What Your Tweets Say About You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the New Yorker: “How much can your tweets reveal about you? Judging by the last nine hundred and seventy-two words that I used on Twitter, I’m about average when it comes to feeling upbeat and being personable, and I’m less likely than most people to be depressed or angry. That, at least, is the snapshot provided by AnalyzeWords, one of the latest creations from James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas who studies how language relates to well-being and personality. One of Pennebaker’s most famous projects is a computer program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (L.I.W.C.), which looks at the words we use, and in what frequency and context, and uses this information to gauge our psychological states and various aspects of our personality….

Take a study, out last month, from a group of researchers based at the University of Pennsylvania. The psychologist Johannes Eichstaedt and his colleagues analyzed eight hundred and twenty-six million tweets across fourteen hundred American counties. (The counties contained close to ninety per cent of the U.S. population.) Then, using lists of words—some developed by Pennebaker, others by Eichstaedt’s team—that can be reliably associated with anger, anxiety, social engagement, and positive and negative emotions, they gave each county an emotional profile. Finally, they asked a simple question: Could those profiles help determine which counties were likely to have more deaths from heart disease?

The answer, it turned out, was yes….

The researchers have a theory: they suggest that “the language of Twitter may be a window into the aggregated and powerful effects of the community context.” They point to other epidemiological studies which have shown that general facts about a community, such as its “social cohesion and social capital,” have consequences for the health of individuals. Broadly speaking, people who live in poorer, more fragmented communities are less healthy than people living in richer, integrated ones.“When we do a sub-analysis, we find that the power that Twitter has is in large part accounted for by community and socioeconomic variables,” Eichstaedt told me when we spoke over Skype. In short, a young person’s negative, angry, and stressed-out tweets might reflect his or her stress-inducing environment—and that same environment may have negative health repercussions for other, older members of the same community….(More)”

Secrecy versus openness: Internet security and the limits of open source and peer production

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dissertation by Andreas Schmidt:” Open source and peer production have been praised as organisational models that could change the world for the better. It is commonly asserted that almost any societal activity could benefit from distributed, bottom-up collaboration — by making societal interaction more open, more social, and more democratic. However, we also need to be mindful of the limits of these models. How could they function in environments hostile to openness? Security is a societal domain more prone to secrecy than any other, except perhaps for romantic love. In light of the destructive capacity of contemporary cyber attacks, how has the Internet survived without a comprehensive security infrastructure? Secrecy vs. openness describes the realities of Internet security production through the lenses of open source and peer production theories. The study offers a glimpse into the fascinating communities of technical experts, who played a pivotal role when the chips were down for the Internet after large-scale attacks. After an initial flirtation with openness in the early years, operational Internet security communities have put in place institutional mechanisms that have resulted in less open forms of social production…(More)”

Using open legislative data to map bill co-sponsorship networks in 15 countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

François Briatte at OpeningParliament.org: “A few years back, Kamil Gregor published a post under the title “Visualizing politics: Network analysis of bill sponsors”. His post, which focused on the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, showed how basic social network analysis can support the exploration of parliamentary work, by revealing the ties that members of parliament create between each other through the co-sponsorship of private bills….In what follows, I would like to quickly report on a small research project that I have developed over the years, under the name “parlnet”.

Legislative data on bill co-sponsorship

This project looks at bill co-sponsorship networks in European countries. Many parliaments allow their members to co-sponsor each other’s private bills, which makes it possible to represent these parliaments as collaborative networks, where a tie exists between two MPs if they have co-sponsored legislation together.

This idea is not new: it was pioneered by James Fowler in the United States, and has been the subject of extensive research in American politics, both on the U.S. Congress and on state legislatures. Similar research also exists on the bill co-sponsorship networks of parliaments in Argentina, Chile andRomania.

Inspired by this research and by Baptiste Coulmont’s visualisation of the French lower chamber, I surveyed the parliamentary websites of the following countries:

  • all 28 current members of the European Union ;
  • 4 members of the EFTA: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland

This search returned 19 parliamentary chambers from 15 countries for which it was (relatively) easy to extract legislative data, either through open data portals like data.riksdagen.se in Sweden ordata.stortinget.no in Norway, or from official parliamentary websites directly….After splitting the data into legislative periods separated by nationwide elections, I was able to draw a large collection of networks showing bill co-sponsorship in these 19 chambers….In this graph, each point (or node) is a Belgian MP, and each tie between two MPs indicates that they have co-sponsored at least one bill together. The colors and abbreviations used in the graph are party-related codes, which combine information on the parliamentary group and linguistic community of each MP.Because this kind of graph can be interesting to explore in more detail, I have also built interactive visualizations out of them, in order to show more detailed information on the MPs who participate in bill cosposorship…

The parlnet project was coded in R, and its code is public so that it might benefit from external contributions. The list of countries and chambers that it covers is not exhaustive: in some cases like Portugal, I simply failed to retrieve the data. More talented coders might therefore be able to add to the current database.

Bill cosponsorship networks illustrate how open legislative data provided by parliaments can be turned into interactive tools that easily convey some information about parliamentary work, including, but not limited to:

  • the role of parliamentary party leaders in managing the legislation produced by their groups
  • the impact of partisan discipline and ideology on legislative collaboration between MPs
  • the extent of cross-party cooperation in various parliamentary environments and chambers… (More)

UNESCO demonstrates global impact through new transparency portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Opendata.UNESCO.org  is intended to present comprehensive, quality and timely information about UNESCO’s projects, enabling users to find information by country/region, funding source, and sector and providing comprehensive project data, including budget, expenditure, completion status, implementing organization, project documents, and more. It publishes program and financial information that are in line with UN system-experience of the IATI (International Aid Transparency Initiative) standards and other relevant transparency initiatives. UNESCO is now part of more than 230 organizations that have published to the IATI Registry, which brings together donor and developing countries, civil society organizations and other experts in aid information who are committed to working together to increase the transparency of aid.

Since its creation 70 years ago, UNESCO has tirelessly championed the causes of education, culture, natural sciences, social and human sciences, communication and information, globally. For instance – started in March 2010, the program for the Enhancement of Literacy in Afghanistan (ELA) benefited from a $19.5 million contribution by Japan. It aimed to improve the level of literacy, numeracy and vocational skills of the adult population in 70 districts of 15 provinces of Afghanistan. Over the next three years, until April 2013, the ELA programme helped some 360,000 adult learners in General Literacy compotency. An interactive map allows for an easy identification of UNESCO’s high-impact programs, and up-to-date information of current and future aid allocations within and across countries.

Public participation and interactivity are key to the success of any open data project. http://Opendata.UNESCO.org will evolve as Member States and partners will get involved, by displaying data on their own websites and sharing data among different networks, building and sharing applications, providing feedback, comments, and recommendations. …(More)”

Institutional isomorphism, policy networks, and the analytical depreciation of measurement indicators: The case of the EU e-government benchmarking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Cristiano Codagnone et al: “This article discusses the socio-political dimension of measurement in the context of benchmarking e-government within the European Union׳s Open Method of Coordination. It provides empirical evidence of how this has resulted in institutional isomorphism within the self-referential policy network community involved in the benchmarking process. It argues that the policy prominence retained by supply-side benchmarking of e-government has probably indirectly limited efforts made to measure and evaluate more tangible impacts. High scores in EU benchmarking have contributed to increasing the institutionally-perceived quality but not necessarily the real quality and utility of e-government services. The article concludes by outlining implications for policy and practical recommendations for filling the gaps identified in measurement and evaluation of e-government. It proposes a more comprehensive policy benchmarking framework, which aims to ensure a gradual improvement in measurement activities with indicators that reflect and follow the pace of change, align measurement activities to evaluation needs and, eventually, reduce measurement error….(More)”

Data for policy: when the haystack is made of needles. A call for contributions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Diana Vlad-Câlcic at the European Commission: “If policy-making is ‘whatever government chooses to do or not to do’ (Th. Dye), then how do governments actually decide? Evidence-based policy-making is not a new answer to this question, but it is constantly challenging both policy-makers and scientists to sharpen their thinking, their tools and their responsiveness.  The European Commission has recognised this and has embedded in its processes, namely through Impact Assessment, policy monitoring and evaluation, an evidence-informed decision-making approach.

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk. (John von Neumann)

New data technologies raise the bar high for advanced modelling, dynamic visualisation, real-time data flows and a variety of data sources, from sensors, to cell phones or the Internet as such. An abundance of (big) data, a haystack made of needles, but do public administrations have the right tools and skills to exploit it? How much of it adds real value to established statistics and to scientific evidence? Are the high hopes and the high expectations partly just hype? And what lessons can we learn from experience?

To explore these questions, the European Commission is launching a study with the Oxford Internet Institute, Technopolis and CEPS  on ‘Data for policy: big data and other innovative data-driven approaches for evidence-informed policymaking’. As a first step, the study will collect examples of initiatives in public institutions at national and international level, where innovative data technologies contribute to the policy process. It will eventually develop case-studies for EU policies.

Contribute to the collective reflection by sharing with us good practices and examples you have from other public administrations. Follow the developments of the study also on Twitter @data4policyEU”

How to Fight the Next Epidemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bill Gates in the New York Times: “The Ebola Crisis Was Terrible. But Next Time Could Be Much Worse….Much of the public discussion about the world’s response to Ebola has focused on whether the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other groups could have responded more effectively. These are worthwhile questions, but they miss the larger point. The problem isn’t so much that the system didn’t work well enough. The problem is that we hardly have a system at all.

To begin with, most poor countries, where a natural epidemic is most likely to start, have no systematic disease surveillance in place. Even once the Ebola crisis was recognized last year, there were no resources to effectively map where cases occurred, or to use people’s travel patterns to predict where the disease might go next….

Data is another crucial problem. During the Ebola epidemic, the database that tracks cases has not always been accurate. This is partly because the situation is so chaotic, but also because much of the case reporting has been done on paper and then sent to a central location for data entry….

I believe that we can solve this problem, just as we’ve solved many others — with ingenuity and innovation.

We need a global warning and response system for outbreaks. It would start with strengthening poor countries’ health systems. For example, when you build a clinic to deliver primary health care, you’re also creating part of the infrastructure for fighting epidemics. Trained health care workers not only deliver vaccines; they can also monitor disease patterns, serving as part of the early warning systems that will alert the world to potential outbreaks. Some of the personnel who were in Nigeria to fight polio were redeployed to work on Ebola — and that country was able to contain the disease very quickly.

We also need to invest in disease surveillance. We need a case database that is instantly accessible to the relevant organizations, with rules requiring countries to share their information. We need lists of trained personnel, from local leaders to global experts, prepared to deal with an epidemic immediately. … (More)”

Big Data Is an Economic Justice Issue, Not Just a Privacy Problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in the Huffington Post: “The control of personal data by “big data” companies is not just an issue of privacy but is becoming a critical issue of economic justice, argues a new report issued by the organization Data Justice>, which itself is being publicly launched in conjunction with the report. ..

At the same time, big data is fueling economic concentration across our economy. As a handful of data platforms generate massive amounts of user data, the barriers to entry rise, since potential competitors have little data themselves to entice advertisers compared with the incumbents, who have both the concentrated processing power and the supply of user data to dominate particular sectors. With little competition, companies end up with little incentive to either protect user privacy or share the economic value of that user data with the consumers generating those profits.

The report argues for a threefold approach to making big data work for everyone in the economy, not just for the big data platforms’ shareholders:

  • First, regulators need to strengthen user control of their own data by both requiring explicit consent for all uses of the data and better informing users of how it’s being used and how companies profit from that data.
  • Second, regulators need to factor control of data into merger review, and to initiate antitrust actions against companies like Google where monopoly control of a sector like search advertising has been established.
  • Third, policymakers should restrict practices that harm consumers, including banning price discrimination where consumers are not informed of all discount options available and bringing the participation of big data platforms in marketing financial services under the regulation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Data Justice itself has been founded as an organization “to promote public education and new alliances to challenge the danger of big data to workers, consumers and the public.” It will work to educate the public, policymakers and organizational allies on how big data is contributing to economic inequality in the economy. Its new website at datajustice.org is intended to bring together a wide range of resources highlighting the economic justice aspects of big data.”

31 cities agree to use EU-funded open innovation platform for better smart cities’ services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “At CEBIT, 25 cities from 6 EU countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and 6 cities from Brazil will present Open & Agile Smart Cities Task Force (OASC), an initiative making it easier for city councils  and startups to improve smart city services (such as transport, energy efficiency, environmental or e-health services). This will be achieved thanks to FIWARE, an EU-funded, open source platform and cloud-based building blocks developed in the EU that can be used to develop a huge range of applications, from Smart Cities to eHealth, and from transport to disaster management. Many applications have already been built using FIWARE – from warnings of earthquakes to preventing food waste to Smartaxi apps. Find a full list of cities in the Background.

The OASC deal will allow cities to share their open data (collected from sensors measuring, for example, traffic flows) so that startups can develop apps and tools that benefit all citizens (for example, an app with traffic information for people on the move). Moreover, these systems will be shared between cities (so, an app with transport information developed in city A can be also adopted by city B, without the latter having to develop it from scratch); FIWARE will also give startups and app developers in these cities access to a global market for smart city services.

Cities from across the globe are trying to make the most of open innovation. This will allow them to include a variety of stakeholders in their activities (services are increasingly connected to other systems and innovative startups are a big part of this trend) and encourage a competitive yet attractive market for developers, thus reducing costs, increasing quality and avoiding vendor lock-in….(More)”

Our New Three Rs: Rigor, Relevance, and Readability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stephen J. Del Rosso in Governance: “…Because of the dizzying complexity of the contemporary world, the quest for a direct relationship between academic scholarship and its policy utility is both quixotic and unnecessary. The 2013 U.S. Senate’s vote to prohibit funding for political science projects through the National Science Foundation, except for those certified “as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States,” revealed a fundamental misreading of the nonlinear path between idea and policy. Rather than providing a clear blueprint for addressing emergent or long-standing challenges, a more feasible role for academic scholarship is what political scientist Roland Paris describes as helping to “order the world in which officials operate.” Scholarly works can “influence practitioners’ understandings of what is possible or desirable in a particular policy field or set of circumstances,” he believes, by “creating operational frameworks for … identifying options and implementing policies.”

It is sometimes claimed that think tanks should play the main role in conveying scholarly insights to policymakers. But, however they may have mastered the sound bite, the putative role of think tanks as effective transmission belts for policy-relevant ideas is limited by their lack of academic rigor and systematic peer review. There is also a tendency, particularly among some “Inside the Beltway” experts, to trim their sails to the prevailing political winds and engage in self-censorship to keep employment options open in current or future presidential administrations. Scholarship’s comparative advantage in the marketplace of ideas is also evident in terms of its anticipatory function—the ability to loosen the intellectual bolts for promising policies not quite ready for implementation. A classic example is Swedish Nobel laureate Gunner Myrdal’s 1944 study of race relations, The American Dilemma, which was largely ignored and even disavowed by its sponsors for over a decade until it proved essential to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Moreover, it should also be noted, rather than providing a detailed game plan for addressing the problem of race in the country, Myrdal’s work was a quintessential example of the power of scholarship to frame critically important issues.

To bridge the scholarship–policy gap, academics must balance rigor and relevance with a third “R”—readability. There is no shortage of important scholarly work that goes unnoticed or unread because of its presentation. Scholars interested in having influence beyond the ivory tower need to combine their pursuit of disciplinary requirements with efforts to make their work more intelligible and accessible to a broader audience. For example, new forms of dissemination, such as blogs and other social media innovations, provide policy-relevant scholars with ample opportunities to supplement more traditional academic outlets. The recent pushback from the editors of the International Studies Association’s journals to the announced prohibition on their blogging is one indication that the cracks in the old system are already appearing.

At the risk of oversimplification, there are three basic tribes populating the political science field. One tribe comprises those who “get it” when it comes to the importance of policy relevance, a second eschews such engagement with the real world in favor of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and a third is made up of anxious untenured assistant professors who seek to follow the path that will best provide them with secure employment. If war, as was famously said, is too important to be left to the generals, then the future of the political science field is too important to be left to the intellectual ostriches who bury their heads in self-referential esoterica. However, the first tribe needs to be supported, and the third tribe needs to be shown that there is professional value in engaging with the world, both to enlighten and, perhaps more importantly, to provoke—a sentiment the policy-relevant scholar and inveterate provocateur, Huntington, would surely have endorsed…(More)”