Paper by Alexander Ronzhyn and Maria A. Wimmer: “With the increased availability of data and the capacity to make sense of these data, computational approaches to analyze, model and simulate public policy evolved toward viable instruments to deliberate, plan, and evaluate them in different areas of application. Such examples include infrastructure, mobility, monetary, or austerity policies, policies on different aspects of societies (health, pandemic, skills, inclusion, etc.). Technological advances along with the evolution of theoretical models and frameworks open valuable opportunities, while at the same time, posing new challenges. The paper investigates the current state of research in the domain and aims at identifying the most pressing areas for future research. This is done through both literature research of policy modeling and the analysis of research and innovation projects that either focus on policy modeling or involve it as a significant component of the research design. In the paper, 16 recent projects involving the keyword policy modeling were analyzed. The majority of projects concern the application of policy modeling to a specific domain or area of interest, while several projects tackled the cross-cutting topics (risk and crisis management). The detailed analysis of the projects led to topics of future research in the domain of policy modeling. Most prominent future research topics in policy modeling include stakeholder involvement approaches, applicability of research results, handling complexity of models, integration of models from different modeling and simulation paradigms and approaches, visualization of simulation results, real-time data processing, and scalability. These aspects require further research to appropriately contribute to further advance the field….(More)”.
A New Tool Shows How Google Results Vary Around the World
Article by Tom Simonite: “Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has earned it an aura of objectivity. Its dominance in search, and the disappearance of most competitors, make its lists of links appear still more canonical. An experimental new interface for Google Search aims to remove that mantle of neutrality.
Search Atlas makes it easy to see how Google offers different responses to the same query on versions of its search engine offered in different parts of the world. The research project reveals how Google’s service can reflect or amplify cultural differences or government preferences—such as whether Beijing’s Tiananmen Square should be seen first as a sunny tourist attraction or the site of a lethal military crackdown on protesters.
Divergent results like that show how the idea of search engines as neutral is a myth, says Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student in science, technology, and society at MIT and cocreator of Search Atlas. “Any attempt to quantify relevance necessarily encodes moral and political priorities,” Ochigame says.
Ochigame built Search Atlas with Katherine Ye, a computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research.
Just like Google’s homepage, the main feature of Search Atlas is a blank box. But instead of returning a single column of results, the site displays three lists of links, from different geographic versions of Google Search selected from the more than 100 the company offers. Search Atlas automatically translates a query to the default languages of each localized edition using Google Translate.
Ochigame and Ye say the design reveals “information borders” created by the way Google’s search technology ranks web pages, presenting different slices of reality to people in different locations or using different languages.
When they used their tool to do an image search on “Tiananmen Square,” the UK and Singaporean versions of Google returned images of tanks and soldiers quashing the 1989 student protests. When the same query was sent to a version of Google tuned for searches from China, which can be accessed by circumventing the country’s Great Firewall, the results showed recent, sunny images of the square, smattered with tourists.
Google’s search engine has been blocked in China since 2010, when the company said it would stop censoring topics the government deemed sensitive, such as the Tiananmen massacre. Search Atlas suggests that the China edition of the company’s search engine can reflect the Chinese government’s preferences all the same. That pattern could result in part from how the corpus of web pages from any language or region would reflect cultural priorities and pressures….(More)”
Guide on Geospatial Data Integration in Official Statistics
Report by PARIS21: “National geospatial integration agencies can provide detailed, timely and relevant data about people, businesses, buildings, infrastructures, agriculture, natural resources and anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere. There is a clear benefit to integrating geospatial data into traditional national statistical systems. Together they provide a very clear picture of the social, economic and environmental issues that underpin sustainable development and allow for more informed policy making. But the question is where to start?
This new PARIS21 publication provides a practical guide, based on five principles for national statistics offices to form stronger partnerships with national geospatial integration agencies….(More)”.
The tyranny of spreadsheets
Tim Harford at the Financial Times: “Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I might be able to explain it. Nearly 16,000 positive Covid cases had disappeared completely from the UK’s contact tracing system. These were 16,000 people who should have been warned they were infected and a danger to others, 16,000 cases contact tracers should have been running down to figure out where the infected went, who they met and who else might be at risk. None of which was happening. Why had the cases disappeared? Apparently, Microsoft Excel had run out of numbers.
It was an astonishing story that would, in time, lead me to delve into the history of accountancy, epidemiology and vaccination, discuss file formatting with Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, and even trace the aftershocks of the collapse of Enron. But above all, it was a story that would teach me about the way we take numbers for granted….
The origin of Excel can be traced back far further than that of Microsoft. In the late 1300s, the need for a solid system for accounts was evident in the outbursts of one man in particular, an Italian textile merchant named Francesco di Marco Datini. Poor Datini was surrounded by fools.
“You cannot see a crow in a bowlful of milk!” he berated one associate.
“You could lose your way from your nose to your mouth!” he chided another.
Iris Origo’s vivid book The Merchant of Prato describes Datini’s everyday life and explains his problem: keeping track of everything in a complicated world. By the end of the 14th century, merchants such as Datini had progressed from mere travelling salesmen able to keep track of profits by patting their purses. They were now in charge of sophisticated operations.
Datini, for example, ordered wool from the island of Mallorca two years before the sheep had even grown it, a hedge to account for the numerous subcontractors that would process it before it became beautiful rolls of dyed cloth. The supply chain between shepherd and consumer stretched across Barcelona, Pisa, Venice, Valencia, North Africa and back to Mallorca. It took four years between the initial order of wool and the final sale of cloth.
No wonder Datini insisted on absolute clarity about where his product was at any moment, not to mention his money. How did he manage? Spreadsheets…(More)”
Seek diversity to solve complexity
Katrin Prager at Nature: “As a social scientist, I know that one person cannot solve a societal problem on their own — and even a group of very intelligent people will struggle to do it. But we can boost our chances of success if we ensure not only that the team members are intelligent, but also that the team itself is highly diverse.
By ‘diverse’ I mean demographic diversity encompassing things such as race, gender identity, class, ethnicity, career stage and age, and cognitive diversity, including differences in thoughts, insights, disciplines, perspectives, frames of reference and thinking styles. And the team needs to be purposely diverse instead of arbitrarily diverse.
In my work I focus on complex world problems, such as how to sustainably manage our natural resources and landscapes, and I’ve found that it helps to deliberately assemble diverse teams. This effort requires me to be aware of the different ways in which people can be diverse, and to reflect on my own preferences and biases. Sometimes the teams might not be as diverse as I’d like. But I’ve found that making the effort not only to encourage diversity, but also to foster better understanding between team members reaps dividends….(more)”
Media Is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving beyond Blame
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
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
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
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
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)”.