Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited Albert Ali Salah, Alex Pentland, Bruno Lepri and Emmanuel Letouzé: “After the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011–12, increasing numbers of civilians sought refuge in neighboring countries. By May 2017, Turkey had received over 3 million refugees — the largest r efugee population in the world. Some lived in government-run camps near the Syrian border, but many have moved to cities looking for work and better living conditions. They faced problems of integration, income, welfare, employment, health, education, language, social tension, and discrimination. In order to develop sound policies to solve these interlinked problems, a good understanding of refugee dynamics is necessary.

This book summarizes the most important findings of the Data for Refugees (D4R) Challenge, which was a non-profit project initiated to improve the conditions of the Syrian refugees in Turkey by providing a database for the scientific community to enable research on urgent problems concerning refugees. The database, based on anonymized mobile call detail records (CDRs) of phone calls and SMS messages of one million Turk Telekom customers, indicates the broad activity and mobility patterns of refugees and citizens in Turkey for the year 1 January to 31 December 2017. Over 100 teams from around the globe applied to take part in the challenge, and 61 teams were granted access to the data.

This book describes the challenge, and presents selected and revised project reports on the five major themes: unemployment, health, education, social integration, and safety, respectively. These are complemented by additional invited chapters describing related projects from international governmental organizations, technological infrastructure, as well as ethical aspects. The last chapter includes policy recommendations, based on the lessons learned.

The book will serve as a guideline for creating innovative data-centered collaborations between industry, academia, government, and non-profit humanitarian agencies to deal with complex problems in refugee scenarios. It illustrates the possibilities of big data analytics in coping with refugee crises and humanitarian responses, by showcasing innovative approaches drawing on multiple data sources, information visualization, pattern analysis, and statistical analysis.It will also provide researchers and students working with mobility data with an excellent coverage across data science, economics, sociology, urban computing, education, migration studies, and more….(More)”.

Sharenthood: Why We Should Think before We Talk about Our Kids Online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Leah Plunkett: “Our children’s first digital footprints are made before they can walk—even before they are born—as parents use fertility apps to aid conception, post ultrasound images, and share their baby’s hospital mug shot. Then, in rapid succession come terabytes of baby pictures stored in the cloud, digital baby monitors with built-in artificial intelligence, and real-time updates from daycare. When school starts, there are cafeteria cards that catalog food purchases, bus passes that track when kids are on and off the bus, electronic health records in the nurse’s office, and a school surveillance system that has eyes everywhere. Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone—friends, employers, law enforcement—forever. In this incisive book, Leah Plunkett examines the implications of “sharenthood”—adults’ excessive digital sharing of children’s data. She outlines the mistakes adults make with kids’ private information, the risks that result, and the legal system that enables “sharenting.”

Plunkett describes various modes of sharenting—including “commercial sharenting,” efforts by parents to use their families’ private experiences to make money—and unpacks the faulty assumptions made by our legal system about children, parents, and privacy. She proposes a “thought compass” to guide adults in their decision making about children’s digital data: play, forget, connect, and respect. Enshrining every false step and bad choice, Plunkett argues, can rob children of their chance to explore and learn lessons. The Internet needs to forget. We need to remember….(More)”.

The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gary Smith and Jay Cordes: “Data science has never had more influence on the world. Large companies are now seeing the benefit of employing data scientists to interpret the vast amounts of data that now exists. However, the field is so new and is evolving so rapidly that the analysis produced can be haphazard at best. 

The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science shows us real-world examples of what can go wrong. Written to be an entertaining read, this invaluable guide investigates the all too common mistakes of data scientists – who can be plagued by lazy thinking, whims, hunches, and prejudices – and indicates how they have been at the root of many disasters, including the Great Recession. 

Gary Smith and Jay Cordes emphasise how scientific rigor and critical thinking skills are indispensable in this age of Big Data, as machines often find meaningless patterns that can lead to dangerous false conclusions. The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science is loaded with entertaining tales of both successful and misguided approaches to interpreting data, both grand successes and epic failures. These cautionary tales will not only help data scientists be more effective, but also help the public distinguish between good and bad data science….(More)”.

Reimagining Administrative Justice: Human Rights in Small Places

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Margaret Doyle and Nick O’Brien: “This book reconnects everyday justice with social rights. It rediscovers human rights in the ‘small places’ of housing, education, health and social care, where administrative justice touches the citizen every day, and in doing so it re-imagines administrative justice and expands its democratic reach. The institutions of everyday justice – ombuds, tribunals and mediation – rarely herald their role in human rights frameworks, and never very loudly. For the most part, human rights and administrative justice are ships that pass in the night. Drawing on design theory, the book proposes to remedy this alienation by replacing current orthodoxies, not least that of ‘user focus’, with more promising design principles of community, network and openness. Thus re-imagined, the future of both administrative justice and social rights is demosprudential, firmly rooted in making response to citizen grievance more democratic and embedding legal change in the broader culture….(More)”.

Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Tony Evans and Peter Hupe: “Actors in public situations are in some ways subject to control while also exercising freedom. Discretion in contemporary societies is increasingly characterized by cross-cutting systems of control as well as by conflicting conceptions of knowledge and expertise. There is also the paradox of the autonomous individual empowered by social media while simultaneously being subject to its algorithms and surveillance. Narrow disciplinary conceptions of discretion—whether they come from law, economics, sociology or politics—are of limited value in understanding the contemporary dynamics of discretion. This chapter describes these phenomena and also seeks to capture the operation of discretion in different settings while examining its role and evaluating its use. It is argued that we need to recognize developing debates within disciplines, cross-fertilization between them and innovative developments at the margins of those disciplines. That enables the conceptualization of the natures, operations and evaluations of discretion as a context-sensitive and dynamic idea….(More)”.

Smart Governance for Cities: Perspectives and Experiences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Nuno Vasco Moreira Lopes: “This book provides theoretical perspectives and practical experiences on smart governance for smart cities. It presents a balanced linkage between research, policies and practices on this area. The authors discuss the sustainability challenges raised by rapid urbanization, challenges with smart governance models in various countries, and a new governance paradigm seen as a capable approach able to overcome social, economic and environmental sustainability problems. The authors include case studies on transformation, adaption and transfers; and country, regional, municipal contextualization. Also included are best practices on monitoring and evaluating smart governance and impact assessment. The book features contributions from researchers, academics, and practitioners in the field. 

  • Analyzes smart governance for cities from a variety of perspectives and a variety of sectors – both in theory and in practice
  • Features information on the linkage between United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and smart governance
  • Covers the connection between research, policies and practice in smart governance for smart cities…(More)”.

Governing Complexity: Analyzing and Applying Polycentricity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Andreas Thiel, William A. Blomquist, and Dustin E. Garrick: “There has been a rapid expansion of academic interest and publications on polycentricity. In the contemporary world, nearly all governance situations are polycentric, but people are not necessarily used to thinking this way. Governing Complexity provides an updated explanation of the concept of polycentric governance. The editors provide examples of it in contemporary settings involving complex natural resource systems, as well as a critical evaluation of the utility of the concept. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, this book makes the case that polycentric governance arrangements exist and it is possible for polycentric arrangements to perform well, persist for long periods, and adapt. Whether they actually function well, persist, or adapt depends on multiple factors that are reviewed and discussed, both theoretically and with examples from actual cases….(More)”.

Data versus Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by  Kris Shaffer: “Human attention is in the highest demand it has ever been. The drastic increase in available information has compelled individuals to find a way to sift through the media that is literally at their fingertips. Content recommendation systems have emerged as the technological solution to this social and informational problem, but they’ve also created a bigger crisis in confirming our biases by showing us only, and exactly, what it predicts we want to see. Data versus Democracy investigates and explores how, in the era of social media, human cognition, algorithmic recommendation systems, and human psychology are all working together to reinforce (and exaggerate) human bias. The dangerous confluence of these factors is driving media narratives, influencing opinions, and possibly changing election results. 


In this book, algorithmic recommendations, clickbait, familiarity bias, propaganda, and other pivotal concepts are analyzed and then expanded upon via fascinating and timely case studies: the 2016 US presidential election, Ferguson, GamerGate, international political movements, and more events that come to affect every one of us. What are the implications of how we engage with information in the digital age? Data versus Democracy explores this topic and an abundance of related crucial questions. We live in a culture vastly different from any that has come before. In a society where engagement is currency, we are the product. Understanding the value of our attention, how organizations operate based on this concept, and how engagement can be used against our best interests is essential in responsibly equipping ourselves against the perils of disinformation….(More)”.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Nick Couldry: “We are told that progress requires human beings to be connected, and that science, medicine and much else that is good demands the kind massive data collection only possible if every thing and person are continuously connected.

But connection, and the continuous surveillance that connection makes possible, usher in an era of neocolonial appropriation. In this new era, social life becomes a direct input to capitalist production, and data – the data collected and processed when we are connected – is the means for this transformation. Hence the need to start counting the costs of connection.

Capturing and processing social data is today handled by an emerging social quantification sector. We are familiar with its leading players, from Acxiom to Equifax, from Facebook to Uber. Together, they ensure the regular and seemingly natural conversion of daily life into a stream of data that can be appropriated for value. This stream is extracted from sensors embedded in bodies and objects, and from the traces left by human interaction online. The result is a new social order based on continuous tracking, and offering unprecedented new opportunities for social discrimination and behavioral influence.  This order has disturbing consequences for freedom, justice and power — indeed, for the quality of human life.

The true violence of this order is best understood through the history of colonialism. But because we assume that colonialism has been replaced by advanced capitalism, we often miss the connection. The concept of data colonialism can thus be used to trace continuities from colonialism’s historic appropriation of territories and material resources to the datafication of everyday life today. While the modes, intensities, scales and contexts of dispossession have changed, the underlying function remains the same: to acquire resources from which economic value can be extracted.

In data colonialism, data is appropriated through a new type of social relation: data relations. We are living through a time when the organization of capital and the configurations of power are changing dramatically because of this contemporary form of social relation. Data colonialism justifies what it does as an advance in scientific knowledge, personalized marketing, or rational management, just as historic colonialism claimed a civilizing mission. Data colonialism is global, dominated by powerful forces in East and West, in the USA and China. The result is a world where, wherever we are connected, we are colonized by data.

Where is data colonialism heading in the long term? Just as historical colonialism paved the way for industrial capitalism, data colonialism is paving the way for a new stage of capitalism whose outlines we only partly see: the capitalization of life without limit. There will be no part of human life, no layer of experience, that is not extractable for economic value. Human life will be there for mining by corporations without reserve as governments look on appreciatively. This process of capitalization will be the foundation for a highly unequal new social arrangement, a social order that is deeply incompatible with human freedom and autonomy.

But resistance is still possible, drawing on past and present decolonial struggles, as well as the on the best of the humanities, philosophy, political economy, information and social science. The goal is to name what is happening and imagine better ways of living together without the exploitation on which today’s models of ‘connection’ are founded….(More)”

Corporate Duties to the Public

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Barnali Choudhury and Martin Petrin: “In a world where the grocery store may be more powerful than the government and corporations are the governors rather than the governed, the notion of corporations being only private actors is slowly evaporating. Gone is the view that corporations can focus exclusively on maximizing shareholder wealth. Instead, the idea that corporations owe duties to the public is capturing the attention of not only citizens and legislators, but corporations themselves. This book explores the deepening connections between corporations and the public. It explores timely – and often controversial – public issues with which corporations must grapple including the corporate purpose, civil and criminal liability, taxation, human rights, the environment and corruption. Offering readers an encompassing, balanced, and systematic understanding of the most pertinent duties corporations should bear, how they work, whether they are justified, and how they should be designed in the future, this book clarifies corporations’ roles vis-à-vis the public….(More)”.