To Understand Global Migration, You Have to See It First

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Data visualization by The New York Times: “In the maps below, Times Opinion can provide the clearest picture to date of how people move across the globe: a record of permanent migration to and from 181 countries based on a single, consistent source of information, for every month from the beginning of 2019 through the end of 2022. These estimates are drawn not from government records but from the location data of three billion anonymized Facebook users all over the world.

The analysis — the result of new research published on Wednesday from Meta, the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University — reveals migration’s true global sweep. And yes, it excludes business travelers and tourists: Only people who remain in their destination country for more than a year are counted as migrants here.

The data comes with some limitations. Migration to and from certain countries that have banned or restricted the use of Facebook, including China, Iran and Cuba, is not included in this data set, and it’s impossible to know each migrant’s legal status. Nevertheless, this is the first time that estimates of global migration flows have been made publicly available at this scale. The researchers found that from 2019 to 2022, an annual average of 30 million people — approximately one-third of a percent of the world’s population — migrated each year.

If you would like to see the data behind this analysis for yourself, we made an interactive tool that you can use to explore the full data set…(More)”

DOGE’s Growing Reach into Personal Data: What it Means for Human Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Deborah Brown: “Expansive interagency sharing of personal data could fuel abuses against vulnerable people and communities who are already being targeted by Trump administration policies, like immigrants, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and student protesters. The personal data held by the government reveals deeply sensitive information, such as people’s immigration status, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and economic status.

A massive centralized government database could easily be used for a range of abusive purposes, like to discriminate against current federal employees and future job applicants on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, or to facilitate the deportation of immigrants. It could result in people forgoing public services out of fear that their data will be weaponized against them by another federal agency.

But the danger doesn’t stop with those already in the administration’s crosshairs. The removal of barriers keeping private data siloed could allow the government or DOGE to deny federal loans for education or Medicaid benefits based on unrelated or even inaccurate data. It could also facilitate the creation of profiles containing all of the information various agencies hold on every person in the country. Such profiles, combined with social media activity, could facilitate the identification and targeting of people for political reasons, including in the context of elections.

Information silos exist for a reason. Personal data should be collected for a determined, specific, and legitimate purpose, and not used for another purpose without notice or justification, according to the key internationally recognized data protection principle, “purpose limitation.” Sharing data seamlessly across federal or even state agencies in the name of an undefined and unmeasurable goal of efficiency is incompatible with this core data protection principle…(More)”.

Democratic Resilience: Moving from Theoretical Frameworks to a Practical Measurement Agenda

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nicholas Biddle, Alexander Fischer, Simon D. Angus, Selen Ercan, Max Grömping, andMatthew Gray: “Global indices and media narratives indicate a decline in democratic institutions, values, and practices. Simultaneously, democratic innovators are experimenting with new ways to strengthen democracy at local and national levels. These both suggest democracies are not static; they evolve as society, technology and the environment change.

This paper examines democracy as a resilient system, emphasizing the role of applied analysis in shaping effective policy and programs, particularly in Australia. Grounded in adaptive processes, democratic resilience is the capacity of a democracy to identify problems, and collectively respond to changing conditions, balancing institutional stability with transformative. It outlines the ambition of a national network of scholars, civil society leaders, and policymakers to equip democratic innovators with practical insights and foresight underpinning new ideas. These insights are essential for strengthening both public institutions, public narratives and community programs.

We review current literature on resilient democracies and highlight a critical gap: current measurement efforts focus heavily on composite indices—especially trust—while neglecting dynamic flows and causal drivers. They focus on the descriptive features and identify weaknesses, they do not focus on the diagnostics or evidence to what strengths democracies. This is reflected in the lack of cross-sector networked, living evidence systems to track what works and why across the intersecting dynamics of democratic practices. To address this, we propose a practical agenda centred on three core strengthening flows of democratic resilience: trusted institutions, credible information, and social inclusion.

The paper reviews six key data sources and several analytic methods for continuously monitoring democratic institutions, diagnosing causal drivers, and building an adaptive evidence system to inform innovation and reform. By integrating resilience frameworks and policy analysis, we demonstrate how real-time monitoring and analysis can enable innovation, experimentation and cross-sector ingenuity.

This article presents a practical research agenda connecting a national network of scholars and civil society leaders. We suggest this agenda be problem-driven, facilitated by participatory approaches to asking and prioritising the questions that matter most. We propose a connected approach to collectively posing key questions that matter most, expanding data sources, and fostering applied ideation between communities, civil society, government, and academia—ensuring democracy remains resilient in an evolving global and national context…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to improve productivity significantly, but there are many questions about how AI could affect jobs and workers.

Recent technical innovations have driven the rapid development of generative AI systems, which produce text, images, or other content based on user requests – advances which have the potential to complement or replace human labor in specific tasks, and to reshape demand for certain types of expertise in the labor market.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work evaluates recent advances in AI technology and their implications for economic productivity, the workforce, and education in the United States. The report notes that AI is a tool with the potential to enhance human labor and create new forms of valuable work – but this is not an inevitable outcome. Tracking progress in AI and its impacts on the workforce will be critical to helping inform and equip workers and policymakers to flexibly respond to AI developments…(More)”.

‘We are flying blind’: RFK Jr.’s cuts halt data collection on abortion, cancer, HIV and more

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alice Miranda Ollstein: “The federal teams that count public health problems are disappearing — putting efforts to solve those problems in jeopardy.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purge of tens of thousands of federal workers has halted efforts to collect data on everything from cancer rates in firefighters to mother-to-baby transmission of HIV and syphilis to outbreaks of drug-resistant gonorrhea to cases of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The cuts threaten to obscure the severity of pressing health threats and whether they’re getting better or worse, leaving officials clueless on how to respond. They could also make it difficult, if not impossible, to assess the impact of the administration’s spending and policies. Both outside experts and impacted employees argue the layoffs will cost the government more money in the long run by eliminating information on whether programs are effective or wasteful, and by allowing preventable problems to fester.

“Surveillance capabilities are crucial for identifying emerging health issues, directing resources efficiently, and evaluating the effectiveness of existing policies,” said Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general in the first Trump’s administration. “Without robust data and surveillance systems, we cannot accurately assess whether we are truly making America healthier.”..(More)”.

Statistical methods in public policy research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Andrew Heiss: “This essay provides an overview of statistical methods in public policy, focused primarily on the United States. I trace the historical development of quantitative approaches in policy research, from early ad hoc applications through the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the full institutionalization of statistical analysis in federal, state, local, and nonprofit agencies by the late 20th century.

I then outline three core methodological approaches to policy-centered statistical research across social science disciplines: description, explanation, and prediction, framing each in terms of the focus of the analysis. In descriptive work, researchers explore what exists and examine any variable of interest to understand their different distributions and relationships. In explanatory work, researchers ask why does it exist and how can it be influenced. The focus of the analysis is on explanatory variables (X) to either (1) accurately estimate their relationship with an outcome variable (Y), or (2) causally attribute the effect of specific explanatory variables on outcomes. In predictive work, researchers as what will happen next and focus on the outcome variable (Y) and on generating accurate forecasts, classifications, and predictions from new data. For each approach, I examine key techniques, their applications in policy contexts, and important methodological considerations.

I then consider critical perspectives on quantitative policy analysis framed around issues related to a three-part “data imperative” where governments are driven to count, gather, and learn from data. Each of these imperatives entail substantial issues related to privacy, accountability, democratic participation, and epistemic inequalities—issues at odds with public sector values of transparency and openness. I conclude by identifying some emerging trends in public sector-focused data science, inclusive ethical guidelines, open research practices, and future directions for the field…(More)”.

So You Want to Be a Dissident?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer: “…Heimans points to an increasingly hostile digital landscape as one barrier to effective grassroots campaigns. At the dawn of the digital era, in the two-thousands, e-mail transformed the field of political organizing, enabling groups like MoveOn.org to mobilize huge campaigns against the Iraq War, and allowing upstart candidates like Howard Dean and Barack Obama to raise money directly from people instead of relying on Party infrastructure. But now everyone’s e-mail inboxes are overflowing. The tech oligarchs who control the social-media platforms are less willing to support progressive activism. Globally, autocrats have more tools to surveil and disrupt digital campaigns. And regular people are burned out on actions that have failed to remedy fundamental problems in society.

It’s not clear what comes next. Heimans hopes that new tactics will be developed, such as, perhaps, a new online platform that would help organizing, or the strengthening of a progressive-media ecosystem that will engage new participants. “Something will emerge that kind of revitalizes the space.”

There’s an oft-told story about Andrei Sakharov, the celebrated twentieth-century Soviet activist. Sakharov made his name working as a physicist on the development of the U.S.S.R.’s hydrogen bomb, at the height of the Cold War, but shot to global prominence after Leonid Brezhnev’s regime punished him for speaking publicly about the dangers of those weapons, and also about Soviet repression.

When an American friend was visiting Sakharov and his wife, the activist Yelena Bonner, in Moscow, the friend referred to Sakharov as a dissident. Bonner corrected him: “My husband is a physicist, not a dissident.”

This is a fundamental tension of building a principled dissident culture—it risks wrapping people up in a kind of negative identity, a cloak of what they are not. The Soviet dissidents understood their work as a struggle to uphold the laws and rights that were enshrined in the Soviet constitution, not as a fight against a regime.

“They were fastidious about everything they did being consistent with Soviet law,” Benjamin Nathans, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a book on Soviet dissidents, said. “I call it radical civil obedience.”

An affirmative vision of what the world should be is the inspiration for many of those who, in these tempestuous early months of Trump 2.0, have taken meaningful risks—acts of American dissent.

Consider Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop who used her pulpit before Trump on Inauguration Day to ask the President’s “mercy” for two vulnerable groups for whom he has reserved his most visceral disdain. For her sins, a congressional ally of the President called for the pastor to be “added to the deportation list.”..(More)”.

Trump Wants to Merge Government Data. Here Are 314 Things It Might Know About You.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Emily Badger and Sheera Frenkel: “The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start. It may also know your …and at least 263 more categories of data.These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in disconnected data systems across the federal government — some at the Treasury, some at the Social Security Administration and some at the Department of Education, among other agencies.

The Trump administration is now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation” of these segregated records, raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.

The effort is being driven by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his lieutenants with the Department of Government Efficiency, who have sought access to dozens of databases as they have swept through agencies across the federal government. Along the way, they have elbowed past the objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections…(More)”.

The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall: “We spend much of our waking lives communicating with others. How does each moment of interaction shape not only our relationships but also our worldviews? And how can we create moments of connection that improve our health and well-being, particularly in a world in which people are feeling increasingly isolated?
 
Drawing from their extensive research, Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall establish a new way to think about our relational life: as existing within “social biomes”—complex ecosystems of moments of interaction with others. Each interaction we have, no matter how unimportant or mundane it might seem, is a building block of our identities and beliefs. Consequently, the choices we make about how we interact and who we interact with—and whether we interact at all—matter more than we might know. Merolla and Hall offer a sympathetic, practical guide to our vital yet complicated social lives and propose realistic ways to embrace and enhance connection and hope…(More)”.

LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jacy Reese Anthis et al: “Accurate and verifiable large language model (LLM) simulations of human research subjects promise an accessible data source for understanding human behavior and training new AI systems. However, results to date have been limited, and few social scientists have adopted these methods. In this position paper, we argue that the promise of LLM social simulations can be achieved by addressing five tractable challenges. We ground our argument in a literature survey of empirical comparisons between LLMs and human research subjects, commentaries on the topic, and related work. We identify promising directions with prompting, fine-tuning, and complementary methods. We believe that LLM social simulations can already be used for exploratory research, such as pilot experiments for psychology, economics, sociology, and marketing. More widespread use may soon be possible with rapidly advancing LLM capabilities, and researchers should prioritize developing conceptual models and evaluations that can be iteratively deployed and refined at pace with ongoing AI advances…(More)”.