About: “The Coronavirus Tech Handbook provides a space for technologists, specialists, civic organisations and public & private institutions to collaborate on a rapid and sophisticated response to the coronavirus outbreak. It is an active and evolving resource with thousands of expert contributors.
In less than two weeks it has grown to cover areas including:
Detailed guidance for doctors and nurses,
Advice and tools for educators adjusting to remote teaching,
Community of open-source ventilator designers
Comprehensive data and models for forecasting the spread of the virus.
Coronavirus Tech Handbook’s goal is to create a rapidly evolving open source technical knowledge base that will help all institutions across civil society and the public sector collaborate to fight the outbreak.
Coronavirus Tech Handbook is not a place for the public to get advice, but a place for specialists to collaborate and make sure the best solutions are quickly shared and deployed….(More)”.
Kenan Malik at The Guardian: “The selfish gene. The Big Bang. The greenhouse effect. Metaphors are at the heart of scientific thinking. They provide the means for both scientists and non-scientists to understand, think through and talk about abstract ideas in terms of more familiar objects or phenomena.
But if metaphors can illuminate, they can also constrain. In his new book, The Idea of the Brain, zoologist and historian Matthew Cobb tells the story of how scientists and philosophers have tried to understand the brain and how it works. In every age, Cobb shows, people have thought about the brain largely in terms of metaphors, drawn usually from the most exciting technology of the day, whether clocks or telephone exchanges or the contemporary obsession with computers. The brain, Cobb observes, “is more like a computer than like a clock”, but “even the simplest animal brain is not a computer like anything we have built, nor one we can yet envisage”.
Metaphors allow “insight and discovery” but are “inevitably partial” and “there will come a point when the understanding they allow will be outweighed by the limits they impose”. We may, Cobb suggests, be at that point in picturing the brain as a computer.
The paradox of neuroscience today is that we possess an unprecedented amount of data about the brain but barely a glimmer of a theory to explain how it works. Indeed, as the French neuroscientist Yves Frégnac has put it, making ample use of metaphor, it can feel as if “we are drowning in a flood of information” and that “all sense of global understanding [of brain function] is in acute danger of being washed away”.
It’s not just in science that metaphors are significant in shaping the ways in which we think. In 1980, the linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson set off the modern debate on this issue with their seminal work, Metaphors We Live By. Metaphors, they argued, are not linguistic flourishes but the fundamental building blocks of thought. We don’t simply talk or write with metaphors, we also think with them….(More)”
Interactive Overview: “The World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index® is the world’s leading source for original, independent data on the rule of law. Now covering 128 countries and jurisdictions, the Index relies on national surveys of more than 130,000 households and 4,000 legal practitioners and experts to measure how the rule of law is experienced and perceived around the world.
Effective rule of law reduces corruption, combats poverty and disease, and protects people from injustices large and small. It is the foundation for communities of justice, opportunity, and peace—underpinning development, accountable government, and respect for fundamental rights.
Learn more about the rule of law and explore the full WJP Rule of Law Index 2020 report, including PDF report download, data insights, methodology, and more at the Index report resources page….(More)”
Paper by Brigham Daniels, Mark Buntaine & Tanner Bangerter: “In modern democracies, governmental transparency is thought to have great value. When it comes to addressing administrative corruption and mismanagement, many would agree with Justice Brandeis’s observation that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Beyond this, many credit transparency with enabling meaningful citizen participation.
But even though transparency appears highly correlated with successful governance in developed democracies, assumptions about administrative transparency have remained empirically untested. Testing effects of transparency would prove particularly helpful in developing democracies where transparency norms have not taken hold or only have done so slowly.
In these contexts, does administrative transparency really create the sorts of benefits attributed to it? Transparency might grease the gears of developed democracies, but what good is grease when many of the gears seem to be broken or missing entirely?
This Article presents empirical results from a first-of-its-kind field study that tested two major promises of administrative transparency in a developing democracy: that transparency increases public participation in government affairs and that it increases government accountability. To test these hypotheses, we used two randomized controlled trials.
Surprisingly, we found transparency had no significant effect in almost any of our quantitative measurements, although our qualitative results suggested that when transparency interventions exposed corruption, some limited oversight could result. Our findings are particularly significant for developing democracies and show, at least in this context, that Justice Brandeis may have oversold the cleansing effects of transparency.
A few rays of transparency shining light on government action do not disinfect the system and cure government corruption and mismanagement. Once corruption and mismanagement are identified, it takes effective government institutions and action from civil society to successfully act as a disinfectant…(More)”.
Chapter by Jörg Raab et al: “The core question addressed is to what extent ex ante knowledge can be made available from a network governance perspective to deal with a crisis such as an infectious disease outbreak. Such outbreaks are often characterized by a lack of information and knowledge, changing and unforeseen conditions as well as a myriad of organizations becoming involved on the one hand but also organizations which do not become adequately involved. We introduce the organizational network governance approach as an exploratory approach to produce useful ex ante information for limiting the transmission of a virus and its impact. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach introducing two fictitious but realistic outbreak scenarios: the West Nile Virus (WNV), which is transmitted via mosquitos and the outbreak of a New Asian Coronavirus (NAC) which is characterized by human to human transmission. Both viruses can lead to serious illnesses or even death as well as large health care and economic costs.
Our organizational network governance approach turns out to be effective in generating information to produce recommendations for strengthening the organizational context in order to limit the transmission of a virus and its impact. We also suggest how the organizational network governance approach could be further developed…(More)”.
Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “Predictive models only get you so far. We also need to maintain our peripheral vision…
What is interesting to ponder is what this episode reveals about the nature of forecasting — and our modern attitudes towards time. As anthropologists often point out, the way we think about time is a defining feature of the post-enlightenment world. During much of human history, the future was viewed as a vague and terrifyingly unknowable blur marked by constant bargaining with deities (to ward off disaster) or cyclical seasonal rhythms (of the sort that underscore Buddhist cognitive maps).
In modern, post-enlightenment western cultures, however, a linear vision of time emerged that presumes the past can be extrapolated into the future, with a sense of progression, not just cyclicality.
In the 20th century, this gave birth to the risk management and finance professions, as Peter Bernstein wrote two decades ago in his brilliant book Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk.
By the turn of the century, innovations such as computing and the internet were turbocharging the forecasting business to an extraordinary degree, as Margaret Heffernan notes in her excellent (and very timely) new book Uncharted. “Human discomfort with uncertainty . . . has fuelled an industry that enriches itself by terrorising us with uncertainty and taunting us with certainty,” she writes.
However, as Heffernan stresses, while the forecasting business has made its “experts” very rich, it is also based on a fallacy: the idea that the future can be neatly extrapolated from the past.
Moreover, the apparent success of some pundits in predicting events (such as the 2008 crash) makes them so overconfident that they get locked into particularly rigid models. “The harder economists try to identify sure-fire methods of predicting markets, the more such insight eludes them,” she writes. Is there a solution? Heffernan’s answer is to embrace uncertainty, build resilience, use “narrative” (or qualitative) analyses instead of rigid models and to respect the wisdom of diverse views to avoid tunnel vision….(More)”.
Kevin Roose at The New York Times:”…There is no use sugarcoating the virus, which has already had devastating consequences for people all over the world, and may get much worse in the months ahead. There will be more lives lost, businesses closed and communities thrown into financial hardship. Nobody is arguing that what is coming will be fun, easy or anything remotely approaching normal for a very long time.
But if there is a silver lining in this crisis, it may be that the virus is forcing us to use the internet as it was always meant to be used — to connect with one another, share information and resources, and come up with collective solutions to urgent problems. It’s the healthy, humane version of digital culture we usually see only in schmaltzy TV commercials, where everyone is constantly using a smartphone to visit far-flung grandparents and read bedtime stories to kids.
Already, social media seems to have improved, with more reliable information than might have been expected from a global pandemic. And while the ways we’re substituting for in-person interaction aren’t perfect — over the next few months in America, there may be no phrase uttered more than “Can someone mute?” — we are seeing an explosion of creativity as people try to use technology as a bridge across physical distances.
Just look at what’s happening in Italy, where homebound adults are posting mini-manifestos on Facebook, while restless kids flock to multiplayer online games like Fortnite. Or see what’s happening in China, where would-be partyers have invented “cloud clubbing,” a new kind of virtual party in which D.J.s perform live sets on apps like TikTok and Douyin while audience members react in real time on their phones. Or observe how we’re coping in the United States, where groups are experimenting with new kinds of socially distanced gatherings: virtual yoga classes, virtual church services, virtual dinner parties.
These are the kinds of creative digital experiments we need, and they are coming at a time when we need them more than ever….(More)”
Paper by Aichida Ul-Aflaha, Mary McNeil and Saki Kumagai: “This paper summarizes the World Bank’s knowledge on open, participatory, and responsive governance. It offers a rethinking and broadening of the term “open government” in light of the World Bank Group’s Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in World Bank Group Operations and World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law. The building blocks of open government are documented based on experience and growing trends. The paper also tries to identify new frontiers and presents a summary of action steps for advancing the open, participatory, and responsive governance agenda within the World Bank….(More)”.
Michael Hallsworth at Behavioral Scientist: “Why don’t we wash our hands as much as we should?
Behavioral science can help identify some of the key barriers. It may also suggest what might make a difference for COVID-19 in the absence of a vaccine, recognizing that there is much we still do not know about this virus.
The first barrier may be a lack of awareness about the effectiveness of soap, water, and scrubbing. People may simply not realize how well specific handwashing actions can prevent the spread of infectious disease. This is why many public health agencies run educational campaigns, which may have varying effects based on how far they take evidence about behavior into account.
For example, last weekend the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), the organization for which I work, ran a set of online trials with 3,500 U.K. adults to test the impact of various posters on people’s intended handwashing behavior. We found that posters seemed to have stronger effects on people who were already washing their hands more frequently. In other words, the more compliant people got more compliant. Obviously, this is a real problem for infection control.
One specific issue with COVID-19 may be that people’s attention is being drawn to something else instead: face masks. In many countries, face masks in public are uncommon. Therefore, people in these places are more likely to notice when others are wearing masks, since doing so is visible and novel—unlike washing of hands! This may create the perception that wearing a face mask is the priority for preventing infection.
There are benefits from face masks, but we still lack evidence about how they are used or whether they work if worn by people who are not yet infected. At least one study suggests that on their own they may be less effective than handwashing at preventing transmission. And given that there’s a limited supply, face masks need to be reserved for the people and situations where they can do the most good.
Perhaps the main concern is that people may have a risk thermostat, whereby taking protective measures in one area means that they feel greater license to take risks in another. Obtaining a face mask may make people feel more protected and could mean they make less of an effort to wash their hands adequately.
Awareness is unlikely to be enough on its own. We also need to consider availability. In some instances, there are practical barriers to handwashing—water, soap, and drying materials may not be available. People may be aware of what they should do but be unable to follow through. One obvious solution is to increase the provision of alcohol-based hand sanitizer dispensers at locations where handwashing is infeasible. Doing this has been shown to improve hand hygiene on its own.
However, behavioral science shows that not all “availability” is equal: even small increases in required effort may result in a hand sanitizer going unused. Therefore, those providing hand sanitizer should also consider whether they’ve made usage as convenient as possible. How can dispensers be located so people do not have to make detours to use them? How can the dispensers be made more prominent—like the use of color? Where do people normally have to pause, thus making them more open to usage—like waiting for an elevator?…(More)”.
Book by Dan Heath: “So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems. Cops chase robbers, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many crimes, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention?
Upstream probes the psychological forces that push us downstream—including “problem blindness,” which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system. A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop out—as early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nation’s culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emerge—and forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas.
Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?…(More)”.
