From Knowing to Doing: Operationalizing the 100 Questions for Air Quality Initiative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jessica Seddon, Stefaan G. Verhulst and Aimee Maron: “…summarizes the September 2021 capstone event that wrapped up 100 Questions for Air Quality, led by GovLab and World Resources Institute (WR). This initiative brought together a group of 100 atmospheric scientists, policy experts, academics and data providers from around the world to identify the most important questions for setting a new, high-impact agenda for further investments in data and data science. After a thorough process of sourcing questions, clustering and ranking them – the public was asked to vote. The results were surprising: the most important question was not about what new data or research is needed, but on how we do more with what we already know to generate political will and investments in air quality solutions.

Co-hosted by Clean Air Fund, Climate and Clean Air Coalition, and Clean Air Catalyst, the 2021 roundtable discussion focused on an answer to that question. This conference proceeding summary reflects early findings from that session and offers a starting point for a much-needed conversation on data-to-action. The group of experts and practitioners from academia, businesses, foundations, government, multilateral organizations, nonprofits, and think tanks have not been identified so they could speak freely….(More)”.

The Behavioral Economics Guide 2022

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial by Kathleen Vohs & Avni Shah: “This year’s Behavioral Economics Guide editorial reviews recent work in the areas of self-control and goals. To do so, we distilled the latest findings and advanced a set of guiding principles termed the FRESH framework: Fatigue, Reminders, Ease, Social influence, and Habits. Example findings reviewed include physicians giving out more prescriptions for opioids later in the workday compared to earlier (fatigue); the use of digital reminders to prompt people to re-engage with goals, such as for personal savings, from which they may have turned away (reminders); visual displays that give people data on their behavioral patterns so as to enable feedback and active monitoring (ease); the importance of geographically-local peers in changing behaviors such as residential water use (social influence); and digital and other tools that help people break the link between aspects of the environment and problematic behaviors (habits). We used the FRESH framework as a potential guide for thinking about the kinds of behaviors people can perform in achieving the goal of being environmental stewards of a more sustainable future…(More)”.

Technology is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephanie Hare: “It seems that just about every new technology that we bring to bear on improving our lives brings with it some downside, side effect or unintended consequence.

These issues can pose very real and growing ethical problems for all of us. For example, automated facial recognition can make life easier and safer for us – but it also poses huge issues with regard to privacy, ownership of data and even identity theft. How do we understand and frame these debates, and work out strategies at personal and governmental levels?

Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics addresses one of today’s most pressing problems: how to create and use tools and technologies to maximize benefits and minimize harms? Drawing on the author’s experience as a technologist, political risk analyst and historian, the book offers a practical and cross-disciplinary approach that will inspire anyone creating, investing in or regulating technology, and it will empower all readers to better hold technology to account…(More)”.

Are blockchains decentralized?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Trail of Bits report: “Blockchains can help push the boundaries of current technology in useful ways. However, to make good risk decisions involving exciting and innovative technologies, people need demonstrable facts that are arrived at through reproducible methods and open data.

We believe the risks inherent in blockchains and cryptocurrencies have been poorly described and are often ignored—or even mocked—by those seeking to cash in on this decade’s gold rush.

In response to recent market turmoil and plummeting prices, proponents of cryptocurrency point to the technology’s fundamentals as sound. Are they?

Over the past year, Trail of Bits was engaged by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to examine the fundamental properties of blockchains and the cybersecurity risks associated with them. DARPA wanted to understand those security assumptions and determine to what degree blockchains are actually decentralized.

To answer DARPA’s question, Trail of Bits researchers performed analyses and meta-analyses of prior academic work and of real-world findings that had never before been aggregated, updating prior research with new data in some cases. They also did novel work, building new tools and pursuing original research.

The resulting report is a 30-thousand-foot view of what’s currently known about blockchain technology. Whether these findings affect financial markets is out of the scope of the report: our work at Trail of Bits is entirely about understanding and mitigating security risk.

The report also contains links to the substantial supporting and analytical materials. Our findings are reproducible, and our research is open-source and freely distributable. So you can dig in for yourself.

Key findings

  • Blockchain immutability can be broken not by exploiting cryptographic vulnerabilities, but instead by subverting the properties of a blockchain’s implementations, networking, and consensus protocols. We show that a subset of participants can garner undue, centralized control over the entire system:
    • While the encryption used within cryptocurrencies is for all intents and purposes secure, it does not guarantee security, as touted by proponents.
    • Bitcoin traffic is unencrypted; any third party on the network route between nodes (e.g., internet service providers, Wi-Fi access point operators, or governments) can observe and choose to drop any messages they wish.
    • Tor is now the largest network provider in Bitcoin; just about 55% of Bitcoin nodes were addressable only via Tor (as of March 2022). A malicious Tor exit node can modify or drop traffic….(More)”

Smartphone apps in the COVID-19 pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jay A. Pandit, Jennifer M. Radin, Giorgio Quer & Eric J. Topol: “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, analog tools such as nasopharyngeal swabs for PCR tests were center stage and the major prevention tactics of masking and physical distancing were a throwback to the 1918 influenza pandemic. Overall, there has been scant regard for digital tools, particularly those based on smartphone apps, which is surprising given the ubiquity of smartphones across the globe. Smartphone apps, given accessibility in the time of physical distancing, were widely used for tracking, tracing and educating the public about COVID-19. Despite limitations, such as concerns around data privacy, data security, digital health illiteracy and structural inequities, there is ample evidence that apps are beneficial for understanding outbreak epidemiology, individual screening and contact tracing. While there were successes and failures in each category, outbreak epidemiology and individual screening were substantially enhanced by the reach of smartphone apps and accessory wearables. Continued use of apps within the digital infrastructure promises to provide an important tool for rigorous investigation of outcomes both in the ongoing outbreak and in future epidemics…(More)”.

Many researchers say they’ll share data — but don’t

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Clare Watson: “Most biomedical and health researchers who declare their willingness to share the data behind journal articles do not respond to access requests or hand over the data when asked, a study reports1.

Livia Puljak, who studies evidence-based medicine at the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb, and her colleagues analysed 3,556 biomedical and health science articles published in a month by 282 BMC journals. (BMC is part of Springer Nature, the publisher of Nature; Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.)

The team identified 381 articles with links to data stored in online repositories and another 1,792 papers for which the authors indicated in statements that their data sets would be available on reasonable request. The remaining studies stated that their data were in the published manuscript and its supplements, or generated no data, so sharing did not apply.

But of the 1,792 manuscripts for which the authors stated they were willing to share their data, more than 90% of corresponding authors either declined or did not respond to requests for raw data (see ‘Data-sharing behaviour’). Only 14%, or 254, of the contacted authors responded to e-mail requests for data, and a mere 6.7%, or 120 authors, actually handed over the data in a usable format. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology on 29 May.

DATA-SHARING BEHAVIOUR. Graphic showing percentage of authors that were willing to share data.
Source: Livia Puljak et al

Puljak was “flabbergasted” that so few researchers actually shared their data. “There is a gap between what people say and what people do,” she says. “Only when we ask for the data can we see their attitude towards data sharing.”

“It’s quite dismaying that [researchers] are not coming forward with the data,” says Rebecca Li, who is executive director of non-profit global data-sharing platform Vivli and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts…(More)”.

It’s in Everyone’s Interest to Sustain our Open Digital Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Govind Shivkumar and Alex Krasodomski-Jones: “…Omidyar Network was proud to support the creation of “The Open Road,” a new report by our partners at Demos that vividly highlights the many dangers facing open infrastructure — and lays out a clear and achievable path to securing its sustainable future. In short, the report urges philanthropies to take concrete steps, with significant funding, to bolster open-source software and open standards, and the people who keep the infrastructure working.

The value of open-source code and the movement behind it

Everything from hospitals and banks to social media and messaging platforms run on open-source software; that is, mostly free “source code” that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance to build their own digital applications. In complement, open standards — like HTML, a common way of coding a website — help facilitate interoperability and data exchanges between different products or services. Both of these “encourage a decentralized community of developers to collaborate on projects and jointly benefit from the resulting software”.

A secure, open technology system is immensely valuable to companies and governments. It facilitates connections between their technologies and other systems, which increases the value of their tools; it is easy to adopt and make changes; and it avoids the pitfalls of reinventing the wheel or reinvesting resources. Because of that vast flexibility, developers and engineers can innovate for the user’s needs faster and more cost-effectively, giving the public a meaningful choice of which interconnected apps, devices, technologies they want to use.

“More openness means more innovation. More transparency means more scrutiny, which means fewer overlooked security vulnerabilities. Openness favors the development of ‘good technology,’ which embeds privacy, security, and other protections in its design.”

The challenges facing open infrastructure

The ecosystem is vast and acutely vulnerable. Period catastrophes like the Heartbleed bug which was exposed in 2014, and later security flaws, such as log4shell and log4J, threatened millions of digital applications worldwide. Other weaknesses are simply the result of neglect and lack of proper investment and upkeep. When security vulnerabilities cause cracks in the infrastructure, allowing malicious actors to wreak havoc, the startled world briefly takes notice…(More)”

Regulatory Governance: Policy Making, Legislative Drafting and Law Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Edward Donelan: “This book describes how governments formulate policies, draft legislation, and manage stocks of legislation and how approaches to these tasks are converging. That convergence has developed over 30 years through the work by the OECD in its studies on regulatory reform and the work of other international organizations to improve regulatory management.

The Institutions of the European Union and its member states, OECD member countries and a growing number of developing and transitional countries have developed a policy best described as ‘Better Regulation.’ That policy is characterized using regulatory impact assessment, improving public consultation, and reducing administrative burdens. The policy has brought improvements in legislative drafting and managing stocks of legislation.

The book concludes with a description of the impact of information technology on governments and how the challenges posed by the Internet, globalization and pandemics are being met by new approaches to regulating to ensure its benefits exceed its costs….(More)”.

The Intersection of Data, Equity, and City Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Yuki Mitsuda: “The Open Data Policy Lab’s City Incubator program was established in September 2021 to help realize the Third Wave of Open Data at the subnational level by building data capacity among city intrapreneurs. In its first iteration, the program supported innovators from ten cities around the world to better use data to address the opportunities and challenges they face.

Reflecting on the six-month program, the work enabled participants to meet the needs of their cities and the people within them. They also revealed shared themes across cities — common challenges and issues that defined urban, data-driven work in the 21st century. This blog explores one of the emerging themes we saw from participants in the City Incubator program: the intersection of equity, data, and city governments…

Three of our city incubator participants designed their data innovations around the ways cities and citizens can use data to measure and improve equity. 

  • Jennifer Bodnarchuk, a Senior Data Scientist at the Innovation & Technology Department in the City of Winnipeg, for example, led the development of a Diversity Dashboard that quantified and visualized their municipal government’s workforce representation. The tool can be used to measure the level of diversity represented in city-wide employment to move towards equitable hiring in the public sector. 
  • Henry Xavier Hernandez, the Chief Information Officer at the Information Technology Department in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and his team leveraged the City Incubator to develop Citizen 360, a public market analysis platform that helps businesses, organizations, and individuals identify economic opportunities in the city. This tool can aid small business owners from all backgrounds who are navigating the journey of starting a new business.
  • Andrea Calderon led Albuquerque’s Equity Index, which helps evaluate the reach of city service distribution with the goal of increasing municipal investment in pockets of the city where equitable city service provision has not yet been achieved. Albuquerque’s Equity Index work entailed assessing air quality in the city through the framework of cumulative impacts, which measures “exposures, public health, or environmental effects from the combined emissions in a geographic area” in pursuit of environmental justice…(More)”.

Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “As the world confronts both the fast catastrophe of Covid and the slow crisis of climate change, we also face a third, less visible emergency: a crisis of imagination. Millions of us can picture the world going awry, yet our confident visions of the future are largely dominated by technology and hardware. Most citizens struggle to envisage how we could live better-improve our democracy, welfare, neighborhoods or education-fueling a pervasive, pessimistic resignation.

This book argues that, although the threats are real, our fatalism has overshot. Achieving a better future depends on creative imagination: the ability to see where we might want to go, and how we might want to get there. Political veteran Geoff Mulgan offers the lessons we can learn from the past and the methods we can use now to open up our thinking about the future; to discover how to look at things not only in terms of what they are, but also what they could be.

Drawing on social sciences, the arts, philosophy and history, Mulgan shows how we can recharge our collective imagination. At a time when the public wants to see transformational social change, he provides a roadmap for the future…(More)”.