Paper by Charles R. Hulten & Leonard I. Nakamura: “GDP is a closely watched indicator of the current health of the economy and an important tool of economic policy. It has been called one of the great inventions of the 20th Century. It is not, however, a persuasive indicator of individual wellbeing or economic progress. There have been calls to refocus or replace GDP with a metric that better reflects the welfare dimension. In response, the U.S. agency responsible for the GDP accounts recently launched a “GDP and Beyond” program. This is by no means an easy undertaking, given the subjective and idiosyncratic nature of much of individual wellbeing. This paper joins the Beyond GDP effort by extending the standard utility maximization model of economic theory, using an expenditure function approach to include those non-GDP sources of wellbeing for which a monetary value can be established. We term our new measure expanded GDP (EGDP). A welfare-adjusted stock of wealth is also derived using the same general approach used to obtain EGDP. This stock is useful for issues involving the sustainability of wellbeing over time. One of the implications of this dichotomy is that conventional cost-based wealth may increase over a period of time while welfare-corrected wealth may show a decrease (due, for example, to strongly negative environmental externalities)…(More)”
On the Power of Networks
Essay by Jay Lloyd: “A mosquito net made from lemons, a workout shirt that feeds sweat to cyanobacteria to generate electricity, a water filter using moss from the Andes—and a slime mold that produces eerie electronic music. For a few days in late June, I logged on to help judge the Biodesign Challenge, a seven-year-old competition where high school and college students showcase designs that use biotechnology to address real problems. Fifty-six teams from 18 countries presented their creations—some practical, others purely speculative.
The competition is, by design, cautiously optimistic about the potential for technology to solve problems such as plastic pollution or malaria or sexually transmitted diseases. This caution manifests in an emphasis on ethics as a first principle in design: many problems the students seek to solve are the results of previous “solutions” gone wrong. Underlying this is a conviction that technology can help build a world that not only works better but is also more just. The biodesign worldview starts with research to understand problems in context, then imagines a design for a biology-based solution, and often envisions how that technology could transform today’s power dynamics. Two projects this year speculated about using mRNA to reduce systemic racism and global inequality.
The Biodesign Challenge is a profoundly hopeful exercise in future-building, but the tensions inherent in this theory of change became clear at the awards ceremony, which coincided with the Supreme Court’s announcement of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, ending the right to abortion at the national level. The ceremony took place under a cloud, and these entrancing proposals for an imagined biofuture sharply juxtaposed with the results of the blunt exercise of political power.
Clearly, networks of people devoted to a cause can be formidable forces for change—and it’s possible that Biodesign Challenge itself could become such a network in the future. The group consists of more than 100 teachers and judges—artists, scientists, social scientists, and people from the biotech industry—and the challengers themselves, who Zoom in from Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Savannah, Cincinnati, Turkey, and elsewhere. As biotechnology matures around the world, it will be applied by networks of people who have determined which problems need to be addressed…(More)”.
Hackathons should be renamed to avoid negative connotations
Article by Alison Paprica, Kimberlyn McGrail and Michael J. Schull: “Events where groups of people come together to create or improve software using large data sets are usually called hackathons. As health data researchers who want to build and maintain public trust, we recommend the use of alternative terms, such as datathon and code fest.
Hackathon is a portmanteau that combines the words “hack” and “marathon.” The “hack” in hackathon is meant to refer to a clever and improvised way of doing something rather than unauthorized computer or data access. From a computer scientist’s perspective, “hackathon” probably sounds innovative, intensive and maybe a little disruptive, but in a helpful rather than criminal way.
The issue is that members of the public do not interpret “hack” the way that computer scientists do.
Our team, and many others, have performed research studies to understand the public’s interests and concerns when health data are used for research and innovation. In all of these studies, we are not aware of any positive references to “hack” or related terms. But studies from Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia have all found that members of the public consistently raise hacking as a major concern for health data…(More)”.
See Plastic in a National Park? Log It on This Website for Science
Article by Angely Mercado: “You’re hiking through glorious nature when you see it—a dirty, squished plastic water bottle along the trail. Instead of picking it up and impotently cursing the litterer, you can now take another small helpful step—you can report the trash to a new data project that aims to inspire policy change. Environmental nonprofit 5 Gyres is asking national park visitors in the U.S. to log trash they see through a new site called TrashBlitz.
The organization, which is dedicated to reducing plastic pollution, created TrashBlitz to gather data on how much, and what kind, of plastic and other litter is clogging our parks. They want to encourage realistic plastic pollution reduction plans for all 63 national parks.
Once registered on the TrashBlitz website, park visitors can specify the types of trash that they’ve spotted, such as if the discarded item was used for food packaging. According to 5 Gyres, the data will contribute to a report to be published this fall on the top items discarded, the materials, and the brands that have created the most waste across national parks…(More)”.
Legislating Data Loyalty
Paper by Woodrow Hartzog and Neil M. Richards: “Lawmakers looking to embolden privacy law have begun to consider imposing duties of loyalty on organizations trusted with people’s data and online experiences. The idea behind loyalty is simple: organizations should not process data or design technologies that conflict with the best interests of trusting parties. But the logistics and implementation of data loyalty need to be developed if the concept is going to be capable of moving privacy law beyond its “notice and consent” roots to confront people’s vulnerabilities in their relationship with powerful data collectors.
In this short Essay, we propose a model for legislating data loyalty. Our model takes advantage of loyalty’s strengths—it is well-established in our law, it is flexible, and it can accommodate conflicting values. Our Essay also explains how data loyalty can embolden our existing data privacy rules, address emergent dangers, solve privacy’s problems around consent and harm, and establish an antibetrayal ethos as America’s privacy identity.
We propose that lawmakers use a two-step process to (1) articulate a primary, general duty of loyalty, then (2) articulate “subsidiary” duties that are more specific and sensitive to context. Subsidiary duties regarding collection, personalization, gatekeeping, persuasion, and mediation would target the most opportunistic contexts for self-dealing and result in flexible open-ended duties combined with highly specific rules. In this way, a duty of data loyalty is not just appealing in theory—it can be effectively implemented in practice just like the other duties of loyalty our law has recognized for hundreds of years. Loyalty is thus not only flexible, but it is capable of breathing life into America’s historically tepid privacy frameworks…(More)”.
Democracy Disrupted: Governance in an Increasingly Virtual and Massively Distributed World.
Essay by Eric B. Schnurer: “…In short, it is often difficult to see where new technologies actually will lead. The same technological development can, in different settings, have different effects: The use of horses in warfare, which led seemingly inexorably in China and Europe to more centralized and autocratic states, had the effect on the other side of the world of enabling Hernán Cortés, with an army of roughly five hundred Spaniards, to defeat the massed infantries of the highly centralized, autocratic Aztec regime. Cortés’s example demonstrates that a particular technology generally employed by a concentrated power to centralize and dominate can also be used by a small insurgent force to disperse and disrupt (although in Cortés’s case this was on behalf of the eventual imposition of an even more despotic rule).
Regardless of the lack of inherent ideological content in any given technology, however, our technological realities consistently give metaphorical shape to our ideological constructs. In ancient Egypt, the regularity of the Nile’s flood cycle, which formed the society’s economic basis, gave rise to a belief in recurrent cycles of life and death; in contrast, the comparatively harsh and static agricultural patterns of the more-or-less contemporaneous Mesopotamian world produced a society that conceived of gods who simply tormented humans and then relegated them after death to sit forever in a place of dust and silence; meanwhile, the pastoral societies of the Fertile Crescent have handed down to us the vision of God as shepherd of his flock. (The Bible also gives us, in the story of Cain and Abel, a parable of the deadly conflict that technologically driven economic changes wreak: Abel was a traditional pastoralist—he tended sheep—while Cain, who planted seeds in the ground, represented the disruptive “New Economy” of settled agriculture. Tellingly, after killing off the pastoralist, the sedentarian Cain exits to found the first city.88xGenesis 4:17.)
As humans developed more advanced technologies, these in turn reshaped our conceptions of the world around us, including the proper social order. Those who possessed superior technological knowledge were invested with supernatural authority: The key to early Rome’s defense was the ability quickly to assemble and disassemble the bridges across the Tiber, so much so that the pontifex maximus—literally the “greatest bridge-builder”—became the high priest, from whose Latin title we derive the term pontiff. The most sophisticated—and arguably most crucial—technology in any town in medieval Europe was its public clock. The clock, in turn, became a metaphor for the mechanical working of the universe—God, in fact, was often conceived of as a clockmaker (a metaphor still frequently invoked to argue against evolution and for the necessity of an intelligent creator)—and for the proper form of social organization: All should know their place and move through time and space as predictably as the figurines making their regular appearances and performing their routinized interactions on the more elaborate and entertaining of these town-square timepieces.
In our own time, the leading technologies continue to provide the organizing concepts for our economic, political, and theological constructs. The factory became such a ubiquitous reflection of economic and social realities that, from the early nineteenth century onward, virtually every social and cultural institution—welfare (the poorhouse, or, as it was often called, the “workhouse”), public safety (the penitentiary), health care (the hospital), mental health (the insane asylum), “workforce” or public housing, even (as teachers often suggest to me) the education system—was consciously remodeled around it. Even when government finally tried to get ahead of the challenges posed by the Industrial Revolution by building the twentieth-century welfare state, it wound up constructing essentially a new capital of the Industrial Age in Washington, DC, with countless New Deal ministries along the Mall—resembling, as much as anything, the rows of factory buildings one can see in the steel and mill towns of the same era.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the atom and the computer came to dominate most intellectual constructs. First, the uncertainty of quantum mechanics upended mechanistic conceptions of social and economic relations, helping to foster conceptions of relativism in everything from moral philosophy to literary criticism. More recently, many scientists have come to the conclusion that the universe amounts to a massive information processor, and popular culture to the conviction that we all simply live inside a giant video game.
In sum, while technological developments are not deterministic—their outcomes being shaped, rather, by the uses we conceive to employ them—our conceptions are largely molded by these dominant technologies and the transformations they effect.99xI should note that while this argument is not deterministic, like those of most current thinkers about political and economic development such as Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, and Yuval Noah Harari, neither is it materialistic, like that of Karl Marx. Marx thoroughly rejected human ideas and thinking as movers of history, which he saw as simply shaped and dictated by the technology. I am suggesting instead a dialectic between the ideal and the material. To repeat the metaphor, technological change constitutes the plate tectonics on which human contingencies are then built. To understand, then, the deeper movements of thought, economic arrangements, and political developments, both historical and contemporary, one must understand the nature of the technologies underlying and driving their unfolding…(More)“.
Crime Prediction Keeps Society Stuck in the Past
Article by Chris Gilliard: “…All of these policing systems operate on the assumption that the past determines the future. In Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition, digital media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that the most common methods used by technologies such as PredPol and Chicago’s heat list to make predictions do nothing of the sort. Rather than anticipating what might happen out of the myriad and unknowable possibilities on which the very idea of a future depends, machine learning and other AI-based methods of statistical correlation “restrict the future to the past.” In other words, these systems prevent the future in order to “predict” it—they ensure that the future will be just the same as the past was.
“If the captured and curated past is racist and sexist,” Chun writes, “these algorithms and models will only be verified as correct if they make sexist and racist predictions.” This is partly a description of the familiar garbage-in/garbage-out problem with all data analytics, but it’s something more: Ironically, the putatively “unbiased” technology sold to us by promoters is said to “work” precisely when it tells us that what is contingent in history is in fact inevitable and immutable. Rather than helping us to manage social problems like racism as we move forward, as the McDaniel case shows in microcosm, these systems demand that society not change, that things that we should try to fix instead must stay exactly as they are.
It’s a rather glaring observation that predictive policing tools are rarely if ever (with the possible exception of the parody “White Collar Crime Risk Zone” project) focused on wage theft or various white collar crimes, even though the dollar amounts of those types of offenses far outstrip property crimes in terms of dollar value by several orders of magnitude. This gap exists because of how crime exists in the popular imagination. For instance, news reports in recent weeks bludgeoned readers with reports of a so-called “crime wave” of shoplifting at high-end stores. Yet just this past February, Amazon agreed to pay regulators a whopping $61.7 million, the amount the FTC says the company shorted drivers in a two-and-a-half-year period. That story received a fraction of the coverage, and aside from the fine, there will be no additional charges.
The algorithmic crystal ball that promises to predict and forestall future crimes works from a fixed notion of what a criminal is, where crimes occur, and how they are prosecuted (if at all). Those parameters depend entirely on the power structure empowered to formulate them—and very often the explicit goal of those structures is to maintain existing racial and wealth hierarchies. This is the same set of carceral logics that allow the placement of children into gang databases, or the development of a computational tool to forecast which children will become criminals. The process of predicting the lives of children is about cementing existing realities rather than changing them. Entering children into a carceral ranking system is in itself an act of violence, but as in the case of McDaniel, it also nearly guarantees that the system that sees them as potential criminals will continue to enact violence on them throughout their lifetimes…(More)”.
Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy
Book edited by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone: “One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about “bad” speech-hate speech, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and incitement of violence-on the internet, and in particular speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors—including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Warner, Newt Minow,Tim Wu, Cass Sunstein, Jack Balkin, Emily Bazelon, and others—to explore the various dimensions of this problem in the American context. They stress how difficult it is to develop remedies given that some of these forms of “bad” speech are ordinarily protected by the First Amendment. Bollinger and Stone argue that it is important to remember that the last time we encountered major new communications technology-television and radio-we established a federal agency to provide oversight and to issue regulations to protect and promote “the public interest.” Featuring a variety of perspectives from some of America’s leading experts on this hotly contested issue, this volume offers new insights for the future of free speech in the social media era…(More)”.
Roe’s overturn is tech’s privacy apocalypse
Scott Rosenberg at Axios: “America’s new abortion reality is turning tech firms’ data practices into an active field of conflict — a fight that privacy advocates have long predicted and company leaders have long feared.
Why it matters: A long legal siege in which abortion-banning states battle tech companies, abortion-friendly states and their own citizens to gather criminal evidence is now a near certainty.
- The once-abstract privacy argument among policy experts has transformed overnight into a concrete real-world problem, superheated by partisan anger, affecting vast swaths of the U.S. population, with tangible and easily understood consequences.
Driving the news: Google announced Friday a new program to automatically delete the location data of users who visit “particularly personal” locations like “counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, abortion clinics, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, cosmetic surgery clinics, and others.”
- Google tracks the location of any user who turns on its “location services” — a choice that’s required to make many of its programs, like Google Search and Maps, more useful.
- That tracking happens even when you’re logged into non-location-related Google services like YouTube, since Google long ago unified all its accounts.
Between the lines: Google’s move won cautious applause but left plenty of open concerns.
- It’s not clear how, and how reliably, Google will identify the locations that trigger automatic data deletion.
- The company will not delete search requests automatically — users who want to protect themselves will have to do so themselves.
- A sudden gap in location data could itself be used as evidence in court…(More)”.
Police Violence In Puerto Rico: Flooded With Data
Blog by Christine Grillo: “For María Mari-Narváez, a recent decision by the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico was both a victory and a moment of reckoning. The Court granted Kilómetro Cero, a citizen-led police accountability project in Puerto Rico, full access to every use-of-force report filed by the Puerto Rico Police Department since 2014. The decision will make it possible for advocates such as Mari to get a clear picture of how state police officers are using force, and when that use of force crosses the line into abuse. But the court victory flooded her small organization with data.
“We won, finally, and then I realized I was going to be receiving thousands of documents that I had zero capacity to process,” says Mari.
“One of the things that’s important to me when analyzing data is to find out where the gaps are, why those gaps exist, and what those gaps represent.” —Tarak Shah, data scientist
The Court made its decision in April 2021, and the police department started handing over PDF files in July. By the end, there could be up to 10,000 documents that get turned in. In addition to incident reports, the police had to provide their use-of-force database. Combined, the victory provides a complicated mixture of quantitative and qualitative data that can be analyzed to answer questions about what the state police are doing to its citizens during police interventions. In particular, Kilómetro Cero, which Mari founded, wants to find out if some Puerto Ricans are more likely to be victims of police violence than others.
“We’re looking for bias,” says Mari. “Bias against poor people, or people who live in a certain neighborhood. Gender bias. Language bias. Bias against drug users, sex workers, immigrants, people who don’t have a house. We’re trying to analyze the language of vulnerability.”…(More)”.