Inside the fascinating, bizarre world of ‘Prepper Pinterest’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post: “Pinterest, the aspirational candyland of women everywhere, has long been beloved by homebuyers, wedding-planners, moms, narcissists, and people who spend too much time on their hair.

Now you can add another, odder demographic to the list: “doomsday” preppers, whose rabid interest in all things DIY actually makes for a pretty comfortable cultural fit.

Prepper Pinterest has exploded in the past year, according to the site itself: The total volume of prepper pins is up 87 percent, and repins of prepping posts have nearly tripled. Leading preppers on the platform, like Angela Paskett, Damian Brindle and Glenn Levy, have racked up tens of thousands of followers.

It’s the conclusive sign, perhaps, that the much-maligned prepper movement has finally gone mainstream — or that a particularly precious branch of it has, at least. One popular infographic, currently circulating among Pinterest’s prepper ranks, depicts a “luxury bomb shelter” complete with self-filtering bathtubs and scented oxygen tanks….

It may help that mainstream culture has, in the past 10 years, become more hospitable to the prepper ethic — thanks, in large part, to a trend that Jessica Grose once dubbed “the Pinterest effect.” Young women have revitalized the $29 billion craft industry, prodded along by ideas on Etsy, Pinterest and lifestyle blogs. Concerns about the origins of our food gave us farmers’ markets, first — followed by urban farms and “Modern Farmers” and backyard chicken coops….(More)”

 

Crowdsourced app helps the visually impaired cross the road

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Out of New York’s 12,000 intersections, less than 100 offer navigation tools to help visually impaired residents cross safely. Audible sign technology is available but the process of installing it across cities is slow — most only have it at about 10 percent of crossings. Offering an alternative,SeeLight is a crowdsourced app that makes all the necessary information about urban crossings available to blind and visually impaired users.

The app collates data from government agencies and uses crowdsourced information to fill in the existing gap. Users can help by timing the length of any walk signal and recording the direction of the crossing using the app, which will then store that information along with a GPS tag. They can also add a brief description, noting whether the intersection has tactile paving or a pedestrian crossing light. When a visually impaired person approaches a crossing, they can then use the app to assist them through voice navigation.

SeeLight is not the first app to crowdsource accessibility data — we recently wrote about AXS Map, which collects user reviews about how accessible places around the world are for users in wheelchairs. SeeLight is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo to finance improvements to the current app, which is available now for free.  …(More)

Citizen Urban Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by Anthony Townsend and Alissa Chisholm at the Cities of Data Project: “Over the coming decades, the world will continue to urbanize rapidly amidst an historic migration of computing power off the desktop, unleashing new opportunities for data collection that reveal how cities function. In a recent report, Making Sense of the Science of Cities (bit.ly/sciencecities) we described an emerging global research movement that seeks establish a new urban science built atop this new infrastructure of instruments. But will this new intellectual venture be an inclusive endeavor? What role is 1 there for the growing ranks of increasingly well-equipped and well-informed citizen volunteers and amateur investigators to work alongside professional scientists? How are researchers, activists and city governments exploring that potential today? Finally, what can be done to encourage and accelerate experimentation?

This report examines three case studies that provide insight into emerging models of citizen science, highlighting the possibilities of citizen-university-government collaborative research, and the important role of open data platforms to enable these partnerships….(More)”

Big data algorithms can discriminate, and it’s not clear what to do about it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation: “This program had absolutely nothing to do with race…but multi-variable equations.”

That’s what Brett Goldstein, a former policeman for the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and current Urban Science Fellow at the University of Chicago’s School for Public Policy, said about a predictive policing algorithm he deployed at the CPD in 2010. His algorithm tells police where to look for criminals based on where people have been arrested previously. It’s a “heat map” of Chicago, and the CPD claims it helps them allocate resources more effectively.

Chicago police also recently collaborated with Miles Wernick, a professor of electrical engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, to algorithmically generate a “heat list” of 400 individuals it claims have thehighest chance of committing a violent crime. In response to criticism, Wernick said the algorithm does not use “any racial, neighborhood, or other such information” and that the approach is “unbiased” and “quantitative.” By deferring decisions to poorly understood algorithms, industry professionals effectively shed accountability for any negative effects of their code.

But do these algorithms discriminate, treating low-income and black neighborhoods and their inhabitants unfairly? It’s the kind of question many researchers are starting to ask as more and more industries use algorithms to make decisions. It’s true that an algorithm itself is quantitative – it boils down to a sequence of arithmetic steps for solving a problem. The danger is that these algorithms, which are trained on data produced by people, may reflect the biases in that data, perpetuating structural racism and negative biases about minority groups.

There are a lot of challenges to figuring out whether an algorithm embodies bias. First and foremost, many practitioners and “computer experts” still don’t publicly admit that algorithms can easily discriminate.More and more evidence supports that not only is this possible, but it’s happening already. The law is unclear on the legality of biased algorithms, and even algorithms researchers don’t precisely understand what it means for an algorithm to discriminate….

While researchers clearly understand the theoretical dangers of algorithmic discrimination, it’s difficult to cleanly measure the scope of the issue in practice. No company or public institution is willing to publicize its data and algorithms for fear of being labeled racist or sexist, or maybe worse, having a great algorithm stolen by a competitor.

Even when the Chicago Police Department was hit with a Freedom of Information Act request, they did not release their algorithms or heat list, claiming a credible threat to police officers and the people on the list. This makes it difficult for researchers to identify problems and potentially provide solutions.

Legal hurdles

Existing discrimination law in the United States isn’t helping. At best, it’s unclear on how it applies to algorithms; at worst, it’s a mess. Solon Barocas, a postdoc at Princeton, and Andrew Selbst, a law clerk for the Third Circuit US Court of Appeals, argued together that US hiring law fails to address claims about discriminatory algorithms in hiring.

The crux of the argument is called the “business necessity” defense, in which the employer argues that a practice that has a discriminatory effect is justified by being directly related to job performance….(More)”

What factors influence transparency in US local government?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Grichawat Lowatcharin and Charles Menifield at LSE Impact Blog: “The Internet has opened a new arena for interaction between governments and citizens, as it not only provides more efficient and cooperative ways of interacting, but also more efficient service delivery, and more efficient transaction activities. …But to what extent does increased Internet access lead to higher levels of government transparency? …While we found Internet access to be a significant predictor of Internet-enabled transparency in our simplest model, this finding did not hold true in our most extensive model. This does not negate that fact that the variable is an important factor in assessing transparency levels and Internet access. …. Our data shows that total land area, population density, percentage of minority, education attainment, and the council-manager form of government are statistically significant predictors of Internet-enabled transparency.  These findings both confirm and negate the findings of previous researchers. For example, while the effect of education on transparency appears to be the most consistent finding in previous research, we also noted that the rural/urban (population density) dichotomy and the education variable are important factors in assessing transparency levels. Hence, as governments create strategic plans that include growth models, they should not only consider the budgetary ramifications of growth, but also the fact that educated residents want more web based interaction with government. This finding was reinforced by a recent Census Bureau report indicating that some of the cities and counties in Florida and California had population increases greater than ten thousand persons per month during the period 2013-2014.

This article is based on the paper ‘Determinants of Internet-enabled Transparency at the Local Level: A Study of Midwestern County Web Sites’, in State and Local Government Review. (More)”

Mining Administrative Data to Spur Urban Revitalization

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Ben Green presented at the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: “After decades of urban investment dominated by sprawl and outward growth, municipal governments in the United States are responsible for the upkeep of urban neighborhoods that have not received sufficient resources or maintenance in many years. One of city governments’ biggest challenges is to revitalize decaying neighborhoods given only limited resources. In this paper, we apply data science techniques to administrative data to help the City of Memphis, Tennessee improve distressed neighborhoods. We develop new methods to efficiently identify homes in need of rehabilitation and to predict the impacts of potential investments on neighborhoods. Our analyses allow Memphis to design neighborhood-improvement strategies that generate greater impacts on communities. Since our work uses data that most US cities already collect, our models and methods are highly portable and inexpensive to implement. We also discuss the challenges we encountered while analyzing government data and deploying our tools, and highlight important steps to improve future data-driven efforts in urban policy….(More)”

Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Jan Whittington et al: “Cities hold considerable information, including details about the daily lives of residents and employees, maps of critical infrastructure, and records of the officials’ internal deliberations. Cities are beginning to realize that this data has economic and other value: If done wisely, the responsible release of city information can also release greater efficiency and innovation in the public and private sector. New services are cropping up that leverage open city data to great effect.

Meanwhile, activist groups and individual residents are placing increasing pressure on state and local government to be more transparent and accountable, even as others sound an alarm over the privacy issues that inevitably attend greater data promiscuity. This takes the form of political pressure to release more information, as well as increased requests for information under the many public records acts across the country.

The result of these forces is that cities are beginning to open their data as never before. It turns out there is surprisingly little research to date into the important and growing area of municipal open data. This article is among the first sustained, cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system. We are a team of researchers in law, computer science, information science, and urban studies. We have worked hand-in-hand with the City of Seattle, Washington for the better part of a year to understand its current procedures from each disciplinary perspective. Based on this empirical work, we generate a set of recommendations to help the city manage risk latent in opening its data….(More)”

Local open data ecosystems – a prototype map

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ed Parkes and Gail Dawes at Nesta: “It is increasingly recognised that some of the most important open data is published by local authorities (LAs) – data which is important to us like bin collection days, planning applications and even where your local public toilet is. Also given the likely move towards greater decentralisation, firstly through devolution to cities, the importance of the publication of local open data could arguably become more important over the next couple of years. In addition, as of 1st April, there is a new transparency code for local government requiring local authorities to publish further information on things like spending to local land assets. To pre-empt this likely renewed focus on local open data we have begun to develop a prototype map to highlight the UK’s local open data ecosystem.

Already there is some great practice in the publication of open data at a local level – such as Leeds Data Mill, London Datastore, and Open Data Sheffield. This regional activity is also characterised not just by high quality data publication, but also by pulling together through hackdays, challenges and meetups a community interested in the power of open data. This creates an ecosystem of publishers and re-users at a local level. Some of the best practice in relation to developing such an ecosystem was recognised by the last government in the announcement of a group of Local Authority Open Data Champions. Some of these were also recipients of the funding for projects from both the Cabinet Office and through the Open Data User Group.

Outside of this best practice it isn’t always easy to understand how developed smaller, less urban open data agendas are. Other than looking at each councils’ website or increasingly on the data portals that forwarding thinking councils are providing, there is a surprisingly large number of places that local authorities could make their open data available. The most well known of these is the Openly Local project but at the time of writing this now seems to be retired. Perhaps the best catalogue of local authority data is on Data.gov.uk itself. This has 1,449 datasets published by LAs across 200 different organisations. Following that there is the Open Data Communities website which hosts links to LA linked datasets. Using data from the latter, Steve Peters has developed the local data dashboard (which was itself based on the UK Local Government Open Data resource map from Owen Boswarva). In addition, local authorities can also register their open data in the LGA’s Open Data Inventory Service and take it through the ODI’s data certification process.

Prototype map of local open data eco-systems

To try to highlight patterns in local authority open data publication we decided to make a map of activity around the country (although in the first instance we’ve focused on England)….(More)

How can we ensure that cities create opportunities for healthy urbanization?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Roy Ahn, Thomas F. Burke & Anita M. McGahan on their new book: “By the year 2100, 8 out of 10 people in the world will reside in cities – a major change in demographics compared to 100 years ago.

Urbanization has sweeping consequences for population health. Most analysts evaluate the “specter of urbanization” by focusing on problems and challenges, which can include slum development, insecurity, and inequality.

As the World Health Organization and UN Habitat note in their seminal report, Hidden Cities, “Cities concentrate opportunities, jobs and services, but they also concentrate risks and hazards for health.” The urban poor are especially vulnerable because their housing conditions and access to clean water, sanitation, and health care are often severely compromised.

Additionally, the jobs available to the urban poor are often informal, dangerous, and temporary. Yet the lack of integrated governance and infrastructure responsible for urbanization problems also can create remarkable and often untapped opportunities for improving health. How can we ensure that cities create opportunities for healthy urbanization?

In our new book, Innovating for Healthy Urbanization, we argue that using the “innovations” lens can provide a unique platform through which solutions for urbanization and health can emerge.

Sometimes “innovations” can be decidedly high tech, such as holograms on medication packaging that protect against drug counterfeiters, or tiny filter paper tests costing pennies that exponentially increase access to medical diagnostic testing for poor people living in cities.

Other innovations are less tech-focused, but equally impactful, such as advocating for motorcycle helmet laws in cities or a low-cost, condom catheter-balloon kit that can save mothers from dying from postpartum hemorrhage.

What makes both high- and low-tech solutions effective? Pushing the envelope on what works and then integrating solutions to meet a community’s priority needs…..(More)”

Urban Informatics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue of Data Engineering: “Most data related to people and the built world originates in urban settings. There is increasing demand to capture and exploit this data to support efforts in areas such as Smart Cities, City Science and Intelligent Transportation Systems. Urban informatics deals with the collection, organization, dissemination and analysis of urban information used in such applications. However, the dramatic growth in the volume of this urban data creates challenges for existing data-management and analysis techniques. The collected data is also increasingly diverse, with a wide variety of sensor, GIS, imagery and graph data arising in cities. To address these challenges, urban informatics requires development of advanced data-management approaches, analysis methods, and visualization techniques. It also provides an opportunity to confront the “Variety” axis of Big Data head on. The contributions in this issue cross the spectrum of urban information, from its origin, to archiving and retrieval, to analysis and visualization. …

Collaborative Sensing for Urban Transportation (By Sergio Ilarri, et al)

Open Civic Data: Of the People, For the People, By the People (by Arnaud Sahuguet, et al, The GovLab)

Plenario: An Open Data Discovery and Exploration Platform for Urban Science (by Charlie Catlett et al)

Riding from Urban Data to Insight Using New York City Taxis (by Juliana Freire et al)…(More)”