It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeynep Tufekci in Wired: “…In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes….

The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.

These tactics usually don’t break any laws or set off any First Amendment alarm bells. But they all serve the same purpose that the old forms of censorship did: They are the best available tools to stop ideas from spreading and gaining purchase. They can also make the big platforms a terrible place to interact with other people.

Even when the big platforms themselves suspend or boot someone off their networks for violating “community standards”—an act that doeslook to many people like old-fashioned censorship—it’s not technically an infringement on free speech, even if it is a display of immense platform power. Anyone in the world can still read what the far-right troll Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet has to say on the internet. What Twitter has denied him, by kicking him off, is attention.

Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

This is not a call for nostalgia. In the past, marginalized voices had a hard time reaching a mass audience at all. They often never made it past the gatekeepers who put out the evening news, who worked and lived within a few blocks of one another in Manhattan and Washington, DC. The best that dissidents could do, often, was to engineer self-sacrificing public spectacles that those gatekeepers would find hard to ignore—as US civil rights leaders did when they sent schoolchildren out to march on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, drawing out the most naked forms of Southern police brutality for the cameras.

But back then, every political actor could at least see more or less what everyone else was seeing. Today, even the most powerful elites often cannot effectively convene the right swath of the public to counter viral messages. …(More)”.

Artificial intelligence and smart cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Michael Batty at Urban Analytics and City Sciences: “…The notion of the smart city of course conjures up these images of such an automated future. Much of our thinking about this future, certainly in the more popular press, is about everything ranging from the latest App on our smart phones to driverless cars while somewhat deeper concerns are about efficiency gains due to the automation of services ranging from transit to the delivery of energy. There is no doubt that routine and repetitive processes – algorithms if you like – are improving at an exponential rate in terms of the data they can process and the speed of execution, faithfully following Moore’s Law.

Pattern recognition techniques that lie at the basis of machine learning are highly routinized iterative schemes where the pattern in question – be it a signature, a face, the environment around a driverless car and so on – is computed as an elaborate averaging procedure which takes a series of elements of the pattern and weights them in such a way that the pattern can be reproduced perfectly by the combinations of elements of the original pattern and the weights. This is in essence the way neural networks work. When one says that they ‘learn’ and that the current focus is on ‘deep learning’, all that is meant is that with complex patterns and environments, many layers of neurons (elements of the pattern) are defined and the iterative procedures are run until there is a convergence with the pattern that is to be explained. Such processes are iterative, additive and not much more than sophisticated averaging but using machines that can operate virtually at the speed of light and thus process vast volumes of big data. When these kinds of algorithm can be run in real time and many already can be, then there is the prospect of many kinds of routine behaviour being displaced. It is in this sense that AI might herald in an era of truly disruptive processes. This according to Brynjolfsson and McAfee is beginning to happen as we reach the second half of the chess board.

The real issue in terms of AI involves problems that are peculiarly human. Much of our work is highly routinized and many of our daily actions and decisions are based on relatively straightforward patterns of stimulus and response. The big questions involve the extent to which those of our behaviours which are not straightforward can be automated. In fact, although machines are able to beat human players in many board games and there is now the prospect of machines beating the very machines that were originally designed to play against humans, the real power of AI may well come from collaboratives of man and machine, working together, rather than ever more powerful machines working by themselves. In the last 10 years, some of my editorials have tracked what is happening in the real-time city – the smart city as it is popularly called – which has become key to many new initiatives in cities. In fact, cities – particularly big cities, world cities – have become the flavour of the month but the focus has not been on their long-term evolution but on how we use them on a minute by minute to week by week basis.

Many of the patterns that define the smart city on these short-term cycles can be predicted using AI largely because they are highly routinized but even for highly routine patterns, there are limits on the extent to which we can explain them and reproduce them. Much advancement in AI within the smart city will come from automation of the routine, such as the use of energy, the delivery of location-based services, transit using information being fed to operators and travellers in real time and so on. I think we will see some quite impressive advances in these areas in the next decade and beyond. But the key issue in urban planning is not just this short term but the long term and it is here that the prospects for AI are more problematic….(More)”.

Using new data sources for policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Technical report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission: “… synthesises the results of our work on using new data sources for policy-making. It reflects a recent shift from more general considerations in the area of Big Data to a more dedicated investigation of Citizen Science, and it summarizes the state of play. With this contribution, we start promoting Citizen Science as an integral component of public participation in policy in Europe.

The particular need to focus on the citizen dimension emerged due to (i) the increasing interest in the topic from policy Directorate-Generals (DGs) of the European Commission (EC); (ii) the considerable socio-economic impact policy making has on citizens’ life and society as a whole; and (iii) the clear potentiality of citizens’ contributions to increase the relevance of policy making and the effectiveness of policies when addressing societal challenges.

We explicitly concentrate on Citizen Science (or public participation in scientific research) as a way to engage people in practical work, and to develop a mutual understanding between the participants from civil society, research institutions and the public sector by working together on a topic that is of common interest.

Acknowledging this new priority, this report concentrates on the topic of Citizen Science and presents already ongoing collaborations and recent achievements. The presented work particularly addresses environment-related policies, Open Science and aspects of Better Regulation. We then introduce the six phases of the ‘cyclic value chain of Citizen Science’ as a concept to frame citizen engagement in science for policy. We use this structure in order to detail the benefits and challenges of existing approaches – building on the lessons that we learned so far from our own practical work and thanks to the knowledge exchange from third parties. After outlining additional related policy areas, we sketch the future work that is required in order to overcome the identified challenges, and translate them into actions for ourselves and our partners.

Next steps include the following:

 Develop a robust methodology for data collection, analysis and use of Citizen Science for EU policy;

 Provide a platform as an enabling framework for applying this methodology to different policy areas, including the provision of best practices;

 Offer guidelines for policy DGs in order to promote the use of Citizen Science for policy in Europe;

 Experiment and evaluate possibilities of overarching methodologies for citizen engagement in science and policy, and their case specifics; and

 Continue to advance interoperability and knowledge sharing between currently disconnected communities of practise. …(More)”.

Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Davison Hunter in The Hedgehog Review: “…while institutions tend to be stable and enduring, even as they evolve, no institution is permanent or indefinitely fixable. The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed. What if the political problems we are rightly worried about are actually symptoms of a deeper problem for which there is no easy or obvious remedy?

These are necessarily historical questions. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America were largely products of the Enlightenment project, reflecting all of its highest ideals, contradictions, hopes, and inconsistencies. It underwrote the project of modern liberalism, which, for all of its flaws and failures, can still boast of some of the greatest achievements in human history. As the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, observed, democracy is the political form of the humane ideal.

Yet with the advantage of twenty-first-century hindsight, we can now see that the Enlightenment project has been unraveling for some time, and that what we are witnessing today are likely the political consequences of that unraveling. Any possibility of “fixing” what ails late-modern American democracy has to take the full measure of this transformation in the deep structures of American and Western political culture. While politics can give expression to and defend a particular social order, it cannot direct it. As Michael Oakeshott famously said, “Political activity may have given us Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of these documents, which came from a stratum of social thought far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians.”1

What I am driving at is made clearer by the distinction between the politics of culture and the culture of politics. The politics of culture refers to the contestation of power over cultural issues. This would include the mobilization of parties and rank-and-file support, the organization of leadership, the formation of special-interest coalitions, and the manipulation of public rhetoric on matters reflecting the symbols or ideals at the heart of a group’s collective identity. This is what most people think about when they use the term culture war. In this case, culture war is the accumulation of political conflicts over issues like abortion, gay rights, or federal funding of the humanities and arts. Though culture is implicated at every level, the politics of culture is primarily about politics.

The culture of politics, by contrast, refers to the symbolic environment in which political institutions are embedded and political action occurs. This symbolic environment is constituted by the basic frameworks of implicit meaning that make particular political arrangements understandable or incomprehensible, desirable or reprehensible. These frameworks constitute a culture’s “deep structure.” Absent a deep structure, certain political institutions and practices simply do not make any sense.

This distinction is essential to making sense of our political moment….(More)”.

Choice Architecture: A new approach to behavior, design, and wellness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Avani Parikh and Prashant Parikh: “From Vitruvius in the 1st century BCE on, there has been an attempt to understand how architecture works, especially in its poetic aspect but also in its basic functions. Design can encourage us to walk, to experience community, to imagine new ways of being, and can affect countless other choices we make that shape our health and happiness.

Using the ideas of rational choice theory and behavioral economics, Choice Architecture shows how behavior, design, and wellness are deeply interconnected. As active agents, we choose our responses to the architectural meanings we encounter based on our perception of our individual contexts. The book offers a way to approach the design of spaces for human flourishing and explains in rich detail how the potential of the built environment to influence our well-being can be realized….(More)”.

Innovation Contests: How to Engage Citizens in Solving Urban Problems?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Sarah Hartmann, Agnes Mainka and Wolfgang G. Stock in Enhancing Knowledge Discovery and Innovation in the Digital Era: “Cities all over the world are challenged with problems evolving from increasing urbanity, population growth, and density. For example, one prominent issue that is addressed in many cities is mobility. To develop smart city solutions, governments are trying to introduce open innovation. They have started to open their governmental and city related data as well as awake the citizens’ awareness on urban problems through innovation contests.

Citizens are the users of the city and therefore, have a practical motivation to engage in innovation contests as for example in hackathons and app competitions. The collaboration and co-creation of civic services by means of innovation contests is a cultural development of how governments and citizens work together in an open governmental environment. A qualitative analysis of innovation contests in 24 world cities reveals this global trend. In particular, such events increase the awareness of citizens and local businesses for identifying and solving urban challenges and are helpful means to transfer the smart city idea into practicable solutions….(More)”.

Research reveals de-identified patient data can be re-identified

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vanessa Teague, Chris Culnane and Ben Rubinstein in PhysOrg: “In August 2016, Australia’s federal Department of Health published medical billing records of about 2.9 million Australians online. These records came from the Medicare Benefits Scheme (MBS) and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) containing 1 billion lines of historical health data from the records of around 10 per cent of the population.

These longitudinal records were de-identified, a process intended to prevent a person’s identity from being connected with information, and were made public on the government’s open data website as part of its policy on accessible public …

We found that patients can be re-identified, without decryption, through a process of linking the unencrypted parts of the  with known information about the individual.

Our findings replicate those of similar studies of other de-identified datasets:

  • A few mundane facts taken together often suffice to isolate an individual.
  • Some patients can be identified by name from publicly available information.
  • Decreasing the precision of the data, or perturbing it statistically, makes re-identification gradually harder at a substantial cost to utility.

The first step is examining a patient’s uniqueness according to medical procedures such as childbirth. Some individuals are unique given public information, and many patients are unique given a few basic facts, such as year of birth or the date a baby was delivered….

The second step is examining uniqueness according to the characteristics of commercial datasets we know of but cannot access directly. There are high uniqueness rates that would allow linking with a commercial pharmaceutical dataset, and with the billing data available to a bank. This means that ordinary people, not just the prominent ones, may be easily re-identifiable by their bank or insurance company…

These de-identification methods were bound to fail, because they were trying to achieve two inconsistent aims: the protection of individual privacy and publication of detailed individual records. De-identification is very unlikely to work for other rich datasets in the government’s care, like census data, tax records, mental health records, penal information and Centrelink data.

While the ambition of making more data more easily available to facilitate research, innovation and sound public policy is a good one, there is an important technical and procedural problem to solve: there is no good solution for publishing sensitive complex individual records that protects privacy without substantially degrading the usefulness of the data.

Some data can be safely published online, such as information about government, aggregations of large collections of material, or data that is differentially private. For sensitive, complex data about individuals, a much more controlled release in a secure research environment is a better solution. The Productivity Commission recommends a “trusted user” model, and techniques like dynamic consent also give patients greater control and visibility over their personal information….(More).

Disrupting Democracy: Point. Click. Transform.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Anthony T. Silberfeld: “In January 2017, the Bertelsmann Foundation embarked on a nine-month journey to explore how digital innovation impacts democracies and societies around the world. This voyage included more than 40,000 miles in the air, thousands of miles on the ground and hundreds of interviews.

From the rival capitals of Washington and Havana to the bustling streets of New Delhi; the dynamic tech startups in Tel Aviv to the efficient order of Berlin, this book focuses on key challenges that have emerged as a result of technological disruption and offers potential lessons to other nations situated at various points along the technological and democratic spectra.

Divided into six chapters, this book provides two perspectives on each of our five case studies (India, Cuba, the United States, Israel and Germany) followed by polling data collected on demographics, digital access and political engagement from four of these countries.

The global political environment is constantly evolving, and it is clear that technology is accelerating that process for better and, in some cases, for worse. Disrupting Democracy attempts to sort through these changes to give policymakers and citizens information that will help them navigate this increasingly volatile world….(More)”.

‘Big Data’ Tells Thailand More About Jobs Than Low Unemployment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Suttinee Yuvejwattana at Bloomberg: “Thailand has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world, which doesn’t always fit the picture of an emerging-market economy that’s struggling to get growth going.

 To get a fuller picture of what’s happening in the labor market — as well as in other under-reported industries in the economy, like the property market — the central bank is increasingly turning to “big data” sources drawn from social media and online stores to supplement official figures.

The Bank of Thailand is building its own employment index based on data from online jobs-search portals and is also creating a property indicator to give it a better sense of supply and demand in the housing market.

“We want to do evidence-based policy so big data is useful,” Jaturong Jantarangs, an assistant governor at the Bank of Thailand, said in an interview in Bangkok. “It’s not only a benefit to monetary policy but financial policy as well.”…

“Official data can’t capture the whole picture of the economy,” said Somprawin Manprasert, Bangkok-based head of research at Bank of Ayudhya Pcl. “We have a big informal sector. Many people are self-employed. This leads to a low unemployment rate.”

“The big data can show all aspects, so it can help us to solve the problems where they are,” he said…

Thailand’s military administration is also trying to harness big data to improve policy decisions, Digital Economy and Society Minister Pichet Durongkaveroj said in an interview last month. Pichet said he’s been tasked to look into digitizing, integrating and analyzing information across more than 200 government departments.

Santitarn Sathirathai, head of emerging Asia economics at Credit Suisse Group AG in Singapore, said big data analytics can be used to better target policy responses as well as allow timely evaluation of past programs. At the same time, he called on authorities to make their data more readily available to the public.

“The government should not just view big data analytics as being solely about it using richer data but also about creating a more open data environment,” he said. That’s to ensure “people can have better access to many government non-sensitive datasets and help conduct analysis that could complement the policy makers,” he said….(More)”.

How Blockchain Technology Is Helping Syrian Refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Siobhan Kenna at the Huffpost: “Azraq Refugee Camp is a 15 kilometre-wide sea of corrugated aluminium houses in the heart of the vast Jordanian desert. The people that live there are detained by the barbed wire that surrounds the entire complex which is located an hour and a half from the country’s capital city, Amman….

From within the strange environment of the camp and the indistinct future, lies a bastion of normalcy for these people — the supermarket.

In the refugee camp the supermarket is much more than a place to shop or purchase food though: Here it is a vital fibre in the social fabric of a makeshift community….

It’s unbelievable to think then, that a place that is so remote and isolated could be home to a world first initiative involving the emerging Blockchain technology.

The Building Blocks Project is the brain child of Houman Haddad, Regional CBT Advisor for United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The project aims to make cash-based transactions between the WFP and the beneficiary faster, cheaper and more secure.

Prior to the project’s launch at the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan in May 2017, it was first trialled in Pakistan and also in King Abduallah Park Refugee Camp as a means of testing the robustness of the technology. On May 31st 2017 the pilot in Azraq was extended indefinitely.

Traditionally, payments are made to refugees from the WFP via a third party financial service provider. The entity could be a bank, mobile monetary company or something similar and the WFP instructs the financial service provider to credit some of the funds to the refugee so they can spend it at the supermarket or elsewhere.

On top of that, the WFP also needs to transfer the funds to the third party so they can actually pay the beneficiary. Sounds complicated right? Well, the Building Blocks Project aims to eliminate reliance on a third party and with this comes plenty of savings.

“So, what we have done is essentially replaced that financial service provider with the Blockchain,” Houman Haddad told HuffPost Australia.

“So instead of having someone else create virtual accounts and credit functions and so on and so forth, we create the virtual account on the Blockchain for beneficiaries, we upload entitlements to them, and currently in the supermarket where they go, the supermarket requests an authorisation code for transactions from the Blockchain as opposed to the bank….(More)”.