Open Hardware: An Opportunity to Build Better Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Alison Parker et al: “Today’s research infrastructure, including scientific hardware, is unevenly distributed in the scientific community, severely limiting collaboration, customization, and impact. Open hardware for science provides an alternative approach to reliance on expensive and proprietary instrumentation while giving “people the freedom to control their technology while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of design.”

Open hardware can be modified and recombined to build diverse libraries of tools that serve as a freely available resource for use across several disciplines. By improving access to tools, open hardware for science encourages collaboration, accelerates innovation, and improves scientific reproducibility and repeatability. Open hardware for science is often less expensive than proprietary equivalents, allowing research laboratories to stretch funding further. Beyond scientific research, open hardware has proven to benefit and impact a number of complementary policy priorities including: broadening public participation in science, accessible experiential STEM education, crisis response, and improving distributed manufacturing capabilities.

Because of recent, bipartisan progress in open science, the U.S. government is well positioned to elevate and enhance the impact of open hardware in American science. By addressing key implementation challenges and prioritizing open hardware for science, we as a nation can build better infrastructure for future science, cement U.S. scientific leadership and innovation, and help the U.S. prepare for future crises. This report addresses the need to build a stronger foundation for science by prioritizing open hardware, describes the unique benefits of open hardware alongside complementary policy priorities, and briefly lays out implementation challenges to overcome. …(More)”.

Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Government statistics are widely used to inform decisions by policymakers, program administrators, businesses and other organizations as well as households and the general public. Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency, Seventh Edition will assist statistical agencies and units, as well as other agencies engaged in statistical activities, to carry out their responsibilities to provide accurate, timely, relevant, and objective information for public and policy use. This report will also inform legislative and executive branch decision makers, data users, and others about the characteristics of statistical agencies that enable them to serve the public good….(More)”

Zoom Court Is Changing How Justice Is Served

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Scigliano at The Atlantic: “…Last spring, as COVID‑19 infections surged for the first time, many American courts curtailed their operations. As case backlogs swelled, courts moved online, at a speed that has amazed—and sometimes alarmed—judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. In the past year, U.S. courts have conducted millions of hearings, depositions, arraignments, settlement conferences, and even trials—nearly entirely in civil cases or for minor criminal offenses—over Zoom and other meeting platforms. As of late February, Texas, the state that’s moved online most aggressively, had held 1.1 million remote proceedings.

“Virtual justice” (the preferred, if unsettling, term) is an emergency response to a dire situation. But it is also a vision some judicial innovators had long tried to realize. One leading booster, Michigan Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack, told me that going online can make courts not only safer but “more transparent, more accessible, and more convenient.” Witnesses, jurors, and litigants no longer need to miss hours of work and fight traffic. Attorneys with cases in multiple courts can jump from one to another by swiping on their phones.

In July the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators jointly endorsed a set of “Guiding Principles for Post-pandemic Court Technology” with a blunt message: The legal system should “move as many court processes as possible online,” and keep them there after the risk of infection passes. The pandemic, they wrote, “is not the disruption courts wanted, but it is the disruption that courts needed.”

America’s courts are burdened by weighty encrustations of complexity and habit, from black robes and “All rise” to arcane trial procedures. COVID-19 has forced them to improvise and experiment. Now, as a post-pandemic future glimmers, we have a chance to reflect. How much of that experimentation will survive after the crisis abates? Given the stakes involved in the justice system, how much should?…(More)”.

Would you notice if fake news changed your behavior? An experiment on the unconscious effects of disinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Zach Bastick: “A growing literature is emerging on the believability and spread of disinformation, such as fake news, over social networks. However, little is known about the degree to which malicious actors can use social media to covertly affect behavior with disinformation. A lab-based randomized controlled experiment was conducted with 233 undergraduate students to investigate the behavioral effects of fake news. It was found that even short (under 5-min) exposure to fake news was able to significantly modify the unconscious behavior of individuals. This paper provides initial evidence that fake news can be used to covertly modify behavior, it argues that current approaches to mitigating fake news, and disinformation in general, are insufficient to protect social media users from this threat, and it highlights the implications of this for democracy. It raises the need for an urgent cross-sectoral effort to investigate, protect against, and mitigate the risks of covert, widespread and decentralized behavior modification over online social networks….(More)”

Infrastructure Isn’t Really About Roads. It’s About the Society We Want.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Klinenberg in the New York Times: “…Consider civic infrastructure. Many of the critical systems the United States needs to build and sustain a good society are degraded. Discriminatory voting laws, like Georgia’s new legislation, threaten the integrity of the political process. Social media companies like Facebook, by using algorithms that reward political extremism and promote political polarization, distort the discourse in our public sphere. Community organizations that help feed, house and educate low-income Americans are essential for preserving peace and improving living standards, but they have struggled to remain solvent during the pandemic. Mr. Biden’s plan leaves these failings in the civic infrastructure practically untouched.

The neglect of social infrastructure in Mr. Biden’s plan is even more striking, given how critical social infrastructure was to the success of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the last “once in a generation” investment in America. The New Deal was not just about roads and bridges, after all. It also funded the construction or renovation of thousands of gathering places across the country, in suburbs and cities, rural areas and small towns.

What came from these investments? Libraries. Parks. Playgrounds. Piers. Post offices. Swimming pools. Sports fields. Theaters. Museums. Gardens. Forests. Beaches. Lodges. Walkways. Armories. Courthouses. County fairgrounds. Today too many of us take these projects for granted, even as we continue to use them on a huge scale.

Paradoxically, the success of this social infrastructure is also the source of its degradation. Our gathering places are overrun and dilapidated. Parks and playgrounds need updating. Athletic fields need new surfaces. Public libraries have an estimated $26 billion in capital needs, according to the American Library Association, and the costs of safely operating them at full capacity are likely to exceed what states and local governments can afford. None of this, sadly, is explicitly addressed in Mr. Biden’s proposal….(More)”.

The Ease of Tracking Mobile Phones of U.S. Soldiers in Hot Spots

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Byron Tau at the Wall Street Journal: “In 2016, a U.S. defense contractor named PlanetRisk Inc. was working on a software prototype when its employees discovered they could track U.S. military operations through the data generated by the apps on the mobile phones of American soldiers.

At the time, the company was using location data drawn from apps such as weather, games and dating services to build a surveillance tool that could monitor the travel of refugees from Syria to Europe and the U.S., according to interviews with former employees. The company’s goal was to sell the tool to U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials.

But buried in the data was evidence of sensitive U.S. military operations by American special-operations forces in Syria. The company’s analysts could see phones that had come from military facilities in the U.S., traveled through countries like Canada or Turkey and were clustered at the abandoned Lafarge Cement Factory in northern Syria, a staging area at the time for U.S. special-operations and allied forces.

The discovery was an early look at what today has become a significant challenge for the U.S. armed forces: how to protect service members, intelligence officers and security personnel in an age where highly revealing commercial data being generated by mobile phones and other digital services is bought and sold in bulk, and available for purchase by America’s adversaries….(More)“.

Ideology and Performance in Public Organizations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NBER Working Paper by Jorg L. Spenkuch, Edoardo Teso & Guo Xu: “We combine personnel records of the United States federal bureaucracy from 1997-2019 with administrative voter registration data to study how ideological alignment between politicians and bureaucrats affects the personnel policies and performance of public organizations. We present four results. (i) Consistent with the use of the spoils system to align ideology at the highest levels of government, we document significant partisan cycles and substantial turnover among political appointees. (ii) By contrast, we find virtually no political cycles in the civil service. The lower levels of the federal government resemble a “Weberian” bureaucracy that appears to be largely protected from political interference. (iii) Democrats make up the plurality of civil servants. Overrepresentation of Democrats increases with seniority, with the difference in career progression being largely explained by positive selection on observables. (iv) Political misalignment carries a sizeable performance penalty. Exploiting presidential transitions as a source of “within-bureaucrat” variation in the political alignment of procurement officers over time, we find that contracts overseen by a misaligned officer exhibit cost overruns that are, on average, 8% higher than the mean overrun. We provide evidence that is consistent with a general “morale effect,” whereby misaligned bureaucrats are less motivated….(More)”

Re-Thinking Think Tanks: Differentiating Knowledge-Based Policy Influence Organizations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Adam Wellstead and Michael P. Howlett: “The idea of “think tanks” is one of the oldest in the policy sciences. While the topic has been studied for decades, however, recent work dealing with advocacy groups, policy and Behavioural Insight labs, and into the activities of think tanks themselves have led to discontent with the definitions used in the field, and especially with the way the term may obfuscate rather than clarify important distinctions between different kinds of knowledge-based policy influence organizations (KBPIO). In this paper, we examine the traditional and current definitions of think tanks utilized in the discipline and point out their weaknesses. We then develop a new framework to better capture the variation in such organizations which operate in many sectors….(More)”.

Data Is Power: Washington Needs to Craft New Rules for the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Slaughter and David McCormick at Foreign Affairs: “…Working with all willing and like-minded nations, it should seek a structure for data that maximizes its immense economic potential without sacrificing privacy and individual liberty. This framework should take the form of a treaty that has two main parts.

First would be a set of binding principles that would foster the cross-border flow of data in the most data-intensive sectors—such as energy, transportation, and health care. One set of principles concerns how to value data and determine where it was generated. Just as traditional trade regimes require goods and services to be priced and their origins defined, so, too, must this framework create a taxonomy to classify data flows by value and source. Another set of principles would set forth the privacy standards that governments and companies would have to follow to use data. (Anonymizing data, made easier by advances in encryption and quantum computing, will be critical to this step.) A final principle, which would be conditional on achieving the other two, would be to promote as much cross-border and open flow of data as possible. Consistent with the long-established value of free trade, the parties should, for example, agree to not levy taxes on data flows—and diligently enforce that rule. And they would be wise to ensure that any negative impacts of open data flows, such as job losses or reduced wages, are offset through strong programs to help affected workers adapt to the digital economy.

Such standards would benefit every sector they applied to. Envision, for example, dozens of nations with data-sharing arrangements for autonomous vehicles, oncology treatments, and clean-tech batteries. Relative to their experience in today’s Balkanized world, researchers would be able to discover more data-driven innovations—and in more countries, rather than just in those that already have a large presence in these industries.

The second part of the framework would be free-trade agreements regulating the capital goods, intermediate inputs, and final goods and services of the targeted sectors, all in an effort to maximize the gains that might arise from data-driven innovations. Thus would the traditional forces of comparative advantage and global competition help bring new self-driving vehicles, new lifesaving chemotherapy compounds, and new sources of renewable energy to participating countries around the world. 

There is already a powerful example of such agreements. In 1996, dozens of countries accounting for nearly 95 percent of world trade in information technology ratified the Information Technology Agreement, a multilateral trade deal under the WTO. The agreement ultimately eliminated all tariffs for hundreds of IT-related capital goods, intermediate inputs, and final products—from machine tools to motherboards to personal computers. The agreement proved to be an important impetus for the subsequent wave of the IT revolution, a competitive spur that led to productivity gains for firms and price declines for consumers….(More)”.

Citizen science is booming during the pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sigal Samuel at Vox: “…The pandemic has driven a huge increase in participation in citizen science, where people without specialized training collect data out in the world or perform simple analyses of data online to help out scientists.

Stuck at home with time on their hands, millions of amateurs arouennd the world are gathering information on everything from birds to plants to Covid-19 at the request of institutional researchers. And while quarantine is mostly a nightmare for us, it’s been a great accelerant for science.

Early in the pandemic, a firehose of data started gushing forth on citizen science platforms like Zooniverse and SciStarter, where scientists ask the public to analyze their data online.It’s a form of crowdsourcing that has the added bonus of giving volunteers a real sense of community; each project has a discussion forum where participants can pose questions to each other (and often to the scientists behind the projects) and forge friendly connections.

“There’s a wonderful project called Rainfall Rescue that’s transcribing historical weather records. It’s a climate change project to understand how weather has changed over the past few centuries,” Laura Trouille, vice president of citizen science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and co-lead of Zooniverse, told me. “They uploaded a dataset of 10,000 weather logs that needed transcribing — and that was completed in one day!”

Some Zooniverse projects, like Snapshot Safari, ask participants to classify animals in images from wildlife cameras. That project saw daily classifications go from 25,000 to 200,000 per day in the initial days of lockdown. And across all its projects, Zooniverse reported that 200,000 participants contributed more than 5 million classifications of images in one week alone — the equivalent of 48 years of research. Although participation has slowed a bit since the spring, it’s still four times what it was pre-pandemic.

Many people are particularly eager to help tackle Covid-19, and scientists have harnessed their energy. Carnegie Mellon University’s Roni Rosenfeld set up a platform where volunteers can help artificial intelligence predict the spread of the coronavirus, even if they know nothing about AI. Researchers at the University of Washington invited people to contribute to Covid-19 drug discovery using a computer game called Foldit; they experimented with designing proteins that could attach to the virus that causes Covid-19 and prevent it from entering cells….(More)”.