Katie Collins at WIRED: “Microsoft researcher Kati London’s aim is “to try to get people to think of data in terms of personalities, relationships and emotions”, she tells the audience at the Story Festival in London. Through Project Sentient Data, she uses her background in games development to create fun but meaningful experiences that bridge online interactions and things that are happening in the real world.
One such experience invited children to play against the real-time flow of London traffic through an online game called the Code of Everand. The aim was to test the road safety knowledge of 9-11 year olds and “make alertness something that kids valued”.
The core mechanic of the game was that of a normal world populated by little people, containing spirit channels that only kids could see and go through. Within these spirit channels, everything from lorries and cars from the streets became monsters. The children had to assess what kind of dangers the monsters posed and use their tools to dispel them.
“Games are great ways to blur and observe the ways people interact with real-world data,” says London.
In one of her earlier projects back in 2005, London used her knowledge of horticulture to bring artificial intelligence to plants. “Almost every workspace I go into has a half dead plant in it, so we gave plants the ability to tell us what they need.” It was, she says, an exercise in “humanising data” that led to further projects that saw her create self aware street signs and a dynamic city map that expressed shame neighbourhood by neighbourhood depending on the open dataset of public complaints in New York.
A further project turned complaint data into cartoons on Instagram every week. London praised the open data initiative in New York, but added that for people to access it, they had to know it existed and know where to find it. The cartoons were a “lightweight” form of “civic engagement” that helped to integrate hyperlocal issues into everyday conversation.
London also gamified community engagement through a project commissioned by the Knight Foundation called Macon Money….(More)”.
Nudge Concept App Hopes To Point Pre-Diabetics Toward A Healthier Lifestyle
Addy Dugdale at FastCompany: “A new concept app from the London office of design and innovation consultancy Smart Design aims to improve the health of a large portion of the world’s population, a segment for whom weight loss can be a matter of life and death: diabetics.
Nudge is a concept app aimed at pre-diabetics—people with a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes—to change their eating habits. Described as a “personal nutritionist disguised as a shopping assistant,” the app keeps track of a user’s weekly grocery shopping using a phone’s camera to scan products on store shelves. The app looks for purchasing patterns that can be improved, and suggests healthy alternatives—like substituting red rice for white rice, or maybe even quinoa—to nudge the individual toward making better decisions. The idea is to help pre-diabetics make small, incremental changes.
…(More)”
One State Wants To Let You Carry Your Driver’s License On Your Phone
Tarun Wadhwa at Singularity Hub: “There’s now a technology to replace almost everything in your wallet. Your cash, credit cards, and loyalty programs are all on their way to becoming obsolete. Money can now be sent via app, text, e-mail — it can even be sent via Snapchat. But you can’t leave your wallet home just yet. That’s because there is one item that remains largely unchanged: your driver’s license.
If the Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles has its way, that may no longer be the case. According to an article in the Des Moines Register, the agency is in the early stages of developing mobile software for just this purpose. The app would store a resident’s personal information, whatever is already on the physical licenses, and also include a scannable bar code. The plans are for the app to include a two-step verification process including some type of biometric or pin code. At this time, it appears that specific implementation details are still being worked out.
The governments of the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates had both previously announced their own attempts to experiment with the concept. It’s becoming increasingly common to see mobile versions of other documents. Over 30 states now allow motorists to show electronic proof of insurance. It only follows that the driver’s license would be next. But the considerations around that document are different — it is perhaps the most regulated and important document that a person carries….(More)”
The Tricky Task of Rating Neighborhoods on 'Livability'
Tanvi Misra at CityLab: “Jokubas Neciunas was looking to buy an apartment almost two years back in Vilnius, Lithuania. He consulted real estate platforms and government data to help him decide the best option for him. In the process, he realized that there was a lot of information out there, but no one was really using it very well.
Fast-forward two years, and Neciunas and his colleagues have created PlaceILive.com—a start-up trying to leverage open data from cities and information from social media to create a holistic, accessible tool that measures the “livability” of any apartment or house in a city.
“Smart cities are the ones that have smart citizens,” says PlaceILive co-founder Sarunas Legeckas.
The team recognizes that foraging for relevant information in the trenches of open data might not be for everyone. So they tried to “spice it up” by creating a visually appealing, user-friendly portal for people looking for a new home to buy or rent. The creators hope PlaceILive becomes a one-stop platform where people find ratings on every quality-of-life metric important to them before their housing hunt begins.
In its beta form, the site features five cities—New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Berlin. Once you click on the New York portal, for instance, you can search for the place you want to know about by borough, zip code, or address. I pulled up Brooklyn….The index is calculated using a variety of public information sources (from transit agencies, police departments, and the Census, for instance) as well as other available data (from the likes of Google, Socrata, and Foursquare)….(More)”
Data Mining Reveals a Global Link Between Corruption and Wealth
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Social scientists have never understood why some countries are more corrupt than others. But the first study that links corruption with wealth could help change that…One question that social scientists and economists have long puzzled over is how corruption arises in different cultures and why it is more prevalent in some countries than others. But it has always been difficult to find correlations between corruption and other measures of economic or social activity.
Michal Paulus and Ladislav Kristoufek at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, have for the first time found a correlation between the perception of corruption in different countries and their economic development.
The data they use comes from Transparency International, a nonprofit campaigning organisation based in Berlin, Germany, and which defines corruption as the misuse of public power for private benefit. Each year, this organization publishes a global list of countries ranked according to their perceived levels of corruption. The list is compiled using at least three sources of information but does not directly measure corruption, because of the difficulties in gathering such data.
Instead, it gathers information from a wide range of sources such as the African Development Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit. But it also places significant weight on the opinions of experts who are asked to assess corruption levels.
The result is the Corruption Perceptions Index ranking countries between 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). In 2014, Denmark occupied of the top spot as the world’s least corrupt nation while Somalia and North Korea prop up the table in an unenviable tie for the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Paulus and Kristoufek use this data to search for find clusters of countries that share similar properties using a new generation of cluster-searching algorithms. And they say that the 134 countries they study fall neatly into four groups which are clearly correlated with the wealth of the nations within them….Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1502.00104 Worldwide Clustering Of The Corruption Perception”
The downside of Open Data
Joshua Chambers at FutureGov: “…Inaccurate public datasets can cause big problems, because apps that feed off of them could be giving out false information. I was struck by this when we reported on an app in Australia that was issuing alerts for forest fires that didn’t exist. The data was coming from public emergency calls, but wasn’t verified before being displayed. This meant that app users would be alerted of all possible fires, but also could be caused unnecessarily panic. The government takes the view that more alerts are better than slower verified ones, but there is the potential for people to become less likely to trust all alerts on the app.
No-one wants to publish inaccurate data, but accuracy takes time and costs money. So we come to a central tension in discussions about open data: is it better to publish more data, with the risk of inaccuracy, or limit publication to datasets which are accurate?
The United Kingdom takes the view that more data is best. I interviewed the UK’s lead official on open data, Paul Maltby, a couple of years ago, and he told me that: “There’s a misnomer here that everything has to be perfect before you can put it out,” adding that “what we’re finding is that, actually, some of the datasets are a bit messy. We try to keep them as high-quality as we can; but other organisations then clean up the data and sell it on”.
Indeed, he noted that some officials use data accuracy as an excuse to not publish information that could hold their departments to account. “There’s sometimes a reluctance to get data out from the civil service; and whilst we see many examples of people understanding the reasons why data has been put to use, I’d say the general default is still not pro-release”.
Other countries take a different view, however. Singapore, for example, publishes much less data than Britain, but has more of a push on making its data accurate to assist startups and app builders….(More)”
VoXup
Nesta: “Does your street feel safe? Would you like to change something in your neighbourhood? Is there enough for young people to do?
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….
Now VoXup is being used by Camden Council to engage with residents about its spending plans.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”
‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”
‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.
The Internet of Anything: A Social Network for the World’s Online Sensors
Klint Finley in Wired: “When her oldest daughter was diagnosed with asthma last March, Yodi Stanton installed air pollution sensors around her London home. She wanted to see if there were links between her daughter’s attacks and the number of dirty particles in the air.
Ultimately, she wasn’t able to find a correlation. But maybe some else will find gold in this data. Instead of keeping it to herself, Stanton streamed the data to a public online service she helped create called OpenSensors.io, and from there, it can be accessed and analyzed by public health researchers, journalists, and other concerned citizens—or even feed into online applications that can make use of it.
OpenSensors is a service where anyone can publish real-time sensor data. Think of it as Twitter for sensors. You can publish a stream of data from virtually any source to the company’s computer servers—or subscribe to streams of data coming from others, using it for your own research, gadget, or online app…..(More)”.
Mini Metro
“Description: Mini Metro is a minimalist subway simulation game about designing efficient subway networks. The player must constantly redesign their line layout to meet the needs of a rapidly-growing city.
History
The prototype for Mini Metro, Mind the Gap, was created at the end of April 2013 during the three-day Ludum Dare 26 Jam. The first pre-alpha build was made public in September 2013. Mini Metro was put up on Steam Greenlight in March 2014 and was greenlit within three weeks. The Early Access release is scheduled for the 11th of August.
Features
- Compelling, constructive, hectic, relaxed gameplay. If that makes sense.
- Three game modes: Commuter for quick scored games, Scenic for stress-free sandbox play, and Rush Hour for the ultimate challenge. (only Commuter is in so far, Scenic will follow soon)
- Three real-world cities to design subways for (London, New York City and Paris), with many more being added before release. Each has a unique colour theme, set of obstacles, and pace.
- Random city growth, so each game plays out differently. A strategy that proved successful last game may not help you in the next.
- Each game’s map is a work of art, built by you in the classic abstract subway style of Harry Beck. If you think it’s a keeper, save it, tweet it, show it off or make it your desktop background!
- Each game’s map is a work of art, built by the player in the classic abstract subway style. If you think it’s a keeper, save it, tweet it, show it off or make it your desktop background!
- Dynamic soundtrack by Disasterpeace.
- Colorblind and night modes.
- Trains!”
Governments and Citizens Getting to Know Each Other? Open, Closed, and Big Data in Public Management Reform
New paper by Amanda Clarke and Helen Margetts in Policy and Internet: “Citizens and governments live increasingly digital lives, leaving trails of digital data that have the potential to support unprecedented levels of mutual government–citizen understanding, and in turn, vast improvements to public policies and services. Open data and open government initiatives promise to “open up” government operations to citizens. New forms of “big data” analysis can be used by government itself to understand citizens’ behavior and reveal the strengths and weaknesses of policy and service delivery. In practice, however, open data emerges as a reform development directed to a range of goals, including the stimulation of economic development, and not strictly transparency or public service improvement. Meanwhile, governments have been slow to capitalize on the potential of big data, while the largest data they do collect remain “closed” and under-exploited within the confines of intelligence agencies. Drawing on interviews with civil servants and researchers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2011 and 2014, this article argues that a big data approach could offer the greatest potential as a vehicle for improving mutual government–citizen understanding, thus embodying the core tenets of Digital Era Governance, argued by some authors to be the most viable public management model for the digital age (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2005, 2006; Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013).”