Springwise: “Most cities were never designed to cater for the huge numbers of bikes seen on their roads every day, and as the number of cyclists grows, so do the fatality statistics thanks to limited investment in safe cycle paths. While Berlin already crowdsources bikers’ favorite cycle routes and maps them through the Dynamic Connections platform, a new app called WeCycle lets cyclists track their journeys, pooling their data to create heat maps for city planners.
Created by the UK’s TravelAI transport startup, WeCycle taps into the current consumer trend for quantifying every aspect of life, including journey times. By downloading the free iOS app, London cyclists can seamlessly create stats each time they get on their bike. They app runs in the background and uses the device’s accelerometer to smartly distinguish walking or running from cycling. They can then see how far they’ve traveled, how fast they cycle and every route they’ve taken. Additionally, the app also tracks bus and car travel.
Anyone that downloads the app agrees that their data can be anonymously sent to TravelAI, creating an accurate and real-time information resource. It aims to create tools such as heat maps and behavior monitoring for cities and local authorities to learn more about how citizens are using roads to better inform their transport policies.
WeCycle follows in the footsteps of similar apps such as Germany’s Radwende and the Toronto Cycling App — both released this year — in taking a popular trend and turning into data that could help make cities a safer place to cycle….Website: www.travelai.info“
Crowdteaching: Supporting Teaching as Designing in Collective Intelligence Communities
Paper by Mimi Recker, Min Yuan, and Lei Ye in the International Review of Research in Open and Distant Learning: “The widespread availability of high-quality Web-based content offers new potential for supporting teachers as designers of curricula and classroom activities. When coupled with a participatory Web culture and infrastructure, teachers can share their creations as well as leverage from the best that their peers have to offer to support a collective intelligence or crowdsourcing community, which we dub crowdteaching. We applied a collective intelligence framework to characterize crowdteaching in the context of a Web-based tool for teachers called the Instructional Architect (IA). The IA enables teachers to find, create, and share instructional activities (called IA projects) for their students using online learning resources. These IA projects can further be viewed, copied, or adapted by other IA users. This study examines the usage activities of two samples of teachers, and also analyzes the characteristics of a subset of their IA projects. Analyses of teacher activities suggest that they are engaging in crowdteaching processes. Teachers, on average, chose to share over half of their IA projects, and copied some directly from other IA projects. Thus, these teachers can be seen as both contributors to and consumers of crowdteaching processes. In addition, IA users preferred to view IA projects rather than to completely copy them. Finally, correlational results based on an analysis of the characteristics of IA projects suggest that several easily computed metrics (number of views, number of copies, and number of words in IA projects) can act as an indirect proxy of instructionally relevant indicators of the content of IA projects.”
DrivenData
DrivenData Blog: “As we begin launching our first competitions, we thought it would be a good idea to lay out what exactly we’re trying to do and why….
At DrivenData, we want to bring cutting-edge practices in data science and crowdsourcing to some of the world’s biggest social challenges and the organizations taking them on. We host online challenges, usually lasting 2-3 months, where a global community of data scientists competes to come up with the best statistical model for difficult predictive problems that make a difference.
Just like every major corporation today, nonprofits and NGOs have more data than ever before. And just like those corporations, they are trying to figure out how to make the best use of their data. We work with mission-driven organizations to identify specific predictive questions that they care about answering and can use their data to tackle.
Then we host the online competitions, where experts from around the world vie to come up with the best solution. Some competitors are experienced data scientists in the private sector, analyzing corporate data by day, saving the world by night, and testing their mettle on complex questions of impact. Others are smart, sophisticated students and researchers looking to hone their skills on real-world datasets and real-world problems. Still more have extensive experience with social sector data and want to bring their expertise to bear on new, meaningful challenges – with immediate feedback on how well their solution performs.
Like any data competition platform, we want to harness the power of crowds combined with the increasing prevalence of large, relevant datasets. Unlike other data competition platforms, our primary goal is to create actual, measurable, lasting positive change in the world with our competitions. At the end of each challenge, we work with the sponsoring organization to integrate the winning solutions, giving them the tools to drive real improvements in their impact….
We are launching soon and we want you to join us!
If you want to get updates about our launch this fall with exciting, real competitions, please sign up for our mailing list here and follow us on Twitter: @drivendataorg.
If you are a data scientist, feel free to create an account and start playing with our first sandbox competitions.
If you are a nonprofit or public sector organization, and want to squeeze every drop of mission effectiveness out of your data, check out the info on our site and let us know! “
Smartphone Movements Could Reveal Empty Parking Spots
Caleb Garling at MIT Technology Review: “Researchers have come up with a novel way to find parking spots with your smartphone. It promises to be much easier than driving around looking for an empty space, and doesn’t require the installation of pricey sensors or other methods for tracking available spots.
At the State University of New York at Buffalo, researchers built an app called PocketParker that does what they’re calling “pocketsourcing”—essentially, turning smartphones into passive sensors that track the location and movements of other users who’ve installed the app. A remote computer crunches the aggregate user actions and determines the likelihood that a lot has an open space. A paper about PocketParker will be presented at the ubiquitous computing conference UbiComp in Seattle next week.
While some parking lots employ sensors to gather information about capacity, PocketParker works without any such infrastructure. It pulls parking lot data from OpenStreetMap and calculates the number of spaces in a given lot based on its dimensions. During a study, researchers found that they could predict the number of spaces to within 6 percent of the actual number.
The app uses the smartphone’s accelerometer to determine where a user is and gauges whether he’s looking for a parking spot based on his movements. If a user drives slowly through a parking lot without stopping, that signals that the lot is full. If a user displays movements typical of walking and then suddenly speeds up and leaves the lot, that signifies that he likely just got into his car and drove away. The app calculates this in the background. “There should be no interaction required,” says SUNY Buffalo computer science professor and paper coauthor Geoffrey Challen….”
From #Ferguson to #OfficerFriendly
Susan Crawford at Bloomberg View: “In the tiny town of Jun, Spain, (population: 3,000) meeting rooms in city hall have their own Twitter accounts. When residents want to reserve them, they send a direct message via Twitter; when it’s time, the door to the room unlocks automatically in response to a tweet. Jun’s mayor, Jose Antonio Rodriguez, says he coordinates with other public servants via Twitter. Residents routinely tweet about public services, and city hall answers. Every police officer in Jun has a Twitter handle displayed on his uniform.
Now the New York Police Department, the largest in the U.S., is starting a broad social media initiative to get every precinct talking and listening online via Twitter, to both serve citizens and manage police personnel. The question is whether the kind of positive, highly local responsiveness the residents of Jun expect is possible across all parts of local government — not just from the police — in a big city. If it works, the benefits to the public from this kind of engagement could be enormous.
In the age of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner‘s in New York, when police abuses can be easily documented by citizens wielding smartphones, relationships between police departments and the communities they serve can quickly become strained. And social media use by the police runs the risk of being initially dismissed as a publicity stunt. But after decades of losing the trust of important New York City communities, this step may help the department gain civic support.
There will be bumps along the way. Last spring, the NYPD kicked off a social media campaign, asking people to share photos accompanied by the Twitter hashtag #myNYPD. Within 24 hours the hashtag was famous worldwide, as activists posted pictures of clashes between residents and the police. But Commissioner Bill Bratton brushed off the criticism, calling the pictures old news and saying the media event was not going to cause the NYPD to change its plans to be active on social media. “I welcome the attention,” he said.
Bratton will roll out a long list of social media efforts this week. The NYPD is training its dozens of commanding officers to understand and use Twitter on their own, both to ask questions and to respond timely to comments and concerns. For example, police in New York City spend a lot of time looking for missing people; now they will be able to get assistance from eyes on the street…”
The Stasi, casinos and the Big Data rush
Book Review by Hannah Kuchler of “What Stays in Vegas” (by Adam Tanner) in the Financial Times: “Books with sexy titles and decidedly unsexy topics – like, say, data – have a tendency to disappoint. But What Stays in Vegas is an engrossing, story-packed takedown of the data industry.
It begins, far from America’s gambling capital, in communist East Germany. The author, Adam Tanner, now a fellow at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, was in the late 1980s a travel writer taking notes on Dresden. What he did not realise was that the Stasi was busy taking notes on him – 50 pages in all – which he found when the files were opened after reunification. The secret police knew where he had stopped to consult a map, to whom he asked questions and when he looked in on a hotel.
Today, Tanner explains: “Thanks to meticulous data gathering from both public documents and commercial records, companies . . . know far more about typical consumers than the feared East German secret police recorded about me.”
Shining a light on how businesses outside the tech sector have become data addicts, Tanner focuses on Las Vegas casinos, which spotted the value in data decades ago. He was given access to Caesar’s Entertainment, one of the world’s largest casino operators. When chief executive Gary Loveman joined in the late 1990s, the former Harvard Business School professor bet the company’s future on harvesting personal data from its loyalty scheme. Rather than wooing the “whales” who spent the most, the company would use the data to decide which freebies were worth giving away to lure in mid-spenders who came back often – a strategy credited with helping the business grow.
The real revelations come when Tanner examines the data brokers’ “Cheez Whiz”. Like the maker of a popular processed dairy spread, he argues, data brokers blend ingredients from a range of sources, such as public records, marketing lists and commercial records, to create a detailed picture of your identity – and you will never quite be able to pin down the origin of any component…
The Big Data rush has gone into overdrive since the global economic crisis as marketers from different industries have sought new methods to grab the limited consumer spending available. Tanner argues that while users have in theory given permission for much of this information to be made public in bits and pieces, increasingly industrial-scale aggregation often feels like an invasion of privacy.
Privacy policies are so long and obtuse (one study Tanner quotes found that it would take a person more than a month, working full-time, to read all the privacy statements they come across in a year), people are unwittingly littering their data all over the internet. Anyway, marketers can intuit what we are like from the people we are connected to online. And as the data brokers’ lists are usually private, there is no way to check the compilers have got their facts right…”
Goodbye, Organization Man
David Brooks in the New York Times:”…The result, right now, is unnecessary deaths from the Ebola virus in Africa. …. At root, this is a governance failure. The disease spreads fastest in places where the health care infrastructure is lacking or nonexistent. Liberia, for example, is being overrun while Ivory Coast has put in a series of policies to prevent an outbreak. The few doctors and nurses in the affected places have trouble acquiring the safety basics: gloves and body bags. More than 100, so far, have died fighting the outbreak.
But it’s not just a failure of governance in Africa. It’s a failure of governance around the world. I wonder if we are looking at the results of a cultural shift.
A few generations ago, people grew up in and were comfortable with big organizations — the army, corporations and agencies. They organized huge construction projects in the 1930s, gigantic industrial mobilization during World War II, highway construction and corporate growth during the 1950s. Institutional stewardship, the care and reform of big organizations, was more prestigious.
Now nobody wants to be an Organization Man. We like start-ups, disrupters and rebels. Creativity is honored more than the administrative execution. Post-Internet, many people assume that big problems can be solved by swarms of small, loosely networked nonprofits and social entrepreneurs. Big hierarchical organizations are dinosaurs.
The Ebola crisis is another example that shows that this is misguided. The big, stolid agencies — the health ministries, the infrastructure builders, the procurement agencies — are the bulwarks of the civil and global order. Public and nonprofit management, the stuff that gets derided as “overhead,” really matters. It’s as important to attract talent to health ministries as it is to spend money on specific medicines.
As recent books by Francis Fukuyama and Philip Howard have detailed, this is an era of general institutional decay. New, mobile institutions languish on the drawing broad, while old ones are not reformed and tended. Executives at public agencies are robbed of discretionary power. Their hands are bound by court judgments and regulations.
When the boring tasks of governance are not performed, infrastructures don’t get built. Then, when epidemics strike, people die.”
Citizen Science: The Law and Ethics of Public Access to Medical Big Data
New Paper by Sharona Hoffman: “Patient-related medical information is becoming increasingly available on the Internet, spurred by government open data policies and private sector data sharing initiatives. Websites such as HealthData.gov, GenBank, and PatientsLikeMe allow members of the public to access a wealth of health information. As the medical information terrain quickly changes, the legal system must not lag behind. This Article provides a base on which to build a coherent data policy. It canvasses emergent data troves and wrestles with their legal and ethical ramifications.
Publicly accessible medical data have the potential to yield numerous benefits, including scientific discoveries, cost savings, the development of patient support tools, healthcare quality improvement, greater government transparency, public education, and positive changes in healthcare policy. At the same time, the availability of electronic personal health information that can be mined by any Internet user raises concerns related to privacy, discrimination, erroneous research findings, and litigation. This Article analyzes the benefits and risks of health data sharing and proposes balanced legislative, regulatory, and policy modifications to guide data disclosure and use.”
5 great apps backed with open data
Jeanne Holm at OpenSource.com: “Data.gov has taken open source to heart. Beyond just providing open data and open source code, the entire process involves open civic engagement. All team ideas, public interactions, and new ideas (from any interaction) are cross-posted and entered in Github. These are tracked openly and completed to milestones for full transparency. We also recently redesigned the website at Data.gov through usability testing and open engagement on Github.
Today, I want to share with you just five of the hundreds of applications that have been developed by the public using open government data. These are examples of the kind of apps, visualizations, and analyses that are created from working with developers, educators, and businesses on a specific challenge at events that pull the community together, like data jams, meetups, and conferences.
Archimedes
Archimedes makes tools that give quantitative models to doctors and patients so that they can find effective interventions, predict how interventions will affect an individual’s health risk, and help decision-makers analyze health outcomes….
Trulia
Trulia provides insights into neighborhoods where you might be interested in moving. Looking at the homes and apartments for sale and rent, trends and prices in real estate, and neighborhood characteristics, Trulia gives you the data to make decisions about buying, selling, renting, and moving….
HelloWallet
HelloWallet helps people to manage their money, and to learn about and start making investments. Some of the subjects for individuals include retirement readiness, debt levels, emergency savings, and health savings….
SaferCar
Consumers looking for a new car, can find a safer car by using the SaferCar app from the Department of Transportation. Powered by data on five-star safety ratings from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, consumers can look at new and used car ratings, recalls and complaints, and information about installing child seats….
Red Cross Hurricane
The Safety.Data.gov community of Data.gov held a Safety Datapalooza and brought together developers, businesses, NGOs, and government participants to brainstorm ways to put government data to use to improve the lives of citizens in America. A 90-day challenge was issued to create some of these apps and concepts, and one was with the Red Cross to create an app that would help people find safe ways to move around during a natural disaster. This included rail, roads, buses, and airports–which were open and what schedules they were running on. These data were provided by the Department of Transportation. As Hurricane Sandy descended on the east coast, we accelerated the development of the Red Cross Hurricane app and launched the app as the Hurricane touched ground…”
Open Payments Database: Despite Criticism, Still On Track To Let The Sunshine In
Shefali Luthra at Kaiser Health News: “Despite technical glitches, the federal “Open Payments” database – which tracks pharmaceutical company contributions to doctors and teaching hospitals – remains on track for its scheduled Sept. 30 launch, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services confirmed.
It was mandated by a sunshine act included in the federal health law seeking to ease concerns that pharmaceutical interests could wield excessive influence over health providers. The database includes payments for research, gifts, meals or speaker fees. Consumer advocates have long called for the public display of such information, arguing that it is key to ensuring doctors don’t prescribe certain drugs out of financial incentives or loyalty.
As planned, the initial site will contain five months’ worth of payment information, spanning August 2013 through December 2013. But after a series of fits and starts, about one-third of the payment information for that period won’t be included because of questions that recently surfaced about its accuracy.
Here’s what happened. CMS made information about specific physicians and teaching hospitals available to those individual providers earlier this summer so that they could confirm or contest payments and contributions listed. But at least one doctor saw payments that corresponded to a different provider, an error attributed to payment information that had been incorrectly submitted.
The mistake, found at the beginning of August, prompted an investigation by CMS that uncovered multiple inaccuracies, leading the agency to take down the database for more than a week. Since then, one third of the payment data included in the system has been removed, although a CMS spokesperson said corrected information will be reviewed and published next year. CMS would not specify what the flaws were with the removed information.
CMS has downplayed critics’ concerns that the problems indicate the database is not ready for public view and pledged all data will be posted to the site in June 2015. The agency has suggested the inaccuracies come from incorrectly submitted drug company reports. Pharmaceutical interests, though, argue their companies submitted the data correctly – and that the fault lies in the technology behind the database.
ProPublica reported Aug. 28 that the database wouldn’t include payments pharmaceutical companies may have made to doctors through third-party organizations, because of potential inaccuracies. Pharmaceutical companies could have given payments to contract research organizations, for instance – which perform tasks such as clinical trials – but any payments those companies then made to doctors haven’t been appropriately reviewed by doctors, according to the news organization…”