Flowing Data: “Accessing government data from the source is frustrating. If you’ve done it, or at least tried to, you know the pain that is oddly formatted files, search that doesn’t work, and annotation that tells you nothing about the data in front of you. The most frustrating part of the process is knowing how useful the data could be if only it were shared more simply. Unfortunately, ease-of-use is rarely the case, and we spend more time formatting and inspecting the data than we do actually putting it to use. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? It’s... (More >)
The Emerging Science of Computational Anthropology
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: The increasing availability of big data from mobile phones and location-based apps has triggered a revolution in the understanding of human mobility patterns. This data shows the ebb and flow of the daily commute in and out of cities, the pattern of travel around the world and even how disease can spread through cities via their transport systems. So there is considerable interest in looking more closely at human mobility patterns to see just how well it can be predicted and how these predictions might be used in everything from disease control and city... (More >)
How Long Is Too Long? The 4th Amendment and the Mosaic Theory
Law and Liberty Blog: “Volume 8.2 of the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty has been sent to the printer and physical copies will be available soon, but the articles in the issue are already available online here. One article that has gotten a lot of attention so far is by Steven Bellovin, Renee Hutchins, Tony Jebara, and Sebastian Zimmeck titled “When Enough is Enough: Location Tracking, Mosaic Theory, and Machine Learning.” A direct link to the article is here. The mosaic theory is a modern corollary accepted by some academics – and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals... (More >)
Open Government Will Reshape Latin America
Alejandro Guerrero at Medium: “When people think on the place for innovations, they typically think on innovation being spurred by large firms and small startups based in the US. And particularly in that narrow stretch of land and water called Silicon Valley. However, the flux of innovation taking place in the intersection between technology and government is phenomenal and emerging everywhere. From the marble hallways of parliaments everywhere —including Latin America’s legislative houses— to office hubs of tech-savvy non-profits full of enthusiastic social changers —also including Latin American startups— a driving force is starting to challenge our conception of... (More >)
US Secret Service seeks Twitter sarcasm detector
BBC: “The agency has put out a work tender looking for a software system to analyse social media data. The software should have, among other things, the “ability to detect sarcasm and false positives”. A spokesman for the service said it currently used the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Twitter analytics and needed its own, adding: “We aren’t looking solely to detect sarcasm.” The Washington Post quoted Ed Donovan as saying: “Our objective is to automate our social media monitoring process. Twitter is what we analyse. “This is real-time stream analysis. The ability to detect sarcasm and false positives is... (More >)
OSTP’s Own Open Government Plan
Nick Sinai and Corinna Zarek: “The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) today released its 2014 Open Government Plan. The OSTP plan highlights three flagship efforts as well as the team’s ongoing work to embed the open government principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration into its activities. OSTP advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The work of the office includes policy efforts encompassing science, environment, energy, national security, technology, and innovation. This plan builds off of the 2010 and 2012 Open Government Plans, updating progress on past... (More >)
Humanitarians in the sky
Patrick Meier in the Guardian: “Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capture images faster, cheaper, and at a far higher resolution than satellite imagery. And as John DeRiggi speculates in “Drones for Development?” these attributes will likely lead to a host of applications in development work. In the humanitarian field that future is already upon us — so we need to take a rights-based approach to advance the discussion, improve coordination of UAV flights, and to promote regulation that will ensure safety while supporting innovation. It was the unprecedentedly widespread use of civilian UAVs following typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines that... (More >)
Measuring Governance: What’s the point?
Alan Hudson at Global Integrity: “Over the last 10-15 years, the fact that governance – the institutional arrangements and relationships that shape how effectively things get done – plays a central role in shaping countries’ development trajectories has become widely acknowledged (see for instance the World Bank’s World Development Report of 2011). This acknowledgement has developed hand-in-hand with determined efforts to measure various aspects of governance. This emphasis on governance and the efforts made to measure its patterns and understand its dynamics is very welcome. There’s no doubt that governance matters and measuring “governance” and its various dimensions can... (More >)
Lessons in Mass Collaboration
Elizabeth Walker, Ryan Siegel, Todd Khozein, Nick Skytland, Ali Llewellyn, Thea Aldrich, and Michael Brennan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “significant advances in technology in the last two decades have opened possibilities to engage the masses in ways impossible to imagine centuries ago. Beyond coordination, today’s technological capability permits organizations to leverage and focus public interest, talent, and energy through mass collaborative engagement to better understand and solve today’s challenges. And given the rising public awareness of a variety of social, economic, and environmental problems, organizations have seized the opportunity to leverage and lead mass collaborations in the... (More >)
CollaborativeScience.org: Sustaining Ecological Communities Through Citizen Science and Online Collaboration
David Mellor at CommonsLab: “In any endeavor, there can be a tradeoff between intimacy and impact. The same is true for science in general and citizen science in particular. Large projects with thousands of collaborators can have incredible impact and robust, global implications. On the other hand, locally based projects can foster close-knit ties that encourage collaboration and learning, but face an uphill battle when it comes to creating rigorous and broadly relevant investigations. Online collaboration has the potential to harness the strengths of both of these strategies if a space can be created that allows for the easy... (More >)
