Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UK Government Office for Science: “In a major report on distributed ledgers published today (19 January 2016), the Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, sets out how this technology could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity.

A distributed ledger is a database that can securely record financial, physical or electronic assets for sharing across a network through entirely transparent updates of information.

Its first incarnation was ‘Blockchain’ in 2008, which underpinned digital cash systems such as Bitcoin. The technology has now evolved into a variety of models that can be applied to different business problems and dramatically improve the sharing of information.

Distributed ledger technology could provide government with new tools to reduce fraud, error and the cost of paper intensive processes. It also has the potential to provide new ways of assuring ownership and provenance for goods and intellectual property.

Distributed ledgers are already being used in the diamond markets and in the disbursing of international aid payments.

Sir Mark Walport said:

Distributed ledger technology has the potential to transform the delivery of public and private services. It has the potential to redefine the relationship between government and the citizen in terms of data sharing, transparency and trust and make a leading contribution to the government’s digital transformation plan.

Any new technology creates challenges, but with the right mix of leadership, collaboration and sound governance, distributed ledgers could yield significant benefits for the UK.

The report makes a number of recommendations which focus on ministerial leadership, research, standards and the need for proof of concept trials.

They include:

  • government should provide ministerial leadership to ensure that it provides the vision, leadership and the platform for distributed ledger technology within government; this group should consider governance, privacy, security and standards
  • government should establish trials of distributed ledgers in order to assess the technology’s usability within the public sector
  • government could support the creation of distributed ledger demonstrators for local government that will bring together all the elements necessary to test the technology and its application.
  • the UK research community should invest in the research required to ensure that distributed ledgers are scalable, secure and provide proof of correctness of their contents….View the report ‘Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain’.”

Smart Devolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by Eddie Copeland and Cameron Scott at Policy Exchange: “Elected mayors should be required to set up an Office of Data Analytics comprising of small, expert teams tasked with using public and privately held data to create smarter and more productive cities.

A new paper, Smart Devolution, by leading think tank Policy Exchange says that most cities have vast quantities of data that if accessed and used effectively could help improve public services, optimise transport routes, support the growth of small businesses and even prevent cycling accidents.

The report highlights how every UK city should use the additional powers they receive from Whitehall to replicate New York by employing a small team of data experts to collect and collate information from a range of sources, including councils, emergency services, voluntary organisations, mobile phone networks and payment systems.

The data teams will provide city mayors with a great opportunity to break down the silos that exist between local authorities and public sector bodies when it comes to unlocking information that could save money and improve the standard of living for the public.

Examples of how a better use of data could make our cities smarter include:

  • Preventing cycling accidents: HGVs travelling through city centres should be required to share their GPS data with the city mayor’s Office for Data Analytics. Combining HGV routes with data from cyclists obtained by their mobile phone signals could provide real time information showing the most common routes shared by large lorries and cyclists. City leaders could then put in place evidence based policy responses, for example, prioritising spending on new bike lanes or updating cyclists via an app of the city’s most dangerous routes.
  • Spending smarter: cities could save and residents benefit from the analysis of  anonymised spend and travel information to understand where investment and services are needed based on real consumer decisions. Locating schools, transport links and housing when and where it is needed. This also applies to business investment with data being harnessed to identify fruitful locations….(More)”

The Future of Behavioural Change: Balancing Public Nudging vs Private Nudging

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

2nd AIM Lecture by Alberto Alemanno: “Public authorities, including the European Union and its Member States, are increasingly interested in exploiting behavioral insights through public action. They increasingly do so through choice architecture, i.e. the alteration of the environment of choice surrounding a particular decision making context in areas as diverse as energy consumption, tax collection and public health. In this regard, it is useful to distinguish between two situations. The first is that of a public authority which seeks to steer behaviour in the public interest, taking into account one or more mental shortcuts. Thus, a default enrollment for organ donation leverages on the power of inertia to enhance the overall prevalence organ donors. Placing an emoticon (sad face) or a set of information about average consumption on a prohibitive energy bill has the potential to nudge consumers towards less energy consumption. I call this pure public nudging. The second perspective is when public authorities react to exploitative uses of mental shortcuts by market forces by regulating private nudging. I call this ‘counter-nudging’. Pure public nudging helps people correct mental shortcuts so as to achieve legitimate objectives (e.g. increased availability of organs, environmental protection, etc.), regardless of their exploitative use by market forces.
It is against this proposed taxonomy that the 2nd AIM Lecture examines whether also private companies may nudge for good. Are corporations well-placed to nudge their customers towards societal objectives, such as the protection of the environment or the promotion of public health? This is what I call benign corporate nudging.
Their record is far from being the most credible. Companies have used behavioural inspired interventions to maximize profits, what led them to sell more and in turn to induce citizens into more consumption. Yet corporate marketing need not always be self-interested. An incipient number of companies are using their brand, generally through their packaging and marketing efforts, to ‘nudge for good’. By illustrating some actual examples, this lecture defines the conditions under which companies may genuinely and credibly nudge for good. It argues that benign corporate nudging may have – unlike dominant CSR efforts – a positive long-term, habit-forming effect that influences consumers’ future behaviour ‘for good’….(More)”

 

Collective Intelligence in Law Reforms: When the Logic of the Crowds and the Logic of Policymaking Collide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tanja Aitamurto: “…shows how the two virtues of collective intelligence – cognitive diversity and large crowds –turn into perils in crowdsourced policymaking. That is because of a conflict between the logic of the crowds and the logic of policymaking. The crowd’s logic differs from that of traditional policymaking in several aspects. To mention some of those: In traditional policymaking it is a small group of experts making proposals to the policy, whereas in crowdsourced policymaking, it is a large, anonymous crowd with a mixed level of expertise. The crowd proposes atomic ideas, whereas traditional policymaking is used to dealing with holistic and synthesized proposals. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced law-making process in Finland, the paper shows how the logics of the crowds and policymaking collide in practice. The conflict prevents policymaking fully benefiting from the crowd’s input, and it also hinders governments from adopting crowdsourcing more widely as a practice for deploying open policymaking practices….(More)”

Open data set to reshape charity and activism in 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Guardian: “In 2015 the EU launched the world’s first international data portal, the Chinese government pledged to make state data public, and the UK lost its open data crown to Taiwan. Troves of data were unlocked by governments around the world last year, but the usefulness of much of that data is still to be determined by the civic groups, businesses and governments who use it. So what’s in the pipeline? And how will the open data ecosystem grow in 2016? We asked the experts.

1. Data will be seen as infrastructure (Heather Savory, director general for data capability, Office for National Statistics)….

2. Journalists, charities and civil society bodies will embrace open data (Hetan Shah, executive director, the Royal Statistical Society)…3. Activists will take it upon themselves to create data

3. Activists will take it upon themselves to create data (Pavel Richter, chief executive, Open Knowledge International)….

 

4. Data illiteracy will come at a heavy price (Sir Nigel Shadbolt, principal, Jesus College, Oxford, professorial research fellow in computer science, University of Oxford and chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute…)

5. We’ll create better tools to build a web of data (Dr Elena Simperl, associate professor, electronics and computer science, University of Southampton) …(More)”

Daedalus Issue on “The Internet”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press release: “Thirty years ago, the Internet was a network that primarily delivered email among academic and government employees. Today, it is rapidly evolving into a control system for our physical environment through the Internet of Things, as mobile and wearable technology more tightly integrate the Internet into our everyday lives.

How will the future Internet be shaped by the design choices that we are making today? Could the Internet evolve into a fundamentally different platform than the one to which we have grown accustomed? As an alternative to big data, what would it mean to make ubiquitously collected data safely available to individuals as small data? How could we attain both security and privacy in the face of trends that seem to offer neither? And what role do public institutions, such as libraries, have in an environment that becomes more privatized by the day?

These are some of the questions addressed in the Winter 2016 issue of Daedalus on “The Internet.”  As guest editors David D. Clark (Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and Yochai Benkler (Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University) have observed, the Internet “has become increasingly privately owned, commercial, productive, creative, and dangerous.”

Some of the themes explored in the issue include:

  • The conflicts that emerge among governments, corporate stakeholders, and Internet users through choices that are made in the design of the Internet
  • The challenges—including those of privacy and security—that materialize in the evolution from fixed terminals to ubiquitous computing
  • The role of public institutions in shaping the Internet’s privately owned open spaces
  • The ownership and security of data used for automatic control of connected devices, and
  • Consumer demand for “free” services—developed and supported through the sale of user data to advertisers….

Essays in the Winter 2016 issue of Daedalus include:

  • The Contingent Internet by David D. Clark (MIT)
  • Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power by Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School)
  • Edge Networks and Devices for the Internet of Things by Peter T. Kirstein (University College London)
  • Reassembling Our Digital Selves by Deborah Estrin (Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medical College) and Ari Juels (Cornell Tech)
  • Choices: Privacy and Surveillance in a Once and Future Internet by Susan Landau (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
  • As Pirates Become CEOs: The Closing of the Open Internet by Zeynep Tufekci (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
  • Design Choices for Libraries in the Digital-Plus Era by John Palfrey (Phillips Academy)…(More)

See also: Introduction

Developing Global Norms for Sharing Data and Results during Public Health Emergencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kayvon Modjarrad et al in PLOS Med: “…When a new or re-emergent pathogen causes a major outbreak, rapid access to both raw and analysed data or other pertinent research findings becomes critical to developing a rapid and effective public health response. Without the timely exchange of information on clinical, epidemiologic, and molecular features of an infectious disease, informed decisions about appropriate responses cannot be made, particularly those that relate to fielding new interventions or adapting existing ones. Failure to share information in a timely manner can have disastrous public health consequences, leading to unnecessary suffering and death. The 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa revealed both successful practices and important deficiencies within existing mechanisms for information sharing. For example, trials of two Ebola vaccine candidates (ChAd3-ZEBOV and rVSV-ZEBOV) benefited greatly from an open collaboration between investigators and institutions in Africa, Europe, and North America . These teams, coordinated by the WHO, were able to generate and exchange critical data for the development of urgently needed, novel vaccines along faster timelines than have ever before been achieved. Similarly, some members of the genome sequencing community made viral sequence data publicly available within days of accessing samples , thus adhering to their profession’s long-established principles of rapid, public release of sequence data in any setting. In contrast, the dissemination of surveillance data early in the epidemic was comparatively slow, and in some cases, the criteria for sharing were unclear.

In recognition of the need to streamline mechanisms of data dissemination—globally and in as close to real-time as possible—the WHO held a consultation in Geneva, Switzerland, on 1–2 September 2015 to advance the development of data sharing norms, specifically in the context of public health emergencies….

preservation of global health requires prioritization of and support for international collaboration. These and other principles were affirmed at the consultation (Table 1) and codified into a consensus statement that was published on the WHO website immediately following the meeting (http://www.who.int/medicines/ebola-treatment/data-sharing_phe/en/). A more comprehensive set of principles and action items was made available in November 2015, including the consensus statement made by the editorial staff of journals that attended the meeting (http://www.who.int/medicines/ebola-treatment/blueprint_phe_data-share-results/en/). The success of prior initiatives to accelerate timelines for reporting clinical trial results has helped build momentum for a broader data sharing agenda. As the quick and transparent dissemination of information is the bedrock of good science and public health practice, it is important that the current trends in data sharing carry over to all matters of acute public health need. Such a global norm would advance the spirit of open collaboration, simplify current mechanisms of information sharing, and potentially save many lives in subsequent outbreaks….(More)”

 

The Power of the Nudge to Change Our Energy Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sebastian Berger in the Scientific American: “More than ever, psychology has become influential not only in explaining human behavior, but also as a resource for policy makers to achieve goals related to health, well-being, or sustainability. For example, President Obama signed an executive order directing the government to systematically use behavioral science insights to “better serve the American people.” Not alone in this endeavor, many governments – including the UK, Germany, Denmark, or Australia – are turning to the insights that most frequently stem from psychological researchers, but also include insights from behavioral economics, sociology, or anthropology.

Particularly relevant are the analysis and the setting of “default-options.” A default is the option that a decision maker receives if he or she does not specifically state otherwise. Are we automatically enrolled in a 401(k), are we organ donors by default, or is the flu-shot a standard that is routinely given to all citizens? Research has given us many examples of how and when defaults can promote public safety or wealth.

One of the most important questions facing the planet, however, is how to manage the transition into a carbon-free economy. In a recent paper, Felix Ebeling of the University of Cologne and I tested whether defaults could nudge consumers into choosing a green energy contract over one that relies on conventional energy. The results were striking: setting the default to green energy increased participation nearly tenfold. This is an important result because it tells us that subtle, non-coercive changes in the decision making environment are enough to show substantial differences in consumers’ preferences in the domain of clean energy. It changes green energy participation from “hardly anyone” to “almost everyone”. Merely within the domain of energy behavior, one can think of many applications where this finding can be applied:  For instance, default engines of new cars could be set to hybrid and customers would need to actively switch to standard options. Standard temperatures of washing machines could be low, etc….(More)”

This Is How Visualizing Open Data Can Help Save Lives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alexander Howard at the Huffington Post: “Cities are increasingly releasing data that they can use to make life better for their residents online — enabling journalists and researchers to better inform the public.

Los Angeles, for example, has analyzed data about injuries and deaths on its streets and published it online. Now people can check its conclusions and understand why LA’s public department prioritizes certain intersections.

The impact from these kinds of investments can lead directly to saving lives and preventing injuries. The work is part of a broader effort around the world to make cities safer.

Like New York City, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles has adopted Sweden’s “Vision Zero” program as part of its strategy for eliminating traffic deaths. California led the nation in bicycle deaths in 2014.

At visionzero.lacity.org, you can see that the City of Los Angeles is using data visualization to identify the locations of “high injury networks,” or the 6 percent of intersections that account for 65 percent of the severe injuries in the area.

CITY OF LOS ANGELES

The work is the result of LA’s partnership with University of South California graduate students. As a result of these analyses, the Los Angeles Police Department has been cracking down on jaywalking near the University of Southern California.

Abhi Nemani, the former chief data officer for LA, explained why the city needed to “go back to school” for help.

“In resource-constrained environments — the environment most cities find themselves in these days — you often have to beg, borrow, and steal innovation; particularly so, when it comes to in-demand resources such as data science expertise,” he told the Huffington Post.

“That’s why in Los Angeles, we opted to lean on the community for support: both the growing local tech sector and the expansive academic base. The academic community, in particular, was eager to collaborate with the city. In fact, most — if not all — local institutions reached out to me at some point asking to partner on a data science project with their graduate students.”

The City of Los Angeles is now working with another member of its tech sector toeliminate traffic deaths. DataScience, based in Culver City, California, received $22 million dollars in funding in December to make predictive insights for customers.

“The City of Los Angeles is very data-driven,” DataScience CEO Ian Swanson told HuffPost. “I commend Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City of Los Angeles on the openness, transparency, and availability of city data initiatives, like Vision Zero, put the City of Los Angeles‘ data into action and improve life in this great city.”

DataScience created an interactive online map showing the locations of collisions involving bicycles across the city….(More)”

The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbo, Anders Olof Larsson, Christian Christensen: “Social media are now widely used for political protests, campaigns, and communication in developed and developing nations, but available research has not yet paid sufficient attention to experiences beyond the US and UK. This collection tackles this imbalance head-on, compiling cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of recent political uses of social media.

Drawing together empirical analyses of the use of social media by political movements and in national and regional elections and referenda, The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics presents studies ranging from Anonymous and the Arab Spring to the Greek Aganaktismenoi, and from South Korean presidential elections to the Scottish independence referendum. The book is framed by a selection of keystone theoretical contributions, evaluating and updating existing frameworks for the social media age….(More)”