Chicago Is Predicting Food Safety Violations. Why Aren’t Other Cities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julian Spector at CityLab: “The three dozen inspectors at the Chicago Department of Public Health scrutinize 16,000 eating establishments to protect diners from gut-bombing food sickness. Some of those pose more of a health risk than others; approximately 15 percent of inspections catch a critical violation.

For years, Chicago, like most every city in the U.S., scheduled these inspections by going down the complete list of food vendors and making sure they all had a visit in the mandated timeframe. That process ensured that everyone got inspected, but not that the most likely health code violators got inspected first. And speed matters in this case. Every day that unsanitary vendors serve food is a new chance for diners to get violently ill, paying in time, pain, and medical expenses.

That’s why, in 2014, Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology started sifting through publicly available city data and built an algorithm to predict which restaurants were most likely to be in violation of health codes, based on the characteristics of previously recorded violations. The program generated a ranked list of which establishments the inspectors should look at first. The project is notable not just because it worked—the algorithm identified violations significantly earlier than business as usual did—but because the team made it as easy as possible for other cities to replicate the approach.

And yet, more than a year after Chicago published its code, only one local government, in metro D.C., has tried to do the same thing. All cities face the challenge of keeping their food safe and therefore have much to gain from this data program. The challenge, then, isn’t just to design data solutions that work, but to do so in a way that facilitates sharing them with other cities. The Chicago example reveals the obstacles that might prevent a good urban solution from spreading to other cities, but also how to overcome them….(More)”

Met Office warns of big data floods on the horizon

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at V3: “The amount of data being collected by departments and agencies mean government services will not be able to implement truly open data strategies, according to Met Office CIO Charles Ewen.

Ewen said the rapidly increasing amount of data being stored by companies and government departments mean it will not be technologically possible able to share all their data in the near future.

During a talk at the Cloud World Forum on Wednesday, he said: “The future will be bigger and bigger data. Right now we’re talking about petabytes, in the near future it will be tens of petabytes, then soon after it’ll be hundreds of petabytes and then we’ll be off into imaginary figure titles.

“We see a future where data has gotten so big the notion of open data and the idea ‘lets share our data with everybody and anybody’ just won’t work. We’re struggling to make it work already and by 2020 the national infrastructure will not exist to shift this stuff [data] around in the way anybody could access and make use of it.”

Ewen added that to deal with the shift he expects many departments and agencies will adapt their processes to become digital curators that are more selective about the data they share, to try and ensure it is useful.

“This isn’t us wrapping our arms around our data and saying you can’t see it. We just don’t see how we can share all this big data in the way you would want it,” he said.

“We see a future where a select number of high-capacity nodes become information brokers and are used to curate and manage data. These curators will be where people bring their problems. That’s the future we see.”

Ewan added that the current expectations around open data are based on misguided views about the capabilities of cloud technology to host and provide access to huge amounts of data.

“The trendy stuff out there claims to be great at everything, but don’t get carried away. We don’t see cloud as anything but capability. We’ve been using appropriate IT and what’s available to deliver our mission services for over 50 to 60 years, and cloud is playing an increasing part of that, but purely for increased capability,” he said.

“It’s just another tool. The important thing is having the skill and knowledge to not just believe vendors but to look and identify the problem and say ‘we have to solve this’.”

The Met Office CIO’s comments follow reports from other government service providers that people’s desire for open data is growing exponentially….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Diagnosis for Patients With Undiagnosed Illnesses: An Evaluation of CrowdMed

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Ashley N.D Meyer et al in the Journal of Medical Internet Research: ” Background: Despite visits to multiple physicians, many patients remain undiagnosed. A new online program, CrowdMed, aims to leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” by giving patients an opportunity to submit their cases and interact with case solvers to obtain diagnostic possibilities.

Objective: To describe CrowdMed and provide an independent assessment of its impact.

Methods: Patients submit their cases online to CrowdMed and case solvers sign up to help diagnose patients. Case solvers attempt to solve patients’ diagnostic dilemmas and often have an interactive online discussion with patients, including an exchange of additional diagnostic details. At the end, patients receive detailed reports containing diagnostic suggestions to discuss with their physicians and fill out surveys about their outcomes. We independently analyzed data collected from cases between May 2013 and April 2015 to determine patient and case solver characteristics and case outcomes.

Results: During the study period, 397 cases were completed. These patients previously visited a median of 5 physicians, incurred a median of US $10,000 in medical expenses, spent a median of 50 hours researching their illnesses online, and had symptoms for a median of 2.6 years. During this period, 357 active case solvers participated, of which 37.9% (132/348) were male and 58.3% (208/357) worked or studied in the medical industry. About half (50.9%, 202/397) of patients were likely to recommend CrowdMed to a friend, 59.6% (233/391) reported that the process gave insights that led them closer to the correct diagnoses, 57% (52/92) reported estimated decreases in medical expenses, and 38% (29/77) reported estimated improvement in school or work productivity.

Conclusions: Some patients with undiagnosed illnesses reported receiving helpful guidance from crowdsourcing their diagnoses during their difficult diagnostic journeys. However, further development and use of crowdsourcing methods to facilitate diagnosis requires long-term evaluation as well as validation to account for patients’ ultimate correct diagnoses….(More)”

Hacking the streets: ‘Smart’ writing in the smart city

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Spencer Jordan at FirstMonday: “Cities have always been intimately bound up with technology. As important nodes within commercial and communication networks, cities became centres of sweeping industrialisation that affected all facets of life (Mumford, 1973). Alienation and estrangement became key characteristics of modernity, Mumford famously noting the “destruction and disorder within great cities” during the long nineteenth century. The increasing use of digital technology is yet another chapter in this process, exemplified by the rise of the ‘smart city’. Although there is no agreed definition, smart cities are understood to be those in which digital technology helps regulate, run and manage the city (Caragliu,et al., 2009). This article argues that McQuire’s definition of ‘relational space’, what he understands as the reconfiguration of urban space by digital technology, is critical here. Although some see the impact of digital technology on the urban environment as deepening social exclusion and isolation (Virilio, 1991), others, such as de Waal perceive digital technology in a more positive light. What is certainly clear, however, is that the city is once again undergoing rapid change. As Varnelis and Friedberg note, “place … is in a process of a deep and contested transformation”.

If the potential benefits from digital technology are to be maximised it is necessary that the relationship between the individual and the city is understood. This paper examines how digital technology can support and augment what de Certeau calls spatial practice, specifically in terms of constructions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ (de Certeau, 1984). The very act of walking is itself an act of enunciation, a process by which the city is instantiated; yet, as de Certeau and Bachelard remind us, the city is also wrought from the stories we tell, the narratives we construct about that space (de Certeau, 1984; Bachelard, 1994). The city is thus envisioned both through physical exploration but also language. As Turchi has shown, the creative stories we make on these voyages can be understood as maps of that world and those we meet (Turchi, 2004). If, as the situationists Kotányi and Vaneigem stated, “Urbanism is comparable to the advertising propagated around Coca-Cola — pure spectacular ideology”, there needs to be a way by which the hegemony of the market, Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, can be challenged. This would wrestle control from the market forces that are seen to have overwhelmed the high street, and allow a refocusing on the needs of both the individual and the community.

This article argues that, though anachronistic, some of the situationists’ ideas persist within hacking, what Himanen (2001) identified as the ‘hacker ethic’. As Taylor argues, although hacking is intimately connected to the world of computers, it can refer to the unorthodox use of any ‘artefact’, including social ‘systems’ . In this way, de Certeau’s urban itineraries, the spatial practice of each citizen through the city, can be understood as a form of hacking. As Wark states, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” If the city itself is called into being through our physical journeys, in what de Certeau called ‘spaces of enunciation’, then new configurations and possibilities abound. The walker becomes hacker, Wark’s “abstractors of new worlds”, and the itinerary a deliberate subversion of an urban system, the dream houses of Benjamin’s arcades. This paper examines one small research project, Waterways and Walkways, in its investigation of a digitally mediated exploration across Cardiff, the Welsh capital. The article concludes by showing just one small way in which digital technology can play a role in facilitating the re-conceptualisation of our cities….(More)”

Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data

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Book edited by Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh: “This book critically explores forms and techniques of calculation that emerge with digital computation, and their implications. The contributors demonstrate that digital calculative devices matter beyond their specific functions as they progressively shape, transform and govern all areas of our life. In particular, it addresses such questions as:

  • How does the drive to make sense of, and productively use, large amounts of diverse data, inform the development of new calculative devices, logics and techniques?
  • How do these devices, logics and techniques affect our capacity to decide and to act?
  • How do mundane elements of our physical and virtual existence become data to be analysed and rearranged in complex ensembles of people and things?
  • In what ways are conventional notions of public and private, individual and population, certainty and probability, rule and exception transformed and what are the consequences?
  • How does the search for ‘hidden’ connections and patterns change our understanding of social relations and associative life?
  • Do contemporary modes of calculation produce new thresholds of calculability and computability, allowing for the improbable or the merely possible to be embraced and acted upon?
  • As contemporary approaches to governing uncertain futures seek to anticipate future events, how are calculation and decision engaged anew?

Drawing together different strands of cutting-edge research that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book makes an important contribution to several areas of scholarship, including the emerging social science field of software studies, and will be a vital resource for students and scholars alike….(More)”

Innovation in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Public Solutions Handbook edited by Patria De Lancer Julnes and  Ed Gibson: “In the organizational context, the word “innovation” is often associated with private sector organizations, which are often perceived as more agile, adaptable, and able to withstand change than government agencies and nonprofit organizations. But the reality is that, while they may struggle, public and nonprofit organizations do innovate. These organizations must find ways to use shrinking resources effectively, improve their performance, and achieve desirable societal outcomes. Innovation in the Public Sector provides alternative frameworks for defining, categorizing, and studying innovation in government and in the nonprofit sector.

Through a diverse collection of international case studies, this book broadens the discussion of innovation in public and nonprofit organizations, demonstrating the hurdles organizations face and examining the technological advances and managerial ingenuity innovators use to achieve their goals, both within and beyond the boundaries of the innovating organization. The chapters shed light on key issues including:

  • how to conceptualize innovation;
  • how organizations decide between competing good ideas;
  • how to implement innovation;
  • how to contend with challenges to innovation;
  • how to judge success in innovation

This book provides current and future public managers with the understanding and skills required to manage change and innovation, and is essential reading for all those studying public management, public administration, and public policy….(More)”

Digital Dividends – World Development Report 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

World Bank Report: “Digital technologies have spread rapidly in much of the world. Digital dividends—the broader development benefits from using these technologies—have lagged behind. In many instances digital technologies have boosted growth, expanded opportunities, and improved service delivery. Yet their aggregate impact has fallen short and is unevenly distributed. For digital technologies to benefit everyone everywhere requires closing the remaining digital divide, especially in internet access. But greater digital adoption will not be enough. To get the most out of the digital revolution, countries also need to work on the “analog complements”—by strengthening regulations that ensure competition among businesses, by adapting workers’ skills to the demands of the new economy, and by ensuring that institutions are accountable…..

Engendering control: The gap between institutions and technology The internet was expected to usher in a new era of accountability and political empowerment, with citizens participating in policy making and forming self-organized virtual communities to hold government to account. These hopes have been largely unmet. While the internet has made many government functions more efficient and convenient, it has generally had limited impact on the most protracted problems—how to improve service provider accountability (principal-agent problems) and how to broaden public involvement and give greater voice to the poor and disadvantaged (collective action problems).

Whether citizens can successfully use the internet to raise the accountability of service providers depends on the context. Most important is the strength of existing accountability relationships between policy makers and providers, as discussed in the 2004 World Development Report, Making Services Work for Poor People. An examination of seventeen digital engagement initiatives for this Report finds that of nine cases in which citizen engagement involved a partnership between civil society organizations (CSOs) and government, three were successful (table O.2). Of eight cases that did not involve a partnership, most failed. This suggests that, although collaboration with government is not a sufficient condition for success, it may well be a necessary one.

Another ingredient for success is effective offline mobilization, particularly because citizen uptake of the digital channels was low in most of the cases. For example, Maji Matone, which facilitates SMS-based feedback about rural water supply problems in Tanzania, received only 53 SMS messages during its first six months of operation, far less than the initial target of 3,000, and was then abandoned. Political participation and engagement of the poor has remained rare, while in many countries the internet has disproportionately benefited political elites and increased the governments’ capacity to influence social and political discourse. Digital technologies have sometimes increased voting overall, but this has not necessarily resulted in more informed or more representative voting. In the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, online voting increased voter turnout by 8 percentage points, but online voters were disproportionately wealthier and more educated (fi gure O.19). Even in developed countries, engaging citizens continues to be a challenge. Only a small, unrepresentative subset of the population participates, and it is often difficult to sustain citizen engagement. There is no agreement among social scientists on whether the internet disproportionately empowers citizens or political elites, whether it increases polarization, or whether it deepens or weakens social capital, in some cases even facilitating organized violence. The use of technology in governments tends to be successful when it addresses fairly straightforward information and monitoring problems. For more demanding challenges, such as better management of providers or giving citizens

There is no agreement among social scientists on whether the internet disproportionately empowers citizens or political elites, whether it increases polarization, or whether it deepens or weakens social capital, in some cases even facilitating organized violence. The use of technology in governments tends to be successful when it addresses fairly straightforward information and monitoring problems. For more demanding challenges, such as better management of providers or giving citizens greater voice, technology helps only when governments are already responsive. The internet will thus often reinforce rather than replace existing accountability relationships between governments and citizens, including giving governments more capacity for surveillance and control (box O.6). Closing the gap between changing technology and unchanging institutions will require initiatives that strengthen the transparency and accountability of governments….(More)”

When Does ICT-Enabled Citizen Voice Lead to Government Responsiveness?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tiago Peixoto and Jonathan Fox (Worldbank): “This paper reviews evidence on the use of 23 information and communication technology (ICT) platforms to project citizen voice to improve public service delivery. This meta-analysis focuses on empirical studies of initiatives in the global South, highlighting both citizen uptake (‘yelp’) and the degree to which public service providers respond to expressions of citizen voice (‘teeth’). The conceptual framework further distinguishes between two trajectories for ICT-enabled citizen voice: Upwards accountability occurs when users provide feedback directly to decision-makers in real time, allowing policy-makers and program managers to identify and address service delivery problems – but at their discretion. Downwards accountability, in contrast, occurs either through real time user feedback or less immediate forms of collective civic action that publicly call on service providers to become more accountable and depends less exclusively on decision- makers’ discretion about whether or not to act on the information provided. This distinction between the ways in which ICT platforms mediate the relationship between citizens and service providers allows for a precise analytical focus on how different dimensions of such platforms contribute to public sector responsiveness. These cases suggest that while ICT platforms have been relevant in increasing policymakers’ and senior managers’ capacity to respond, most of them have yet to influence their willingness to do so….(More)”

Smart Devolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by Eddie Copeland and Cameron Scott at Policy Exchange: “Elected mayors should be required to set up an Office of Data Analytics comprising of small, expert teams tasked with using public and privately held data to create smarter and more productive cities.

A new paper, Smart Devolution, by leading think tank Policy Exchange says that most cities have vast quantities of data that if accessed and used effectively could help improve public services, optimise transport routes, support the growth of small businesses and even prevent cycling accidents.

The report highlights how every UK city should use the additional powers they receive from Whitehall to replicate New York by employing a small team of data experts to collect and collate information from a range of sources, including councils, emergency services, voluntary organisations, mobile phone networks and payment systems.

The data teams will provide city mayors with a great opportunity to break down the silos that exist between local authorities and public sector bodies when it comes to unlocking information that could save money and improve the standard of living for the public.

Examples of how a better use of data could make our cities smarter include:

  • Preventing cycling accidents: HGVs travelling through city centres should be required to share their GPS data with the city mayor’s Office for Data Analytics. Combining HGV routes with data from cyclists obtained by their mobile phone signals could provide real time information showing the most common routes shared by large lorries and cyclists. City leaders could then put in place evidence based policy responses, for example, prioritising spending on new bike lanes or updating cyclists via an app of the city’s most dangerous routes.
  • Spending smarter: cities could save and residents benefit from the analysis of  anonymised spend and travel information to understand where investment and services are needed based on real consumer decisions. Locating schools, transport links and housing when and where it is needed. This also applies to business investment with data being harnessed to identify fruitful locations….(More)”

Human-machine superintelligence pegged as key to solving global problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ravi Mandalia at Dispatch Tribunal: “Global complex problems such as climate change and geopolitical conflicts need a new approach if we want to solve them and researchers have suggested that human-machine super intelligence could be the key.

These so called ‘wicked’ problems are some of the most dire ones that need our immediate attention and researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University have presented their new vision of human computation that could help solve these problems in an article published in the journal Science.

Scientists behind the article have cited how power of human computation has helped push the traditional limits to new heights – something that was not achievable until now. Humans are still ahead of machines at great many things – cognitive abilities is one the key areas – but if their powers are combined with those of machines, the result would be multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

Researchers have already proved that micro-tasking has helped with some complex problems including build the world’s most complete map of human retinal neurons; however, this approach isn’t always viable to solve much more complex problems of today and entirely new and innovative approach is required to solve “wicked problems” – those that involve many interacting systems that are constantly changing, and whose solutions have unforeseen consequences (e.g., corruption resulting from financial aid given in response to a natural disaster).

Recently developed human computation technologies that provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs could enable creation of more flexible collaborative environments and such setups are more apt for addressing the most challenging issues.

This idea is already taking shape in several human computation projects, including YardMap.org, which was launched by the Cornell in 2012 to map global conservation efforts one parcel at a time.

“By sharing and observing practices in a map-based social network, people can begin to relate their individual efforts to the global conservation potential of living and working landscapes,” says Janis Dickinson, Professor and Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

YardMap allows participants to interact and build on each other’s work – something that crowdsourcing alone cannot achieve. The project serves as an important model for how such bottom-up, socially networked systems can bring about scalable changes how we manage residential landscapes.

HCI has recently set out to use crowd-power to accelerate Cornell-based Alzheimer’s disease research. WeCureAlz.com combines two successful microtasking systems into an interactive analytic pipeline that builds blood flow models of mouse brains. The stardust@home system, which was used to search for comet dust in one million images of aerogel, is being adapted to identify stalled blood vessels, which will then be pinpointed in the brain by a modified version of the EyeWire system….(More)”