Like the character of George Bailey, it bridged the gap between the hierarchical (in this case, the medical establishment), and the populist ("anecdotal" information, folk remedy; or, if I may, compassion).
[If you're interested, more information on the Populist Caucus can be found at the Populist Caucus webpage, which Chairman Braley has created on his official House webpage.].
Given the current anti-expert feeling, I'm reluctant to criticise a movement that would make better social use of data, but Evgeny Morozov's call for data populism ("Data populists must seize our information for the benefit of us all", In Focus, last week) fails on a number of points.
WikiLeaks, in Assange's ideal, is a populist machine, delivering unmediated secret information directly to readers.
The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.
Now, here is a "digital populist" remix of that paragraph, putting a different spin on the basic information that you can hear Bjork's new songs online.
This means that when a subject is highly complex and contains lots of uncertainty, asking populist opinion is going to give a really low probability of valid information about what is likely to happen or what we should actually do.
It is clearly in evidence in a short populist book by the architect of that report, Charles Fletcher, which was intended to give clear information to the public about the dangers of smoking (Fletcher et al. 1963).
All the open information in the world will not create positive change absent the focus watchdogs bring to populist issues in order to leverage political decisions. .
