people who run the channels, which used to offer political news, now post updates, videos and photos of the unfolding turmoil sent in from users, locations of heavy police presence, contacts of human rights activists, and outright calls for new demonstrations — something Belarusian opposition leaders have refrained from doing publicly themselves. Tens of thousands of people all across the country have responded to those calls.

In a matter of days, the channels — NEXTA, NEXTA Live and Belarus of the Brain are the most popular — have become the main method for facilitating the protests, said Franak Viacorka, a Belarusian analyst and non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council….(More)”.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) – Is Blockchain a True Savior in This Pandemic Crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ajay Chawla and Sandra Ro: “The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually all businesses, but the effect has not been stable yet. While the current disruption may present challenges to the blockchain industry in the short term, it will also unlock new opportunities in the mid and longer-term. By providing help in the COVID-19 crisis and recovery, blockchain can play a pivotal role in accelerating post-crisis digital transformation initiatives and solving those problems highlighted in the current system.

Of course, no one could have foreseen the unprecedented upheaval caused by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic which has almost disrupted and dislocated economies and ecosystems across the planet but COVID-19 has brought supply chains to their knees.

Nevertheless, there are some bright spots where blockchain is used to combat the effects of COVID-19 and aid in the recovery process. These innovative use cases can demonstrate the benefits of blockchain to a wider audience.

Organizations including the World Health Organisation (WHO), Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, among other tech companies, government agencies, and international bodies are all working together to develop the blockchain-based platforms and solutions.

Blockchain technology is anchored by its ability to enable decentralized sharing of verified, trusted, and secure information among individuals or organizations. Furthermore, it can be paired with critical security and cryptography to protect the privacy of the users and individuals contributing data while still providing provenance and trust in the shared data.

By providing help in the COVID-19 crisis and recovery, blockchain can play a pivotal role in accelerating post-crisis digital transformation initiatives and solving those problems highlighted in the current system.

However, at the present moment, blockchain is not the panacea of all the problems. While the promise and potential of blockchain are undoubtedly transformative, it is still in the nascence of its evolution.

Keeping a tab on this technology and our capacities is the right direction we can head towards….(More)”.

Sandboxing Nature: How Regulatory Sandboxes Could Help Restore Species, Enhance Water Quality and Build Better Habitats Faster

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

White Paper by Phoebe Higgins & Timothy Male: “Late in 2017, the United Kingdom’s energy regulator, Ofgem, gave fast approval for a new project allowing residents to buy and sell renewable energy from solar panels and batteries within their own apartment buildings. Normally, this would not be legal since UK energy rules dictate that locally generated energy can only be used by the owner or sold back to the grid at a relatively low price. However, the earlier establishment of a regulatory sandbox for such energy delivery modernizations created a path to try something new and get it approved quickly. In April 2018, only a few months after project initiation, the first peer-to-peer energy trades within apartment complexes started.

Energy policy is not the only space where rules need fast modification to make allowances for all the novelty arising in the world today. The protection and restoration of our water, healthy soil and wildlife resources are static processes, starved for creativity. A United Nations’ panel recently reported on the extinction risks that face more than one million species around the globe. In a 2009 National Rivers and Streams Assessment, the EPA reported that 46 percent of U.S. waterways were in ‘poor’ biological condition, and more than 40 percent were polluted with high levels of nitrogen or phosphorus.

Innovators have big ideas that could help with these problems, but ponderous regulatory systems and older generations of bureaucrats aren’t used to the fast pace of new technologies, tools and products. Often, it is a simple thing—one word or phrase in a policy or regulation—that is a barrier to a new technology or technique being widely used. However, one sentence can be just as hard and slow to change as a whole law. Rather than simply accept this regulatory status quo, we believe in the need to find, nurture and learn from new concepts even when it means deliberately
breaking old rules.

Regulatory sandboxes like the one in the United Kingdom open the door to testing new approaches within a controlled environment. While they don’t ensure success, they make it possible for new technologies and tools to be explored in real-world settings. Not just so that innovators can learn, but also to allow government bureaucracies to catch up to the present and adapt to the future. Our planet and country need more opportunities to do this….(More)“

Health Data Privacy under the GDPR: Big Data Challenges and Regulatory Responses

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Maria Tzanou: “The growth of data collecting goods and services, such as ehealth and mhealth apps, smart watches, mobile fitness and dieting apps, electronic skin and ingestible tech, combined with recent technological developments such as increased capacity of data storage, artificial intelligence and smart algorithms have spawned a big data revolution that has reshaped how we understand and approach health data. Recently the COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded a variety of data privacy issues. The collection, storage, sharing and analysis of health- related data raises major legal and ethical questions relating to privacy, data protection, profiling, discrimination, surveillance, personal autonomy and dignity.

This book examines health privacy questions in light of the GDPR and the EU’s general data privacy legal framework. The GDPR is a complex and evolving body of law that aims to deal with several technological and societal health data privacy problems, while safeguarding public health interests and addressing its internal gaps and uncertainties. The book answers a diverse range of questions including: What role can the GDPR play in regulating health surveillance and big (health) data analytics? Can it catch up with the Internet age developments? Are the solutions to the challenges posed by big health data to be found in the law? Does the GDPR provide adequate tools and mechanisms to ensure public health objectives and the effective protection of privacy? How does the GDPR deal with data that concern children’s health and academic research?

By analysing a number of diverse questions concerning big health data under the GDPR from various different perspectives, this book will appeal to those interested in privacy, data protection, big data, health sciences, information technology, the GDPR, EU and human rights law….(More)”.

Blame the politicians, not the technology, for A-level fiasco

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Editorial Board at the Financial Times: “The soundtrack of school students marching through Britain’s streets shouting “f*** the algorithm” captured the sense of outrage surrounding the botched awarding of A-level exam grades this year. But the students’ anger towards a disembodied computer algorithm is misplaced. This was a human failure. The algorithm used to “moderate” teacher-assessed grades had no agency and delivered exactly what it was designed to do.

It is politicians and educational officials who are responsible for the government’s latest fiasco and should be the target of students’ criticism….

Sensibly designed, computer algorithms could have been used to moderate teacher assessments in a constructive way. Using past school performance data, they could have highlighted anomalies in the distribution of predicted grades between and within schools. That could have led to a dialogue between Ofqual, the exam regulator, and anomalous schools to come up with more realistic assessments….

There are broader lessons to be drawn from the government’s algo fiasco about the dangers of automated decision-making systems. The inappropriate use of such systems to assess immigration status, policing policies and prison sentencing decisions is a live danger. In the private sector, incomplete and partial data sets can also significantly disadvantage under-represented groups when it comes to hiring decisions and performance measures.

Given the severe erosion of public trust in the government’s use of technology, it might now be advisable to subject all automated decision-making systems to critical scrutiny by independent experts. The Royal Statistical Society and The Alan Turing Institute certainly have the expertise to give a Kitemark of approval or flag concerns.

As ever, technology in itself is neither good nor bad. But it is certainly not neutral. The more we deploy automated decision-making systems, the smarter we must become in considering how best to use them and in scrutinising their outcomes. We often talk about a deficit of trust in our societies. But we should also be aware of the dangers of over-trusting technology. That may be a good essay subject for next year’s philosophy A-level….(More)”.

No more gut-based strategies: Using evidence to solve the digital divide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gregory Rosston and Scott J. Wallsten at the Hill: “COVID-19 has, among other things, brought home the costs of the digital divide. Numerous op-eds have offered solutions, including increasing subsidies to schools, providing eligible low-income people with a $50 per month broadband credit, funding more digital literacy classes and putting WiFi on school buses. A House bill would allocate $80 billion to ideas meant to close the digital divide.

The key missing component of nearly every proposal to solve the connectivity problem is evidence — evidence suggesting the ideas are likely to work and ways to use evidence in the future to evaluate whether they did work. Otherwise, we are likely throwing money away. Understanding what works and what doesn’t requires data collection and research now and in the future….

Consider President Trump’s belief in hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the novel coronavirus based simply on his “gut.” That resulted in the government ordering the drug to be produced, distributed to hospitals, and 63 million doses put into a strategic national stockpile.

The well-meaning folks offering up multi-billion dollar broadband plans probably recognize the foolhardiness of the president’s gut-check approach to guiding virus treatment plans. But so far, policy makers and advocates are promoting their own gut beliefs that their proposals will treat the digital divide. An evidence-free approach is likely to cost billions of dollars more and connect fewer people than an evidence-based approach.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The pandemic did not only lay bare the implications of the digital divide, it also created a laboratory for studying how best to bridge the divide. The most immediate problem was how to help kids without home broadband attend distance learning classes. Schools had no time to formally study different options — it was a race to find anything that might help. As a result, schools incidentally ran thousands of concurrent experiments around the country….(More)”.

Might social intelligence save Latin America from its governments in times of Covid-19?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Thamy Pogrebinschi: “…In such scenarios, it seems relevant to acknowledge the limits of the state to deal with huge and unpredictable challenges and thus the need to resort to civil society. State capacity cannot be built overnight, but social intelligence is an unlimited and permanently available resource. In recent years, digital technology has multiplied what has been long called social intelligence (Dewey) and is now more often known as collective intelligence (Lévy), the wisdom of crowds (Surowiecki), or democratic reason (Landemore).

Taken together, these concepts point to the most powerful tool available to governments facing hard problems and unprecedented challenges: the sourcing and sharing of knowledge, information, skills, resources, and data from citizens in order to address social and political problems.

The Covid-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to test the potential of social intelligence as fuel for processes of creative collaboration that may aid governments to reinvent themselves and prepare for the challenges that will remain after the virus is gone. By creative collaboration, I mean a range of forms of communication, action, and connection among citizens themselves, between citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs), and between the latter two and their governments, all with the common aim of addressing problems that affect all and that the state for various reasons cannot (satisfactorily) respond to alone.

While several Latin American countries have been stuck in the Covid-19 crisis with governments unable or unwilling to contain it or to reduce its damages, a substantial number of digital democratic innovations have been advanced by civil society in the past few months. These comprise institutions, processes, and mechanisms that rely on digital citizen participation as a means to address social and political problems – and, more recently, also problems of a humanitarian nature….

Between March 16 and July 1 of this year, at least 400 digital democratic innovations were created across 18 countries in Latin America with the specific aim of handling the Covid-19 crisis and mitigating its impact, according to recent data from the LATINNO project. These innovations are essentially mechanisms and processes in which citizens, with the aid of digital tools, are enabled to address social, political, and humanitarian problems related to the pandemic.

Citizens engage in and contribute to three levels of responses, which are based on information, connection, and action. About one-fourth of these digital democratic innovations clearly rely on crowdsourcing social intelligence.

The great majority of those digital innovations have been developed by CSOs. Around 75% of them have no government involvement at all, which is striking in a region known for implementing state-driven citizen participation as a result of the democratization processes that took place in the late 20th century. Civil society has stepped in in most countries, particularly where government responses were absent (Brazil and Nicaragua), slow (Mexico), insufficient due to lack of economic resources (Argentina) or infrastructure (Peru), or simply inefficient (Chile).

Based on these data from 18 Latin American countries, one can observe that digital democratic innovations address challenges posed by the Covid-19 outbreak in five main ways: first, generating verified information and reliable data; second, geolocating problems, needs, and demands; third, mobilizing resources, skills, and knowledge to address those problems, needs, and demands; fourth, connecting demand (individuals and organizations in need) and supply (individuals and organizations willing to provide whatever is needed); and fifth and finally, implementing and monitoring public policies and actions. In some countries, there is a sixth use that cuts across the other five: assisting vulnerable groups such as the elderly, women, children and youth, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants….(More)”