The Wikipedia competitor that’s harnessing blockchain for epistemological supremacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Rubin at Wired: “At the time of this writing, the opening sentence of Larry Sanger’s Everipedia entry is pretty close to his Wikipedia entry. It describes him as “an American Internet project developer … best known as co-founder of Wikipedia.” By the time you read this, however, it may well mention a new, more salient fact—that Sanger recently became the Chief Information Officer of Everipedia itself, a site that seeks to become a better version of the online encyclopedia than the one he founded back in 2001. To do that, Sanger’s new employer is trying something that no other player in the space has done: moving to a blockchain.

Oh, blockchain, that decentralized “global ledger” that provides the framework for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (as well as a thousand explainer videos, and seemingly a thousand startups’ business plans). Blockchain already stands to make medical patient data easier to move and improve food safety; now, Everipedia’s founders hope, it will allow for a more powerful, accountable encyclopedia.

Here’s how it’ll work. Everipedia already uses a points system where creating articles and approved edits amasses “IQ.” In January, when the site moves over to a blockchain, Everipedia will convert IQ scores to a token-based currency, giving all existing editors an allotment proportionate to their IQ—and giving them a real, financial stake in Everipedia. From then on, creating and curating articles will allow users to earn tokens, which act as virtual shares of the platform. To prevent bad actors from trying to cash in with ill-founded or deliberately false articles and edits, Everipedia will force users to put up a token of their own in order to submit. If their work is accepted, they get their token back, plus a little bit for their contribution; if not, they lose their token. The assumption is that other users, motivated by the desire to maintain the site’s value, will actively seek to prevent such efforts….

This isn’t the first time a company has proposed a decentralized blockchain-based encyclopedia; earlier this year, a company called Lunyr announced similar plans. However, judging from Lunyr’s most recent roadmap, Everipedia will beat it to market with room to spare….(More)”.

Big data in social and psychological science: theoretical and methodological issues

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lin Qiu, Sarah Hian May Chan and David Chan in the Journal of Computational Social Science: “Big data presents unprecedented opportunities to understand human behavior on a large scale. It has been increasingly used in social and psychological research to reveal individual differences and group dynamics. There are a few theoretical and methodological challenges in big data research that require attention. In this paper, we highlight four issues, namely data-driven versus theory-driven approaches, measurement validity, multi-level longitudinal analysis, and data integration. They represent common problems that social scientists often face in using big data. We present examples of these problems and propose possible solutions….(More)”.

Analyzing the Role of the Internet-of-Things in Business and Technologically-Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by A. Shinn, K. Nakatani, and W. Rodriguez in the International Journal of Internet of Things: “This research analyzes and theorizes on the role that the Internet-of-Things will play in the expansion of business and technologically-smart cities. This study examines: a) the underlying technology, referred to as the Internet of Things that forms the foundation for smart cities; b) what businesses and government must do to successfully transition to a technologically-smart city; and c) how the proliferation of the Internet of Things through the emerging cities will affect local citizens. As machine-to-machine communication becomes increasingly common, new use cases are continually created, as is the case with the use of the Internet of Things in technologically-smart cities. Technology businesses are keeping a close pulse on end-users’ needs in order to identify and create technologies and systems to cater to new use cases. A number of the international smart city-specific use cases will be discussed in this paper along with the technology that aligns to those use cases….(More)”.

A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman: “At a time when trust is dropping precipitously and American government at the national level has fallen into a state of long-term, partisan-based gridlock, local government can still be effective—indeed more effective and even more responsive to the needs of its citizens. Based on decades of direct experience and years studying successful models around the world, the authors of this intriguing book propose a new operating system (O/S) for cities. Former mayor and Harvard professor Stephen Goldsmith and New York University professor Neil Kleiman suggest building on the giant leaps that have been made in technology, social engagement, and big data.

Calling their approach “distributed governance,” Goldsmith and Kleiman offer a model that allows public officials to mobilize new resources, surface ideas from unconventional sources, and arm employees with the information they need to become pre-emptive problem solvers. This book highlights lessons from the many innovations taking place in today’s cities to show how a new O/S can create systemic transformation.

For students of government, A New City O/S: The Power of Distributed Governance presents a groundbreaking strategy for rethinking the governance of cities, marking an important evolution of the current bureaucratic authority-based model dating from the 1920s. More important, the book is designed for practitioners, starting with public-sector executives, managers, and frontline workers. By weaving real-life examples into a coherent model, the authors have created a step-by-step guide for all those who would put the needs of citizens front and center. Nothing will do more to restore trust in government than solutions that work. A New City O/S: The Power of Distributed Governanceputs those solutions within reach of those public officials responsible for their delivery….(More)”.

Blockchain: Unpacking the disruptive potential of blockchain technology for human development.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IDRC white paper: “In the scramble to harness new technologies to propel innovation around the world, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and blockchain technologies are being explored and deployed in a wide variety of contexts globally.

Although blockchain is one of the most hyped of these new technologies, it is also perhaps the least understood. Blockchain is the distributed ledger — a database that is shared across multiple sites or institutions to furnish a secure and transparent record of events occurring during the provision of a service or contract — that supports cryptocurrencies (digital assets designed to work as mediums of exchange).

Blockchain is now underpinning applications such as land registries and identity services, but as its popularity grows, its relevance in addressing socio-economic gaps and supporting development targets like the globally-recognized UN Sustainable Development Goals is critical to unpack. Moreover, for countries in the global South that want to be more than just end users or consumers, the complex infrastructure requirements and operating costs of blockchain could prove challenging. For the purposes of real development, we need to not only understand how blockchain is workable, but also who is able to harness it to foster social inclusion and promote democratic governance.

This white paper explores the potential of blockchain technology to support human development. It provides a non-technical overview, illustrates a range of applications, and offers a series of conclusions and recommendations for additional research and potential development programming….(More)”.

The social preferences of local citizens and spontaneous volunteerism during disaster relief operations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Samuel Roscoe et al: “Existing studies on disaster relief operations (DRO) pay limited attention to acts of spontaneous volunteerism by local citizens in the aftermath of disasters. The purpose of this paper is to explore how social preferences motivate citizens to help during post-disaster situations; above and beyond their own self-regarding interests. The paper begins by synthesizing the literature on social preferences from the field of behavioral economics and social psychology with the discourse surrounding behavioral operations management and humanitarian operations management (HOM). By doing so, we identify the motivators, enablers and barriers of local citizen response during disaster relief operations. These factors inform a theoretical framework of the social preferences motivating spontaneous volunteerism in post-disaster situations. We evidence facets of the framework using archival and unstructured data retrieved from Twitter feeds generated by local citizens during the floods that hit Chennai, India in 2015. Our model highlights the importance of individual level action during disaster relief operations and the enabling role of social media as a coordination mechanism for such efforts….(More)”.

Reputation What It Is and Why It Matters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gloria Origgi: “Reputation touches almost everything, guiding our behavior and choices in countless ways. But it is also shrouded in mystery. Why is it so powerful when the criteria by which people and things are defined as good or bad often appear to be arbitrary? Why do we care so much about how others see us that we may even do irrational and harmful things to try to influence their opinion? In this engaging book, Gloria Origgi draws on philosophy, social psychology, sociology, economics, literature, and history to offer an illuminating account of an important yet oddly neglected subject.

Origgi examines the influence of the Internet and social media, as well as the countless ranking systems that characterize modern society and contribute to the creation of formal and informal reputations in our social relations, in business, in politics, in academia, and even in wine. She highlights the importance of reputation to the effective functioning of the economy and e-commerce. Origgi also discusses the existential significance of our obsession with reputation, concluding that an awareness of the relationship between our reputation and our actions empowers us to better understand who we are and why we do what we do….(More)”.

‘Big Data’ Tells Thailand More About Jobs Than Low Unemployment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Suttinee Yuvejwattana at Bloomberg: “Thailand has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world, which doesn’t always fit the picture of an emerging-market economy that’s struggling to get growth going.

 To get a fuller picture of what’s happening in the labor market — as well as in other under-reported industries in the economy, like the property market — the central bank is increasingly turning to “big data” sources drawn from social media and online stores to supplement official figures.

The Bank of Thailand is building its own employment index based on data from online jobs-search portals and is also creating a property indicator to give it a better sense of supply and demand in the housing market.

“We want to do evidence-based policy so big data is useful,” Jaturong Jantarangs, an assistant governor at the Bank of Thailand, said in an interview in Bangkok. “It’s not only a benefit to monetary policy but financial policy as well.”…

“Official data can’t capture the whole picture of the economy,” said Somprawin Manprasert, Bangkok-based head of research at Bank of Ayudhya Pcl. “We have a big informal sector. Many people are self-employed. This leads to a low unemployment rate.”

“The big data can show all aspects, so it can help us to solve the problems where they are,” he said…

Thailand’s military administration is also trying to harness big data to improve policy decisions, Digital Economy and Society Minister Pichet Durongkaveroj said in an interview last month. Pichet said he’s been tasked to look into digitizing, integrating and analyzing information across more than 200 government departments.

Santitarn Sathirathai, head of emerging Asia economics at Credit Suisse Group AG in Singapore, said big data analytics can be used to better target policy responses as well as allow timely evaluation of past programs. At the same time, he called on authorities to make their data more readily available to the public.

“The government should not just view big data analytics as being solely about it using richer data but also about creating a more open data environment,” he said. That’s to ensure “people can have better access to many government non-sensitive datasets and help conduct analysis that could complement the policy makers,” he said….(More)”.

Stewardship in the “Age of Algorithms”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Clifford Lynch at First Monday: “This paper explores pragmatic approaches that might be employed to document the behavior of large, complex socio-technical systems (often today shorthanded as “algorithms”) that centrally involve some mixture of personalization, opaque rules, and machine learning components. Thinking rooted in traditional archival methodology — focusing on the preservation of physical and digital objects, and perhaps the accompanying preservation of their environments to permit subsequent interpretation or performance of the objects — has been a total failure for many reasons, and we must address this problem.

The approaches presented here are clearly imperfect, unproven, labor-intensive, and sensitive to the often hidden factors that the target systems use for decision-making (including personalization of results, where relevant); but they are a place to begin, and their limitations are at least outlined.

Numerous research questions must be explored before we can fully understand the strengths and limitations of what is proposed here. But it represents a way forward. This is essentially the first paper I am aware of which tries to effectively make progress on the stewardship challenges facing our society in the so-called “Age of Algorithms;” the paper concludes with some discussion of the failure to address these challenges to date, and the implications for the roles of archivists as opposed to other players in the broader enterprise of stewardship — that is, the capture of a record of the present and the transmission of this record, and the records bequeathed by the past, into the future. It may well be that we see the emergence of a new group of creators of documentation, perhaps predominantly social scientists and humanists, taking the front lines in dealing with the “Age of Algorithms,” with their materials then destined for our memory organizations to be cared for into the future…(More)”.

Platform tackles extremist views with blockchain technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “The phrase ‘fake news’, whether used accurately or not, is creating a situation where any voice can claim legitimacy or call reliable sources into question. However, we’ve already covered innovations using either the blockchain or algorithms on Facebook to provide clarity to the situation, and now UK-based Ananas is looking to use cryptocurrency as an incentive for reliable knowledge-sharing.

Ananas is a charitable foundation whose main aim is to align the interests of disparate groups by encouraging knowledge diversity and combining honest discussion with reward. Users will contribute to an open-book platform where subjects and ideas are open to misrepresentation. As well as sharing knowledge, users can be rewarded by earning ‘Anacoins’, an ethereum-based cryptocurrency that can be transferred into other currencies. While users who wish to contribute content will initially have to buy Anacoins, they can earn more by having their comments and sources verified and by demonstrating supportive behavior, via voting from other community members. The company believes this will empower individuals and communities to map their own belief systems and will result in a structured framework of references and resources.

Additionally, users are further rewarded by having the value of the coin increase, as only a limited number of Anacoins will be made. Ananas’s first project is referred to as the ‘living Quran’ — a digital version of the holy text that scholars and community leaders will be able to provide commentary on. The content is available to anyone via a free app, with users able to filter information from certain groups, acting as a ‘map’ of knowledge across different subcultures and viewpoints, with the overall aim to prevent a misrepresentation of ideas and potentially fight extremism and Islamophobia. Anacoins are currently available through the ethical ICO (Initial Coin Offering) platform Chainstarter, with a current value of fifty Anacoins equal to USD 1.00….(More).