Paper by Nicole Robitaille, Nina Mažar, and Julian House: “While behavioral scientists sometimes aim to nudge one-time actions, such as registering as an organ donor or signing up for a 401K, there are many other behaviors—making healthy food choices, paying bills, filing taxes, getting a flu shot—that are repeated on a daily, monthly, or annual basis. If you want to target these recurrent behaviors, can introducing a nudge once lead to consistent changes in behavior? What if you presented the same nudge several times—would seeing it over and over make its effects stronger, or just the opposite? Decades of... (More >)
Data-driven environmental decision-making and action in armed conflict
Essay by Wim Zwijnenburg: “Our understanding of how severely armed conflicts have impacted natural resources, eco-systems, biodiversity and long-term implications on climate has massively improved over the last decade. Without a doubt, cataclysmic events such as the 1991 Gulf War oil fires contributed to raising awareness on the conflict-environment nexus, and the images of burning wells are engraved into our collective mind. But another more recent, under-examined yet major contributor to this growing cognizance is the digital revolution, which has provided us with a wealth of data and information from conflict-affected countries quickly made available through the internet. With... (More >)
Next-generation nowcasting to improve decision making in a crisis
Frank Gerhard, Marie-Paule Laurent, Kyriakos Spyrounakos, and Eckart Windhagen at McKinsey: “In light of the limitations of the traditional models, we recommend a modified approach to nowcasting that uses country- and industry-specific expertise to boil down the number of variables to a selected few for each geography or sector, depending on the individual economic setting. Given the specific selection of each core variable, the relationships between the variables will be relatively stable over time, even during a major crisis. Admittedly, the more variables used, the easier it is to explain an economic shift; however, using more variables also means... (More >)
Establishing a Data Trust: From Concept to Reality
Blog by Stefaan Verhulst, Aditi Ramesh & Andrew Young, Peter Rabley & Christopher Keefe: “As ever-more areas of our public and private lives succumb to a process of datafication, it is becoming increasingly urgent to find new ways of managing the data lifecycle: how data is collected, stored, used, and reused. In particular, legacy notions of control and data access need to be reimagined for the twenty-first century, in ways that give more prominence to the public good and common interests – in a manner that is responsible and sustainable. That is particularly true for mapping data which is... (More >)
Three ways to supercharge your city’s open-data portal
Bloomberg Cities: “…Three open data approaches cities are finding success with: Map it Much of the data that people seem to be most interested in is location-based, local data leaders say. That includes everything from neighborhood crime stats and police data used by journalists and activists to property data regularly mined by real estate companies. Rather than simply making spatial data available, many cities have begun mapping it themselves, allowing users to browse information that’s useful to them. At atlas.phila.gov, for example, Philadelphians can type in their own addresses to find property deeds, historic photos, nearby 311 complaints and... (More >)
Side-Stepping Safeguards, Data Journalists Are Doing Science Now
Article by Irineo Cabreros: “News stories are increasingly told through data. Witness the Covid-19 time series that decorate the homepages of every major news outlet; the red and blue heat maps of polling predictions that dominate the runup to elections; the splashy, interactive plots that dance across the screen. As a statistician who handles data for a living, I welcome this change. News now speaks my favorite language, and the general public is developing a healthy appetite for data, too. But many major news outlets are no longer just visualizing data, they are analyzing it in ever more sophisticated... (More >)
Harnessing collective intelligence to find missing children
Cordis: “It is estimated that over 250 000 children go missing every year in the EU. Statistics on their recovery is scant, but based on data from the EU-wide 116 000 hotline, 14 % of runaways and 57 % of migrant minors reported missing in 2019 had not been found by the end of the year. The EU-supported ChildRescue project has developed a collective intelligence and stakeholder communication approach for missing children investigations. It consists of a collaborative platform and two mobile apps available for organisations, verified volunteers and the general public. “ChildRescue is being used by our piloting... (More >)
Citizen Science Is Helping Tackle Stinky Cities
Article by Lucrezia Lozza: “Marta has lived with a bad smell lingering in her hometown in central Spain, Villanueva del Pardillo, for a long time. Fed up, in 2017 she and her neighbors decided to pursue the issue. “The smell is disgusting,” Marta says, pointing a finger at a local yeast factory. Originally, she thought of recording the “bad smell days” on a spreadsheet. When this didn’t work out, after some research she found Odour Collect, a crowdsourced map that allows users to enter a geolocalized timestamp of bad smells in their neighborhood. After noise, odor nuisances are the... (More >)
Assessing the social and emotional costs of mass shootings with Twitter data
Article by Mary Blankenship and Carol Graham: “Mass shootings that result in mass casualties are almost a weekly occasion in the United States, which—not coincidentally—also has the most guns per capita in the world. Viewed from outside the U.S., it seems that Americans are not bothered by the constant deadly gun violence and have simply adapted to it. Yet, our analysis of the well-being costs of gun violence—using Twitter data to track real-time responses throughout the course of these appalling events—suggest that is not necessarily the case. We focus on the two March 2021 shootings in Atlanta and Boulder,... (More >)
Building on a year of open data: progress and promise
Jennifer Yokoyama at Microsoft: “…The biggest takeaway from our work this past year – and the one thing I hope any reader of this post will take away – is that data collaboration is a spectrum. From the presence (or absence) of data to how open that data is to the trust level of the collaboration participants, these factors may necessarily lead to different configurations and different goals, but they can all lead to more open data and innovative insights and discoveries. Here are a few other lessons we have learned over the last year: Principles set the foundation... (More >)
