Paper by Edwards, Lilian and Urquhart, Lachlan: “In this paper we give a basic introduction to the transition in contemporary surveillance from top down traditional police surveillance to profiling and “pre-crime” methods. We then review in more detail the rise of open source (OSINT) and social media (SOCMINT) intelligence and its use by law enforcement and security authorities. Following this we consider what if any privacy protection is currently given in UK law to SOCMINT. Given the largely negative response to the above question, we analyse what reasonable expectations of privacy there may be for users of public social media, with reference to existing case law on art 8 of the ECHR. Two factors are in particular argued to be supportive of a reasonable expectation of privacy in open public social media communications: first, the failure of many social network users to perceive the environment where they communicate as “public”; and secondly, the impact of search engines (and other automated analytics) on traditional conceptions of structured dossiers as most problematic for state surveillance. Lastly, we conclude that existing law does not provide adequate protection foropen SOCMINT and that this will be increasingly significant as more and more personal data is disclosed and collected in public without well-defined expectations of privacy….(More)”
To reduce economic inequality, do we need better democracy?
Matt Leighninger at Public Agenda: “When people have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, they will be better off economically as well as politically.
This idea has intrigued community development experts, foundation executives, public officials and academic researchers for many years. It has also animated some of the work people and governments are undertaking to address inequality, both in the United States and (especially) in the Global South.
But can a participatory democracy lead to greater economic opportunity? We are just beginning to amass evidence that this idea is true, understand how and why it works, and figure out how to make it happen better and faster.
Over the last two decades we have witnessed a quiet revolution in how governments and other institutions engage the public. Public officials, technologists, engagement practitioners, community organizers and other leaders have developed hundreds of projects, processes, tools and apps that boost engagement.
While they differ in many ways, these strategies and resources have one common thread: they treat citizens like adults rather than the clients (or children) of the state. They give people chances to connect, learn, deliberate, make recommendations, vote on budget or policy decisions, take action to solve public problems or all of the above. The principles behind these practices embody and enable greater political equality.
This wave of experimentation has produced inspiring outcomes in cities all over the world, but it has been particularly productive in Brazil and other parts of the Global South, where engagement has been built into the way that many cities operate. In these places, it is increasingly clear that when people have a legitimate voice in the institutions that govern their communities, and when they have support through various kinds of social and political networks, their economic fortunes improve.
The best-documented cases come from cities in Brazil, where Participatory Budgeting and other forms of engagement have been built into a much more robust “civic infrastructure” than we have in most American cities. In other words, people in these places have a wider variety of ways to participate on a broader range of issues and decisions. Their chances for engagement include online opportunities as well as face-to-face meetings. Many are social events as much as political ones: people participate because they get to see their neighbors and feel like they are part of a community, in addition to being able to weigh in on a public decision.
In these cities, the gap between rich and poor has narrowed, much more so than in similar cities without vibrant local democracies. In addition, governments are more likely to complete planned projects; public finances are better managed and less prone to corruption; people exhibit increased trust in public institutions and are more likely to pay their taxes; public expenditures are more likely to benefit low-income people; public health outcomes, such as the rate of infant mortality, have improved; and poverty has been reduced.
The connection between democratic innovation and greater economic equity raises many questions ripe for research:….(More)”
Danish city uses sensor system to understand Christmas shoppers
Springwise: “The success of a Christmas market or winterfete doesn’t always translate to money spent, it may simply increase foot traffic or visitor dwell time. Now, the Danish city of Aalborg is measuring exactly those quantities during its busy Christmas shopping period, using Bliptrack, the sensor system that detects devices that are using wifi.
We have already seen Bliptrack used in JFK airport to let passengers know their wait times. Now, Aalborg City Business Association has installed the system in the city centre to track visitor behavior.
The system consists of a number of sensors placed around the city, which detect nearby wifi devices such as smartphones and tablets. As a pedestrian or car moves around from point to point, they are detected by each sensor. Each device has a unique MAC address, meaning the system is able to track the user’s journey and how long they took to get from one sensor to the next. Aalborg can then use the data collected to understand the impact of events, as well as visitors’ shopping activities. The insights can help them improve business operations such as opening at optimum hours and providing the right amount of staff….(More)”
Guffipedia: a dictionary of business jargon
Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times: ” At this time of year, my mind naturally turns to guff. Every December I open the cupboard in which I store the worst examples of the year’s jargon and begin the search for winners of my annual Golden Flannel awards.
This year, as ever, the cupboard is stuffed with ugly words and phrases that people have written or spoken in 2015. To pick a few at random, there is “passionpreneur”. There is delta (to mean gap). There is to solutionize, to mindshare and even to role-model. All are new. All reach new linguisticlows….
To this end we have created Guffipedia, a repository for the terms that I’verailed at over the years. You will find previous years’ Golden Flannel winners with chapter-and-verse from me on why they are so ghastly (in case you are too steeped in the stuff to be able to work it out for yourself)….The point of Guffipedia is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in
The point of Guffipedia is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in Guffish.
I am urging you to submit horrible new words or phrases, to have a stab at translating them into serviceable English, and to state where you found them. You don’t need to name the perpetrator (though it would be nice if you did). “Heard in a lift” is fine — so long as it actually was. And if you get your entries in before the end of the year, they may end up winning a prize in my 2015 Golden Flannel awards, announced the first week inJanuary….See Guffipedia”
Big Data for Development: A Review of Promises and Challenges
Martin Hilbert in the Development Policy Review: “The article uses a conceptual framework to review empirical evidence and some 180 articles related to the opportunities and threats of Big Data Analytics for international development. The advent of Big Data delivers a cost-effective prospect for improved decision-making in critical development areas such as healthcare, economic productivity and security. At the same time, the well-known caveats of the Big Data debate, such as privacy concerns and human resource scarcity, are aggravated in developing countries by long-standing structural shortages in the areas of infrastructure, economic resources and institutions. The result is a new kind of digital divide: a divide in the use of data-based knowledge to inform intelligent decision-making. The article systematically reviews several available policy options in terms of fostering opportunities and minimising risks…..(More)”
Smarter as the New Urban Agenda
New book edited by Gil-Garcia, J. Ramon, Pardo, Theresa A., Nam, Taewoo: “This book will provide one of the first comprehensive approaches to the study of smart city governments with theories and concepts for understanding and researching 21st century city governments innovative methodologies for the analysis and evaluation of smart city initiatives. The term “smart city” is now generally used to represent efforts that in different ways describe a comprehensive vision of a city for the present and future. A smarter city infuses information into its physical infrastructure to improve conveniences, facilitate mobility, add efficiencies, conserve energy, improve the quality of air and water, identify problems and fix them quickly, recover rapidly from disasters, collect data to make better decisions, deploy resources effectively and share data to enable collaboration across entities and domains. These and other similar efforts are expected to make cities more intelligent in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, transparency, and sustainability, among other important aspects. Given this changing social, institutional and technology environment, it seems feasible and likeable to attain smarter cities and by extension, smarter governments: virtually integrated, networked, interconnected, responsive, and efficient. This book will help build the bridge between sound research and practice expertise in the area of smarter cities and will be of interest to researchers and students in the e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, administrative sciences and management, sociology, computer science, and information technology. As well as government officials and public managers who will find practical recommendations based on rigorous studies that will contain insights and guidance for the development, management, and evaluation of complex smart cities and smart government initiatives….(More)”
Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombings
Paper by Johnny Nhan et al: “This paper explores the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing incident and how members of the general public, through the online community Reddit, attempted to provide assistance to law enforcement through conducting their own parallel investigations. As we document through an analysis of user posts, Reddit members shared information about the investigation, searched for information that would identify the perpetrators and, in some cases, drew on their own expert knowledge to uncover clues concerning key aspects of the attack. Although it is the case that the Reddit cyber-sleuths’ did not ultimately solve this case, or provide significant assistance to the police investigation, their actions suggest the potential role the public could play within security networks….(More)”
OpenAI won’t benefit humanity without data-sharing
Neil Lawrence at the Guardian: “There is a common misconception about what drives the digital-intelligence revolution. People seem to have the idea that artificial intelligence researchers are directly programming an intelligence; telling it what to do and how to react. There is also the belief that when we interact with this intelligence we are processed by an “algorithm” – one that is subject to the whims of the designer and encodes his or her prejudices.
OpenAI, a new non-profit artificial intelligence company that was founded on Friday, wants to develop digital intelligence that will benefit humanity. By sharing its sentient algorithms with all, the venture, backed by a host of Silicon Valley billionaires, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, wants to avoid theexistential risks associated with the technology.
OpenAI’s launch announcement was timed to coincide with this year’s Neural Information Processing Systems conference: the main academic outlet for scientific advances in machine learning, which I chaired. Machine learning is the technology that underpins the new generation of AI breakthroughs.
One of OpenAI’s main ideas is to collaborate openly, publishing code and papers. This is admirable and the wider community is already excited by what the company could achieve.
OpenAI is not the first company to target digital intelligence, and certainly not the first to publish code and papers. Both Facebook and Google have already shared code. They were also present at the same conference. All three companies hosted parties with open bars, aiming to entice the latest and brightest minds.
However, the way machine learning works means that making algorithms available isn’t necessarily as useful as one might think. A machine- learning algorithm is subtly different from popular perception.
Just as in baking we don’t have control over how the cake will emerge from the oven, in machine learning we don’t control every decision that the computer will make. In machine learning the quality of the ingredients, the quality of the data provided, has a massive impact on the intelligence that is produced.
For intelligent decision-making the recipe needs to be carefully applied to the data: this is the process we refer to as learning. The result is the combination of our data and the recipe. We need both to make predictions.
By sharing their algorithms, Facebook and Google are merely sharing the recipe. Someone has to provide the eggs and flour and provide the baking facilities (which in Google and Facebook’s case are vast data-computation facilities, often located near hydroelectric power stations for cheaper electricity).
So even before they start, an open question for OpenAI is how will it ensure it has access to the data on the necessary scale to make progress?…(More)”
The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists
Kaveh Waddell at the Atlantic: “Computer scientists and cryptographers occupy some of the ivory tower’s highest floors. Among academics, their work is prestigious and celebrated. To the average observer, much of it is too technical to comprehend. The field’s problems can sometimes seem remote from reality.
But computer science has quite a bit to do with reality. Its practitioners devise the surveillance systems that watch over nearly every space, public or otherwise—and they design the tools that allow for privacy in the digital realm. Computer science is political, by its very nature.
That’s at least according to Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, who has helped create some of the most important tools that secure the Internet today. Last week, Rogaway took his case directly to a roomful of cryptographers at a conference in Auckland, New Zealand. He accused them of a moral failure: By allowing the government to construct a massive surveillance apparatus, the field had abused the public trust. Rogaway said the scientists had a duty to pursue social good in their work.
He likened the danger posed by modern governments’ growing surveillance capabilities to the threat of nuclear warfare in the 1950s, and called upon scientists to step up and speak out today, as they did then.
I spoke to Rogaway about why cryptographers fail to see their work in moral terms, and the emerging link between encryption and terrorism in the national conversation. A transcript of our conversation appears below, lightly edited for concision and clarity….(More)”
Stretching science: why emotional intelligence is key to tackling climate change
Faith Kearns at the Conversation: “…some environmental challenges are increasingly taking on characteristics of intractable conflicts, which may remain unresolved despite good faith efforts.
In the case of climate change, conflicts ranging from debates over how to lower emissions to denialism are obvious and ongoing -– the science community has often approached them as something to be defeated or ignored.
While some people love it and others hate it, conflict is often an indicator that something important is happening; we generally don’t fight about things we don’t care about.
Working with conflict is a challenging proposition, in part because while it manifests in interactions with others, much of the real effort comes in dealing with our own internal conflicts.
However, beginning to accept and even value conflict as a necessary part of large-scale societal transformation has the potential to generate new approaches to climate change engagement. For example, understanding that in some cases denial by another person is protective may lead to new approaches to engagement.
As we connect more deeply with conflict, we may come to see it not as a flame to be fanned or put out, but as a resource.
A relational approach to climate change
Indeed, because of the emotion and conflict involved, the concept of a relational approach is one that offers a great deal of promise in the climate change arena. It is, however, vastly underexplored.
Relationship-centered approaches have been taken up in law, medicine, and psychology.
A common thread among these fields is a shift from expert-driven to more collaborative modes of working together. Navigating the personal and emotional elements of this kind of work asks quite a bit more of practitioners than subject-matter expertise.
In medicine, for example, relationship-centered care is a framework examining how relationships – between patients and clinicians, among clinicians, and even with broader communities – impact health care. It recognizes that care may go well beyond technical competency.
This kind of framework can demonstrate how a relational approach is different from more colloquial understandings of relationships; it can be a way to intentionally and transparently attend to conflict and power dynamics as they arise.
Although this is a simplified view of relational work, many would argue that an emphasis on emergent and transformative properties of relationships has been revolutionary. And one of the key challenges, and opportunities, of a relationship-centered approach to climate work is that we truly have no idea what the outcomes will be.
We have long tried to motivate action around climate change by decreasing scientific uncertainty, so introducing social uncertainty feels risky. At the same time it can be a relief because, in working together, nobody has to have the answer.
Learning to be comfortable with discomfort
A relational approach to climate change may sound basic to some, and complicated to others. In either case, it can be useful to know there is evidence that skillful relational capacity can be taught and learned.
The medical and legal communities have been developing relationship-centered training for years.
It is clear that relational skills and capacities like conflict resolution, empathy, and compassion can be enhanced through practices including active listening and self-reflection. Although it may seem an odd fit, climate change invites ability to work together in new ways that include acknowledging and working with the strong emotions involved.
With a relationship-centered approach, climate change issues become less about particular solutions, and more about transforming how we work together. It is both risky and revolutionary in that it asks us to take a giant leap into trusting not just scientific information, but each other….(More)”