"In his book Direct Democracy Worldwide, David Altman moves beyond the classic narratives of Greek city-states and New England town halls to demonstrate that this form of government is pertinent today despite its still relatively modest use at the national level. However, although some forms of direct democracy, particularly citizen initiatives, may enhance a larger representational context, others offer little opportunity for authentic popular voice. Direct democracy here is a tool, rather than a system, a tool that has the potential to be harnessed to refine the limitations of representation. Thus, Altman provides a rich evaluation of the possibilities for such input—a much needed addition to this literature—while initiating a longer term agenda for scholars of democracy.
"More historic understandings of direct democracy have offered a simplistic understanding of its use: Citizens gather in a common place, or through a ballot, and themselves determine the policy that will govern their polity. Yet Altman provokes the reader to consider a much more complex constellation of possibilities in his first chapter. Rather than consider direct democracy as a Weberian ideal type of political order, he effectively offers a vision of this process as a function within a larger representational system."

(etc., etc.)

"The Unheavenly Chorus is the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created--representing more than thirty-five thousand organizations over a twenty-five-year period--this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities--and more."

Odd that he doesn't mention slashdot. (Not odd that he doesn't mention Sterling's _Distraction_, with its rival confederations of nomadic biker-gangs, oriented around competing reputation systems.)

"Searching for relevant content in a massive amount of multimedia information is facilitated by accurately annotating each image, video, or song with a large number of relevant semantic keywords, or tags. We introduce game-powered machine learning, an integrated approach to annotating multimedia content that combines the effectiveness of human computation, through online games, with the scalability of machine learning. We investigate this framework for labeling music. First, a socially-oriented music annotation game called Herd It collects reliable music annotations based on the “wisdom of the crowds.” Second, these annotated examples are used to train a supervised machine learning system. Third, the machine learning system actively directs the annotation games to collect new data that will most benefit future model iterations. Once trained, the system can automatically annotate a corpus of music much larger than what could be labeled using human computation alone. Automatically annotated songs can be retrieved based on their semantic relevance to text-based queries (e.g., “funky jazz with saxophone,” “spooky electronica,” etc.). Based on the results presented in this paper, we find that actively coupling annotation games with machine learning provides a reliable and scalable approach to making searchable massive amounts of multimedia data."

--- This is more than a bit of a stunt, but it points in an interesting direction.

"This first examination in almost 40 years of political ideas in the seventeenth-century American colonies reaches some surprising conclusions about the history of democratic theory more generally. The origins of a distinctively modern kind of thinking about democracy can be located, not in revolutionary America and France in the later eighteenth century, but in the tiny New England colonies in the middle seventeenth. The key feature of this democratic rebirth was honoring not only the principle of popular sovereignty through regular elections but also the principle of accountability through non-electoral procedures for the auditing and impeachment of elected officers. By staking its institutional identity entirely on elections, modern democratic thought has misplaced the sense of robust popular control that originally animated it."

"This history is truly what makes the lamentations of present-day conservatives for a conservative think tank (or think tanks in general) dedicated to rigorous policy development so hard to accept. In the sixties and seventies conservatives in places like AEI, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute did more than anyone else to discredit the idea of policy making as a social-scientific endeavor. Instead, policy debates became primarily concerned with political identities and political combat and provided the foundation for the elite media discourse within which Americans live today, where “balancing” public policy debates between “two sides” in a “marketplace of ideas” effectively takes precedence over policy content and, dare I say, truth.
"Likewise, this history makes the lamentations of Julian Sanchez at Cato equally hard to have sympathy for. As the brief history I’ve outlined here suggests, the political subjectivities and biases of the wealthy funders of conservative think tanks were integral to the success of these institutions. Obviously, such monies were used to develop the institutional infrastructure, but even more importantly their biases and subjectivities were used as a way to change and enter public policy debates. So, it is hard to feel sorry for those at Cato who are now lamenting what Koch may or may not do to the institution. When the history of the institution is wrapped up in a project which uses the biases of wealth funders to gain power and change the way people discuss politics and public policy, you can hardly be angry when those funders want to change the political identity that you’re promoting.
"And this, ultimately, is what the debate at Cato is about. Since it has been a long time since the technocratic ideal held (if it ever truly did—that is a discussion for another post) this is not a debate between one side that wants an institution dedicated to Republican Party political combat (Koch) and one side that wants rigorous truth-seeking and a development of policies that “work” (people like Sanchez at Cato). No, it is instead the battle that conservatives (in think tanks and elsewhere) have been wanting for the last four decades—a battle of identities in a political marketplace. Who will win: the millionaire who is seeking to “re-brand his product” or the old-school libertarian brand? According to the narrative conservatives have been offering us, only “the market” can decide."

"In this paper, we derive a novel probabilistic model of boosting as a Product of Experts. We re-derive the boosting algorithm as a greedy incremental model selection procedure which ensures that addition of new experts to the ensemble does not decrease the likelihood of the data. These learning rules lead to a generic boosting algorithm - POE- Boost which turns out to be similar to the AdaBoost algorithm under certain assumptions on the expert probabilities. The paper then extends the POEBoost algorithm to POEBoost.CS which handles hypothesis that produce probabilistic predictions. This new algorithm is shown to have better generalization performance compared to other state of the art algorithms."

"Complex problems in science, business, and engineering typically require some tradeoff between exploitation of known solutions and exploration for novel ones, where, in many cases, information about known solutions can also disseminate among individual problem solvers through formal or informal networks. Prior research on complex problem solving by collectives has found the counterintuitive result that inefficient networks, meaning networks that disseminate information relatively slowly, can perform better than efficient networks for problems that require extended exploration. In this paper, we report on a series of 256 Web-based experiments in which groups of 16 individuals collectively solved a complex problem and shared information through different communication networks. As expected, we found that collective exploration improved average success over independent exploration because good solutions could diffuse through the network. In contrast to prior work, however, we found that efficient networks outperformed inefficient networks, even in a problem space with qualitative properties thought to favor inefficient networks. We explain this result in terms of individual-level explore-exploit decisions, which we find were influenced by the network structure as well as by strategic considerations and the relative payoff between maxima. We conclude by discussing implications for real-world problem solving and possible extensions."

"Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks—someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people choose to engage with political causes.

Corrigall-Brown reveals how individual characteristics and life experiences impact the pathway of participation, illustrating that the context and period in which a person engages are critical. This is the real picture of activism, one in which many people engage, in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of continuity. This book challenges the current conceptualization of activism and pushes us to more systematically examine the varying ways that individuals participate in contentious politics over their lifetimes."

"Oppenheimer and Edwards argue that democracy works because regular elections, no matter how flawed, produce a variety of unintuitive, positive consequences. Mass participation in contested elections creates psychological pressure for voters to be better citizens and for politicians to be better leaders; alternating power regularly between different factions helps avoid instability; citizens are sometimes able to overcome their ignorance and make informed choices; and voters do have the power to punish politicians for excessively bad behavior. The brilliance of democracy, write Oppenheimer and Edwards, does not lie in the people’s ability to pick superior leaders. It lies in the many ways that it subtly encourages the flawed people and their flawed leaders to work toward building a better society."

"Boosting is an approach to machine learning based on the idea of creating a highly accurate predictor by combining many weak and inaccurate “rules of thumb.” A remarkably rich theory has evolved around boosting, with connections to a range of topics, including statistics, game theory, convex optimization, and information geometry. Boosting algorithms have also enjoyed practical success in such fields as biology, vision, and speech processing. At various times in its history, boosting has been perceived as mysterious, controversial, even paradoxical.

This book, written by the inventors of the method, brings together, organizes, simplifies, and substantially extends two decades of research on boosting, presenting both theory and applications in a way that is accessible to readers from diverse backgrounds while also providing an authoritative reference for advanced researchers. With its introductory treatment of all material and its inclusion of exercises in every chapter, the book is appropriate for course use as well.

The book begins with a general introduction to machine learning algorithms and their analysis; then explores the core theory of boosting, especially its ability to generalize; examines some of the myriad other theoretical viewpoints that help to explain and understand boosting; provides practical extensions of boosting for more complex learning problems; and finally presents a number of advanced theoretical topics. Numerous applications and practical illustrations are offered throughout."

"The process of developing a new technology through open discussion has been called collective invention. This paper documents two episodes of collective invention and proposes a general model based on search theory. The first episode deals with the development of mass production steel in the U.S. (1866-1885), and the second with early personal computers (1975- 1985). In both cases technical people openly discussed and sometimes shared technology they were developing. Both technologies advanced to the point that they supported substantial economic growth. Open source software development is partway through a similar process now.
The episodes have common features. The process begins with an invention or a change in legal restrictions. Hobbyists and startup firms experiment with practical methods of production and share their results through a social network. The members of the network form a new industry or change an existing one. The network then disappears if the new firms keep their research and development secret. A model of the search for innovations can describe this process if it is expanded to include independent hobbyists and consultants as well as profit-seeking firms."

I have never properly appreciated "I don't write the headlines" complaints before this.

Further self-justifying whining: http://bactra.org/weblog/838.html

"This paper argues that democracy can be seen as a way to channel “democratic reason,” or the collective political intelligence of the many. The paper hypothesizes that two main democratic mechanisms - the practice of inclusive deliberation (in its direct and indirect versions) and the institution of majority rule with universal suffrage - combine their epistemic properties to maximize the chances that the group pick the “better” political answer within a given context and a set of values. The paper further argues that under the conditions of a liberal society, characterized among other things by sufficient cognitive diversity, these two mechanisms give democracy an epistemic edge over versions of the rule of the few."

"The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for explaining why and how disciplines, subfields, theory groups, bandwagons, actor networks, and other kindred formations arise to alter the intellectual landscape. To fill this lacuna, this article presents a general theory of scientific/intellectual movements (SIMs). The theory synthesizes work in the sociology of ideas, social studies of science, and the literature on social movements to explain the dynamics of SIMs, which the authors take to be central mechanisms for change in the world of knowledge and ideas. Illustrating their arguments with a diverse sampling of positive and negative cases, they define SIMs, identify a set of theoretical presuppositions, and offer four general propositions for explaining the social conditions under which SIMs are most likely to emerge, gain prestige, and achieve some level of institutional stability."

Review: http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2011-08.html#laughlin

"Reputation-Based Governance melds concepts from businesses like eBay with politics. Author Lucio Picci uses interdisciplinary tools to argue that the intelligent use of widely available Internet technologies can strengthen reputational mechanisms and significantly improve public governance. Based on this notion, the book proposes a governance model that leans on the concept of reputational incentives while discussing the pivotal role of reputation in politics today. Picci argues that a continuous, distributed process of assessing policy outcomes, enabled by an appropriate information system, would contribute to a governance model characterized by effectiveness, efficiency, and a minimum amount of rent-seeking activity. Moreover, if citizens were also allowed to express their views on prospective policies, then reputation-based governance would provide a platform on which to develop advanced forms of participative democracy."

"challenges the conventional wisdom that participatory democracy is worthy in purpose but unworkable in practice... social movements have often used bottom-up decision making as a powerful tool for political change... also highlights the obstacles that arise when activists model their democracies after familiar nonpolitical relationships such as friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship... brought into their deliberations the trust, respect, and caring typical of those relationships. But it has also fostered values that run counter to democracy ... exclusivity ... aversion to rules ... have been the fault lines ... the fragility of the form less to its basic inefficiency or inequity than to the gaps between activists' democratic commitments and the cultural models on which they have depended ... The challenge ... is to forge new kinds of democratic relationships, ones that balance trust with accountability, respect with openness to disagreement, and caring with inclusiveness."

"A novel paradigm was developed to study the behavior of groups of networked people searching a problem space. The authors examined how different network structures affect the propagation of information in laboratory-created groups. Participants made numerical guesses and received scores that were also made available to their neighbors in the network. The networks were compared on speed of discovery and convergence on the optimal solution. One experiment showed that individuals within a group tend to converge on similar solutions even when there is an equally valid alternative solution. Two additional studies demonstrated that the optimal network structure depends on the problem space being explored, with networks that incorporate spatially based cliques having an advantage for problems that benefit from broad exploration, and networks with greater long-range connectivity having an advantage for problems requiring less exploration."

The definition of "democracy" in the abstract strikes me as rather odd.

"this book is about political culture. It examines developments in the social sciences and integrates them into a theoretical explanation of historical changes in political values. The starting point is the premise that political culture is rooted in the interaction between individual thinking and social norms. Through discourse, individual conceptions of social life are transformed and, interactively, social norms and cultural orientations as well. The first two parts of the book explore these issues theoretically. The second two examine them empirically by showing the ways that political cultures have changed over time. In the modern period the differences in the political cultures of capitalist and communist systems are contrasted; although both coneptualize social life in terms of property accumulation, they utilize different cultural orientations to reduce institutional transaction costs. The way the tensions between these two systems can be resolved is also explored."

"human-subject experiments on the problems of coloring (a social differentiation task) and consensus (a social agreement task) [on a network]. Both [are] coordination games, and despite their cognitive similarity, we find that ... network structure elicits opposing behavioral effects in the two problems, with increased long-distance connectivity making consensus easier for subjects and coloring harder. We investigate the influence that subjects have on their network neighbors and the collective outcome, and find that it varies considerably, beyond what can be explained by network position alone. ... strong correlations between influence and other features of individual subject behavior. ... much of the recent research in network science ... often emphasizes network topology out of the context of any specific problem and places primacy on network position, our findings highlight the potential importance of the details of tasks and individuals in social networks."

Not sure of the relevance to the "re:" paper. "knowledge acquisition as performed by multiple agents interacting as they infer, under [noise], respective models of a complex system. ... at each time step, each agent takes into account its current observation as well as the average of the models of its neighbors. The agents are connected by a network... of Erdős-Rényi or Barabási-Albert type. .. [if] one [agent] has a different [error rate] (higher or lower). ... [t]he influence of this special agent over the quality of the models inferred by the rest of the network can be substantial, varying linearly with the ... degree of the [special] agent ... [if] the degree of this agent is taken as a respective fitness parameter, the effect of the different [error rate] is ... superlinear.. when the agents are grouped into communities ... edges between agents (within a community) having higher probability of observation error [worsens] the estimation of the agents in the other communities."

"all institutions are syncretic, ... composed of an indeterminate number of features, which are decomposable and recombinable in unpredictable ways. ... action within institutions is always potentially creative, ... draw[ing] on [many] cultural and institutional resources to create novel combinations. [This is] creative syncretism. ... existing accounts of institutional change, which are rooted in structuralism, produce excess complexity and render the most important sources and results of change invisible. ... we need [to explain] how people live institutional rules. We find that grounding in John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of habit. ... a field guide to creative syncretism. It uses an experiential approach to provide novel insights on three problems that have occupied institutionalist research: periodization in American political development, convergence among advanced capitalist democracies, and institutional change in developing countries."

Review: http://bactra.org/reviews/ober-democracy-and-knowledge.html

When does culture help you realize that not only is it not raining, but that in fact somebody's pissing on you and a lot of other people?

"attacks the assumption ... that social control as such is .. intellectually and morally destructive ... social freedom cannot mean immunity from social pressure .... competence as rational and social agents depends on a constructive adaptation of social

Apparently not.

Dewey meets rational choice theories.

"Considers the question of how liberal democracies produce citizens who are capable of governing themselves, rethinking the relationship between welfare and citizenship, democracy and despotism, and subjectivity and subjection."