Public Scrutiny of Automated Decisions: Early Lessons and Emerging Methods

Automated decisions are increasingly part of everyday life, but how can the public scrutinize, understand, and govern them? To begin to explore this, Omidyar Network has, in partnership with Upturn, published Public Scrutiny of Automated Decisions: Early Lessons and Emerging Methods.The report is based on an extensive review of computer and social science literature, a broad array of real-world attempts to study automated systems, and dozens of conversations with global digital rights advocates, regulators, technologists, and industry representatives. It maps out the landscape of public scrutiny of automated decision-making, both in terms of what civil society was or was not doing in this nascent sector and what laws and regulations were or were not in place to help regulate it.Our aim in exploring this is three-fold:1) We hope it will help civil society actors consider how much they have to gain in empowering the public to effectively scrutinize, understand, and help govern automated decisions; 2) We think it can start laying a policy framework for this governance, adding to the growing literature on the social and economic impact of such decisions; and3) We're optimistic that the report's findings and analysis will inform other funders' decisions in this important and growing field

Legitimising accession: Transformation politics and elite consensus on EU membership in Poland, 1989-2003.

This thesis considers the evolution of Poland's party-political consensus on accession to the European Union, starting with the elections to the contract parliament in June 1989 and ending with the accession referendum in June 2003. The main finding is that the establishment of consensus in favour of accession among Poland's political elites proved much more challenging than the elites' declarations of support suggest. Although most parties declared support for accession, throughout the entire pre-accession period they also supported policy proposals that contradicted accession conditions. The EU's strict neoliberal economic requirements and the loss of national sovereignty accession entailed proved particularly challenging. Rather than reconcile their policy proposals with EU's conditions, or change their stance on accession, parties rhetorically re-presented the EU into different visions that aligned with their ideological offering. Declarations of support for 'Social Europe', 'Christian Europe' or the 'Europe of Nations' gave the appearance of consensus. But in fact no in-depth consensus was possible since the way in which political groupings presented the 'Europe' they claimed to support was so different as to remove a common denominator they could agree on. As a result, the single biggest change Polish society experienced since 1989 was never really addressed in political debate. The integration project was propelled forward not by in-depth political consensus but by a series of rhetorical compromises. At each stage of the accession process the parties' inability to negotiate more than a nominal consensus prevented meaningful public debate. During each electoral contest of the pre-accession period voters were presented with ambiguous rhetoric in place of alternative policy options that would have enabled the electorate to hold decision makers to account

Applied Cognitive Sciences

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field in the study of the mind and intelligence. The term cognition refers to a variety of mental processes, including perception, problem solving, learning, decision making, language use, and emotional experience. The basis of the cognitive sciences is the contribution of philosophy and computing to the study of cognition. Computing is very important in the study of cognition because computer-aided research helps to develop mental processes, and computers are used to test scientific hypotheses about mental organization and functioning. This book provides a platform for reviewing these disciplines and presenting cognitive research as a separate discipline

Music From Out There, In Here:25 Years of the London Jazz Festival

Webster and McKay have pieced together a fascinating jigsaw puzzle of archival material, interviews, and stories from musicians, festival staff and fans alike. Including many evocative images, the book weaves together the story of the festival wit the history of its home city, London, touching on broader social topics such as gender, race, politics, and the search for the meaning of jazz. They also trace the forgotten history of London as a vibrant city of jazz festivals going as far back as the 1940s