How Big Data Harms Poor Communities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kaveh Waddell in the Atlantic: “Big data can help solve problems that are too big for one person to wrap their head around. It’s helped businesses cut costs, cities plan new developments, intelligence agencies discover connections between terrorists, health officials predict outbreaks, and police forces get ahead of crime. Decision-makers are increasingly told to “listen to the data,” and make choices informed by the outputs of complex algorithms.

But when the data is about humans—especially those who lack a strong voice—those algorithms can become oppressive rather than liberating. For many poor people in the U.S., the data that’s gathered about them at every turn can obstruct attempts to escape poverty.

Low-income communities are among the most surveilled communities in America. And it’s not just the police that are watching, says Michele Gilman, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former civil-rights attorney at the Department of Justice. Public-benefits programs, child-welfare systems, and monitoring programs for domestic-abuse offenders all gather large amounts of data on their users, who are disproportionately poor.
In certain places, in order to qualify for public benefits like food stamps, applicants have to undergo fingerprinting and drug testing. Once people start receiving the benefits, officials regularly monitor them to see how they spend the money, and sometimes check in on them in their homes.

Data gathered from those sources can end up feeding back into police systems, leading to a cycle of surveillance. “It becomes part of these big-data information flows that most people aren’t aware they’re captured in, but that can have really concrete impacts on opportunities,” Gilman says.

Once an arrest crops up on a person’s record, for example, it becomes much more difficult for that person to find a job, secure a loan, or rent a home. And that’s not necessarily because loan officers or hiring managers pass over applicants with arrest records—computer systems that whittle down tall stacks of resumes or loan applications will often weed some out based on run-ins with the police.

When big-data systems make predictions that cut people off from meaningful opportunities like these, they can violate the legal principle of presumed innocence, according to Ian Kerr, a professor and researcher of ethics, law, and technology at the University of Ottawa.

Outside the court system, “innocent until proven guilty” is upheld by people’s due-process rights, Kerr says: “A right to be heard, a right to participate in one’s hearing, a right to know what information is collected about me, and a right to challenge that information.” But when opaque data-driven decision-making takes over—what Kerr calls “algorithmic justice”—some of those rights begin to erode….(More)”

Technology for Transparency: Cases from Sub-Saharan Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Havard Political Review: “Over the last decade, Africa has experienced previously unseen levels of economic growth and market vibrancy. Developing countries can only achieve equitable growth and reduce poverty rates, however, if they are able to make the most of their available resources. To do this, they must maximize the impact of aid from donor governments and NGOs and ensure that domestic markets continue to diversify, add jobs, and generate tax revenues. Yet, in most developing countries, there is a dearth of information available about industry profits, government spending, and policy outcomes that prevents efficient action.

ONE, an international advocacy organization, has estimated that $68.6 billion was lost in sub-Saharan Africa in 2012 due to a lack of transparency in government budgeting….

The Importance of Technology

Increased visibility of problems exerts pressure on politicians and other public sector actors to adjust their actions. This process is known as social monitoring, and it relies on citizens or public agencies using digital tools, such as mobile phones, Facebook, and other social media sites to spot public problems. In sub-Saharan Africa, however, traditional media companies and governments have not shown consistency in reporting on transparency issues.

New technologies offer a solution to this problem. Philip Thigo, the creator of an online and SMS platform that monitors government spending, said in an interview with Technology for Transparency, “All we are trying to do is enhance the work that [governments] do. We thought that if we could create a clear channel where communities could actually access data, then the work of government would be easier.” Networked citizen media platforms that rely on the volunteer contributions of citizens have become increasingly popular. Given that in most African countries less than 10 percent of the population has Internet access, mobile-device-based programs have proven the logical solution. About 30 percent of the population continent-wide has access to cell phones.

Lova Rakotomalala, a co-founder of an NGO in Madagascar that promotes online exposure of social grassroots projects, told the HPR, “most Malagasies will have a mobile phone and an FM radio because it helps them in their daily lives.” Rakotomalala works to provide workshops and IT training to people in regions of Madagascar where Internet access has been recently introduced. According to him, “the amount of data that we can collect from social monitoring and transparency projects will only grow in the near future. There is much room for improvement.”

Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool

The Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool is a prominent example of how social media technology can help obviate traditional transparency issues. Despite increased development assistance and foreign aid, the number of Kenyans classified as poor grew from 29 percent in the 1970s to almost 60 percent in 2000. Noticing this trend, Philip Thigo created an online and SMS platform called the Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool. The platform specifically focuses on the Constituencies Development Fund, through which members of the Kenyan parliament are able to allocate resources towards various projects, such as physical infrastructure, government offices, or new schools.

This social monitoring technology has exposed real government abuses. …

Another mobile tool, Question Box, allows Ugandans to call or message operators who have access to a database full of information on health, agriculture, and education.

But tools like Medic Mobile and the Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool are only the first steps in solving the problems that plague corrupt governments and underdeveloped communities. Improved access to information is no substitute for good leadership. However, as Rakotomalala argued, it is an important stepping-stone. “While legally binding actions are the hammer to the nail, you need to put the proverbial nail in the right place first. That nail is transparency.”…(More)

States’ using iwaspoisoned.com for outbreak alerts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dan Flynn at Food Safety News: “The crowdsourcing site iwaspoisoned.com has collected thousands of reports of foodborne illnesses from individuals across the United States since 2009 and is expanding with a custom alert service for state health departments.

“There are now 26 states signed up, allowing government (health) officials and epidemiologists to receive real time, customized alerts for reported foodborne illness incidents,” said iwaspoisoned.com founder Patrick Quade.
Quade said he wanted to make iwaspoisoned.com data more accessible to health departments and experts in each state.

“This real time information provides a wider range of information data to help local agencies better manage food illness outbreaks,” he said. “It also supplements existing reporting channels and serves to corroborate their own reporting systems.”

The Florida Department of Health, Food and Waterborne Disease Program (FWDP) began receiving iwaspoisoned.com alerts beginning in December 2015.

“The FWDP has had an online complaint form for individuals to report food and waterborne illnesses,” a spokesman said. “However, the program has been looking for ways to expand their reach to ensure they are investigating all incidents. Partnering with iwaspoisoned.com was a logical choice for this expansion.”…

Quade established iwaspoisoned.com in New York City seven years ago to give people a place to report their experiences of being sickened by restaurant food. It gives such people a place to report the restaurants, locations, symptoms and other details and permits others to comment on the report….

The crowdsourcing site has played an increasing role in recent nationally known outbreaks, including those associated with Chipotle Mexican Grill in the last half of 2015. For example, CBS News in Los Angeles first reported on the Simi Valley, Calif., norovirus outbreak after noticing that about a dozen Chipotle customers had logged their illness reports on iwaspoisoned.com.

Eventually, health officials confirmed at least 234 norovirus illnesses associated with a Chipotle location in Simi Valley…(More)”

How the FDA aims to speed review of medical devices

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kathleen Hickey at GCN: “The Food and Drug Administration is piloting a new system to speed up the premarket review process for new medical devices.

One of the main bottlenecks in the medical device review process is finding the right expert reviewer. Currently the FDA relies on “the usual suspects” – a core group of reviewers from the FDA Office of Device Evaluation (ODE), according to a GovLab report on the pilot program. However, this pool of experts is limited and may not include those with knowledge of the specific technologies in new medical devices. Finding qualified reviewers outside this core group can take as long as nine months.

To combat the issue, the Department of Health and Human Services is creating a network database of experts — HHS Profiles — based on a customized version of theHarvard Profiles Research Networking Software, a National Institutes of Health-funded open source tool for finding researchers with specific areas of expertise.

Potential expert reviewers create profiles in the system describing their skills and experience. The software then imports and analyzes reviewer contact information, publications and other data sources to create and maintain a searchable library of electronic resumes of HHS experts. Representatives of the Office for Device Evaluation can then search the profiles to identify the most qualified individuals to participate in the regulatory review of a given medical device.

The pilot will compare the efficacy of picking expert reviewers from profiles versus the current methods, including determining whether matching individuals based on their published articles and academic degrees is the best method for finding the right reviewer; the time required for the panel to meet and review a device; and safety outcomes – e.g. product recalls and adverse event reports.

The FDA anticipates the new platform will increase the speed and effectiveness of the medical device regulatory review process and expand the pool of reviewers. Currently the premarket approval review process, done exclusively by internal staff, takes an average of 266 days. Reviewing unique devices takes an average of 18 months.

The pilot program is being conducted this year in partnership with GovLab and its MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance.  Funding is provided by the General Services Administration from its The Great Pitch investment contest….(More)”

Don’t know where to go when the volcano blows? Crowdsource it.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Frances Johnson in ThrivingEarthExchange: “In the shadow of a rumbling volcano, Quito, Ecuador solicits just-in-time advice from the world’s disaster experts…

Cotopaxi’s last large-scale eruption was in 1877, and the volcano’s level of activity suggests another one is inevitable. In addition to spewing lava, a major eruption would melt Cotopaxi’s glaciers and send a large flow of material barreling down the mountain, posing an immediate risk to people and potentially causing rivers to overflow their banks. Some 120,000 people living in the valley beneath the volcano would have a mere 12 minutes to escape the lava’s path, and more than 325,000 other area residents would have only slightly more time to evacuate. An eruption could also create significant long-term challenges across a broad area, including dangerous air quality and disruptions to infrastructure, food systems and water supplies.

As danger looms, a city gets coaching from the crowd

Aware that the city was underprepared for a significant eruption, The Governance Lab, a program of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, volunteered its time and expertise to help local officials accelerate preparation efforts. The GovLab, which helps governments and other institutions work collaboratively to solve problems, teamed up with Linq, the city’s innovation agency.

“We were very aware that this was a time-sensitive matter—we needed experts, and we needed them fast,” explained Dinorah Cantú-Pedraza, a human rights lawyer and Research Fellow at The GovLab who collaborated on the project. “So that’s why we decided to create online sessions focused on how innovations can solve specific problems facing the city.”…

GovLab’s “fail-fast, learn-by-doing” approach is crucial to its projects’ success in remaining responsive to the problems at hand. “That was a central element in how we worked with our partners and improved the approach as we went forward,” said Cantú-Pedraza.

To help translate the Cotopaxi crowdsourcing model for other circumstances, GovLab is working to build a network of innovators and experts that can be tapped on short notice to address problems as they emerge around the world. Although we can hope for the best in Quito and elsewhere, the reality is that we must plan for the worst…(More)

The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ben Shneiderman: “The problems we face in the 21st century require innovative thinking from all of us. Be it students, academics, business researchers of government policy makers. Hopes for improving our healthcare, food supply, community safety and environmental sustainability depend on the pervasive application of research solutions.

The research heroes who take on the immense problems of our time face bigger than ever challenges, but if they adopt potent guiding principles and effective research lifecycle strategies, they can produce the advances that will enhance the lives of many people. These inspirational research leaders will break free from traditional thinking, disciplinary boundaries, and narrow aspirations. They will be bold innovators and engaged collaborators, who are ready to lead, yet open to new ideas, self-confident, yet empathetic to others.

In this book, Ben Shneiderman recognizes the unbounded nature of human creativity, the multiplicative power of teamwork, and the catalytic effects of innovation. He reports on the growing number of initiatives to promote more integrated approaches to research so as to promote the expansion of these efforts. It is meant as a guide to students and junior researchers, as well as a manifesto for senior researchers and policy makers, challenging widely-held beliefs about how applied innovations evolve and how basic breakthroughs are made, and to help plotting the course towards tomorrow’s great advancements….(More)”

How Google Optimized Healthy Office Snacks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zoe Chance, Ravi Dhar, Michelle Hatzis and Michiel Bakker at Harvard Business Review: “Employers need simple, low-cost ways of helping employees make healthy choices. The effects of poor health and obesity cost U.S. companies $225 billion every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and this number is quickly rising. Although some employer-sponsored wellness programs have yielded high returns — Johnson & Johnson reported a 170% return on wellness spending in the 2000s — the employee wellness industry as a whole has struggled to prove its value.

 

Wellness initiatives often fail because they rely on outdated methods of engagement, placing too much emphasis on providing information. Extensive evidence from behavioral economics has shown that information rarely succeeds in changing behavior or building new habits for fitness and food choices. Telling people why and how to improve their health fails to elicit behavior changes because behavior often diverges from intentions. This is particularly true for food choices because our self-control is taxed by any type of depletion, including hunger. And the necessity of making food decisions many times a day means we can’t devote much processing power to each choice, so our eating behaviors tend to be habit- and instinct-driven. With a clearer understanding of the influences on choice — context and impulsivity, for instance — companies can design environments that reinforce employees’ healthy choices, limit potential lapses, and save on health care costs.

Jointly, the Google Food Team and the Yale Center for Customer Insights have been studying how behavioral economics can improve employee health choices. We’ve run multiple field experiments to understand how small “tweaks” can nudge behavior toward desirable outcomes and yield outsized benefits. To guide these interventions, we distilled scattered findings from behavioral science into a simple framework, the four Ps of behavior change:

  • Process
  • Persuasion
  • Possibilities
  • Person

The framework helped us structure a portfolio of strategies for making healthy choices easier and more enticing and making unhealthy choices harder and less tempting. Below, we present a brief example of each point of intervention….(More)”

How tech is forcing firms to be better global citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Catherine Lawson at the BBC: “…technology is forcing companies to up their game and interact with communities more directly and effectively….

Platforms such as Kritical Mass have certainly given a fillip to the idea of crowd-supported philanthropy, attracting individuals and corporate sponsors to its projects, whether that’s saving vultures in Kenya or bringing solar power to rural communities in west Africa.

Sponsors can offer funding, volunteers, expertise or marketing. So rather than imposing corporate ideas of “do-gooding” on communities in a patronising manner, firms can simply respond to demand.

HelpfulPeeps has pushed its volunteering platform into more than 40 countries worldwide, connecting people who want to share their time, knowledge and skills with each other for free.

In the UK, online platform Neighbourly connects community projects and charities with companies and people willing to volunteer their resources. For example, Starbucks has pledged 2,500 days of volunteering and has so far backed 70 community projects….

Judging by the strong public appetite for supporting good causes and campaigning against injustice on sites such as Change.org, Avaaz.org, JustGiving andGoFundMe, his assessment appears to be correct.

And LinkedIn says millions of members have signalled on their profiles that they want to serve on a non-profit board or use their skills to volunteer….

Tech companies in particular are offering expertise and skills to good causes as way of making a tangible difference.

For example, in January, Microsoft announced that through its new organisation,Microsoft Philanthropies, it will donate $1bn-worth (£700m) of cloud computing resources to serve non-profits and university researchers over the next three years…

And data analytics specialist Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) has offered its data-crunching skills to help the Capital Area Food Bank charity distribute food more efficiently to hungry people around the Washington DC area.

APT used data to develop a “hunger heat map” to help CAFB target resources and plan for future demand better.

In another project, APT helped The Cara Program – a Chicago-based charity providing training and job placements to people affected by homelessness or poverty – evaluate what made its students more employable….

And Launch, an open platform jointly founded by Nasa, Nike, the US Agency for International Development, and the US Department of State aims to provide support for start-ups and “inspire innovation”.

In the age of internet transparency, it seems corporates no longer have anywhere to hide – a spot of CSR whitewashing is not going to cut it anymore….(More)”.

HeroX enables breakthroughs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About HeroX, “The World’s Problem Solver Community”: “On October 21, 2004, Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne reached the edge of space, an altitude of 100km, becoming the first privately built spacecraft to perform this feat, twice within two weeks.

In so doing, they won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE, ushering in a new era of commercial space exploration and applications.

It was the inaugural incentive prize competition of the XPRIZE Foundation, which has gone on to create an incredible array of incentive prizes to solve the world’s Grand Challenges — ocean health, literacy, space exploration, among many others.

In 2011, City Light Capital partnered with XPRIZE to envision a platform that would make the power of incentive challenges available to anyone. The result was the spin-off of HeroX in 2013.

HeroX was co-founded in 2013 by XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, challenge designer Emily Fowler and entrepreneur Christian Cotichini as a means to democratize the innovation model of XPRIZE.

HeroX exists to enable anyone, anywhere in the world, to create a challenge that addresses any problem or opportunity, build a community around that challenge and activate the circumstances that can lead to a breakthrough innovation.

This innovation model has existed for centuries.

The Ansari XPRIZE was inspired by the 1927 Orteig Prize, in which Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. The $25,000 prize had been offered by hotelier Raymond Orteig to spur tourism. Lindbergh’s flight lead to a boom in air travel the world over.

A similar challenge had launched 200 years earlier with the 1716 Longitude Prize, which sought a technology to more accurately measure longitude at sea. Nearly 60 years later, a British clockmaker named John Harrison invented the chronometer, which spurred Trans-Atlantic migration on a massive scale.

In 1795, Napoleon offered a 12,000 franc prize for a better method of preserving food, which was often spoiled by the time it reached the front lines of his armies. The breakthrough innovation to Napoleon’s prize led to the creation of the canning industry.

HeroX incentive prize challenges are designed to do the same — to harness the collective mind power of a community to innovate upon any problem or opportunity. Anyone can change the world. HeroX can help.

The only question is, “What do you want to solve?”… (More)

The Problem With Evidence-Based Policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ricardo Hausmann at Project Syndicate: “Many organizations, from government agencies to philanthropic institutions and aid organizations, now require that programs and policies be “evidence-based.” It makes sense to demand that policies be based on evidence and that such evidence be as good as possible, within reasonable time and budgetary limits. But the way this approach is being implemented may be doing a lot of harm, impairing our ability to learn and improve on what we do.

The current so-called “gold standard” of what constitutes good evidence is the randomized control trial, or RCT, an idea that started in medicine two centuries ago, moved to agriculture, and became the rage in economics during the past two decades. Its popularity is based on the fact that it addresses key problems in statistical inference.

For example, rich people wear fancy clothes. Would distributing fancy clothes to poor people make them rich? This is a case where correlation (between clothes and wealth) does not imply causation.

Harvard graduates get great jobs. Is Harvard good at teaching – or just at selecting smart people who would have done well in life anyway? This is the problem of selection bias.

RCTs address these problems by randomly assigning those participating in the trial to receive either a “treatment” or a “placebo” (thereby creating a “control” group). By observing how the two groups differ after the intervention, the effectiveness of the treatment can be assessed. RCTs have been conducted on drugs, micro-loans, training programs, educational tools, and myriad other interventions….

In economics, RCTs have been all the rage, especially in the field of international development, despite critiques by the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, Lant Pritchett, and Dani Rodrik, who have attacked the inflated claims of RCT’s proponents. One serious shortcoming is external validity. Lessons travel poorly: If an RCT finds out that giving micronutrients to children in Guatemala improves their learning, should you give micronutrients to Norwegian children?

My main problem with RCTs is that they make us think about interventions, policies, and organizations in the wrong way. As opposed to the two or three designs that get tested slowly by RCTs (like putting tablets or flipcharts in schools), most social interventions have millions of design possibilities and outcomes depend on complex combinations between them. This leads to what the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman calls a “rugged fitness landscape.”

Getting the right combination of parameters is critical. This requires that organizations implement evolutionary strategies that are based on trying things out and learning quickly about performance through rapid feedback loops, as suggested by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock at Harvard’s Center for International Development.

RCTs may be appropriate for clinical drug trials. But for a remarkably broad array of policy areas, the RCT movement has had an impact equivalent to putting auditors in charge of the R&D department. That is the wrong way to design things that work. Only by creating organizations that learn how to learn, as so-called lean manufacturing has done for industry, can we accelerate progress….(More)”