New paper in Development Policy Review: “Analysis of the impact and effectiveness of Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation has been hampered by lack of systematic evidence and conceptual confusion about what kind of right it represents. This article discusses some of the main conceptual parameters of FOI theory, before reviewing the available evidence from a range of studies. It presents case studies of civil-society activism on FOI in India and South Africa to illustrate the extent to which access to information is having an impact, in particular on socio-economic conditions. After reviewing the range of approaches used, it concludes that the academic community and the FOI community of practice need to come together to devise robust and rigorous methodologies.”
The Power of Us: The Art and Science of Enlightened Citizen Engagement and Collective Action
New e-book: “Anita Estell has done it! She has published an easy-to-read handbook that promises to transform our individual and collective understanding of the federal government, how it really works, and most important, our own relevance in its operation. The Power of US is a must-have guide. It provides instruction for those possessing the audacity to seize the opportunities unfolding during one of the most transformational periods in American history. Estell shares insights, experiences, wisdom, and expertise, gained in more than twenty years of working at the federal level, in a way that not only invites and supports constructive engagement but also sheds light on the way forward. Estell provides an extraordinary panorama of information and instruction, melding a multidisciplinary suite of principles that underscore and bring texture to what Estell calls citizen-centricity, or citizen-centric engagement. The Power of US provides a profoundly creative approach relevant to policymakers and advocates. Estell’s treatment is a breath of fresh air in civic discourse—which can be stifled by stale approaches and potentially toxic hyperpartisan dynamics. In The Power of US, Estell establishes herself as a revolutionary thinker exhibiting the vision, knowledge, and personal power to move the compass of individual hope in the direction of collective freedom.”
An Inquiry into the Dynamics of Government Secrecy
New paper by Steven Aftergood in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 2013): “This Article reviews selected aspects of secrecy policy in the Obama Administration to better comprehend the dynamics of official secrecy, particularly in the national security realm. An understanding emerges: secrecy policy is founded on a set of principles so broadly conceived that they do not provide unequivocal guidance to government officials who are responsible for deciding whether or not to classify particular topics. In the absence of such guidance, individual classification decisions are apt to be shaped by extraneous factors, including bureaucratic self-interest and public controversy. The lack of clear guidance has unwholesome implications for the scope and operation of the classification system, leading it to stray from its legitimate national security foundations. But an insight into the various drivers of classification policy also suggests new remedial approaches to curtail inappropriate secrecy.”
The World is a Natural Laboratory, and Social Media is the New Petri Dish
Perspective by Jean-Loup Rault et al in Ethology: “Many high-priority and high-interest species are challenging to study due to the difficulty in accessing animals and/or obtaining sufficient sample sizes. The recent explosion in technology, particularly social media and live webcams available on the Internet, provides new opportunities for behavioral scientists to collect data not just on our own species, as well as new resources for teaching and outreach. We discuss here the possibility of exploiting online media as a new source of behavioral data, which we termed ‘video mining’. This article proposes epidemiological and ethological field techniques to gather and screen online media as a data source on diverse taxa. This novel method provides access to a rich source of untapped knowledge, particularly to study the behavior of understudied species or sporadic behaviors, but also for teaching or monitoring animals in challenging settings.”
A much-maligned engine of innovation
Review by Martin Wolf of The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths, by Mariana Mazzucato, Anthem Press: “…what determines innovation? Conventional economics offers abstract models; conventional wisdom insists the answer lies with private entrepreneurship. In this brilliant book, Mariana Mazzucato, a Sussex university professor of economics who specialises in science and technology, argues that the former is useless and the latter incomplete. Yes, innovation depends on bold entrepreneurship. But the entity that takes the boldest risks and achieves the biggest breakthroughs is not the private sector; it is the much-maligned state…
Why is the state’s role so important? The answer lies in the huge uncertainties, time spans and costs associated with fundamental, science-based innovation. Private companies cannot and will not bear these costs, partly because they cannot be sure to reap the fruits and partly because these fruits lie so far in the future.
Indeed, the more competitive and finance-driven the economy, the less the private sector will be willing to bear such risks. Buying back shares is apparently a far more attractive way of using surplus cash than spending on fundamental innovation. The days of AT&T’s path-breaking Bell Labs are long gone. In any case, the private sector could not have created the internet or GPS. Only the US military had the resources to do so.
Arguably, the most important engines of innovation in the past five decades have been the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the NIH. Today, if the world is to make fundamental breakthroughs in energy technologies, states will play a big role. Indeed, the US government even helped drive the development of the hydraulic fracturing of shale rock.”
Empirically Informed Regulation
Paper by Cass Sunstein: “In recent years, social scientists have been incorporating empirical findings about human behavior into economic models. These findings offer important insights for thinking about regulation and its likely consequences. They also offer some suggestions about the appropriate design of effective, low-cost, choice-preserving approaches to regulatory problems, including disclosure requirements, default rules, and simplification. A general lesson is that small, inexpensive policy initiatives can have large and highly beneficial effects. In the United States, a large number of recent practices and reforms reflect an appreciation of this lesson. They also reflect an understanding of the need to ensure that regulations have strong empirical foundations, both through careful analysis of costs and benefits in advance and through retrospective review of what works and what does not.”
A Videogame That Recruits Players to Map the Brain
Wired: “I’m no neuroscientist, and yet, here I am at my computer attempting to reconstruct a neural circuit of a mouse’s retina. It’s not quite as difficult and definitely not as boring as it sounds. In fact, it’s actually pretty fun, which is a good thing considering I’m playing a videogame.
Called EyeWire, the browser-based game asks players to map the connections between retinal neurons by coloring in 3-D slices of the brain. Much like any other game out there, being good at EyeWire earns you points, but the difference is that the data you produce during gameplay doesn’t just get you on a leader board—it’s actually used by scientists to build a better picture of the human brain.
Created by neuroscientist Sebastian Seung’s lab at MIT, EyeWire basically gamifies the professional research Seung and his collaborators do on a daily basis. Seung is studying the connectome, the hyper-complex tangle of connections among neurons in the brain.”
The Shame Game: U.S. Department of Labor Smartphone App Will Allow Public to Effortlessly Scrutinize Business Employment Practices
Charles B. Palmer in National Law Review: “The United States Department of Labor (DOL) recently launched a contest to find a new smartphone app that will allow the general public to effortlessly search for and scrutinize businesses and employers that have faced DOL citations. Dubbed the DOL Fair Labor Data Challenge, the contest seeks app entries that integrate information from consumer ratings websites, location tracking services, DOL Wage & Hour Division (WHD) citation data, and Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) citation data, into one software platform. In addition, the contest also encourages app developers to include other features in their respective app entries, such as information from state health boards and various licensing agencies.
The DOL Fair Labor Data Challenge is part of the DOL’s plan to amplify its enforcement efforts through increased public awareness and ease of access to citation data. Consumers and job applicants will soon be able to search for and publicly shame employers that hold one or more citations in the DOL database, all by just using their smartphones.”
For OpenBlock, Big Improvements From Small Newsrooms
Ryan Thornburg at Ideas Lab: “A little more than five months after NBC News shut down its hyperlocal product, EveryBlock.com, the original open-source application has been resurrected in Columbia, Mo. But although both products were born of the same Django codebase and Knight Foundation funding, visitors to The Columbia Daily Tribune’s new Neighborhoods site will see a different emphasis and a new hope for a project that has slowed under the weight of government disability and technical complexity….The user interface is clean and smart, and the government data — which is the most difficult of any kind of data to mine — appears to be more current and complete than any OpenBlock installation has seen since the very early days before its code was made public.
That kind of commitment is needed for OpenBlock to succeed, because pulling digital records out of all but the very most efficient and transparent government agencies is a tremendous drag on the expense side of the news business. That difficulty, though, can also create an opportunity for outsized revenue.
Chris Gubbels, the Web developer who’s been overseeing the project for The Tribune, said that unlike many jurisdictions, Columbia’s police and fire data were “pretty simple” to pull into OpenBlock. The police even provided The Tribune with an RSS feed of geocoded 911 response calls.”
Big data, crowdsourcing and machine learning tackle Parkinson’s
Successful Workingplace: “Parkinson’s is a very tough disease to fight. People suffering from the disease often have significant tremors that keep them from being able to create accurate records of their daily challenges. Without this information, doctors are unable to fine tune drug dosages and other treatment regimens that can significantly improve the lives of sufferers.
It was a perfect catch-22 situation until recently, when the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced that LIONsolver, a company specializing in machine learning software, was able to differentiate Parkinson’s patients from healthy individuals and to also show the trend in symptoms of the disease over time.…
To set up the competition, the Foundation worked with Kaggle, an organization that specializes in crowdsourced big data analysis competitions. The use of crowdsourcing as a way to get to the heart of very difficult Big Data problems works by allowing people the world over from a myriad of backgrounds and with diverse experiences to devote time on personally chosen challenges where they can bring the most value. It’s a genius idea for bringing some of the scarcest resources together with the most intractable problems.”