'From Atoms to Bits': A Visual History of American Ideas


in The Atlantic: “A new paper employs a simple technique—counting words in patent texts—to trace the history of American invention, from chemistry to computers….in a new paper, Mikko Packalen at the University of Waterloo and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, devised a brilliant way to address this question empirically. In short, they counted words in patent texts.

In a series of papers studying the history of American innovation, Packalen and Bhattacharya indexed every one-word, two-word, and three-word phrase that appeared in more than 4 million patent texts in the last 175 years. To focus their search on truly new concepts, they recorded the year those phrases first appeared in a patent. Finally, they ranked each concept’s popularity based on how many times it reappeared in later patents. Essentially, they trawled the billion-word literature of patents to document the birth-year and the lifespan of American concepts, from “plastic” to “world wide web” and “instant messaging.”

Here are the 20 most popular sequences of words in each decade from the 1840s to the 2000s. You can see polymerase chain reactions in the middle of the 1980s stack. Since the timeline, as it appears in the paper, is too wide to be visible on this article page, I’ve chopped it up and inserted the color code both above and below the timeline….

Another theme of Packalen and Bhattacharya’s research is that innovation has become more collaborative. Indeed, computers have not only taken over the world of inventions, but also they have changed the geography of innovation, Bhattacharya said. Larger cities have historically held an innovative advantage, because (the theory goes) their density of smarties speeds up debate on the merits of new ideas, which are often born raw and poorly understood. But the researchers found that in the last few decades, larger cities are no more likely to produce new ideas in patents than smaller cities that can just as easily connect online with their co-authors. “Perhaps due to the Internet, the advantage of larger cities appears to be eroding,” Packalen wrote in an email….(More)”

Ad hoc encounters with big data: Engaging citizens in conversations around tabletops


Morten Fjeld, Paweł Woźniak, Josh Cowls, Bonnie Nardi at FirstMonday: “The increasing abundance of data creates new opportunities for communities of interest and communities of practice. We believe that interactive tabletops will allow users to explore data in familiar places such as living rooms, cafés, and public spaces. We propose informal, mobile possibilities for future generations of flexible and portable tabletops. In this paper, we build upon current advances in sensing and in organic user interfaces to propose how tabletops in the future could encourage collaboration and engage users in socially relevant data-oriented activities. Our work focuses on the socio-technical challenges of future democratic deliberation. As part of our vision, we suggest switching from fixed to mobile tabletops and provide two examples of hypothetical interface types: TableTiles and Moldable Displays. We consider how tabletops could foster future civic communities, expanding modes of participation originating in the Greek Agora and in European notions of cafés as locales of political deliberation….(More)”

Fifty Shades of Manipulation


New paper by Cass Sunstein: “A statement or action can be said to be manipulative if it does not sufficiently engage or appeal to people’s capacity for reflective and deliberative choice. One problem with manipulation, thus understood, is that it fails to respect people’s autonomy and is an affront to their dignity. Another problem is that if they are products of manipulation, people’s choices might fail to promote their own welfare, and might instead promote the welfare of the manipulator. To that extent, the central objection to manipulation is rooted in a version of Mill’s Harm Principle: People know what is in their best interests and should have a (manipulation-free) opportunity to make that decision. On welfarist grounds, the norm against manipulation can be seen as a kind of heuristic, one that generally works well, but that can also lead to serious errors, at least when the manipulator is both informed and genuinely interested in the welfare of the chooser.
For the legal system, a pervasive puzzle is why manipulation is rarely policed. The simplest answer is that manipulation has so many shades, and in a social order that values free markets and is committed to freedom of expression, it is exceptionally difficult to regulate manipulation as such. But as the manipulator’s motives become more self-interested or venal, and as efforts to bypass people’s deliberative capacities becomes more successful, the ethical objections to manipulation become very forceful, and the argument for a legal response is fortified. The analysis of manipulation bears on emerging first amendment issues raised by compelled speech, especially in the context of graphic health warnings. Importantly, it can also help orient the regulation of financial products, where manipulation of consumer choices is an evident but rarely explicit concern….(More)”.

Medical Wikis Dedicated to Clinical Practice: A Systematic Review


New paper by Alexandre Brulet et al:  “Wikis may give clinician communities the opportunity to build knowledge relevant to their practice. The only previous study reviewing a set of health-related wikis, without specification of purpose or audience, globally showed a poor reliability…. Our aim was to review medical wiki websites dedicated to clinical practices…..Among 25 wikis included, 11 aimed at building an encyclopedia, five a textbook, three lessons, two oncology protocols, one a single article, and three at reporting clinical cases. Sixteen wikis were specialized with specific themes or disciplines. Fifteen wikis were using MediaWiki software as-is, three were hosted by online wiki farms, and seven were purpose-built. Except for one MediaWiki-based site, only purpose-built platforms managed detailed user disclosures. ….The 25 medical wikis we studied present various limitations in their format, management, and collaborative features. Professional medical wikis may be improved by using clinical cases, developing more detailed transparency and editorial policies, and involving postgraduate and continuing medical education learners….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Dilemma


New paper by Victor Naroditskiy, Nicholas R. Jennings, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Manuel Cebrian: “Crowdsourcing offers unprecedented potential for solving tasks efficiently by tapping into the skills of large groups of people. A salient feature of crowdsourcing—its openness of entry—makes it vulnerable to malicious behavior. Such behavior took place in a number of recent popular crowdsourcing competitions. We provide game-theoretic analysis of a fundamental tradeoff between the potential for increased productivity and the possibility of being set back by malicious behavior. Our results show that in crowdsourcing competitions malicious behavior is the norm, not the anomaly—a result contrary to the conventional wisdom in the area. Counterintuitively, making the attacks more costly does not deter them but leads to a less desirable outcome. These findings have cautionary implications for the design of crowdsourcing competitions…(More)”

Opinion Mining in Social Big Data


New Paper by Wlodarczak, Peter and Ally, Mustafa and Soar, Jeffrey: “Opinion mining has rapidly gained importance due to the unprecedented amount of opinionated data on the Internet. People share their opinions on products, services, they rate movies, restaurants or vacation destinations. Social Media such as Facebook or Twitter has made it easier than ever for users to share their views and make it accessible for anybody on the Web. The economic potential has been recognized by companies who want to improve their products and services, detect new trends and business opportunities or find out how effective their online marketing efforts are. However, opinion mining using social media faces many challenges due to the amount and the heterogeneity of the available data. Also, spam or fake opinions have become a serious issue. There are also language related challenges like the usage of slang and jargon on social media or special characters like smileys that are widely adopted on social media sites.
These challenges create many interesting research problems such as determining the influence of social media on people’s actions, understanding opinion dissemination or determining the online reputation of a company. Not surprisingly opinion mining using social media has become a very active area of research, and a lot of progress has been made over the last years. This article describes the current state of research and the technologies that have been used in recent studies….(More)”
 

The Internet’s hidden science factory


Jenny Marder at PBS Newshour: “….Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task. The work has been called microlabor, and the jobs, known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, range wildly. Some are tedious: transcribing interviews or cropping photos. Some are funny: prank calling someone’s buddy (that’s worth $1) or writing the title to a pornographic movie based on a collection of dirty screen grabs (6 cents). And others are downright bizarre. One task, for example, asked workers to strap live fish to their chests and upload the photos. That paid $5 — a lot by Mechanical Turk standards….
These aren’t obscure studies that Turkers are feeding. They span dozens of fields of research, including social, cognitive and clinical psychology, economics, political science and medicine. They teach us about human behavior. They deal in subjects like energy conservation, adolescent alcohol use, managing money and developing effective teaching methods.


….In 2010, the researcher Joseph Henrich and his team published a paper showing that an American undergraduate was about 4,000 times more likely than an average American to be the subject of a research study.
But that output pales in comparison to Mechanical Turk workers. The typical “Turker” completes more studies in a week than the typical undergraduate completes in a lifetime. That’s according to research by Rand, who surveyed both groups. Among those he surveyed, he found that the median traditional lab subject had completed 15 total academic studies — an average of one per week. The median Turker, on the other hand, had completed 300 total academic studies — an average of 20 per week….(More)”

Scenario Planning Case Studies Using Open Government Data


New Paper by Robert Power, Bella Robinson, Lachlan Rudd, and Andrew Reeson: “The opportunity for improved decision making has been enhanced in recent years through the public availability of a wide variety of information. In Australia, government data is routinely made available and maintained in the http://data.gov.au repository. This is a single point of reference for data that can be reused for purposes beyond that originally considered by the data custodians. Similarly a wealth of citizen information is available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Combining this data allows informed decisions to be made through planning scenarios.”

We present two case studies that demonstrate the utility of data integration and web mapping. As a simple proof of concept the user can explore different scenarios in each case study by indicating the relative weightings to be used for the decision making process. Both case studies are demonstrated as a publicly available interactive map-based website….(More)”

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: How smarter use of technology and data can deliver real reform of local government


Policy Exchange (UK): “Local authorities could save up to £10billion by 2020 through smarter and more collaborative use of technology and data.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined highlights how every year councils lose more than £1 billion by failing to identify where fraud has taken place. The paper also sheds light on how a lack of data sharing and collaboration between many local authorities, as well as the use of bespoke IT systems, keeps the cost of providing public services unsustainably high.
The report sets out three ways in which local authorities could not only save billions of pounds, but also provide better, more coordinated public services:

  1. Using data to predict and prevent fraud. Each year councils lose in excess of £1.3 billion through Council Tax fraud, benefit fraud and housing tenancy fraud (such as illegal subletting). By collecting and analysing data from numerous different sources, it is possible to predict where future violations are most likely to occur and direct investigative teams to respond to them first.
  2. Sharing data between neighbouring councils. Sharing data would reveal where it might be beneficial for two or more neighbouring LAs to merge one or more services. For example, if one council spends £5m each year on combating a particular issue, such as investigating food safety violations, fly-tipping or pest control, it may be more cost-effective to hire the services of a neighbouring council that has a far greater incidence of that same issue.
  3. Phasing out costly bespoke IT systems. Rather than each LA independently designing or commissioning its own apps and online services (such as paying for council tax or reporting noisy neighbours), an ‘app store’ should be created where individuals, businesses or other organisations can bid to provide them. The services created could then be used by dozens – or even hundreds – of LAs, creating economies of scale that bring down prices for all.

Since 2008, councils have shouldered the largest spending cuts of any part of the public sector – despite providing 80% of local public services – and face a funding shortfall of £12.4 billion by 2020. Some are doing admirably well under this extreme financial pressure, developing innovative schemes using data to ensure that they scale back spending but continue to provide vital public services. For example, Leeds, Yorkshire and Humber are developing a shared platform for digital services needed by all three councils. Similarly, a collaboration of public sector organisations in and around Hampshire and the Isle of Wight is developing ways of sharing data and helping neighbouring councils to share content and data through the Hampshire Hub.
FULL Report

The story of the sixth myth of open data and open government


Paper by Ann-Sofie Hellberg and Karin Hedström: “The aim of this paper is to describe a local government effort to realise an open government agenda. This is done using a storytelling approach….The empirical data is based on a case study. We participated in, as well as followed, the process of realising an open government agenda on a local level, where citizens were invited to use open public data as the basis for developing apps and external web solutions. Based on an interpretative tradition, we chose storytelling as a way to scrutinize the competition process. In this paper, we present a story about the competition process using the story elements put forward by Kendall and Kendall (2012).

….Our research builds on existing research by proposing the myth that the “public” wants to make use of open data. We provide empirical insights into the challenge of gaining benefits from open public data. In particular, we illustrate the difficulties in getting citizens interested in using open public data. Our case shows that people seem to like the idea of open public data, but do not necessarily participate actively in the data re-use process…..This study illustrates the difficulties of promoting the re-use of open public data. Public organisations that want to pursue an open government agenda can use our findings as empirical insights… (More)”