Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving beyond Blame

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Elizaveta Friesem: “Media is usually seen as a feature of the modern world enabled by the latest technologies. Scholars, educators, parents, and politicians often talk about media as something people should be wary of due to its potential negative impact on their lives. But do we really understand what media is?

Elizaveta Friesem argues that instead of being worried about media or blaming it for what’s going wrong in society, we should become curious about uniquely human ways we communicate with each other. Media Is Us proposes five key principles of communication that are relevant both for the modern media and for people’s age-old ways of making sense of the world.

In order to understand problems of the contemporary society revealed and amplified by the latest technologies, we will have to ask difficult questions about ourselves. Where do our truths and facts come from? How can we know who is to blame for flaws of the social system? What can we change about our own everyday actions to make the world a better place? To answer these questions we will need to rethink not only the term “media” but also the concept of power. The change of perspective proposed by the book is intended to help the reader become more self-aware and also empathic towards those who choose different truths.

Concluding with practical steps to build media literacy through the ACE model—from Awareness to Collaboration through Empathy—this timely book is essential for students and scholars, as well as anyone who would use the new understanding of media to decrease the current levels of cultural polarization….(More)”.

Manipulation As Theft

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Cass Sunstein: “Should there be a right not to be manipulated? What kind of right? On Kantian grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion are moral wrongs, and for similar reasons; they deprive people of agency, insult their dignity, and fail to respect personal autonomy. On welfarist grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion share a different characteristic; they displace the choices of those whose lives are directly at stake, and who are likely to have epistemic advantages, with the choices of outsiders, who are likely to lack critical information. Kantians and welfarists should be prepared to endorse a (moral) right not to be manipulated, though on very different grounds.

The moral prohibition on manipulation, like the moral prohibition on lies, should run against officials and regulators, not only against private institutions. At the same time, the creation of a legal right not to be manipulated raises hard questions, in part because of definitional challenges; there is a serious risk of vagueness and a serious risk of overbreadth. (Lies, as such, are not against the law, and the same is true of unkindness, inconsiderateness, and even cruelty.) With welfarist considerations in mind, it is probably best to start by prohibiting particular practices, while emphasizing that they are forms of manipulation and may not count as fraud. The basic goal should be to build on the claim that in certain cases, manipulation is a form of theft; the law should forbid theft, whether it occurs through force, lies, or manipulation. Some manipulators are thieves….(More)”

Introduction to Modern Statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Free-to-download book by Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel and Johanna Hardin: “…a re-imagining of a previous title, Introduction to Statistics with Randomization and Simulation. The new book puts a heavy emphasis on exploratory data analysis (specifically exploring multivariate relationships using visualization, summarization, and descriptive models) and provides a thorough discussion of simulation-based inference using randomization and bootstrapping, followed by a presentation of the related Central Limit Theorem based approaches. Other highlights include:

Web native book. The online book is available in HTML, which offers easy navigation and searchability in the browser. The book is built with the bookdown package and the source code to reproduce the book can be found on GitHub. Along with the bookdown site, this book is also available as a PDF and in paperback. Read the book online here.

Tutorials. While the main text of the book is agnostic to statistical software and computing language, each part features 4-8 interactive R tutorials (for a total of 32 tutorials) that walk you through the implementation of the part content in R with the tidyverse for data wrangling and visualisation and the tidyverse-friendly infer package for inference. The self-paced and interactive R tutorials were developed using the learnr R package, and only an internet browser is needed to complete them. Browse the tutorials here.

Labs. Each part also features 1-2 R based labs. The labs consist of data analysis case studies and they also make heavy use of the tidyverse and infer packages. View the labs here.

Datasets. Datasets used in the book are marked with a link to where you can find the raw data. The majority of these point to the openintro package. You can install the openintro package from CRAN or get the development version on GitHub. Find out more about the package here….(More)”.

Measuring What Matters for Child Well-being and Policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Olivier Thévenon at the OECD: “Childhood is a critical period in which individuals develop many of the skills and abilities needed to thrive later in life. Promoting child well-being is not only an important end in itself, but is also essential for safeguarding the prosperity and sustainability of future generations. As the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates existing challenges—and introduces new ones—for children’s material, physical, socio-emotional and cognitive development, improving child well-being should be a focal point of the recovery agenda.

To design effective child well-being policies, policy-makers need comprehensive and timely data that capture what is going on in children’s lives. Our new report, Measuring What Matters for Child Well-being and Policies, aims to move the child data agenda forward by laying the groundwork for better statistical infrastructures that will ultimately inform policy development. We identify key data gaps and outline a new aspirational measurement framework, pinpointing the aspects of children’s lives that should be assessed to monitor their well-being….(More)”.

Street Experiments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “City streets are increasingly becoming spaces for experimentation, for testing “in the wild” a seemingly unstoppable flow of “disruptive” mobility innovations such as mobility platforms for shared mobility and ride/hailing, electric and autonomous vehicles, micro-mobility solutions, etc. But also, and perhaps more radically, for recovering the primary function of city streets as public spaces, not just traffic channels.

City street experiments are:

​“intentional, temporary changes of the street use, regulation and/or form, aimed at exploring systemic change in urban mobility”

​They offer a prefiguration of what a radically different arrangement of the city´s mobility system and public space could look like and allow moving towards that vision by means of “learning by doing”.

The S.E.T. platform offers a collection of Resources for implementing and supporting street experiments. As well as a special section of COVID-19 devoted to the best practices of street experiments that offered solutions and strategies for cities to respond to the current pandemic and a SET Guidelines Kit that provides insights and considerations on creating impactful street experiments with long-term effects….(More)”.

The uncounted: politics of data in global health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Sara L M Davis: “Data is seductive in global health politics. It seduces donors with the promise of cost-effectiveness in making the right investments in people’s health and of ensuring they get results and performance from the state projects they fund. It seduces advocates of gender equality with its power to make gender differences in health outcomes and burdens visible. The seduction of data is that of the quick or technocratic fix to complex social and political problems. Are women disproportionately impacted by COVID-19? Get better data to find out the extent of the problem. Do you want to save as many lives as possible?…(More)”.

Lessons learned from telco data informing COVID-19 responses: toward an early warning system for future pandemics?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to a special issue of Data and Policy (Open Access) by Richard Benjamins, Jeanine Vos, and Stefaan Verhulst: “More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the damage is still unfolding. While some countries have recently managed to gain an element of control through aggressive vaccine campaigns, much of the developing world — South and Southeast Asia in particular — remain in a state of crisis. Given what we now know about the global nature of this disease and the potential for mutant versions to develop and spread, a crisis anywhere is cause for concern everywhere. The world remains very much in the grip of this public health crisis.

From the beginning, there has been hope that data and technology could offer solutions to help inform the government’s response strategy and decision-making. Many of the expectations have been focused on mobile data analytics in particular, whereby mobile network operators create mobility insights and decision-support tools generated from anonymized and aggregated telco data. This stems both from a growing group of mobile network operators having significantly invested in systems and capabilities to develop such products and services for public and private sector customers. As well as their value having been demonstrated in addressing different global challenges, ranging from models to better understand the spread of Zika in Brazil to interactive dashboards to aid emergency services during earthquakes and floods in Japan. Yet despite these experiences, many governments across the world still have limited awareness, capabilities and resources to leverage these tools, in their efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 using non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), both from a medical and economic point of view.

Today, we release the first batch of papers of a special collection of Data & Policy that examines both the potential of mobile data, as well as the challenges faced in delivering these tools to inform government decision-making. Consisting of 5 papers from 33 researchers and experts from academia, industry and government, the articles cover a wide range of geographies, including Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Austria, Belgium, and Spain. Responding to our call for case studies to illustrate the opportunities (and challenges) offered by mobile big data in the fight against COVID-19, the authors of these papers describe a number of examples of how mobile and mobile-related data have been used to address the medical, economic, socio-cultural and political aspects of the pandemic….(More)”.

Solving Public Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Beth Simone Noveck (The GovLab): “The challenges societies face today, from inequality to climate change to systemic racism, cannot be solved with yesterday’s toolkit. Solving Public Problems shows how readers can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems.  
 
Offering a radical rethinking of the role of the public servant and the skills of the public workforce, this book is about the vast gap between failing public institutions and the huge number of public entrepreneurs doing extraordinary things—and how to close that gap.  
 
Drawing on lessons learned from decades of advising global leaders and from original interviews and surveys of thousands of public problem solvers, Beth Simone Noveck provides a practical guide for public servants, community leaders, students, and activists to become more effective, equitable, and inclusive leaders and repair our troubled, twenty-first-century world….(More)”

Take the free online course presented by The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Using big data for insights into the gender digital divide for girls: A discussion paper

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Using big data for insights into the gender digital divide for girls: A discussion paper

UNICEF paper: “This discussion paper describes the findings of a study that used big data as an alternative data source to understand the gender digital divide for under-18s. It describes 6 key insights gained from analysing big data from Facebook and Instagram platforms, and discusses how big data can be further used to contribute to the body of evidence for the gender digital divide for adolescent girls….(More)”

Citizen participation in budgeting and beyond: Deliberative Practices and their Impact in Contemporary Cases

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access book by Joanna Podgórska-Rykała and Jacek Sroka: “…The basic questions which the theory and practice of public policy try to answer is the question about desires in democratic conditions and at the same time an effective formula for balancing centralization and decentralization in decision-making processes. […]

Participatory budgeting, as one of possible variants of deliberation, is one of those phenomena of public life, the quality of which depends on the relations of the parties involved. The shape of these relationships only to a limited extent depends on the ways of their current practice, because these methods are causally conditioned, and the causes lie in cultural constructions. That is why these relations are not easy to study; it is difficult to reach that deep, because it is difficult to both model the conceptualization of the problem and the methodological approach to such research. These are one of the most difficult and, at the same time, the most promising research areas of public policy. We hope that this book will contribute to their partial exploration…(More)”.