science

Technology and the Future of Cities

Curated on February 24, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Gorenberg, Craig Mundie, Eric Schmidt and Marjory Blumenthal at PCAST: “Growing urbanization presents the United States with an opportunity to showcase its innovation strength, grow its exports, and help to improve citizens’ lives – all at once. Seizing this triple opportunity will involve a concerted effort to develop and apply new technologies to enhance the way cities work for the people who live there.

A new report released today by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Technology and the Future of Cities, lays out why now is a good time to promote technologies for cities: more (and more diverse) people are living in cities; people are increasingly open to different ways of using space, living, working, and traveling across town; physical infrastructures for transportation, energy, and water are aging; and a wide range of innovations are in reach that can yield better infrastructures and help in the design and operation of city services.

There are also new ways to collect and use information to design and operate systems and services. Better use of information can help make the most of limited resources – whether city budgets or citizens’ time – and help make sure that the neediest as well as the affluent benefit from new technology.

Although the vision of technology’s promise applies city-wide, PCAST suggests that a practical way for cities to adopt infrastructural and other innovation is by starting in a discrete area – a district, the dimensions of which depend on the innovation in question. Experiences in districts can help inform decisions elsewhere in a given city – and in other cities. PCAST urges broader sharing of information about, and tools for, innovation in cities.

Such sharing is already happening in isolated pockets focused on either specific kinds of information or recipients of specific kinds of funding. A more comprehensive City Web, achieved through broader interconnection, could inform and impel urban innovation. A systematic approach to developing open-data resources for cities is recommended, too.

PCAST recommends a variety of steps to make the most of the Federal Government’s engagement with cities. To begin, it calls for more – and more effective – coordination among Federal agencies that are key to infrastructural investments in cities. Coordination across agencies, of course, is the key to place-based policy. Building on the White House Smart Cities Initiative, which promotes not only R&D but also deployment of IT-based approaches to help cities solve challenges, PCAST also calls for expanding research and development coordination to include the physical, infrastructural technologies that are so fundamental to city services.

A new era of city design and city life is emerging. If the United States steers Federal investments in cities in ways that foster innovation, the impacts can be substantial. The rest of the world has also seen the potential, with numerous cities showcasing different approaches to innovation. The time to aim for leadership in urban technologies and urban science is now….(More)”

Open Data Button

Curated on February 23, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Button: “Hidden data is hindering research, and we’re tired of it. Next week we’ll release the Open Data Button beta as part of Open Data Day. The Open Data Button will help people find, release, and share the data behind papers. We need your support to share, test, and improve the Open Data Button. Today, we’re going to provide some in depth info about the tool.

You’ll be able to download the free Open Data Button on the 29th of February. Follow the launch conversation on Twitter and at #opendatabutton.

How the Open Data Button works

You will be able to download the Open Data Button on Chrome, and later on Firefox. When you need the data supporting a paper (even if it’s behind a paywall), push the Button. If the data has already been made available through the Open Data Button, we’ll give you a link. If it hasn’t, youâll be able to start a request for the data. Eventually, we want to search a variety of other sources for it – but can’t yet (read on, we need your help with that).

The request will be sent to the author. We know sharing data can be hard and there’s sometimes good reasons not to. The author will be able to respond to it by saying how long it’ll take to share the data – or if they can’t. If the data is already available, the author can simply share a URL to the dataset. If it isn’t, they can attach files to a response for us to make available. Files shared with us will be deposited in the Open Science Framework for identification and archiving. The Open Science Framework supports data sharing for all disciplines. As much metadata as possible will be obtained from the paper, the rest we’ll ask the author for.

The progress of this request is tracked through our new “request” pages. On request pages others can support a request and be sent a copy of the data when it’s available. We’ll map requests, and stories will be searchable – both will now be embeddable objects.

Once available, we’ll send data to people who’ve requested it. You can award an Open Data Badge to the author if there’s enough supporting information to reproduce the data’s results.

At first we’ll only have a Chrome add-on, but support for Firefox will be available from Firefox 46. Support for a bookmarklet will also be provided, but we don’t have a release date yet….(More)”

Exploring the economic value of open government data

Curated on February 18, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Fatemeh Ahmadi Zeleti et al in Government Information Quarterly: “Business models for open data have emerged in response to the economic opportunities presented by the increasing availability of open data. However, scholarly efforts providing elaborations, rigorous analysis and comparison of open data models are very limited. This could be partly attributed to the fact that most discussions on Open Data Business Models (ODBMs) are predominantly in the practice community. This shortcoming has resulted in a growing list of ODBMs which, on closer examination, are not clearly delineated and lack clear value orientation. This has made the understanding of value creation and exploitation mechanisms in existing open data businesses difficult and challenging to transfer. Following the Design Science Research (DSR) tradition, we developed a 6-Value (6-V) business model framework as a design artifact to facilitate the explication and detailed analysis of existing ODBMs in practice. Based on the results from the analysis, we identify business model patterns and emerging core value disciplines for open data businesses. Our results not only help streamline existing ODBMs and help in linking them to the overall business strategy, but could also guide governments in developing the required capabilities to support and sustain the business models….(More)”

Zika Emergency Puts Open Data Policies to the Test

Curated on February 18, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Larry Peiperl and Peter Hotez at PLOS: “The spreading epidemic of Zika virus, with its putative and alarming associations with Guillain-Barre syndrome and infant microcephaly, has arrived just as several initiatives have come into place to minimize delays in sharing the results of scientific research.

In September 2015, in response to concerns that research publishing practices had delayed access tocrucial information in the Ebola crisis, the World Health Organization convened a consultation “[i]nrecognition of the need to streamline mechanisms of data dissemination—globally and in as close toreal-time as possible” in the context of public health emergencies.

Participating medical journal editors, representing PLOS,BMJ and Nature journals and NEJM, provided a statement that journals should not act to delay access to data in a public health emergency: “In such scenarios,journals should not penalize, and, indeed, shouldencourage or mandate public sharing of relevant data…”

In a subsequent Comment in The Lancet, authors frommajor research funding organizations expressed supportfor data sharing in public health emergencies. TheInternational Committee of Medical Journal Editors(ICMJE), meeting in November 2015, lent further support to the principles of the WHO consultation byamending ICMJE “Recommendations” to endorse data sharing for public health emergencies of anygeographic scope.

Now that WHO has declared Zika to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, responses from these groups in recent days appear consistent with their recent declarations.

The ICMJE has announced that “In light of the need to rapidly understand and respond to the globalemergency caused by the Zika virus, content in ICMJE journals related to Zika virus is being made freeto access. We urge other journals to do the same. Further, as stated in our Recommendations, in theevent of a public health emergency (as defined by public health officials), information with immediateimplications for public health should be disseminated without concern that this will preclude subsequentconsideration for publication in a journal.”(www.icmje.org, accessed 9 Feburary 2016)

WHO has implemented special provisions for research manuscripts relevant to the Zika epidemic thatare submitted to WHO Bulletin; such papers “will be assigned a digital object identifier and posted onlinein the “Zika Open” collection within 24 hours while undergoing peer review. The data in these papers willthus be attributed to the authors while being freely available for reader scrutiny and unrestricted use”under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY IGO 3.0).

At PLOS, where open access and data sharing apply as matter of course, all PLOS journals aim toexpedite peer review evaluation, pre-publication posting, and data sharing from research relevant to theZika outbreak. PLOS Currents Outbreaks offers an online platform for rapid publication of preliminaryresults, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases has committed to provide priority handling of Zika reports ingeneral, and other PLOS journals will prioritize submissions within their respective scopes. The PLOSZika Collection page provides central access to relevant and continually updated content from acrossthe PLOS journals, blogs, and collaborating organizations.

Today, the Wellcome Trust has issued a statement urging journals to commit to “make all content concerning the Zika virus free to access,” and funders to “require researchers undertaking work relevant to public health emergencies to set in place mechanisms to share quality-assured interim and final data as rapidly and widely as possible, including with public health and research communities and the World Health Organisation.” Among 31 initial signatories are such journals and publishers as PLOS, Springer Nature, Science journals, The JAMA Network, eLife, the Lancet, and New England Journal ofMedicine; and funding organizations including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UK Medical ResearchCouncil, US National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, and other major national and internationalresearch funders.

This policy shift prompts reconsideration of how we publish urgently needed data during a public health emergency….(More)”

Our finances are a mess – could behavioral science help clean them up?

Curated on February 17, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Katy Davis at the Conversation: “Typical approaches to solving problematic finances are either to “educate” people about the need to save more or to “incentivize” savings with monetary rewards.

But when we look at traditional financial education and counseling programs, they have had virtually no long-term impact on behavior. Similarly, matched savings programs are expensive and have shown mixed results on savings rates. Furthermore, these approaches often prioritize the need for savings while treating debt repayment as a secondary concern.

Education and incentives haven’t worked because they are based on problematic assumptions about lower-income consumers that turn out to be false….

The good news is that a range of simple, behaviorally informed solutions can easily be deployed to tackle these problems, from policy innovations to product redesign.

For instance, changing the “suggested payoff” in credit card statements for targeted segments (i.e., those who were already paying in full) could help consumers more effectively pay down debt, as could allowing tax refunds to be directly applied toward debt repayment. Well-designed budgeting tools that leverage financial technology could be integrated into government programs. The state of California, for example, is currently exploring ways to implement such technologies across a variety of platforms.

But the public and private sectors both need to play a role for these tools to be effective. Creating an integrated credit-and-saving product, for example, would require buy-in from regulators along with financial providers.

While these banking solutions may not close the economic inequality gap on their own, behaviorally informed design shifts can be the missing piece of the puzzle in these efforts to fix major problems.

Our research indicates that people already want to be doing a better job with their finances; we just need to make it a little less difficult for them….(More)”

How Citizen Science Changed the Way Fukushima Radiation is Reported

Curated on February 14, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ari Beser at National Geographic: “It appears the world-changing event didn’t change anything, and it’s disappointing,”said Pieter Franken, a researcher at Keio University in Japan (Wide Project), the MIT Media Lab (Civic Media Centre), and co-founder of Safecast, a citizen-science network dedicated to the measurement and distribution of accurate levels of radiation around the world, especially in Fukushima. “There was a chance after the disaster for humanity to innovate our thinking about energy, and that doesn’t seem like it’s happened. But what we can change is the way we measure the environment around us.”

Franken and his founding partners found a way to turn their email chain, spurred by the tsunami, into Safecast; an open-source network that allows everyday people to contribute to radiation-monitoring.

“We literally started the day after the earthquake happened,” revealed Pieter. “A friend of mine, Joi Ito, the director of MIT Media Lab, and I were basically talking about what Geiger counter to get. He was in Boston at the time and I was here in Tokyo, and like the rest of the world, we were worried, but we couldn’t get our hands on anything. There’s something happening here, we thought. Very quickly as the disaster developed, we wondered how to get the information out. People were looking for information, so we saw that there was a need. Our plan became: get information, put it together and disseminate it.”

An e-mail thread between Franken, Ito, and Sean Bonner, (co-founder of CRASH Space, a group that bills itself as Los Angeles’ first hackerspace), evolved into a network of minds, including members of Tokyo Hackerspace, Dan Sythe, who produced high-quality Geiger counters, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s former Chief Technical Officer. On April 15, the group that was to become Safecast sat down together for the first time. Ozzie conceived the plan to strap a Geiger counter to a car and somehow log measurements in motion. This would became the bGeigie, Safecast’s future model of the do-it-yourself Geiger counter kit.

Armed with a few Geiger counters donated by Sythe, the newly formed team retrofitted their radiation-measuring devices to the outside of a car. Safecast’s first volunteers drove up to the city of Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture, and took their own readings around all of the schools. Franken explained, “If we measured all of the schools, we covered all the communities; because communities surround schools. It was very granular, the readings changed a lot, and the levels were far from academic, but it was our start. This was April 24, 6 weeks after the disaster. Our thinking changed quite a bit through this process.”

With the DIY kit available online, all anyone needs to make their own Geiger counter is a soldering iron and the suggested directions.

Since their first tour of Koriyama, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Safecast’s team of volunteers have developed the bGeigie handheld radiation monitor, that anyone can buy on Amazon.com and construct with suggested instructions available online. So far over 350 users have contributed 41 million readings, using around a thousand fixed, mobile, and crowd-sourced devices….(More)

On Researching Data and Communication

Curated on February 10, 2016October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Andrew Schrock: “We are awash in predictions about our data-driven future. Enthusiasts believe it will offer new ways to research behavior. Critics worry it will enable powerful regimes of institutional control. Both visions, although polar opposites, tend to downplay the importance of communication. As a result, the role of communication in human-centered data science has rarely been considered. This article fills this gap by outlining three perspectives on data that foreground communication. First, I briefly review the common social scientific perspective: “communication as data.” Next, I elaborate on two less explored perspectives. A “data as communication” perspective captures how data imperfectly carry meanings and guide action. “Communication around data” describes communication in organizational and institutional data cultures. I conclude that communication offers nuanced perspectives to inform human-centered data science. Researchers should embrace a robust agenda, particularly when researching the relationship between data and power…(More)”

Dive Against Debris: Employing 25,600 scuba divers to collect data

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

DataDrivenJournalism: “In 2011, the team at Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris program with the objective of better documenting the amount of marine debris found in the world’s oceans. This global citizen science program trains volunteer scuba divers from across the globe to conduct underwater surveys, generating quantitative data on the debris they see. After cleaning this data for quality assurance, it is then published on their interactive Dive Against Debris Map. This data and visualization informs the team’s advocacy work, ultimately seeking to generate changes in policy.

The impact of marine debris is devastating, killing marine life and changing their habitats and ecosystems. Animals are extremely vulnerable to ingestion or entanglement which leads to death, as they are unable to distinguish between what is trash and what is not.

Beyond this, as microscopic pieces of plastic enter the food chain, most seafood ingested by humans also likely contains marine debris.

Project AWARE is a growing movement of scuba divers protecting the ocean, with a long history of working on the marine debris issue. Through its work, the Project AWARE team found that there was a significant lack of data available regarding underwater marine debris.

To remedy this, the Dive Against Debris program was launched in 2011. The programs seeks to collect and visualise data generated by their volunteers, then use this data to influence policy changes and raise social awareness around the world. This data collection is unique in that it focuses exclusively on yielding data about the types and quantities of marine debris items found beneath in the ocean, an issue Hannah Pragnell-Raasch, a Program Specialist with Project AWARE, told us “has previously been disregarded as out of sight, out of mind, as the everyday person is not exposed to the harmful impacts.”

To date, Dive Against Debris surveys have been conducted in over 50 countries, with the top reporting countries being the United States, Thailand and Greece. As more divers get involved with Dive Against Debris, Project AWARE continues to bring visibility to the problem of marine debris and helps to identify target areas for waste prevention efforts.

….

Anyone can take part in a Dive Against Debris survey, as long as they are a certified diver. As described in their “Action Zone”, scuba divers can either “join” or “create” an action. To further support the program, Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris Distinctive Specialty, a course of divers, which “aims to equip students (scuba divers) with the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct their own Dive Against Debris Surveys.”

Before the data appears on the interactive Dive Against Debris Map, it goes through a quality review in order to ensure data integrity. The survey leader at Project AWARE corrects any data inconsistencies. Then, as the focus is exclusively on what is found underwater, all land data is removed. Project AWARE Aware aims to create “an accurate perspective about underwater marine debris, that policy-makers simply cannot ignore”…. Explore the Dive Against Debris project here…. (More)

The Open (Data) Market

Curated on February 2, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sean McDonald at Medium: “Open licensing privatizes technology and data usability. How does that effect equality and accessibility?…The open licensing movement(open data, open source software, etc.) predicates its value on increasing accessibility and transparency by removing legal and ownership restrictions on use. The groups that advocate for open data and open sourcecode, especially in government and publicly subsidized industries, often come from transparency, accountability, and freedom of information backgrounds. These efforts, however, significantly underestimate the costs of refining, maintaining, targeting, defining a value proposition, marketing, and presenting both data and products in ways that are effective and useful for the average person. Recent research suggests the primary beneficiaries of civic technologies — those specifically built on government data or services — are privileged populations. The World Banks recent World Development Report goes further to point out that public digitization can be a driver of inequality.

The dynamic of self-replicating privilege in both technology and openmarkets is not a new phenomenon. Social science research refers to it as the Matthew Effect, which says that in open or unregulated spaces, theprivileged tend to become more privileged, while the poor become poorer.While there’s no question the advent of technology brings massive potential,it is already creating significant access and achievement divides. Accordingto the Federal Communication Commission’s annual Broadband Progressreport in 2015, 42% of students in the U.S. struggle to do their homeworkbecause of web access — and 39% of rural communities don’t even have abroadband option. Internet access skews toward urban, wealthycommunities, with income, geography, and demographics all playing a rolein adoption. Even further, research suggests that the rich and poor use technology differently. This runs counter to narrative of Interneteventualism, which insist that it’s simply a (small) matter of time beforethese access (and skills) gaps close. Evidence suggests that for upper andmiddle income groups access is almost universal, but the gaps for lowincome groups are growing…(More)”