Stefaan Verhulst
Gillian Tett in the Financial Times: “Last week, I decided to take a gaggle of kids for an end-of-school-year lunch in a New York neighbourhood that I did not know well. I duly began looking for a suitable restaurant. A decade ago, I would have done that by turning to a restaurant guide. In the world I grew up in, it was normal to seek advice from the “experts”.
But in Manhattan last week, it did not occur to me to consult Fodor’s. Instead, I typed what I needed into my cellphone, scrolled through a long list of online restaurant recommendations, including comments from people who had eaten in them — and picked one.
Yes, it was a leap of faith; those restaurant reviews might have been fake. But there were enough voices for me to feel able to trust the wisdom of the cyber crowds — and, as it happened, our lunch choice was very good.
This is a trivial example of a much bigger change that is under way, and one that has some thought-provoking implications in the wake of the Brexit vote. Before the referendum, British citizens were subjected to a blitz of advice about the potential costs of Brexit from “experts”: economists, central bankers, the International Monetary Fund and world leaders, among others. Indeed, the central strategy of the government (and other “Remainers”) appeared to revolve around wheeling out these experts, with their solemn speeches and statistics….
I suspect that it indicates something else: that citizens of the cyber world no longer have much faith in anything that experts say, not just in the political sphere but in numerous others too. At a time when we increasingly rely on crowd-sourced advice rather than official experts to choose a restaurant, healthcare and holidays, it seems strange to expect voters to listen to official experts when it comes to politics.
In our everyday lives, we are moving from a system based around vertical axes of trust, where we trust people who seem to have more authority than we do, to one predicated on horizontal axes of trust: we take advice from our peer group.
You can see this clearly if you look at the surveys conducted by groups such as the Pew Research Center. These show that faith in institutions such as the government, big business and the media has crumbled in recent years; indeed, almost the only institution in the US that has bucked the trend is the military.
What is even more interesting to look at, however, are the areas where trust remains high. In an annual survey conducted by the Edelman public relations firm, people in 20 countries are asked who they trust. They show rising confidence in the “a person like me” category, and surprisingly high trust in digital technology. We live in a world where we increasingly trust our Facebook friends and the Twitter crowd more than we do the IMF or the prime minister.
In some senses, this is good news. Relying on horizontal axes of trust should mean more democracy and empowerment for ordinary citizens. But the problem of this new world is that people can fall prey to social fads and tribalism — or groupthink…..
Either way, nobody is going to put this genie back into the bottle. So we all need to think about what creates the bonds of “trust” in today’s world. And recognise that the 20th-century model of politics, with its reverence for experts and fixed parties, may eventually seem as outdated as restaurant guides. We live in volatile time…(More)”
The White House: “Every year, more than 11 million people move through America’s 3,100 local jails, many on low-level, non-violent misdemeanors, costing local governments approximately $22 billion a year. In local jails, 64 percent of people suffer from mental illness, 68 percent have a substance abuse disorder, and 44 percent suffer from chronic health problems. Communities across the country have recognized that a relatively small number of these highly vulnerable people cycle repeatedly not just through local jails, but also hospital emergency rooms, shelters, and other public systems, receiving fragmented and uncoordinated care at great cost to American taxpayers, with poor outcomes.
For example, in Miami-Dade, Florida found that 97 people with serious mental illness accounted for $13.7 million in services over four years, spending more than 39,000 days in either jail, emergency rooms, state hospitals or psychiatric facilities in their county. In response, the county provided key mental health de-escalation training to their police officers and 911 dispatchers and, over the past five years, Miami-Dade police have responded to nearly 50,000 calls for service for people in mental health crisis, but have made only 109 arrests, diverting more than 10,000 people to services or safely stabilizing situations without arrest. The jail population fell from over 7000 to just over 4700 and the county was able to close an entire jail facility, saving nearly $12 million a year.
In addition, on any given day, more than 450,000 people are held in jail before trial, nearly 63 percent of the local jail population, even though they have not been convicted of a crime. A 2014 study of New York’s Riker’s Island jail found more than 86% percent of detained individuals were held on a bond of $500 or less. To tackle the challenges of bail, in 2014 Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC began using a data-based risk assessment tool to identify low risk people in jail and find ways to release them safely. Since they began using the tool, the jail population has gone down 20 percent, significantly more low-risk individuals have been released from jail, and there has been no increase in reported crime.
To break this cycle of incarceration, the Administration has launched the Data-Driven Justice Initiative with a bipartisan coalition of city, county, and state governments who have committed to using data-driven strategies to divert low-level offenders with mental illness out of the criminal system and to change approaches to pre-trial incarceration so that low risk offenders no longer stay in jail simply because they cannot afford a bond. These innovative strategies, which have measurably reduced jail populations in several communities, help stabilize individuals and families, better serve communities, and, often, saves money in the process. DDJ communities commit to:
- combining data from across criminal justice and health systems to identify the individuals with the highest number of contacts with police, ambulance, emergency departments, and other services, and, leverage existing resources to link them to health, behavioral health, and social services in the community;
- equipping law enforcement and first responders to enable more rapid deployment of tools, approaches, and other innovations they need to safely and more effectively respond to people in mental health crisis and divert people with high needs to identified service providers instead of arrest; and
- working towards using objective, data-driven, validated risk assessment tools to inform the safe release of low-risk defendants from jails in order to reduce the jail population held pretrial….(More: FactSheet)”
Katherine M. A. Reilly and Juan P. Alperin at Global Media Journal: “Open Development (OD) is a subset of ICT4D that studies the potential of ITenabled openness to support social change among poor or marginalized populations. Early OD work examined the potential of IT-enabled openness to decentralize power and enable public engagement by disintermediating knowledge production and dissemination. However, in practice, intermediaries have emerged to facilitate open data and related knowledge production activities in development processes. We identify five models of intermediation in OD work: decentralized, arterial, ecosystem, bridging, and communities of practice and examine the implications of each for stewardship of open processes. We conclude that studying OD through these five forms of intermediation is a productive way of understanding whether and how different patterns of knowledge stewardship influence development outcomes. We also offer suggestions for future research that can improve our understanding of how to sustain openness, facilitate public engagement, and ensure that intermediation contributes to open development….(More)”
Springwise: “Creating good transit apps can be difficult, given the vast amount of city (and worldwide) data app builders need to have access to. Aiming to address this, Transitland is an open platform that aggregates publicly available transport information from around the world.
The startup cleans the data sets, making them easy-to-use, and adds them to Mapzen, an open source mapping platform. Mapzen Turn-by-Turn is the platform’s transport planning service that, following its latest expansion, now contains data from more than 200 regions around the world on every continent except Antarctica. Transitland encourages anyone interested in transport, data and mapping to get involved, from adding data streams to sharing new apps and analyses. Mapzen Turn-by-Turn also manages all licensing related to use of the data, leaving developers free to discover and build. The platform is available to use for free.
We have seen a platform enable data sharing to help local communities and governments work better together, as well as a startup that visualizes government data so that it is easy-to-use for entrepreneurs….(More)”
Ken Banks at kiwanja.net: “The ubiquity of mobile phones, the reach of the Internet, the shear number of problems facing the planet, competitions and challenges galore, pots of money and strong media interest in tech-for-good projects has today created the perfect storm. Not a day goes by without the release of an app hoping to solve something, and the fact so many people are building so many apps to fix so many problems can only be a good thing. Right?
The only problem is this. It’s become impossible to tell good from bad, even real from fake. It’s something of a Wild West out there. So it was no surprise to see this happening recently. Quoting The Guardian:
An app which purported to offer aid to refugees lost in the Mediterranean has been pulled from Apple’s App Store after it was revealed as a fake. The I Sea app, which also won a Bronze medal at the Cannes Lions conference on Monday night, presented itself as a tool to help report refugees lost at sea, using real-time satellite footage to identify boats in trouble and highlighting their location to the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas), which would provide help.
In fact, the app did nothing of the sort. Rather than presenting real-time satellite footage – a difficult and expensive task – it instead simply shows a portion of a static, unchanging image. And while it claims to show the weather in the southern Mediterranean, that too isn’t that accurate: it’s for Western Libya.
The worry isn’t only that someone would decide to build a fake app which ‘tackles’ such an emotive subject, but the fact that this particular app won an award and received favourable press. Wired, Mashable, the Evening Standard and Reuters all spoke positively about it. Did no-one check that it did what it said it did?
This whole episode reminds me of something Joel Selanikio wrote in his contributing chapter to two books I’ve recently edited and published. In his chapters, which touch on his work on the Magpi data collection tool in addition to some of the challenges facing the tech-for-development community, Joel wrote:
In going over our user activity logs for the online Magpi app, I quickly realised that no-one from any of our funding organisations was listed. Apparently no-one who was paying us had ever seen our working software! This didn’t seem to make sense. Who would pay for software without ever looking at it? And if our funders hadn’t seen the software, what information were they using when they decided whether to fund us each year?
…The shear number of apps available that claim to solve all manner of problems may seem encouraging on the surface – 1,500 (and counting) to help refugees might be a case in point – but how many are useful? How many are being used? How many solve a problem? And how many are real?
Due diligence? Maybe it’s time we had an app for that…(More)”
Paper by Florian Schaub, Travis D. Breaux, and Norman Sadeh: “Privacy policies are supposed to provide transparency about a service’s data practices and help consumers make informed choices about which services to entrust with their personal information. In practice, those privacy policies are typically long and complex documents that are largely ignored by consumers. Even for regulators and data protection authorities privacy policies are difficult to assess at scale. Crowdsourcing offers the potential to scale the analysis of privacy policies with microtasks, for instance by assessing how specific data practices are addressed in privacy policies or extracting information about data practices of interest, which can then facilitate further analysis or be provided to users in more effective notice formats. Crowdsourcing the analysis of complex privacy policy documents to non-expert crowdworkers poses particular challenges. We discuss best practices, lessons learned and research challenges for crowdsourcing privacy policy analysis….(More)”
Book edited by D’Ascenzo, F., Magni, M., Lazazzara, A., Za, S: “This book examines the impact of digital innovation on organizations. It reveals how the digital revolution is redefining traditional levels of analysis while at the same time blurring the internal and external boundaries of the organizational environment. It presents a collection of research papers that examine the interaction between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and behavior from a threefold perspective:
First, they analyze individual behavior in terms of specific organizational practices like learning, collaboration and knowledge transfer, as well as the use of ICT within the organization.
Second, they explore the dynamics at work on the border between the internal and the external environments by analyzing the organizational impact of ICT usage outside the company, as can be seen in employer branding, consumer behavior and organizational image.
Third, they investigate how ICT is being adopted to help face societal challenges outside the company like waste and pollution, smart cities, and e-government….(More)”
Special issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience edited by Corrado Corradi-Dell’Acqua, Leonie Koban, Susanne Leiberg and Patrik Vuilleumier: “In the last decade, a growing research effort in behavioral sciences, especially psychology and neuroscience, has been invested in the study of the cognitive, biological, and evolutionary foundations of social behavior. Differently from the case of sociology, which studies social behavior also at the group level in terms of organizations and structures, psychology and neuroscience often define “social” as a feature of the individual brain that allows an efficient interaction with conspecifics, and thus constitutes a possible evolutionary advantage (Matusall, 2013). …
In the last decades, psychologist and neuroscientists invested a considerable amount of research to investigate the ability to act “socially”, which is considered an evolutionary advantage of many species (Matusall, 2013). The present Research Topic is a collection of a large number (38) of original contributions from an interdisciplinary community which together highlight that determinants of individual social behavior should be best understood along at least two different dimensions. This general perspective represents the backbone for a comprehensive and articulated model of how people and their brains interact with each other in social contexts. However, despite its appeal, it remains unclear how the model put forward in this editorial relates to particular paradigms with high ecological value, where it is more difficult to neatly disentangle the relative contribution of personal/environmental or stable/transient determinants. This is for instance the case of Preston et al. (2013) who investigated hospitalized terminal patients, measuring the emotional reactions elicited in observers and whether they were related to the frequency with which aid was delivered. In this perspective, a great challenge for future research in social psychology and neuroscience will indeed be to develop more accurate predictive models of social behavior and to make them applicable to ecologically valid settings….(More)”
Clive Thompson at the Smithsonian magazine: “As the 2016 election approaches, we’re hearing a lot about “red states” and “blue states.” That idiom has become so ingrained that we’ve almost forgotten where it originally came from: a data visualization.
In the 2000 presidential election, the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so razor close that broadcasters pored over electoral college maps—which they typically colored red and blue. What’s more, they talked about those shadings. NBC’s Tim Russert wondered aloud how George Bush would “get those remaining 61 electoral red states, if you will,” and that language became lodged in the popular imagination. America became divided into two colors—data spun into pure metaphor. Now Americans even talk routinely about “purple” states, a mental visualization of political information.
We live in an age of data visualization. Go to any news website and you’ll see graphics charting support for the presidential candidates; open your iPhone and the Health app will generate personalized graphs showing how active you’ve been this week, month or year. Sites publish charts showing how the climate is changing, how schools are segregating, how much housework mothers do versus fathers. And newspapers are increasingly finding that readers love “dataviz”: In 2013, the New York Times’ most-read story for the entire year was a visualization of regional accents across the United States. It makes sense. We live in an age of Big Data. If we’re going to understand our complex world, one powerful way is to graph it.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve discovered the pleasures of making information into pictures. Over a hundred years ago, scientists and thinkers found themselves drowning in their own flood of data—and to help understand it, they invented the very idea of infographics.
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The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is—a representation of geographic information—and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography. Only a few examples exist: Around the 11th century, a now-anonymous scribe created a chart of how the planets moved through the sky. By the 18th century, scientists were warming to the idea of arranging knowledge visually. The British polymath Joseph Priestley produced a “Chart of Biography,” plotting the lives of about 2,000 historical figures on a timeline. A picture, he argued, conveyed the information “with more exactness, and in much less time, than it [would take] by reading.”
Still, data visualization was rare because data was rare. That began to change rapidly in the early 19th century, because countries began to collect—and publish—reams of information about their weather, economic activity and population. “For the first time, you could deal with important social issues with hard facts, if you could find a way to analyze it,” says Michael Friendly, a professor of psychology at York University who studies the history of data visualization. “The age of data really began.”
An early innovator was the Scottish inventor and economist William Playfair. As a teenager he apprenticed to James Watt, the Scottish inventor who perfected the steam engine. Playfair was tasked with drawing up patents, which required him to develop excellent drafting and picture-drawing skills. After he left Watt’s lab, Playfair became interested in economics and convinced that he could use his facility for illustration to make data come alive.
“An average political economist would have certainly been able to produce a table for publication, but not necessarily a graph,” notes Ian Spence, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who’s writing a biography of Playfair. Playfair, who understood both data and art, was perfectly positioned to create this new discipline.
In one famous chart, he plotted the price of wheat in the United Kingdom against the cost of labor. People often complained about the high cost of wheat and thought wages were driving the price up. Playfair’s chart showed this wasn’t true: Wages were rising much more slowly than the cost of the product.
“He wanted to discover,” Spence notes. “He wanted to find regularities or points of change.” Playfair’s illustrations often look amazingly modern: In one, he drew pie charts—his invention, too—and lines that compared the size of various country’s populations against their tax revenues. Once again, the chart produced a new, crisp analysis: The British paid far higher taxes than citizens of other nations.
Neurology was not yet a robust science, but Playfair seemed to intuit some of its principles. He suspected the brain processed images more readily than words: A picture really was worth a thousand words. “He said things that sound almost like a 20th-century vision researcher,” Spence adds. Data, Playfair wrote, should “speak to the eyes”—because they were “the best judge of proportion, being able to estimate it with more quickness and accuracy than any other of our organs.” A really good data visualization, he argued, “produces form and shape to a number of separate ideas, which are otherwise abstract and unconnected.”
Soon, intellectuals across Europe were using data visualization to grapple with the travails of urbanization, such as crime and disease….(More)”
Haje Jan Kamps in TechCrunch: “In a world where the phrase “oh god, not another app” often springs to mind, along with “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you want to make a world a better place” TraffickCam is a blast of icy-fresh air.
TraffickCam is an app developed by the Exchange Initiative, an organization fighting back against sex trafficking.
The goal of the new app is to build a national database of photos of the insides of hotel rooms to help law enforcement match images posted by sex traffickers to locations, in an effort to map out the routes and methods used by traffickers. The app will also be useful to help locate victims — and the people who put them in their predicament.
Available for both iOS and Android, the app is unlikely to win any design awards, but that isn’t the point; the app makers are solving a tremendous problem and any tools available to help resolve some of this will be welcomed with open arms by the organizations fighting the good fight….
The app, then, is a crowd-sourced data gathering tool which can be used to match known locations to photos confiscated from or shared by the perpetrators. Features such as patterns in the carpeting, furniture, room accessories and window views can be analyzed, and according to the app’s creators, testing shows that the app is 85 percent accurate in identifying the correct hotel in the top 20 matches.
“Law enforcement is always looking for new and innovative ways to recover victims, locate suspects and investigate criminal activity,” said Sergeant Adam Kavanagh, St. Louis County Police Department and Supervisor of the St. Louis County Multi-Jurisdictional Human Trafficking Task Force.