Handbook of Research on Politics in the Computer Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Ashu M. G. Solo: “Technology and particularly the Internet have caused many changes in the realm of politics. Aspects of engineering, computer science, mathematics, or natural science can be applied to politics. Politicians and candidates use their own websites and social network profiles to get their message out. Revolutions in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have started in large part due to social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Social networking has also played a role in protests and riots in numerous countries. The mainstream media no longer has a monopoly on political commentary as anybody can set up a blog or post a video online. Now, political activists can network together online.

The Handbook of Research on Politics in the Computer Age is a pivotal reference source that serves to increase the understanding of methods for politics in the computer age, the effectiveness of these methods, and tools for analyzing these methods. The book includes research chapters on different aspects of politics with information technology, engineering, computer science, or math, from 27 researchers at 20 universities and research organizations in Belgium, Brazil, Cape Verde, Egypt, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, and the United States of America. Highlighting topics such as online campaigning and fake news, the prospective audience includes, but is not limited to, researchers, political and public policy analysts, political scientists, engineers, computer scientists, political campaign managers and staff, politicians and their staff, political operatives, professors, students, and individuals working in the fields of politics, e-politics, e-government, new media and communication studies, and Internet marketing….(More)”.

The Precision Farming Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by James E. Addicott: “This book examines the precision farming revolution in Somerset, England. It reveals the reasons why local farmers invested in autonomous systems and traces the outcomes of adoption. It describes the local and global drivers of the fourth industrial revolution, from world population growth, climatic and ecological crises, profit driven farming and government agri-tech grants, to the Space Race era. A new cultural method of intelligence, ideas and thinking, new organisational and control powers, was precisely what precision farming offered farmers and off-farm firms, who were able to remotely monitor and control natural environments and aspects of on-farm activities. As a result of local farmers opting into precision farming systems the power dynamics of industrial agriculture were reorganised and this book will offer readers an understanding of how and why….(More)”.

Comparative Constitution Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Hanna Lerner and David Landau: “In a seminal article more than two decades ago, Jon Elster lamented that despite the large volume of scholarship in related fields, such as comparative constitutional law and constitutional design, there was a severe dearth of work on the process and context of constitution making. Happily, his point no longer holds. Recent years have witnessed a near-explosion of high-quality work on constitution-making processes, across a range of fields including law, political science, and history. This volume attempts to synthesize and expand upon this literature. It offers a number of different perspectives and methodologies aimed at understanding the contexts in which constitution making takes place, its motivations, the theories and processes that guide it, and its effects. The goal of the contributors is not simply to explain the existing state of the field, but also to provide new research on these key questions.

Our aims in this introduction are relatively modest. First, we seek to set up some of the major questions treated by recent research in order to explain how the chapters in this volume contribute to them. We do not aim to give a complete state of the field, but we do lay out what we see as several of the biggest challenges and questions posed by recent scholarship. …(More)”.

Breaking Down Information Silos with Big Data: A Legal Analysis of Data Sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Giovanni De Gregorio and Sofia Ranchordas in J. Cannataci, V. Falce & O. Pollicino (Eds), New Legal Challenges of Big Data (Edward Elgar, 2020, Forthcoming): “In the digital society, individuals play different roles depending on the situation they are placed in: they are consumers when they purchase a good, citizens when they vote for elections, content providers when they post information on a platform, and data subjects when their data is collected. Public authorities have thus far regulated citizens and the data collected on their different roles in silos (e.g., bankruptcy registrations, social welfare databases), resulting in inconsistent decisions, redundant paperwork, and delays in processing citizen requests. Data silos are considered to be inefficient both for companies and governments. Big data and data analytics are disrupting these silos allowing the different roles of individuals and the respective data to converge. In practice, this happens in several countries with data sharing arrangements or ad hoc data requests. However, breaking down the existing structure of information silos in the public sector remains problematic. While big data disrupts artificial silos that may not make sense in the digital society and promotes a truly efficient digitalization of data, removing information out of its original context may alter its meaning and violate the privacy of citizens. In addition, silos ensure that citizens are not assessed in one field by information generated in a totally different context. This chapter discusses how big data and data analytics are changing information silos and how digital technology is challenging citizens’ autonomy and right to privacy and data protection. This chapter also explores the need for a more integrated approach to the study of information, particularly in the public sector.

Private Law, Nudging and Behavioural Economic Analysis: The Mandated-Choice Model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Antonios Karampatzos: “Offering a fresh perspective on “nudging”, this book uses legal paternalism to explore how legal systems may promote good policies without ignoring personal autonomy.

It suggests that the dilemma between inefficient opt-in rules and autonomy restricting opt-out schemes fails to realistically capture the span of options available to the policy maker. There is a third path, namely the ‘mandated-choice model’. The book is dedicated to presenting this model and exploring its great potential. Contract law, consumer protection, products safety and regulatory problems such as organ donation or excessive borrowing are the setting for the discussion. Familiarising the reader with a hot debate on paternalism, behavioural economics and private law, this book takes a further step and links this behavioural law and economics discussion with philosophical considerations to shed a light on modern challenges, such as organ donation or consumers protection, by adopting an openly interdisciplinary approach….(More)”.

Linked Democracy: Foundations, Tools, and Applications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Marta Poblet, Pompeu Casanovas and Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel: “This open access book shows the factors linking information flow, social intelligence, rights management and modelling with epistemic democracy, offering licensed linked data along with information about the rights involved. This model of democracy for the web of data brings new challenges for the social organisation of knowledge, collective innovation, and the coordination of actions. Licensed linked data, licensed linguistic linked data, right expression languages, semantic web regulatory models, electronic institutions, artificial socio-cognitive systems are examples of regulatory and institutional design (regulations by design). The web has been massively populated with both data and services, and semantically structured data, the linked data cloud, facilitates and fosters human-machine interaction. Linked data aims to create ecosystems to make it possible to browse, discover, exploit and reuse data sets for applications. Rights Expression Languages semi-automatically regulate the use and reuse of content…(More)”.

Official Statistics 4.0: Verified Facts for People in the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Walter J. Radermacher: “This book explores official statistics and their social function in modern societies. Digitisation and globalisation are creating completely new opportunities and risks, a context in which facts (can) play an enormously important part if they are produced with a quality that makes them credible and purpose-specific. In order for this to actually happen, official statistics must continue to actively pursue the modernisation of their working methods.This book is not about the technical and methodological challenges associated with digitisation and globalisation; rather, it focuses on statistical sociology, which scientifically deals with the peculiarities and pitfalls of governing-by-numbers, and assigns statistics a suitable position in the future informational ecosystem. Further, the book provides a comprehensive overview of modern issues in official statistics, embodied in a historical and conceptual framework that endows it with different and innovative perspectives. Central to this work is the quality of statistical information provided by official statistics. The implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the form of indicators is another driving force in the search for answers, and is addressed here….(More)”.

The Economics of Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb: “Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) highlight the potential of this technology to affect productivity, growth, inequality, market power, innovation, and employment. This volume seeks to set the agenda for economic research on the impact of AI.

It covers four broad themes: AI as a general purpose technology; the relationships between AI, growth, jobs, and inequality; regulatory responses to changes brought on by AI; and the effects of AI on the way economic research is conducted. It explores the economic influence of machine learning, the branch of computational statistics that has driven much of the recent excitement around AI, as well as the economic impact of robotics and automation and the potential economic consequences of a still-hypothetical artificial general intelligence. The volume provides frameworks for understanding the economic impact of AI and identifies a number of open research questions…. (More)”

Human Rights in the Age of Platforms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Rikke Frank Jørgensen: “Today such companies as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter play an increasingly important role in how users form and express opinions, encounter information, debate, disagree, mobilize, and maintain their privacy. What are the human rights implications of an online domain managed by privately owned platforms? According to the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted by the UN Human Right Council in 2011, businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights and to carry out human rights due diligence. But this goal is dependent on the willingness of states to encode such norms into business regulations and of companies to comply. In this volume, contributors from across law and internet and media studies examine the state of human rights in today’s platform society.

The contributors consider the “datafication” of society, including the economic model of data extraction and the conceptualization of privacy. They examine online advertising, content moderation, corporate storytelling around human rights, and other platform practices. Finally, they discuss the relationship between human rights law and private actors, addressing such issues as private companies’ human rights responsibilities and content regulation…(More)”.

Why Trust Science?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Naomi Oreskes: “Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don’t? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength—and the greatest reason we can trust it.

Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late nineteenth century to today, Oreskes explains that, contrary to popular belief, there is no single scientific method. Rather, the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted. This process is not perfect—nothing ever is when humans are involved—but she draws vital lessons from cases where scientists got it wrong. Oreskes shows how consensus is a crucial indicator of when a scientific matter has been settled, and when the knowledge produced is likely to be trustworthy.

Based on the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University, this timely and provocative book features critical responses by climate experts Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, political scientist Jon Krosnick, philosopher of science Marc Lange, and science historian Susan Lindee, as well as a foreword by political theorist Stephen Macedo….(More)”.