WEF Report: “The accelerated digital transition is unlocking economic and technology innovation, boosting growth, and enabling new forms of social engagement across the globe. Yet, the benefits from digital transformation have not been fully realized; compounded with macroeconomic and geopolitical headwinds that are forcing public-private leaders to make digital technology investment trade-offs. The Digital Transition Framework: An Action Plan for Public-Private Collaboration sets out concrete actions and leading examples to support governments achieve their digital transition goals in the face of uncertainty…(More)”.
The ethical and legal landscape of brain data governance
Paper by Paschal Ochang , Bernd Carsten Stahl, and Damian Eke: “Neuroscience research is producing big brain data which informs both advancements in neuroscience research and drives the development of advanced datasets to provide advanced medical solutions. These brain data are produced under different jurisdictions in different formats and are governed under different regulations. The governance of data has become essential and critical resulting in the development of various governance structures to ensure that the quality, availability, findability, accessibility, usability, and utility of data is maintained. Furthermore, data governance is influenced by various ethical and legal principles. However, it is still not clear what ethical and legal principles should be used as a standard or baseline when managing brain data due to varying practices and evolving concepts. Therefore, this study asks what ethical and legal principles shape the current brain data governance landscape? A systematic scoping review and thematic analysis of articles focused on biomedical, neuro and brain data governance was carried out to identify the ethical and legal principles which shape the current brain data governance landscape. The results revealed that there is currently a large variation of how the principles are presented and discussions around the terms are very multidimensional. Some of the principles are still at their infancy and are barely visible. A range of principles emerged during the thematic analysis providing a potential list of principles which can provide a more comprehensive framework for brain data governance and a conceptual expansion of neuroethics…(More)”.
Semantic Media: Mapping Meaning on the Internet
Book by Andrew Iliadis: “Media technologies now provide facts, answers, and “knowledge” to people – search engines, apps, and virtual assistants increasingly articulate responses rather than direct people to other sources.
Semantic Media is about this emerging era of meaning-making technologies. Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft organize information in new media products that seek to “intuitively” grasp what people want to know and the actions they want to take. This book describes some of the insidious technological practices through which organizations achieve this while addressing the changing contexts of internet searches, and examines the social and political consequences of what happens when large companies become primary sources of information…(More)”.
The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs
Article by Reid Blackman: “…One should always worry when a person or an organization places one value above all. The moral fabric of our world is complex. It’s nuanced. Sensitivity to moral nuance is difficult, but unwavering support of one principle to rule them all is morally dangerous.
The way Signal wields the word “surveillance” reflects its coarsegrained understanding of morality. To the company, surveillance covers everything from a server holding encrypted data that no one looks at to a law enforcement agent reading data after obtaining a warrant to East Germany randomly tapping citizens’ phones. One cannot think carefully about the value of privacy — including its relative importance to other values in particular contexts — with such a broad brush.
What’s more, the company’s proposition that if anyone has access to data, then many unauthorized people probably will have access to that data is false. This response reflects a lack of faith in good governance, which is essential to any well-functioning organization or community seeking to keep its members and society at large safe from bad actors. There are some people who have access to the nuclear launch codes, but “Mission Impossible” movies aside, we’re not particularly worried about a slippery slope leading to lots of unauthorized people having access to those codes.
I am drawing attention to Signal, but there’s a bigger issue here: Small groups of technologists are developing and deploying applications of their technologies for explicitly ideological reasons, with those ideologies baked into the technologies. To use those technologies is to use a tool that comes with an ethical or political bent.
Signal is pushing against businesses like Meta that turn users of their social media platforms into the product by selling user data. But Signal embeds within itself a rather extreme conception of privacy, and scaling its technology is scaling its ideology. Signal’s users may not be the product, but they are the witting or unwitting advocates of the moral views of the 40 or so people who operate Signal.
There’s something somewhat sneaky in all this (though I don’t think the owners of Signal intend to be sneaky). Usually advocates know that they’re advocates. They engage in some level of deliberation and reach the conclusion that a set of beliefs is for them…(More)”.
Data drives media coverage of climate refugees
Case study by Sherry Ricchiardi: “Data has become a springboard for journalists on the frontlines of the climate refugee crisis. It points them to weather emergencies in hot zones like South Asia and Central America and to humans facing misery and despair.
Jorge A., a Guatemalan farmer lost his corn crop to floods. He planted okra, but a drought killed it off. He feared if he didn’t get his family out, they, too, might die.
Jorge’s story was told in gripping detail in a data-driven investigation by ProPublica in partnership with The New York Times Magazine, exploring how changes in population patterns could lead to catastrophe. The “Great Climate Migration Has Begun,” presented as a visual essay, cited scenarios of how this crisis might play out.
The joint venture, supported by the Pulitzer Center, had an over-arching strategy: To model, for the first time, how climate refugees might move across international borders. The modeling informed the journalist’s findings and “possible general pathways for the future.”
“Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s population,” wrote ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten, lead author for the 2020 series…
Journalists have taken a stand on how they cover the climate beat. Their view of what constitutes a “balanced news report” has shifted from “he said, she said” objectivity toward a “weight of evidence” approach. Mainstream media are giving climate skeptics less time and for good reason.
Researchers long had raised concerns that the media distorted scientific consensus on climate change by “false balance” reporting or “bothsidesism,” giving climate deniers too much say. Research by Northwestern University psychology professor David Rapp sheds light on the controversy.
During a co-authored study, experiments were conducted to test how people would respond when two views about climate change were presented as equally valid, even though one side was based on scientific consensus and the other on denial. Among the conclusions, “When both sides of an argument are presented, people tend to have lower estimates about scientific consensus and seem to be less likely to believe climate change is something to worry about.” A campus publication touted, “Northwestern research finds ‘bothsidesism’ in journalism undermines science.”..(More)”.
Behavioural Economics and the Environment
Book edited by Alessandro Bucciol, Alessandro Tavoni and Marcella Veronesi: “Humans have long neglected to fully consider the impact of their behaviour on the environment. From excessive consumption of fossil fuels and natural resources to pollution, waste disposal, and, in more recent years, climate change, most people and institutions lack a clear understanding of the environmental consequences of their actions. The new field of behavioural environmental economics seeks to address this by applying the framework of behavioural economics to environmental issues, thereby rationalizing unexplained puzzles and providing a more realistic account of individual behaviour.
This book provides a complete and rigorous overview of environmental topics that may be addressed and, in many instances, better understood by integrating a behavioural approach. This volume features state-of-the-art research on this topic by influential scholars in behavioural and environmental economics, focussing on the effects of psychological, social and cognitive factors on the decision-making process. It presents research performed using different methods and data collection mechanisms (e.g. laboratory experiments, field experiments, natural experiments, online surveys) on a variety of environmental topics (e.g. sustainability, natural resources)…(More)”.
The Strength of Knowledge Ties
Paper by Luca Maria Aiello: “Social relationships are probably the most important things we have in our life. They help us to get new jobs, live longer, and be happier. At the scale of cities, networks of diverse social connections determine the economic prospects of a population. The strength of social ties is believed one of the key factors that regulate these outcomes. According to Granovetter’s classic theory about tie strength, information flows through social ties of two strengths: weak ties that are used infrequently but bridge distant groups that tend to posses diverse knowledge; and strong ties, that are used frequently, knit communities together, and provide dependable sources of support.
For decades, tie strength has been quantified using the frequency of interaction. Yet, frequency does not reflect Granovetter’s initial conception of strength, which in his view is a multidimensional concept, such as the “combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, intimacy, and services which characterize the tie.” Frequency of interaction is traditionally used as a proxy for more complex social processes mostly because it is relatively easy to measure (e.g., the number of calls in phone records). But what if we had a way to measure these social processes directly?
We used advanced techniques in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to quantify whether the text of a message conveys knowledge (whether the message provides information about a specific domain) or support (expressions of emotional or practical help), and applied it to a large conversation network from Reddit composed by 630K users resident in the United States, linked by 12.8M ties. Our hypothesis was that the resulting knowledge and support networks would fare better in predicting social outcomes than a traditional social network weighted by interaction frequency. In particular, borrowing a classic experimental setup, we tested whether the diversity of social connections of Reddit users resident in a specific US state would correlate with the economic opportunities in that state (estimated with GDP per capita)…(More)”.
The Protection and Promotion of Civic Space
OECD Report: “The past decade has seen increasing international recognition of civic space as a cornerstone of functioning democracies, alongside efforts to promote and protect it. Countries that foster civic space are better placed to reap the many benefits of higher levels of citizen engagement, strengthened transparency and accountability, and empowered citizens and civil society. In the longer term, a vibrant civic space can help to improve government effectiveness and responsiveness, contribute to more citizen-centred policies, and boost social cohesion. This first OECD comparative report on civic space offers a baseline of data from 33 OECD Members and 19 non-Members and a nuanced overview of the different dimensions of civic space, with a focus on civic freedoms, media freedoms, civic space in the digital age, and the enabling environment for civil society. It provides an exhaustive review of legal frameworks, policies, strategies, and institutional arrangements, in addition to implementation gaps, trends and good practices. The analysis is complemented by a review of international standards and guidance, in addition to data and analysis from civil society and other stakeholders…(More)”.
We need data infrastructure as well as data sharing – conflicts of interest in video game research
Article by David Zendle & Heather Wardle: “Industry data sharing has the potential to revolutionise evidence on video gaming and mental health, as well as a host of other critical topics. However, collaborative data sharing agreements between academics and industry partners may also afford industry enormous power in steering the development of this evidence base. In this paper, we outline how nonfinancial conflicts of interest may emerge when industry share data with academics. We then go on to describe ways in which such conflicts may affect the quality of the evidence base. Finally, we suggest strategies for mitigating this impact and preserving research independence. We focus on the development of data infrastructure: technological, social, and educational architecture that facilitates unfettered and free access to the kinds of high-quality data that industry hold, but without industry involvement…(More)”.
Use of new data sources for measuring international migration
UNICE Report: “Migration and other forms of cross-border mobility are issues of high policy importance. Demands for statistics in these areas have further increased in light of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. The statistical community continues to be challenged to capture international migration and cross-border mobility in a way that would meet the growing needs of users.
Measurement of migration and cross-border mobility relies on a variety of sources, such as population and housing censuses, household surveys and administrative records, with each of them having their own strengths and limitations. Integration of data from different sources is often seen as a way to enhance the richness of data and reduce coverage or accuracy problems. Yet, even this would often not capture all dimensions of migration and cross-border mobility.
New non-conventional data sources, such as data gathered from the use of mobile telephones, credit cards and social networks — generally known as big and social media data — could be useful for producing migration statistics when used in combination with conventional sources. Notwithstanding the challenges of accessibility, accuracy and access to these new sources, examples are emerging that highlight their potential.
In 2020 the Bureau of the Conference of European Statisticians (CES) set up a task force to review existing experience and plans for using new data sources for measuring international migration in national statistical offices and outside official statistics; analyse the material collected; and compile the examples into a reference tool.
This publication presents the results of the work of the task force, including various national experiences with big data and new data sources collected through two surveys among countries participating in the CES…(More)”.