Paper by Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen: “Crowdsourcing legislation gives ordinary citizens, rather than political and bureaucratic elites, the chance to cooperate to come up with innovative new policies. By increasing popular involvement, representative democracies hope to restock dwindling reserves of political legitimacy. However, it is still not clear how involvement in legislative decision making affects the attitudes of the participants. It is therefore of central concern to establish whether crowdsourcing can actually help restore political legitimacy by creating more positive attitudes toward the political system. This article contributes to this research agenda by examining the developments in attitudes among the users on the Finnish website Avoin Ministeriö (“Open Ministry”) which orchestrates crowdsourcing of legislation by providing online tools for deliberating ideas for citizens’ initiatives. The developments in attitudes are investigated with a two-stage survey of 421 respondents who answered questions concerning political and social attitudes, as well as political activities performed. The results suggest that while crowdsourcing legislation has so far not affected political legitimacy in a positive manner, it has the potential to do so….(More)”
8 great data visualizations from TED Talks
| Eric Berlow and Sean Gourley: Mapping ideas worth spreading The event: TED2013 What they’re illustrating: Ecologist Eric Berlow and data scientist Sean Gourley met at TED and discovered that their talks — on the data and ecology of war — were connected. They decided to map a wide variety of interlocking ideas, using TEDx talks as their data set. Most eye-popping moment: At 2:57, talks (represented as nodes) spin and cluster into a multicolored 3D visual map of the TEDx universe. |
| Nathalie Miebach: Art made of storms The event: TEDGlobal 2011 What she’s illustrating: Using strings and beads, Nathalie Miebach translates weather data into woven sculptures — and then uses the sculptures as a basis for musical scores. Most eye-popping moment: Check out the detailed close-ups starting at 3:32, but don’t miss the brief string quartet rendition of her score in the opening shot. |
| Aaron Koblin: Visualizing ourselves … with crowd-sourced data The event: TED2011 What he’s illustrating: Artist Aaron Koblin starts simply enough, with elegant, illuminated maps showing U.S. flight path patterns. But his crowdsourced illustration projects quickly lead us into strange and uncharted visual territory. Most eye-popping moment: At 13:08, Koblin plays a clip from his music video for a posthumous Johnny Cash track, using thousands of web-sourced, frame-by-frame Flash drawings to build a hypnotic and moving portrait of the country legend. |
| David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization The event: TEDGlobal 2010 What he’s illustrating: The glut of information in our world clouds our understanding of current events. Data expert David McCandless shows how infographics help us make sense out of statistics. Most eye-popping moment: At 2:07, McCandless provides a sobering and simple graphic to illustrate the catastrophic impact of the 2008 financial crisis. |
| Carter Emmart: A 3D atlas of the universe The event: TED2010 What he’s illustrating: Oh, the entire known universe, circa 2010 Most eye-popping moment: We pan up from the peaks of the Himalayas to the edge of the cosmos in less than 7:00. You’re really going to want to see the whole thing. |
| Margaret Wertheim: The beautiful math of coral The event: TED2009 What she’s illustrating: Using knitting techniques derived from mathematical algorithms found in natural forms, Margaret Wertheim and her collaborators crocheted a jaw-droppingly accurate re-creation of a coral reef. Most eye-popping moment: From 1:19-1:55, we get a slideshow picturing Wertheim’s “corals” in breathtaking detail, revealing both their mathematical structure and their eerie realism. Don’t be surprised when you reach for your snorkel. |
Open-Data Project Adds Transparency to African Elections
Jessica Weiss at the International Center for Journalists: “An innovative tool developed to help people register to vote in Kenya is proving to be a valuable asset to voters across the African continent.
GotToVote was created in 2012 by two software developers under the guidance of ICFJ’s Knight International Journalism Fellow Justin Arenstein for use during Kenya’s general elections. In just 24 hours, the developers took voter registration information in a government PDF and turned it into a simple website with usable data that helped people locate the nearest voting center where they could register for elections. Kenyan media drove a large audience to the site, which resulted in a major boost in voter registrations.
Since then, GotToVote has helped people register to vote in Malawi and Zimbabwe. Now, it is being adapted for use in national elections in Ghana and Uganda in 2016.
Ugandan civic groups led by The African Freedom of Information Centre are planning to use it to help people register, to verify registrations and for SMS registration drives. They are also proposing new features—including digital applications to help citizens post issues of concern and compare political positions between parties and candidates so voters better understand the choices they are being offered.
In Ghana, GotToVote is helping citizens find their nearest registration center to make sure they are eligible to vote in that country’s 2016 national elections. The tool, which is optimized for mobile devices, makes voter information easily accessible to the public. It explains who is eligible to register for the 2016 general elections and gives a simple overview of the voter registration process. It also tells users what documentation to take with them to register…..
Last year, Malawi’s national government used GotToVote to check whether voters were correctly registered. As a result, more than 20,000 were found to be incorrectly registered, because they were not qualified voters or were registered in the wrong constituency. In 2013, thousands used GotToVote via their mobile and tablet devices to find their polling places in Zimbabwe.
The successful experiment provides a number of lessons about the power and feasibility of open data projects, showing that they don’t require large teams, big budgets or a lot of time to build…(More)“
Knight Cities Challenge Winners
Carol Coletta at Knight Foundation: “32 civic innovators receive $5 million in funding in first Knight Cities Challenge…
Several themes emerged among the winning applications, which all sought to accelerate talent, opportunity or engagement—the three primary drivers of city success—in some way. “Bringing life back to public and vacant space” was the theme of our largest category of winners, representing almost a third of the group. The second largest category was “changing the stories people tell about their cities” with almost 20 percent. Three more themes each represented 13 percent of the winning ideas: “reimagining the civic commons,” “retaining talent” and “promoting civic engagement.” A full list of the winners appears below…. (More)”
Discovering the Language of Data: Personal Pattern Languages and the Social Construction of Meaning from Big Data
Paper by Kim Erwin; Maggee Bond; Aashika Jain in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: “This paper attempts to address two issues relevant to the sense-making of Big Data. First, it presents a case study for how a large dataset can be transformed into both a visual language and, in effect, a ‘text’ that can be read and interpreted by human beings. The case study comes from direct observation of graduate students at the IIT Institute of Design who investigated task-switching behaviours, as documented by productivity software on a single user’s laptop and a smart phone. Through a series of experiments with the resulting dataset, the team effects a transformation of that data into a catalogue of visual primitives — a kind of iconic alphabet — that allow others to ‘read’ the data as a corpus and, more provocatively, suggest the formation of a personal pattern language. Second, this paper offers a model for human-technical collaboration in the sense-making of data, as demonstrated by this and other teams in the class. Current sense-making models tend to be data- and technology-centric, and increasingly presume data visualization as a primary point of entry of humans into Big Data systems. This alternative model proposes that meaningful interpretation of data emerges from a more elaborate interplay between algorithms, data and human beings….(More)”
Improving public policy through behavioral economics
Professor Chetty has been widely recognized for his research that combines empirical evidence and economic theory to help design more effective government policies. This is Part One of our conversation.
For part 2 of our conversation, on the use of administrative data (or “big data”) for research on what works in public policy, click here.”
Open Research, Open Data, Open Humans
at Quantified Self: ….“Open Humans aims to break down data silos in human health and research. We believe data has a huge potential to live and grow beyond the boundaries a single study or program. Our online portal allows members to aggregate data from the research they participate in. By connecting individuals willing to share existing research data about themselves with researchers who are interested in using that data, data can be re-used and built upon.” — OpenHumans.org
On March 24, 2015 the Open Humans Network officially opened their virtual doors and began allowing individuals to sign up and engage in a new model of participatory research. We spoke with Co-founder & Principal Investigator of the Public Data Sharing study, Madeleine Ball, Ph.D. about Open Humans, what it means for research, and what we can look foward to from this exciting initiative. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation….
What excites me about Open Humans is the potential we have to transform future research studies — from how they treat data to how they think about data sharing. We’re building our system so that participants are central to the data process. A good example of this when researchers use our member’s data they must also agree to return any new data that results from their research back to the original participant. This decentralization of data is a key component of our design. No single person, researchers, or study has all the data…(More)
Learning to See Data
Benedict Carey in the New York Times: “FOR the past year or so genetic scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have been collaborating with a specialist from another universe: Daniel Kohn, a Brooklyn-based painter and conceptual artist.
Mr. Kohn has no training in computers or genetics, and he’s not there to conduct art therapy classes. His role is to help the scientists with a signature 21st-century problem: Big Data overload.
Advanced computing produces waves of abstract digital data that in many cases defy interpretation; there’s no way to discern a meaningful pattern in any intuitive way. To extract some order from this chaos, analysts need to continually reimagine the ways in which they represent their data — which is where Mr. Kohn comes in. He spent 10 years working with scientists and knows how to pose useful questions. He might ask, for instance, What if the data were turned sideways? Or upside down? Or what if you could click on a point on the plotted data and see another dimension?….
And so it is in many fields, whether predicting climate, flagging potential terrorists or making economic forecasts. The information is all there, great expanding mountain ranges of it. What’s lacking is the tracker’s instinct for picking up a trail, the human gut feeling for where to start looking to find patterns and meaning. But can such creative instincts really be trained systematically? And even if they could, wouldn’t it take years to do so?
The answers are yes and no, at least when it comes to some advanced skills. And that should give analysts drowning in data some cause for optimism.
Scientists working in a little-known branch of psychology called perceptual learning have shown that it is possible to fast-forward a person’s gut instincts both in physical fields, like flying an airplane, and more academic ones, like deciphering advanced chemical notation. The idea is to train specific visual skills, usually with computer-game-like modules that require split-second decisions. Over time, a person develops a “good eye” for the material, and with it an ability to extract meaningful patterns instantaneously.
Perceptual learning is such an elementary skill that people forget they have it. It’s what we use as children to make distinctions between similar-looking letters, like U and V, long before we can read. It’s the skill needed to distinguish an A sharp from a B flat (both the notation and the note), or between friendly insurgents and hostiles in a fast-paced video game. By the time we move on to sentences and melodies and more cerebral gaming — “chunking” the information into larger blocks — we’ve forgotten how hard it was to learn all those subtle distinctions in the first place….(More)
Can Big Data Measure Livability in Cities?
PlaceILive: “Big data helps us measure and predict consumer behavior, hurricanes and even pregnancies. It has revolutionized the way we access and use information. That being said, so far big data has not been able to tackle bigger issues like urbanization or improve the livability of cities.
A new startup, www.placeilive.com thinks big data should and can be used to measure livability. They aggregated open data from government institutions and social media to create a tool that can calculate just that. ….PlaceILive wants to help people and governments better understand their cities, so that they can make smarter decisions. Cities can be more sustainable, while its users save money and time when they are choosing a new home.
Not everyone is eager to read long lists of raw data. Therefore they created appealing user-friendly maps that visualize the statistics. Offering the user fast and accessible information on the neighborhoods that matter to them.
Another cornerstone of PlaceILive is their Life Quality Index: an algorithm that takes aspects like transportation, safety, and affordability into account. Making it possible for people to easily compare the livability of different houses. You can read more on the methodology and sources here.
In its beta form, the site features five cities—New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Berlin. When you click on the New York portal, for instance, you can search for the place you want to know more about by borough, zip code, or address. Using New York as an example, it looks like this….(More)
Most text message health interventions were effective
Aditi Pai at MobiHealthNews: “A majority of published text message interventions between 2009 and 2014 that addressed diabetes self-management, weight loss, physical activity, smoking cessation, and medication adherence were effective, according to a systematic review of reviews published in The Annual Review of Public Health.
The review looked at 15 studies that reviewed 228 text message intervention studies addressing health promotion, disease prevention, and chronic disease self management. Study sizes ranged from 10 to 5,800 participants.
When the researchers assessed the reviews by effectiveness, they reported five of the 15 reviews — focused on a wide range of disease prevention and health promotion topics — found text messaging interventions had “statistically significant positive effects on health outcomes and/or behaviors”. These reviews looked at studies that focused on smoking cessation, physical activity, weight loss, and chronic disease self-management.
Three of the 15 reviews focused on physical activity, diet, and weight loss. One of these reviews reported that six out of 13 studies found a statistically significant clinical outcome. A meta-analysis of these studies found that participants in the study had seven times greater weight loss on average than non-SMS control participants.
Another review focused on physical activity, diet, and weight loss found that 11 of the 14 reviewed studies reported a decrease in weight. While five of 10 studies reported a reduction in body mass index, three of six studies reported a statistically significant increase in physical activity, and two of three studies found a reduction in blood pressure….(More)”