Rob Stein at NPR: “People often talk about how their friends feel like family. Well, there’s some new research out that suggests there’s more to that than just a feeling. People appear to be more like their friends genetically than they are to strangers, the research found.
“The striking thing here is that friends are actually significantly more similar to one another than we were expecting,” says James Fowler, a professor of medical genetics at the University of California, San Diego, who conducted the study with Nicholas A. Christakis, a social scientist at Yale University.
In fact, the study in Monday’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins.
“It’s as if they shared a great- great- great-grandparent in common,” Fowler told Shots.
Some of the genes that friends were most likely to have in common involve smell. “We tend to smell things the same way that our friends do,” Fowler says. The study involved nearly 2,000 adults.
This suggests that as humans evolved, the ability to tolerate and be drawn to certain smells may have influenced where people hung out. Today we might call this the Starbucks effect.
“You may really love the smell of coffee. And you’re drawn to a place where other people have been drawn to who also love the smell of coffee,” Fowler says. “And so that might be the opportunity space for you to make friends. You’re all there together because you love coffee and you make friends because you all love coffee.”…”
Social Network Sites as a Mode to Collect Health Data: A Systematic Review
New paper by Fahdah Alshaikh, et al, in J Med Internet Research: “Background: To date, health research literature has focused on social network sites (SNS) either as tools to deliver health care, to study the effect of these networks on behavior, or to analyze Web health content. Less is known about the effectiveness of these sites as a method for collecting data for health research and the means to use such powerful tools in health research.
Objective: The objective of this study was to systematically review the available literature and explore the use of SNS as a mode of collecting data for health research. The review aims to answer four questions: Does health research employ SNS as method for collecting data? Is data quality affected by the mode of data collection? What types of participants were reached by SNS? What are the strengths and limitations of SNS?
Methods: The literature was reviewed systematically in March 2013 by searching the databases MEDLINE, Embase, and PsycINFO, using the Ovid and PubMed interface from 1996 to the third week of March 2013. The search results were examined by 2 reviewers, and exclusion, inclusion, and quality assessment were carried out based on a pre-set protocol.
Results: The inclusion criteria were met by 10 studies and results were analyzed descriptively to answer the review questions. There were four main results. (1) SNS have been used as a data collection tool by health researchers; all but 1 of the included studies were cross-sectional and quantitative. (2) Data quality indicators that were reported include response rate, cost, timeliness, missing data/completion rate, and validity. However, comparison was carried out only for response rate and cost as it was unclear how other reported indicators were measured. (3) The most targeted population were females and younger people. (4) All studies stated that SNS is an effective recruitment method but that it may introduce a sampling bias.
Conclusions: SNS has a role in health research, but we need to ascertain how to use it effectively without affecting the quality of research. The field of SNS is growing rapidly, and it is necessary to take advantage of the strengths of this tool and to avoid its limitations by effective research design. This review provides an important insight for scholars who plan to conduct research using SNS.”
i-teams
New Report and Site from NESTA: “Last year we were aware of the growing trend for governments to set up innovation teams, funds, and labs. Yet who are they? What do they do? And crucially, are they making any difference for their host and partner governments? Together Nesta and Bloomberg Philanthropies set out to answer these questions.
Drawing on an in-depth literature review, over 80 interviews, and surveys, i-teams tells the stories of 20 teams, units and funds, all are established by government, and all are charged with making innovation happen. The i-teams case studied are based in city, regional and national governments across six continents, and work across the spectrum of innovation – from focusing on incremental improvements to aiming for radical transformations.
The i-teams were all created in recognition that governments need dedicated structures, capabilities and space to allow innovation to happen. Beyond this, the i-teams work in different ways, drawing on a mix of methods, approaches, skills, resources, and tackling challenges as diverse as reducing murder rates to improving education attainment.
The i-teams report details the different ways in which these twenty i-teams operate, but to highlight a few:
- The Behavioural Insights Team designs trials to test policy ideas, and achieved government savings of around 22 times the cost of the team in the first two years of operation.
- MindLab is a Danish unit using human centred design as a way to identify problems and develop policy recommendations. One project helped businesses to find the right industry code for registrations and demonstrated a 21:1 return on investment in savings to government and businesses.
- New Orleans Innovation Delivery Team is based in city hall and is tasked with solving mayoral challenges. Their public safety efforts led to a 20% reduction in the number of murders in 2013 compared to the previous year.
- PS21 encourages staff to find better ways of improving Singaporean public services. An evaluation of PS21 estimated that over a year it generated 520,000 suggestions from staff, of which approximately 60 per cent were implemented, leading to savings of around £55 million.
Alongside the report we have launched theiteams.org a living map to keep track of i-teams developing and emerging around the world, and to create a network of global government innovators. As James Anderson from Bloomberg Philanthropies says, “There’s no reason for every government to start its innovation efforts from scratch.” There is much we can learn from what is underway, what’s working and what’s not, to ensure all i-teams are using the most cutting edge techniques, methods and approaches….”
Crowdsourcing Parking Lot Occupancy using a Mobile Phone Application
Paper by Davami, Erfan; Sukthankar, Gita available at ASE@360: “Participatory sensing is a specialized form of crowdsourcing for mobile devices in which the users act as sensors to report on local environmental conditions. • This poster describes the process of prototyping a mobile phone crowdsourcing app for monitoring parking availability on a large university campus. • We present a case study of how an agent-based urban model can be used to perform a sensitivity analysis of the comparative susceptibility of different data fusion paradigms to potentially troublesome user behaviors: 1. Poor user enrollment, 2. Infrequent usage, 3. A preponderance of untrustworthy users.”
The open data imperative
Paper by Geoffrey Boulton in Insights: the UKSG journal: “The information revolution of recent decades is a world historical event that is changing the lives of individuals, societies and economies and with major implications for science, research and learning. It offers profound opportunities to explore phenomena that were hitherto beyond our power to resolve, and at the same time is undermining the process whereby concurrent publication of scientific concept and evidence (data) permitted scrutiny, replication and refutation and that has been the bedrock of scientific progress and of ‘self-correction’ since the inception of the first scientific journals in the 17th century. Open publication, release and sharing of data are vital habits that need to be redefined and redeveloped for the modern age by the research community if it is to exploit technological opportunities, maintain self-correction and maximize the contribution of research to human understanding and welfare.”
How Citizen Scientists Are Using The Web to Track the Natural World
Yale Environment 360: “By making the recording and sharing of environmental data easier than ever, web-based technology has fostered the rapid growth of so-called citizen scientists — volunteers who collaborate with scientists to collect and interpret data. Numerous Internet-based projects now make use of citizen scientists to monitor environmental health and to track sensitive plant and wildlife populations. From counting butterflies, frogs, and bats across the globe, to piloting personal drones capable of high-definition infrared imaging, citizen scientists are playing a crucial role in collecting data that will help researchers understand the environment. Here is a sampling of some of these projects. ”
View the gallery.
To improve quality, value of patient data, get them involved, study says
at Vital Signs: “The key to the future use of patient-generated data is focusing on data that patients want to produce, own and use and making it easy for them to produce it.
At least, that’s the take of four co-authors from Duke University in an article in this month’s healthcare policy journal Health Affairs. The July issue is chockablock with articles on the many forms and uses of Big Data.
“We observe that the key to high-quality, patient-generated data is to have immediate and actionable data so that patients experience the importance of the data for their own care as well as research purposes,” the authors said in “Assessing the Value of Patient-Generated Data to Comparative Effectiveness Research.”
Patient-generated data, which the authors describe as patient-reported outcomes, or PRO will be “critical to developing the evidence base that informs decisions made by patients, providers and policymakers in pursuit of high-value medical care,” they predict.
“The easier it is for patients and clinicians to navigate (personal data) the more relevant that information will be to patient care, the more invested patients and clinics will be in contributing high-quality data, and the better the data in the big-data ecosystem will be,” they write.
“Analysis show that data quality improves over time and that the amount of missing data declines as patients experience the attention to their symptoms and actions that result from the information they provide,” the authors say…”
Online Tools Every Community Should Use
Courtney Subramanian at NationSwell: “Larger cities like Chicago, San Francisco and New York continue to innovate civic technology and bridge the divide between citizens and government, while this progress is leaving small communities behind.
Without digital tools, staff or infrastructure in place to bring basic services online, small local governments and their citizens are suffering from a digital divide. But one Silicon Valley mind is determined to break that barrier and help smaller cities understand how they can join the digital movement…any civic technology should include the following eight tools:
Bullets: Crime-related data that give residents a sense of how safety is handled in the city.
Examples: CrimeAround.Us, Crime in Chicago, Oakland Crimespotting
Bills: Providing citizens with more transparency around legislative data.
Examples: OpenGov’s AmericaDecoded, MySociety’s SayIt, Councilmatic
Budget: Making public finances and city spending available online.
Examples: OpenGov.com, OpenSpending, Look at Cook
Buses: Transportation tools to help residents with schedules, planning, etc.
Examples: OpenTripPlanner, OneBusAway
Data: Open, organized, municipal information.
Examples: Socrata, NuData, CKAN, OpenDataCatalog, Junar
411: An online information hotline used in the same regard as the phone version.
Examples: CityAnswers, MindMixer, OSQA
311: Non-emergency online assistance including reporting things like road repairs.
Examples: SeeClickFix, PublicStuff, Connected Bits, Service Tracker, Open311Mobile
211: A social services hotline for services including health, jobs training and housing.
Examples: Aunt Bertha, Purple Binder, Connect Chicago
“The opportunity is that we have the chance to take all of these components that are being built as open-source tools and turn them into companies that offer them to cities as hosted platforms,” Nemani told Next City. “Even a 10-person shop can put in a credit card number and pay a hundred dollars a month for one of these tools.”
While Nemani admits each city will be different — some places are too small for transportation components — working towards a template is critical to make civic technology accessible for everyone. But by focusing on these eight tools, any town is off to a great start….”
GitHub: A Swiss Army knife for open government
FCW: “Today, more than 300 government agencies are using the platform for public and private development. Cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco), states (New York, Washington, Utah) and countries (United Kingdom, Australia) are sharing code and paving a new road to civic collaboration….
Civic-focused organizations — such as the OpenGov Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and the Open Knowledge Foundation — are also actively involved with original projects on GitHub. Those projects include the OpenGov Foundation’s Madison document-editing tool touted by the likes of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN, which powers hundreds of government data platforms around the world.
According to GovCode, an aggregator of public government open-source projects hosted on GitHub, there have been hundreds of individual contributors and nearly 90,000 code commits, which involve making a set of tentative changes permanent.
The nitty-gritty
Getting started on GitHub is similar to the process for other social networking platforms. Users create individual accounts and can set up “organizations” for agencies or cities. They can then create repositories (or repos) to collaborate on projects through an individual or organizational account. Other developers or organizations can download repo code for reuse or repurpose it in their own repositories (called forking), and make it available to others to do the same.
Collaborative aspects of GitHub include pull requests that allow developers to submit and accept updates to repos that build on and grow an open-source project. There are wikis, gists (code snippet sharing) and issue tracking for bugs, feature requests, or general questions and answers.
GitHub provides free code hosting for all public repos. Upgrade offerings include personal and organizational plans based on the number of private repos. For organizations that want a self-hosted GitHub development environment, GitHub Enterprise, used by the likes of CFPB, allows for self-hosted, private repos behind a firewall.
GitHub’s core user interface can be unwelcoming or even intimidating to the nondeveloper, but GitHub’s Pages package offers Web-hosting features that include domain mapping and lightweight content management tools such as static site generator Jekyll and text editor Atom.
Notable government projects that use Pages are the White House’s Project Open Data, 18F’s /Developer Program, CFPB’s Open Tech website and New York’s Open Data Handbook. Indeed, Wired recently commented that the White House’s open-data GitHub efforts “could help fix government.”…
See also: GitHub for Government (GovLab)
Accessible Law for the Internet Age
AmericaDecoded: “America’s Laws Are the People’s Public Property. The State Decoded software provides you with a people-friendly way to access your local, state, and federal legal code.
Careful organization by article and section makes browsing a breeze.
A site-wide search allows you to find the laws you’re looking for by topic.
Scroll-over definitions translate legal jargon into common English.
Downloadable legal code lets you take the law into your own hands.
Best of all, everything on the site remains cost-and restriction-free.”