Academic freedom and democracy in African countries: the first study to track the connection

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Liisa Laakso: “There is growing interest in the state of academic freedom worldwide. A 1997 Unesco document defines it as the right of scholars to teach, discuss, research, publish, express opinions about systems and participate in academic bodies. Academic freedom is a cornerstone of education and knowledge.

Yet there is surprisingly little empirical research on the actual impact of academic freedom. Comparable measurements have also been scarce. It was only in 2020 that a worldwide index of academic freedom was launched by the Varieties of Democracy database, V-Dem, in collaboration with the Scholars at Risk Network….

My research has been on the political science discipline in African universities and its role in political developments on the continent. As part of this project, I have investigated the impact of academic freedom in the post-Cold War democratic transitions in Africa.

A study I published with the Tunisian economist Hajer Kratou showed that academic freedom has a significant positive effect on democracy, when democracy is measured by indicators such as the quality of elections and executive accountability.

However, the time factor is significant. Countries with high levels of academic freedom before and at the time of their democratic transition showed high levels of democracy even 5, 10 and 15 years later. In contrast, the political situation was more likely to deteriorate in countries where academic freedom was restricted at the time of transition. The impact of academic freedom was greatest in low-income countries….(More)”

OSTP Issues Guidance to Make Federally Funded Research Freely Available Without Delay

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) updated U.S. policy guidance to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. In a memorandum to federal departments and agencies, Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of OSTP, delivered guidance for agencies to update their public access policies as soon as possible to make publications and research funded by taxpayers publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost. All agencies will fully implement updated policies, including ending the optional 12-month embargo, no later than December 31, 2025.

This policy will likely yield significant benefits on a number of key priorities for the American people, from environmental justice to cancer breakthroughs, and from game-changing clean energy technologies to protecting civil liberties in an automated world.

For years, President Biden has been committed to delivering policy based on the best available science, and to working to ensure the American people have access to the findings of that research. “Right now, you work for years to come up with a significant breakthrough, and if you do, you get to publish a paper in one of the top journals,” said then-Vice President Biden in remarks to the American Association for Cancer Research in 2016. “For anyone to get access to that publication, they have to pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars to subscribe to a single journal. And here’s the kicker — the journal owns the data for a year. The taxpayers fund $5 billion a year in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of that taxpayer-funded research sits behind walls. Tell me how this is moving the process along more rapidly.” The new public access guidance was developed with the input of multiple federal agencies over the course of this year, to enable progress on a number of Biden-Harris Administration priorities.

“When research is widely available to other researchers and the public, it can save lives, provide policymakers with the tools to make critical decisions, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society,” said Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of OSTP. “The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually. There should be no delay or barrier between the American public and the returns on their investments in research.”..(More)“.

U.S. Government Effort to Tap Private Weather Data Moves Along Slowly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Isabelle Bousquette: “The U.S. government’s six-year-old effort to improve its weather forecasting ability by purchasing data from private-sector satellite companies has started to show results, although the process is moving more slowly than anticipated.

After a period of testing, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a scientific, service and regulatory arm of the Commerce Department, began purchasing data from two satellite companies, Spire Global Inc. of Vienna, Va., and GeoOptics Inc. of Pasadena, Calif.

The weather data from these two companies fills gaps in coverage left by NOAA’s own satellites, the agency said. NOAA also began testing data from a third company this year.

Beyond these companies, new entrants to the field offering weather data based on a broader range of technologies have been slow to emerge, the agency said.

“We’re getting a subset of what we hoped,” said Dan St. Jean, deputy director of the Office of System Architecture and Advanced Planning at NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service.

NOAA’s weather forecasts help the government formulate hurricane evacuation plans and make other important decisions. The agency began seeking out private sources of satellite weather data in 2016. The idea was to find a more cost-effective alternative to funding NOAA’s own satellite constellations, the agency said. It also hoped to seed competition and innovation in the private satellite sector.

It isn’t yet clear whether there is a cost benefit to using private data, in part because the relatively small number of competitors in the market has made it challenging to determine a steady market price, NOAA said.

“All the signs in the nascent ‘new space’ industry indicated that there would be a plethora of venture capitalists wanting to compete for NOAA’s commercial pilot/purchase dollars. But that just never materialized,” said Mr. St. Jean…(More)”.

We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jason Collins: “…Behavioral economics today is famous for its increasingly large collection of deviations from rationality, or, as they are often called, ‘biases’. While useful in applied work, it is time to shift our focus from collecting deviations from a model of rationality that we know is not true. Rather, we need to develop new theories of human decision to progress behavioral economics as a science. We need heliocentrism. 

The dominant model of human decision-making across many disciplines, including my own, economics, is the rational-actor model. People make decisions based on their preferences and the constraints that they face. Whether implicitly or explicitly, they typically have the computational power to calculate the best decision and the willpower to carry it out. It’s a fiction but a useful one.

As has become broadly known through the growth of behavioral economics, there are many deviations from this model. (I am going to use the term behavioral economics through this article as a shorthand for the field that undoubtedly extends beyond economics to social psychology, behavioral science, and more.) This list of deviations has grown to the extent that if you visit the Wikipedia page ‘List of Cognitive Biases’ you will now see in excess of 200 biases and ‘effects’. These range from the classics described in the seminal papers of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman through to the obscure.

We are still at the collection-of-deviations stage. There are not 200 human biases. There are 200 deviations from the wrong model…(More)”

Whither Nudge? The Debate Itself Offers Lessons on the Influence of Social Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Tony Hockley: “Pursuing impact can be a disturbing balancing act between spin and substance. Underdo the spin whilst maintaining substance and the impact will likely be zero, but credibility is upheld. Overdo the spin and risk the substance being diluted by marketing and misappropriation. The story of Nudge offers insights into what can happen when research has an unpredictably large impact in the world of politics and policy.

Has Nudge overdone the spin, and how much is a one-word book title to blame if it has? It is certainly true that the usual academic balancing act of spin versus substance was tipped by a publisher’s suggestion of snappy title instead of the usual academic tongue-twister intelligible only to the initiated. Under the title Nudge the book found a receptive audience of policymakers looking to fix problems easily and on the cheap after the 2008 economic crash, and a public policy community eager to adopt exciting new terminology into their own areas of interest. ‘Behavioural Insights Teams’ quickly sprang up around the world, dubbed (very inaccurately) as “nudge units.” There was little discernible push-back against this high-level misappropriation of the term, the general excitement, and the loss of strict definition attached to the authors’ underlying concept for nudge policies of “libertarian paternalism.” In short, the authors had lost control of their own work. The book became a global bestseller. In 2021 it was updated and republished, in what was described as “the final edition.” Perhaps in recognition that the concept had stretched to the end of its logical road?…(More)”.

Identifying and addressing data asymmetries so as to enable (better) science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young: “As a society, we need to become more sophisticated in assessing and addressing data asymmetries—and their resulting political and economic power inequalities—particularly in the realm of open science, research, and development. This article seeks to start filling the analytical gap regarding data asymmetries globally, with a specific focus on the asymmetrical availability of privately-held data for open science, and a look at current efforts to address these data asymmetries. It provides a taxonomy of asymmetries, as well as both their societal and institutional impacts. Moreover, this contribution outlines a set of solutions that could provide a toolbox for open science practitioners and data demand-side actors that stand to benefit from increased access to data. The concept of data liquidity (and portability) is explored at length in connection with efforts to generate an ecosystem of responsible data exchanges. We also examine how data holders and demand-side actors are experimenting with new and emerging operational models and governance frameworks for purpose-driven, cross-sector data collaboratives that connect previously siloed datasets. Key solutions discussed include professionalizing and re-imagining data steward roles and functions (i.e., individuals or groups who are tasked with managing data and their ethical and responsible reuse within organizations). We present these solutions through case studies on notable efforts to address science data asymmetries. We examine these cases using a repurposable analytical framework that could inform future research. We conclude with recommended actions that could support the creation of an evidence base on work to address data asymmetries and unlock the public value of greater science data liquidity and responsible reuse…(More)”.

See Plastic in a National Park? Log It on This Website for Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Angely Mercado: “You’re hiking through glorious nature when you see it—a dirty, squished plastic water bottle along the trail. Instead of picking it up and impotently cursing the litterer, you can now take another small helpful step—you can report the trash to a new data project that aims to inspire policy change. Environmental nonprofit 5 Gyres is asking national park visitors in the U.S. to log trash they see through a new site called TrashBlitz.

The organization, which is dedicated to reducing plastic pollution, created TrashBlitz to gather data on how much, and what kind, of plastic and other litter is clogging our parks. They want to encourage realistic plastic pollution reduction plans for all 63 national parks.

Once registered on the TrashBlitz website, park visitors can specify the types of trash that they’ve spotted, such as if the discarded item was used for food packaging. According to 5 Gyres, the data will contribute to a report to be published this fall on the top items discarded, the materials, and the brands that have created the most waste across national parks…(More)”.

How Three False Starts Stifle Open Social Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Patrick Dunleavy: “Open social science is new, and like any beginner is still finding its way. However, to a large extent we are still operating in the shadow of open science (OS) in the Science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine, or STEMM, disciplines. Nearly a decade ago an influential Royal Society report argued:

‘Open science is often effective in stimulating scientific discovery, [and] it may also help to deter, detect and stamp out bad science. Openness facilitates a systemic integrity that is conducive to early identification of error, malpractice and fraud, and therefore deters them. But this kind of transparency only works when openness meets standards of intelligibility and assessability – where there is intelligent openness’.

More recently, the Turing Way project defined open science far more broadly as a range of measures encouraging reproducibility, replication, robustness, and the generalisability of research. Alongside CIVICA researchers we have put forward an agenda for progressing open social science in line with these ambitions. Yet for open social science to take root it must develop an ‘intelligent’ concept of openness, one that is adapted to the wide range of concerns that our discipline group addresses, and is appropriate for the sharply varying conditions in which social research must be carried out.

This task has been made more difficult by a number of premature and partial efforts to ‘graft’ an ‘open science’ concept from STEMM disciplines onto the social sciences. Three false starts have already been made and have created misconceptions about open social science. Below, I want to show how each of the strategies may actually work to obstruct the wider development of open social science.

Bricolage – Reading across directly from STEMM

This approach sees open social science as just about picking up (not quite at random) the best-known or most discussed individual components of open science in STEMM disciplines  – focusing on specific things like open access publishing, the FAIR principles for data management, replication studies, or the pre-registration of hypotheses…(More)”.

What AI Can Tell Us About Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Yann LeCun and Jacob Browning: “If there is one constant in the field of artificial intelligence it is exaggeration: there is always breathless hype and scornful naysaying. It is helpful to occasionally take stock of where we stand.

The dominant technique in contemporary AI is deep learning (DL) neural networks, massive self-learning algorithms which excel at discerning and utilizing patterns in data. Since their inception, critics have prematurely argued that neural networks had run into an insurmountable wall — and every time, it proved a temporary hurdle. In the 1960s, they could not solve non-linear functions. That changed in the 1980s with backpropagation, but the new wall was how difficult it was to train the systems. The 1990s saw a rise of simplifying programs and standardized architectures which made training more reliable, but the new problem was the lack of training data and computing power.

In 2012, when contemporary graphics cards could be trained on the massive ImageNet dataset, DL went mainstream, handily besting all competitors. But then critics spied a new problem: DL required too much hand-labelled data for training. The last few years have rendered this criticism moot, as self-supervised learning has resulted in incredibly impressive systems, such as GPT-3, which do not require labeled data.

Today’s seemingly insurmountable wall is symbolic reasoning, the capacity to manipulate symbols in the ways familiar from algebra or logic. As we learned as children, solving math problems involves a step-by-step manipulation of symbols according to strict rules (e.g., multiply the furthest right column, carry the extra value to the column to the left, etc.). Gary Marcus, author of “The Algebraic Mind”and co-author (with Ernie Davis) of “Rebooting AI,”recently argued that DL is incapable of further progress because neural networks struggle with this kind of symbol manipulation. By contrast, many DL researchers are convinced that DL is already engaging in symbolic reasoning and will continue to improve at it.

At the heart of this debate are two different visions of the role of symbols in intelligence, both biological and mechanical: one holds that symbolic reasoning must be hard-coded from the outset and the other holds it can be learned through experience, by machines and humans alike. As such, the stakes are not just about the most practical way forward, but also how we should understand human intelligence — and, thus, how we should pursue human-level artificial intelligence…(More)”.

The Behavioral Economics Guide 2022

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial by Kathleen Vohs & Avni Shah: “This year’s Behavioral Economics Guide editorial reviews recent work in the areas of self-control and goals. To do so, we distilled the latest findings and advanced a set of guiding principles termed the FRESH framework: Fatigue, Reminders, Ease, Social influence, and Habits. Example findings reviewed include physicians giving out more prescriptions for opioids later in the workday compared to earlier (fatigue); the use of digital reminders to prompt people to re-engage with goals, such as for personal savings, from which they may have turned away (reminders); visual displays that give people data on their behavioral patterns so as to enable feedback and active monitoring (ease); the importance of geographically-local peers in changing behaviors such as residential water use (social influence); and digital and other tools that help people break the link between aspects of the environment and problematic behaviors (habits). We used the FRESH framework as a potential guide for thinking about the kinds of behaviors people can perform in achieving the goal of being environmental stewards of a more sustainable future…(More)”.