Aligning investment and values: How an Economic Value Atlas can map regional strategies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Adie Tomer and Caroline George: “Traditional built environment and economic development practices are falling short in the face of a convergent set of environmental, economic, and social challenges. With each passing year, more communities find themselves vulnerable to extreme weather events; income disparities continue to rise, leaving too many households unable to afford essential services; and employers, especially many young and minority-owned businesses, often struggle to find talented workers and access financial capital. 

Public, private, and civic leaders increasingly recognize that achieving inclusive growth and designing resilient communities require more than recruiting out-of-town businesses or attempting to reduce highway congestion. Those leaders need a new kind of policy playbook—one that addresses the cross-sectoral challenges regions face and designs strategies across disciplines.  

An Economic Value Atlas, or EVA, is part of that playbook. An EVA is a regional engagement, value-setting, and measurement process culminating in an interactive regional map that indexes neighborhood-level, value-based performance metrics. The overall framework helps practitioners delve into geographic disparities in how the region is living up to its values—opening the door to more equitable, place-based decisionmaking for business, infrastructure, and land use purposes…

The EVA framework consists of five phases of work, each of which can be adjusted based on unique local conditions: 

  • The EVA’s leadership team sets a stakeholder table with a diverse collection of regional voices to serve as the board of directors for the EVA process. 
  • The leadership team and stakeholder table develop a shared vision—a collection of specific long-term goals a region would like to achieve. 
  • A research-driven team translates values into indicators and metrics using sets of categorical indicators and quantitative metrics that reflect the goals stakeholders would like to achieve. 
  • A coding team develops and launches EVA software, which uses dynamic and flexible data to benchmark neighborhood performance relative to regional goals. 
  • The leadership team works with government and civic leaders to inform and guide policy and investment decisions using EVA outputs. 

Critically, the EVA framework is designed to deliver results…(More)”

Parallel Worlds: Revealing the Inequity of Access to Urban Spaces in Mexico City Through Mobility Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Emmanuel Letouzé et al: “The near-ubiquitous use of mobile devices generates mobility data that can paint pictures of urban behavior at unprecedented levels of granularity and complexity. In the current period of intense sociopolitical polarization, mobility data can help reveal which urban spaces serve to attenuate or accentuate socioeconomic divides. If urban spaces served to bridge class divides, people from different socioeconomic groups would be prone to mingle in areas further removed from their homes, creating opportunities for sharing experiences in the physical world. In an opposing scenario, people would remain among neighbors and peers, creating “local urban bubbles” that reflect and reinforce social inequities and their adverse effects on social mixity, cohesion, and trust. These questions are especially salient in cities with high levels of socioeconomic inequality, such as Mexico City.

Building on a joint research project between Data-Pop Alliance and Oxfam Mexico titled “Mundos Paralelos” [Parallel Worlds], this paper leverages privacy-preserving mobility data to unveil the unequal use and appropriation of urban spaces by the inhabitants of Mexico City. This joint research harnesses a year (2018–2019) of anonymized mobility data to perform mobility and behavioral analysis of specific groups at high spatial resolution. Its main findings suggest that Mexico City is a spatially fragmented, even segregated city: although distinct socioeconomic groups do meet in certain spaces, a pattern emerges where certain points of interest are exclusive to the high- and low-income groups analyzed in this paper. The results demonstrate that spatial inequality in Mexico City is marked by unequal access to government services and cultural sites, which translates into unequal experiences of urban life and biased access to the city. The paper concludes with a series of public policy recommendations to foster a more equitable and inclusive appropriation of public space…(More)”.

A New Model for Saving Lives on Roads Around the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Krishen Mehta & Piyush Tewari: “…In 2016, SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF), an Indian non-profit organization, introduced the Zero Fatality Corridor (ZFC) solution, which has, since its inception, delivered an unprecedented reduction in road crash fatalities on the stretches of road where it has been deployed. The ZFC solution has adapted and added to the Safe System Approach, traditionally a western concept, to make it suitable for Indian conditions and requirements.

The Safe System Approach recognizes that people are fallible and can make mistakes that may be fatal for them or their fellow road-users—irrespective of how well they are trained.

The ZFC model, in turn, is an innovation designed specifically to accommodate the realities, resources, and existing infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries, which are vastly different from their developed counterparts. For example, unlike developed nations, people in low- and middle-income countries often live closer to the highways, and use them on a daily basis on foot or through traditional and slower modes of transportation. This gives rise to high crash conflict areas.

Some of the practices that are a part of the ZFC solution include optimized placement of ambulances at high-fatality locations, the utilization of drones to identify parked vehicles to preemptively prevent rear-end collisions, and road engineering solutions unique to the realities of countries like India. The ZFC model has helped create a secure environment specific to such countries with safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds, safer drivers, and rapid post-crash response.

The ZFC model was first deployed in 2016 on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway (MPEW) in Maharashtra, through a collaboration between SLF, Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC), and automaker Mahindra & Mahindra. From 2010 to 2016, the 95-kilometer stretch witnessed 2,579 crashes and 887 fatalities, making it one of India’s deadliest roads…(More)”.

How Covid Tracking Apps Are Pivoting for Commercial Profit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Matt Reynolds and Morgan Meaker: “…At its peak, 2.4 million people tracked their symptoms using the Covid Symptom Tracker. It was one of three surveillance studies the UK government used to track and respond to new outbreaks. Data from the tracker led to the UK government adding loss of smell and taste to the official list of Covid-19 symptoms. Between August 2020 and March 2022, the app was funded with £5.1 million ($6.2 million) from the Department of Health and Social Care.

But in early May 2022, Zoe announced in an email to users that its Covid tracking app would no longer be just a place for people to report their Covid symptoms. The Covid Symptom Tracker was becoming the Zoe Health Study, which asks people to take 10 seconds a day to log their mental and physical health beyond Covid. People who agree to take part in this wider study are asked to establish their baseline health—reporting everything from hair loss to mouth ulcers—as well as providing daily health updates. The company says this data will be used to “fight the most important health issues of our time,” but that it might also be used to develop commercial health, nutrition, and lifestyle products. (Zoe also sells nutrition tests and subscriptions to a personalized nutrition platform.)

Zoe isn’t the only Covid app developer pivoting away from the pandemic. In Berlin, a contact-tracing app called Luca is reinventing itself as a payment system, while in northern Italy an app set up to track coronavirus cases now warns citizens about natural disasters. With the most urgent phase of the pandemic now over, developers are looking for ways to squeeze more value out of the users who have downloaded their apps. The great Covid-19 data pivot is well and truly underway…(More)”.

Public Health Struggles to Get Rid of Its Data Silos

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Carl Smith: “…In September 2019, before the first COVID-19 case was reported in the U.S., the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) published a report calling for a “public health data superhighway” capable of detecting health challenges and informing the response to them.

The technology to accomplish this already exists, CSTE noted. But even so, “public health departments struggle to take advantage of these advancements and continue to rely on sluggish, manual processes like paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets, and faxes requiring manual data entry.”

The limitations of this data ecosystem became a considerable liability when public health officials ran up against a virus that had never been seen before, working to both understand and control it at the same time. “There were mixed messages, and the pandemic made us look like our data was not adequate to the task,” says Gail C. Christopher, executive director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity.

This provided an opening for political or social actors to push anti-public health campaigns that continue to fuel public distrust of public health leaders, workers and guidelines. Reliable and timely data could help heal some of the harm that has been done, says Christopher.

“I think every health department has aspects of a complete data system,” says Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the DeBeaumont Foundation, which funded the CSTE report. “But we need to articulate what a complete data system looks like — right now, we don’t even know what the destination is, so it’s hard to tell when we’re lost.”

A Data Modernization Movement

Data systems improvement is one of three major topics that recur in discussions about rebuilding public health, along with workforce expansion and regaining public trust, says Michael Fraser, executive director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO). “A major finding from all the conversations that we’ve had about COVID is that data systems need to be modernized.”

In recent years, there has been considerable effort by the public health community to find ways to move away from “silo-based” or disease-based surveillance between states and the federal government to an enterprise-wide system, says Fraser. “During COVID, a lot of states had a hard time sharing data, and there are many parts of this country where people go back and forth between multiple states on any given day — it’s not just the ability for states to share data with the federal government, but for states to share amongst themselves.”

The CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative, launched in 2020, is a $1.2 billion effort to address this challenge, envisioning resilient, connected systems that could “solve problems before they happen and reduce the harm caused by the problems that do happen.” The CSTE campaign “Data: Elemental to Health” is working to ensure sustained public funding for this work…(More)”.

Why You Need an AI Ethics Committee

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Reid Blackman: “…There are a lot of well-documented and highly publicized ethical risks associated with AI; unintended bias and invasions of privacy are just two of the most notable kinds. In many instances the risks are specific to particular uses, like the possibility that self-driving cars will run over pedestrians or that AI-generated social media newsfeeds will sow distrust of public institutions. In some cases they’re major reputational, regulatory, financial, and legal threats. Because AI is built to operate at scale, when a problem occurs, it affects all the people the technology engages with—for instance, everyone who responds to a job listing or applies for a mortgage at a bank. If companies don’t carefully address ethical issues in planning and executing AI projects, they can waste a lot of time and money developing software that is ultimately too risky to use or sell, as many have already learned.

Your organization’s AI strategy needs to take into account several questions: How might the AI we design, procure, and deploy pose ethical risks that cannot be avoided? How do we systematically and comprehensively identify and mitigate them? If we ignore them, how much time and labor would it take us to respond to a regulatory investigation? How large a fine might we pay if found guilty, let alone negligent, of violating regulations or laws? How much would we need to spend to rebuild consumer and public trust, provided that money could solve the problem?

The answers to those questions will underscore how much your organization needs an AI ethical risk program. It must start at the executive level and permeate your company’s ranks—and, ultimately, the technology itself. In this article I’ll focus on one crucial element of such a program—an AI ethical risk committee—and explain why it’s critical that it include ethicists, lawyers, technologists, business strategists, and bias scouts. Then I’ll explore what that committee requires to be effective at a large enterprise.

But first, to provide a sense of why such a committee is so important, I’ll take a deep dive into the issue of discriminatory AI. Keep in mind that this is just one of the risks AI presents; there are many others that also need to be investigated in a systematic way…(More)”.

How to get to the core of democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Toralf Stark, Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann and Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach: “…Many criticisms of conceptions of democracy are directed more at the institutional design than at its normative underpinnings. These include such things as the concept of representativeness. We propose focussing more on the normative foundations assessed by the different institutional frameworks than discussing the institutional frameworks themselves. We develop a new concept, which we call the ‘core principle of democracy’. By doing so, we address the conceptual and methodological puzzles theoretically and empirically. Thus, we embrace a paradigm shift.

Collecting data is ultimately meaningless if we do not find ways to assess, summarise and theorise it. Kei Nishiyama argued we must ‘shift our attention away from the concept of democracy and towards concepts of democracy’. By the term concept we, in line with Nishiyama, are following Rawls. Rawls claimed that ‘the concept of democracy refers to a single, common principle that transcends differences and on which everyone agrees’. In contrast with this, ‘ideas of democracy (…) refer to different, sometimes contested ideas based on a common concept’. This is what Laurence Whitehead calls the ‘timeless essence of democracy’….

Democracy is a latent construct and, by nature, not directly observable. Nevertheless, we are searching for indicators and empirically observable characteristics we can assign to democratic conceptions. However, by focusing only on specific patterns of institutions, only sometimes derived from theoretical considerations, we block our view of its multiple meanings. Thus, we’ve no choice but to search behind the scenes for the underlying ‘core’ principle the institutions serve.

The singular core principle that all concepts of democracy seek to realise is political self-efficacy…(More)”.

Political self-efficacy
Source: authors’ own compilation

The digitalisation of social protection before and since the onset of Covid-19: opportunities, challenges and lessons

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the Overseas Development Institute: “…discusses the main opportunities and challenges associated with digital social protection, drawing on trends pre-Covid and since the onset of the pandemic. It offers eight lessons to help social protection actors capitalise on technology’s potential in a risk-sensitive manner.

  • The response to Covid-19 accelerated the trend of increasing digitalisation of social protection delivery.
  • Studies from before and during the pandemic suggest that well-used technology holds potential to enhance provision for some service users, and played a notable role in rapid social protection expansion during Covid-19. It may also help reduce leakage or inclusion errors, lower costs and support improvements in programme design.
  • However, unless designed and implemented with careful mitigating measures, digitalisation may in some cases do more harm than good. Key concerns relate to potential risks and challenges of exclusion, protection and privacy violations, ‘technosolutionism’ and obscured transparency and accountability.
  • Ultimately, technology is a tool, and its outcomes depend on the needs it is expected to meet, the goals it is deployed to pursue, and the specific ways in which it is designed and implemented…(More)”.

Understanding Criminal Justice Innovations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Meghan J. Ryan: “Burgeoning science and technology have provided the criminal justice system with the opportunity to address some of its shortcomings. And the criminal justice system has significant shortcomings. Among other issues, we have a mass incarceration problem; clearance rates are surprisingly low; there are serious concerns about wrongful convictions; and the system is layered with racial, religious, and other biases. Innovations that are widely used across industries, as well as those directed specifically at the criminal justice system, have the potential to improve upon such problems. But it is important to recognize that these innovations also have downsides, and criminal justice actors must proceed with caution and understand not only the potential of these interventions but also their limitations. Relevant to this calculation of caution is whether the innovation is broadly used across industry sectors or, rather, whether it has been specifically developed for use within the criminal justice system. These latter innovations have a record of not being sufficiently vetted for accuracy and reliability. Accordingly, criminal justice actors must be sufficiently well versed in basic science and technology so that they have the ability and the confidence to critically assess the usefulness of the various criminal justice innovations in light of their limitations. Considering lawyers’ general lack of competency in these areas, scientific and technological training is necessary to mold them into modern competent criminal justice actors. This training must be more than superficial subject-specific training, though; it must dig deeper, delving into critical thinking skills that include evaluating the accuracy and reliability of the innovation at issue, as well as assessing broader concerns such as the need for development transparency, possible intrusions on individual privacy, and incentives to curtail individual liberties given the innovation at hand….(More)”

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Beyond the Hype

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WEF Report: “Decentralized autonomous organizations are disrupting whole sectors. From finance to social networking to philanthropy, these code-driven, community-governed entities are changing the way we work. Yet these organizations also confront challenges of cybersecurity, governance, and regulatory uncertainty. The Crypto Impact and Sustainability Accelerator and Wharton Blockchain and Digital Asset Project have teamed up with an international group of crypto experts, civil society leaders, and builders to examine this nascent, but critical, emerging form…(More)”.