Quality of life, big data and the power of statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Shivam Gupta in Statistics & Probability Letters: “Quality of life (QoL) is tied to the perception of ‘meaning’. The quest for meaning is central to the human condition, and we are brought in touch with a sense of meaning when we reflect on what we have created, loved, believed in or left as a legacy (Barcaccia, 2013). QoL is associated with multi-dimensional issues and features such as environmental pressure, total water management, total waste management, noise and level of air pollution (Eusuf et al., 2014). A significant amount of data is needed to understand all these dimensions. Such knowledge is necessary to realize the vision of a smart city, which involves the use of data-driven approaches to improve the quality of life of the inhabitants and city infrastructures (Degbelo et al., 2016).

Technologies such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) or the Internet of Things (IoT) are producing a large volume of data. Koh et al. (2015) pointed out that approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every day, and 90 percent of the data in the world has been created in the past two years alone. Managing this large amount of data, and analyzing it efficiently can help making more informed decisions while solving many of the societal challenges (e.g., exposure analysis, disaster preparedness, climate change). As discussed in Goodchild (2016), the attractiveness of big data can be summarized in one word, namely spatial prediction – the prediction of both the where and when.

This article focuses on the 5Vs of big data (volume, velocity, variety, value, veracity). The challenges associated with big data in the context of environmental monitoring at a city level are briefly presented in Section 2. Section 3 discusses the use of statistical methods like Land Use Regression (LUR) and Spatial Simulated Annealing (SSA) as two promising ways of addressing the challenges of big data….(More)”.

The nation that thrived by ‘nudging’ its population

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Keating at the BBC: “Singapore has grown from almost nothing in 50 years. And this well-regarded society has been built up, partly, thanks to the power of suggestion….But while Singapore still loves a public campaign, it has moved toward a more nuanced approach of influencing the behaviours of its inhabitants.

Nudging the population isn’t uniquely Singaporean; more than 150 governments across the globe have tried nudging as a better choice. A medical centre in Qatar, for example, managed to increase the uptake of diabetes screening by offering to test people during Ramadan. People were fasting anyway so the hassle of having to not eat before your testing was removed. It was convenient and timely, two key components to a successful nudge.

Towns in Iceland, India and China have trialed ‘floating zebra crossings’ – 3D optical illusions which make the crossings look like they are floating above the ground designed to urge drivers to slow down. And in order to get people to pay their taxes in the UK, people were sent a letter saying that the majority of taxpayers pay their taxes on time which has had very positive results. Using social norms make people want to conform.

In Singapore some of the nudges you come across are remarkably simple. Rubbish bins are placed away from bus stops to separate smokers from other bus users. Utility bills display how your energy consumption compares to your neighbours. Outdoor gyms have been built near the entrances and exits of HDB estates so they are easy to use, available and prominent enough to consistently remind you. Train stations have green and red arrows on the platform indicating where you should stand so as to speed up the alighting process. If you opt to travel at off-peak times (before 0700), your fare is reduced.

And with six out of 10 Singaporeans eating at food courts four or more times a week, getting people to eat healthier is also a priority. As well as the Healthier Dining Programme, some places make it cheaper to take the healthy option. If you’re determined to eat that Fried Bee Hoon at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, for example, you’re going to have to pay more for it.

The National Steps Challenge, which encourages participants to get exercising using free step counters in exchange for cash and prizes, has been so successful that the programme name has been trademarked. This form of gamifying is one of the more successful ways of engaging users in achieving objectives. Massive queues to collect the free fitness tracker demonstrated the programme’s popularity.

And it’s not just in tangible ways that nudges are being rolled out. Citizens pay into a mandatory savings programme called the Central Provident Fund at a high rate. This can be accessed for healthcare, housing and pensions as a way to get people to save long-term because evidence has shown that people are too short-sighted when it comes to financing their future

And as the government looks to increase the population 30% by 2030, the city-state’s ageing population and declining birth rate is a problem. The Baby Bonus Scheme goes some way to encouraging parents to have more children by offering cash incentives. Introduced in 2001, the scheme means that all Singapore citizens who have a baby get a cash gift as well as a money into a Child Development Account (CDA) which can be used to pay for childcare and healthcare. The more children you have, the more money you get – since March 2016 you get a cash gift of $8,000 SGD (£4,340) for your first child and up to $10,000 (£5,430) for the third and any subsequent children, as well as money into your CDA.

So do people like being nudged? Is there any cultural difference in the way people react to being swayed toward a ‘better’ choice or behaviour? Given the breadth of the international use of behavioural insights, there is relatively little research done into whether people are happy about it….(More)”.

Open data sharing and the Global South—Who benefits?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Serwadda et al in Science: “A growing number of government agencies, funding organizations, and publishers are endorsing the call for increased data sharing, especially in biomedical research, many with an ultimate goal of open data. Open data is among the least restrictive forms of data sharing, in contrast to managed access mechanisms, which typically have terms of use and in some cases oversight by the data generators themselves. But despite an ethically sound rationale and growing support for open data sharing in many parts of the world, concerns remain, particularly among researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia and the Middle East that comprise the Global South. Drawing on our perspective as researchers and ethicists working in the Global South, we see opportunities to improve community engagement, raise awareness, and build capacity, all toward improving research and data sharing involving researchers in LMICs…African scientists have expressed concern that open data compromises national ownership and reopens the gates for “parachute-research” (i.e., Northern researchers absconding with data to their home countries). Other LMIC researchers have articulated fears over free-riding scientists using the data collected by others for their own career advancement …(More)”

Power of the People: A Technical, Ethical and Experimental Examination of the Use of Crowdsourcing to Support International Nuclear Safeguards Verification

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Sandia National Laboratories Report by Zoe N. Gastelum, Meili C. Swanson, Kari Sentz and Christina Rinaudo : “Recent advances in information technology have led to an expansion of crowdsourcing activities that utilize the “power of the people” harnessed via online games, communities of interest, and other platforms to collect, analyze, verify, and provide technological solutions for challenges from a multitude of domains. To related this surge in popularity, the research team developed a taxonomy of crowdsourcing activities as they relate to international nuclear safeguards, evaluated the potential legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of crowdsourcing to support safeguards, and proposed experimental designs to test the capabilities and prospect for the use of crowdsourcing to support nuclear safeguards verification….(More)”.

A primer on political bots: Part one

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stuart W. Shulman et al at Data Driven Journalism: “The rise of political bots brings into sharp focus the role of automated social media accounts in today’s democratic civil society. Events during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election revealed the scale of this issue for the first time to the majority of citizens and policy-makers. At the same time, the deployment of Russian-linked bots designed to promote pro-gun laws in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting demonstrates the state-sponsored, real-time readiness to shape, through information warfare, the dominant narratives on platforms such as Twitter. The regular news reports on these issues lead us to conclude that the foundations of democracy have become threatened by the presence of aggressive and socially disruptive bots, which aim to manipulate online political discourse.

While there is clarity on the various functions that bot accounts can be scripted to perform, as described below, the task of accurately defining this phenomenon and identifying bot accounts remains a challenge. At Texifter, we have endeavoured to bring nuance to this issue through a research project which explores the presence of automated accounts on Twitter. Initially, this project concerned itself with an attempt to identify bots which participated in online conversations around the prevailing cryptocurrency phenomenon. This article is the first in a series of three blog posts produced by the researchers at Texifter that outlines the contemporary phenomenon of Twitter bots….

Bots in their current iteration have a relatively short, albeit rapidly evolving history. Initially constructed with non-malicious intentions, it wasn’t until the late 1990s with the advent of Web 2.0 when bots began to develop a more negative reputation. Although bots have been used maliciously in denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, spam emails, and mass identity theft, their purpose is not explicitly to incite mayhem.

Before the most recent political events, bots existed in chat rooms, operated as automated customer service agents on websites, and were a mainstay on dating websites. This familiar form of the bot is known to the majority of the general population as a “chatbot” – for instance, CleverBot was and still is a popular platform to talk to an “AI”. Another prominent example was Microsoft’s failed Twitter Chatbot Tay which made headlines in 2016 when “her” vocabulary and conversation functions were manipulated by Twitter users until “she” espoused neo-nazi views when “she” was subsequently deleted.

Image: XKCD Comic #632.

A Twitter bot is an account controlled by an algorithm or script, which is typically hosted on a cloud platform such as Heroku. They are typically, though not exclusively, scripted to conduct repetitive tasks.  For example, there are bots that retweet content containing particular keywords, reply to new followers, and direct messages to new followers; although they can be used for more complex tasks such as participating in online conversations. Bot accounts make up between 9 and 15% of all active accounts on Twitter; however, it is predicted that they account for a much greater percentage of total Twitter traffic. Twitter bots are generally not created with malicious intent; they are frequently used for online chatting or for raising the professional profile of a corporation – but their ability to pervade our online experience and shape political discourse warrants heightened scrutiny….(More)”.

Do Academic Journals Favor Researchers from Their Own Institutions?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yaniv Reingewertz and Carmela Lutmar at Harvard Business Review: “Are academic journals impartial? While many would suggest that academic journals work for the advancement of knowledge and science, we show this is not always the case. In a recent study, we find that two international relations (IR) journals favor articles written by authors who share the journal’s institutional affiliation. We term this phenomenon “academic in-group bias.”

In-group bias is a well-known phenomenon that is widely documented in the psychological literature. People tend to favor their group, whether it is their close family, their hometown, their ethnic group, or any other group affiliation. Before our study, the evidence regarding academic in-group bias was scarce, with only one studyfinding academic in-group bias in law journals. Studies from economics found mixedresults. Our paper provides evidence of academic in-group bias in IR journals, showing that this phenomenon is not specific to law. We also provide tentative evidence which could potentially resolve the conflict in economics, suggesting that these journals might also exhibit in-group bias. In short, we show that academic in-group bias is general in nature, even if not necessarily large in scope….(More)”.

Online Political Microtargeting: Promises and Threats for Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius et al in Utrecht Law Review: “Online political microtargeting involves monitoring people’s online behaviour, and using the collected data, sometimes enriched with other data, to show people-targeted political advertisements. Online political microtargeting is widely used in the US; Europe may not be far behind.

This paper maps microtargeting’s promises and threats to democracy. For example, microtargeting promises to optimise the match between the electorate’s concerns and political campaigns, and to boost campaign engagement and political participation. But online microtargeting could also threaten democracy. For instance, a political party could, misleadingly, present itself as a different one-issue party to different individuals. And data collection for microtargeting raises privacy concerns. We sketch possibilities for policymakers if they seek to regulate online political microtargeting. We discuss which measures would be possible, while complying with the right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights….(More)”.

The Rise of Virtual Citizenship

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Bridle in The Atlantic: “In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold….“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Hannah Arendt called citizenship “the right to have rights.” Like any other right, it can be bestowed and withheld by those in power, but in its newer forms it can also be bought, traded, and rewritten. Virtual citizenship is a commodity that can be acquired through the purchase of real estate or financial investments, subscribed to via an online service, or assembled by peer-to-peer digital networks. And as these options become available, they’re also used, like so many technologies, to exclude those who don’t fit in.

In a world that increasingly operates online, geography and physical infrastructure still remain crucial to control and management. Undersea fiber-optic cables trace the legacy of imperial trading routes. Google and Facebook erect data centers in Scandinavia and the Pacific Northwest, close to cheap hydroelectric power and natural cooling. The trade in citizenship itself often manifests locally as architecture. From luxury apartments in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean to data centers in Europe and refugee settlements in the Middle East, a scattered geography of buildings brings a different reality into focus: one in which political decisions and national laws transform physical space into virtual territory…(More)”.

How Blockchain can benefit migration programmes and migrants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Solon Ardittis at the Migration Data Portal: “According to a recent report published by CB Insights, there are today at least 36 major industries that are likely to benefit from the use of Blockchain technology, ranging from voting procedures, critical infrastructure security, education and healthcare, to car leasing, forecasting, real estate, energy management, government and public records, wills and inheritance, corporate governance and crowdfunding.

In the international aid sector, a number of experiments are currently being conducted to distribute aid funding through the use of Blockchain and thus to improve the tracing of the ways in which aid is disbursed. Among several other examples, the Start Network, which consists of 42 aid agencies across five continents, ranging from large international organizations to national NGOs, has launched a Blockchain-based project that enables the organization both to speed up the distribution of aid funding and to facilitate the tracing of every single payment, from the original donor to each individual assisted.

As Katherine Purvis of The Guardian noted, “Blockchain enthusiasts are hopeful it could be the next big development disruptor. In providing a transparent, instantaneous and indisputable record of transactions, its potential to remove corruption and provide transparency and accountability is one area of intrigue.”

In the field of international migration and refugee affairs, however, Blockchain technology is still in its infancy.

One of the few notable examples is the launch by the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) in May 2017 of a project in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan which, through the use of Blockchain technology, enables the creation of virtual accounts for refugees and the uploading of monthly entitlements that can be spent in the camp’s supermarket through the use of an authorization code. Reportedly, the programme has contributed to a reduction by 98% of the bank costs entailed by the use of a financial service provider.

This is a noteworthy achievement considering that organizations working in international relief can lose up to 3.5% of each aid transaction to various fees and costs and that an estimated 30% of all development funds do not reach their intended recipients because of third-party theft or mismanagement.

At least six other UN agencies including the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Women, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Development Group (UNDG), are now considering Blockchain applications that could help support international assistance, particularly supply chain management tools, self-auditing of payments, identity management and data storage.

The potential of Blockchain technology in the field of migration and asylum affairs should therefore be fully explored.

At the European Union (EU) level, while a Blockchain task force has been established by the European Parliament to assess the ways in which the technology could be used to provide digital identities to refugees, and while the European Commission has recently launched a call for project proposals to examine the potential of Blockchain in a range of sectors, little focus has been placed so far on EU assistance in the field of migration and asylum, both within the EU and in third countries with which the EU has negotiated migration partnership agreements.

This is despite the fact that the use of Blockchain in a number of major programme interventions in the field of migration and asylum could help improve not only their cost-efficiency but also, at least as importantly, their degree of transparency and accountability. This at a time when media and civil society organizations exercise increased scrutiny over the quality and ethical standards of such interventions.

In Europe, for example, Blockchain could help administer the EU Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), both in terms of transferring funds from the European Commission to the eligible NGOs in the Member States and in terms of project managers then reporting on spending. This would help alleviate many of the recurrent challenges faced by NGOs in managing funds in line with stringent EU regulations.

As crucially, Blockchain would have the potential to increase transparency and accountability in the channeling and spending of EU funds in third countries, particularly under the Partnership Framework and other recent schemes to prevent irregular migration to Europe.

A case in point is the administration of EU aid in response to the refugee emergency in Greece where, reportedly, there continues to be insufficient oversight of the full range of commitments and outcomes of large EU-funded investments, particularly in the housing sector. Another example is the set of recent programme interventions in Libya, where a growing number of incidents of human rights abuses and financial mismanagement are being brought to light….(More)”.

Data Collaboratives can transform the way civil society organisations find solutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst at Disrupt & Innovate: “The need for innovation is clear: The twenty-first century is shaping up to be one of the most challenging in recent history. From climate change to income inequality to geopolitical upheaval and terrorism: the difficulties confronting International Civil Society Organisations (ICSOs) are unprecedented not only in their variety but also in their complexity. At the same time, today’s practices and tools used by ICSOs seem stale and outdated. Increasingly, it is clear, we need not only new solutions but new methods for arriving at solutions.

Data will likely become more central to meeting these challenges. We live in a quantified era. It is estimated that 90% of the world’s data was generated in just the last two years. We know that this data can help us understand the world in new ways and help us meet the challenges mentioned above. However, we need new data collaboration methods to help us extract the insights from that data.

UNTAPPED DATA POTENTIAL

For all of data’s potential to address public challenges, the truth remains that most data generated today is in fact collected by the private sector – including ICSOs who are often collecting a vast amount of data – such as, for instance, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which generates various (often sensitive) data related to humanitarian activities. This data, typically ensconced in tightly held databases toward maintaining competitive advantage or protecting from harmful intrusion, contains tremendous possible insights and avenues for innovation in how we solve public problems. But because of access restrictions and often limited data science capacity, its vast potential often goes untapped.

DATA COLLABORATIVES AS A SOLUTION

Data Collaboratives offer a way around this limitation. They represent an emerging public-private partnership model, in which participants from different areas — including the private sector, government, and civil society — come together to exchange data and pool analytical expertise.

While still an emerging practice, examples of such partnerships now exist around the world, across sectors and public policy domains. Importantly several ICSOs have started to collaborate with others around their own data and that of the private and public sector. For example:

  • Several civil society organisations, academics, and donor agencies are partnering in the Health Data Collaborative to improve the global data infrastructure necessary to make smarter global and local health decisions and to track progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
  • Additionally, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) built Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), a platform for sharing humanitarian from and for ICSOs – including Caritas, InterAction and others – donor agencies, national and international bodies, and other humanitarian organisations.

These are a few examples of Data Collaboratives that ICSOs are participating in. Yet, the potential for collaboration goes beyond these examples. Likewise, so do the concerns regarding data protection and privacy….(More)”.