Paper by Theodora Gazi: “Data collection is valuable before, during and after interventions in order to increase the effectiveness of humanitarian projects. Although the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets forth rules for the processing of personal data, its implementation by humanitarian aid actors is crucial and presents challenges. Failure to comply triggers severe risks for both data subjects and the reputation of the actor. This article provides insights into the implementation of the guiding principles of the GDPR, the legal bases for data processing, data subjects’ rights and data sharing during the provision of humanitarian assistance…(More)”
Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities
Paper by David M. J. Lazer et al: “The field of computational social science (CSS) has exploded in prominence over the past decade, with thousands of papers published using observational data, experimental designs, and large-scale simulations that were once unfeasible or unavailable to researchers. These studies have greatly improved our understanding of important phenomena, ranging from social inequality to the spread of infectious diseases. The institutions supporting CSS in the academy have also grown substantially, as evidenced by the proliferation of conferences, workshops, and summer schools across the globe, across disciplines, and across sources of data. But the field has also fallen short in important ways. Many institutional structures around the field—including research ethics, pedagogy, and data infrastructure—are still nascent. We suggest opportunities to address these issues, especially in improving the alignment between the organization of the 20th-century university and the intellectual requirements of the field….(More)”.
Prioritizing COVID-19 tests based on participatory surveillance and spatial scanning
Paper by O.B Leal-Neto et al: “Participatory surveillance has shown promising results from its conception to its application in several public health events. The use of a collaborative information pathway provides a rapid way for the data collection on symptomatic individuals in the territory, to complement traditional health surveillance systems. In Brazil, this methodology has been used at the national level since 2014 during mass gatherings events since they have great importance for monitoring public health emergencies.
With the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the limitation of the main non-pharmaceutical interventions for epidemic control – in this case, testing and social isolation – added to the challenge of existing underreporting of cases and delay of notifications, there is a demand on alternative sources of up to date information to complement the current system for disease surveillance. Several studies have demonstrated the benefits of participatory surveillance in coping with COVID-19, reinforcing the opportunity to modernize the way health surveillance has been carried out. Additionally, spatial scanning techniques have been used to understand syndromic scenarios, investigate outbreaks, and analyze epidemiological risk, constituting relevant tools for health management. While there are limitations in the quality of traditional health systems, the data generated by participatory surveillance reveals an interesting application combining traditional techniques to clarify epidemiological risks that demand urgency in decision-making. Moreover, with the limitations of testing available, the identification of priority areas for intervention is an important activity in the early response to public health emergencies. This study aimed to describe and analyze priority areas for COVID-19 testing combining data from participatory surveillance and traditional surveillance for respiratory syndromes….(More)”.
Why hypothesis testers should spend less time testing hypotheses
Paper by Scheel, Anne M., Leonid Tiokhin, Peder M. Isager, and Daniel Lakens: “For almost half a century, Paul Meehl educated psychologists about how the mindless use of null-hypothesis significance tests made research on theories in the social sciences basically uninterpretable (Meehl, 1990). In response to the replication crisis, reforms in psychology have focused on formalising procedures for testing hypotheses. These reforms were necessary and impactful. However, as an unexpected consequence, psychologists have begun to realise that they may not be ready to test hypotheses. Forcing researchers to prematurely test hypotheses before they have established a sound ‘derivation chain’ between test and theory is counterproductive. Instead, various non-confirmatory research activities should be used to obtain the inputs necessary to make hypothesis tests informative.
Before testing hypotheses, researchers should spend more time forming concepts, developing valid measures, establishing the causal relationships between concepts and their functional form, and identifying boundary conditions and auxiliary assumptions. Providing these inputs should be recognised and incentivised as a crucial goal in and of itself.
In this article, we discuss how shifting the focus to non-confirmatory research can tie together many loose ends of psychology’s reform movement and help us lay the foundation to develop strong, testable theories, as Paul Meehl urged us to….(More)”
Business-to-Business Data Sharing: An Economic and Legal Analysis
Paper by Bertin Martens et al: “The European Commission announced in its Data Strategy (2020) its intentions to propose an enabling legislative framework for the governance of common European data spaces, to review and operationalize data portability, to prioritize standardization activities and foster data interoperability and to clarify usage rights for co-generated IoT data. This Strategy starts from the premise that there is not enough data sharing and that much data remain locked up and are not available for innovative re-use. The Commission will also consider the adoption of a New Competition Tool as well as the adoption of ex ante regulation for large online gate-keeping platforms as part of the announced Digital Services Act Package . In this context, the goal of this report is to examine the obstacles to Business-to-Business (B2B) data sharing: what keeps businesses from sharing or trading more of their data with other businesses and what can be done about it? For this purpose, this report uses the well-known tools of legal and economic thinking about market failures. It starts from the economic characteristics of data and explores to what extent private B2B data markets result in a socially optimal degree of data sharing, or whether there are market failures in data markets that might justify public policy intervention.
It examines the conditions under which monopolistic data market failures may occur. It contrasts these welfare losses with the welfare gains from economies of scope in data aggregation in large pools. It also discusses other potential sources of B2B data market failures due to negative externalities, risks and transaction costs and asymmetric information situations. In a next step, the paper explores solutions to overcome these market failures. Private third-party data intermediaries may be in a position to overcome market failures due to high transactions costs and risks. They can aggregate data in large pools to harvest the benefits of economies of scale and scope in data. Where third-party intervention fails, regulators can step in, with ex-post competition instruments and with ex-ante regulation. The latter includes data portability rights for personal data and mandatory data access rights….(More)”.
Designing Nudges for Success in Health Care
Joseph D. Harrison at AMA Journal of Ethics: “Nudges are subtle changes to the design of the environment or the framing of information that can influence our behaviors. There is significant potential to use nudges in health care to improve patient outcomes and transform health care delivery. However, these interventions must be tested and implemented using a systematic approach. In this article, we describe several ways to design nudges for success by focusing on optimizing and fitting them into the clinical workflow, engaging the right stakeholders, and rapid experimentation….(More)”.
The Open Innovation in Science research field: a collaborative conceptualisation approach
Paper by Susanne Beck et al: “Openness and collaboration in scientific research are attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, a common understanding of these phenomena is hindered by disciplinary boundaries and disconnected research streams. We link dispersed knowledge on Open Innovation, Open Science, and related concepts such as Responsible Research and Innovation by proposing a unifying Open Innovation in Science (OIS) Research Framework. This framework captures the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of open and collaborative practices along the entire process of generating and disseminating scientific insights and translating them into innovation. Moreover, it elucidates individual-, team-, organisation-, field-, and society‐level factors shaping OIS practices. To conceptualise the framework, we employed a collaborative approach involving 47 scholars from multiple disciplines, highlighting both tensions and commonalities between existing approaches. The OIS Research Framework thus serves as a basis for future research, informs policy discussions, and provides guidance to scientists and practitioners….(More)”.
Internet Searches for Acute Anxiety During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Paper by John W. Ayers et al: “There is widespread concern that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may harm population mental health, chiefly owing to anxiety about the disease and its societal fallout. But traditional population mental health surveillance (eg, telephone surveys, medical records) is time consuming, expensive, and may miss persons who do not participate or seek care. To evaluate the association of COVID-19 with anxiety on a population basis, we examined internet searches indicative of acute anxiety during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods
The analysis relied on nonidentifiable, aggregate, public data and was exempted by the University of California San Diego Human Research Protections Program. Acute anxiety, including colloquially called anxiety attacks or panic attacks, was monitored because of its higher prevalence relative to other mental health problems. It can lead to other mental health problems (including depression), it is triggered by outside stressors, and it is socially contagious. Using Google Trends (https://trends.google.com/trends) we monitored the daily fraction of all internet searches (thereby adjusting the results for any change in total queries) that included the terms anxiety or panic in combination with attack (including panic attack, signs of anxiety attack, anxiety attack symptoms) that originated from the US from January 1, 2004, through May 4, 2020. Raw search counts were inferred using Comscore estimates (comscore.com).
We compared search volumes after President Trump declared a national COVID-19 emergency on March 13, 2020, with expected search volumes if COVID-19 had not occurred, thereby taking into account the historical trend and periodicity in the data. Expected volumes were computed using an autoregressive integrated moving average model,4 based on historical trends from January 1, 2004 to March 12, 2020, to predict counterfactual trends for March 13, 2020 to May 9, 2020. The expected volumes with prediction intervals (PIs) and ratio of observed and expected volumes with bootstrap CIs were computed using R statistical software (version 3.5.3, R Foundation). The results were similar if we varied our interruption date plus or minus 1 week….(More)”.
Scaling up Deliberation: Testing the Potential of Mini‐Publics to Enhance the Deliberative Capacity of Citizens
Paper by Jane Suiter, Lala Muradova, John Gastil and David M. Farrell: “This paper tests the possibility of embedding the benefits of minipublic deliberation within a wider voting public. We test whether a statement such as those derived from a Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) can influence voters who did not participate in the pre‐referendum minipublic deliberation. This experiment was implemented in advance of the 2018 Irish referendum on blasphemy, one of a series of social‐moral referendums following the recommendations of a deliberative assembly. This is the first application of a CIR‐style voting aid in a real world minipublic and referendum outside of the US and also the first application to what is principally a moral question. We found that survey respondents exposed to information about the minipublic and its findings significantly increased their policy knowledge. Further, exposing respondents to minipublic statements in favour and against the policy measure increased their empathy for the other side of the policy debate….(More)”.
Data Mining on Open Public Transit Data for Transportation Analytics During Pre-COVID-19 Era and COVID-19 Era
Paper by Carson K. Leung et al: “As the urbanization of the world continues and the population of cities rise, the issue of how to effectively move all these people around the city becomes much more important. In order to use the limited space in a city most efficiently, many cities and their residents are increasingly looking towards public transportation as the solution. In this paper, we focus on the public bus system as the primary form of public transit. In particular, we examine open public transit data for the Canadian city of Winnipeg. We mine and conduct transportation analytics on data prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) situation and during the COVID-19 situation. By discovering how often and when buses were reported to be too full to take on new passengers at bus stops, analysts can get an insight of which routes and destinations are the busiest. This information would help decision makers make appropriate actions (e.g., add extra bus for those busiest routines). This results in a better and more convenient transit system towards a smart city. Moreover, during the COVID-19 era, it leads to additional benefits of contributing to safer buses services and bus waiting experiences while maintaining social distancing…(More)”.