The books were Armed Services Editions, printed by a coalition of publishers with funding from the government and shipped by the Army and Navy. The largest of them were only three-quarters of an inch thick—thin enough to fit in the pocket of a soldier’s pants. Soldiers read them on transport ships, in camps and in foxholes. Wounded and waiting for medics, men turned to them on Omaha Beach, propped against the base of the cliffs. Others were buried with a book tucked in a pocket.
“When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II” by Molly Guptill Manning tells the story of the Armed Services Editions. To be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on Dec. 2, the book reveals how the special editions sparked correspondence between soldiers and authors, lifted “The Great Gatsby” from obscurity, and created a new audience of readers back home.
The program was conceived by a group of publishers, including Doubleday, Random House and W. W. Norton. In 1942 they formed the Council on Books in Wartime to explore how books could serve the nation during the war. Ultimately, the program transformed the publishing industry. “It basically provided the foundation for the mass-market paperback,” said Michael Hackenberg, a bookseller and historian. It also turned a generation of young men into lifelong readers….”
Innovating Practice in a Culture of Expertise
Aleem Walji at SSI Review: “When I joined the World Bank five years ago to lead a new innovation practice, the organization asked me to help expand the space for experimentation and learning with an emphasis on emergent technologies. But that mandate was intimidating and counter-intuitive in an “expert-driven” culture. Experts want detailed plans, budgets, clear success indicators, and minimal risk. But innovation is about managing risk and navigating uncertainty intelligently. You fail fast and fail forward. It has been a step-by-step process, and the journey is far from over, but the World Bank today sees innovation as essential to achieving its mission.
It’s taught me a lot about seeding innovation in a culture of expertise, including phasing change across approaches to technology, teaming, problem solving, and ultimately leadership.
Innovating technologies: As a newcomer, my goal was not to try to change the World Bank’s culture. I was content to carve out a space where my team could try new things we couldn’t do elsewhere in the institution, learn fast, and create impact. Our initial focus was leveraging technologies with approaches that, if they took root, could be very powerful.
Over the first 18 to 24 months, we served as an incubator for ideas and had a number of successes that built on senior management’s support for increased access to information. The Open Data Initiative, for example, made our trove of information on countries, people, projects, and programs widely available and searchable. To our surprise, people came in droves to access it. We also launched the Mapping for Results initiative, which mapped project results and poverty data to show the relationship between where we lend and where the poor live, and the results of our work. These programs are now mainstream at the World Bank and have penetrated other development institutions….
Innovating teams: The lab idea—phase two—would require collaboration and experimentation in an unprecedented way. For example, we worked with other parts of the World Bank and a number of outside organizations to incubate the Open Development Technology Alliance, now part of the digital engagement unit of the World Bank. It worked to enhance accountability, and improve the delivery and quality of public services through technology-enabled citizen engagement such as using mobile phones, interactive mapping, and social media to draw citizens into collective problem mapping and problem solving….
Innovating problem solving: At the same time, we recognized that we face some really complex problems that the World Bank’s traditional approach of lending to governments and supervising development projects is not solving. For this, we needed another type of lab that innovated the very way we solve problems. We needed a deliberate process for experimenting, learning, iterating, and adapting. But that’s easier said than done. At our core, we are an expert-driven organization with know-how in disciplines ranging from agricultural economics and civil engineering to maternal health and early childhood development. Our problem-solving architecture is rooted in designing technical solutions to complicated problems. Yet the hardest problems in the world defy technical fixes. We work in contexts where political environments shift, leaders change, and conditions on the ground constantly evolve. Problems like climate change, financial inclusion, food security, and youth unemployment demand new ways of solving old problems.
The innovation we most needed was innovation in the leadership architecture of how we confront complex challenges. We share knowledge and expertise on the “what” of reform, but the “how” is what we need most. We need to marry know-how with do-how. We need multiyear, multi-stakeholder, and systems approaches to solving problems. We need to get better at framing and reframing problems, integrative thinking, and testing a range of solutions. We need to iterate and course-correct as we learn what works and doesn’t work in which context. That’s where we are right now with what we call “integrated leadership learning innovation”—phase four. It’s all about shaping an innovative process to address complex problems….”
Can Government Mine Tweets to Assess Public Opinion?
What if instead of going to a city meeting, you could go on Twitter, tweet your opinion, and still be heard by those in government? New research suggests this is a possibility.
The Urban Attitudes Lab at Tufts University has conducted research on accessing “big data” on social networking sites for civic purposes, according to Justin Hollander, associate professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts.
About six months ago, Hollander began researching new ways of accessing how people think about the places they live, work and play. “We’re looking to see how tapping into social media data to understand attitudes and opinions can benefit both urban planning and public policy,” he said.
Harnessing natural comments — there are about one billion tweets per day — could help governments learn what people are saying and feeling, said Hollander. And while formal types of data can be used as proxies for how happy people are, people openly share their sentiments on social networking sites.
Twitter and other social media sites can also provide information in an unobtrusive way. “The idea is that we can capture a potentially more valid and reliable view [of people’s] opinions about the world,” he said. As an inexact science, social science relies on a wide range of data sources to inform research, including surveys, interviews and focus groups; but people respond to being the subject of study, possibly affecting outcomes, Hollander said.
Hollander is also interested in extracting data from social sites because it can be done on a 24/7 basis, which means not having to wait for government to administer surveys, like the Decennial Census. Information from Twitter can also be connected to place; Hollander has approximated that about 10 percent of all tweets are geotagged to location.
In its first study earlier this year, the lab looked at using big data to learn about people’s sentiments and civic interests in New Bedford, Mass., comparing Twitter messages with the city’s published meeting minutes.
To extract tweets over a six-week period from February to April, researchers used the lab’s own software to capture 122,186 tweets geotagged within the city that also had words pertaining to the New Bedford area. Hollander said anyone can get API information from Twitter to also mine data from an area as small as a neighborhood containing a couple hundred houses.
Researchers used IBM’s SPSS Modeler software, comparing this to custom-designed software, to leverage a sentiment dictionary of nearly 3,000 words, assigning a sentiment score to each phrase — ranging from -5 for awful feelings to +5 for feelings of elation. The lab did this for the Twitter messages, and found that about 7 percent were positive versus 5.5 percent negative, and correspondingly in the minutes, 1.7 percent were positive and .7 percent negative. In total, about 11,000 messages contained sentiments.
The lab also used NVivo qualitative software to analyze 24 key words in a one-year sample of the city’s meeting minutes. By searching for the same words in Twitter posts, the researchers found that “school,” “health,” “safety,” “parks,” “field” and “children” were used frequently across both mediums.
….
Next up for the lab is a new study contrasting Twitter posts from four Massachusetts cities with the recent election results.
Future Crimes
New book by Marc Goodman: “Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways—but there is an ominous flip side. Criminals are often the earliest, and most innovative, adopters of technology, and modern times have led to modern crimes. Today’s criminals are stealing identities, draining online bank accounts and wiping out computer servers. It’s disturbingly easy to activate baby monitors to spy on families, pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity, and thieves are analyzing your social media in order to determine the best time for a home invasion. Meanwhile, 3D printers produce AK-47s, terrorists can download the recipe for the Ebola virus, and drug cartels are building drones. This is just the beginning of the tsunami of technological threats coming our way. In Future Crimes, Marc Goodman rips opens his database of hundreds of real cases to give us front-row access to these impending perils. Reading like a sci-fi thriller, but based in startling fact, Future Crimes raises tough questions about the expanding role of technology in our lives. Future Crimes is a call to action for better security measures worldwide, but most importantly, it will empower readers to protect themselves against looming technological threats—before it’s too late.”
The Reliability of Tweets as a Supplementary Method of Seasonal Influenza Surveillance
New Paper by Ming-Hsiang Tsou et al in the Journal of Medical Internet Research: “Existing influenza surveillance in the United States is focused on the collection of data from sentinel physicians and hospitals; however, the compilation and distribution of reports are usually delayed by up to 2 weeks. With the popularity of social media growing, the Internet is a source for syndromic surveillance due to the availability of large amounts of data. In this study, tweets, or posts of 140 characters or less, from the website Twitter were collected and analyzed for their potential as surveillance for seasonal influenza.
Objective: There were three aims: (1) to improve the correlation of tweets to sentinel-provided influenza-like illness (ILI) rates by city through filtering and a machine-learning classifier, (2) to observe correlations of tweets for emergency department ILI rates by city, and (3) to explore correlations for tweets to laboratory-confirmed influenza cases in San Diego.
Methods: Tweets containing the keyword “flu” were collected within a 17-mile radius from 11 US cities selected for population and availability of ILI data. At the end of the collection period, 159,802 tweets were used for correlation analyses with sentinel-provided ILI and emergency department ILI rates as reported by the corresponding city or county health department. Two separate methods were used to observe correlations between tweets and ILI rates: filtering the tweets by type (non-retweets, retweets, tweets with a URL, tweets without a URL), and the use of a machine-learning classifier that determined whether a tweet was “valid”, or from a user who was likely ill with the flu.
Results: Correlations varied by city but general trends were observed. Non-retweets and tweets without a URL had higher and more significant (P<.05) correlations than retweets and tweets with a URL. Correlations of tweets to emergency department ILI rates were higher than the correlations observed for sentinel-provided ILI for most of the cities. The machine-learning classifier yielded the highest correlations for many of the cities when using the sentinel-provided or emergency department ILI as well as the number of laboratory-confirmed influenza cases in San Diego. High correlation values (r=.93) with significance at P<.001 were observed for laboratory-confirmed influenza cases for most categories and tweets determined to be valid by the classifier.
Conclusions: Compared to tweet analyses in the previous influenza season, this study demonstrated increased accuracy in using Twitter as a supplementary surveillance tool for influenza as better filtering and classification methods yielded higher correlations for the 2013-2014 influenza season than those found for tweets in the previous influenza season, where emergency department ILI rates were better correlated to tweets than sentinel-provided ILI rates. Further investigations in the field would require expansion with regard to the location that the tweets are collected from, as well as the availability of more ILI data…”
Hashtag Standards For Emergencies
Key Findings of New Report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs:”
- The public is using Twitter for real-time information exchange and for expressing emotional support during a variety of crises, such as wildfires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, political protests, mass shootings, and communicable-disease tracking.31 By encouraging proactive standardization of hashtags, emergency responders may be able to reduce a big-data challenge and better leverage crowdsourced information for operational planning and response.
- Twitter is the primary social media platform discussed in this Think Brief. However, the use of hashtags has spread to other social media platforms, including Sina Weibo, Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora. As a result, the ideas behind hashtag standardization may have a much larger sphere of influence than just this one platform.
- Three hashtag standards are encouraged and discussed: early standardization of the disaster name (e.g., #Fay), how to report non-emergency needs (e.g., #PublicRep) and requesting emergency assistance (e.g., #911US).
- As well as standardizing hashtags, emergency response agencies should encourage the public to enable Global Positioning System (GPS) when tweeting during an emergency. This will provide highly detailed information to facilitate response.
- Non-governmental groups, national agencies and international organizations should discuss the potential added value of monitoring social media during emergencies. These groups need to agree who is establishing the standards for a given country or event, which agency disseminates these prescriptive messages, and who is collecting and validating the incoming crowdsourced reports.
- Additional efforts should be pursued regarding how to best link crowdsourced information into emergency response operations and logistics. If this information will be collected, the teams should be ready to act on it in a timely manner.”
Could digital badges clarify the roles of co-authors?
at AAAS Science Magazine: “Ever look at a research paper and wonder how the half-dozen or more authors contributed to the work? After all, it’s usually only the first or last author who gets all the media attention or the scientific credit when people are considered for jobs, grants, awards, and more. Some journals try to address this issue with the “authors’ contributions” sections within a paper, but a collection of science, publishing, and software groups is now developing a more modern solution—digital “badges,” assigned on publication of a paper online, that detail what each author did for the work and that the authors can link to their profiles elsewhere on the Web.
Those organizations include publishers BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science; The Wellcome Trust research charity; software development groups Mozilla Science Lab (a group of researchers, developers, librarians, and publishers) and Digital Science (a software and technology firm); and ORCID, an effort to assign researchers digital identifiers. The collaboration presented its progress on the project at the Mozilla Festival in London that ended last week. (Mozilla is the open software community behind the Firefox browser and other programs.)
The infrastructure of the badges is still being established, with early prototypes scheduled to launch early next year, according to Amye Kenall, the journal development manager of open data initiatives and journals at BioMed Central. She envisions the badge process in the following way: Once an article is published, the publisher would alert software maintained by Mozilla to automatically set up an online form, where authors fill out roles using a detailed contributor taxonomy. After the authors have completed this, the badges would then appear next to their names on the journal article, and double-clicking on a badge would lead to the ORCID site for that particular author, where the author’s badges, integrated with their publishing record, live….
The parties behind the digital badge effort are “looking to change behavior” of scientists in the competitive dog-eat-dog world of academia by acknowledging contributions, says Kaitlin Thaney, director of Mozilla Science Lab. Amy Brand, vice president of academic and research relations and VP of North America at Digital Science, says that the collaboration believes that the badges should be optional, to accommodate old-fashioned or less tech-savvy authors. She says that the digital credentials may improve lab culture, countering situations where junior scientists are caught up in lab politics and the “star,” who didn’t do much of the actual research apart from obtaining the funding, gets to be the first author of the paper and receive the most credit. “All of this calls out for more transparency,” Brand says….”
Ten Leaders In the Civic Space
List Developed by SeeClickFix:
5. OpenGov Hub
The OpenGov Hub seeks to bring together existing small and medium-sized organizations working on the broader open government agenda. …
Learn more about them here on their website.
6. Blexting
Blexting is a mobile app that lets individuals photographically survey properties and update condition information for posting and sharing. …
Read another article about them here.
9. Emerging Local Government Leaders
ELGL is a group of innovative local government leaders who are hungry to make an impact. …
Learn more about them here on their website.
10. ArchiveSocial
ArchiveSocial is a social media archiving solution that automates record keeping from social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. ….
Learn more about them here on their website.”
Creating community data tools for local impact: Piton Foundation
Amy Gahran at Knight Digital Media Center: “Many local funders focus on providing grants and doing fundraising to support local organizations and projects. However, some local funders also directly operate their own programs to serve the local community.
This November in the Denver metro area, the Piton Foundation will launch a major revamp of their Community Factsonline database of neighborhood-level community statistics. This resource is designed to help Denver-area nonprofits, researchers, community organizers and others better understand and serve communities in need.
Although Piton serves Denver-area communities, it’s not a community foundation in the traditional sense. Piton is a private, operating foundation established in the 1970s with a mission to improve the lives of Colorado’s low-income children and their families. Recently, Piton became part of Gary Community Investments(GCI) — an organization that invests directly in for-profit and philanthropic organizations, projects and programs to benefit Colorado’s low-income children and their families. Originally Piton focused on serving only the city and county of Denver, but since Piton joined GCI, they’ve expanded their focus to serving communities across the entire seven-county Denver metro area.
Back in 1991, Piton took the then-unusual step of forming its own Data Initiative. This early “open government” effort gained access to local datasets, cleaned them up, and made this data available to organizations serving low-income Denver communities. By opening and democratizing local data, and putting it in the context of local neighborhoods, Piton empowered local organizations to do more for local families in need. Such data can help organizations better target programs or fundraising efforts, or better understand local needs and trends in ways that enhance the services they offer.
In 2011, Piton’s Data Initiative expanded, adding projects like the Colorado Data Engine — an open source online data repository of neighborhood-scale public data in a standardized, geolocated format. The development of this data engine was supported by funding from the Knight Foundation and the Denver Foundation….”
ShareHub: at the Heart of Seoul's Sharing Movement
Cat Johnson at Shareable: “In 2012, Seoul publicly announced its commitment to becoming a sharing city. It has since emerged as a leader of the global sharing movement and serves as a model for cities around the world. Supported by the municipal government and embedded in numerous parts of everyday life in Seoul, the Sharing City project has proven to be an inspiration to city leaders, entrepreneurs, and sharing enthusiasts around the world.
At the heart of Sharing City, Seoul is ShareHub, an online platform that connects users with sharing services, educates and informs the public about sharing initiatives, and serves as the online hub for the Sharing City, Seoul project. Now a year and a half into its existence, ShareHub, which is powered by Creative Commons Korea (CC Korea), has served 1.4 million visitors since launching, hosts more than 350 articles about sharing, and has played a key role in promoting sharing policies and projects. Shareable connected with Nanshil Kwon, manager of ShareHub, to find out more about the project, its role in promoting sharing culture, and the future of the sharing movement in Seoul….”