Many researchers say they’ll share data — but don’t

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Clare Watson: “Most biomedical and health researchers who declare their willingness to share the data behind journal articles do not respond to access requests or hand over the data when asked, a study reports1.

Livia Puljak, who studies evidence-based medicine at the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb, and her colleagues analysed 3,556 biomedical and health science articles published in a month by 282 BMC journals. (BMC is part of Springer Nature, the publisher of Nature; Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.)

The team identified 381 articles with links to data stored in online repositories and another 1,792 papers for which the authors indicated in statements that their data sets would be available on reasonable request. The remaining studies stated that their data were in the published manuscript and its supplements, or generated no data, so sharing did not apply.

But of the 1,792 manuscripts for which the authors stated they were willing to share their data, more than 90% of corresponding authors either declined or did not respond to requests for raw data (see ‘Data-sharing behaviour’). Only 14%, or 254, of the contacted authors responded to e-mail requests for data, and a mere 6.7%, or 120 authors, actually handed over the data in a usable format. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology on 29 May.

DATA-SHARING BEHAVIOUR. Graphic showing percentage of authors that were willing to share data.
Source: Livia Puljak et al

Puljak was “flabbergasted” that so few researchers actually shared their data. “There is a gap between what people say and what people do,” she says. “Only when we ask for the data can we see their attitude towards data sharing.”

“It’s quite dismaying that [researchers] are not coming forward with the data,” says Rebecca Li, who is executive director of non-profit global data-sharing platform Vivli and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts…(More)”.

Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sara B. Heller, Benjamin Jakubowski, Zubin Jelveh & Max Kapustin: “This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. We address central concerns about police data and algorithmic bias by predicting shooting victimization rather than arrest, which we show accurately captures risk differences across demographic groups despite bias in the predictors. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 130 times higher than the average Chicagoan. Although Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions, those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits: predictive accuracy among the top 500 people justifies spending up to $123,500 per person for an intervention that could cut their risk of being shot in half….(More)”.

Meet the fact-checkers decoding Sri Lanka’s meltdown

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nilesh Christopher: “On the evening of May 3, the atmosphere at Galle Face Green, an esplanade along the coastline of Sri Lanka’s capital city of Colombo, was carnivalesque. Parents strolled on sidewalks with toddlers hoisted on their shoulders. Teenagers wearing bandanas played the flute and blew plastic horns. People climbed atop makeshift podiums to address the crowds, greeted by scattered applause. 

The crowd of a few hundred was part of a series of protests that had been underway since mid-March, demanding the ouster of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. For months, the country has been trapped in a brutal economic crisis: Sri Lanka is currently unable to pay for imports of essentials, such as food, medicines, and fuel. Populist tax cuts, an abrupt ban on fertilizer imports, decimated crop yields, and the collapse of tourism during the pandemic all helped to push the country into the worst economic crisis it has faced since gaining independence in 1948.

The island nation owes nearly $7 billion this year and has next to no foreign reserves left. “We don’t have any gas. We don’t have fuel and some food items. We lose power for three to four hours daily now,” Nalin Chamara, 42, a hotelier protesting with his family and children, told Rest of World. Meanwhile, the presidential family at one point controlled around 70% of the nation’s budget and ran it as a family business, spending billions of dollars of borrowed money on vanity projects, such as an extravagant airport and cricket stadium that now sit almost entirely unused.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne walked among the Galle Face Green crowds, surveying the scene. He pointed out where demonstrators had jury-rigged their own electricity supply by welding solar panels atop an open truck and connecting them to a battery. The power generated was being used to charge over two dozen smartphones inside a big blue tent, which also contained a library housing 15,000 books. “This is what Sri Lankans will do if you let them build stuff. Fucking build infrastructure from scratch,” Wijeratne said. The protest featured a giant middle finger monument made of plastic bottles, directed at the Rajapaksas. “Our real educational export should be B.Sc. in protest,” Wijeratne said.

Wijeratne, 29 years old, is best known as the author of Numbercaste, a science fiction novel about a near-future world where people’s importance in society is decided based on the all-powerful Number, a credit score determined by their social circle and social network data. But he is also the chief executive of Watchdog, a research collective based in Colombo that uses fact-checking and open source intelligence (OSINT) methods to investigate Sri Lanka’s ongoing crisis. As part of its work, he and his 12-member team of coders, journalists, economists, and students track, time stamp, geolocate, and document videos of protests shared online.

Watchdog’s protest tracker has emerged as the most comprehensive online archive of the historic events unfolding in Sri Lanka. Its data set, which comprises 597 different protests and 49 conflicts, has been used by global news organizations to demonstrate the extent of public pushback.

“[Our] core mission is simple,” Wijeratne told Rest of World. “We want to help people understand the infrastructure they use. The concrete, the laws, the policies, and the social contracts that they live under. We want to help people understand the causality of how they came to be and how they operate.”…(More)”.

Evidence decision-making tool for policymakers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Repository by The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) (via APO): “…outlines tools for education policy-makers to assess their confidence in a certain policy, program or initiative, and decide on next steps.

The evidence decision-making tool assists you to:

  • assess how confident you are that a certain policy, program or other initiative is likely to be effective in your context
  • decide on next steps, including how to implement the initiative given your level of confidence, and how to collect more evidence to increase your confidence in its effectiveness

The evidence decision-making tool can be used by an individual or a group, for example, in a planning workshop. It’s designed to be flexible, so you can use it to consider a change to an existing initiative or the introduction of something new…(More)”.

Regulatory Governance: Policy Making, Legislative Drafting and Law Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Edward Donelan: “This book describes how governments formulate policies, draft legislation, and manage stocks of legislation and how approaches to these tasks are converging. That convergence has developed over 30 years through the work by the OECD in its studies on regulatory reform and the work of other international organizations to improve regulatory management.

The Institutions of the European Union and its member states, OECD member countries and a growing number of developing and transitional countries have developed a policy best described as ‘Better Regulation.’ That policy is characterized using regulatory impact assessment, improving public consultation, and reducing administrative burdens. The policy has brought improvements in legislative drafting and managing stocks of legislation.

The book concludes with a description of the impact of information technology on governments and how the challenges posed by the Internet, globalization and pandemics are being met by new approaches to regulating to ensure its benefits exceed its costs….(More)”.

Digital Government Model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by USAID: “The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the importance of digital government processes and tools. Governments with digital systems, processes, and infrastructure in place were able to quickly scale emergency response assistance, communications, and payments. At the same time, the pandemic accelerated many risks associated with digital tools, such as mis- and disinformation, surveillance, and the exploitation of personal data.

USAID and development partners are increasingly supporting countries in the process of adopting technologies to create public value– broadly referred to as digital government–while mitigating and avoiding risks. The Digital Government Model provides a basis for establishing a shared understanding and language on the core components of digital government, including the contextual considerations and foundational elements that influence the success of digital government investments…(More)”

Judging Deliberation: An Assessment of the Crowdsourced Icelandic Constitutional Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Delia Popescu and Matthew Loveland: “This study explores deliberation as a lived experience between individuals engaged in putatively deliberative practices. While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are fewer empirical studies that address its online counterpart. The authors review current theoretical conceptualizations and operationalize a measure of deliberation, and then apply the measure to the case of the debate fostered by the Constitutional Council online public platform dedicated to drafting the Icelandic constitution – the first “crowdsourced” constitutional project in the world. This is the first effort to both quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the nature of deliberation in the case of Iceland. Generally, this exploration is meant to identify and analyze markers of deliberation in a setting that aspires to foster such exchanges. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this work for future political theory and related empirical investigation….(More).”

Sweeping Legislation Aims to Ban the Sale of Location Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Joseph Cox and Liz Landers: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren and a group of other Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would essentially outlaw the sale of location data harvested from smartphones. The bill also presents a range of other powers to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and individual victims to push back against the multibillion-dollar location data industry.

The move comes after Motherboard reported multiple instances in which companies were selling location data of people who visited abortion clinics, and sometimes making subsets of that data freely available. Such data has taken on a new significance in the wake of the Supreme Court’s looming vote on whether to overturn the protections offered by Roe v. Wade. The bill also follows a wave of reporting from Motherboard and others on various abuses and data sales in the location data industry writ large.

“Data brokers profit from the location data of millions of people, posing serious risks to Americans everywhere by selling their most private information,” Warren told Motherboard in a statement. “With this extremist Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and states seeking to criminalize essential health care, it is more crucial than ever for Congress to protect consumers’ sensitive data. The Health and Location Data Protection Act will ban brokers from selling Americans’ location and health data, rein in giant data brokers, and set some long overdue rules of the road for this $200 billion industry.”…(More)”.

How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bennett Cyphers: “…Weather apps, navigation apps, coupon apps, and “family safety” apps often request location access in order to enable key features. But once an app has location access, it typically has free rein to share that access with just about anyone.

That’s where the location data broker industry comes in. Data brokers entice app developers with cash-for-data deals, often paying per user for direct access to their device. Developers can add bits of code called “software development kits,” or SDKs, from location brokers into their apps. Once installed, a broker’s SDK is able to gather data whenever the app itself has access to it: sometimes, that means access to location data whenever the app is open. In other cases, it means “background” access to data whenever the phone is on, even if the app is closed.

One app developer received the following marketing email from data broker Safegraph:

SafeGraph can monetize between $1-$4 per user per year on exhaust data (across location, matches, segments, and other strategies) for US mobile users who have strong data records. We already partner with several GPS apps with great success, so I would definitely like to explore if a data partnership indeed makes sense.

But brokers are not limited to data from apps they partner with directly. The ad tech ecosystem provides ample opportunities for interested parties to skim from the torrents of personal information that are broadcast during advertising auctions. In a nutshell, advertising monetization companies (like Google) partner with apps to serve ads. As part of the process, they collect data about users—including location, if available—and share that data with hundreds of different companies representing digital advertisers. Each of these companies uses that data to decide what ad space to bid on, which is a nasty enough practice on its own. But since these “bidstream” data flows are largely unregulated, the companies are also free to collect the data as it rushes past and store it for later use. 

The data brokers covered in this post add another layer of misdirection to the mix. Some of them may gather data from apps or advertising exchanges directly, but others acquire data exclusively from other data brokers. For example, Babel Street reportedly purchases all of its data from Venntel. Venntel, in turn, acquires much of its data from its parent company, the marketing-oriented data broker Gravy Analytics. And Gravy Analytics has purchased access to data from the brokers Complementics, Predicio, and Mobilewalla. We have little information about where those companies get their data—but some of it may be coming from any of the dozens of other companies in the business of buying and selling location data.

If you’re looking for an answer to “which apps are sharing data?”, the answer is: “It’s almost impossible to know.” Reporting, technical analysis, and right-to-know requests through laws like GDPR have revealed relationships between a handful of apps and location data brokers. For example, we know that the apps Muslim Pro and Muslim Mingle sold data to X-Mode, and that navigation app developer Sygic sent data to Predicio (which sold it to Gravy Analytics and Venntel). However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Each of the location brokers discussed in this post obtains data from hundreds or thousands of different sources. Venntel alone has claimed to gather data from “over 80,000” different apps. Because much of its data comes from other brokers, most of these apps likely have no direct relationship with Venntel. As a result, the developers of the apps fueling this industry likely have no idea where their users’ data ends up. Users, in turn, have little hope of understanding whether and how their data arrives in these data brokers’ hands…(More)”.

The Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals: Transforming Governance Through Global Goals?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Frank Biermann, Thomas Hickmann, and Carole-Anne Sénit: “Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence, and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies….(More)”.