Beth Noveck at the Yale Human Rights and Development Journal: “Open data policy mandates that government proactively publish its data online for the public to reuse. It is a radically different approach to transparency than traditional right-to-know strategies as embodied in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legislation in that it involves ex ante rather than ex post disclosure of whole datasets. Although both open data and FOIA deal with information sharing, the normative essence of open data is participation rather than litigation. By fostering public engagement, open data shifts the relationship between state and citizen from a monitorial to a collaborative one, centered around using information to solve problems together. This Essay explores the theory and practice of open data in comparison to FOIA and highlights its uses as a tool for advancing human rights, saving lives, and strengthening democracy. Although open data undoubtedly builds upon the fifty-year legal tradition of the right to know about the workings of one’s government, open data does more than advance government accountability. Rather, it is a distinctly twenty-first century governing practice borne out of the potential of big data to help solve society’s biggest problems. Thus, this Essay charts a thoughtful path toward a twenty-first century transparency regime that takes advantage of and blends the strengths of open data’s collaborative and innovation-centric approach and the adversarial and monitorial tactics of freedom of information regimes….(More)”.
U.S. soldiers are revealing sensitive and dangerous information by jogging
Liz Sly at Washington Post: “An interactive map posted on the Internet that shows the whereabouts of people who use fitness devices such as Fitbit also reveals highly sensitive information about the locations and activities of soldiers at U.S. military bases, in what appears to be a major security oversight.
The Global Heat Map, published by the GPS tracking company Strava, uses satellite information to map the locations and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year period, by illuminating areas of activity.
Strava says it has 27 million users around the world, including people who own widely available fitness devices such as Fitbit and Jawbone, as well as people who directly subscribe to its mobile app. The map is not live — rather, it shows a pattern of accumulated activity between 2015 and September 2017.
Most parts of the United States and Europe, where millions of people use some type of fitness tracker, show up on the map as blazes of light because there is so much activity.
In war zones and deserts in countries such as Iraq and Syria, the heat map becomes almost entirely dark — except for scattered pinpricks of activity. Zooming in on those areas brings into focus the locations and outlines of known U.S. military bases, as well as of other unknown and potentially sensitive sites — presumably because American soldiers and other personnel are using fitness trackers as they move around.
The U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State said on Monday it is revising its guidelines on the use of all wireless and technological devices on military facilities as a result of the revelations….(More)”.
2018 Edelman Trust Barometer
Executive Summary: “Volatility brews beneath a stagnant surface. If a single theme captures the state of the world’s trust in 2018, it is this. Even as people’s trust in business, government, NGOs and media across 28 countries remained largely unchanged, experiencing virtually no recovery from 2017 (Fig. 1), dramatic shifts are taking place at the country level and within the institution of media.
Globally, 20 of 28 countries lie in distruster territory (Fig. 2), one more than in 2017. Trust among the informed public—those with higher levels of income and education— declined slightly on a global level, from 60 percent to 59 percent, thrusting this group into neutral territory from its once trusting status. A closer look, however, reveals a world moving apart (Fig. 3).
In 2018, two poles have emerged: a cluster of six nations where trust has dramatically increased, and six where trust has deeply declined. Whereas in previous years country-level trust has moved largely in lockstep, for the first time ever there is now a distinct split between extreme trust gainers and losers. No country saw steeper declines than the United States, with a 37-point aggregate drop in trust across all institutions.
The loss of trust was most severe among the informed public—a 23-point fall on the Trust Index—nearly erasing the “mass-class” divide that once stood between this segment of the U.S. population and the country’s farless-trusting mass population. At the opposite end of the spectrum, China experienced a 27-point gain, more than any other country. Following behind in the trust gainer category are the UAE (24 points) and South Korea (23 points)….(More)”.
Upholding Democracy Amid the Challenges of New Technology
Paper by Eyal Benvenisti at the The European Journal of International Law: “The law on global governance that emerged after the Second World War was grounded in irrefutable trust in international organizations and an assumption that their subjection to legal discipline and judicial review would be unnecessary and, in fact, detrimental to their success. The law that evolved systematically insulated international organizations from internal and external scrutiny and absolved them of any inherent legal obligations – and, to a degree, continues to do so.
Indeed, it was only well after the end of the Cold War that mistrust in global governance began to trickle through into the legal discourse and the realization gradually took hold that the operation of international organizations needed to be subject to the disciplining power of the law. Since the mid-1990s, scholars have sought to identify the conditions under which trust in global bodies can be regained, mainly by borrowing and adapting domestic public law precepts that emphasize accountability through communications with those affected.
Today, although a ‘culture of accountability’ may have taken root, its legal tools are still shaping up and are often contested. More importantly, these communicative tools are ill-equipped to address the new modalities of governance that are based on decision-making by machines using raw data (rather than two-way exchange with stakeholders) as their input.
The new information and communication technologies challenge the foundational premise of the accountability school – that ‘the more communication, the better’ – as voters-turned-users obtain their information from increasingly fragmented and privatized marketplaces of ideas that are manipulated for economic and political gain.
In this article, I describe and analyse how the law has evolved to acknowledge the need for accountability, how it has designed norms for this purpose and continues in this endeavour – yet how the challenges it faces today are leaving its most fundamental assumptions open to question. I argue that, given the growing influence of public and private global governance bodies on our daily lives and the shape of our political communities, the task of the law of global governance is no longer limited to ensuring the accountability of global bodies, but is also to protect human dignity and the very viability of the democratic state….(More)”.
Increasing citizen voice and government responsiveness: what does success really look like, and who decides?
Paper by Vanessa Herringshaw: “Narratives in the field of information and communications technology (ICT) for governance are full of claims, of either enormous success or almost none. But understanding ‘success’ and ‘failure’ depends on how these are framed. Research supported by Making All Voices Count suggests that different actors can seek very different goals from the same ICT-enabled interventions – some stated, some not.
This programme learning report proposes two important dimensions for framing variations in visions of success for ICT-enabled governance interventions: (1) the kind of change in governance systems sought (‘functional’, ‘instrumental’, ‘transformative’ and ‘no change’); and (2) the vision of the ideal citizen–state relationship. It applies this framing to three areas where ICTs are being used, at least on paper, to encourage and channel citizen voice into governance processes, and to improve government responsiveness in return: participatory policy- and strategymaking; participatory budgeting; and citizen feedback to improve service delivery.
In terms of the kind of change in governance systems sought, much of the rhetoric touts the use of ICTs as inherently ‘transformative’. However, findings suggest that it has mostly been deployed in ‘functional’, ‘instrumental’ and ‘no change’ ways. That said, the possibility of ICT-enabled ‘transformative’ change appears somewhat higher when citizens have more direct control over outcomes, and more online and offline processes are mixed and used in ways that foster collective, rather than individualised, inputs, deliberation and answerability.
In terms of the vision of the state–citizen relationship, the findings show great variation in outcomes sought regarding the kinds and levels of participatory democracy, who this should benefit, the ideal size of the state, and the desired stability of actor groups and decision-making structures.
The evidence suggests that the use of ICTs may have the potential to support change, including transformative change, but only when the political goals of key actors are pre-structured to support this. The choice of ICTs does matter to the effectiveness of this support, as does the way in which they are used. But overall, ICTs do not appear to be inherently ‘generative’ of change. They are, rather, ‘reflective’, ‘enabling’ or ‘amplifying’ of existing political agendas and levels of commitment.
The recommendations of this report focus on the need to understand deeply and face the realities of these varying agendas and visions of success at the start of intervention planning, and throughout implementation as they evolve over time. This imperative should remain undiminished, regardless of any rhetoric of the inherently transformative or ‘democratising’ nature of ICTs, and of interventions to strengthen citizen voice and government responsiveness more broadly….(More).
‘Politics done like science’: Critical perspectives on psychological governance and the experimental state
Extracting crowd intelligence from pervasive and social big data
Introduction by With the prevalence of ubiquitous computing devices (smartphones, wearable devices, etc.) and social network services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), humans are generating massive digital traces continuously in their daily life. Considering the invaluable crowd intelligence residing in these pervasive and social big data, a spectrum of opportunities is emerging to enable promising smart applications for easing individual life, increasing company profit, as well as facilitating city development. However, the nature of big data also poses fundamental challenges on the techniques and applications relying on the pervasive and social big data from multiple perspectives such as algorithm effectiveness, computation speed, energy efficiency, user privacy, server security, data heterogeneity and system scalability. This special issue presents the state-of-the-art research achievements in addressing these challenges. After the rigorous review process of reviewers and guest editors, eight papers were accepted as follows.
The first paper “Automated recognition of hypertension through overnight continuous HRV monitoring” by Ni et al. proposes a non-invasive way to differentiate hypertension patients from healthy people with the pervasive sensors such as a waist belt. To this end, the authors train a machine learning model based on the heart rate data sensed from waists worn by a crowd of people, and the experiments show that the detection accuracy is around 93%.
The second paper “The workforce analyzer: group discovery among LinkedIn public profiles” by Dai et al. describes two users’ group discovery methods among LinkedIn public profiles. One is based on K-means and another is based on SVM. The authors contrast results of both methods and provide insights about the trending professional orientations of the workforce from an online perspective.
The third paper “Tweet and followee personalized recommendations based on knowledge graphs” by Pla Karidi et al. present an efficient semantic recommendation method that helps users filter the Twitter stream for interesting content. The foundation of this method is a knowledge graph that can represent all user topics of interest as a variety of concepts, objects, events, persons, entities, locations and the relations between them. An important advantage of the authors’ method is that it reduces the effects of problems such as over-recommendation and over-specialization.
The fourth paper “CrowdTravel: scenic spot profiling by using heterogeneous crowdsourced data” by Guo et al. proposes CrowdTravel, a multi-source social media data fusion approach for multi-aspect tourism information perception, which can provide travelling assistance for tourists by crowd intelligence mining. Experiments over a dataset of several popular scenic spots in Beijing and Xi’an, China, indicate that the authors’ approach attains fine-grained characterization for the scenic spots and delivers excellent performance.
The fifth paper “Internet of Things based activity surveillance of defence personnel” by Bhatia et al. presents a comprehensive IoT-based framework for analyzing national integrity of defence personnel with consideration to his/her daily activities. Specifically, Integrity Index Value is defined for every defence personnel based on different social engagements, and activities for detecting the vulnerability to national security. In addition to this, a probabilistic decision tree based automated decision making is presented to aid defence officials in analyzing various activities of a defence personnel for his/her integrity assessment.
The sixth paper “Recommending property with short days-on-market for estate agency” by Mou et al. proposes an estate with short days-on-market appraisal framework to automatically recommend those estates using transaction data and profile information crawled from websites. Both the spatial and temporal characteristics of an estate are integrated into the framework. The results show that the proposed framework can estimate accurately about 78% estates.
The seventh paper “An anonymous data reporting strategy with ensuring incentives for mobile crowd-sensing” by Li et al. proposes a system and a strategy to ensure anonymous data reporting while ensuring incentives simultaneously. The proposed protocol is arranged in five stages that mainly leverage three concepts: (1) slot reservation based on shuffle, (2) data submission based on bulk transfer and multi-player dc-nets, and (3) incentive mechanism based on blind signature.
The last paper “Semantic place prediction from crowd-sensed mobile phone data” by Celik et al. semantically classifes places visited by smart phone users utilizing the data collected from sensors and wireless interfaces available on the phones as well as phone usage patterns, such as battery level, and time-related information, with machine learning algorithms. For this study, the authors collect data from 15 participants at Galatasaray University for 1 month, and try different classification algorithms such as decision tree, random forest, k-nearest neighbour, naive Bayes, and multi-layer perceptron….(More)”.
The Potential for Human-Computer Interaction and Behavioral Science
Article by Kweku Opoku-Agyemang as part of a special issue by Behavioral Scientist on “Connected State of Mind,” which explores the impact of tech use on our behavior and relationships (complete issue here):
A few days ago, one of my best friends texted me a joke. It was funny, so a few seconds later I replied with the “laughing-while-crying emoji.” A little yellow smiley face with tear drops perched on its eyes captured exactly what I wanted to convey to my friend. No words needed. If this exchange happened ten years ago, we would have emailed each other. Two decades ago, snail mail.
As more of our interactions and experiences are mediated by screens and technology, the way we relate to one another and our world is changing. Posting your favorite emoji may seem superficial, but such reflexes are becoming critical for understanding humanity in the 21st century.
Seemingly ubiquitous computer interfaces—on our phones and laptops, not to mention our cars, coffee makers, thermostats, and washing machines—are blurring the lines between our connected and our unconnected selves. And it’s these relationships, between users and their computers, which define the field of human–computer interaction (HCI). HCI is based on the following premise: The more we understand about human behavior, the better we can design computer interfaces that suit people’s needs.
For instance, HCI researchers are designing tactile emoticons embedded in the Braille system for individuals with visual impairments. They’re also creating smartphones that can almost read your mind—predicting when and where your finger is about to touch them next.
Understanding human behavior is essential for designing human-computer interfaces. But there’s more to it than that: Understanding how people interact with computer interfaces can help us understand human behavior in general.
One of the insights that propelled behavioral science into the DNA of so many disciplines was the idea that we are not fully rational: We procrastinate, forget, break our promises, and change our minds. What most behavioral scientists might not realize is that as they transcended rationality, rational models found a new home in artificial intelligence. Much of A.I. is based on the familiar rational theories that dominated the field of economics prior to the rise of behavioral economics. However, one way to better understand how to apply A.I. in high-stakes scenarios, like self-driving cars, may be to embrace ways of thinking that are less rational.
It’s time for information and computer science to join forces with behavioral science. The mere presence of a camera phone can alter our cognition even when switched off, so if we ignore HCI in behavioral research in a world of constant clicks, avatars, emojis, and now animojis we limit our understanding of human behavior.
Below I’ve outlined three very different cases that would benefit from HCI researchers and behavioral scientists working together: technology in the developing world, video games and the labor market, and online trolling and bullying….(More)”.
Technology as a Driver for Governance by the People for the People
Chapter by Ruth Kattumuri in the book Governance and Governed: “The changing dynamics of leadership and growing involvement of people in the process of governance can be attributed to an enhanced access to technology, which enables the governed to engage directly and instantly. This is expected to lead to a greater sense of accountability on the part of leaders to render outcomes for the benefit of the public at large. Effective leadership is increasingly seen to play a significant role in institutionalising citizen’s involvement through social media in order to improve the responsibility of political decision-makers towards the citizens. “Governed” have discovered the ability to transform “governance” through the use of technology, such as social media. This chapter examines the role of technology and media, and the interface between the two, as key drivers in the evolving dynamics of state, society and the governance process….(More)”.
How Tenants Use Digital Mapping to Track Bad Landlords and Gentrification
Hannah Norman at Yes! Magazine: “When Teresa Salazar first encountered the notice posted to her front door—which offered tenants $10,000 to move out of their East Oakland, California, apartment building—she knew the place she called home was in jeopardy.
“All of us were surprised and afraid because it is not easy to move to some other place when the rents are so high,” Salazar said in a video produced by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. The project uses mapping as well as data analysis and digital storytelling as organizing tools for low-income tenants to combat eviction and displacement amid the Bay Area’s raging housing crisis.
The jarring move-out offer was left by the Bay Area Property Group, founded by landlord attorney Daniel Bornstein—known for holding landlord workshops on how to evict tenants. The property management firm buys and flips apartment buildings, Salazar said, driving gentrification in neighborhoods like hers. In fear of being displaced, Salazar and other tenants from her building met with counselors from Causa Justa :: Just Cause, a community legal services group. There, they learned about their rights under Oakland’s Just Cause of Eviction Ordinance. With this information, they successfully stood their ground and remained in their homes.
But not all Bay Area tenants are as fortunate as Salazar. Between 2005 and 2015, Oakland witnessed more than 32,402 unlawful detainers, or eviction proceedings, according to data obtained by AEMP through record requests. But AEMP hopes to change these statistics by arming tenants and housing advocates with map-based data to fight evictions and displacements and, ultimately, drive local and state policies on the issue. In addition to mapping, AEMP uses videos of tenants like Salazar to raise awareness of the human experience behind jaw-dropping statistics.
The project is part of a rising tide of social justice cartography, where maps are being harnessed for activism as the technology becomes more accessible….(More)”.