Paper by Amanda Levendowski: “Contemporary citation practices are often unjust. Data cartels, like Google, Westlaw, and Lexis, prioritize profits and efficiency in ways that threaten people’s autonomy, particularly that of pregnant people and immigrants. Women and people of color have been legal scholars for more than a century, yet colleagues consistently under-cite and under-acknowledge their work. Other citations frequently lead to materials that cannot be accessed by disabled people, poor people or the public due to design, paywalls or link rot. Yet scholars and students often understand citation practices as “just” citation and perpetuate these practices unknowingly. This Article is an intervention. Using an intersectional feminist framework for understanding how cyberlaws oppress and liberate oppressed, an emerging movement known as feminist cyberlaw, this Article investigates problems posed by prevailing citation practices and introduces practical methods that bring citation into closer alignment with the feminist values of safety, equity, and accessibility. Escaping data cartels, engaging marginalized scholars, embracing free and public resources, and ensuring that those resources remain easily available represent small, radical shifts that promote just citation. This Article provides powerful, practical tools for pursuing all of them…(More)”.
The Benefits of Statistical Noise
Article by Ruth Schmidt: “The year was 1999. Chicago’s public housing was in distress, with neglect and gang activity hastening the decline of already depressed neighborhoods. In response, the city launched the Plan for Transformation to offer relief to residents and rejuvenate the city’s public housing system: residents would be temporarily relocated during demolition, after which the real estate would be repurposed for a mixed-income community. Once the building phase was completed, former residents were to receive vouchers to move back into their safer and less stigmatized old neighborhood.
But a billion dollars and over 20 years later, the jury is still out about the plan’s effectiveness and side effects. While many residents do now live in safer, more established communities, many had to move multiple times before settling, or remain in high-poverty, highly segregated neighborhoods. And the idealized notion of former residents as “moving on up” in a free market system rewarded those who knew how to play the game—like private real estate developers—over those with little practice. Some voices were drowned out.
Chicago’s Plan for Transformation shared the same challenges—cost, time, a diverse set of stakeholders—as many similar large-scale civic initiatives. But it also highlights another equally important issue that’s often hidden in plain sight: informational “noise.”
Noise, defined as extraneous data that intrudes on fair and consistent decision-making, is nearly uniformly considered a negative influence on judgment that can lead experts to reach variable findings in contexts as wide-ranging as medicine, public policy, court decisions, and insurance claims. In fact, Daniel Kahneman himself has suggested that for all the attention to bias, noise in decision-making may actually be an equal-opportunity contributor to irrational judgment.
Kahneman and his colleagues have used the metaphor of a target to explain how both noise and bias result in inaccurate judgments, failing to predictably hit the bull’s-eye in different ways. Where bias looks like a tight cluster of shots that all consistently miss the mark, the erratic judgments caused by noise look like a scattershot combination of precise hits and wild misses…(More)”.
ChatGPT took people by surprise – here are four technologies that could make a difference next
Article by Fabian Stephany and Johann Laux: “…There are some AI technologies waiting on the sidelines right now that hold promise. The four we think are waiting in the wings are next-level GPT, humanoid robots, AI lawyers, and AI-driven science. Our choices appear ready from a technological point of view, but whether they satisfy all three of the criteria we’ve mentioned is another matter. We chose these four because they were the ones that kept coming up in our investigations into progress in AI technologies.
1. AI legal help
The startup company DoNotPay claims to have built a legal chatbot – built on LLM technology – that can advise defendants in court.
The company recently said it would let its AI system help two defendants fight speeding tickets in real-time. Connected via an earpiece, the AI can listen to proceedings and whisper legal arguments into the ear of the defendant, who then repeats them out loud to the judge.
After criticism and a lawsuit for practising law without a license, the startup postponed the AI’s courtroom debut. The potential for the technology will thus not be decided by technological or economic constraints, but by the authority of the legal system.
Lawyers are well-paid professionals and the costs of litigation are high, so the economic potential for automation is huge. However, the US legal system currently seems to oppose robots representing humans in court.
2. AI scientific support
Scientists are increasingly turning to AI for insights. Machine learning, where an AI system improves at what it does over time, is being employed to identify patterns in data. This enables the systems to propose novel scientific hypotheses – proposed explanations for phenomena in nature. These may even be capable of surpassing human assumptions and biases.
For example, researchers at the University of Liverpool used a machine learning system called a neural network to rank chemical combinations for battery materials, guiding their experiments and saving time.
The complexity of neural networks means that there are gaps in our understanding of how they actually make decisions – the so-called black box problem. Nevertheless, there are techniques that can shed light on the logic behind their answers and this can lead to unexpected discoveries.
While AI cannot currently formulate hypotheses independently, it can inspire scientists to approach problems from new perspectives…(More)”.
Next Generation Virtual Worlds: Societal, Technological, Economic and Policy Challenges for the EU
JRC Report: “This report provides an overview of the opportunities that next generation virtual worlds may bring in different sectors such as education, manufacturing, health, and public services among others. This potential will need to be harnessed in light of the challenges the EU may need to address along societal, technological, and economic and policy dimensions. We apply a multidisciplinary and multisectoral perspective to our analysis, covering technical, social, industrial, political and economic facets. The report also offers a first techno-economic analysis of the digital ecosystem identifying current key players in different subdomains related to virtual worlds…(More)”.
Government at a Glance
OECD Report: “Published every two years, Government at a Glance provides reliable, internationally comparable indicators on government activities and their results in OECD countries. Where possible, it also reports data for selected non-member countries. It includes input, process, output and outcome indicators as well as contextual information for each country.
Each indicator in the publication is presented in a user-friendly format, consisting of graphs and/or charts illustrating variations across countries and over time, brief descriptive analyses highlighting the major findings conveyed by the data, and a methodological section on the definition of the indicator and any limitations in data comparability…(More)”.
Shifting the Culture of Public Procurement Can Help Improve Digital Public Services
Article by Sarah Forland: “Advancing digital public infrastructure (DPI) that strengthens the delivery of public services requires shifting the culture around how governments design, develop, and implement digital solutions. At the foundation of this work, is public procurement—a unique and often overlooked avenue for improving digital public services…
To reconceptualize public procurement, stakeholders need to collaborate to improve shared accountability, build mutual trust, and create better outcomes for public service delivery. In October 2022, DIGI worked with experts across the field to identify five core opportunity areas for change and highlighted personal narratives with advice on how to get there, including insight from some of the panelist organizations and experts…
1. View procurement as part of the innovation process.
Rather than focusing primarily on risk-avoidance and compliance, public servants should integrate procurement into the innovation process. jurisdictions can adopt goal-oriented, modular contracting practices or performance-based contracts by fostering collaboration among various stakeholders. This approach allows for agile, iterative, and flexible solution development, placing emphasis on outcome-based solutions.
2. Start with the goal, then work toward the most effective solution, rather than prescribing a solution.
Jurisdictions can create an environment that encourages vendors to propose a variety of innovative solutions through request for proposals (RFP) that explicitly outlines objectives, success indicators, and potential failure points. This process can serve as a design exercise for vendors, enabling jurisdictions to select the proposal that most effectively aligns with their identified goals.
3. Center diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA) throughout procurement.
Delivering people-centered outcomes through civic solutions requires intentional DEIA practices. On the backend, this can include increasing RFP availability and access to new vendors—especially women- and minority-owned businesses. In addition, requiring human-centered design and community input can help ensure that those who will interact with a digital solution can do so effectively, easily, and safely…(More)”.
Index, A History of the
“A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age” by Dennis Duncan: “Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists’ living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and—of course—indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart—and we have been for eight hundred years…(More)”.
Harvard fraud claims fuel doubts over science of behaviour
Article by Andrew Hill and Andrew Jack: “Claims that fraudulent data was used in papers co-authored by a star Harvard Business School ethics expert have fuelled a growing controversy about the validity of behavioural science, whose findings are routinely taught in business schools and applied within companies.
While the professor has not yet responded to details of the claims, the episode is the latest blow to a field that has risen to prominence over the past 15 years and whose findings in areas such as decision-making and team-building are widely put into practice.
Companies from Coca-Cola to JPMorgan Chase have executives dedicated to behavioural science, while governments around the world have also embraced its findings. But well-known principles in the field such as “nudge theory” are now being called into question.
The Harvard episode “is topic number one in business school circles”, said André Spicer, executive dean of London’s Bayes Business School. “There has been a large-scale replication crisis in psychology — lots of the results can’t be reproduced and some of the underlying data has found to be faked.”…
That cast a shadow over the use of behavioural science by government-linked “nudge units” such as the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, which was spun off into a company in 2014, and the US Office of Evaluation Sciences.
However, David Halpern, now president of BIT, countered that publication bias is not unique to the field. He said he and his peers use far larger-scale, more representative and robust testing than academic research.
Halpern argued that behavioural research can help to effectively deploy government budgets. “The dirty secret of most governments and organisations is that they spend a lot of money, but have no idea if they are spending in ways that make things better.”
Academics point out that testing others’ results is part of normal scientific practice. The difference with behavioural science is that initial results that have not yet been replicated are often quickly recycled into sensational headlines, popular self-help books and business practice.
“Scientists should be better at pointing out when non-scientists over-exaggerate these things and extrapolate, but they are worried that if they do this they will ruin the positive trend [towards their field],” said Pelle Guldborg Hansen, chief executive of iNudgeyou, a centre for applied behavioural research.
Many consultancies have sprung up to cater to corporate demand for behavioural insights. “What I found was that almost anyone who had read Nudge had a licence to set up as a behavioural scientist,” said Nuala Walsh, who formed the Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists in 2020 to try to set some standards…(More)”.
How Leaders in Higher Education Can Embed Behavioral Science in Their Institutions
Essay by Ross E. O’Hara: “…Once we view student success through a behavioral science lens and see the complex systems underlying student decision making, it becomes clear that behavioral scientists work best not as mechanics who repair broken systems, but as engineers who design better systems. Higher education, therefore, needs to diffuse those engineers throughout the organization.
To that end, Hallsworth recommends that organizations change their view of behavioral science “from projects to processes, from commissions to culture.” Only when behavioral science expertise is diffused across units and incorporated into all key organizational functions can a college become behaviorally enabled. So how might higher education go about this transformation?
1. Leverage the faculty
Leaders with deep expertise in behavioral science are likely already employed in social and behavioral sciences departments. Consider ways to focus their energy inward to tackle institutional challenges, perhaps using their own classrooms or departments as testing grounds. As they find promising solutions, build the infrastructure to disseminate and implement those ideas college and system wide. Unlike higher education’s normal approach—giving faculty additional unpaid and underappreciated committee work—provide funding and recognition that incentivizes faculty to make higher education policy an important piece of their academic portfolio.
2. Practice cross-functional training
I have spent the past several years providing colleges with behavioral science professional development, but too often this work is focused on a single functional unit, like academic advisors or faculty. Instead, create trainings that include representatives from across campus (e.g., enrollment; financial aid; registrar; student affairs). Not only will this diffuse behavioral science knowledge across the institution, but it will bring together the key players that impact student experience and make it easier for them to see the adaptive system that determines whether a student graduates or withdraws.
3. Let behavioral scientists be engineers
Whether you look for faculty or outside consultants, bring behavioral science experts into conversations early. From redesigning college-to-career pathways to building a new cafeteria, behavioral scientists can help gather and interpret student voices, foresee and circumvent behavioral challenges, and identify measurable and meaningful evaluation metrics. The impact of their expertise will be even greater when they work in an environment with a diffuse knowledge of behavioral science already in place…(More)”
There Is Always An Alternative
Speech by Cory Doctorow: “…The human condition is…not good. We’re in the polycrisis, a widening gyre of climate emergency, inequality, infrastructure neglect, rising authoritarianism and zoonotic plagues.
But that’s not the bad part. Stuff breaks. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not up for debate. Things fall apart. Assuming nothing will break doesn’t make you an optimist — it makes you a danger to yourself and others. “Nothing will go wrong” is how we get “let’s not put any lifeboats on the Titanic.”
Let me say, “to hell with optimism and pessimism.” Optimism and pessimism are just fatalism in respectable suits.
Optimism is the belief that things will get better, no matter what we do.
Pessimism is the belief that things will get worse, no matter what we do.
Both deny human agency, that we can intervene to change things.
The belief that nothing will change — that nothing can change — is the wrecker’s most powerful weapon. After all, if you can convince people that nothing can be done, they won’t try to do anything.
Thus: Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, “There is no alternative,” a polite way of saying “Resistance is futile,” or, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
This is inevitabilism, the belief that nothing can change. It’s the opposite of science fiction. As a science fiction writer, my job is to imagine alternatives. “There is no alternative” is a demand pretending to be an observation: “stop trying to think of an alternative.”
At its best, science fiction demands that we look beyond what a gadget does and interrogate who it does it for and who it does it to. That’s an important exercise, maybe the important exercise.
It’s the method by which we seize the means of computation for the betterment of the human race, not the immortal, rapacious colony organisms we call “limited liability companies,” to whom we represent inconvenient gut-flora, and which are rendering the only planet in the universe capable of sustaining human life unfit for human habitation.
The Luddites practiced science fiction. Perhaps you’ve heard that the Luddites were technophobic thugs who smashed steam-looms because they feared progress. That’s an ahistorical libel. The Luddites weren’t technophobes, they were highly skilled tech workers. Textile guilds required seven years of apprenticeship — Luddites got the equivalent of a master’s from MIT.
Luddites didn’t hate looms. They smashed looms because their bosses wanted to fire skilled workers, ship kidnapped Napoleonic War orphans north from London, and lock them inside factories for a decade of indenture, to be starved, beaten, maimed and killed.
Designing industrial machinery that’s “so easy a child can use it,” isn’t necessarily a prelude to child-slavery, but it’s not not a prelude to child-slavery, either.
The Luddites weren’t mad about what the machines did — they were mad at who the machines did it for and whom they did it to. The child-kidnapping millionaires of the Industrial Revolution said, “There is no alternative,” and the Luddites roared, “The hell you say there isn’t!”
Today’s tech millionaires are no different. Mark Zuckerberg used to insist that there was no way to talk to your friends without being comprehensively spied upon, so every intimate and compromising fact of your life could be gathered, processed, and mobilised against you.
He said this was inevitable, as though some bearded prophet staggered down off a mountain, bearing two stone tablets, intoning, “Zuck, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles, and lo, thou shalt mine them for actionable market intelligence.”
When we demanded the right to talk to our friends without Zuckerberg spying on us, he looked at us like we’d just asked for water that wasn’t wet.
Today, Zuck has a new inevitabilist narrative: that we will spend the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled, low-polygon cartoon characters in “the metaverse,” a virtual world he lifted from a 20-year-old dystopian science-fiction novel…(More)”.