Icelandic Citizen Engagement Tool Offers Tips for U.S.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zack Quaintance at Government Technology: “The world of online discourse was vastly different one decade ago. This was before foreign election meddling, before social media execs were questioned by Congress, and before fighting with cantankerous uncles became an online trope. The world was perhaps more naïve, with a wide-eyed belief in some circles that Internet forums would amplify the voiceless within democracy.

This was the world in which Róbert Bjarnason and his collaborators lived. Based in Iceland, Bjarnason and his team developed a platform in 2010 for digital democracy. It was called Shadow Parliament, and its aim was simply to connect Iceland’s people with its governmental leadership. The platform launched one morning that year, with a comments section for debate. By evening, two users were locked in a deeply personal argument.

“We just looked at each other and thought, this is not going to be too much fun,” Bjarnason recalled recently. “We had just created one more platform for people to argue on.”

Sure, the engagement level was quite high, bringing furious users back to the site repeatedly to launch vitriol, but Shadow Parliament was not fostering the helpful discourse for which it was designed. So, developers scrapped it, pulling from the wreckage lessons to inform future work.

Bjarnason and team, officially a nonprofit called Citizens Foundation, worked for roughly a year, and, eventually, a new platform called Better Reykjavik was born. Better Reykjavik had key differences, chief among them a new debate system with simple tweaks: Citizens must list arguments for and against ideas, and instead of replying to each other directly, they can only down-vote things with which they disagree. This is a design that essentially forces users to create standalone points, rather than volley combative responses at one another, threaded in the fashion of Facebook or Twitter.

“With this framing of it,” Bjarnason said, “we’re not asking people to write the first comment they think of. We’re actually asking people to evaluate the idea.”

One tradeoff is that fury has proven itself to be an incredible driver of traffic, and the site loses that. But what the platform sacrifices in irate engagement, it gains in thoughtful debate. It’s essentially trading anger clicks for coherent discourse, and it’s seen tremendous success within Iceland — where some municipalities report 20 percent citizen usage — as well as throughout the international community, primarily in Europe. All told, Citizens Foundation has now built like-minded projects in 20 countries. And now, it is starting to build platforms for communities in the U.S….(More)”.

The Starving State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Todd N. Tucker, and Gabriel Zucman at Foreign Affairs: “For millennia, markets have not flourished without the help of the state. Without regulations and government support, the nineteenth-century English cloth-makers and Portuguese winemakers whom the economist David Ricardo made famous in his theory of comparative advantage would have never attained the scale necessary to drive international trade. Most economists rightly emphasize the role of the state in providing public goods and correcting market failures, but they often neglect the history of how markets came into being in the first place. The invisible hand of the market depended on the heavier hand of the state.

The state requires something simple to perform its multiple roles: revenue. It takes money to build roads and ports, to provide education for the young and health care for the sick, to finance the basic research that is the wellspring of all progress, and to staff the bureaucracies that keep societies and economies in motion. No successful market can survive without the underpinnings of a strong, functioning state.

That simple truth is being forgotten today. In the United States, total tax revenues paid to all levels of government shrank by close to four percent of national income over the last two decades, from about 32 percent in 1999 to approximately 28 percent today, a decline unique in modern history among wealthy nations. The direct consequences of this shift are clear: crumbling infrastructure, a slowing pace of innovation, a diminishing rate of growth, booming inequality, shorter life expectancy, and a sense of despair among large parts of the population. These consequences add up to something much larger: a threat to the sustainability of democracy and the global market economy….(More)”.

A Matter of Trust: Higher Education Institutions as Information Fiduciaries in an Age of Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kyle M. L. Jones, Alan Rubel and Ellen LeClere: “Higher education institutions are mining and analyzing student data to effect educational, political, and managerial outcomes. Done under the banner of “learning analytics,” this work can—and often does—surface sensitive data and information about, inter alia, a student’s demographics, academic performance, offline and online movements, physical fitness, mental wellbeing, and social network. With these data, institutions and third parties are able to describe student life, predict future behaviors, and intervene to address academic or other barriers to student success (however defined). Learning analytics, consequently, raise serious issues concerning student privacy, autonomy, and the appropriate flow of student data.

We argue that issues around privacy lead to valid questions about the degree to which students should trust their institution to use learning analytics data and other artifacts (algorithms, predictive scores) with their interests in mind. We argue that higher education institutions are paradigms of information fiduciaries. As such, colleges and universities have a special responsibility to their students. In this article, we use the information fiduciary concept to analyze cases when learning analytics violate an institution’s responsibility to its students….(More)”.

One Nation Tracked: An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel at the New York Times: “…For brands, following someone’s precise movements is key to understanding the “customer journey” — every step of the process from seeing an ad to buying a product. It’s the Holy Grail of advertising, one marketer said, the complete picture that connects all of our interests and online activity with our real-world actions.

Pointillist location data also has some clear benefits to society. Researchers can use the raw data to provide key insights for transportation studies and government planners. The City Council of Portland, Ore., unanimously approved a deal to study traffic and transit by monitoring millions of cellphones. Unicef announced a plan to use aggregated mobile location data to study epidemics, natural disasters and demographics.

For individual consumers, the value of constant tracking is less tangible. And the lack of transparency from the advertising and tech industries raises still more concerns.

Does a coupon app need to sell second-by-second location data to other companies to be profitable? Does that really justify allowing companies to track millions and potentially expose our private lives?

Data companies say users consent to tracking when they agree to share their location. But those consent screens rarely make clear how the data is being packaged and sold. If companies were clearer about what they were doing with the data, would anyone agree to share it?

What about data collected years ago, before hacks and leaks made privacy a forefront issue? Should it still be used, or should it be deleted for good?

If it’s possible that data stored securely today can easily be hacked, leaked or stolen, is this kind of data worth that risk?

Is all of this surveillance and risk worth it merely so that we can be served slightly more relevant ads? Or so that hedge fund managers can get richer?

The companies profiting from our every move can’t be expected to voluntarily limit their practices. Congress has to step in to protect Americans’ needs as consumers and rights as citizens.

Until then, one thing is certain: We are living in the world’s most advanced surveillance system. This system wasn’t created deliberately. It was built through the interplay of technological advance and the profit motive. It was built to make money. The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself….(More)”.

Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP): Improving Drug Research Efficiency through Biomarker Data Sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Data Collaborative Case Study by Michelle Winowatan, Andrew Young, and Stefaan Verhulst: “Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) is a cross-sector data-sharing partnership in the United States between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), multiple biopharmaceutical and life science companies, as well as non-profit organizations that seeks to improve the efficiency of developing new diagnostics and treatments for several types of disease. To achieve this goal, the partnership created a pre-competitive collaborative ecosystem where the biomedical community can pool data and resources that are relevant to the prioritized disease areas. A key component of the partnership is to make biomarkers data available to the medical research community through online portals.

Data Collaboratives Model: Based on our typology of data collaborative models, AMP is an example of the data pooling model of data collaboration, specifically a public data pool. Public data pools co-mingle data assets from multiple data holders — in this case pharmaceutical companies — and make those shared assets available on the web. Pools often limit contributions to approved partners (as public data pools are not crowdsourcing efforts), but access to the shared assets is open, enabling independent re-uses.

Data Stewardship Approach: Data stewardship is built into the partnership through the establishment of an executive committee, which governs the entire partnership, and a steering committee for each disease area, which governs each of the sub-projects within AMP. These committees consist of representatives from the institutional partners involved in AMP and perform data stewards function including enabling inter-institutional engagement as well as intra-institutional coordination, data audit and assessment of value and risk, communication of findings, and nurture the collaboration to sustainability….(Full Case Study)”.

Federal Sources of Entrepreneurship Data: A Compendium

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Compendium developed by Andrew Reamer: “The E.M. Kauffman Foundation has asked the George Washington Institute of Public Policy (GWIPP) to prepare a compendium of federal sources of data on self-employment, entrepreneurship, and small business development. The Foundation believes that the availability of useful, reliable federal data on these topics would enable robust descriptions and explanations of entrepreneurship trends in the United States and so help guide the development of effective entrepreneurship policies.


Achieving these ends first requires the identification and detailed description of available federal datasets, as provided in this compendium. Its contents include:

  • An overview and discussion of 18 datasets from four federal agencies, organized by two categories and five subcategories.
  • Tables providing information on each dataset, including:
    • scope of coverage of self-employed, entrepreneurs, and businesses;
    • data collection methods (nature of data source, periodicity, sampling frame, sample size);
    • dataset variables (owner characteristics, business characteristics and operations, geographic areas);
    • Data release schedule; and
    • Data access by format (including fixed tables, interactive tools, API, FTP download, public use microdata samples [PUMS], and confidential microdata).

For each dataset, examples of studies, if any, that use the data source to describe and explain trends in entrepreneurship.
The author’s aim is for the compendium to facilitate an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of currently available federal datasets, discussion about how data availability and value can be improved, and implementation of desired improvements…(More)”

Industry and Public Sector Leaders Partner to Launch the Mobility Data Collaborative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The Mobility Data Collaborative (the Collaborative), a multi-sector forum with the goal of creating a framework to improve mobility through data, launches today…

New mobility services, such as shared cars, bikes, and scooters, are emerging and integrating into the urban transportation landscape across the globe. Data generated by these new mobility services offers an exciting opportunity to inform local policies and infrastructure planning. The Collaborative brings together key members from the public and private sectors to develop best practices to harness the potential of this valuable data to support safe, equitable, and livable streets.

The Collaborative will leverage the knowledge of its current and future members to solve the complex challenges facing shared mobility operators and the public agencies who manage access to infrastructure that these new services require. A critical component of this collaboration is providing an open and impartial forum for sharing information and developing best practices. 

Membership is open to public agencies, nonprofits, academic institutions and private companies….(More)”.

New Orleans has declared a state of emergency after a cyberattack

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Technology Review: “The city told its employees to shut down their computers as a precaution this weekend after an attempted cyberattack on Friday.

The news: New Orleans spotted suspicious activity in its networks at around 5 a.m. on Friday, with a spike in the attempted attacks at 8 a.m. It detected phishing attempts and ransomware, Kim LaGrue, the city’s head of IT, later told reporters. Once they were confident the city was under attack, the team shut down its servers and computers. City authorities then filed a declaration of a state of emergency with the Civil District Court, and pulled local, state, and federal authorities into a (still pending) investigation of the incident. The city is still working to recover data from the attack but will be open as usual from this morning, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said on Twitter.

Was it ransomware? The nature of the attack is still something of a mystery. Cantrell confirmed that ransomware had been detected, but the city hasn’t received any demands for ransom money.

The positives: New Orleans was at least fairly well prepared for this attack, thanks to training for this scenario and its ability to operate many of its services without internet access, officials told reporters.

A familiar story: New Orleans is just the latest government to face ransomware attacks, after nearly two dozen cities in Texas were targeted in August, plus Louisiana in November (causing the governor to declare a state of emergency). The phenomenon goes beyond the US, too: in October Johannesburg became the biggest city yet to face a ransomware attack.…(More)”.

What is the Difference between a Conclusion and a Fact?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Howard M. Erichson: “In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, building on Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, the Supreme Court instructed district courts to treat a complaint’s conclusions differently from allegations of fact. Facts, but not conclusions, are assumed true for purposes of a motion to dismiss. The Court did little to help judges or lawyers understand the elusive distinction, and, indeed, obscured the distinction with its language. The Court said it was distinguishing “legal conclusions” from factual allegations. The application in Twombly and Iqbal, however, shows that the relevant distinction is not between law and fact, but rather between different types of factual assertions. This essay, written for a symposium on the tenth anniversary of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, explores the definitional problem with the conclusion-fact distinction and examines how district courts have applied the distinction in recent cases….(More)”.

Assessing employer intent when AI hiring tools are biased

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Caitlin Chin at Brookings: “When it comes to gender stereotypes in occupational roles, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to either mitigate historical bias or heighten it. In the case of the Word2vec model, AI appears to do both.

Word2vec is a publicly available algorithmic model built on millions of words scraped from online Google News articles, which computer scientists commonly use to analyze word associations. In 2016, Microsoft and Boston University researchers revealed that the model picked up gender stereotypes existing in online news sources—and furthermore, that these biased word associations were overwhelmingly job related. Upon discovering this problem, the researchers neutralized the biased word correlations in their specific algorithm, writing that “in a small way debiased word embeddings can hopefully contribute to reducing gender bias in society.”

Their study draws attention to a broader issue with artificial intelligence: Because algorithms often emulate the training datasets that they are built upon, biased input datasets could generate flawed outputs. Because many contemporary employers utilize predictive algorithms to scan resumes, direct targeted advertising, or even conduct face- or voice-recognition-based interviews, it is crucial to consider whether popular hiring tools might be susceptible to the same cultural biases that the researchers discovered in Word2vec.

In this paper, I discuss how hiring is a multi-layered and opaque process and how it will become more difficult to assess employer intent as recruitment processes move online. Because intent is a critical aspect of employment discrimination law, I ultimately suggest four ways upon which to include it in the discussion surrounding algorithmic bias….(More)”

This report from The Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology (AIET) Initiative is part of “AI and Bias,” a series that explores ways to mitigate possible biases and create a pathway toward greater fairness in AI and emerging technologies.