When Science Meets Power

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “Science and politics have collaborated throughout human history, and science is repeatedly invoked today in political debates, from pandemic management to climate change. But the relationship between the two is muddled and muddied.

Leading policy analyst Geoff Mulgan here calls attention to the growing frictions caused by the expanding authority of science, which sometimes helps politics but often challenges it.

He dissects the complex history of states’ use of science for conquest, glory and economic growth and shows the challenges of governing risk – from nuclear weapons to genetic modification, artificial intelligence to synthetic biology. He shows why the governance of science has become one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century, ever more prominent in daily politics and policy.

Whereas science is ordered around what we know and what is, politics engages what we feel and what matters. How can we reconcile the two, so that crucial decisions are both well informed and legitimate?

The book proposes new ways to organize democracy and government, both within nations and at a global scale, to better shape science and technology so that we can reap more of the benefits and fewer of the harms…(More)”.

Social Economy Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Gorgi Krlev, Dominika Wruk, Giulio Pasi, and Marika Bernhard: “Lack of progress in the area of global sustainable development and difficulties in crisis management highlight the need to transform the economy and find new ways of making society more resilient. The social economy is increasingly recognized as a driver of such transformations; it comprises traditional forms of cooperative or solidarity-based organizations alongside new phenomena such as impact investing or social tech ventures that aim to contribute to the public good. Social Economy Science provides the first comprehensive analysis of why and how social economy organizations create superior value for society. The book draws on organizational theory and transition studies to provide a systematic perspective on complex multi-stakeholder forms of action. It discusses the social economy’s role in promoting innovation for impact, as well as its role as an agent of societal change and as a partner to businesses, governments, and citizens…(More)”.

Parliament Buildings: The Architecture of Politics in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Sophia Psarra, Uta Staiger, and Claudia Sternberg: “As political polarisation undermines confidence in the shared values and established constitutional orders of many nations, it is imperative that we explore how parliaments are to stay relevant and accessible to the citizens whom they serve. The rise of modern democracies is thought to have found physical expression in the staged unity of the parliamentary seating plan. However, the built forms alone cannot give sufficient testimony to the exercise of power in political life.

Parliament Buildings brings together architecture, history, art history, history of political thought, sociology, behavioural psychology, anthropology and political science to raise a host of challenging questions. How do parliament buildings give physical form to norms and practices, to behaviours, rituals, identities and imaginaries? How are their spatial forms influenced by the political cultures they accommodate? What kinds of histories, politics and morphologies do the diverse European parliaments share, and how do their political trajectories intersect?

This volume offers an eclectic exploration of the complex nexus between architecture and politics in Europe. Including contributions from architects who have designed or remodelled four parliament buildings in Europe, it provides the first comparative, multi-disciplinary study of parliament buildings across Europe and across history…(More)”

City Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ramon Gras, and Jeremy Burke: “The Aretian team, a spin off company from the Harvard Innovation Lab, has developed a city science methodology to evaluate the relationship between city form and urban performance. This book illuminates the relationship between a city’s spatial design and quality of life it affords for the general population. By measuring innovation economies to design Innovation Districts, social networks and patterns to help form organization patterns, and city topology, morphology, entropy and scale to create 15 Minute Cities are some of the frameworks presented in this volume.
Therefore, urban designers, architects and engineers will be able to successfully tackle complex urban design challenges by using the authors’ frameworks and findings in their own work. Case studies help to present key insights from advanced, data-driven geospatial analyses of cities around the world in an illustrative manner. This inaugural book by Aretian Urban Analytics and Design will give readers a new set of tools to learn from, expand, and develop for the healthy growth of cities and regions around the world…(More)”.

What Is Public Trust in the Health System? Insights into Health Data Use

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book by Felix Gille: “This book explores the concept of public trust in health systems.

In the context of recent events, including public response to interventions to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination uptake and the use of health data and digital health, this important book uses empirical evidence to address why public trust is vital to a well-functioning health system.

In doing so, it provides a comprehensive contemporary explanation of public trust, how it affects health systems and how it can be nurtured and maintained as an integral component of health system governance…(More)”.

Networked Press Freedom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mike Ananny: “…offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Ananny challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and an analysis of ten years of journalism discourse about news and technology, he argues that press freedom emerges from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power and fight for visions of democratic life. He shows how dominant, historical ideals of professionalized press freedom often mistook journalistic freedom from constraints for the public’s freedom to encounter the rich mix of people and ideas that self-governance requires. Ananny’s notion of press freedom ensures not only an individual right to speak, but also a public right to hear.

Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, Ananny explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today’s press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. If someone says, “The public needs a free press,” Ananny urges us to ask in response, “What kind of public, what kind of freedom, and what kind of press?” Answering these questions shows what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike…(More)”.

The Government Analytics Handbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

(Open Access) Book edited by Daniel Rogger and Christian Schuster: “Governments across the world make thousands of personnel management decisions, procure millions of goods and services, and execute billions of processes each day. They are data rich.  And yet, there is little systematic practice to-date which capitalizes on this data to make public administrations work better. This means that governments are missing out on data insights to save billions in procurement expenditures, recruit better talent into government, and identify sources of corruption, to name just a few.

The Government Analytics Handbook seeks to change that. It presents frontier evidence and practitioner insights on how to leverage data to make governments work better. Covering a range of microdata sources—such as administrative data and public servant surveys—as well as tools and resources for undertaking the analytics, it transforms the ability of governments to take a data-informed approach to diagnose and improve how public organizations work…(More)”.

Your Face Belongs to Us

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Kashmir Hill: “… was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?

In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.
      
Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.
     
Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”…(More)”.

Future Law, Ethics, and Smart Technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by John-Stewart Gordon: “This interdisciplinary textbook serves as a solid introduction to the future of legal education against the background of the widespread use of AI written by colleagues from different disciplines, e.g. law, philosophy/ethics, economy, and computer science, whose common interest concerns AI and its impact on legal and ethical issues. The book provides, first, a general overview of the effects of AI on major disciplines such as ethics, law, economy, political science, and healthcare. Secondly, it offers a comprehensive analysis of major key issues concerning law: (a) AI decision-making, (b) rights, status, and responsibility, (c) regulation and standardisation, and (d) education…(More)”.

Automating Empathy 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book by Andrew McStay: “We live in a world where artificial intelligence and intensive use of personal data has become normalized. Companies across the world are developing and launching technologies to infer and interact with emotions, mental states, and human conditions. However, the methods and means of mediating information about people and their emotional states are incomplete and problematic.

Automating Empathy offers a critical exploration of technologies that sense intimate dimensions of human life and the modern ethical questions raised by attempts to perform and simulate empathy. It traces the ascendance of empathic technologies from their origins in physiognomy and pathognomy to the modern day and explores technologies in nations with non-Western ethical histories and approaches to emotion, such as Japan. The book examines applications of empathic technologies across sectors such as education, policing, and transportation, and considers key questions of everyday use such as the integration of human-state sensing in mixed reality, the use of neurotechnologies, and the moral limits of using data gleaned through automated empathy. Ultimately, Automating Empathy outlines the key principles necessary to usher in a future where automated empathy can serve and do good…(More)”