Stefaan Verhulst
Blogpost by Laura McGorman and Alex Pompe at Facebook: “Small businesses and people around the world are suffering devastating financial losses due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and public institutions need real time information to help. Today Facebook is launching new datasets and insights to help support economic recovery through our Data for Good program.
Researchers estimate that over the next five years, the global economy could suffer over $80 trillion in losses due to COVID-19. Small businesses in particular are being hit hard — our Global State of Small Business Report found that over one in four had closed their doors in 2020. Governments around the world are looking to effectively distribute financial aid as well as accurately forecast when and how economies will recover. These four datasets — Business Activity Trends, Commuting Zones, Economic Insights from the Symptom Survey and the latest Future of Business Survey results — will help researchers, nonprofits and local officials identify which areas and businesses may need the most support.
Business Activity Trends
Many factors influence the pandemic’s impact on local economies around the world. However, real time information on business activity is scarce, leaving institutions seeking to provide economic aid with limited information on how to distribute it. To address these information gaps, we partnered with the University of Bristol to aggregate information from Facebook Business Pages to estimate the change in activity among local businesses around the world and how they respond and recover from crises over time.
“Determining whether small and medium businesses are open is very important to assess the recovery after events like mandatory stay-at-home orders,” said Dr. Flavia De Luca, Senior Lecturer in Structural and Earthquake Engineering at the University of Bristol. “The traditional way of collecting this information, such as surveys and interviews, are usually costly, time consuming, and do not scale. By using real time information from Facebook, we hope to make it easier for public institutions to better respond to these events.”…(More)”.
Richard Thaler at the New York Times: “The good news is that safe and effective vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer appear to be on the way soon and that more are likely to follow.
The bad news is an usual combination: There won’t be enough vaccine on hand to meet initial demand, yet there is also a need to urge everyone to get shots.
I have some suggestions: An unusual type of charity auction, a bit of technology and a few nudges can help….
Economic theory offers a standard method for dealing with shortages. It is, basically: Let markets work. This would mean that those willing to pay the most would get the vaccine first.
Wisely, policymakers are not following this course. Nurses, other frontline workers and most nursing home residents could not win a bidding battle with billionaires. And, to be clear, they should not have to!
Yet there is a small but useful role that prices might play in determining who gets priority in the second round of vaccines, after the first 20 million people have gotten their shots.
At that point, perhaps sometime early this winter, suppose a small proportion of doses are sold in what would amount to a charity auction.
Who might be the winning bidders? Very wealthy individuals and high-tech companies are likely to account for some of the demand, along with businesses that employ high-profile talent like professional athletes and entertainers.
Just imagine how much the National Basketball Association, whose season will start around Christmas, would be willing to pay to ensure that none of its players or staff would be infected! The same goes for Hollywood studios and television production companies that are eager to go back to work.
The prospect of selling off precious vaccine to celebrity athletes and entertainers, hedge fund magnates and high-tech billionaires may strike you as utterly immoral, exacerbating the inequality this disease has already inflicted. But before you dismiss this idea as outrageous, let me make three points.
First, the very purpose of the charity auction would be to redistribute money from the rich to the poor….(More)”.
Essay by Robin Lane Fox: “The Hippocratic books now known as the Epidemics are entitled in Greek epidemiai. This title does not refer to epidemics as we now painfully recognize them, individual diseases which are spread widely through a population, whether by touch, inhaling, contact with wildlife, eating, drinking, kissing (which the elder Pliny, c. AD 70, recognized to be a means of transmitting diseases) or sex, while remaining one and the same disease. In the mid-fifth century BC, the amiable Ion, a poet and author from the island of Chios, composed Epidemiai which referred to his visits to the demos, or people, of individual city-states around the Greek world. His title has sometimes misled readers of the medical Epidemiai into thinking that their title, too, refers to traveling doctors’ visits to particular places. They refer to such visits, but their use of the verb epidemein shows that for them the word epidemia referred to the presence of a disease in a community. It was not necessarily a rampant disease in our sense of the word “epidemic,” and it was not contrasted with diseases which were endemic, a category the authors did not distinguish, but it was certainly a disease at large. This meaning was still correctly understood in later ancient commentaries on the Epidemic books.
By the mid-first century AD, seven books were grouped under this title: the grammarian Erotian referred then to “seven books of Epidemics” in the list of works which he considered, over-optimistically, to be by Hippocrates himself. The title went back to earlier editors, probably at least as early as the third century BC, but it may not have been used by any of the books’ original authors. All seven books share a distinctive feature. Whereas the other texts in the Hippocratic Corpus refer to patients in general, and only once, in passing, name an individual, the Epidemic books are quite different. They contain individual case histories, most of which specify the very place where the named patient lived, even the house or location. They are the very first observations and descriptions of real-life individuals during a number of days which survive anywhere in the world. In Babylonia written case histories of named individuals are unknown.
In China none survives until c. 170 BC, and even then they were presented for a different purpose, to defend their doctor-author’s reputation. In ancient Egypt, cases were discussed individually in the now-famous medical papyri whose contents date back into the second millennium BC, but they never name patients or describe observations of them day after day, let alone locate them at an exact address….(More)”.
Paper by Marius Zumwald, Benedikt Knüsel, David N.Bresch and Reto Knutti: :”Understanding the patterns of urban temperature a high spatial and temporal resolution is of large importance for urban heat adaptation and mitigation. Machine learning offers promising tools for high-resolution modeling of urban heat, but it requires large amounts of data. Measurements from official weather stations are too sparse but could be complemented by crowd-sensed measurements from citizen weather stations (CWS). Here we present an approach to model urban temperature using the quantile regression forest algorithm and CWS, open government and remote sensing data. The analysis is based on data from 691 sensors in the city of Zurich (Switzerland) during a heat wave using data from for 25-30th June 2019. We trained the model using hourly data from for 25-29th June (n = 71,837) and evaluate the model using data from June 30th (n = 14,105). Based on the model, spatiotemporal temperature maps of 10 × 10 m resolution were produced. We demonstrate that our approach can accurately map urban heat at high spatial and temporal resolution without additional measurement infrastructure. We furthermore critically discuss and spatially map estimated prediction and extrapolation uncertainty. Our approach is able to inform highly localized urban policy and decision-making….(More)”.
Press Release by the Council of Europe: “The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) has adopted a feasibility study on the possible establishment of a certification mechanism for artificial intelligence tools and services. The study is based on the CEPEJ Charter on the use of artificial intelligence in judicial systems and their environment, adopted in December 2018. The Council of Europe, if it decides to create such a mechanism, could be a pioneer in this field. After consultation with all member and observer states, this feasibility study will be followed by an action plan that the CEPEJ will prepare and send to the Committee of Ministers for examination in 2021….(Study)”.
Report by Mercy Corps: “In our digital age, data is increasingly recognized as a powerful tool across all sectors, including agriculture. Historically, data on rural farmers was extremely limited and unreliable; the advent of new digital technologies has allowed more reliable data sources to emerge, from satellites to telecom to the Internet of Things. Private companies—including fintech and agricultural technology innovators—are increasingly utilizing these new data sources to learn more about farmers and to structure new services to meet their needs.
In order to make efficient use of this emerging data, many actors are exploring data-sharing partnerships that combine the power of multiple datasets to create greater impact for smallholder farmers. In a new Learning Brief looking at AgriFin engagements with 14 partners across four different countries, we found that 25% of engagements featured a strong data-sharing component. These engagements spanned various use cases, including credit scoring, targeted training, and open access to information.
Drawing on this broad experience, our research looks at what we’ve learned about data sharing to enhance service delivery for smallholder farmers. We have distilled these lessons into common barriers faced by data-sharing arrangements in order to provide practical guidance and tools for overcoming these barriers to the broader ecosystem of actors involved in optimizing data sharing for agriculture….(More) (Access the full length learning brief)”.
Sarah O’Connor at the Financial Times: “In 2015 I took my reporter’s notebook to Liverpool because statistics suggested it was enjoying a jobs boom. The unemployment gap between the northern English city and the national average had shrunk to the smallest in a decade. When I mentioned that fact to people I met, I might as well have said the grass was pink.
“It’s certainly not our experience, I would say I’ve never seen poverty at this level,” was the response from the director of the local Citizens Advice Bureau. A woman who ran a small cake business said: “My cynical side thinks straight away they’ve probably got zero-hours contracts somewhere — [they] are a great way of cooking the books.”
I thought of that trip when I read a newly published study that uses an in-depth survey and focus groups to delve into the British public’s understanding of economics. The headline findings are bleak. Large parts of the public have misperceptions about how economic concepts such as the unemployment rate are measured and they are “sceptical and cynical” about data.
One obvious response would be to blame inadequate education and worry that economic ignorance allows people to be duped by demagogues such as Nigel Farage in the UK and Donald Trump in the US.
Economic literacy classes in schools would certainly be a good idea, especially since most of those surveyed were “deeply interested” in the economy and regretted not understanding the details. But there’s more to this story. The public live and breathe the economy every day. If their first response to a statistic such as the unemployment rate is to say “that doesn’t feel right” (a common response in the focus groups) then perhaps it’s the economists who are missing something….(More)”.
Book edited by Anne Thurston: ” The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiative has the potential to set the direction for a future world that works for everyone. Approved by 193 United Nations member countries in September 2016 to help guide global and national development policies through the year 2030, the seventeen goals build on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals, but also include new priority areas, such as climate change, economic inequality, innovation, sustainable consumption, peace, and justice. Assessed against commonly agreed targets and indicators, the goals should facilitate inter-governmental cooperation and the development of regional and even global development strategies. This book explores, through a series of case studies, the substantial challenges for assembling reliable data and statistics to address pressing development challenges, particularly in Africa. By highlighting the enormous potential value of creating and using high quality data, statistics, and records as an interconnected resource and describing how this can be achieved, the book will contribute to defining meaningful and realistic global and national development policies in the critical period to 2030….(More)”.
Paper by Wayne A. Logan: “Crowdsourcing, which leverages the collective expertise and resources of (mainly online) communities to achieve specified objectives, today figures prominently in a broad array of realms, including business, human rights, and medical and scientific research. It also now plays a significant role in governmental crime control efforts. Web and forensic–genetic sleuths, armchair detectives, and the like are collecting and analyzing evidence and identifying criminal suspects, at the behest of and with varying degrees of assistance from police officials.
Unfortunately, as with so many other aspects of modern society, current criminal procedure doctrine is ill-equipped to address this development. In particular, for decades it has been accepted that the Fourth Amendment only limits searches and seizures undertaken by public law enforcement, not private actors. Crowdsourcing, however, presents considerable taxonomic difficulty for existing doctrine, making the already often permeable line between public and private behavior considerably more so. Moreover, although crowdsourcing promises considerable benefit as an investigative force multiplier for police, it poses risks, including misidentification of suspects, violation of privacy, a diminution of governmental transparency and democratic accountability, and the fostering of a mutual social suspicion that is inimical to civil society.
Despite its importance, government use of crowdsourcing to achieve crime control goals has not yet been examined by legal scholars. Like the internet on which it predominantly relies, crowdsourcing is not going away; if anything, it will proliferate in coming years. The challenge lies in harnessing its potential, while protecting against the significant harms that will accrue should it go unregulated. This Essay describes the phenomenon and provides a framework for its regulation, in the hope of ensuring that the wisdom of the crowd does not become the tyranny of the crowd….(More)”.
Paper by Thomas Coleman: “John Snow, the London doctor often considered the father of modern epidemiology, analyzed 1849 and 1854 cholera mortality for a population of nearly half a million in South London. His aim was to convince skeptics and “prove the overwhelming influence which the nature of the water supply exerted over the mortality.” Snow’s analysis was innovative – he is commonly credited with the first application of both randomization as an instrumental variable and differences-in-differences (DiD).
This paper provides an historical review of Snow’s three approaches to analyzing the data: a direct comparison of mixed (quasi-randomized) populations; a primitive form of difference-in-differences; and a comparison of actual versus predicted mortality. Snow’s analysis did not convince his skeptics, and we highlight problems with his analysis. We then turn to a re-analysis of Snow’s evidence, casting his analysis in the modern forms of randomization as IV and DiD. The re-examination supports Snow’s claims that data demonstrated the influence of water supply. As a matter of historical interest this strengthens the argument against Snow’s skeptics. For modern practitioners, the data and analysis provide an example of modern statistical tools (randomization and DiD) and the complementary use of observational and (quasi) experimental data….(More)”