Book edited O’Hara, K. , Nguyen, M-H.C., Haynes, P.: “Tracking the evolution of digital technology is no easy task; changes happen so fast that keeping pace presents quite a challenge. This is, nevertheless, the aim of the Digital Enlightenment Yearbook.
This book is the third in the series which began in 2012 under the auspices of the Digital Enlightenment Forum. This year, the focus is on the relationship of individuals with their networks, and explores “Social networks and social machines, surveillance and empowerment”. In what is now the well-established tradition of the yearbook, different stakeholders in society and various disciplinary communities (technology, law, philosophy, sociology, economics, policymaking) bring their very different opinions and perspectives to bear on this topic.
The book is divided into four parts: the individual as data manager; the individual, society and the market; big data and open data; and new approaches. These are bookended by a Prologue and an Epilogue, which provide illuminating perspectives on the discussions in between. The division of the book is not definitive; it suggests one narrative, but others are clearly possible.
The 2014 Digital Enlightenment Yearbook gathers together the science, social science, law and politics of the digital environment in order to help us reformulate and address the timely and pressing questions which this new environment raises. We are all of us affected by digital technology, and the subjects covered here are consequently of importance to us all. (Contents)”
Access to Scientific Data in the 21st Century: Rationale and Illustrative Usage Rights Review
Paper by James Campbell in Data Science Journal: “Making scientific data openly accessible and available for re-use is desirable to encourage validation of research results and/or economic development. Understanding what users may, or may not, do with data in online data repositories is key to maximizing the benefits of scientific data re-use. Many online repositories that allow access to scientific data indicate that data is “open,” yet specific usage conditions reviewed on 40 “open” sites suggest that there is no agreed upon understanding of what “open” means with respect to data. This inconsistency can be an impediment to data re-use by researchers and the public. (More)”
Open Government: Origin, Development, and Conceptual Perspectives
Paper by Bernd W. Wirtz & Steven Birkmeyer in the International Journal of Public Administration: “The term “open government” is frequently used in practice and science. Since President Obama’s Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies in March 2009, open government has attracted an enormous amount of public attention. It is applied by authors from diverse areas, leading to a very heterogeneous comprehension of the concept. Against this background, this article screens the current open government literature to deduce an integrative definition of open government. Furthermore, this article analyzes the empirical and conceptual literature of open government to deduce an open government framework. In general, this article provides a clear understanding of the open government concept. (More)”
Millions of LinkedIn Members Want to Volunteer Their Skills for Good [INFOGRAPHIC]
LinkedIn: “What do 140,000 marketers, 4,000 Googlers, and 170,000 C-level executives have in common?
Answer: They all want to use their skills for good!
More than 4 million professionals like them have expressed interest in joining a nonprofit board or doing skills-based volunteering – or both.
GreatNonprofits, an organization that helps people find and rate other nonprofits, recently found two of these professionals on LinkedIn. Both are product managers who are spending 6 months to develop critical web-based tools to help the organization expand its reach.
“Both volunteers are creative, analytical, and really engaging deeply with staff,” says GreatNonprofits Founder and CEO Perla Ni. “We’re encouraged by how many talented, passionate people there are on LinkedIn who are willing to commit time to help nonprofits.”
As a professional, you can signal you want to use your skills for good on your LinkedIn profile by checking the boxes for “Joining a nonprofit board” and/or “Skills-based volunteering” in the Volunteer Experience & Causes section. If you’ve already done that, try searching for volunteer opportunities in your area.
For nonprofit organizations, we’ve made it quick and easy to find professionals who are eager to help. Use our free Advanced Search tool to find these talented needles in the haystack.
We took a closer look at the millions of LinkedIn members who’ve raised their hands for volunteer or board service, and found some interesting insights. For starters, the stereotype that millennials are hungry for purpose actually rings true. Also, the highest concentration of would-be volunteers are in the Midwest. And they have a ton of valuable skills – from strategic planning to marketing – for nonprofits to leverage.
Check out the infographic below for more, or visit nonprofit.linkedin.com.”
Moneyball for Government
New book edited by Peter Orszag and Jim Nussle: “A bipartisan group of current and former federal government leaders and advisors have written a new book, titled Moneyball for Government, which encourages government to change how it works so that data, evidence and evaluation drive policy and funding decisions.
The book includes jointly-written chapters by former Obama and George W. Bush administration Budget Directors Peter Orszag and Jim Nussle, U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Mark Warner (D-VA), former Obama and George W. Bush domestic policy advisors Melody Barnes and John Bridgeland; and former spokesmen for the Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns Kevin Madden and Howard Wolfson. It also includes chapters from former Obama and George W. Bush economic advisors Gene Sperling and Glenn Hubbard, and Obama and George W. Bush policy experts Robert Gordon and Ron Haskins.
The book also features profiles of innovative government and nonprofit leaders and organizations across the country that are successfully leveraging data, evidence and evaluation to get better results.
This book is about changing the way government works. By shifting public resources toward solutions that are informed by the best possible data, evidence and evaluation about what works, our government can improve the lives of young people, their families and communities. By brining together leading thinkers from across the political spectrum and highlighting the good work underway across the country, this book makes the case for Moneyball for Government and shows that it’s possible.”
With a Few Bits of Data, Researchers Identify ‘Anonymous’ People
Natasha Singer in the New York Times: “Even when real names and other personal information are stripped from big data sets, it is often possible to use just a few pieces of the information to identify a specific person, according to a study to be published Friday in the journal Science.
In the study, titled “Unique in the Shopping Mall: On the Reidentifiability of Credit Card Metadata,” a group of data scientists analyzed credit card transactions made by 1.1 million people in 10,000 stores over a three-month period. The data set contained details including the date of each transaction, amount charged and name of the store.
Although the information had been “anonymized” by removing personal details like names and account numbers, the uniqueness of people’s behavior made it easy to single them out.
In fact, knowing just four random pieces of information was enough to reidentify 90 percent of the shoppers as unique individuals and to uncover their records, researchers calculated. And that uniqueness of behavior — or “unicity,” as the researchers termed it — combined with publicly available information, like Instagram or Twitter posts, could make it possible to reidentify people’s records by name.
“The message is that we ought to rethink and reformulate the way we think about data protection,” said Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a graduate student in computational privacy at the M.I.T. Media Lab who was the lead author of the study. “The old model of anonymity doesn’t seem to be the right model when we are talking about large-scale metadata.”
The analysis of large data sets containing details on people’s behavior holds great potential to improve public health, city planning and education.
But the study calls into question the standard methods many companies, hospitals and government agencies currently use to anonymize their records. It may also give ammunition to some technologists and privacy advocates who have challenged the consumer-tracking processes used by advertising software and analytics companies to tailor ads to so-called anonymous users online….(More).”
How Network Science Is Changing Our Understanding of Law
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “One of the more fascinating areas of science that has emerged in recent years is the study of networks and their application to everyday life. It turns out that many important properties of our world are governed by networks with very specific properties.
These networks are not random by any means. Instead, they are often connected in the now famous small world pattern in which any part of the network can be reached in a relatively small number of steps. These kinds of networks lie behind many natural phenomena such as earthquakes, epidemics and forest fires and are equally ubiquitous in social phenomena such as the spread of fashions, languages, and even wars.
So it should come as no surprise that the same kind of network should exist in the legal world. Today, Marios Koniaris and pals at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece show that the network of links between laws follows exactly the same pattern. They say their network approach provides a unique insight into the nature of the law, the way it has emerged and how changes may influence it in the future.
The work of Koniaris and co focuses entirely on the law associated with the European Union. They begin by pointing out that this legal network is different from many other types of networks in two important ways….
The network can also be using for visualizing the nature of the legal world. It reveals clusters and related connections and can help legislators determine the effect of proposed changes…..It also shows how network science is spreading to every corner of scientific and social research.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1501.05237 : Network Analysis In The Legal Domain: A Complex Model For European Union Legal Sources”
The new scientific revolution: Reproducibility at last
in the Washington Post:”…Reproducibility is a core scientific principle. A result that can’t be reproduced is not necessarily erroneous: Perhaps there were simply variables in the experiment that no one detected or accounted for. Still, science sets high standards for itself, and if experimental results can’t be reproduced, it’s hard to know what to make of them.
“The whole point of science, the way we know something, is not that I trust Isaac Newton because I think he was a great guy. The whole point is that I can do it myself,” said Brian Nosek, the founder of a start-up in Charlottesville, Va., called the Center for Open Science. “Show me the data, show me the process, show me the method, and then if I want to, I can reproduce it.”
The reproducibility issue is closely associated with a Greek researcher, John Ioannidis, who published a paper in 2005 with the startling title “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Ioannidis, now at Stanford, has started a program to help researchers improve the reliability of their experiments. He said the surge of interest in reproducibility was in part a reflection of the explosive growth of science around the world. The Internet is a factor, too: It’s easier for researchers to see what everyone else is doing….
Errors can potentially emerge from a practice called “data dredging”: When an initial hypothesis doesn’t pan out, the researcher will scan the data for something that looks like a story. The researcher will see a bump in the data and think it’s significant, but the next researcher to come along won’t see it — because the bump was a statistical fluke….
So far about 7,000 people are using that service, and the center has received commitments for $14 million in grants, with partners that include the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, Nosek said.
Another COS initiative will help researchers register their experiments in advance, telling the world exactly what they plan to do, what questions they will ask. This would avoid the data-dredging maneuver in which researchers who are disappointed go on a deep dive for something publishable.
Nosek and other reformers talk about “publication bias.” Positive results get reported, negative results ignored. Someone reading a journal article may never know about all the similar experiments that came to naught….(More).”
Schemes used by South Australia to include citizens in policy making
Joshua Chambers at Future Gov Asia: “…South Australia has pioneered a number of innovative methods to try to include its residents in policymaking. …The highest profile participatory programme run by the state government is the Citizens’ Jury initiative, …The Citizens’ Jury takes a randomly selected, representative group of citizens through a process to hear arguments and evidence much like a jury in a trial, before writing an independent report which makes recommendations to government.
There were 37 members of the jury, hearing evidence on Thursday evenings and Saturdays over a five week period. They heard from motorists associations, cycling associations, and all sorts of other interested groups.
They used Basecamp software to ensure that jurors stayed connected when not at meetings, hosting discussions in a private space to consider the evidence they heard. …The jurors prepared 21 recommendations, ranging from decreasing speed in the city to a schools programme…. The Government supports the majority of the recommendations and will investigate the remaining three.
The government has also committed to provide jurors with an update every 6 months on the progress being made in this area.
Lessons and challenges
As would be expected with an innovative new scheme, it hasn’t always been smooth. One lesson learned from the first initiative was that affected agencies need to be engaged in advance, and briefed throughout the process, so that they can prepare their responses and resources. ….
Aside from the Citizens’ Jury, the Government of South Australia is also pioneering other approaches to include citizens in policy making. Fund My Idea is a crowdsourcing site that allows citizens to propose new projects. …(More)”
How to Convince Men to Help the Poor
Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard: “Please give. It’s a plea we are confronted with constantly, as a variety of charities implore us to help them help the less fortunate.
Whether we get out our checkbook or throw the request in the recycling bin is determined, in part, by the specific way the request is framed. But a new study suggests non-profits might want to create two separate appeals: One aimed at men, and another at women.
A research team led by Stanford University sociologist Robb Willer reports empathy-based appeals tend to be effective with women. But as a rule, men—who traditionally give somewhat less to anti-poverty charities—need to be convinced that their self-interest aligns with that of the campaign.
“Framing poverty as an issue that negatively affects all Americans increased men’s willingness to donate to the cause, eliminating the gender gap,” the researchers write in the journal Social Science Research….
“While this reframing resonated with men, who were otherwise less likely to spontaneously express concern about poverty,” Willer and his colleagues write, “it had the opposite effect for women, who might have felt less motivated to express concern about poverty when doing so seemed inconsistent with feeling empathy for the poor.”…(More)”