Paper by Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell at PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences): “Judging others’ personalities is an essential skill in successful social living, as personality is a key driver behind people’s interactions, behaviors, and emotions. Although accurate personality judgments stem from social-cognitive skills, developments in machine learning show that computer models can also make valid judgments. This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants’ Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49); (ii) computer models show higher interjudge agreement; and (iii) computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores. Computers outpacing humans in personality judgment presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing, and privacy…(More)”.
The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology
Adam Greenfield at the Guardian: “We are lucky enough to live at a time in which a furious wave of innovation is breaking across the cities of the global south, spurred on both by the blistering pace of urbanisation, and by the rising popular demand for access to high-quality infrastructure that follows in its wake.
From Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting and the literally destratifying cable cars of Caracas, to Nairobi’s “digital matatus” and the repurposed bus-ferries of Manila, the communities of the south are responsible for an ever-lengthening parade of social and technical innovations that rival anything the developed world has to offer for ingenuity and practical utility.
Nor is India an exception to this tendency. Transparent Chennai’s participatory maps and the work of the Mumbai-based practices CRIT and URBZ are better-known globally, but it is the tactics of daily survival devised by the unheralded multitude that really inspire urbanists. These techniques maximise the transactive capacity of the urban fabric, wrest the very last increment of value from the energy invested in the production of manufactured goods, and allow millions to eke a living, however precarious, from the most unpromising of circumstances. At a time of vertiginously spiralling economic and environmental stress globally, these are insights many of us in the developed north would be well advised to attend to – and by no means merely the poorest among us.
But, for whatever reason, this is not the face of urban innovation official India wants to share with the world – perhaps small-scale projects or the tactics of the poor simply aren’t dramatic enough to convey the magnitude and force of national ambition. We hear, instead, of schemes like Palava City, a nominally futuristic vision of digital technology minutely interwoven into the texture of everday urban life. Headlines were made around the planet this year when Narendra Modi’s government announced it had committed to building no fewer than 100 similarly “smart” cities….(More).”
Does Real-Time Feedback On Electricity Use Really Change Our Behavior?
Jessica Leber at Co.Exist: “Is information power? Or more to the point, does information about our energy usage help us consume less power?
Even though there are a growing number of smart devices and systems on the market designed to give feedback about energy and water usage, in hopes of nudging us to cut back, studies have shown mixed evidence as to whether they actually work in changing long-term behavior.
In September 2010, the developer of a new LEED Gold apartment building in Manhattan approached Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions with the idea of studying whether they could reduce energy use by giving occupants devices that gave them real-time feedback on their electricity demand. They chose the Modlet, a device made by ThinkEco, that monitors energy use at each outlet, appliance by appliance.
The results of the study, published recently as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, show that getting people to change their behavior is more complicated than it seems….(More).”
Public-sector digitization: The trillion-dollar challenge
Article by Cem Dilmegani, Bengi Korkmaz, and Martin Lundqvist from McKinsey: “Citizens and businesses now expect government information to be readily available online, easy to find and understand, and at low or no cost. Governments have many reasons to meet these expectations by investing in a comprehensive public-sector digital transformation. Our analysis suggests that capturing the full potential of government digitization could free up to $1 trillion annually in economic value worldwide, through improved cost and operational performance. Shared services, greater collaboration and integration, improved fraud management, and productivity enhancements enable system-wide efficiencies. At a time of increasing budgetary pressures, governments at national, regional, and local levels cannot afford to miss out on those savings.
Indeed, governments around the world are doing their best to meet citizen demand and capture benefits. More than 130 countries have online services. For example, Estonia’s 1.3 million residents can use electronic identification cards to vote, pay taxes, and access more than 160 services online, from unemployment benefits to property registration. Turkey’s Social Aid Information System has consolidated multiple government data sources into one system to provide citizens with better access and faster decisions on its various aid programs. The United Kingdom’s gov.uk site serves as a one-stop information hub for all government departments. Such online services also provide greater access for rural populations, improve quality of life for those with physical infirmities, and offer options for those whose work and lifestyle demands don’t conform to typical daytime office hours.
However, despite all the progress made, most governments are far from capturing the full benefits of digitization. To do so, they need to take their digital transformations deeper, beyond the provision of online services through e-government portals, into the broader business of government itself. That means looking for opportunities to improve productivity, collaboration, scale, process efficiency, and innovation….
While digital transformation in the public sector is particularly challenging, a number of successful government initiatives show that by translating private-sector best practices into the public context it is possible to achieve broader and deeper public-sector digitization. Each of the six most important levers is best described by success stories….(More).”
Businesses dig for treasure in open data
Lindsay Clark in ComputerWeekly: “Open data, a movement which promises access to vast swaths of information held by public bodies, has started getting its hands dirty, or rather its feet.
Before a spade goes in the ground, construction and civil engineering projects face a great unknown: what is down there? In the UK, should someone discover anything of archaeological importance, a project can be halted – sometimes for months – while researchers study the site and remove artefacts….
During an open innovation day hosted by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), open data services and technology firm Democrata proposed analytics could predict the likelihood of unearthing an archaeological find in any given location. This would help developers understand the likely risks to construction and would assist archaeologists in targeting digs more accurately. The idea was inspired by a presentation from the Archaeological Data Service in the UK at the event in June 2014.
The proposal won support from the STFC which, together with IBM, provided a nine-strong development team and access to the Hartree Centre’s supercomputer – a 131,000 core high-performance facility. For natural language processing of historic documents, the system uses two components of IBM’s Watson – the AI service which famously won the US TV quiz show Jeopardy. The system uses SPSS modelling software, the language R for algorithm development and Hadoop data repositories….
The proof of concept draws together data from the University of York’s archaeological data, the Department of the Environment, English Heritage, Scottish Natural Heritage, Ordnance Survey, Forestry Commission, Office for National Statistics, the Land Registry and others….The system analyses sets of indicators of archaeology, including historic population dispersal trends, specific geology, flora and fauna considerations, as well as proximity to a water source, a trail or road, standing stones and other archaeological sites. Earlier studies created a list of 45 indicators which was whittled down to seven for the proof of concept. The team used logistic regression to assess the relationship between input variables and come up with its prediction….”
Uncle Sam Wants You…To Crowdsource Science
Neal Ungerleider at Co-Labs: “It’s not just for the private sector anymore: Government scientists are embracing crowdsourcing. At a White House-sponsored workshop in late November, representatives from more than 20 different federal agencies gathered to figure out how to integrate crowdsourcing and citizen scientists into various government efforts. The workshop is part of a bigger effort with a lofty goal: Building a set of best practices for the thousands of citizens who are helping federal agencies gather data, from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to NASA….Perhaps the best known federal government crowdsourcing project is Nature’s Notebook, a collaboration between the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service which asks ordinary citizens to take notes on plant and animal species during different times of year. These notes are then cleansed and collated into a massive database on animal and plant phenology that’s used for decision-making by national and local governments. The bulk of the observations, recorded through smartphone apps, are made by ordinary people who spend a lot of time outdoors….Dozens of government agencies are now asking the public for help. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention runs a student-oriented, Mechanical Turk-style “micro-volunteering” service called CDCology, the VA crowdsources design of apps for homeless veterans, while the National Weather Service distributes a mobile app called mPING that asks ordinary citizens to help fine-tune public weather reports by giving information on local conditions. The Federal Communication Commission’s Measuring Broadband America app, meanwhile, allows citizens to volunteer information on their Internet broadband speeds, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Sensor Toolbox asks users to track local air pollution….
As of now, however, when it comes to crowdsourcing data for government scientific research, there’s no unified set of standards or best practices. This can lead to wild variations in how various agencies collect data and use it. For officials hoping to implement citizen science projects within government, the roadblocks to crowdsourcing include factors that crowdsourcing is intended to avoid: limited budgets, heavy bureaucracy, and superiors who are skeptical about the value of relying on the crowd for data.
Benforado and Shanley also pointed out that government agencies are subject to additional regulations, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act, which can make implementation of crowdsourcing projects more challenging than they would be in academia or the private sector… (More)”
The Free 'Big Data' Sources Everyone Should Know
Bernard Marr at Linkedin Pulse: “…The moves by companies and governments to put large amounts of information into the public domain have made large volumes of data accessible to everyone….here’s my rundown of some of the best free big data sources available today.
Data.gov
The US Government pledged last year to make all government data available freely online. This site is the first stage and acts as a portal to all sorts of amazing information on everything from climate to crime. To check it out, click here.
US Census Bureau
A wealth of information on the lives of US citizens covering population data, geographic data and education. To check it out, click here. To check it out, click here.
European Union Open Data Portal
As the above, but based on data from European Union institutions. To check it out, click here.
Data.gov.uk
Data from the UK Government, including the British National Bibliography – metadata on all UK books and publications since 1950. To check it out, click here.
The CIA World Factbook
Information on history, population, economy, government, infrastructure and military of 267 countries. To check it out, click here.
Healthdata.gov
125 years of US healthcare data including claim-level Medicare data, epidemiology and population statistics. To check it out, click here.
NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre
Health data sets from the UK National Health Service. To check it out, click here.
Amazon Web Services public datasets
Huge resource of public data, including the 1000 Genome Project, an attempt to build the most comprehensive database of human genetic information and NASA’s database of satellite imagery of Earth. To check it out, click here.
Facebook Graph
Although much of the information on users’ Facebook profile is private, a lot isn’t – Facebook provide the Graph API as a way of querying the huge amount of information that its users are happy to share with the world (or can’t hide because they haven’t worked out how the privacy settings work). To check it out, click here.
Gapminder
Compilation of data from sources including the World Health Organization and World Bank covering economic, medical and social statistics from around the world. To check it out, click here.
Google Trends
Statistics on search volume (as a proportion of total search) for any given term, since 2004. To check it out, click here.
Google Finance
40 years’ worth of stock market data, updated in real time. To check it out, click here.
Google Books Ngrams
Search and analyze the full text of any of the millions of books digitised as part of the Google Books project. To check it out, click here.
National Climatic Data Center
Huge collection of environmental, meteorological and climate data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center. The world’s largest archive of weather data. To check it out, click here.
DBPedia
Wikipedia is comprised of millions of pieces of data, structured and unstructured on every subject under the sun. DBPedia is an ambitious project to catalogue and create a public, freely distributable database allowing anyone to analyze this data. To check it out, click here.
Topsy
Free, comprehensive social media data is hard to come by – after all their data is what generates profits for the big players (Facebook, Twitter etc) so they don’t want to give it away. However Topsy provides a searchable database of public tweets going back to 2006 as well as several tools to analyze the conversations. To check it out, click here.
Likebutton
Mines Facebook’s public data – globally and from your own network – to give an overview of what people “Like” at the moment. To check it out, click here.
New York Times
Searchable, indexed archive of news articles going back to 1851. To check it out, click here.
Freebase
A community-compiled database of structured data about people, places and things, with over 45 million entries. To check it out, click here.
Million Song Data Set
Metadata on over a million songs and pieces of music. Part of Amazon Web Services. To check it out, click here.”
See also Bernard Marr‘s blog at Big Data Guru
4 Tech Trends Changing How Cities Operate
at Governing: “Louis Brandeis famously characterized states as laboratories for democracy, but cities could be called labs for innovation or new practices….When Government Technology magazine (produced by Governing’s parent company, e.Republic, Inc.) published its annual Digital Cities Survey, the results provided an interesting look at how local governments are using technology to improve how they deliver services, increase production and streamline operations…the survey also showed four technology trends changing how local government operates and serves its citizens:
1. Open Data
…Big cities were the first to open up their data and gained national attention for their transparency. New York City, which passed an open data law in 2012, leads all cities with more than 1,300 data sets open to the public; Chicago started opening up data to the public in 2010 following an executive order and is second among cities with more than 600; and San Francisco, which was the first major city to open the doors to transparency in 2009, had the highest score from the U.S. Open Data Census for the quality of its open data.
But the survey shows that a growing number of mid-sized jurisdictions are now getting involved, too. Tacoma, Wash., has a portal with 40 data sets that show how the city is spending tax dollars on public works, economic development, transportation and public safety. Ann Arbor, Mich., has a financial transparency tool that reveals what the city is spending on a daily basis, in some cases….
2. ‘Stat’ Programs and Data Analytics
…First, the so-called “stat” programs are proliferating. Started by the New York Police Department in the 1980s, CompStat was a management technique that merged data with staff feedback to drive better performance by police officers and precinct captains. Its success led to many imitations over the years and, as the digital survey shows, stat programs continue to grow in importance. For example, Louisville has used its “LouieStat” program to cut the city’s bill for unscheduled employee overtime by $23 million as well as to spot weaknesses in performance.
Second, cities are increasing their use of data analytics to measure and improve performance. Denver, Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix have launched programs that sift through data sets to find patterns that can lead to better governance decisions. Los Angeles has combined transparency with analytics to create an online system that tracks performance for the city’s economy, service delivery, public safety and government operations that the public can view. Robert J. O’Neill Jr., executive director of the International City/County Management Association, said that both of these tech-driven performance trends “enable real-time decision-making.” He argued that public leaders who grasp the significance of these new tools can deliver government services that today’s constituents expect.
3. Online Citizen Engagement
…Avondale, Ariz., population 78,822, is engaging citizens with a mobile app and an online forum that solicits ideas that other residents can vote up or down.
In Westminster, Colo., population 110,945, a similar forum allows citizens to vote online about community ideas and gives rewards to users who engage with the online forum on a regular basis (free passes to a local driving range or fitness program). Cities are promoting more engagement activities to combat a decline in public trust in government. The days when a public meeting could provide citizen engagement aren’t enough in today’s technology-dominated world. That’s why social media tools, online surveys and even e-commerce rewards programs are popping up in cities around the country to create high-value interaction with its citizens.
4. Geographic Information Systems
… Cities now use them to analyze financial decisions to increase performance, support public safety, improve public transit, run social service activities and, increasingly, engage citizens about their city’s governance.
Augusta, Ga., won an award for its well-designed and easy-to-use transit maps. Sugar Land, Texas, uses GIS to support economic development and, as part of its citizen engagement efforts, to highlight its capital improvement projects. GIS is now used citywide by 92 percent of the survey respondents. That’s significant because GIS has long been considered a specialized (and expensive) technology primarily for city planning and environmental projects….”
Let’s kickstart science in America
David Lang at Ideas.Ted: “Science funding is broken. To fix it, we need to empower a new class of makers, citizen scientists and explorers
The troubling state of science funding in America goes by many names: sequestration, the profzi scheme, the postdocalypse. Because it can take extensive planning over years in academia to gain research funds from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, “nobody takes risks anymore,” writes one researcher in his “Goodbye Academia” letter. “Nobody young jumps and tries totally new things, because it’s almost surely a noble way to suicide your career.” The result? We are on the verge of losing a generation of scientists at the exact moment we need to embolden them. Biologist Michael Eisen sums up the effects of the funding crunch: “It is an amazing time to do science, but an incredibly difficult time to be a scientist.”
It’s not all bad news for the thousands of science and conservation ideas that fall outside the traditional funding rubric. Fortunately, new citizen science models are emerging — along with a new class of philanthropic backers to fill the funding voids left by the NSF and the NIH. Our experience developing OpenROV (an open-source underwater robot) into one of the largest (by volume) underwater robot manufacturers in the world is illustrative of this shift.
Looking back at the sequence of events, it seems improbable that such a small amount of initial funding could have made such a large impact, but it makes perfect sense when you break down all the contributing factors. Two years ago, we weren’t even part of the oceanographic community. Our ideas and techniques were outside the playbook for experienced ocean engineers. And since we only had enough money to test the first thing, not the whole thing, we started by creating a prototype. Using TechShop equipment in San Francisco, we able to create several iterations of a low-cost underwater robot that was suitable for our purpose: exploring an underwater cave and looking for lost treasure. After sharing our designs online, we found a community of like-minded developers. Together we raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter to do a first run of manufacturing.
This experience made us think: How can we make more microsponsorship opportunities available in science, exploration and conservation? OpenExplorer was our response. Instead of providing seed funding, we’ve created a model that gives everyone a chance to sponsor new ideas, research and expeditions in science and engineering. One success: TED Fellow Asha de Vos‘s work on preventing the ship strike of blue whales in the Indian Ocean….”
States and democracy
New paper by Francis Fukuyama in the journal Democratization: “The state, rule of law, and democratic accountability are the three basic components of a modern political order. The state concentrates and uses power, while law and democracy constrain the exercise of power, indicating that there is an inherent tension between them. This article looks at ways in which the state and liberal democracy interact in three areas: citizen security, patronage and clientelism, and the formation of national identity. In all three areas, state and democracy act at cross purposes in some domains, and are mutually supportive in others. The reason for this complex relationship is that both state and democracy are themselves complex collections of institutions which interact on a multiplicity of levels. Understanding the relationship between state and democracy is important in policy terms because many recent initiatives to improve the quality of governance assume that state quality and democracy are mutually supportive, something that is not fully supported by the empirical evidence.”