New Book by Richard Rottenburg et al: “The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance. (More)”
A new journal wants to publish your research ideas
at ScienceInsider: “Do you have a great idea for a study that you want to share with the world? A new journal will gladly publish it. Research Ideas and Outcomes(RIO) will also publish papers on your methods, workflows, data, reports, and software—in short, “all outputs of the research cycle.” RIO, an open-access (OA) journal, was officially launched today and will start accepting submissions in November.
“We’re interested in making the full process of science open,” says RIO founding editor Ross Mounce, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. Many good research proposals fall by the wayside because funding agencies have limited budgets, Mounce says; RIO is a way to give them another chance. Mounce hopes that funders will use the journal to spot interesting new projects.
Publishing proposals can also help create links between research teams, Mounce says. “Let’s say you’re going to Madagascar for 6 months to sample turtle DNA,” he suggests. ”If you can let other researchers know ahead of time, you can agree to do things together.”
RIO‘s idea to publish research proposals is “exactly what we need if we really want to have open science,” says Iryna Kuchma, the OA program manager at the nonprofit organization Electronic Information for Libraries in Rome. Pensoft, the publishing company behind RIO, is a “strong open-access publishing venue” that has proven its worth with more than a dozen journals in the biodiversity field, Kuchma says.
The big question is, of course: Will researchers want to share promising ideas, at the risk that rivals run with them?…(More)”
Give me location data, and I shall move the world
Marta Poblet at the Conversation: “Behind the success of the new wave of location based mobile apps taking hold around the world is digital mapping. Location data is core to popular ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, but also to companies such as Amazon or Domino’s Pizza, which are testing drones for faster deliveries.
Last year, German delivery firm DHL launched its first “parcelcopter” to send medication to the island of Juist in the Northern Sea. In the humanitarian domain, drones are also being tested for disaster relief operations.
Better maps can help app-led companies gain a competitive edge, but it’s hard to produce them at a global scale. …
A flagship base map for the past ten years has been OpenStreetMap (OSM), also known as the “Wikipedia of mapping”. With more than two million registered users, OpenStreetMap aims to create a free map of the world. OSM volunteers have been particularly active in mapping disaster-affected areas such as Haiti, the Philippines or Nepal. A recent study reports how humanitarian response has been a driver of OSM’s evolution, “in part because open data and participatory ideals align with humanitarian work, but also because disasters are catalysts for organizational innovation”….
Intense competition for digital maps also flags the start of the self-driving car race. Google is already testing its prototypes outside Silicon Valley and Apple has been rumoured to work on a secret car project code named Titan.
Uber has partnered with Carnegie Mellon and Arizona Universities to work on vehicle safety and cheaper laser mapping systems. Tesla is also planning to make its electric cars self-driving.
Legal and ethical challenges are not to be underestimated either. Most countries impose strict limits on testing self-driving cars on public roads. Similar limitations apply to the use of civilian drones. And the ethics of fully autonomous cars is still in its infancy. Autonomous cars probably won’t be caught texting, but they will still be confronted with tough decisions when trying to avoid potential accidents. Current research engages engineers and philosophers to work on how to assist cars when making split-second decisions that can raise ethical dilemmas….(More)”
Memex Human Trafficking
“MEMEX is a DARPA program that explores how next generation search and extraction systems can help with real-world use cases. The initial application is the fight against human trafficking. In this application, the input is a portion of the public and dark web in which human traffickers are likely to (surreptitiously) post supply and demand information about illegal labor, sex workers, and more. DeepDive processes such documents to extract evidential data, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, job types, job requirements, information about rates of service, etc. Some of these data items are difficult for trained human annotators to accurately extract and have never been previously available, but DeepDive-based systems have high accuracy (Precision and Recall in the 90s, which may exceed non-experts). Together with provenance information, such structured, evidential data are then passed on to both other collaborators on the MEMEX program as well as law enforcement for analysis and consumption in operational applications. MEMEX has been featured extensively in the media and is supporting actual investigations. For example, every human trafficking investigation pursued by the Human Trafficking Response Unity in New York City involves MEMEX. DeepDive is the main extracted data provider for MEMEX. See also, 60 minutes, Scientific American, Wall St. Journal, BBC, and Wired. It is supporting actual investigations and perhaps new usecases in the war on terror.
Here is a detailed description of DeepDive’s role in MEMEX.”
‘Airbnb for refugees’ group overwhelmed by offers of help
Jessica Elgot at The Guardian: “A German group which matchmakes citizens willing to share their homes with refugees said it had been overwhelmed by offers of support, with plans in the works for similar schemes in other European countries.
The Berlin-based Refugees Welcome, which has been described as an “Airbnb for refugees”, has helped people fleeing from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria.
More than 780 Germans have signed up to the Refugees Welcome website and 26 people have been placed in private homes so far. Two of the site’s founders, Jonas Kakoschke, 31, and Mareike Geiling, 28, live with 39-year-old Bakari, a refugee from Mali, whom they are helping with German classes while he waits for a work permit.
A spokesman said the project’s growing success has now led to offers of help to set up similar schemes in other EU countries, including Greece, Portugal and the UK, with a comparable project in Austria already up and running since January.
Over the weekend, thousands of Icelanders offered to accommodate Syrian refugees in their own homes in an open letter to the government about the migration crisis….(More)”
When Big Data Becomes Bad Data
Lauren Kirchner at ProPublica: “A recent ProPublica analysis of The Princeton Review’s prices for online SAT tutoring shows that customers in areas with a high density of Asian residents are often charged more. When presented with this finding, The Princeton Review called it an “incidental” result of its geographic pricing scheme. The case illustrates how even a seemingly neutral price model could potentially lead to inadvertent bias — bias that’s hard for consumers to detect and even harder to challenge or prove.
Over the past several decades, an important tool for assessing and addressing discrimination has been the “disparate impact” theory. Attorneys have used this idea to successfully challenge policies that have a discriminatory effect on certain groups of people, whether or not the entity that crafted the policy was motivated by an intent to discriminate. It’s been deployed in lawsuits involving employment decisions, housing and credit. Going forward, the question is whether the theory can be applied to bias that results from new technologies that use algorithms….(More)”
Hacking the Obesity Epidemic
Press Release: “The de Beaumont Foundation, in collaboration with the Health Data Consortium and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is pleased to announce the winners of the U.S. Obesity Data Challenge at NHS England’s Health and Care Innovation Expo 2015. The challenge is part of a joint U.S.-England initiative designed to harness the power of health data in tackling the epidemic of adult obesity in both countries….
The winning entries are:
- Healthdata+Obesity (1st place) — This simple, curated dashboard helps health officials tell a powerful story about the root causes of obesity. The dashboard provides customizable data visualizations at the national, state, and local level as well as an interactive map, national benchmarks, and written content to contextualize the data. Developed by HealthData+, a partnership between the Public Health Institute and LiveStories.
- The Neighborhood Map of U.S. Obesity (2nd Place) — This highly-detailed, interactive mapincorporates obesity data with a GIS database to provide a localized, high-resolution visualization of the prevalence of obesity. Additional data sources can also be added to the map to allow researchers and health officials greater flexibility in customizing the map to support analysis and decision-making on a community level. Developed by RTI International.
- The Health Demographic Analysis Tool – Visualizing The Cross-Sector Relationship Between Obesity And Social Determinants (3rd Place) — This interactive database maps the relationship between the social determinants of health (factors like educational attainment, income, and lifestyle choices) and health outcomes in order to illustrate what plays a role in community health. The powerful images generated by this tool provide compelling material for new health interventions as well as a way to look retrospectively at the impact of existing public health campaigns. Developed by GeoHealth Innovations andCommunity Health Solutions….(More)
Design Thinking Comes of Age
Jon Kolko at HBR: “There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work.
This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business. That complexity takes many forms. Sometimes software is at the center of a product and needs to be integrated with hardware (itself a complex task) and made intuitive and simple from the user’s point of view (another difficult challenge). Sometimes the problem being tackled is itself multi-faceted: Think about how much tougher it is to reinvent a health care delivery system than to design a shoe. And sometimes the business environment is so volatile that a company must experiment with multiple paths in order to survive.
I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.
A set of principles collectively known as design thinking—empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure chief among them—is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture….
Design thinking, first used to make physical objects, is increasingly being applied to complex, intangible issues, such as how a customer experiences a service. Regardless of the context, design thinkers tend to use physical models, also known as design artifacts, to explore, define, and communicate. Those models—primarily diagrams and sketches—supplement and in some cases replace the spreadsheets, specifications, and other documents that have come to define the traditional organizational environment. They add a fluid dimension to the exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear thought when tackling nonlinear problems.
For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Center for Innovation has used a design artifact called a customer journey map to understand veterans’ emotional highs and lows in their interactions with the VA….
In design-centric organizations, you’ll typically see prototypes of new ideas, new products, and new services scattered throughout offices and meeting rooms. Whereas diagrams such as customer journey maps explore the problem space, prototypes explore the solution space. They may be digital, physical, or diagrammatic, but in all cases they are a way to communicate ideas. The habit of publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an open-minded culture, one that values exploration and experimentation over rule following….(More)”
Global platform launched to promote positive plagiarism among foundations
Ellie Ward at PioneersPost: “A group of leading foundations and NGOs, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Oxfam and the Skoll Foundation have launched a peer-to-peer platform to make solving pressing social issues easier.
Sphaera (pronounced s’faira) is a peer-to-peer online platform that will collate the knowledge of funders and practitioners working to solve social and environmental issues around the world.
Organisations will share their evidence-based solutions and research within the portal, which will then repurpose the information into tools, processes and frameworks that can be used by others. In theory a solution that helps fishermen log their catch could be repurposed for healthcare workers to track and improve treatment of contagious disease. …”Sphaera makes it easy to discover, share and remix solutions. We put the collective, practical knowledge of what works – in health, finance, conservation, education, in every sector relevant to wellbeing – at the fingertips of practitioners everywhere. Our hope is that together we are better, faster, and more effective in tackling the urgent problems of our time.”
Arthur Wood, founding partner of Total Impact Capital and a global leader in social finance, said: “With the birth of cloud technology we have seen a plethora of models changing the way we use, share, purchase and allocate resources. From AirBNB to Uber, folks are now asking why this trend has had zero impact in Philanthropy.”
Wood explained that Sphaera is “designed to liberate the silos of individual project knowledge and to leverage that expertise and knowledge to create scale and collaboration across the philanthropic landscape… Or simply stated, how can a great idea in one stovepipe be shared to the benefit of all?” (More)“
A data revolution is underway. Will NGOs miss the boat?
Opinion by Sophia Ayele at Oxfam: “The data revolution has arrived. ….The UN has even launched a Data Revolution Group (to ensure that the revolution penetrates into international development). The Group’s 2014 report suggests that harnessing the power of newly available data could ultimately lead to, “more empowered people, better policies, better decisions and greater participation and accountability, leading to better outcomes for people and the planet.”
But where do NGOs fit in?
NGOs are generating dozens (if not hundreds) of datasets every year. Over the last two decades, NGO have been collecting increasing amounts of research and evaluation data, largely driven by donor demands for more rigorous evaluations of programs. The quality and efficiency of data collection has also been enhanced by mobile data collection. However, a quick scan of UK development NGOs reveals that few, if any, are sharing the data that they collect. This means that NGOs are generating dozens (if not hundreds) of datasets every year that aren’t being fully exploited and analysed. Working on tight budgets, with limited capacity, it’s not surprising that NGOs often shy away from sharing data without a clear mandate.
But change is in the air. Several donors have begun requiring NGOs to publicise data and others appear to be moving in that direction. Last year, USAID launched its Open Data Policy which requires that grantees “submit any dataset created or collected with USAID funding…” Not only does USAID stipulate this requirement, it also hosts this data on its Development Data Library (DDL) and provides guidance on anonymisation to depositors. Similarly, Gates Foundation’s 2015 Open Access Policy stipulates that, “Data underlying published research results will be accessible and open immediately.” However, they are allowing a two-year transition period…..Here at Oxfam, we have been exploring ways to begin sharing research and evaluation data. We aren’t being required to do this – yet – but, we realise that the data that we collect is a public good with the potential to improve lives through more effective development programmes and to raise the voices of those with whom we work. Moreover, organizations like Oxfam can play a crucial role in highlighting issues facing women and other marginalized communities that aren’t always captured in national statistics. Sharing data is also good practice and would increase our transparency and accountability as an organization.
… the data that we collect is a public good with the potential to improve lives. However, Oxfam also bears a huge responsibility to protect the rights of the communities that we work with. This involves ensuring informed consent when gathering data, so that communities are fully aware that their data may be shared, and de-identifying data to a level where individuals and households cannot be easily identified.
As Oxfam has outlined in our, recently adopted, Responsible Data Policy,”Using data responsibly is not just an issue of technical security and encryption but also of safeguarding the rights of people to be counted and heard, ensuring their dignity, respect and privacy, enabling them to make an informed decision and protecting their right to not be put at risk… (More)”