Omvärldsanalys i statliga myndigheter. Framväxt, organisation och arbetsmetoder

Horizon scanning is an ambiguous concept and difficult to define. Within the context of central government authorities, it can be interpreted as an umbrella term for a variety of activities that monitors and analyzes changes in the external environment. As a phenomenon and discourse, horizon scanning is more common today compared to ten years ago. More central government authorities have a formal or semi-formal organization for horizon scanning. Modern information technology and external consultants play in many cases a central role in development. Organizational problems such as lack of resources, competence and management’s commitment remain for many central government authorities.Futures studies; Horizon scanning; Planning; Central government; Authorities; Framtidsstudier; Omvärldsanalys; Omvärldsbevakning; Verksamhetsplanering; Statliga myndigheter

Extracellular Fibrils of Pathogenic Yeast Cryptococcus gattii Are Important for Ecological Niche, Murine Virulence and Human Neutrophil Interactions

Cryptococcus gattii, an emerging fungal pathogen of humans and animals, is found on a variety of trees in tropical and temperate regions. The ecological niche and virulence of this yeast remain poorly defined. We used Arabidopsis thaliana plants and plant-derived substrates to model C. gattii in its natural habitat. Yeast cells readily colonized scratch-wounded plant leaves and formed distinctive extracellular fibrils (40–100 nm diameter ×500–3000 nm length). Extracellular fibrils were observed on live plants and plant-derived substrates by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and by high voltage- EM (HVEM). Only encapsulated yeast cells formed extracellular fibrils as a capsule-deficient C. gattii mutant completely lacked fibrils. Cells deficient in environmental sensing only formed disorganized extracellular fibrils as apparent from experiments with a C. gattii STE12α mutant. C. gattii cells with extracellular fibrils were more virulent in murine model of pulmonary and systemic cryptococcosis than cells lacking fibrils. C. gattii cells with extracellular fibrils were also significantly more resistant to killing by human polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMN) in vitro even though these PMN produced elaborate neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). These observations suggest that extracellular fibril formation could be a structural adaptation of C. gattii for cell-to-cell, cell-to-substrate and/or cell-to- phagocyte communications. Such ecological adaptation of C. gattii could play roles in enhanced virulence in mammalian hosts at least initially via inhibition of host PMN– mediated killing

The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: Investigating Immigration and Social Policy Preferences. Executive Report.

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of selective model reporting and lack of replicability. The heterogeneity of countries obscures attempts to clearly define data-generating models. P-hacking and HARKing lurk among standard research practices in this area.This project employs crowdsourcing to address these issues. It draws on replication, deliberation, meta-analysis and harnessing the power of many minds at once. The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative carries two main goals, (a) to better investigate the linkage between immigration and social policy preferences across countries, and (b) to develop crowdsourcing as a social science method. The Executive Report provides short reviews of the area of social policy preferences and immigration, and the methods and impetus behind crowdsourcing plus a description of the entire project. Three main areas of findings will appear in three papers, that are registered as PAPs or in process

Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings

Web Applications for Large-Scale Decision Support : Preference Elicitation, Modeling and Visualization

This thesis addresses the lack of effective and efficient technology design in current e-participation research by investigating two approaches that yet have not been explored to any great extent in the literature: decision science and data visualization. It is concerned with the problem of how to combine techniques from these two fields to achieve decision support in the context of e-participation; from preference elicitation and modeling to data analysis, visualization and final recommendations, such that it can provide value to practitioners.  The work was carried out in two separate research projects, but which shared a common research strategy: to develop, demonstrate, and evaluate e-participation technologies in real-life settings. The first project was a pilot designed to provide European universities with a web-based e-participation platform to empower students in the Bologna Process. Thirteen universities in Europe participated as end-users of the platform. Using a mixed methods research design, the results showed that ICT is poorly conceptualized in e-participation research and practice, typically conceived informally and simply as tools, independent of the political and social context within which they are developed and used. With regard to sociotechnical challenges in e-participation, the results confirm much of previous research that has underlined the prevalence of technological determinism, institutional resistance, privacy and trust issues, among many other factors.  In the second project we developed a decision analytic framework for structuring, evaluating, and analyzing stakeholder conflicts in land-use planning. The Municipality of Upplands Väsby in Stockholm, Sweden, participated as a trial. Using agile design principles and methods we implemented the framework as a prototype spatial decision support system using the R programming language. Our prototype shows that a combination of decision science and data visualization has the potential to become a powerful tool in the hands of governments to enable members of society to identify where their differences really matter and where they are unimportant, thus providing structure and new insight to democratic debate. Furthermore, we believe it has the potential to alleviate some of the barriers and limitations associated with traditional methods of community engagement, including distance and time constraints, issues of scale, and high costs

Civic Participation and Empowerment through Visualization

Abstract This article elaborates on the use of data visualization to promote civic participation and democratic engagement. The power and potential of data visualization is examined through a brief historical overview and four interconnected themes that provide new opportunities for electronic participation research: data storytelling, infographics, data physicalization, and quantified self. The goal is to call attention to this space and encourage a larger community of researchers to explore the possibilities that data visualization can bring

Online Participation in Higher Education Decision-making

This article considers online participation in higher education decision-making using the MyUniversity EU project as a case study. MyUniversity was a pilot designed to provide European universities with a web-based system to empower and involve students and other members of the academic community in the Bologna Process. Thirteen universities in Spain, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania participated in trials. The study uses data collection methods from across the quantitative and qualitative spectrum: web analytics, online surveys, key performance indicators, interviews, focus groups, participant observation, document studies, and usability evaluations. The results are represented by 10 themes: project design, participation, functionality and usability, impact on decision-making, privacy and trust, institutional resistance, motivational factors, the political, economic, and sociocultural context, language barriers, and moderation and framing. The article ends with a discussion based on the results, including recommendations for future research.</p

Online Participation in Higher Education Decision-making

This article considers online participation in higher education decision-making using the MyUniversity EU project as a case study. MyUniversity was a pilot designed to provide European universities with a web-based system to empower and involve students and other members of the academic community in the Bologna Process. Thirteen universities in Spain, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania participated in trials. The study uses data collection methods from across the quantitative and qualitative spectrum: web analytics, online surveys, key performance indicators, interviews, focus groups, participant observation, document studies, and usability evaluations. The results are represented by 10 themes: project design, participation, functionality and usability, impact on decision-making, privacy and trust, institutional resistance, motivational factors, the political, economic, and sociocultural context, language barriers, and moderation and framing. The article ends with a discussion based on the results, including recommendations for future research

The Lack of Transparency in Public Decision Processes

We discuss the lack of transparency and use of elaborated decision methods in public decision processes. The decision regarding new roads in the greater Stockholm area has been used as a significant example

Portfolio Decision Analysis for Evaluating Stakeholder Conflicts in Land Use Planning

Urban planning typically involves multiple actors and stakeholders with conflicting opinions and diverging preferences. The proposed development plans and actions greatly affect the quality of life of the local community at different spatial scales and time horizons. Consequently, it is important for decision-makers to understand and analyse the conflicting needs and priorities of the local community. This paper presents a decision analytic framework for evaluating stakeholder conflicts in urban planning. First, the stakeholders state their preferences regarding the actions in terms of a set of criteria and estimate the weight of each criterion. Then, a conflict index and overall value for each action is calculated. Next, a set of Pareto efficient portfolios of actions are generated by solving an optimization problem with different levels of conflict as a resource constraint. Finally, a sensitivity analysis of the actions is performed. The framework is demonstrated using real-world survey data collected in the municipality of Upplands Vasby, Sweden