Tribalism Comes for Pandemic Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Yuval Levin at The New Atlantis: “he Covid-19 pandemic has tested our society in countless ways. From the health system to the school system, the economy, government, and family life, we have confronted some enormous and unfamiliar challenges. But many of these stresses are united by the need to constantly adapt to new information and evidence and accept that any knowledge we might have is only provisional. This demands a kind of humble restraint — on the part of public health experts, political leaders, and the public at large — that our society now finds very hard to muster.

The virus is novel, so our understanding of what responding to it might require of us has had to be built on the fly. But the polarized culture war that pervades so much of our national life has made this kind of learning very difficult. Views developed in response to provisional assessments of incomplete evidence quickly rigidify as they are transformed into tribal markers and then cultural weapons. Soon there are left-wing and right-wing views on whether to wear masks, whether particular drugs are effective, or how to think about social distancing.

New evidence is taken as an assault on these tribal commitments, and policy adjustments in response are seen as forms of surrender to the enemy. Every new piece of information gets filtered through partisan sieves, implicitly examined to see whose interest it serves, and then embraced or rejected on that basis. We all do this. You’re probably doing it right now — skimming quickly to the end of this piece to see if I’m criticizing you or only those other people who behave so irresponsibly….(More)”.

Constructing Digital Democracies: Facebook, Arendt, and the Politics of Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jennifer Forestal: “Deliberative democracy requires both equality and difference, with structures that organize a cohesive public while still accommodating the unique perspectives of each participant. While institutions like laws and norms can help to provide this balance, the built environment also plays a role supporting democratic politics—both on- and off-line.

In this article, I use the work of Hannah Arendt to articulate two characteristics the built environment needs to support democratic politics: it must (1) serves as a common world, drawing users together and emphasizing their common interests and must also (2) preserve spaces of appearance, accommodating diverse perspectives and inviting disagreement. I, then, turn to the example of Facebook to show how these characteristics can be used as criteria for evaluating how well a particular digital platform supports democratic politics and providing alternative mechanisms these sites might use to fulfill their role as a public realm….(More)”.

Libraries Supporting Open Government: Areas for Engagement and Lessons Learned

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by IFLA: “This report explores the roles libraries play in different countries’ Open Government Partnership Action Plans. Within the OGP framework, states and civil society actors work together to set out commitments for reforms, implement and review the impacts in recurring two-year cycles.

In different countries’ OGP commitments over the years, libraries and library associations assisted other agencies with the implementation of their commitments, or lead their own initiatives. Offering venues for civic engagement, helping develop tools and platforms for easier access to government records, providing valuable cultural Open Data and more – libraries can play a versatile role in supporting and enabling Open Government.

The report outlines the Open Government policy areas that libraries have been engaged in, the roles they took up to help deliver on OGP commitments, and some of the key ways to maximise the impact of library interventions, drawing on the lessons from earlier OGP cycles….(More)”.

Characterizing Disinformation Risk to Open Data in the Post-Truth Era

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Adrienne Colborne and Michael Smit: “Curated, labeled, high-quality data is a valuable commodity for tasks such as business analytics and machine learning. Open data is a common source of such data—for example, retail analytics draws on open demographic data, and weather forecast systems draw on open atmospheric and ocean data. Open data is released openly by governments to achieve various objectives, such as transparency, informing citizen engagement, or supporting private enterprise.

Critical examination of ongoing social changes, including the post-truth phenomenon, suggests the quality, integrity, and authenticity of open data may be at risk. We introduce this risk through various lenses, describe some of the types of risk we expect using a threat model approach, identify approaches to mitigate each risk, and present real-world examples of cases where the risk has already caused harm. As an initial assessment of awareness of this disinformation risk, we compare our analysis to perspectives captured during open data stakeholder consultations in Canada…(More)”.

Democracies contain epidemics most effectively

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Many people would look at the covid-19 pandemic and conclude that democracies are bad at tackling infectious diseases. America and the eu had months to prepare after China sounded the alarm in January. Both have subsequently suffered more than 300 confirmed deaths per 1m people. China’s Communist Party reports an official death rate that is 99% lower, and has trumpeted its apparent success in containing the outbreak domestically.

Yet most data suggest that political freedom can be a tonic against disease. The Economist has analysed epidemics from 1960 to 2019. Though these outbreaks varied in contagiousness and lethality, a clear correlation emerged. Among countries with similar wealth, the lowest death rates tend to be in places where most people can vote in free and fair elections. Other definitions of democracy give similar results.

We cannot replicate this analysis for covid-19 yet, as it is still spreading at different rates around the world. Western democracies were hit early, in big cities with large flows of people from abroad. Daily deaths are now declining in these places but rising in developing countries, which tend to be less connected and more autocratic….

One consistent measure that is available in most countries, but not China, is Google’s index of mobility via smartphone apps. Researchers at Oxford University reckon that, after adjusting for a country’s wealth and other characteristics, democracies saw a 35% larger reduction in movement in response to lockdown policies. The drop in New Zealand, for example, was twice that in autocratic Bahrain.

People who praise China for its handling of covid-19 would do better to look at Taiwan, a neighbouring democracy. China wasted valuable time in December by intimidating doctors who warned of a lethal virus. Taiwan swiftly launched tracing measures in January—and has suffered only seven deaths…(More)”.

The technology of witnessing brutality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Axios: “The ways Americans capture and share records of racist violence and police misconduct keep changing, but the pain of the underlying injustices they chronicle remains a stubborn constant.

Driving the news: After George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked wide protests, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said, “Thank God a young person had a camera to video it.”

Why it matters: From news photography to TV broadcasts to camcorders to smartphones, improvements in the technology of witness over the past century mean we’re more instantly and viscerally aware of each new injustice.

  • But unless our growing power to collect and distribute evidence of injustice can drive actual social change, the awareness these technologies provide just ends up fueling frustration and despair.

For decades, still news photography was the primary channel through which the public became aware of incidents of racial injustice.

  • A horrific 1930 photo of the lynching of J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith, two black men in Marion, Indiana, brought the incident to national attention and inspired the song “Strange Fruit.” But the killers were never brought to justice.
  • Photos of the mutilated body of Emmett Till catalyzed a nationwide reaction to his 1955 lynching in Mississippi.

In the 1960s, television news footage brought scenes of police turning dogs and water cannons on peaceful civil rights protesters in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama into viewers’ living rooms.

  • The TV coverage was moving in both senses of the word.

In 1991, a camcorder tape shot by a Los Angeles plumber named George Holliday captured images of cops brutally beating Rodney King.

  • In the pre-internet era, it was only after the King tape was broadcast on TV that Americans could see it for themselves.

Over the past decade, smartphones have enabled witnesses and protesters to capture and distribute photos and videos of injustice quickly — sometimes, as it’s happening.

  • This power helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement beginning in 2013 and has played a growing role in broader public awareness of police brutality.

Between the lines: For a brief moment mid-decade, some hoped that the combination of a public well-supplied with video recording devices and requirements that police wear bodycams would introduce a new level of accountability to law enforcement.

The bottom line: Smartphones and social media deliver direct accounts of grief- and rage-inducing stories…(More)”.

Centering Racial Equity Throughout Data Integration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Toolkit by AISP: “Societal “progress” is often marked by the construction of new infrastructure that fuels change and innovation. Just as railroads and interstate highways were the defining infrastructure projects of the 1800 and 1900s, the development of data infrastructure is a critical innovation of our century. Railroads and highways were drivers of development and prosperity for some investors and sites. Yet other individuals and communities were harmed, displaced, bypassed, ignored, and forgotten by
those efforts.

At this moment in our history, we can co-create data infrastructure to promote racial equity and the public good, or we can invest in data infrastructure that disregards the historical, social, and political context—reinforcing racial inequity that continues to harm communities. Building data infrastructure without a racial equity lens and understanding of historical context will exacerbate existing inequalities along the lines of race, gender, class, and ability. Instead, we commit to contextualize our work in the historical and structural oppression that shapes it, and organize stakeholders across geography, sector, and experience to center racial equity throughout data integration….(More)”.

Sharing Health Data and Biospecimens with Industry — A Principle-Driven, Practical Approach

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kayte Spector-Bagdady et al at the New England Journal of Medicine: “The advent of standardized electronic health records, sustainable biobanks, consumer-wellness applications, and advanced diagnostics has resulted in new health information repositories. As highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, these repositories create an opportunity for advancing health research by means of secondary use of data and biospecimens. Current regulations in this space give substantial discretion to individual organizations when it comes to sharing deidentified data and specimens. But some recent examples of health care institutions sharing individual-level data and specimens with companies have generated controversy. Academic medical centers are therefore both practically and ethically compelled to establish best practices for governing the sharing of such contributions with outside entities.1 We believe that the approach we have taken at Michigan Medicine could help inform the national conversation on this issue.

The Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects offers some safeguards for research participants from whom data and specimens have been collected. For example, researchers must notify participants if commercial use of their specimens is a possibility. These regulations generally cover only federally funded work, however, and they don’t apply to deidentified data or specimens. Because participants value transparency regarding industry access to their data and biospecimens, our institution set out to create standards that would better reflect participants’ expectations and honor their trust. Using a principlist approach that balances beneficence and nonmaleficence, respect for persons, and justice, buttressed by recent analyses and findings regarding contributors’ preferences, Michigan Medicine established a formal process to guide our approach….(More)”.

Digital contact tracing and surveillance during COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report on General and Child-specific Ethical Issues by Gabrielle Berman, Karen Carter, Manuel García-Herranz and Vedran Sekara: “The last few years have seen a proliferation of means and approaches being used to collect sensitive or identifiable data on children. Technologies such as facial recognition and other biometrics, increased processing capacity for ‘big data’ analysis and data linkage, and the roll-out of mobile and internet services and access have substantially changed the nature of data collection, analysis, and use.

Real-time data are essential to support decision-makers in government, development and humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF to better understand the issues facing children, plan appropriate action, monitor progress and ensure that no one is left behind. But the collation and use of personally identifiable data may also pose significant risks to children’s rights.

UNICEF has undertaken substantial work to provide a foundation to understand and balance the potential benefits and risks to children of data collection. This work includes the Industry Toolkit on Children’s Online Privacy and Freedom of Expression and a partnership with GovLab on Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) – which promotes good practice principles and has developed practical tools to assist field offices, partners and governments to make responsible data management decisions.

Balancing the need to collect data to support good decision-making versus the need to protect children from harm created through the collection of the data has never been more challenging than in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The response to the pandemic has seen an unprecedented rapid scaling up of technologies to support digital contact tracing and surveillance. The initial approach has included:

  • tracking using mobile phones and other digital devices (tablet computers, the Internet of Things, etc.)
  • surveillance to support movement restrictions, including through the use of location monitoring and facial recognition
  • a shift from in-person service provision and routine data collection to the use of remote or online platforms (including new processes for identity verification)
  • an increased focus on big data analysis and predictive modelling to fill data gaps…(More)”.

How data analysis helped Mozambique stem a cholera outbreak

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Jack at the Financial Times: “When Mozambique was hit by two cyclones in rapid succession last year — causing death and destruction from a natural disaster on a scale not seen in Africa for a generation — government officials added an unusual recruit to their relief efforts. Apart from the usual humanitarian and health agencies, the National Health Institute also turned to Zenysis, a Silicon Valley start-up.

As the UN and non-governmental organisations helped to rebuild lives and tackle outbreaks of disease including cholera, Zenysis began gathering and analysing large volumes of disparate data. “When we arrived, there were 400 new cases of cholera a day and they were doubling every 24 hours,” says Jonathan Stambolis, the company’s chief executive. “None of the data was shared [between agencies]. Our software harmonised and integrated fragmented sources to produce a coherent picture of the outbreak, the health system’s ability to respond and the resources available.

“Three and a half weeks later, they were able to get infections down to zero in most affected provinces,” he adds. The government attributed that achievement to the availability of high-quality data to brief the public and international partners.

“They co-ordinated the response in a way that drove infections down,” he says. Zenysis formed part of a “virtual control room”, integrating information to help decision makers understand what was happening in the worst hit areas, identify sources of water contamination and where to prioritise cholera vaccinations.

It supported an “mAlert system”, which integrated health surveillance data into a single platform for analysis. The output was daily reports distilled from data issued by health facilities and accommodation centres in affected areas, disease monitoring and surveillance from laboratory testing….(More)”.