Open Knowledge Maps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Our Goal is to revolutionize discovery of scientific knowledge. We are building a visual interface that dramatically increases the visibility of research findings for science and society alike. We are a non-profit organization and we believe that a better way to explore and discover scientific knowledge will benefit us all.

  • An Open Knowledge Maps visualization presents you with a topical overview for your search term. It is based on the 100 most relevant documents for your search term.
  • We use text similarity to create the knowledge maps. The algorithm groups those papers together that have many words in common.
  • The visualization is intended to give you a head start on your literature search. You can also use Open Knowledge Maps to stay up-to-date – just limit your search to the most recent papers in the options….(More)”.

Using Public Data From Different Sources

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter byYair Cohen in Maximizing Social Science Research Through Publicly Accessible Data Sets, book edited by S. Marshall Perry: “The United States federal government agencies as well as states agencies are liberating their data through web portals. Web portals like data.gov, census.gov, healthdata.gov, ed.gov and many others on the state level provide great opportunity for researchers of all fields. This chapter shows the challenges and the opportunities that lie by merging data from different pubic sources. The researcher collected and merged data from the following datasets: NYSED school report card, NYSED Fiscal Profile Reporting System, Civil Rights Data Collection, and Census 2010 School District Demographics System. The challenges include data validation, data cleaning, flatting data for easy reporting, and merging datasets based on text fields….(More)”.

 

Storm Crowds: Evidence from Zooniverse on Crowd Contribution Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sandra Barbosu and Joshua S. Gans: “Crowdsourcing – a collaborative form of content production based on the contributions of large groups of individuals – has proliferated in the past decade. As a result, recent research seeks to understand the factors that affect its sustainability. Prior studies have highlighted the importance of volunteers’ prosocial motivations, the sense of belonging to a community, and symbolic rewards within crowdsourcing websites. One factor that has received limited attention in the existing literature is how the design of crowdsourcingplatforms affects their sustainability.

We study whether the design element – particularly, the divisibility of contributions (i.e. whether contributing tasks are bundled together or can be carried out separately) – is a factor that affects the level and quality of crowdsourcing contributions. We investigate this in the context of Zooniverse, the world’s largest crowdsourced science site, in which volunteers contribute to scientific research by performing data processing tasks. Our choice of empirical setting is motivated by the fact that one of the Zooniverse projects, Cyclone Center, underwent a format change that decreased the divisibility of contributions, by bundling together two tasks that were previously separate. We refer to contributions for which both tasks were done as complete, and contributions for which only one task was done as incomplete. In this context, we develop a theoretical model that predicts (i) a positive relationship between contribution divisibility and the total number of contributions (i.e. complete and incomplete) per volunteer, (ii) an ambiguous relationship between contribution divisibility and the number of complete contributions per volunteer, and (iii) an ambiguous relationship between contribution divisibility and the value of complete contributions. We test these predictions empirically by exploiting the format change in Cyclone Center.

We find that after the format change, which decreased contribution divisibility, (i) the total number of contributions per volunteer decreased, (ii) the number of complete contributions made by anonymous volunteers increased, while that made by registered volunteers remained unchanged, and (iii) the value of complete contributions increased because anonymous volunteers, who increased their number of complete contributions, contributed high quality contributions. Our results have strategic implications for crowdsourcing platforms because they suggest that the design of crowdsourcing platforms, specifically the divisibility of contributions, is a factor that matters for their sustainability….(More)”

Why Information Matters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Luciano Floridi in Special Issue of Atlantis on Information, Matter and Life: “…As information technologies come to affect all areas of life, they are becoming implicated in our most important problems — their causes, effects, and solutions, the scientific investigations aimed at explaining them, the concepts created to understand them, the means of discussing them, and even, as in the case of Bill Gates, the wealth required to tackle them.

Furthermore, information technologies don’t just modify how we act in the world; they also profoundly affect how we understand the world, how we relate to it, how we see ourselves, how we interact with each other, and how our hopes for a better future are shaped. All these are old philosophical issues, of course, but we must now consider them anew, with the concept of information as a central concern.

This means that if philosophers are to help enable humanity to make sense of our world and to improve it responsibly, information needs to be a significant field of philosophical study. Among our mundane and technical concepts, information is currently not only one of the most important and widely used, but also one of the least understood. We need a philosophy of information.

How to Ask a Question

In the fall of 1999, NASA lost radio contact with its Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million weather satellite that had been launched the year before. In a maneuver to enter the spacecraft into orbit around Mars, the trajectory had put the spacecraft far closer to Mars than planned, so that it directly entered the planet’s atmosphere, where it probably disintegrated. The reason for this unhappy event was that for a particular software file, the Lockheed Martin engineering team had used English (imperial) units of measurement instead of the metric units specified by the agency, whose trajectory modelers assumed the data they were looking at was provided in metric.

This incident illustrates a simple lesson: successful cooperation depends on an agreement between all parties that the information being exchanged is fixed at a specified level. Wrongly assuming that everyone will follow the rules that specify the level — for example, that impulse will be expressed not as pound-seconds (the English unit) but as newton-seconds (the metric unit) — can lead to costly mistakes. Even though this principle may seem obvious, it is one of the most valuable contributions that philosophy can offer to our understanding of information. This is because, as we will see, failing to specify a level at which we ask a given philosophical question can be the reason for deep confusions and useless answers. Another simple example will help to illustrate the problem…(More)”

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Melanie Swan: “Bitcoin is starting to come into its own as a digital currency, but the blockchain technology behind it could prove to be much more significant. This book takes you beyond the currency (“Blockchain 1.0”) and smart contracts (“Blockchain 2.0”) to demonstrate how the blockchain is in position to become the fifth disruptive computing paradigm after mainframes, PCs, the Internet, and mobile/social networking.

Author Melanie Swan, Founder of the Institute for Blockchain Studies, explains that the blockchain is essentially a public ledger with potential as a worldwide, decentralized record for the registration, inventory, and transfer of all assets—not just finances, but property and intangible assets such as votes, software, health data, and ideas.

Topics include:

  • Concepts, features, and functionality of Bitcoin and the blockchain
  • Using the blockchain for automated tracking of all digital endeavors
  • Enabling censorship?resistant organizational models
  • Creating a decentralized digital repository to verify identity
  • Possibility of cheaper, more efficient services traditionally provided by nations
  • Blockchain for science: making better use of the data-mining network
  • Personal health record storage, including access to one’s own genomic data
  • Open access academic publishing on the blockchain…(More)”.

In design as in politics: who decides?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joan Subirats at Open Democracy: “Can we keep on organizing decision-making processes as we used to do in the age of the Enlightenment or in a scenario where information only flows from top to bottom? Designers and creators have been questioning this for a long time now, seeking to go beyond the user paradigm which has determined innovation processes in recent decades. Today, their concern is how to put people at the center of new experiences…..

Today, in the world of design, emphasis is being placed on the fact that all those who will want or will be able to use a product or service should be incorporated into the creative process itself. On the other hand, science has shown that we cannot imagine designing a building or constructing an infrastructure without taking into account the materials we use, the impact on the surroundings, and the effects on the environment and on the functioning of the city where the new building is located or the new service is to come into operation. The building, the infrastructure “participates” in a complex environment than cannot be ignored. The design of any object or activity is not immune to all that is around it and to the materials used to build or imagine it – nor is its destruction or disappearance. The design of “things” cannot be only a framework in which participants are to be assumed as data, the design itself has to be “participated”.

In this sense, designers cannot avoid being participants, just as politicians cannot avoid being citizens. In the same way as you cannot complain about a traffic jam where you find yourself stuck as if the whole problem was due to others, for the simple reason that you are part of this traffic and this jam. We need design and policy-making systems that do not have designers sitting in a bubble, seemingly immune to what goes on outside. We need political decision-making systems that invite-incite-engage people, rather than processes that ask people to participate in what others have thought needs to be done. And, surely, to do this, we need a little more humility when it comes to doing politics – and this implies changing power structures and the distribution of responsibilities. In the face of ever more complex problems, with more structural implications and more heterogeneous interests, we need a reconfiguration and an expansion of collective decision-making mechanisms…. (More) (Español).”

Plato and the Nerd. The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MITPress: “In this book, Edward Ashford Lee makes a bold claim: that the creators of digital technology have an unsurpassed medium for creativity. Technology has advanced to the point where progress seems limited not by physical constraints but the human imagination. Writing for both literate technologists and numerate humanists, Lee makes a case for engineering—creating technology—as a deeply intellectual and fundamentally creative process. Explaining why digital technology has been so transformative and so liberating, Lee argues that the real power of technology stems from its partnership with humans.

Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of—for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation—that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data. Lee argues that the evidence for this is weak, and the likelihood that nature has limited itself to processes that conform to today’s notion of digital computation is remote.

Lee goes on to argue that artificial intelligence’s goal of reproducing human cognitive functions in computers vastly underestimates the potential of computers. In his view, technology is coevolving with humans. It augments our cognitive and physical capabilities while we nurture, develop, and propagate the technology itself. Complementarity is more likely than competition….(More)”.

The Role of Evidence in Politics: Motivated Reasoning and Persuasion among Politicians

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Martin Baekgaard et al in British Journal of Political Science: “Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information? Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly. These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided….(More)“.

Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ralph Hertwig and Till Grüne-Yanoff in Perspectives on Psychological Science: “In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized “nudges,” that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, “boosts.” The objective of boosts is to foster people’s competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing citizen science: exploring the tensions between paid professionals and users

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jamie Woodcock et al in the Journal of Peer Production: “This paper explores the relationship between paid labour and unpaid users within the Zooniverse, a crowdsourced citizen science platform. The platform brings together a crowd of users to categorise data for use in scientific projects. It was initially established by a small group of academics for a single astronomy project, but has now grown into a multi-project platform that has engaged over 1.3 million users so far. The growth has introduced different dynamics to the platform as it has incorporated a greater number of scientists, developers, links with organisations, and funding arrangements—each bringing additional pressures and complications. The relationships between paid/professional and unpaid/citizen labour have become increasingly complicated with the rapid expansion of the Zooniverse. The paper draws on empirical data from an ongoing research project that has access to both users and paid professionals on the platform. There is the potential through growing peer-to-peer capacity that the boundaries between professional and citizen scientists can become significantly blurred. The findings of the paper, therefore, address important questions about the combinations of paid and unpaid labour, the involvement of a crowd in citizen science, and the contradictions this entails for an online platform. These are considered specifically from the viewpoint of the users and, therefore, form a new contribution to the theoretical understanding of crowdsourcing in practice….(More)”.