World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior


World Development Report (WorldBank): “Every policy relies on explicit or implicit assumptions about how people make choices. Those assumptions typically rest on an idealized model of how people think, rather than an understanding of how everyday thinking actually works. This year’s World Development Report argues that a more realistic account of decision-making and behavior will make development policy more effective. The Report emphasizes what it calls “the three marks of everyday thinking.” In everyday thinking, people use intuition much more than careful analysis. They employ concepts and tools that prior experience in their cultural world has made familiar. And social emotions and social norms motivate much of what they do. These insights together explain the extraordinary persistence of some social practices, and rapid change in others. They also offer new targets for development policy. A richer understanding of why people save, use preventive health care, work hard, learn, and conserve energy provides a basis for innovative and inexpensive interventions. The insights reveal that poverty not only deprives people of resources but is an environment that shapes decision making, a fact that development projects across the board need to recognize. The insights show that the psychological foundations of decision making emerge at a young age and require social support. The Report applies insights from modern behavioral and social sciences to development policies for addressing poverty, finance, productivity, health, children, and climate change. It demonstrates that new policy ideas based on a richer view of decision-making can yield high economic returns. These new policy targets include: • the choice architecture (for example, the default option) • the scope for social rewards • frames that influence whether or not a norm is activated • information in the form of rules of thumb • opportunities for experiences that change mental models or social norms Finally, the Report shows that small changes in context have large effects on behavior. As a result, discovering which interventions are most effective, and with which contexts and populations, inherently requires an experimental approach. Rigor is needed for testing the processes for delivering interventions, not just the products that are delivered…”

Big video data could change how we do everything — from catching bad guys to tracking shoppers


Sean Varah at VentureBeat: “Everyone takes pictures and video with their devices. Parents record their kids’ soccer games, companies record employee training, police surveillance cameras at busy intersections run 24/7, and drones monitor pipelines in the desert.
With vast amounts of video growing vaster at a rate faster than the day before, and the hottest devices like drones decreasing in price and size until everyone has one (OK, not in their pocket quite yet) it’s time to start talking about mining this mass of valuable video data for useful purposes.
Julian Mann, the cofounder of Skybox Imaging — a company in the business of commercial satellite imagery and the developer advocate for Google Earth outreach — says that the new “Skybox for Good” program will provide “a constantly updated model of change of the entire planet” with the potential to “save lives, protect the environment, promote education, and positively impact humanity.”…
Mining video data through “man + machine” artificial intelligence is new technology in search of unsolved problems. Could this be the next chapter in the ever-evolving technology revolution?
For the past 50 years, satellite imagery has only been available to the U.S. intelligence community and those countries with technology to launch their own. Digital Globe was one of the first companies to make satellite imagery available commercially, and now Skybox and a few others have joined them. Drones are even newer, having been used by the U.S. military since the ‘90s for surveillance over battlefields or, in this age of counter-terrorism, playing the role of aerial detectives finding bad guys in the middle of nowhere. Before drones, the same tasks required thousands of troops on the ground, putting many young men and women in harm’s way. Today, hundreds of trained “eyes” safely located here in the U.S. watch hours of video from a single drone to assess current situations in countries far away….”

Challenging Critics of Transparency in Government


at Brookings’s FIXGOV: “Brookings today published my paper, “Why Critics of Transparency Are Wrong.” It describes and subsequently challenges a school of thinkers who in various ways object to government openness and transparency. They include some very distinguished scholars and practitioners from Francis Fukuyama to Brookings’ own Jonathan Rauch. My co-authors, Gary Bass and Danielle Brian, and I explain why they get it wrong—government needs more transparency, not less.

“Critics like these assert that transparency results in government indecision, poor performance, and stalemate. Their arguments are striking because they attack a widely-cherished value, openness, attempting to connect it to an unrelated malady, gridlock. But when you hold the ‘transparency is the problem’ hypothesis up to the sunlight, its gaping holes quickly become visible.”

There is no doubt that gridlock, government dysfunction, polarization and other suboptimal aspects of the current policy environment are frustrating. However, proposed solutions must factor in both the benefits and the expected negative consequences of such changes. Less openness and transparency may ameliorate some current challenges while returning the American political system to a pre-progressive reform era in which corruption precipitated serious social and political costs.

“Simply put, information is power, and keeping information secret only serves to keep power in the hands of a few. This is a key reason the latest group of transparency critics should not be shrugged off: if left unaddressed, their arguments will give those who want to operate in the shadows new excuses.”

It is difficult to imagine a context in which honest graft is not paired with dishonest graft. It is even harder to foresee a government that is effective at distinguishing between the two and rooting out the latter.

“Rather than demonizing transparency for today’s problems, we should look to factors such as political parties and congressional leadership, partisan groups, and social (and mainstream) media, all of which thrive on the gridlock and dysfunction in Washington.”….

Click to read “Why Critics of Transparency Are Wrong.”

Co-operation


Patrick Bateson at Kings Review: “I wrote this piece nearly 30 years ago and delivered it as a secular address in King’s College Chapel.  I unearthed it and brought it up to date because the issues are as relevant today as they were then.

I am disturbed by the way we have created a social environment in which so much emphasis is laid on competition – on forging ahead while trampling on others. The ideal of social cooperation has come to be treated as high-sounding flabbiness, while individual selfishness is regarded as the natural and sole basis for a realistic approach to life. The image of the struggle for existence lies at the back of it, seriously distorting the view we have of ourselves and wrecking mutual trust.
The fashionable philosophy of individualism draws its respectability in part from an appeal to biology and specifically to the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Now, Darwin’s theory remains the most powerful explanation for the way that each plant and animal evolved so that it is exquisitely adapted to its environment. The theory works just as well for behaviour as it does for anatomy. Individual animals differ in the way they behave. Those that behave in a manner that is better suited to the conditions in which they live are more likely to survive. Finally, if their descendants resemble them in terms of behaviour, then in the course of evolution, the better adapted forms of behaviour will replace those that are not so effective in keeping the individual alive.
It is the Darwinian concept of differential survival that has been picked up and used so insistently in political rhetoric. Biology is thought to be all about competition – and that supposedly means constant struggle.  This emphasis has had an insidious effect on the public mind and has encouraged the belief in individual selfishness and in confrontation.  Competition is now widely seen as the mainspring of human activity, at least in Western countries. Excellence in the universities and in the arts is thought to be driven by the same ruthless process that supposedly works so well on the sportsfield or the market place, and they all have a lot in common with what supposedly happens in the jungle. The image of selfish genes, competing with each other in the course of evolution has fused imperceptibly with the notion of selfish individuals competing with each other in the course of their life-times. Individuals only thrive by winning. The argument has become so much a part of conventional belief that it is hard at first to see what is wrong with it.
To put it bluntly, thought has been led seriously astray by the rhetoric.  Beginning where the argument starts in biology, genes do not operate in a vacuum. The survival of each gene obviously depends on the characteristics of the whole gene “team” that makes up the total genetic complement of an individual. A similar point can be made above the level of the individual when symbiosis occurs between different species.
Take, for instance, lichens which are found from the Arctic to the tropics – and on virtually every surface from rocks and old roofs to tree trunks. They look like single organisms. However, they represent the fusing of algae and fungi working together in symbiotic partnership. The partners depend utterly on each other and the characteristics of the whole entity provide the adaptations to the environment.
Similarly, cooperation among social animals belies the myth of constant struggle. Many birds and mammals huddle to conserve warmth or reduce the surface exposed to biting insects. Males in a pride of lions help each other to defend the females from other males. Mutual assistance is frequently offered in hunting; for instance, cooperating members of a wolf pack will often split into those that drive the deer and those that lie in ambush. Each wolf gets more to eat as a result. In highly complex animals aid may be reciprocated on a subsequent occasion. So, if one male baboon helps another to fend off competition for a female today, the favour will be returned at a later date. What is obvious about such cases is that each of the participating individuals benefits by working together with the others. Moreover, some things can be done by a group that cannot be done by the individual. It takes two to put up a tent.
The joint action of cooperating individuals can also be a well-adapted character in its own right. The pattern generated by cooperative behaviour could distinguish one social group from another and could make the difference between group survival and communal death.  Clearly, a cheat could sometimes obtain the benefits of the others’ cooperation without joining in itself. However, such actions would not be retained if individuals were unable to survive outside their own social group and the groups containing cheats were less likely to survive than those without. This logic does have some bearing on the way we think about ourselves.
At the turn of the 20th century an exiled Russian aristocrat and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, wrote a classic book called Mutual Aid. He complained that, in the widespread acceptance of Darwin’s ideas, heavy emphasis had been laid on the cleansing role of social conflict and far too little attention given to the remarkable examples of cooperation. Even now, biological knowledge of symbiosis, reciprocity and mutualism has not yet percolated extensively into public discussions of human social behaviour.
As things stand, the appeal to biology is not to the coherent body of scientific thought that does exist but to a confused myth. It is a travesty of Darwinism to suggest that all that matters in social life is conflict. One individual may be more likely to survive because it is better suited to making its way about its environment and not because it is fiercer than others. Individuals may survive better when they join forces with others.  By their joint actions they can frequently do things that one individual cannot do. Consequently, those that team up are more likely to survive than those that do not. Above all, social cohesion may become a critical condition for the survival of the society.
A straightforward message is, then, that each of us may live happier and, in the main, more successful lives, if we treat our fellow human beings as individuals with whom we can readily work. This is a rational rather than a moral argument. It should appeal to all those pragmatists who want to look after themselves.  Cooperation is good business practice. However, another matter impinges on rampant individualism, which cannot be treated in a way that so readily generates agreement….”
 

Cities Find Rewards in Cheap Technologies


Nanette Byrnes at MIT Technology Review: “Cities around the globe, whether rich or poor, are in the midst of a technology experiment. Urban planners are pulling data from inexpensive sensors mounted on traffic lights and park benches, and from mobile apps on citizens’ smartphones, to analyze how their cities really operate. They hope the data will reveal how to run their cities better and improve urban life. City leaders and technology experts say that managing the growing challenges of cities well and affordably will be close to impossible without smart technology.
Fifty-four percent of humanity lives in urban centers, and almost all of the world’s projected population growth over the next three decades will take place in cities, including many very poor cities. Because of their density and often strained infrastructure, cities have an outsize impact on the environment, consuming two-thirds of the globe’s energy and contributing 70 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions. Urban water systems are leaky. Pollution levels are often extreme.
But cities also contribute most of the world’s economic production. Thirty percent of the world’s economy and most of its innovation are concentrated in just 100 cities. Can technology help manage rapid population expansion while also nurturing cities’ all-important role as an economic driver? That’s the big question at the heart of this Business Report.
Selling answers to that question has become a big business. IBM, Cisco, Hitachi, Siemens, and others have taken aim at this market, publicizing successful examples of cities that have used their technology to tackle the challenges of parking, traffic, transportation, weather, energy use, water management, and policing. Cities already spend a billion dollars a year on these systems, and that’s expected to grow to $12 billion a year or more in the next 10 years.
To justify this kind of outlay, urban technologists will have to move past the test projects that dominate discussions today. Instead, they’ll have to solve some of the profound and growing problems of urban living. Cities leaning in that direction are using various technologies to ease parking, measure traffic, and save water (see “Sensing Santander”), reduce rates of violent crime (see “Data-Toting Cops”), and prepare for ever more severe weather patterns.
There are lessons to be learned, too, from cities whose grandiose technological ideas have fallen short, like the eco-city initiative of Tianjin, China (see “China’s Future City”), which has few residents despite great technology and deep government support.
The streets are similarly largely empty in the experimental high-tech cities of Songdo, South Korea; Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; and Paredes, Portugal, which are being designed to have minimal impact on the environment and offer high-tech conveniences such as solar-powered air-conditioning and pneumatic waste disposal systems instead of garbage trucks. Meanwhile, established cities are taking a much more incremental, less ambitious, and perhaps more workable approach, often benefiting from relatively inexpensive and flexible digital technologies….”

A New Taxonomy of Smart City Projects


New paper by Guido Perboli et al: “City logistics proposes an integrated vision of freight transportation systems within urban area and it aims at the optimization of them as a whole in terms of efficiency, security, safety, viability and environmental sustainability. Recently, this perspective has been extended by the Smart City concept in order to include other aspects of city management: building, energy, environment, government, living, mobility, education, health and so on. At the best of our knowledge, a classification of Smart City Projects has not been created yet. This paper introduces such a classification, highlighting success factors and analyzing new trends in Smart City.”

Seattle Launches Sweeping, Ethics-Based Privacy Overhaul


for the Privacy Advisor: “The City of Seattle this week launched a citywide privacy initiative aimed at providing greater transparency into the city’s data collection and use practices.
To that end, the city has convened a group of stakeholders, the Privacy Advisory Committee, comprising various government departments, to look at the ways the city is using data collected from practices as common as utility bill payments and renewing pet licenses or during the administration of emergency services like police and fire. By this summer, the committee will deliver the City Council suggested principles and a “privacy statement” to provide direction on privacy practices citywide.
In addition, the city has partnered with the University of Washington, where Jan Whittington, assistant professor of urban design and planning and associate director at the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, has been given a $50,000 grant to look at open data, privacy and digital equity and how municipal data collection could harm consumers.
Responsible for all things privacy in this progressive city is Michael Mattmiller, who was hired to the position of chief technology officer (CTO) for the City of Seattle in June. Before his current gig, he worked as a senior strategist in enterprise cloud privacy for Microsoft. He said it’s an exciting time to be at the helm of the office because there’s momentum, there’s talent and there’s intention.
“We’re at this really interesting time where we have a City Council that strongly cares about privacy … We have a new police chief who wants to be very good on privacy … We also have a mayor who is focused on the city being an innovative leader in the way we interact with the public,” he said.
In fact, some City Council members have taken it upon themselves to meet with various groups and coalitions. “We have a really good, solid environment we think we can leverage to do something meaningful,” Mattmiller said….
Armbruster said the end goal is to create policies that will hold weight over time.
“I think when looking at privacy principles, from an ethical foundation, the idea is to create something that will last while technology dances around us,” she said, adding the principles should answer the question, “What do we stand for as a city and how do we want to move forward? So any technology that falls into our laps, we can evaluate and tailor or perhaps take a pass on as it falls under our ethical framework.”
The bottom line, Mattmiller said, is making a decision that says something about Seattle and where it stands.
“How do we craft a privacy policy that establishes who we want to be as a city and how we want to operate?” Mattmiller asked.”

A World That Counts: Mobilising a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development


Executive Summary of the Report by the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development (IEAG): “Data are the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability. Without high-quality data providing the right information on the right things at the right time; designing, monitoring and evaluating effective policies becomes almost impossible.
New technologies are leading to an exponential increase in the volume and types of data available, creating unprecedented possibilities for informing and transforming society and protecting the environment. Governments, companies, researchers and citizen groups are in a ferment of experimentation, innovation and adaptation to the new world of data, a world in which data are bigger, faster and more detailed than ever before. This is the data revolution.
Some are already living in this new world. But too many people, organisations and governments are excluded because of lack of resources, knowledge, capacity or opportunity. There are huge and growing inequalities in access to data and information and in the ability to use it.
Data needs improving. Despite considerable progress in recent years, whole groups of people are not being counted and important aspects of people’s lives and environmental conditions are still not measured. For people, this can lead to the denial of basic rights, and for the planet, to continued environmental degradation. Too often, existing data remain unused because they are released too late or not at all, not well-documented and harmonized, or not available at the level of detail needed for decision-making.
As the world embarks on an ambitious project to meet new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is an urgent need to mobilise the data revolution for all people and the whole planet in order to monitor progress, hold governments accountable and foster sustainable development. More diverse, integrated, timely and trustworthy information can lead to better decision-making and real-time citizen feedback. This in turn enables individuals, public and private institutions, and companies to make choices that are good for them and for the world they live in.
This report sets out the main opportunities and risks presented by the data revolution for sustain-able development. Seizing these opportunities and mitigating these risks requires active choices, especially by governments and international institutions. Without immediate action, gaps between developed and developing countries, between information-rich and information-poor people, and between the private and public sectors will widen, and risks of harm and abuses of human rights will grow.

An urgent call for action: Key recommendations

The strong leadership of the United Nations (UN) is vital for the success of this process. The Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG), established in August 2014, offers the UN Secretary-General several key recommendations for actions to be taken in the near future, summarised below:

  1. Develop a global consensus on principles and standards: The disparate worlds of public, private and civil society data and statistics providers need to be urgently brought together to build trust and confidence among data users. We propose that the UN establish a process whereby key stakeholders create a “Global Consensus on Data”, to adopt principles concerning legal, technical, privacy, geospatial and statistical standards which, among other things, will facilitate openness and information exchange and promote and protect human rights.
  2. Share technology and innovations for the common good: To create mechanisms through which technology and innovation can be shared and used for the common good, we propose
    to create a global “Network of Data Innovation Networks”, to bring together the organisations and experts in the field. This would: contribute to the adoption of best practices for improving the monitoring of SDGs, identify areas where common data-related infrastructures could address capacity problems and improve efficiency, encourage collaborations, identify critical research gaps and create incentives to innovate.
  3. New resources for capacity development: Improving data is a development agenda in
    its own right, and can improve the targeting of existing resources and spur new economic opportunities. Existing gaps can only be overcome through new investments and the strengthening of capacities. A new funding stream to support the data revolution for sustainable development should be endorsed at the “Third International Conference on Financing for Development”, in Addis Ababa in July 2015. An assessment will be needed of the scale of investments, capacity development and technology transfer that is required, especially for low income countries; and proposals developed for mechanisms to leverage the creativity and resources of the private sector. Funding will also be needed to implement an education program aimed at improving people’s, infomediaries’ and public servants’ capacity and data literacy to break down barriers between people and data.
  4. Leadership for coordination and mobilisation: A UN-led “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data” is proposed, tomobiliseandcoordinate the actions and institutions required to make the data revolution serve sustainable development, promoting several initiatives, such as:
    • A “World Forum on Sustainable Development Data” to bring together the whole data ecosystem to share ideas and experiences for data improvements, innovation, advocacy and technology transfer. The first Forum should take place at the end of 2015, once the SDGs are agreed;
    • A “Global Users Forum for Data for SDGs”, to ensure feedback loops between data producers and users, help the international community to set priorities and assess results;
    • Brokering key global public-private partnerships for data sharing.
  5. Exploit some quick wins on SDG data: Establishing a “SDGs data lab” to support the development of a first wave of SDG indicators, developing an SDG analysis and visualisation platform using the most advanced tools and features for exploring data, and building a dashboard from diverse data sources on ”the state of the world”.

Never again should it be possible to say “we didn’t know”. No one should be invisible. This is the world we want – a world that counts.”

Governing the Smart, Connected City


Blog by Susan Crawford at HBR: “As politics at the federal level becomes increasingly corrosive and polarized, with trust in Congress and the President at historic lows, Americans still celebrate their cities. And cities are where the action is when it comes to using technology to thicken the mesh of civic goods — more and more cities are using data to animate and inform interactions between government and citizens to improve wellbeing.
Every day, I learn about some new civic improvement that will become possible when we can assume the presence of ubiquitous, cheap, and unlimited data connectivity in cities. Some of these are made possible by the proliferation of smartphones; others rely on the increasing number of internet-connected sensors embedded in the built environment. In both cases, the constant is data. (My new book, The Responsive City, written with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, tells stories from Chicago, Boston, New York City and elsewhere about recent developments along these lines.)
For example, with open fiber networks in place, sending video messages will become as accessible and routine as sending email is now. Take a look at rhinobird.tv, a free lightweight, open-source video service that works in browsers (no special download needed) and allows anyone to create a hashtag-driven “channel” for particular events and places. A debate or protest could be viewed from a thousand perspectives. Elected officials and public employees could easily hold streaming, virtual town hall meetings.
Given all that video and all those livestreams, we’ll need curation and aggregation to make sense of the flow. That’s why visualization norms, still in their infancy, will become a greater part of literacy. When the Internet Archive attempted late last year to “map” 400,000 hours of television news, against worldwide locations, it came up with pulsing blobs of attention. Although visionary Kevin Kelly has been talking about data visualization as a new form of literacy for years, city governments still struggle with presenting complex and changing information in standard, easy-to-consume ways.
Plenar.io is one attempt to resolve this. It’s a platform developed by former Chicago Chief Data Officer Brett Goldstein that allows public datasets to be combined and mapped with easy-to-see relationships among weather and crime, for example, on a single city block. (A sample question anyone can ask of Plenar.io: “Tell me the story of 700 Howard Street in San Francisco.”) Right now, Plenar.io’s visual norm is a map, but it’s easy to imagine other forms of presentation that could become standard. All the city has to do is open up its widely varying datasets…”

The Internet of Things vision: Key Features, Applications and Open Issues


Article by Eleonora Borgia in Computer Communications: “The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that combines aspects and technologies coming from different approaches. Ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, Internet Protocol, sensing technologies, communication technologies, and embedded devices are merged together in order to form a system where the real and digital worlds meet and are continuously in symbiotic interaction. The smart object is the building block of the IoT vision. By putting intelligence into everyday objects, they are turned into smart objects able not only to collect information from the environment and interact/control the physical world, but also to be interconnected, to each other, through Internet to exchange data and information. The expected huge number of interconnected devices and the significant amount of available data open new opportunities to create services that will bring tangible benefits to the society, environment, economy and individual citizens. In this paper we present the key features and the driver technologies of IoT. In addition to identifying the application scenarios and the correspondent potential applications, we focus on research challenges and open issues to be faced for the IoT realization in the real world.”