U.S. Government Effort to Tap Private Weather Data Moves Along Slowly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Isabelle Bousquette: “The U.S. government’s six-year-old effort to improve its weather forecasting ability by purchasing data from private-sector satellite companies has started to show results, although the process is moving more slowly than anticipated.

After a period of testing, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a scientific, service and regulatory arm of the Commerce Department, began purchasing data from two satellite companies, Spire Global Inc. of Vienna, Va., and GeoOptics Inc. of Pasadena, Calif.

The weather data from these two companies fills gaps in coverage left by NOAA’s own satellites, the agency said. NOAA also began testing data from a third company this year.

Beyond these companies, new entrants to the field offering weather data based on a broader range of technologies have been slow to emerge, the agency said.

“We’re getting a subset of what we hoped,” said Dan St. Jean, deputy director of the Office of System Architecture and Advanced Planning at NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service.

NOAA’s weather forecasts help the government formulate hurricane evacuation plans and make other important decisions. The agency began seeking out private sources of satellite weather data in 2016. The idea was to find a more cost-effective alternative to funding NOAA’s own satellite constellations, the agency said. It also hoped to seed competition and innovation in the private satellite sector.

It isn’t yet clear whether there is a cost benefit to using private data, in part because the relatively small number of competitors in the market has made it challenging to determine a steady market price, NOAA said.

“All the signs in the nascent ‘new space’ industry indicated that there would be a plethora of venture capitalists wanting to compete for NOAA’s commercial pilot/purchase dollars. But that just never materialized,” said Mr. St. Jean…(More)”.

Whataboutism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by B.D. McClay: “Attention is finite, the record of how we spend it public, and it is easy enough to check if somebody who tweets every day about Ukraine has ever tweeted about Yemen. Many people are inclined to give somebody they trust a pass; behavior that might attract loud condemnation of a stranger might be ignored if done by a friend. Sometimes, such inconsistencies, added up, indicate that somebody is untrustworthy, that her commitments are insincere, and that there is something manipulative about her public persona. But most of the time, I would hazard, they indicate that people do not live their lives striving for perfect consistency….

The Internet, however, has only one currency, and that currency is attention. On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, we platform and deplatform, we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how. What we pay attention to and the language in which we pay attention are the only realities worth considering, which is one reason why stories are so often framed by the idea that nobody is talking about a problem, when the problem is often quite endlessly talked about—just not solved. Why isn’t the media covering this story? is a common refrain that is just as often accompanied by a link to an article about the story, which is how the complainer learned about it in the first place.

Attention can be paid and registered in many forms, but you pay attention online by making it known that you are paying attention. Your own expenditure is worthless unless other people are paying attention to you. As they do in regard to the currency of the analog world, people feel as though they get to judge how other people pay attention. Even though most actions are undertaken with some idea of gaining attention, to do something out of a blatant desire to attract attention is gauche and discrediting. People whose job is to translate attention into real money—celebrities, “influencers,” and so on—are often left walking a thin and ridiculous line. They must draw attention to some larger event going on in the world lest they be judged selfish, but their attempts to do so mostly underscore that drawing attention to something means very little…(More)”.

Artificial intelligence was supposed to transform health care. It hasn’t.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ben Leonard and Ruth Reader: “Artificial intelligence is spreading into health care, often as software or a computer program capable of learning from large amounts of data and making predictions to guide care or help patients. | Seth Wenig/AP Photo

Investors see health care’s future as inextricably linked with artificial intelligence. That’s obvious from the cash pouring into AI-enabled digital health startups, including more than $3 billion in the first half of 2022 alone and nearly $10 billion in 2021, according to a Rock Health investment analysis commissioned by POLITICO.

And no wonder, considering the bold predictions technologists have made. At a conference in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton, British cognitive psychologist and “godfather” of AI, said radiologists would soon go the way of typesetters and bank tellers: “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that, within five years, deep learning is going to do better.”

But more than five years since Hinton’s forecast, radiologists are still training to read image scans. Instead of replacing doctors, health system administrators now see AI as a tool clinicians will use to improve everything from their diagnoses to billing practices. AI hasn’t lived up to the hype, medical experts said, because health systems’ infrastructure isn’t ready for it yet. And the government is just beginning to grapple with its regulatory role.

“Companies come in promising the world and often don’t deliver,” said Bob Wachter, head of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “When I look for examples of … true AI and machine learning that’s really making a difference, they’re pretty few and far between. It’s pretty underwhelming.”

Administrators say algorithms — the software that processes data — from outside companies don’t always work as advertised because each health system has its own technological framework. So hospitals are building out engineering teams and developing artificial intelligence and other technology tailored to their own needs.

But it’s slow going. Research based on job postings shows health care behind every industry except construction in adopting AI…(More)”.

To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Divya Siddarth: “There isn’t much we can agree on these days. But two sweeping statements that might garner broad support are “We need to fix technology” and “We need to fix democracy.”

There is growing recognition that rapid technology development is producing society-scale risks: state and private surveillance, widespread labor automation, ascending monopoly and oligopoly power, stagnant productivity growth, algorithmic discrimination, and the catastrophic risks posed by advances in fields like AI and biotechnology. Less often discussed, but in my view no less important, is the loss of potential advances that lack short-term or market-legible benefits. These include vaccine development for emerging diseases and open source platforms for basic digital affordances like identity and communication.

At the same time, as democracies falter in the face of complex global challenges, citizens (and increasingly, elected leaders) around the world are losing trust in democratic processes and are being swayed by autocratic alternatives. Nation-state democracies are, to varying degrees, beset by gridlock and hyper-partisanship, little accountability to the popular will, inefficiency, flagging state capacity, inability to keep up with emerging technologies, and corporate capture. While smaller-scale democratic experiments are growing, locally and globally, they remain far too fractured to handle consequential governance decisions at scale.

This puts us in a bind. Clearly, we could be doing a better job directing the development of technology towards collective human flourishing—this may be one of the greatest challenges of our time. If actually existing democracy is so riddled with flaws, it doesn’t seem up to the task. This is what rings hollow in many calls to “democratize technology”: Given the litany of complaints, why subject one seemingly broken system to governance by another?…(More)”.

A South African City Says It’s Putting QR Codes On Informal Settlement Cabins To Help Services. But Residents And Privacy Experts Are Uncertain.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ray Mwareya: “Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system.

Cape Town, South Africa’s second wealthiest city, is piloting a new plan for the 146,000 households in its informal settlements: QR-coding their homes.

City officials say the plan is to help residents get access to government services like welfare and provide an alternative to a formal street address so they can more easily get packages delivered or hail a taxi. But privacy experts warn that the city isn’t being clear about how the data will be stored or used, and the digital identification of poor Black residents could lead to retreading Cape Town’s ugly history of discrimination.

Cape Town’s government says it has marked 1,000 cabins in unofficial settlements with QR codes and made sure every individual’s information is checked, vetted, and saved by its corporate geographic information system…(More)”.

The Adoption of Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Benjamin Kumpf & Emma Proud: “The adoption of innovation means an innovation has ceased to be “innovative.” It means that a method, technology, or approach to a problem has moved from the experimental edges of an organization to the core of its work: no longer a novelty, but something normal and institutionalized.

However, the concept of adoption is rarely discussed, and the experience and know-how to bring it about is even less common. While an increasing evidence base has been developed on adopting digital systems in development and public sector organizations, as well as literature on organizational reform, little has been published on strategically moving approaches and technologies out of the innovation space to the mainstream of how organizations work. The most relevant insights come from institutionalizing behavioral insights in governments, mainly in public sector entities in the global north. This gap makes it all the more important to surface the challenges, opportunities, and factors that enable adoption, as well as the barriers and roadblocks that impede it….

Adoption is not the same as scaling. Broadly speaking, scaling means “taking successful projects, programs, or policies and expanding, adapting, and sustaining them in different ways over time for greater development impact,” as the authors of the 2020 Focus Brief on Scaling-Up put it. But scaling tends to involve different players and focuses on a specific service, product, or delivery model. For example, SASA! Raising Voices is a community mobilization approach to address and reduce gender-based violence which was first pioneered in Tanzania, but after being rigorously evaluated, has since then adapted in at least 30 countries by more than 75 organizations around the world…(More)”.

Architectures of Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jay Lloyd and Annalee Saxenian: “Silicon Valley’s dynamism during the final three decades of the twentieth century highlighted the singular importance of social and professional networks to innovation. Since that time, contemporary and historical case studies have corroborated the link between networks and the pace of technological change. These studies have shown that networks of networks, or ecosystems, that are characterized by a mix of collaboration and competition, can accelerate learning and problem-solving.

However, these insights about networks, collaboration, and ecosystems remain surprisingly absent from public debates about science and technology policy. Since the end of World War II, innovation policy has targeted economic inputs such as funding for basic scientific research and a highly skilled workforce (via education, training, and/or immigration), as well as support for commercialization of technology, investments in information technology, and free trade. Work on national systems of innovation, by contrast, seeks to define the optimal ensembles of institutions and policies. Alternatively, policy attention is focused on achieving efficiencies and scale by gaining control over value chains, especially in critical industries such as semiconductors. Antitrust advocates have attributed stalled technological innovation to monopolistic concentration among large firms, arguing that divestiture or regulation is necessary to reinvigorate competition and speed gains for society. These approaches ignore the lessons of network research, potentially threatening the very ecosystems that could unlock competitive advantages. For example, attempts to strengthen value chains risk cutting producers off from global networks, leaving them vulnerable to shifting markets and technology and weakening the wider ecosystem. Breaking up large platform firms may likewise undermine less visible internal interdependencies that support innovation, while doing nothing to encourage external collaboration. 

Networks of networks, or ecosystems, that are characterized by a mix of collaboration and competition, can accelerate learning and problem-solving.

How might the public sector promote and strengthen important network connections in a world of continuous flux? This essay reexamines innovation policy through the lens of the current era of cloud computing, arguing that the public sector has a regulatory role as well as a nurturing one to play in fostering innovation ecosystems…(More)”.

Culver City, Calif., Uses AR to Showcase Stormwater Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julia Edinger: “Culver City, Calif., and Trigger XR have teamed up to enhance a stormwater project by adding an interactive augmented reality experience.

Government agencies have been seeing the value of augmented and virtual reality for improved training and accessibility in recent years. Now, governments are launching innovative projects to help educate and engage residents — from a project in Charlotte, N.C., that revives razed Black neighborhoods to efforts to animate parks in Buffalo, N.Y., and Fairfax, Va.

For Culver City, an infrastructure project’s signage will bring the project to life with an augmented reality experience that educates the public on both the project itself and the city’s history…

…as is the case with many infrastructure projects, a big portion of the action would happen out of sight, motivating the project team to include “interpretive signage” that explains the purpose of the project through an interactive, virtual experience, Sean Singletary, the city’s senior civil engineer, explained in a written response…

The AR experience will soon be available for visitors, who will be able to learn about the project by reading the information on the signs — printed in both Spanish and English — or by scanning the QR code to get deeper.

There are six different “experiences” in augmented reality that users can participate in. In one experience, users can visualize the stormwater project that exists beneath their feet or watch images of the city’s history float past them as if they were walking through a museum. Another features a turtle that is native to Ballona Creek, which will swim around users as informational text boxes about the turtle’s history and keeping the creek clean pop up to enhance the experience…(More)”.

The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram in The New York Times: “Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked, recorded and ranked. What is gained, companies say, is efficiency and accountability. What is lost?…

In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others. Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time, according to an examination by The New York Times.

Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don’t have control — and in some cases, that they don’t even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as “demoralizing,” “humiliating” and “toxic.” Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said.

But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world’s new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself…(More)”.

AI-powered cameras to enforce bus lanes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chris Teale: “New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority will use an automated camera system to ensure bus lanes in New York City are free from illegally parked vehicles.

The MTA is partnering with Hayden AI to deploy Automated Bus Lane Enforcement camera systems to 300 buses, which will be mounted on the interior of the windshield and powered by artificial intelligence. The agency has the option to add the cameras to 200 more buses if it chooses.

Chris Carson, Hayden AI’s CEO and co-founder, said when the cameras detect an encroachment on a bus lane, they use real-time automated license plate recognition and edge computing to compile a packet of evidence that includes the time, date and location of the offense, as well as a brief video that shows the violator’s license plate. 

That information is encrypted and sent securely to the cloud, where MTA officials can access and analyze it for violations. If there is no encroachment on a bus lane, the cameras do not record anything…

An MTA spokesperson said the agency will also use data from the system to identify locations that have the highest instances of vehicles blocking bus lanes. New York City has 140 miles of bus lanes and has plans to build 150 more miles in the next four years, but congestion and lane violations from other road users slows the speed of the buses. The city already uses cameras and police patrols to attempt to enforce proper bus lane use…(More)”.