Book Review by Tim Wu in the New York Times: “Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker who has described her work as the “steamed broccoli” in our cultural diet. Her last film, “Examined Life,” depicted philosophers walking around and talking about their ideas. She’s the kind of creative person who was supposed to benefit when the Internet revolution collapsed old media hierarchies. But two decades since that revolution began, she’s not impressed: “We are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty,” Taylor writes. “Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs.” Instead of serving as the great equalizer, the web has created an abhorrent cultural feudalism. The creative masses connect, create and labor, while Google, Facebook and Amazon collect the cash.
Taylor’s thesis is simply stated. The pre-Internet cultural industry, populated mainly by exploitative conglomerates, was far from perfect, but at least the ancien régime felt some need to cultivate cultural institutions, and to pay for talent at all levels. Along came the web, which swept away hierarchies — as well as paychecks, leaving behind creators of all kinds only the chance to be fleetingly “Internet famous.” And anyhow, she says, the web never really threatened to overthrow the old media’s upper echelons, whether defined as superstars, like Beyoncé, big broadcast television shows or Hollywood studios. Instead, it was the cultural industry’s middle classes that have been wiped out and replaced by new cultural plantations ruled over by the West Coast aggregators.
It is hard to know if the title, “The People’s Platform,” is aspirational or sarcastic, since Taylor believes the classless aura of the web masks an unfair power structure. “Open systems can be starkly inegalitarian,” she says, arguing that the web is afflicted by what the feminist scholar Jo Freeman termed a “tyranny of structurelessness.” Because there is supposedly no hierarchy, elites can happily deny their own existence. (“We just run a platform.”) But the effects are real: The web has reduced professional creators to begging for scraps of attention from a spoiled public, and forced creators to be their own brand.
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The tech industry might be tempted to dismiss Taylor’s arguments as merely a version of typewriter manufacturers’ complaints circa 1984, but that would be a mistake. “The People’s Platform” should be taken as a challenge by the new media that have long claimed to be improving on the old order. Can they prove they are capable of supporting a sustainable cultural ecosystem, in a way that goes beyond just hosting parties at the Sundance Film Festival?
We see some of this in the tech firms that have begun to pay for original content, as with Netflix’s investments in projects like “Orange Is the New Black.” It’s also worth pointing out that the support of culture is actually pretty cheap. Consider the nonprofit ProPublica, which employs investigative journalists, and has already won two Pulitzers, all on a budget of just over $10 million a year. That kind of money is a rounding error for much of Silicon Valley, where losing billions on bad acquisitions is routinely defended as “strategic.” If Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon truly believe they’re better than the old guard, let’s see it.”
See : THE PEOPLE’S PLATFORM. Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age By Astra Taylor, 276 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company.
Indonesian techies crowdsource election results
The Indonesian techies, who work for multinational companies, were spurred into action after both presidential candidates claimed victory and accused each other of trying to rig the convoluted counting process, raising fears that the country’s young democracy was under threat.
Mr Najib and two friends took advantage of the decision by the national election commission (KPU) to upload the individual results from Indonesia’s 480,000 polling stations to its website for the first time, in an attempt to counter widespread fears about electoral fraud.
The three Indonesians scraped the voting data from the KPU website on to a database and then recruited 700 friends and acquaintances through Facebook to type in the results and check them. They uploaded the data to a website called kawalpemilu.org, which means “guard the election” in Indonesian.
Throughout the process, Mr Najib said he had to fend off hacking attacks, forcing him to shift data storage to a cloud-based service. The whole exercise cost $10 for a domain name and $0.10 for the data storage….”
Can Experts Solve Poverty?
The #GlobalPOV Project: “We all have experts in our lives. Computer experts, plumbing experts, legal experts — you name the problem, and there is someone out there who specializes in addressing that problem. Whether it’s a broken car, a computer glitch, or even a broken heart – call the expert, they’ll fix us right up.
So who do we call when society is broken? Who do we call when over a billion people live in poverty, unable to meet the basic requirements to sustain their lives? Or when the wealthiest 2% of the world owns 50% of the world’s assets?
We call experts, of course: poverty experts. But — who is a poverty expert, and can experts solve poverty?
VIDEO:
The #GlobalPOV Project is a program of the Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) Minor. Based at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, University of California, Berkeley, the GPP Minor creates new ways of thinking about poverty, inequality and undertaking poverty action.
Website: http://blumcenter.berkeley.edu/globalpov“
The Skeleton Crew
Book Review by Edward Jay Epstein in the Wall Street Journal: “…Even in an age when we are tracked electronically by our phone companies at every single moment, about 4,000 unidentified corpses turn up in the U.S. every year, of which about half have been murdered. In 2007 no fewer than 13,500 sets of unidentified human remains were languishing in the evidence rooms of medical examiners, according to an analysis published in the National Institute of Justice Journal.
In her brilliant book “The Skeleton Crew,” Deborah Halber explains why local law enforcement often fails to investigate such deaths:”Unidentified corpses are like obtuse, financially strapped houseguests: they turn up uninvited, take up space reserved for more obliging visitors, require care and attention, and then, when you are ready for them to move on, they don’t have anywhere to go.” The result is that many of these remains are consigned to oblivion.
While the population of the anonymous dead receives only scant attention from the police or the media, it has given rise to a macabre subculture of Internet sleuthing. Ms. Halber chronicles with lucidity and wit how amateur investigators troll websites, such as the Doe Network, Official Cold Case Investigations and Websleuths Crime Sleuthing Community, and check online databases looking for matches between the reported missing and the unidentified dead. It is a grisly pursuit involving linking the images of dead bodies to the descriptions posted by people trying to find someone.
Ms. Halber devotes most of “The Skeleton Crew” to describing a handful of cases that have given rise to this bizarre avocation….”
Countable Wants To Make Politics A ‘Continual Conversation’
Cat Zakrzewski in Techcrunch: “Telling your senator how to vote is as easy as “liking” a Facebook picture, thanks to a new app from the creators of TV streaming service SideReel.
Countable, available for iOS and coming to Android soon, presents a succinct summary of each piece of legislation Congress is considering, along with a short one-sentence argument in favor of the bill or against it. You are then able to vote “yay” or “nay.” When you are logged in through Facebook, Countable can automatically generate a message and send it to your representatives based on your location.
Countable also keeps track of how the lawmakers vote and then informs you how your representatives’ votes stack up to your own, generating “compatibility rankings.”
Co-founders Bart Myers and Peter Arzhintar came up with Countable when trying to figure out their next move after selling SideReel in 2011. Myers said they wanted to move away from TV and into something Myers said was more meaningful. As they brainstormed ideas, they kept coming back to one.
“We kept coming back to the disconnect that the American people feel with their representatives, that disconnect that we felt ourselves,” Myers says. “We decided to take a new bent at it … create a product where … what my representatives are doing can basically be made bite-sized, pushed to me like updates from our friends pushed through Facebook.”
And browsing the app’s colorful interface feels a lot more like swiping through friends’ pictures than wading through pages of lengthy bills. Countable’s team, which includes writers and consultants with experience in both the Democratic and Republican parties, has prepared short summaries and explanations that are easy to understand. Myers says the app allows users to go as deep into an issue as they want, linking to media coverage and the full text of the bill…”
European Commission encourages re-use of public sector data
Press Release: “Today, the European Commission is publishing guidelines to help Member States benefit from the revised Directive on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive). These guidelines explain for example how to give access to weather data, traffic data, property asset data and maps. Open data can be used as the basis for innovative value-added services and products, such as mobile apps, which encourage investment in data-driven sectors. The guidelines published today are based on a detailed consultation and cover issues such as:
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Licencing: guidelines on when public bodies can allow the re-use of documents without conditions or licences; gives conditions under which the re-use of personal data is possible. For example:
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Public sector bodies should not impose licences when a simple notice is sufficient;
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Open licences available on the web, such as several “Creative Commons” licences can facilitate the re-use of public sector data without the need to develop custom-made licences;
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Attribution requirement is sufficient in most cases of PSI re-use.
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Datasets: presents five thematic dataset categories that businesses and other potential re-users are mostly interested in and could thus be given priority for being made available for re-use. For example:
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Postcodes, national and local maps;
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Weather, land and water quality, energy consumption, emission levels and other environmental and earth data;
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Transport data: public transport timetables, road works, traffic information;
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Statistics: GDP, age, health, unemployment, income, education etc.;
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Company and business registers.
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Cost: gives an overview on how public sector bodies, including libraries, museums and archives, should calculate the amount they should charge re-users for data. For example:
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Where digital documents are downloaded electronically a no‑cost policy is recommended;
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For cost-recovery charging, any income generated in the process of collecting or producing documents, e.g. from registration fees or taxes, should be subtracted from the total costs incurred so as to establish the ‘net cost’ of collection, production, reproduction and dissemination.
European Commission Vice President @NeelieKroesEU said: “This guidance will help all of us benefit from the wealth of information public bodies hold. Opening and re-using this data will lead to many new businesses and convenient services.“
An independent report carried out by the consultants McKinsey in 2013 claimed that open data re-use could boost the global economy hugely; and a 2013 Spanish studyfound that commercial re-users in Spain could employ around 10,000 people and reach a business volume of €900 million….”
See also Speech by Neelie Kroes: Embracing the open opportunity
Neuroeconomics, Judgment, and Decision Making
New edited book by Evan A. Wilhelms, and Valerie F. Reyna: “This volume explores how and why people make judgments and decisions that have economic consequences, and what the implications are for human well-being. It provides an integrated review of the latest research from many different disciplines, including social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; neuroscience and neurobiology; and economics and business.
The book takes a broad perspective and is written in an accessible way so as to reach a wide audience of advanced students and researchers interested in behavioral economics and related areas. This includes neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, clinicians, psychologists (developmental, social, and cognitive), economists and other social scientists; legal scholars and criminologists; professionals in public health and medicine; educators; evidence-based practitioners; and policy-makers.”
The Quiet Movement to Make Government Fail Less Often
in The New York Times: “If you wanted to bestow the grandiose title of “most successful organization in modern history,” you would struggle to find a more obviously worthy nominee than the federal government of the United States.
In its earliest stirrings, it established a lasting and influential democracy. Since then, it has helped defeat totalitarianism (more than once), established the world’s currency of choice, sent men to the moon, built the Internet, nurtured the world’s largest economy, financed medical research that saved millions of lives and welcomed eager immigrants from around the world.
Of course, most Americans don’t think of their government as particularly successful. Only 19 percent say they trust the government to do the right thing most of the time, according to Gallup. Some of this mistrust reflects a healthy skepticism that Americans have always had toward centralized authority. And the disappointing economic growth of recent decades has made Americans less enamored of nearly every national institution.
But much of the mistrust really does reflect the federal government’s frequent failures – and progressives in particular will need to grapple with these failures if they want to persuade Americans to support an active government.
When the federal government is good, it’s very, very good. When it’s bad (or at least deeply inefficient), it’s the norm.
The evidence is abundant. Of the 11 large programs for low- and moderate-income people that have been subject to rigorous, randomized evaluation, only one or two show strong evidence of improving most beneficiaries’ lives. “Less than 1 percent of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence of cost-effectiveness,” writes Peter Schuck, a Yale law professor, in his new book, “Why Government Fails So Often,” a sweeping history of policy disappointments.
As Mr. Schuck puts it, “the government has largely ignored the ‘moneyball’ revolution in which private-sector decisions are increasingly based on hard data.”
And yet there is some good news in this area, too. The explosion of available data has made evaluating success – in the government and the private sector – easier and less expensive than it used to be. At the same time, a generation of data-savvy policy makers and researchers has entered government and begun pushing it to do better. They have built on earlier efforts by the Bush and Clinton administrations.
The result is a flowering of experiments to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
New York City, Salt Lake City, New York State and Massachusetts have all begun programs to link funding for programs to their success: The more effective they are, the more money they and their backers receive. The programs span child care, job training and juvenile recidivism.
The approach is known as “pay for success,” and it’s likely to spread to Cleveland, Denver and California soon. David Cameron’s conservative government in Britain is also using it. The Obama administration likes the idea, and two House members – Todd Young, an Indiana Republican, and John Delaney, a Maryland Democrat – have introduced a modest bill to pay for a version known as “social impact bonds.”
The White House is also pushing for an expansion of randomized controlled trials to evaluate government programs. Such trials, Mr. Schuck notes, are “the gold standard” for any kind of evaluation. Using science as a model, researchers randomly select some people to enroll in a government program and others not to enroll. The researchers then study the outcomes of the two groups….”
France: Rapport de la Commission Open Data en santé
Ce rapport, remis le 9 juillet 2014 à Marisol Touraine, Ministre des Affaires sociales et de la Santé, retrace les travaux et discussions de la Commission :
- Un panorama de l’existant (partie 1) : définitions des concepts, état du droit, présentation de la gouvernance, présentation de l’accès aux données du SNIIRAM et du PMSI, cartographie des données de santé et enseignements tirés des expériences étrangères ;
- Les enjeux pour l’avenir (partie 2) ;
- Les actions à mener (partie 3) : données à ouvrir en open data, orientations en matière de données réidentifiantes, données relatives aux professionnels et aux établissements.
Ce rapport a été adopté consensuellement par l’ensemble des membres de la commission, qui partagent des attentes communes et fortes.”
Rapport final commission open data (pdf – 1 Mo) – [09/07/2014] – [MAJ : 09/07/2014]
Facebook Nation
Essay by Leonidas Donskis in the Hedgehog Review: “A German anthropologist who lived in England and was studying the society and culture of Kosovo Albanians once said something that lodged firmly in my memory: Whenever she wanted to make an interesting thought or position available to Albanian students or intellectuals, she simply published it on her Facebook page. “You don’t have to add a comment or explain anything,” she said with a smile. “The posting of it on Facebook is a sure sign that the message is a good one.”
She promised to perform this operation with a few thoughts of mine she had heard and liked in one of my lectures. When she noticed my surprise, she cheerfully explained that the Albanians considers themselves such a particularly dispersed lot, such a diaspora nation par excellence, that they are inclined to view themselves as a coherent collectivity only on Facebook. Without it, their friends, relatives, and family members living in Albania and elsewhere would have no tangible ties to one another.
This made me think that today’s version of Ahasver, the Wandering Jew of legend, is a Facebook user, and that Facebook—not the physical world—is where that displaced person wanders.
The Facebook Nation is host to an ongoing referendum in which its denizens cast their ballots daily, hourly, even minute by minute. Let’s make no mistake about what it means to be in this peculiar digital republic. For a lover, as Milan Kundera put it, to be is to live in the eye of one’s beloved. And what is it to be for people who don’t know where they are or where they want to be or even if they exist at all? Quite simply, it is to be liked on Facebook.
Facebook is where everyone becomes his or her own journalist, a situation that has forced real journalists to become Facebooking and tweeting simulacra of their former selves, or else to abandon journalism for other pursuits, whether literary or academic or something altogether different. Évariste Gamelin, the protagonist of Anatole France’s 1912 novel Les dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Thirsty), is a painter, a passionate disciple of Jacques Louis David, and a young fanatic who doesn’t know whether he is fatally in love with his charming girlfriend or with his mother, the Revolution. He believes that after the Revolution every citizen will become a judge of himself and of the Republic. But modernity plays a joke on him: It does not fulfill this promise. It had no intention of doing so. Instead of turning into judges, we all became journalists…”