Anna Scott in The Guardian:”Bananas are a staple food in Uganda. Ugandans eat more of the fruit than any other country in the world. Each person eats on average 700g (about seven small bananas) a day, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, and they provide up to 27% of the population’s calorie intake.
But since 2002 a disease known as banana bacterial wilt (BBW) has wiped out crops across the country. When plants are infected, they cannot absorb water so their leaves start to shrivel and they eventually die….
The Ugandan government drew upon open data – data that is licensed and made available for anyone to access and share – about the disease made available by Unicef’s community polling project Ureport to deal with the problem.
Ureport mobilises a network of nearly 300,000 volunteers across Uganda, who use their mobiles to report on issues that affect them, from polio immunisation to malaria treatment, child marriage, to crop failure. It gathers data from via SMS polls and publishes the results as open sourced, open datasets.
The results are sent back to community members via SMS along with treatment options and advice on how best to protect their crops. Within five days of the first SMS being sent out, 190,000 Ugandans had learned about the disease and knew how to save bananas on their farms.
Via the Ureport platform, the datasets can also be accessed in real-time by community members, NGOs and the Ugandan government, allowing them to target treatments to where they we needed most. They are also broadcast on radio shows and analysed in articles produced by Ureport, informing wider audiences of scope and nature of the disease and how best to avoid it….
A report published this week by the Open Data Institute (ODI) features stories from around the world which reflect how people are using open date in development. Examples range from accessing school results in Tanzania to building smart cities in Latin America….(More).”
How I used data-driven journalism to reveal racial disparities in U.S. nursing homes
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein at StoryBench: “In 2009, while at The Chicago Reporter, I took a deep look at racial disparities in the quality of care in nursing homes in Chicago, Illinois and nationally. For a project that the Center for Public Integrity published in November 2014, I brought together Medicaid cost reports, self-reported staffing figures, testimonies from advocates and lawyers, and personal stories from nursing home residents and their families to address a simple question: how much care is a loved one actually receiving at a nursing home? The conclusion? Nursing homes serving minorities offer a lot less care than those predominately housing whites. …(More)”
The Epidemic of Facelessness
Stephen Marche in the New York Times: “….Every month brings fresh figuration to the sprawling, shifting Hieronymus Bosch canvas of faceless 21st-century contempt. Faceless contempt is not merely topical. It is increasingly the defining trait of topicality itself. Every day online provides its measure of empty outrage.
When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There is a vast dissonance between virtual communication and an actual police officer at the door. It is a dissonance we are all running up against more and more, the dissonance between the world of faces and the world without faces. And the world without faces is coming to dominate…..
The Gyges effect, the well-noted disinhibition created by communications over the distances of the Internet, in which all speech and image are muted and at arm’s reach, produces an inevitable reaction — the desire for impact at any cost, the desire to reach through the screen, to make somebody feel something, anything. A simple comment can so easily be ignored. Rape threat? Not so much. Or, as Mr. Nunn so succinctly put it on Twitter: “If you can’t threaten to rape a celebrity, what is the point in having them?”
The challenge of our moment is that the face has been at the root of justice and ethics for 2,000 years. The right to face an accuser is one of the very first principles of the law, described in the “confrontation clause” of the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution, but reaching back through English common law to ancient Rome. In Roman courts no man could be sentenced to death without first seeing his accuser. The precondition of any trial, of any attempt to reconcile competing claims, is that the victim and the accused look each other in the face.
For the great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the encounter with another’s face was the origin of identity — the reality of the other preceding the formation of the self. The face is the substance, not just the reflection, of the infinity of another person. And from the infinity of the face comes the sense of inevitable obligation, the possibility of discourse, the origin of the ethical impulse.
The connection between the face and ethical behavior is one of the exceedingly rare instances in which French phenomenology and contemporary neuroscience coincide in their conclusions. A 2009 study by Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, explained the connection: “Through imitation and mimicry, we are able to feel what other people feel. By being able to feel what other people feel, we are also able to respond compassionately to other people’s emotional states.” The face is the key to the sense of intersubjectivity, linking mimicry and empathy through mirror neurons — the brain mechanism that creates imitation even in nonhuman primates.
The connection goes the other way, too. Inability to see a face is, in the most direct way, inability to recognize shared humanity with another. In a metastudy of antisocial populations, the inability to sense the emotions on other people’s faces was a key correlation. There is “a consistent, robust link between antisocial behavior and impaired recognition of fearful facial affect. Relative to comparison groups, antisocial populations showed significant impairments in recognizing fearful, sad and surprised expressions.” A recent study in the Journal of Vision showed that babies between the ages of 4 months and 6 months recognized human faces at the same level as grown adults, an ability which they did not possess for other objects. …
The neurological research demonstrates that empathy, far from being an artificial construct of civilization, is integral to our biology. And when biological intersubjectivity disappears, when the face is removed from life, empathy and compassion can no longer be taken for granted.
The new facelessness hides the humanity of monsters and of victims both. Behind the angry tangles of wires, the question is, how do we see their faces again?
(More)”
Agile Government Handbook
“The Agile Government Handbook is a community project to help government learn and adopt Agile development practices….
The U.S. federal TechFAR Handbook highlights six key reasons why government should adopt Agile for IT project management and development.
- Improvement in investment manageability and budgetary feasibility
- Reduction of overall risk
- Frequent delivery of usable capabilities that provide value to customers more rapidly
- Increased flexibility
- Creation of new opportunities for small businesses
- Greater visibility into contractor performance
(Source: The TechFAR Handbook for Procuring Digital Services Using Agile Processes)…
18F Consulting Co-Managing Director Robert L. Read presents on “How to Run an Agile Project in Government.”
Scenario Planning Case Studies Using Open Government Data
We present two case studies that demonstrate the utility of data integration and web mapping. As a simple proof of concept the user can explore different scenarios in each case study by indicating the relative weightings to be used for the decision making process. Both case studies are demonstrated as a publicly available interactive map-based website….(More)”
The Trouble With Disclosure: It Doesn’t Work
Jesse Eisinger at ProPublica: “Louis Brandeis was wrong. The lawyer and Supreme Court justice famously declared that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we have unquestioningly embraced that advice ever since.
All this sunlight is blinding. As new scholarship is demonstrating, the value of all this information is unproved. Paradoxically, disclosure can be useless — and sometimes actually harmful or counterproductive.
“We are doing disclosure as a regulatory move all over the board,” says Adam J. Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown, “The funny thing is, we are doing this despite very little evidence of its efficacy.”…
Of course, some disclosure works. Professor Levitin cites two examples. The first is an olfactory disclosure. Methane doesn’t have any scent, but a foul smell is added to alert people to a gas leak. The second is ATM. fees. A study in Australia showed that once fees were disclosed, people avoided the high-fee machines and took out more when they had to go to them.
But to Omri Ben-Shahar, co-author of a recent book, ” More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,” these are cherry-picked examples in a world awash in useless disclosures. Of course, information is valuable. But disclosure as a regulatory mechanism doesn’t work nearly well enough, he argues.
First, it really works only when things are simple. As soon as transactions become complex, disclosure starts to stumble. Buying a car, for instance, turns out to be several transactions: the purchase itself, the financing, maybe the trade-in of old car and various insurance and warranty decisions. These are all subject to various disclosure rules, but making the choices clear and useful has proved nigh impossible.
In complex transactions, we then must rely on intermediaries to give us advice. Because they are often conflicted, they, too, become subject to disclosure obligations. Ah, even more boilerplate to puzzle over!
And then there’s the harm. Over the years, banks that sold complex securities often stuck impossible-to-understand clauses deep in prospectuses that “disclosed” what was really going on. When the securities blew up, as they often did, banks then fended off lawsuits by arguing they had done everything the law required and were therefore not liable.
“That’s the harm of disclosure,” Professor Ben-Shahar said. “It provides a safe harbor for practices that smell bad. It sanitizes every bad practice.”
The anti-disclosure movement is taking on the ” Nudge” school, embraced by the Obama administration and promoted most prominently by Cass R. Sunstein, a scholar at Harvard, and Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago. These nudgers believe that small policies will prod people to do what’s in their best interests.
The real-world evidence in favor of nudging is thin. …
The ever-alluring notion is that we are just one or two changes away from having meaningful disclosure. If we could only have annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings in plain English, we could finally understand what’s going on at corporations. A University of San Diego Law School professor, Frank Partnoy, and I called for better bank disclosure in an article in The Atlantic a few years ago.
Professor Ben-Shahar mocks it. ” ‘Plain English!’ ‘Make it simple.’ That is the deus ex machina, the god that will solve everything,” he said.
Complex things are, sadly, complex. A mortgage is not an easy transaction to understand. People are not good at predicting their future behavior and so don’t know what options are best for them. “The project of simplification is facing a very poor empirical track record and very powerful theoretical problem,” he said.
What to do instead? Hard and fast rules. If lawmakers want to end a bad practice, ban it. Having them admit it is not enough. (More)”
“We are doing disclosure as a regulatory move all over the board,” says Adam J. Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown, “The funny thing is, we are doing this despite very little evidence of its efficacy.”…
Of course, some disclosure works. Professor Levitin cites two examples. The first is an olfactory disclosure. Methane doesn’t have any scent, but a foul smell is added to alert people to a gas leak. The second is ATM. fees. A study in Australia showed that once fees were disclosed, people avoided the high-fee machines and took out more when they had to go to them.
But to Omri Ben-Shahar, co-author of a recent book, ” More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,” these are cherry-picked examples in a world awash in useless disclosures. Of course, information is valuable. But disclosure as a regulatory mechanism doesn’t work nearly well enough, he argues.
First, it really works only when things are simple. As soon as transactions become complex, disclosure starts to stumble. Buying a car, for instance, turns out to be several transactions: the purchase itself, the financing, maybe the trade-in of old car and various insurance and warranty decisions. These are all subject to various disclosure rules, but making the choices clear and useful has proved nigh impossible.
In complex transactions, we then must rely on intermediaries to give us advice. Because they are often conflicted, they, too, become subject to disclosure obligations. Ah, even more boilerplate to puzzle over!
And then there’s the harm. Over the years, banks that sold complex securities often stuck impossible-to-understand clauses deep in prospectuses that “disclosed” what was really going on. When the securities blew up, as they often did, banks then fended off lawsuits by arguing they had done everything the law required and were therefore not liable.
“That’s the harm of disclosure,” Professor Ben-Shahar said. “It provides a safe harbor for practices that smell bad. It sanitizes every bad practice.”
The anti-disclosure movement is taking on the ” Nudge” school, embraced by the Obama administration and promoted most prominently by Cass R. Sunstein, a scholar at Harvard, and Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago. These nudgers believe that small policies will prod people to do what’s in their best interests.
The real-world evidence in favor of nudging is thin. …
The ever-alluring notion is that we are just one or two changes away from having meaningful disclosure. If we could only have annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings in plain English, we could finally understand what’s going on at corporations. A University of San Diego Law School professor, Frank Partnoy, and I called for better bank disclosure in an article in The Atlantic a few years ago.
Professor Ben-Shahar mocks it. ” ‘Plain English!’ ‘Make it simple.’ That is the deus ex machina, the god that will solve everything,” he said.
Complex things are, sadly, complex. A mortgage is not an easy transaction to understand. People are not good at predicting their future behavior and so don’t know what options are best for them. “The project of simplification is facing a very poor empirical track record and very powerful theoretical problem,” he said.
What to do instead? Hard and fast rules. If lawmakers want to end a bad practice, ban it. Having them admit it is not enough. (More)”
Small Pieces Loosely Joined: How smarter use of technology and data can deliver real reform of local government
Policy Exchange (UK): “Local authorities could save up to £10billion by 2020 through smarter and more collaborative use of technology and data.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined highlights how every year councils lose more than £1 billion by failing to identify where fraud has taken place. The paper also sheds light on how a lack of data sharing and collaboration between many local authorities, as well as the use of bespoke IT systems, keeps the cost of providing public services unsustainably high.
The report sets out three ways in which local authorities could not only save billions of pounds, but also provide better, more coordinated public services:
- Using data to predict and prevent fraud. Each year councils lose in excess of £1.3 billion through Council Tax fraud, benefit fraud and housing tenancy fraud (such as illegal subletting). By collecting and analysing data from numerous different sources, it is possible to predict where future violations are most likely to occur and direct investigative teams to respond to them first.
- Sharing data between neighbouring councils. Sharing data would reveal where it might be beneficial for two or more neighbouring LAs to merge one or more services. For example, if one council spends £5m each year on combating a particular issue, such as investigating food safety violations, fly-tipping or pest control, it may be more cost-effective to hire the services of a neighbouring council that has a far greater incidence of that same issue.
- Phasing out costly bespoke IT systems. Rather than each LA independently designing or commissioning its own apps and online services (such as paying for council tax or reporting noisy neighbours), an ‘app store’ should be created where individuals, businesses or other organisations can bid to provide them. The services created could then be used by dozens – or even hundreds – of LAs, creating economies of scale that bring down prices for all.
Since 2008, councils have shouldered the largest spending cuts of any part of the public sector – despite providing 80% of local public services – and face a funding shortfall of £12.4 billion by 2020. Some are doing admirably well under this extreme financial pressure, developing innovative schemes using data to ensure that they scale back spending but continue to provide vital public services. For example, Leeds, Yorkshire and Humber are developing a shared platform for digital services needed by all three councils. Similarly, a collaboration of public sector organisations in and around Hampshire and the Isle of Wight is developing ways of sharing data and helping neighbouring councils to share content and data through the Hampshire Hub.
FULL Report“
Text service to save young lives in East Africa
Springwise: “In the developing world, the most effective healthcare solutions are often the most simple. A few years ago we featured FrontlineSMS:Medic, a service allowing medical workers in poor rural villages to communicate patient information with hospitals using free, two-way texts. Now, a Kenyan service called Totohealth is also aiming to use SMS as a lifesaving tool.
Totohealth is a social enterprise, directed at new parents and expecting mothers, that is aiming to use SMS messaging to greatly reduce the child and mother mortality rate, and minimise developmental defects in infants. The company works with hospitals and maternity centres to give vital information to patients, twice a week. These personalised texts are designed to dispel myths, offer advice and ensure that appointments and vaccinations are met. The texts can be translated into a variety of languages. The messages and their replies are then kept in a patient database which the health service can use.
The service is free for users, and is funded by the small fees paid by hospitals and NGOs to get their messages out. Pilots began last year in Nairobi and since then Totohealth has worked with over 6,000 mothers and fathers across nine hospitals, sending more than 133,000 texts in the process. Executive Director Felix Kimaru plans to expand to those areas of Kenya with the highest rate of mortality in children under five, before growing into Somalia and elsewhere in East Africa.
According to Kimaru, “preventive health in 3rd world countries is still far from being realized”, with many people believing that the health of citizens is in the hands of government and NGOs. Along with a swathe of other ‘mHealth’ platforms, Kimaru is aiming to change that, by empowering new parents with the information needed to take their own health in their hands….”
Holding Data Hostage: The Perfect Internet Crime?
Tom Simonite at MIT Technology Review: “Every so often someone invents a new way of making money on the Internet that earns wild profits, attracts countless imitators, and reshapes what it means to be online. Unfortunately, such a shift took place last year in the world of online crime, with the establishment of sophisticated malicious software known as ransomware as a popular and reliable business model for criminals.
After infecting a computer, perhaps via an e-mail attachment or a malicious website, ransomware automatically encrypts files, which may include precious photos, videos, and business documents, and issues an electronic ransom note. Getting those files back means paying a fee to the criminals who control the malware—and hoping they will keep their side of the bargain by decrypting them.
The money that can be made with ransomware has encouraged technical innovations. The latest ransomware requests payment via the hard-to-trace cryptocurrency Bitcoin and uses the anonymizing Tor network. Millions of home and business computers were infected by ransomware in 2014. Computer crime experts say the problem will only get worse, and some believe mobile devices will be the next target….
The recent rise of ransomware prompted the FBI to issue a report last month in which it warned that the crime poses a threat not only to home computer users but also to “businesses, financial institutions, government agencies, academic institutions, and other organizations.”
Some security researchers predict that 2015 will see significant efforts by criminals to get ransomware working on smartphones and tablets as well. These devices often contain highly prized personal files such as photos and videos….(More)”
What Is the Purpose of Society?
Mark Bittman in the New York Times:“….Think about it this way: There are two kinds of operating systems, hard and soft. A clock is a hard system. We know what it’s for, we know when it isn’t working, and we know that 10 clock experts would agree on how to fix it — and could do so.
Soft systems, like agriculture and economics, are more complex. We don’t all agree on goals, and we don’t agree on whether things are working or in need of repair. For example, is contemporary American agriculture a system for nourishing people and providing a livelihood for farmers? Or is it one for denuding the nation’s topsoil while poisoning land, water, workers and consumers and enriching corporations? Our collective actions would indicate that our principles favor the latter; that has to change.
Defining goals that matter to people is critical, because the most powerful way to change a complex, soft system is to change its purpose. For example, if we had a national agreement that food is not just a commodity, a way to make money, but instead a way to nourish people and the planet and a means to safeguard our future, we could begin to reconfigure the system for that purpose. More generally, if we agreed that human well-being was a priority, creating more jobs would not ring so hollow.
Sadly, even if we did agree, complex systems are not subject to clever fixes. Rather, changes often have unexpected results (that shouldn’t happen with a clock), so change necessarily remains incremental. But without an agreement on goals, without statements of purpose, we are going to continue to see changes that are not in the interest of the majority. Increasingly, it’s corporations and not governments that are determining how the world works. As unrepresentative as government might seem right now, there is at least a chance of improving it, whereas corporations will always act in their own interests.
It’s been adequately demonstrated that more than minor tweaks are needed to improve life for most people. Let’s try to make sense of where the world is now instead of relying on outdated doctrines like “capitalism” and “socialism” created by people who had no idea what the 21st century would look like. Let’s ambitiously and publicly philosophize — as the conservatives do — and think about what shape a sensible political economy might take.
The big ideas and strategies for how we should manage society and thrive with the planet are not a set of rules handed down from on high. To develop them for now and the future is a major challenge, and we — progressives and our allies — have to work harder at it. No one is going to figure it out for us….(More)”.