book – Page 98 – The Living Library

Big Data: A Twenty-First Century Arms Race

Curated on June 27, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Atlantic Council and Thomson Reuters: “We are living in a world awash in data. Accelerated interconnectivity, driven by the proliferation of internet-connected devices, has led to an explosion of data—big data. A race is now underway to develop new technologies and implement innovative methods that can handle the volume, variety, velocity, and veracity of big data and apply it smartly to provide decisive advantage and help solve major challenges facing companies and governments

For policy makers in government, big data and associated technologies like machine-learning and artificial Intelligence, have the potential to drastically improve their decision-making capabilities. How governments use big data may be a key factor in improved economic performance and national security. This publication looks at how big data can maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of government and business, while minimizing modern risks. Five authors explore big data across three cross-cutting issues: security, finance, and law.

Chapter 1, “The Conflict Between Protecting Privacy and Securing Nations,” Els de Busser
Chapter 2, “Big Data: Exposing the Risks from Within,” Erica Briscoe
Chapter 3, “Big Data: The Latest Tool in Fighting Crime,” Benjamin Dean, Fellow
Chapter 4, “Big Data: Tackling Illicit Financial Flows,” Tatiana Tropina
Chapter 5, “Big Data: Mitigating Financial Crime Risk,” Miren Aparicio….Read the Publication (PDF)“

Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame

Curated on June 24, 2017October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities by Martha C. Nussbaum: “… I believe the Greeks and Romans are right: anger is a poison to democratic politics, and it is all the worse when fueled by a lurking fear and a sense of helplessness. As a philosopher I have been working on these ideas for some time, first in a 2016 book called Anger and Forgiveness, and now in a book in progress called The Monarchy of Fear, investigating the relationship between anger and fear. In my work, I draw not only on the Greeks and Romans, but also on some recent figures, as I shall tonight. I conclude that we should resist anger in ourselves and inhibit its role in our political culture.

That idea, however, is radical and evokes strong opposition. For anger, with all its ugliness, is a popular emotion. Many people think that it is impossible to care for justice without anger at injustice, and that anger should be encouraged as part of a transformative process. Many also believe that it is impossible for individuals to stand up for their own self-respect without anger, that someone who reacts to wrongs and insults without anger is spineless and downtrodden. Nor are these ideas confined to the sphere of personal relations. The most popular position in the sphere of criminal justice today is retributivism, the view that the law ought to punish aggressors in a manner that embodies the spirit of justified anger. And it is also very widely believed that successful challenges against great injustice need anger to make progress.

Still, we may persist in our Aeschylean skepticism, remembering that recent years have seen three noble and successful freedom movements conducted in a spirit of non-anger: those of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela—surely people who stood up for their self-respect and that of others, and who did not acquiesce in injustice.

I’ll now argue that a philosophical analysis of anger can help us support these philosophies of non-anger, showing why anger is fatally flawed from a normative viewpoint—sometimes incoherent, sometimes based on bad values, and especially poisonous when people use it to deflect attention from real problems that they feel powerless to solve. Anger pollutes democratic politics and is of dubious value in both life and the law. I’ll present my general view, and then show its relevance to thinking well about the struggle for political justice, taking our own ongoing struggle for racial justice as my example. And I’ll end by showing why these arguments make it urgent for us to learn from literature and philosophy, keeping the humanities strong in our society….(More)”

Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World

Curated on June 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

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)”

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Curated on June 13, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: “Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions.

By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.

Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?

Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world…(More)”.

Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles and Applications

Curated on June 13, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Houbing Song, Ravi Srinivasan, Tamim Sookoor, Sabina Jeschke: “Smart cities are emerging as a priority for research and development across the world. They open up significant opportunities in several areas, such as economic growth, health, wellness, energy efficiency, and transportation, to promote the sustainable development of cities. This book provides the basics of smart cities, and it examines the possible future trends of this technology. Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles, and Applications provides a systems science perspective in presenting the foundations and principles that span multiple disciplines for the development of smart cities.

Divided into three parts—foundations, principles, and applications—Smart Cities addresses the various challenges and opportunities of creating smart cities and all that they have to offer. It also covers smart city theory modeling and simulation, and examines case studies of existing smart cities from all around the world. In addition, the book:

Addresses how to develop a smart city and how to present the state of the art and practice of them all over the world
Focuses on the foundations and principles needed for advancing the science, engineering, and technology of smart cities—including system design, system verification, real-time control and adaptation, Internet of Things, and test beds
Covers applications of smart cities as they relate to smart transportation/connected vehicle (CV) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for improved mobility, safety, and environmental protection…(More)”

Applying Public Opinion in Governance

Curated on June 8, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Scott Edward Bennett: “…explores how public opinion is used to design, monitor and evaluate government programmes in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Using information collected from the media and from international practitioners in the public opinion field, as well as interviews in each of the 4 countries, the author describes how views of public opinion and governance differ significantly between elites and the general public. Bennett argues that elites generally risk more by allowing the creation of new data, fearing that its analysis may become public and create communications and political problems of various kinds. The book finds evidence that recent conservative governments in several countries are changing their perspective on the use of public opinion, and that conventional public opinion studies are facing challenges from the availability of other kinds of information and new technologies….(More)”

Design and Implementation of Behavioral Informatics Interventions

Curated on June 8, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Liliana Laranjo, Annie Lau and Enrico Coiera in Cognitive Informatics in Health and Biomedicine: “The growing burden of chronic disease is drawing unprecedented attention to the importance of optimizing lifestyle behaviors. Interventions to promote behavior change seem promising, but their full potential can be missed when they are not easily disseminated or accessible to a larger audience. The ability of technology to address these issues, as well as to facilitate the tailoring of interventions, has led to the growing popularity of the field of behavioral informatics (BI).

Behavioral informatics interventions are designed to support patients and healthy consumers in modifying behaviors to improve health, with the help of computers, the Internet, mobile phones, wireless devices, or social media, among other technologies. To date, BI interventions have been applied in several health domains, from the promotion of healthy lifestyle behaviors to mental health and chronic disease self-management.

The effectiveness and impact of BI interventions are largely dependent on their meaningful design, development, evaluation, and implementation. Key elements for success include: performing a comprehensive observation and framing of the particular behavioral challenge within context; recognizing the relevant behavior change theories, models and techniques; having a deep understanding of user characteristics and needs; involving users throughout design and development; and refining the design through user-centred evaluation.

Due to the rapid pace of technology development, the evaluation of interventions and translation of research to practice are met with particular challenges. Innovative methodologies and implementation strategies are increasingly required to bring to fruition the potential of BI interventions in delivering cost-effective, personalized interventions, with broad scalability….(More)”.

The Citizen Marketer

Curated on June 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Joel Penney: “From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes on social media, the landscape of political communication is being transformed by the grassroots circulation of opinion on digital platforms and beyond. By exploring how everyday people assist in the promotion of political media messages to persuade their peers and shape the public mind, Joel Penney offers a new framework for understanding the phenomenon of viral political communication: the citizen marketer. Like the citizen consumer, the citizen marketer is guided by the logics of marketing practice, but, rather than being passive, actively circulates persuasive media to advance political interests. Such practices include using protest symbols in social media profile pictures, strategically tweeting links to news articles to raise awareness about select issues, sharing politically-charged internet memes and viral videos, and displaying mass-produced T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers that promote a favored electoral candidate or cause. Citizens view their participation in such activities not only in terms of how it may shape or influence outcomes, but as a statement of their own identity. As the book argues, these practices signal an important shift in how political participation is conceptualized and performed in advanced capitalist democratic societies, as they casually inject political ideas into the everyday spaces and places of popular culture.

While marketing is considered a dirty word in certain critical circles — particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of political struggle — some of these very critics have determined that the most effective way to push back against the forces of neoliberal capitalism is to co-opt its own marketing and advertising techniques to spread counter-hegemonic ideas to the public. Accordingly, this book argues that the citizen marketer approach to political action is much broader than any one ideological constituency or bloc. Rather, it is a means of promoting a wide range of political ideas, including those that are broadly critical of elite uses of marketing in consumer capitalist societies. The book includes an extensive historical treatment of citizen-level political promotion in modern democratic societies, connecting contemporary digital practices to both the 19th century tradition of mass political spectacle as well as more informal, culturally-situated forms of political expression that emerge from postwar countercultures. By investigating the logics and motivations behind the citizen marketer approach, as well as how it has developed in response to key social, cultural, and technological changes, Penney charts the evolution of activism in an age of mediatized politics, promotional culture, and viral circulation….(More)”.

Smart Cities: The Internet of Things, People and Systems

Curated on June 6, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Schahram Dustdar, Stefan Nastić and Ognjen Šćekić: “This book presents a coherent, novel vision of Smart Cities, built around a value-driven architecture. It describes the limitations of the contemporary notion of the Smart City and argues that the next developmental step must actively include not only the physical infrastructure, but information technology and human infrastructure as well, requiring the intensive integration of technical solutions from the Internet of Things (IoT) and social computing.
The book is divided into five major parts, the first of which provides both a general introduction and a coherent vision that ties together all the components that are required to realize the vision for Smart Cities. Part II then discusses the provisioning and governance of Smart City systems and infrastructures. In turn, Part III addresses the core technologies and technological enablers for managing the social component of the Smart City platform. Both parts combine state-of-the-art research with cutting-edge industrial efforts in the respective fields. Lastly, Part IV details a road map to achieving Cyber-Human Smart Cities. Rounding out the coverage, it discusses the concrete technological advances needed to move beyond contemporary Smart Cities and toward the Smart Cities of the future.
Overall, the book provides an essential overview of the latest developments in the areas of IoT and social computing research, and outlines a research roadmap for a closer integration of the two areas in the context of the Smart City. As such, it offers a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students alike….(More)”.