Stefaan Verhulst

Courtney Kennedy at Pew Research Center: “… we are often asked about how we conduct our research. We work hard to make our methodologies transparent and understandable, but we also know that survey mode effects and data weighting aren’t on everyone’s short list of water-cooler conversation topics.

That’s why we’re launching Methods 101, a new occasional video series dedicated to explaining and educating the public about the basic methods we use to conduct our survey research. We hope this effort will make survey methods more accessible, even if you’re not a statistician or pollster. We also hope it will help give our audience the confidence to be savvy consumers of all polls.

Our first video is about random sampling, a concept that undergirds all probability-based survey research. The video explains what it means and why it’s important. We hope you’ll find it useful….(More)”

Paper by Matheus Araujo et al at ArXiv: “Every day, millions of users reveal their interests on Facebook, which are then monetized via targeted advertisement marketing campaigns. In this paper, we explore the use of demographically rich Facebook Ads audience estimates for tracking non-communicable diseases around the world. Across 47 countries, we compute the audiences of marker interests, and evaluate their potential in tracking health conditions associated with tobacco use, obesity, and diabetes, compared to the performance of placebo interests. Despite its huge potential, we €find that, for modeling prevalence of health conditions across countries, di‚fferences in these interest audiences are only weakly indicative of the corresponding prevalence rates. Within the countries, however, our approach provides interesting insights on trends of health awareness across demographic groups. Finally, we provide a temporal error analysis to expose the potential pitfalls of using Facebook’s Marketing API as a black box…(More)”.

Featured innovations for the second STI Forum: “…The theme of the 2017 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) is “Eradicating poverty and promoting prosperity in a changing world“, and the Member States have decided that the HLPF 2017 shall focus on six SDGs (1, 2, 3, 5, 9 and 14) in addition to SDG 17 that will be considered at each HLPF. In this context, the following topic may be considered for the STI Forum 2017: “Science, Technology and Innovation for a Changing World – Focus on SDGs 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, and 14“….

The second Call for Innovations was launched for the sharing of innovations that provide solutions targeted to these six SDGs. Innovators from around the world were invited to submit their scientific and technological solutions to the challenges posed by the six SDGs.The Call for Innovations is now closed. More than 110 inspiring innovations from all the globe were submitted through the Global Innovations Exchange platform.The following outstanding innovators were selected to attend the STI Forum 2017 at UNHQ and showcase their solutions:

• Missing Maps: crowdsourcing digital map creation
• Babajob: Informal Sector Jobs Marketplace
• Virtual Farmers Market
• doctHERs
• Virtual Water Prospecting Program to locate naturally desalinated self-recharging & self-replenishing Water Sources
• Ignitia
• Farmer Query System
• OMOMI
• Mobilized Construction
• Paper Airplanes
• JokkoSante, pharmacy community
• CodePhil: Digital Literacy in Rural Philippines for Sustainable Livelihoods & Community Resilience…(More)”

“ALTwitter” – as in the alternate Twitter is the profiles of the Members of European Parliaments built on their Twitter metadata. In spite of the risks and challenges associated with the privacy of ineffectively regulated metadata, the beauty of the metadata which everyone should appreciate lies in its brevity and flexibility.

When you navigate to the profiles of the members of the parliament listed below, you will notice that these profiles give the essence of their interaction with Twitter and the data that they generate there. Without going through all their tweets, one can learn their areas/topics that they work, the device/mediums they use, the type of websites they refer, their sleeping/activity pattern, etc. The amount insight that can be derived from these metadata is indeed more interesting. We intend to present such artifacts in a separate blog post soon.

This open source project is a part of #hakunametadata series (with the earlier module on browsing metadata) is educate about the immense amount of information contained in the metadata that we generate by our day-to-day internet activities. Every bit of data used for this project is from the publically available information on Twitter. Furthermore, this project will be updated periodically and automatically to track the changes.”…(More)”

Carlos Santiso at The Rockefeller Foundation Blog: “Driven by fast-paced technological innovations, an exponential growth of smartphones, and a daily stream of big data, the “digital revolution” is changing the way we live our lives. Nowhere are the changes more sweeping than in cities. In Latin America, almost 80 percent of the population lives in cities, where massive adoption of social media is enabling new forms of digital engagement. Technology is ubiquitous in cities. The expectations of Latin American “digital citizens” have grown exponentially as a result of a rising middle class and an increasingly connected youth.

This digital transformation is recasting the relation between states and citizens. Digital citizens are asking for better services, more transparency, and meaningful participation. Their rising expectations concern the quality of the services city governments ought to provide, but also the standards of integrity, responsiveness, and fairness of the bureaucracy in their daily dealings. A recent study shows that citizens’ satisfaction with public services is not only determined by the objective quality of the service, but also their subjective expectations and how fairly they consider being treated….

New technologies and data analytics are transforming the governance of cities. Digital-intensive and data-driven innovations are changing how city governments function and deliver services, and also enabling new forms of social participation and co-creation. New technologies help improve efficiency and further transparency through new modes of open innovation. Tech-enabled and citizen-driven innovations also facilitate participation through feedback loops from citizens to local authorities to identify and resolve failures in the delivery of public services.

Three structural trends are driving the digital revolution in governments.

1. The digital transformation of the machinery of government. National and city governments in the region are developing digital strategies to increase connectivity, improve services, and enhance accountability. According to a recent report, 75 percent of the 23 countries surveyed have developed comprehensive digital strategies, such as Uruguay Digital, Colombia’s Vive Digital or Mexico’s Agenda Digital, that include legally recognized digital identification mechanisms. “Smart cities” are intensifying the use of modern technologies and improve the interoperability of government systems, the backbone of government, to ensure that public services are inter-connected and thus avoid having citizens provide the same information to different entities. An important driver of this transformation is citizens’ demands for greater transparency and accountability in the delivery of public services. Sixteen countries in the region have developed open government strategies, and cities such as Buenos Aires in Argentina, La Libertad in Peru, and Sao Paolo in Brazil have also committed to opening up government to public scrutiny and new forms of social participation. This second wave of active transparency reforms follows a first, more passive wave that focused on facilitating access to information.

2. The digital transformation of the interface with citizens. Sixty percent of the countries surveyed by the aforementioned report have established integrated service portals through which citizens can access online public services. Online portals allow for a single point of access to public services. Cities, such as Bogotá and Rio de Janeiro, are developing their own online service platforms to access municipal services. These innovations improve access to public services and contribute to simplifying bureaucratic processes and cutting red-tape, as a recent study shows. Governments are resorting to crowdsourcing solutions, open intelligence initiatives, and digital apps to encourage active citizen participation in the improvement of public services and the prevention of corruption. Colombia’s Transparency Secretariat has developed an app that allows citizens to report “white elephants” — incomplete or overbilled public works. By the end of 2015, it identified 83 such white elephants, mainly in the capital Bogotá, for a total value of almost $500 million, which led to the initiation of criminal proceedings by law enforcement authorities. While many of these initiatives emerge from civic initiatives, local governments are increasingly encouraging them and adopting their own open innovation models to rethink public services.

3. The gradual mainstreaming of social innovation in local government. Governments are increasingly resorting to public innovation labs to tackle difficult problems for citizens and businesses. Governments innovation labs are helping address “wicked problems” by combining design thinking, crowdsourcing techniques, and data analytics tools. Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Uruguay, have developed such social innovation labs within government structures. As a recent report notes, these mechanisms come in different forms and shapes. Large cities, such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo, are at the forefront of testing such laboratory mechanisms and institutionalizing tech-driven and citizen-centered approaches through innovation labs. For example, in 2013, Mexico City created its Laboratorio para la Ciudad, as a hub for civic innovation and urban creativity, relying on small-case experiments and interventions to improve specific government services and make local government more transparent, responsive, and receptive. It spearheaded an open government law for the city that encourages residents to participate in the design of public policies and requires city agencies to consider those suggestions…..(More)”.

Barry Libert, Megan Beck, Brian Komar and Josue Estrada at Knowledge@Wharton: “…nonprofit groups, academic institutions and philanthropic organizations engaged in social change are struggling to adapt to the new global, technological and virtual landscape.

Legacy modes of operation, governance and leadership competencies rooted in the age of physical realities continue to dominate the space. Further, organizations still operate in internal and external silos — far from crossing industry lines, which are blurring. And their ability to lead in a world that is changing at an exponential rate seems hampered by their mental models and therefore their business models of creating and sustaining value as well.

If civil society is not to get drenched and sink like a stone, it must start swimming in a new direction. This new direction starts with social organizations fundamentally rethinking the core assumptions driving their attitudes, behaviors and beliefs about creating long-term sustainable value for their constituencies in an exponentially networked world. Rather than using an organization-centric model, the nonprofit sector and related organizations need to adopt a mental model based on scaling relationships in a whole new way using today’s technologies — the SCaaP model.

Embracing social change as a platform is more than a theory of change, it is a theory of being — one that places a virtual network or individuals seeking social change at the center of everything and leverages today’s digital platforms (such as social media, mobile, big data and machine learning) to facilitate stakeholders (contributors and consumers) to connect, collaborate, and interact with each other to exchange value among each other to effectuate exponential social change and impact.

SCaaP builds on the government as a platform movement (Gov 2.0) launched by technologist Tim O’Reilly and many others. Just as Gov 2.0 was not about a new kind of government but rather, as O’Reilly notes, “government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time,” so it is with social change as a platform. Civil society is the primary location for collective action and SCaaP helps to rebuild the kind of participatory community celebrated by 19^th century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville when he observed that Americans’ propensity for civic association is central to making our democratic experiment work. “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition,” he noted, “are forever forming associations.”

But SCaaP represents a fundamental shift in how civil society operates. It is grounded in exploiting new digital technologies, but extends well beyond them to focus on how organizations think about advancing their core mission — do they go at it alone or do they collaborate as part of a network? SCaaP requires thinking and operating, in all things, as a network. It requires updating the core DNA that runs through social change organizations to put relationships in service of a cause at the center, not the institution. When implemented correctly, SCaaP will impact everything — from the way an organization allocates resources to how value is captured and measured to helping individuals achieve their full potential….(More)”.

Book by Howard G. Birnbaum and Paul E. Greenberg: “In the past decade there has been a worldwide evolution in evidence-based medicine that focuses on real-world Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) to compare the effects of one medical treatment versus another in real world settings. While most of this burgeoning literature has focused on research findings, data and methods, Howard Birnbaum and Paul Greenberg (both of Analysis Group) have edited a book that provides a practical guide to decision making using the results of analysis and interpretation of CER. Decision Making in a World of Comparative Effectiveness contains chapters by senior industry executives, key opinion leaders, accomplished researchers, and leading attorneys involved in resolving disputes in the life sciences industry. The book is aimed at ‘users’ and ‘decision makers’ involved in the life sciences industry rather than those doing the actual research. This book appeals to those who commission CER within the life sciences industry (pharmaceutical, biologic, and device manufacturers), government (both public and private payers), as well as decision makers of all levels, both in the US and globally…(More)”.

Book by Cass R. Sunstein: “This Palgrave Pivot offers comprehensive evidence about what people actually think of “nudge” policies designed to steer decision makers’ choices in positive directions. The data reveal that people in diverse nations generally favor nudges by strong majorities, with a preference for educative efforts – such as calorie labels – that equip individuals to make the best decisions for their own lives. On the other hand, there are significant arguments for noneducational nudges – such as automatic enrollment in savings plans – as they allow people to devote their scarce time and attention to their most pressing concerns.  The decision to use either educative or noneducative nudges raises fundamental questions about human freedom in both theory and practice. Sunstein’s findings and analysis offer lessons for those involved in law and policy who are choosing which method to support as the most effective way to encourage lifestyle changes….(More)”.

William Isaac and Andi Dixon in The Conversation: “In early 2017, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a new initiative in the city’s ongoing battle with violent crime. The most common solutions to this sort of problem involve hiring more police officers or working more closely with community members. But Emanuel declared that the Chicago Police Department would expand its use of software, enabling what is called “predictive policing,” particularly in neighborhoods on the city’s south side.

The Chicago police will use data and computer analysis to identify neighborhoods that are more likely to experience violent crime, assigning additional police patrols in those areas. In addition, the software will identify individual people who are expected to become – but have yet to be – victims or perpetrators of violent crimes. Officers may even be assigned to visit those people to warn them against committing a violent crime.

Any attempt to curb the alarming rate of homicides in Chicago is laudable. But the city’s new effort seems to ignore evidence, including recent research from members of our policing study team at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, that predictive policing tools reinforce, rather than reimagine, existing police practices. Their expanded use could lead to further targeting of communities or people of color.

Working with available data

At its core, any predictive model or algorithm is a combination of data and a statistical process that seeks to identify patterns in the numbers. This can include looking at police data in hopes of learning about crime trends or recidivism. But a useful outcome depends not only on good mathematical analysis: It also needs good data. That’s where predictive policing often falls short.

Machine-learning algorithms learn to make predictions by analyzing patterns in an initial training data set and then look for similar patterns in new data as they come in. If they learn the wrong signals from the data, the subsequent analysis will be lacking.

This happened with a Google initiative called “Flu Trends,” which was launched in 2008 in hopes of using information about people’s online searches to spot disease outbreaks. Google’s systems would monitor users’ searches and identify locations where many people were researching various flu symptoms. In those places, the program would alert public health authorities that more people were about to come down with the flu.

But the project failed to account for the potential for periodic changes in Google’s own search algorithm. In an early 2012 update, Google modified its search tool to suggest a diagnosis when users searched for terms like “cough” or “fever.” On its own, this change increased the number of searches for flu-related terms. But Google Flu Trends interpreted the data as predicting a flu outbreak twice as big as federal public health officials expected and far larger than what actually happened.

Criminal justice data are biased

The failure of the Google Flu Trends system was a result of one kind of flawed data – information biased by factors other than what was being measured. It’s much harder to identify bias in criminal justice prediction models. In part, this is because police data aren’t collected uniformly, and in part it’s because what data police track reflect longstanding institutional biases along income, race and gender lines….(More)”.