Book: Algorithmic Rule

ALGORITHMIC RULE

'The future is here and it is not simply digital; it is algorithmic. Algorithms now shape not only what we see and hear through the media, but also how public administrations function and how work is managed. Decisions about health, employment and even children’s education are increasingly outsourced to automated systems. This book explores the algorithmic present, and what can sometimes be described as algocracy – rule by algorithms. To navigate this new reality, we must ask not only technological but also democratic questions. This book is a guide to doing just that.

What national algorithmic scandals have already unfolded, and what lessons can be drawn from them? How is the future of work being reshaped, as employers rely on algorithmic management tools powered by constant workplace surveillance? Should artificial intelligence be allowed to make decisions in the public sector? Where can we find examples of local governments working for inclusion and transparency through open-source programming? How are institutions handling the massive and sensitive data flows that structure daily life? And what does it mean for democracy if the only face of the state becomes a ubiquitous chatbot?' 

Continued:

https://feps-europe.eu/publication/algorithmic-rule/ 

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic -------------------------------------------  mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group-population

	ALGORITHMIC
	RULE

Survey: Identifying and Fixing Undesirable Behaviors Across Software Versions

Hello,

As part of my PhD at the University of Lille, I am currently conducting a study on how developers handle certain bug scenarios. 

The goal is to better understand current practices, the tools used, and developers' needs regarding debugging in a specific scenario. 

You can find the survey at the following address:

https://sondages.inria.fr/index.php/462191?lang=en

Your participation in this short questionnaire (5 - 10 minutes) would greatly help us analyze existing methods and identify potential gaps in the available solutions. 

This survey will be open for 6 weeks (until May 15th, 2025). The responses will be analyzed and included in a scientific publication. The results will be available here.

If you can, please feel free to share this questionnaire with other developers who might be interested. 

Every response counts and will contribute to a better understanding of the community's practices! 

A big thank you for your help and time. 

Best regards, 

Rémi Dufloer

PhD Student, University of Lille 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bonjour,

Dans le cadre de ma thèse à l’Université de Lille, je mène actuellement une étude sur la manière dont les développeurs gèrent certains scénarios de bugs.
L’objectif est de mieux comprendre les pratiques actuelles, les outils utilisés et les besoins des développeurs en matière de debugging sur un scénario précis.

Voici le lien du questionnaire:

https://sondages.inria.fr/index.php/462191?lang=en

Votre participation à ce court questionnaire (5 - 10 minutes) nous aiderait énormément à analyser les méthodes existantes et à identifier les éventuelles lacunes dans les solutions disponibles.
Ce survey est ouvert durant 6 semaines (fermeture le15 mai 2025).Les réponses obtenues seront analysées et feront l'objet d'une publication scientifique.Les résultats seront publiésici.

Si vous le pouvez, n’hésitez pas à partager ce questionnaire avec d’autres développeurs susceptibles d’être intéressés.
Chaque réponse compte et contribuera à une meilleure compréhension des pratiques de la communauté !

Un grand merci pour votre aide et votre temps.

Bien cordialement,

Dufloer Rémi
Doctorant, Université de Lille

________________
My source: Esug-list mailing list & checking with Rémi.

ERCIM News No. 139 Special Theme: "Software Security"

Dear ERCIM News reader,

A new ERCIM News issue (Number 139) is online with a special theme on Software Security. The articles in this special theme offer a comprehensive panorama of the current European research activities in software security and protection. They showcase a diverse range of research projects, highlighting the ongoing advancements and key developments of the field..

You can access the issue at https://ercim-news.ercim.eu/

This special theme was coordinated by our guest editors Sebastian Schrittwieser (University of Vienna) and Michele Ianni (University of Calabria).

Thank you for reading ERCIM News!

Please share this issue with anyone who might find it interesting. You can also support us on X (https://x.com/ercim_news) and LinkedIn. Let's keep the conversation going and share the latest updates together!

Next issue:

No. 140, January 2025
Special Theme: " Large-Scale Scientific Computing". Submissions are welcome! See call for contributions.

Announcements in this issue: Call for Proposals: Dagstuhl Seminars and Perspectives Workshops - Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik is accepting proposals for scientific seminars/workshops in all areas of computer science.

Call for Papers: ACM Digital Threats: Research and Practice

ERCIM News is published quarterly by ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. With the printed and online edition, ERCIM News reaches more than 10000 readers.
All issues published to date are available online.

About ERCIM

ERCIM - the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics - aims to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase cooperation with European industry. Leading European research institutes are members of ERCIM. ERCIM is the European host of W3C.

Peter Kunz                      	
ERCIM Office
+33 (0)7 68 16 50 47

2004, Route des Lucioles
BP93
F-06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex

@ercim_news 

NHS Independent Report: "Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis"

"Professor Ben Goldacre’s review into how the efficient and safe use of health data for research and analysis can benefit patients and the healthcare sector."

 

 

INDIVIDUAL

|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

"Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis"	"Raw data - such as NHS patients’ electronic health records - is prepared, analysed, and visualised by writing code that issues instructions to computers. Data preparation and analysis are hugely complex technical tasks."
PUBLIC: Safety Privacy Accountability [inc. Value for Money] Benefits Trust Literacy Awareness / Understanding of Science(s) Self-care, Care of family and Social Care (Inoculation: Fake news, Dis-, Mis-, Malinformation)? 'Broader' (a further post ...?)	“Nobody wants to work in an NHS trust on NHS data, it’s a nightmare and we can't pay people appropriately.” - Interviewee

Department of Health & Social Care, Independent report. "Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis". Published 7 April 2022.

 

My source: 

Trevor Peacock, Head of Governance, Risk & Compliance, Information Security Group, Information Services Division University College London 

c/o NHS-HE-FORUM

 

Two heads are better than one, but ...

beware ...

 

 individual 

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

... team - group - department - organisation - Party ...

 

	group think

 

My source: Various

Book: Making of Byrne’s Euclid

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

	Scans of first eight propositions from Byrne’s Euclid

My source: Twitter @dr_tj @defilippovale @rougeux

https://twitter.com/defilippovale/status/1074436950663278592

Cash Transactions : Care Continuity

In programming major applications such as finance there is a need to ensure within the transactions and the database operations that mistakes do not occur.

The classic example is a transfer between two accounts:

def transfer(from, to, amount)
  from.debit(amount)
  to.credit(amount)
end

It is vital that the above method (example provided by Tate and Hibbs) does not fail after the debit. In Rails the transaction method help to prevent 'digital accidents' as follows:

def transfer(from, to, amount)
  Account.transaction do
   from.debit(amount)
   to.credit(amount)
  end
end

transaction is itself a method built into Rail's Active Record that helps to maintain the integrity of transactions. Which brings me to 'care'. ...

There are several blog posts here since you reach a stage in your career when the hard fought lessons of yesteryear have to be faced again but this time like after dinner wind.
There are many possible care transactions that arise.

Many have a specific context and frequently these are conjoined:

• timing
• relationships - trust
• responsibility - transfer
• care environment
• record (paper, electronic)

As to care transaction consider these:

def transfer(from, to, care_plan)
 Care.transaction do
  from.hospital(care_plan)
  to.community(care_plan)
 end
end

def transfer(from, to, day_care)
 Care.transaction do
  from.home(day_care)
  to.day_center(day_care)
 end
end

Wherever, whenever, whatever and whoever your transactions involve, take care of them and remember in health and social care (esp.) outcomes add up.

Don't forget to look after the however: the information, the knowledge, the promises ....

def transfer(from, to, promise_plan_of_action)
 Care.transaction do
  from.nurse(promise_plan_of_action)
  to.carer(promise_plan_of_action)
 end
end

Reference: Bruce Tate, Curt Hibbs (2006) Ruby on Rails: Up and Running, O'Reilly, p.35.

Nursing as reverse engineering...

At Scotland on Rails last month one of the sessions included an example of Ruby code outlining a 'morning routine'. It comprised a series of tasks and sub-tasks all of which led to getting to work.

Much of the vital essentials of the code I cannot understand beyond some tentative inklings, but in the hope of learning I've re-hashed the accessible bits and turned it into a NursingRoutine. The output looks like this....

Nursing....
"Non-judgmental attitude"
"Universal positive regard"
"Basic counselling skills"
"Open mind"
"Meet person"
"Receive referral"
"assess person utilizing Hodges model"
"Create care plan"
"Meet physical needs"
"Meet interpersonal needs"
"Meet political care needs"
"Meet social care needs"
"Holistic care"
"Evaluate physical needs"
"Evaluate interpersonal needs"
"Evaluate social care needs"
"Evaluate political care needs"
"Evaluate care"
"caring..."

Something like nursing is obviously a much more complex routine than that implied above - that is because:

• nursing is not [some - 'thing'];
• nursing can be represented as a routine BUT;
• nursing seeks to transcend the routine: emphasizing the personal, unique, the humanistic;
• nursing is parallel and sequential;

In addition now we are about collaborative, multidisciplinary care that must factor in agreement (the care plan...), and patient reported outcome measures (PROMS). ...

In the meantime I need to exercise care trying to understand the program that produced the output (that could also be easily printed as a list). While this is not an example there is such a thing as obfuscated code, but surely not obfuscated nursing care?

Domain Specific Languages [II] + a Ruby mixin

Last year in one of those pick-it-up:put-it-down cycles, I surfed into this article on DSLs and Ruby c/o:

Ruby Code & Style Creating DSLs with Ruby
by Jim Freeze, March 16, 2006

Although as mentioned the other week, I'd read - and keep reading! - Chris Pine's intro Ruby book and the Thomas's Pickaxe, much of the code is hard to follow for a beginner - here's a snippet (from page 3 of 4):

[n.b. Some lines below are incomplete due to Blogger's interpretation of the characters]

Again, we update the require statement in dsl-loader.rb to load the mydsl4.rb file and run the loader:

% ruby dsl-loader.rb params.dsl
#
["@parameter", "@name"]

This is all well and good, but what if we don’t know the parameter names in advance? Depending on the use cases for the DSL, parameter names may be generated by the user. Never fear. With Ruby, we have the power of method_missing. A two-line method added to MyDSL will define a DSL attribute with dsl_accessor on demand. That is, if a value is to be assigned to a (thus far) non-existent parameter, method_missing will define the getters and setters and assign the value to the parameter.

% cat mydsl5.rb
require 'dslhelper'

class MyDSL
def method_missing(sym, *args)
self.class.dsl_accessor sym
send(sym, *args)
end

def self.load(filename)
# ... Same as before
end
end

% head -1 dsl-loader.rb
require 'mydsl5'

% ruby dsl-loader.rb params.dsl
#
["@parameter", "@name"]

Once again Olsen's - Design Patterns in Ruby has helped me (to begin to) understand  method-missing (p.184). I swear I heard some clanks as the pieces re-arranged themselves and one or two fell (almost) in place. Having copied Freeze's code into Ruby, it would not run. At least now the code is not as complex looking at it was and reading it through now it makes a lot more sense. I'm really looking forward to trying this again in Eclipse. On that first exposure I had a vague notion of the principle of method-missing, but reading Olsen's book I've a better grasp and may be able to keep hold of this and other Ruby concepts. Believe me that helps in my pick-it-up:put-it-down world.

more to follow ....