Curated findings and actionable knowledge at the intersection of technology, innovation, and governance
About: “The Diverse Sources Database is NPR’s resource for journalists who believe in the value of diversity and share our goal to make public radio look and sound like America.
Originally called Source of the Week, the database launched in 2013 as a way help journalists at NPR and member stations expand the racial/ethnic diversity of the experts they tap for stories…(More)”.
Max Fisher at the New York Times: “There’s a decent chance you’ve had at least one of these rumors, all false, relayed to you as fact recently: that President Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat; that Virginia is eliminating advanced math in schools to advance racial equality; and that border officials are mass-purchasing copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s book to hand out to refugee children.
All were amplified by partisan actors. But you’re just as likely, if not more so, to have heard it relayed from someone you know. And you may have noticed that these cycles of falsehood-fueled outrage keep recurring.
We are in an era of endemic misinformation — and outright disinformation. Plenty of bad actors are helping the trend along. But the real drivers, some experts believe, are social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation in the first place. And those forces are on the rise.
“Why are misperceptions about contentious issues in politics and science seemingly so persistent and difficult to correct?” Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist, posed in a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It’s not for want of good information, which is ubiquitous. Exposure to good information does not reliably instill accurate beliefs anyway. Rather, Dr. Nyhan writes, a growing body of evidence suggests that the ultimate culprits are “cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and political elites.”
Put more simply, people become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most important, is when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for what social scientists call ingrouping — a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and that other groups can be blamed for their problems….(More)”.
Report by Dhanaraj Thakur and Emma Llansó: “The ever-increasing amount of user-generated content online has led, in recent years, to an expansion in research and investment in automated content analysis tools. Scrutiny of automated content analysis has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as social networking services have placed a greater reliance on these tools due to concerns about health risks to their moderation staff from in-person work. At the same time, there are important policy debates around the world about how to improve content moderation while protecting free expression and privacy. In order to advance these debates, we need to understand the potential role of automated content analysis tools.
This paper explains the capabilities and limitations of tools for analyzing online multimedia content and highlights the potential risks of using these tools at scale without accounting for their limitations. It focuses on two main categories of tools: matching models and computer prediction models. Matching models include cryptographic and perceptual hashing, which compare user-generated content with existing and known content. Predictive models (including computer vision and computer audition) are machine learning techniques that aim to identify characteristics of new or previously unknown content….(More)”.
Article by Nicholas Weller, Michelle Sullivan Govani, and Mahmud Farooque: “In a ballroom at the Arizona Science Center one afternoon in 2017, more than 70 Phoenix residents—students, teachers, nurses, and retirees—gathered around tables to participate in a public forum about how cities can respond to extreme weather such as heat waves. Each table was covered in colorful printouts with a large laminated poster resembling a board game. Milling between the tables were decisionmakers from local government and the state. All were taking part in a deliberative process called participatory technology assessment, or pTA, designed to break down the walls between “experts” and citizens to gain insights into public policy dilemmas involving science, technology, and uncertainty.
Foreshadowing their varied viewpoints and experiences, participants prepared differently for the “extreme weather” of the heavily air conditioned ballroom, with some gripping cardigans around their shoulders while others were comfortable in tank tops. Extreme heat is something all the participants were familiar with—Phoenix is one of the hottest cities in the country—but not everyone understood the unequal way that heat and related deaths affect different parts of the Valley of the Sun. Though a handful of the participants might have called themselves environmentalists, most were not regular town-hall goers or political activists. Instead, they represented a diverse cross section of people in Phoenix. All had applied to attend—motivated by a small stipend, the opportunity to have their voice heard, or a bit of both.
Unlike typical town hall setups, where a few bold participants tend to dominate questioning and decisionmakers often respond by being defensive or vague, pTA gatherings are deliberately organized to encourage broad participation and conversation. To help people engage with the topic, the meeting was divided into subgroups to examine the story of Heattown, a fictionalized name for a real but anonymized community contending with the health, environmental, and economic impacts of heat waves. Then each group began a guided discussion of the different characters living in Heattown, vulnerabilities of the emergency-response and infrastructure systems, and strategies for dealing with those vulnerabilities….(More)”.
Bloomberg Cities: “…Three open data approaches cities are finding success with:
Much of the data that people seem to be most interested in is location-based, local data leaders say. That includes everything from neighborhood crime stats and police data used by journalists and activists to property data regularly mined by real estate companies. Rather than simply making spatial data available, many cities have begun mapping it themselves, allowing users to browse information that’s useful to them.
At atlas.phila.gov, for example, Philadelphians can type in their own addresses to find property deeds, historic photos, nearby 311 complaints and service requests, and their polling place and date of the next local election, among other information. Los Angeles city’s GeoHub collects maps showing the locations of marijuana dispensaries, reports of hate crimes, and five years of severe and fatal crashes between drivers and bikers or pedestrians, and dozens more.
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Cities with open-data policies learn from best practices in other city halls. In the last few years, many have begun offering trainings to equip residents with rudimentary data analysis skills. Baton Rouge, for example, offered a free, three-part Citizen Data Academy instructing residents on “how to find [open data], what it includes, and how to use it to understand trends and improve quality of life in our community.” …
In some communities, open-data officials work with city workers and neighborhood leaders to learn to help their communities access the benefits of public data even if only a small fraction of residents are accessing the data itself.
In Philadelphia, city teams work with the Citizens Planning Institute, an educational initiative of the city planning commission, to train neighborhood organizers in how to use city data around things like zoning and construction permits to keep up with development in their neighborhoods, says Kistine Carolan, open data program manager in the Office of Innovation and Technology. The Los Angeles Department of Neighborhood Empowerment runs a Data Literacy Program to help neighborhood groups make better use of the city’s data. So far, officials say, representatives of 50 of the city’s 99 neighborhood councils have signed up as part of the Data Liaisons program to learn new GIS and data-analysis skills to benefit their neighborhoods.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted cities’ open-data plans, just like it has complicated every other aspect of society. Cities had to cancel scheduled in-person trainings and programs that help them reach some of their less-connected residents. But the pandemic has also demonstrated the fundamental role that data can play in helping to manage public emergencies. Cities large and small have hosted online tools that allow residents to track where cases are spiking—tools that have gotten many new people to interact with public data, officials say….(More)”.
Paper by Kenneth R. Ahern: “Compared to the federal government, the average citizen in the U.S. has far greater interaction with city governments, including policing, health services, zoning laws, utilities, schooling, and transportation. At the regional level, it is city governments that provide the infrastructure and services that facilitate agglomeration economies in urban areas. However, there is relatively little empirical evidence on the operations of city governments as economic entities. To overcome deficiencies in traditional datasets, this paper amasses a novel, hand-collected dataset on city government finances to describe the functions, expenses, and revenues of the largest 39 cities in the United States from 2003 to 2018. First, city governments are large, with average revenues equivalent to the 78th percentile of U.S. publicly traded firms. Second, cities collect an increasingly large fraction of revenues through direct user fees, rather than taxes. By 2018, total charges for services equal tax revenue in the median city. Third, controlling for city fixed effects, population, and personal income, large city governments shrunk by 15% between 2009 and 2018. Finally, the growth rate of city expenses is more sensitive to population growth, while the growth rate of city revenues is more sensitive to income. These sensitivities lead smaller, poorer cities’ expenses to grow faster than their revenues….(More)”.
Article by Linda Poon and Marie Patino: “At the end of May, Dan Mozgai will spend his vacation from his day job chasing cicadas. The bugs won’t be hard to find; in about a week, billions of the beady-eyed crawlers from Brood X will start coming up from their 17-year-long underground, blanketing parts of 15 states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest with their cacophony of shrill mating calls.
Mozgai isn’t an entomologist — he does online marketing for DirecTV. But since2007, he’s worked closely with academic researchers to track various broods of periodical cicadas,as part of one of the oldest citizen science efforts in the U.S.
He’ll be joined by ten of thousands of other volunteers across the Brood X territory who will use the mobile app Cicada Safari, where userscan add geotagged photos and videos onto a live map, as dozens of student researchers behind the scenes verify each submission. Videos will be especially helpful this year, as it provides audio data for the researchers, says Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, and the creator behind Cicada Safari. He’s been testing the new app with smaller broods for two years in anticipation for this moment. https://0b26ee1773bac5736a29111147e28a6b.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Brood X, is one of the largest, and mostly broadly distributed geographically, of periodical cicadas, which emerge every 13 or 17 years. They’ll stick around for just a few weeks, through June, to mate and lay eggs.
“With the smartphone technology and the GPS location services, it was just a perfect way to do citizen science,” Kritsky says. Some 87,000 people have signed up as of the beginning of May, and they’ve already documented several early risers, especially around Cincinnati and Washington, D.C. — two of the expected hotspot…(More)”.
Essay by Craig Robertson: “The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of the 20th-century. Like most infrastructure, it was usually overlooked….The subject of this essay emerged by chance. I was researching the history of the U.S. passport, and had spent weeks at the National Archives, struggling through thousands of reels of unindexed microfilm records of 19th-century diplomatic correspondence; then I arrived at the records for 1906. That year, the State Department adopted a numerical filing system. Suddenly, every American diplomatic office began using the same number for passport correspondence, with decimal numbers subdividing issues and cases. Rather than scrolling through microfilm images of bound pages organized chronologically, I could go straight to passport-relevant information that had been gathered in one place.
I soon discovered that I had Elihu Root to thank for making my research easier. A lawyer whose clients included Andrew Carnegie, Root became secretary of state in 1905. But not long after he arrived, the prominent corporate lawyer described himself as “a man trying to conduct the business of a large metropolitan law-firm in the office of a village squire.” The department’s record-keeping practices contributed to his frustration. As was then common in American offices, clerks used press books or copybooks to store incoming and outgoing correspondence in chronologically ordered bound volumes with limited indexing. For Root, the breaking point came when a request for a handful of letters resulted in several bulky volumes appearing on his desk. His response was swift: he demanded that a vertical filing system be adopted; soon the department was using a numerical subject-based filing system housed in filing cabinets.
The shift from bound volumes to filing systems is a milestone in the history of classification; the contemporaneous shift to vertical filing cabinets is a milestone in the history of storage….(More)”.
Interview with Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values Emerita at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of “Beyond Adversary Democracy.” Her current work revolves around representation, democratic deliberation, and everyday activism:
GAZETTE: How might we get citizens who are so polarized to listen to one another?
MANSBRIDGE: One proven practice is the technique of citizens’ assemblies or deliberative polls. These are groups of citizens drawn randomly, through a democratic lottery, from a particular population. It could be an entire country, a state, a city, or even a neighborhood, from which you bring together a group of citizens to talk about an issue that is of concern to their community. For this technique to be successful, the group has to be random, meaning that you have to have good representation from everyone, not just the white retirees who don’t have much to do and would love to come to this sort of thing. To get a random group, you ought to able to pay the participants because you want to be able to get the poor, the less educated, and people who, for one reason or another, would not give up a weekend otherwise to come together with other citizens to deliberate about some major issue.
GAZETTE: How do we know these assemblies foster civil dialogue?
MANSBRIDGE: Let’s take the deliberative polling organized by the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford that I’ve worked with, in informal ways, for a couple of decades. If you look at those gatherings, one important way to get citizens to listen to one another comes from their design, in which they alternate small groups of 12 or so people, randomly drawn from the random selection, with larger assemblies, in which the citizens ask questions to experts. One of the tasks they have in their small group is not only to deliberate about the issues, but to design questions they want to ask the experts. As it happens, the project of asking a common question becomes a task that binds citizens together across the lines of difference….(More)”
Article by Carlos Santiso and Marcelo Facchina: “Technology is changing city dwellers lives, as well as how urban centres evolve to meet their needs. The pandemic has accelerated this transformation, and the digital transition has generated an explosion of data, especially in cities. In this context, the ability of local governments to manage urban problems will be paramount for the recovery, and the pandemic has helped us better understand the missing elements we need to govern cities effectively. For instance, the World Bank’s World Development Report of 2021 underscored that a data infrastructure policy is one of the building blocks of a good data governance framework, both to foster the local data economy and promote digital inclusion.
It is inconceivable not to consider cities as an integral part of the solution to challenges like tackling social exclusion, improving public services and reducing insecurity, among others. A key issue that has become increasingly prominent in city agendas is the good governance of data; that is how data is handled and for what purpose, its quality and integrity, as well as the privacy and security concerns related to its collection and use. In other words, city governments need to preserve people’s trust in the way they handle data to improve lives.
A modern local government cannot be sustained without good data governance, secure data infrastructure, and digital talent to extract public value from data. Data policy must therefore act as an enabler of transformation strategies, defining the scope, direction, responsibilities and procedures for the effective and responsible use of data for more responsive and resilient cities.
At the national level, “delivery units” have gained relevance as instruments for managing change in governments and driving the effective implementation of strategic priorities. These management models led by central government have proven to be effective instruments for achieving government targets, priority goals and major projects.
The model is even being expanded to subnational governments, like in the case of Colombia. Municipalities interact directly with citizens in providing public services, and innovations like the “delivery units”, can help improve citizen satisfaction with government services. In a recent study, we show how Latin American cities, for example Recife and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, have leveraged these innovations in public management as a strategic planning tool, building on the pioneering experience of New York. Another interesting case is Buenos Aires, in Argentina, where systematic monitoring of government commitments by the Compliance Management Unit achieved a significant decrease in murder rates (43%) and road accidents (33%) between 2015 and 2019.
The pivotal role of new technologies and the strategic use of data by municipal governments can also improve delivery of services, making them more accessible, agile, efficient and less costly. In another recent study, we look at the case of 12 cities around the world and in the region, including Boston, Seoul, London, Buenos Aires, Medellin, Mexico and Recife that are seeking to strengthen their strategic management with more intensive use of data to better meet the growing expectations of their citizens….(More)”.