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)”

Data Collaboratives: Matching Demand with Supply of (Corporate) Data to solve Public Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Stefaan G. Verhulst, IrynaSusha and Alexander Kostura: “Data Collaboratives refer to a new form of collaboration, beyond the public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors (private companies, research institutions, and government agencies) share data to help solve public problems. Several of society’s greatest challenges — from climate change to poverty — require greater access to big (but not always open) data sets, more cross-sector collaboration, and increased capacity for data analysis. Participants at the workshop and breakout session explored the various ways in which data collaborative can help meet these needs.

Matching supply and demand of data emerged as one of the most important and overarching issues facing the big and open data communities. Participants agreed that more experimentation is needed so that new, innovative and more successful models of data sharing can be identified.

How to discover and enable such models? When asked how the international community might foster greater experimentation, participants indicated the need to develop the following:

· A responsible data framework that serves to build trust in sharing data would be based upon existing frameworks but also accommodates emerging technologies and practices. It would also need to be sensitive to public opinion and perception.

· Increased insight into different business models that may facilitate the sharing of data. As experimentation continues, the data community should map emerging practices and models of sharing so that successful cases can be replicated.

· Capacity to tap into the potential value of data. On the demand side,capacity refers to the ability to pose good questions, understand current data limitations, and seek new data sets responsibly. On the supply side, this means seeking shared value in collaboration, thinking creatively about public use of private data, and establishing norms of responsibility around security, privacy, and anonymity.

· Transparent stock of available data supply, including an inventory of what corporate data exist that can match multiple demands and that is shared through established networks and new collaborative institutional structures.

· Mapping emerging practices and models of sharing. Corporate data offers value not only for humanitarian action (which was a particular focus at the conference) but also for a variety of other domains, including science,agriculture, health care, urban development, environment, media and arts,and others. Gaining insight in the practices that emerge across sectors could broaden the spectrum of what is feasible and how.

In general, it was felt that understanding the business models underlying data collaboratives is of utmost importance in order to achieve win-win outcomes for both private and public sector players. Moreover, issues of public perception and trust were raised as important concerns of government organizations participating in data collaboratives….(More)”

Big data’s big role in humanitarian aid

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary K. Pratt at Computerworld: “Hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed into Europe in 2015 from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. Some estimates put the number at nearly a million.

The sheer volume of people overwhelmed European officials, who not only had to handle the volatile politics stemming from the crisis, but also had to find food, shelter and other necessities for the migrants.

Sweden, like many of its European Union counterparts, was taking in refugees. The Swedish Migration Board, which usually sees 2,500 asylum seekers in an average month, was accepting 10,000 per week.

“As you can imagine, with that number, it requires a lot of buses, food, registration capabilities to start processing all the cases and to accommodate all of those people,” says Andres Delgado, head of operational control, coordination and analysis at the Swedish Migration Board.

Despite the dramatic spike in refugees coming into the country, the migration agency managed the intake — hiring extra staff, starting the process of procuring housing early, getting supplies ready. Delgado credits a good part of that success to his agency’s use of big data and analytics that let him predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what was heading his way.

“Without having that capability, or looking at the tool every day, to assess every need, this would have crushed us. We wouldn’t have survived this,” Delgado says. “It would have been chaos, actually — nothing short of that.”

The Swedish Migration Board has been using big data and analytics for several years, as it seeks to gain visibility into immigration trends and what those trends will mean for the country…./…

“Can big data give us peace? I think the short answer is we’re starting to explore that. We’re at the very early stages, where there are shining examples of little things here and there. But we’re on that road,” says Kalev H. Leetaru, creator of the GDELT Project, or the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone, which describes itself as a comprehensive “database of human society.”

The topic is gaining traction. A 2013 report, “New Technology and the Prevention of Violence and Conflict,” from the International Peace Institute, highlights uses of telecommunications technology, including data, in several crisis situations around the world. The report emphasizes the potential these technologies hold in helping to ease tensions and address problems.

The report’s conclusion offers this idea: “Big data can be used to identify patterns and signatures associated with conflict — and those associated with peace — presenting huge opportunities for better-informed efforts to prevent violence and conflict.”

That’s welcome news to Noel Dickover. He’s the director of PeaceTech Data Networks at the PeaceTech Lab, which was created by the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) to advance USIP’s work on how technology, media and data help reduce violent conflict around the world.

Such work is still in the nascent stages, Dickover says, but people are excited about its potential. “We have unprecedented amounts of data on human sentiment, and we know there’s value there,” he says. “The question is how to connect it.”

Dickover is working on ways to do just that. One example is the Open Situation Room Exchange (OSRx) project, which aims to “empower greater collective impact in preventing or mitigating serious violent conflicts in particular arenas through collaboration and data-sharing.”…(More)