New book by Cass Sunstein: “Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood and ink has been spilt to establish and protect our rights to make them freely.
Choice can also be a burden. Our cognitive capacity to research and make the best decisions is limited, so every active choice comes at a cost. In modern life the requirement to make active choices can often be overwhelming. So, across broad areas of our lives, from health plans to energy suppliers, many of us choose not to choose. By following our default options, we save ourselves the costs of making active choices. By setting those options, governments and corporations dictate the outcomes for when we decide by default. This is among the most significant ways in which they effect social change, yet we are just beginning to understand the power and impact of default rules. Many central questions remain unanswered: When should governments set such defaults, and when should they insist on active choices? How should such defaults be made? What makes some defaults successful while others fail?….
The onset of big data gives corporations and governments the power to make ever more sophisticated decisions on our behalf, defaulting us to buy the goods we predictably want, or vote for the parties and policies we predictably support. As consumers we are starting to embrace the benefits this can bring. But should we? What will be the long-term effects of limiting our active choices on our agency? And can such personalized defaults be imported from the marketplace to politics and the law? Confronting the challenging future of data-driven decision-making, Sunstein presents a manifesto for how personalized defaults should be used to enhance, rather than restrict, our freedom and well-being. (More)”
The Epidemic of Facelessness
Stephen Marche in the New York Times: “….Every month brings fresh figuration to the sprawling, shifting Hieronymus Bosch canvas of faceless 21st-century contempt. Faceless contempt is not merely topical. It is increasingly the defining trait of topicality itself. Every day online provides its measure of empty outrage.
When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate…..
The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody feel something, anything. A simple comment can so easily be ignored. Rape threat? Not so much. Or, as Mr. Nunn so succinctly put it on Twitter: “If you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point in having them?”
The challenge of our moment is that the face has been at the root of justice and ethics for 2,000 years. The right to face an accuser is one of the very first principles of the law, described in the “confrontation clause” of the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution, but reaching back through English common law to ancient Rome. In Roman courts no man could be sentenced to death without first seeing his accuser. The precondition of any trial, of any attempt to reconcile competing claims, is that the victim and the accused look each other in the face.
For the great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with another’s face was the origin of identity — the reality of the other preceding the formation of the self. The face is the substance, not just the reflection, of the infinity of another person. And from the infinity of the face comes the sense of inevitable obligation, the possibility of discourse, the origin of the ethical impulse.
The connection between the face and ethical behavior is one of the exceedingly rare instances in which French phenomenology and contemporary neuroscience coincide in their conclusions. A 2009 study by Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, explained the connection: “Through imitation and mimicry, we are able to feel what other people feel. By being able to feel what other people feel, we are also able to respond compassionately to other people’s emotional states.” The face is the key to the sense of intersubjectivity, linking mimicry and empathy through mirror neurons — the brain mechanism that creates imitation even in nonhuman primates.
The connection goes the other way, too. Inability to see a face is, in the most direct way, inability to recognize shared humanity with another. In a metastudy of antisocial populations, the inability to sense the emotions on other people’s faces was a key correlation. There is “a consistent, robust link between antisocial behavior and impaired recognition of fearful facial affect. Relative to comparison groups, antisocial populations showed significant impairments in recognizing fearful, sad and surprised expressions.” A recent study in the Journal of Vision showed that babies between the ages of 4 months and 6 months recognized human faces at the same level as grown adults, an ability which they did not possess for other objects. …
The neurological research demonstrates that empathy, far from being an artificial construct of civilization, is integral to our biology. And when biological intersubjectivity disappears, when the face is removed from life, empathy and compassion can no longer be taken for granted.
The new facelessness hides the humanity of monsters and of victims both. Behind the angry tangles of wires, the question is, how do we see their faces again?
(More)”
Scenario Planning Case Studies Using Open Government Data
We present two case studies that demonstrate the utility of data integration and web mapping. As a simple proof of concept the user can explore different scenarios in each case study by indicating the relative weightings to be used for the decision making process. Both case studies are demonstrated as a publicly available interactive map-based website….(More)”
The Trouble With Disclosure: It Doesn’t Work
Jesse Eisinger at ProPublica: “Louis Brandeis was wrong. The lawyer and Supreme Court justice famously declared that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we have unquestioningly embraced that advice ever since.
All this sunlight is blinding. As new scholarship is demonstrating, the value of all this information is unproved. Paradoxically, disclosure can be useless — and sometimes actually harmful or counterproductive.
“We are doing disclosure as a regulatory move all over the board,” says Adam J. Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown, “The funny thing is, we are doing this despite very little evidence of its efficacy.”…
Of course, some disclosure works. Professor Levitin cites two examples. The first is an olfactory disclosure. Methane doesn’t have any scent, but a foul smell is added to alert people to a gas leak. The second is ATM. fees. A study in Australia showed that once fees were disclosed, people avoided the high-fee machines and took out more when they had to go to them.
But to Omri Ben-Shahar, co-author of a recent book, ” More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,” these are cherry-picked examples in a world awash in useless disclosures. Of course, information is valuable. But disclosure as a regulatory mechanism doesn’t work nearly well enough, he argues.
First, it really works only when things are simple. As soon as transactions become complex, disclosure starts to stumble. Buying a car, for instance, turns out to be several transactions: the purchase itself, the financing, maybe the trade-in of old car and various insurance and warranty decisions. These are all subject to various disclosure rules, but making the choices clear and useful has proved nigh impossible.
In complex transactions, we then must rely on intermediaries to give us advice. Because they are often conflicted, they, too, become subject to disclosure obligations. Ah, even more boilerplate to puzzle over!
And then there’s the harm. Over the years, banks that sold complex securities often stuck impossible-to-understand clauses deep in prospectuses that “disclosed” what was really going on. When the securities blew up, as they often did, banks then fended off lawsuits by arguing they had done everything the law required and were therefore not liable.
“That’s the harm of disclosure,” Professor Ben-Shahar said. “It provides a safe harbor for practices that smell bad. It sanitizes every bad practice.”
The anti-disclosure movement is taking on the ” Nudge” school, embraced by the Obama administration and promoted most prominently by Cass R. Sunstein, a scholar at Harvard, and Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago. These nudgers believe that small policies will prod people to do what’s in their best interests.
The real-world evidence in favor of nudging is thin. …
The ever-alluring notion is that we are just one or two changes away from having meaningful disclosure. If we could only have annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings in plain English, we could finally understand what’s going on at corporations. A University of San Diego Law School professor, Frank Partnoy, and I called for better bank disclosure in an article in The Atlantic a few years ago.
Professor Ben-Shahar mocks it. ” ‘Plain English!’ ‘Make it simple.’ That is the deus ex machina, the god that will solve everything,” he said.
Complex things are, sadly, complex. A mortgage is not an easy transaction to understand. People are not good at predicting their future behavior and so don’t know what options are best for them. “The project of simplification is facing a very poor empirical track record and very powerful theoretical problem,” he said.
What to do instead? Hard and fast rules. If lawmakers want to end a bad practice, ban it. Having them admit it is not enough. (More)”
“We are doing disclosure as a regulatory move all over the board,” says Adam J. Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown, “The funny thing is, we are doing this despite very little evidence of its efficacy.”…
Of course, some disclosure works. Professor Levitin cites two examples. The first is an olfactory disclosure. Methane doesn’t have any scent, but a foul smell is added to alert people to a gas leak. The second is ATM. fees. A study in Australia showed that once fees were disclosed, people avoided the high-fee machines and took out more when they had to go to them.
But to Omri Ben-Shahar, co-author of a recent book, ” More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,” these are cherry-picked examples in a world awash in useless disclosures. Of course, information is valuable. But disclosure as a regulatory mechanism doesn’t work nearly well enough, he argues.
First, it really works only when things are simple. As soon as transactions become complex, disclosure starts to stumble. Buying a car, for instance, turns out to be several transactions: the purchase itself, the financing, maybe the trade-in of old car and various insurance and warranty decisions. These are all subject to various disclosure rules, but making the choices clear and useful has proved nigh impossible.
In complex transactions, we then must rely on intermediaries to give us advice. Because they are often conflicted, they, too, become subject to disclosure obligations. Ah, even more boilerplate to puzzle over!
And then there’s the harm. Over the years, banks that sold complex securities often stuck impossible-to-understand clauses deep in prospectuses that “disclosed” what was really going on. When the securities blew up, as they often did, banks then fended off lawsuits by arguing they had done everything the law required and were therefore not liable.
“That’s the harm of disclosure,” Professor Ben-Shahar said. “It provides a safe harbor for practices that smell bad. It sanitizes every bad practice.”
The anti-disclosure movement is taking on the ” Nudge” school, embraced by the Obama administration and promoted most prominently by Cass R. Sunstein, a scholar at Harvard, and Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago. These nudgers believe that small policies will prod people to do what’s in their best interests.
The real-world evidence in favor of nudging is thin. …
The ever-alluring notion is that we are just one or two changes away from having meaningful disclosure. If we could only have annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings in plain English, we could finally understand what’s going on at corporations. A University of San Diego Law School professor, Frank Partnoy, and I called for better bank disclosure in an article in The Atlantic a few years ago.
Professor Ben-Shahar mocks it. ” ‘Plain English!’ ‘Make it simple.’ That is the deus ex machina, the god that will solve everything,” he said.
Complex things are, sadly, complex. A mortgage is not an easy transaction to understand. People are not good at predicting their future behavior and so don’t know what options are best for them. “The project of simplification is facing a very poor empirical track record and very powerful theoretical problem,” he said.
What to do instead? Hard and fast rules. If lawmakers want to end a bad practice, ban it. Having them admit it is not enough. (More)”
Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2014
Book edited O’Hara, K. , Nguyen, M-H.C., Haynes, P.: “Tracking the evolution of digital technology is no easy task; changes happen so fast that keeping pace presents quite a challenge. This is, nevertheless, the aim of the Digital Enlightenment Yearbook.
This book is the third in the series which began in 2012 under the auspices of the Digital Enlightenment Forum. This year, the focus is on the relationship of individuals with their networks, and explores “Social networks and social machines, surveillance and empowerment”. In what is now the well-established tradition of the yearbook, different stakeholders in society and various disciplinary communities (technology, law, philosophy, sociology, economics, policymaking) bring their very different opinions and perspectives to bear on this topic.
The book is divided into four parts: the individual as data manager; the individual, society and the market; big data and open data; and new approaches. These are bookended by a Prologue and an Epilogue, which provide illuminating perspectives on the discussions in between. The division of the book is not definitive; it suggests one narrative, but others are clearly possible.
The 2014 Digital Enlightenment Yearbook gathers together the science, social science, law and politics of the digital environment in order to help us reformulate and address the timely and pressing questions which this new environment raises. We are all of us affected by digital technology, and the subjects covered here are consequently of importance to us all. (Contents)”
How Network Science Is Changing Our Understanding of Law
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “One of the more fascinating areas of science that has emerged in recent years is the study of networks and their application to everyday life. It turns out that many important properties of our world are governed by networks with very specific properties.
These networks are not random by any means. Instead, they are often connected in the now famous small world pattern in which any part of the network can be reached in a relatively small number of steps. These kinds of networks lie behind many natural phenomena such as earthquakes, epidemics and forest fires and are equally ubiquitous in social phenomena such as the spread of fashions, languages, and even wars.
So it should come as no surprise that the same kind of network should exist in the legal world. Today, Marios Koniaris and pals at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece show that the network of links between laws follows exactly the same pattern. They say their network approach provides a unique insight into the nature of the law, the way it has emerged and how changes may influence it in the future.
The work of Koniaris and co focuses entirely on the law associated with the European Union. They begin by pointing out that this legal network is different from many other types of networks in two important ways….
The network can also be using for visualizing the nature of the legal world. It reveals clusters and related connections and can help legislators determine the effect of proposed changes…..It also shows how network science is spreading to every corner of scientific and social research.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1501.05237 : Network Analysis In The Legal Domain: A Complex Model For European Union Legal Sources”
Waze a danger to cops? Police reveal their own location on social media
The Cathedral of Computation
at the Atlantic: “We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy. Algorithms are everywhere, supposedly. We are living in an “algorithmic culture,” to use the author and communication scholar Ted Striphas’s name for it. Google’s search algorithms determine how we access information. Facebook’s News Feed algorithms determine how we socialize. Netflix’s and Amazon’s collaborative filtering algorithms choose products and media for us. You hear it everywhere. “Google announced a change to its algorithm,” a journalist reports. “We live in a world run by algorithms,” a TED talk exhorts. “Algorithms rule the world,” a news report threatens. Another upgrades rule to dominion: “The 10 Algorithms that Dominate Our World.”…
It’s part of a larger trend. The scientific revolution was meant to challenge tradition and faith, particularly a faith in religious superstition. But today, Enlightenment ideas like reason and science are beginning to flip into their opposites. Science and technology have become so pervasive and distorted, they have turned into a new type of theology.
The worship of the algorithm is hardly the only example of the theological reversal of the Enlightenment—for another sign, just look at the surfeit of nonfiction books promising insights into “The Science of…” anything, from laughter to marijuana. But algorithms hold a special station in the new technological temple because computers have become our favorite idols….
Once you adopt skepticism toward the algorithmic- and the data-divine, you can no longer construe any computational system as merely algorithmic. Think about Google Maps, for example. It’s not just mapping software running via computer—it also involves geographical information systems, geolocation satellites and transponders, human-driven automobiles, roof-mounted panoramic optical recording systems, international recording and privacy law, physical- and data-network routing systems, and web/mobile presentational apparatuses. That’s not algorithmic culture—it’s just, well, culture….(More).”
The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?
Jill Lepore in The New Yorker: “….The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. ….Web pages don’t have to be deliberately deleted to disappear. Sites hosted by corporations tend to die with their hosts. When MySpace, GeoCities, and Friendster were reconfigured or sold, millions of accounts vanished. …
The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,” and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.
The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?… (More)”.
Open Data Barometer (second edition)
The second edition of the Open Data Barometer: “A global movement to make government “open by default” picked up steam in 2013 when the G8 leaders signed an Open Data Charter – promising to make public sector data openly available, without charge and in re-useable formats. In 2014 the G20 largest industrial economies followed up by pledging to advance open data as a tool against corruption, and the UN recognized the need for a “Data Revolution” to achieve global development goals.
However, this second edition of the Open Data Barometer shows that there is still a long way to go to put the power of data in the hands of citizens. Core data on how governments are spending our money and how public services are performing remains inaccessible or paywalled in most countries. Information critical to fight corruption and promote fair competition, such as company registers, public sector contracts, and land titles, is even harder to get. In most countries, proactive disclosure of government data is not mandated in law or policy as part of a wider right to information, and privacy protections are weak or uncertain.
Our research suggests some of the key steps needed to ensure the “Data Revolution” will lead to a genuine revolution in the transparency and performance of governments:
However, this second edition of the Open Data Barometer shows that there is still a long way to go to put the power of data in the hands of citizens. Core data on how governments are spending our money and how public services are performing remains inaccessible or paywalled in most countries. Information critical to fight corruption and promote fair competition, such as company registers, public sector contracts, and land titles, is even harder to get. In most countries, proactive disclosure of government data is not mandated in law or policy as part of a wider right to information, and privacy protections are weak or uncertain.
Our research suggests some of the key steps needed to ensure the “Data Revolution” will lead to a genuine revolution in the transparency and performance of governments:
- High-level political commitment to proactive disclosure of public sector data, particularly the data most critical to accountability
- Sustained investment in supporting and training a broad cross-section of civil society and entrepreneurs to understand and use data effectively
- Contextualizing open data tools and approaches to local needs, for example by making data visually accessible in countries with lower literacy levels.
- Support for city-level open data initiatives as a complement to national-level programmes
- Legal reform to ensure that guarantees of the right to information and the right to privacy underpin open data initiatives
Over the next six months, world leaders have several opportunities to agree these steps, starting with the United Nation’s high-level data revolution in Africa conference in March, Canada’s global International Open Data Conference in May and the G7 summit in Germany this June. It is crucial that these gatherings result in concrete actions to address the political and resource barriers that threaten to stall open data efforts….(More)”.