book – Page 121 – The Living Library

Why: A Guide to Finding and Using Causes

Curated on December 9, 2015October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Samantha Kleinberg: “Can drinking coffee help people live longer? What makes a stock’s price go up? Why did you get the flu? Causal questions like these arise on a regular basis, but most people likely have not thought deeply about how to answer them.

This book helps you think about causality in a structured way: What is a cause, what are causes good for, and what is compelling evidence of causality? Author Samantha Kleinberg shows you how to develop a set of tools for thinking more critically about causes. You’ll learn how to question claims, identify causes, make decisions based on causal information, and verify causes through further tests.

Whether it’s figuring out what data you need, or understanding that the way you collect and prepare data affects the conclusions you can draw from it, Why will help you sharpen your causal inference skills….(More)”

Smart Urbanism: Utopian vision or false dawn?

Curated on December 8, 2015November 14, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane: “Smart Urbanism (SU) – the rebuilding of cities through the integration of digital technologies with buildings, neighbourhoods, networked infrastructures and people – is being represented as a unique emerging ‘solution’ to the majority of problems faced by cities today. SU discourses, enacted by technology companies, national governments and supranational agencies alike, claim a supremacy of urban digital technologies for managing and controlling infrastructures, achieving greater effectiveness in managing service demand and reducing carbon emissions, developing greater social interaction and community networks, providing new services around health and social care etc. Smart urbanism is being represented as the response to almost every facet of the contemporary urban question.

This book explores this common conception of the problematic of smart urbanism and critically address what new capabilities are being created by whom and with what exclusions; how these are being developed – and contested; where is this happening both within and between cities; and, with what sorts of social and material consequences. The aim of the book is to identify and convene a currently fragmented and disconnected group of researchers, commentators, developers and users from both within and outside the mainstream SU discourse, including several of those that adopt a more critical perspective, to assess ‘what’ problems of the city smartness can address

The volume provides the first internationally comparative assessment of SU in cities of the global north and south, critically evaluates whether current visions of SU are able to achieve their potential; and then identifies alternative trajectories for SU that hold radical promise for reshaping cities….(More)”

Forging Trust Communities: How Technology Changes Politics

Curated on December 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Irene S. Wu: “Bloggers in India used social media and wikis to broadcast news and bring humanitarian aid to tsunami victims in South Asia. Terrorist groups like ISIS pour out messages and recruit new members on websites. The Internet is the new public square, bringing to politics a platform on which to create community at both the grassroots and bureaucratic level. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies from more than ten countries, Irene S. Wu’s Forging Trust Communities argues that the Internet, and the technologies that predate it, catalyze political change by creating new opportunities for cooperation. The Internet does not simply enable faster and easier communication, but makes it possible for people around the world to interact closely, reciprocate favors, and build trust. The information and ideas exchanged by members of these cooperative communities become key sources of political power akin to military might and economic strength.

Wu illustrates the rich world history of citizens and leaders exercising political power through communications technology. People in nineteenth-century China, for example, used the telegraph and newspapers to mobilize against the emperor. In 1970, Taiwanese cable television gave voice to a political opposition demanding democracy. Both Qatar (in the 1990s) and Great Britain (in the 1930s) relied on public broadcasters to enhance their influence abroad. Additional case studies from Brazil, Egypt, the United States, Russia, India, the Philippines, and Tunisia reveal how various technologies function to create new political energy, enabling activists to challenge institutions while allowing governments to increase their power at home and abroad.

Forging Trust Communities demonstrates that the way people receive and share information through network communities reveals as much about their political identity as their socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or religion. Scholars and students in political science, public administration, international studies, sociology, and the history of science and technology will find this to be an insightful and indispensable work….(More)”

New frontiers in social innovation research

Curated on December 3, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan: “Nesta has published a new book with Palgrave which contains an introduction by me and many important chapters from leading academics around the world. I hope that many people will read it, and think about it, because it challenges, in a highly constructive way, many of the rather tired assumptions of the London media/political elite of both left and right.

The essay is by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, perhaps the world’s most creative and important contemporary intellectual. He is Professor of Law at Harvard (where he taught Obama); a philosopher and political theorist; author of one of the most interesting recent books on religion; co-author of an equally ground-breaking recent book on theoretical physics; and serves as strategy minister in the Brazilian government.

His argument is that a radically different way of thinking about politics, government and social change is emerging, which has either not been noticed by many political leaders, or misinterpreted. The essence of the argument is that practice is moving faster than theory; that systematic experimentation is a faster way to solve problems than clever authorship of pamphlets, white papers and plans; and that societies have the potential to be far more active agents of their own future than we assume.

The argument has implications for many fields. One is think-tanks. Twenty years ago I set up a think-tank, Demos. At that time the dominant model for policy making was to bring together some clever people in a capital city to write pamphlets, white papers and then laws. In the 1950s to 1970s a primary role was played by professors in universities, or royal commissions. Then it shifted to think-tanks. Sometimes teams within governments played a similar role – and I oversaw several of these, including the Strategy Unit in government. All saw policy as an essentially paper-based process, involving a linear transmission from abstract theories and analyses to practical implementation.

There’s still an important role to be played by think-tanks. But an opposite approach has now become common, and is promoted by Unger. In this approach, practice precedes theory. Experiment in the real world drives the development of new ideas – in business, civil society, and on the edges of the public sector. Learning by doing complements, and often leads analysis. The role of the academics and think-tanks shifts from inventing ideas to making sense of what’s emerging, and generalising it. Policies don’t try to specify every detail but rather set out broad directions and then enable a process of experiment and discovery.

As Unger shows, this approach has profound philosophical roots (reaching back to the 19th century pragmatists and beyond), and profound political implications (it’s almost opposite to the classic Marxist view, later adopted by the neoliberal right, in which intellectuals define solutions in theory which are then translated into practice). It also has profound implications for civil society – which he argues should adopt a maximalist rather than a minimalist view of social innovation.

The Unger approach doesn’t work for everything – for example, constitutional reform. But it is a superior method for improving most of the fields where governments have power – from welfare and health, to education and economic policy, and it has worked well for Nesta – evolving new models of healthcare, working with dozens of governments to redesign business policy, testing out new approaches to education.

The several hundred public sector labs and innovation teams around the world – from Chile to China, south Africa to Denmark – share this ethos too, as do many political leaders. Michael Bloomberg has been an exemplar, confident enough to innovate and experiment constantly in his time as New York Mayor. Won Soon Park in Korea is another…..

Unger’s chapter should be required reading for anyone aspiring to play a role in 21st century politics. You don’t have to agree with what he says. But you do need to work out where you disagree and why….(New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research)

Decoding the Future for National Security

Curated on December 2, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

George I. Seffers at Signal: “U.S. intelligence agencies are in the business of predicting the future, but no one has systematically evaluated the accuracy of those predictions—until now. The intelligence community’s cutting-edge research and development agency uses a handful of predictive analytics programs to measure and improve the ability to forecast major events, including political upheavals, disease outbreaks, insider threats and cyber attacks.

The Office for Anticipating Surprise at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is a place where crystal balls come in the form of software, tournaments and throngs of people. The office sponsors eight programs designed to improve predictive analytics, which uses a variety of data to forecast events. The programs all focus on incidents outside of the United States, and the information is anonymized to protect privacy. The programs are in different stages, some having recently ended as others are preparing to award contracts.

But they all have one more thing in common: They use tournaments to advance the state of the predictive analytic arts. “We decided to run a series of forecasting tournaments in which people from around the world generate forecasts about, now, thousands of real-world events,” says Jason Matheny, IARPA’s new director. “All of our programs on predictive analytics do use this tournament style of funding and evaluating research.” The Open Source Indicators program used a crowdsourcing technique in which people across the globe offered their predictions on such events as political uprisings, disease outbreaks and elections.

The data analyzed included social media trends, Web search queries and even cancelled dinner reservations—an indication that people are sick. “The methods applied to this were all automated. They used machine learning to comb through billions of pieces of data to look for that signal, that leading indicator, that an event was about to happen,” Matheny explains. “And they made amazing progress. They were able to predict disease outbreaks weeks earlier than traditional reporting.” The recently completed Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program also used a crowdsourcing competition in which people predicted events, including whether weapons would be tested, treaties would be signed or armed conflict would break out along certain borders. Volunteers were asked to provide information about their own background and what sources they used. IARPA also tested participants’ cognitive reasoning abilities. Volunteers provided their forecasts every day, and IARPA personnel kept score. Interestingly, they discovered the “deep domain” experts were not the best at predicting events. Instead, people with a certain style of thinking came out the winners. “They read a lot, not just from one source, but from multiple sources that come from different viewpoints. They have different sources of data, and they revise their judgments when presented with new information. They don’t stick to their guns,” Matheny reveals. …

The ACE research also contributed to a recently released book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, according to the IARPA director. The book was co-authored, along with Dan Gardner, by Philip Tetlock, the Annenberg University professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a principal investigator for the ACE program. Like ACE, the Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation program uses the forecasting tournament format, but it also requires participants to explain and defend their reasoning. The initiative aims to improve analytic thinking by combining structured reasoning techniques with crowdsourcing.

Meanwhile, the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) program forecasts science and technology breakthroughs….(More)”

Smart Cities as Democratic Ecologies

Curated on November 26, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Daniel Araya: “The concept of the ‘smart city’ as the confluence of urban planning and technological innovation has become a predominant feature of public policy discourse. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a ‘smart city’. One reason for this ambiguity is that the term means different things to different disciplines. For some, the concept of the ‘smart city’ refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies. For others, it refers to the deployment of information and communication technologies as next generation infrastructure.

This volume focuses on a third strand in this discourse, specifically technology driven changes in democracy and civic engagement. In conjunction with issues related to power grids, transportation networks and urban sustainability, there is a growing need to examine the potential of ‘smart cities’ as ‘democratic ecologies’ for citizen empowerment and user-driven innovation. What is the potential of ‘smart cities’ to become platforms for bottom-up civic engagement in the context of next generation communication, data sharing, and application development? What are the consequences of layering public spaces with computationally mediated technologies? Foucault’s notion of the panopticon, a metaphor for a surveillance society, suggests that smart technologies deployed in the design of ‘smart cities’ should be evaluated in terms of the ways in which they enable, or curtail, new urban literacies and emergent social practices….(More)”

Uninformed: Why People Seem to Know So Little about Politics and What We Can Do about It

Curated on November 24, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Arthur Lupia: “Research polls, media interviews, and everyday conversations reveal an unsettling truth: citizens, while well-meaning and even passionate about current affairs, appear to know very little about politics. Hundreds of surveys document vast numbers of citizens answering even basic questions about government incorrectly. Given this unfortunate state of affairs, it is not surprising that more knowledgeable people often deride the public for its ignorance. Some experts even think that less informed citizens should stay out of politics altogether.

As Arthur Lupia shows in Uninformed, this is not constructive. At root, critics of public ignorance fundamentally misunderstand the problem. Many experts believe that simply providing people with more facts will make them more competent voters. However, these experts fail to understand how most people learn, and hence don’t really know what types of information are even relevant to voters. Feeding them information they don’t find relevant does not address the problem. In other words, before educating the public, we need to educate the educators.

Lupia offers not just a critique, though; he also has solutions. Drawing from a variety of areas of research on topics like attention span and political psychology, he shows how we can actually increase issue competence among voters in areas ranging from gun regulation to climate change. To attack the problem, he develops an arsenal of techniques to effectively convey to people information they actually care about.

Citizens sometimes lack the knowledge that they need to make competent political choices, and it is undeniable that greater knowledge can improve decision making. But we need to understand that voters either don’t care about or pay attention to much of the information that experts think is important. Uninformed provides the keys to improving political knowledge and civic competence: understanding what information is important to others and knowing how to best convey it to them….(More)”

Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics after Remix

Curated on November 18, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by David J. Gunkel : “Remix—or the practice of recombining preexisting content—has proliferated across media both digital and analog. Fans celebrate it as a revolutionary new creative practice; critics characterize it as a lazy and cheap (and often illegal) recycling of other people’s work. In Of Remixology, David Gunkel argues that to understand remix, we need to change the terms of the debate. The two sides of the remix controversy, Gunkel contends, share certain underlying values—originality, innovation, artistic integrity. And each side seeks to protect these values from the threat that is represented by the other. In reevaluating these shared philosophical assumptions, Gunkel not only provides a new way to understand remix, he also offers an innovative theory of moral and aesthetic value for the twenty-first century.

In a section called “Premix,” Gunkel examines the terminology of remix (including “collage,” “sample,” “bootleg,” and “mashup”) and its material preconditions, the technology of recording. In “Remix,” he takes on the distinction between original and copy; makes a case for repetition; and considers the question of authorship in a world of seemingly endless recompiled and repurposed content. Finally, in “Postmix,” Gunkel outlines a new theory of moral and aesthetic value that can accommodate remix and its cultural significance, remixing—or reconfiguring and recombining—traditional philosophical approaches in the process….(More)”

The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad

Curated on November 12, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard H. Thaler in the New York Times: “Nudges, small design changes that can markedly affect individual behavior, have been catching on. These techniques rely on insights from behavioral science, and when used ethically, they can be very helpful. But we need to be sure that they aren’t being employed to sway people to make bad decisions that they will later regret.

Whenever I’m asked to autograph a copy of “Nudge,” the book I wrote with Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor, I sign it, “Nudge for good.” Unfortunately, that is meant as a plea, not an expectation.

Three principles should guide the use of nudges:

■ All nudging should be transparent and never misleading.

■ It should be as easy as possible to opt out of the nudge, preferably with as little as one mouse click.

■ There should be good reason to believe that the behavior being encouraged will improve the welfare of those being nudged.
As far as I know, the government teams in Britain and the United States that have focused on nudging have followed these guidelines scrupulously. But the private sector is another matter. In this domain, I see much more troubling behavior.

For example, last spring I received an email telling me that the first prominent review of a new book of mine had appeared: It was in The Times of London. Eager to read the review, I clicked on a hyperlink, only to run into a pay wall. Still, I was tempted by an offer to take out a one-month trial subscription for the price of just £1. As both a consumer and producer of newspaper articles, I have no beef with pay walls. But before signing up, I read the fine print. As expected, I would have to provide credit card information and would be automatically enrolled as a subscriber when the trial period expired. The subscription rate would then be £26 (about $40) a month. That wasn’t a concern because I did not intend to become a paying subscriber. I just wanted to read that one article.

But the details turned me off. To cancel, I had to give 15 days’ notice, so the one-month trial offer actually was good for just two weeks. What’s more, I would have to call London, during British business hours, and not on a toll-free number. That was both annoying and worrying. As an absent-minded American professor, I figured there was a good chance I would end up subscribing for several months, and that reading the article would end up costing me at least £100….

These examples are not unusual. Many companies are nudging purely for their own profit and not in customers’ best interests. In a recent column in The New York Times, Robert Shiller called such behavior “phishing.” Mr. Shiller and George Akerlof, both Nobel-winning economists, have written a book on the subject, “Phishing for Phools.”

Some argue that phishing — or evil nudging — is more dangerous in government than in the private sector. The argument is that government is a monopoly with coercive power, while we have more choice in the private sector over which newspapers we read and which airlines we fly.

I think this distinction is overstated. In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.

One example is the mortgage industry in the early 2000s. Borrowers were encouraged to take out loans that they could not repay when real estate prices fell. Competition did not eliminate this practice, because it was hard for anyone to make money selling the advice “Don’t take that loan.”

As customers, we can help one another by resisting these come-ons. The more we turn down questionable offers like trip insurance and scrutinize “one month” trials, the less incentive companies will have to use such schemes. Conversely, if customers reward firms that act in our best interests, more such outfits will survive and flourish, and the options available to us will improve….(More)