Paper by Carolina Aguerre and Carla Bonina: “Digital technologies have a recognised potential to build more efficient, credible, and innovative public institutions in Latin America. Despite progress, digital transformation in Latin American governments remains limited. In this work, we explore a peculiar yet largely understudied opportunity in the region: pursuing digital government transformation as a collaborative process between the government and civil society organisations. To do so, we draw from information systems research on digital government and platforms for development, complemented with governance theory from political science and conduct an interpretive in-depth case study of an urban reporting platform in Montevideo called ‘Por Mi Barrio’. The study reveals three mutually reinforced orders of governance in the trajectory of the project and explain how the collaboration unfolded over time: (i) a technical decision to use open platform architectures; (ii) the negotiation of formal and informal rules to make the project thrive and (iii) a shared, long-term ideology around the value of open technologies and technical sovereignty grounded in years of political history. Using a contextual explanation approach, our study helps to improve our understanding on the governance of collaborative digital government platforms in Latin America, with specific contributions to practice…(More)”.
The tools of global spycraft have changed
The Economist: “A few years ago intelligence analysts observed that internet-connected CCTV cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were inexplicably talking to vital parts of the Indian power grid. The strange connection turned out to be a deliberately circuitous route by which Chinese spies were communicating with malware they had previously buried deep inside crucial parts of the Indian grid (presumably to enable future sabotage). The analysts spotted it because they were scanning the internet to look for “command and control” (c2) nodes—such as cameras—that hackers use as stepping stones to their victims.
The attack was not revealed by an Indian or Western intelligence agency, but by Recorded Future, a firm in Somerville, Massachusetts. Christopher Ahlberg, its boss, claims the company has knowledge of more c2 nodes than anyone in the world. “We use that to bust Chinese and Russian intel operations constantly.” It also has billions of stolen log-in details found on the dark web (a hard-to-access part of the internet) and collects millions of images daily. “We know every UK company, every Chinese company, every Indian company,” says Mr Ahlberg. Recorded Future has 1,700 clients in 75 countries, including 47 governments.
The Chinese intrusion and its discovery were a microcosm of modern intelligence. The internet, and devices connected to it, is everywhere, offering opportunities galore for surveillance, entrapment and covert operations. The entities monitoring it, and acting on it, are often private firms, not government agencies…(More)” See Special Issue on Watching the Watchers
Positive Pathways report
Report by Michael Lawrence and Megan Shipman: “Polycrisis analysis reveals the complex and systemic nature of the world’s problems, but it can also help us pursue “positive pathways” to better futures. This report outlines the sorts of systems changes required to avoid, mitigate, and navigate through polycrisis given the dual nature of crises as harmful disasters and opportunities for transformation. It then examines the progression between three prominent approaches to systems change—leverage points, tipping points, and multi-systemic stability landscapes—by highlighting their advances and limitations. The report concludes that new tools like Cross-Impact Balance analysis can build on these approaches to help navigate through polycrisis by identifying stable and desirable multi-systemic equilibria…(More)”
Satisfaction with democracy has declined in recent years in high-income nations
Pew Research Center: “..Since 2017, we’ve regularly asked people in 12 economically advanced democracies how satisfied they are with the state of their democracy. Overall, satisfaction declined in these countries between 2017 and 2019 before bouncing back in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since 2021, however, people in these nations have become more frustrated with their democracies. A median of 49% across these 12 nations were satisfied with the way their democracy was working in 2021; today, just 36% hold this view. (The 2024 survey was conducted before the European Parliament elections in June.)
Satisfaction is lower today than it was in 2021 in nine of the 12 nations where we have asked the question consistently. This includes six countries where satisfaction has dropped by double digits: Canada, Germany, Greece, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Satisfaction has not increased in any of the 12 countries surveyed…(More)”
From Waves to Ecosystems: The Next Stage of Democratic Innovation
Paper by Josh Lerner: “Anti-democratic movements are surging around the world, threatening to undermine elections and replace them with oligarchy. Pro-democracy movements mainly focus on defending elections, even though most people think that elections alone are inadequate. While elections dominate current thinking about democracy, the history and future of democracy is much broader. For over 5,000 years, people have built up competing waves of electoral, direct, deliberative, and participatory democracy. We are now seeing a transition, however, from waves to ecosystems. Rather than seeking one single solution to our ailing democracy, a new generation of democracy reformers is weaving together different democratic practices into balanced democratic ecosystems. This white paper provides a roadmap for this emerging next stage of democratic innovation. It reviews the limitations of elections, the different waves of democratic innovation and efforts to connect them, and key challenges and strategies for building healthy ecosystems of democracy…(More)”.
Government + research + philanthropy: How cross-sector partnerships can improve policy decisions and action
Paper by Jenni Owen: “Researchers often lament that government decision-makers do not generate or use research evidence. People in government often lament that researchers are not responsive to government’s needs. Yet there is increasing enthusiasm in government, research, and philanthropy sectors for developing, investing in, and sustaining government-research partnerships that focus on government’s use of evidence. There is, however, scant guidance about how to do so. To help fill the gap, this essay addresses (1) Why government-research partnerships matter; (2) Barriers to developing government-research partnerships; (3) Strategies for addressing the barriers; (4) The role of philanthropy in government-research partnerships. The momentum to develop, invest in, and sustain cross-sector partnerships that advance government’s use of evidence is exciting. It is especially encouraging that there are feasible and actionable strategies for doing so…(More)”.
Oracles in the Machine
Essay by Zora Che: “…In sociologist Charles Cooley’s theory of the “looking glass of self,” we understand ourselves through the perceptions of others. Online, models perceive us, responding to and reinforcing the versions of ourselves which they glean from our behaviors. They sense my finger lingering, my invisible gaze apparent by the gap of my movements. My understanding of my digital self and my digital reality becomes a feedback loop churned by models I cannot see. Moreover, the model only “sees” me as data that can be optimized for objectives that I cannot uncover. That objective is something closer to optimizing my time spent on the digital product than to holding my deepest needs; the latter perhaps was never a mathematical question to begin with.
Divination and algorithmic opacity both appear to bring us what we cannot see. Diviners see through what is obscure and beyond our comprehension: it may be incomprehensible pain and grief, vertiginous lack of control, and/or the unwarranted future. The opacity of divination comes from the limitations of our own knowledge. But the opacity of algorithms comes from both the algorithm itself and the socio-technical infrastructure that it was built around. Jenna Burrell writes of three layers of opacity in models: “(1) opacity as intentional corporate or state secrecy, (2) opacity as technical illiteracy, and (3) an opacity that arises from the characteristics of machine learning algorithms and the scale required to apply them usefully.” As consumers of models, we interact with the first and third layer of the opacity―that of platforms hiding models from us, and that of the gap between what the model is optimizing for and what may be explainable. The black-box model is an alluring oracle, interacting with us in inexplicable ways: no explanation for the daily laconic message Co-Star pushes to its users, no logic behind why you received this tarot reading while scrolling, no insight into the models behind these oracles and their objectives…(More)”.
Real Chaos, Today! Are Randomized Controlled Trials a good way to do economics?
Article by Maia Mindel: “A few weeks back, there was much social media drama about this a paper titled: “Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter” (2024) by Jingyi Qiu, Yan Chen, Alain Cohn, and Alvin Roth (recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics). The study posted job market papers by economics PhDs, and then assigned prominent economists (who had volunteered) to randomly promote half of them on their profiles(more detail on this paper in a bit).
The “drama” in question was generally: “it is immoral to throw dice around on the most important aspect of a young economist’s career”, versus “no it’s not”. This, of course, awakened interest in a broader subject: Randomized Controlled Trials, or RCTs.
R.C.T. T.O. G.O.
Let’s go back to the 1600s – bloodletting was a common way to cure diseases. Did it work? Well, doctor Joan Baptista van Helmont had an idea: randomly divvy up a few hundred invalids into two groups, one of which got bloodletting applied, and another one that didn’t.
While it’s not clear this experiment ever happened, it sets up the basic principle of the randomized control trial: the idea here is that, to study the effects of a treatment, (in a medical context, a medicine; in an economics context, a policy), a sample group is divided between two: the control group, which does not receive any treatment, and the treatment group, which does. The modern randomized controlled (or control) trial has three “legs”: it’s randomized because who’s in each group gets chosen at random, it’s controlled because there’s a group that doesn’t get the treatment to serve as a counterfactual, and it’s a trial because you’re not developing “at scale” just yet.
Why could it be important to randomly select people for economic studies? Well, you want the only difference, on average, between the two groups to be whether or not they get the treatment. Consider military service: it’s regularly trotted out that drafting kids would reduce crime rates. Is this true? Well, the average person who is exempted from the draft could be, systematically, different than the average person who isn’t – for example, people who volunteer could be from wealthier families who are more patriotic, or poorer families who need certain benefits; or they could have physical disabilities that impede their labor market participation, or wealthier university students who get a deferral. But because many countries use lotteries to allocate draftees versus non draftees, you can get a group of people who are randomly assigned to the draft, and who on average should be similar enough to each other. One study in particular, about Argentina’s mandatory military service in pretty much all of the 20th century, finds that being conscripted raises the crime rate relative to people who didn’t get drafted through the lottery. This doesn’t mean that soldiers have higher crime rates than non soldiers, because of selection issues – but it does provide pretty good evidence that getting drafted is not good for your non-criminal prospects…(More)”.
Assembling Tomorrow
Book by Stanford d.school: “…explores how to use readily accessible tools of design to both mend the mistakes of our past and shape our future for the better. It explores the intangibles, the mysterious forces that contribute to the off-kilter feelings of today, and follows up with actionables to help you alter your perspective and find opportunities in these turbulent times. Mixed throughout are histories of the future, short pieces of speculative fiction that illustrate how things go haywire and what might be in store if we don’t set them straight…(More)”.
Top 10 Emerging Technologies to Address Global Challenges
World Economic Forum: “The Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2024 are:
- 1. AI for scientific discovery: While artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in research for many years, advances in deep learning, generative AI and foundation models are revolutionizing the scientific discovery process. AI will enable researchers to make unprecedented connections and advancements in understanding diseases, proposing new materials, and enhancing knowledge of the human body and mind.
- 2. Privacy-enhancing technologies: Protecting personal privacy while providing new opportunities for global data sharing and collaboration, “synthetic data” is set to transform how information is handled with powerful applications in health-related research.
- 3. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces: These innovative surfaces turn ordinary walls and surfaces into intelligent components for wireless communication while enhancing energy efficiency in wireless networks. They hold promise for numerous applications, from smart factories to vehicular networks.
- 4. High-altitude platform stations: Using aircraft, blimps and balloons, these systems can extend mobile network access to remote regions, helping bridge the digital divide for over 2.6 billion people worldwide.
- 5. Integrated sensing and communication: The advent of 6G networks facilitates simultaneous data collection (sensing) and transmission (communication). This enables environmental monitoring systems that help in smart agriculture, environmental conservation and urban planning. Integrated sensing and communication devices also promise to reduce energy and silicon consumption.
- 6. Immersive technology for the built world: Combining computing power with virtual and augmented reality, these technologies promise rapid improvements in infrastructure and daily systems. This technology allows designers and construction professionals to check for correspondence between physical and digital models, ensuring accuracy and safety and advancing sustainability.
- 7. Elastocalorics: As global temperatures rise, the need for cooling solutions is set to soar. Offering higher efficiency and lower energy use, elastocalorics release and absorb heat under mechanical stress, presenting a sustainable alternative to current technologies.
- 8. Carbon-capturing microbes: Engineered organisms convert emissions into valuable products like biofuels, providing a promising approach to mitigating climate change.
- 9. Alternative livestock feeds: protein feeds for livestock sourced from single-cell proteins, algae and food waste could offer a sustainable solution for the agricultural industry.
- 10. Genomics for transplants: The successful implantation of genetically engineered organs into a human marks a significant advancement in healthcare, offering hope to millions awaiting transplants…(More)”.