John Gastil and Robert C. Richards Jr. in Political Science & Politics (Forthcoming): “Recent advances in online civic engagement tools have created a digital civic space replete with opportunities to craft and critique laws and rules or evaluate candidates, ballot measures, and policy ideas. These civic spaces, however, remain largely disconnected from one another, such that tremendous energy dissipates from each civic portal. Long-term feedback loops also remain rare. We propose addressing these limitations by building an integrative online commons that links together the best existing tools by making them components in a larger “Democracy Machine.” Drawing on gamification principles, this integrative platform would provide incentives for drawing new people into the civic sphere, encouraging more sustained and deliberative engagement, and feedback back to government and citizen alike to improve how the public interfaces with the public sector. After describing this proposed platform, we consider the most challenging problems it faces and how to address them….(More)”
Who Is Doing Computational Social Science?
Trends in Big Data Research, a Sage Whitepaper: “Information of all kinds is now being produced, collected, and analyzed at unprecedented speed, breadth, depth, and scale. The capacity to collect and analyze massive data sets has already transformed fields such as biology, astronomy, and physics, but the social sciences have been comparatively slower to adapt, and the path forward is less certain. For many, the big data revolution promises to ask, and answer, fundamental questions about individuals and collectives, but large data sets alone will not solve major social or scientific problems. New paradigms being developed by the emerging field of “computational social science” will be needed not only for research methodology, but also for study design and interpretation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, data curation and dissemination, visualization, replication, and research ethics (Lazer et al., 2009). SAGE Publishing conducted a survey with social scientists around the world to learn more about researchers engaged in big data research and the challenges they face, as well as the barriers to entry for those looking to engage in this kind of research in the future. We were also interested in the challenges of teaching computational social science methods to students. The survey was fully completed by 9412 respondents, indicating strong interest in this topic among our social science contacts. Of respondents, 33 percent had been involved in big data research of some kind and, of those who have not yet engaged in big data research, 49 percent (3057 respondents) said that they are either “definitely planning on doing so in the future” or “might do so in the future.”…(More)”
The ethical impact of data science
Theme issue of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A compiled and edited by Mariarosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi: “This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping data ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing and use), algorithms (including artificial intelligence, artificial agents, machine learning and robots) and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data ethics builds on the foundation provided by computer and information ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the level of abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations—the interactions among hardware, software and data—rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enable them. And it emphasizes the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by data science. Because of such complexity, data ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of data science and its applications within a consistent, holistic and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics will data ethics provide solutions that can maximize the value of data science for our societies, for all of us and for our environments….(More)”
Table of Contents:
- The dynamics of big data and human rights: the case of scientific research; Effy Vayena, John Tasioulas
- Facilitating the ethical use of health data for the benefit of society: electronic health records, consent and the duty of easy rescue; Sebastian Porsdam Mann, Julian Savulescu, Barbara J. Sahakian
- Faultless responsibility: on the nature and allocation of moral responsibility for distributed moral actions; Luciano Floridi
- Compelling truth: legal protection of the infosphere against big data spills; Burkhard Schafer
- Locating ethics in data science: responsibility and accountability in global and distributed knowledge production systems; Sabina Leonelli
- Privacy is an essentially contested concept: a multi-dimensional analytic for mapping privacy; Deirdre K. Mulligan, Colin Koopman, Nick Doty
- Beyond privacy and exposure: ethical issues within citizen-facing analytics; Peter Grindrod
- The ethics of smart cities and urban science; Rob Kitchin
- The ethics of big data as a public good: which public? Whose good? Linnet Taylor
- Data philanthropy and the design of the infraethics for information societies; Mariarosaria Taddeo
- The opportunities and ethics of big data: practical priorities for a national Council of Data Ethics; Olivia Varley-Winter, Hetan Shah
- Data science ethics in government; Cat Drew
- The ethics of data and of data science: an economist’s perspective; Jonathan Cave
- What’s the good of a science platform? John Gallacher
Open Data Collection (PLOS)
Daniella Lowenberg, Amy Ross, Emma Ganley at PLOS: “In the spirit of Open Con and highlighting the state of Open Data, PLOS is proud to release our Open Data Collection. The many values of Open Data are becoming increasingly apparent, and as a result, we are seeing an adoption of Open Data policies across publishers, funders and organizations. Open Data has proven a fantastic tool to help evaluate the replicability of published research, and even politicians are taking a stand in favor of Open Data as a mechanism to advance science rapidly. In March of 2014, PLOS updated our Data Policy to reflect the need for the underlying data to be as open as the paper itself resulting in complete transparency of the research. Two and-a-half years later, we have seen over 60,000 published papers with open data sets and an increase in submissions reflecting open data practices and policies….
To create this Open Data Collection, we exhaustively searched for relevant articles published across PLOS that discuss open data in some way. Then, in collaboration with our external advisor, Melissa Haendel, we have selected 26 of those articles with the aim to highlight a broad scope of research articles, guidelines, and commentaries about data sharing, data practices, and data policies from different research fields. Melissa has written an engaging blog post detailing the rubric and reasons behind her selections….(More)”
Make Democracy Great Again: Let’s Try Some ‘Design Thinking’
Ken Carbone in the Huffington Post: “Allow me to begin with the truth. I’ve never studied political science, run for public office nor held a position in government. For the last forty years I’ve led a design agency working with enduring brands across the globe. As with any experienced person in my profession, I have used research, deductive reasoning, logic and “design thinking“ to solve complex problems and create opportunities. Great brands that are showing their age turn to our agency to get back on course. In this light, I believe American democracy is a prime target for some retooling….
The present campaign cycle has left many voters wondering how such divisiveness and national embarrassment could be happening in the land of the free and home of the brave. This could be viewed as symptomatic of deeper structural problems in our tradition bound 240 year-old democracy. Great brands operate on a “innovate or die” model to insure success. The continual improvement of how a business operates and adapts to market conditions is a sound and critical practice.
Although the current election frenzy will soon be over, I want to examine three challenges to our election process and propose possible solutions for consideration. I’ll use the same diagnostic thinking I use with major corporations:
Term Limits…
Voting and Voter registration…
Political Campaigns…
In June of this year I attended the annual leadership conference of AIGA, the professional association for design, in Raleigh NC. A provocative question posed to a select group of designers was “What would you do if you were Secretary of Design.” The responses addressed issues concerning positive social change, education and Veteran Affairs. The audience was full of several hundred trained professionals whose everyday problem solving methods encourage divergent thinking to explore many solutions (possible or impossible) and then use convergent thinking to select and realize the best resolution. This is the very definition of “design thinking.” That leads to progress….(More)”.
Beyond nudging: it’s time for a second generation of behaviourally-informed social policy
Katherine Curchin at LSE Blog: “…behavioural scientists are calling for a second generation of behaviourally-informed policy. In some policy areas, nudges simply aren’t enough. Behavioural research shows stronger action is required to attack the underlying cause of problems. For example, many scholars have argued that behavioural insights provide a rationale for regulation to protect consumers from manipulation by private sector companies. But what might a second generation of behaviourally-informed social policy look like?
Behavioural insights could provide a justification to change the trajectory of income support policy. Since the 1990s policy attention has focused on the moral character of benefits recipients. Inspired by Lawrence Mead’s paternalist philosophy, governments have tried to increase the resolve of the unemployed to work their way out of poverty. More and more behavioural requirements have been attached to benefits to motivate people to fulfil their obligations to society.
But behavioural research now suggests that these harsh policies are misguided. Behavioural science supports the idea that people often make poor decisions and do things which are not in their long term interests. But the weakness of individuals’ moral constitution isn’t so much the problem as the unequal distribution of opportunities in society. There are circumstances in which humans are unlikely to flourish no matter how motivated they are.
Normal human psychological limitations – our limited cognitive capacity, limited attention and limited self-control – interact with environment to produce the behaviour that advocates of harsh welfare regimes attribute to permissive welfare. In their book Scarcity, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir argue that the experience of deprivation creates a mindset that makes it harder to process information, pay attention, make good decisions, plan for the future, and resist temptations.
Importantly, behavioural scientists have demonstrated that this mindset can be temporarily created in the laboratory by placing subjects in artificial situations which induce the feeling of not having enough. As a consequence, experimental subjects from middle-class backgrounds suddenly display the short-term thinking and irrational decision making often attributed to a culture of poverty.
Tying inadequate income support to a list of behavioural conditions will most punish those who are suffering most. Empirical studies of welfare conditionality have found that benefit claimants often do not comprehend the complicated rules that apply to them. Some are being punished for lack of understanding rather than deliberate non-compliance.
Behavioural insights can be used to mount a case for a more generous, less punitive approach to income support. The starting point is to acknowledge that some of Mead’s psychological assumptions have turned out to be wrong. The nature of the cognitive machinery humans share imposes limits on how self-disciplined and conscientious we can reasonably expect people living in adverse circumstances to be. We have placed too much emphasis on personal responsibility in recent decades. Why should people internalize the consequences of their behaviour when this behaviour is to a large extent the product of their environment?…(More)”
Self-organised scientific crowds to remedy research bureaucracy
Michele Catanzaro at EuroScientist: “Imagine a world without peer review committees, project proposals or activity reports. Imagine a world where research funds seamlessly flow where they are best employed, like nutrients in a food-web or materials in a river network. Many scientists would immediately signup to live in such a world.
The Netherlands is set to become the place where this academic paradise will be tested, in the next few years. In July 2016, the Dutch parliament approved a motion related to implementing alternative funding procedures to alleviate the research bureaucracy, which is increasingly burdening scientists. Here EuroScientistinvestigates whether the self-organisation power of the scientific community could help resolve one of researchers’ worse burden.
Self-organisation
The Dutch national funding agency is planning to adopt a radically new system to allocate part of its funding, promoted by ecologist Marten Sheffer, who is professor of aquatic ecology and water quality management at Wageningen University and Research Centre. Under the proposed approach, funds would intially be evenly divided among all scientists in the country. Then, they would each have to allocate half of what they have received to the person who, in their opinion, is the most deserving scientist in their network. Then, the process would be iterated.
The promoters of the system believe that the “wisdom of the crowd” of the scientific community would assigning more funds to the most deserving scientists among them; with minimal amount of paperwork. The Dutch initiative is part of a broader effort to use a scientific approach to improve science.
In other words, it is part of a trend aiming to employ scientific evidence to tweak the social mechanisms of academia. Specifically, findings from what is known as complexity research are increasingly brought forward as a way of reducing bureaucracy, removing red tape, and maximising the time scientists spend in thinking….
Abandoning the current bureaucratic, top-down system to evaluate and fund research, based on labour-intensive peer-review, may not be too much of a loss. “Peer-review is an imperfect, fragile mechanism. Our simulations show that assigning funds at random would not distort too much the results of the traditional mechanism,” says Flaminio Squazzoni, an economist at the University of Brescia, Italy, and the coordinator of the PEERE-New Frontiers of Peer Review COST action.
In reality peer-review is never quite neutral. “If scientists behave perfectly, then peer review works,” Squazzoni explains, “but if strategic motivations are taken into account, like saving time or competition, then the results are worse than random.” Squazzoni believes that automation, economic incentives, or the creation of professional reviewers may improve the situation….(More)”
Power to the People: Addressing Big Data Challenges in Neuroscience by Creating a New Cadre of Citizen Neuroscientists
Portugal has announced the world’s first nationwide participatory budget
Graça Fonseca at apolitical:”Portugal has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted.
Although participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible, Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes via ATM machines.
‘It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK?’ Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible, told Apolitical. ‘And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.’
Although the official window for proposals begins in January, some have already been submitted to the project’s website. One suggests equipping kindergartens with technology to teach children about robotics. Using the open-source platform Arduino, the plan is to let children play with the tech and so foster scientific understanding from the earliest age.
Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture and lifelong learning, and there will be more than forty events in the new year for people to present and discuss their ideas.
The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens. Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails. Moreover, those who make the proposals often become passionate about them, campaigning for votes, flyering, making YouTube videos, going door-to-door and so fuelling a public discussion that involves ever more people in the process.
On the other side, it can bring public servants nearer to their fellow citizens by sharpening their understanding of what people want and what their priorities are. It can also raise the quality of public services by directing them more precisely to where they’re needed as well as by tapping the collective intelligence and imagination of thousands of participants….
Although it will not be used this year, because the project is still very much in the trial phase, the use of ATMs is potentially revolutionary. As Fonseca puts it, ‘In every remote part of the country, you might have nothing else, but you have an ATM.’ Moreover, an ATM could display proposals and allow people to vote directly, not least because it already contains a secure way of verifying their identity. At the moment, for comparison, people can vote by text or online, sending in the number from their ID card, which is checked against a database….(More)”.
Wikipedia’s not as biased as you might think
Ananya Bhattacharya in Quartz: “The internet is as open as people make it. Often, people limit their Facebook and Twitter circles to likeminded people and only follow certain subreddits, blogs, and news sites, creating an echo chamber of sorts. In a sea of biased content, Wikipedia is one of the few online outlets that strives for neutrality. After 15 years in operation, it’s starting to see results
Researchers at Harvard Business School evaluated almost 4,000 articles in Wikipedia’s online database against the same entries in Encyclopedia Brittanica to compare their biases. They focused on English-language articles about US politics, especially controversial topics, that appeared in both outlets in 2012.
“That is just not a recipe for coming to a conclusion,” Shane Greenstein, one of the study’s authors, said in an interview. “We were surprised that Wikipedia had not failed, had not fallen apart in the last several years.”
Greenstein and his co-author Feng Zhu categorized each article as “blue” or “red.” Drawing from research in political science, they identified terms that are idiosyncratic to each party. For instance, political scientists have identified that Democrats were more likely to use phrases such as “war in Iraq,” “civil rights,” and “trade deficit,” while Republicans used phrases such as “economic growth,” “illegal immigration,” and “border security.”…
“In comparison to expert-based knowledge, collective intelligence does not aggravate the bias of online content when articles are substantially revised,” the authors wrote in the paper. “This is consistent with a best-case scenario in which contributors with different ideologies appear to engage in fruitful online conversations with each other, in contrast to findings from offline settings.”
More surprisingly, the authors found that the 2.8 million registered volunteer editors who were reviewing the articles also became less biased over time. “You can ask questions like ‘do editors with red tendencies tend to go to red articles or blue articles?’” Greenstein said. “You find a prevalence of opposites attract, and that was striking.” The researchers even identified the political stance for a number of anonymous editors based on their IP locations, and the trend held steadfast….(More)”