Don’t know where to go when the volcano blows? Crowdsource it.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Frances Johnson in ThrivingEarthExchange: “In the shadow of a rumbling volcano, Quito, Ecuador solicits just-in-time advice from the world’s disaster experts…

Cotopaxi’s last large-scale eruption was in 1877, and the volcano’s level of activity suggests another one is inevitable. In addition to spewing lava, a major eruption would melt Cotopaxi’s glaciers and send a large flow of material barreling down the mountain, posing an immediate risk to people and potentially causing rivers to overflow their banks. Some 120,000 people living in the valley beneath the volcano would have a mere 12 minutes to escape the lava’s path, and more than 325,000 other area residents would have only slightly more time to evacuate. An eruption could also create significant long-term challenges across a broad area, including dangerous air quality and disruptions to infrastructure, food systems and water supplies.

As danger looms, a city gets coaching from the crowd

Aware that the city was underprepared for a significant eruption, The Governance Lab, a program of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, volunteered its time and expertise to help local officials accelerate preparation efforts. The GovLab, which helps governments and other institutions work collaboratively to solve problems, teamed up with Linq, the city’s innovation agency.

“We were very aware that this was a time-sensitive matter—we needed experts, and we needed them fast,” explained Dinorah Cantú-Pedraza, a human rights lawyer and Research Fellow at The GovLab who collaborated on the project. “So that’s why we decided to create online sessions focused on how innovations can solve specific problems facing the city.”…

GovLab’s “fail-fast, learn-by-doing” approach is crucial to its projects’ success in remaining responsive to the problems at hand. “That was a central element in how we worked with our partners and improved the approach as we went forward,” said Cantú-Pedraza.

To help translate the Cotopaxi crowdsourcing model for other circumstances, GovLab is working to build a network of innovators and experts that can be tapped on short notice to address problems as they emerge around the world. Although we can hope for the best in Quito and elsewhere, the reality is that we must plan for the worst…(More)

Visualizing Potential Outbreaks of the Zika Virus

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google’s Official Blog: “The recent Zika virus outbreak has caused concern around the world. We’ve seen more than a 3,000 percent increase in global search interest since November, and last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency. The possible correlation with Zika, microcephaly and other birth defects is particularly alarming.

But unlike many other global pandemics, the spread of Zika has been harder to identify, map and contain. It’s believed that 4 in 5 people with the virus don’t show any symptoms, and the primary transmitter for the disease, the Aedes mosquito species, is both widespread and challenging to eliminate. That means that fighting Zika requires raising awareness on how people can protect themselves, as well as supporting organizations who can help drive the development of rapid diagnostics and vaccines. We also have to find better ways to visualize the threat so that public health officials and NGO’s can support communities at risk….

A volunteer team of Google engineers, designers, and data scientists is helping UNICEF build a platform to process data from different sources (i.e., weather and travel patterns) in order to visualize potential outbreaks. Ultimately, the goal of this open source platform is to identify the risk of Zika transmission for different regions and help UNICEF, governments and NGO’s decide how and where to focus their time and resources. This set of tools is being prototyped for the Zika response, but will also be applicable to future emergencies….

We already include robust information for 900+ health conditions directly on Search for people in the U.S. We’ve now also added extensive information about Zika globally in 16 languages, with an overview of the virus, symptom information, and Public Health Alerts from that can be updated with new information as it becomes available.

We’re also working with popular YouTube creators across Latin America, including Sesame Street and Brazilian physician Drauzio Varella, to raise awareness about Zika prevention via their channels.

We hope these efforts are helpful in fighting this new public health emergency, and we will continue to do our part to help combat this outbreak.

And if you’re curious about what that 3,000 percent search increase looks like, take a look:….(More)

Ideas Help No One on a Shelf. Take Them to the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg at The New York Times: “Have you thought of a clever product to mitigate climate change? Did you invent an ingenious gadget to light African villages at night? Have you come up with a new kind of school, or new ideas for lowering the rate of urban shootings?

Thanks, but we have lots of those.

Whatever problem possesses you, we already have plenty of ways to solve it. Many have been rigorously tested and have a lot of evidence behind them — and yet they’re sitting on a shelf.

So don’t invent something new. If you want to make a contribution, choose one of those ideas — and spread it.

Spreading an idea can mean two different things. One is to take something that’s working in one place and introduce it somewhere else. If you want to reduce infant mortality in Cleveland, why not try what’s working in Baltimore?

Well, you might not know about what’s working because there’s no quick system for finding it.

Even when a few people do search out the answer, innovative ideas don’t spread by themselves. To become well known, they require effort from their originators. For example, a Bogotá, Colombia, maternity hospital invented Kangaroo Care — a method of keeping premature babies warm by strapping them 24/7 to Mom’s chest. It saved a lot of lives in Bogotá. But what allowed it to save lives around the world was a campaign to spread it to other countries.

The Colombians established Fundación Canguro and got grants from wealthy countries to bring groups of doctors and nurses from all over to visit Bogotá for two or three weeks.  Once the visitors had gone back and set up a program in their hospital, the foundation loaned them a doctor and nurse to help get them started. Save the Children now leads a global partnership to spread Kangaroo Care, with the goal of reaching half the world.

In short, this work requires dedicated organizations, a smart program and lots of money.

The other meaning of spreading an idea is creating ways to get new inventions out to people who need them.

“When I talk to college students or anyone who’s thinking about entrepreneurship or targeting global poverty, the gadget is where 99 percent of people start thinking,” said Nicholas Fusso, the director of D-Prize (its slogan: “Distribution is development”).  “That’s important — but the biggest problems in the poverty world aren’t a lack of gadgets or new products. It’s figuring out how people can have access to them.” So D-Prize gives seed money, in chunks of $10,000 to $20,000, to tiny new organizations that have good ideas for how to distribute useful things.

This analysis may be familiar to regular readers of Fixes. Indeed, the first Fixes column, more than five years ago, focused on distribution: getting health care to people in rural Africa by putting health care workers on motorcycles and keeping the bikes running….

Philanthropists and government aid agencies are only starting to get interested in the challenges of distribution — one new philanthropy that does have this focus is Good Ventures. As for academia, it still rewards invention almost exclusively. “There’s a lot of attention and award-giving and prize-giving and credit to people who come up with fancy new ideas instead of reaching people and having impact,” said Brodbar. “The incentives aren’t aligned. The culture of social entrepreneurship needs to change.”

Recognizing the true value of spreading an idea would also allow people who aren’t inventors (which is most of us) to get involved in social change. “The notion that if you want to engage in [social entrepreneurship] you have to have the big idea does a disservice to this space and people who want to play a role in it,” said Brodbar. “It’s a much wider front door.”…(More)

In Peru, trackable vultures are helping authorities find illegal garbage dumps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Peru’s black vultures are well known locally for their natural aptitude for garbage location. They don’t have to search too hard, since much of the garbage produced by the city of Lima is dumped illegally and ends up in the Pacific ocean. Now, the Ministry of the Environment has launched the Gallinazo Avisa campaign — meaning Vultures Warn — to clean up the city. It is using the vultures to its advantage, by fitting a flock of them with GoPros, which collect real-time GPS data, and enable the people to find the illegal dumps across the city.

The scheme is being run with the help of the Museum of Natural History and a local university, who had already tagged vultures to understand their seasonal movements. Each of the birds has been given a name and character, and their movements can be followed in real-time through an interactive map. Promotional videos have been created, which place the vultures in a filmic narrative as misunderstood heroes. Not only does the GPS data enable the location of garbage, the footage collected is also having a two-fold effect. First, it is educating the citizens about the repercussions of illegal dumping, and second, it is improving the reputation of the vultures by transforming them into allies of the people….(More)

vulturewarn-1-garbage-animal-bird-data-location

 

The Problem With Evidence-Based Policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ricardo Hausmann at Project Syndicate: “Many organizations, from government agencies to philanthropic institutions and aid organizations, now require that programs and policies be “evidence-based.” It makes sense to demand that policies be based on evidence and that such evidence be as good as possible, within reasonable time and budgetary limits. But the way this approach is being implemented may be doing a lot of harm, impairing our ability to learn and improve on what we do.

The current so-called “gold standard” of what constitutes good evidence is the randomized control trial, or RCT, an idea that started in medicine two centuries ago, moved to agriculture, and became the rage in economics during the past two decades. Its popularity is based on the fact that it addresses key problems in statistical inference.

For example, rich people wear fancy clothes. Would distributing fancy clothes to poor people make them rich? This is a case where correlation (between clothes and wealth) does not imply causation.

Harvard graduates get great jobs. Is Harvard good at teaching – or just at selecting smart people who would have done well in life anyway? This is the problem of selection bias.

RCTs address these problems by randomly assigning those participating in the trial to receive either a “treatment” or a “placebo” (thereby creating a “control” group). By observing how the two groups differ after the intervention, the effectiveness of the treatment can be assessed. RCTs have been conducted on drugs, micro-loans, training programs, educational tools, and myriad other interventions….

In economics, RCTs have been all the rage, especially in the field of international development, despite critiques by the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, Lant Pritchett, and Dani Rodrik, who have attacked the inflated claims of RCT’s proponents. One serious shortcoming is external validity. Lessons travel poorly: If an RCT finds out that giving micronutrients to children in Guatemala improves their learning, should you give micronutrients to Norwegian children?

My main problem with RCTs is that they make us think about interventions, policies, and organizations in the wrong way. As opposed to the two or three designs that get tested slowly by RCTs (like putting tablets or flipcharts in schools), most social interventions have millions of design possibilities and outcomes depend on complex combinations between them. This leads to what the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman calls a “rugged fitness landscape.”

Getting the right combination of parameters is critical. This requires that organizations implement evolutionary strategies that are based on trying things out and learning quickly about performance through rapid feedback loops, as suggested by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock at Harvard’s Center for International Development.

RCTs may be appropriate for clinical drug trials. But for a remarkably broad array of policy areas, the RCT movement has had an impact equivalent to putting auditors in charge of the R&D department. That is the wrong way to design things that work. Only by creating organizations that learn how to learn, as so-called lean manufacturing has done for industry, can we accelerate progress….(More)”

Global fact-checking up 50% in past year

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Stencel at Duke Reporters’ Lab: “The high volume of political truth-twisting is driving demand for political fact-checkers around the world, with the number of fact-checking sites up 50 percent since last year.

The Duke Reporters’ Lab annual census of international fact-checking currently counts 96 active projects in 37 countries. That’s up from 64 active fact-checkers in the 2015 count. (Map and List)

Active Fact-checkers 2016A bumper crop of new fact-checkers across the Western Hemisphere helped increase the ranks of journalists and government watchdogs who verify the accuracy of public statements and track political promises. The new sites include 14 in the United States, two in Canada as well as seven additional fact-checkers in Latin America.There also were new projects in 10 other countries, from North Africa to Central Europe to East Asia…..

The growing numbers have even spawned a new global association, the International Fact-Checking Network hosted by the Poynter Institute, a media training center in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Promises, Promises

Some of the growth has come in the form of promise-tracking. Since January 2015, fact-checkers launched six sites in five countries devoted to tracking the status of pledges candidates and party leaders made in political campaigns. In Tunisia, there are two new sites dedicated to promise-tracking — one devoted to the country’s president and the other to its prime minister.

There are another 20 active fact-checkers elsewhere that track promises,…

Nearly two-thirds of the active fact-checkers (61 of 96, or 64 percent) are directly affiliated with a new organization. However this breakdown reflects the dominant business structure in the United States, where 90 percent of fact-checkers are part of a news organization. That includes nine of 11 national projects and 28 of 30 state/local fact-checkers…The story is different outside the United States, where less than half of the active fact-checking projects (24 of 55, or 44 percent) are affiliated with news organizations.

The other fact-checkers are typically associated with non-governmental, non-profit and activist groups focused on civic engagement, government transparency and accountability. A handful are partisan, especially in conflict zones and in countries where the lines between independent media, activists and opposition parties are often blurry and where those groups are aligned against state-controlled media or other governmental and partisan entities….(More)“

A Gargantuan Challenge for The Megalopolis: Mexico City calls citizens to help map its complex public bus system

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Mexico City, the largest and oldest urban agglomeration in the American continent. The city is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, and its size and its diversity also poses certain challenges. In a city with such big scale (the metropolitan area measures 4,887 mi2) transportation is one of its main problems. Finding ways to improve how people move within requires imagination and cooperation from decision makers and society alike.

The scale and dynamism of Mexico City’s public transport system represents a challenge to generate quality information. Processes for the generation of mobility data are time-consuming and expensive. Given this scenario, the best alternative for the city is to include transport users in generating this information.

The megalopolis lacks an updated, open database of its more than 1,500 bus routes. To tackle this problem, Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Mexico City’s experimental office and creative think-tank, reporting to the Mayor) partnered with 12 organizations that include NGOs and  other government offices to develop Mapatón CDMX: a crowdsourcing and gamification experiment to map the city’s bus routes through civic collaboration and technology.

After one year of designing and testing a strategy, the team behind Mapatón CDMX is calling citizens to map the public transport system by participating on a city game from January 29th to February 14th 2016. The game’s goal is to map routes of licenced public transport (buses, minibuses and vans) from start to finish in order to score points, which is done through an app for Android devices that gathers GPS data from the user inside the bus.

The mappers will participate individually or in groups with friends and family for two weeks. As an incentive and once the mapping marathon is finished, those participants with higher scores will earn cash prizes and electronic devices. (A smart algorithm creates incentives to map the longest or most ignored routes, giving mappers extra points.) But what is most valuable: the data resulting will be openly available at the end of February 2016, much faster and cheaper than with traditional processes.

Mapatón CDMX is an innovative and effective way to generate updated and open information about transport routes as the game harnesses collective intelligence of the gargantuan city. Organisers consider that the open database may be used by anyone to create –for example– data driven policy, strategies for academic analysis, maps for users, applications, visualizations, among many other digital products….(More)”

Core Concepts: Computational social science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Mann at PNAS: “Cell phone tower data predicts which parts of London can expect a spike in crime (1). Google searches for polling place information on the day of an election reveal the consequences of different voter registration laws (2). Mathematical models explain how interactions among financial investors produce better yields, and even how they generate economic bubbles (3).

Figure

Using cell-phone and taxi GPS data, researchers classified people in San Francisco into “tribal networks,” clustering them according to their behavioral patterns. Student’s, tourists, and businesspeople all travel through the city in various ways, congregating and socializing in different neighborhoods. Image courtesy of Alex Pentland (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA).

Figure

Where people hail from in the Mexico City area, here indicated by different colors, feeds into a crime-prediction model devised by Alex Pentland and colleagues (6). Image courtesy of Alex Pentland (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA).

 These are just a few examples of how a suite of technologies is helping bring sociology, political science, and economics into the digital age. Such social science fields have historically relied on interviews and survey data, as well as censuses and other government databases, to answer important questions about human behavior. These tools often produce results based on individuals—showing, for example, that a wealthy, well-educated, white person is statistically more likely to vote (4)—but struggle to deal with complex situations involving the interactions of many different people.

 

A growing field called “computational social science” is now using digital tools to analyze the rich and interactive lives we lead. The discipline uses powerful computer simulations of networks, data collected from cell phones and online social networks, and online experiments involving hundreds of thousands of individuals to answer questions that were previously impossible to investigate. Humans are fundamentally social creatures and these new tools and huge datasets are giving social scientists insights into exactly how connections among people create societal trends or heretofore undetected patterns, related to everything from crime to economic fortunes to political persuasions. Although the field provides powerful ways to study the world, it’s an ongoing challenge to ensure that researchers collect and store the requisite information safely, and that they and others use that information ethically….(More)”

2015 Philip Meyer Award winners for data-driven investigation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

From IRE: “First Place: “Failure Factories” | Tampa Bay Times
Cara Fitzpatrick, Michael LaForgia, Lisa Gartner, Nathaniel Lash and Connie Humburg

The team used statistical analysis and linear regression of data from dozens of records requests to document how steady resegregation of Pinellas County schools left black children to fail at increasingly higher rates than anywhere else in Florida. The series focused on failures of school district officials to give the schools the support necessary for success. The judges praised the reporters for dogged work on a project that took 18 months to report and write, and noted that the results underscored what decades of sociological research has shown happens in racially segregated schools.

Second Place: “The Changing Face of America” | USA Today
Paul Overberg, Sarah Frostenson, Marisol Bello, Greg Toppo, and Jodi Upton 

The project was built around measurements across time of the racial and ethnic diversity of each of America’s more than 3,100 counties, going back to 1960 and projected ahead to 2060. The reporters used the results to reveal that high levels of diversity, once found only in a few Southern states and along the border with Mexico, had bloomed out into large areas of the upper Midwest and the Appalachians, for instance. Those results informed the assignments of reporters to find the local stories that illustrated those changes, with the results running in more than 100 Gannett papers and broadcast stations.

Third Place: “The Echo Chamber” | Thomson Reuters
Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts and John Shiffman

The Reuters team analyzed the characteristics of more than 14,400 U.S. Supreme Court records from nine years worth of petitions seeking review by the Court. The analysis showed that 43% of cases eventually heard by the court came from a tiny pool of a few dozen lawyers who represent less than 1% of the more than 17,000 lawyers seeking such review. Further reporting showed that these elite lawyers, mostly representing large corporations, had strong personal connections with the justices, with about half of them having served as clerks to the justices….(More)”

Passive Philanthropy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PSFK: “What if you could cure cancer in your sleep? What if throwing out food meant feeding more people? What if helping coffee farmers in developing nations was as easy as a retweet? Today, businesses pay big money in order to reach the same audience as some viral tweets, and the same strategy is being applied to the reach and impact of social good campaigns. Nonprofits have also begun to leverage creative opportunities to spread awareness and raise funds to harness socially-aware citizens and rethink how social good is spread and executed. Take, for instance, an app that tracks exercise and donates to the charity of choice based on distance….

The DreamLab is a free app that turns smartphones into a research tool for cancer researchers in the Garvan Institute in Australia when their users are sleeping. Developed in conjunction with Vodaphone, the app uses the processing power of idle phones as an alternative to supercomputers which can be difficult to access. After downloading the app, participants simply open it and charge their phone. Once the phone reaches 95 percent charge, it gets to work, acting as a networked processor alongside other users with the app. Each phone solves a small piece of a larger puzzle and sends it back to Garvan.

If 1,000 people are using the app, cancer puzzles can be solved 30x faster.

As DreamLab researchers work toward finding a cure for cancer, Feeding Forward is working toward ending hunger. In America, hunger is not a problem of supply, but rather of distribution. Feeding Forward aims to solves this by connecting restaurants, grocery stores, caterers, or other businesses that are forced to throw away perishable food products with those in need.

Businesses simply need post their excess food on the platform and a driver will come pick it up to deliver to a food bank in need. Donors receive profiles of the people they helped and can also write off the donation as a charitable contribution for tax purposes. Since their launch in 2013, Feeding Forward has achieved a pick up rate of 99 percent, distributing 780,000 pounds of food saving business $3.9 million.

DreamLab and Feeding Forward are putting activities people are already going to do to use, while One Big Tweet harnesses the power of people’s social media accounts as a fundraising strategy. Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation are getting people to donate their Twitter followings for charity, asking people to sign up to post an automated tweet from a corporate sponsor who purchased the privilege at an auction for social good. The more people who donate their accounts, the higher the value of the tweet at auction. After four months, over 700 people with a collective reach of 3.2 mil followers, signed up to help make the One Big Tweet worth $49,000. While the charity is still in search of a buyer, Cafédirect promises the tweet that will be sent out through participants’ accounts will only happen once and be “safe enough for your Gran to read.” All money from the sale will go directly to continuing the work they do with coffee and tea farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America…(MoreMore)