media

Statistics and data science degrees: Overhyped or the real deal?

Curated on October 9, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

P. Richard Hahn at The Conversation: “Data science” is hot right now. The number of undergraduate degrees in statistics has tripled in the past decade, and as a statistics professor, I can tell you that it isn’t because freshmen love statistics.

Way back in 2009, economist Hal Varian of Google dubbed statistician the “next sexy job.” Since then, statistician, data scientist and actuary have topped various “best jobs” lists. Not to mention the enthusiastic press coverage of industry applications: Machine learning! Big data! AI! Deep learning!

But is it good advice? I’m going to voice an unpopular opinion for the sake of starting a conversation. Stats is indeed useful, but not in the way that the popular media – and all those online data science degree programs – seem to suggest….

While all the press tends to go to the sensationalist applications – computers that watch cat videos, anyone? – the data science boom reflects a broad increase in demand for data literacy, as a baseline requirement for modern jobs.

The “big data era” doesn’t just mean large amounts of data; it also means increased ease and ability to collect data of all types, in all walks of life. Although the big five tech companies – Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – represent about 10 percent of the U.S. market cap and dominate the public imagination, they employ only one-half of one percent of all employees.

Therefore, to be a true revolution, data science will need to infiltrate nontech industries. And it is. The U.S. has seen its impact on political campaigns. I myself have consulted in the medical devices sector. A few years back, Walmart held a data analysis competition as a recruiting tool. The need for people that can dig into the data and parse it is everywhere.

In a speech at the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, Steven “Freakonomics” Levitt related his insights about the need for data-savvy workers, based on his experience as a sought-after consultant in fields ranging from the airline industry to fast food….(More)”.

Can the UN Include Indigenous Peoples in its Development Goals?: There’s An App For That

Curated on October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jacquelyn Kovarik at NACA: “…Last year, during a high-level event of the General Assembly, a coalition of states along with the European Union and the International Labour Organization announced a new technology for monitoring the rights of Indigenous people. The proposal was a web application called “Indigenous Navigator,” designed to enable native peoples to monitor their rights from within their communities. The project is extremely seductive: why rely on the General Assembly to represent Indigenous peoples when they can represent themselves—remotely and via cutting-edge data-collecting technology? Could an app be the answer to over a decade of failed attempts to include Indigenous peoples in the international body?

The web application, which officially launched in 11 countries early this year, is comprised of four “community-based monitoring tools” that are designed to bridge the gap between Indigenous rights implementation and the United Nations goals. The toolbox, which is available open-access to anyone with internet, consists of: a set of two impressively comprehensive surveys designed to collect data on Indigenous rights at a community and national level; a comparative matrix that illustrates the links between the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights and the UN development goals; an index designed to quickly compare Indigenous realities across communities, regions, or states; and a set of indicators designed to measure the realization of Indigenous rights in communities or states. The surveys are divided by sections based on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and include such categories as cultural integrity, land rights, access to justice, health, cross-border contacts, freedom of expression and media, education, and economic and social development. The surveys also include tips for methodological administration. For example, in questions about poverty rates in the community, a tip provided reads: “Most people/communities have their own criteria for defining who are poor and who are not poor. Here you are asked to estimate how many of the men of your people/community are considered poor, according to your own criteria for poverty.” It then suggests that it may be helpful to first discuss what are the perceived characteristics of a poor person within the community, before answering the question….(More)”.

Text Analysis Systems Mine Workplace Emails to Measure Staff Sentiments

Curated on October 8, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alan Rothman at LLRX: “…For all of these good, bad or indifferent workplaces, a key question is whether any of the actions of management to engage the staff and listen to their concerns ever resulted in improved working conditions and higher levels of job satisfaction?

The answer is most often “yes”. Just having a say in, and some sense of control over, our jobs and workflows can indeed have a demonstrable impact on morale, camaraderie and the bottom line. As posited in the Hawthorne Effect, also termed the “Observer Effect”, this was first discovered during studies in the 1920’s and 1930’s when the management of a factory made improvements to the lighting and work schedules. In turn, worker satisfaction and productivity temporarily increased. This was not so much because there was more light, but rather, that the workers sensed that management was paying attention to, and then acting upon, their concerns. The workers perceived they were no longer just cogs in a machine.

Perhaps, too, the Hawthorne Effect is in some ways the workplace equivalent of the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics. To vastly oversimplify this slippery concept, the mere act of observing a subatomic particle can change its position.¹

Giving the processes of observation, analysis and change at the enterprise level a modern (but non-quantum) spin, is a fascinating new article in the September 2018 issue of The Atlantic entitled What Your Boss Could Learn by Reading the Whole Company’s Emails, by Frank Partnoy. I highly recommend a click-through and full read if you have an opportunity. I will summarize and annotate it, and then, considering my own thorough lack of understanding of the basics of y=f(x), pose some of my own physics-free questions….

Today the text analytics business, like the work done by KeenCorp, is thriving. It has been long-established as the processing behind email spam filters. Now it is finding other applications including monitoring corporate reputations on social media and other sites.²

The finance industry is another growth sector, as investment banks and hedge funds scan a wide variety of information sources to locate “slight changes in language” that may point towards pending increases or decreases in share prices. Financial research providers are using artificial intelligence to mine “insights” from their own selections of news and analytical sources.

But is this technology effective?

In a paper entitled Lazy Prices, by Lauren Cohen (Harvard Business School and NBER), Christopher Malloy (Harvard Business School and NBER), and Quoc Nguyen (University of Illinois at Chicago), in a draft dated February 22, 2018, these researchers found that the share price of company, in this case NetApp in their 2010 annual report, measurably went down after the firm “subtly changes” its reporting “descriptions of certain risks”. Algorithms can detect such changes more quickly and effectively than humans. The company subsequently clarified in its 2011 annual report their “failure to comply” with reporting requirements in 2010. A highly skilled stock analyst “might have missed that phrase”, but once again its was captured by “researcher’s algorithms”.

In the hands of a “skeptical investor”, this information might well have resulted in them questioning the differences in the 2010 and 2011 annual reports and, in turn, saved him or her a great deal of money. This detection was an early signal of a looming decline in NetApp’s stock. Half a year after the 2011 report’s publication, it was reported that the Syrian government has bought the company and “used that equipment to spy on its citizen”, causing further declines.

Now text analytics is being deployed at a new target: The composition of employees’ communications. Although it has been found that workers have no expectations of privacy in their workplaces, some companies remain reluctant to do so because of privacy concerns. Thus, companies are finding it more challenging to resist the “urge to mine employee information”, especially as text analysis systems continue to improve.

Among the evolving enterprise applications are the human resources departments in assessing overall employee morale. For example, Vibe is such an app that scans through communications on Slack, a widely used enterprise platform. Vibe’s algorithm, in real-time reporting, measures the positive and negative emotions of a work team….(More)”.

Whither large International Non-Governmental Organisations?

Curated on October 8, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Working Paper by Penny Lawrence: “Large international non-government organisations (INGOs) seem to be in an existential crisis in their role in the fight for social justice. Many, such as Save the Children or Oxfam, have become big well-known brands with compliance expectations similar to big businesses. Yet the public still imagine them to be run by volunteers. Their context is changing so fast, and so unpredictably, that they are struggling to keep up. It is a time of extraordinary disruptive change including the digital transformation, changing societal norms and engagement expectations and political upheaval and challenge. Fifteen years ago the political centre-ground in the UK seemed firm, with expanding space for civil society organisations to operate. Space for civil society voice now seems more threatened and challenged (Kenny 2015).

There has been a decline in trust in large charities in particular, partly as a result of their own complacency, acting as if the argument for aid has been won. Partly as a result of questioned practices e.g. the fundraising scandal of 2016/17 (where repeated mail drops to individuals requesting funds caused public backlash) and the safeguarding scandal of 2018 (where historic cases of sexual abuse by INGO staff, including Oxfam, were revisited by media in the wake of the #me too movement). This is also partly as a result of political challenge on INGOs’ advocacy and influencing role, their bias and their voice:

‘Some government ministers regard the charity sector with suspicion because it largely employs senior people with a left-wing perspective on life and because of other unfair criticisms of government it means there is regularly a tension between big charities and the conservative party’ Richard Wilson (Former Minister for Civil Society) 2018

On the other hand many feel that charities who have taken significant contracts to deliver services for the state have forfeited their independent voice and lost their way:

‘The voluntary sector risks declining over the next ten years into a mere instrument of a shrunken state, voiceless and toothless, unless it seizes the agenda and creates its own vision.’ Professor Nicholas Deakin 2014

It’s a tough context to be leading an INGO through, but INGOs have appeared ill prepared and slow to respond to the threats and opportunities, not realising how much they may need to change to respond to the fast evolving context and expectations. Large INGOs spend most of their energy exploiting present grant and contract business models, rather than exploring the opportunities to overcome poverty offered by such disruptive change. Their size and structures do not enable agility. They are too internally focused and self-referencing at a time when the world around them is changing so fast, and when political sands have shifted. Focussing on the internationalisation of structures and decision-making means large INGOs are ‘defeated by our own complexity’, as one INGO interviewee put it.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate thinking amongst large INGOs at a time of such extraordinary disruptive change. The paper explores options for large INGOs, in terms of function and structure. After outlining large INGOs’ history, changing context, value and current thinking, it explores learning from others outside the development sector before suggesting the emerging options. It reflects on what’s encouraging and what’s stopping change and offers possible choices and pathways forwards….(More)”.

Renovating democracy from the bottom up

Curated on October 8, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nathan Gardels at the Washington Post: “The participatory power of social media is a game changer for governance. It levels the playing field among amateurs and experts, peers and authorities and even challenges the legitimacy of representative government. Its arrival coincides with and reinforces the widespread distrust of elites across the Western world, ripening the historical moment for direct democracy.

For the first time, an Internet-based movement has come to power in a major country, Italy, under the slogan “Participate, don’t delegate!” All of the Five Star Movement’s parliamentarians, who rule the country in a coalition with the far-right League party, were nominated and elected to stand for office online. And they have appointed the world’s first minister for direct democracy, Riccardo Fraccaro.

In Rome this week, he explained the participatory agenda of Italy’s ruling coalition government to The WorldPost at a meeting of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy. “Citizens must be granted the same possibility to actively intervene in the process of managing and administrating public goods as normally carried out by their elected representatives,” he enthused. “What we have witnessed in our democracy is a drift toward ‘partyocracy,’ in which a restricted circle of policymakers have been so fully empowered with decision-making capacity that they could virtually ignore and bypass the public will. The mere election of a representative every so many years is no longer sufficient to prevent this from happening. That is why our government will take the next step forward in order to innovate and enhance our democracy.”

Fraccaro went on: “Referenda, public petitions and the citizens’ ballot initiative are nothing other than the direct means available for the citizenry to submit laws that political parties are not willing to propose or to reject rules approved by political parties that are not welcome by the people. Our aim, therefore, is to establish the principles and practices of direct democracy alongside the system of representative government in order to give real, authentic sovereignty to the citizens.”

At the Rome forum, Deputy Prime Minister Luigi di Maio, a Five Star member, railed against the technocrats and banks he says are trying to frustrate the will of the people. He promised forthcoming changes in the Italian constitution to follow through on Fraccaro’s call for citizen-initiated propositions that will go to the public ballot if the legislature does not act on them.

The program that has so far emerged out of the government’s participatory agenda is a mixed bag. It includes everything from anti-immigrant and anti-vaccine policies to the expansion of digital networks and planting more trees. In a move that has unsettled the European Union authorities as well as Italy’s non-partisan, indirectly-elected president, the governing coalition last week proposed both a tax cut and the provision of a universal basic income — despite the fact that Italy’s long-term debt is already 130 percent of GDP.

The Italian experiment warrants close attention as a harbinger of things to come elsewhere. It reveals a paradox for governance in this digital age: the more participation there is, the greater the need for the counterbalance of impartial mediating practices and institutions that can process the cacophony of voices, sort out the deluge of contested information, dispense with magical thinking and negotiate fair trade-offs among the welter of conflicting interests….(More)”.

(In)Equalities and Social (In)Visibilities in the Digital Age

Curated on October 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Intro by Inês Amaral, Maria João Barata and Vasco Almeida to the Special issue of Interações: “The influence of new technologies in public and private spheres of society, rather than a reformulation, has given rise to a new social field and directly interferes with how we perceive the world, relate to it and to others. One should note that in Pierre Bourdieu›s (2001) theory, field arises as a configuration of socially distributed relations.

Progressively, a universe of socialisation has emerged and consolidated: cyber-space. Although virtual, it exists and produces effects. It can be defined as the space boosted by the different digital communication platforms and assumes itself as an

individual communication model, allowing the receiver to be simultaneously emitter. Space of flows (Castells, 1996), cyberspace translates the social dimension of the Internet, enabling the diffusion of communication/information on a global scale. This causes an intense process of inclusion and exclusion of people in the network.

The reference to info-inclusive and info-excluded societies of the digital scenario is imperative when it is reflected in the geography of the new socio-technological spaces. The dynamics of these territories are directly associated with the way social,

demographic, economic and technological variables condition each other, revealing the potential for dissemination of information and knowledge through technologies.

In this special issue of the journal Interações we propose a reflection on (In)Equalities and Social (In)Visibilities in the Digital Age. The articles in the volume present research results and/or theoretical reflection on social visibilities and invisibilities

created by dynamics of media and digital inclusion and exclusion, relations between the digital and inequalities in different geographical, social and professional contexts, digital literacy and vulnerable social groups, conditioning created by technology to the individual in social context, among others….(More)”

Ctrl Alt Delete: How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy

Curated on October 2, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tom Baldwin: We all know something has gone wrong: people hate politics, loathe the media and are now scared of each other too. Journalist and one-time senior political advisor Tom Baldwin tells the riveting–often terrifying–story of how a tidal wave of information overwhelmed democracy’s sandcastle defenses against extremism and falsehood.

Ctrl Alt Delete exposes the struggle for control between a rapacious 24-hour media and terrified politicians that has loosened those leaders’ grip on truth as the internet rips the ground out from under them. It explains how dependency on data, algorithms and digital technology brought about the rise of the Alt Right, the Alt Left and a triumphant army of trolls driving people apart. And it warns of the rise of those threatening to delete what remains of democracy: resurgent populists in Westminster, the White House and the Kremlin, but also–just as often–liberals fearful of mob rule.

This is an explosive, brutally honest and sometimes funny account of what we all got wrong, and how to put it right again. It will change the way you look at the world–and especially the everyday technology that crashed our democracy….(More)”.

Social Media Use in Crisis and Risk Communication: Emergencies, Concerns and Awareness

Curated on October 2, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Harald Hornmoen and Klas Backholm: ” This book is about how different communicators – whether professionals, such as crisis managers, first responders and journalists, or private citizens and disaster victims – have used social media to communicate about risks and crises. It is also about how these very different actors can play a crucial role in mitigating or preventing crises. How can they use social media to strengthen their own and the public’s awareness and understanding of crises when they unfold? How can they use social media to promote resilience during crises and the ability to deal with the after-effects? Moreover, what can they do to avoid using social media in a manner that weakens the situation awareness of crisis workers and citizens, or obstructs effective emergency management?

The RESCUE (Researching Social Media and Collaborative Software Use in Emergency Situations) project, on which this book is based, has sought to enable a more efficient and appropriate use of social media among key communicators, such as journalists and government actors involved in crisis management. Through empirical studies, and by drawing on relevant theory, the collection aims to improve our understanding of how social media have been used in different types of risks and crises. Building on our empirical work, we provide research-based input into how social media can be used efficiently by different communicators in a way appropriate to the specific crisis and to the concerns of the public.

We address our questions by presenting new research-based knowledge on social media use during different crises: the terrorist attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011; the central European floods in Austria in 2013; and the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. The social media platforms analysed include the most popular ones in the affected areas at the time of the crises: Twitter and Facebook. By addressing such different cases, the book will move the field of crisis communication in social media beyond individual studies towards providing knowledge which is valid across situations….(More)”.

Emerging Labour Market Data Sources towards Digital Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET)

Curated on October 1, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nikos Askitas, Rafik Mahjoubi, Pedro S. Martins, Koffi Zougbede for Paris21/OECD: “Experience from both technology and policy making shows that solutions for labour market improvements are simply choices of new, more tolerable problems. All data solutions supporting digital Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) will have to incorporate a roadmap of changes rather than an unrealistic super-solution. The ideal situation is a world in which labour market participants engage in intelligent strategic behavior in an informed, fair and sophisticated manner.

Labour market data captures transactions within labour market processes. In order to successfully capture such data, we need to understand the specifics of these market processes. Designing an ecosystem of labour market matching facilitators and rules of engagement for contributing to a lean and streamlined Logistics Management and Information System (LMIS) is the best way to create Big Data with context relevance. This is in contrast with pre-existing Big Data captured by global job boards or social media for which relevance is limited by the technology access gap and its variations across the developing world.

Network effects occur in technology and job facilitation, as seen in the developed world. Managing and instigating the right network effects might be crucial to avoid fragmented stagnation and inefficiency. This is key to avoid throwing money behind wrong choices that do not gain traction.

A mixed mode approach is possibly the ideal approach for developing countries. Mixing offline and online elements correctly will be crucial in bridging the technology access gap and reaping the benefits of digitisation at the same time.

Properly incentivising the various entities is critical for progression, and more specifically the private sector, which is significantly more agile and inventive, has “skin in the game” and a long-term commitment to the conditions in the field, has intimate knowledge of how to solve the the technology gap and brings a better understanding of the particular ambient context they are operating in. To summarise: Big Data starts small.

Managing expectations and creating incentives for the various stakeholders will be crucial in establishing digitally supported TVET. Developing the right business models will be crucial in the short term and beyond, and it will be the result of creating the right mix of technological and policy expertise with good knowledge of the situation on the ground….(More)”.