Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Way back in 1906, the English polymath Francis Galton visited a country fair in which 800 people took part in a contest to guess the weight of a slaughtered ox. After the fair, he collected the guesses and calculated their average which turned out to be 1208 pounds. To Galton’s surprise, this was within 1 per cent of the true weight of 1198 pounds.
This is one of the earliest examples of a phenomenon that has come to be known as the wisdom of the crowd. The idea is that the collective opinion of a group of individuals can be better than a single expert opinion.
This phenomenon is commonplace today on websites such as Reddit in which users vote on the importance of particular stories and the most popular are given greater prominence.
However, anyone familiar with Reddit will know that the collective opinion isn’t always wise. In recent years, researchers have spent a significant amount of time and effort teasing apart the factors that make crowds stupid. One important factor turns out to be the way members of a crowd influence each other.
It turns out that if a crowd offers a wide range of independent estimates, then it is more likely to be wise. But if members of the crowd are influenced in the same way, for example by each other or by some external factor, then they tend to converge on a biased estimate. In this case, the crowd is likely to be stupid.
Today, Gabriel Madirolas and Gonzalo De Polavieja at the Cajal Institute in Madrid, Spain, say they found a way to analyse the answers from a crowd which allows them to remove this kind of bias and so settle on a wiser answer.
The theory behind their work is straightforward. Their idea is that some people are more strongly influenced by additional information than others who are confident in their own opinion. So identifying these more strongly influenced people and separating them from the independent thinkers creates two different groups. The group of independent thinkers is then more likely to give a wise estimate. Or put another way, ignore the wisdom of the crowd in favour of the wisdom of the confident.
So how to identify confident thinkers. Madirolas and De Polavieja began by studying the data from an earlier set of experiments in which groups of people were given tasks such as to estimate the length of the border between Switzerland and Italy, the correct answer being 734 kilometres.
After one task, some groups were shown the combined estimates of other groups before beginning their second task. These experiments clearly showed how this information biased the answers from these groups in their second tasks.
Madirolas and De Polavieja then set about creating a mathematical model of how individuals incorporate this extra information. They assume that each person comes to a final estimate based on two pieces of information: first, their own independent estimate of the length of the border and second, the earlier combined estimate revealed to the group. Each individual decides on a final estimate depending on the weighting they give to each piece of information.
Those people who are heavily biased give a strong weighting to the additional information whereas people who are confident in their own estimate give a small or zero weighting to the additional information.
Madirolas and De Polavieja then take each person’s behaviour and fit it to this model to reveal how independent their thinking has been.
That allows them to divide the groups into independent thinkers and biased thinkers. Taking the collective opinion of the independent thinkers then gives a much more accurate estimate of the length of the border.
“Our results show that, while a simple operation like the mean, median or geometric mean of a group may not allow groups to make good estimations, a more complex operation taking into account individuality in the social dynamics can lead to a better collective intelligence,” they say.
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Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1406.7578 : Wisdom of the Confident: Using Social Interactions to Eliminate the Bias in Wisdom of the Crowds”
Are the Authoritarians Winning?
Review of several books by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Review of Books: “In the 1930s travelers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous.
Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence. In the 1930s, Westerners went to Russia to admire Stalin’s Moscow subway stations; today they go to China to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, and just as in the 1930s, they return wondering why autocracies can build high-speed railroad lines seemingly overnight, while democracies can take forty years to decide they cannot even begin. The Francis Fukuyama moment—when in 1989 Westerners were told that liberal democracy was the final form toward which all political striving was directed—now looks like a quaint artifact of a vanished unipolar moment.
For the first time since the end of the cold war, the advance of democratic constitutionalism has stopped. The army has staged a coup in Thailand and it’s unclear whether the generals will allow democracy to take root in Burma. For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Côte d’Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.
In Latin America, democracy has sunk solid roots in Chile, but in Mexico and Colombia it is threatened by violence, while in Argentina it struggles to shake off the dead weight of Peronism. In Brazil, the millions who took to the streets last June to protest corruption seem to have had no impact on the cronyism in Brasília. In the Middle East, democracy has a foothold in Tunisia, but in Syria there is chaos; in Egypt, plebiscitary authoritarianism rules; and in the monarchies, absolutism is ascendant.
In Europe, the policy elites keep insisting that the remedy for their continent’s woes is “more Europe” while a third of their electorate is saying they want less of it. From Hungary to Holland, including in France and the UK, the anti-European right gains ground by opposing the European Union generally and immigration in particular. In Russia the democratic moment of the 1990s now seems as distant as the brief constitutional interlude between 1905 and 1914 under the tsar….
It is not at all apparent that “governance innovation,” a bauble Micklethwait and Wooldridge chase across three continents, watching innovators at work making government more efficient in Chicago, Sacramento, Singapore, and Stockholm, will do the trick. The problem of the liberal state is not that it lacks modern management technique, good software, or different schemes to improve the “interface” between the bureaucrats and the public. By focusing on government innovation, Micklethwait and Wooldridge assume that the problem is improving the efficiency of government. But what is required is both more radical and more traditional: a return to constitutional democracy itself, to courts and regulatory bodies that are freed from the power of money and the influence of the powerful; to legislatures that cease to be circuses and return to holding the executive branch to public account while cooperating on measures for which there is a broad consensus; to elected chief executives who understand that they are not entertainers but leaders….”
Books reviewed:
Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order
by Richard N. Haass
Basic Books, 195 pp., $15.99 (paper)
Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy
by Barry R. Posen
Cornell University Press, 234 pp., $29.95
The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Penguin, 305 pp., $27.95
Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity
a white paper by Joseph Stiglitz
Roosevelt Institute, 28 pp., May 28, 2014; available at rooseveltinstitute.org“
Digital Government: Turning the Rhetoric into Reality
at BCG Perspectives: “Getting better—but still plenty of room for improvement: that’s the current assessment by everyday users of their governments’ efforts to deliver online services. The public sector has made good progress, but most countries are not moving nearly as quickly as users would like. Many governments have made bold commitments, and a few countries have determined to go “digital by default.” Most are moving more modestly, often overwhelmed by complexity and slowed by bureaucratic skepticism over online delivery as well as by a lack of digital skills. Developing countries lead in the rate of online usage, but they mostly trail developed nations in user satisfaction.
Many citizens—accustomed to innovation in such sectors as retailing, media, and financial services—wish their governments would get on with it. Of the services that can be accessed online, many only provide information and forms, while users are looking to get help and transact business. People want to do more. Digital interaction is often faster, easier, and more efficient than going to a service center or talking on the phone, but users become frustrated when the services do not perform as expected. They know what good online service providers offer. They have seen a lot of improvement in recent years, and they want their governments to make even better use of digital’s capabilities.
Many governments are already well on the way to improving digital service delivery, but there is often a gap between rhetoric and reality. There is no shortage of government policies and strategies relating to “digital first,” “e-government,” and “gov2.0,” in addition to digital by default. But governments need more than a strategy. “Going digital” requires leadership at the highest levels, investments in skills and human capital, and cultural and behavioral change. Based on BCG’s work with numerous governments and new research into the usage of, and satisfaction with, government digital services in 12 countries, we see five steps that most governments will want to take:
1. Focus on value. Put the priority on services with the biggest gaps between their importance to constituents and constituents’ satisfaction with digital delivery. In most countries, this will mean services related to health, education, social welfare, and immigration.
2. Adopt service design thinking. Governments should walk in users’ shoes. What does someone encounter when he or she goes to a government service website—plain language or bureaucratic legalese? How easy is it for the individual to navigate to the desired information? How many steps does it take to do what he or she came to do? Governments can make services easy to access and use by, for example, requiring users to register once and establish a digital credential, which can be used in the future to access online services across government.
3. Lead users online, keep users online. Invest in seamless end-to-end capabilities. Most government-service sites need to advance from providing information to enabling users to transact their business in its entirety, without having to resort to printing out forms or visiting service centers.
4. Demonstrate visible senior-leadership commitment. Governments can signal—to both their own officials and the public—the importance and the urgency that they place on their digital initiatives by where they assign responsibility for the effort.
5. Build the capabilities and skills to execute. Governments need to develop or acquire the skills and capabilities that will enable them to develop and deliver digital services.
This report examines the state of government digital services through the lens of Internet users surveyed in Australia, Denmark, France, Indonesia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the UK, and the U.S. We investigated 37 different government services. (See Exhibit 1.)…”
Opening Public Transportation Data in Germany
Thesis by Kaufmann, Stefan: “Open data has been recognized as a valuable resource, and public institutions have taken to publishing their data under open licenses, also in Germany. However, German public transit agencies are still reluctant to publish their schedules as open data. Also, two widely used data exchange formats used in German transit planning are proprietary, with no documentation publicly available. Through this work, one of the proprietary formats was reverse-engineered, and a transformation process into the open GTFS schedule format was developed. This process allowed a partnering transit operator to publish their schedule as open data. Also, through a survey taken with German transit authorities and operators, the prevalence of transit data exchange formats, and reservations concerning open transit data were evaluated. The survey brought a series of issues to light which serve as obstacles for opening up transit data. Addressing the issues found through this work, and partnering with open-minded transit authorities to further develop transit data publishing processes can serve as a foundation for wider adoption of publishing open transit data in Germany”
Every citizen a scientist? An EU project tries to change the face of research
Every citizen can be a scientist
The project helps usher in new advances in everything from astronomy to social science.
‘One breakthrough is our increased capacity to reproduce, analyse and understand complex issues thanks to the engagement of large groups of volunteers,’ says Mr Fermin Serrano Sanz, researcher at the University of Zaragoza and Project Coordinator of SOCIENTIZE. ‘And everyone can be a neuron in our digitally-enabled brain.’
But how can ordinary citizens help with such extraordinary science? The key, says Mr Serrano Sanz, is in harnessing the efforts of thousands of volunteers to collect and classify data. ‘We are already gathering huge amounts of user-generated data from the participants using their mobile phones and surrounding knowledge,’ he says.
For example, the experiment ‘SavingEnergy@Home’ asks users to submit data about the temperatures in their homes and neighbourhoods in order to build up a clearer picture of temperatures in cities across the EU, while in Spain, GripeNet.es asks citizens to report when they catch the flu in order to monitor outbreaks and predict possible epidemics.
Many Hands Make Light Work
But citizens can also help analyse data. Even the most advanced computers are not very good at recognising things like sun spots or cells, whereas people can tell the difference between living and dying cells very easily, given only a short training.
The SOCIENTIZE projects ‘Sun4All’ and ‘Cell Spotting’ ask volunteers to label images of solar activity and cancer cells from an application on their phone or computer. With Cell Spotting, for instance, participants can observe cell cultures being studied with a microscope in order to determine their state and the effectiveness of medicines. Analysing this data would take years and cost hundreds of thousands of euros if left to a small team of scientists – but with thousands of volunteers helping the effort, researchers can make important breakthroughs quickly and more cheaply than ever before.
But in addition to bringing citizens closer to science, SOCIENTIZE also brings science closer to citizens. On 12-14 June, the project participated in the SONAR festival with ‘A Collective Music Experiment’ (CME). ‘Two hundred people joined professional DJs and created musical patterns using a web tool; participants shared their creations and re-used other parts in real time. The activity in the festival also included a live show of RdeRumba and Mercadal playing amateurs rhythms’ Mr. Serrano Sanz explains.
The experiment – which will be presented in a mini-documentary to raise awareness about citizen science – is expected to help understand other innovation processes observed in emergent social, technological, economic or political transformations. ‘This kind of event brings together a really diverse set of participants. The diversity does not only enrich the data; it improves the dialogue between professionals and volunteers. As a result, we see some new and innovative approaches to research.’
The EUR 0.7 million project brings together 6 partners from 4 countries: Spain (University of Zaragoza and TECNARA), Portugal (Museu da Ciência-Coimbra, MUSC ; Universidade de Coimbra), Austria (Zentrum für Soziale Innovation) and Brazil (Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, UFCG).
SOCIENTIZE will end in October 2104 after bringing together 12000 citizens in different phases of research activities for 24 months.”
Cataloging the World
New book on “Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age”: “The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius.
In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Paul Otlet, a librarian by training, worked at expanding the potential of the catalog card, the world’s first information chip. From there followed universal libraries and museums, connecting his native Belgium to the world by means of a vast intellectual enterprise that attempted to organize and code everything ever published. Forty years before the first personal computer and fifty years before the first browser, Otlet envisioned a network of “electric telescopes” that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed, in 1934, a réseau mondial–essentially, a worldwide web.
Otlet’s life achievement was the construction of the Mundaneum–a mechanical collective brain that would house and disseminate everything ever committed to paper. Filled with analog machines such as telegraphs and sorters, the Mundaneum–what some have called a “Steampunk version of hypertext”–was the embodiment of Otlet’s ambitions. It was also short-lived. By the time the Nazis, who were pilfering libraries across Europe to collect information they thought useful, carted away Otlet’s collection in 1940, the dream had ended. Broken, Otlet died in 1944.
Wright’s engaging intellectual history gives Otlet his due, restoring him to his proper place in the long continuum of visionaries and pioneers who have struggled to classify knowledge, from H.G. Wells and Melvil Dewey to Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steve Jobs. Wright shows that in the years since Otlet’s death the world has witnessed the emergence of a global network that has proved him right about the possibilities–and the perils–of networked information, and his legacy persists in our digital world today, captured for all time…”
Democracy and open data: are the two linked?
Molly Shwartz at R-Street: “Are democracies better at practicing open government than less free societies? To find out, I analyzed the 70 countries profiled in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index and compared the rankings against the 2013 Global Democracy Rankings. As a tenet of open government in the digital age, open data practices serve as one indicator of an open government. Overall, there is a strong relationship between democracy and transparency.
Using data collected in October 2013, the top ten countries for openness include the usual bastion-of-democracy suspects: the United Kingdom, the United States, mainland Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions. Germany ranks lower than Russia and China. All three rank well above Lithuania. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Nepal all beat out Belgium. The chart (below) shows the democracy ranking of these same countries from 2008-2013 and highlights the obvious inconsistencies in the correlation between democracy and open data for many countries.
There are many reasons for such inconsistencies. The implementation of open-government efforts – for instance, opening government data sets – often can be imperfect or even misguided. Drilling down to some of the data behind the Open Data Index scores reveals that even countries that score very well, such as the United States, have room for improvement. For example, the judicial branch generally does not publish data and houses most information behind a pay-wall. The status of legislation and amendments introduced by Congress also often are not available in machine-readable form.
As internationally recognized markers of political freedom and technological innovation, open government initiatives are appealing political tools for politicians looking to gain prominence in the global arena, regardless of whether or not they possess a real commitment to democratic principles. In 2012, Russia made a public push to cultivate open government and open data projects that was enthusiastically endorsed by American institutions. In a June 2012 blog post summarizing a Russian “Open Government Ecosystem” workshop at the World Bank, one World Bank consultant professed the opinion that open government innovations “are happening all over Russia, and are starting to have genuine support from the country’s top leaders.”
Given the Russian government’s penchant for corruption, cronyism, violations of press freedom and increasing restrictions on public access to information, the idea that it was ever committed to government accountability and transparency is dubious at best. This was confirmed by Russia’s May 2013 withdrawal of its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership. As explained by John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation:
While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions of reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.
Which just goes to show that, while a democratic government does not guarantee open government practices, a government that regularly violates democratic principles may be an impossible environment for implementing open government.
A cursory analysis of the ever-evolving international open data landscape reveals three major takeaways:
- Good intentions for government transparency in democratic countries are not always effectively realized.
- Politicians will gladly pay lip-service to the idea of open government without backing up words with actions.
- The transparency we’ve established can go away quickly without vigilant oversight and enforcement.”
A civic-social platform for a new kind of citizen duty
Dirk Jan van der Wal at OpenSource.com: “In the Netherlands a community of civil servants has developed an open source platform for collaboration within the public sector. What began as a team of four has grown to over 75,000 registered users. What happened? And, why was open source key to the project’s success?
Society is rapidly changing. One change is the tremendous development of Internet and Web-based tools. These tools have opened up new ways for collaboration and sharing information. This is a big change for our society and democracy, having an impact on our politics. How does government change along with it?
A need to change the way government organizations worked and civil servants interacted too could not be ignored. Take for example, politicians resigning because of one tweet! Meanwhile, government organizations continually face the challenge of doing more with less funds. I think this increased the need to cooperate and share knowledge; it was not longer feasible for smaller communities to maintain knowledge on their own.
The question became: How do we cooperate in an efficient manner?
In the Netherlands, we have over 500 different government organizations: departments, city councils, provinces, and so on. All these organizations have their own information and communications technology (ICT) environment. So, with a growing network and discussions around multiple themes, it became clear that one of the basic requirements for cooperating efficiently is having a government-wide platform for people to communicate and work from.
So, a small team of four started Pleio for Dutch civil servants and citizens to meet each other, have discussions, and work together on things that matter to them.
(Pleio translates loosely in English to “government square.”)
As in real life, citizens and government officials work together across various teams, groups, and networks to think about and do work on projects that matter. Using the Pleio online platform, citizens and government officials can find and then engage with the right people to collaborate on a project or problem…”
Three projects meet the European Job Challenge and receive the Social Innovation Prize
EU Press Release: “Social innovation can be a tool to create new or better jobs, while giving an answer to pressing challenges faced by Europe. Today, Michel Barnier, European Commissioner, has awarded three European Social Innovation prizes to ground-breaking ideas to create new types of work and address social needs. The winning projects aim to help disadvantaged women by employing them to create affordable and limited fashion collections, create jobs in the sector of urban farming, and convert abandoned social housing into learning spaces and entrepreneurship labs.
After the success of the first edition in 2013, the European Commission launched a second round of the Social Innovation Competition in memory of Diogo Vasconcelos1. Its main goal was to invite Europeans to propose new solutions to answer The Job Challenge. The Commission received 1,254 ideas out of which three were awarded with a prize of €30,000 each.
Commissioner Michel Barnier said: “We believe that the winning projects can take advantage of unmet social needs and create sustainable jobs. I want these projects to be scaled up and replicated and inspire more social innovations in Europe. We need to tap into this potential to bring innovative solutions to the needs of our citizens and create new types of work.”
More informationon the Competition page
More jobs for Europe – three outstanding ideas
The following new and exceptional ideas are the winners of the second edition of the European Social Innovation Competition:
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‘From waste to wow! QUID project’ (Italy): fashion business demands perfection, and slightly damaged textile cannot be used for top brands. The project intends to recycle this first quality waste into limited collections and thereby provide jobs to disadvantaged women. This is about creating highly marketable products and social value through recycling.
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‘Urban Farm Lease’ (Belgium): urban agriculture could provide 6,000 direct jobs in Brussels, and an additional 1,500 jobs considering indirect employment (distribution, waste management, training or events). The project aims at providing training, connection and consultancy so that unemployed people take advantage of the large surfaces available for agriculture in the city (e.g. 908 hectares of land or 394 hectares of suitable flat roofs).
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‘Voidstarter’ (Ireland): all major cities in Europe have “voids”, units of social housing which are empty because city councils have insufficient budgets to make them into viable homes. At the same time these cities also experience pressure with social housing provision and homelessness. Voidstarter will provide unemployed people with learning opportunities alongside skilled tradespersons in the refurbishing of the voids.”
CrowdOut: A mobile crowdsourcing service for road safety in digital cities
New paper by Aubry, Elian: “Nowadays cities invest more in their public services, and particularly digital ones, to improve their resident’s quality of life and attract more people. Thus, new crowdsourcing services appear and they are based on contributions made by mobile users equipped with smartphones. For example, the respect of the traffic code is essential to ensure citizens’ security and welfare in their city. In this paper, we present CrowdOut, a new mobile crowdsourcing service for improving road safety in cities. CrowdOut allows users to report traffic offence they witness in real time and to map them on a city plan. CrowdOut service has been implemented and experiments and demonstrations have been performed in the urban environment of the Grand Nancy, in France. This service allows users appropriating their urban environment with an active participation regarding the collectivity. This service also represents a tool for city administrators to help for decisions and improve their urbanization policy, or to check the impact of their policy in the city environment.”