Starting with a nice illustration as to the difference between alchemy and chemistry (the former was conducted in secret), leading to a critique of a similar situation with Big Data and how this is used by big internet corporations. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q3sr

A nice short piece basically advocating complete honesty in public pronouncements: “Five rules for evidence communication. Avoid unwarranted certainty, neat narratives and partisan presentation; strive to inform, not persuade.“ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03189-1

Although election models generally do not have a large impact upon people’s lives, it is a case where the nature and practice of modelling is very much in the public eye, and (almost uniquely) they will be objectively judged on their accuracy after the real results are known. Modelling practice here tends to mirror (or… Read More Modelling Practices of Election Forecasts

…in a democratic way. There is a series of online workshops and you can raise issues etc. via their developing documentation at: https://openmodelingfoundation.github.io/

Includes a lot of sensible recommendations about getting your simulation research so that it is understood by those that would benefit from it. Article at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0272989X20945308

When evidence does not matter – What Brazil teaches us about the fragility of evidence based policymaking This sheds light on the disturbing fact that scientific evidence can and has been utterly ignored when it contradicts the dominant interests in majoritarian and relatively closed political systems A Post by Flavia Donadelli at the LSE at:… Read More A reminder of what happens when science is not listened to in policy making (and why)

So this represents progress over the Imperial/Ferguson model, which took a long time to publicly release. This ticks many of the boxes but fails to document the code. Article at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1001-6 See here for what to do to make ones code effectively open.

Sensible stuff, including the following quotes: “…multidisciplinarity in science advice is essential. These discussions across disciplines have to be organised and co-ordinated well, given that the range of perspectives is wide and the scholars involved may not always be familiar with working across the territories of other disciplines.” “Communicating uncertainty and complexity to policy makers… Read More The European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors’ guidance for giving advice in pandemic situations

“The overwhelming majority of our advice is ignored,” Dr. Michie said, “but the pieces are picked up and used for political purposes.” The whole piece at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/world/europe/sage-britain-coronavirus-ferguson.html

In the 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan (under the coalition government – remember how we used to be critical of them?), there was a general commitment towards making the whole policy-making process more transparent and open to multiple voices (see Civil-Service-Reform-Plan-final). This has been forgotten under subsequent governments (indeed the page for this plan has… Read More Principles of Policy Transparency seeming being forgotten by the Current Government..