Teenage scientists enlisted to fight Zika

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ShareAmerica: “A mosquito’s a mosquito, right? Not when it comes to Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Only two of the estimated 3,000 species of mosquitoes are capable of carrying the Zika virus in the United States, but estimates of their precise range remain hazy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists could start getting better information about these pesky, but important, insects with the help of plastic cups, brown paper towels and teenage biology students.

As part of the Invasive Mosquito Project from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, secondary-school students nationwide are learning about mosquito populations and helping fill the knowledge gaps.

Simple experiment, complex problem

The experiment works like this: First, students line the cups with paper, then fill two-thirds of the cups with water. Students place the plastic cups outside, and after a week, the paper is dotted with what looks like specks of dirt. These dirt particles are actually mosquito eggs, which the students can identify and classify.

Students then upload their findings to a national crowdsourced database. Crowdsourcing uses the collective intelligence of online communities to “distribute” problem solving across a massive network.

Entomologist Lee Cohnstaedt of the U.S. Department of Agriculture coordinates the program, and he’s already thinking about expansion. He said he hopes to have one-fifth of U.S. schools participate in the mosquito species census. He also plans to adapt lesson plans for middle schools, Scouting troops and gardening clubs.

Already, crowdsourcing has “collected better data than we could have working alone,” he told the Associated Press….

In addition to mosquito tracking, crowdsourcing has been used to develop innovative responses to a number of complex challenges, from climate change to archaeologyto protein modeling….(More)”

Big data: big power shifts?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue of Internet Policy Review: “Facing general conceptions of the power effects of big data, this thematic edition is interested in studies that scrutinise big data and power in concrete fields of application. It brings together scholars from different disciplines who analyse the fields agriculture, education, border control and consumer policy. As will be made explicit in the following, each of the articles tells us something about firstly, what big data is and how it relates to power. They secondly also shed light on how we should shape “the big data society” and what research questions need to be answered to be able to do so….

The ethics of big data in big agriculture
Isabelle M. Carbonell, University of California, Santa Cruz

Regulating “big data education” in Europe: lessons learned from the US
Yoni Har Carmel, University of Haifa

The borders, they are a-changin’! The emergence of socio-digital borders in the EU
Magdalena König, Maastricht University

Beyond consent: improving data protection through consumer protection law
Michiel Rhoen, Leiden University…

(More)”

Health care data as a public utility: how do we get there?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mohit Kaushal and Margaret Darling at Brookings: “Forty-six million Americans use mobile fitness and health apps. Over half of providers serving Medicare or Medicaid patients are using electronic health records (EHRs). Despite such advances and proliferation of health data and its collection, we are not yet on an inevitable path to unleashing the often-promised “power of data” because data remain proprietary and fragmented among insurers, providers, health record companies, government agencies, and researchers.

Despite the technological integration seen in banking and other industries, health care data has remained scattered and inaccessible. EHRs remain fragmented among 861 distinct ambulatory vendors and 277 inpatient vendors as of 2013. Similarly, insurance claims are stored in the databases of insurers, and information about public health—including information about the social determinants of health, such as housing, food security, safety, and education—is often kept in databases belonging to various governmental agencies. These silos wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except for the lack of interoperability that has long plagued the health care industry.

For this reason, many are reconsidering if health care data is a public good, provided to all members of the public without profit. This idea is not new. In fact, the Institute of Medicine established the Roundtable on Value and Science-Driven Healthcare, citing that:

“A significant challenge to progress resides in the barriers and restrictions that derive from the treatment of medical care data as a proprietary commodity by the organizations involved. Even clinical research and medical care data developed with public funds are often not available for broader analysis and insights. Broader access and use of healthcare data for new insights require not only fostering data system reliability and interoperability but also addressing the matter of individual data ownership and the extent to which data central to progress in health and health care should constitute a public good.”

Indeed, publicly available health care data holds the potential to unlock many innovations, much like what public goods have done in other industries. As publicly available weather data has shown, the public utility of open access information is not only good for consumers, itis good for businesses…(More)”

BeMyEye: Crowdsourcing is making it easier to gather data fast

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jack Torrance at Management Today: “The era of big data is upon us. Dozens of well-funded start-ups have sprung up of late claiming to be able to turn raw data into ‘actionable insights’ that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. But the process of actually collecting data is still not always straightforward….

London-based start-up BeMyEye (not to be confused with Be My Eyes, an iPhone app that claims to ‘help the blind see’) has built an army of casual data gatherers that report back via their phones. ‘For companies that sell their product to high street retailers or supermarkets, being able to verify the presence of their product, the adequacy of the promotions, the positioning in relation to competitors, this is all invaluable intelligence,’ CEO Luca Pagano tells MT. ‘Our crowd is able to observe and feed this information back to these brands very, very quickly.’…

They can do more than check prices in shops. Some of its clients (which include Heineken, Illy and Three) have used the service to check billboards they are paying for have actually been put up correctly. ‘We realised the level of [billboard] compliance is actually below 90%,’ says Pagano. It can also be used to generate sales leads….

BeMyEyes isn’t the only company that’s exploring this business model. San Francisco company Premise is using a similar network of data gatherers to monitor food prices and other metrics in developing countries for NGOs and governments as well as commercial organisations. It’s not hard to see why they would be an attractive proposition for clients, but the challenge for both of these businesses will be ensuring they can find enough reliable and effective data gatherers to keep the information flowing in at a high enough quality….(More)”

Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst at The GovLab: “Next Monday, May 23rd, governments, non-profit organizations and citizen groups will gather in Istanbul at the first World Humanitarian Summit. A range of important issues will be on the agenda, not least of which the refugee crisis confronting the Middle East and Europe. Also on the agenda will be an issue of growing importance and relevance, even if it does not generate front-page headlines: the increasing potential (and use) of data in the humanitarian context.

To explore this topic, a new paper, “Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action,” is being released today, and will be presented tomorrow at the Understanding Risk Forum. This paper is the result of a collaboration between the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), The GovLab (NYU Tandon School of Engineering), the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and Leiden UniversityCentre for Innovation. It seeks to identify the potential benefits and risks of using data in the humanitarian context, and begins to outline an initial framework for the responsible use of data in humanitarian settings.

Both anecdotal and more rigorously researched evidence points to the growing use of data to address a variety of humanitarian crises. The paper discusses a number of data risk case studies, including the use of call data to fight Malaria in Africa; satellite imagery to identify security threats on the border between Sudan and South Sudan; and transaction data to increase the efficiency of food delivery in Lebanon. These early examples (along with a few others discussed in the paper) have begun to show the opportunities offered by data and information. More importantly, they also help us better understand the risks, including and especially those posed to privacy and security.

One of the broader goals of the paper is to integrate the specific and the theoretical, in the process building a bridge between the deep, contextual knowledge offered by initiatives like those discussed above and the broader needs of the humanitarian community. To that end, the paper builds on its discussion of case studies to begin establishing a framework for the responsible use of data in humanitarian contexts. It identifies four “Minimum Humanitarian standards for the Responsible use of Data” and four “Characteristics of Humanitarian Organizations that use Data Responsibly.” Together, these eight attributes can serve as a roadmap or blueprint for humanitarian groups seeking to use data. In addition, the paper also provides a four-step practical guide for a data responsibility framework (see also earlier blog)….(More)” Full Paper: Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action

Society’s biggest problems need more than a nudge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation: “So-called “nudge units” are popping up in governments all around the world.

The best-known examples include the U.K.’s Behavioural Insights Team, created in 2010, and the White House-based Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, introduced by the Obama administration in 2014. Their mission is to leverage findings from behavioral science so that people’s decisions can be nudged in the direction of their best intentions without curtailing their ability to make choices that don’t align with their priorities.

Overall, these – and other – governments have made important strides when it comes to using behavioral science to nudge their constituents into better choices.

Yet, the same governments have done little to improve their own decision-making processes. Consider big missteps like the Flint water crisis. How could officials in Michigan decide to place an essential service – safe water – and almost 100,000 people at risk in order to save US$100 per day for three months? No defensible decision-making process should have allowed this call to be made.

When it comes to many of the big decisions faced by governments – and the private sector – behavioral science has more to offer than simple nudges.

Behavioral scientists who study decision-making processes could also help policy-makers understand why things went wrong in Flint, and how to get their arms around a wide array of society’s biggest problems – from energy transitions to how to best approach the refugee crisis in Syria.

When nudges are enough

The idea of nudging people in the direction of decisions that are in their own best interest has been around for a while. But it was popularized in 2008 with the publication of the bestseller “Nudge“ by Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein of Harvard.

A common nudge goes something like this: if we want to eat better but are having a hard time doing it, choice architects can reengineer the environment in which we make our food choices so that healthier options are intuitively easier to select, without making it unrealistically difficult to eat junk food if that’s what we’d rather do. So, for example, we can shelve healthy foods at eye level in supermarkets, with less-healthy options relegated to the shelves nearer to the floor….

Sometimes a nudge isn’t enough

Nudges work for a wide array of choices, from ones we face every day to those that we face infrequently. Likewise, nudges are particularly well-suited to decisions that are complex with lots of different alternatives to choose from. And, they are advocated in situations where the outcomes of our decisions are delayed far enough into the future that they feel uncertain or abstract. This describes many of the big decisions policy-makers face, so it makes sense to think the solution must be more nudge units.

But herein lies the rub. For every context where a nudge seems like a realistic option, there’s at least another context where the application of passive decision support would be either be impossible – or, worse, a mistake.

Take, for example, the question of energy transitions. These transitions are often characterized by the move from infrastructure based on fossil fuels to renewables to address all manner of risks, including those from climate change. These are decisions that society makes infrequently. They are complex. And, the outcomes – which are based on our ability to meet conflicting economic, social and environmental objectives – will be delayed.

But, absent regulation that would place severe restrictions on the kinds of options we could choose from – and which, incidentally, would violate the freedom-of-choice tenet of choice architecture – there’s no way to put renewable infrastructure options at proverbial eye level for state or federal decision-makers, or their stakeholders.

Simply put, a nudge for a decision like this would be impossible. In these cases, decisions have to be made the old-fashioned way: with a heavy lift instead of a nudge.

Complex policy decisions like this require what we call active decision support….(More)”

Fifty Shades of Open

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek at First Monday: “Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. Until quite recently, the word “open” had a fairly constant meaning. The over-use of the word “open” has led to its meaning becoming increasingly ambiguous. This presents a critical problem for this important word, as ambiguity leads to misinterpretation.

“Open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. When we started writing this essay, we thought our working title was simply amusing. But the working title became the actual title, as we found that there are at least 50 different terms in which the word “open” is used, encompassing nearly as many different criteria for openness. In this essay we will attempt to make sense of this open season on the word “open.”

Opening the door on open

The word “open” is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a very old one in the English language, harking back to Early Old English. Unlike some words in English, the definition of “open” has changed very little in the intervening thousand-plus years: the earliest recorded uses of the word are completely consistent with its modern usage as an adjective, indicating a passage through or an access into something (Oxford English Dictionary, 2016).

This meaning leads to the development in the fifteenth century of the phrases “open house,” meaning an establishment in which all are welcome, and “open air,” meaning unenclosed outdoor spaces. One such unenclosed outdoor space that figured large in the fifteenth century, and continues to do so today, is the Commons (Hardin, 1968): land or other resources that are not privately owned, but are available for use to all members of a community. The word “open” in these phrases indicates that all have access to a shared resource. All are welcome to visit an open house, but not to move in; all are welcome to walk in the open air or graze their sheep on the Commons, but not to fence the Commons as part of their backyard. (And the moment at which Commons land ceases to be open is precisely the moment it is fenced by an owner, which is in fact what happened in Great Britain during the Enclosure movement of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.)

Running against the grain of this cultural movement to enclosure, the nineteenth century saw the circulating library become the norm — rather than libraries in which massive tomes were literally chained to desks. The interpretation of the word “open” to mean a shared resource to which all had access, fit neatly into the philosophy of the modern library movement of the nineteenth century. The phrases “open shelves” and “open stacks” emerged at this time, referring to resources that were directly available to library users, without necessarily requiring intervention by a librarian. Naturally, however, not all library resources were made openly available, nor are they even today. Furthermore, resources are made openly available with the understanding that, like Commons land, they must be shared: library resources have a due date.

The twentieth century saw an increase in the use of the word “open,” as well as a hint of the confusion that was to come about the interpretation of the word. The term “open society” was coined prior to World War I, to indicate a society tolerant of religious diversity. The “open skies” policy enables a nation to allow other nations’ commercial aviation to fly through its airspace — though, importantly, without giving up control of its airspace. The Open University was founded in the United Kingdom in 1969, to provide a university education to all, with no formal entry requirements. The meaning of the word “open” is quite different across these three terms — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these terms use different shadings of the word.

But it has been the twenty-first century that has seen the most dramatic increase in the number of terms that use “open.” The story of this explosion in the use of the word “open” begins, however, with a different word entirely: the word “free.”….

Introduction
Opening the door on open
Speech, beer, and puppies
Open means rights
Open means access
Open means use
Open means transparent
Open means participatory
Open means enabling openness
Open means philosophically aligned with open principles
Openwashing and its discontents
Conclusion“

Is behavioural economics ready to save the world?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by Trenton G Smith of Behavioral Economics and Public Health : “Modern medicine has long doled out helpful advice to ailing patients about not only drug treatments, but also diet, exercise, alcohol abuse, and many other lifestyle decisions. And for just as long, patients have been failing to follow doctors’ orders. Many of today’s most pressing public health problems would disappear if people would just make better choices.

Enter behavioural economics. A fairly recent offshoot of the dismal science, behavioural economics aims to take the coldly rational decision makers who normally populate economic theories, and instil in them a host of human foibles. Neoclassical (ie, conventional) economics, after all is the study of optimising behaviour in the presence of material constraints—why not add constraints on cognitive capacity, or self-control, or susceptibility to the formation of bad habits? The hope is that by incorporating insights from other behavioural sciences (most notably cognitive psychology and neuroscience) while retaining the methodological rigour of neoclassical economics, behavioural economics will yield a more richly descriptive theory of human behaviour, and generate new and important insights to better inform public policy.

Policy makers have taken notice. In an era in which free-market rhetoric dominates the political landscape, the idea that small changes to public health policies might serve to nudge consumers towards healthier behaviours holds great appeal. Even though some (irrational) consumers might be better off, the argument goes, if certain unhealthy food products were banned (or worse, taxed), this approach would infringe on the rights of the many consumers who want to indulge occasionally, and fully understand the consequences. If governments could instead use evidence from consumer science to make food labels more effective, or to improve the way that healthy foods are presented in school cafeterias, more politically unpalatable interventions in the marketplace might not be needed. This idea, dubbed “libertarian paternalism” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, has been pursued with gusto in both the UK (David Cameron’s Government formed the Behavioural Insights Team—unofficially described as the Nudge Unit) and the USA (where Sunstein spent time in the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs).

Whatever public health practitioners might think about these developments—or indeed, of economics as a discipline—this turn of events has rather suddenly given scholars at the cutting edge of consumer science an influential voice in the regulatory process, and some of the best and brightest have stepped up to contribute. Behavioral Economics & Public Health (edited by Christina Roberto and Ichiro Kawachi) is the product of a 2014 Harvard University exploratory workshop on applying social science insights to public health. As might be expected in a volume that aims to bring together two such inherently multidisciplinary fields, the book’s 11 chapters offer an eclectic mix of perspectives. The editors begin with an excellent overview of the field of behavioural economics and its applications to public health, and an economic perspective can also be found in four of the other chapters: Justin White and William Dow write about intertemporal choice, Kristina Lewis and Jason Block review the use of incentives to promote health, Michael Sanders and Michael Hallsworth describe their experience working within the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, and Frederick Zimmerman concludes with a thoughtful critique of the field of behavioural economics. The other contributions are largely from the perspectives of psychology and marketing: Dennis Runger and Wendy Wood discuss habit formation, Rebecca Ferrer and colleagues emphasise the importance of emotion in decision making, Brent McFerran discusses social norms in the context of obesity, Jason Riis and Rebecca Ratner explain why some public health communication strategies are more effective than others, and Zoe Chance and colleagues and Brian Wansink offer frameworks for designing environments (eg, in schools and workplaces) that are conducive to healthy choices.

This collection of essays holds many hidden gems, but the one that surprised me the most was the attention given (by Runger and Wood briefly, and Zimmerman extensively) to a dirty little secret that behavioural economists rarely mention: once it is acknowledged that sometimes-irrational consumers can be manipulated into making healthy choices, it does not require much of a leap to conclude that business interests can—and do—use the same methods to push back in the other direction. This conclusion leads Zimmerman to a discussion of power in the marketplace and in our collective political economy, and to a call to action on these larger structural issues in society that neoclassical theory has long neglected….(More; Book)

Army looks to outsmart soldiers’ bad habits

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Army Times: “You wouldn’t think that moving the salad bar to the front of the chow hall and moving the dessert bar back 10 feet would make the Army healthier. But at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that bumped up salad sales about 24 percent and dessert sales down 10 percent, a nudge toward goals of soldiers eating, exercising and sleeping healthier.

That’s just an example of the kind of change Army Medical Command hopes to inspire and successes it hopes to share across installations through its first annual Health of the Force report.

“I’m pretty proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish with this inaugural report,” said Col. Deydre Teyhen during a recent roundtable at Defense Health Agency headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia.  “I think we can’t get to a better state of health unless we inform people of what’s working out there in the field.”

The Army hopes to reduce the figure of 17 percent of soldiers not medically deployable within 72 hours. …The overarching philosophy of these recent MEDCOM efforts is to improve overall health rather than play whack-a-mole with problems as they arise. Teyhen pointed out that the average soldier is a patient at a health care facility for about 100 minutes per year, and the trick is to influence soldier health choices over the other 525,500 minutes, extending influence outside of brick-and-mortar health facilities.It dovetails with the Army’s Performance Triad, the plan to improve readiness through sleep, nutrition and exercise….(More)”

A New Dark Age Looms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

William B. Gail in the New York Times: “Imagine a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.

To comprehend how this could occur, picture yourself in our grandchildren’s time, a century hence. Significant global warming has occurred, as scientists predicted. Nature’s longstanding, repeatable patterns — relied on for millenniums by humanity to plan everything from infrastructure to agriculture — are no longer so reliable. Cycles that have been largely unwavering during modern human history are disrupted by substantial changes in temperature and precipitation….

Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors.

But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.

The list of possible disruptions is long and alarming. We could see changes to the prevalence of crop and human pests, like locust plagues set off by drought conditions; forest fire frequency; the dynamics of the predator-prey food chain; the identification and productivity of reliably arable land, and the predictability of agriculture output.

Historians of the next century will grasp the importance of this decline in our ability to predict the future. They may mark the coming decades of this century as the period during which humanity, despite rapid technological and scientific advances, achieved “peak knowledge” about the planet it occupies. They will note that many decades may pass before society again attains the same level.

One exception to this pattern-based knowledge is the weather, whose underlying physics governs how the atmosphere moves and adjusts. Because we understand the physics, we can replicate the atmosphere with computer models. Monitoring by weather stations and satellites provides the starting point for the models, which compute a forecast for how the weather will evolve. Today, forecast accuracy based on such models is generally good out to a week, sometimes even two.

But farmers need to think a season or more ahead. So do infrastructure planners as they design new energy and water systems. It may be feasible to develop the science and make the observations necessary to forecast weather a month or even a season in advance. We are also coming to understand enough of the physics to make useful global and regional climate projections a decade or more ahead.

The intermediate time period is our big challenge. Without substantial scientific breakthroughs, we will remain reliant on pattern-based methods for time periods between a month and a decade. … Our best knowledge is built on what we have seen in the past, like how fish populations respond to El Niño’s cycle. Climate change will further undermine our already limited ability to make these predictions. Anticipating ocean resources from one year to the next will become harder.

Civilization’s understanding of Earth has expanded enormously in recent decades, making humanity safer and more prosperous. As the patterns that we have come to expect are disrupted by warming temperatures, we will face huge challenges feeding a growing population and prospering within our planet’s finite resources. New developments in science offer our best hope for keeping up, but this is by no means guaranteed….(More)”