Grace Dobush in Quartz: “Taking a bus in Latin America can be a disorienting experience. Whilethe light rail systems in places like Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Riode Janeiro have system maps that are fairly easy to understand, mostcities lack a comprehensive bus map.
Several factors have kept bus maps from taking root in much of LatinAmerica. One reason is that bus lines running through cities tend to beoperated by a collection of private companies, so they have lessincentive to coordinate. Newspapers and local governmentsoccasionally attempt to create system maps, but none have stuck.
In Managua, Nicaragua, this absence has had a constricting effect onresidents’ lives. Most people know the bus lines that take them toschool or to work, but don’t stray far from their usual route. “Mobilityin Managua is very difficult,” says Felix Delattre, a German programmerand amateur cartographer who moved to Nicaragua 10 years ago towork for an NGO. “People don’t go out at night because they don’t havethe information on when the bus is coming and where it’s going.”
Delattre led a group of volunteers who teamed up with universitystudents in Managua to create what they believe to be the firstcomprehensive bus map in Latin America. The mapping venture is anindependent project connected to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMapTeam, a nonprofit group that uses open-source technology andcrowdsourcing to create badly needed maps around the world. The teamspent almost two years mapping out Managua and Ciudad Sandino andrecording its 46 bus routes….(More)
Rose Eveleth at Motherboard: “For centuries judges have had to make guesses about the people in front of them.Will this person commit a crime again? Or is this punishment enough to deter them?Do they have the support they need at home to stay safe and healthy and away from crime? Or will they be thrust back into a situation that drives them to their old ways? Ultimately, judges have to guess.
But recently, judges in states including California and Florida have been given a new piece of information to aid in that guess work: a “risk assessment score” determined by an algorithm. These algorithms take a whole suite of variables into account, and spit out a number (usually between 1 and 10) that estimates the risk that the person in question will wind up back in jail.
If you’ve read this column before, you probably know where this is going. Algorithms aren’t unbiased, and a recent ProPublica investigation suggests what researchers have long been worried about: that these algorithms might contain latent racial prejudice. According to ProPublica’s evaluation of a particular scoring method called the COMPAS system, which was created by a company called Northpointe, people of color are more likely to get higher scores than white people for essentially the same crimes.
Bias against folks of color isn’t a new phenomenon in the judicial system. (This might be the understatement of the year.) There’s a huge body of research that shows that judges, like all humans, are biased. Plenty of studies have shown that for the same crime, judges are more likely to sentence a black person more harshly than a white person. It’s important to question biases of all kinds, both human and algorithmic, but it’s also important to question them in relation to one another. And nobody has done that.
I’ve been doing some research of my own into these recidivism algorithms, and whenI read the ProPublica story, I came out with the same question I’ve had since I started looking into this: these algorithms are likely biased against people of color. But so are judges. So how do they compare? How does the bias present in humans stack up against the bias programmed into algorithms?
This shouldn’t be hard to find out: ideally you would divide judges in a single county in half, and give one half access to a scoring system, and have the other half carry on as usual. If you don’t want to A/B test within a county—and there are some questions about whether that’s an ethical thing to do—then simply compare two counties with similar crime rates, in which one county uses rating systems and the other doesn’t. In either case, it’s essential to test whether these algorithmic recidivism scores exacerbate, reduce, or otherwise change existing bias.
I was wrong. As far as I can find, and according to everybody I’ve talked to in the field,nobody has done this work, or anything like it. These scores are being used by judges to help them sentence defendants and nobody knows whether the scores exacerbate existing racial bias or not….(More)”
Bradley J. Fikes in the San Diego Union Tribune: “The modern era’s dramatic advances in medical care relies on more than scientists, doctors and biomedical companies. None of it could come to fruition without patients willing to risk trying experimental therapies to see if they are safe and effective.
More than 220,000 clinical trials are taking place worldwide, with more than 81,000 of them in the United States, according to the federal government’s registry, clinicaltrials.gov. That poses a huge challenge for recruitment.
Companies are offering a variety of inducements to coax patients into taking part. Some rely on that good old standby, cash. Others remove obstacles. Axovant Sciences, which is preparing to test an Alzheimer’s drug, is offering patients transportation from the ridesharing service Lyft.
In addition, non-cash rewards such as iPads, opt-out enrollment in low-risk trials or even guaranteeing patients they will be informed about the clinical trial results should be considered, say a group of researchers who suggest testing these incentives scientifically.
In an article published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers present a matrix of these options, their benefits, and potential drawbacks. They urge companies to track the outcomes of these incentives to find out what works best.
The goal, the article states, is to “nudge” patients into participating, but not so far as to turn the nudge into a coercive shove. Go to j.mp/nudgeclin for the article.
For a nudge, the researchers suggest the wording of a consent form could include options such as a choice of preferred appointment times, such as “Yes, morning appointments,” with a number of similarly worded statements. That wording would “imply that enrollment is normative,” or customary, the article stated.
Researchers could go so far as to vary the offers to patients in a single clinical trial and measure which incentives produce the best responses, said Eric M. Van Epps, one of the researchers. In effect, that would provide a clinical trial of clinical trial incentives.
As part of that tracking, companies need to gain insight into why some patients are reluctant to take part, and those reasons vary, said Van Epps, of the Michael J. Crescenz Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia.
“Sometimes they’re not made aware of the clinical trials, they might not understand how clinical trials work, they might want more control over their medication regimen or how they’re going to proceed,” Van Epps said.
At other times, patients may be overwhelmed by the volume of paperwork required. Some paperwork is necessary for legal and ethical reasons. Patients must be informed about the trial’s purpose, how it might help them, and what harm might happen. However, it could be possible to simplify the informed consent paperwork to make it more understandable and less intimidating….(More)”
Kent Smetters in The Hill: ” Big Data and analytics are driving advancements that touch nearly every part of our lives. From improving disaster relief efforts following a storm, to enhancing patient response to specific medications to criminal justice reform and real-time traffic reporting, Big Data is saving lives, reducing costs and improving productivity across the private and the public sector.Yet when our elected officials draft policy they lack access to advanced data and analytics that would help them understand the economic implications of proposed legislation. Instead of using Big Data to inform and shape vital policy questions, Members of Congress typically don’t receive a detailed analysis of a bill until after it has been written, and after they have sought support for it. That’s when a policy typically undergoes a detailed budgetary analysis. And even then, these assessments often ignore the broader impact on jobs and the economy.
Yet when our elected officials draft policy they lack access to advanced data and analytics that would help them understand the economic implications of proposed legislation. Instead of using Big Data to inform and shape vital policy questions, Members of Congress typically don’t receive a detailed analysis of a bill until after it has been written, and after they have sought support for it. That’s when a policy typically undergoes a detailed budgetary analysis. And even then, these assessments often ignore the broader impact on jobs and the economy.
We must do better. Just as modern marketing firms use deep analytical tools to make smart business decisions, policymakers in Washington should similarly have access to modern tools for analyzing important policy questions.
Will Social Security be solvent for our grandchildren? How will changes to immigration policy influence the number of jobs and the GDP? How will tax reform impact the budget, economic growth and the income distribution? What is the impact of new investments in health care, education and roads? These are big questions that must be answered with reliable data and analysis while legislation is being written, not afterwards. The absence leaves us with ideology-driven partisanship.
Simply put, Washington needs better tools to evaluate these complex factors. Imagine the productive conversations we could have if we applied the kinds of tools that are commonplace in the business world to help Washington make more informed choices.
For example, with the help of a nonpartisan budget model from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, policymakers and the public can uncover some valuable—and even surprising—information about our choices surrounding Social Security, immigration and other issues.
By analyzing more than 4,000 different Social Security policy options, for example, the model projects that the Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted three years earlier than the Social Security Administration’s projections, barring any changes in current law. The tool’s projected shortfalls are larger than the SSA’s, in fact—because it takes into account how changes over time will affect the outcome. We also learn that many standard policy options fail to significantly move the Trust Fund exhaustion date, as these policies phase in too slowly or are too small. Securing Social Security, we now know, requires a range of policy combinations and potentially larger changes than we may have been considering.
Immigration policy, too, is an area where we could all benefit from greater understanding. The political left argues that legalizing undocumented workers will have a positive impact on jobs and the economy. The political right argues for just the opposite—deportation of undocumented workers—for many of the same reasons. But, it turns out, the numbers don’t offer much support to either side.
On one hand, legalization actually slightly reduces the number of jobs. The reason is simple: legal immigrants have better access to school and college, and they can spend more time looking for the best job match. However, because legal immigrants can gain more skills, the actual impact on GDP from legalization alone is basically a wash.
The other option being discussed, deportation, also reduces jobs, in this case because the number of native-born workers can’t rise enough to absorb the job losses caused by deportation. GDP also declines. Calculations based on 125 different immigration policy combinations show that increasing the total amount of legal immigrants—especially those with higher skills—is the most effective policy for increasing employment rates and GDP….(More)”
In response, thousands of citizens took to the streets and aided the government in beating back the coup. The military plotters had taken over state TV. In this digital age they apparently didn’t realize television was no longer sufficient to ensure control over the message.
This story may appear like a triumphant example of the internet promoting democracy over authoritarianism.
Not so fast….This duality of the internet, as a tool to promote democracy or authoritarianism, or simultaneously both, is a complex puzzle.
The U.S. State Department has allocated tens of millions of dollars to promote internet freedom, primarily in the area of censorship circumvention. And just this month, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution declaring internet freedom a fundamental human right. The resolution condemns internet shutdowns by national governments, an act that has become increasingly common in variety of countries across the globe, including Turkey, Brazil, India and Uganda.
On the surface, this policy makes sense. The internet is an intuitive boon for democracy. It provides citizens around the world with greater freedom of expression, opportunities for civil society, education and political participation. And previous research, including our own, has been optimistic about the internet’s democratic potential.
However, this optimism is based on the assumption that citizens who gain internet access use it to expose themselves to new information, engage in political discussions, join social media groups that advocate for worthy causes and read news stories that change their outlook on the world.
And some do.
But others watch Netflix. They use the internet to post selfies to an intimate group of friends. They gain access to an infinite stream of music, movies and television shows. They spend hours playing video games.
However, our recent research shows that tuning out from politics and immersing oneself in online spectacle has political consequences for the health of democracy….Political use of the internet ranks very low globally, compared to other uses. Research has found that just 9 percent of internet users posted links to political news and only 10 percent posted their own thoughts about political or social issues. In contrast, almost three-quarters (72 percent) say they post about movies and music, and over half (54 percent) also say they post about sports online.
This inspired our study, which sought to show how the internet does not necessarily serve as democracy’s magical solution. Instead, its democratic potential is highly dependent on how citizens choose to use it….
The U.S. government, NGOs and other democracy advocates have invested a great deal of time and resources toward promoting internet access, fighting overt online censorship and creating circumvention technologies. Yet their success, at best, has been limited.
The reason is twofold. First, authoritarian governments have adapted their own strategies in response. Second, the “if we build it, they will come” philosophy underlying a great deal of internet freedom promotion doesn’t take into account basic human psychology in which entertainment choices are preferred over news and attitudes toward the internet determine its use, not the technology itself.
Allies in the internet freedom fight should realize that the locus of the fight has shifted. Greater efforts must be put toward tearing down “psychological firewalls,” building demand for internet freedom and influencing citizens to employ the internet’s democratic potential.
Doing so ensures that the democratic online toolkit is a match for the authoritarian one….(More)”
Stefaan G. Verhulst at Positive Returns (Medium): “Over the last few years we have seen growing recognition of the potential of “civic tech,” or the use of technology that “empowers citizens to make government more accessible, efficient and effective (definition provided in “Engines of Change”)”. One commentator recently described “civic tech as the next big thing.” At the same time, we are yet to witness a true tech-enabled transformation of how government works and how citizens engage with institutions and with each other to solve societal problems. In many ways, civic tech still operates under the radar screen and often lacks broad acceptance. So how do we accelerate and expand the civic tech sector? How can we build a civic tech field that can last and stand the test of time?
The “Engines of Change” report written for Omidyar Network by Purpose seeks to provide an answer to these questions in the context of the United States….
Given the new insights gained from the report, how to move forward? How to translate its findings into a strategy that seeks to improve people’s lives and addresses societal problems by leveraging technology? What emerges from reading the report, and reflecting on how fields and movements have been built in other areas (e.g., the digital learning movement by theMacArthur Foundation or the Hewlett Foundation’s efforts to build a conflict resolution field), are a set of design principles that, when applied consistently, may generate a true lasting civic tech movement. These principles include:
Define a common problem that matters enough to work on collectively and identify a unique opportunity to solve it. Most successful movements seek to solve hard problems. So what is the problem that civic tech seeks to address? …
Encourage experimentation. As it stands, there is no shortage of experimentation with new platforms and tools in the civic tech space.What is missing, however, is the type of assessment that uncovers whether or not such efforts are actually working, and why or why not. Rather than viewing experimentation as simply “trying new things,” the field could embrace “fast-cycle action research” to understand both more quickly, and more precisely, when an innovation works, for whom, and under what conditions.
Establish an evidence base and a common set of metrics. While there is good reason to believe that breakthrough solutions may come from using technology, there are still too little studies measuring exactly how impactful civic tech is. Without a deeper understanding of whether, when, why and to what extent an intervention has made an impact, the civic tech movement will lack credibility. To accelerate the rate of experimentation and create more agile institutions capable of piloting civic tech solutions, we need research that will enable the sector to move away from “faith-based” initiatives toward “evidence-based” ones. The TicTec conference, the Opening Governance Research Network and the recently launched Open Governance Research Exchange are some initiatives that seek to address this shortcoming. Yet more analysis and translation of current findings into clear baselines of impact against common metrics is needed to make the sector more reliable.
Develop a Network Infrastructure…
Identify the signal…
As every engineer knows, building engines requires a set of basic design principles. Similarly, transforming the civic tech sector into a sustainable engine of change may require the implementation of the principles outlined above. Let’s build a civic tech sector to last….(More)”
Tom Saunders at NESTA: “You’re sat in city hall one day and you decide it would be a good idea to engage residents in whatever it is you’re working on – next year’s budget, for example, or the redevelopment of a run down shopping mall. How do you go about it?
In the past, you might have held resident meetings and exhibitions where people could view proposed designs or talk to city government employees. You can still do that today, but now there’s digital: apps, websites and social media. So you decide on a digital engagement strategy: you build a website or you run a social media campaign inviting feedback on your proposals. What happens next?
Two scenarios: 1) You get 50 responses, mostly from campaign groups and local political activists; or 2) you receive such a huge number of responses that you don’t know what to do with them. Besides which, you don’t have the power or budget to implement 90 per cent of the suggestions and neither do you have the time to tell people why their proposals will be ignored. The main outcome of your citizen engagement exercise seems to be that you have annoyed the very people you were trying to get buy in from. What went wrong?
Four tips for digital engagement
With all the apps and platforms out there, it’s hard to make sense of what is going on in the world of digital tools for citizen engagement. It seems there are three distinct activities that digital tools enable: delivering council services online – say applying for a parking permit; using citizen generated data to optimise city government processes and engaging citizens in democratic exercises. In Conneced Councils Nesta sets out what future models of online service delivery could look like. Here I want to focus on the ways that engaging citizens with digital technology can help city governments deliver services more efficiently and improve engagement in democratic processes.
Resist the temptation to build an app…
Think about what you want to engage citizens for…
Sometimes engagement is statutory: communities have to be shown new plans for their area. Beyond this, there are a number of activities that citizen engagement is useful for. When designing a citizen engagement exercise it may help to think which of the following you are trying to achieve (note: they aren’t mutually exclusive):
Better understanding of the facts
If you want to use digital technologies to collect more data about what is happening in your city, you can buy a large number of sensors and install them across the city, to track everything from people movements to how full bins are. A cheaper and possibly more efficient way for cities to do this might involve working with people to collect this data – making use of the smartphones that an increasing number of your residents carry around with them. Prominent examples of this included flood mapping in Jakarta using geolocated tweets and pothole mapping in Boston using a mobile app.
For developed world cities, the thought of outsourcing flood mapping to citizens might fill government employees with horror. But for cities in developing countries, these technologies present an opportunity, potentially, for them to leapfrog their peers – to reach a level of coverage now that would normally require decades of investment in infrastructure to achieve. This is currently a hypothetical situation: cities around the world are only just starting to pilot these ideas and technologies and it will take a number of years before we know how useful they are to city governments.
Generating better ideas and options
The examples above involve passive data collection. Moving beyond this to more active contributions, city governments can engage citizens to generate better ideas and options. There are numerous examples of this in urban planning – the use of Minecraft by the UN in Nairobi to collect and visualise ideas for the future development of the community, or the Carticipe platform in France, which residents can use to indicate changes they would like to see in their city on a map.
It’s all very well to create a digital suggestion box, but there is a lot of evidence that deliberation and debate lead to much better ideas. Platforms like BetterReykjavic include a debate function for any idea that is proposed. Based on feedback, the person who submitted the idea can then edit it, before putting it to a public vote – only then, if the proposal gets the required number of votes, is it sent to the city council for debate.
Better decision making
As well as enabling better decision making by giving city government employees, better data and better ideas, digital technologies can give the power to make decisions directly to citizens. This is best encapsulated by participatory budgeting – which involves allowing citizens to decide how a percentage of the city budget is spent. Participatory budgeting emerged in Brazil in the 1980s, but digital technologies help city governments reach a much larger audience. ‘Madame Mayor, I have an idea’ is a participatory budgeting process that lets citizens propose and vote on ideas for projects in Paris. Over 20,000 people have registered on the platform and the pilot phase of the project received over 5000 submissions.
Remember that there’s a world beyond the internet…
Pick the right question for the right crowd…
When we talk to city governments and local authorities, they express a number of fears about citizen engagement: Fear of relying on the public for the delivery of critical services, fear of being drowned in feedback and fear of not being inclusive – only engaging with those that are online and motivated. Hopefully, thinking through the issues discussed above may help alleviate some of these fears and make city government more enthusiastic about digital engagement….(More)
Lewis Mitchell at the Conversation: “Since its public launch 10 years ago, Twitter has been used as a social networking platform among friends, an instant messaging service for smartphone users and a promotional tool for corporations and politicians.
But it’s also been an invaluable source of data for researchers and scientists – like myself – who want to study how humans feel and function within complex social systems.
By analyzing tweets, we’ve been able to observe and collect data on the social interactions of millions of people “in the wild,” outside of controlled laboratory experiments.
So how, exactly, did Twitter become such a unique resource for computational social scientists? And what has it allowed us to discover?
Twitter’s biggest gift to researchers
On July 15, 2006, Twittr (as it was then known) publiclylaunched as a “mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS.” The ability to send free 140-character group texts drove many early adopters (myself included) to use the platform.
With time, the number of users exploded: from 20 million in 2009 to 200 million in 2012 and 310 million today. Rather than communicating directly with friends, users would simply tell their followers how they felt, respond to news positively or negatively, or crack jokes.
For researchers, Twitter’s biggest gift has been the provision of large quantities of open data. Twitter was one of the first major social networks to provide data samples through something called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which enable researchers to query Twitter for specific types of tweets (e.g., tweets that contain certain words), as well as information on users.
This led to an explosion of research projects exploiting this data. Today, a Google Scholar search for “Twitter” produces six million hits, compared with five million for “Facebook.” The difference is especially striking given that Facebook has roughly five times as many users as Twitter (and is two years older).
Twitter’s generous data policy undoubtedly led to some excellent free publicity for the company, as interesting scientific studies got picked up by the mainstream media.
Studying happiness and health
With traditional census data slow and expensive to collect, open data feeds like Twitter have the potential to provide a real-time window to see changes in large populations.
The University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab was founded in 2006 and studies problems across applied mathematics, sociology and physics. Since 2008, the Story Lab has collected billions of tweets through Twitter’s “Gardenhose” feed, an API that streams a random sample of 10 percent of all public tweets in real time.
I spent three years at the Computational Story Lab and was lucky to be a part of many interesting studies using this data. For example, we developed a hedonometer that measures the happiness of the Twittersphere in real time. By focusing on geolocated tweets sent from smartphones, we were able to map the happiest places in the United States. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found Hawaii to be the happiest state and wine-growing Napa the happiest city for 2013.
A map of 13 million geolocated U.S. tweets from 2013, colored by happiness, with red indicating happiness and blue indicating sadness.PLOS ONE, Author provided
These studies had deeper applications: Correlating Twitter word usage with demographics helped us understand underlying socioeconomic patterns in cities. For example, we could link word usage with health factors like obesity, so we built a lexicocalorimeter to measure the “caloric content” of social media posts. Tweets from a particular region that mentioned high-calorie foods increased the “caloric content” of that region, while tweets that mentioned exercise activities decreased our metric. We found that this simple measure correlates with other health and well-being metrics. In other words, tweets were able to give us a snapshot, at a specific moment in time, of the overall health of a city or region.
Henry Farrell at SSRC: “The politics of social science access to data are shifting rapidly in the United States as in other developed countries. It used to be that states were the most important source of data on their citizens, economy, and society. States needed to collect and aggregate large amounts of information for their own purposes. They gathered this directly—e.g., through censuses of individuals and firms—and also constructed relevant indicators. Sometimes state agencies helped to fund social science projects in data gathering, such as the National Science Foundation’s funding of the American National Election Survey over decades. While scholars such as James Scott and John Brewer disagreed about the benefits of state data gathering, they recognized the state’s primary role.
In this world, the politics of access to data were often the politics of engaging with the state. Sometimes the state was reluctant to provide information, either for ethical reasons (e.g. the privacy of its citizens) or self-interest. However, democratic states did typically provide access to standard statistical series and the like, and where they did not, scholars could bring pressure to bear on them. This led to well-understood rules about the common availability of standard data for many research questions and built the foundations for standard academic practices. It was relatively easy for scholars to criticize each other’s work when they were drawing on common sources. This had costs—scholars tended to ask the kinds of questions that readily available data allowed them to ask—but also significant benefits. In particular, it made research more easily reproducible.
We are now moving to a very different world. On the one hand, open data initiatives in government are making more data available than in the past (albeit often without much in the way of background resources or documentation).The new universe of private data is reshaping social science research in some ways that are still poorly understood. On the other, for many research purposes, large firms such as Google or Facebook (or even Apple) have much better data than the government. The new universe of private data is reshaping social science research in some ways that are still poorly understood. Here are some of the issues that we need to think about:…(More)”
Meera Senthilingam in the New York Times: “Despite a firm reputation for being walkers, New Yorkers have an obesity epidemic on their hands. Lee Altman, a former employee of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction, explains it this way: “We did a very good job at designing physical activity out of our daily lives.”
According to the city’s health department, more than half of the city’s adult population is either overweight (34 percent) or obese (22 percent), and the convenience of their environment has contributed to this. “Everything is dependent on a car, elevator; you sit in front of a computer,” said Altman, “not moving around a lot.”
This is not just a New York phenomenon. Mass urbanization has caused populations the world over to reduce the amount of time they spend moving their bodies. But the root of the problem runs deep in a city’s infrastructure.
Safety, graffiti, proximity to a park, and even the appeal of stairwells all play roles in whether someone chooses to be active or not. But only recently have urban developers begun giving enough priority to these factors.
Planners in New York have now begun employing a method known as “active design” to solve the problem. The approach is part of a global movement to get urbanites onto their streets and enjoying their surroundings on foot, bike or public transport.
“We can impact public health and improve health outcomes through the way that we design,” said Altman, a former active design coordinator for New York City. She now lectures as an adjunct assistant professor inColumbia University’s urban design program.
“The communities that have the least access to well-maintained sidewalks and parks have the highest risk of obesity and chronic disease,” said Joanna Frank, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Active Design; her work focuses on creating guidelines and reports, so that developers and planners are aware, for example, that people have been “less likely to walk down streets, less likely to bike, if they didn’t feel safe, or if the infrastructure wasn’t complete, so you couldn’t get to your destination.”
Even adding items as straightforward as benches and lighting to a streetscape can greatly increase the likelihood of someone’s choosing to walk, she said.
This may seem obvious, but without evidence its importance could be overlooked. “We’ve now established that’s actually the case,” said Frank.
How can things change? According to Frank, four areas are critical: transportation, recreation, buildings and access to food….(More)”
