Statement from the Boston Children’s Hospital: “The higher the percentage of people in a city, town or neighborhood with Facebook interests suggesting a healthy, active lifestyle, the lower that area’s obesity rate. At the same time, areas with a large percentage of Facebook users with television-related interests tend to have higher rates of obesity. Such are the conclusions of a study by Boston Children’s Hospital researchers comparing geotagged Facebook user data with data from national and New York City-focused health surveys.
Together, the conclusions suggest that knowledge of people’s online interests within geographic areas may help public health researchers predict, track and map obesity rates down to the neighborhood level, while offering an opportunity to design geotargeted online interventions aimed at reducing obesity rates.
The study team, led by Rumi Chunara, PhD, and John Brownstein, PhD, of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Informatics Program (CHIP), published their findings on April 24 in PLOS ONE. The amount of data available from social networks like Facebook makes it possible to efficiently carry out research in cohorts of a size that has until now been impractical.”
Primer on Crowdfunding
Primer by ValuationApp: “Crowdfunding can be defined as raising funds from the general public usually through internet platforms in order to support a project started by an individual or an organization….Crowdfunding is essentially a subset of Crowdsourcing; a process where organizations reach out to their customers and the general public, and outsource some of their functions to the public in order to get feedback, ideas and solutions. In crowdsourcing, the participants either work for free or for a very small amount…the first historically documented crowdfunding event was the completion of the Statue of Liberty in 1885, where the city reached out to the crowd through newspapers and part of the money required to build the statue was contributed by the citizens…
Several benefits of crowdfunding have been discussed in the previous sections, so in this section let’s cut right to the chase and present points in the most compact form. Through crowdfunding, individuals and organizations can:
- Reach out to a wide range of people all over the world.
- Raise large amounts of funds while simultaneously creating their own brand identity.
- Gain valuable feedback on the product/service/project they are raising the funds for.
- Turn funders into future customers.
- Stop depending on large investment from investors and thus enjoy minimum interference from the investors.
- Increase public awareness about their products and gain free word of mouth marketing on social media.”
Visual argumentation
Volta: “Visualising arguments helps people assemble their throughts and get to grip with complex problems according to The Argumentation Factory, based in Amsterdam. Their Argument Maps, constructed for government agencies, NGOs and commercial organizations, are designed to enable people to make better decisions and share and communicate information.
Dutch research organisation TNO, in association with The Argumentation Factory, have launched the European Shale Gas Argument Map detailing the pros and cons of the production of shale gas for EU member states with shale gas resources. Their map is designed to provide the foundation for an open discussion and help the user make a balaced assessment.”
Stock Market Prediction using Google search terms
MIT Technology Review: “This week’s fleeting stock market crash prompted by a false report from the Associated Press’s hacked Twitter account has focused attention again on the growing Wall Street practice of mining news and social data to make trades.
A study in Nature Scientific Reports today illustrates just how lucrative the right combination of algorithms could potentially be.
Using Google Trends, researchers analyzed the Google search query volumes from 2004 to 2011 for a set of 98 mostly finance-related search terms, looked at how stock prices changed over that same time, and tried to see if they could retroactively tease out search patterns that showed “early warning signs” of market moves. They also tested trading strategies that would act on these signs.
The volume of the search term “debt” turned out to be the word that showed the most promise, and one trading plan based on changes in searches for this term would have yielded a return of 326 percent over the period analyzed, the authors found. For comparison, a “buy and hold” investment in the Dow Jones Industrial Average yielded 16 percent return.”
Better Cities Competition
Announcement: Do you want to make our cities of the future better? Want to help improve quality of life in your home, your work and your public life? Have an idea how? Capture it in a short video and be in with a chance to win one of our amazing prizes!
As a part of Open Innovation 2.0: Sustainable Economy & Society collaboration Intel Labs Europe, Dublin City Council, Trinity College Dublin and European Commission Open Innovation and Strategy Policy Group are delighted to announce that the 2013 Better Cities competition is now open.
The theme of the competition is how to make our cities more socially and economically sustainable, through use of open data and information technology. Particular focus should be given to how citizens can engage and contribute to the innovation process.
The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt
James Surowiecki in the New Yorker: “If Reddit were looking for a model to follow, it could use NASA’s Clickworkers experiment, which in 2000-01 let tens of thousands of amateurs look at photos of Mars in order to identify craters on the planet and classify them by age. That study found that the aggregated judgments of the amateur “clickworkers” were “virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience.”
The problem from Reddit’s perspective, of course, is that this method of sleuthing would be far less exciting for users, and would probably generate less traffic, than its current free-for-all approach. The point of the “find-the-bombers” subthread, after all, wasn’t just to find the bombers—it was also to connect and talk with others, and to feel like you were part of a virtual community. But valuable as that experience may have been for users, it also diminished the chances of the community coming up with useful information. Reddit has done an excellent job of being engaging. Now it needs to figure out if it wants to be effective”.
Open Data Research Announced
WWW Foundation Press Release: “Speaking at an Open Government Partnership reception last night in London, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation) and inventor of the Web, unveiled details of the first ever in-depth study into how the power of open data could be harnessed to tackle social challenges in the developing world. The 14 country study is funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and will be overseen by the Web Foundation’s world-leading open data experts. An interim progress update will be made at an October 2013 meeting of the Open Government Partnership, with in-depth results expected in 2014…
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and inventor of the Web said:
“Open Data, accessed via a free and open Web, has the potential to create a better world. However, best practice in London or New York is not necessarily best practice in Lima or Nairobi. The Web Foundation’s research will help to ensure that Open Data initiatives in the developing world will unlock real improvements in citizens’ day-to-day lives.”
José M. Alonso, program manager at the World Wide Web Foundation, added:
“Through this study, the Web Foundation hopes not only to contribute to global understanding of open data, but also to cultivate the ability of developing world researchers and development workers to understand and apply open data for themselves.”
Further details on the project, including case study outlines are available here: http://oddc.opendataresearch.org/
From Open Data to Information Justice
Paper by Jeffrey Johnson for Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association: “This paper argues for subsuming the question of open data within a larger question of information justice. I show that there are several problems of justice that emerge as a consequence of opening data to full public accessibility, and are generally a consequence of the failure of the open data movement to understand the constructed nature of data. I examine three such problems: the embedding of social privilege in datasets as the data is constructed, the differential capabilities of data users (especially differences between citizens and “enterprise” users), and the norms that data systems impose through their function as disciplinary systems.
In each case I show that open data has the quite real potential to exacerbate rather than alleviate injustices. This necessitates a theory of information justice. I briefly suggest two complementary directions in which such a theory might be developed: one leading toward moral principles that can be used to evaluate the justness of data practices, and another exploring the practices and structures that a social movement promoting information justice might pursue.”
The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism
Paper by NetLab (Toronto University) scholars in the latest issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: “We review the evidence from a number of surveys in which our NetLab has been involved about the extent to which the Internet is transforming or enhancing community. The studies show that the Internet is used for connectivity locally as well as globally, although the nature of its use varies in different countries. Internet use is adding on to other forms of communication, rather than replacing them. Internet use is reinforcing the pre-existing turn to societies in the developed world that are organized around networked individualism rather than group or local solidarities. The result has important implications for civic involvement.”
The Dangers of Surveillance
Paper by Neil M. Richards in Harvard Law Review. Abstract: “From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, our culture is full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad, and why we should be wary of it. To the extent the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context, and why it matters. Developments in government and corporate practices have made this problem more urgent. Although we have laws that protect us against government surveillance, secret government programs cannot be challenged until they are discovered.
… I propose a set of four principles that should guide the future development of surveillance law, allowing for a more appropriate balance between the costs and benefits of government surveillance. First, we must recognize that surveillance transcends the public-private divide. Even if we are ultimately more concerned with government surveillance, any solution must grapple with the complex relationships between government and corporate watchers. Second, we must recognize that secret surveillance is illegitimate, and prohibit the creation of any domestic surveillance programs whose existence is secret. Third, we should recognize that total surveillance is illegitimate and reject the idea that it is acceptable for the government to record all Internet activity without authorization. Fourth, we must recognize that surveillance is harmful. Surveillance menaces intellectual privacy and increases the risk of blackmail, coercion, and discrimination; accordingly, we must recognize surveillance as a harm in constitutional standing doctrine.