research paper / thesis / dissertation

A science that knows no country: Pandemic preparedness, global risk, sovereign science

Curated on February 14, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by J. Benjamin Hurlbut: “… examines political norms and relationships associated with governance of pandemic risk. Through a pair of linked controversies over scientific access to H5N1 flu virus and genomic data, it examining the duties, obligations, and allocations of authority articulated around the imperative for globally free-flowing information and around the corollary imperative for a science that is set free to produce such information.

It argues that scientific regimes are laying claim to a kind of sovereignty, particularly in moments where scientific experts call into question the legitimacy of claims grounded in national sovereignty, by positioning the norms of scientific practice, including a commitment to unfettered access to scientific information and to the authority of science to declare what needs to be known, as essential to global governance. Scientific authority occupies a constitutional position insofar as it figures centrally in the repertoire of imaginaries that shape how a global community is imagined: what binds that community together and what shared political commitments, norms, and subjection to delegated authority are seen as necessary for it to be rightly governed….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing Judgments of News Source Quality

Curated on February 13, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand: “The spread of misinformation and disinformation, especially on social media, is a major societal challenge. Here, we assess whether crowdsourced ratings of trust in news sources can effectively differentiate between more and less reliable sources. To do so, we ran a preregistered experiment (N = 1,010 from Amazon Mechanical Turk) in which individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: 1) Mainstream media outlets, 2) Websites that produce hyper-partisan coverage of actual facts, and 3) Websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”).

Our results indicate that, despite substantial partisan bias, laypeople across the political spectrum rate mainstream media outlets as far more trustworthy than either hyper-partisan or fake news sources (all but 1 mainstream source, Salon, was rated as more trustworthy than every hyper-partisan or fake news source when equally weighting ratings of Democrats and Republicans).

Critically, however, excluding ratings from participants who are not familiar with a given news source dramatically reduces the difference between mainstream media sources and hyper-partisan or fake news sites. For example, 30% of the mainstream media websites (Salon, the Guardian, Fox News, Politico, Huffington Post, and Newsweek) received lower trust scores than the most trusted fake news site (news4ktla.com) when excluding unfamiliar ratings.

This suggests that rather than being initially agnostic about unfamiliar sources, people are initially skeptical – and thus a lack of familiarity is an important cue for untrustworthiness. Overall, our findings indicate that crowdsourcing media trustworthiness judgments is a promising approach for fighting misinformation and disinformation online, but that trustworthiness ratings from participants who are unfamiliar with a given source should not be ignored….(More)”.

Feasibility Study of Using Crowdsourcing to Identify Critical Affected Areas for Rapid Damage Assessment: Hurricane Matthew Case Study

Curated on February 12, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Faxi Yuan and Rui Liu at the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction: “…rapid damage assessment plays a critical role in crisis management. Collection of timely information for rapid damage assessment is particularly challenging during natural disasters. Remote sensing technologies were used for data collection during disasters. However, due to the large areas affected by major disasters such as Hurricane Matthew, specific data cannot be collected in time such as the location information.

Social media can serve as a crowdsourcing platform for citizens’ communication and information sharing during natural disasters and provide the timely data for identifying affected areas to support rapid damage assessment during disasters. Nevertheless, there is very limited existing research on the utility of social media data in damage assessment. Even though some investigation of the relationship between social media activities and damages was conducted, the employment of damage-related social media data in exploring the fore-mentioned relationship remains blank.

This paper for the first time, establishes the index dictionary by semantic analysis for the identification of damage-related tweets posted during Hurricane Matthew in Florida. Meanwhile, the insurance claim data from the publication of Florida Office of Insurance Regulation is used as a representative of real hurricane damage data in Florida. This study performs a correlation analysis and a comparative analysis of the geographic distribution of social media data and damage data at the county level in Florida. We find that employing social media data to identify critical affected areas at the county level during disasters is viable. Damage data has a closer relationship with damage-related tweets than disaster-related tweets….(More)”.

A Really Bad Blockchain Idea: Digital Identity Cards for Rohingya Refugees

Curated on February 8, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Wayan Vota at ICTworks: “The Rohingya Project claims to be a grassroots initiative that will empower Rohingya refugees with a blockchain-leveraged financial ecosystem tied to digital identity cards….

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Concerns about Rohingya data collection are not new, so Linda Raftree‘s Facebook post about blockchain for biometrics started a spirited discussion on this escalation of techno-utopia. Several people put forth great points about the Rohingya Project’s potential failings. For me, there were four key questions originating in the discussion that we should all be debating:

1. Who Determines Ethnicity?

Ethnicity isn’t a scientific way to categorize humans. Ethnic groups are based on human constructs such as common ancestry, language, society, culture, or nationality. Who are the Rohingya Project to be the ones determining who is Rohingya or not? And what is this rigorous assessment they have that will do what science cannot?

Might it be better not to perpetuate the very divisions that cause these issues? Or at the very least, let people self-determine their own ethnicity.

2. Why Digitally Identify Refugees?

Let’s say that we could group a people based on objective metrics. Should we? Especially if that group is persecuted where it currently lives and in many of its surrounding countries? Wouldn’t making a list of who is persecuted be a handy reference for those who seek to persecute more?

Instead, shouldn’t we focus on changing the mindset of the persecutors and stop the persecution?

3. Why Blockchain for Biometrics?

How could linking a highly persecuted people’s biometric information, such as fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs, to a public, universal, and immutable distributed ledger be a good thing?

Might it be highly irresponsible to digitize all that information? Couldn’t that data be used by nefarious actors to perpetuate new and worse exploitation of Rohingya? India has already lost Aadhaar data and the Equafax lost Americans’ data. How will the small, lightly funded Rohingya Project do better?

Could it be possible that old-fashioned paper forms are a better solution than digital identity cards? Maybe laminate them for greater durability, but paper identity cards can be hidden, even destroyed if needed, to conceal information that could be used against the owner.

4. Why Experiment on the Powerless?

Rohingya refugees already suffer from massive power imbalances, and now they’ll be asked to give up their digital privacy, and use experimental technology, as part of an NGO’s experiment, in order to get needed services.

Its not like they’ll have the agency to say no. They are homeless, often penniless refugees, who will probably have no realistic way to opt-out of digital identity cards, even if they don’t want to be experimented on while they flee persecution….(More)”

Artificial Intelligence and Foreign Policy

Curated on February 8, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ben Scott, Stefan Heumann and Philppe Lorenz: “The plot-lines of the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are debated and contested. But it is safe to predict that it will become one of the central technologies of the 21st century. It is fashionable these days to speak about data as the new oil. But if we want to “refine” the vast quantities of data we are collecting today and make sense of it, we will need potent AI. The consequences of the AI revolution could not be more far reaching. Value chains will be turned upside down, labor markets will get disrupted and economic power will shift to those who control this new technology. And as AI is deeply embedded in the connectivity of the Internet, the challenge of AI is global in nature. Therefore it is striking that AI is almost absent from the foreign policy agenda.

This paper seeks to provide a foundation for planning a foreign policy strategy that responds effectively to the emerging power of AI in international affairs. The developments in AI are so dynamic and the implications so wide-ranging that ministries need to begin engaging immediately. That means starting with the assets and resources at hand while planning for more significant changes in the future. Many of the tools of traditional diplomacy can be adapted to this new field. While the existing toolkit can get us started, this pragmatic approach does not preclude thinking about more drastic changes that the technological changes might require for our foreign policy institutions and instruments.

The paper approaches this challenge, drawing on the existing foreign policy toolbox and reflecting on the past lessons of adapting this toolbox to the Internet revolution. The paper goes on to make suggestions on how the tools could be applied to the international challenges that the AI revolution will bring about. The toolbox includes policy making, public diplomacy, bilateral and multilateral engagement, actions through international and treaty organizations, convenings and partnerships, grant-making and information-gathering and analysis. The analysis of the international challenges of the AI transformation are divided into three topical areas. Each of the three sections includes concrete suggestions how instruments from the tool box could be applied to address the challenges AI will bring about in international affairs….(More)“.

Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond ‘Free’

Curated on February 7, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez Hernández and Jaron Lanier: “In the digital economy, user data is typically treated as capital created by corporations observing willing individuals. This neglects users’ role in creating data, reducing incentives for users, distributing the gains from the data economy unequally and stoking fears of automation. Instead treating data (at least partially) as labor could help resolve these issues and restore a functioning market for user contributions, but may run against the near-term interests of dominant data monopsonists who have benefited from data being treated as ‘free’. Countervailing power, in the form of competition, a data labor movement and/or thoughtful regulation could help restore balance….(More)”.

And Yet They Thrive!—Regaining the Relevance of a Transparency System

Curated on February 6, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Pontus Hedlin in Development Policy Review: “Over the past decade, a host of donor organizations implemented transparency systems to make international development aid more transparent to the public. These initiatives have met with little public interest, but their proliferation and development show no sign of diminishing. This article shows how internal importance to the political system, fueled by formal rankings and the exhibition of transparency systems as a flagship initiative, can replace relevance to the public as a driving force for sustainable development. The article concludes by discussing the possibility of a future development where transparency systems finally do connect with user groups, such as citizens of both donor and recipient countries, and gain a relevance even beyond original intentions….(More)”.

How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policy Makers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks

Curated on February 4, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O’Connor, and Justin Bruner: “In their recent book Merchants of Doubt [New York:Bloomsbury 2010], Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe the “tobacco strategy”, which was used by the tobacco industry to influence policy makers regarding the health risks of tobacco products. The strategy involved two parts, consisting of (1) promoting and sharing independent research supporting the industry’s preferred position and (2) funding additional research, but selectively publishing the results.

We introduce a model of the Tobacco Strategy, and use it to argue that both prongs of the strategy can be extremely effective–even when policy makers rationally update on all evidence available to them. As we elaborate, this model helps illustrate the conditions under which the Tobacco Strategy is particularly successful. In addition, we show how journalists engaged in “fair” reporting can inadvertently mimic the effects of industry on public belief….(More)”.

Foursquare to The Rescue: Predicting Ambulance Calls Across Geographies

Curated on February 4, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anastasios Noulas, Colin Moffatt, Desislava Hristova, and Bruno Gonćalves: “Understanding how ambulance incidents are spatially distributed can shed light to the epidemiological dynamics of geographic areas and inform healthcare policy design. Here we analyze a longitudinal dataset of more than four million ambulance calls across a region of twelve million residents in the North West of England. With the aim to explain geographic variations in ambulance call frequencies, we employ a wide range of data layers including open government datasets describing population demographics and socio-economic characteristics, as well as geographic activity in online services such as Foursquare.

Working at a fine level of spatial granularity we demonstrate that daytime population levels and the deprivation status of an area are the most important variables when it comes to predicting the volume of ambulance calls at an area. Foursquare check-ins on the other hand complement these government sourced indicators, offering a novel view to population nightlife and commercial activity locally. We demonstrate how check-in activity can provide an edge when predicting certain types of emergency incidents in a multi-variate regression model…(More)”.