Stefaan Verhulst
Ava Kofman at the Intercept: “Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that.
The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city’s patterns of movement. Like “SimCity,” Replica’s “user-friendly” tool deploys statistical simulations to give a comprehensive view of how, when, and where people travel in urban areas. It’s an appealing prospect for planners making critical decisions about transportation and land use. In recent months, transportation authorities in Kansas City, Portland, and the Chicago area have signed up to glean its insights. The only catch: They’re not completely sure where the data is coming from.
Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data. As Nick Bowden of Sidewalk Labs has explained, “Replica provides a full set of baseline travel measures that are very difficult to gather and maintain today, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they’re using (car, transit, bike, or foot), and their trip purpose (commuting to work, going shopping, heading to school).”
To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It then models this anonymized data in simulations — creating a synthetic population that faithfully replicates a city’s real-world patterns but that “obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people,” as Bowden told The Intercept.
The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data — and raises new questions about Google’s encroachment on the physical world
EU Science Hub: “Data analysis highlights very diverse development patterns and inequalities across cities and world regions.
Building on the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), the new database provides more detailed information on the cities’ location and size as well as characteristics such as greenness, night time light emission, population size, the built-up areas exposed to natural hazards, and travel time to the capital city.
For several of these attributes, the database contains information recorded over time, dating as far back as 1975.
Responding to a lack of consistent data, or data only limited to large cities, the Urban Centre Database now makes it possible to map, classify and count all human settlements in the world in a standardised way.
An analysis of the data reveals very different development patterns in the different parts of the world.
“The data shows that in the low-income countries, high population growth has resulted only into moderate increases in the built-up areas, while in the high-income countries, moderate population growth has resulted into very big increases in the built-up areas. In practice, cities have grown more in size in richer countries, with respect to poorer countries where the populations are growing faster”, said JRC researcher Thomas Kemper.
According to JRC scientists, around 75% of the global population now live in cities, towns or suburbs….
The City Centres Database provides new open data supporting the monitoring of UN Sustainable Development Goals, the UN’s New Urban Agenda and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
The main findings based on the Urban Centre Database are summarised in a new edition of the Atlas of the Human Planet, published together with the database
Paper by Xuan Wang et al: Crowdsourcing contests have become widely adopted for idea generation and problem-solving in various companies in different industries. The success of crowdsourcing depends on the sustained participation and quality-submissions of the individuals. Yet, little is known about the factors that influence individuals’ continued participation in these contests. We address this issue, by conducting an empirical study using data from an online crowdsourcing contest platform, Kaggle, which delivers data science and machine learning solutions and models to its clients.
The findings show that the community activities and team activities do not contribute to motivating the continued participation, but tenure does significantly affect the continued participation. We also found statistically significant effects of
Many of these interventions and products have related apps that use gamification in some capacity in order to improve the user experience, offer motivation, and encourage behavior change. We identified 57 apps from nearly 2400 screened apps that both target direct energy use and employ at least one element of gamification.
We evaluated these apps with
Blog by Yoichi Funabashi: “Without the high-quality research that independent think tanks provide, there can be no effective policymaking, nor even a credible basis for debating major issues. Insofar as funding challenges, foreign influence-peddling, and populist attacks on truth pose a threat to such institutions tanks, they threaten democracy itself
The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC – perhaps the world’s top think tank – is under scrutiny for receiving six-figure donations from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which many consider to be a security threat. And since the barbaric murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi last October, many other Washington-based think tanks have come under pressure to stop accepting donations from Saudi Arabia.
These recent controversies have given rise to a narrative that Washington-based think tanks are facing a funding crisis. In fact, traditional think tanks are confronting three major challenges that have put them in a uniquely difficult situation. Not only are they facing increased competition from for-profit think tanks such as the McKinsey Global Institute and the Eurasia Group; they also must negotiate rising geopolitical tensions, especially between the United States and China.And complicating matters further, many citizens, goaded by populist harangues, have become dismissive of “experts” and the fact-based analyses that think tanks produce (or at least should produce).
With respect to the first challenge, Daniel Drezner of Tufts University argues in The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas that for-profit think tanks have engaged in thought leadership by operating as platforms for provocative thinkers who push big ideas. Whereas many non-profit think tanks – as well as universities and non-governmental organizations – remain “old-fashioned” in their approach to data, their for-profit counterparts thrive by finding the one statistic that captures public attention in the digital age. Given their access to both public and proprietary information, for-profit think tanks are also able to maximize the potential of big data in ways that traditional think tanks cannot.
Moreover, with the space for balanced foreign-policy arguments narrowing, think tanks are at risk of becoming tools of geopolitical statecraft. This is especially true now that US-China relations are deteriorating and becoming more ideologically tinged.
Over time, foreign governments of all stripes have cleverly sought to influence policymaking not only in Washington, but also in London, Brussels, Berlin, and elsewhere, by becoming significant donors to think tanks. Governments realize that the well-connected think tanks that act as “power brokers” vis-à-vis the political establishment have been facing fundraising challenges since the 2008 financial crisis. In some cases, locally based think tanks have even been accused of becoming fronts for foreign authoritarian governments….(More)”.
Special Issue of Global Policy: “The papers in this special issue investigate the politics that shaped the SDGs, the setting of the goals, the selection of the measurement methods. The SDGs ushered in a new era of ‘governance by indicators’ in global development. Goal setting and the use of numeric performance indicators have now become the method for negotiating a consensus vision of development and priority objectives. The choice of indicators is seemingly a technical issue, but measurement methods
The case studies in this collection show the open multi-stakeholder negotiations helped craft more transformative and ambitious goals. But across many goals, there was slippage in ambition when targets and indicators were selected. The papers also highlight how the increasing role of big data and other non-traditional sources of data is altering data production, dissemination and use, and fundamentally altering the epistemology of information and knowledge. This raises questions about ‘data for whom and for what’ – fundamental issues concerning the power of data to shape knowledge, the democratic governance of SDG indicators and of knowledge for development overall.
Introduction
Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring the SDGs – Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Desmond McNeill
Case Studies
The Contested Discourse of Sustainable Agriculture – Desmond McNeill
Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment: Feminist Mobilization for the SDGs – Gita Sen
Keeping Out Extreme Inequality from The SDG Agenda – The Politics of Indicators – Sakiko Fukuda-Parr
The Design of Environmental Priorities in the SDGs – Mark Elder and Simon Høiberg Olsen
Data Governance
The IHME in the Shifting Landscape of Global Health Metrics – Manjari Mahajan
The Big (data) Bang: Opportunities and Challenges for Compiling SDG Indicators – Steve MacFeely …(More)”
Center for Data Innovation: “Most Americans (58 percent) are willing to allow third parties to collect at least some sensitive personal data, according to a new survey from the Center for Data Innovation.
While many surveys measure public opinions on privacy, few ask consumers about their willingness to make tradeoffs, such as sharing certain personal information in exchange for services or benefits they want. In this survey, the Center asked respondents whether they would allow a mobile app to collect their biometrics or location data for purposes such as making it easier to sign into an account or getting free navigational help, and it asked whether they would allow medical researchers to collect sensitive data about their health if it would lead to medical cures for their families or others. Only one-third of respondents (33 percent) were unwilling to let mobile apps collect either their biometrics or location data under any of the described scenarios. And overall, nearly 6 in 10 respondents (58 percent) were willing to let a third party collect at least one piece of sensitive personal data, such as
Digital Promise: “Frontline workers, or the workers who interact directly with customers and provide services in industries like retail, healthcare, food service, and hospitality, help make up the backbone of today’s workforce.
However, frontline workforce talent development presents numerous challenges. Frontline workers may not be receiving the education and training they need to advance in their careers and sustain gainful employment. They also likely do not have access to data regarding their own skills and learning, and do not know what skills employers seek in quality workers.
Today, Digital Promise, a nonprofit authorized by Congress to support comprehensive research and development of programs to advance innovation in education, launched “Tapping Data for Frontline Talent Development,” a new, interactive report that shares how the seamless and secure sharing of data is key to creating more effective learning and career pathways for frontline service workers.
The research revealed that the current learning ecosystem that serves frontline workers—which includes stakeholders like education and training providers, funders, and employers—is complex, siloed, and removes agency from the worker.
Although many data types are collected, in today’s system much of the data is duplicative and rarely used to inform impact and long-term outcomes. The processes and systems in the ecosystem do not support the flow of data between stakeholders or frontline workers.
And yet, data sharing systems and collaborations are beginning to emerge as providers, funders, and employers recognize the power in data-driven decision-making and the benefits to data sharing. Not only can data sharing help to improve programs and services, it can create more personalized interventions for education providers supporting frontline workers, and it can also improve talent pipelines for employers.
In addition to providing three case studies with valuable examples of employers, a community, and a state focused on driving change based on data, this new report identifies key recommendations that have the potential to move the current system toward a more data-driven, collaborative, worker-centered learning ecosystem, including:
- Creating awareness and demand among stakeholders
- Ensuring equity and inclusion for workers/learners through access and awareness
- Creating data sharing resources
- Advocating for data standards
- Advocating for policies and incentives
- Spurring the creation of technology systems that enable data sharing/interoperability
We invite you to read our new report today for more
Book edited by Ben Wagner, Matthias C. Kettemann and Kilian Vieth: “In a digitally connected world, the question of how to respect, protect and implement human rights has become unavoidable. This contemporary Research Handbook offers new insights into well-established debates by framing them in terms of human rights. It examines the issues posed by the management of key Internet resources, the governance of its architecture, the role of different stakeholders, the legitimacy of
The GovLab: “The road to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals is complex and challenging. Policymakers around the world need both new solutions and new ways to become more innovative. This includes evidence-based policy and program design, as well as improved monitoring of progress made.
Unlocking privately processed data through data collaboratives — a new form of public-private partnership in which private industry, government and civil society work together to release previously siloed data — has become essential to address the challenges of our era.
Yet while research has proven its promise and value, several barriers to scaling data collaboration exist.
Ensuring trust and shared responsibility in how the data will be handled and used proves particularly challenging, because of the high transaction costs involved in drafting contracts and agreements of sharing.
Ensuring Trust in Data Collaboration
The goal of the Contracts for Data Collaboration (C4DC) initiative is to address the inefficiencies of developing contractual agreements for public-private data collaboration.
The intent is to inform and guide those seeking to establish a data collaborative by developing and making available a shared repository of contractual clauses (taken from existing data sharing agreements) that covers a host of issues, including (non –exclusive):
- The provenance, quality and purpose of data;
- Security and privacy concerns;
- Roles and responsibilities of participants;
- Access provisions; and use limitations;
- Governance mechanisms;
- Other contextual mechanisms
In addition to the searchable library of contractual clauses, the repository will house use cases, guides and other information that analyse common patterns, language and best practices.
Help Us Scale Data Collaboration
Contracts for Data Collaboration builds on efforts from member organizations that have experience in developing and managing data collaboratives; and have documented the legal challenges and opportunities of data collaboration.
The initiative is an open collaborative with charter members from the GovLab at NYU, UN SDSN Thematic Research Network on Data and Statistics (TReNDS), University of Washington and the World Economic Forum.
Organizations interested in joining the initiative should contact the individuals noted below; or share any agreements they have used for data sharing activities (without any sensitive or identifiable information): Stefaan Verhulst, GovLab (Stefaan@thegovlab.org) …(More)