Springwise: “Modern technology has turned many of the things we consume from physical objects into pixels on a screen. While this has benefited the majority of us, those with sight difficulties don’t get along well with visual stimuli or touchscreen devices. In the past, we’ve seen Yahoo! Japan develop Hands On Search, a project that lets blind kids carry out web searches with 3D printed results. Now the country’s governmental department GSI is creating software that will enable those with visual impairments to print out 3D versions of online maps.
The official mapping body for Japan — much like the US Geological Survey — GSI already has paper maps for the blind, using embossed surfaces to mark out roads. It’s now developing a program that is able to do the same thing for digital maps.
The software first differentiates the highways, railway lines and walkways from the rest of the landscape. It then creates a 3D relief model that uses different textures to distinguish the features so that anyone running their finger along them will be able to determine what it is. The program also takes into account contour lines, creating accurate topographical representations of a particular area….
Website: www.gsi.go.jp“
CC Science → Sensored City
Citizen Sourced Data: “We routinely submit data to others and then worry about liberating the data from the silos. What if we could invert the model? What if collected data were first put into a completely free and open repository accessible to everyone so anyone could build applications with the data? What if the data itself were free so everyone could have an equal opportunity to create and even monetize their creativity? Funded by a generous grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we intend to do just that.
Partnering with Manylabs, a San Francisco-based sensor tools and education nonprofit, and Urban Matter, Inc., a Brooklyn-based design studio, and in collaboration with the City of Louisville, Kentucky, and Propeller Health, maker of a mobile platform for respiratory health management, we will design, develop and install a network of sensor-based hardware that will collect environmental information at high temporal and spatial scales and store it in a software platform designed explicitly for storing and retrieving such data.
Further, we will design, create and install a public data art installation that will be powered by the data we collect thereby communicating back to the public what has been collected about them.”
Google trial lets you chat with doctors when you search for symptoms
at Engadget: “Searching the web for symptoms of illness can be dangerous — you could identify a real condition, but you also risk scaring yourself for no reason through a misdiagnosis. Google might have a solution that puts your mind at ease, though. The company has confirmed to Engadget that it’s testing a Helpouts-style feature which offers video chats with doctors when you search for symptoms. While there aren’t many details of how this works in practice, the search card mentions that Google is covering the costs of any chats during the trial phase. You’ll likely have to pay for virtual appointments if and when the service is ever ready for prime time, then. That’s not ideal, but it could be much cheaper than seeing a physician in person….”
HopeLab
Press Release from the Drucker Institute: “Today, we announced that HopeLab is the winner of the 2014 Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation.
The judges recognized HopeLab for its pioneering work in creating products that help people tap into their innate resilience and respond to life’s adversity in healthy ways….
The judges noted that they were particularly impressed with the way that HopeLab met a key criteria for the award—showing how its programming makes a real difference in the lives of the people it serves.
For example, its Re-Mission video games for adolescents and young adults with cancer address the problem of poor treatment adherence by putting players inside the body to battle the disease with weapons like chemotherapy, antibiotics and the body’s natural defenses. Working with hospitals and clinics, HopeLab has distributed more than 210,000 copies of the game in 81 countries. And research published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that playing Re-Mission significantly improved key behavioral and psychological factors associated with successful cancer treatment. In fact, in the largest randomized controlled study of a video-game intervention ever conducted, participants who were given Re-Mission took their chemotherapy and antibiotics more consistently, showed faster acquisition of cancer-related knowledge and increased their self-efficacy.
Building on the success of this founding project, HopeLab has since launched the Re-Mission 2 online games and mobile app, the Zamzee program to boost physical activity and combat sedentary behavior in children, and a number of other mobile apps and social technologies that support resilience and improve health….”
Hey Uncle Sam, Eat Your Own Dogfood
It’s been five years since Tim O’Reilly published his screed on Government as Platform. In that time, we’ve seen “civic tech” and “open data” gain in popularity and acceptance. The Federal Government has an open data platform, data.gov. And so too do states and municipalities across America. Code for America is the hottest thing around, and the healthcare.gov fiasco landed fixing public technology as a top concern in government. We’ve successfully laid the groundwork for a new kind of government technology. We’re moving towards a day when, rather than building user facing technology, the government opens up interfaces to data that allows the private sector to create applications and websites that consume public data and surface it to users.
However, we appear to have stalled out a bit in our progress towards government as platform. It’s incredibly difficult to ingest the data for successful commercial products. The kaleidoscope of data formats in open data portals like data.gov might politely be called ‘obscure’, and perhaps more accurately, ‘perversely unusable’. Some of the data hasn’t been updated since first publication, and is quite positively too stale to use. If documentation exists, most of the time it’s incomprehensible….
What we actually need, is for Uncle Sam to start dogfooding his own open data.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, dogfooding is a slang term used by engineers who are using their own product. So, for example, Google employees use Gmail and Google Drive to organize their own work. This term also applies to engineering teams that consume their public APIs to access internal data. Dogfooding helps teams deeply understand their own work from the same perspective as external users. It also provides a keen incentive to make products work well.
Dogfooding is the golden rule of platforms. And currently, open government portals are flagrantly violating this golden rule. I’ve asked around, and I can’t find a single example of a government entity consuming the data they publish…”
Building a Smarter University Big Data, Innovation, and Analytics
New book edited by Jason E. Lane : “The Big Data movement and the renewed focus on data analytics are transforming everything from healthcare delivery systems to the way cities deliver services to residents. Now is the time to examine how this Big Data could help build smarter universities. While much of the cutting-edge research that is being done with Big Data is happening at colleges and universities, higher education has yet to turn the digital mirror on itself to advance the academic enterprise. Institutions can use the huge amounts of data being generated to improve the student learning experience, enhance research initiatives, support effective community outreach, and develop campus infrastructure. This volume focuses on three primary themes related to creating a smarter university: refining the operations and management of higher education institutions, cultivating the education pipeline, and educating the next generation of data scientists. Through an analysis of these issues, the contributors address how universities can foster innovation and ingenuity in the academy. They also provide scholarly and practical insights in order to frame these topics for an international discussion.”
Open Data as Universal Service. New perspectives in the Information Profession
Paper by L. Fernando Ramos Simón et al in Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences: “The Internet provides a global information flow, which improves living conditions in poor countries as well as in rich countries. Owing to its abundance and quality, public information (meteorological, geographic, transport information. and also the content managed in libraries, archives and museums) is an incentive for change, becoming invaluable and accessible to all citizens. However, it is clear that Open Data plays a significant role and provides a business service in the digital economy. Nevertheless, it is unknown how this amount of public data may be introduced as universal service to make it available to all citizens in matters of education, health, culture . In fact, a function or role which has traditionally been assumed by libraries. In addition, information professionals will have to acquire new skills that enable them to assume a new role in the information management: data management (Open Data) and content management (Open Content). Thus, this study analyzes new roles, which will be assumed by new information professionals such as metadata, interoperability, access licenses, information search and retrieval tools and applications for data queries…”
The Power of Data Analytics to Transform Government
Hugo Moreno at Forbes: “It’s mind boggling to consider the amount of information governments collect on their citizens. We often just expect them to manage and analyze it in a way that will benefit the general public and facilitate government transparency. However, it can be difficult to organize, manage and extract insights from these large, diverse data sets. According to “Analytics Paves the Way for Better Government,” a Forbes Insights case study sponsored by SAP, government leaders have called for investment in Big Data analytics capabilities to modernize government services and aid their economies. State and federal governments have begun to recognize the benefits of applying analytics. In fact, McKinsey & Co. estimates that by digitizing information, disseminating public data sets and applying analytics to improve decision making, governments around the world can act as catalysts for more than $3 trillion in economic value.
Governor Mike Pence of Indiana understands the importance of data and is keeping it at the center of his long-term vision for improving the management and effectiveness of government programs and making Indiana a leader in data-driven decision making. A year after taking office, he ordered state agencies to collaborate and share data to improve services. Data sharing is not a common practice in states, but the governor recognized that sharing data will lead to a successful enterprise.
Insights from analytics will help Indiana pursue six public policy goals: Increase private sector employment; attract new investment to the state; improve the quality of the state’s workforce; improve the health, safety and well-being of families; increase high school graduation rates; and improve the math and reading skills of elementary students….”
We Want Privacy, but Can’t Stop Sharing
Kate Murphy in the New York Times: “Well, that’s essentially the state of affairs on the Internet. There is no privacy. If those creepy targeted ads on Google hadn’t tipped you off, then surely Edward J. Snowden’s revelations, or, more recently, Jennifer Lawrence’s nude selfies, made your vulnerability to cybersnooping abundantly clear.
You need only read George Orwell’s “1984” or watch the film “Minority Report” to understand how surveillance is incompatible with a free society. And increasingly, people are coming to understand how their online data might be used against them. You might not get a job, a loan or a date because of an indiscreet tweet or if your address on Google Street View shows your brother-in-law’s clunker in the driveway. But less obvious is the psychic toll of the current data free-for-all.
“With all the focus on the legal aspects of privacy and the impact on global trade there’s been little discussion of why you want privacy and why it’s intrinsically important to you as an individual,” said Adam Joinson, professor of behavior change at the University of the West of England in Bristol, who coined the term “digital crowding” to describe excessive social contact and loss of personal space online.
Perhaps that’s because there is no agreement over what constitutes private information. It varies among cultures, genders and individuals. Moreover, it’s hard to argue for the value of privacy when people eagerly share so much achingly personal information on social media.
But the history of privacy (loosely defined as freedom from being observed) is one of status. Those who are institutionalized for criminal behavior or ill health, children and the impoverished have less privacy than those who are upstanding, healthy, mature and wealthy. Think of crowded tenements versus mansions behind high hedges.
“The implication is that if you don’t have it, you haven’t earned the right or aren’t capable or trustworthy,” said Christena Nippert-Eng, professor of sociology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and author of “Islands of Privacy.”
So it’s not surprising that privacy research in both online and offline environments has shown that just the perception, let alone the reality, of being watched results in feelings of low self-esteem, depression and anxiety. Whether observed by a supervisor at work or Facebook friends, people are inclined to conform and demonstrate less individuality and creativity. Their performance of tasks suffers and they have elevated pulse rates and levels of stress hormones.
An analogy in the psychological literature is that privacy is like sleep….”
Uncovering State And Local Gov’s 15 Hidden Successes
at GovLoop: “From garbage trucks to vacant lots, cities and states are often tasked with the thankless job of cleaning up a community’s mess. These are tasks that are often overlooked, but are critical to keeping a community vibrant.
But even in these sometimes thankless jobs, there are real innovations happening. Take Miami-Dade County where they are using hybrid garbage trucks to save the community millions of dollars in fuel every year and make the environment a little cleaner. Or head over to Milwaukee where the city is turning vacant and abandoned lots into urban farms.
There are just two of the fifteen examples, GovLoop uncovered in our new guide, From the State House to the County Clerk – 15 Challenges and Success Stories.
We have broken the challenges into four categories:
- Internal Best Practices
- Tech Challenges
- Health and Safety
- Community Engagement and Outreach
Here’s another example, the open data movement has the potential to effect governing and civic engagement at the state and local government levels. But today very few agencies are actively providing open data. In fact, only 46 U.S. cities and counties have open data sites. One of the cities on the leading edge of the open data movement is Fort Worth, Texas.
“When I came into office, that was one of my campaign promises, that we would get Fort Worth into this century on technology and that we would take a hard look at open records requests and requests for data,” Mayor Betsy Price said in an interview with the Star-Telegram. “It goes a lot further to being transparent and letting people participate in their government and see what we are doing. It is the people’s data, and it should be easy to access.”
The website, data.fortworthtexas.gov, offers data and documents such as certificates of occupancy, development permits and residential permits for download in several formats, including Excel and PDF. Not all datasets are available yet — the city said its priority was to put the most-requested data on the portal first. Next up? Crime data, code violations, restaurant ratings and capital projects progress.
City officials’ ultimate goal is to create and adopt a full open data policy. As part of the launch, they are also looking for local software developers and designers who want to help guide the open data initiative. Those interested in participating can sign up online to receive more information….”