Stefaan Verhulst

Benedict Carey in the New York Times: “FOR the past year or so genetic scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have been collaborating with a specialist from another universe: Daniel Kohn, a Brooklyn-based painter and conceptual artist.

Mr. Kohn has no training in computers or genetics, and he’s not there to conduct art therapy classes. His role is to help the scientists with a signature 21st-century problem: Big Data overload.

Advanced computing produces waves of abstract digital data that in many cases defy interpretation; there’s no way to discern a meaningful pattern in any intuitive way. To extract some order from this chaos, analysts need to continually reimagine the ways in which they represent their data — which is where Mr. Kohn comes in. He spent 10 years working with scientists and knows how to pose useful questions. He might ask, for instance, What if the data were turned sideways? Or upside down? Or what if you could click on a point on the plotted data and see another dimension?….

And so it is in many fields, whether predicting climate, flagging potential terrorists or making economic forecasts. The information is all there, great expanding mountain ranges of it. What’s lacking is the tracker’s instinct for picking up a trail, the human gut feeling for where to start looking to find patterns and meaning. But can such creative instincts really be trained systematically? And even if they could, wouldn’t it take years to do so?

The answers are yes and no, at least when it comes to some advanced skills. And that should give analysts drowning in data some cause for optimism.

Scientists working in a little-known branch of psychology called perceptual learning have shown that it is possible to fast-forward a person’s gut instincts both in physical fields, like flying an airplane, and more academic ones, like deciphering advanced chemical notation. The idea is to train specific visual skills, usually with computer-game-like modules that require split-second decisions. Over time, a person develops a “good eye” for the material, and with it an ability to extract meaningful patterns instantaneously.

Perceptual learning is such an elementary skill that people forget they have it. It’s what we use as children to make distinctions between similar-looking letters, like U and V, long before we can read. It’s the skill needed to distinguish an A sharp from a B flat (both the notation and the note), or between friendly insurgents and hostiles in a fast-paced video game. By the time we move on to sentences and melodies and more cerebral gaming — “chunking” the information into larger blocks — we’ve forgotten how hard it was to learn all those subtle distinctions in the first place….(More)

Learning to See Data

PlaceILive: “Big data helps us measure and predict consumer behavior, hurricanes and even pregnancies. It has revolutionized the way we access and use information. That being said, so far big data has not been able to tackle bigger issues like urbanization or improve the livability of cities.

A new startup, www.placeilive.com thinks big data should and can be used to measure livability. They aggregated open data from government institutions and social media to create a tool that can calculate just that. ….PlaceILive wants to help people and governments better understand their cities, so that they can make smarter decisions. Cities can be more sustainable, while its users save money and time when they are choosing a new home.

Not everyone is eager to read long lists of raw data. Therefore they created appealing user-friendly maps that visualize the statistics. Offering the user fast and accessible information on the neighborhoods that matter to them.

Another cornerstone of PlaceILive is their Life Quality Index: an algorithm that takes aspects like transportation, safety, and affordability into account. Making it possible for people to easily compare the livability of different houses. You can read more on the methodology and sources here.

life quality index press release

In its beta form, the site features five cities—New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Berlin. When you click on the New York portal, for instance, you can search for the place you want to know more about by borough, zip code, or address. Using New York as an example, it looks like this….(More)

Can Big Data Measure Livability in Cities?

Aditi Pai at MobiHealthNews: “A majority of published text message interventions between 2009 and 2014 that addressed diabetes self-management, weight loss, physical activity, smoking cessation, and medication adherence were effective, according to a systematic review of reviews published in The Annual Review of Public Health.

The review looked at 15 studies that reviewed 228 text message intervention studies addressing health promotion, disease prevention, and chronic disease self management. Study sizes ranged from 10 to 5,800 participants.

When the researchers assessed the reviews by effectiveness, they reported five of the 15 reviews — focused on a wide range of disease prevention and health promotion topics — found text messaging interventions had “statistically significant positive effects on health outcomes and/or behaviors”. These reviews looked at studies that focused on smoking cessation, physical activity, weight loss, and chronic disease self-management.

Three of the 15 reviews focused on physical activity, diet, and weight loss. One of these reviews reported that six out of 13 studies found a statistically significant clinical outcome. A meta-analysis of these studies found that participants in the study had seven times greater weight loss on average than non-SMS control participants.

Another review focused on physical activity, diet, and weight loss found that 11 of the 14 reviewed studies reported a decrease in weight. While five of 10 studies reported a reduction in body mass index, three of six studies reported a statistically significant increase in physical activity, and two of three studies found a reduction in blood pressure….(More)”

Most text message health interventions were effective

Book edited by Behrisch, Michael, and Weber, Melanie: “This contributed volume contains the conference proceedings of the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) conference 2014, Berlin. The included research papers cover a wide range of topics in traffic planning and simulation, including open data, vehicular communication, e-mobility, urban mobility, multimodal traffic as well as usage approaches. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Modeling Mobility with Open Data

Jonathan Breckon et al at NESTA: “When the banners and bunting have been tidied away after the May election, and a new bunch of ministers sit at their Whitehall desks, could they embrace a more experimental approach to government?

Such an approach requires a degree of humility. Facing up to the fact that we don’t have all the answers for the next five years. We need to test things out, evaluate new ways of doing things with the best of social science, and grow what works. And drop policies that fail.

But how best to go about it? Here are our 8 ways to make it a reality:

Make failure OK. A more benign attitude to risk is central to experimentation. As a 2003 Cabinet Office review entitled Trying it Out said, a pilot that reveals a policy to be flawed should be ‘viewed as a success rather than a failure, having potentially helped to avert a potentially larger political and/or financial embarrassment’. Pilots are particularly important in fast moving areas such as technology to try promising fresh ideas in real-time. Our ‘Visible Classroom’ pilot tried an innovative approach to teacher CPD developed from technology for television subtitling.
Avoid making policies that are set in stone. Allowing policy to be more project–based, flexible and time-limited could encourage room for manoeuvre, according to a previous Nesta report State of Uncertainty; Innovation policy through experimentation. The Department for Work and Pensions’ Employment Retention and Advancement pilot scheme to help people back to work was designed to influence the shape of legislation. It allowed for amendments and learning as it was rolled out. We need more policy experiments like this.
Work with the grain of current policy environment. Experimenters need to be opportunists. We need to be nimble and flexible. Ready to seize windows of opportunity to experiment. Some services have to be rolled out in stages due to budget constraints. This offers opportunities to try things out before going national. For instance, The Mexican Oportunidades anti-poverty experiments which eventually reached 5.8 million households in all Mexican states, had to be trialled first in a handful of areas. Greater devolution is creating a patchwork of different policy priorities, funding and delivery models – so-called ‘natural experiments’. Let’s seize the opportunity to deliberately test and compare across different jurisdictions. What about a trial of basic income in Northern Ireland, for example, along the lines of recent Finnish proposals, or universal free childcare in Scotland?
Experiments need the most robust and appropriate evaluation methods such as, if appropriate, Randomised Controlled Trials. Other methods, such as qualitative research may be needed to pry open the ‘black box’ of policies – to learn about why and how things are working. Civil servants should use the government trial advice panel as a source of expertise when setting up experiments.
Grow the public debate about the importance of experimentation. Facebook had to apologise after a global backlash to psychological experiments on their 689,000 users web-users. Approval by ethics committees – normal practice for trials in hospitals and universities – is essential, but we can’t just rely on experts. We need a dedicated public understanding of experimentation programmes, perhaps run by Evidence Matters or Ask for Evidence campaigns at Sense about Science. Taking part in an experiment in itself can be a learning opportunity creating an appetite amongt the public, something we have found from running an RCT with schools.
Create ‘Skunkworks’ institutions. New or improved institutional structures within government can also help with experimentation. The Behavioural Insights Team, located in Nesta, operates a classic ‘skunkworks’ model, semi-detached from day-to-day bureaucracy. The nine UK What Works Centres help try things out semi-detached from central power, such as the The Education Endowment Foundation who source innovations widely from across the public and private sectors- including Nesta- rather than generating ideas exclusively in house or in government.
Find low-cost ways to experiment. People sometimes worry that trials are expensive and complicated. This does not have to be the case. Experiments to encourage organ donation by the Government Digital Service and Behavioural Insights Team involved an estimated cost of £20,000. This was because the digital experiments didn’t involve setting up expensive new interventions – just changing messages on web pages for existing services. Some programmes do, however, need significant funding to evaluate and budgets need to be found for it. A memo from the White House Office for Management and Budget has asked for new Government schemes seeking funding to allocate a proportion of their budgets to ‘randomized controlled trials or carefully designed quasi-experimental techniques’.
Be bold. A criticism of some experiments is that they only deal with the margins of policy and delivery. Government officials and researchers should set up more ambitious experiments on nationally important big-ticket issues, from counter-terrorism to innovation in jobs and housing….(More)

Eight ways to make government more experimental

Benjamin Mueller And Jeffrey E. Singer at the New York Times: “The New York Police Department has faced its share of pushback on social media, most memorably when it solicited photos of police interactions on Twitter under the hashtag #myNYPD. Images of aggression by officers upended that campaign.

Now, the department is seeking to turn New Yorkers’ penchant for online complaints to its gain by crowdsourcing their concerns. It has even consulted another sector troubled by social media gripes — the airline industry — to become more responsive to problems voiced online.

“They’re very good at managing customer complaints,” said Zachary Tumin, deputy commissioner for strategic initiatives and leader of the department’s social media efforts, who visited Delta Air Lines’ Atlanta headquarters this month. “That’s an area we need to explore.”

The department’s fleet of commanding officers has found its footing on Twitter in recent months, using the site to herald arrests, announce transportation delays and spread information about suspects. Now, the officers are planning to use that online visibility to draw ground-level information on crimes and conditions, a potential boost to a department seeking to align its “broken windows” crime-fighting objectives with local communities’ needs….

In a pilot program starting next month in the 109th Precinct in Queens, police officials will use a platform called IdeaScale to solicit tips and concerns from residents. The platform, which some government agencies have used internally as a brainstorming tool, promotes the posts that other users agree deserve attention.

In that way, officials argue, the police will be able to look beyond departmentwide priorities and focus on concerns that resonate in smaller communities….(More)”

New York Police to Use Social Media to Connect With Residents

Medha Basu at FutureGov: “One of the largest users of social media in the world, Indonesians are taking it a step further with a new social network just for public services.

Enda Nasution and his team have built an app called Sebangsa, or Same Nation, featuring Facebook-like timelines (or Twitter-like feeds) for citizens to share about public services.

They want to introduce an idea they call “social government” in Indonesia, Nasution told FutureGov, going beyond e-government and open government to build a social relationship between the government and citizens….

It has two features that stand out. One called Sebangsa911 is for Indonesians to post emergencies, much like they might on Twitter or Facebook when they see an accident on the road or a crowd getting violent, for instance. Indonesia does not have any single national emergency number.

Another feature is called Sebangsa1800 which is a channel for people to post reviews, questions and complaints on public services and consumer products.

Why another social network?
But why build another social network when there are millions of users on Facebook and Twitter already? One reason is to provide a service that focuses on Indonesians, Nasution said – the app is in Bahasa.

Another is because existing social networks are not built specifically for public services. If you post a photo of an accident on Twitter, how many and how fast people see it depends on how many followers you have, Nasution said. These reports are also unstructured because they are “scattered all over Twitter”, he said. The app “introduces a little bit of structure to the reports”….(More)”

Twitter for government: Indonesians get social media for public services

Paper by Jesse A. Sievers on “A Strategy for State and Local Governments Approaching “Whole Community” Emergency Planning”: “Over the last century, state and local governments have been challenged to keep proactive, emergency planning efforts ahead of the after-the-disaster, response efforts. After moving from decentralized to centralized planning efforts, the most recent policy has returned to the philosophy that a decentralized planning approach is the most effective way to plan for a disaster. In fact, under the Obama administration, a policy of using the “whole community” approach to emergency planning has been adopted. This approach, however, creates an obvious problem for state and local government practitioners already under pressure for funding, time, and the continuous need for higher and broader expertise—the problem of how to actually incorporate the whole community into emergency planning efforts. This article suggests one such approach, crowdsourcing, as an option for local governments. The crowdsourcer-problem-crowd-platform-solution (CPCPS) model is suggested as an initial framework for practitioners seeking a practical application and basic comprehension. The model, discussion, and additional examples in this essay provide a skeletal framework for state and local governments wishing to reach the whole community while under the constraints of time, budget, and technical expertise….(More).

Embracing Crowdsourcing

“The World Justice Project (WJP) Open Government Index™ provides scores and rankings on four dimensions of government openness: publicized laws and government data, right to information, civic participation, and complaint mechanisms (full descriptions below). Scores are based on responses to household surveys and in-country expert questionnaires collected for the WJP Rule of Law Index. The WJP Open Government Index 2015 covers a total of 102 countries and jurisdictions.

This index is the product of two years of development, consultation, and vetting with policy makers, civil society groups, and academics from several countries. It is our hope that over time this diagnostic tool will help identify strengths and weaknesses in countries under review and encourage policy choices that enhance openness, promote effective public oversight, and increase collaboration amongst public and private sectors.

Download the full report, data set, and global insights: worldjusticeproject.org/opengov
Read the methodology: worldjusticeproject.org/opengov/methodology
Learn about the World Justice Project: worldjusticeproject.org“

World Justice Project (WJP) Open Government Index

Aida Akl at VOATechTonics: “A mobile solution from the Mekong Club, a non-profit group dedicated to fighting slavery, helps identify potential trafficking victims among populations where the person’s country of origin and language is unknown, and lets law enforcement agencies communicate with them.

The Android app was the product of collaboration between the Mekong Club, the United Nations Action for Cooperation Against Trafficking in Persons, and MotherApp, a private company that developed the app for free.

To communicate with potential victims, users press an icon which brings up a sample of flags on the phone’s screen, said Mathew Friedman, CEO of the Mekong Club, in an email interview.

A screenshot from the human trafficking mobile app shows potential human trafficking victims the flags of several countries. Once users choose thee one that corresponds to them, a video in their language comes on and asks them questions about whether they are being exploited and need help.

Users then tap the flags that correspond to their countries of origin. “Once this has been done,” Friedman added, “a video in the language of the country comes up informing the respondent of his/her rights, assuring them of confidentiality, and explaining that the officials playing the video to them are there to help should they require assistance.”

The videos pose a number of questions for users to respond to by pressing either a green button for an affirmative answer or a red button for a negative response.

A screenshot from the Mekong Club's mobile app shows some of the questions users are asked to determine if they are victims of human trafficking. (The Mekong Club)

The questions help law enforcement officials determine if the respondent is a victim of human trafficking.

“If all of the users’ answers are in the affirmative, then that would indicate a potential problem,” said Friedman.

Organizations that tested the app found it useful in bridging the translation gap. Friedman said the easy-to-use app offers an option for responders to triage potential victims in locations where translation is absent and allows the user to take notes and record audio/visual information….

Once developed, Friedman said the app will be cost-effective because “putting it on responder phones doesn’t cost anything.” But he lamented that it was only able to help “about 48,000″ trafficking victims last year — “well below one percent,” he said….(More)”

Mobile Spans Language Gap to Aid Human Trafficking Victims

Stefaan Verhulst

Get the latest news right in your inbox