Book by Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke : “Applied econometrics, known to aficionados as ‘metrics, is the original data science. ‘Metrics encompasses the statistical methods economists use to untangle cause and effect in human affairs. Through accessible discussion and with a dose of kung fu–themed humor, Mastering ‘Metrics presents the essential tools of econometric research and demonstrates why econometrics is exciting and useful.
The five most valuable econometric methods, or what the authors call the Furious Five–random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences in differences–are illustrated through well-crafted real-world examples (vetted for awesomeness by Kung Fu Panda’s Jade Palace). Does health insurance make you healthier? Randomized experiments provide answers. Are expensive private colleges and selective public high schools better than more pedestrian institutions? Regression analysis and a regression discontinuity design reveal the surprising truth. When private banks teeter, and depositors take their money and run, should central banks step in to save them? Differences-in-differences analysis of a Depression-era banking crisis offers a response. Could arresting O. J. Simpson have saved his ex-wife’s life? Instrumental variables methods instruct law enforcement authorities in how best to respond to domestic abuse….(More).”
Senate moves to open-data format
Adam Mazmanian in FCW: “The U.S. Senate will begin making bills and other legislative information available for bulk XML download, following on efforts made by the House of Representatives in 2013. The Senate will include all summary and bill information from the 113th Congress, which just gaveled out, and legislation from the upcoming 114th
This is a very big deal for watchdog groups and private firms that use legislative data to make products for tracking Congress. Before the Senate decision was announced Dec. 18 at a meeting of the Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force, users of Senate data had to scrape information from multiple sources. That can be expensive and yield inaccurate data, said Hudson Hollister, executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition and a former Capitol Hill staffer.
“This change by the Senate means a crucial link in the chain will become more reliable. It’s great news for the ecosystem that wants to use government information to deliver transparency and deliver efficiency,” Hollister told FCW.
Having the House and Senate legislation available for bulk download means it’s possible to build services that track legislative language by keyword or topic as bills move through Congress, and follow the process as bills get marked up in committee, combined with other bills, or amended on the floor. Already a few firms are building services along these lines, such as (Leg)Cyte and Fiscal Note.
Despite the recent move by the Senate, all of Congress isn’t exactly speaking with one voice regarding data standards. In the summer of 2013, the Office of Law Revision Council, which maintains the U.S. Code as new legislation is signed into law, developed an XML information model called U.S. Legislative Markup (USLM) as a way of publishing laws and associated metadata in XML. This model could potentially be adapted for use across Congress for bills, summaries, reports and other information….(More)”
4 Tech Trends Changing How Cities Operate
at Governing: “Louis Brandeis famously characterized states as laboratories for democracy, but cities could be called labs for innovation or new practices….When Government Technology magazine (produced by Governing’s parent company, e.Republic, Inc.) published its annual Digital Cities Survey, the results provided an interesting look at how local governments are using technology to improve how they deliver services, increase production and streamline operations…the survey also showed four technology trends changing how local government operates and serves its citizens:
1. Open Data
…Big cities were the first to open up their data and gained national attention for their transparency. New York City, which passed an open data law in 2012, leads all cities with more than 1,300 data sets open to the public; Chicago started opening up data to the public in 2010 following an executive order and is second among cities with more than 600; and San Francisco, which was the first major city to open the doors to transparency in 2009, had the highest score from the U.S. Open Data Census for the quality of its open data.
But the survey shows that a growing number of mid-sized jurisdictions are now getting involved, too. Tacoma, Wash., has a portal with 40 data sets that show how the city is spending tax dollars on public works, economic development, transportation and public safety. Ann Arbor, Mich., has a financial transparency tool that reveals what the city is spending on a daily basis, in some cases….
2. ‘Stat’ Programs and Data Analytics
…First, the so-called “stat” programs are proliferating. Started by the New York Police Department in the 1980s, CompStat was a management technique that merged data with staff feedback to drive better performance by police officers and precinct captains. Its success led to many imitations over the years and, as the digital survey shows, stat programs continue to grow in importance. For example, Louisville has used its “LouieStat” program to cut the city’s bill for unscheduled employee overtime by $23 million as well as to spot weaknesses in performance.
Second, cities are increasing their use of data analytics to measure and improve performance. Denver, Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix have launched programs that sift through data sets to find patterns that can lead to better governance decisions. Los Angeles has combined transparency with analytics to create an online system that tracks performance for the city’s economy, service delivery, public safety and government operations that the public can view. Robert J. O’Neill Jr., executive director of the International City/County Management Association, said that both of these tech-driven performance trends “enable real-time decision-making.” He argued that public leaders who grasp the significance of these new tools can deliver government services that today’s constituents expect.
3. Online Citizen Engagement
…Avondale, Ariz., population 78,822, is engaging citizens with a mobile app and an online forum that solicits ideas that other residents can vote up or down.
In Westminster, Colo., population 110,945, a similar forum allows citizens to vote online about community ideas and gives rewards to users who engage with the online forum on a regular basis (free passes to a local driving range or fitness program). Cities are promoting more engagement activities to combat a decline in public trust in government. The days when a public meeting could provide citizen engagement aren’t enough in today’s technology-dominated world. That’s why social media tools, online surveys and even e-commerce rewards programs are popping up in cities around the country to create high-value interaction with its citizens.
4. Geographic Information Systems
… Cities now use them to analyze financial decisions to increase performance, support public safety, improve public transit, run social service activities and, increasingly, engage citizens about their city’s governance.
Augusta, Ga., won an award for its well-designed and easy-to-use transit maps. Sugar Land, Texas, uses GIS to support economic development and, as part of its citizen engagement efforts, to highlight its capital improvement projects. GIS is now used citywide by 92 percent of the survey respondents. That’s significant because GIS has long been considered a specialized (and expensive) technology primarily for city planning and environmental projects….”
How do we improve open data for police accountability?
Emily Shaw at the SunLight Foundation: “This is a challenging time for people who worry about the fairness of American governmental institutions. In quick succession, grand juries declined to indict two police officers accused of killing black men. In the case of Ferguson, Mo. officer Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, the grand jury’s decision appeared to center on uncertainty about whether Wilson’s action was legal and whether he killed under threat. In the case of New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo’s killing of Eric Garner, however, a bystander recorded and made public a video of the police officer causing Garner’s death through an illegal chokehold. In Pantaleo’s case, the availability of video data has made the question about institutional fairness even more urgent, as people can see for themselves the context in which the officer exercised power. The data has given us a common set of facts to use in judging police behavior.
We grant law enforcement and corrections departments the right to exercise more physical power over the public than we do to any other part of our government. But do we generally have the data we need to evaluate how they’re using it?….
The time to find good solutions to these problems is now. Responding to widespread frustration, President Obama has just announced a three-part initiative to “strengthen community policing”: an increased focus on transparency and oversight for federal-to-local transfers of military equipment, a proposal to provide matching funding to local police departments to buy body cameras, and a “Task Force on 21st Century Policing” that will make recommendations for how to implement community-oriented policing practices.
While each element of Obama’s initiative corresponds to a distinct set of concerns about policing, one element they share in common is the need to increase access to information about police work. Each of the three approaches will rely on mechanisms to increase the flow of public information about what police officers are doing in their official roles and how they are doing it. How are police officers going about fulfilling their responsibility to ensure public safety? Are they working in ways that appropriately respect individual rights? Are they responsive to public concerns, when concerns are raised?
By encouraging the collection and publication of more data about how government is working, Obama’s initiative has the potential to support precisely the kind of increase in data availability that can transform public outcomes. When applied with the intent to improve transparency and accountability and to increase public engagement, open data — and the civic tech that uses this data — can bridge the often too-large gap between the public and government.
However, because Obama’s initiatives depend on the effective collection, publication, and communication of information, open data advocates have a particular contribution to make. It’s important to think about what lessons we can apply from our experiences with open data — and with data collected and used for police accountability — in order to ensure that this initiative has the greatest possible impact. As an open data and open government community, can we make recommendations that can help improve the data we’re collecting for police transparency and accountability?
I’m going to begin a list, but it’s just a beginning – I am certain that you have many more recommendations to make. I’ll categorize them first by Obama’s “Strengthening Community Policing” initiatives and then keep thinking about what additional data is needed. Please think along with me about what kind of datasets we will need, what potential issues with data availability and quality we’re likely to see, what kind of laws may need to be changed to improve access to the data necessary for police accountability, then make your recommendations in the Google Doc embedded at the end of this post. If you’ve seen any great projects you’ve seen which improve police transparency and accountability, be sure to share those as well….”
The case against human rights
Eric Posner in the Guardian: “We live in an age in which most of the major human rights treaties – there are nine “core” treaties – have been ratified by the vast majority of countries. Yet it seems that the human rights agenda has fallen on hard times. In much of the Islamic world, women lack equality, religious dissenters are persecuted and political freedoms are curtailed. The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained ground in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as diverse as Russia and Nigeria. The traditional champions of human rights – Europe and the United States – have floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels. The United States, which used torture in the years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist. A recent report estimates that nearly 30 million people are forced against their will to work. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
At a time when human rights violations remain widespread, the discourse of human rights continues to flourish…
And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that governments continue to violate human rights with impunity. Why, for example, do more than 150 countries (out of 193 countries that belong to the UN) engage in torture? Why has the number of authoritarian countries increased in the last several years? Why do women remain a subordinate class in nearly all countries of the world? Why do children continue to work in mines and factories in so many countries?
The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning. The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades tried (and failed) to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its failures. It is time for a reckoning….
It is time to start over with an approach to promoting wellbeing in foreign countries that is empirical rather than ideological. Human rights advocates can learn a lot from the experiences of development economists – not only about the flaws of top-down, coercive styles of forcing people living in other countries to be free, but about how one can actually help those people if one really wants to. Wealthy countries can and should provide foreign aid to developing countries, but with the understanding that helping other countries is not the same as forcing them to adopt western institutions, modes of governance, dispute-resolution systems and rights. Helping other countries means giving them cash, technical assistance and credit where there is reason to believe that these forms of aid will raise the living standards of the poorest people. Resources currently used in fruitless efforts to compel foreign countries to comply with the byzantine, amorphous treaty regime would be better used in this way.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris, with more than a passing resemblance to the civilising efforts undertaken by western governments and missionary groups in the 19th century, which did little good for native populations while entangling European powers in the affairs of countries they did not understand. A humbler approach is long overdue.”
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States and democracy
New paper by Francis Fukuyama in the journal Democratization: “The state, rule of law, and democratic accountability are the three basic components of a modern political order. The state concentrates and uses power, while law and democracy constrain the exercise of power, indicating that there is an inherent tension between them. This article looks at ways in which the state and liberal democracy interact in three areas: citizen security, patronage and clientelism, and the formation of national identity. In all three areas, state and democracy act at cross purposes in some domains, and are mutually supportive in others. The reason for this complex relationship is that both state and democracy are themselves complex collections of institutions which interact on a multiplicity of levels. Understanding the relationship between state and democracy is important in policy terms because many recent initiatives to improve the quality of governance assume that state quality and democracy are mutually supportive, something that is not fully supported by the empirical evidence.”
Pricey privacy: Framing the economy of information in the digital age
Paper by Federica Fornaciari in FirstMonday: “As new information technologies become ubiquitous, individuals are often prompted rethinking disclosure. Available media narratives may influence one’s understanding of the benefits and costs related to sharing personal information. This study, guided by frame theory, undertakes a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of media discourse developed to discuss the privacy concerns related to the corporate collection and trade of personal information. The aim is to investigate the frames — the central organizing ideas — used in the media to discuss such an important aspect of the economics of personal data. The CDA explored 130 articles published in the New York Times between 2000 and 2012. Findings reveal that the articles utilized four frames: confusion and lack of transparency, justification and private interests, law and self-regulation, and commodification of information. Articles used episodic framing often discussing specific instances of infringements rather than broader thematic accounts. Media coverage tended to frame personal information as a commodity that may be traded, rather than as a fundamental value.”
Anyone can now crowdfund their legal battle
Springwise: “Platforms such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter have helped to prove that crowdfunding is now a viable option for entrepreneurs wanting to get a product off the ground, but both still have strict rules about what can be funded (despite the latter relaxing theirs earlier this year). There has been a push to create more social crowdfunding platforms however, and we’ve seen Watsi let donors pledge money to individuals’ healthcare needs. Now the legal industry has got its own crowdfunding site. New York’s Lexshares is getting investors to provide support to those who can’t afford the high costs of court battles.
Legal fights can be incredibly expensive, and if you want a good lawyer than plaintiffs will need to cough up. Unfortunately, those with a case may not have the funds to bring their battle to court and end up with an injustice going unchallenged. LexShares helps connect those people and businesses with investors that could help front the legal costs of taking their opponent to trial.
Specializing in ‘David and Goliath’ cases between small businesses and large corporations and multinationals, anyone can send their case in to be reviewed by LexShares’ team of law professionals. If they believe it has a chance, it’s posted on the site for investors to review. Anyone who wants to support the case can decide how much they want to invest. If it’s successful, investors receive a return of any legal fees and damages recovered through the trial, but if it fails the plaintiff doesn’t need to pay them anything. Investors can track each case through the LexShares dashboard.
LexShares aims to help businesses who might otherwise not have the capital to take their case to court. However, the company may need to be careful that the platform doesn’t turn the legal process into a betting platform for investors. Could this type of crowdfunding work for individuals who typically find it hard to get representation?
Website: www.lexshares.com“
Activists Wield Search Data to Challenge and Change Police Policy
at the New York Times: “One month after a Latino youth died from a gunshot as he sat handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser here last year, 150 demonstrators converged on Police Headquarters, some shouting “murderers” as baton-wielding officers in riot gear fired tear gas.
The police say the youth shot himself with a hidden gun. But to many residents of this city, which is 40 percent black, the incident fit a pattern of abuse and bias against minorities that includes frequent searches of cars and use of excessive force. In one case, a black female Navy veteran said she was beaten by an officer after telling a friend she was visiting that the friend did not have to let the police search her home.
Yet if it sounds as if Durham might have become a harbinger of Ferguson, Mo. — where the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer led to weeks of protests this summer — things took a very different turn. Rather than relying on demonstrations to force change, a coalition of ministers, lawyers and community and political activists turned instead to numbers. They used an analysis of state data from 2002 to 2013 that showed that the Durham police searched black male motorists at more than twice the rate of white males during stops. Drugs and other illicit materials were found no more often on blacks….
The use of statistics is gaining traction not only in North Carolina, where data on police stops is collected under a 15-year-old law, but in other cities around the country.
Austin, Tex., began requiring written consent for searches without probable cause two years ago, after its independent police monitor reported that whites stopped by the police were searched one in every 28 times, while blacks were searched one in eight times.
In Kalamazoo, Mich., a city-funded study last year found that black drivers were nearly twice as likely to be stopped, and then “much more likely to be asked to exit their vehicle, to be handcuffed, searched and arrested.”
As a result, Jeff Hadley, the public safety chief of Kalamazoo, imposed new rules requiring officers to explain to supervisors what “reasonable suspicion” they had each time they sought a driver’s consent to a search. Traffic stops have declined 42 percent amid a drop of more than 7 percent in the crime rate, he said.
“It really stops the fishing expeditions,” Chief Hadley said of the new rules. Though the findings demoralized his officers, he said, the reaction from the African-American community stunned him. “I thought they would be up in arms, but they said: ‘You’re not telling us anything we didn’t already know. How can we help?’ ”
The School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a new manual for defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges, with a chapter that shows how stop and search data can be used by the defense to raise challenges in cases where race may have played a role…”
New Tool in Fighting Corruption: Open Data
Martin Tisne at Omidyar Network: “Yesterday in Brisbane, the G20 threw its weight behind open data by featuring it prominently in the G20 Anti-Corruption working action plan. Specifically, the action plan calls for effort in three related areas:
(1) Prepare a G20 compendium of good practices and lessons learned on open data and its application in the fight against corruption
(2) Prepare G20 Open Data Principles, including identifying areas or sectors where their application is particularly useful
(3) Complete self‑assessments of G20 country open data frameworks and initiatives
Open data describes information that is not simply public, but that has been published in a manner that makes it easy to access and easy to compare and connect with other information.
This matters for anti corruption – if you are a journalist or a civil society activist investigating bribery and corruption those connections are everything. They tell you that an anonymous person (e.g. ‘Mr Smith’) who owns an obscure company registered in a tax haven is linked to a another company that has been illegally exporting timber from a neighboring country. That the said Mr. Smith is also the son-in-law of the mining minister of yet another country, who herself has been accused of embezzling mining revenues. As we have written elsewhere on this blog, investigative journalists, prosecution authorities, and civil society groups all need access to this linked data for their work.
The action plan also links open data to the wider G20 agenda, citing its impact on the ability of businesses to make better investment decisions. You can find the full detail here….”