Jason Brick at PSFK: “Air pollution is among the most serious environmental problems of the modern age. Although pollution in developed nations like the USA and Germany has fallen since the 1980s, air quality in growing technological countries — especially in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) group — grows worse with each year. In 2012, 3.7 million people died as a direct result of problems caused by chronic exposure to bad air, and tens of millions more were made ill.
There is no easy solution to such a complex and widespread problem, but Breathe offers a fix for one aspect and solves it in two ways.
The first way is the device itself: a portable plastic brick smaller than a bar of soap that monitors the presence and concentration of toxic gases and other harmful substances in the air, in real time throughout your day. It records the quality and, if it reaches unacceptably dangerous levels, warns you immediately with an emergency signal. Plug the device into your smart phone, and it keeps a record of air quality by time and location you can use to avoid the most polluted times of day and places in your area.
The second solution is the truly innovative aspect of this project. Via the Breathe app, any user who wants to can add her data to a central database that keeps statistics worldwide. Individuals can then use that data to plan vacations, time outdoor activities or schedule athletic events. Given enough time, Breathe could accumulate enough data to be used to affect policy by identifying the most polluted areas in a city, county or nation so the authorities can work on a more robust solution….(More)”
Launching “Map the Banks” campaign to map the global financial industry
OpenCorporates: “Today, we are happy to announce the launch of our latest campaign: Map the Banks – possibly first ever global sprint to scrape a single class of data from every jurisdiction in the world. For this campaign, we are focussing on how the financial industry is licenced to operate.
The financial crisis cost the world 4 trillion dollars. Before we can disrupt the industry, we need to map it. The financial crisis revealed the damage done by our lack of understanding of the influence and size of banks and financial companies. We no longer want to be in the dark. Citizens and regulators have to take control back by having open and free access to this information. We are taking up the challenge of collecting every banking and financial licence in the world so we can work towards a better banking system, that works for the good of society. We’re joined in this mission by Civio, OpenNorth & many more… (Interested in being a partner? Email us!)
Collecting this data could answer questions like:
- Which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? Even with the small amount of data already collected, we know there are at least 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US.
- Which countries have the most financial services outsourced to them?
- What companies are licenced to operate in the largest number of countries worldwide?
- Which US bank has the most consumer credit licences in Asia?
- Which organisations appear to operate like financial services companies, yet aren’t regulated as such?
- Where are credit unions being dissolved or created the fastest?
HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities
Book by Todd Presner, David Shepard, Yoh Kawano: “The prefix “hyper” refers to multiplicity and abundance. More than a physical space, a hypercity is a real city overlaid with information networks that document the past, catalyze the present, and project future possibilities. Hypercities are always under construction.
Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. A collaboratively authored and designed work, HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the Tehran election protests of 2009.
Not a book about maps in the literal sense, HyperCities describes thick mapping: the humanist project of participating and listening that transforms mapping into an ethical undertaking. Ultimately, the digital humanities do not consist merely of computer-based methods for analyzing information. They are a means of integrating scholarship with the world of lived experience, making sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.”
Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. A collaboratively authored and designed work, HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the Tehran election protests of 2009.
Not a book about maps in the literal sense, HyperCities describes thick mapping: the humanist project of participating and listening that transforms mapping into an ethical undertaking. Ultimately, the digital humanities do not consist merely of computer-based methods for analyzing information. They are a means of integrating scholarship with the world of lived experience, making sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.”
Surprise! Creativity in the Public Sector
at Good Magazine: “….As a watchword, “innovation” has been slow to infiltrate the public sector. We are a nation of private inventors and public regulators. However, while this bizarre gem of a cover page may not signify a major event, I see it as an indicator of where the public sector is headed. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, a CalTrans supervisor said of the cover, “This was an innovative project… We wanted people to notice the document and open it up.” And it worked. This “innovative project” brought attention to the 1,300-page report, which was not mentioned in local media until people noticed the unconventional cover page.
Less than a month later, the mayor of Los Angeles perpetuated the theme of public sector ingenuity by announcing an “Innovation Fund.” The Fund will support creative solutions proposed not by professionals in the art or tech industries, but by city employees. Anyone from janitors to general managers will be able to submit original ideas to improve the status quo. This initiative acknowledges the innovative potential in city staff and, moreover, provides funding to effectively tap into that potential.
The idea of creative change within the public sector aligns with the philosophy behind the Startup Cities Institute. Their model encourages unconventional ideas to be implemented by cities on a small scale to find solutions to problems in governance, infrastructure, and similar challenges. The key concept in this approach is that innovation comes not only from outside city hall, but from inside as well. Even though planners love guerrilla urbanism, it’s pretty spectacular when city government pulls off a good surprise. Some of my favorite “surprise-innovations” are New York’s Time Square beach chairs, Bogata’s traffic control mimes, and Hans Monderman’s naked streets, all conceived and executed by the public sector.
Innovative acts can be found everywhere. I have many friends in creative industries, but also some who are nurses, teachers, social workers, and full-time parents, and they are among the most creative people I know. I work for the City of Los Angeles in the Planning Department. I have seen the political and logistical challenges that the public sector is up against, but I am convinced that we can meet these challenges with novel ideas, fresh perspectives, and unconventional approaches. (And maybe some ‘90s clip art.) We can serve the public as well as delight them. That is the future of public service.…”
Techs Mex: a laboratory for Mexico
David Lida at the LongandShort: “…The five are members of Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City), an innovation lab founded by Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera soon after he assumed office in December 2012. While innovation labs have sprung up around much of the developed world in the last few years, the Laboratory for the City is the first of its kind in Latin America. Over espresso, croissants and sandwiches, the lab members brainstormed about strategy for other parts of Latin America.
The meeting was convened because the lab had been approached by governments and organisations in cities such as São Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo, as well as the entire country of Chile, and Miraflores, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Lima, Peru. All these locations asked for advice about establishing their own innovation labs or to collaborate with the Mexican lab on specific projects. Among the ideas bandied about was whether or not the lab should share the code of its website. Should they host a symposium about innovation labs for people from all over Latin America? Could they get funding for it from the World Bank? Would it be helpful to write a manual about starting an innovation lab? Should they establish alliances with other cities?
Amid all the breathless propositions and after the second cup of coffee, the lab’s director, Gabriella Gómez-Mont, reminded her four staff members of a crucial point: “We are in the middle of our own apprenticeship.”
Indeed. Despite the mostly gushing articles about the Laboratory for the City that have appeared in international media such as Monocle, Wired, and Forbes, it might be a bit premature for it to offer advice. Despite the fact that some of the staff members seem to work 24 hours a day, the lab is only in its infancy, at least in terms of tangible results.
“Innovation labs can generate good ideas for change on a civic scale,” says Nate Berg, who writes about cities for such publications as City Lab, Architects and Next City.” But the implementation is sometimes put off.”
The Laboratory for the City has only been up and running for a year and a half, so perhaps it’s too early to expect many results. Still, the language in its promotional literature – and indeed that spoken by its staff – can be frustratingly vague in terms of what it is trying to accomplish.
“We are very interested in the possibilities of tech as a social amplifier. But we are not a digital department,” says Gabriella Gómez-Mont. “We are an experimental area and creative thinktank and tech is just one of our many tools. Our real work lies in bringing in different perspectives and methodologies, exploring other means and ways forward, engaging other types of disciplines and people into the fascinating realm of city-making.
“We believe there are fascinating possibilities in creating spaces for experimentation within government, as well as making its dividing walls more porous. Through several projects and experimenting with different methodologies, we are prototyping what it means to add a temporal yet intensive ‘layer’ of citizen participation to government, break inward-looking orientation subconsciously generated by the way that most governments structure themselves, and even embedding up to nine months’ different profiles within different city departments, with our Code for Mexico City and Open Office programmes, for example.”… (full article).
The Free 'Big Data' Sources Everyone Should Know
Bernard Marr at Linkedin Pulse: “…The moves by companies and governments to put large amounts of information into the public domain have made large volumes of data accessible to everyone….here’s my rundown of some of the best free big data sources available today.
Data.gov
The US Government pledged last year to make all government data available freely online. This site is the first stage and acts as a portal to all sorts of amazing information on everything from climate to crime. To check it out, click here.
US Census Bureau
A wealth of information on the lives of US citizens covering population data, geographic data and education. To check it out, click here. To check it out, click here.
European Union Open Data Portal
As the above, but based on data from European Union institutions. To check it out, click here.
Data.gov.uk
Data from the UK Government, including the British National Bibliography – metadata on all UK books and publications since 1950. To check it out, click here.
The CIA World Factbook
Information on history, population, economy, government, infrastructure and military of 267 countries. To check it out, click here.
Healthdata.gov
125 years of US healthcare data including claim-level Medicare data, epidemiology and population statistics. To check it out, click here.
NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre
Health data sets from the UK National Health Service. To check it out, click here.
Amazon Web Services public datasets
Huge resource of public data, including the 1000 Genome Project, an attempt to build the most comprehensive database of human genetic information and NASA’s database of satellite imagery of Earth. To check it out, click here.
Facebook Graph
Although much of the information on users’ Facebook profile is private, a lot isn’t – Facebook provide the Graph API as a way of querying the huge amount of information that its users are happy to share with the world (or can’t hide because they haven’t worked out how the privacy settings work). To check it out, click here.
Gapminder
Compilation of data from sources including the World Health Organization and World Bank covering economic, medical and social statistics from around the world. To check it out, click here.
Google Trends
Statistics on search volume (as a proportion of total search) for any given term, since 2004. To check it out, click here.
Google Finance
40 years’ worth of stock market data, updated in real time. To check it out, click here.
Google Books Ngrams
Search and analyze the full text of any of the millions of books digitised as part of the Google Books project. To check it out, click here.
National Climatic Data Center
Huge collection of environmental, meteorological and climate data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center. The world’s largest archive of weather data. To check it out, click here.
DBPedia
Wikipedia is comprised of millions of pieces of data, structured and unstructured on every subject under the sun. DBPedia is an ambitious project to catalogue and create a public, freely distributable database allowing anyone to analyze this data. To check it out, click here.
Topsy
Free, comprehensive social media data is hard to come by – after all their data is what generates profits for the big players (Facebook, Twitter etc) so they don’t want to give it away. However Topsy provides a searchable database of public tweets going back to 2006 as well as several tools to analyze the conversations. To check it out, click here.
Likebutton
Mines Facebook’s public data – globally and from your own network – to give an overview of what people “Like” at the moment. To check it out, click here.
New York Times
Searchable, indexed archive of news articles going back to 1851. To check it out, click here.
Freebase
A community-compiled database of structured data about people, places and things, with over 45 million entries. To check it out, click here.
Million Song Data Set
Metadata on over a million songs and pieces of music. Part of Amazon Web Services. To check it out, click here.”
See also Bernard Marr‘s blog at Big Data Guru
Transparency is not just television
Beth Noveck at the SunLight Foundation Blog: “In 2009, Larry Lessig published a headline-grabbing piece in the New Republic entitled “Against Transparency,” arguing that the “naked transparency movement” might inspire disgust in, rather than reform of, our political system. In their recent Brookings Institution paper, “Why Critics of Transparency Are Wrong,” Gary Bass, Danielle Brian and Norm Eisen rightly critique the latest generation of naysayers who contend that transparency has contributed to our political ills, and that efforts to reduce transparency will cause government to work better. The problem with suggesting that transparency is the root of extreme partisan gridlock, the absence of dealmaking, and the lowest rates of trust by the American people in Congress, however, is that there is no real transparency in that institution.
If there is any shortcoming in Bass, Brian and Eisen’s robust defense of transparency, it is that they should be even tougher in rapping these other writers across the knuckles, including for some critics’ unsophisticated equation of television cameras in the chamber with transparency.
Even in our media-savvy age, televising congressional deliberations (if you can call them that) – what we might call political transparency – surely contributes too little to policy transparency. It lays bare the spectacle but does not provide access to the kinds of information disclosures about the workings of Congress in a way that also affords people an opportunity to participate in changing those workings and that Bass, Brian and Eisen also support. Done right, transparency provides an empirical foundation for developing solutions together. If the Brits can have a 21st Century parliament initiative, we are long overdue for a 21st century Congress….”
The openness revolution
The Economist: “Business is being forced to open up in a host of reporting areas, from tax and government contracts to anti-corruption and sustainability programmes. Campaigners are cock-a-hoop, but continue to demand more. Executives are starting to ask whether the revolution is in danger of going too far.
Three forces are driving change. First, governments are demanding greater corporate accountability in the wake of the global financial crisis. No longer is ending corporate secrecy—the sharp end of which is money-laundering shell companies—an agenda pushed merely by Norway and a few others; it has become a priority for the G20. Second, investigative journalists have piled in. A recent example is the exposure by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists of sweetheart tax deals for multinationals in Luxembourg. The third factor is the growing sophistication of NGOs in this sphere, such as Transparency International (TI) and Global Witness. “Twenty years ago our work seemed an impossible dream. Now it’s coming true,” says Ben Elers of TI.
TI recently published its latest study on corporate reporting, which evaluated 124 big publicly listed companies, based on the clarity of their anti-corruption programmes, their corporate holdings and their financial reporting. Four-fifths of them scored less than five out of ten overall, but there were big regional disparities: seven of the ten most open firms were European; eight of the ten most clammed-up were Asian (see table)….“
Climate Resilience Toolkit
“Meeting the challenges of a changing climate
The U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit provides scientific tools, information, and expertise to help people manage their climate-related risks and opportunities, and improve their resilience to extreme events. The site is designed to serve interested citizens, communities, businesses, resource managers, planners, and policy leaders at all levels of government.
A climate-smart approach to taking action
In response to the President’s Climate Action Plan and Executive Order to help the nation prepare for climate-related changes and impacts, U.S. federal government agencies gathered resources that can help people take action to build their climate resilience. The impacts of climate change—including higher temperatures, heavier downpours, more frequent and intense droughts, wildfires, and floods, and sea level rise—are affecting communities, businesses, and natural resources across the nation.
Now is the time to act. For some, taking a business-as-usual approach has become more risky than taking steps to build their climate resilience. People who recognize they are vulnerable to climate variability and change can work to reduce their vulnerabilities, and find win-win opportunities that simultaneously boost local economies, create new jobs, and improve the health of ecosystems. This is a climate-smart approach—investing in activities that build resilience and capacity while reducing risk.
What’s in the Toolkit? How can it help?
Using plain language, the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit helps people face climate problems and find climate opportunities. The site offers:
- Steps to Resilience—a five-step process you can follow to initiate, plan, and implement projects to become more resilient to climate-related hazards.
- Taking Action stories—real-world case studies describing climate-related risks and opportunities that communities and businesses face, steps they’re taking to plan and respond, and tools and techniques they’re using to improve resilience.
- A catalog of freely available Tools for accessing and analyzing climate data, generating visualizations, exploring climate projections, estimating hazards, and engaging stakeholders in resilience-building efforts.
- Climate Explorer—a visualization tool that offers maps of climate stressors and impacts as well as interactive graphs showing daily observations and long-term averages from thousands of weather stations.
- Topic narratives that explain how climate variability and change can impact particular regions of the country and sectors of society.
- Pointers to free, federally developed training courses that can build skills for using climate tools and data.
- Maps highlighting the locations of centers where federal and state agencies can provide regional climate information.
- The ability to Search the entire federal government’s climate science domain and filter results according to your interests.”
Start-Up Seeks to Provide Inexpensive Satellite Images for Nonprofits
Nicole Wallace at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Planet Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up, has ambitious plans to bring down the sky-high cost of satellite imagery and significantly increase the recording frequency of such photos—all with the goal of improving life down here on earth. To make that happen, the company plans to set up a nonprofit arm, Planet.org, to provide satellite images to charities and help them learn how to use the cutting-edge technology to fulfill their missions….
Satellite imagery is expensive, and the photos aren’t updated very often. The interval between image recordings can be from several weeks to more than a year. The satellites themselves are often the size of a school bus, may take as long as a decade to build, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Planet Labs is trying to upend that model. Rather than building custom parts, the company uses cutting-edge—but readily available—electronics and sensors to build shoebox-size microsatellites. The tiny devices have been launched from the International Space State and from unmanned rockets. Modeling its approach on the software industry, Planet Labs redesigns its satellites every three months or so, incorporating new information it learns by testing them in space.
The plan is to encircle the globe with a network of microsatellites that will scan the earth’s surface every day. So far, Planet Labs has launched 71 of the devices. It expects to launch 100 to 150 more satellites to meet a goal of achieving daily imaging in the next 12 to 18 months.
The prospect of cheaper, more up-to-date satellite imagery excites nonprofit technology experts.
Because of the cost, only a handful of large charities have been able to use satellite imagery in their work, says Jim Fruchterman, chief executive of Benetech, a nonprofit technology group in Palo Alto, Calif. He points to Amnesty International’s use of remote imagery to document human-rights abuses in Darfur and Syria as an example.
Lowering the price of the technology will increase the number of nonprofits that can use the data, and more-frequent images will expand the ways groups can use the information, he says. Human-rights groups could, in some cases, use the images to confirm or refute reports they receive, almost in real time, says Mr. Fruchterman….
Some of the ways that nonprofits will probably use the satellite data won’t be that different from applications by the company’s commercial customers, says Mr. Schingler.
One case in point, he says, is agriculture. Many farmers in developed countries already use satellite imagery to help them plan when they should plant and irrigate, says Mr. Schingler. With wider access to remote imagery, he says, nonprofits could help distribute the same information to farmers in developing countries….”