The Dilemmas of Wonderland: Decisions in the Age of Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Yakov Ben-Haim: “Innovations create both opportunities and dilemmas. They provide new and supposedly better opportunities, but — because of their newness — they are often more uncertain and potentially worse than existing options. Recent inventions and discoveries include new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys and new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances and many other discoveries and inventions.

Is it better to use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That dilemma faces just about everybody. The paradigm of the innovation dilemma characterizes many situations, even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending nation-states. These dilemmas have far-reaching implications for individuals, organizations, and society at large as they make decisions in the age of innovation. The uncritical belief in outcome-optimization — “more is better, so most is best” — pervades decision-making in all domains, but is often irresponsible when facing the uncertainties of innovation. 

There is a great need for practical conceptual tools for understanding and managing the dilemmas of innovation. This book offers a new direction for a wide audience. It discusses examples from many fields, including e-reading, bipolar disorder and pregnancy, disruptive technology in industry, stock markets, agricultural productivity and world hunger, military hardware, military intelligence, biological conservation, on-line learning, and more….(More)”.

The global South is changing how knowledge is made, shared and used

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert Morrell at The Conversation: “Globalisation and new technology have changed the ways that knowledge is made, disseminated and consumed. At the push of a button, one can find articles or sources from all over the world. Yet the global knowledge economy is still marked by its history.

The former colonial nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the rich countries of Europe and North America which are collectively called the global North (normally considered to include the West and the first world, the North contains a quarter of the world’s population but controls 80% of income earned) – are still central in the knowledge economy. But the story is not one simply of Northern dominance. A process of making knowledge in the South is underway.

European colonisers encountered many sophisticated and complex knowledge systems among the colonised. These had their own intellectual workforces, their own environmental, geographical, historical and medical sciences. They also had their own means of developing knowledge. Sometimes the colonisers tried to obliterate these knowledges.

In other instances colonisers appropriated local knowledge, for instance in agriculture, fisheries and mining. Sometimes they recognised and even honoured other knowledge systems and intellectuals. This was the case among some of the British in India, and was the early form of “Orientalism”, the study of people and cultures from the East.

In the past few decades, there’s been more critique of global knowledge inequalities and the global North’s dominance. There have also been shifts in knowledge production patterns; some newer disciplines have stepped away from old patterns of inequality.

These issues are examined in a new book, Knowledge and Global Power: Making new sciences in the South (published by Wits University Press), which I co-authored with Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell and Joao Maia. The focus is especially on those areas where old patterns are not being replicated, so the study chooses climate change, gender and HIV and AIDS as three new areas of knowledge production in which new voices from the South might be prominent….(More)”.

Beyond opinion classification: Extracting facts, opinions and experiences from health forums

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz et al in PLOS-ONE: “Surveys indicate that patients, particularly those suffering from chronic conditions, strongly benefit from the information found in social networks and online forums. One challenge in accessing online health information is to differentiate between factual and more subjective information. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of exploiting lexical, syntactic, semantic, network-based and emotional properties of texts to automatically classify patient-generated contents into three types: “experiences”, “facts” and “opinions”, using machine learning algorithms. In this context, our goal is to develop automatic methods that will make online health information more easily accessible and useful for patients, professionals and researchers….

We work with a set of 3000 posts to online health forums in breast cancer, morbus crohn and different allergies. Each sentence in a post is manually labeled as “experience”, “fact” or “opinion”. Using this data, we train a support vector machine algorithm to perform classification. The results are evaluated in a 10-fold cross validation procedure.

Overall, we find that it is possible to predict the type of information contained in a forum post with a very high accuracy (over 80 percent) using simple text representations such as word embeddings and bags of words. We also analyze more complex features such as those based on the network properties, the polarity of words and the verbal tense of the sentences and show that, when combined with the previous ones, they can boost the results….(More)”.

What you don’t know about your health data will make you sick

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeanette Beebe at Fast Company: “Every time you shuffle through a line at the pharmacy, every time you try to get comfortable in those awkward doctor’s office chairs, every time you scroll through the web while you’re put on hold with a question about your medical bill, take a second to think about the person ahead of you and behind you.

Chances are, at least one of you is being monitored by a third party like data analytics giant Optum, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group, Inc. Since 1993, it’s captured medical data—lab results, diagnoses, prescriptions, and more—from 150 million Americans. That’s almost half of the U.S. population.

“They’re the ones that are tapping the data. They’re in there. I can’t remove them from my own health insurance contracts. So I’m stuck. It’s just part of the system,” says Joel Winston, an attorney who specializes in privacy and data protection law.

Healthcare providers can legally sell their data to a now-dizzyingly vast spread of companies, who can use it to make decisions, from designing new drugs to pricing your insurance rates to developing highly targeted advertising.

It’s written in the fine print: You don’t own your medical records. Well, except if you live in New Hampshire. It’s the only state that mandates its residents own their medical data. In 21 states, the law explicitly says that healthcare providers own these records, not patients. In the rest of the country, it’s up in the air.

Every time you visit a doctor or a pharmacy, your record grows. The details can be colorful: Using sources like Milliman’s IntelliScript and ExamOne’s ScriptCheck, a fuller picture of you emerges. Your interactions with the health are system, your medical payments, your prescription drug purchase history. And the market for the data is surging.

Its buyers and sharers—pharma giants, insurers, credit reporting agencies, and other data-hungry companies or “fourth parties” (like Facebook)—say that these massive health data sets can improve healthcare delivery and fuel advances in so-called “precision medicine.”

Still, this glut of health data has raised alarms among privacy advocates, who say many consumers are in the dark about how much of their health-related info is being gathered and mined….

Gardner predicted that traditional health data systems—electronic health records and electronic medical records—are less than ideal, given the “rigidity of the vendors and the products” and the way our data is owned and secured. Don’t count on them being around much longer, she said, “beyond the next few years.”

The future, Gardner suggested, is a system that runs on blockchain, which she defined for the committee as “basically a secure, visible, irrefutable ledger of transactions and ownership.” Still, a recent analysis of over 150 white papers revealed most healthcare blockchain projects “fall somewhere between half-baked and overly optimistic.”

As larger companies like IBM sign on, the technology may be edging closer to reality. Last year, Proof Work outlined a HIPAA-compliant system that manages patients’ medical histories over time, from acute care in the hospital to preventative checkups. The goal is to give these records to patients on their phones, and to create a “democratized ecosystem” to solve interoperability between patients, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and researchers. Similar proposals from blockchain-focused startups like Health Bank and Humanity.co would help patients store and share their health information securely—and sell it to researchers, too….(More)”.

Technology and political will can create better governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Darshana Narayanan at The Economist: “Current forms of democracy exclude most people from political decision-making. We elect representatives and participate in the occasional referendums, but we mainly remain on the outside. The result is that a handful of people in power dictate what ought to be collective decisions. What we have now is hardly a democracy, or at least, not a democracy that we should settle for.

To design a truer form of democracy—that is, fair representation and an outcome determined by a plurality—we might draw some lessons from the collective behaviour of other social animals: schools of fish, for example. Schooling fish self-organise for the benefit of the group and are rarely in a fracas. Individuals in the group may not be associated and yet they reach consensus. A study in 2011 led by Iain Couzin found that “uninformed” fish—in that case, ones that had not been trained to have a preference to move towards a particular target—can dilute the influence of a powerful minority group which did have such preferences. 

Of course fish are not the same as humans. But that study does suggest a way of thinking about decision-making. Instead of limiting influence to experts and strongly motivated interest groups, we should actively work to broaden participation to ensure that we include people lacking strong preferences or prior knowledge of an issue. In other words, we need to go against the ingrained thinking that non-experts should be excluded from decision-making. Inclusivity might just improve our chances of reaching a real, democratic consensus.

How can our political institutions facilitate this? In my work over the past several years I have tried to apply findings from behavioural science into institutions and into code to create better systems of governance. In the course of my work, I have found some promising experiments taking place around the world that harness new digital tools. They point the way to how democracy can be practiced in the 21st century….(More)”.

The Referendum and Other Essays on Constitutional Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Matt Qvortrup: “Until recently, referendums were little used. After the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums, they have come to the fore as a mechanism with the potential to disrupt the status quo and radically change political direction. This book looks at the historical development of the referendum, its use in different jurisdictions, and the types of constitutional questions it seeks to address. Written in an engaging style, the book offers a clear, objective overview of this important political and constitutional tool….(More)”.

OECD survey reveals many people unhappy with public services and benefits

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by OECD: “Many people in OECD countries believe public services and social benefits are inadequate and hard to reach. More than half say they do not receive their fair share of benefits given the taxes they pay, and two-thirds believe others get more than they deserve. Nearly three out of four people say they want their government to do more to protect their social and economic security.  

These are among the findings of a new OECD survey, “Risks that Matter”, which asked over 22,000 people aged 18 to 70 years old in 21 countries about their worries and concerns and how well they think their government helps them tackle social and economic risks.

This nationally representative survey finds that falling ill and not being able to make ends meet are often at the top of people’s lists of immediate concerns. Making ends meet is a particularly common worry for those on low incomes and in countries that were hit hard by the financial crisis. Older people are most often worried about their health, while younger people are frequently concerned with securing adequate housing. When asked about the longer-term, across all countries, getting by in old age is the most commonly cited worry.

The survey reveals a dissatisfaction with current social policy. Only a minority are satisfied with access to services like health care, housing, and long-term care. Many believe the government would not be able to provide a proper safety net if they lost their income due to job loss, illness or old age. More than half think they would not be able to easily access public benefits if they needed them.

“This is a wake-up call for policy makers,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría. “OECD countries have some of the most advanced and generous social protection systems in the world. They spend, on average, more than one-fifth of their GDP on social policies. Yet, too many people feel they cannot count fully on their government when they need help. A better understanding of the factors driving this perception and why people feel they are struggling is essential to making social protection more effective and efficient. We must restore trust and confidence in government, and promote equality of opportunity.”

In every country surveyed except Canada, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, most people say that their government does not incorporate the views of people like them when designing social policy. In a number of countries, including Greece, Israel, Lithuania, Portugal and Slovenia, this share rises to more than two-thirds of respondents. This sense of not being part of the policy debate increases at higher levels of education and income, while feelings of injustice are stronger among those from high-income households.

Public perceptions of fairness are worrying. More than half of respondents say they do not receive their fair share of benefits given the taxes they pay, a share that rises to three quarters or more in Chile, Greece, Israel and Mexico. At the same time, people are calling for more help from government. In almost all countries, more than half of respondents say they want the government to do more for their economic and social security. This is especially the case for older respondents and those on low incomes.

Across countries, people are worried about financial security in old age, and most are willing to pay more to support public pension systems… (More)”.

Imagination unleashed: Democratising the knowledge economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Isaac Stanley, Madeleine Gabriel, and Geoff Mulgan: “If economic eras are defined by their most advanced form of production, then we live in a knowledge economy – one where knowledge plays a decisive role in the organisation of production, distribution and consumption.

The era of Fordist mass production that preceded it transformed almost every part of the economy. But the knowledge economy hasn’t spread in the same way. Only some people and places are reaping the benefits.

This is a big problem: it contributes to inequality, stagnation and political alienation. And traditional policy solutions are not sufficient to tackle it. We can’t expect benefits simply to trickle down to the rest of the population, and redistribution alone will not solve the inequalities we are facing.

What’s the alternative? Nesta has been working with Roberto Mangabeira Unger to convene discussions with politicians, researchers, and activists from member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, to explore policy options for an inclusive knowledge economy. This report presents the results of that collaboration.

We argue that an inclusive knowledge economy requires action to democratise the economy – widening access to capital and productive opportunity, transforming models of ownership, addressing new concentrations of power, and democratising the direction of innovation.

It demands that we establish a social inheritance by reforming education and social security.

And it requires us to create a high-energy democracy, promoting experimental government, and independent and empowered civil society.

Recommendations

This is a broad ranging agenda. In practice, it focuses on:

  • SMEs and their capacity and skills – greatly accelerating the adoption of new methods and technologies at every level of the economy, including new clean technologies that reduce carbon emissions
  • Transforming industrial policy to cope with the new concentrations of power and to prevent monopoly and predatory behaviours
  • Transforming and disaggregating property rights so that more people can have a stake in productive resources
  • Reforming education to prepare the next generation for the labour market of the future not the past – cultivating the mindsets, skills and cultures relevant to future jobs
  • Reforming social policy to respond to new patterns of work and need – creating more flexible systems that can cope with rapid change in jobs and skills, with a greater emphasis on reskilling
  • Reforming government and democracy to achieve new levels of participation, agility, experimentation and effectiveness…(More)”

Comparative Accuracy of Diagnosis by Collective Intelligence of Multiple Physicians vs Individual Physicians

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Study by Michael L. Barnett et al in JAMA: “Is a collective intelligence approach of pooling multiple clinician and medical student diagnoses associated with improvement in diagnostic accuracy in online, structured clinical cases?

Findings  This cross-sectional study analyzing data from the Human Diagnosis Project found that, across a broad range of medical cases and common presenting symptoms, independent differential diagnoses of multiple physicians combined into a weighted list significantly outperformed diagnoses of individual physicians with groups as small as 2, and accuracy increased with larger groups up to 9 physicians. Groups of nonspecialists also significantly outperformed individual specialists solving cases matched to the individual specialist’s specialty….

Main Outcomes and Measures  The primary outcome was diagnostic accuracy, assessed as a correct diagnosis in the top 3 ranked diagnoses for an individual; for groups, the top 3 diagnoses were a collective differential generated using a weighted combination of user diagnoses with a variety of approaches. A version of the McNemar test was used to account for clustering across repeated solvers to compare diagnostic accuracy.

Conclusions and Relevance  A collective intelligence approach was associated with higher diagnostic accuracy compared with individuals, including individual specialists whose expertise matched the case diagnosis, across a range of medical cases. Given the few proven strategies to address misdiagnosis, this technique merits further study in clinical settings….(More)”.

New Data Tools Connect American Workers to Education and Job Opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Department of Commerce: “These are the real stories of the people that recently participated in the Census Bureau initiative called The Opportunity Project—a novel, collaborative effort between government agencies, technology companies, and nongovernment organizations to translate government open data into user-friendly tools that solve real world problems for families, communities, and businesses nationwide.  On March 1, they came together to share their projects at The Opportunity Project’s Demo Day. Projects like theirs help veterans, aspiring technologists, and all Americans connect with the career and educational opportunities, like Bryan and Olivia did.

One barrier for many American students and workers is the lack of clear data to help match them with educational opportunities and jobs.  Students want information on the best courses that lead to high paying and high demand jobs. Job seekers want to find the jobs that best match their skills, or where to find new skills that open up career development opportunities.  Despite the increasing availability of big data and the long-standing, highly regarded federal statistical system, there remain significant data gaps about basic labor market questions.

  • What is the payoff of a bachelor’s degree versus an apprenticeship, 2-year degree, industry certification, or other credential?
  • What are the jobs of the future?  Which jobs of today also will be the jobs of the future? What skills and experience do companies value most?

The Opportunity Project brings government, communities, and companies like IBM, the veteran-led Shift.org, and Nepris together to create tools to answer simple questions related to education, employment, health, transportation, housing, and many other matters that are critical to helping Americans advance in their lives and careers….(More)”.