Paper by Helene Landemore: “Deliberative democracy is at risk of becoming collateral damage of the current crisis of representative democracy. If deliberative democracy is necessarily representative and if representation betrays the true meaning of democracy as rule of, by, and for the people, then how can deliberative democracy retain any validity as a theory of political legitimacy? Any tight connection between deliberative democracy and representative democracy thus risks making deliberative democracy obsolete: a dated paradigm fit for a precrisis order, but maladjusted to the world of Occupy, the Pirate Party, the Zapatistas, and other antirepresentative movements. This essay argues... (More >)
Crowdsourcing the fight against mosquitos
YahooFinance: “That smartphone in your pocket could hold the cure for malaria, dengue and the Zika virus, a noted Stanford University scientist says. Manu Prakash has a history of using oddball materials for medical research. His latest project, Abuzz, uses sound. Specifically, he asks regular citizens to capture and record mosquitoes. There are 30 unique species, and each has a different wingbeat pattern. The big idea is to use algorithms to match sample recordings with disease-carrying species, and then recommend strategies to control the population. Weird science, sure, but don’t knock it. In this age of massive amounts of... (More >)
Slave to the Algorithm? Why a ‘Right to Explanation’ is Probably Not the Remedy You are Looking for
Paper by Lilian Edwards and Michael Veale: “Algorithms, particularly of the machine learning (ML) variety, are increasingly consequential to individuals’ lives but have caused a range of concerns evolving mainly around unfairness, discrimination and opacity. Transparency in the form of a “right to an explanation” has emerged as a compellingly attractive remedy since it intuitively presents as a means to “open the black box”, hence allowing individual challenge and redress, as well as possibilities to foster accountability of ML systems. In the general furore over algorithmic bias and other issues laid out in section 2, any remedy in a... (More >)
What drives legitimacy in government?
Discussion paper by the Centre for Public Impact (CPI): “…What are the sources of legitimacy, and how can legitimacy be strengthened? By legitimacy we mean the reservoir of support that that allows governments to deliver positive outcomes for people, what we at the CPI call public impact. We are interested in exploring how governments can build constructive relationships with their citizens for the benefit of each of us and society as a whole. This might be at a wholeof-government level or the level of an individual service or policy. We will explore how legitimacy flows between these levels, and... (More >)
How Data Mining Facebook Messages Can Reveal Substance Abusers
Emerging Technology from the arXiv: “…Substance abuse is a serious concern. Around one in 10 Americans are sufferers. Which is why it costs the American economy more than $700 billion a year in lost productivity, crime, and health-care costs. So a better way to identify people suffering from the disorder, and those at risk of succumbing to it, would be hugely useful. Bickel and co say they have developed just such a technique, which allows them to spot sufferers simply by looking at their social media messages such as Facebook posts. The technique even provides new insights into the... (More >)
More professionalism, less populism: How voting makes us stupid, and what to do about it
Paper by Benjamin Wittes and Jonathan Rauch: “For several generations, political reform and rhetoric have been entirely one-directional: always more direct democracy, never less. The general belief holds that more public involvement will produce more representative and thus more effective and legitimate governance. But does increasing popular involvement in politics remedy the ills of our government culture; is it the chicken soup of political reforms? In a new report, “More professionalism, less populism: How voting makes us stupid, and what to do about it,” Brookings Senior Fellows Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes argue that the best way forward is... (More >)
The Way Ahead
Transcript of lecture delivered by Stephen Fry on the 28th May 2017 • Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye: “Peter Florence, the supremo of this great literary festival, asked me some months ago if I might, as part of Hay’s celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s kickstarting of the reformation, suggest a reform of the internet… You will be relieved to know, that unlike Martin Luther, I do not have a full 95 theses to nail to the door, or in Hay’s case, to the tent flap. It might be worth reminding ourselves perhaps, however, of the great excitements... (More >)
ControCurator: Understanding Controversy Using Collective Intelligence
Paper by Benjamin Timmermans et al: “There are many issues in the world that people do not agree on, such as Global Warming [Cook et al. 2013], Anti-Vaccination [Kata 2010] and Gun Control [Spitzer 2015]. Having opposing opinions on such topics can lead to heated discussions, making them appear controversial. Such opinions are often expressed through news articles and social media. There are increasing calls for methods to detect and monitor these online discussions on different topics. Existing methods focus on using sentiment analysis and Wikipedia for identifying controversy [Dori-Hacohen and Allan 2015]. The problem with this is that... (More >)
Big Data: A New Empiricism and its Epistemic and Socio-Political Consequences
Chapter by Gernot Rieder and Judith Simon in by Berechenbarkeit der Welt? Philosophie und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter von Big Data: “…paper investigates the rise of Big Data in contemporary society. It examines the most prominent epistemological claims made by Big Data proponents, calls attention to the potential socio-political consequences of blind data trust, and proposes a possible way forward. The paper’s main focus is on the interplay between an emerging new empiricism and an increasingly opaque algorithmic environment that challenges democratic demands for transparency and accountability. It concludes that a responsible culture of quantification requires epistemic vigilance as well... (More >)
Microtasking: Redefining crowdsourcing practices in emergency management
Paper by Poblet, Marta; Fitzpatrick, Mari and Chhetri, Prem: “…examines the roles, types and forms of virtual microtasking for emergency information management in order to better understand collective intelligence mechanisms and the potential for logistics response. Using three case studies this paper reviews the emerging body of knowledge in microtasking practices in emergency management to demonstrate how crowd-sourced information is captured and processed during emergency events to provide critical intelligence throughout the emergency cycle. It also considers the impact of virtual information collection, collation and management on traditional humanitarian operations and relief efforts. Based on the case studies the... (More >)
