Springwise: “Businesses often stand by the motto ‘the customer is always right’ — but are they? We’ve already seen a few services that deny consumers what they want based on their personal info. For example, Billboard Brasil’s Fan Check Machine only gave out copies of the music magazine if the buyer could prove they owned tracks by the artist on the cover. Now the Luce X2 Touch TV vending machine uses facial recognition and customers’ medical records to determine if they should be allowed to buy an unhealthy snack.
Created by Italy-based Rhea Vendors and recently launched in the UK, the machine features a 22-inch touchscreen display that lets customers to select an item just like a standard vending machine. However, before the snack is released customers with an account can go through a facial recognition check.
The technology detects the customer’s age, build and mood in order to determine whether the purchase is a wise decision. The machine can also be programmed to access information about the user’s medical records and purchase history. If the algorithms decide that purchasing a coffee with 3 sugars or the fourth candy bar of the day is a bad idea for their health or mood, it can refuse to vend the product.
While some customers won’t appreciate their private data being analyzed or getting rejected by a lifeless machine, the idea could be a savior for those on a diet….(More).
Make policy for real, not ideal, humans
Martin Wolf at the Financial Times: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. This famous remark of the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is particularly relevant to economists. “Homo economicus” is far-sighted, rational and self-interested. Real human beings are none of these things. We are bundles of emotions, not calculating machines. This matters
The World Bank’s latest World Development Report examines this territory. It notes that “behavioural economics” alters our view of human behaviour in three ways: first, most of our thinking is not deliberative, but automatic; second, it is socially conditioned; and, third, it is shaped by inaccurate mental models.
The Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, explored the idea that we think in two different ways in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow . The need for an automatic system is evident. Our ancestors did not have the time to work out answers to life’s challenges from first principles. They acquired automatic responses and a cultural predisposition towards rules of thumb. We inherited both these traits. Thus, we are influenced by how a problem is framed.
Another characteristic is “confirmation bias” — the tendency to interpret new information as support for pre-existing beliefs. We also suffer from loss aversion, fierce resistance to losing what one already has. For our ancestors, on the margin of survival, that made sense.
The fact that humans are intensely social is clear. Even the idea that we are autonomous is itself socially conditioned. We are also far from solely self-interested. A bad consequence of the power of norms is that societies may be stuck in destructive patterns of behaviour. Nepotism and corruption are examples. If they are entrenched, it may be difficult (or dangerous) for individuals not to participate. But social norms can also be valuable. Trust is a valuable norm. It rests on one of humanity’s strongest behaviours: conditional co-operation. People will punish free-riders even when it costs them to do so. This trait strengthens groups and so must raise members’ ability to survive.
Mental models are essential. Some seem to be inbuilt; and some can be damaging — as well as productive. Ideas about “us” and “them”, reinforced by social norms, may well lead to results that range from the merely unfair to the catastrophic. Equally important may be mental models that create self-fulfilling expectations of who will succeed and who will fail. There is evidence, notes the WDR, that mental models rooted in history may shape people’s view of the world for centuries: caste is an example. Such mental models survive because they are reproduced socially and become part of the automatic rather than the deliberative system. They influence not just our perceptions of others, but perceptions of ourselves.
To illustrate the relevance of these realities, the report analyses the policy challenges of poverty, early childhood development, household finance, productivity, health and climate change….(More)”
Just say no to digital hoarding
Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “We have become a nation of digital hoarders. We save everything, even stuff that we know, deep down, we’ll never need or be able to find. We save every e-mail, every photo, every file, every text message and every video clip. If we don’t have enough space on our mobile devices, we move it to a different storage device, maybe even a hard drive or a flash drive. Or, better yet, we just move it to “the cloud.”….
If this were simply a result of the exponential growth of information — the “information overload” — that would be one thing. That’s what technology is supposed to do for us – provide new ways of creating, storing and manipulating information. Innovation, from this perspective, can be viewed as technology’s frantic quest to keep up with society’s information needs.
But digital hoarding is about something much different – it’s about hoarding data for the sake of data. When Apple creates a new “Burst Mode” on the iPhone 5s, enabling you to rapidly save a series of up to 10 photos in succession – and you save all of them – is that not an example of hoarding? When you save every e-book, every movie and every TV season that you’ve “binge-watched” on your tablet or other digital device — isn’t that another symptom of being a digital hoarder? In the analog era, you would have donated used books to charity, hosted a garage sale to get rid of old albums you never listen to, or simply dumped these items in the trash.
You may not think you are a digital hoarder. You may think that the desire to save each and every photo, e-mail or file is something relatively harmless. Storage is cheap and abundant, right? You may watch a reality TV show such as “Hoarders” and think to yourself, “That’s not me.” But maybe it is you. (Especially if you still have those old episodes of “Hoarders” on your digital device.)
Unlike hoarding in the real world — where massive stacks of papers, books, clothing and assorted junk might physically obstruct your ability to move and signal to others that you need help – there are no obvious outward signs of being a digital hoarder. And, in fact, owning the newest, super-slim 128GB tablet capable of hoarding more information than anyone else strikes many as being progressive. However, if you are constantly increasing the size of your data plan or buying new digital devices with ever more storage capacity, you just might be a digital hoarder…
In short, innovation should be about helping us transform data into information. “Search” was perhaps the first major innovation that helped us transform data into information. The “cloud” is currently the innovation that has the potential to organize our data better and more efficiently, keeping it from clogging up our digital devices. The next big innovation may be “big data,” which claims that it can make sense of all the new data we’re creating. This may be either brilliant — helping us find the proverbial needle in the digital haystack — or disastrous — encouraging us to build bigger and bigger haystacks in the hope that there’s a needle in there somewhere… (More).”
Crowdsourcing Data to Fight Air Pollution
Jason Brick at PSFK: “Air pollution is among the most serious environmental problems of the modern age. Although pollution in developed nations like the USA and Germany has fallen since the 1980s, air quality in growing technological countries — especially in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) group — grows worse with each year. In 2012, 3.7 million people died as a direct result of problems caused by chronic exposure to bad air, and tens of millions more were made ill.
There is no easy solution to such a complex and widespread problem, but Breathe offers a fix for one aspect and solves it in two ways.
The first way is the device itself: a portable plastic brick smaller than a bar of soap that monitors the presence and concentration of toxic gases and other harmful substances in the air, in real time throughout your day. It records the quality and, if it reaches unacceptably dangerous levels, warns you immediately with an emergency signal. Plug the device into your smart phone, and it keeps a record of air quality by time and location you can use to avoid the most polluted times of day and places in your area.
The second solution is the truly innovative aspect of this project. Via the Breathe app, any user who wants to can add her data to a central database that keeps statistics worldwide. Individuals can then use that data to plan vacations, time outdoor activities or schedule athletic events. Given enough time, Breathe could accumulate enough data to be used to affect policy by identifying the most polluted areas in a city, county or nation so the authorities can work on a more robust solution….(More)”
Launching “Map the Banks” campaign to map the global financial industry
OpenCorporates: “Today, we are happy to announce the launch of our latest campaign: Map the Banks – possibly first ever global sprint to scrape a single class of data from every jurisdiction in the world. For this campaign, we are focussing on how the financial industry is licenced to operate.
The financial crisis cost the world 4 trillion dollars. Before we can disrupt the industry, we need to map it. The financial crisis revealed the damage done by our lack of understanding of the influence and size of banks and financial companies. We no longer want to be in the dark. Citizens and regulators have to take control back by having open and free access to this information. We are taking up the challenge of collecting every banking and financial licence in the world so we can work towards a better banking system, that works for the good of society. We’re joined in this mission by Civio, OpenNorth & many more… (Interested in being a partner? Email us!)
Collecting this data could answer questions like:
- Which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? Even with the small amount of data already collected, we know there are at least 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US.
- Which countries have the most financial services outsourced to them?
- What companies are licenced to operate in the largest number of countries worldwide?
- Which US bank has the most consumer credit licences in Asia?
- Which organisations appear to operate like financial services companies, yet aren’t regulated as such?
- Where are credit unions being dissolved or created the fastest?
HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities
Book by Todd Presner, David Shepard, Yoh Kawano: “The prefix “hyper” refers to multiplicity and abundance. More than a physical space, a hypercity is a real city overlaid with information networks that document the past, catalyze the present, and project future possibilities. Hypercities are always under construction.
Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. A collaboratively authored and designed work, HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the Tehran election protests of 2009.
Not a book about maps in the literal sense, HyperCities describes thick mapping: the humanist project of participating and listening that transforms mapping into an ethical undertaking. Ultimately, the digital humanities do not consist merely of computer-based methods for analyzing information. They are a means of integrating scholarship with the world of lived experience, making sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.”
Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. A collaboratively authored and designed work, HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the Tehran election protests of 2009.
Not a book about maps in the literal sense, HyperCities describes thick mapping: the humanist project of participating and listening that transforms mapping into an ethical undertaking. Ultimately, the digital humanities do not consist merely of computer-based methods for analyzing information. They are a means of integrating scholarship with the world of lived experience, making sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.”
Launching Disasters.Data.Gov
at the OSTP Blog: “Strengthening our Nation’s resilience to disasters is a shared responsibility, with all community members contributing their unique skills and perspectives. Whether you’re a data steward who can unlock information and foster a culture of open data, an innovator who can help address disaster preparedness challenges, or a volunteer ready to join the “Innovation for Disasters” movement, we are excited for you to visit the new disasters.data.gov site, launching today.
First previewed at the White House Innovation for Disaster Response and Recovery Initiative Demo Day, disasters.data.gov is designed to be a public resource to foster collaboration and the continual improvement of disaster-related open data, free tools, and new ways to empower first responders, survivors, and government officials with the information needed in the wake of a disaster.
A screenshot from the new disasters.data.gov web portal.
Today, the Administration is unveiling the first in a series of Innovator Challenges that highlight pressing needs from the disaster preparedness community. The inaugural Innovator Challenge focuses on a need identified from firsthand experience of local emergency management, responders, survivors, and Federal departments and agencies. The challenge asks innovators across the nation: “How might we leverage real-time sensors, open data, social media, and other tools to help reduce the number of fatalities from flooding?”
In addition to this first Innovator Challenge, here are some highlights from disasters.data.gov:….(More)”
How Government Can Unlock Economic Benefits from Open Data
Zillow is a prime example of how open data creates economic value. The Seattle-based company has grown rapidly since its launch in 2006, generating more than $78 million in revenue in its last financial quarter and employing more than 500 workers. But real estate firms aren’t the only businesses benefiting from data collected and published by government.
GovLab, a research laboratory run by New York University, publishes the Open Data 500, a list of companies that benefit from open data produced by the federal government. The list contains more than 15 categories of businesses, ranging from health care and education to energy, finance, legal and the environment. And the data flows from all the major agencies, including NASA, Defense, Transportation, Homeland Security and Labor….
Zillow’s road to success underscores the challenges that lie ahead if local government is going to grab its share of open data’s economic bonanza. One of the company’s biggest hurdles was to create a system that could integrate government data from thousands of databases in county government. “There’s no standard format, which is very frustrating,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist, told Computerworld.com. “It’s up to us to figure out 3,000 different ways to ingest data and make sense of it…. More at GovTech”
An Introduction to the Economic Analysis of Open Data
Research Note by Soichiro Takagi: “Open data generally refers to a movement in which public organizations provide data in a machine-readable format to the public, so that anyone can reuse the data. Open data is becoming an important phenomenon in Japan. At this moment, utilization of open data in Japan is emerging with collaborative efforts among small units of production such as individuals. These collaborations have been also observed in the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, but collaboration in open data is somewhat different in respect to small-scale, distributed collaboration. The aim of this research note is to share the phenomena of open data as an object of economic analysis with readers by describing the movement and providing a preliminary analysis. This note discusses how open data is associated with mass collaboration from the viewpoint of organizational economics. It also provides the results of empirical analysis on how the regional characteristics of municipalities affect the decision of local governments to conduct open data initiatives.”
Here’s What Happens When Community Input Meets Great Ideas
People4Smarter Cities: “Making Connections for Positive Change in Communities: New York-based Ioby is connecting community change-makers with resources. The organization, which stands for “In our back yard,” offers an online crowd-resourcing platform aimed at matching up people working on neighborhood ecological and environmental projects with citizens who can offer either financial or physical support. Current projects on the online platform include creating urban gardens in Harlem to provide healthful, organic food to children living in the area, while another seeks to build fitness zones for individuals with physical and developmental disabilities.
Aiming to Make the Grade in D.C.: In Washington, D.C., citizens can choose whether the local government passes or fails. Through a program launched by the city called Grade D.C., feedback and comments by residents on their interaction with municipal services and departments are culled from the Grade D.C. website and social-media outlets. A third-party firm then uses an algorithm to convert the feedback into a score and a letter grade ranging from A to F. The grades are posted online each month for about 15 agencies. The city says its goal is to help citizens offer actionable feedback and help government agencies improve the quality of customer care.
When Citizens Want a Piece of the ACTion: For residents of Alexandria, Virginia, who want to improve their community, waiting for local issues to solve themselves isn’t an option. With the citizen-created online platform ACTion Alexandria, they can team up with others to share ideas, debate solutions and take action simply by connecting through the portal. Residents can go to the site’s Challenge section to propose solutions to community problems posted by locals. When an idea receives substantial community support, the website tries to rally others around the idea. Meanwhile, the platform’s Action Center lists projects already underway that need a helping hand….More at People4Smarter Cities”