Crowdsourcing reliable local data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jane Lawrence Sumner, Emily M. Farris, and Mirya R. Holman: “The adage “All politics is local” in the United States is largely true. Of the United States’ 90,106 governments, 99.9% are local governments. Despite variations in institutional features, descriptive representation, and policy making power, political scientists have been slow to take advantage of these variations. One obstacle is that comprehensive data on local politics is often extremely difficult to obtain; as a result, data is unavailable or costly, hard to replicate, and rarely updated.

We provide an alternative: crowdsourcing this data. We demonstrate and validate crowdsourcing data on local politics, using two different data collection projects. We evaluate different measures of consensus across coders and validate the crowd’s work against elite and professional datasets. In doing so, we show that crowd-sourced data is both highly accurate and easy to use. In doing so, we demonstrate that non-experts can be used to collect, validate, or update local data….All data from the project available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/2chainz …(More)”.

The biggest pandemic risk? Viral misinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Heidi J. Larson at Nature: “A hundred years ago this month, the death rate from the 1918 influenza was at its peak. An estimated 500 million people were infected over the course of the pandemic; between 50 million and 100 million died, around 3% of the global population at the time.

A century on, advances in vaccines have made massive outbreaks of flu — and measles, rubella, diphtheria and polio — rare. But people still discount their risks of disease. Few realize that flu and its complications caused an estimated 80,000 deaths in the United States alone this past winter, mainly in the elderly and infirm. Of the 183 children whose deaths were confirmed as flu-related, 80% had not been vaccinated that season, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I predict that the next major outbreak — whether of a highly fatal strain of influenza or something else — will not be due to a lack of preventive technologies. Instead, emotional contagion, digitally enabled, could erode trust in vaccines so much as to render them moot. The deluge of conflicting information, misinformation and manipulated information on social media should be recognized as a global public-health threat.

So, what is to be done? The Vaccine Confidence Project, which I direct, works to detect early signals of rumours and scares about vaccines, and so to address them before they snowball. The international team comprises experts in anthropology, epidemiology, statistics, political science and more. We monitor news and social media, and we survey attitudes. We have also developed a Vaccine Confidence Index, similar to a consumer-confidence index, to track attitudes.

Emotions around vaccines are volatile, making vigilance and monitoring crucial for effective public outreach. In 2016, our project identified Europe as the region with the highest scepticism around vaccine safety (H. J. Larson et al. EBioMedicine 12, 295–301; 2016). The European Union commissioned us to re-run the survey this summer; results will be released this month. In the Philippines, confidence in vaccine safety dropped from 82% in 2015 to 21% in 2018 (H. J. Larson et al. Hum. Vaccines Immunother. https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2018.1522468; 2018), after legitimate concerns arose about new dengue vaccines. Immunization rates for established vaccines for tetanus, polio, tetanus and more also plummeted.

We have found that it is useful to categorize misinformation into several levels….(More).

After the flood, the flood map: uncovering values at risk

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rebecca Elliott at Work in Progress: “Climate change is making the planet we inhabit a more dangerous place to live. After the devastating 2017 hurricane season in the U.S. and Caribbean, it has become easier, and more frightening, to comprehend what a world of more frequent and severe storms and extreme weather might portend for our families and communities.

When policymakers, officials, and experts talk about such threats, they often do so in a language of “value at risk”: a measurement of the financial worth of assets exposed to potential losses in the face of natural hazards. This language is not only descriptive, expressing the extent of the threat, it is also in some ways prescriptive.

Information about value and risk provides a way for us to exert some control, to “tame uncertainty” and, if not precisely predict, at least to plan and prepare prudently for the future. If we know the value at risk, we can take smart steps to protect it.

This logic can, however, break down in practice.

After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, I went to New York City to find out how residents there, particularly homeowners, were responding to a new landscape of “value at risk.” In the wake of the catastrophe, they had received a new “flood insurance rate map” that expanded the boundaries of the city’s high-risk flood zones.

129 billion dollars of property was now officially “at risk” of flood, an increase of more than 120 percent over the previous map.

And yet, I found that many New Yorkers were less worried about the threat of flooding than they were about the flood map itself. As one Rockaway man put it, the map was “scarier than another storm.”

Far from producing clear strategies of action, the map produced ambivalent actors and outcomes. Even when people took steps to reduce their flood risk, they often did not feel that they were better off or more secure for having done so. How can we understand this?

By examining the social life of the flood insurance rate map, talking to its users (affected residents as well as the experts, officials, and professionals who work with them), I found that the stakes on the ground were bigger than just property values and floods. Other kinds of values were threatened here, and not just from floods, complicating the decision of what to do and when….(More)”.

Global Trends in Democracy: Background, U.S. Policy, and Issues for Congress

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Michael A. Weber for the Congressional Research Service: “Widespread concerns exist among analysts and policymakers over the current trajectory of democracy around the world. Congress has often played an important role in supporting and institutionalizing U.S. democracy promotion, and current developments may have implications for U.S. policy, which for decades has broadly reflected the view that the spread of democracy around the world is favorable to U.S. interests.

The aggregate level of democracy around the world has not advanced for more than a decade. Analysis of data trendlines from two major global democracy indexes indicates that, as of 2017, the level of democracy around the world has not advanced since around the year 2005 or 2006. Although the degree of democratic backsliding around the world has arguably been modest overall to this point, some elements of democracy, particularly those associated with liberal democracy, have receded during this period. Declines in democracy that have occurred may have disproportionately affected countries with larger population sizes. Overall, this data indicates that democracy’s expansion has been more challenged during this period than during any similar period dating back to the 1970s. Despite this, democratic declines to this point have been considerably less severe than the more pronounced setbacks that occurred during some earlier periods in the 20th century.

Numerous broad factors may be affecting democracy globally. These include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • The growing international influence of nondemocratic governments. These countries may in some instances view containing the spread of democracy as instrumental toward other goals or as helpful to their own domestic regime stability. Thus they may be engaging in various activities that have negative impacts on democracy internationally. At the same time, relatively limited evidence exists to date of a more affirmative agenda to promote authoritarian political systems or norms as competing alternatives to democracy.
  • The state of democracy’s global appeal as a political system. Challenges to and apparent dissatisfaction with government performance within democracies, and the concomitant emergence of economically successful authoritarian capitalist states, may be affecting in particular democracy’s traditional instrumental appeal as the political system most capable of delivering economic growth and national prestige. Public opinion polling data indicate that democracy as a political system may overall still retain considerable appeal around the world relative to nondemocratic alternatives.
  • Nondemocratic governments’ use of new methods to repress political dissent within their own societies. Tools such as regulatory restrictions on civil society and technology-enhanced censorship and surveillance are arguably enhancing the long-term durability of nondemocratic forms of governance.
  • Structural conditions in nondemocracies. Some scholars argue that broad conditions in many of the world’s remaining nondemocracies, such as their level of wealth or economic inequality, are not conducive to sustained democratization. The importance of these factors to democratization is complex and contested among experts.

Democracy promotion is a longstanding, but contested, element of U.S. foreign policy. Wide disagreements and wellworn policy debates persist among experts over whether, or to what extent, the United States should prioritize democracy promotion in its foreign policy. Many of these debates concern the relevance of democracy promotion to U.S. interests, its potential tension with other foreign policy objectives, and the United States’ capacity to effectively promote democratization.

Recent developments pose numerous potential policy considerations and questions for Congress. Democracy promotion has arguably not featured prominently in the Trump Administration’s foreign policy to this point, creating potential continued areas of disagreement between some Members of Congress and the Administration. Simultaneously, current challenges around the world present numerous questions of potential consideration for Congress. Broadly, these include whether and where the United States should place greater or lesser emphasis on democracy promotion in its foreign policy, as well as various related questions concerning the potential tools for promoting democracy…(More)”.

Getting the Work Done: What Government Innovation Really Looks Like

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Hana Schank and Sara Hudson: “…In 2017 and 2018, we interviewed problem-solvers working across federal, state, and local government in the United States on improving the state of government services. This movement is small compared to the number of government agencies running business as usual, but it is growing. Innovation teams, digital service teams, technologists, researchers, policymakers, lawyers, funders, and service designers are rethinking how government functions, reshaping how people solve problems, and helping to restore citizens’ faith in governing bodies.

We had both worked on these types of teams at the city and federal level, and wanted a holistic view of the work, its successes, and its challenges. We knew there were efforts across the country focused on making government work, but less work connecting the field. We had a hunch that these teams knew a lot. They had tested out strategies, saw what worked and what didn’t. We wanted to understand what all of that knowledge added up to when taken together.

Our original plan was simple: interview people “in the field” doing the work of making government work. Or work better. (We were flexible.) Ideally, find great success stories. Aggregate and distill them into lessons learned. Maybe make a playbook. Maybe make a report like this. Definitely write some pieces for national publications, because this kind of work inspires and expands through storytelling.

We focused on people improving government services through technology and citizen-centered thinking. We interviewed people from major cities to smaller locales; chief innovation officers and city managers to service designers, product managers, and engineers.

But after we started to do interviews and synthesis, we realized we had been asking the wrong questions. We wanted tactics on how to get the work done from people who had everything figured out. As it turns out, no one has it all figured out. As a community, we are still trying to answer the most basic questions. What do we call ourselves? This work? Is this a field? What do we really mean by innovation? With so much work to be done, where do we start? What’s the best way to hire people? What’s the best way to keep them once they’ve been hired? How do we affect culture change? How do we get the work done? How do we know when we’ve succeeded? How do we know when it’s time to quit?

What we have compiled in this report is neither a playbook nor a document with all the answers. Instead, this report reflects many of the things people often wonder about at work, whisper in corners at conferences, save in browser tabs, or jot in the margins at meetings to think over later: Where are we seeing solutions? Where are we seeing pain points? Who else is doing this? How are they approaching it? How do I find them?…One of the most important themes, which weaves into every piece of this report’s findings, is that people in government care. They want to make a difference, but often aren’t sure how. When given the chance to learn more, and to do better, they jump at it. We’re sharing this to lift up what many such people have learned about how to make change. We hope it inspires more people, cities, and government workers to follow suit….(More)”

Crowdsourcing the vote: New horizons in citizen forecasting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Mickael Temporão,  Yannick Dufresne,  Justin Savoie and Clifton van der Linden in International Journal of Forecasting: “People do not know much about politics. This is one of the most robust findings in political science and is backed by decades of research. Most of this research has focused on people’s ability to know about political issues and party positions on these issues. But can people predict elections? Our research uses a very large dataset (n>2,000,000) collected during ten provincial and federal elections in Canada to test whether people can predict the electoral victor and the closeness of the race in their district throughout the campaign. The results show that they can. This paper also contributes to the emerging literature on citizen forecasting by developing a scaling method that allows us to compare the closeness of races and that can be applied to multiparty contexts with varying numbers of parties. Finally, we assess the accuracy of citizen forecasting in Canada when compared to voter expectations weighted by past votes and political competency….(More)”.

How data helped visualize the family separation crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chava Gourarie at StoryBench: “Early this summer, at the height of the family separation crisis – where children were being forcibly separated from their parents at our nation’s border – a team of scholars pooled their skills to address the issue. The group of researchers – from a variety of humanities departments at multiple universities – spent a week of non-stop work mapping the immigration detention network that spans the United States. They named the project “Torn Apart/Separados” and published it online, to support the efforts of locating and reuniting the separated children with their parents.

The project utilizes the methods of the digital humanities, an emerging discipline that applies computational tools to fields within the humanities, like literature and history. It was led by members of Columbia University’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, which had previously used methods such as rapid deployment to responded to natural disasters.

The group has since expanded the project, publishing a second volume that focuses on the $5 billion immigration industry, based largely on public data about companies that contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The visualizations highlight the astounding growth in investment of ICE infrastructure (from $475 million 2014 to $5.1 billion in 2018), as well as who benefits from these contracts, and how the money is spent.

Storybench spoke with Columbia University’s Alex Gil, who worked on both phases of the project, about the process of building “Torn Apart/Separados,” about the design and messaging choices that were made and the ways in which methods of the digital humanities can cross pollinate with those of journalism…(More)”.

When the Rule of Law Is Not Working

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A conversation with Karl Sigmund at Edge: “…Now, I’m getting back to evolutionary game theory, the theory of evolution of cooperation and the social contract, and how the social contract can be subverted by corruption. That’s what interests me most currently. Of course, that is not a new story. I believe it explains a lot of what I see happening in my field and in related fields. The ideas that survive are the ideas that are fruitful in the sense of quickly producing a lot of publications, and that’s not necessarily correlated with these ideas being important to advancing science.

Corruption is a wicked problem, wicked in the technical sense of sociology, and it’s not something that will go away. You can reduce it, but as soon as you stop your efforts, it comes back again. Of course, there are many sides to corruption, but everybody seems now to agree that it is a very important problem. In fact, there was a Gallop Poll recently in which people were asked what the number one problem in today’s world is. You would think it would be climate change or overpopulation, but it turned out the majority said “corruption.” So, it’s a problem that is affecting us deeply.

There are so many different types of corruption, but the official definition is “a misuse of public trust for private means.” And this need not be by state officials; it could be also by CEOs, or by managers of non-governmental organizations, or by a soccer referee for that matter. It is always the misuse of public trust for private means, which of course takes many different forms; for instance, you have something called pork barreling, which is a wonderful expression in the United States, or embezzlement of funds, and so on.

I am mostly interested in the effect of bribery upon the judiciary system. If the trust in contracts breaks down, then the economy breaks down, because trust is at the root of the economy. There are staggering statistics which illustrate that the economic welfare of a state is closely related to the corruption perception index. Every year there are statistics about corruption published by organizations such as Transparency International or other such non-governmental organizations. It is truly astonishing how close this gradient between the different countries on the corruption level aligns with the gradient in welfare, in household income and things like this.

The paralyzing effect of this type of corruption upon the economy is something that is extremely interesting. Lots of economists are now turning their interest to that, which is new. In the 1970s, there was a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Gunnar Myrdal, who said that corruption is practically taboo as a research topic among economists. This has well changed in the decades since. It has become a very interesting topic for law students, for students of economy, sociology, and historians, of course, because corruption has always been with us. This is now a booming field, and I would like to approach this with evolutionary game theory.

Evolutionary game theory has a long tradition, and I have witnessed its development practically from the beginning. Some of the most important pioneers were Robert Axelrod and John Maynard Smith. In particular, Axelrod who in the late ‘70s wrote a truly seminal book called The Evolution of Cooperation, which iterated the prisoner’s dilemma. He showed that there is a way out of the social dilemma, which is based on reciprocity. This surprised economists, particularly, game theoreticians. He showed that by viewing social dilemmas in the context of a population where people learn from each other, where the social learning imitates whatever type of behavior is currently the best, you can place it into a context where cooperative strategies, like tit for tat, based on reciprocation can evolve….(More)”.

Here’s What the USMCA Does for Data Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua New at the Center for Data Innovation: “…the Trump administration announced the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the trade deal it intends to replace NAFTA with. The parties—Canada, Mexico, and the United States—still have to adopt the deal, and if they do, they will enjoy several welcome provisions that can give a boost to data-driven innovation in all three countries.

First, USMCA is the first trade agreement in the world to promote the publication of open government data. Article 19.18 of the agreement officially recognizes that “facilitating public access to and use of government information fosters economic and social development, competitiveness, and innovation.” Though the deal does not require parties to publish open government data, to the extent they choose to publish this data, it directs them to adhere to best practices for open data, including ensuring it is in open, machine-readable formats. Additionally, the deal directs parties to try to cooperate and identify ways they can expand access to and the use of government data, particularly for the purposes of creating economic opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses. While this is a welcome provision, the United States still needs legislation to ensure that publishing open data becomes an official responsibility of federal government agencies.

Second, Article 19.11 of USMCA prevents parties from restricting “the cross-border transfer of information, including personal information, by electronic means if this activity is for the conduct of the business of a covered person.” Additionally, Article 19.12 prevents parties from requiring people or firms “to use or locate computing facilities in that Party’s territory as a condition for conducting business in that territory.” In effect, these provisions prevent parties from enacting protectionist data localization requirements that inhibit the flow of data across borders. This is important because many countries have disingenuously argued for data localization requirements on the grounds that it protects their citizens from privacy or security harms, despite the location of data having no bearing on either privacy or security, to prop up their domestic data-driven industries….(More)”.

A Doctor’s Prescription: Data May Finally Be Good for Your Health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by Art Kleiner: “In 2015, Robert Wachter published The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age, a skeptical account of digitization in hospitals. Despite the promise offered by the digital transformation of healthcare, electronic health records had not delivered better care and greater efficiency. The cumbersome design, legacy procedures, and resistance from staff were frustrating everyone — administrators, nurses, consultants, and patients. Costs continued to rise, and preventable medical mistakes were not spotted. One patient at Wachter’s own hospital, one of the nation’s finest, was given 39 times the correct dose of antibiotics by an automated system that nobody questioned. The teenager survived, but it was clear that there needed to be a new approach to the management and use of data.

Wachter has for decades considered the delivery of healthcare through a lens focused on patient safety and quality. In 1996, he coauthored a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that coined the term hospitalist in describing and promoting a new way of managing patients in hospitals: having one doctor — the hospitalist — “own” the patient journey from admission to discharge. The primary goal was to improve outcomes and save lives. Wachter argued it would also reduce costs and increase efficiency, making the business case for better healthcare. And he was right. Today there are more than 50,000 hospitalists, and it took just two years from the article’s publication to have the first data proving his point. In 2016, Wachter was named chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he has worked since 1990.

Today, Wachter is, to paraphrase the title of a recent talk, less grumpy than he used to be about health tech. The hope part of his book’s title has materialized in some areas faster than he predicted. AI’s advances in imaging are already helping the detection of cancers become more accurate. As data collection has become better systematized, big technology firms such as Google, Amazon, and Apple are entering (in Google’s case, reentering) the field and having more success focusing their problem-solving skills on healthcare issues. In his San Francisco office, Wachter sat down with strategy+businessto discuss why the healthcare system may finally be about to change….

Systems for Fresh Thinking

S+B: The changes you appreciate seem to have less to do with technological design and more to do with people getting used to the new systems, building their own variations, and making them work.
WACHTER: The original electronic health record was just a platform play to get the data in digital form. It didn’t do anything particularly helpful in terms of helping the physicians make better decisions or helping to connect one kind of doctor with another kind of doctor. But it was a start.

I remember that when we were starting to develop our electronic health record at UCSF, 12 or 13 years ago, I hired a physician who is now in charge of our health computer system. I said to him, “We don’t have our electronic health record in yet, but I’m pretty sure we will in seven or eight years. What will your job be when that’s done?” I actually thought once the system was fully implemented, we’d be done with the need to innovate and evolve in health IT. That, of course, was asinine.

S+B: That’s like saying to an auto mechanic, “What will your job be when we have automatic transmissions?”
WACHTER: Right, but even more so, because many of us saw electronic health records as the be-all and end-all of digitally facilitated medicine. But putting in the electronic health record is just step one of 10. Then you need to start connecting all the pieces, and then you add analytics that make sense of the data and make predictions. Then you build tools and apps to fit into the workflow and change the way you work.

One of my biggest epiphanies was this: When you digitize, in any industry, nobody is clever enough to actually change anything. All they know how to do is digitize the old practice. You only start seeing real progress when smart people come in, begin using the new system, and say, “Why the hell do we do it that way?” And then you start thinking freshly about the work. That’s when you have a chance to reimagine the work in a digital environment…(More)”.