David Golumbia in Jacobin: “The digital revolution, we are told everywhere today, produces democracy. It gives “power to the people” and dethrones authoritarians; it levels the playing field for distribution of information critical to political engagement; it destabilizes hierarchies, decentralizes what had been centralized, democratizes what was the domain of elites.
Most on the Left would endorse these ends. The widespread availability of tools whose uses are harmonious with leftist goals would, one might think, accompany broad advancement of those goals in some form. Yet the Left today is scattered, nearly toothless in most advanced democracies. If digital communication technology promotes leftist values, why has its spread coincided with such a stark decline in the Left’s political fortunes?
Part of this disconnect between advancing technology and a retreating left can be explained by the advent of cyberlibertarianism, a view that widespread computerization naturally produces democracy and freedom.
In the 1990s, UK media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, US journalist Paulina Borsook, and US philosopher of technology Langdon Winner introduced the term to describe a prominent worldview in Silicon Valley and digital culture generally; a related analysis can be found more recently in Stanford communication scholar Fred Turner’s work. While cyberlibertarianism can be defined as a general digital utopianism, summed up by a simple slogan like “computerization will set us free” or “computers provide the solution to any and all problems,” these writers note a specific political formation — one Winner describes as “ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics.”
There are overt libertarians who are also digital utopians — figures like Jimmy Wales, Eric Raymond, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, Dread Pirate Roberts, and Sergey Brin, and the members of the Technology Liberation Front who explicitly describe themselves as cyberlibertarians. But the term also describes a wider ideological formation in which people embrace digital utopianism as compatible or even identical with leftist politics opposed to neoliberalism.
In perhaps the most pointed form of cyberlibertarianism, computer expertise is seen as directly applicable to social questions. In The Cultural Logic of Computation, I argue that computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power. To the extent that algorithmic forms of reason and social organization can be said to have an inherent politics, these have long been understood as compatible with political formations on the Right rather than the Left.
Yet today, “hacktivists” and other promoters of the liberatory nature of mass computerization are prominent political voices, despite their overall political commitments remaining quite unclear. They are championed by partisans of both the Right and the Left as if they obviously serve the political ends of each. One need only reflect on the leftist support for a project like Open Source software to notice the strange and under-examined convergence of the Right and Left around specifically digital practices whose underlying motivations are often explicitly libertarian. Open Source is a deliberate commercialization of Richard Stallman’s largely noncommercial notion ofFree Software (see Stallman himself on the distinction). Open Source is widely celebrated by libertarians and corporations, and was started by libertarian Eric Raymond and programmer Bruce Perens, with support from businessman and corporate sympathizer Tim O’Reilly. Today the term Open Source has wide currency as a political imperative outside the software development community, despite its place on the Right-Left spectrum being at best ambiguous, and at worst explicitly libertarian and pro-corporate.
When computers are involved, otherwise brilliant leftists who carefully examine the political commitments of most everyone they side with suddenly throw their lot in with libertarians — even when those libertarians explicitly disavow Left principles in their work…”
Minecraft: All of Denmark virtually recreated
BBC: “The whole of Denmark has been recreated, to scale, within the virtual world of Minecraft. The whole country has been faithfully reproduced in the hugely popular title’s building-block style by the Danish government. Danish residents are urged to “freely move around in Denmark” and “find your own residential area, to build and tear down”.
Around 50 million copies of Minecraft have been sold worldwide.Known as a “sandbox” game, the title allows players to exist in a virtual world, using building blocks to create everything from basic structures to entire worlds. Minecraft was launched in 2011 by independent Swedish developer Markus “Notch” Persson.
The Danish government said the maps were created to be used as an educational tool – suggesting “virtual field trips” to hard-to-reach parts of the country.
Flat roofs
There are no specific goals to achieve other than continued survival. Recreating real-world locations is of particular interest for many players. Last year an intern working with the UK’s Ordnance Survey team built geographically accurate landscapes covering 86,000 sq miles (224,000 sq km) of Britain.The Danish project is more ambitious however, with buildings and towns reproduced in more detail. The only difference, the team behind it said, was that all roofs were flat.
It has also banned the use of one of the game’s typical tools – dynamite. The full map download of Denmark will be available until 23 October.”
New York Police Twitter Strategy Has Unforeseen Consequences
J. David Goodman in The New York Times: “The New York Police Department has long seen its crime-fighting strategies emulated across the country and around the world.
So when a departmental Twitter campaign, meant to elicit smiling snapshots, instead attracted tens of thousands of less flattering images of officers, it did not take long for the hashtag #myNYPD to spread far beyond the five boroughs.
By Wednesday, the public relations situation in New York City had sparked imitators from Los Angeles (#myLAPD) to Mexico (#MiPolicíaMexicana) and over the ocean to Greece (#myELAS), Germany (#DankePolizei) and France (#maPolice).
The images, including circles of police officers, in riot gear poised to strike a man on a bench, or hosing down protesters, closely resembled those posted on Tuesday by critics of the Police Department in New York, in which many of the most infamous moments in recent police history had been dredged up by Twitter users….”
UK Department of Health: Citizen Space
Sarah Wood at the UK Department of Health: “We recently ran a survey of our internal DH Citizen Space users. Citizen Space is the digital tool that DH and a number of other local and central Government Departments use to run their consultations.
Overall, our survey results were positive with staff reporting they had found the tool relatively easy to use and access. The survey did flag some internal issues eg. visibility of the tool in the Department, minor technical issues etc, which we’re planning to address through better promotion of Citizen Space and training, but on the whole our internal user experience seemed to be good.
However, there was one area where internal users did seem to be experiencing problems, and ironically it wasn’t with the tool itself. Many of our survey respondents seemed to be struggling with the analysis of their consultation responses, with some teams even questioning the usefulness of the data they were amassing from their digital consultations.
Some common mistakes
To help us get to the bottom of what was going on, we contacted some of our respondents and met with some consultation teams to talk about how they design, run and analyse the responses from their digital consultations. We found some common mistakes:
- Not thinking ‘digital first’ – not designing consultations with a digital audience and digital responses in mind. Eg. writing consultations for print and then trying to shoehorn them into a digital tool
- Not identifying what ‘real’ success means for a consultation before launching it or not putting in place the metrics needed to measure for success. Eg. not setting benchmarks, not measuring qualitative data or not identifying key target audiences and how to reach them.
- Not thinking about the type and/or amount of data that will be returned and planning resources and tools accordingly. Eg. asking lots of free-text questions and then drowning in responses
As a team, we are trying to address many of these issues by improving the way the Department approaches and designs its digital consultations. The next iteration of our Digital policymaking toolkit, which will combine a new set of Policy Standards with our digital tools, techniques and advice for policymakers, should help. Alongside other work our team is doing to build up digital capability in the department and to produce analytical tools for data mining and sentiment analysis that will help teams with free-text analysis.
…how to use or build a consultation in Citizen Space, you can find one of those in the Citizen Space User Guide and further guides and user forums on the Citizen Space Knowledge Base website.
Twenty-one European Cities Advance in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge Competition to Create Innovative Solutions to Urban Challenges
Press Release: “Bloomberg Philanthropies today revealed the 21 European cities that have emerged as final contenders in its 2013-2014 Mayors Challenge, a competition to inspire cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life, and that ultimately can spread to other cities. One grand prize winner will receive €5 million for the most creative and transferable idea. Four additional cities will be awarded €1 million, and all will be announced in the fall. The finalists’ proposed solutions address some of Europe’s most critical issue areas: youth unemployment, aging populations, civic engagement, economic development, environment and energy concerns, public health and safety, and making government more efficient…
James Anderson, the head of government innovation for Bloomberg Philanthropies, said: “While the ideas are very diverse, we identified key themes. The ideas tended toward networked, distributed solutions as opposed to costly centralized ones. There was a lot of interest in citizen engagement as both a means and end. Technology that concretely and positively affects the lives of individual citizens – from the blind person in Warsaw to the unemployed youth in Amsterdam to the homeowner in Schaerbeek — also played a significant role.”
Bloomberg Philanthropies staff and an independent selection committee of 12 members from across Europe closely considered each application over multiple rounds of review, culminating in feedback and selection earlier this month, resulting in 21 cities’ ideas moving forward for further development. The submissions will be judged on four critieria: vision, potential for impact, implementation plan, and potential to spread to other cities. The finalists and their ideas are:
- AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Youth Unemployment: Tackling widespread youth unemployment by equipping young people with 21st century skills and connecting them with jobs and apprenticeships across Europe through an online game
- ATHENS, Greece – Civic Engagement: Empowering citizens with a new online platform to address the large number of small-scale urban challenges accelerated by the Greek economic crisis
- BARCELONA, Spain – Aging: Improving quality of life and limiting social isolation by establishing a network of public and private support – including family, friends, social workers, and volunteers – for each elderly citizen
- BOLOGNA, Italy – Youth Unemployment: Building an urban scale model of informal education labs and civic engagement to prevent youth unemployment by teaching children aged 6-16 entrepreneurship and 21st century skills
- BRISTOL, United Kingdom – Health/Anti-obesity: Tackling obesity and unemployment by creating a new economic system that increases access to locally grown, healthy foods
- BRNO, Czech Republic – Public Safety/Civic Engagement: Engaging citizens in keeping their own communities safe to build social cohesion and reduce crime
- CARDIFF, United Kingdom – Economic Development: Increasing productivity little by little in residents’ personal and professional lives, so that a series of small improvements add up to a much more productive city
- FLORENCE, Italy – Economic Development: Combatting unemployment with a new economic development model that combines technology and social innovation, targeting the city’s historic artisan and maker community
- GDAŃSK, Poland – Civic Engagement: Re-instilling faith in local democracy by mandating that city government formally debate local issues put forward by citizens
- KIRKLEES, United Kingdom – Social Capital: Pooling the city and community’s idle assets – from vehicles to unused spaces to citizens’ untapped time and expertise – to help the area make the most of what it has and do more with less
- KRAKOW, Poland – Transportation: Implementing smart, personalized transportation incentives and a seamless and unified public transit payment system to convince residents to opt for greener modes of transportation
- LISBON, Portugal – Energy: Transforming wasted kinetic energy generated by the city’s commuting traffic into electricity, reducing the carbon footprint and increasing environmental sustainability
- LONDON, United Kingdom – Public Health: Empowering citizens to monitor and improve their own health through a coordinated, multi-stakeholder platform and new technologies that dramatically improve quality of life and reduce health care costs
- MADRID, Spain – Energy: Diversifying its renewable energy options by finding and funding the best ways to harvest underground power, such as wasted heat generated by the city’s below-ground infrastructure
- SCHAERBEEK, Belgium – Energy: Using proven flyover and 3D geothermal mapping technology to provide each homeowner and tenant with a personalized energy audit and incentives to invest in energy-saving strategies
- SOFIA, Bulgaria – Civic Engagement: Transforming public spaces by deploying mobile art units to work side-by-side with local residents, re-envisioning and rejuvenating underused spaces and increasing civic engagement
- STARA ZAGORA, Bulgaria – Economic Development: Reversing the brain-drain of the city’s best and brightest by helping young entrepreneurs turn promising ideas into local high-tech businesses
- STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Environment: Combatting climate change by engaging citizens to produce biochar, an organic material that increases tree growth, sequesters carbon, and purifies storm runoff
- THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Civic Engagement: Enabling citizens to allocate a portion of their own tax money to support the local projects they most believe in
- WARSAW, Poland – Transportation/Accessibility: Enabling the blind and visually impaired to navigate the city as easily as their sighted peers by providing high-tech auditory alerts which will save them travel time and increase their independence
- YORK, United Kingdom – Government Systems: Revolutionizing the way citizens, businesses, and others can propose new ideas to solve top city problems, providing a more intelligent way to acquire or develop the best solutions, thus enabling greater civic participation and saving the city both time and money
Further detail and related elements for this year’s Mayors Challenge can be found via: http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/”
In Belgium, speed camera locations are crowdsourced from citizens
Springwise: “As much as local authorities try to, they aren’t able to stop every single civic infraction because they only have a limited number of eyes on the street. However, smartphones have already enabled councils to crowdsource details of law breaches, through apps such as Parking Mobility that let users log when a driver is using a disabled parking bay without a licence. Now the ikflitsmee campaign in Belgium has encouraged citizens to send in locations where they believe speeding is a problem in order for the police to invest in safety measures.
Open until April 10, anyone could log onto the ikflitsmee website to nominate locations such as schools, playgrounds or sharp turns in the road where speeding is a particular problem. The initiative spanned the whole country, involving both local and Federal police forces. After receiving more than 50,000 suggestions, those forces were then invited to check the pinned locations near to them to see if a speed camera would be a feasible solution. The website gets residents to flag up the areas they know to be dangerous and helps authorities by creating an instant data resource to plan future audits.
By asking residents to show them where potential speeders are, local authorities can curb accidents and deliver more fines to culprits, boosting their revenue. At the same time, citizens feel empowered and involved in the improvement of road safety in the country. Are there other ways to tap citizens’ smartphones for more rapid gathering of data that can help councils improve their service to the community?
Website: www.ikflitsmee.be”
Finland opens new portal launched to support transparency and interaction
Epractice:” The Ministry of Justice (of Finland) has launched a new portal, demokratia.fi, which gathers together information from various democracy-related sites and news in the field of political decision-making. The site thereby makes it easier for citizens to find the best channels for participation and influence, and increases government transparency and interaction.
Demokratia.fi summarises the eDemocracy web services maintained by the Ministry of Justice, namely otakantaa.fi, kansalaisaloite.fi and kuntalaisaloite.fi. Later in spring 2014, a fourth site will be added, lausuntopalvelu.fi, which is intended to streamline the consultation procedures and make it transparent and open to the public. The service will digitise the current consultation process.
The administration is acting in accordance with the principles of the Finnish action plan for open government, to strengthen citizens’ rights to information and participation in the development of common solutions and services. Matters that are under preparation should be reported at an early stage of preparations so that citizens have genuine opportunities to influence the process.
Demokrati.fi also contains links to other public authorities’ websites with information on current matters that are being planned or prepared. In addition, it highlights the latest news from, for example, the parliament and the government.”
In Austria, council uses app to crowdsource community issues
Springwise: “Civic authorities can’t be everywhere at once and often rely on citizens to inform them of the improvements that need making. The NYPD already launched its own crowdsourcing crime reports app, and now the Bürgerforum Vorarlberg mobile app is enabling citizens to flag community issues that need addressing by sending photos and text direct to the council.
Available for all residents to download from the App Store and Google Play, the app has been developed by Vorarlberg news outlets VN and Vol.at. Users who have found a problem on the streets of the Austrian province can take a photo and add a caption, while the app automatically adds a geolocation tag. The issue is then added to a map of complaints and concerns filed by other residents. The idea is that local authorities can then easily see the issues that need to be dealt with.
Website: www.buergerforum.vol.at
Contact: www.twitter.com/vorarlberg“
The Data Mining Techniques That Reveal Our Planet's Cultural Links and Boundaries
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “The habits and behaviors that define a culture are complex and fascinating. But measuring them is a difficult task. What’s more, understanding the way cultures change from one part of the world to another is a task laden with challenges.
The gold standard in this area of science is known as the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists studying values and their impact on social and political life. Between 1981 and 2008, this survey conducted over 250,000 interviews in 87 societies. That’s a significant amount of data and the work has continued since then. This work is hugely valuable but it is also challenging, time-consuming and expensive.
Today, Thiago Silva at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil and a few buddies reveal another way to collect data that could revolutionize the study of global culture. These guys study cultural differences around the world using data generated by check-ins on the location-based social network, Foursquare.
That allows these researchers to gather huge amounts of data, cheaply and easily in a short period of time. “Our one-week dataset has a population of users of the same order of magnitude of the number of interviews performed in [the World Values Survey] in almost three decades,” they say.
Food and drink are fundamental aspects of society and so the behaviors and habits associated with them are important indicators. The basic question that Silva and co attempt to answer is: what are your eating and drinking habits? And how do these differ from a typical individual in another part of the world such as Japan, Malaysia, or Brazil?
Foursquare is ideally set up to explore this question. Users “check in” by indicating when they have reached a particular location that might be related to eating and drinking but also to other activities such as entertainment, sport and so on.
Silva and co are only interested in the food and drink preferences of individuals and, in particular, on the way these preferences change according to time of day and geographical location.
So their basic approach is to compare a large number individual preferences from different parts of the world and see how closely they match or how they differ.
Because Foursquare does not share its data, Silva and co downloaded almost five million tweets containing Foursquare check-ins, URLs pointing to the Foursquare website containing information about each venue. They discarded check-ins that were unrelated to food or drink.
That left them with some 280,000 check-ins related to drink from 160,000 individuals; over 400,000 check-ins related to fast food from 230,000 people; and some 400,000 check-ins relating to ordinary restaurant food or what Silva and co call slow food.
They then divide each of these classes into subcategories. For example, the drink class has 21 subcategories such as brewery, karaoke bar, pub, and so on. The slow food class has 53 subcategories such as Chinese restaurant, Steakhouse, Greek restaurant, and so on.
Each check-in gives the time and geographical location which allows the team to compare behaviors from all over the world. They compare, for example, eating and drinking times in different countries both during the week and at the weekend. They compare the choices of restaurants, fast food habits and drinking habits by continent and country. The even compare eating and drinking habits in New York, London, and Tokyo.
The results are a fascinating insight into humanity’s differing habits. Many places have similar behaviors, Malaysia and Singapore or Argentina and Chile, for example, which is just as expected given the similarities between these places.
But other resemblances are more unexpected. A comparison of drinking habits show greater similarity between Brazil and France, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, than they do between France and England, separated only by the English Channel…
They point out only two major differences. The first is that no Islamic cluster appears in the Foursquare data. Countries such as Turkey are similar to Russia, while Indonesia seems related to Malaysia and Singapore.
The second is that the U.S. and Mexico make up their own individual cluster in the Foursquare data whereas the World Values Survey has them in the “English-speaking” and “Latin American” clusters accordingly.
That’s exciting data mining work that has the potential to revolutionize the way sociologists and anthropologists study human culture around the world. Expect to hear more about it
Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.1009: You Are What You Eat (and Drink): Identifying Cultural Boundaries By Analyzing Food & Drink Habits In Foursquare”.
'Hackathons' Aim to Solve Health Care's Ills
Amy Dockser Marcus in the Wall Street Journal: “Hackathons, the high-octane, all-night problem-solving sessions popularized by the software-coding community, are making their way into the more traditional world of health care. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a recent event called Hacking Medicine’s Grand Hackfest attracted more than 450 people to work for one weekend on possible solutions to problems involving diabetes, rare diseases, global health and information technology used at hospitals.
Health institutions such as New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have held hackathons. MIT, meantime, has co-sponsored health hackathons in India, Spain and Uganda.
Hackathons of all kinds are increasingly popular. Intel Corp. recently bought a group that organizes them. Companies hoping to spark creative thinking sponsor them. And student-run hackathons have turned into intercollegiate competitions.
But in health care, where change typically comes much more slowly than in Silicon Valley, they represent a cultural shift. To solve a problem, scientists and doctors can spend years painstakingly running experiments, gathering data, applying for grants and publishing results. So the idea of an event where people give two-minute pitches describing a problem, then join a team of strangers to come up with a solution in the course of one weekend is radical.
“We are not trying to replace the medical culture with Facebook culture,” said Elliot Cohen, who wore a hoodie over a button-down dress shirt at the MIT event in March and helped start MIT Hacking Medicine while at business school. “But we want to try to blend them more.”
Mr. Cohen co-founded and is chief technology officer at PillPack, a pharmacy that sends customers personalized packages of their medications, a company that started at a hackathon.
At MIT’s health-hack, physicians, researchers, students and a smattering of people wearing Google Glass sprawled on the floor of MIT’s Media Lab and at tables with a view of the Boston skyline. At one table, a group of college students, laptops plastered with stickers, pulled juice boxes and snacks out of backpacks, trash piling up next to them as they feverishly wrote code.
Nupur Garg, an emergency-room physician and one of the eventual winners, finished her hospital shift at 2 a.m. Saturday in New York, drove to Boston and arrived at MIT in time to pitch the need for a way to capture images of patients’ ears and throats that can be shared with specialists to help make diagnoses. She and her team immediately started working on a prototype for the device, testing early versions on anyone who stopped by their table.
Dr. Garg and teammate Nancy Liang, who runs a company that makes Web apps for 3-D printers, caught a few hours of sleep in a dorm room Saturday night. They came up with the idea for their product’s name—MedSnap—later that night while watching students use cellphone cameras to send SnapChats to one another. “There was no time to conduct surveys on what was the best name,” said Ms. Liang. “Many ideas happen after midnight.”
Winning teams in each category won $1,000, as well as access to the hackathons sponsors for advice and pilot projects.
Yet even supporters say hackathons can’t solve medicine’s challenges overnight. Harlan Krumholz, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who ran a many-months trial that found telemonitoring didn’t reduce hospitalizations or deaths of cardiology patients, said he supports the problem-solving ethos of hackathons. But he added that “improvements require a long-term commitment, not just a weekend.”
Ned McCague, a data scientist at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, served as a mentor at the hackathon. He said he wasn’t representing his employer, but he used his professional experiences to push groups to think about the potential customer. “They have a good idea and are excited about it, but they haven’t thought about who is paying for it,” he said.
Zen Chu, a senior lecturer in health-care innovation and entrepreneur-in-residence at MIT, and one of the founders of Hacking Medicine, said more than a dozen startups conceived since the first hackathon, in 2011, are still in operation. Some received venture-capital funding.
The upsides of hackathons were made clear to Sharon Moalem, a physician who studies rare diseases. He had spent years developing a mobile app that can take pictures of faces to help diagnose rare genetic conditions, but was stumped on how to give the images a standard size scale to make comparisons. At the hackathon, Dr. Moalem said he was approached by an MIT student who suggested sticking a coin on the subjects’ forehead. Since quarters have a standard measurement, it “creates a scale,” said Dr. Moalem.
Dr. Moalem said he had never considered such a simple, elegant solution. The team went on to write code to help standardize facial measurements based on the dimensions of a coin and a credit card.
“Sometimes when you are too close to something, you stop seeing solutions, you only see problems,” Dr. Moalem said. “I needed to step outside my own silo.”