Access Rules: Freeing Data from Big Tech for a Better Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Thomas Ramge: “Information is power, and the time is now for digital liberation. Access Rules mounts a strong and hopeful argument for how informational tools at present in the hands of a few could instead become empowering machines for everyone. By forcing data-hoarding companies to open access to their data, we can reinvigorate both our economy and our society. Authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge contend that if we disrupt monopoly power and create a level playing field, digital innovations can emerge to benefit us all.

Over the past twenty years, Big Tech has managed to centralize the most relevant data on their servers, as data has become the most important raw material for innovation. However, dominant oligopolists like Facebook, Amazon, and Google, in contrast with their reputation as digital pioneers, are actually slowing down innovation and progress by withholding data for the benefit of their shareholders––at the expense of customers, the economy, and society. As Access Rules compellingly argues, ultimately it is up to us to force information giants, wherever they are located, to open their treasure troves of data to others. In order for us to limit global warming, contain a virus like COVID-19, or successfully fight poverty, everyone—including citizens and scientists, start-ups and established companies, as well as the public sector and NGOs—must have access to data. When everyone has access to the informational riches of the data age, the nature of digital power will change. Information technology will find its way back to its original purpose: empowering all of us to use information so we can thrive as individuals and as societies….(More)”.

Should we get rid of the scientific paper?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stuart Ritchie: “But although the internet has transformed the way we read it, the overall system for how we publish science remains largely unchanged. We still have scientific papers; we still send them off to peer reviewers; we still have editors who give the ultimate thumbs up or down as to whether a paper is published in their journal.

This system comes with big problems. Chief among them is the issue of publication bias: reviewers and editors are more likely to give a scientific paper a good write-up and publish it in their journal if it reports positive or exciting results. So scientists go to great lengths to hype up their studies, lean on their analyses so they produce “better” results, and sometimes even commit fraud in order to impress those all-important gatekeepers. This drastically distorts our view of what really went on.

There are some possible fixes that change the way journals work. Maybe the decision to publish could be made based only on the methodology of a study, rather than on its results (this is already happening to a modest extent in a few journals). Maybe scientists could just publish all their research by default, and journals would curate, rather than decide, which results get out into the world. But maybe we could go a step further, and get rid of scientific papers altogether.

Scientists are obsessed with papers – specifically, with having more papers published under their name, extending the crucial “publications” section of their CV. So it might sound outrageous to suggest we could do without them. But that obsession is the problem. Paradoxically, the sacred status of a published, peer-reviewed paper makes it harder to get the contents of those papers right.

Consider the messy reality of scientific research. Studies almost always throw up weird, unexpected numbers that complicate any simple interpretation. But a traditional paper – word count and all – pretty well forces you to dumb things down. If what you’re working towards is a big, milestone goal of a published paper, the temptation is ever-present to file away a few of the jagged edges of your results, to help “tell a better story”. Many scientists admit, in surveys, to doing just that – making their results into unambiguous, attractive-looking papers, but distorting the science along the way.

And consider corrections. We know that scientific papers regularly contain errors. One algorithm that ran through thousands of psychology papers found that, at worst, more than 50% had one specific statistical error, and more than 15% had an error serious enough to overturn the results. With papers, correcting this kind of mistake is a slog: you have to write in to the journal, get the attention of the busy editor, and get them to issue a new, short paper that formally details the correction. Many scientists who request corrections find themselves stonewalled or otherwise ignored by journals. Imagine the number of errors that litter the scientific literature that haven’t been corrected because to do so is just too much hassle.

Finally, consider data. Back in the day, sharing the raw data that formed the basis of a paper with that paper’s readers was more or less impossible. Now it can be done in a few clicks, by uploading the data to an open repository. And yet, we act as if we live in the world of yesteryear: papers still hardly ever have the data attached, preventing reviewers and readers from seeing the full picture.

The solution to all these problems is the same as the answer to “How do I organise my journals if I don’t use cornflakes boxes?” Use the internet. We can change papers into mini-websites (sometimes called “notebooks”) that openly report the results of a given study. Not only does this give everyone a view of the full process from data to analysis to write-up – the dataset would be appended to the website along with all the statistical code used to analyse it, and anyone could reproduce the full analysis and check they get the same numbers – but any corrections could be made swiftly and efficiently, with the date and time of all updates publicly logged…(More)”.

Decoding human behavior with big data? Critical, constructive input from the decision sciences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Konstantinos V. Katsikopoulos and Marc C. Canellas: “Big data analytics employs algorithms to uncover people’s preferences and values, and support their decision making. A central assumption of big data analytics is that it can explain and predict human behavior. We investigate this assumption, aiming to enhance the knowledge basis for developing algorithmic standards in big data analytics. First, we argue that big data analytics is by design atheoretical and does not provide process-based explanations of human behavior; thus, it is unfit to support deliberation that is transparent and explainable. Second, we review evidence from interdisciplinary decision science, showing that the accuracy of complex algorithms used in big data analytics for predicting human behavior is not consistently higher than that of simple rules of thumb. Rather, it is lower in situations such as predicting election outcomes, criminal profiling, and granting bail. Big data algorithms can be considered as candidate models for explaining, predicting, and supporting human decision making when they match, in transparency and accuracy, simple, process-based, domain-grounded theories of human behavior. Big data analytics can be inspired by behavioral and cognitive theory….(More)”.

Making forest data fair and open

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Renato A. F. de Lima : “It is a truth universally acknowledged that those in possession of time and good fortune must be in want of information. Nowhere is this more so than for tropical forests, which include the richest and most productive ecosystems on Earth. Information on tropical forest carbon and biodiversity, and how these are changing, is immensely valuable, and many different stakeholders wish to use data on tropical and subtropical forests. These include scientists, governments, nongovernmental organizations and commercial interests, such as those extracting timber or selling carbon credits. Another crucial, often-ignored group are the local communities for whom forest information may help to assert their rights and conserve or restore their forests.

A widespread view is that to lead to better public outcomes it is necessary and sufficient for forest data to be open and ‘Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable’ (FAIR). There is indeed a powerful case. Open data — those that anyone can use and share without restrictions — can encourage transparency and reproducibility, foster innovation and be used more widely, thus translating into a greater public good (for example, https://creativecommons.org). Open biological collections and genetic sequences such as GBIF or GenBank have enabled species discovery, and open Earth observation data helps people to understand and monitor deforestation (for example, Global Forest Watch). But the perspectives of those who actually make the forest measurements are much less recognized, meaning that open and FAIR data can be extremely unfair indeed. We argue here that forest data policies and practices must be fair in the correct, linguistic use of the term — just and equitable.

In a world in which forest data origination — measuring, monitoring and sustaining forest science — is secured by large, long-term capital investment (such as through space missions and some officially supported national forest inventories), making all data open makes perfect sense. But where data origination depends on insecure funding and precarious employment conditions, top-down calls to make these data open can be deeply problematic. Even when well-intentioned, such calls ignore the socioeconomic context of the places where the forest plots are located and how knowledge is created, entrenching the structural inequalities that characterize scientific research and collaboration among and within nations. A recent review found scant evidence for open data ever lessening such inequalities. Clearly, only a privileged part of the global community is currently able to exploit the potential of open forest data. Meanwhile, some local communities are de facto owners of their forests and associated knowledge, so making information open — for example, the location of valuable species — may carry risks to themselves and their forests….(More)”.

Cities Take the Lead in Setting Rules Around How AI Is Used

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jackie Snow at the Wall Street Journal: “As cities and states roll out algorithms to help them provide services like policing and traffic management, they are also racing to come up with policies for using this new technology.

AI, at its worst, can disadvantage already marginalized groups, adding to human-driven bias in hiring, policing and other areas. And its decisions can often be opaque—making it difficult to tell how to fix that bias, as well as other problems. (The Wall Street Journal discussed calls for regulation of AI, or at least greater transparency about how the systems work, with three experts.)

Cities are looking at a number of solutions to these problems. Some require disclosure when an AI model is used in decisions, while others mandate audits of algorithms, track where AI causes harm or seek public input before putting new AI systems in place.

Here are some ways cities are redefining how AI will work within their borders and beyond.

Explaining the algorithms: Amsterdam and Helsinki

One of the biggest complaints against AI is that it makes decisions that can’t be explained, which can lead to complaints about arbitrary or even biased results.

To let their citizens know more about the technology already in use in their cities, Amsterdam and Helsinki collaborated on websites that document how each city government uses algorithms to deliver services. The registry includes information on the data sets used to train an algorithm, a description of how an algorithm is used, how public servants use the results, the human oversight involved and how the city checks the technology for problems like bias.

Amsterdam has six algorithms fully explained—with a goal of 50 to 100—on the registry website, including how the city’s automated parking-control and trash-complaint reports work. Helsinki, which is only focusing on the city’s most advanced algorithms, also has six listed on its site, with another 10 to 20 left to put up.

“We needed to assess the risk ourselves,” says Linda van de Fliert, an adviser at Amsterdam’s Chief Technology Office. “And we wanted to show the world that it is possible to be transparent.”…(More)” See also AI Localism: The Responsible Use and Design of Artificial Intelligence at the Local Level

The Power of Narrative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Mallerett: “…The expression “failure of imagination” captures this by describing the expectation that future opportunities and risks will resemble those of the past. Novelist Graham Greene used it in The Power and the Glory, but the 9/11 Commission made it popular by invoking it as the main reason why intelligence agencies had failed to anticipate the “unimaginable” events of that day.

Ever since, the expression has been associated with situations in which strategic thinking and risk management are stuck in unimaginative and reactive thinking. Considering today’s wide and interdependent array of risks, we can’t afford to be unimaginative, even though, as the astrobiologist Caleb Scharf points out, we risk getting imprisoned in a dangerous cognitive lockdown because of the magnitude of the task. “Indeed, we humans do seem to struggle in general when too many new things are thrown at us at once. Especially when those things are outside of our normal purview. Like, well, weird viruses or new climate patterns,” Scharf writes. “In the face of such things, we can simply go into a state of cognitive lockdown, flipping from one small piece of the problem to another and not quite building a cohesive whole.”

Imagination is precisely what is required to escape a state of “cognitive lockdown” and to build a “cohesive whole.” It gives us the capacity to dream up innovative solutions to successfully address the multitude of risks that confront us. For decades now, we’ve been destabilizing the world, having failed to imagine the consequences of our actions on our societies and our biosphere, and the way in which they are connected. Now, following this failure and the stark realization of what it has entailed, we need to do just the opposite: rely on the power of imagination to get us out of the holes we’ve dug ourselves into. It is incumbent upon us to imagine the contours of a more equitable and sustainable world. Imagination being boundless, the variety of social, economic, and political solutions is infinite.

With respect to the assertion that there are things we don’t imagine to be socially or politically possible, a recent book shows that nothing is preordained. We are in fact only bound by the power of our own imaginations. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow (an anthropologist and an archaeologist) prove this by showing that every imaginable form of social and economic organization has existed from the very beginning of humankind. Over the past 300,000 years, we’ve pursued knowledge, experimentation, happiness, development, freedom, and other human endeavors in myriad different ways. During these times that preceded our modern world, none of the arrangements that we devised to live together exhibited a single point of origin or an invariant pattern. Early societies were peaceful and violent, authoritarian and democratic, patriarchal and matriarchal, slaveholding and abolitionist, some moving between different types of organizations all the time, others not. Antique industrial cities were flourishing at the heart of empires while others existed in the absence of a sovereign entity…(More)”

Opening up Science—to Skeptics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Rohan R. Arcot  and Hunter Gehlbach: “Recently, the soaring trajectory of science skepticism seems to be rivaled only by global temperatures. Empirically established facts—around vaccines, elections, climate science, and the like—face potent headwinds. Despite the scientific consensus on these issues, much of the public remains unconvinced. In turn, science skepticism threatens our health, the health of our democracy, and the health of our planet.  

The research community is no stranger to skepticism. Its own members have been questioning the integrity of many scientific findings with particular intensity of late. In response, we have seen a swell of open science norms and practices, which provide greater transparency about key procedural details of the research process, mitigating many research skeptics’ misgivings. These open practices greatly facilitate how science is communicated—but only between scientists. 

Given the present historical moment’s critical need for science, we wondered: What if scientists allowed skeptics in the general public to look under the hood at how their studies were conducted? Could opening up the basic ideas of open science beyond scholars help combat the epidemic of science skepticism?  

Intrigued by this possibility, we sought a qualified skeptic and returned to Rohan’s father. If we could chaperone someone through a scientific journey—a person who could vicariously experience the key steps along the way—could our openness assuage their skepticism?…(More)”.

How to use the Civil Society Foresight report

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Dominique Barron, Rachel Coldicutt, Stephanie Pau, Anna Williams: “This report is for anyone making plans for the future.  In particular, we hope it will be a useful strategic tool for funders, civil society organisations, and policymakers who are developing strategies for long-term change. 

What is it? 

A way of looking ahead that makes it easier to see past the overwhelming present and focus on creating longer-term change. 

It highlights what is missing now; what is too dominant; and it shows that innovation is something driven by people, not technologies. 

How was it created?

The scenarios here were produced through a relational process. (More on that process in our report “A Constellation of Possible Futures”.) Our team brought together thirteen civil society leaders with lived, learned and practice experience; introduced them to some of the “official” futures created by management consultancies, trade bodies and banks (reports that focus on things like retail and transport and financial capital); and we then all participated in a workshop process that took us to 2036 and beyond. 

What does it cover?

The concepts explored in this report include the notion of care in a climate-altered world; a sketch of what happens when a nation welcomes migrants at scale; the psychological toll of social division; and the possible outcomes of technological breakdown. The outputs focussed on ways to reduce fear, overcome entrenched barriers, and increase spirituality and belonging. 

Importantly, the process never asked for agreement or utopia; instead, it held a space for tension, disagreement, and pragmatism. And it surfaced the strategic knowledge of expertise of people in civil society with a wide range of experience…(More)”.

Regulatory Technology for the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

White Paper by the World Economic Forum: “Regulation is central to government’s management of complex systems. However, if designed or applied ineffectively, regulation may trigger significant losses, impose unnecessary financial burdens and stifle innovation. Regulatory Technology (RegTech), is the application of new technological solutions to in set, effectuate and meet regulatory requirements. This white paper explores the value of RegTech through a series of case studies and identifies the 7 common success factors that help define best practice deployment of RegTech. It provides government and business with a roadmap to start implementing RegTech without having to upend or rewrite entire regulatory and compliance frameworks to begin the journey…(More)”.

Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Taylor Lorenz: “Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people seek to bypass content moderation filters on social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch.

Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.”

As the pandemic pushed more people to communicate and express themselves online, algorithmic content moderation systems have had an unprecedented impact on the words we choose, particularly on TikTok, and given rise to a new form of internet-driven Aesopian language.

Unlike other mainstream social platforms, the primary way content is distributed on TikTok is through an algorithmically curated “For You” page; having followers doesn’t guarantee people will see your content. This shift has led average users to tailor their videos primarily toward the algorithm, rather than a following, which means abiding by content moderation rules is more crucial than ever.

When the pandemic broke out, people on TikTok and other apps began referring to it as the “Backstreet Boys reunion tour” or calling it the “panini” or “panda express” as platforms down-ranked videos mentioning the pandemic by name in an effort to combat misinformation. When young people began to discuss struggling with mental health, they talked about “becoming unalive” in order to have frank conversations about suicide without algorithmic punishment. Sex workers, who have long been censored by moderation systems, refer to themselves on TikTok as “accountants” and use the corn emoji as a substitute for the word “porn.”

As discussions of major events are filtered through algorithmic content delivery systems, more users are bending their language. Recently, in discussing the invasion of Ukraine, people on YouTube and TikTok have used the sunflower emoji to signify the country. When encouraging fans to follow them elsewhere, users will say “blink in lio” for “link in bio.”

Euphemisms are especially common in radicalized or harmful communities. Pro-anorexia eating disorder communities have long adopted variations on moderated words to evade restrictions. One paper from the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology found that the complexity of such variants even increased over time. Last year, anti-vaccine groups on Facebook began changing their names to “dance party” or “dinner party” and anti-vaccine influencers on Instagram used similar code words, referring to vaccinated people as “swimmers.”

Tailoring language to avoid scrutiny predates the Internet. Many religions have avoided uttering the devil’s name lest they summon him, while people living in repressive regimes developed code words to discuss taboo topics…(More)”.