Wittgenstein, #TheDress and Google’s search for a bigger truth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert Shrimsley at the Financial Times: “As the world burnt with a BuzzFeed-prompted debate over whether a dress was black and blue or white and gold, the BBC published a short article posing the question everyone was surely asking: “What would Wittgenstein say about that dress?”

Wittgenstein died in 1951, so we cannot know if the philosopher of language, truth and context would have been a devotee of BuzzFeed. (I guess it depends on whether we are talking of the early or the late Ludwig. The early Wittgenstein, it is well known, was something of an enthusiast for LOLs, whereas the later was more into WTFs and OMGs.)

The dress will now join the pantheon of web phenomena such as “Diet Coke and Mentos” and “Charlie bit my finger”. But this trivial debate on perceived truth captured in miniature a wider issue for the web: how to distil fact from noise when opinion drowns out information and value is determined by popularity.

At about the same time as the dress was turning the air blue — or was it white? — the New Scientist published a report on how one web giant might tackle this problem, a development in which Wittgenstein might have been very interested. The magazine reported on a Google research paper about how the company might reorder its search rankings to promote sites that could be trusted to tell the truth. (Google produces many such papers a year so this is a long way short of official policy.) It posits a formula for finding and promoting sites with a record of reliability.

This raises an interesting question over how troubled we should be by the notion that a private company with its own commercial interests and a huge concentration of power could be the arbiter of truth. There is no current reason to see sinister motives in Google’s search for a better web: it is both honourable and good business. But one might ask how, for example, Google Truth might determine established truths on net neutrality….

The paper suggests using fidelity to proved facts as a proxy for trust. This is easiest with single facts, such as a date or place of birth. For example, it suggests claiming Barack Obama was born in Kenya would push a site down the rankings. This would be good for politics but facts are not always neutral. Google would risk being depicted as part of “the mainstream media”. Fox Search here we come….(More)”

Models and Patterns of Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper presented by Bran Knowles et al at the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing: “As in all collaborative work, trust is a vital ingredient of successful computer supported cooperative work, yet there is little in the way of design principles to help practitioners develop systems that foster trust. To address this gap, we present a set of design patterns, based on our experience designing systems with the explicit intention of increasing trust between stakeholders. We contextualize these patterns by describing our own learning process, from the development, testing and refinement of a trust model, to our realization that the insights we gained along the way were most usefully expressed through design patterns. In addition to a set of patterns for trust, this paper seeks to demonstrate of the value of patterns as a means of communicating the nuances revealed through ethnographic investigation….(More)“

‘Data.gov-in-a-box’: Delimiting transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Clare Birchall in the European Journal of Social Theory: “Given that the Obama administration still relies on many strategies we would think of as sitting on the side of secrecy, it seems that the only lasting transparency legacy of the Obama administration will be data-driven or e-transparency as exemplified by the web interface ‘data.gov’. As the data-driven transparency model is exported and assumes an ascendant position around the globe, it is imperative that we ask what kind of publics, subjects, and indeed, politics it will produce. Open government data is not just a matter concerning accountability but is seen as a necessary component of the new ‘data economy’. To participate and benefit from this info-capitalist-democracy, the data subject is called upon to be both auditor and entrepreneur. This article explores the implications of responsibilization, outsourcing, and commodification on the contract of representational democracy and asks if there are other forms of transparency that might better resist neoliberal formations and re-politicize the public sphere….(More)”

Breaking Public Administrations’ Data Silos. The Case of Open-DAI, and a Comparison between Open Data Platforms.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Raimondo Iemma, Federico Morando, and Michele Osella: “An open reuse of public data and tools can turn the government into a powerful ‘platform’ also involving external innovators. However, the typical information system of a public agency is not open by design. Several public administrations have started adopting technical solutions to overcome this issue, typically in the form of middleware layers operating as ‘buses’ between data centres and the outside world. Open-DAI is an open source platform designed to expose data as services, directly pulling from legacy databases of the data holder. The platform is the result of an ongoing project funded under the EU ICT PSP call 2011. We present the rationale and features of Open-DAI, also through a comparison with three other open data platforms: the Socrata Open Data portal, CKAN, and ENGAGE….(More)”

The Power of Heuristics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ideas42: “People are presented with many choices throughout their day, from what to have for lunch to where to go on vacation to how much money to save for emergencies. In many situations, this ability to choose enhances our lives. However, having too many choices can sometimes feel like a burden, especially if the choices are complex or the decisions we’re making are important. In these instances, we often make poor decisions, or sometimes even fail to choose at all. This can create real problems, for example when people fail to save enough for retirement or don’t make the right choices when it comes to staying healthy.
So why is it that so much effort has been spent trying to improve decision-making by giving people even more information about the choices available – often complicating the choice even further?
In a new paper by ideas42, ideas42 co-founder Antoinette Schoar of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and ideas42’s Saugato Datta argue that this approach of providing more information to help individuals make better decisions is flawed, “since it does not take into account the psychological or behavioral barriers that prevent people from making better decisions.” The solution, they propose, is using effective rules of thumb, or ‘heuristics’, to “enable people to make ‘reasonably good’ decisions without needing to understand all the complex nuances of the situation.” The paper explores the effectiveness of heuristics as a tool to simplify information during decision-making and help people follow through on their intentions. The authors offer powerful examples of effective heuristics-based methods in three domains: financial education, agriculture, and medicine….(More)”

Pantheon: A Dataset for the Study of Global Cultural Production

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Amy Zhao Yu, Shahar Ronen, Kevin Hu, Tiffany Lu, and César A. Hidalgo: “We present the Pantheon 1.0 dataset: a manually curated dataset of individuals that have transcended linguistic, temporal, and geographic boundaries. The Pantheon 1.0 dataset includes the 11,341 biographies present in more than 25 languages in Wikipedia and is enriched with: (i) manually curated demographic information (place of birth, date of birth, and gender), (ii) a cultural domain classification categorizing each biography at three levels of aggregation (i.e. Arts/Fine Arts/Painting), and (iii) measures of global visibility (fame) including the number of languages in which a biography is present in Wikipedia, the monthly page-views received by a biography (2008-2013), and a global visibility metric we name the Historical Popularity Index (HPI). We validate our measures of global visibility (HPI and Wikipedia language editions) using external measures of accomplishment in several cultural domains: Tennis, Swimming, Car Racing, and Chess. In all of these cases we find that measures of accomplishments and fame (HPI) correlate with an R2≥50, suggesting that measures of global fame are appropriate proxies for measures of accomplishment….(More)“

Measuring government impact in a social media world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Arthur Mickoleit & Ryan Androsoff at OECD Insights: “There is hardly a government around the world that has not yet felt the impact of social media on how it communicates and engages with citizens. And while the most prominent early adopters in the public sector have tended to be politicians (think of US President Barack Obama’s impressive use of social media during his 2008 campaign), government offices are also increasingly jumping on the bandwagon. Yes, we are talking about those – mostly bricks-and-mortar – institutions that often toil away from the public gaze, managing the public administration in our countries. As the world changes, they too are increasingly engaging in a very public way through social media.
Research from our recent OECD working paper “Social Media Use by Governments” shows that as of November 2014, out of 34 OECD countries, 28 have a Twitter account for the office representing the top executive institution (head of state, head of government, or government as a whole), and 21 have a Facebook account….
 
But what is the impact governments can or should expect from social media? Is it all just vanity and peer pressure? Surely not.
Take the Spanish national police force (e.g. on Twitter, Facebook & YouTube), a great example of using social media to build long-term engagement, trust and a better public service. The thing so many governments yearn for, in this case the Spanish police seem to have managed well.
Or take the Danish “tax daddy” on Twitter – @Skattefar. It started out as the national tax administration’s quest to make it easier for everyone to submit correct tax filings; it is now one of the best examples around of a tax agency gone social.
Government administrations can use social media for internal purposes too. The Government of Canada used public platforms like Twitter and internal platforms like GCpedia and GCconnex to conduct a major employee engagement exercise (Blueprint 2020) to develop a vision for the future of the Canadian federal public service.
And when it comes to raising efficiency in the public sector, read this account of a Dutch research facility’s Director who decided to stop email. Not reduce it, but stop it altogether and replace it with social media.
There are so many other examples that could be cited. But the major question is how can we even begin to appraise the impact of these different initiatives? Because as we’ve known since the 19th century, “if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” (quote usually attributed to Lord Kelvin). Some aspects of impact measurement for social media can be borrowed from the private sector with regards to presence, popularity, penetration, and perception. But it’s around purpose that impact measurement agendas will split between the private sector and government. Virtually all companies will want to calculate the return on social media investments based on whether it helps them improve their financial returns. That’s different in the public sector where purpose is rarely defined in commercial terms.
A good impact assessment for social media in the public sector therefore needs to be built around its unique purpose-orientation. This is much more difficult to measure and it will involve a mix of quantitative data (e.g. reach of target audience) and qualitative data (e.g. case studies describing tangible impact). Social Media Use by Governments proposes a framework to start looking at social media measurement in gradual steps – from measuring presence, to popularity, to penetration, to perception, and finally, to purpose-orientation. The aim of this framework is to help governments develop truly relevant metrics and start treating social media activity by governments with the same public management rigour that is applied to other government activities. You can see a table summarising the framework by clicking on the thumbnail below.
This is far from an exact science, but we are beginning the work collaborating with member and partner governments to develop a toolkit that will help decision-makers implement the OECD Recommendation on Digital Government Strategies, including on the issue of social media metrics…(More)”.

Urban technology analysis matrix

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Paper by  Pablo Emilio Branchi , Carlos Fernández-Valdivielso , and Ignacio Raúl Matías: “Our objective is to develop a method for better analyzing the utility and impact of new technologies on Smart Cities. We have designed a tool that will evaluate new technologies according to a three-pronged scoring system that considers the impact on physical space, environmental issues, and city residents. The purpose of this tool is to be used by city planners as part of a strategic approach to the implementation of a Smart City initiative in order to reduce unnecessary public spending and ensure the optimal allocation of city resources….

The paper provides a list of the different elements to be analyzed in Smart Cities in the form of a matrix and develops the methodology to evaluate them in order to obtain a final score for technologies prior to its application in cities….Traditional technological scenarios have been challenged, and Smart Cities have become the center of urban competitiveness. A lack of clarity has been detected in the way of describing what Smart Cities are, and we try to establish a methodology for urban policy makers to do so. As a dynamic process that affects several aspects, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed solution further. (More)”

 

We Need To Innovate The Science Business Model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Greg Satell at Forbes: “In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the man that led the nation’s scientific efforts during World War II, delivered a proposal to President Truman for funding scientific research in the post-war world.  Titled Science, The Endless Frontier, it led to the formation of the NSF, NIH, DARPA and other agencies….
One assumption inherent in Bush’s proposal was that institutions would be at the center of scientific life.  Scientists from disparate labs could read each others papers and meet at an occasional conference, but for the most part, they would be dependent on the network of researchers within their organization and those close by.
Sometimes, the interplay between institutions had major, even historical, impacts, such as John von Neumann’s sponsorship of Alan Turing, but mostly the work you did was largely a function of where you did it.  The proximity of Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, for example, played a major role in the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Yet today, digital technology is changing not only the speed and ease of how we communicate, but the very nature of how we are able to collaborate.  When I spoke to Jonathan Adams, Chief Scientist at Digital Science, which develops and invests in software that makes science more efficient, he noted that there is a generational shift underway and said this:

When you talk to people like me, we’re established scientists who are still stuck in the old system of institutions and conferences.  But the younger scientists are using technology to access networks and they do so on an ongoing, rather than a punctuated basis.  Today, you don’t have to go to a conference or write a paper to exchange ideas.

Evidence would seem to bear this out.  The prestigious journal Nature recently noted that the average scientific paper has four times as many authors as it did in the 1950’s, when Bush’s career was at its height.  Moreover, it’s become common for co-authors to work at far-flung institutions.  Scientific practice needs to adopt to this scientific reality.
There has been some progress in this area.  The Internet, in fact, was created for the the explicit purpose of scientific collaboration.  Yet still, the way in which scientists report and share their findings remains much the same as a century ago.
Moving From Publications To Platforms For Discovery
One especially ripe area for innovation is publishing.  Typically, a researcher with a new discovery waits six months to a year for the peer review process to run its course before the work can be published.  Even then, many of the results are questionable at best.  Nature recently reported that the overwhelming majority of studies can’t be replicated…(More)”

City Governments Are Using Yelp to Tell You Where Not to Eat

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Luca and Luther Lowe at HBR Blog: “…in recent years consumer-feedback platforms like TripAdvisor, Foursquare, and Chowhound have transformed the restaurant industry (as well as the hospitality industry), becoming important guides for consumers. Yelp has amassed about 67 million reviews in the last decade. So it’s logical to think that these platforms could transform hygiene awareness too — after all, people who contribute to review sites focus on some of the same things inspectors look for.

It turns out that one way user reviews can transform hygiene awareness is by helping health departments better utilize their resources. The deployment of inspectors is usually fairly random, which means time is often wasted on spot checks at clean, rule-abiding restaurants. Social media can help narrow the search for violators.
Within a given city or area, it’s possible to merge the entire history of Yelp reviews and ratings — some of which contain telltale words or phrases such as “dirty” and “made me sick” — with the history of hygiene violations and feed them into an algorithm that can predict the likelihood of finding problems at reviewed restaurants. Thus inspectors can be allocated more efficiently.
In San Francisco, for example, we broke restaurants into the top half and bottom half of hygiene scores. In a recent paper, one of us (Michael Luca, with coauthor Yejin Choi and her graduate students) showed that we could correctly classify more than 80% of restaurants into these two buckets using only Yelp text and ratings. In the next month, we plan to hold a contest on DrivenData to get even better algorithms to help cities out (we are jointly running the contest). Similar algorithms could be applied in any city and in other sorts of prediction tasks.
Another means for transforming hygiene awareness is through the sharing of health-department data with online review sites. The logic is simple: Diners should be informed about violations before they decide on a destination, rather than after.
Over the past two years, we have been working with cities to help them share inspection data with Yelp through an open-data standard that Yelp created in 2012 to encourage officials to put their information in places that are more useful to consumers. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Raleigh, and Louisville, Kentucky, customers now see hygiene data alongside Yelp reviews. There’s evidence that users are starting to pay attention to this data — click-through rates are similar to those for other features on Yelp ….

And there’s no reason this type of data sharing should be limited to restaurant-inspection reports. Why not disclose data about dentists’ quality and regulatory compliance via Yelp? Why not use data from TripAdvisor to help spot bedbugs? Why not use Twitter to understand what citizens are concerned about, and what cities can do about it? Uses of social media data for policy, and widespread dissemination of official data through social media, have the potential to become important means of public accountability. (More)