Overcoming Data Graveyards in Official Statistics: Catalyzing Uptake and Use

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Trends and Open Data Watch: “The world is awash in information. Every day, an estimated 1.1 billion gigabytes of data are produced, and this number will increase as mobile connections continue to expand and new ways of gathering data are incorporated by the private and public sectors to improve their products and services. The volume of statistics published by government agencies such as National Statistics Offices (NSOs) has also grown. New technologies offer new ways of gathering, storing, and disseminating data and producers of official statistics are releasing more information in more detailed ways through data portals and other mechanisms than ever before.

Once produced, data may live forever, but far too often, the data produced are not what data users are looking for or users lack the awareness or technical skill to use the data. As a result, data fall into data graveyards (Custer, 2017) where they go unutilized and prevent evidence-informed policies from being made. This is dangerous particularly at a time when intersecting crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and energy and food insecurity put a premium on decision-making that incorporates the best data. In addition, public sector producers of data, who do so using public funds, need evidence of the use of their data to justify investments in data.

Data use remains a complex topic, with many policymakers and managers in national statistical system agencies unclear about this issue and how to improve their practices to ensure uptake and use. With conceptual clarity and best practices in hand, these actors can improve their practices and better address the needs of data users, while recognizing that a ‘one size fits all’ approach will not be suitable for countries at various stages of statistical capacity….(More)”

Five-year campaign breaks science’s citation paywall

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dalmeet Singh Chawla: “The more than 60 million scientific-journal papers indexed by Crossref — the database that registers DOIs, or digital object identifiers, for many of the world’s academic publications — now contain reference lists that are free to access and reuse.

The milestone, announced on Twitter on 18 August, is the result of an effort by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), launched in 2017. Open-science advocates have for years campaigned to make papers’ citation data accessible under liberal copyright licences so that they can be studied, and those analyses shared. Free access to citations enables researchers to identify research trends, lets them conduct studies on which areas of research need funding, and helps them to spot when scientists are manipulating citation counts….

The move means that bibliometricians, scientometricians and information scientists will be able to reuse citation data in any way they please under the most liberal copyright licence, called CC0. This, in turn, allows other researchers to build on their work.

Before I4OC, researchers generally had to obtain permission to access data from major scholarly databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, and weren’t able to share the samples.

However, the opening up of Crossref articles’ citations doesn’t mean that all the world’s scholarly content now has open references. Although most major international academic publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature (which publishes Nature) and Taylor & Francis, index their papers on Crossref, some do not. These often include regional and non-English-language publications.

I4OC co-founder Dario Taraborelli, who is science programme officer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and based in San Francisco, California, says that the next challenge will be to encourage publishers who don’t already deposit reference data in Crossref to do so….(More)”.

How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation Needs Bureaucracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo: “A ground-breaking account which shows how the public sector must adapt, but also persevere, in order to advance technology and innovation

From self-driving cars to smart grids, governments are experimenting with new technologies to significantly change the way we live. Innovation has become vitally important to states across the world.

Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo explore how public bodies pursue innovation, looking at how new policies are designed and implemented. Spanning Europe, the USA and Asia, the authors show how different institutions finance new technologies and share cutting-edge information. They argue for the importance of ‘agile stability’, demonstrating that in order to successfully innovate, state organizations have to move nimbly like start-ups and yet ensure stability at the same time. And that, particularly in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments need both long-term policy and dynamic capabilities to handle crises.

This vital account explores the complex and often contradictory positions of innovating public bodies—and shows how they can overcome financial and political resistance to change for the good of us all…(More)”.

Rethinking Intelligence In A More-Than-Human World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Amanda Rees: “We spend a lot of time debating intelligence — what does it mean? Who has it? And especially lately — can technology help us create or enhance it?

But for a species that relies on its self-declared “wisdom” to differentiate itself from all other animals, a species that consistently defines itself as intelligent and rational, Homo sapiens tends to do some strikingly foolish things — creating the climate crisis, for example, or threatening the survival of our world with nuclear disaster, or creating ever-more-powerful and pervasive algorithms. 

If we are in fact to be “wise,” we need to learn to manage a range of different and potentially existential risks relating to (and often created by) our technological interventions in the bio-social ecologies we inhabit. We need, in short, to rethink what it means to be intelligent. 

Points Of Origin

Part of the problem is that we think of both “intelligence” and “agency” as objective, identifiable, measurable human characteristics. But they’re not. At least in part, both concepts are instead the product of specific historical circumstances. “Agency,” for example, emerges with the European Enlightenment, perhaps best encapsulated in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” Writing in the late 15th century, Mirandola revels in the fact that to humanity alone “it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills. … On man … the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit.”

In other words, what makes humans unique is their possession of the God-given capacity to exercise free will — to take rational, self-conscious action in order to achieve specific ends. Today, this remains the model of agency that underpins significant and influential areas of public discourse. It resonates strongly with neoliberalist reforms of economic policy, for example, as well as with debates on public health responsibility and welfare spending. 

A few hundred years later, the modern version of “intelligence” appears, again in Europe, where it came to be understood as a capacity for ordered, rational, problem-solving, pattern-recognizing cognition. Through the work of the eugenicist Francis Galton, among others, intelligence soon came to be regarded as an innate quality possessed by individuals to greater or lesser degree, which could be used to sort populations into hierarchies of social access and economic reward…(More)”.

Community science draws on the power of the crowd

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Amber Dance: “In community science, also called participatory science, non-professionals contribute their time, energy or expertise to research. (The term ‘citizen science’ is also used but can be perceived as excluding non-citizens.)

Whatever name is used, the approach is more popular than ever and even has journals dedicated to it. The number of annual publications mentioning ‘citizen science’ went from 151 in 2015 to more than 640 in 2021, according to the Web of Science database. Researchers from physiologists to palaeontologists to astronomers are finding that harnessing the efforts of ordinary people is often the best route to the answers they seek.

“More and more funding organizations are actually promoting this type of participatory- and citizen-science data gathering,” says Bálint Balázs, managing director of the Environmental Social Science Research Group in Budapest, a non-profit company focusing on socio-economic research for sustainability.

Community science is also a great tool for outreach, and scientists often delight in interactions with amateur researchers. But it’s important to remember that community science is, foremost, a research methodology like any other, with its own requirements in terms of skill and effort.

“To do a good project, it does require an investment in time,” says Darlene Cavalier, founder of SciStarter, an online clearing house that links research-project leaders with volunteers. “It’s not something where you’re just going to throw up a Google form and hope for the best.” Although there are occasions when scientific data are freely and easily available, other projects create significant costs.

No matter what the topic or approach, people skills are crucial: researchers must identify and cultivate a volunteer community and provide regular feedback or rewards. With the right protocols and checks and balances, the quality of volunteer-gathered data often rivals or surpasses that achieved by professionals.

“There is a two-way learning that happens,” says Tina Phillips, assistant director of the Center for Engagement in Science and Nature at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “We all know that science is better when there are more voices, more perspectives.”…(More)”

Uncovering the genetic basis of mental illness requires data and tools that aren’t just based on white people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hailiang Huang: “Mental illness is a growing public health problem. In 2019, an estimated 1 in 8 people around the world were affected by mental disorders like depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. While scientists have long known that many of these disorders run in families, their genetic basis isn’t entirely clear. One reason why is that the majority of existing genetic data used in research is overwhelmingly from white people.

In 2003, the Human Genome Project generated the first “reference genome” of human DNA from a combination of samples donated by upstate New Yorkers, all of whom were of European ancestry. Researchers across many biomedical fields still use this reference genome in their work. But it doesn’t provide a complete picture of human genetics. Someone with a different genetic ancestry will have a number of variations in their DNA that aren’t captured by the reference sequence.

When most of the world’s ancestries are not represented in genomic data sets, studies won’t be able to provide a true representation of how diseases manifest across all of humanity. Despite this, ancestral diversity in genetic analyses hasn’t improved in the two decades since the Human Genome Project announced its first results. As of June 2021, over 80% of genetic studies have been conducted on people of European descent. Less than 2% have included people of African descent, even though these individuals have the most genetic variation of all human populations.

To uncover the genetic factors driving mental illness, I, Sinéad Chapman and our colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have partnered with collaborators around the world to launch Stanley Global, an initiative that seeks to collect a more diverse range of genetic samples from beyond the U.S. and Northern Europe, and train the next generation of researchers around the world. Not only does the genetic data lack diversity, but so do the tools and techniques scientists use to sequence and analyze human genomes. So we are implementing a new sequencing technology that addresses the inadequacies of previous approaches that don’t account for the genetic diversity of global populations…(More).

The wealth of (Open Data) nations? Open government data, country-level institutions and entrepreneurial activity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Franz Huber, Alan Ponce, Francesco Rentocchini & Thomas Wainwright: “Lately, Open Data (OD) has been promoted by governments around the world as a resource to accelerate innovation within entrepreneurial ventures . However,it remains unclear to what extent OD drives innovative entrepreneurship. This paper sheds light on this open question by providing novel empirical evidence on the relationship between OD publishing and (digital) entrepreneurship at the country-level. We draw upon a longitudinal dataset comprising 90 countries observed over the period 2013–2016. We find a significant and positive association between OD publishing and entrepreneurship at the country level. The results also show that OD publishing and entrepreneurship is strong in countries with high institutional quality. We argue that publishing OD is not sufficient to improve innovative entrepreneurship alone, so states need to move beyond a focus on OD initiatives and promotion, to focus on a broader set of policy initiatives that promote good governance…(More)”.

The End of Real Social Networks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Daron Acemoglu: “Social media platforms are not only creating echo chambers, propagating falsehoods, and facilitating the circulation of extremist ideas. Previous media innovations, dating back at least to the printing press, did that, too, but none of them shook the very foundations of human communication and social interaction.

CAMBRIDGE – Not only are billions of people around the world glued to their mobile phones, but the information they consume has changed dramatically – and not for the better. On dominant social-media platforms like Facebook, researchers have documented that falsehoods spread faster and more widely than similar content that includes accurate information. Though users are not demanding misinformation, the algorithms that determine what people see tend to favor sensational, inaccurate, and misleading content, because that is what generates “engagement” and thus advertising revenue.

As the internet activist Eli Pariser noted in 2011, Facebook also creates filter bubbles, whereby individuals are more likely to be presented with content that reinforces their own ideological leanings and confirms their own biases. And more recent research has demonstrated that this process has a major influence on the type of information users see.

Even leaving aside Facebook’s algorithmic choices, the broader social-media ecosystem allows people to find subcommunities that align with their interests. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you are the only person in your community with an interest in ornithology, you no longer have to be alone, because you can now connect with ornithology enthusiasts from around the world. But, of course, the same applies to the lone extremist who can now use the same platforms to access or propagate hate speech and conspiracy theories.

No one disputes that social-media platforms have been a major conduit for hate speech, disinformation, and propaganda. Reddit and YouTube are breeding grounds for right-wing extremism. The Oath Keepers used Facebook, especially, to organize their role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol. Former US President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets were found to have fueled violence against minorities in the US.

True, some find such observations alarmist, noting that large players like Facebook and YouTube (which is owned by Google/Alphabet) do much more to police hate speech and misinformation than their smaller rivals do, especially now that better moderation practices have been developed. Moreover, other researchers have challenged the finding that falsehoods spread faster on Facebook and Twitter, at least when compared to other media.

Still others argue that even if the current social-media environment is treacherous, the problem is transitory. After all, novel communication tools have always been misused. Martin Luther used the printing press to promote not just Protestantism but also virulent anti-Semitism. Radio proved to be a powerful tool in the hands of demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin in the US and the Nazis in Germany. Both print and broadcast outlets remain full of misinformation to this day, but society has adjusted to these media and managed to contain their negative effects…(More)”.

Collection of Case Studies of Institutional Adoption of Citizen Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About TIME4CS : “The first objective was to increase our knowledge about the actions leading to institutional changes in RPOs (which are necessary to promote CS in science and technology) through a complete and up-to-date picture based upon the identification, mapping, monitoring and analysis of ongoing CS practices. To accomplish this objective, we, the TIME4CS project team, have collected and analysed 37 case studies on the institutional adoption of Citizen Science and Open Science around the world, which this article addresses.

For an organisation to open up and accept data and information that was produced outside it, with a different framework for data collection and quality assurance, there are multiple challenges. These include existing practices and procedures, legal obligations, as well as resistance from within due to framing of such action as a threat. Research that was carried out with multiple international case studies (Haklay et al. 2014; GFDRR 2018), demonstrated the importance of different institutional and funding structures needed to enable such activities and the use of the resulting information…(More)”.

Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “As the world confronts the fast catastrophe of Covid and the slow calamity of climate change, we also face a third, less visible emergency: a crisis of imagination. We can easily picture ecological disaster or futures dominated by technology. But we struggle to imagine a world in which people thrive and where we improve our democracy, welfare, neighbourhoods or education. Many are resigned to fatalism—yet they desperately want transformational social change.

This book argues that, although the threats are real, we can use creative imagination to achieve a better future: visualising where we want to go and how to get there. Political and social thinker Geoff Mulgan offers lessons we can learn from the past, and methods we can use now to open up thinking about the future and spark action.

Drawing on social sciences, the arts, philosophy and history, Mulgan shows how we can recharge our collective imagination. From Socrates to Star Wars, he provides a roadmap for the future….(More)”.