science

What Is Citizen Science? – A Scientometric Meta-Analysis

Curated on January 21, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Christopher Kullenberg and Dick Kasperowski at PLOS One: “The concept of citizen science (CS) is currently referred to by many actors inside and outside science and research. Several descriptions of this purportedly new approach of science are often heard in connection with large datasets and the possibilities of mobilizing crowds outside science to assists with observations and classifications. However, other accounts refer to CS as a way of democratizing science, aiding concerned communities in creating data to influence policy and as a way of promoting political decision processes involving environment and health.

Objective

In this study we analyse two datasets (N = 1935, N = 633) retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) with the aim of giving a scientometric description of what the concept of CS entails. We account for its development over time, and what strands of research that has adopted CS and give an assessment of what scientific output has been achieved in CS-related projects. To attain this, scientometric methods have been combined with qualitative approaches to render more precise search terms.

Results

Results indicate that there are three main focal points of CS. The largest is composed of research on biology, conservation and ecology, and utilizes CS mainly as a methodology of collecting and classifying data. A second strand of research has emerged through geographic information research, where citizens participate in the collection of geographic data. Thirdly, there is a line of research relating to the social sciences and epidemiology, which studies and facilitates public participation in relation to environmental issues and health. In terms of scientific output, the largest body of articles are to be found in biology and conservation research. In absolute numbers, the amount of publications generated by CS is low (N = 1935), but over the past decade a new and very productive line of CS based on digital platforms has emerged for the collection and classification of data….(More)”

Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain

Curated on January 20, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

UK Government Office for Science: “In a major report on distributed ledgers published today (19 January 2016), the Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, sets out how this technology could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity.

A distributed ledger is a database that can securely record financial, physical or electronic assets for sharing across a network through entirely transparent updates of information.

Its first incarnation was ‘Blockchain’ in 2008, which underpinned digital cash systems such as Bitcoin. The technology has now evolved into a variety of models that can be applied to different business problems and dramatically improve the sharing of information.

Distributed ledger technology could provide government with new tools to reduce fraud, error and the cost of paper intensive processes. It also has the potential to provide new ways of assuring ownership and provenance for goods and intellectual property.

Distributed ledgers are already being used in the diamond markets and in the disbursing of international aid payments.

Sir Mark Walport said:

Distributed ledger technology has the potential to transform the delivery of public and private services. It has the potential to redefine the relationship between government and the citizen in terms of data sharing, transparency and trust and make a leading contribution to the government’s digital transformation plan.

Any new technology creates challenges, but with the right mix of leadership, collaboration and sound governance, distributed ledgers could yield significant benefits for the UK.

The report makes a number of recommendations which focus on ministerial leadership, research, standards and the need for proof of concept trials.

They include:

government should provide ministerial leadership to ensure that it provides the vision, leadership and the platform for distributed ledger technology within government; this group should consider governance, privacy, security and standards
government should establish trials of distributed ledgers in order to assess the technology’s usability within the public sector
government could support the creation of distributed ledger demonstrators for local government that will bring together all the elements necessary to test the technology and its application.
the UK research community should invest in the research required to ensure that distributed ledgers are scalable, secure and provide proof of correctness of their contents….View the report ‘Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain’.”

The impact of open access scientific knowledge

Curated on January 20, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jack Karsten and Darrell M. West at Brookings: “In spite of technological advancements like the Internet, academic publishing has operated in much the same way for centuries. Scientists voluntarily review their peers’ papers for little or no compensation; the paper’s author likewise does not receive payment from academic publishers. Though most of the costs of publishing a journal are administrative, the cost of subscribing to scientific journals nevertheless increased 600 percent between 1984 and 2002. The funding for the research libraries that form the bulk of journal subscribers has not kept pace, leading to campaigns at universities including Harvard to boycott for-profit publishers.

Though the Internet has not yet brought down the price of academic journal subscriptions, it has led to some interesting alternatives. In 2015, the Twitter hashtag #icanhazPDF was created to request copies of papers located behind paywalls. Anyone with access to a specific paper can download it and then e-mail it to the requester. The practice violates the copyright of publishers, but puts papers in reach of researchers who would otherwise not be able to read them. If a researcher cannot read a journal article in the first place, they cannot go on to cite it, which raises the profile of the cited article and the journal that published it. The publisher is caught between two conflicting goals: to increase the number of citations for their articles and earning revenue to stay in business.

Thinking outside the journal

A trio of University of Chicago researchers examines this issue through the lens of Wikipedia in a paper titled “Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science.” Wikipedia makes a compelling subject for scientific diffusion given its status as one of the most visited websites in the world, attracting 374 million unique visitors monthly as of September 2015. The study found that on English language articles, Wikipedia editors are 47 percent more likely to cite an article from an open access journal. Anyone using Wikipedia as a first source for information on a subject is more likely to read information from open source journals. If readers click through the links to cited articles, they can read the actual text of these open-source journal articles.

Given how much the federal government spends on scientific research ($66 billion on nondefense R&D in 2015), it has a large role to play in the diffusion of scientific knowledge. Since 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has required researchers who publish in academic journals to also publish in PubMed, an online open access journal. Expanding provisions like the NIH Public Access Policy to other agencies and to recipients of federal grants at universities would give the public and other researchers a wealth of scientific information. Scientific literacy, even on cutting-edge research, is increasingly important when science informs policy on major issues such as climate change and health care….(More)”

Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data

Curated on January 19, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh: “This book critically explores forms and techniques of calculation that emerge with digital computation, and their implications. The contributors demonstrate that digital calculative devices matter beyond their specific functions as they progressively shape, transform and govern all areas of our life. In particular, it addresses such questions as:

How does the drive to make sense of, and productively use, large amounts of diverse data, inform the development of new calculative devices, logics and techniques?
How do these devices, logics and techniques affect our capacity to decide and to act?
How do mundane elements of our physical and virtual existence become data to be analysed and rearranged in complex ensembles of people and things?
In what ways are conventional notions of public and private, individual and population, certainty and probability, rule and exception transformed and what are the consequences?
How does the search for ‘hidden’ connections and patterns change our understanding of social relations and associative life?
Do contemporary modes of calculation produce new thresholds of calculability and computability, allowing for the improbable or the merely possible to be embraced and acted upon?
As contemporary approaches to governing uncertain futures seek to anticipate future events, how are calculation and decision engaged anew?

Drawing together different strands of cutting-edge research that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book makes an important contribution to several areas of scholarship, including the emerging social science field of software studies, and will be a vital resource for students and scholars alike….(More)”

Human-machine superintelligence pegged as key to solving global problems

Curated on January 15, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ravi Mandalia at Dispatch Tribunal: “Global complex problems such as climate change and geopolitical conflicts need a new approach if we want to solve them and researchers have suggested that human-machine super intelligence could be the key.

These so called ‘wicked’ problems are some of the most dire ones that need our immediate attention and researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University have presented their new vision of human computation that could help solve these problems in an article published in the journal Science.

Scientists behind the article have cited how power of human computation has helped push the traditional limits to new heights – something that was not achievable until now. Humans are still ahead of machines at great many things – cognitive abilities is one the key areas – but if their powers are combined with those of machines, the result would be multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

Researchers have already proved that micro-tasking has helped with some complex problems including build the world’s most complete map of human retinal neurons; however, this approach isn’t always viable to solve much more complex problems of today and entirely new and innovative approach is required to solve “wicked problems” – those that involve many interacting systems that are constantly changing, and whose solutions have unforeseen consequences (e.g., corruption resulting from financial aid given in response to a natural disaster).

Recently developed human computation technologies that provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs could enable creation of more flexible collaborative environments and such setups are more apt for addressing the most challenging issues.

This idea is already taking shape in several human computation projects, including YardMap.org, which was launched by the Cornell in 2012 to map global conservation efforts one parcel at a time.

“By sharing and observing practices in a map-based social network, people can begin to relate their individual efforts to the global conservation potential of living and working landscapes,” says Janis Dickinson, Professor and Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

YardMap allows participants to interact and build on each other’s work – something that crowdsourcing alone cannot achieve. The project serves as an important model for how such bottom-up, socially networked systems can bring about scalable changes how we manage residential landscapes.

HCI has recently set out to use crowd-power to accelerate Cornell-based Alzheimer’s disease research. WeCureAlz.com combines two successful microtasking systems into an interactive analytic pipeline that builds blood flow models of mouse brains. The stardust@home system, which was used to search for comet dust in one million images of aerogel, is being adapted to identify stalled blood vessels, which will then be pinpointed in the brain by a modified version of the EyeWire system….(More)”

How Much Development Data Is Enough?

Curated on January 12, 2016July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Keith D. Shepherd at Project Syndicate: “Rapid advances in technology have dramatically lowered the cost of gathering data. Sensors in space, the sky, the lab, and the field, along with newfound opportunities for crowdsourcing and widespread adoption of the Internet and mobile telephones, are making large amounts of information available to those for whom it was previously out of reach. A small-scale farmer in rural Africa, for example, can now access weather forecasts and market prices at the tap of a screen.

This data revolution offers enormous potential for improving decision-making at every level – from the local farmer to world-spanning development organizations. But gathering data is not enough. The information must also be managed and evaluated – and doing this properly can be far more complicated and expensive than the effort to collect it. If the decisions to be improved are not first properly identified and analyzed, there is a high risk that much of the collection effort could be wasted or misdirected.

This conclusion is itself based on empirical analysis. The evidence is weak, for example, that monitoring initiatives in agriculture or environmental management have had a positive impact. Quantitative analysis of decisions across many domains, including environmental policy, business investments, and cyber security, has shown that people tend to overestimate the amount of data needed to make a good decision or misunderstand what type of data are needed.

Furthermore, grave errors can occur when large data sets are mined using machine algorithms without having first having properly examined the decision that needs to be made. There are many examples of cases in which data mining has led to the wrong conclusion – including in medical diagnoses or legal cases – because experts in the field were not consulted and critical information was left out of the analysis.

Decision science, which combines understanding of behavior with universal principles of coherent decision-making, limits these risks by pairing empirical data with expert knowledge. If the data revolution is to be harnessed in the service of sustainable development, the best practices of this field must be incorporated into the effort.

The first step is to identify and frame frequently recurring decisions. In the field of development, these include large-scale decisions such as spending priorities – and thus budget allocations – by governments and international organizations. But it also includes choices made on a much smaller scale: farmers pondering which crops to plant, how much fertilizer to apply, and when and where to sell their produce.

The second step is to build a quantitative model of the uncertainties in such decisions, including the various triggers, consequences, controls, and mitigants, as well as the different costs, benefits, and risks involved. Incorporating – rather than ignoring – difficult-to-measure, highly uncertain factors leads to the best decisions…..

The third step is to compute the value of obtaining additional information – something that is possible only if the uncertainties in all of the variables have been quantified. The value of information is the amount a rational decision-maker would be willing to pay for it. So we need to know where additional data will have value for improving a decision and how much we should spend to get it. In some cases, no further information may be needed to make a sound decision; in others, acquiring further data could be worth millions of dollars….(More)”

How Facebook Makes Us Dumber

Curated on January 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Cass R. Sunstein in BloombergView: “Why does misinformation spread so quickly on the social media? Why doesn’t it get corrected? When the truth is so easy to find, why do people accept falsehoods?

A new study focusing on Facebook users provides strong evidence that the explanation is confirmation bias: people’s tendency to seek out information that confirms their beliefs, and to ignore contrary information.

Confirmation bias turns out to play a pivotal role in the creation of online echo chambers. This finding bears on a wide range of issues, including the current presidential campaign, the acceptance of conspiracy theories and competing positions in international disputes.

The new study, led by Michela Del Vicario of Italy’s Laboratory of Computational Social Science, explores the behavior of Facebook users from 2010 to 2014. One of the study’s goals was to test a question that continues to be sharply disputed: When people are online, do they encounter opposing views, or do they create the virtual equivalent of gated communities?

Del Vicario and her coauthors explored how Facebook users spread conspiracy theories (using 32 public web pages); science news (using 35 such pages); and “trolls,” which intentionally spread false information (using two web pages). Their data set is massive: It covers all Facebook posts during the five-year period. They explored which Facebook users linked to one or more of the 69 web pages, and whether they learned about those links from their Facebook friends.

In sum, the researchers find a lot of communities of like-minded people. Even if they are baseless, conspiracy theories spread rapidly within such communities.

More generally, Facebook users tended to choose and share stories containing messages they accept, and to neglect those they reject. If a story fits with what people already believe, they are far more likely to be interested in it and thus to spread it….(More)”

Open data set to reshape charity and activism in 2016

Curated on January 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Guardian: “In 2015 the EU launched the world’s first international data portal, the Chinese government pledged to make state data public, and the UK lost its open data crown to Taiwan. Troves of data were unlocked by governments around the world last year, but the usefulness of much of that data is still to be determined by the civic groups, businesses and governments who use it. So what’s in the pipeline? And how will the open data ecosystem grow in 2016? We asked the experts.

1. Data will be seen as infrastructure (Heather Savory, director general for data capability, Office for National Statistics)….

2. Journalists, charities and civil society bodies will embrace open data (Hetan Shah, executive director, the Royal Statistical Society)…3. Activists will take it upon themselves to create data

3. Activists will take it upon themselves to create data (Pavel Richter, chief executive, Open Knowledge International)….

4. Data illiteracy will come at a heavy price (Sir Nigel Shadbolt, principal, Jesus College, Oxford, professorial research fellow in computer science, University of Oxford and chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute…)

5. We’ll create better tools to build a web of data (Dr Elena Simperl, associate professor, electronics and computer science, University of Southampton) …(More)”

Playing ‘serious games,’ adults learn to solve thorny real-world problems

Curated on January 8, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lawrence Susskind and Ella Kim in The Conversation: “…We have been testing the use of role-playing games to promote collaborative decision-making by nations, states and communities. Unlike online computer games, players in role-playing games interact face-to-face in small groups of six to eight. The games place them in a hypothetical setting that simulates a real-life problem-solving situation. People are often assigned roles that are very different from their real-life roles. This helps them appreciate how their political adversaries view the problem.

Players receive briefing materials to read ahead of time so they can perform their assigned roles realistically. The idea is to reenact the tensions that actual stakeholders will feel when they are making real-life decisions. In the game itself, participants are asked to reach agreement in their roles in 60-90 minutes. (Other games, like the Mercury Game or the Chlorine Game, take longer to play.) If multiple small groups play the game at the same time, the entire room – which may include 100 tables of game players or more – can discuss the results together. In these debriefings, the most potent learning often occurs when players hear about creative moves that others have used to reach agreement.

It can take up to several months to design a game. Designers start by interviewing real-life decision makers to understand how they view the problem. Game designers must also synthesize a great deal of scientific and technical information to present it in the game in a form that anyone can understand. After the design phase, games have to be tested and refined before they are ready for play.

Research shows that this immersive approach to learning is particularly effective for adults. Our own research shows that elected and appointed officials, citizen advocates and corporate leaders can absorb a surprising amount of new scientific information when it is embedded in a carefully crafted role-playing game. In one study of more than 500 people in four New England coastal communities, we found that a significant portion of game players (1) changed their minds about how urgent a threat climate change is; (2) became more optimistic about their local government’s ability to reduce climate change risks; and (3) became more confident that conflicting groups would be able to reach agreement on how to proceed with climate adaptation….

Our conclusion is that “serious games” can prepare citizens and officialsto participate successfully in science-based problem-solving. In related research in Ghana and Vietnam, we found that role-playing games had similarly valuable effects. While the agreements reached in games do not necessarily indicate what actual agreements may be reached, they can help officials and stakeholder representatives get a much clearer sense of what might be possible.

We believe that role-playing games can be used in a wide range of situations. We have designed games that have been used in different parts of the world to help all kinds of interest groups work together to draft new environmental regulations. We have brought together adversaries in energy facility siting and waste cleanup disputes to play a game prior to facing off against each other in real life. This approach has also facilitated decisions in regional economic development disputes, water allocation disputes in an international river basin and disputes among aboriginal communities, national governments and private industry….(More)”