Paper by Christian Sandvig et al in Special Issue of the International Journal of Communication on Automation, Algorithms, and Politics: “Computer algorithms organize and select information across a wide range of applications and industries, from search results to social media. Abuses of power by Internet platforms have led to calls for algorithm transparency and regulation. Algorithms have a particularly problematic history of processing information about race. Yet some analysts have warned that foundational computer algorithms are not useful subjects for ethical or normative analysis due to complexity, secrecy, technical character, or generality. We respond by investigating what it is an analyst needs to know to determine whether the algorithm in a computer system is improper, unethical, or illegal in itself. We argue that an “algorithmic ethics” can analyze a particular published algorithm. We explain the importance of developing a practical algorithmic ethics that addresses virtues, consequences, and norms: We increasingly delegate authority to algorithms, and they are fast becoming obscure but important elements of social structure…. (More)”
NYC cyclists crowd-source map showing cars in bike lanes
Springwise: “Founded by a cyclist frustrated at the lack of local government action on enforcing bike safety, the Cars In Bike Lanes map geo-tags and time-stamps each contribution. New York City riders upload their photos, including a description of the cross streets where the incident occurred. License plate details are made visible, and users of the map can click to find out if a driver is a repeat offender.
The interactive map is open source, and the founder says he hopes other cities and developers customize the site for their areas. Development plans for the site will focus on increasing the numbers of cyclists using, and contributing to, it. And ideally, it will put pressure on local governments to actively enforce safety regulations designed to protect cyclists.
Cycle safety is a common urban problem, and cities around the world are designing different solutions. In The Netherlands,flashing LED lights warn cars of approaching cyclists at busy intersections. In Denmark, bikes fitted with radio frequency identification tags turn traffic lights in favor of the cyclist….(More)”
A decentralized web would give power back to the people online
Matthew Hodgson at TechCrunch: “…The original purpose of the web and internet, if you recall, was to build a common neural network which everyone can participate in equally for the betterment of humanity.Fortunately, there is an emerging movement to bring the web back to this vision and it even involves some of the key figures from the birth of the web. It’s called the Decentralised Web or Web 3.0, and it describes an emerging trend to build services on the internet which do not depend on any single “central” organisation to function.
So what happened to the initial dream of the web? Much of the altruism faded during the first dot-com bubble, as people realised that an easy way to create value on top of this neutral fabric was to build centralised services which gather, trap and monetise information.
Search Engines (e.g. Google), Social Networks (e.g. Facebook), Chat Apps (e.g. WhatsApp )have grown huge by providing centralised services on the internet. For example, Facebook’s future vision of the internet is to provide access only to the subset of centralised services endorses (Internet.org and Free Basics).
Meanwhile, it disables fundamental internet freedoms such as the ability to link to content via a URL (forcing you to share content only within Facebook) or the ability for search engines to index its contents (other than the Facebook search function).
The Decentralised Web envisions a future world where services such as communication,currency, publishing, social networking, search, archiving etc are provided not by centralised services owned by single organisations, but by technologies which are powered by the people: their own community. Their users.
The core idea of decentralisation is that the operation of a service is not blindly trusted toany single omnipotent company. Instead, responsibility for the service is shared: perhaps by running across multiple federated servers, or perhaps running across client side apps in an entirely “distributed” peer-to-peer model.
Even though the community may be “byzantine” and not have any reason to trust or depend on each other, the rules that describe the decentralised service’s behaviour are designed to force participants to act fairly in order to participate at all, relying heavily on cryptographic techniques such as Merkle trees and digital signatures to allow participants to hold each other accountable.
There are three fundamental areas that the Decentralised Web necessarily champions:privacy, data portability and security.
- Privacy: Decentralisation forces an increased focus on data privacy. Data is distributed across the network and end-to-end encryption technologies are critical for ensuring that only authorized users can read and write. Access to the data itself is entirely controlled algorithmically by the network as opposed to more centralized networks where typically the owner of that network has full access to data, facilitating customer profiling and ad targeting.
- Data Portability: In a decentralized environment, users own their data and choose with whom they share this data. Moreover they retain control of it when they leave a given service provider (assuming the service even has the concept of service providers). This is important. If I want to move from General Motors to BMW today, why should I not be able to take my driving records with me? The same applies to chat platform history or health records.
- Security: Finally, we live in a world of increased security threats. In a centralized environment, the bigger the silo, the bigger the honeypot is to attract bad actors.Decentralized environments are safer by their general nature against being hacked,infiltrated, acquired, bankrupted or otherwise compromised as they have been built to exist under public scrutiny from the outset….(More)”
Crowdsourcing investigative journalism
Convoca in Peru: “…collaborative effort is the essence of Convoca. We are a team of journalists and programmers who work with professionals from different disciplines and generations to expose facts that are hidden by networks of power and affect the life of citizens. We bet on the work in partnership to publish findings of high impact from Peru, where the Amazon survives in almost 60% of the country, in the middle of oil exploitation, minerals and criminal activities such as logging, illegal mining and human trafficking. Fifty percent of social conflicts have as epicenter extractives areas of natural resources where the population and communities with the highest poverty rates live.
Over one year and seven months, Convoca has uncovered facts of public relevance such as the patterns of corruption and secrecy networking with journalists from Latin America and the world. The series of reports with the BRIO platform revealed the cost overruns of highways and public works in Latin American countries in the hands of Brazilian companies financed by the National Bank of Economic and Social Development (BNDES), nowadays investigated in the most notorious corruption scandal in the region, ‘Lava Jato’. This research won the 2016 Journalistic Excellence Award granted by the Inter American Press Association (SIP). On a global scale, we dove into 11 million and a half files of the ‘Panama Papers’ with more than a hundred media and organizations led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which allowed to undress the world of tax havens where companies and characters hide their fortune.
Our work on extractive industries ‘Excesses unpunished’ won the most important award of data journalism in the world, the Data Journalism Awards 2016, and is a finalist of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Award which recognized the best of journalism in Latin America. We invite you to be the voice of this effort to keep publishing new reports that allow citizens to make better decisions about their destinies and compel groups of power to come clean about their activities and fulfill their commitments. So join ConBoca: The Power of Citizens Call, our first fundraising campaign alongside our readers. We believe that journalism is a public service….(More)”
How Companies Can Help Cities Close the Data Gap
Shamina Singh in Governing: “Recent advances in data analytics have revolutionized the way many companies do business. Starbucks, for example, rolls out new beverages and chooses its store locations by analyzing customer, economic and other data. And as Amazon’s customers know so well, the company makes purchase recommendations to them in real time based on items they’ve viewed or bought. So why aren’t more of our cities leveraging data in the same way to improve services for their residents?
According to a recent report by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities initiative, city officials say they simply lack the capacity to do so. Nearly half pointed to a shortage of staff and financial resources dedicated to gathering and evaluating data.
This gap between companies’ and cities’ ability to use data is not surprising. Businesses have invested heavily in data and analytics in recent years, and they are spending an average of $7 million annually per company on data-related activities. These investments are made with the understanding that they will improve the companies’ bottom line, and they have started paying off.
City halls, on the other hand, find themselves hamstrung when it comes to investing in data and analytics. Despite recent growth, city revenues remain below pre-recession levels, with spending demands on the rise. Furthermore, many cities face the need to balance long-term opportunity with real short-term needs. Do you hire a data scientist — who may command a salary north of $200,000 — to research strategies to reduce crime in the long run, or do you hire more police officers to keep neighborhoods safe today?….
One way companies can help is through data philanthropy, leveraging their data analytics and capabilities to advance social progress. A step beyond conventional philanthropy and traditional corporate social-responsibility initiatives, data philanthropy is a new kind of response to social issues.
There are a number of ways cities could employ data philanthropy. For starters, they could partner with relevant apps to help ameliorate deteriorating roads. In Oklahoma City, for example, potholes are a particularly serious problem. Data from Waze, the community-based mapping and navigation app, could be leveraged to build a system through which residents could report potholes, allowing city services to efficiently fill them in.
Some data-philanthropy projects are already underway. Uber, for example, recently partnered with the city of Boston in the hopes that its data could help the city improve traffic congestion and community planning. Uber donates anonymized trip data by Zip code, allowing city officials to see the date and time of a trip, its duration and distance traveled. Boston’s transportation, neighborhood development and redevelopment agencies will have access to the data, equipping them with a new tool for more-effective policymaking.
While there is demonstrated enthusiasm from cities for more effective use of data to improve their residents’ lives, cities won’t be able to close the data gap on their own. Private-sector companies must answer the call. Helped in part by the better use of data, cities can create improved, more inclusive and stronger business environments. Who would argue with that goal?…(More)”
Rethinking Society for the 21st Century
The International Panel on Social Progress: “The crisis of social-democracy in recent decades seems, in the rich countries, to have generated a decline of hope for a just society. In developing countries, the trend is now to mimic the developed countries, rather than inventing a new model, and, in spite of reduced poverty in several countries, social hardships reminiscent of the early phase of Western capitalism are widespread.
Yet neither the collapse of utopian illusions nor booming capitalism in developing countries should mean the end of the quest for justice.
Can we hope for a better society?
Social scientists have never been so well equipped to provide an answer, thanks to the development of all the relevant disciplines since WWII….
The International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) will harness the competence of hundreds of experts about social issues and will deliver a report addressed to all social actors, movements, organizations, politicians and decision-makers, in order to provide them with the best expertise on questions that bear on social change.
The Panel will seek consensus whenever possible but will not hide controversies and will honestly present up-to-date arguments and analyses, and debates about them, in an accessible way.
The Panel will have no partisan political agenda, but will aim at restoring hope in social progress and stimulating intellectual and public debates. Different political and philosophical views may conceive of social progress in different ways, emphasizing values such as freedom, dignity, or equality.
The Panel will retain full independence from political parties, governments, and organizations with a partisan agenda.
While the Panel will primarily work for the dissemination of knowledge to all relevant actors in society, it will also foster research on the topics it will study and help to revive interest for research in social long-term prospective analysis….(More)”
IPSP Report: open for comment.
From Brexit to Colombia’s No vote: are constitutional democracies in crisis?
The Conversation Global: What do Colombia’s recent plebiscite and Brexit have in common? The surface similarities are clear: both referendums produced outcomes that few experts or citizens expected.
And many considered them a blow to core the social values of peace, integration, development and prosperity.
The unanticipated and widely debated results in Colombia and Great Britain – indeed, the very decision to use the mechanism of popular consultation to identify the citizenry’s will – obliges us to reflect on the future of democratic systems.
Both the British and Colombian plebiscites can be understood as the consequence, not the cause, of a crisis in representative democracy that affects not just these two countries but many others around the world.
The nature of democracy
Democracies recognise that only the people have the legitimacy to decide their destiny. But they also acknowledge that identifying the will of a collective isn’t simple: modern democracies are constitutional, which means that decisions made by the people – usually through their representatives – are limited by the content of the national constitution.
Decisions occasionally made by a constitutional assembly or by a supermajority in congress – say, to ban torture – prevent the government from authorising such action, no matter how dramatic the current social circumstance (a terrorist attack, for instance, or war), or how much a national majority favours the measure.
Constitutional rights and the rules of the democratic game cannot be modified by governments or even by a majority of the people. Democratic communities are bound by the deep constitutional commitments they’ve made to respect human rights and the rule of law.
These beliefs may, of course, be threatened by an occasional challenge. A terrorist attack that fills people with fear and resentment may make them forget, momentarily, that yesterday or two centuries ago – when they were mentally and emotionally far from this blinding, overwhelming event – they made the choice never to torture, anticipating that their desire to do so would be motivated by basic human instinct such as survival or vengeance.
That’s what a constitution is for: defining our shared basic values and goals as a nation, external factors be damned.
Decisions like the ones the Colombian and British people were asked to vote on do not represent mere political choices, such as whether to raise the sales tax or expand free trade.
They were much more akin to constitutional decisions that, depending on their outcomes, would usher in a new era in the lives of those nations. Community identity, rights, the rule of law and peace itself were some of the basic and fundamental values at stake.
The problem with plebiscites
There are many ways to make, validate, and build consensus around fundamental constitutional decisions: parliamentary super-majorities in Chile, constitutional assemblies in Argentina, or state legislature approvalin Mexico and the United States.
In some, such as the current Chilean process designed by Michelle Bachelet’s administration, the people themselves are called to deliberate constitutional choices in public forums.
And yet in the Colombian and the British cases, the government chose the riskiest of all known methods for identifying popular constitutional will. In this kind of process, complex questions are put forth in a way that makes it seem quite simple, because they must be answered in a single word: yes or no….
these difficult and deep concerns cannot be decided via a confusing question and a binary response.
Plebiscites are not necessarily democratic for those of us who believe that the justification of democracy as a superior political system superior is not because it counts heads, but because of the deliberative process that precedes decisions.
Thus, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s famous plebscita were not democratic exercises. A democratic exercise only exists when a diverse exchange of perspectives, opinions, and information can take place. The more diverse those inputs, the more legitimate the outcome of the vote.
The plebiscite constitutes the opposite of everything that we hope will happen in constitutional decision-making: the question is designed and imposed by those in power and the probability or suspicion that their formulation is biased is very high.
What’s more, public deliberation about the question may happen, but it’s not a certainty. Are people talking to their neighbours? Are they developing their position and hearing alternative approaches, which is the best way to make an educated decision?…
Constitutional decisions, which is to say the decisions political communities make rarely but carefully over the course of their history – what Bruce Ackerman calls “constitutional moments” – cannot be decided by plebiscite.
The popular will is too elusive for us to fool ourselves into thinking we can capture it with a single question….(More)”
For Better Citizenship, Scratch and Win
Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times: “China, with its largely cash economy, has a huge problem with tax evasion. Not just grand tax evasion, but the everyday “no receipt, please” kind, even though there have been harsh penalties: Before 2011, some forms of tax evasion were even punishable by death.
The country needed a different approach. So what did it do to get people to pay sales tax?
A. Hired a force of inspectors to raid restaurants and stores to catch people skipping the receipt, accompanied by big fines and prison terms.
B. Started an “It’s a citizen’s duty to denounce” exhortation campaign.
C. Installed cameras to photograph every transaction.
D. Turned receipts into scratch-off lottery games.
One of these things is not like the other, and that’s the answer: D. Instead of punishing under-the-table transactions, China wisely decided to encouragelegal transactions by starting a receipt lottery. Many places have done this — Brazil, Chile, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Taiwan, among others. In Taiwan, for example, every month the tax authorities post lottery numbers; match a few numbers for a small prize, or all of them to win more than $300,000.
China took it further. Customers need not store their receipts and wait until the end of the month to see if they’ve won money. Gratification is instant: Each receipt, known as a fapiao, is a scratch-off lottery ticket. People still game the system, but much less. The fapiao system has greatly raised collections of sales tax, business income tax and total tax. And it’s cheap to administer: one study found that new tax revenue totaled 30 times (PDF) the cost of the lottery prizes.
When a receipt is a lottery ticket, people ask for a receipt. They hope to get money, but just as important, they like to play games. Those axioms apply around the globe.
“We have groups that say: we can give out an incentive to our customers worth $15,” said Aron Ezra, chief executive of OfferCraft, an American company that designs games for businesses. “They could do that and have everyone get an incentive for $15. But they’d get better results for the same average price by having variability — some get $10, some get $100.” The lottery makes it exciting.
The huge popularity of lotteries shows this. Another example is the Save to Win program, which credit unions are using in seven states. Microscopic interest rates weren’t enough to get low-income customers to save. So instead, for every $25 they put into a savings account, depositors get one lottery entry. They can win a grand prize — in some states, $10,000 — or $100 prizes every month.
What else could lotteries do?
Los Angeles and Philadelphia have been the sites of experiments to increase dismal voter turnout in local elections by choosing a voter at random to win a large cash prize. In May 2015, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Los Angeles offered $25,000 to a random voter in one district during a school board election, in a project named Voteria.
Health-related lotteries aren’t new. In 1957, Glasgow held a mass X-ray campaign to diagnose tuberculosis. Health officials aimed to X-ray 250,000 people and in the end got three times that many. One reason for the enthusiasm: a weekly prize draw. A lovely vintage newsreel reported on the campaign.
More than 50 years later, researchers set up a lottery among young adults in Lesotho, designed to promote safe sex practices. Every four months the subjects were tested for two sexually transmitted diseases, syphilis and trichonomiasis. A negative test got them entered into a lottery to win either $50 (equivalent to a week’s average salary) or $100. The idea was to see if incentives to reduce the spread of syphilis would also protect against HIV.
The results were significant — a 21.4 percent reduction in the rate of new H.I.V. infections, and a 3.4 percent lower prevalence rate of HIV in the treatment group after two years. And the effect was lasting — the gains persisted a year after the experiment ended. The lottery worked in large part because it was most attractive to those most at risk: many people who take sexual risks also enjoy taking monetary risks, and might be eager to play a lottery.
The authors wrote in a blog post: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first H.I.V. prevention intervention focusing on sexual behavior changes (as opposed to medical interventions) to have been demonstrated to lead to a significant reduction in H.I.V. incidence, the ultimate objective of any H.I.V. prevention intervention.”…(More)”
Sustainable Smart Cities: Creating Spaces for Technological, Social and Business Development
Book edited by Peris-Ortiz, Marta, Bennett, Dag, and Pérez-Bustamante Yábar, Diana: “This volume provides the most current research on smart cities. Specifically, it focuses on the economic development and sustainability of smart cities and examines how to transform older industrial cities into sustainable smart cities. It aims to identify the role of the following elements in the creation and management of smart cities:
- Citizen participation and empowerment
- Value creation mechanisms
- Public administration
- Quality of life and sustainability
- Democracy
- ICT
- Private initiatives and entrepreneurship
Regardless of their size, all cities are ultimately agglomerations of people and institutions. Agglomeration economies make it possible to attain minimum efficiencies of scale in the organization and delivery of services. However, the economic benefits do not constitute the main advantage of a city. A city’s status rests on three dimensions: (1) political impetus, which is the result of citizens’ participation and the public administration’s agenda; (2) applications derived from technological advances (especially in ICT); and (3) cooperation between public and private initiatives in business development and entrepreneurship. These three dimensions determine which resources are necessary to create smart cities. But a smart city, ideal in the way it channels and resolves technological, social and economic-growth issues, requires many additional elements to function at a high-performance level, such as culture (an environment that empowers and engages citizens) and physical infrastructure designed to foster competition and collaboration, encourage new ideas and actions, and set the stage for new business creation. …(More)”.
Privacy Preservation in the Age of Big Data
A survey and primer by John S. Davis II and Osonde Osoba at Rand: “Anonymization or de-identification techniques are methods for protecting the privacy of subjects in sensitive data sets while preserving the utility of those data sets. The efficacy of these methods has come under repeated attacks as the ability to analyze large data sets becomes easier. Several researchers have shown that anonymized data can be reidentified to reveal the identity of the data subjects via approaches such as so-called “linking.” In this report, we survey the anonymization landscape of approaches for addressing re-identification and we identify the challenges that still must be addressed to ensure the minimization of privacy violations. We also review several regulatory policies for disclosure of private data and tools to execute these policies….(More)”.