Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Vaclav Smil: “Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child’s growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.

Smil takes readers from bacterial invasions through animal metabolisms to megacities and the global economy. He begins with organisms whose mature sizes range from microscopic to enormous, looking at disease-causing microbes, the cultivation of staple crops, and human growth from infancy to adulthood. He examines the growth of energy conversions and man-made objects that enable economic activities—developments that have been essential to civilization. Finally, he looks at growth in complex systems, beginning with the growth of human populations and proceeding to the growth of cities. He considers the challenges of tracing the growth of empires and civilizations, explaining that we can chart the growth of organisms across individual and evolutionary time, but that the progress of societies and economies, not so linear, encompasses both decline and renewal. The trajectory of modern civilization, driven by competing imperatives of material growth and biospheric limits, Smil tells us, remains uncertain….(More)”.

Great Policy Successes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mallory Compton and Edited by Paul ‘t Hart: “With so much media and political criticism of their shortcomings and failures, it is easy to overlook the fact that many governments work pretty well much of the time. Great Policy Successes turns the spotlight on instances of public policy that are remarkably successful. It develops a framework for identifying and assessing policy successes, paying attention not just to their programmatic outcomes but also to the quality of the processes by which policies are designed and delivered, the level of support and legitimacy they attain, and the extent to which successful performance endures over time. The bulk of the book is then devoted to 15 detailed case studies of striking policy successes from around the world, including Singapore’s public health system, Copenhagen and Melbourne’s rise from stilted backwaters to the highly liveable and dynamic urban centres they are today, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia poverty relief scheme, the US’s GI Bill, and Germany’s breakthrough labour market reforms of the 2000s. Each case is set in context, its main actors are introduced, key events and decisions are described, the assessment framework is applied to gauge the nature and level of its success, key contributing factors to success are identified, and potential lessons and future challenges are identified. Purposefully avoiding the kind of heavy theorizing that characterizes many accounts of public policy processes, each case is written in an accessible and narrative style ideally suited for classroom use in conjunction with mainstream textbooks on public policy design, implementation, and evaluation….(More)”.

The Innovation Barometer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Demographic changes. Climate crisis. Cybercrime. Budget deficits. Diminishing political legitimacy. From a global perspective there is no shortage of complex problems facing the public sector. The need for innovative solutions is evident, but a systematic knowledge base for necessary public sector innovations is hard to come by.

Private sector companies have been the subject of internationally comparable statistics on innovation for nearly three decades, giving private companies, scholars and public sector decision-makers essential guidance for business development, research and policymaking.

For the public sector, however, anecdotes and opinions have been substitutes for statistical data on innovation. That is why, in 2015, the Danish National Centre for Public Sector Innovation, in association with Statistics Denmark, began separating myth from reality. The result was the Innovation Barometer, the world’s first official statistics on public sector innovation. The statistic is based on a nationwide web-based survey addressed to managers of public sector workplaces of all kinds – kindergartens, schools, hospitals, police stations ect.

While the findings were both surprising and useful, additional insight from national comparisons was missing. But not for long. By 2018 Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland had all conducted one or more national surveys, utilising similar methodologies and definitions, though adapted somewhat to better serve national agendas. Their ongoing efforts have also contributed to methodological adjustments, improving the original survey design.

Currently a large variety of people and organisations use Nordic Innovation Barometer data, applying them for their own purposes, e.g. inspiration, policymaking, strategizing, HR development, teaching, research and consultancy services. Or for legitimising certain decisions and criticising others. In short, the Nordic Innovation Barometers are being put to use as the public good they were intended to be, also in ways the developers and adaptors did not foresee.

On behalf of the remarkably innovative Nordic public sectors we are pleased to present the first website containing cross-Nordic comparisons. Although this website does not tell us everything that we would like to know about public sector innovation, it does provide a sorely needed systematic foundation for developing new solutions….(More)”.

Goodhart’s Law: Are Academic Metrics Being Gamed?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Michael Fire: “…We attained the following five key insights from our study:

First, these results support Goodhart’s Law as it relates to academic publishing; that is, traditional measures (e.g., number of papers, number of citations, h-index, and impact factor) have become targets, and are no longer true measures importance/impact. By making papers shorter and collaborating with more authors, researchers are able to produce more papers in the same amount of time. Moreover, the majority of changes in papers’ structure are correlated with papers that receive higher numbers of citations. Authors can use longer titles and abstracts, or use question or exclamation marks in titles, to make their papers more appealing for readers and increase citations, i.e. academic clickbait. These results support our hypothesis that academic papers have evolved in order to score a bullseye on target metrics.

Second, it is clear that citation number has become a target for some researchers. We observe a general increasing trend for researchers to cite their previous work in their new studies, with some authors self citing dozens, or even hundreds, of times. Moreover, a huge quantity of papers – over 72% of all papers and 25% of all papers with at least 5 references – have no citations at all after 5 years. Clearly, a signficant amount of resources is spent on papers with limited impact, which may indicate that researchers are publishing more papers of poorer quality to boost their total number of publications. Additionally, we noted that different decades have very different paper citation distributions. Consequently, comparing citation records of researchers who published papers in different time periods can be challenging.

Number of self-citations over time

Third, we observed an exponential growth in the number of new researchers who publish papers, likely due to career pressures. …(More)”.

Cyber Influence and Cognitive Threats

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access book by Vladlena Benson and John Mcalaney: “In the wake of fresh allegations that personal data of Facebook users have been illegally used to influence the outcome of the US general election and the Brexit vote, the debate over manipulation of social big data continues to gain more momentum. Cyber Influence and Cognitive Threats addresses various emerging challenges in response to cyber security, examining cognitive applications in decision making, behaviour and basic human interaction. The book examines the role of psychology in cybersecurity by addressing each factor involved in the process: hackers, targets, cybersecurity practitioners, and the wider social context in which these groups operate.

Cyber Influence and Cognitive Threats covers a variety of topics including information systems, psychology, sociology, human resources, leadership, strategy, innovation, law, finance and others….(More)”.

Using a design approach to create collaborative governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John Bryson, Barbara Crosby and Danbi Seo: “In complex, shared-power settings, policymakers, administrators and other kinds of decision makers increasingly must engage in collaborative inter-organisational efforts to effectively address challenging public issues. These collaborations must be governed effectively if they are to achieve their public purposes. A design approach to the governance of collaborations can help, especially if it explicitly focuses on the design and use of formal and informal settings for dialogue and deliberation (forums), decision making (arenas) and resolution of residual disputes (courts). The success of a design approach will depend on many things, but especially on leaders and leadership and careful attention to the design and use of forums, arenas and courts and the effective use of power. The argument is illustrated by examining the emergence and governance of a collaboration designed to cope with the fragmented policy field of minority business support….(More)”.

How Nontraditional Innovation is Rejuvenating Public Housing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jamal Gauthier: “The crisis of affordable public housing can be felt across America on a large scale. Many poor and impoverished families that reside in public housing projects are consistently unable to pay rent for their dwellings while dealing with a host of other social complications that make living in public housing even more difficult. Creating affordable public housing involves the use of innovative processes that reduce construction cost and maximize livable square footage so that rents can remain affordable. Through the rising popularity of nontraditional approaches to innovation, many organizations tasked with addressing these difficult housing challenges are adopting such methods to uncover previously unthought of solutions.

The concept of crowdsourcing especially is paving the way for federal agencies (such as HUD), nonprofits, and private housing companies alike to gain new perspectives and approaches to complex public housing topics from unlikely and/or underutilized sources. Crowdsourcing proponents and stakeholders hope to add fresh ideas and new insights to the shared pool of public knowledge, augmenting innovation and productivity in the current public housing landscape.

The federal government could particularly benefit from these nontraditional forms of innovation by implementing these practices into standard government processes. The struggling affordable public housing system in America, for example, points to a glaring flaw in standard government process that makes applying the best ideas for real-world implementation by the government virtually impossible….(More)”.

Radical visions of future government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nesta Report: “Is government fit for purpose? Evaporating public trust in democracy and political institutions, a broken social contract, lack of money and stale ideas mean it feels increasingly difficult to answer that question in the affirmative. It is this fear – that government and our public services are no longer up to the job – that inspired us to launch an open call, seeking radical visions of future government.

We wanted a serious rethink about what government is, what it should do, and how it should work. Radical Visions of Future Government is the culmination of that work, presenting 17 visions of the future of government. The collection features essays, provocations, thought experiments, fiction, speculative design and original art, with each one asking the reader to consider the implications of an idea about something fundamentally different in the future.

While written from a British context, combinations of these issues have a resonance in governments around the world. We chose the year 2030 as the setting for these visions: near enough to be imaginable, far enough away for radical change to actually be contemplated.

The collection is not intended to set out exclusively desirable or optimistic futures, but instead to stimulate thinking about a spectrum of possibilities. As one essay in the collection argues, it is better to think about the future than not; that in itself is democratising. It would be very surprising if a reader agreed with all of them. Nor are any of them a reflection of a Nesta view. But we think they are useful energisers, and we hope that any reader will come away with a sharpened sense of what might be possible and where we should set our sights for 2030.

The contributions come from a range of voices – researchers, artists, designers, academics, writers and public servants – each with a different perspective on what needs to change about government….(More)”.

The Future of Political Philosophy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Katrina Forrester in Boston Review: “Since the upheavals of the financial crisis of 2008 and the political turbulence of 2016, it has become clear to many that liberalism is, in some sense, failing. The turmoil has given pause to economists, some of whom responded by renewing their study of inequality, and to political scientists, who have since turned to problems of democracy, authoritarianism, and populism in droves. But Anglo-American liberal political philosophers have had less to say than they might have.

The silence is due in part to the nature of political philosophy today—the questions it considers worth asking and those it sidelines. Since Plato, philosophers have always asked about the nature of justice. But for the last five decades, political philosophy in the English-speaking world has been preoccupied with a particular answer to that question developed by the American philosopher John Rawls.

Rawls’s work in the mid-twentieth century ushered in a paradigm shift in political philosophy. In his wake, philosophers began exploring what justice and equality meant in the context of modern capitalist welfare states, using those concepts to describe, in impressive and painstaking detail, the ideal structure of a just society—one that turned out to closely resemble a version of postwar social democracy. Working within this framework, they have since elaborated a body of abstract moral principles that provide the philosophical backbone of modern liberalism. These ideas are designed to help us see what justice and equality demand—of our society, of our institutions, and of ourselves.

This is a story of triumph: Rawls’s philosophical project was a major success. It is not that political philosophers after Rawls didn’t disagree; fine-grained and heated arguments are what philosophers do best. But over the last few decades they built a robust consensus about the fundamental rules of the game, conceiving of themselves as engaged in a common intellectual project with a shared conceptual framework. The governing concepts and aims of political philosophy have, for generations, been more or less taken for granted.

But if modern political philosophy is bound up with modern liberalism, and liberalism is failing, it may well be time to ask whether these apparently timeless ideas outlived their usefulness….(More)”.

Administrative Reform and the Quest for Openness: A Popperian Review of Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alex Ingrams: “Scholars and policymakers claim open government offers a panoply of good governance benefits, but it also risks political abuse as window dressing or a smokescreen. To address this risk, this article builds on the meaning of openness through an examination of closed and open society in Karl Popper’s theory. Four historic trends in open government reform are analyzed. The findings suggest a need for new attention to Popperian notions of the social technologist’s piecemeal change and mechanical engineering aimed at serious policy problems. Without appreciation of these open society linkages, open governments will continue to paradoxically co-exist alongside closed societies…(More)”.