Nepal Aid Workers Helped by Drones, Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Shirley Wang et al in the Wall Street Journal: “….It is too early to gauge the exact impact of the technology in Nepal relief efforts, which have just begun amid chaos on the ground. Aid organizations have reported hospitals are overstretched, a shortage of capacity at Katmandu’s airport is crippling aid distribution and damaged roads and the mountainous country’s difficult terrain make reaching villages difficult.

Still, technology is playing an increasing role in the global response to humanitarian crises. Within hours of Saturday’s 7.8-magnitude temblor, U.S. giants such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. were offering their networks for use in verifying survivors and helping worried friends and relatives locate their loved ones.

Advances in online mapping—long used to calculate distances and plot driving routes—and the ability of camera-equipped drones are playing an increasingly important role in coordinating emergency responses at ground zero of any disaster.

A community of nonprofit groups uses satellite images, private images and open-source mapping technology to remap areas affected by the earthquake. They mark damaged buildings and roads so rescuers can identify the worst-hit areas and assess how accessible different areas are. The technology complements more traditional intelligence from aircraft.

Such crowdsourced real-time mapping technologies were first used in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, according to Chris Grundy, a professor in Geographical Information Systems at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The technology “has been advancing a little bit every time [every situation where it is used] as we start to see what works,” said Prof. Grundy.

The American Red Cross supplied its relief team on the Wednesday night flight to Nepal from Washington, D.C. with 50 digital maps and an inch-thick pile of paper maps that help identify where the needs are. The charity has a mapping project with the British Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a crowdsourced data-sharing group.

Almost a week after the Nepal earthquake, two more people have been pulled from the rubble in Katmandu by teams of international rescuers. But hope for finding more survivors is waning. Photo: Sean McLain/The Wall Street Journal.

Mapping efforts have grown substantially since Haiti, according to Dale Kunce, head of the geographic information systems team at the American Red Cross. In the two months after the Haiti temblor, 600 mapping contributors made 1.5 million edits, while in the first 48 hours after the Nepal earthquake, 2,000 mappers had already made three million edits, Mr. Kunce said.

Some 3,400 volunteers from around the world are now inspecting images of Nepal online to identify road networks and conditions, to assess the extent of damage and pinpoint open spaces where displaced persons tend to congregate, according to Nama Budhathoki, executive director of a nonprofit technology company called Katmandu Living Labs.

His group is operating from a cramped but largely undamaged meeting room in a central-Katmandu office building to help coordinate the global effort of various mapping organizations with the needs of agencies like Doctors Without Borders and the international Red Cross community.

In recent days the Nepal Red Cross and Nepalese army have requested and been supplied with updated maps of severely damaged districts, said Dr. Budhathoki….(More)”

The Incredible Jun: A Town that Runs on Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Deb Roy and William Powers in the Huffington Post: “For the last four years, a town in southern Spain has been conducting a remarkable experiment in civic life. Jun (pronounced “hoon”) has been using Twitter as its principal medium for citizen-government communication. Leading the effort is Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, a passionate believer in the power of technology to solve problems and move society forward.

Since launching the initiative in 2011, Rodríguez Salas has been recruiting his 3,500 townspeople to not only join the social network but have their Twitter accounts locally verified at town hall. This extra step isn’t necessary to participate in the conversation – Twitter is open to anyone – but it helps town employees know they’re dealing with actual residents.

In the most basic scenario, a citizen who has a question, request or complaint tweets it to the mayor or one of his staff, who work to resolve the matter. For instance, in the sequence of tweets shown below (which we pulled from the 2014 Twitter data and translated into English), at 10:48 pm a citizen tells the mayor that a street lamp is out on Maestro Antonio Linares Street. Nine minutes later, the mayor replies that he’ll have the town electrician fix it the next day. The mayor’s tweet includes the Twitter handle of the electrician, who is automatically notified that he’s been mentioned and sees the exchange. That tweet is a public promise that the town will indeed take action, and to underline this it ends with the hashtag #JunGetsMoving. The next day, the electrician tweets a photo of the repaired fixture, thanking the citizen for his help and repeating the hashtag.

A citizen alerts the mayor to a broken street lamp. Two tweets later, it’s fixed.

Governments have been responding to citizens for centuries. But digital networks have made it possible to build much faster, more efficient feedback loops. Each of the participants in the above transaction wrote a single text of less than 140 characters, and in less than 24 hours the problem was solved….(More)”

European Policy: A Nudge in the Right Direction

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Snyder, Madeleine in the Harvard International Review: “A man in the UK opens his email after receiving his monthly energy bill. Along with a smorgasbord of information about energy conservation and his current spending on energy, he sees how much he could potentially save by doing small things, like insulating doors and windows and using more efficient light bulbs. The next day at the supermarket he passes an aisle filled with draft blockers and LED lights. Remembering the email and that potential 200 pound saving, he purchases three energy efficient light bulbs and schedules to have his door reinsulated. This is one example of a new technique the UK government is using to encourage citizens to be ecofriendly, while avoiding the pitfalls of expensive public policy.

In 2010, the UK partnered with an intelligence and consulting company to give its more ineffective and expensive policies a nudge in the right direction. The aptly named Nudge Unit, or more formally, the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) is co-directed by the UK Cabinet Office and Nesta, the leading UK charity for innovation. The BIT uses ‘nudging’, or’behavioral insights’, at the intersection of psychology, political theory, behavioral economics, and social anthropology, to engineer more effective and efficient policy to influence social behavior. Policy goals range from getting more people to save for a pension or actively look for a job if they become unemployed, to encouraging people to recycle or donate to charity.

But what exactly counts as a ‘nudge’? According to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of the book Nudge, it is “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. “Thus including more footage of actors recycling in popular TV shows counts as nudging, but limiting trash collection to once a month and expanding recycling pickup to twice a week does not. Nudging is all about using incentives, responses, and psychology to design effective policy.

Beyond working closely with the UK government, the BIT helps other companies, small businesses, and charities use behavioral insights to improve internal affairs and productivity. …

The key to BIT policy and the bulk of step three is the Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely (EAST) set of insights. Study results from the BIT indicate that the most effective policies incorporate all four of these….(More)”.

Monithon

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Moni-thon” comes from “monitor” and “marathon”, and this is precisely what this platform seeks to help with: anintensive activity of observing and reporting of public policies in Italy.

What’s there to monitor?  Monithon was born as an independently developed initiative to promote the citizen monitoring of development projects funded both by the Italian government and the EU through the Cohesion (aka. Regional) Policy. Projects include a wide range of interventions such as large transport, digital, research or environmental infrastructures (railroads, highways, broadband networks, waste management systems…), aids to enterprises to support innovation and competitiveness, and other funding for energy efficiency, social inclusion, education and training, occupation and workers mobility, tourism, etc.

Citizen monitoring of these projects is possible thanks to a combination of open government data and citizens’ collaboration, joined by the goal of controlling how the projects are progressing, and whether they deliver actual results.

The Italian government releases the information on all the 800k+ projects funded (worth almost 100 billion Euros), the beneficiaries of the subsidies and all the actors involved as open data, including the location and the timing of the intervention. All the data is integrated with interactive visualizations on the national portal OpenCoesione, where people can play with the data and find the most interesting projects to follow.

The Monithon initiative takes this transparency further: it asks citizens to actively engage with open government data and to produce valuable information through it.

How does it work? Monithon means active involvement of communities and a shared methodology. Citizens, journalist, experts, researchers, students – or all combined – collect information on a specific project chosen from the OpenCoesione database. Then this information can be uploaded on the Monithon platform (based on Ushahidi) by selecting the projects from a list and it can be geo-referenced and enriched with interviews, quantitative data, pictures, videos. The result is a form of civic, bottom-down, collective data storytelling. All the “wannabe monithoners” can download this simple toolkit, a 10-page document that describes the initiative and explains how to pick a project to monitor and get things started.  ….

How to achieve actual impact? The Monithon platform is method and a model whereby citizen monitoring may be initiated and a tool for civic partners to press forward, to report on malpractice, but also to collaborate in making all these projects work, in accelerating their completion and understanding whether they actually respond to local demand. ….

Monithon has rapidly evolved from being an innovative new platform into a transferable civic engagement format.  Since its launch in September 2013, Monithon has drawn dozens of national and local communities (some formed on purpose, other based on existing associations) and around 500 people into civic monitoring activities, mostly in Southern Italy, where cohesion funds are more concentrated. Specific activities are carried out by established citizen groups, like Libera, a national anti-Mafia association, which became Monithon partner, focusing their monitoring on the rehabilitation of Mafia-seized properties. Action Aid is now partnering with Monithon to promote citizen empowerment. Existing, local groups of activists are using the Monithon methodology to test local transportation systems that benefited from EU funding, while new groups have formed to begin monitoring social innovation and cultural heritage projects.

Now more than 50 “citizen monitoring reports”, which take the form of collective investigations on project development and results, are publicly available on the Monithon website, many of which spurred further dialogue with public administrations….(More)“

Data Fusion Heralds City Attractiveness Ranking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “The ability of any city to attract visitors is an important metric for town planners, businesses based on tourism, traffic planners, residents, and so on. And there are increasingly varied ways of measuring this thanks to the growing volumes of city-related data generated by with social media, and location-based data.

So it’s only natural that researchers would like to draw these data sets together to see what kind of insight they can get from this form of data fusion.

And so it has turned out thanks to the work of Stanislav Sobolevsky at MIT and a few buddies. These guys have fused three wildly different data sets related to the attractiveness of a city that allows them to rank these places and to understand why people visit them and what they do when they get there.

The work focuses exclusively on cities in Spain using data that is relatively straightforward to gather. The first data set consists of the number of credit and debit card transactions carried out by visitors to cities throughout Spain during 2011. This includes each card’s country of origin, which allows Sobolevsky and co to count only those transactions made by foreign visitors—a total of 17 million anonymized transactions from 8.6 million foreign visitors from 175 different countries.

The second data set consists of over 3.5 million photos and videos taken in Spain and posted to Flickr by people living in other countries. These pictures were taken between 2005 and 2014 by 16,000 visitors from 112 countries.

The last data set consists of around 700,000 geotagged tweets posted in Spain during 2012. These were posted by 16,000 foreign visitors from 112 countries.

Finally, the team defined a city’s attractiveness, at least for the purposes of this study, as the total number of pictures, tweets and card transactions that took place within it……

That’s interesting work that shows how the fusion of big data sets can provide insights into the way people use cities.   It has its limitations of course. The study does not address the reasons why people find cities attractive and what draws them there in the first place. For example, are they there for tourism, for business, or for some other reason. That would require more specialized data.

But it does provide a general picture of attractiveness that could be a start for more detailed analyses. As such, this work is just a small part of a new science of cities based on big data, but one that shows how much is becoming possible with just a little number crunching.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1504.06003 : Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economic and social media activity”

EU DataLandscape

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DataLandscape.eu: “The European Data Market study aims to define, assess and measure the European data economy, supporting the achievement of the Data Value Chain policy of the European Commission. This strategy is focused on developing a vibrant and innovative data ecosystem of stakeholders driving the growth of this innovative market in Europe. The main results of this study will feed into the annual reviews of the Digital Agenda Scoreboard providing valuable data and information.

Additionally, supporting above-mentioned aims the study also plans to support the development of the community of relevant stakeholders in the EU. Since the “data community” in Europe is already strong albeit very diverse, dispersed in several communities, the study wants to move from disparate communities to a genuine stakeholders’ ecosystem….(More)”

The Design Economy primer: how design is revolutionising health, business, cities and government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Pallister at the Design Council: “In the four sections that follow, we offer a guide to the design economy in the twenty-first century – a flavour of the critical issues, leading companies, research institutes and designers in:

1. Health

A growing awareness of the social impact of design has led to an increasing number of designers working in health and well-being.​​

2. Business

Global corporations, following in the tracks of Apple, Philips and IBM, are building design studios and seeking Chief Design Officers to join their boards and orchestrate the transition from marketing-led to design-led businesses.

3. Cities

With a rapidly increasing proportion of the population living in cities, design is being used to tackle the implications of this demographic shift in areas like housing and infrastructure.​

4. Government

In the UK, Europe and the US, designers can now be found close to the seat of government, employing design to improve public services and policies.

With design expanding into these important and largely uncharted areas, we urgently need to begin asking informed questions about design and its practical and ethical territory.

John Mathers, Chief Executive of the Design Council, asks us to pause for a moment to consider, “How has design, which many still associate largely with style and consumerism, come to be something one might look to for solutions to the most complex and challenging problems facing humanity today – problems requiring not just local fixes using clever design objects, but solutions that reimagine systems themselves? Are we, at this point, really even still talking about the same discipline?”

The questions, perhaps, boil down to one: ‘What should design do?’ …(More)”

 

What, Exactly, Do You Want?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cass Sunstein at the New York Times: “Suppose that you value freedom of choice. Are you committed to the mere opportunity to choose, or will you also insist that people actually exercise that opportunity? Is it enough if the government, or a private institution, gives people the option of going their own way? Or is it particularly important to get people to say precisely what they want? In coming decades, these seemingly abstract questions will grow in importance, because they will decide central features of our lives.

Here’s an example. Until last month, all 50 states had a simple policy for voter registration: If you want to become a voter, you have the opportunity to register. Oregon is now the first state to adopt a radically different approach: If the relevant state officials know that you live in Oregon and are 18 or older, you’re automatically registered as a voter. If you don’t want to be one, you have the opportunity to opt out.

We could easily imagine a third approach. A state might decide that if you want some kind of benefit — say, a driver’s license — you have to say whether you want to register to vote. Under this approach, the state would require you to make an active choice about whether to be a voter. You would have to indicate your desires explicitly.

In countless contexts, the government, or some private institution, must decide among three possible approaches: Give people the opportunity to opt in; give people the opportunity to opt out; or require people to make some kind of active choice. For example, an employer may say that employees will be enrolled in a pension plan only if they opt in. Alternatively, it may automatically enroll employees in a pension plan (while allowing them the opportunity to opt out). Or it may instead tell employees that they can’t start work unless they say whether they want to participate in a pension plan.

You may think that while the decision raises philosophical puzzles, the stakes are small. If so, you would be wrong; the decision can have huge consequences. By itself, the opportunity to choose is not all that matters, because many people will not exercise that opportunity. Inertia has tremendous force, and people tend to procrastinate. If a state or a private company switches from a system of opt-out to one of opt-in, or vice versa, it can have major effects on people’s lives.

For example, Oregon expects that its new policy will produce up to 300,000 new registered voters. In 2004, Congress authorized the Department of Agriculture to allow states and localities to automatically enroll eligible poor children in school meal programs, rather than requiring their parents to sign them up. As a result, millions of such children now have access to school meals. In many nations, including the United States, Britain and Denmark, automatic enrollment in pension plans has significantly increased the number of employees who participate in pension plans. The Affordable Care Act builds on this practice with a provision that will require large employers to enroll employees automatically in health insurance plans.

In light of findings of this kind (and there are many more), a lot of people have argued that people would be much better off if many institutions switched, today or tomorrow, from “opt in” designs to “opt out.” Often they’re right; “opt out” can be a lot better. But from the standpoint of both welfare and personal freedom, opt out raises problems of its own, precisely because it does not involve an actual exercise of the power to choose….(More)

Solving the obesity crisis: knowledge, nudge or nanny?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

BioMedCentral Blog: ” The 5th Annual Oxford London Lecture (17 March 2015) was delivered by Professor Susan Jebb from Oxford University. The presentation was titled: ‘Knowledge, nudge and nanny: Opportunities to improve the nation’s diet’. In this guest blog Dr Helen Walls, Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, covers key themes from this presentation.

“Obesity and related non-communicable disease such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer poses a significant health, social and economic burden in countries worldwide, including the United Kingdom. Whilst the need for action is clear, the nutrition policy response is a highly controversial topic. Professor Jebb raised the question of how best to achieve dietary change: through ‘knowledge, nudge or nanny’?

Education regarding healthy nutrition is an important strategy, but insufficient. People are notoriously bad at putting their knowledge to work. The inclination to overemphasise the importance of knowledge, whilst ignoring the influence of environmental factors on human behaviours, is termed the ‘fundamental attribution error’. Education may also contribute to widening inequities.

Our choices are strongly shaped by the environments in which we live. So if ‘knowledge’ is not enough, what sort of interventions are appropriate? This raises questions regarding individual choice and the role of government. Here, Professor Jebb introduced the Nuffield Intervention Ladder.

 

Nuffield Intervention Ladder
Nuffield Intervention Ladder
Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Public health ethical issues. London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics. 2007.

The Nuffield Intervention Ladder or what I will refer to as ‘the ladder’ describes intervention types from least to most intrusive on personal choice. With addressing diets and obesity, Professor Jebb believes we need a range of policy types, across the range of rungs on the ladder.

Less intrusive measures on the ladder could include provision of information about healthy and unhealthy foods, and provision of nutritional information on products (which helps knowledge be put into action). More effective than labelling is the signposting of healthier choices.

Taking a few steps up the ladder brings in ‘nudge’, a concept from behavioural economics. A nudge is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding options or significantly changing economic incentives. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.

Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.

The in-store environment has a huge influence over our choices, and many nudge options would fit here. For example, gondalar-end (end of aisle) promotions create a huge up-lift in sales. Removing unhealthy products from this position could make a considerable difference to the contents of supermarket baskets.

Nudge could be used to assist people make better nutritional choices, but it’s also unlikely to be enough. We celebrate the achievement we have made with tobacco control policies and smoking reduction. Here, we use a range of intervention types, including many legislative measures – the ‘nanny’ aspect of the title of this presentation….(More)”

The Rule of History

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jill Lepore about Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the hold of time in The New Yorker: “…Magna Carta has been taken as foundational to the rule of law, chiefly because in it King John promised that he would stop throwing people into dungeons whenever he wished, a provision that lies behind what is now known as due process of law and is understood not as a promise made by a king but as a right possessed by the people. Due process is a bulwark against injustice, but it wasn’t put in place in 1215; it is a wall built stone by stone, defended, and attacked, year after year. Much of the rest of Magna Carta, weathered by time and for centuries forgotten, has long since crumbled, an abandoned castle, a romantic ruin.

Magna Carta is written in Latin. The King and the barons spoke French. “Par les denz Dieu!” the King liked to swear, invoking the teeth of God. The peasants, who were illiterate, spoke English. Most of the charter concerns feudal financial arrangements (socage, burgage, and scutage), obsolete measures and descriptions of land and of husbandry (wapentakes and wainages), and obscure instruments for the seizure and inheritance of estates (disseisin and mort d’ancestor). “Men who live outside the forest are not henceforth to come before our justices of the forest through the common summonses, unless they are in a plea,” one article begins.

Magna Carta’s importance has often been overstated, and its meaning distorted. “The significance of King John’s promise has been anything but constant,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens aptly wrote, in 1992. It also has a very different legacy in the United States than it does in the United Kingdom, where only four of its original sixty-some provisions are still on the books. In 2012, three New Hampshire Republicans introduced into the state legislature a bill that required that “all members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived.” For American originalists, in particular, Magna Carta has a special lastingness. “It is with us every day,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in a speech at a Federalist Society gathering last fall.

Much has been written of the rule of law, less of the rule of history. Magna Carta, an agreement between the King and his barons, was also meant to bind the past to the present, though perhaps not in quite the way it’s turned out. That’s how history always turns out: not the way it was meant to. In preparation for its anniversary, Magna Carta acquired a Twitter username: @MagnaCarta800th….(More)”