environment

Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners

Curated on October 8, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ellie Violet Bramley at The Guardian: “We’ve all been there. You want a short cut – to the bus stop, office or corner shop – but there’s no designated path. Others before you have already flattened the grass, or cut a line through a hedge. Why not, you think.

So goes the logic of “desire paths” – described by Robert Macfarlane as “paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning”; he calls them “free-will ways”. The New Yorker offers other names: “cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails)”. JM Barrie described the m as “Paths that have Made Themselves”….

Desire paths have been described as illustrating “the tension between the native and the built environment and our relationship to them”. Because they often form in areas where there are no pavements, they can be seen to “indicate [the] yearning” of those wishing to walk, a way for “city dwellers to ‘write back’ to city planners, giving feedback with their feet”.

But as well as revealing the path of least resistance, they can also reveal where people refuse to tread. If you’ve been walking the same route for years, an itchy-footed urge to go off-piste, even just a few metres, is probably something you’ll identify with. It’s this idea that led one academic journal to describe them as a record of “civil disobedience”.

Rather than dismiss or even chastise the naughty pedestrian by placing fences or railings to block off “illicit” wanderings, some planners work to incorporate them into urban environments. This chimes with the thinking of Jane Jacobs, an advocate of configuring cities around desire lines, who said: “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them … that we must fit our plans.”…(More)”.

Privacy and Interoperability Challenges Could Limit the Benefits of Education Technology

Curated on October 2, 2018October 5, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Katharina Ley Best and John F. Pane: “The expansion of education technology is transforming the learning environment in classrooms, schools, school systems, online, and at home. The rise of education technology brings with it an increased opportunity for the collection and application of data, which are valuable resources for educators, schools, policymakers, researchers, and software developers.

RAND researchers examine some of the possible implications of growing data collection and availability related to education technology. Specifically, this Perspective discusses potential data infrastructure challenges that could limit data usefulness, consider data privacy implications in an education technology context, and review privacy principles that could help educators and policymakers evaluate the changing education data privacy landscape in anticipation of potential future changes to regulations and best practices….(More)”.

What Can Satellite Imagery Tell Us About Obesity in Cities?

Curated on October 1, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emily Matchar at Smithsonian: “About 40 percent of American adults are obese, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) over 30. But obesity is not evenly distributed around the country. Some cities and states have far more obese residents than others. Why? Genetics, stress, income levels and access to healthy foods are play a role. But increasingly researchers are looking at the built environment—our cities—to understand why people are fatter in some places than in others.

New research from the University of Washington attempts to take this approach one step further by using satellite data to examine cityscapes. By using the satellite images in conjunction with obesity data, they hope to uncover which urban features might influence a city’s obesity rate.

The researchers used a deep learning network to analyze about 150,000 high-resolution satellite image of four cities: Los Angeles, Memphis, San Antonio and Seattle. The cities were selected for being from states with both high obesity rates (Texas and Tennessee) and low obesity rates (California and Washington). The network extracted features of the built environment: crosswalks, parks, gyms, bus stops, fast food restaurants—anything that might be relevant to health.

“If there’s no sidewalk you’re less likely to go out walking,” says Elaine Nsoesie, a professor of global health at the University of Washington who led the research.

The team’s algorithm could then see what features were more or less common in areas with greater and lesser rates of obesity. Some findings were predictable: more parks, gyms and green spaces were correlated with lower obesity rates. Others were surprising: more pet stores equaled thinner residents (“a high density of pet stores could indicate high pet ownership, which could influence how often people go to parks and take walks around the neighborhood,” the team hypothesized).

A paper on the results was recently published in the journal JAMA Network Open….(More)”.

The New York City Business Atlas: Leveling the Playing Field for Small Businesses with Open Data

Curated on September 25, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young in Smarter New York City:How City Agencies Innovate. Edited by André Corrêa d’Almeida: “While retail entrepreneurs, particularly those operating in the small-business space, are experts in their respective trades, they often lack access to high-quality information about social, environmental, and economic conditions in the neighborhoods where they operate or are considering operating.

The New York City Business Atlas, conceived by the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA) and the Department of Small Business Services, is designed to alleviate that information gap by providing a public web-based tool that gives small businesses access to high-quality data to help them decide where to establish a new business or expand an existing one. e tool brings together a diversity of data, including business-fling data from the Department of Consumer Affairs, sales-tax data from the Department of Finance, demographic data from the census, and traffic data from Placemeter, a New York City startup focusing on real-time traffic information.

The initial iteration of the Business Atlas made useful and previously inaccessible data available to small-business owners and entrepreneurs in an innovative manner. After a few years, however, it became clear that the tool was not experiencing the level of use or creating the level of demonstrable impact anticipated. Rather than continuing down the same path or abandoning the effort entirely, MODA pivoted to a new approach, moving from the Business Atlas as a single information-providing tool to the Business Atlas as a suite of capabilities aimed at bolstering New York’s small-business community.

Through problem- and user-centered efforts, the Business Atlas is now making important insights available to stakeholders who can put it to meaningful use—from how long it takes to open a restaurant in the city to which areas are most in need of education and outreach to improve their code compliance. This chapter considers the open data environment from which the Business Atlas was launched, details the initial version of the Business Atlas and the lessons it generated and describes the pivot to this new approach….(More)”.

United Nations accidentally exposed passwords and sensitive information to the whole internet

Curated on September 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Micah Lee at The Intercept: “The United Nations accidentally published passwords, internal documents, and technical details about websites when it misconfigured popular project management service Trello, issue tracking app Jira, and office suite Google Docs.

The mistakes made sensitive material available online to anyone with the proper link, rather than only to specific users who should have access. Affected data included credentials for a U.N. file server, the video conferencing system at the U.N.’s language school, and a web development environment for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Security researcher Kushagra Pathak discovered the accidental leak and notified the U.N. about what he found a little over a month ago. As of today, much of the material appears to have been taken down.

In an online chat, Pathak said he found the sensitive information by running searches on Google. The searches, in turn, produced public Trello pages, some of which contained links to the public Google Docs and Jira pages.

Trello projects are organized into “boards” that contain lists of tasks called “cards.” Boards can be public or private. After finding one public Trello board run by the U.N., Pathak found additional public U.N. boards by using “tricks like by checking if the users of one Trello board are also active on some other boards and so on.” One U.N. Trello board contained links to an issue tracker hosted on Jira, which itself contained even more sensitive information. Pathak also discovered links to documents hosted on Google Docs and Google Drive that were configured to be accessible to anyone who knew their web addresses. Some of these documents contained passwords….Here is just some of the sensitive information that the U.N. accidentally made accessible to anyone who Googled for it:

A social media team promoting the U.N.’s “peace and security” efforts published credentials to access a U.N. remote file access, or FTP, server in a Trello card coordinating promotion of the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. It is not clear what information was on the server; Pathak said he did not connect to it.
The U.N.’s Language and Communication Programme, which offers language courses at U.N. Headquarters in New York City, published credentials for a Google account and a Vimeo account. The program also exposed, on a publicly visible Trello board, credentials for a test environment for a human resources web app. It also made public a Google Docs spreadsheet, linked from a public Trello board, that included a detailed meeting schedule for 2018, along with passwords to remotely access the program’s video conference system to join these meetings.
One public Trello board used by the developers of Humanitarian Response and ReliefWeb, both websites run by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, included sensitive information like internal task lists and meeting notes. One public card from the board had a PDF, marked “for internal use only,” that contained a map of all U.N. buildings in New York City. …(More)”.

Is Mass Surveillance the Future of Conservation?

Curated on September 18, 2018October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mallory Picket at Slate: “The high seas are probably the most lawless place left on Earth. They’re a portal back in time to the way the world looked for most of our history: fierce and open competition for resources and contested territories. Pirating continues to be a way to make a living.

It’s not a complete free-for-all—most countries require registration of fishing vessels and enforce environmental protocols. Cooperative agreements between countries oversee fisheries in international waters. But the best data available suggests that around 20 percent of the global seafood catch is illegal. This is an environmental hazard because unregistered boats evade regulations meant to protect marine life. And it’s an economic problem for fishermen who can’t compete with boats that don’t pay for licenses or follow the (often expensive) regulations. In many developing countries, local fishermen are outfished by foreign vessels coming into their territory and stealing their stock….

But Henri Weimerskirch, a French ecologist, has a cheap, low-impact way to monitor thousands of square miles a day in real time: He’s getting birds to do it (a project first reported by Hakai). Specifically, albatross, which have a 10-foot wingspan and can fly around the world in 46 days. The birds naturally congregate around fishing boats, hoping for an easy meal, so Weimerskirch is equipping them with GPS loggers that also have radar detection to pick up the ship’s radar (and make sure it is a ship, not an island) and a transmitter to send that data to authorities in real time. If it works, this should help in two ways: It will provide some information on the extent of the unofficial fishing operation in the area, and because the logger will transmit their information in real time, the data will be used to notify French navy ships in the area to check out suspicious boats.

His team is getting ready to deploy about 80 birds in the south Indian Ocean this November.
The loggers attached around the birds’ legs are about the shape and size of a Snickers. The south Indian Ocean is a shared fishing zone, and nine countries, including France (courtesy of several small islands it claims ownership of, a vestige of colonialism), manage it together. But there are big problems with illegal fishing in the area, especially of the Patagonian toothfish (better known to consumers as Chilean seabass)….(More)”

Building block(chain)s for a better planet

Curated on September 18, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

PWC report: “…Our research and analysis identified more than 65 existing and emerging blockchain use cases for the environment through desk-based research and interviews with a range of stakeholders at the forefront of applying blockchain across industry, big tech, entrepreneurs, research and government. Blockchain use-case solutions that are particularly relevant across environmental applications tend to cluster around the following cross-cutting themes: enabling the transition to cleaner and more efficient decentralized systems; peer-to-peer trading of resources or permits; supply-chain transparency and management; new financing models for environmental outcomes; and the realization of non-financial value and natural capital. The report also identifies enormous potential to create blockchain-enabled “game changers” that have the ability to deliver transformative solutions to environmental challenges. These game changers have the potential to disrupt, or substantially optimize, the systems that are critical to addressing many environmental challenges. A high-level summary of those game changers is outlined below:

“See-through” supply chains: blockchain can create undeniable (and potentially unavoidable) transparency in supply chains. …
Decentralized and sustainable resource management: blockchain can underpin a transition to decentralized utility systems at scale…
Raising the trillions – new sources of sustainable finance: blockchain-enabled finance platforms could potentially revolutionize access to capital and unlock potential for new investors in projects that address environmental challenges – from retail-level investment in green infrastructure projects through to enabling blended finance or charitable donations for developing countries. …
Incentivizing circular economies: blockchain could fundamentally change the way in which materials and natural resources are valued and traded, incentivizing individuals, companies and governments to unlock financial value from things that are currently wasted, discarded or treated as economically invaluable. …
Transforming carbon (and other environmental) markets: blockchain platforms could be harnessed to use cryptographic tokens with a tradable value to optimize existing market platforms for carbon (or other substances) and create new opportunities for carbon credit transactions.
Next-gen sustainability monitoring, reporting and verification: blockchain has the potential to transform both sustainability reporting and assurance, helping companies manage, demonstrate and improve their performance, while enabling consumers and investors to make better-informed decisions. …
Automatic disaster preparedness and humanitarian relief: blockchain could underpin a new shared system for multiple parties involved in disaster preparedness and relief to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, coordination and trust of resources. An interoperable decentralized system could enable the sharing of information (e.g. individual relief activities transparent to all other parties within the distributed network) and rapid automated transactions via smart contracts. ..
Earth-management platforms: new blockchainenabled geospatial platforms, which enable a range of value-based transactions, are in the early stages of exploration and could monitor, manage and enable market mechanisms that protect the global environmental commons – from life on land to ocean health. Such applications are further away in terms of technical and logistical feasibility, but they remain exciting to contemplate….(More)”.

The Use of Regulatory Sandboxes in Europe and Asia

Curated on September 11, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Claus Christensen at Regulation Aisa: “Global attention to money-laundering, terrorism financing and financial criminal practices has grown exponentially in recent years. As criminals constantly come up with new tactics, global regulations in the financial world are evolving all the time to try and keep up. At the same time, end users’ expectations are putting companies at commercial risk if they are not prepared to deliver outstanding and digital-first customer experiences through innovative solutions.

Among the many initiatives introduced by global regulators to address these two seemingly contradictory needs, regulatory sandboxes – closed environments that allow live testing of innovations by tech companies under the regulator’s supervision – are by far one of the most popular. As the CEO of a fast-growing regtech company working across both Asia and Europe, I have identified a few differences in how the regulators across different jurisdictions are engaging with the industry in general, and regulatory sandboxes in particular.

Since the launch of ‘Project Innovate’ in 2014, the UK’s FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) has won recognition for the success of its sandbox, where fintech companies can test innovative products, services and business models in a live market environment, while ensuring that appropriate safeguards are in place through temporary authorisation. The FCA advises companies, whether fintech startups or established banks, on which existing regulations might apply to their cutting-edge products.

So far, the sandbox has helped more than 500 companies, with 40+ firms receiving regulatory authorisation. Project Innovate has helped the FCA’s reputation for supporting initiatives which boost competition within financial services, which was part of the regulator’s post-financial crisis agenda. The success of the initiative in fostering a fertile fintech environment is reflected by the growing number of UK-based challenger banks that are expanding their client bases across Europe. Following its success, the sandbox approach has gone global, with regulators around the world adopting a similar strategy for fintech innovation.

Across Europe, regulators are directly working with financial services providers and taking proactive measures to not only encourage the use of innovative technology in improving their systems, but also to boost adoption by others within the ecosystem…(More)”.

Message and Environment: a framework for nudges and choice architecture

Curated on September 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Luca Congiu and Ivan Moscati in Behavioural Public Policy: “We argue that the diverse components of a choice architecture can be classified into two main dimensions – Message and Environment – and that the distinction between them is useful in order to better understand how nudges work. In the first part of this paper, we define what we mean by nudge, explain what Message and Environment are, argue that the distinction between them is conceptually robust and show that it is also orthogonal to other distinctions advanced in the nudge literature. In the second part, we review some common types of nudges and show they target either Message or Environment or both dimensions of the choice architecture. We then apply the Message–Environment framework to discuss some features of Amazon’s website and, finally, we indicate how the proposed framework could help a choice architect to design a new choice architecture….(More)”.