Reinvention in Middle America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by sparks & honey: “Conventional wisdom suggests that to peer into the crystal ball of America’s future, one should go to Silicon Valley to check out the latest start-up unicorns, or to New York or Los Angeles to scout emerging trends in fashion and food.
Middle America, on the other hand, is often described as if it’s on the margins of culture and innovation — “flyover country” — provincial, unsophisticated and stuck in the past. But Middle America is diverse and although it is not stuck in the past —rhetoric about it is.

In this culture forecast report, we spotlight the region, looking at it not through the lens of politics, ideology or outdated clichés, but rather through innovation. Key cities from Cleveland to Nashville to Louisville are reinventing themselves by embracing innovation in manufacturing, city design, healthcare, sustainability efforts and clean energy, creatively solving problems that the entire country will eventually have to confront. And they’re imbuing this reinvention with characteristic Middle American values of community, collaboration, and concern for the social impact of their actions.

Yes, portions of Middle America may have a lot of cornfields — but drone-farming is happening there. Although Nashville is still the seat of the Grand Ole Opry, it’s also emerging as a major fashion and design hub. And in Appalachia, a coal museum is powered by solar energy and out-of-work coal miners are reinventing themselves as coders. It’s even predicted that in five years, the Midwest will have more startups than Silicon Valley.

Although it’s easy to politicize and divide America, innovation is not about moving right or left. Innovation is about moving forward…(More)”

Detecting riots with Twitter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cardiff University News: “An analysis of data taken from the London riots in 2011 showed that computer systems could automatically scan through Twitter and detect serious incidents, such as shops being broken in to and cars being set alight, before they were reported to the Metropolitan Police Service.

The computer system could also discern information about where the riots were rumoured to take place and where groups of youths were gathering. The new research, published in the peer-review journal ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, showed that on average the computer systems could pick up on disruptive events several minutes before officials and over an hour in some cases.

“Antagonistic narratives and cyber hate”

The researchers believe that their work could enable police officers to better manage and prepare for both large and small scale disruptive events.

Co-author of the study Dr Pete Burnap, from Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science and Informatics, said: “We have previously used machine-learning and natural language processing on Twitter data to better understand online deviance, such as the spread of antagonistic narratives and cyber hate…”

“We will never replace traditional policing resource on the ground but we have demonstrated that this research could augment existing intelligence gathering and draw on new technologies to support more established policing methods.”

Scientists are continually looking to the swathes of data produced from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to help them to detect events in real-time.

Estimates put social media membership at approximately 2.5 billion non-unique users, and the data produced by these users have been used to predict elections, movie revenues and even the epicentre of earthquakes.

In their study the research team analysed 1.6m tweets relating to the 2011 riots in England, which began as an isolated incident in Tottenham on August 6 but quickly spread across London and to other cities in England, giving rise to looting, destruction of property and levels of violence not seen in England for more than 30 years.

Machine-learning algorithms

The researchers used a series of machine-learning algorithms to analyse each of the tweets from the dataset, taking into account a number of key features such as the time they were posted, the location where they were posted and the content of the tweet itself.

Results showed that the machine-learning algorithms were quicker than police sources in all but two of the disruptive events reported…(More)”.

What Bhutanese hazelnuts tell us about using data for good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño at WEForum: “How are we going to close the $2.5 trillion/year finance gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Whose money? What business model? How to scale it that much? If you read the recent development economics scholar literature, or Jim Kim’s new financing approach of the World Bank, you might hear the benefits of “blended finance” or “triple bottom lines.” I want to tell you instead about a real case that makes a dent. I want to tell you about Sonam.

Sonam is a 60-year old farmer in rural Bhutan. His children left for the capital, Thimphu, like many are doing nowadays. Four years ago, he decided to plant 2 acres of hazelnuts on an unused rocky piece of his land. Hazelnut saplings, training, and regular supervision all come from “Mountain Hazelnuts”, Bhutan’s only 100% foreign invested company. They fund the costs of the trees and helps him manage his orchard. In return, when the nuts come, he will sell his harvest to them above the guaranteed floor price, which will double his income; in a time when he will be too old to work in his rice field.

You could find similar impact stories for the roughly 10,000 farmers participating in this operation across the country, where the farmers are carefully selected to ensure productivity, maximize social and environmental benefits, such as vulnerable households, or reducing land erosion.

But Sonam also gets a visit from Kinzang every month. This is Kinzang’s first job. Otherwise, he would have moved to the city in hopes of finding a low paying job, but more likely joining the many unemployed youth from the countryside. Kinzang carefully records data on his smart-phone, talks to Sonam and digitally transmits the data back to the company HQ. There, if a problem is recorded with irrigation, pests, or there is any data anomaly, a team of experts (locally trained agronomists) will visit his orchard to figure out a solution.

The whole system of support, monitoring, and optimization live on a carefully crafted data platform that feeds information to and from the farmers, the monitors, the agronomist experts, and local government authorities. It ensures that all 10 million trees are healthy and productive, minimizes extra costs, tests and tracks effectiveness of new treatments….

This is also a story which demonstrates how “Data is the new oil” is not the right approach. If Data is the new oil, you extract value from the data, without much regard to feeding back value to the source of the data. However, in this system, “Data is the new soil.” Data creates a higher ground in which value flows back and forth. It lifts the source of the data -the farmers- into new income generation, it enables optimized operations; and it also helps the whole country: Much of the data (such as road quality used by the monitors) is made open for the benefit of the Bhutanese people, without contradiction or friction with the business model….(More)”.

Rawification and the careful generation of open government data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jérôme Denis and Samuel Goëta in Social Studies of Science: “Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study within several French administrations involved in open data programs, this article aims to investigate the conditions of the release of government data – the rawness of which open data policies require. This article describes two sets of phenomena. First, far from being taken for granted, open data emerge in administrations through a progressive process that entails uncertain collective inquiries and extraction work. Second, the opening process draws on a series of transformations, as data are modified to satisfy an important criterion of open data policies: the need for both human and technical intelligibility. There are organizational consequences of these two points, which can notably lead to the visibilization or the invisibilization of data labour. Finally, the article invites us to reconsider the apparent contradiction between the process of data release and the existence of raw data. Echoing the vocabulary of one of the interviewees, the multiple operations can be seen as a ‘rawification’ process by which open government data are carefully generated. Such a notion notably helps to build a relational model of what counts as data and what counts as work….(More)”.

Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities by Martha C. Nussbaum: “… I believe the Greeks and Romans are right: anger is a poison to democratic politics, and it is all the worse when fueled by a lurking fear and a sense of helplessness. As a philosopher I have been working on these ideas for some time, first in a 2016 book called Anger and Forgiveness, and now in a book in progress called The Monarchy of Fear, investigating the relationship between anger and fear. In my work, I draw not only on the Greeks and Romans, but also on some recent figures, as I shall tonight. I conclude that we should resist anger in ourselves and inhibit its role in our political culture.

That idea, however, is radical and evokes strong opposition. For anger, with all its ugliness, is a popular emotion. Many people think that it is impossible to care for justice without anger at injustice, and that anger should be encouraged as part of a transformative process. Many also believe that it is impossible for individuals to stand up for their own self-respect without anger, that someone who reacts to wrongs and insults without anger is spineless and downtrodden. Nor are these ideas confined to the sphere of personal relations. The most popular position in the sphere of criminal justice today is retributivism, the view that the law ought to punish aggressors in a manner that embodies the spirit of justified anger. And it is also very widely believed that successful challenges against great injustice need anger to make progress.

Still, we may persist in our Aeschylean skepticism, remembering that recent years have seen three noble and successful freedom movements conducted in a spirit of non-anger: those of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela—surely people who stood up for their self-respect and that of others, and who did not acquiesce in injustice.

I’ll now argue that a philosophical analysis of anger can help us support these philosophies of non-anger, showing why anger is fatally flawed from a normative viewpoint—sometimes incoherent, sometimes based on bad values, and especially poisonous when people use it to deflect attention from real problems that they feel powerless to solve.  Anger pollutes democratic politics and is of dubious value in both life and the law. I’ll present my general view, and then show its relevance to thinking well about the struggle for political justice, taking our own ongoing struggle for racial justice as my example. And I’ll end by showing why these arguments make it urgent for us to learn from literature and philosophy, keeping the humanities strong in our society….(More)”

Blockchains, personal data and the challenge of governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Theo Bass at NESTA: “…There are a number of dominant internet platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) that hoard, analyse and sell information about their users in the name of a more personalised and efficient service. This has become a problem.

People feel they are losing control over how their data is used and reused on the web. 500 million adblocker downloads is a symptom of a market which isn’t working well for people. As Irene Ng mentions in a recent guest blog on the Nesta website, the secondary data market is thriving (online advertising is a major player), as companies benefit from the opacity and lack of transparency about where profit is made from personal data.

It’s said that blockchain’s key characteristics could provide a foundational protocol for a fairer digital identity system on the web. Beyond its application as digital currency, blockchain could provide a new set of technical standards for transparency, openness, and user consent, on top of which a whole new generation of services might be built.

While the aim is ambitious, a handful of projects are rising to the challenge.

Blockstack is creating a global system of digital IDs, which are written into the bitcoin blockchain. Nobody can touch them other than the owner of that ID. Blockstack are building a new generation of applications on top of this infrastructure which promises to provide “a new decentralized internet where users own their data and apps run locally”.

Sovrin attempts to provide users with “self-sovereign identity”. The argument is that “centralized” systems for storing personal data make it a “treasure chest for attackers”. Sovrin argues that users should more easily be able to have “ownership” over their data, and the exchange of data should be made possible through a decentralised, tamper-proof ledger of transactions between users.

Our own DECODE project is piloting a set of collaboratively owned, local sharing economy platforms in Barcelona and Amsterdam. The blockchain aims to provide a public record of entitlements over where people’s data is stored, who can access it and for what purpose (with some additional help from new techniques in zero-knowledge cryptography to preserve people’s privacy).

There’s no doubt this is an exciting field of innovation. But the debate is characterised by a lot of hype. The following sections therefore discuss some of the challenges thrown up when we start thinking about implementations beyond bitcoin.

Blockchains and the challenge of governance

As mentioned above, bitcoin is a “bearer asset”. This is a necessary feature of decentralisation — all users maintain sole ownership over the digital money they hold on the network. If users get hacked (digital wallets sometimes do), or if a password gets lost, the money is irretrievable.

While the example of losing a password might seem trivial, it highlights some difficult questions for proponents of blockchain’s wider uses. What happens if there’s a dispute over an online transaction, but no intermediary to settle it? What happens if a someone’s digital assets or their digital identity is breached and sensitive data falls into the wrong hands? It might be necessary to assign responsibility to a governing actor to help resolve the issue, but of course this would require the introduction of a trusted middleman.

Bitcoin doesn’t try to answer these questions; its anonymous creators deliberately tried to avoid implementing a clear model of governance over the network, probably because they knew that bitcoin would be used by people as a method for subverting the law. Bitcoin still sees a lot of use in gray economies, including for the sale of drugs and gambling.

But if blockchains are set to enter the mainstream, providing for businesses, governments and nonprofits, then they won’t be able to function irrespective of the law. They will need to find use-cases that can operate alongside legal frameworks and jurisdictional boundaries. They will need to demonstrate regulatory compliance, create systems of rules and provide accountability when things go awry. This cannot just be solved through increasingly sophisticated coding.

All of this raises a potential paradox recently elaborated in a post by Vili Lehdonvirta of the Oxford Internet Institute: is it possible to successfully govern blockchains without undermining their entire purpose?….

If blockchain advocates only work towards purely technical solutions and ignore real-world challenges of trying to implement decentralisation, then we’ll only ever see flawed implementations of the technology. This is already happening in the form of centrally administered, proprietary or ‘half-baked’ blockchains, which don’t offer much more value than traditional databases….(More)”.

Remix, Slang and Memes: A New Collection Documents Web Culture

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Library of Congress: “…just announced the release of the Web Cultures Web Archive Collection, a representative sampling of websites documenting the creation and sharing of emergent cultural traditions on the web.

Why is this important? Increasingly, people take to their smart phones, tablets and laptops to enact much of their lives through creative communication, making the web a predominant place to share folklore. It is where a significant portion of the historical record is now being written.

Archived from the web starting in 2014, the new—and growing—collection of collaborative cultural creation includes reaction GIFs (animated images, often bodies in motion, used online as responses or reactions to previous posts in a communication thread); image macros (photographic images on which a funny caption is superimposed); and memes (in this context, internet phenomena).

Because the collection aims to document online communities that have established, shaped and disseminated communication tropes and themes, it also includes sites that capture icon-based communications, such as emoji, and those that establish or define vernacular language. Examples of these include “Leet” and “Lolspeak,” two examples of written English language that derive from internet usages. Leet emerged from 1980s software piracy communities, referring to “elite” code wranglers. Lolspeak primarily features in memes and carries collective meaning as the form of English that cats might use.

Some sites represent the DIY (do-it-yourself) movements of crafting and making—for example, Instructables. Still others focus on the distribution and discussion of digital “urban legends” and lore, such as Creepypasta, or vernacular creative forms, such as fan fiction.

The project is a contemporary manifestation of the AFC’s mission to document traditional cultural forms and practices, and results from the collaborative work between the AFC and those steeped in digital culture, both scholars and enthusiasts….(More)”.

How did awful panel discussions become the default format?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at The Guardian: “With the occasional exception, my mood in conferences usually swings between boredom, despair and rage. The turgid/self-aggrandizing keynotes and coma-inducing panels, followed by people (usually men) asking ‘questions’ that are really comments, and usually not on topic. The chairs who abdicate responsibility and let all the speakers over-run, so that the only genuinely productive bit of the day (networking at coffee breaks and lunch) gets squeezed. I end up dozing off, or furiously scribbling abuse in my notebook as a form of therapy, and hoping my neighbours can’t see what I’m writing. I probably look a bit unhinged…

This matters both because of the lost opportunity that badly run conferences represent, and because they cost money and time. I hope that if it was easy to fix, people would have done so already, but the fact is that the format is tired and unproductive.

For example, how did something as truly awful as panel discussions become the default format? They end up being a parade of people reading out papers, or they include terrible powerpoints crammed with too many words and illegible graphics. Can we try other formats, like speed dating (eg 10 people pitch their work for 2 minutes each, then each goes to a table and the audience hooks up (intellectually, I mean) with the ones they were interested in); world cafes; simulation games; joint tasks (eg come up with an infographic that explains X)? Anything, really. Yes ‘manels’ (male only panels – take the pledge here) are an outrage, but why not go for complete abolition, rather than mere gender balance?

Conferences frequently discuss evidence and results. So where is the evidence and results for the efficacy of conferences? Given the resources being ploughed into research on development (DFID alone spends about £350m a year), surely it would be a worthwhile investment, if it hasn’t already been done, to sponsor a research programme that runs multiple parallel experiments with different event formats, and compares the results in terms of participant feedback, how much people retain a month after the event etc? At the very least, can they find or commission a systematic review on what the existing evidence says?

Feedback systems could really help. A public eBay-type ratings system to rank speakers/conferences would provide nice examples of good practice for people to draw on (and bad practice to avoid). Or why not go real-time and encourage instant audience feedback? OK, maybe Occupy-style thumbs up from the audience if they like the speaker, thumbs down if they don’t would be a bit in-your-face for academe, but why not introduce a twitterwall to encourage the audience to interact with the speaker (perhaps with moderation to stop people testing the limits, as my LSE students did to Owen Barder last term)?

We need to get better at shaping the format to fit the the precise purpose of the conference. … if the best you can manage is ‘disseminating new research’ of ‘information sharing’, alarm bells should probably ring….(More)”.

Introducing Test+Build – a new tool to help you run your own randomised controlled trial.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Sanders, Miranda Jackman and Martin Sweeney at Behavioural Insights Team: “Work in fraud, error, and debt, and especially tax compliance and collection, has always been a core part of what the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) does. One of our favourite pieces of work is still that first HMRC trial that told taxpayers with outstanding debts that ‘nine out of ten people pay their tax on time.’ That trial significantly increased the rate at which people paid their taxes, bringing forward £3 million in tax debt. It’s a result that has since been replicated worldwide….

Though all these trials have been in very different contexts and situations, they all employ similar insights and involve running trials to test which letter is most effective. And this got us thinking. Could we build a tool that would enable us to automate lots of the process, while also helping organisations to build their own capabilities? We are pleased to say that the answer is, yes.

 

Our new tool is called Test+Build, and it aims to hugely increase the use of behavioural science in tax collection by helping people design and run their own randomised controlled trials. Test+Build does this by guiding users through the four stages of BIT’s TEST methodology – Target, Explore, Solution and Trial – and provides them with guides, case studies and videos developed by the team that relate to compliance and enforcement. Test+Build also brings in support from BIT researchers to offer advice, conduct randomisations, and analyse and interpret the results. It provides organisations with the tools to run their own trials, and in doing so, increases the organisation’s level of expertise for implementing them in the future.

By letting users work through the process themselves, with support from BIT researchers at key points along the way, we’ve significantly reduced the cost to organisations of running a BIT trial – by about 50 per cent. Of course, the all-important question for us is – as always – does it work?…(More)

Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”—human and machine capabilities working together—has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies.

Geoff Mulgan explores how collective intelligence has to be consciously organized and orchestrated in order to harness its powers. He looks at recent experiments mobilizing millions of people to solve problems, and at groundbreaking technology like Google Maps and Dove satellites. He also considers why organizations full of smart people and machines can make foolish mistakes—from investment banks losing billions to intelligence agencies misjudging geopolitical events—and shows how to avoid them.

Highlighting differences between environments that stimulate intelligence and those that blunt it, Mulgan shows how human and machine intelligence could solve challenges in business, climate change, democracy, and public health. But for that to happen we’ll need radically new professions, institutions, and ways of thinking.

Informed by the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind shows how collective intelligence could help us survive and thrive….(More)”