Collection

Evidence-Based Policy Mistakes

Curated on December 3, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kaushik Basu at Project Syndicate: “… it is important to recognize that data alone are not enough to determine future expectations or policies. While there is certainly value in collecting data (via, for example, randomized control trials), there is also a need for deductive and inductive reasoning, guided by common sense – and not just on the part of experts. By dismissing the views and opinions of ordinary people, economists may miss out on crucial insights.

People’s everyday experiences provide huge amounts of potentially useful information. While a common-sense approach based on individual experience is not the most “scientific,” it should not be dismissed out of hand. A meteorologist might detect a coming storm by plugging data from myriad sources – atmospheric sensors, weather balloons, radar, and satellites – into complex computer models. But that doesn’t mean that the sight of gathering clouds in the sky is not also a legitimate sign that one might need an umbrella – even if the weather forecast promises sunshine.

Intuition and common sense have been critical to our evolution. After all, had humans not been able to draw reasonably accurate conclusions about the world through experience or observation, we wouldn’t have survived as a species.

The development of more systematic approaches to scientific inquiry has not diminished the need for such intuitive reasoning. In fact, there are important and not obvious truths that are best deduced using pure reason.

Consider the Pythagorean Theorem, which establishes the relation among the three sides of a right triangle. If all conclusions had to be reached by combing through large data sets, Pythagoras, who is believed to have devised the theorem’s first proof, would have had to measure a huge number of right triangles. In any case, critics would likely argue that he had looked at a biased sample, because all of the triangles examined were collected from the Mediterranean region.

Inductive reasoning, too, is vital to reach certain kinds of knowledge. We “know” that an apple will not remain suspended in mid-air, because we have seen so many objects fall. But such reasoning is not foolproof. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, “The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

Of course, many policymakers – not just the likes of Erdoğan and Trump – make bad decisions not because of a misunderstanding of the evidence, but because they prefer to pursue politically expedient measures that benefit their benefactors or themselves. In such cases, exposing the inappropriateness of their supposed evidence may be the only option.

But, for the rest, the imperative must be to advocate for a more comprehensive approach, in which leaders use “reasoned intuition” to draw effective conclusions based on hard data. Only then will the age of effective evidence-based policymaking really begin….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing: a new tool for policy-making?

Curated on December 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper byAraz Taeihagh in Policy Sciences: “Crowdsourcing is rapidly evolving and applied in situations where ideas, labour, opinion or expertise of large groups of people is used. Crowdsourcing is now used in various policy-making initiatives; however, this use has usually focused on open collaboration platforms and specific stages of the policy process, such as agenda-setting and policy evaluations. Other forms of crowdsourcing have been neglected in policy-making, with a few exceptions. This article examines crowdsourcing as a tool for policy-making and explores the nuances of the technology and its use and implications for different stages of the policy process. The article addresses questions surrounding the role of crowdsourcing and whether it can be considered as a policy tool or as a technological enabler and investigates the current trends and future directions of crowdsourcing….(More)”

Influenzanet: Citizens Among 10 Countries Collaborating to Monitor Influenza in Europe

Curated on December 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carl E Koppeschaar et al in the Special Issue of JMIR Public Health and Surveillance on Participatory Disease Surveillance: “The wide availability of the Internet and the growth of digital communication technologies have become an important tool for epidemiological studies and health surveillance. Influenzanet is a participatory surveillance system monitoring the incidence of influenza-like illness (ILI) in Europe since 2003. It is based on data provided by volunteers who self-report their symptoms via the Internet throughout the influenza season and currently involves 10 countries.

Objective: In this paper, we describe the Influenzanet system and provide an overview of results from several analyses that have been performed with the collected data, which include participant representativeness analyses, data validation (comparing ILI incidence rates between Influenzanet and sentinel medical practice networks), identification of ILI risk factors, and influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) studies previously published. Additionally, we present new VE analyses for the Netherlands, stratified by age and chronic illness and offer suggestions for further work and considerations on the continuity and sustainability of the participatory system.

Methods: Influenzanet comprises country-specific websites where residents can register to become volunteers to support influenza surveillance and have access to influenza-related information. Participants are recruited through different communication channels. Following registration, volunteers submit an intake questionnaire with their postal code and sociodemographic and medical characteristics, after which they are invited to report their symptoms via a weekly electronic newsletter reminder. Several thousands of participants have been engaged yearly in Influenzanet, with over 36,000 volunteers in the 2015-16 season alone.

Results: In summary, for some traits and in some countries (eg, influenza vaccination rates in the Netherlands), Influenzanet participants were representative of the general population. However, for other traits, they were not (eg, participants underrepresent the youngest and oldest age groups in 7 countries). The incidence of ILI in Influenzanet was found to be closely correlated although quantitatively higher than that obtained by the sentinel medical practice networks. Various risk factors for acquiring an ILI infection were identified. The VE studies performed with Influenzanet data suggest that this surveillance system could develop into a complementary tool to measure the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine, eventually in real time.

Conclusions: Results from these analyses illustrate that Influenzanet has developed into a fast and flexible monitoring system that can complement the traditional influenza surveillance performed by sentinel medical practices. The uniformity of Influenzanet allows for direct comparison of ILI rates between countries. It also has the important advantage of yielding individual data, which can be used to identify risk factors. The way in which the Influenzanet system is constructed allows the collection of data that could be extended beyond those of ILI cases to monitor pandemic influenza and other common or emerging diseases….(More)”. (see also https://www.influenzanet.eu/)

How Blockchain Technology Is Helping Syrian Refugees

Curated on December 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Siobhan Kenna at the Huffpost: “Azraq Refugee Camp is a 15 kilometre-wide sea of corrugated aluminium houses in the heart of the vast Jordanian desert. The people that live there are detained by the barbed wire that surrounds the entire complex which is located an hour and a half from the country’s capital city, Amman….

From within the strange environment of the camp and the indistinct future, lies a bastion of normalcy for these people — the supermarket.

In the refugee camp the supermarket is much more than a place to shop or purchase food though: Here it is a vital fibre in the social fabric of a makeshift community….

It’s unbelievable to think then, that a place that is so remote and isolated could be home to a world first initiative involving the emerging Blockchain technology.

The Building Blocks Project is the brain child of Houman Haddad, Regional CBT Advisor for United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The project aims to make cash-based transactions between the WFP and the beneficiary faster, cheaper and more secure.

Prior to the project’s launch at the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan in May 2017, it was first trialled in Pakistan and also in King Abduallah Park Refugee Camp as a means of testing the robustness of the technology. On May 31st 2017 the pilot in Azraq was extended indefinitely.

Traditionally, payments are made to refugees from the WFP via a third party financial service provider. The entity could be a bank, mobile monetary company or something similar and the WFP instructs the financial service provider to credit some of the funds to the refugee so they can spend it at the supermarket or elsewhere.

On top of that, the WFP also needs to transfer the funds to the third party so they can actually pay the beneficiary. Sounds complicated right? Well, the Building Blocks Project aims to eliminate reliance on a third party and with this comes plenty of savings.

“So, what we have done is essentially replaced that financial service provider with the Blockchain,” Houman Haddad told HuffPost Australia.

“So instead of having someone else create virtual accounts and credit functions and so on and so forth, we create the virtual account on the Blockchain for beneficiaries, we upload entitlements to them, and currently in the supermarket where they go, the supermarket requests an authorisation code for transactions from the Blockchain as opposed to the bank….(More)”.

How Software is Eating the World and Reprogramming Democracy

Curated on December 1, 2017July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jaime Gómez Ramírez at Open Mind: “Democracy, the government of the majority typically through elected representatives, is undergoing a major crisis. Human societies have experimented with democracy since at least the fifth century BC in the polis of Athens. Whether democracy is scalable is an open question that could help understand the current mistrust in democratic institutions and the rise of populism. The majority rule is a powerful narrative that is fed every few years with elections. In Against elections, the cultural historian Van Reybrouck claims that elections were never meant to make democracy possible, rather the opposite, it was a tool designed for those in power to prevent “the rule of the mob”. Elections created a new elite and power remained in the hands of a minority, but this time endowed with democratic legitimacy….

The 2008 financial crisis have changed the perception of, the once taken for granted, complementary nature of democracy and capitalism. The belief that capitalism and democracy go hand by hand is not credible anymore. The concept of nation is a fiction in need of a continuous stock of intergenerational believers. The nation state successfully assimilated heterogeneous groups of people under a common language and shared cultural values. But this seems today a rather fragile foundation to resist the centrifugal forces that financial capitalism impinges upon the social fabric.

Nation states will not collapse over night, but they are an industrial era device in a digital world. To do not fall into obsolescence they will need to change their operative system. Since the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen coined the phrase “software is eating the world” the logic of financial capitalism has accelerated this trend. Five software companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet (FANG) equal more than 10 per cent percent of the S&P 500 cap. Todays dominant industries in entertainment, retail, telecom, marketing companies and others are software companies. Software is also taking a bigger share in industries that traditionally exist in the physical space like automakers and energy. Education and health care have shown more resistance to software-based entrepreneurial change but a very profound transformation is underway. This is already visible with the growing popularity of MOOCs and personalized health monitoring systems.

Software-based business not only have up trending market share but more importantly, software can reprogram the world. The internet of things will allow to have full connectivity of smart devices in an economy with massive deflationary costs in computing. Computing might even become free. This has profound consequences for business, industry and most importantly, for how citizens want to organize society and governance.

The most promising technological innovation in years is the blockchain technology, an encrypted and distributed ledger system. Blockchain is an universal and freely accessible repository of documents including property and insurance contracts, publicly auditable, and resistant to special group interests manipulation and corruption. New kinds of governance models and services could be tested and implemented using the blockchain. The time is ripe for fundamental software-based transformation in governance. Democracy and free society will ignore this at its own peril…(More)”.

The citizen in the smart city. How the smart city could transform citizenship

Curated on December 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Martijn de Waal and Marloes Dignum: “Smart city-policy makers and technology vendors are increasingly stating they want to bring about citizen-centered smart cities. Yet, it often remains unclear what exactly that means, and how citizens are envisaged as actors in smart cities. This article wants to contribute to this discussion by exploring the relation between smart cities and citizenship. It aims to do this by introducing a heuristic scheme that brings out the implied notions of citizenship in three distinct sets of smart city visions and practices: The Control Room envisages the city as a collection of infrastructures and services; The Creative City views the city from the perspective of (economic) geography and ponders on local and regional systems of innovation; The Smart Citizens discourse addresses the city as a political and civic community. These smart city discourses are mapped against two visions on citizenship and governance taken from political philosophy. A `republican’ perspective with strong presence in social-democratic countries is contrasted with a libertarian one, most prominent in Silicon Valley approaches to smart city technologies. This provides a scheme to reflect on potential benefits and downsides if a specific smart city discourse would develop. Instances of smart cities may promote notions of citizenship that are based on consumer choice and individual responsibility, alternatively they could also reinforce collective responsibilities towards the common good of society…(More)”.

Accelerating the Sharing of Data Across Sectors to Advance the Common Good

Curated on December 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Robert M. Groves and Adam Neufeld: “The public pays for and provides an incredible amount of data to governments and companies. Yet much of the value of this data is being wasted, remaining in silos rather than being shared to enhance the common good—whether it’s helping governments to stop opioid addiction or helping companies predict and meet the demand for electric or autonomous vehicles.

Many companies and governments are interested in sharing more of their data with each other; however, right now the process of sharing is very time consuming and can pose great risks since it often involves sharing full data sets with another entity

We need intermediaries to design safe environments to facilitate data sharing in the low-trust and politically sensitive context of companies and governments. These safe environments would exist outside the government, be transparent to the public, and use modern technologies and techniques to allow only statistical uses of data through temporary linkages in order to minimize the risk to individuals’ privacy.

Governments must lead the way in sharing more data by re-evaluating laws that limit sharing of data, and must embrace new technologies that could allow the private sector to receive at least some value from many sensitive data sets. By decreasing the cost and risks of sharing data, more data will be freed from their silos, and we will move closer to what we deserve—that our data are used for the greatest societal benefit….(More)”.

Scientists can now figure out detailed, accurate neighborhood demographics using Google Street View photos

Curated on December 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post: “A team of computer scientists has derived accurate, neighborhood-level estimates of the racial, economic and political characteristics of 200 U.S. cities using an unlikely data source — Google Street View images of people’s cars.

Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the report details how the scientists extracted 50 million photographs of street scenes captured by Google’s Street View cars in 2013 and 2014. They then trained a computer algorithm to identify the make, model and year of 22 million automobiles appearing in neighborhoods in those images, parked outside homes or driving down the street.

The vehicles seen in Street View images are often small or blurry, making precise identification a challenge. So the researchers had human experts identify a small subsample of the vehicles and compare those to the results churned out by their algorithm. They that the algorithm correctly identified whether a vehicle was U.S.- or foreign-made roughly 88 percent of the time, got the manufacturer right 66 percent of the time and nailed the exact model 52 percent of the time.

While far from perfect, the sheer size of the vehicle database means those numbers are still useful for real-world statistical applications, like drawing connections between vehicle preferences and demographic data. The 22 million vehicles in the database comprise roughly 8 percent of all vehicles in the United States. By comparison, the U.S. Census Bureau’s massive American Community Survey reaches only about 1.6 percent of American householdseach year, while the typical 1,000-person opinion poll includes just 0.0004 of American adults.

To test what this data set could be capable of, the researchers first paired the Zip code-level vehicle data with numbers on race, income and education from the American Community Survey. They did this for a random 15 percent of the Zip codes in their data set to create a “training set.” They then created another algorithm to go through the training set to see how vehicle characteristics correlated with neighborhood characteristics: What kinds of vehicles are disproportionately likely to appear in white neighborhoods, or black ones? Low-income vs. high-income? Highly-educated areas vs. less-educated ones?

That yielded a number of reliable correlations….(More)”.