Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “One of the more fascinating areas of science that has emerged in recent years is the study of networks and their application to everyday life. It turns out that many important properties of our world are governed by networks with very specific properties.
These networks are not random by any means. Instead, they are often connected in the now famous small world pattern in which any part of the network can be reached in a relatively small number of steps. These kinds of networks lie behind many natural phenomena such as earthquakes, epidemics and forest fires and are equally ubiquitous in social phenomena such as the spread of fashions, languages, and even wars.
So it should come as no surprise that the same kind of network should exist in the legal world. Today, Marios Koniaris and pals at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece show that the network of links between laws follows exactly the same pattern. They say their network approach provides a unique insight into the nature of the law, the way it has emerged and how changes may influence it in the future.
The work of Koniaris and co focuses entirely on the law associated with the European Union. They begin by pointing out that this legal network is different from many other types of networks in two important ways….
The network can also be using for visualizing the nature of the legal world. It reveals clusters and related connections and can help legislators determine the effect of proposed changes…..It also shows how network science is spreading to every corner of scientific and social research.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1501.05237 : Network Analysis In The Legal Domain: A Complex Model For European Union Legal Sources”
Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?
Essay by Francis Fukuyama in the Journal of Democracy: “The Journal of Democracy published its inaugural issue a bit past the midpoint of what Samuel P. Huntington labeled the “third wave” of democratization, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and just before the breakup of the former Soviet Union. The transitions in Southern Europe and most of those in Latin America had already happened, and Eastern Europe was moving at dizzying speed away from communism, while the democratic transitions in sub-Saharan Africa and the former USSR were just getting underway. Overall, there has been remarkable worldwide progress in democratization over a period of almost 45 years, raising the number of electoral democracies from about 35 in 1970 to well over 110 in 2014.
But as Larry Diamond has pointed out, there has been a democratic recession since 2006, with a decline in aggregate Freedom House scores every year since then. The year 2014 has not been good for democracy, with two big authoritarian powers, Russia and China, on the move at either end of Eurasia. The “Arab Spring” of 2011, which raised expectations that the Arab exception to the third wave might end, has degenerated into renewed dictatorship in the case of Egypt, and into anarchy in Libya, Yemen, and also Syria, which along with Iraq has seen the emergence of a new radical Islamist movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
It is hard to know whether we are experiencing a momentary setback in a general movement toward greater democracy around the world, similar to a stock-market correction, or whether the events of this year signal a broader shift in world politics and the rise of serious alternatives to democracy. In either case, it is hard not to feel that the performance of democracies around the world has been deficient in recent years. This begins with the most developed and successful democracies, those of the United States and the European Union, which experienced massive economic crises in the late 2000s and seem to be mired in a period of slow growth and stagnating incomes. But a number of newer democracies, from Brazil to Turkey to India, have also been disappointing in their performance in many respects, and subject to their own protest movements.
Spontaneous democratic movements against authoritarian regimes continue to arise out of civil society, from Ukraine and Georgia to Tunisia and Egypt to Hong Kong. But few of these movements have been successful in leading to the establishment of stable, well-functioning democracies. It is worth asking why the performance of democracy around the world has been so disappointing.
In my view, a single important factor lies at the core of many democratic setbacks over the past generation. It has to do with a failure of institutionalization—the fact that state capacity in many new and existing democracies has not kept pace with popular demands for democratic accountability. It is much harder to move from a patrimonial or neopatrimonial state to a modern, impersonal one than it is to move from an authoritarian regime to one that holds regular, free, and fair elections. It is the failure to establish modern, well-governed states that has been the Achilles heel of recent democratic transitions… (More)”
Democracy makes itself at home online
Geoff Mulgan on the creation of new parties in 2015 at NESTA: “….On its own the Internet is an imperfect tool for making decisions or shaping options. Opening decisions up to large numbers of people doesn’t automatically make decisions better (the ‘wisdom of crowds’). But in the right circumstances the Internet can involve far more people in shaping policy and sharing their expertise.
Hybrid models that combine the openness of the Internet with a continuing role for parliaments, committees and leaders in making decisions and being held to account are showing great promise (something being pursued in Nesta’s D-CENT project in countries like Finland and Iceland, and in our work with Podemos in Spain).
My prediction is that the aftermath of the UK election will see the first Internet-age parties emerge in the UK, our own versions of Podemos or Democracy OS. My hope is that they will help to engage millions of people currently detached from politics, and to provide them with ways to directly influence ideas and decisions. UKIP has tapped into that alienation – but mainly offers a better yesterday rather than a plausible vision of the future. That leaves a gap for new parties that are more at home in the 21st century and can target a much younger age group.
If new parties do spring up, the old ones will have to respond. Before long open primaries, deliberations on the Internet, and crowd-sourced policy processes could become the norm. As that happens politics will become messier and more interesting. Leaders will have to be adept at responding to contradictory currents of opinion, with more conversation and fewer bland speeches. The huge power once wielded by newspaper owners, commentators and editors will almost certainly continue to decline.
The hope, in short, is that democracy could be reenergised…. (More).
Hybrid models that combine the openness of the Internet with a continuing role for parliaments, committees and leaders in making decisions and being held to account are showing great promise (something being pursued in Nesta’s D-CENT project in countries like Finland and Iceland, and in our work with Podemos in Spain).
My prediction is that the aftermath of the UK election will see the first Internet-age parties emerge in the UK, our own versions of Podemos or Democracy OS. My hope is that they will help to engage millions of people currently detached from politics, and to provide them with ways to directly influence ideas and decisions. UKIP has tapped into that alienation – but mainly offers a better yesterday rather than a plausible vision of the future. That leaves a gap for new parties that are more at home in the 21st century and can target a much younger age group.
If new parties do spring up, the old ones will have to respond. Before long open primaries, deliberations on the Internet, and crowd-sourced policy processes could become the norm. As that happens politics will become messier and more interesting. Leaders will have to be adept at responding to contradictory currents of opinion, with more conversation and fewer bland speeches. The huge power once wielded by newspaper owners, commentators and editors will almost certainly continue to decline.
The hope, in short, is that democracy could be reenergised…. (More).
Institutions, Innovation, and Industrialization: Essays in Economic History and Development
Book edited by Avner Greif, Lynne Kiesling & John V. C. Nye: “This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr’s important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution….(More)”
This vending machine will deny you snacks based on medical records
Springwise: “Businesses often stand by the motto ‘the customer is always right’ — but are they? We’ve already seen a few services that deny consumers what they want based on their personal info. For example, Billboard Brasil’s Fan Check Machine only gave out copies of the music magazine if the buyer could prove they owned tracks by the artist on the cover. Now the Luce X2 Touch TV vending machine uses facial recognition and customers’ medical records to determine if they should be allowed to buy an unhealthy snack.
Created by Italy-based Rhea Vendors and recently launched in the UK, the machine features a 22-inch touchscreen display that lets customers to select an item just like a standard vending machine. However, before the snack is released customers with an account can go through a facial recognition check.
The technology detects the customer’s age, build and mood in order to determine whether the purchase is a wise decision. The machine can also be programmed to access information about the user’s medical records and purchase history. If the algorithms decide that purchasing a coffee with 3 sugars or the fourth candy bar of the day is a bad idea for their health or mood, it can refuse to vend the product.
While some customers won’t appreciate their private data being analyzed or getting rejected by a lifeless machine, the idea could be a savior for those on a diet….(More).
The Global Open Data Index 2014
Open Knowledge Foundation: “The Global Open Data Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels.
The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .
Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.
Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.
Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK and Greece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.
Explore the Global Open Data Index 2014 for yourself!”
The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .
Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.
Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.
Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK and Greece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.
Explore the Global Open Data Index 2014 for yourself!”
Cities Find Rewards in Cheap Technologies
Nanette Byrnes at MIT Technology Review: “Cities around the globe, whether rich or poor, are in the midst of a technology experiment. Urban planners are pulling data from inexpensive sensors mounted on traffic lights and park benches, and from mobile apps on citizens’ smartphones, to analyze how their cities really operate. They hope the data will reveal how to run their cities better and improve urban life. City leaders and technology experts say that managing the growing challenges of cities well and affordably will be close to impossible without smart technology.
Fifty-four percent of humanity lives in urban centers, and almost all of the world’s projected population growth over the next three decades will take place in cities, including many very poor cities. Because of their density and often strained infrastructure, cities have an outsize impact on the environment, consuming two-thirds of the globe’s energy and contributing 70 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions. Urban water systems are leaky. Pollution levels are often extreme.
But cities also contribute most of the world’s economic production. Thirty percent of the world’s economy and most of its innovation are concentrated in just 100 cities. Can technology help manage rapid population expansion while also nurturing cities’ all-important role as an economic driver? That’s the big question at the heart of this Business Report.
Selling answers to that question has become a big business. IBM, Cisco, Hitachi, Siemens, and others have taken aim at this market, publicizing successful examples of cities that have used their technology to tackle the challenges of parking, traffic, transportation, weather, energy use, water management, and policing. Cities already spend a billion dollars a year on these systems, and that’s expected to grow to $12 billion a year or more in the next 10 years.
To justify this kind of outlay, urban technologists will have to move past the test projects that dominate discussions today. Instead, they’ll have to solve some of the profound and growing problems of urban living. Cities leaning in that direction are using various technologies to ease parking, measure traffic, and save water (see “Sensing Santander”), reduce rates of violent crime (see “Data-Toting Cops”), and prepare for ever more severe weather patterns.
There are lessons to be learned, too, from cities whose grandiose technological ideas have fallen short, like the eco-city initiative of Tianjin, China (see “China’s Future City”), which has few residents despite great technology and deep government support.
The streets are similarly largely empty in the experimental high-tech cities of Songdo, South Korea; Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; and Paredes, Portugal, which are being designed to have minimal impact on the environment and offer high-tech conveniences such as solar-powered air-conditioning and pneumatic waste disposal systems instead of garbage trucks. Meanwhile, established cities are taking a much more incremental, less ambitious, and perhaps more workable approach, often benefiting from relatively inexpensive and flexible digital technologies….”
Spain is trialling city monitoring using sound
Springwise: “There’s more traffic on today’s city streets than there ever has been, and managing it all can prove to be a headache for local authorities and transport bodies. In the past, we’ve seen the City of Calgary in Canada detect drivers’ Bluetooth signals to develop a map of traffic congestion. Now the EAR-IT project in Santander, Spain, is using acoustic sensors to measure the sounds of city streets and determine real time activity on the ground.
Launched as part of the autonomous community’s SmartSantander initiative, the experimental scheme placed hundreds of acoustic processing units around the region. These pick up the sounds being made in any given area and, when processed through an audio recognition engine, can provide data about what’s going on on the street. Smaller ‘motes’ were also developed to provide more accurate location information about each sound.
Created by members of Portugal’s UNINOVA institute and IT consultants EGlobalMark, the system was able to use city noises to detect things such as traffic congestion, parking availability and the location of emergency vehicles based on their sirens. It could then automatically trigger smart signs to display up-to-date information, for example.
The team particularly focused on a junction near the city hospital that’s a hotspot for motor accidents. Rather than force ambulance drivers to risk passing through a red light and into lateral traffic, the sensors were able to detect when and where an emergency vehicle was coming through and automatically change the lights in their favor.
The system could also be used to pick up ‘sonic events’ such as gunshots or explosions and detect their location. The researchers have also trialled an indoor version that can sense if an elderly resident has fallen over or to turn lights off when the room becomes silent.”
Atlas of Cities
New book edited by Paul Knox: “More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and that proportion is expected to rise to three-quarters by 2050. Urbanization is a global phenomenon, but the way cities are developing, the experience of city life, and the prospects for the future of cities vary widely from region to region. The Atlas of Cities presents a unique taxonomy of cities that looks at different aspects of their physical, economic, social, and political structures; their interactions with each other and with their hinterlands; the challenges and opportunities they present; and where cities might be going in the future.
Each chapter explores a particular type of city—from the foundational cities of Greece and Rome and the networked cities of the Hanseatic League, through the nineteenth-century modernization of Paris and the industrialization of Manchester, to the green and “smart” cities of today. Expert contributors explore how the development of these cities reflects one or more of the common themes of urban development: the mobilizing function (transport, communication, and infrastructure); the generative function (innovation and technology); the decision-making capacity (governance, economics, and institutions); and the transformative capacity (society, lifestyle, and culture)….
Table of Contents; Introduction[PDF] 
“
VouliWatch – Empowering Democracy in Greece
Proposal at IndieGogo: “In the wake of the economic crisis and in a country where politics has all too often been beset by scandals and corruption, Vouliwatch aims to help develop an open and accountable political system that uses new digital technology to promote citizen participation in the political process and to rebuild trust in parliamentary democracy. In the heyday of Ancient Greek democracy, citizens actively participated in political dialogue, and Vouliwatch aims to revive this essential aspect of a democratic society through the use of digital technology.
How it actually works!
Vouliwatch is a digital platform that offers Greek citizens the opportunity to publicly question MPs and MEPs on the topic of their choice, and to hold their elected representatives accountable for their parliamentary activity. It is loosely modelled on similar initiatives that are already running successfully in other countries (Ireland, Luxemburg, Tunisia, Germany, France and Austria)….
Crowdsourcing/bottom up approach
The platform also gives users the chance to influence political debate and to focus the attention of both the media and the politicians on issues that citizens believe are important and are not being discussed widely.Vouliwatch offers citizens the chance to share their ideas and experiences and to make proposals to parliament for political action. The community of users can then comment on and rate them. A Google map application depicts all submitted data with the option of filtering based on different criteria (location; subject categories such as e.g. education, tourism, etc.). Every 2 months all submitted data is summarized in a report and sent to all MPs by our team, as food for thought and action. Vouliwatch will then publish and promote any resulting parliamentary reaction….”