Article by Naomi Nix, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Cat Zakrzewski: “For years, regulators and activists have worried that social media companies’ algorithms were dividing the United States with politically toxic posts and conspiracies. The concern was so widespread that in 2020, Meta flung open troves of internal data for university academics to study how Facebook and Instagram would affect the upcoming presidential election. The first results of that research show that the company’s platforms play a critical role in funneling users to partisan information with which they are likely to agree. But the results cast doubt on assumptions that... (More >)
Interested but Uncertain: Carbon Markets and Data Sharing among U.S. Crop Farmers
Paper by Guang Han and Meredith T. Niles: “The potential for farmers and agriculture to sequester carbon and contribute to global climate change goals is widely discussed. However, there is currently low participation in agricultural carbon markets and a limited understanding of farmer perceptions and willingness to participate. Furthermore, farmers’ concerns regarding data privacy may complicate participation in agricultural carbon markets, which necessitates farmer data sharing with multiple entities. This study aims to address research gaps by assessing farmers’ willingness to participate in agricultural carbon markets, identifying the determinants of farmers’ willingness regarding carbon markets participation, and exploring how... (More >)
Journalism Is a Public Good and Should Be Publicly Funded
Essay by Patrick Walters: “News deserts” have proliferated across the U.S. Half of the nation’s more than 3,140 counties now have only one newspaper—and nearly 200 of them have no paper at all. Of the publications that survive, researchers have found many are “ghosts” of their former selves. Journalism has problems nationally: CNN announced hundreds of layoffs at the end of 2022, and National Geographic laid off the last of its staff writers this June. In the latter month the Los Angeles Times cut 13 percent of its newsroom staff. But the crisis is even more acute at the... (More >)
Innovation Can Reboot American Democracy
Blog by Suzette Brooks Masters: “A thriving multiracial pluralist democracy is an aspiration that many people share for America. Far from being inevitable, the path to such a future is uncertain. To stretch how we think about American democracy’s future iterations and begin to imagine the contours of the new, we need to learn from what’s emergent. So I’m going to take you on a whirlwind tour of some experiments taking place here and abroad that are the bright spots illuminating possible futures ahead. My comments are informed by a research report I wrote last year called Imagining Better... (More >)
The Eyewitness Community Survey: An Engaging Citizen Science Tool to Capture Reliable Data while Improving Community Participants’ Environmental Health Knowledge and Attitudes
Paper by Melinda Butsch Kovacic: “Many youths and young adults have variable environmental health knowledge, limited understanding of their local environment’s impact on their health, and poor environmentally friendly behaviors. We sought to develop and test a tool to reliably capture data, increase environmental health knowledge, and engage youths as citizen scientists to examine and take action on their community’s challenges. The Eyewitness Community Survey (ECS) was developed through several iterations of co-design. Herein, we tested its performance. In Phase I, seven youths audited five 360° photographs. In Phase II, 27 participants works as pairs/trios and audited five locations,... (More >)
Leveraging Social Media Data for Emergency Preparedness and Response
Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Most state departments of transportation (DOTs) use social media to broadcast information and monitor emergencies, but few rely heavily on social media data. The most common barriers to using social media for emergencies are personnel availability and training, privacy issues, and data reliability. NCHRP Synthesis 610: Leveraging Social Media Data for Emergency Preparedness and Response, from TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program, documents state DOT practices that leverage social media data for emergency preparedness, response, and recovery... (More >)
How Statisticians Should Grapple with Privacy in a Changing Data Landscape
Article by Joshua Snoke, and Claire McKay Bowen: “Suppose you had a data set that contained records of individuals, including demographics such as their age, sex, and race. Suppose also that these data contained additional in-depth personal information, such as financial records, health status, or political opinions. Finally, suppose that you wanted to glean relevant insights from these data using machine learning, causal inference, or survey sampling adjustments. What methods would you use? What best practices would you ensure you followed? Where would you seek information to help guide you in this process?... (More >)
To Save Society from Digital Tech, Enable Scrutiny of How Policies Are Implemented
Article by Ido Sivan-Sevilla: “…there is little discussion about how to create accountability when implementing tech policies. Decades of research exploring policy implementation across diverse areas consistently shows how successful implementation allows policies to be adapted and involves crucial bargaining. But this is rarely understood in the tech sector. For tech policies to work, those responsible for enforcement and compliance should be overseen and held to account. Otherwise, as history shows, tech policies will struggle to fulfill the intentions of their policymakers. Scrutiny is required for three types of actors. First are regulators, who convert promising tech laws into... (More >)
Attacks on Tax Privacy: How the Tax Prep Industry Enabled Meta to Harvest Millions of Taxpayers’ Sensitive Data
Congressional Report: “The investigation revealed that: Tax preparation companies shared millions of taxpayers’ data with Meta, Google, and other Big Tech firms: The tax prep companies used computer code – known as pixels – to send data to Meta and Google. While most websites use pixels, it is particularly reckless for online tax preparation websites to use them on webpages where tax return information is entered unless further steps are taken to ensure that the pixels do not access sensitive information. TaxAct, TaxSlayer, and H&R Block confirmed that they had used the Meta Pixel, and had been using it... (More >)
Combining Human Expertise with Artificial Intelligence: Experimental Evidence from Radiology
Paper by Nikhil Agarwal, Alex Moehring, Pranav Rajpurkar & Tobias Salz: “While Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms have achieved performance levels comparable to human experts on various predictive tasks, human experts can still access valuable contextual information not yet incorporated into AI predictions. Humans assisted by AI predictions could outperform both human-alone or AI-alone. We conduct an experiment with professional radiologists that varies the availability of AI assistance and contextual information to study the effectiveness of human-AI collaboration and to investigate how to optimize it. Our findings reveal that (i) providing AI predictions does not uniformly increase diagnostic quality, and... (More >)
