Big Money, Uncertain Return

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary K. Pratt  in a MIT Technology Review Special Report on Data-Driven Health Care: “Hospitals are spending billions collecting and analyzing medical data. The one data point no one is tracking: the payoff…. Ten years ago, Kaiser Permanente began building a $4 billion electronic-health-record system that includes a comprehensive collection of health-care data ranging from patients’ treatment records to research-based clinical advice. Now Kaiser has added advanced analytics tools and data from more sources, including a pilot program that integrates information from patients’ medical devices.

Faced with new government regulations and insurer pressure to control costs, other health-care organizations are following Kaiser’s example and increasing their use of analytics. The belief: that mining their vast quantities of patient data will yield insights into the best treatments at the lowest cost.

But just how big will the financial payoff be? Terhilda Garrido, vice president of health IT transformation and analytics at Kaiser, admits she doesn’t know. Nor do other health-care leaders. The return on investment for health-care analytics programs remains elusive and nearly impossible for most to calculate…

Opportunities to identify the most effective treatments could slip away if CIOs and their teams aren’t able to quantify the return on their analytics investments. Health-care providers are under increasing pressure to cut costs in an era of capped billing, and executives at medical organizations won’t okay spending their increasingly limited dollars on data warehouses, analytics software, and data scientists if they can’t be sure they’ll see real benefit.

A new initiative at Cleveland Clinic shows the opportunities and challenges. By analyzing patients’ records on their overall health and medical conditions, the medical center determines which patients coming in for hip and knee replacements can get postoperative services in their own homes (the most cost-effective option), which ones will need a short stay in a skilled nursing facility, and which ones will have longer stints in a skilled nursing facility (the most costly option). The classifications control costs while still ensuring the best possible medical outcomes, says CIO C. Martin Harris.

That does translate into real—and significant—financial benefits, but Harris wonders how to calculate the payoff from his data investment. Should the costs of every system from which patient data is pulled be part of the equation in addition to the costs of the data warehouse and analytics tools? Calculating how much money is saved by implementing better protocols is not straightforward either. Harris hesitates to attribute better, more cost-effective patient outcomes solely to analytics when many other factors are also likely contributors…”

The People’s Platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review by Tim Wu in the New York Times: “Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker who has described her work as the “steamed broccoli” in our cultural diet. Her last film, “Examined Life,” depicted philosophers walking around and talking about their ideas. She’s the kind of creative person who was supposed to benefit when the Internet revolution collapsed old media hierarchies. But two decades since that revolution began, she’s not impressed: “We are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty,” Taylor writes. “Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs.” Instead of serving as the great equalizer, the web has created an abhorrent cultural feudalism. The creative masses connect, create and labor, while Google, Facebook and Amazon collect the cash.
Taylor’s thesis is simply stated. The pre-Internet cultural industry, populated mainly by exploitative conglomerates, was far from perfect, but at least the ancien régime felt some need to cultivate cultural institutions, and to pay for talent at all levels. Along came the web, which swept away hierarchies — as well as paychecks, leaving behind creators of all kinds only the chance to be fleetingly “Internet famous.” And anyhow, she says, the web never really threatened to overthrow the old media’s upper echelons, whether defined as superstars, like Beyoncé, big broadcast television shows or Hollywood studios. Instead, it was the cultural industry’s middle ­classes that have been wiped out and replaced by new cultural plantations ruled over by the West Coast aggregators.
It is hard to know if the title, “The People’s Platform,” is aspirational or sarcastic, since Taylor believes the classless aura of the web masks an unfair power structure. “Open systems can be starkly inegalitarian,” she says, arguing that the web is afflicted by what the feminist scholar Jo Freeman termed a “tyranny of structurelessness.” Because there is supposedly no hierarchy, elites can happily deny their own existence. (“We just run a platform.”) But the effects are real: The web has reduced professional creators to begging for scraps of attention from a spoiled public, and forced creators to be their own brand.
…
The tech industry might be tempted to dismiss Taylor’s arguments as merely a version of typewriter manufacturers’ complaints circa 1984, but that would be a mistake. “The People’s Platform” should be taken as a challenge by the new media that have long claimed to be improving on the old order. Can they prove they are capable of supporting a sustainable cultural ecosystem, in a way that goes beyond just hosting parties at the Sundance Film ­Festival?
We see some of this in the tech firms that have begun to pay for original content, as with Netflix’s investments in projects like “Orange Is the New Black.” It’s also worth pointing out that the support of culture is actually pretty cheap. Consider the nonprofit ProPublica, which employs investigative journalists, and has already won two Pulitzers, all on a budget of just over $10 million a year. That kind of money is a rounding error for much of Silicon Valley, where losing billions on bad acquisitions is routinely defended as “strategic.” If Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon truly believe they’re better than the old guard, let’s see it.”
See : THE PEOPLE’S PLATFORM. Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age By Astra Taylor, 276 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company.

Indonesian techies crowdsource election results

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Ben Bland in the Financial Times: “Three Indonesian tech experts say they have used crowdsourcing to calculate an accurate result for the country’s contested presidential election in six days, while 4m officials have been beavering away for nearly two weeks counting the votes by hand.

The Indonesian techies, who work for multinational companies, were spurred into action after both presidential candidates claimed victory and accused each other of trying to rig the convoluted counting process, raising fears that the country’s young democracy was under threat.

“We did this to prevent the nation being ripped apart because of two claims to victory that nobody can verify,” said Ainun Najib, who is based in Singapore. “This solution was only possible because all the polling station data were openly available for public scrutiny and verification.”

Mr Najib and two friends took advantage of the decision by the national election commission (KPU) to upload the individual results from Indonesia’s 480,000 polling stations to its website for the first time, in an attempt to counter widespread fears about electoral fraud.

The three Indonesians scraped the voting data from the KPU website on to a database and then recruited 700 friends and acquaintances through Facebook to type in the results and check them. They uploaded the data to a website called kawalpemilu.org, which means “guard the election” in Indonesian.

Throughout the process, Mr Najib said he had to fend off hacking attacks, forcing him to shift data storage to a cloud-based service. The whole exercise cost $10 for a domain name and $0.10 for the data storage….”

Countable Wants To Make Politics A ‘Continual Conversation’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Techcrunch: “Telling your senator how to vote is as easy as “liking” a Facebook picture, thanks to a new app from the creators of TV streaming service SideReel.

Countable, available for iOS and coming to Android soon, presents a succinct summary of each piece of legislation Congress is considering, along with a short one-sentence argument in favor of the bill or against it. You are then able to vote “yay” or “nay.” When you are logged in through Facebook, Countable can automatically generate a message and send it to your representatives based on your location.

Countable also keeps track of how the lawmakers vote and then informs you how your representatives’ votes stack up to your own, generating “compatibility rankings.”

Co-founders Bart Myers and Peter Arzhintar came up with Countable when trying to figure out their next move after selling SideReel in 2011. Myers said they wanted to move away from TV and into something Myers said was more meaningful. As they brainstormed ideas, they kept coming back to one.

“We kept coming back to the disconnect that the American people feel with their representatives, that disconnect that we felt ourselves,” Myers says. “We decided to take a new bent at it … create a product where … what my representatives are doing can basically be made bite-sized, pushed to me like updates from our friends pushed through Facebook.”

And browsing the app’s colorful interface feels a lot more like swiping through friends’ pictures than wading through pages of lengthy bills. Countable’s team, which includes writers and consultants with experience in both the Democratic and Republican parties, has prepared short summaries and explanations that are easy to understand. Myers says the app allows users to go as deep into an issue as they want, linking to media coverage and the full text of the bill…”

European Commission encourages re-use of public sector data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today, the European Commission is publishing guidelines to help Member States benefit from the revised Directive on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive). These guidelines explain for example how to give access to weather data, traffic data, property asset data and maps. Open data can be used as the basis for innovative value-added services and products, such as mobile apps, which encourage investment in data-driven sectors. The guidelines published today are based on a detailed consultation and cover issues such as:

  1. Licencing: guidelines on when public bodies can allow the re-use of documents without conditions or licences; gives conditions under which the re-use of personal data is possible. For example:

  • Public sector bodies should not impose licences when a simple notice is sufficient;

  • Open licences available on the web, such as several “Creative Commons” licences can facilitate the re-use of public sector data without the need to develop custom-made licences;

  • Attribution requirement is sufficient in most cases of PSI re-use.

  1. Datasets: presents five thematic dataset categories that businesses and other potential re-users are mostly interested in and could thus be given priority for being made available for re-use. For example:

  • Postcodes, national and local maps;

  • Weather, land and water quality, energy consumption, emission levels and other environmental and earth data;

  • Transport data: public transport timetables, road works, traffic information;

  • Statistics: GDP, age, health, unemployment, income, education etc.;

  • Company and business registers.

  1. Cost: gives an overview on how public sector bodies, including libraries, museums and archives, should calculate the amount they should charge re-users for data. For example:

  • Where digital documents are downloaded electronically a no‑cost policy is recommended;

  • For cost-recovery charging, any income generated in the process of collecting or producing documents, e.g. from registration fees or taxes, should be subtracted from the total costs incurred so as to establish the ‘net cost’ of collection, production, reproduction and dissemination.

European Commission Vice President @NeelieKroesEU said: “This guidance will help all of us benefit from the wealth of information public bodies hold. Opening and re-using this data will lead to many new businesses and convenient services.“

An independent report carried out by the consultants McKinsey in 2013 claimed that open data re-use could boost the global economy hugely; and a 2013 Spanish studyfound that commercial re-users in Spain could employ around 10,000 people and reach a business volume of €900 million….”

See also Speech by Neelie Kroes: Embracing the open opportunity

France: Rapport de la Commission Open Data en santé

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
“La Commission « open data en santé », qui s’est réunie de novembre 2013 à mai 2014, avait pour mission de débattre, dans un cadre pluraliste associant les parties prenantes, des enjeux et des propositions en matière d’accès aux données de santé.
Ce rapport, remis le 9 juillet 2014 à Marisol Touraine, Ministre des Affaires sociales et de la Santé, retrace les travaux et discussions de la Commission :

  • Un panorama de l’existant (partie 1) : définitions des concepts, état du droit, présentation de la gouvernance, présentation de l’accès aux données du SNIIRAM et du PMSI, cartographie des données de santé et enseignements tirés des expériences étrangères ;
  • Les enjeux pour l’avenir (partie 2) ;
  • Les actions à mener (partie 3) : données à ouvrir en open data, orientations en matière de données réidentifiantes, données relatives aux professionnels et aux établissements.

Ce rapport a été adopté consensuellement par l’ensemble des membres de la commission, qui partagent des attentes communes et fortes.”
Rapport final commission open data (pdf – 1 Mo) – [09/07/2014] – [MAJ : 09/07/2014]

Facebook Nation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Leonidas Donskis in the Hedgehog Review: “A German anthropologist who lived in England and was studying the society and culture of Kosovo Albanians once said something that lodged firmly in my memory: Whenever she wanted to make an interesting thought or position available to Albanian students or intellectuals, she simply published it on her Facebook page. “You don’t have to add a comment or explain anything,” she said with a smile. “The posting of it on Facebook is a sure sign that the message is a good one.”
She promised to perform this operation with a few thoughts of mine she had heard and liked in one of my lectures. When she noticed my surprise, she cheerfully explained that the Albanians considers themselves such a particularly dispersed lot, such a diaspora nation par excellence, that they are inclined to view themselves as a coherent collectivity only on Facebook. Without it, their friends, relatives, and family members living in Albania and elsewhere would have no tangible ties to one another.
This made me think that today’s version of Ahasver, the Wandering Jew of legend, is a Facebook user, and that Facebook—not the physical world—is where that displaced person wanders.
The Facebook Nation is host to an ongoing referendum in which its denizens cast their ballots daily, hourly, even minute by minute. Let’s make no mistake about what it means to be in this peculiar digital republic. For a lover, as Milan Kundera put it, to be is to live in the eye of one’s beloved. And what is it to be for people who don’t know where they are or where they want to be or even if they exist at all? Quite simply, it is to be liked on Facebook.
Facebook is where everyone becomes his or her own journalist, a situation that has forced real journalists to become Facebooking and tweeting simulacra of their former selves, or else to abandon journalism for other pursuits, whether literary or academic or something altogether different. Évariste Gamelin, the protagonist of Anatole France’s 1912 novel Les dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Thirsty), is a painter, a passionate disciple of Jacques Louis David, and a young fanatic who doesn’t know whether he is fatally in love with his charming girlfriend or with his mother, the Revolution. He believes that after the Revolution every citizen will become a judge of himself and of the Republic. But modernity plays a joke on him: It does not fulfill this promise. It had no intention of doing so. Instead of turning into judges, we all became journalists…”

Networks and Hierarchies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

on whether political hierarchy in the form of the state has met its match in today’s networked world in the American Interest: “…To all the world’s states, democratic and undemocratic alike, the new informational, commercial, and social networks of the internet age pose a profound challenge, the scale of which is only gradually becoming apparent. First email achieved a dramatic improvement in the ability of ordinary citizens to communicate with one another. Then the internet came to have an even greater impact on the ability of citizens to access information. The emergence of search engines marked a quantum leap in this process. The advent of laptops, smartphones, and other portable devices then emancipated electronic communication from the desktop. With the explosive growth of social networks came another great leap, this time in the ability of citizens to share information and ideas.
It was not immediately obvious how big a challenge all this posed to the established state. There was a great deal of cheerful talk about the ways in which the information technology revolution would promote “smart” or “joined-up” government, enhancing the state’s ability to interact with citizens. However, the efforts of Anonymous, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden to disrupt the system of official secrecy, directed mainly against the U.S. government, have changed everything. In particular, Snowden’s revelations have exposed the extent to which Washington was seeking to establish a parasitical relationship with the key firms that operate the various electronic networks, acquiring not only metadata but sometimes also the actual content of vast numbers of phone calls and messages. Techniques of big-data mining, developed initially for commercial purposes, have been adapted to the needs of the National Security Agency.
The most recent, and perhaps most important, network challenge to hierarchy comes with the advent of virtual currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin. Since ancient times, states have reaped considerable benefits from monopolizing or at least regulating the money created within their borders. It remains to be seen how big a challenge Bitcoin poses to the system of national fiat currencies that has evolved since the 1970s and, in particular, how big a challenge it poses to the “exorbitant privilege” enjoyed by the United States as the issuer of the world’s dominant reserve (and transaction) currency. But it would be unwise to assume, as some do, that it poses no challenge at all….”

No silver bullet: De-identification still doesn’t work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Arvind Narayanan and Edward W. Felten: “Paul Ohm’s 2009 article Broken Promises of Privacy spurred a debate in legal and policy circles on the appropriate response to computer science research on re-identification techniques. In this debate, the empirical research has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. A new report by Ann Cavoukian and Daniel Castro is full of such inaccuracies, despite its claims of “setting the record straight.” In a response to this piece, Ed Felten and I point out eight of our most serious points of disagreement with Cavoukian and Castro. The thrust of our arguments is that (i) there is no evidence that de-identification works either in theory or in practice and (ii) attempts to quantify its efficacy are unscientific and promote a false sense of security by assuming unrealistic, artificially constrained models of what an adversary might do. Specifically, we argue that:

  1. There is no known effective method to anonymize location data, and no evidence that it’s meaningfully achievable.
  2. Computing re-identification probabilities based on proof-of-concept demonstrations is silly.
  3. Cavoukian and Castro ignore many realistic threats by focusing narrowly on a particular model of re-identification.
  4. Cavoukian and Castro concede that de-identification is inadequate for high-dimensional data. But nowadays most interesting datasets are high-dimensional.
  5. Penetrate-and-patch is not an option.
  6. Computer science knowledge is relevant and highly available.
  7. Cavoukian and Castro apply different standards to big data and re-identification techniques.
  8. Quantification of re-identification probabilities, which permeates Cavoukian and Castro’s arguments, is a fundamentally meaningless exercise.

Data privacy is a hard problem. Data custodians face a choice between roughly three alternatives: sticking with the old habit of de-identification and hoping for the best; turning to emerging technologies like differential privacy that involve some trade-offs in utility and convenience; and using legal agreements to limit the flow and use of sensitive data. These solutions aren’t fully satisfactory, either individually or in combination, nor is any one approach the best in all circumstances. Change is difficult. When faced with the challenge of fostering data science while preventing privacy risks, the urge to preserve the status quo is understandable. However, this is incompatible with the reality of re-identification science. If a “best of both worlds” solution exists, de-identification is certainly not that solution. Instead of looking for a silver bullet, policy makers must confront hard choices.”

Introduction to Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Standards

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Joseph McGenn; Dominic Taylor; Gail Millin-Chalabi (Editor); Kamie Kitmitto (Editor) at Jorum : “The onset of the Information Age and Digital Revolution has created a knowledge based society where the internet acts as a global platform for the sharing of information. In a geospatial context, this resulted in an advancement of techniques in how we acquire, study and share geographic information and with the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), locational services, and online mapping, spatial data has never been more abundant. The transformation to this digital era has not been without its drawbacks, and a forty year lack of common polices to data sharing has resulted in compatibility issues and great diversity in how software and data are delivered. Essential to the sharing of spatial information is interoperability, where different programmes can exchange and open data from various sources seamlessly. Applying universal standards across a sector provides interoperable solutions. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) facilitates interoperability by providing open standard specifications which organisations can use to develop geospatial software. This means that two separate pieces of software or platforms, if developed using open standard specifications, can exchange data without compatibility issues. By defining these specifications and standards the OGC plays a crucial role in how geospatial information is shared on a global scale. Standard specifications are the invisible glue that holds information systems together, without which, data sharing generally would be an arduous task. On some level they keep the world spinning and this course will instil some appreciation for them from a geospatial perspective. This course introduces users to the OGC and all the common standards in the context of geoportals and mapping solutions. These standards are defined and explored using a number of platforms and interoperability is demonstrated in a practical sense. Finally, users will implement these standards to develop their own platforms for sharing geospatial information.”