Stefaan Verhulst
Mitesh S. Patel et al in The New England Journal of Medicine: “The final common pathway for the application of nearly every advance in medicine is human behavior. No matter how effective a drug, how protective a vaccine, or how targeted a therapy may be, a clinician usually has to prescribe it, and a patient accept and use it as directed, for it to improve health. Clinicians’ and patients’ environments influence their decisions about taking these actions, and the seemingly subtle design of information and choices can have outsize effects on our behavior. When the “choice architecture” is designed to influence behavior in a predictable way but without restricting choice, it is often called a “nudge.”…
In 2016, we launched the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit to systematically develop and test approaches using nudges to improve health care delivery. The goals are to improve health care value and outcomes, advance knowledge about how to best implement nudges for impact, evaluate our efforts, and disseminate our findings. Ideas are generated by health system leadership, frontline clinicians and staff, and members of the unit itself. Our early successes and failures reveal some lessons about the role that nudge units can play in improving health care (see table).
First, these units can help health systems understand when it makes sense to use a nudge and when it doesn’t. Nudges can be designed to remind, guide, or motivate behavior. Promising opportunities are those in which suboptimal care can be addressed by targeting a specific decision that drives a less-than-optimal behavior. For example, when prescribing medications, physicians must decide between brand-name and generic formulations. Systems can set generics as the default choice, so that ordering them becomes the path of least resistance even as the ability to opt out and order a brand-name drug is preserved. When we implemented this change in our EHR, prescribing rates for generics increased from 75% to 98%. Clinical settings also play an important role. We found that reducing the default duration of opioid prescriptions may make sense for acute conditions often seen by clinicians in the emergency department but may be inappropriate for clinicians caring for patients with chronic pain.
Second, although nudges have typically been deployed for simple one-off decisions, we’ve found that they can also support more complex decision paths. For example, only 15% of our eligible patients were being referred for cardiac rehabilitation after myocardial infarction. When we asked the cardiologists why, we discovered that the process remained manual, so they had to take action to initiate the referrals — in other words, it was an opt-in system. The process was redesigned as an opt-out system in which referral for rehab was the default; patient identification was automated using the EHR; staff were notified using secure text messaging; and processes were restructured so that cardiologists signed orders in a template for referral on rounds and staff met with patients to set up rehab placement before discharge. The referral rate increased to more than 80%.
Third, stakeholder alignment is critical to nudges’ success. ….
Fourth, nudges can lead to unintended behavior that’s invisible without proper evaluation….(More)”.
Paper by Koen Leurs & Sandra Ponzanesi at Special Issue on Connected Migrants of Popular Communications: “Taking a cue from Dana Diminescu’s seminal manifesto on “the connected migrant,” this special issue introduces the notions of encapsulation and cosmopolitanism to understand digital migration studies. The pieces here present a nonbinary, integrated notion of an increasingly digitally mediated cosmopolitanism that accommodates differences within but also recognizes Europe’s colonial legacy and the fraught postcolonial present.
Of special interest is an essay by the late Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that the messy boundaries of Europe require a renewed vision of cosmopolitan Europe, based on dialogue and aspirations, rather than on Eurocentrism and universal values.
In this article, we focus on three overarching discussions informing this special issue: (a) an appreciation of the so-called “refugee crisis” and the articulation of conflicting Europeanisms, (b) an understanding of the relationships between the concepts of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, and (c) a recognition of the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of digital migration studies….(More)”.
Beth Noveck in Forbes: “The way Congress makes law is simply no longer viable. In David Schoenbrod’s recent book DC Confidential, he outlines “five tricks” politicians use to take credit in front of television cameras in order to further political party agendas while passing the blame and the buck to future generations for bad legislation. Although Congress makes the laws that govern all Americans, people also feel disenfranchised. One study concludes that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” But technology offers the promise of improving both the quality and accountability of lawmaking by opening up the process to more and more diverse expertise and input from the public at every stage of the legislative process. We call such open and participatory lawmaking: “CrowdLaw.”
Moving Beyond the Ballot Box
Around the world, there are already over two dozen examples of local legislatures and national parliaments turning to the internet to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of the laws they make; we need to do the same here if we are to begin to fix congressional dysfunction.
For example, Finland’s Citizen’s Initiative Act at the national level, like Madrid’s Decide initiative at the local level, allows any member of the public with the requisite signatures to propose new legislation, meaning that not only interest groups and politicians get to set the agenda for lawmaking.
In France, the Parlement & Citoyens platform allows the public to respond to a problem posed by a representative by contributing information about both causes and solutions. Relevant citizen input is then synthesized, debated, and incorporated into the resulting draft legislation. This brings greater empiricism into the legislative process through public contribution of expertise….(More)”.
Report by Richard Barkham, Sheharyar Bokhari and Albert Saiz: “In this report, we discuss recent trends in the application of urban big data and their impact on real estate markets. We expect such technologies to improve quality of life and the productivity of cities over the long run.
We forecast that smart city technologies will reinforce the primacy of the most successful global metropolises at least for a decade or more. A few select metropolises in emerging countries may also leverage these technologies to leapfrog on the provision of local public services.
In the long run, all cities throughout the urban system will end up adopting successful and cost-effective smart city initiatives. Nevertheless, smaller-scale interventions are likely to crop up everywhere, even in the short run. Such targeted programs are more likely to improve conditions in blighted or relatively deprived neighborhoods, which could generate gentrification and higher valuations there. It is unclear whether urban information systems will have a centralizing or suburbanizing impact. They are likely to make denser urban centers more attractive, but they are also bound to make suburban or exurban locations more accessible…(More)”.
Cover article by Robert Draper for Special Issue of the National Geographic: “Technology and our increasing demand for security have put us all under surveillance. Is privacy becoming just a memory?…
In 1949, amid the specter of European authoritarianism, the British novelist George Orwell published his dystopian masterpiece 1984, with its grim admonition: “Big Brother is watching you.” As unsettling as this notion may have been, “watching” was a quaintly circumscribed undertaking back then. That very year, 1949, an American company released the first commercially available CCTV system. Two years later, in 1951, Kodak introduced its Brownie portable movie camera to an awestruck public.
Today more than 2.5 trillion images are shared or stored on the Internet annually—to say nothing of the billions more photographs and videos people keep to themselves. By 2020, one telecommunications company estimates, 6.1 billion people will have phones with picture-taking capabilities. Meanwhile, in a single year an estimated 106 million new surveillance cameras are sold. More than three million ATMs around the planet stare back at their customers. Tens of thousands of cameras known as automatic number plate recognition devices, or ANPRs, hover over roadways—to catch speeding motorists or parking violators but also, in the case of the United Kingdom, to track the comings and goings of suspected criminals. The untallied but growing number of people wearing body cameras now includes not just police but also hospital workers and others who aren’t law enforcement officers. Proliferating as well are personal monitoring devices—dash cams, cyclist helmet cameras to record collisions, doorbells equipped with lenses to catch package thieves—that are fast becoming a part of many a city dweller’s everyday arsenal. Even less quantifiable, but far more vexing, are the billions of images of unsuspecting citizens captured by facial-recognition technology and stored in law enforcement and private-sector databases over which our control is practically nonexistent.
Those are merely the “watching” devices that we’re capable of seeing. Presently the skies are cluttered with drones—2.5 million of which were purchased in 2016 by American hobbyists and businesses. That figure doesn’t include the fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles used by the U.S. government not only to bomb terrorists in Yemen but also to help stop illegal immigrants entering from Mexico, monitor hurricane flooding in Texas, and catch cattle thieves in North Dakota. Nor does it include the many thousands of airborne spying devices employed by other countries—among them Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
We’re being watched from the heavens as well. More than 1,700 satellites monitor our planet. From a distance of about 300 miles, some of them can discern a herd of buffalo or the stages of a forest fire. From outer space, a camera clicks and a detailed image of the block where we work can be acquired by a total stranger….
This is—to lift the title from another British futurist, Aldous Huxley—our brave new world. That we can see it coming is cold comfort since, as Carnegie Mellon University professor of information technology Alessandro Acquisti says, “in the cat-and-mouse game of privacy protection, the data subject is always the weaker side of the game.” Simply submitting to the game is a dispiriting proposition. But to actively seek to protect one’s privacy can be even more demoralizing. University of Texas American studies professor Randolph Lewis writes in his new book, Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America, “Surveillance is often exhausting to those who really feel its undertow: it overwhelms with its constant badgering, its omnipresent mysteries, its endless tabulations of movements, purchases, potentialities.”
The desire for privacy, Acquisti says, “is a universal trait among humans, across cultures and across time. You find evidence of it in ancient Rome, ancient Greece, in the Bible, in the Quran. What’s worrisome is that if all of us at an individual level suffer from the loss of privacy, society as a whole may realize its value only after we’ve lost it for good.”…(More)”.
Article on the European JRC Open Day Experiment by Gioia Ciro; Tarchi Dario; Vespe Michele and Sermi Francesco: “The research pointed out the feasibility of crowd monitoring through WiFi data. A methodology has been developed and tested using real data. The data were collected during the JRC Open Day 2016 by 20 WiFi access points deployed on the Ispra site. The methodology includes a cleaning procedure to identify actual users and a user localization technique based on a modified WeC approach. The estimated number of attending people were compared with the statistics of the security service showing evident consistency; the possibility to validate the results with independent information represents a significant added value to this research. Finally, the proposed approach allowed to reconstruct the distribution of people within the site in different time spots….(More)”.
Introduction by With the prevalence of ubiquitous computing devices (smartphones, wearable devices, etc.) and social network services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), humans are generating massive digital traces continuously in their daily life. Considering the invaluable crowd intelligence residing in these pervasive and social big data, a spectrum of opportunities is emerging to enable promising smart applications for easing individual life, increasing company profit, as well as facilitating city development. However, the nature of big data also poses fundamental challenges on the techniques and applications relying on the pervasive and social big data from multiple perspectives such as algorithm effectiveness, computation speed, energy efficiency, user privacy, server security, data heterogeneity and system scalability. This special issue presents the state-of-the-art research achievements in addressing these challenges. After the rigorous review process of reviewers and guest editors, eight papers were accepted as follows.
The first paper “Automated recognition of hypertension through overnight continuous HRV monitoring” by Ni et al. proposes a non-invasive way to differentiate hypertension patients from healthy people with the pervasive sensors such as a waist belt. To this end, the authors train a machine learning model based on the heart rate data sensed from waists worn by a crowd of people, and the experiments show that the detection accuracy is around 93%.
The second paper “The workforce analyzer: group discovery among LinkedIn public profiles” by Dai et al. describes two users’ group discovery methods among LinkedIn public profiles. One is based on K-means and another is based on SVM. The authors contrast results of both methods and provide insights about the trending professional orientations of the workforce from an online perspective.
The third paper “Tweet and followee personalized recommendations based on knowledge graphs” by Pla Karidi et al. present an efficient semantic recommendation method that helps users filter the Twitter stream for interesting content. The foundation of this method is a knowledge graph that can represent all user topics of interest as a variety of concepts, objects, events, persons, entities, locations and the relations between them. An important advantage of the authors’ method is that it reduces the effects of problems such as over-recommendation and over-specialization.
The fourth paper “CrowdTravel: scenic spot profiling by using heterogeneous crowdsourced data” by Guo et al. proposes CrowdTravel, a multi-source social media data fusion approach for multi-aspect tourism information perception, which can provide travelling assistance for tourists by crowd intelligence mining. Experiments over a dataset of several popular scenic spots in Beijing and Xi’an, China, indicate that the authors’ approach attains fine-grained characterization for the scenic spots and delivers excellent performance.
The fifth paper “Internet of Things based activity surveillance of defence personnel” by Bhatia et al. presents a comprehensive IoT-based framework for analyzing national integrity of defence personnel with consideration to his/her daily activities. Specifically, Integrity Index Value is defined for every defence personnel based on different social engagements, and activities for detecting the vulnerability to national security. In addition to this, a probabilistic decision tree based automated decision making is presented to aid defence officials in analyzing various activities of a defence personnel for his/her integrity assessment.
The sixth paper “Recommending property with short days-on-market for estate agency” by Mou et al. proposes an estate with short days-on-market appraisal framework to automatically recommend those estates using transaction data and profile information crawled from websites. Both the spatial and temporal characteristics of an estate are integrated into the framework. The results show that the proposed framework can estimate accurately about 78% estates.
The seventh paper “An anonymous data reporting strategy with ensuring incentives for mobile crowd-sensing” by Li et al. proposes a system and a strategy to ensure anonymous data reporting while ensuring incentives simultaneously. The proposed protocol is arranged in five stages that mainly leverage three concepts: (1) slot reservation based on shuffle, (2) data submission based on bulk transfer and multi-player dc-nets, and (3) incentive mechanism based on blind signature.
The last paper “Semantic place prediction from crowd-sensed mobile phone data” by Celik et al. semantically classifes places visited by smart phone users utilizing the data collected from sensors and wireless interfaces available on the phones as well as phone usage patterns, such as battery level, and time-related information, with machine learning algorithms. For this study, the authors collect data from 15 participants at Galatasaray University for 1 month, and try different classification algorithms such as decision tree, random forest, k-nearest neighbour, naive Bayes, and multi-layer perceptron….(More)”.
Merlin Stone and Eleni Aravopoulou in The Bottom Line: “This case study describes how one of the world’s largest public transport operations, Transport for London (TfL), transformed the real-time availability of information for its customers and staff through the open data approach, and what the results of this transformation were. Its purpose is therefore to show what is required for an open data approach to work.
This case study is based mainly on interviews at TfL and data supplied by TfL directly to the researchers. It analyses as far as possible the reported facts of the case, in order to identify the processes required to open data and the benefits thereof.
The main finding is that achieving an open data approach in public transport is helped by having a clear commitment to the idea that the data belongs to the public and that third parties should be allowed to use and repurpose the information, by having a strong digital strategy, and by creating strong partnerships with data management organisations that can support the delivery of high volumes of information.
The case study shows how open data can be used to create commercial and non-commercial customer-facing products and services, which passengers and other road users use to gain a better travel experience, and that this approach can be valued in terms of financial/economic contribution to customers and organisations….(More)”.
Research report by Rosie McGee with Duncan Edwards, Colin Anderson, Hannah Hudson and Francesca Feruglio: “Making All Voices Count was a programme designed to solve the ‘grand challenge’ of creating more effective democratic governance and accountability around the world. Conceived in an era of optimism about the use of tech to open up government and allow more fluid communication between citizens and governments, it used funding from four donors to support the development and spread of innovative ideas for solving governance problems – many of them involving tools and platforms based on mobile phone and web technologies. Between 2013 and 2017, the programme made grants for innovation and scaling projects that aimed to amplify the voices of citizens and enable governments to listen and respond. It also conducted research and issued research grants to explore the roles that technology can play in securing responsive, accountable government.
This synthesis report reviews the Making All Voices Count’s four-and-a-half years of operational experience and learning. In doing so, it revisits and assesses the key working assumptions and expectations about the roles that technologies can play in governance, which underpinned the programme at the outset. The report draws on a synthesis of evidence from Making All Voices Count’s 120+ research, evidence and learning-focused publications, and the insights and knowledge that arose from the innovation, scaling and research projects funded through the programme, and the related grant accompaniment activities.
It shares 14 key messages on the roles technologies can play in enabling citizen voice and accountable and responsive governance. These messages are presented in four sections:
- Applying technologies as technical fixes to solve service delivery problems
- Applying technologies to broader, systemic governance challenges
- Applying technologies to build the foundations of democratic and accountable governance systems
- Applying technologies for the public ‘bad’.
The research concludes that the tech optimism of the era in which the programme was conceived can now be reappraised from the better-informed vantage point of hindsight. Making All Voices Count’s wealth of diverse and grounded experience and documentation provides an evidence base that should enable a more sober and mature position of tech realism as the field of tech for accountable governance continues to evolve….(More)”.