DATA – Page 383 – The Living Library

What Are Data? A Categorization of the Data Sensitivity Spectrum

Curated on December 4, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John M.M. Rumbold and Barbara K. Pierscionek in Big Data Research: “The definition of data might at first glance seem prosaic, but formulating a definitive and useful definition is surprisingly difficult. This question is important because of the protection given to data in law and ethics. Healthcare data are universally considered sensitive (and confidential), so it might seem that the categorisation of less sensitive data is relatively unimportant for medical data research. This paper will explore the arguments that this is not necessarily the case and the relevance of recognizing this.

The categorization of data and information requires re-evaluation in the age of Big Data in order to ensure that the appropriate protections are given to different types of data. The aggregation of large amounts of data requires an assessment of the harms and benefits that pertain to large datasets linked together, rather than simply assessing each datum or dataset in isolation. Big Data produce new data via inferences, and this must be recognized in ethical assessments. We propose a schema for a granular assessment of data categories. The use of schemata such as this will assist decision-making by providing research ethics committees and information governance bodies with guidance about the relative sensitivities of data. This will ensure that appropriate and proportionate safeguards are provided for data research subjects and reduce inconsistency in decision making…(More)”.

How Blockchain Technology Is Helping Syrian Refugees

Curated on December 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Siobhan Kenna at the Huffpost: “Azraq Refugee Camp is a 15 kilometre-wide sea of corrugated aluminium houses in the heart of the vast Jordanian desert. The people that live there are detained by the barbed wire that surrounds the entire complex which is located an hour and a half from the country’s capital city, Amman….

From within the strange environment of the camp and the indistinct future, lies a bastion of normalcy for these people — the supermarket.

In the refugee camp the supermarket is much more than a place to shop or purchase food though: Here it is a vital fibre in the social fabric of a makeshift community….

It’s unbelievable to think then, that a place that is so remote and isolated could be home to a world first initiative involving the emerging Blockchain technology.

The Building Blocks Project is the brain child of Houman Haddad, Regional CBT Advisor for United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The project aims to make cash-based transactions between the WFP and the beneficiary faster, cheaper and more secure.

Prior to the project’s launch at the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan in May 2017, it was first trialled in Pakistan and also in King Abduallah Park Refugee Camp as a means of testing the robustness of the technology. On May 31st 2017 the pilot in Azraq was extended indefinitely.

Traditionally, payments are made to refugees from the WFP via a third party financial service provider. The entity could be a bank, mobile monetary company or something similar and the WFP instructs the financial service provider to credit some of the funds to the refugee so they can spend it at the supermarket or elsewhere.

On top of that, the WFP also needs to transfer the funds to the third party so they can actually pay the beneficiary. Sounds complicated right? Well, the Building Blocks Project aims to eliminate reliance on a third party and with this comes plenty of savings.

“So, what we have done is essentially replaced that financial service provider with the Blockchain,” Houman Haddad told HuffPost Australia.

“So instead of having someone else create virtual accounts and credit functions and so on and so forth, we create the virtual account on the Blockchain for beneficiaries, we upload entitlements to them, and currently in the supermarket where they go, the supermarket requests an authorisation code for transactions from the Blockchain as opposed to the bank….(More)”.

How Software is Eating the World and Reprogramming Democracy

Curated on December 1, 2017July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jaime Gómez Ramírez at Open Mind: “Democracy, the government of the majority typically through elected representatives, is undergoing a major crisis. Human societies have experimented with democracy since at least the fifth century BC in the polis of Athens. Whether democracy is scalable is an open question that could help understand the current mistrust in democratic institutions and the rise of populism. The majority rule is a powerful narrative that is fed every few years with elections. In Against elections, the cultural historian Van Reybrouck claims that elections were never meant to make democracy possible, rather the opposite, it was a tool designed for those in power to prevent “the rule of the mob”. Elections created a new elite and power remained in the hands of a minority, but this time endowed with democratic legitimacy….

The 2008 financial crisis have changed the perception of, the once taken for granted, complementary nature of democracy and capitalism. The belief that capitalism and democracy go hand by hand is not credible anymore. The concept of nation is a fiction in need of a continuous stock of intergenerational believers. The nation state successfully assimilated heterogeneous groups of people under a common language and shared cultural values. But this seems today a rather fragile foundation to resist the centrifugal forces that financial capitalism impinges upon the social fabric.

Nation states will not collapse over night, but they are an industrial era device in a digital world. To do not fall into obsolescence they will need to change their operative system. Since the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen coined the phrase “software is eating the world” the logic of financial capitalism has accelerated this trend. Five software companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet (FANG) equal more than 10 per cent percent of the S&P 500 cap. Todays dominant industries in entertainment, retail, telecom, marketing companies and others are software companies. Software is also taking a bigger share in industries that traditionally exist in the physical space like automakers and energy. Education and health care have shown more resistance to software-based entrepreneurial change but a very profound transformation is underway. This is already visible with the growing popularity of MOOCs and personalized health monitoring systems.

Software-based business not only have up trending market share but more importantly, software can reprogram the world. The internet of things will allow to have full connectivity of smart devices in an economy with massive deflationary costs in computing. Computing might even become free. This has profound consequences for business, industry and most importantly, for how citizens want to organize society and governance.

The most promising technological innovation in years is the blockchain technology, an encrypted and distributed ledger system. Blockchain is an universal and freely accessible repository of documents including property and insurance contracts, publicly auditable, and resistant to special group interests manipulation and corruption. New kinds of governance models and services could be tested and implemented using the blockchain. The time is ripe for fundamental software-based transformation in governance. Democracy and free society will ignore this at its own peril…(More)”.

The citizen in the smart city. How the smart city could transform citizenship

Curated on December 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Martijn de Waal and Marloes Dignum: “Smart city-policy makers and technology vendors are increasingly stating they want to bring about citizen-centered smart cities. Yet, it often remains unclear what exactly that means, and how citizens are envisaged as actors in smart cities. This article wants to contribute to this discussion by exploring the relation between smart cities and citizenship. It aims to do this by introducing a heuristic scheme that brings out the implied notions of citizenship in three distinct sets of smart city visions and practices: The Control Room envisages the city as a collection of infrastructures and services; The Creative City views the city from the perspective of (economic) geography and ponders on local and regional systems of innovation; The Smart Citizens discourse addresses the city as a political and civic community. These smart city discourses are mapped against two visions on citizenship and governance taken from political philosophy. A `republican’ perspective with strong presence in social-democratic countries is contrasted with a libertarian one, most prominent in Silicon Valley approaches to smart city technologies. This provides a scheme to reflect on potential benefits and downsides if a specific smart city discourse would develop. Instances of smart cities may promote notions of citizenship that are based on consumer choice and individual responsibility, alternatively they could also reinforce collective responsibilities towards the common good of society…(More)”.

Accelerating the Sharing of Data Across Sectors to Advance the Common Good

Curated on December 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Robert M. Groves and Adam Neufeld: “The public pays for and provides an incredible amount of data to governments and companies. Yet much of the value of this data is being wasted, remaining in silos rather than being shared to enhance the common good—whether it’s helping governments to stop opioid addiction or helping companies predict and meet the demand for electric or autonomous vehicles.

Many companies and governments are interested in sharing more of their data with each other; however, right now the process of sharing is very time consuming and can pose great risks since it often involves sharing full data sets with another entity

We need intermediaries to design safe environments to facilitate data sharing in the low-trust and politically sensitive context of companies and governments. These safe environments would exist outside the government, be transparent to the public, and use modern technologies and techniques to allow only statistical uses of data through temporary linkages in order to minimize the risk to individuals’ privacy.

Governments must lead the way in sharing more data by re-evaluating laws that limit sharing of data, and must embrace new technologies that could allow the private sector to receive at least some value from many sensitive data sets. By decreasing the cost and risks of sharing data, more data will be freed from their silos, and we will move closer to what we deserve—that our data are used for the greatest societal benefit….(More)”.

Solving Public Problems with Data

Curated on November 29, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dinorah Cantú-Pedraza and Sam DeJohn at The GovLab: “….To serve the goal of more data-driven and evidence-based governing, The GovLab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering this week launched “Solving Public Problems with Data,” a new online course developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

This online lecture series helps those working for the public sector, or simply in the public interest, learn to use data to improve decision-making. Through real-world examples and case studies — captured in 10 video lectures from leading experts in the field — the new course outlines the fundamental principles of data science and explores ways practitioners can develop a data analytical mindset. Lectures in the series include:

Introduction to evidence-based decision-making (Quentin Palfrey, formerly of MIT)
Data analytical thinking and methods, Part I (Julia Lane, NYU)
Machine learning (Gideon Mann, Bloomberg LP)
Discovering and collecting data (Carter Hewgley, Johns Hopkins University)
Platforms and where to store data (Arnaud Sahuguet, Cornell Tech)
Data analytical thinking and methods, Part II (Daniel Goroff, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation)
Barriers to building a data practice (Beth Blauer, Johns Hopkins University and GovEx)
Data collaboratives (Stefaan G. Verhulst, The GovLab)
Strengthening a data analytic culture (Amen Ra Mashariki, ESRI)
Data governance and sharing (Beth Simone Noveck, NYU Tandon/The GovLab)

The goal of the lecture series is to enable participants to define and leverage the value of data to achieve improved outcomes and equities, reduced cost and increased efficiency in how public policies and services are created. No prior experience with computer science or statistics is necessary or assumed. In fact, the course is designed precisely to serve public professionals seeking an introduction to data science….(More)”.

SAM, the first A.I. politician on Messenger

Curated on November 29, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lulu Chang at Digital Trends: “It’s said that all politicians are the same, but it seems safe to assume that you’ve never seen a politician quite like this. Meet SAM, heralded as the politician of the future. Unfortunately, you can’t exactly shake this politician’s hand, or have her kiss your baby. Rather, SAM is the world’s first Virtual Politician (and a female presence at that), “driven by the desire to close the gap between what voters want and what politicians promise, and what they actually achieve.”

The artificially intelligent chat bot is currently live on Facebook Messenger, though she probably is most helpful to those in New Zealand. After all, the bot’s website notes, “SAM’s goal is to act as a representative for all New Zealanders, and evolves based on voter input.” Capable of being reached by anyone at just about anytime from anywhere, this may just be the single most accessible politician we’ve ever seen. But more importantly, SAM purports to be a true representative, claiming to analyze “everyone’s views [and] opinions, and impact of potential decisions.” This, the bot notes, could make for better policy for everyone….(More)”.

GovEx Launches First International Open Data Standards Directory

Curated on November 29, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

GT Magazine: “…A nonprofit gov tech group has created an international open data standards directory, aspiring to give cities a singular resource for guidance on formatting data they release to the public…The nature of municipal data is nuanced and diverse, and the format in which it is released often varies depending on subject matter. In other words, a format that works well for public safety data is not necessarily the same that works for info about building permits, transit or budgets. Not having a coordinated and agreed-upon resource to identify the best standards for these different types of info, Nicklin said, creates problems.

One such problem is that it can be time-consuming and challenging for city government data workers to research and identify ideal formats for data. Another is that the lack of info leads to discord between different jurisdictions, meaning one city might format a data set about economic development in an entirely different way than another, making collaboration and comparisons problematic.

What the directory does is provide a list of standards that are in use within municipal governments, as well as an evaluation based on how frequent that use is, whether the format is machine-readable, and whether users have to pay to license it, among other factors.

The directory currently contains 60 standards, some of which are in Spanish, and those involved with the project say they hope to expand their efforts to include more languages. There is also a crowdsourcing component to the directory, in that users are encouraged to make additions and updates….(More)”