book – Page 146 – The Living Library

Trust, Computing, and Society

Curated on March 5, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Richard H. R. Harper: “The Internet has altered how people engage with each other in myriad ways, including offering opportunities for people to act distrustfully. This fascinating set of essays explores the question of trust in computing from technical, socio-philosophical, and design perspectives. Why has the identity of the human user been taken for granted in the design of the Internet? What difficulties ensue when it is understood that security systems can never be perfect? What role does trust have in society in general? How is trust to be understood when trying to describe activities as part of a user requirement program? What questions of trust arise in a time when data analytics are meant to offer new insights into user behavior and when users are confronted with different sorts of digital entities? These questions and their answers are of paramount interest to computer scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and designers confronting the problem of trust.

Brings together authors from a variety of disciplines
Can be adopted in multiple course areas: computer science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology
Integrated, multidisciplinary approach to understanding trust as it relates to modern computing”

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and overview Richard Harper
Part I. The Topography of Trust and Computing:
2. The role of trust in cyberspace David Clark
3. The new face of the internet Thomas Karagiannis
4. Trust as a methodological tool in security engineering George Danezis
Part II. Conceptual Points of View:
5. Computing and the search for trust Tom Simpson
6. The worry about trust Olli Lagerspetz
7. The inescapability of trust Bob Anderson and Wes Sharrock
8. Trust in interpersonal interaction and cloud computing Rod Watson
9. Trust, social identity, and computation Charles Ess
Part III. Trust in Design:
10. Design for trusted and trustworthy services M. Angela Sasse and Iacovos Kirlappos
11. Dialogues: trust in design Richard Banks
12. Trusting oneself Richard Harper and William Odom
13. Reflections on trust, computing and society Richard Harper
Bibliography.

Open Government -Opportunities and Challenges for Public Governance

Curated on March 1, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New volume of Public Administration and Information Technology series: “Given this global context, and taking into account both the need of academicians and practitioners, it is the intention of this book to shed light on the open government concept and, in particular:

• To provide comprehensive knowledge of recent major developments of open government around the world.

• To analyze the importance of open government efforts for public governance.

• To provide insightful analysis about those factors that are critical when designing, implementing and evaluating open government initiatives.

• To discuss how contextual factors affect open government initiatives’success or failure.

• To explore the existence of theoretical models of open government.

• To propose strategies to move forward and to address future challenges in an international context.”

Table of contents

Big Data, Big New Businesses

Curated on February 26, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigel Shaboldt and Michael Chui: “Many people have long believed that if government and the private sector agreed to share their data more freely, and allow it to be processed using the right analytics, previously unimaginable solutions to countless social, economic, and commercial problems would emerge. They may have no idea how right they are.

Even the most vocal proponents of open data appear to have underestimated how many profitable ideas and businesses stand to be created. More than 40 governments worldwide have committed to opening up their electronic data – including weather records, crime statistics, transport information, and much more – to businesses, consumers, and the general public. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the annual value of open data in education, transportation, consumer products, electricity, oil and gas, health care, and consumer finance could reach $3 trillion.

These benefits come in the form of new and better goods and services, as well as efficiency savings for businesses, consumers, and citizens. The range is vast. For example, drawing on data from various government agencies, the Climate Corporation (recently bought for $1 billion) has taken 30 years of weather data, 60 years of data on crop yields, and 14 terabytes of information on soil types to create customized insurance products.

Similarly, real-time traffic and transit information can be accessed on smartphone apps to inform users when the next bus is coming or how to avoid traffic congestion. And, by analyzing online comments about their products, manufacturers can identify which features consumers are most willing to pay for, and develop their business and investment strategies accordingly.

Opportunities are everywhere. A raft of open-data start-ups are now being incubated at the London-based Open Data Institute (ODI), which focuses on improving our understanding of corporate ownership, health-care delivery, energy, finance, transport, and many other areas of public interest.

Consumers are the main beneficiaries, especially in the household-goods market. It is estimated that consumers making better-informed buying decisions across sectors could capture an estimated $1.1 trillion in value annually. Third-party data aggregators are already allowing customers to compare prices across online and brick-and-mortar shops. Many also permit customers to compare quality ratings, safety data (drawn, for example, from official injury reports), information about the provenance of food, and producers’ environmental and labor practices.

Consider the book industry. Bookstores once regarded their inventory as a trade secret. Customers, competitors, and even suppliers seldom knew what stock bookstores held. Nowadays, by contrast, bookstores not only report what stock they carry but also when customers’ orders will arrive. If they did not, they would be excluded from the product-aggregation sites that have come to determine so many buying decisions.

The health-care sector is a prime target for achieving new efficiencies. By sharing the treatment data of a large patient population, for example, care providers can better identify practices that could save $180 billion annually.

The Open Data Institute-backed start-up Mastodon C uses open data on doctors’ prescriptions to differentiate among expensive patent medicines and cheaper “off-patent” varieties; when applied to just one class of drug, that could save around $400 million in one year for the British National Health Service. Meanwhile, open data on acquired infections in British hospitals has led to the publication of hospital-performance tables, a major factor in the 85% drop in reported infections.

There are also opportunities to prevent lifestyle-related diseases and improve treatment by enabling patients to compare their own data with aggregated data on similar patients. This has been shown to motivate patients to improve their diet, exercise more often, and take their medicines regularly. Similarly, letting people compare their energy use with that of their peers could prompt them to save hundreds of billions of dollars in electricity costs each year, to say nothing of reducing carbon emissions.

Such benchmarking is even more valuable for businesses seeking to improve their operational efficiency. The oil and gas industry, for example, could save $450 billion annually by sharing anonymized and aggregated data on the management of upstream and downstream facilities.

Finally, the move toward open data serves a variety of socially desirable ends, ranging from the reuse of publicly funded research to support work on poverty, inclusion, or discrimination, to the disclosure by corporations such as Nike of their supply-chain data and environmental impact.

There are, of course, challenges arising from the proliferation and systematic use of open data. Companies fear for their intellectual property; ordinary citizens worry about how their private information might be used and abused. Last year, Telefónica, the world’s fifth-largest mobile-network provider, tried to allay such fears by launching a digital confidence program to reassure customers that innovations in transparency would be implemented responsibly and without compromising users’ personal information.

The sensitive handling of these issues will be essential if we are to reap the potential $3 trillion in value that usage of open data could deliver each year. Consumers, policymakers, and companies must work together, not just to agree on common standards of analysis, but also to set the ground rules for the protection of privacy and property.”

Visualising Information for Advocacy

Curated on February 26, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book: “Visualising Information for Advocacy is a book about how advocates and activists use visual elements in their campaigns. This 170-page guide features over 60 case studies from around the world to provide an introduction to understanding visual information and a framework for using images for influence.
At Tactical Tech we have been analysing how different kinds of visual techniques serve the work of advocacy, and have been testing out our ideas. We have developed three ways to classify how the visual works in advocacy campaigns:

Get the idea is about making simple, eye-catching products that convey one concise point, provoking and inviting audiences to find out more about the issue.
Get the picture is about creating a visual summary of an argument by crafting a narrative with visuals and data.
Get the detail is about presenting data through interactive digital formats in a way that allows the audience to dig deeper and explore the issue for themselves.

Flick through Visualising Information for Advocacy to get inspiration for your project, try out some of the visual techniques showcased, or find advice on how we produce visuals for advocates.”

The Power of Knowledge,' by Jeremy Black

Curated on February 26, 2014October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by Roger Kimball: “It’s surprising to me that the English historian Jeremy Black isn’t better known on these shores. He has written dozens of books on subjects as various as the Battle of Waterloo, the history of the slave trade, both world wars and the rise of European power in the 18th century. His bibliography includes books about maps and naval power, and even “The Politics of James Bond.” What is more, he commands an engaging prose style and possesses an outlook appealingly grounded in the principles of a high but undoctrinaire Toryism. This combination of fluency and wide-ranging erudition are conspicuously on display in “The Power of Knowledge,” an ambitious, synoptic, “big idea” book that is likely to extend the frontiers of Mr. Black’s audience in this country.

The thesis of the book is neatly encapsulated in the title of Chapter 13: “Information Is All.” The idea that there is an intimate link between knowledge and what we might call administrative power is perennial. It is inscribed in the nature of things that the more you know, the more you control.
The technological side of that syllogism, Mr. Black notes, didn’t really come to the fore until the 17th century. “Knowledge is Power,” wrote Francis Bacon, enunciating a principle that seems obvious only because we have been the beneficiaries of the processes he helped to define. Writing a few years later, René Descartes promised that his method of inquiry would make man “the master and possessor of nature.” Descartes looked forward to all manner of material benefits, not least in the realm of medicine. He was prescient.
Mr. Black touches on Bacon and Descartes in his chapter on the Scientific Revolution, but his focus is much more encompassing. He begins his story with the formation of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century and describes how the Great Khan’s superior deployment of information, prominently including his command of trade along the Silk Road, stood behind the creation of the largest contiguous empire in history.

The guiding theme of this book is the complex linkage (what Mr. Black calls “synergies”) between information and power—political power, above all, but also military, economic and technological power. The increasingly sophisticated acquisition and manipulation of information, Mr. Black argues, is “a defining characteristic of modernity,” and it fueled the rise and shaped the distinctiveness of the West from the 18th century through the early 21st.

Part of what makes modernity modern—and a large part of what has made the West its crucible—is the interpenetration of information and technique under the guidance of an increasingly secularized idea of human flourishing. Other cultures made local contributions to this drama, but Mr. Black is right: The breathtaking spectacle of modern technological achievement has been overwhelmingly a Western achievement. This fact has been a source of great sadness for politically correct exponents of multiculturalism. Mr. Black knows this, but he early on hedges his account to avoid “triumphalism.”
As Mr. Black concedes, many of the master terms of his narrative are “porous.” What, after all, is information? It is data, yes, but also statistics, rumor, propaganda and practical know-how. All enter into the story he tells, but their aggregation makes for an argument that is more kaleidoscopic than discursive.
The very breadth of Mr. Black’s subject makes reading “The Power of Knowledge” partly thrilling, partly vertiginous. It is a long journey that Mr. Black engages here, but all of the stops are express stops. There is no lingering. In a section on advances in maritime charting, for example, he mentions that an equivalent was the development during the Renaissance of one-point perspective using mathematical rules. True enough, but that rich topic is confined to a few sentences. Still, the book bristles with interesting tidbits. I took some smuggish satisfaction in knowing that the term “bureaucracy” was coined by a Frenchman (de Gournay) but that we owe “scientist” to the British geologist William Whewell.
Although deeply grounded in history from the Middle Ages on down, this book also conjures with contemporary issues. Some are technical, like the vistas of information unraveled in the human genome project. Some are political. Until fairly recently, Mr. Black notes, central governments lacked the mechanisms to intervene consistently in everyday life. That, as anyone who can pronounce the acronym “NSA” knows, has changed dramatically. Mr. Black devotes an entire chapter to what he calls “the scrutinized society.” The effort to control public opinion and the flow of information has been most flagrant in totalitarian regimes, but he shows that in democracies, too, information is “filtered and deployed as part of the battle for public opinion.”…

A Natural History of Human Thinking

Curated on February 21, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New Harvard University Press Book: “Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own.
Tomasello argues that our prehuman ancestors, like today’s great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello’s “shared intentionality hypothesis” captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us most from other great apes, Tomasello proposes, are the new forms of thinking engendered by our new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction.
A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.”

Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons

Curated on February 20, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by David Bollier: “In our age of predatory markets and make-believe democracy, our troubled political institutions have lost sight of real people and practical realities. But if you look to the edges, ordinary people are reinventing governance and provisioning on their own terms. The commons is arising as a serious, practical alternative to the corrupt Market/State.

The beauty of commons is that we can build them ourselves, right now. But the bigger challenge is, Can we learn to see the commons and, more importantly, to think like a commoner?…

The biggest “tragedy of the commons” is the misconception that commons are failures — relics from another era rendered unnecessary by the Market and State. Think Like a Commoner dispels such prejudices by explaining the rich history and promising future of the commons — an ageless paradigm of cooperation and fairness that is re-making our world.
With graceful prose and dozens of fascinating examples, David Bollier describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical new forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. Think Like a Commoner explains how the commons:

Is an exploding field of DIY innovation ranging from Wikipedia and seed-sharing to community forests and collaborative consumption, and beyond;
Challenges the standard narrative of market economics by explaining how cooperation generates significant value and human fulfillment; and
Provides a framework of law and social action that can help us move beyond the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism.

We have a choice: Ignore the commons and suffer the ongoing private plunder of our common wealth. Or Think Like a Commoner and learn how to rebuild our society and reclaim our shared inheritance. This accessible, comprehensive introduction to the commons will surprise and enlighten you, and provoke you to action.”

Four Threats to American Democracy

Curated on February 20, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jared Diamond in Governance: “The U.S. government has spent the last two years wrestling with a series of crises over the federal budget and debt ceiling. I do not deny that our national debt and the prospect of a government shutdown pose real problems. But they are not our fundamental problems, although they are symptoms of them. Instead, our fundamental problems are four interconnected issues combining to threaten a breakdown of effective democratic government in the United States.
Why should we care? Let’s remind ourselves of the oft-forgotten reasons why democracy is a superior form of government (provided that it works), and hence why its deterioration is very worrisome. (Of course, I acknowledge that there are many countries in which democracy does not work, because of the lack of a national identity, of an informed electorate, or of both). The advantages of democracy include the following:

In a democracy, one can propose and discuss virtually any idea, even if it is initially unpalatable to the government. Debate may reveal the idea to be the best solution, whereas in a dictatorship the idea would not have gotten debated, and its virtues would not have been discovered.
In a democracy, citizens and their ideas get heard. Hence, without democracy, people are more likely to feel unheard and frustrated and to resort to violence.
Compromise is essential to a democracy. It enables us to avoid tyranny by the majority or (conversely) paralysis of government through vetoes exercised by a frustrated minority.
In modern democracies, all citizens can vote. Hence, government is motivated to invest in all citizens, who thereby receive the opportunity to become productive, rather than just a small dictatorial elite receiving that opportunity.

Why should we Americans keep reminding ourselves of those fundamental advantages of democracies? I would answer: not only in order to motivate ourselves to defend our democratic processes, but also because increasing numbers of Americans today are falling into the trap of envying the supposed efficiency of China’s dictatorship. Yes, it is true that dictatorships, by closing debate, can sometimes implement good policies faster than can the United States, as has China in quickly converting to lead-free gasoline and building a high-speed rail network. But dictatorships suffer from a fatal disadvantage. No one, in the 5,400 years of history of centralized government on all the continents, has figured out how to ensure that a dictatorship will embrace only good policies. Dictatorships also prevent the public debate that helps to avert catastrophic policies unparalleled in any large modern First World democracy—such as China’s quickly abolishing its educational system, sending its teachers out into the fields, and creating the world’s worst air pollution.
That is why democracy, given the prerequisites of an informed electorate and a basic sense of common interest, is the best form of government—at least, better than all the alternatives that have been tried, as Winston Churchill quipped. Our form of government is a big part of the explanation why the United States has become the richest and most powerful country in the world. Hence, an undermining of democratic processes in the United States means throwing away one of our biggest advantages. Unfortunately, that is what we are now doing, in four ways.
First, political compromise has been deteriorating in recent decades, and especially in the last five years. That deterioration can be measured as the increase in Senate rejections of presidential nominees whose approvals used to be routine, the increasing use of filibusters by the minority party, the majority party’s response of abolishing filibusters for certain types of votes, and the decline in number of laws passed by Congress to the lowest level of recent history. The reasons for this breakdown in political compromise, which seems to parallel increasing levels of nastiness in other areas of American life, remain debated. Explanations offered include the growth of television and then of the Internet, replacing face-to-face communication, and the growth of many narrowly partisan TV channels at the expense of a few broad-public channels. Even if these reasons hold a germ of truth, they leave open the question why these same trends operating in Canada and in Europe have not led to similar deterioration of political compromise in those countries as well.
Second, there are increasing restrictions on the right to vote, weighing disproportionately on voters for one party and implemented at the state level by the other party. Those obstacles include making registration to vote difficult and demanding that registered voters show documentation of citizenship when they present themselves at the polls. Of course, the United States has had a long history of denying voting rights to blacks, women, and other groups. But access to voting had been increasing in the last 50 years, so the recent proliferation of restrictions reverses that long positive trend. In addition to those obstacles preventing voter registration, the United States has by far the lowest election turnout among large First World democracies: under 60% of registered voters in most presidential elections, 40% for congressional elections, and 20% for the recent election for mayor of my city of Los Angeles. (A source of numbers for this and other comparisons that I shall cite is an excellent recent book by Howard Steven Friedman, The Measure of a Nation). And, while we are talking about elections, let’s not forget the astronomical recent increase in costs and durations of election campaigns, their funding by wealthy interests, and the shift in campaign pitches to sound bites. Those trends, unparalled in other large First World democracies, undermine the democratic prerequisite of a well-informed electorate.
A third contributor to the growing breakdown of democracy is our growing gap between rich and poor. Among our most cherished core values is our belief that the United States is a “land of opportunity,” and that we uniquely offer to our citizens the potential for rising from “rags to riches”—provided that citizens have the necessary ability and work hard. This is a myth. Income and wealth disparity in the United States (as measured by the Gini index of equality/inequality, and in other ways) is much higher in the United States than in any other large First World democracy. So is hereditary socioeconomic immobility, that is, the probability that a son’s relative income will just mirror his father’s relative income, and that sons of poor fathers will not become wealthy. Part of the reason for those depressing facts is inequality of educational opportunities. Children of rich Americans tend to receive much better educations than children of poor Americans.
That is bad for our economy, because it means that we are failing to develop a large fraction of our intellectual capital. It is also bad for our political stability, because poor parents who correctly perceive that their children are not being given the opportunity to succeed may express their resulting frustration in violence. Twice during my 47 years of residence in Los Angeles, in 1964 and 1993, frustration in poor areas of Los Angeles erupted into violence, lootings, and killings. In the 1993 riots, when police feared that rioters would spill into the wealthy suburb of Beverly Hills, all that the outnumbered police could do to protect Beverly Hills was to string yellow plastic police tape across major streets. As it turned out, the rioters did not try to invade Beverly Hills in 1993. But if present trends causing frustration continue, there will be more riots in Los Angeles and other American cities, and yellow plastic police tape will not suffice to contain the rioters.
The remaining contributor to the decline of American democracy is the decline of government investment in public purposes, such as education, infrastructure, and nonmilitary research and development. Large segments of the American populace deride government investment as “socialism.” But it is not socialism. On the contrary, it is one of the longest established functions of government. Ever since the rise of the first governments 5,400 years ago, governments have served two main functions: to maintain internal peace by monopolizing force, settling disputes, and forbidding citizens to resort to violence in order to settle disputes themselves; and to redistribute individual wealth for investing in larger aims—in the worst cases, enriching the elite; in the best cases, promoting the good of society as a whole. Of course, some investment is private, by wealthy individuals and companies expecting to profit from their investments. But many potential payoffs cannot attract private investment, either because the payoff is so far off in the future (such as the payoff from universal primary school education), or because the payoff is diffused over all of society rather than concentrated in areas profitable to the private investor (such as diffused benefits of municipal fire departments, roads, and broad education). Even the most passionate American supporters of small government do not decry as socialism the funding of fire departments, interstate highways, and public schools.

Mindless – Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans

Curated on February 19, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Simon Head: “The tools of corporate efficiency—expert systems, databases, and operations management—have improved our lives significantly, but with a cost: they’re turning us into mindless drones.
We live in the age of Computer Business Systems (CBSs)—the highly complex, computer-intensive management programs on which large organizations increasingly rely. In Mindless, Simon Head argues that these systems have come to trump human expertise, dictating the goals and strategies of a wide array of businesses, and de-skilling the jobs of middle class workers in the process. CBSs are especially dysfunctional, Head argues, when they apply their disembodied expertise to transactions between humans, as in health care, education, customer relations, and human resources management. And yet there are industries with more human approaches, as Head illustrates with specific examples, whose lead we must follow and extend to the mainstream American economy.
Mindless illustrates the shortcomings of CBS, providing an in-depth and disturbing look at how human dignity is slipping as we become cogs on a white collar assembly line.”