Country and Region: Northern America

Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, United States of America

These 3 barriers make it hard for policymakers to use the evidence that development researchers produce

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Callen, Adnan Khan, Asim I. Khwaja, Asad Liaqat and Emily Myers at the Monkey Cage/Washington Post: “In international development, the “evidence revolution” has generated a surge in policy research over the past two decades. We now have a clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t. In India, performance pay for teachers works: students in schools where bonuses were on offer got significantly higher test scores. In Kenya, charging small fees for malaria bed nets doesn’t work — and is actually less cost-effective than free distribution. The American Economic Association’s registry for randomized controlled trials now lists 1,287 studies in 106 countries, many of which are testing policies that very well may be expanded.

But can policymakers put this evidence to use?

Here’s how we did our research

We assessed the constraints that keep policymakers from acting on evidence. We surveyed a total of 1,509 civil servants in Pakistan and 108 in India as part of a program called Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE), carried out by Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD)at Harvard Kennedy School and funded by the British government. We found that simply presenting evidence to policymakers doesn’t necessarily improve their decision-making. The link between evidence and policy is complicated by several factors.

1. There are serious constraints in policymakers’ ability to interpret evidence….

2. Organizational and structural barriers get in the way of using evidence….

 

3. When presented with quantitative vs. qualitative evidence, policymakers update their beliefs in unexpected ways....(More)

The Case for Sharing All of America’s Data on Mosquitoes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ed Yong in the Atlantic: “The U.S. is sitting on one of the largest data sets on any animal group, but most of it is inaccessible and restricted to local agencies….For decades, agencies around the United States have been collecting data on mosquitoes. Biologists set traps, dissect captured insects, and identify which species they belong to. They’ve done this for millions of mosquitoes, creating an unprecedented trove of information—easily one of the biggest long-term attempts to monitor any group of animals, if not the very biggest.

The problem, according to Micaela Elvira Martinez from Princeton University and Samuel Rund from the University of Notre Dame, is that this treasure trove of data isn’t all in the same place, and only a small fraction of it is public. The rest is inaccessible, hoarded by local mosquito-control agencies around the country.

Currently, these agencies can use their data to check if their attempts to curtail mosquito populations are working. Are they doing enough to remove stagnant water, for example? Do they need to spray pesticides? But if they shared their findings, Martinez and Rund say that scientists could do much more. They could better understand the ecology of these insects, predict the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever or Zika, coordinate control efforts across states and counties, and quickly spot the arrival of new invasive species.

That’s why Martinez and Rund are now calling for the creation of a national database of mosquito records that anyone can access. “There’s a huge amount of taxpayer investment and human effort that goes into setting traps, checking them weekly, dissecting all those mosquitoes under a microscope, and tabulating the data,” says Martinez. “It would be a big bang for our buck to collate all that data and make it available.”

Martinez is a disease modeler—someone who uses real-world data to build simulations that reveal how infections rise, spread, and fall. She typically works with childhood diseases like measles and polio, where researchers are almost spoiled for data. Physicians are legally bound to report any cases, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) compiles and publishes this information as a weekly report.

The same applies to cases of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and Zika, but not to populations of the insects themselves. So, during last year’s Zika epidemic, when Martinez wanted to study the Aedes aegypti mosquito that spreads the disease, she had a tough time. “I was really surprised that I couldn’t find data on Aedes aegypti numbers,” she says. Her colleagues explained that scientists use climate variables like temperature and humidity to predict where mosquitoes are going to be abundant. That seemed ludicrous to her, especially since organizations collect information on the actual insects. It’s just that no one ever gathers those figures together….

Together with Rund and a team of undergraduate students, she found that there are more than 1,000 separate agencies in the United States that collect mosquito data—at least one in every county or jurisdiction. Only 152 agencies make their data publicly available in some way. The team collated everything they could find since 2009, and ended up with information about more than 15 million mosquitoes. Imagine what they’d have if all the datasets were open, especially since some go back decades.

A few mosquito-related databases do exist, but none are quite right. ArboNET, which is managed by the CDC and state health departments, mainly stores data about mosquito-borne diseases, and whatever information it has on the insects themselves isn’t precise enough in either time or space to be useful for modeling. MosquitoNET, which was developed by the CDC, does track mosquitoes, but “it’s a completely closed system, and hardly anyone has access to it,” says Rund. The Smithsonian Institution’s VectorMap is better in that it’s accessible, “but it lacks any real-time data from the continental United States,” says Rund. “When I checked a few months ago, it had just one record of Aedes aegypti since 2013.”…

Some scientists who work on mosquito control apparently disagree, and negative reviews have stopped Martinez and Rund from publishing their ideas in prominent academic journals. (For now, they’ve uploaded a paper describing their vision to the preprint repository bioRxiv.) “Some control boards say: What if people want to sue us because we’re showing that they have mosquito vectors near their homes, or if their house prices go down?” says Martinez. “And one mosquito-control scientist told me that no one should be able to work with mosquito data unless they’ve gone out and trapped mosquitoes themselves.”…

“Data should be made available without having to justify exactly what’s going to be done with it,” Martinez says. “We should put it out there for scientists to start unlocking it. I think there are a ton of biologists who will come up with cool things to do.”…(More)”.

Algorithms in the Criminal Justice System: Assessing the Use of Risk Assessments in Sentencing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Priscilla Guo, Danielle Kehl, and Sam Kessler at Responsive Communities (Harvard): “In the summer of 2016, some unusual headlines began appearing in news outlets across the United States. “Secret Algorithms That Predict Future Criminals Get a Thumbs Up From the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” read one. Another declared: “There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.” These news stories (and others like them) drew attention to a previously obscure but fast-growing area in the field of criminal justice: the use of risk assessment software, powered by sophisticated and sometimes proprietary algorithms, to predict whether individual criminals are likely candidates for recidivism. In recent years, these programs have spread like wildfire throughout the American judicial system. They are now being used in a broad capacity, in areas ranging from pre-trial risk assessment to sentencing and probation hearings. This paper focuses on the latest—and perhaps most concerning—use of these risk assessment tools: their incorporation into the criminal sentencing process, a development which raises fundamental legal and ethical questions about fairness, accountability, and transparency. The goal is to provide an overview of these issues and offer a set of key considerations and questions for further research that can help local policymakers who are currently implementing or considering implementing similar systems. We start by putting this trend in context: the history of actuarial risk in the American legal system and the evolution of algorithmic risk assessments as the latest incarnation of a much broader trend. We go on to discuss how these tools are used in sentencing specifically and how that differs from other contexts like pre-trial risk assessment. We then delve into the legal and policy questions raised by the use of risk assessment software in sentencing decisions, including the potential for constitutional challenges under the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Finally, we summarize the challenges that these systems create for law and policymakers in the United States, and outline a series of possible best practices to ensure that these systems are deployed in a manner that promotes fairness, transparency, and accountability in the criminal justice system….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing the Charlottesville Investigation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Internet sleuths got to work, and by Monday morning they were naming names and calling for arrests.

The name of the helmeted man went viral after New York Daily News columnist Shaun King posted a series of photos on Twitter and Facebook that more clearly showed his face and connected him to photos from a Facebook account. “Neck moles gave it away,” King wrote in his posts, which were shared more than 77,000 times. But the name of the red-bearded assailant was less clear: some on Twitter claimed it was a Texas man who goes by a Nordic alias online. Others were sure it was a Michigan man who, according to Facebook, attended high school with other white nationalist demonstrators depicted in photos from Charlottesville.

After being contacted for comment by The Marshall Project, the Michigan man removed his Facebook page from public view.

Such speculation, especially when it is not conclusive, has created new challenges for law enforcement. There is the obvious risk of false identification. In 2013, internet users wrongly identified university student Sunil Tripathi as a suspect in the Boston marathon bombing, prompting the internet forum Reddit to issue an apology for fostering “online witch hunts.” Already, an Arkansas professor was misidentified as as a torch-bearing protester, though not a criminal suspect, at the Charlottesville rallies.

Beyond the cost to misidentified suspects, the crowdsourced identification of criminal suspects is both a benefit and burden to investigators.

“If someone says: ‘hey, I have a picture of someone assaulting another person, and committing a hate crime,’ that’s great,” said Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, the spokesman for the Seattle Police Department, which used social media to help identify the pilot of a drone that crashed into a 2015 Pride Parade. (The man was convicted in January.) “But saying, ‘I am pretty sure that this person is so and so’. Well, ‘pretty sure’ is not going to cut it.”

Still, credible information can help police establish probable cause, which means they can ask a judge to sign off on either a search warrant, an arrest warrant, or both….(More)“.

Inside the Lab That’s Quantifying Happiness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rowan Jacobsen at Outside: “In Mississippi, people tweet about cake and cookies an awful lot; in Colorado, it’s noodles. In Mississippi, the most-tweeted activity is eating; in Colorado, it’s running, skiing, hiking, snowboarding, and biking, in that order. In other words, the two states fall on opposite ends of the behavior spectrum. If you were to assign a caloric value to every food mentioned in every tweet by the citizens of the United States and a calories-burned value to every activity, and then totaled them up, you would find that Colorado tweets the best caloric ratio in the country and Mississippi the worst.

Sure, you’d be forgiven for doubting people’s honesty on Twitter. On those rare occasions when I destroy an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s, I most assuredly do not tweet about it. Likewise, I don’t reach for my phone every time I strap on a pair of skis.

And yet there’s this: Mississippi has the worst rate of diabetes and heart disease in the country and Colorado has the best. Mississippi has the second-highest percentage of obesity; Colorado has the lowest. Mississippi has the worst life expectancy in the country; Colorado is near the top. Perhaps we are being more honest on social media than we think. And perhaps social media has more to tell us about the state of the country than we realize.

That’s the proposition of Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, who co-direct the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, a warren of whiteboards and grad students in a handsome brick building near the shores of Lake Champlain. Dodds and Danforth are applied mathematicians, but they would make a pretty good comedy duo. When I stopped by the lab recently, both were in running clothes and cracking jokes. They have an abundance of curls between them and the wiry energy of chronic thinkers. They came to UVM in 2006 to start the Vermont Complex Systems Center, which crunches big numbers from big systems and looks for patterns. Out of that, they hatched the Computational Story Lab, which sifts through some of that public data to discern the stories we’re telling ourselves. “It took us a while to come up with the name,” Dodds told me as we shotgunned espresso and gazed into his MacBook. “We were going to be the Department of Recreational Truth.”

This year, they teamed up with their PhD student Andy Reagan to launch the Lexicocalorimeter, an online tool that uses tweets to compute the calories in and calories out for every state. It’s no mere party trick; the Story Labbers believe the Lexicocalorimeter has important advantages over slower, more traditional methods of gathering health data….(More)”.

Chicago police see less violent crime after using predictive code

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jon Fingas at Engadget: “Law enforcement has been trying predictive policing software for a while now, but how well does it work when it’s put to a tough test? Potentially very well, according to Chicago police. The city’s 7th District police reportthat their use of predictive algorithms helped reduce the number of shootings 39 percent year-over-year in the first 7 months of 2017, with murders dropping by 33 percent. Three other districts didn’t witness as dramatic a change, but they still saw 15 to 29 percent reductions in shootings and a corresponding 9 to 18 percent drop in murders.

It mainly comes down to knowing where and when to deploy officers. One of the tools used in the 7th District, HunchLab, blends crime statistics with socioeconomic data, weather info and business locations to determine where crimes are likely to happen. Other tools (such as the Strategic Subject’s List and ShotSpotter) look at gang affiliation, drug arrest history and gunfire detection sensors.

If the performance holds, It’ll suggest that predictive policing can save lives when crime rates are particularly high, as they have been on Chicago’s South Side. However, both the Chicago Police Department and academics are quick to stress that algorithms are just one part of a larger solution. Officers still have be present, and this doesn’t tackle the underlying issues that cause crime, such as limited access to education and a lack of economic opportunity. Still, any successful reduction in violence is bound to be appreciated….(More)”.

Building Digital Government Strategies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan et al: “This book provides key strategic principles and best practices to guide the design and implementation of digital government strategies. It provides a series of recommendations and findings to think about IT applications in government as a platform for information, services and collaboration, and strategies to avoid identified pitfalls. Digital government research suggests that information technologies have the potential to generate immense public value and transform the relationships between governments, citizens, businesses and other stakeholders. However, developing innovative and high impact solutions for citizens hinges on the development of strategic institutional, organizational and technical capabilities.

Thus far,  particular characteristics and problems of the public sector organization promote the development of poorly integrated and difficult to maintain applications. For example, governments maintain separate applications for open data, transparency, and public services, leading to duplication of efforts and a waste of resources. The costs associated with maintaining such sets of poorly integrated systems may limit the use of resources to future projects and innovation.

This book provides best practices and recommendations based on extensive research in both Mexico and the United States on how governments can develop a digital government strategy for creating public value, how to finance digital innovation in the public sector, how to building successful collaboration networks and foster citizen engagement, and how to correctly implement open government projects and open data. It will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, students, and public sector IT professionals that work in the design and implementation of technology-based projects and programs….(More)”.

Why We Should Care About Bad Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Stefaan G. Verhulst: “At a time of open and big data, data-led and evidence-based policy making has great potential to improve problem solving but will have limited, if not harmful, effects if the underlying components are riddled with bad data.

Why should we care about bad data? What do we mean by bad data? And what are the determining factors contributing to bad data that if understood and addressed could prevent or tackle bad data? These questions were the subject of my short presentation during a recent webinar on  Bad Data: The Hobgoblin of Effective Government, hosted by the American Society for Public Administration and moderated by Richard Greene (Partner, Barrett and Greene Inc.). Other panelists included Ben Ward (Manager, Information Technology Audits Unit, California State Auditor’s Office) and Katherine Barrett (Partner, Barrett and Greene Inc.). The webinar was a follow-up to the excellent Special Issue of Governing on Bad Data written by Richard and Katherine….(More)”

Design Thinking for the Greater Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Book by Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer:  “Facing especially wicked problems, social sector organizations are searching for powerful new methods to understand and address them. Design Thinking for the Greater Good goes in depth on both the how of using new tools and the why. As a way to reframe problems, ideate solutions, and iterate toward better answers, design thinking is already well established in the commercial world. Through ten stories of struggles and successes in fields such as health care, education, agriculture, transportation, social services, and security, the authors show how collaborative creativity can shake up even the most entrenched bureaucracies—and provide a practical roadmap for readers to implement these tools.

The design thinkers Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer explore how major agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Transportation and Security Administration in the United States, as well as organizations in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, have instituted principles of design thinking. In each case, these groups have used the tools of design thinking to reduce risk, manage change, use resources more effectively, bridge the communication gap between parties, and manage the competing demands of diverse stakeholders. Along the way, they have improved the quality of their products and enhanced the experiences of those they serve. These strategies are accessible to analytical and creative types alike, and their benefits extend throughout an organization. This book will help today’s leaders and thinkers implement these practices in their own pursuit of creative solutions that are both innovative and achievable….(More)”.

Waste Is Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Dietmar Offenhuber: “Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visualizations shape infrastructure governance. He does so by looking at three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects in Seattle, São Paulo, and Boston.

Offenhuber expands the notion of urban legibility—the idea that the city can be read like a text—to introduce the concept of infrastructure legibility. He argues that infrastructure governance is enacted through representations of the infrastructural system, and that these representations stem from the different stakeholders’ interests, which drive their efforts to make the system legible. The Trash Track project in Seattle used sensor technology to map discarded items through the waste and recycling systems; the Forager project looked at the informal organization processes of waste pickers working for Brazilian recycling cooperatives; and mobile systems designed by the city of Boston allowed residents to report such infrastructure failures as potholes and garbage spills. Through these case studies, Offenhuber outlines an emerging paradigm of infrastructure governance based on a complex negotiation among users, technology, and the city….(More)”.

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