Unlocking Responsible Access to Data to Increase Equity and Economic Mobility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Markle Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF): “Economic mobility remains elusive for far too many Americans and has been declining for several decades. A person born in 1980 is 50% less likely to earn more than their parents than a person born in 1950 is. While all children who grow up in low-opportunity neighborhoods face mobility challenges, racial, ethnic, and gender disparities add even more complexity. In 99% of neighborhoods in America, Black boys earn less, and are more likely to fall into poverty, than white boys, even when they grow up on the same block, attend the same schools, and have the same family income. In 2016, a Pew Research study found that the median wealth of white households was ten times the median wealth of Black households and eight times that of Hispanic households. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated existing disparities, as communities of color suffer higher exposure and death rates, along with greater job loss and increased food and housing insecurity.

Reversing this overall decline to address the persistent racial, ethnic, and gender gaps in economic mobility is one of the great challenges of our time. Some progress has been made in identifying the causes and potential solutions to declining mobility, yet policymakers, researchers, and the public still lack access to critical data necessary to understand which policies, programs, interventions, and investments are most effective at creating opportunity for students and workers, particularly those struggling with intergenerational poverty. Data collected across all levels of governments, nonprofit organizations, and private sector companies can help answer foundational policy and research questions on what drives economic mobility. There are promising efforts underway to improve government data infrastructure and processes at both the federal and state levels, but critical data often remains siloed, and legitimate concerns about privacy and civil liberties can make data difficult to share. Often, data on vulnerable populations most in need of services is of poor quality or is not collected at all.

To tackle this challenge, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the Markle Foundation (Markle) spent much of 2020 working with a diverse range of experts to identify strategic opportunities to accelerate progress towards unlocking data to improve policymaking, answer foundational research questions, and ensure that individuals can easily and responsibly access the information they need to make informed decisions in a rapidly changing environment….(More)”.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and, Francis de Véricourt: “The essential tool that will enable humanity to find the best way through a forest of looming problems is defined in Framers by internationally renowned authors Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt. From pandemics to populism, AI to ISIS, wealth inequity to climate change, humanity faces unprecedented challenges that threaten our very existence.
 
To frame is to make a mental model that enables us to see patterns, predict how things will unfold, and make sense of new situations. Frames guide the decisions we make and the results we attain. People have long focused on traits like memory and reasoning leaving framing all but ignored. But with computers becoming better at some of those cognitive tasks, framing stands out as a critical function—and only humans can do it. This book is the first guide to mastering this innate human ability.
 
Illustrating their case with compelling examples and the latest research, authors Cukier, Mayer-Schönberger and de Véricourt examine:
 
·       Why advice to “think outside the box” is useless.
·       How Spotify beat Apple by reframing music as an experience.
·       What the historic 1976 Israeli commando raid on Entebbe that rescued over 100 hostages can tell us about how to frame.
·       How the #MeToo twitter hashtag reframed the perception of sexual assault.
·       The disaster of framing Covid-19 as equivalent to seasonal flu, and how framing it akin to SARS delivered New Zealand from the pandemic.
 
Framers shows how framing is not just a way to improve how we make decisions in the era of algorithms—but why it will be a matter of survival for humanity in a time of societal upheaval and machine prosperity….(More)”.

The mysterious user editing a global open-source map in China’s favor

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Vittoria Elliott and Nilesh Christopher Late last year, Nick Doiron spotted an article in The New York Times, detailing how China had built a village along the contested border with neighboring Bhutan. Doiron is a mapping aficionado and longtime contributor to OpenStreetMap (OSM), an open-source mapping platform that relies on an army of unpaid volunteers, just as Wikipedia does. Governments, universities, humanitarian groups, and companies like Amazon, Grab, Baidu, and Facebook all use data from OSM, making it an important tool that underpins ride-hailing apps and other technologies used by millions of people.

After reading the article, Doiron went to add new details about the Chinese village to OSM, which he expected would be missing. But when he zoomed in on the area, he made a peculiar discovery: Someone else had already documented the settlement before it was reported in the Times, and they had included granular details that Doiron couldn’t find anywhere else.

“They mapped the outlines of the buildings,” Doiron said, labeling one as a kindergarten, one as a police station, and another as a radio station. Even if the mysterious person had bought a satellite image from a private company, “I don’t know how they could have had that specific kind of information,” Doiron said.

That wasn’t the only thing that struck Doiron as strange. The user had also made the changes under the name NM$L, Chinese slang for the insult “Your mom is dead,” and linked to a Chinese rap music label that shares the same name. An accompanying bio hinted at their motives: “Safeguarding national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity is the common obligation of all Chinese people, including compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan,” it read.

“Most people on OpenStreetMap don’t even have anything in their profile,” said Doiron. “It’s not like a social media site.”

As he looked deeper, Doiron discovered that NM$L had made several other edits, many of them along China’s border and in contested territories. The account had added changes to the Spratly Islands, an archipelago that an international tribunal ruled in 2016 was not part of China’s possible territorial claims, though it has continued to develop in the area. The account also drew along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that separates Indian and Chinese territory in the disputed Himalayan border region, which the two countries fought a war over in 1962.

What, Doiron wondered, is going on here? 

Anyone can contribute to OSM, which makes the site democratic and open, but also leaves it vulnerable to the politics and perspectives of its individual contributors. This wasn’t the first time Doiron had heard of a user making edits in a certain country’s favor. “I know there are pro-India accounts that have added things like military checkpoints from the India perspective,” he said….(More)”.

Collaboration technology has been invaluable during the pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

TechRepublic: “The pandemic forced the enterprise to quickly pivot from familiar business practices and develop ways to successfully function while keeping employees safe. A new report from Zoom, The Impact of Video Communications During COVID-19, was released Thursday.

“Video communications were suddenly our lifeline to society, enabling us to continue work and school in a digital environment,” said Brendan Ittelson, chief technology officer of Zoom, on the company’s blog. “Any baby steps toward digital transformation suddenly had to become leaps and bounds, with people reimagining their entire day-to-day practically overnight.”

Zoom commissioned the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to conduct a survey and economic analysis to evaluate the economic impact of remote work and video communications solutions during the pandemic. BCG also conducted a survey and economic analysis, with a focus on which industries pivoted business processes using video conferencing, resulting in business continuity and even growth during a time of significant economic turmoil.

Key findings

  • In the U.S., the ability to work remotely saved 2.28 million jobs up to three times as many employees worked remotely, with a nearly three times increase in the use of video conferencing solutions.
  • Of the businesses surveyed, the total time spent on video conferencing solutions increased by as much as five times the numbers pre-pandemic.
  • BCG’s COVID-19 employee sentiment survey from 2020 showed that 70% of managers are more open to flexible remote working models than they were before the pandemic.
  • Hybrid working models will be the norm soon. The businesses surveyed expect more than a third of employees to work remotely beyond the pandemic.
  • The U.K. saved 550,000 jobs because of remote capabilities; Germany saved 372,00 jobs and France saved 250,000….(More)”.

Using FOIA logs to develop news stories

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yilun Cheng at MuckRock: “In the fiscal year 2020, federal agencies received a total of 790,772 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. There are also tens of thousands of state and local agencies taking in and processing public record requests on a daily basis. Since most agencies keep a log of requests received, FOIA-minded reporters can find interesting story ideas by asking for and digging through the history of what other people are looking to obtain.

Some FOIA logs are posted on the websites of agencies that proactively release these records. Those that are not can be obtained through a FOIA request. There are a number of online resources that collect and store these documents, including MuckRock, the Black Vault, Government Attic and FOIA Land.

Sorting through a FOIA log can be challenging since format differs from agency to agency. A more well-maintained log might include comprehensive information on the names of the requesters, the records being asked for, the dates of the requests’ receipt and the agency’s responses, as shown, for example, in a log released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency.https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20508483/annotations/2024702

But other departments –– the Cook County Department of Public Health, for instance –– might only send over a three-column spreadsheet with no descriptions of the nature of the requests.https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20491259/annotations/2024703

As a result, learning how to negotiate with agencies and interpreting the content in their FOIA logs are crucial for journalists trying to understand the public record landscape. While some reporters only use FOIA logs to keep tabs on their competitors’ reporting interests, the potential of these documents goes far beyond this. Below are some tips for getting story inspiration from FOIA logs….(More)”.

How video conferencing reduces vocal synchrony and collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Maria Tomprou et al: “Collective intelligence (CI) is the ability of a group to solve a wide range of problems. Synchrony in nonverbal cues is critically important to the development of CI; however, extant findings are mostly based on studies conducted face-to-face. Given how much collaboration takes place via the internet, does nonverbal synchrony still matter and can it be achieved when collaborators are physically separated? Here, we hypothesize and test the effect of nonverbal synchrony on CI that develops through visual and audio cues in physically-separated teammates. We show that, contrary to popular belief, the presence of visual cues surprisingly has no effect on CI; furthermore, teams without visual cues are more successful in synchronizing their vocal cues and speaking turns, and when they do so, they have higher CI. Our findings show that nonverbal synchrony is important in distributed collaboration and call into question the necessity of video support….(More)”.

Freedom of Information Act—How Open is Public Access to Government Data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

US Government Accountability Office: “The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) establishes a legal right for individuals and organizations to request access to government information. In FY 2019, federal agencies reported that they processed nearly 878,000 FOIA requests for government information, an increase of 32% since FY 2012.  

In honor of Sunshine Week—an annual observation that promotes open government—today’s WatchBlog post looks at our recent reports on agencies’ implementation of laws that seek to improve the public’s access to government information.

What does the government disclose as part of open government laws?

FOIA requires agencies to publicly post certain information without waiting for specific requests and report on these disclosures annually. These proactive disclosures include final opinions, administrative staff manuals, and records that have been requested 3 or more times.

In our March report, we assessed agency policies related to these disclosures. Among other things, we found that the Department of Housing and Urban Development did not report proactively disclosing any records from FY 2017 through 2019. Similarly, we found that the Veterans Health Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration did not report the number of records disclosed for all required categories in FY 2019.

We made 8 recommendations to help improve compliance with these requirements.

What might the government not disclose under FOIA?

FOIA requires agencies to provide the relevant records in response to a request unless an exemption applies to limit the disclosure of that information, such as withholding classified national defense or foreign policy information. The graphic below provides more detail on FOIA’s 9 exemptions.

Pie Chart showing federal exemptions to FOIA by category

In FY 2019, agencies denied approximately 34,000 requests based on exemptions. More than half of these requests were related to law enforcement and investigations….(More)”.

What Data Can’t Do

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hannah Fry in The New Yorker: “Tony Blair was usually relaxed and charismatic in front of a crowd. But an encounter with a woman in the audience of a London television studio in April, 2005, left him visibly flustered. Blair, eight years into his tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister, had been on a mission to improve the National Health Service. The N.H.S. is a much loved, much mocked, and much neglected British institution, with all kinds of quirks and inefficiencies. At the time, it was notoriously difficult to get a doctor’s appointment within a reasonable period; ailing people were often told they’d have to wait weeks for the next available opening. Blair’s government, bustling with bright technocrats, decided to address this issue by setting a target: doctors would be given a financial incentive to see patients within forty-eight hours.

It seemed like a sensible plan. But audience members knew of a problem that Blair and his government did not. Live on national television, Diana Church calmly explained to the Prime Minister that her son’s doctor had asked to see him in a week’s time, and yet the clinic had refused to take any appointments more than forty-eight hours in advance. Otherwise, physicians would lose out on bonuses. If Church wanted her son to see the doctor in a week, she would have to wait until the day before, then call at 8 a.m. and stick it out on hold. Before the incentives had been established, doctors couldn’t give appointments soon enough; afterward, they wouldn’t give appointments late enough.

“Is this news to you?” the presenter asked.

“That is news to me,” Blair replied.

“Anybody else had this experience?” the presenter asked, turning to the audience.

Chaos descended. People started shouting, Blair started stammering, and a nation watched its leader come undone over a classic case of counting gone wrong.

Blair and his advisers are far from the first people to fall afoul of their own well-intentioned targets. Whenever you try to force the real world to do something that can be counted, unintended consequences abound. That’s the subject of two new books about data and statistics: “Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters” (Liveright), by Deborah Stone, which warns of the risks of relying too heavily on numbers, and “The Data Detective” (Riverhead), by Tim Harford, which shows ways of avoiding the pitfalls of a world driven by data.

Both books come at a time when the phenomenal power of data has never been more evident. The covid-19 pandemic demonstrated just how vulnerable the world can be when you don’t have good statistics, and the Presidential election filled our newspapers with polls and projections, all meant to slake our thirst for insight. In a year of uncertainty, numbers have even come to serve as a source of comfort. Seduced by their seeming precision and objectivity, we can feel betrayed when the numbers fail to capture the unruliness of reality.

The particular mistake that Tony Blair and his policy mavens made is common enough to warrant its own adage: once a useful number becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a useful number. This is known as Goodhart’s law, and it reminds us that the human world can move once you start to measure it….(More)”.

Unlocking benefits for agriculture with FAIR data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Toolkit by CABI: “The Data Sharing Toolkit contains seven eLearning modules with supporting case studies, checklists, cheat sheets and guides. All the modules help demystify how to use, collect and share Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) and safeguarded data for you, and, for the people in agriculture you wish to empower.

Step 1 Login or sign-up for a free CABI Academy account to get started

Step 2 Start at Module 1 if you are new to data, or simply —

Step 3 Start with whichever module resonates most with your project needs, as you don’t need to do all seven to upskill in FAIR data.

Seven modules with seven guiding questions:

Each question supports best practice for FAIR and safeguarded data in investments in agriculture around the world, in support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantees and program officers….(More)”.

From Tech Critique to Ways of Living

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alan Jacobs at the New Atlantis: “Neil Postman was right. So what?… In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began to describe the anatomy of our technological society. Then, starting in the 1970s, a generation emerged who articulated a detailed critique of that society. The critique produced by these figures I refer to in the singular because it shares core features, if not a common vocabulary. What Ivan Illich, Ursula Franklin, Albert Borgmann, and a few others have said about technology is powerful, incisive, and remarkably coherent. I am going to call the argument they share the Standard Critique of Technology, or SCT. The one problem with the SCT is that it has had no success in reversing, or even slowing, the momentum of our society’s move toward what one of their number, Neil Postman, called technopoly.

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).

The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones.

The Standard Critique of Technology as thus described is cogent and correct. I have referred to it many times and applied it to many different situations. For instance, I have used the logic of the SCT to make a case for rejecting the “walled gardens” of the massive social media companies, and for replacing them with a cultivation of the “digital commons” of the open web.

But the number of people who are even open to following this logic is vanishingly small. For all its cogency, the SCT is utterly powerless to slow our technosocial momentum, much less to alter its direction. Since Postman and the rest made that critique, the social order has rushed ever faster toward a complete and uncritical embrace of the prescriptive, manipulatory technologies deceitfully presented to us as Liberation and Empowerment. So what next?…(More)”.