The problem with the data revolution in four Venn diagrams

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Morten Jerven in The Guardian: “In August, UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon named his independent expert advisory group, 24 experts tasked with providing recommendations on how best to use data to deliver the sustainable development goals….On 6 November, those recommendations were published in a report entitled A world that counts, a cleverly crafted motivational manifesto, but by no means a practical roadmap on how to apply a “data revolution” to the future development agenda.
I have previously written about this in more detail, but essentially, the report’s key weakness is that it conflates several terms, and assumes automatic relationships between things such as “counting” and “knowing”.
Using four Venn diagrams, I’ve tried to illustrate some of the main misconceptions.

Not everything that counts can be counted

venn 1
Image 1

The report strongly suggests that everything that matters can be counted. We know that this is not true. If the guiding principle for the sustainable development goals is to make decisions as if everything can be counted, the end result will be very misleading.

Data is not the same as statistics

venn 2
Image 2

The “data revolution” hype is just one of many places where the difference between statistics and data is misunderstood. Data is not the same as numbers. Data literally mean ‘what is given’, so when we speak of data we are talking about observations – quantitative or qualitative, or even figurative – that can be used to get information.
To keep talking about data when we mean statistics may sound better, but it only leads to confusion. The report (pdf) calls on the UN to establish “a process whereby key stakeholders create a Global Consensus on Data”. What is that supposed to mean? That statement is meaningless if you exchange the word “data” with “observations”, “knowledge” or ‘evidence’. It can, however, make sense if you talk about “statistics”.
International organisations do have a natural role when it comes to developing global standards for official statistics. Reaching a global consensus on how observations and evidence constitute knowledge is futile.

More data does not mean better decisions…

There are other methods to knowing than through counting…(More)”

 

MIT to Pioneer Science of Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Irving Wladawsky-Berger in the Wall Street Journal: ““Innovation – identified by MIT economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow as the driver of long-term, sustainable economic growth and prosperity – has been a hallmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since its inception.” Thus starts The MIT Innovation Initiative: Sustaining and Extending a Legacy of Innovation, the preliminary report of a yearlong effort to define the innovation needed to address some of the world’s most challenging problems. Released earlier this month, the report was developed by the MIT Innovation Initiative, launched a year ago by MIT President Rafael Reif…. Its recommendations are focused on four key priorities.
Strengthen and expand idea-to-impact education and research. Students are asking for career preparation that enables them to make a positive difference early in their careers. Twenty percent of incoming students say that they want to launch a company or NGO during their undergraduate years…
The report includes a number of specific ideas-to-impact recommendations. In education, they include new undergraduate minor programs focused on the engineering, scientific, economic and social dimensions of innovation projects. In research, it calls for supplementing research activities with specific programs designed to extend the work beyond publication with practical solutions, including proof-of-concept grants.
Extend innovation communities. Conversations with students, faculty and other stakeholders uncovered that the process of engaging with MIT’s innovation programs and activities is somewhat fragmented.  The report proposes tighter integration and improved coordinations with three key types of communities:

  • Students and postdocs with shared interests in innovation, including links to appropriate mentors;
  • External partners, focused on linking the MIT groups more closely to corporate partners and entrepreneurs; and
  • Global communities focused on linking MIT with key stakeholders in innovation hubs around the world.

Enhance innovation infrastructures. The report includes a number of recommendations for revitalizing innovation-centric infrastructures in four key areas…..
Pioneer the development of the Science of Innovation. In my opinion, the report’s most important and far reaching recommendation calls for MIT to create a new Laboratory for Innovation Science and Policy –…”
 

Geneticists Begin Tests of an Internet for DNA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review: “A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as HTTP, the protocol created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, was to the Web.
One of the group’s first demonstration projects is a simple search engine that combs through the DNA letters of thousands of human genomes stored at nine locations, including Google’s server farms and the University of Leicester, in the U.K. According to the group, which includes key players in the Human Genome Project, the search engine is the start of a kind of Internet of DNA that may eventually link millions of genomes together.
The technologies being developed are application program interfaces, or APIs, that let different gene databases communicate. Pooling information could speed discoveries about what genes do and help doctors diagnose rare birth defects by matching children with suspected gene mutations to others who are known to have them.
The alliance was conceived two years ago at a meeting in New York of 50 scientists who were concerned that genome data was trapped in private databases, tied down by legal consent agreements with patients, limited by privacy rules, or jealously controlled by scientists to further their own scientific work. It styles itself after the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, a body that oversees standards for the Web.
“It’s creating the Internet language to exchange genetic information,” says David Haussler, scientific director of the genome institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is one of the group’s leaders.
The group began releasing software this year. Its hope—as yet largely unrealized—is that any scientist will be able to ask questions about genome data possessed by other laboratories, without running afoul of technical barriers or privacy rules….(More)”

Just say no to digital hoarding

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “We have become a nation of digital hoarders. We save everything, even stuff that we know, deep down, we’ll never need or be able to find. We save every e-mail, every photo, every file, every text message and every video clip. If we don’t have enough space on our mobile devices, we move it to a different storage device, maybe even a hard drive or a flash drive. Or, better yet, we just move it to “the cloud.”….
If this were simply a result of the exponential growth of information — the “information overload” — that would be one thing. That’s what technology is supposed to do for us – provide new ways of creating, storing and manipulating information. Innovation, from this perspective, can be viewed as technology’s frantic quest to keep up with society’s information needs.
But digital hoarding is about something much different – it’s about hoarding data for the sake of data. When Apple creates a new “Burst Mode” on the iPhone 5s, enabling you to rapidly save a series of up to 10 photos in succession – and you save all of them – is that not an example of hoarding? When you save every e-book, every movie and every TV season that you’ve “binge-watched” on your tablet or other digital device — isn’t that another symptom of being a digital hoarder? In the analog era, you would have donated used books to charity, hosted a garage sale to get rid of old albums you never listen to, or simply dumped these items in the trash.
You may not think you are a digital hoarder. You may think that the desire to save each and every photo, e-mail or file is something relatively harmless. Storage is cheap and abundant, right? You may watch a reality TV show such as “Hoarders” and think to yourself, “That’s not me.” But maybe it is you. (Especially if you still have those old episodes of “Hoarders” on your digital device.)
Unlike hoarding in the real world — where massive stacks of papers, books, clothing and assorted junk might physically obstruct your ability to move and signal to others that you need help – there are no obvious outward signs of being a digital hoarder. And, in fact, owning the newest, super-slim 128GB tablet capable of hoarding more information than anyone else strikes many as being progressive. However, if you are constantly increasing the size of your data plan or buying new digital devices with ever more storage capacity, you just might be a digital hoarder…
In short, innovation should be about helping us transform data into information. “Search” was perhaps the first major innovation that helped us transform data into information. The “cloud” is currently the innovation that has the potential to organize our data better and more efficiently, keeping it from clogging up our digital devices. The next big innovation may be “big data,” which claims that it can make sense of all the new data we’re creating. This may be either brilliant — helping us find the proverbial needle in the digital haystack — or disastrous — encouraging us to build bigger and bigger haystacks in the hope that there’s a needle in there somewhere… (More).”

Launching “Map the Banks” campaign to map the global financial industry

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OpenCorporates: “Today, we are happy to announce the launch of our latest campaign: Map the Banks – possibly first ever global sprint to scrape a single class of data from every jurisdiction in the world. For this campaign, we are focussing on how the financial industry is licenced to operate.
The financial crisis cost the world 4 trillion dollars. Before we can disrupt the industry, we need to map it. The financial crisis revealed the damage done by our lack of understanding of the influence and size of banks and financial companies. We no longer want to be in the dark. Citizens and regulators have to take control back by having open and free access to this information. We are taking up the challenge of collecting every banking and financial licence in the world so we can work towards a better banking system, that works for the good of society. We’re joined in this mission by Civio, OpenNorth & many more… (Interested in being a partner? Email us!)
Collecting this data could answer questions like:

  • Which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? Even with the small amount of data already collected, we know there are at least 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US.
  • Which countries have the most financial services outsourced to them?
  • What companies are licenced to operate in the largest number of countries worldwide?
  • Which US bank has the most consumer credit licences in Asia?
  • Which organisations appear to operate like financial services companies, yet aren’t regulated as such?
  • Where are credit unions being dissolved or created the fastest?

HOW TO GET INVOLVED…”

HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Book by Todd Presner, David Shepard, Yoh Kawano: “The prefix “hyper” refers to multiplicity and abundance. More than a physical space, a hypercity is a real city overlaid with information networks that document the past, catalyze the present, and project future possibilities. Hypercities are always under construction.
Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. A collaboratively authored and designed work, HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the Tehran election protests of 2009.
Not a book about maps in the literal sense, HyperCities describes thick mapping: the humanist project of participating and listening that transforms mapping into an ethical undertaking. Ultimately, the digital humanities do not consist merely of computer-based methods for analyzing information. They are a means of integrating scholarship with the world of lived experience, making sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.”

The openness revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Business is being forced to open up in a host of reporting areas, from tax and government contracts to anti-corruption and sustainability programmes. Campaigners are cock-a-hoop, but continue to demand more. Executives are starting to ask whether the revolution is in danger of going too far.
Three forces are driving change. First, governments are demanding greater corporate accountability in the wake of the global financial crisis. No longer is ending corporate secrecy—the sharp end of which is money-laundering shell companies—an agenda pushed merely by Norway and a few others; it has become a priority for the G20. Second, investigative journalists have piled in. A recent example is the exposure by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists of sweetheart tax deals for multinationals in Luxembourg. The third factor is the growing sophistication of NGOs in this sphere, such as Transparency International (TI) and Global Witness. “Twenty years ago our work seemed an impossible dream. Now it’s coming true,” says Ben Elers of TI.
TI recently published its latest study on corporate reporting, which evaluated 124 big publicly listed companies, based on the clarity of their anti-corruption programmes, their corporate holdings and their financial reporting. Four-fifths of them scored less than five out of ten overall, but there were big regional disparities: seven of the ten most open firms were European; eight of the ten most clammed-up were Asian (see table)….“

The Global Open Data Index 2014

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Open Knowledge Foundation: “The Global Open Data Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels.
The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .
Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.
Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.
Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK and Greece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.
Explore the Global Open Data Index 2014 for yourself!”

Social innovation and the challenge of democracy in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lane and Filippo Addarii at Open Democracy: “What’s going on in Paris? This year over four thousand Parisians have been consulted on how to allocate twenty million Euros across fifteen projects that aim to improve the quality of life in the French capital.
Anne Hidalgo, who was elected as the Mayor of Paris in April 2014, has introduced a participatory budget process to give citizens an opportunity to decide on the allocation of five per cent of the capital’s investment budget. For the first time in France, a politician is giving citizens some degree of direct control over public expenditure—a sum amounting to 426 million Euros in total between 2014 and 2020.
This is an example of social innovation, but not the pseudo-revolutionary, growth-obsessed, blind-to-power variety that’s constantly hyped by management consultants and public policy think tanks. Instead, people are actively involved in planning their own shared future. They’re entrusted with the responsibility of devising ways to improve life in their communities. And the process is coherent with the purpose: everyone, not just the ‘experts,’ has an opportunity to have their say in an open and transparent online platform.
Participatory budgeting isn’t new, but this kind of public participation in processes of social innovation is a welcome and growing development across Europe. Public institutions need more participation from stakeholders and citizens to do their jobs. The political challenge of our time—the challenge of democracy in Europe—is how to channel people’s passion, expertise and resources into complex and long-term projects that improve collective life.
This challenge has motivated a group of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to join together in a project called INSITE (“Innovation, Sustainability and ICT).” INSITE is exploring the cascading dynamics of social innovation processes, and investigating how people can regain control over their results by freeing themselves from dependence on political intermediaries and experts.
INSITE started with the idea that societies’ love affair with innovation may be misplaced – at least with respect to the way that social innovation is currently conceived and organized. The lion’s share of attention goes to products that make a profit—not processes that enhance the collective good or transform systems, structures and values.
The hype around the “Innovation Society” also obscures the fact that innovation processes bring about cascades of changes that are unpredictable, and may produce toxic side-effects. Just think about the growth of new kinds of financial instruments which exploded in the sub-prime mortgage disaster, triggering the financial and economic crises that have dragged on since 2008. Market-driven cascades of innovation have also contributed to global warming and obesity epidemics in the industrialized world. Not everything that’s innovative is valuable or effective.
As presently constituted, neither governments nor markets are able to control these cascades of innovation. They lack the means and the intelligence to detect unintended consequences and encourage innovation processes to move in positive directions. So how can this ‘boat’ be steered through the ‘storm’ before it crashes on the ‘rocks?’
Since 2008, researchers from INSITE and elsewhere have been trying to address this question by refocusing innovation theory on social questions, power relations and democratic concerns. For INSITE, the “social” in “social innovation” isn’t simply a marker for a target group in society or the social intentions of innovators and entrepreneurs. It stands for something much deeper: giving power back to society to direct innovation processes towards greater prosperity for all. In this conception, social innovation challenges the foundations of the “Innovation Society’s” narrow ideology. It provides an alternative through which engaged citizens can mobilize to construct a socially sustainable future. …more.“

How to Fingerprint a City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Frank Jacobs at BigThink: “Thanks to Big Data, a new “Science of Cities” is emerging. Urban processes that until now could only be perceived subjectively can finally be quantified. Point in case: two French scientists have developed a mathematical formula to ‘fingerprint’ cities.
Take a good, close look at your fingertips. The pattern of grooves and ridges on your skin there [1] is yours alone. Equally unique is the warp and weft of urban road networks. No two cities’ street grids are exactly alike. Some are famously distinct. The forensic urbanist in all of us can probably recognise a blind map of New York, London and a few other global metropolises.
Rémi Louf and Marc Barthelemy examined the street patterns of 131 cities around the world. Not to learn them by heart and impress their fellow scientists at the Institut de Physique Théorique near Paris – although that would be a neat parlor trick. They wanted to see if it would be possible to classify them into distinct types. The title of their paper, A Typology of Street Patterns, is a bit of a giveaway: the answer is Yes.
Before we get to the How, let’s hear them explain the Why:

“[Street and road] networks can be thought as a simplified schematic view of cities, which captures a large part of their structure and organization and contain a large amount of information about underlying and universal mechanisms at play in their formation and evolution. Extracting common patterns between cities is a way towards the identification of these underlying mechanisms. At stake is the question of the processes behind the so-called ‘organic’ patterns – which grow in response to local constraints – and whether they are preferable to the planned patterns which are designed under large scale constraints”.

There have been attempts before to classify urban networks, but the results have always been colored by the subjectivity of what Louf and Barthelemy call the ‘Space Syntax Community’. That’s all changed now: Big Data – in this case, the mass digitization of street maps – makes it possible to extract common patterns from street grids in an objective manner, as dispassionately as the study of tree leaves according to their venation. …
Read their entire paper here.“