From Desert Battlefields To Coral Reefs, Private Satellites Revolutionize The View

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NPR Story: “As the U.S. military and its allies attacked the last Islamic State holdouts last year, it wasn’t clear how many civilians were still in the besieged desert town of Baghouz, Syria.

So Human Rights Watch asked a private satellite company, Planet, for its regular daily photos and also made a special request for video.

“That live video actually was instrumental in convincing us that there were thousands of civilians trapped in this pocket,” said Josh Lyons of Human Rights Watch. “Therefore, the coalition forces absolutely had an obligation to stop and to avoid bombardment of that pocket at that time.”

Which they did until the civilians fled.

Lyons, who’s based in Geneva, has a job title you wouldn’t expect at a human rights group: director of geospatial analysis. He says satellite imagery is increasingly a crucial component of human rights investigations, bolstering traditional eyewitness accounts, especially in areas where it’s too dangerous to send researchers.

“Then we have this magical sort of fusion of data between open-source, eyewitness testimony and data from space. And that becomes essentially a new gold standard for investigations,” he said.

‘A string of pearls’

Satellite photos used to be restricted to the U.S. government and a handful of other nations. Now such imagery is available to everyone, creating a new world of possibilities for human rights groups, environmentalists and researchers who monitor nuclear programs.

They get those images from a handful of private, commercial satellite companies, like Planet and Maxar….(More)”.

When Mini-Publics and Maxi-Publics Coincide: Ireland’s National Debate on Abortion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Farrell et al: “Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly (CA) of 2016–18 was tasked with making recommendations on abortion. This paper shows that from the outset its members were in large part in favour of the liberalisation of abortion (though a fair proportion were undecided), that over the course of its deliberations the CA as a whole moved in a more liberal direction on the issue, but that its position was largely reflected in the subsequent referendum vote by the population as a whole….(More)”

Journalists’ guide to COVID data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by RTDNA: “Watch a press conference, turn on a newscast, or overhear just about any phone conversation these days and you’ll hear mayors discussing R values, reporters announcing new fatalities and separated families comparing COVID case rolling averages in their counties. As coronavirus resurges across the country, medical data is no longer just the purview of epidemiologists (though a quick glance at any social media comments section shows an unlikely simultaneous surge in the number of virology experts and statisticians).

Journalists reporting on COVID, however, have a particular obligation to understand the data, to add context and to acknowledge uncertainty when reporting the numbers.

“Journalism requires more than merely reporting remarks, claims or comments. Journalism verifies, provides relevant context, tells the rest of the story and acknowledges the absence of important additional information.” – RTDNA Code of Ethics

This guide to common COVID metrics is designed to help journalists know how each data point is calculated, what it means and, importantly, what it doesn’t mean….(More)”.

Genomic Epidemiology Data Infrastructure Needs for SARS-CoV-2

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “In December 2019, new cases of severe pneumonia were first detected in Wuhan, China, and the cause was determined to be a novel beta coronavirus related to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus that emerged from a bat reservoir in 2002. Within six months, this new virus—SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)—has spread worldwide, infecting at least 10 million people with an estimated 500,000 deaths. COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, was declared a public health emergency of international concern on January 30, 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and a pandemic on March 11, 2020. To date, there is no approved effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19, and it continues to spread in many countries.

Genomic Epidemiology Data Infrastructure Needs for SARS-CoV-2: Modernizing Pandemic Response Strategies lays out a framework to define and describe the data needs for a system to track and correlate viral genome sequences with clinical and epidemiological data. Such a system would help ensure the integration of data on viral evolution with detection, diagnostic, and countermeasure efforts. This report also explores data collection mechanisms to ensure a representative global sample set of all relevant extant sequences and considers challenges and opportunities for coordination across existing domestic, global, and regional data sources….(More)”.

Strengthening Privacy Protections in COVID-19 Mobile Phone–Enhanced Surveillance Programs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rand Report: “Dozens of countries, including the United States, have been using mobile phone tools and data sources for COVID-19 surveillance activities, such as tracking infections and community spread, identifying populated areas at risk, and enforcing quarantine orders. These tools can augment traditional epidemiological interventions, such as contact tracing with technology-based data collection (e.g., automated signaling and record-keeping on mobile phone apps). As the response progresses, other beneficial technologies could include tools that authenticate those with low risk of contagion or that build community trust as stay-at-home orders are lifted.

However, the potential benefits that COVID-19 mobile phone–enhanced public health (“mobile”) surveillance program tools could provide are also accompanied by potential for harm. There are significant risks to citizens from the collection of sensitive data, including personal health, location, and contact data. People whose personal information is being collected might worry about who will receive the data, how those recipients might use the data, how the data might be shared with other entities, and what measures will be taken to safeguard the data from theft or abuse.

The risk of privacy violations can also impact government accountability and public trust. The possibility that one’s privacy will be violated by government officials or technology companies might dissuade citizens from getting tested for COVID-19, downloading public health–oriented mobile phone apps, or sharing symptom or location data. More broadly, real or perceived privacy violations might discourage citizens from believing government messaging or complying with government orders regarding COVID-19.

As U.S. public health agencies consider COVID-19-related mobile surveillance programs, they will need to address privacy concerns to encourage broad uptake and protect against privacy harms. Otherwise, COVID-19 mobile surveillance programs likely will be ineffective and the data collected unrepresentative of the situation on the ground….(More)“.

How the Administrative State Got to This Challenging Place

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Peter Strauss: “This essay has been written to set the context for a future issue of Daedalus, the quarterly of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, addressing the prospects of American administrative law in the Twenty-first Century. It recounts the growth of American government over the centuries since its founding, in response to the profound changes in the technology, economy, and scientific understandings it must deal with, under a Constitution written for the governance of a dispersed agrarian population operating with hand tools in a localized economy. It then suggests profound challenges of the present day facing administrative law’s development: the transition from processes of the paper age to those of the digital age; the steadily growing centralization of decision in an opaque, political presidency, displacing the focused knowledge and expertise of agencies Congress created to pursue particular governmental ends; the thickening, as well, of the political layer within agencies themselves, threatening similar displacements; and the revival in the courts of highly formalized analytic techniques inviting a return to the forms of government those who wrote the Constitution might themselves have imagined. The essay will not be published until months after the November election. While President Trump’s first term in office has sharply illustrated an imbalance in American governance between law and politics and law, reason and unreason, that imbalance is hardly new; it has been growing for decades. There lie the challenges….(More)”

The $100 Million Nudge: Increasing Tax Compliance of Businesses and the Self-Employed using a Natural Field Experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Justin E. Holz et al: “This paper uses a natural field experiment to examine the effectiveness of specific nudges on tax compliance amongst firms and the self-employed in the Dominican Republic. In collaboration with the Dominican Republic’s tax authority, we designed messages for more than 28,000 self-employed workers and over 56,000 firms. Leveraging administrative tax data, we find evidence that our nudges (increasing the salience of prison sentences or public disclosure of tax evaders) have large effects on increasing tax compliance, primarily working through the channel of decreasing claimed tax exemptions. Interestingly, we find that firms are more impacted than the self-employed, and that firm size is critically linked to nudge effectiveness: larger firms are considerably more influenced by nudges than smaller firms. We find this latter result noteworthy given the paucity of evidence showing significant behavioral impacts of nudges amongst the largest players in a market. Overall, our messages increased tax revenue by $193 million (roughly 0.23% of the Dominican Republic’s GDP in 2018), with over $100 million constituting income that the government would not have received without our field experimental nudges….(More)”.

Can You Fight Systemic Racism With Design?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Reboot’s “Design With” podcast with Antionette Carroll: “What began as a 24-hour design challenge addressing racial inequality in Ferguson, MO has since grown into a powerful organization fighting inequity with its own brand of collaborative design. Antionette Carroll, founder of Creative Reaction Lab, speaks about Equity-Centered Community Design—and how Black and Latinx youth are using design as their tool of choice to dismantle the very systems designed to exclude them….(More)”.

Democratic Innovation in Times of Crisis: Exploring Changes in Social and Political Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Martin Karlsson, Joachim Åström and Magnus Adenskog: “The Estonian Citizens’ Assembly (ECA) was initiated in late 2012 as a direct consequence of a legitimacy crisis of Estonian political parties and representative institutions. The spark igniting this crisis was the unraveling of a scheme of illegal party financing. The response from governmental institutions took the form of a democratic innovation involving public crowd‐sourcing and deliberative mini‐publics. This study reports on a survey among the participants in the online crowd‐sourcing process of the ECA (n  = 847). The study examines how this democratic innovation influenced participants’ social and political trust as well as the impact of participants’ predispositions and level of satisfaction with the ECA on changes in trust. We find that participants that had positive predispositions and who were satisfied with the ECA were more likely to gain trust. Furthermore, we also find that the participants, in general, became more distrustful of political institutions, while their participation fostered increased social trust. This outcome differs from the intentions of the Estonian institutions which organized the ECA and sheds new light on the role of democratic innovations in the context of legitimacy crises. This is an important step forward in the scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic innovation and trust….(More)”.

What privacy preserving techniques make possible: for transport authorities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Georgina Bourke: “The Mayor of London listed cycling and walking as key population health indicators in the London Health Inequalities Strategy. The pandemic has only amplified the need for people to use cycling as a safer and healthier mode of transport. Yet as the majority of cyclists are white, Black communities are less likely to get the health benefits that cycling provides. Groups like Transport for London (TfL) should monitor how different communities cycle and who is excluded. Organisations like the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) could help boroughs procure privacy preserving technology to help their efforts.

But at the moment, it’s difficult for public organisations to access mobility data held by private companies. One reason is because mobility data is sensitive. Even if you remove identifiers like name and address, there’s still a risk you can reidentify someone by linking different data sets together. This means you could track how an individual moved around a city. I wrote more about the privacy risks with mobility data in a previous blog post. The industry’s awareness of privacy issues in using and sharing mobility data is rising. In the case of Los Angeles Department of Transport’s Mobility Data Specification (LADOT), Uber is concerned about sharing anonymised data because of the privacy risk. Both organisations are now involved in a legal battle to see which has the rights to the data. This might have been avoided if Uber had applied privacy preserving techniques….

Privacy preserving techniques can help mobility providers share important insights with authorities without compromising peoples’ privacy.

Instead of requiring access to all customer trip data, authorities could ask specific questions like, where are the least popular places to cycle? If mobility providers apply techniques like randomised response, an individual’s identity is obscured by the noise added to the data. This means it’s highly unlikely that someone could be reidentified later on. And because this technique requires authorities to ask very specific questions – for randomised response to work, the answer has to be binary, ie Yes or No – authorities will also be practicing data minimisation by default.

It’s easy to imagine transport authorities like TfL combining privacy preserved mobility data from multiple mobility providers to compare insights and measure service provision. They could cross reference the privacy preserved bike trip data with demographic data in the local area to learn how different communities cycle. The first step to addressing inequality is being able to measure it….(More)”.