Using Public Data From Different Sources

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter byYair Cohen in Maximizing Social Science Research Through Publicly Accessible Data Sets, book edited by S. Marshall Perry: “The United States federal government agencies as well as states agencies are liberating their data through web portals. Web portals like data.gov, census.gov, healthdata.gov, ed.gov and many others on the state level provide great opportunity for researchers of all fields. This chapter shows the challenges and the opportunities that lie by merging data from different pubic sources. The researcher collected and merged data from the following datasets: NYSED school report card, NYSED Fiscal Profile Reporting System, Civil Rights Data Collection, and Census 2010 School District Demographics System. The challenges include data validation, data cleaning, flatting data for easy reporting, and merging datasets based on text fields….(More)”.

 

User Centric E-Government: Challenges and Opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Saqib Saeed, Zaigham Mahmood and T. Ramayah: “This book provides user studies and theories related to user-centered technology design processes for e-government projects. The book mainly discusses inherent issues of technology design implications, user experiences, and guidelines for technology appropriation. Ethnographic studies focusing on real life examples will enable readers to understand the problems in an effective way. Furthermore, the theories and results will help researchers and practitioners to handle these challenges in an efficient way.

E-Government is about harnessing the information revolution to improve the efficiency of government processes and the lives of citizens. It aims at a citizen centered approach to governance through effective use of the Internet and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). E-Government promotes transparency and effectiveness of a government’s processes as well as citizens’ participation (e-participation) in the affairs of the government. Whereas E-government projects are huge undertakings for government departments, a user-centric approach requires citizens’ participation in the design and delivery  of e government services. In both these respects, there are huge challenges and governments require long term commitment as well as correct planning and availability of financial resources to address them.

System design for e-governmental applications is inherently a complex process. In successful e-government projects, appropriately designed technology infrastructure plays a pivotal rule. The technology appropriation process requires that e-government technologies should be in line with the work practices of end users, so that successful usage of these technologies can be realized. E-governmental systems which fail to take into account such human factors result in failure and wasting huge amounts of public money as well as a loss of confidence of the public in such technological infrastructures. It is highly important that citizens are enabled to have access to the appropriate information technology, have knowledge and skills to use the available technology, and have the positive commitment to affect the governments’ strategies. So, enabling citizens to effectively participate is much more difficult.  This book addresses these inherent challenges and available opportunities with respect to user-centric e-government….(More)”.

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Melanie Swan: “Bitcoin is starting to come into its own as a digital currency, but the blockchain technology behind it could prove to be much more significant. This book takes you beyond the currency (“Blockchain 1.0”) and smart contracts (“Blockchain 2.0”) to demonstrate how the blockchain is in position to become the fifth disruptive computing paradigm after mainframes, PCs, the Internet, and mobile/social networking.

Author Melanie Swan, Founder of the Institute for Blockchain Studies, explains that the blockchain is essentially a public ledger with potential as a worldwide, decentralized record for the registration, inventory, and transfer of all assets—not just finances, but property and intangible assets such as votes, software, health data, and ideas.

Topics include:

  • Concepts, features, and functionality of Bitcoin and the blockchain
  • Using the blockchain for automated tracking of all digital endeavors
  • Enabling censorship?resistant organizational models
  • Creating a decentralized digital repository to verify identity
  • Possibility of cheaper, more efficient services traditionally provided by nations
  • Blockchain for science: making better use of the data-mining network
  • Personal health record storage, including access to one’s own genomic data
  • Open access academic publishing on the blockchain…(More)”.

Plato and the Nerd. The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MITPress: “In this book, Edward Ashford Lee makes a bold claim: that the creators of digital technology have an unsurpassed medium for creativity. Technology has advanced to the point where progress seems limited not by physical constraints but the human imagination. Writing for both literate technologists and numerate humanists, Lee makes a case for engineering—creating technology—as a deeply intellectual and fundamentally creative process. Explaining why digital technology has been so transformative and so liberating, Lee argues that the real power of technology stems from its partnership with humans.

Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of—for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation—that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data. Lee argues that the evidence for this is weak, and the likelihood that nature has limited itself to processes that conform to today’s notion of digital computation is remote.

Lee goes on to argue that artificial intelligence’s goal of reproducing human cognitive functions in computers vastly underestimates the potential of computers. In his view, technology is coevolving with humans. It augments our cognitive and physical capabilities while we nurture, develop, and propagate the technology itself. Complementarity is more likely than competition….(More)”.

The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Aeron Davis: “...argues for the value and importance of shared, publicly accessible knowledge, and suggests that the erosion of its most visible forms, including public service broadcasting, education, and the network of public libraries, has worrying outcomes for democracy.

With contributions from both activists and academics, this collection of short, sharp essays focuses on different aspects of public knowledge, from libraries and education to news media and public policy. Together, the contributors record the stresses and strains placed upon public knowledge by funding cuts and austerity, the new digital economy, quantification and target-setting, neoliberal politics, and inequality. These pressures, the authors contend, not only hinder democracies, but also undermine markets, economies, and social institutions and spaces everywhere.

Covering areas of international public concern, these polemical, accessible texts include reflections on the fate of schools and education, the takeover of public institutions by private interests, and the corruption of news and information in the financial sector. They cover the compromised Greek media during recent EU negotiations, the role played by media and political elites in the Irish property bubble, the compromising of government policy by corporate interests in the United States and Korea, and the squeeze on public service media in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States.

Individually and collectively, these pieces spell out the importance of maintaining public, shared knowledge in all its forms, and offer a rallying cry for doing so, asserting the need for strong public, financial, and regulatory support….(More)”

Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom Read

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Joshua A. T. Fairfield: “… explains the crisis of digital ownership – how and why we no longer control our smartphones or software-enable devices, which are effectively owned by software and content companies. In two years we will not own our ‘smart’ televisions which will also be used by advertisers to listen in to our living rooms. In the coming decade, if we do not take back our ownership rights, the same will be said of our self-driving cars and software-enabled homes. We risk becoming digital peasants, owned by software and advertising companies, not to mention overreaching governments. Owned should be read by anyone wanting to know more about the loss of our property rights, the implications for our privacy rights and how we can regain control of both….(More)”.

Civic Tech in the Global South

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New book edited by Tiago Peixoto: “Civic Tech in the Global South is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of 23 digital platforms designed to amplify citizen voices to improve service delivery, highlighting citizen uptake and the degree of responsiveness by public service providers. The initiatives are an SMS-based polling platform run by UNICEF in Uganda, a complaints-management system run by the water sector in Kenya, and an internet-based participatory budgeting program in Brazil. Based on these experiences, the authors examine: i) the extent to which technologies have promoted inclusiveness, ii) the effect of these initiatives on public service delivery, and iii) the extent to which these effects can be attributed to technology….(More)”.

Making Sense of Corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Bo Rothstein and Aiysha Varraich: “Corruption is a serious threat to prosperity, democracy and human well-being, with mounting empirical evidence highlighting its detrimental effects on society. Yet defining this threat has resulted in profound disagreement, producing a multidimensional concept. Tackling this important and provocative topic, the authors provide an accessible and systematic analysis of how our understanding of corruption has evolved. They identify gaps in the research and make connections between related concepts such as clientelism, patronage, patrimonialism, particularism and state capture. A fundamental issue discussed is how the opposite of corruption should be defined. By arguing for the possibility of a universal understanding of corruption, and specifically what corruption is not, an innovative solution to this problem is presented. This book provides an accessible overview of corruption, allowing scholars and students alike to see the far reaching place it has within academic research….(More)”.

 

The Internet of Us

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Michael P. Lynch: “We used to say “seeing is believing”; now, googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world’s information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf in search of answers. We just open our browsers, type in a few keywords and wait for the information to come to us. Now firmly established as a pioneering work of modern philosophy, The Internet of Us has helped revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be human in the digital age. Indeed, demonstrating that knowledge based on reason plays an essential role in society and that there is more to “knowing” than just acquiring information, leading philosopher Michael P. Lynch shows how our digital way of life makes us value some ways of processing information over others, and thus risks distorting the greatest traits of mankind. Charting a path from Plato’s cave to Google Glass, the result is a necessary guide on how to navigate the philosophical quagmire that is the “Internet of Things.”…(More)”.

Dictionaries and crowdsourcing, wikis and user-generated content

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Living Reference Work Entry by Michael Rundel: “It is tempting to dismiss crowdsourcing as a largely trivial recent development which has nothing useful to contribute to serious lexicography. This temptation should be resisted. When applied to dictionary-making, the broad term “crowdsourcing” in fact describes a range of distinct methods for creating or gathering linguistic data. A provisional typology is proposed, distinguishing three approaches which are often lumped under the heading “crowdsourcing.” These are: user-generated content (UGC), the wiki model, and what is referred to here as “crowd-sourcing proper.” Each approach is explained, and examples are given of their applications in linguistic and lexicographic projects. The main argument of this chapter is that each of these methods – if properly understood and carefully managed – has significant potential for lexicography. The strengths and weaknesses of each model are identified, and suggestions are made for exploiting them in order to facilitate or enhance different operations within the process of developing descriptions of language. Crowdsourcing – in its various forms – should be seen as an opportunity rather than as a threat or diversion….(More)”.