DATA – Page 510 – The Living Library

Climaps

Curated on December 22, 2014October 30, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Climaps: “This website presents the results of the EU research project EMAPS, as well as its process: an experiment to use computation and visualization to harness the increasing availability of digital data and mobilize it for public debate. To do so, EMAPS gathered a team of social and data scientists, climate experts and information designers. It also reached out beyond the walls of Academia and engaged with the actors of the climate debate.

The climate is changing. Efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions have so far been ineffective or, at least, insufficient. As the impacts of global warming are emerging, our societies experience an unprecedented pressure. How to live with climate change without giving up fighting it? How to share the burden of adaptation among countries, regions and communities? How to be fair to all human and non-human beings affected by such a planetary transition? Since our collective life depends on these questions, they deserve discussion, debate and even controversy. To provide some help to navigate in the uncharted territories that lead to our future, here is an electronic atlas. It proposes a series of maps and stories related to climate adaptation issues. They are not exhaustive or error-proof. They are nothing but sketches of the new world in which we will have to live. Such a world remains undetermined and its atlas can be but tentative…(More)”

Geneticists Begin Tests of an Internet for DNA

Curated on December 19, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review: “A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as HTTP, the protocol created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, was to the Web.
One of the group’s first demonstration projects is a simple search engine that combs through the DNA letters of thousands of human genomes stored at nine locations, including Google’s server farms and the University of Leicester, in the U.K. According to the group, which includes key players in the Human Genome Project, the search engine is the start of a kind of Internet of DNA that may eventually link millions of genomes together.
The technologies being developed are application program interfaces, or APIs, that let different gene databases communicate. Pooling information could speed discoveries about what genes do and help doctors diagnose rare birth defects by matching children with suspected gene mutations to others who are known to have them.
The alliance was conceived two years ago at a meeting in New York of 50 scientists who were concerned that genome data was trapped in private databases, tied down by legal consent agreements with patients, limited by privacy rules, or jealously controlled by scientists to further their own scientific work. It styles itself after the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, a body that oversees standards for the Web.
“It’s creating the Internet language to exchange genetic information,” says David Haussler, scientific director of the genome institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is one of the group’s leaders.
The group began releasing software this year. Its hope—as yet largely unrealized—is that any scientist will be able to ask questions about genome data possessed by other laboratories, without running afoul of technical barriers or privacy rules….(More)”

Will Organization Design Be Affected By Big Data?

Curated on December 19, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Giles Slinger and Rupert Morrison in the Journal of Organization Design: “Computing power and analytical methods allow us to create, collate, and analyze more data than ever before. When datasets are unusually large in volume, velocity, and variety, they are referred to as “big data.” Some observers have suggested that in order to cope with big data (a) organizational structures will need to change and (b) the processes used to design organizations will be different. In this article, we differentiate big data from relatively slow-moving, linked people data. We argue that big data will change organizational structures as organizations pursue the opportunities presented by big data. The processes by which organizations are designed, however, will be relatively unaffected by big data. Instead, organization design processes will be more affected by the complex links found in people data.”

Gamifying Cancer Research Crowdsources the Race for the Cure

Curated on December 19, 2014October 30, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Brick at PSFK: “Computer time and human hours are among of the biggest obstacles in the face of progress in the fight against cancer. Researchers have terabytes of data, but only so many processors and people with which to analyze it. Much like the SETI program (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), it’s likely that big answers are already in the information we’ve collected. They’re just waiting for somebody to find them.
Reverse the Odds, a free mobile game from Cancer Research UK, accesses the combined resources of geeks and gamers worldwide. It’s a simple app game, the kind you play in line at the bank or while waiting at the dentist’s office, in which you complete mini puzzles and buy upgrades to save an imaginary world.
Each puzzle of the game is a repurposing of cancer data. Players find patterns in the data — the exact kind of analysis grad students and volunteers in a lab look for — and the results get compiled by Cancer Research UK for use in finding a cure. Errors are expected and accounted for because the thousands of players expected will round out the occasional mistake….(More)”

Just say no to digital hoarding

Curated on December 17, 2014November 27, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “We have become a nation of digital hoarders. We save everything, even stuff that we know, deep down, we’ll never need or be able to find. We save every e-mail, every photo, every file, every text message and every video clip. If we don’t have enough space on our mobile devices, we move it to a different storage device, maybe even a hard drive or a flash drive. Or, better yet, we just move it to “the cloud.”….
If this were simply a result of the exponential growth of information — the “information overload” — that would be one thing. That’s what technology is supposed to do for us – provide new ways of creating, storing and manipulating information. Innovation, from this perspective, can be viewed as technology’s frantic quest to keep up with society’s information needs.
But digital hoarding is about something much different – it’s about hoarding data for the sake of data. When Apple creates a new “Burst Mode” on the iPhone 5s, enabling you to rapidly save a series of up to 10 photos in succession – and you save all of them – is that not an example of hoarding? When you save every e-book, every movie and every TV season that you’ve “binge-watched” on your tablet or other digital device — isn’t that another symptom of being a digital hoarder? In the analog era, you would have donated used books to charity, hosted a garage sale to get rid of old albums you never listen to, or simply dumped these items in the trash.
You may not think you are a digital hoarder. You may think that the desire to save each and every photo, e-mail or file is something relatively harmless. Storage is cheap and abundant, right? You may watch a reality TV show such as “Hoarders” and think to yourself, “That’s not me.” But maybe it is you. (Especially if you still have those old episodes of “Hoarders” on your digital device.)
Unlike hoarding in the real world — where massive stacks of papers, books, clothing and assorted junk might physically obstruct your ability to move and signal to others that you need help – there are no obvious outward signs of being a digital hoarder. And, in fact, owning the newest, super-slim 128GB tablet capable of hoarding more information than anyone else strikes many as being progressive. However, if you are constantly increasing the size of your data plan or buying new digital devices with ever more storage capacity, you just might be a digital hoarder…
In short, innovation should be about helping us transform data into information. “Search” was perhaps the first major innovation that helped us transform data into information. The “cloud” is currently the innovation that has the potential to organize our data better and more efficiently, keeping it from clogging up our digital devices. The next big innovation may be “big data,” which claims that it can make sense of all the new data we’re creating. This may be either brilliant — helping us find the proverbial needle in the digital haystack — or disastrous — encouraging us to build bigger and bigger haystacks in the hope that there’s a needle in there somewhere… (More).”

HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities

Curated on December 16, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

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.”

How Government Can Unlock Economic Benefits from Open Data

Curated on December 16, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tod Newcombe at GovTech: “Zillow, the fast-growing online real estate marketplace, couldn’t exist without public data. More specifically, it probably couldn’t exist without online public data relating to real estate sales information. The nation has more than 3,000 counties, each with its own registry of deeds where routine but vital data are recorded on every transaction involving the sale of homes, businesses and land. Until recently, much of that information resided in paper documents stored in filing cabinets. But as that information has moved online, its value has increased, making it possible for firms like Zillow to use the data in new ways, creating its popular “zestimate” forecast on home values.

Zillow is a prime example of how open data creates economic value. The Seattle-based company has grown rapidly since its launch in 2006, generating more than $78 million in revenue in its last financial quarter and employing more than 500 workers. But real estate firms aren’t the only businesses benefiting from data collected and published by government.
GovLab, a research laboratory run by New York University, publishes the Open Data 500, a list of companies that benefit from open data produced by the federal government. The list contains more than 15 categories of businesses, ranging from health care and education to energy, finance, legal and the environment. And the data flows from all the major agencies, including NASA, Defense, Transportation, Homeland Security and Labor….
Zillow’s road to success underscores the challenges that lie ahead if local government is going to grab its share of open data’s economic bonanza. One of the company’s biggest hurdles was to create a system that could integrate government data from thousands of databases in county government. “There’s no standard format, which is very frustrating,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist, told Computerworld.com. “It’s up to us to figure out 3,000 different ways to ingest data and make sense of it…. More at GovTech”

An Introduction to the Economic Analysis of Open Data

Curated on December 16, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Note by Soichiro Takagi: “Open data generally refers to a movement in which public organizations provide data in a machine-readable format to the public, so that anyone can reuse the data. Open data is becoming an important phenomenon in Japan. At this moment, utilization of open data in Japan is emerging with collaborative efforts among small units of production such as individuals. These collaborations have been also observed in the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, but collaboration in open data is somewhat different in respect to small-scale, distributed collaboration. The aim of this research note is to share the phenomena of open data as an object of economic analysis with readers by describing the movement and providing a preliminary analysis. This note discusses how open data is associated with mass collaboration from the viewpoint of organizational economics. It also provides the results of empirical analysis on how the regional characteristics of municipalities affect the decision of local governments to conduct open data initiatives.”