Environmental Law, Big Data, and the Torrent of Singularities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by William Boyd: “How will big data impact environmental law in the near future? This Essay imagines one possible future for environmental law in 2030 that focuses on the implications of big data for the protection of public health from risks associated with pollution and industrial chemicals. It assumes the perspective of an historian looking back from the end of the twenty-first century at the evolution of environmental law during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The premise of the Essay is that big data will drive a major shift in the underlying knowledge practices of environmental law (along with other areas of law focused on health and safety). This change in the epistemic foundations of environmental law, it is argued, will in turn have important, far-reaching implications for environmental law’s normative commitments and for its ability to discharge its statutory responsibilities. In particular, by significantly enhancing the ability of environmental regulators to make harm more visible and more traceable, big data will put considerable pressure on previous understandings of acceptable risk across populations, pushing toward a more singular and more individualized understanding of harm. This will raise new and difficult questions regarding environmental law’s capacity to confront and take responsibility for the actual lives caught up in the tragic choices it is called upon to make. In imagining this near future, the Essay takes a somewhat exaggerated and, some might argue, overly pessimistic view of the implications of big data for environmental law’s efforts to protect public health. This is done not out of a conviction that such a future is likely, but rather to highlight some of the potential problems that may arise as big data becomes a more prominent part of environmental protection. In an age of data triumphalism, such a perspective, it is hoped, may provide grounds for a more critical engagement with the tools and knowledge practices that inform environmental law and the implications of those tools for environmental law’s ability to meet its obligations. Of course, there are other possible futures, and big data surely has the potential to make many positive contributions to environmental protection in the coming decades. Whether it will do so will depend in no small part on the collective choices we make to manage these new capabilities in the years ahead….(More)”

The Risk to Civil Liberties of Fighting Crime With Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Quentin Hardy  in the New York Times: “…Sharing data, both among the parts of a big police department and between the police and the private sector, “is a force multiplier,” he said.

Companies working with the military and intelligence agencies have long practiced these kinds of techniques, which the companies are bringing to domestic policing, in much the way surplus military gear has beefed upAmerican SWAT teams.

Palantir first built up its business by offering products like maps of social networks of extremist bombers and terrorist money launderers, and figuring out efficient driving routes to avoid improvised explosive devices.

Palantir used similar data-sifting techniques in New Orleans to spot individuals most associated with murders. Law enforcement departments around Salt Lake City used Palantir to allow common access to 40,000 arrest photos, 520,000 case reports and information like highway and airport data — building human maps of suspected criminal networks.

People in the predictive business sometimes compare what they do to controlling the other side’s “OODA loop,” a term first developed by a fighter pilot and military strategist named John Boyd.

OODA stands for “observe, orient, decide, act” and is a means of managing information in battle.

“Whether it’s war or crime, you have to get inside the other side’s decision cycle and control their environment,” said Robert Stasio, a project manager for cyberanalysis at IBM, and a former United States government intelligence official. “Criminals can learn to anticipate what you’re going to do and shift where they’re working, employ more lookouts.”

IBM sells tools that also enable police to become less predictable, for example, by taking different routes into an area identified as a crime hotspot. It has also conducted studies that show changing tastes among online criminals — for example, a move from hacking retailers’ computers to stealing health care data, which can be used to file for federal tax refunds.

But there are worries about what military-type data analysis means for civil liberties, even among the companies that get rich on it.

“It definitely presents challenges to the less sophisticated type of criminal,but it’s creating a lot of what is called ‘Big Brother’s little helpers,’” Mr.Bowman said. For now, he added, much of the data abundance problem is that “most police aren’t very good at this.”…(More)’

Even in Era of Disillusionment, Many Around the World Say Ordinary Citizens Can Influence Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Survey by Pew Global: “Signs of political discontent are increasingly common in many Western nations, with anti-establishment parties and candidates drawing significant attention and support across the European Union and in the United States. Meanwhile, as previous Pew Research Center surveys have shown, in emerging and developing economies there is widespread dissatisfaction with the way the political system is working.

As a new nine-country Pew Research Center survey on the strengths and limitations of civic engagement illustrates, there is a common perception that government is run for the benefit of the few, rather than the many in both emerging democracies and more mature democracies that have faced economic challenges in recent years. In eight of nine nations surveyed, more than half say government is run for the benefit of only a few groups in society, not for all people.1

However, this skeptical outlook on government does not mean people have given up on democracy or the ability of average citizens to have an impact on how the country is run. Roughly half or more in eight nations – Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the U.S., India, Greece, Italy and Poland – say ordinary citizens can have a lot of influence on government. Hungary, where 61% say there is little citizens can do, is the lone nation where pessimism clearly outweighs optimism on this front.

Many people in these nine nations say they could potentially be motivated to become politically engaged on a variety of issues, especially poor health care, poverty and poor-quality schools. When asked what types of issues could get them to take political action, such as contacting an elected official or taking part in a protest, poor health care is the top choice among the six issues tested in six of eight countries. Health care, poverty and education constitute the top three motivators in all nations except India and Poland….(More)

What We Should Mean When We Talk About Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Gordon in Governing: “…But here’s the problem: The institutional language of engagement has been defined by its measurement. Chief engagement officers in corporations are measuring milliseconds on web pages, and clicks on ads, and not relations among people. This is disproportionately influencing the values of democracy and the responsibility of public institutions to protect them.

Too often, when government talks about engagement, it is talking those things that are measurable, but it is providing mandates to employees imbued with ambiguity. For example, the executive order issued by Mayor Murray in Seattle is a bold directive for the “timely implementation by all City departments of equitable outreach and engagement practices that reaffirm the City’s commitment to inclusive participation.”

This extraordinary mayoral mandate reflects clear democratic values, but it lacks clarity of methods. It reflects a need to use digital technology to enhance process, but it doesn’t explain why. This in no way is meant as a criticism of Seattle’s effort; rather, it is simply meant to illustrate the complexity of engagement in practice. Departments are rewarded for quantifiable efficiency, not relationships. Just because something is called engagement, this fundamental truth won’t change.

Government needs to be much more clear about what it really means when it talks about engagement. In 2015, Living Cities and the Citi Foundation launched the City Accelerator on Public Engagement, which was an effort to source and support effective practices of public engagement in city government. This 18-month project, based on a cohort of five cities throughout the United States, is just now coming to an end. Out of it came several lasting insights, one of which I will share here. City governments are institutions in transition that need to ask why people should care.

After the election, who is going to care about government? How do you get people to care about the services that government provides? How do you get people to care about the health outcomes in their neighborhoods? How do you get people to care about ensuring accessible, high-quality public education?

I want to propose that when government talks about civic engagement, it is really talking about caring. When you care about something, you make a decision to be attentive to that thing. But “caring about” is one end of what I’ll call a spectrum of caring. On the other end, there is “caring for,” when, as described by philosopher Nel Noddings, “what we do depends not upon rules, or at least not wholly on rules — not upon a prior determination of what is fair or equitable — but upon a constellation of conditions that is viewed through both the eyes of the one-caring and the eyes of the cared-for.”

In short, caring-for is relational. When one cares for another, the outcomes of an encounter are not predetermined, but arise through relation….(More)”.

A Practical Guide for Harnessing the Power of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rella Kaplowitz at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “The nonprofit organization Repair the World has one goal: to make public service a defining element of American Jewish life. To achieve its mission, Repair works to involve thousands of young adults every year in meaningful service opportunities — and inspires them to go from being one-time participants to regular volunteers.

How does it do that? In a word: data.

Using a series of surveys and evaluations, Repair learned that once people participate in two volunteer opportunities, they’re more likely to continue volunteering regularly. Repair has used that and other findings to inform its operations and strategy, and to accelerate its work to encourage individuals to make an enduring commitment to public service.

Many purpose-driven organizations like Repair the World are committing more brainpower, time, and money to gathering data, and nonprofit and foundation professionals alike are recognizing the importance of that effort.

And yet there is a difference between just having data and using it well. Recent surveys have found that 94 percent of nonprofit professionals felt they were not using data effectively, and that 75 percent of foundation professionals felt that evaluations conducted by and submitted to grant makers did not provide any meaningful insights.

To remedy this, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation (one of Repair the World’s donors) developed the Data Playbook, a new tool to help more organizations harness the power of data to make smarter decisions, gain insights, and accelerate progress….

In the purpose-driven sector, our work is critically important for shaping lives and strengthening communities. Now is the time for all of us to commit to using the data at our fingertips to advance the broad range of causes we work on — education, health care, leadership development, social-justice work, and much more…

We are in this together. Let’s get started. (More)”

How to ensure smart cities benefit everyone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation Global: “By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in mega-cities. How all those people live, and what their lives are like, will depend on important choices leaders make today and in the coming years.

Technology has the power to help people live in communities that are more responsive to their needs and that can actually improve their lives. For example, Beijing, notorious for air pollution, is testing a 23-foot-tall air purifier that vacuums up smog, filters the bad particles and releases clear air.

This isn’t a vision of life like on “The Jetsons.” It’s real urban communities responding in real-time to changing weather, times of day and citizen needs. These efforts can span entire communities. They can vary from monitoring traffic to keep cars moving efficiently or measuring air quality to warn residents (or turn on massive air purifiers) when pollution levels climb.

Using data and electronic sensors in this way is often referred to as building “smart cities,” which are the subject of a major global push to improve how cities function. In part a response to incoherent infrastructure design and urban planning of the past, smart cities promise real-time monitoring, analysis and improvement of city decision-making. The results, proponents say, will improve efficiency, environmental sustainability and citizen engagement.

Smart city projects are big investments that are supposed to drive social transformation. Decisions made early in the process determine what exactly will change. But most research and planning regarding smart cities is driven by the technology, rather than the needs of the citizens. Little attention is given to the social, policy and organizational changes that will be required to ensure smart cities are not just technologically savvy but intelligently adaptive to their residents’ needs. Design will make the difference between smart city projects offering great promise or actually reinforcing or even widening the existing gaps in unequal ways their cities serve residents.

City benefits from efficiency

A key feature of smart cities is that they create efficiency. Well-designed technology tools can benefit government agencies, the environment and residents. Smart cities can improve the efficiency of city services by eliminating redundancies, finding ways to save money and streamlining workers’ responsibilities. The results can provide higher-quality services at lower cost….

Environmental effects

Another way to save money involves real-time monitoring of energy use, which can also identify opportunities for environmental improvement.

The city of Chicago has begun implementing an “Array of Things” initiative by installing boxes on municipal light poles with sensors and cameras that can capture air quality, sound levels, temperature, water levels on streets and gutters, and traffic.

The data collected are expected to serve as a sort of “fitness tracker for the city,” by identifying ways to save energy, to address urban flooding and improve living conditions.

Helping residents

Perhaps the largest potential benefit from smart cities will come from enhancing residents’ quality of life. The opportunities cover a broad range of issues, including housing and transportation, happiness and optimism, educational services, environmental conditions and community relationships.

Efforts along this line can include tracking and mapping residents’ health, using data to fight neighborhood blight, identifying instances of discrimination and deploying autonomous vehicles to increase residents’ safety and mobility….(More)“.

Big Data Is Not a Monolith

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Hamid R. Ekbia and Michael Mattioli: “Big data is ubiquitous but heterogeneous. Big data can be used to tally clicks and traffic on web pages, find patterns in stock trades, track consumer preferences, identify linguistic correlations in large corpuses of texts. This book examines big data not as an undifferentiated whole but contextually, investigating the varied challenges posed by big data for health, science, law, commerce, and politics. Taken together, the chapters reveal a complex set of problems, practices, and policies.

The advent of big data methodologies has challenged the theory-driven approach to scientific knowledge in favor of a data-driven one. Social media platforms and self-tracking tools change the way we see ourselves and others. The collection of data by corporations and government threatens privacy while promoting transparency. Meanwhile, politicians, policy makers, and ethicists are ill-prepared to deal with big data’s ramifications. The contributors look at big data’s effect on individuals as it exerts social control through monitoring, mining, and manipulation; big data and society, examining both its empowering and its constraining effects; big data and science, considering issues of data governance, provenance, reuse, and trust; and big data and organizations, discussing data responsibility, “data harm,” and decision making….(More)”

Tackling Corruption with People-Powered Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sandra Prüfer at Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth: “Informal fees plague India’s “free” maternal health services. In Nigeria, village households don’t receive the clean cookstoves their government paid for. Around the world, corruption – coupled with the inability to find and share information about it – stymies development in low-income communities.

Now, digital transparency platforms – supplemented with features illiterate and rural populations can use – make it possible for traditionally excluded groups to make their voices heard and access tools they need to grow.

Mapping Corruption Hot Spots in India

One of the problems surrounding access to information is the lack of reliable information in the first place: a popular method to create knowledge is crowdsourcing and enlisting the public to monitor and report on certain issues.

The Mera Swasthya Meri Aawaz platform, which means “Our Health, Our Voice”, is an interactive map in Uttar Pradesh launched by the Indian non-profit organization SAHAYOG. It enables women to anonymously report illicit fees charged for services at maternal health clinics using their mobile phones.

To reduce infant mortality and deaths in childbirth, the Indian government provides free prenatal care and cash incentives to use maternal health clinics, but many charge illegal fees anyway – cutting mothers off from lifesaving healthcare and inhibiting communities’ growth. An estimated 45,000 women in India died in 2015 from complications of pregnancy and childbirth – one of the highest rates of any country in the world; low-income women are disproportionately affected….“Documenting illegal payment demands in real time and aggregating the data online increased governmental willingness to listen,” Sandhya says. “Because the data is linked to technology, its authenticity is not questioned.”

Following the Money in Nigeria

In Nigeria, Connected Development (CODE) also champions open data to combat corruption in infrastructure building, health and education projects. Its mission is to improve access to information and empower local communities to share data that can expose financial irregularities. Since 2012, the Abuja-based watchdog group has investigated twelve capital projects, successfully pressuring the government to release funds including $5.3 million to treat 1,500 lead-poisoned children.

“People activate us: if they know about any project that is supposed to be in their community, but isn’t, they tell us they want us to follow the money – and we’ll take it from there,” says CODE co-founder Oludotun Babayemi.

Users alert the watchdog group directly through its webpage, which publishes open-source data about development projects that are supposed to be happening, based on reports from freedom of information requests to Nigeria’s federal minister of environment, World Bank data and government press releases.

Last year, as part of their #WomenCookstoves reporting campaign, CODE revealed an apparent scam by tracking a $49.8 million government project that was supposed to purchase 750,000 clean cookstoves for rural women. Smoke inhalation diseases disproportionately affect women who spend time cooking over wood fires; according to the World Health Organization, almost 100,000 people die yearly in Nigeria from inhaling wood smoke, the country’s third biggest killer after malaria and AIDS.

“After three months, we found out that only 15 percent of the $48 million was given to the contractor – meaning there were only 45,000 cook stoves out of 750,000 in the county,” Babayemi says….(More)”

Wikipedia is already the world’s ‘Dr Google’ – it’s time for doctors and researchers to make it better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Conversation: “Health professionals have a duty to improve the accuracy of medical entries in Wikipedia, according to a letter published today in Lancet Global Health, because it’s the first port of call for people all over the world seeking medical information.

In our correspondence, a group of international colleagues and I call on medical journals to do more to help experts make Wikipedia more accurate, and for the medical community to make improving its content a top priority.

Use around the world

Ranked the fifth most-visited website in the world, Wikipedia is one of the most-read sources of medical information by the general public. It’s also frequently the first port of call for doctors, medical students, lawmakers, and educators.

Access is provided free of charge on mobile phones in many countries, under the Wikipedia Zero scheme. In developing nations, this has helped the site become the main source of information on medical topics. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, for instance, page views of the Ebola virus disease peaked at more than 2.5 million per day.

Earlier this year, the site launched the free Medical Wikipedia Offline app in seven languages. The Android app has had nearly 100,000 downloads in its first few months of release. It’s particularly useful in low and middle-income countries, where internet access is typically slow and expensive.

All this makes Wikipedia’s accuracy vital because every medical entry on the collaborative online encyclopedia has the potential for immediate real-world health consequences.

A question of priorities

Given its model of allowing anyone to edit entries, Wikipedia is already surprisingly accurate, famously rivalling Encyclopedia Britannica. But even as the online encyclopedia matures, the accuracy of its medical content remains inconsistent.

The platform has historically struggled to attract expert contributions from researchers. Improving Wikipedia entries tends to be low on the list of priorities for doctors and other health professionals…

accurate information on medication affects what doctors prescribe, what patients request, and what students learn…

Several scholarly journals have been exploring academic peer review of Wikipedia entries and more look to soon join them. Examples of joint-publishing include the Wikipedia articles for Dengue fever and the cerebellum, which have been reviewed and published by the medical journals Open Medicine and the WikiJournal of Medicine respectively.

PLOS Computational Biology similarly joint-publishes review articles in its journal and in Wikipedia for maximum impact. And, the journal RNA Biology requires researchers describing a new RNA family to also write a Wikipedia entry for it.

Embedding the new approach

Progress has been slow, but several independent ventures show how the attitudes of major players in the biomedical ecosystem are beginning to shift further, and take Wikipedia more seriously.

Cochrane, which creates medical guidelines after reviewing research data, now finds Wikipedian partners for its Review Groups to help disseminate their information through Wikipedia.

Medical schools are also getting involved in improving Wikipedia entries. Medical students at University of California, San Francisco, can gain course credit for supervised editing of Wikipedia articles in need of attention….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Gun Violence Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Penn Engineering: “Gun violence is often described as an epidemic, but as visible and shocking as shooting incidents are, epidemiologists who study that particular source of mortality have a hard time tracking them. The Centers for Disease Control is prohibited by federal law from conducting gun violence research, so there is little in the way of centralized infrastructure to monitor where, how,when, why and to whom shootings occur.

Chris Callison-Burch, Aravind K.Joshi Term Assistant Professor in Computer and InformationScience, and graduate studentEllie Pavlick are working to solve this problem.

They have developed the GunViolence Database, which combines machine learning and crowdsourcing techniques to produce a national registry of shooting incidents. Callison-Burch and Pavlick’s algorithm scans thousands of articles from local newspaper and television stations,determines which are about gun violence, then asks everyday people to pullout vital statistics from those articles, compiling that information into a unified, open database.

For natural language processing experts like Callison-Burch and Pavlick, the most exciting prospect of this effort is that it is training computer systems to do this kind of analysis automatically. They recently presented their work on that front at Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange conference.

The Gun Violence Database project started in 2014, when it became the centerpiece of Callison-Burch’s “Crowdsourcing and Human Computation”class. There, Pavlick developed a series of homework assignments that challenged undergraduates to develop a classifier that could tell whether a given news article was about a shooting incident.

“It allowed us to teach the things we want students to learn about datascience and natural language processing, while giving them the motivation to do a project that could contribute to the greater good,” says Callison-Burch.

The articles students used to train their classifiers were sourced from “TheGun Report,” a daily blog from New York Times reporters that attempted to catalog shootings from around the country in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Realizing that their algorithmic approach could be scaled up to automate what the Times’ reporters were attempting, the researchers began exploring how such a database could work. They consulted with DouglasWiebe, a Associate Professor of Epidemiology in Biostatistics andEpidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, to learn more about what kind of information public health researchers needed to better study gun violence on a societal scale.

From there, the researchers enlisted people to annotate the articles their classifier found, connecting with them through Mechanical Turk, Amazon’scrowdsourcing platform, and their own website, http://gun-violence.org/…(More)”