Evidence is lacking for patient-reported effectiveness of treatments for most medical conditions and specifically for lower back pain. In this paper, we examined a consumer-based social network that collects patients’ treatment ratings as a potential source of evidence. Acknowledging the potential biases of this data set, we used propensity score matching and generalized linear regression to account for confounding variables. To evaluate validity, we compared results obtained by analyzing the patient reported data to results of evidence-based studies. Overall, there was agreement on the relationship between back pain and being obese. In addition, there was agreement about which treatments were effective or had no benefit. The patients’ ratings also point to new evidence that postural modification treatment is effective and that surgery is harmful to a large proportion of patients….(More)”.
The Age of Customer.gov: Can the Tech that Drives 311 Help Government Deliver an Amazon-like Experience?
Tod Newcombe at GovTech: “The Digital Communities Special … June 2017 report explores the idea that the tech that drives 311 can help government deliver an Amazon-like experience.
PART 1: 311: FROM A HOTLINE TO A PLATFORM FOR CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
PART 2: CLOUD 311 POPULARITY GROWS AS CITIES OF ALL SIZES MOVE TO REMOTELY HOSTED CRM
PART 3: THE FUTURE OF CRM AND CUSTOMER SERVICE: LOOK TO BOSTON
PART 4: CRM USE IS GAINING TRACTION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT — HERE ARE THE NUMBERS TO PROVE IT…(More)”.
LSE launches crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials to shape Brexit
LSE Press Release: “A crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials in Britain and the EU to help shape the upcoming Brexit negotiations is being launched by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) this week.
The social media-based project, which hopes to engage 3000 millennials aged 35 and under, kicks off on 23 June, the first anniversary of the life-changing vote to take Britain out of the EU.
One of the Generation Brexit project leaders, Dr Jennifer Jackson-Preece from LSE’s European Institute, said the online platform would give a voice to British and European millennials on the future of Europe in the Brexit negotiations and beyond.
She said: “We’re going to invite millennials from across the UK and Europe to debate, decide and draft policy proposals that will be sent to parliaments in Westminster and Strasbourg during the negotiations.”
Another project leader, Dr Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz, said the pan-European project would seek views from a whole cross section of millennials, including Leavers, Remainers, left and right-wingers, European federalists and nationalists.
“We want to come up with millennial proposals for a mutually beneficial relationship, reflecting the diverse political, cultural, religious and economic backgrounds in the UK and EU.
“We are especially keen to engage the forgotten, the apolitical and the apathetic – for whom Brexit has become a moment of political awakening,” he said.
Generation Brexit follows on the heels of LSE’s Constitution UK crowdsourcing project in 2015, which broke new ground in galvanising people around the country to help shape Britain’s first constitution. The 10-week internet project signed up 1500 people from all corners of the UK to debate how the country should be governed.
Dr Manmit Bhambra, also working on the project, said the success of the Constitution UK platform had laid the foundation for Generation Brexit, with LSE hoping to double the numbers and sign up 3000 participants, split equally between Britain and Europe.
The project can be accessed at www.generationbrexit.org and all updates will be available on Twitter @genbrexit & @lsebrexitvote with the hashtag #GenBrexit, and on facebook.com/GenBrexit… (More)”.
Towards Crowd-Scale Deliberation
Paper by Mark Klein: “Let us define deliberation as the activity where groups of people (1) identify possible solutions for a problem, (2) evaluate these alternatives, and (3) select the solution(s) that best meet their needs. Deliberation processes have changed little in centuries. Typically, small groups of powerful players craft policies behind closed doors, and then battle to engage wider support for their preferred options. Most people affected by the decisions have at best limited input into defining the solution options. This approach has become increasingly inadequate as the scale and complexity of the problems we face has increased. Many important ideas and perspectives simply do not get incorporated, squandering the opportunity for far superior outcomes. We have the potential to do much better by radically widening the circle of people involved in complex deliberations, moving from “team” scales (tens of participants) to “crowd” scales (hundreds, thousands, or more).
This is because crowd-scale interactions have been shown to produce, in appropriate circumstances, such powerful emergent phenomena as:
- The long tail: crowd-scale participation enables access to a much greater diversity of ideas than would otherwise be practical: potentially superior solutions “small voices” (the tail of the frequency distribution) have a chance to be heard .
- Idea synergy: the ability for users to share their creations in a common forum can enable a synergistic explosion of creativity, since people often develop new ideas by forming novel combinations and extensions of ideas that have been put out by others.
- Many eyes: crowds can produce remarkably high-quality results (e.g. in open source software) by virtue of the fact that there are multiple independent verifications – many eyes continuously checking the shared content for errors and correcting them .
- Wisdom of the crowds: large groups of (appropriately independent, motivated and informed) contributors can collectively make better judgments than those produced by the individuals that make them up, often exceeding the performance of experts,because their collective judgment cancels out the biases and gaps of the individual members…
Our team has been developing crowd-scale deliberation support technologies that address these three fundamental challenges by enabling:
- better ideation: helping crowds develop better solution ideas
- better evaluation: helping crowds evaluate potential solutions more accurately
- better decision-making: helping crowds select pareto-optimal solutions…(More)”.
Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World
Book by Geoff Mulgan: “A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”—human and machine capabilities working together—has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies.
Geoff Mulgan explores how collective intelligence has to be consciously organized and orchestrated in order to harness its powers. He looks at recent experiments mobilizing millions of people to solve problems, and at groundbreaking technology like Google Maps and Dove satellites. He also considers why organizations full of smart people and machines can make foolish mistakes—from investment banks losing billions to intelligence agencies misjudging geopolitical events—and shows how to avoid them.
Highlighting differences between environments that stimulate intelligence and those that blunt it, Mulgan shows how human and machine intelligence could solve challenges in business, climate change, democracy, and public health. But for that to happen we’ll need radically new professions, institutions, and ways of thinking.
Informed by the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind shows how collective intelligence could help us survive and thrive….(More)”
Nobody Is Smarter or Faster Than Everybody
Rod Collins at Huffington Post: “One of the deepest beliefs of command-and-control management is the assumption that the smartest organization is the one with the smartest individuals. This belief is as old as scientific management itself. According to this way of thinking, just as there is a right way to perform every activity, there are right individuals who are essential for defining what are the right things and for making sure that things are done right. Thus, traditional organizations have long held that the key to the successful achievement of the corporation’s two basic accountabilities of strategy and execution is to hire the smartest individual managers and the brightest functional experts.
Command-and-control management assumes that intelligence fundamentally resides in a select number of star performers who are able to leverage their expertise across large groups of people through proper direction and effective control. Thus, the recruiting efforts and the promotional practices of most companies are focused on competing for and retaining the most talented people. While established management thinking holds that most individual workers are replaceable, this is not so for those star performers whose decision-making and problem-solving prowess are heroically revered. Traditional hierarchical organizations firmly believe in the myth of the individual hero. They are convinced that a single highly intelligent individual can make the difference between success and failure, whether that person is a key senior executive, a functional expert, or even a highly paid consultant.
However, in a rapidly changing world, it is becoming painfully obvious to harried executives that no single individual or even an elite cadre of star performers can adequately process the ever-evolving knowledge of fast-changing markets into operational excellence in real-time. Eric Teller, the CEO of Google X, has astutely recognized that we now live in a world where the pace of technological change exceeds the capacity for most individuals to absorb these changes in real time. If we can’t depend upon smart individuals to process change in time to respond to market developments, what options do business leaders have?
Nobody Is Smarter Than Everybody
If business executives want to build smart companies in a rapidly changing world, they will need to think differently and discover the most untapped resource in their organizations: the collective intelligence of their own people. Innovative organizations, such as Wikipedia and Google, have made this discovery and have leveraged the power of collective intelligence into powerful business models that have radically transformed their industries. The struggling online encyclopedia Nupedia rescued itself from oblivion when it serendipitously discovered an obscure application known as a wiki and transformed itself into Wikipedia by using the wiki platform to leverage the power of collective intelligence. In less than a decade, Wikipedia became the world’s most popular general reference resource. Google, which was a late entry into a crowded field of search engine upstarts, quickly garnered two-thirds of the search market by becoming the first engine to use the wisdom of crowds to rank web pages. These successful enterprises have uncovered the essential management wisdom for our times: Nobody is smarter or faster than everybody….
While smart individuals are important in any organization, it isn’t their unique intelligence that is paramount but rather their unique contributions to the overall intelligence of teams. That’s because the blending of the diverse perspectives of different types of intelligences is often the fastest path to the solution of complex problems, as we learned in the summer of 2011 when a diverse group of over 250,000 experts, non-experts, and unusual suspects in a scientific gaming community called Foldit, solved in ten days a biomolecular problem that had alluded the world’s best scientists for over ten years. This means a self-organized group that required no particular credentials for membership was 365 times more effective and efficient than the world’s most credentialed individual experts. Similarly, the non-credentialed contributors of Wikipedia were able to produce approximately 18,000 articles in its first year of operation compared to only 25 articles produced by academic experts in Nupedia’s first year. This means the wisdom of the crowd was 720 times more effective and efficient than the individual experts. These results are completely counterintuitive to everything that most of us have been taught about how intelligence works. However, as counterintuitive as this may seem, the preeminence of collective intelligence has suddenly become a practical reality thanks to proliferation of digital technology over the last two decades.
As we move from the first wave of the digital revolution, which was sparked by connecting people via the Internet, to the second wave where everyone and everything will be hyper-connected in the emerging Internet of Things, our capacity to aggregate and leverage collective intelligence is likely to accelerate as practical applications of artificial intelligence become everyday realities….(More)”.
Social Network for Doctors to Transform Medical Crowdsourcing
Press Release: “SERMO, a global social network for physicians has expanded its footprint globally to revolutionize medical crowdsourcing. SERMO is now open to physicians on all seven continents, delivering on its promise from day one to unite physicians from every corner of the globe, ensuring the free flow of expert information amongst physicians.
Now available in more than 150 countries, physicians from both rural and urban areas, in developed and developing nations, can be exposed to the same expertise from their peers, providing an even higher level of care to their patients.
According to one orthopedic surgeon from Greece, SERMO offers “Exciting doctor interactions, is very helpful with difficult cases and always prompts us with very interesting social topics and discussions. It is a form of collective intelligence that allows individuals to achieve more than they could on their own.”
Combined with last month’s Drug Ratings launch, physicians will now be able to evaluate prescription drugs, in addition to communicating with peers and solving tough patient cases. These tools are revolutionizing the way physicians exchange and obtain information, as well as offer personalized care to their patients. With over 300,000 drug ratings gathered since the beta launch began last year, Ratings enables doctors globally to share prescription drug treatment experiences with their peers, transforming how physicians around the world make prescribing decisions in their daily practice.
SERMO’s membership has grown from 130,000 in 2012, when SERMO merged with WorldOne, to 650,000 total members prior to today’s expansion – now, the network includes close to 800,000 physicians….(More)”.
Crowdsourcing the fight against mosquitos
YahooFinance: “That smartphone in your pocket could hold the cure for malaria, dengue and the Zika virus, a noted Stanford University scientist says.
Manu Prakash has a history of using oddball materials for medical research. His latest project, Abuzz, uses sound. Specifically, he asks regular citizens to capture and record mosquitoes. There are 30 unique species, and each has a different wingbeat pattern.
The big idea is to use algorithms to match sample recordings with disease-carrying species, and then recommend strategies to control the population.
Weird science, sure, but don’t knock it. In this age of massive amounts of compute and abundant sensors, dreamers are doing what should be impossible. They are replicating expensive research tools with inexpensive, makeshift solutions. Solutions that can, in many cases, save lives.
In this case, citizen-scientists capture a mosquito in a plastic bottle, poke a hole in the cap and record the buzzing with their phone. Then they send the digital file off to Prakash and his team.
It’s not the first time the Indian-born professor of bioengineering has made something from almost nothing.
In 2013, he saw a centrifuge being used as a doorstop at a Ugandan clinic. The expensive medical device had been donated by well-meaning researchers. But the village had no electricity.
So, Prakash put on his problem-solving hat. He later developed the Paperfuge.
Inspired by a toy whirligig, the paper-and-string device can separate blood cells from plasma. At a cost of 20 cents, the instrument is perfect for “diagnosis in the field,” Prakash told a TED conference audience.
And that’s just one example of how a little innovation can go a long way, for not a lot of money.
While visiting remote clinics in India and Thailand, he noticed expensive microscopes were collecting dust on shelves. They were too bulky to carry into the field. In 2014, his team showed off Foldscope, an inexpensive, lightweight microscope inspired by origami….(More)”.
Europol introduce crowdsourcing to catch child abusers
LeakofNations: “The criminal intelligence branch of the European Union, known as Europol, have started a campaign called #TraceAnObject which uses social media crowdsourcing to detect potentially-identifying objects in material that depicts child abuse….
Investigative crowdsourcing has gained traction in academic and journalistic circles in recent years, but this represents the first case of government bureaus relying on social media people-power to conduct more effective analysis.
Journalists are increasingly relying on a combination of high-end computing to organise terabytes of data and internet cloud hubs that allow a consortium of journalists from around the world to share their analysis of the material. In the Panama Papers scoop the Australian software Nuix was used to analyse, extract, and index documents into an encrypted central hub in which thousands of journalists from 80 countries were able to post their workings and assist others in a forum-type setting. This model was remarkably efficient; over 11.5 million documents, dating back to the 1970’s, were analysed in less than a year.
The website Zooinverse has achieved huge success in creating public participation on academic projects, producing the pioneering game Foldit, where participants play with digital models of proteins. The Oxford University-based organisation has now engaged over 1 million volunteers, and has has significant successes in astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science.
The most complex investigations still require thousands of hours of straightforward tasks that cannot be computerised. The citizen science website Planet Four studies conditions on Mars, and needs volunteers to compare photographs and detect blotches on Mars’ surface – enabling anyone to feel like Elon Musk, regardless of their educational background.
Child abuse is something that incites anger in most people. Crowdsourcing is an opportunity to take the donkey-work away from slow bureaucratic offices and allow ordinary citizens, many of whom felt powerless to protect children from these vile crimes, to genuinely progress cases that will make children safer.
Zooinverse proves that the public are hungry for this kind of work; the ICIJ project model of a central cloud forum shows that crowdsourcing across international borders allows data to be interpreted more efficiently. Europol’s latest idea could well be a huge success.
Even the most basic object could potentially provide vital clues to the culprit’s identity. The most significant items released so far include a school uniform complete with ID card necktie, and a group of snow-covered lodges….(More) (see also #TraceAnObject).
Citizen Science and Alien Species in Europe
European Commission: “Citizen Science programs aim at creating a bridge between science and the general public, actively involving citizens in research projects. In this way, citizen scientists can work side by side with experts, contributing to the increase of scientific knowledge, addressing local, national and international issues that need scientific support and having the potential to influence policy-making.
The EU Regulation 1143/2014 on Invasive Alien Species (IAS) acknowledges the important role public awareness and active involvement of the citizens have for the successful implementation of the Regulation. Thus, Citizen Science could bring an important contribution to the early detection and monitoring of invasive alien species, as, in order to adopt efficient control measures, it is necessary to know the presence and distribution of these species as soon as possible.
With the new website section we want to disseminate information about how citizens can be involved in activities aimed at protecting European biodiversity, awareness raising, sharing news, examples and developments from the emerging field of Citizen Science.
If you are interested in becoming a citizen scientist and want to help monitor invasive alien species (IAS) in your region, you can use our App “Invasive Alien Species Europe” to report the 37 IAS of Union Concern.
Furthermore, we have compiled a list of European Citizen Science projects dealing with alien species. The list is not exhaustive and is open for improvement …(More)”.