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Fighting Illegal Fishing With Big Data

Curated on March 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emily Matchar in Smithsonian: “In many ways, the ocean is the Wild West. The distances are vast, the law enforcement agents few and far between, and the legal jurisdiction often unclear. In this environment, illegal activity flourishes. Illegal fishing is so common that experts estimate as much as a third of fish sold in the U.S. was fished illegally. This illegal fishing decimates the ocean’s already dwindling fish populations and gives rise to modern slavery, where fishermen are tricked onto vessels and forced to work, sometimes for years.

A new use of data technology aims to help curb these abuses by shining a light on the high seas. The technology uses ships’ satellite signals to detect instances of transshipment, when two vessels meet at sea to exchange cargo. As transshipment is a major way illegally caught fish makes it into the legal supply chain, tracking it could potentially help stop the practice.

“[Transshipment] really allows people to do something out of sight,” says David Kroodsma, the research program director at Global Fishing Watch, an online data platform launched by Google in partnership with the nonprofits Oceana and SkyTruth. “It’s something that obscures supply chains. It’s basically being able to do things without any oversight. And that’s a problem when you’re using a shared resource like the oceans.”

Global Fishing Watch analyzed some 21 billion satellite signals broadcast by ships, which are required to carry transceivers for collision avoidance, from between 2012 and 2016. It then used an artificial intelligence system it created to identify which ships were refrigerated cargo vessels (known in the industry as “reefers”). They then verified this information with fishery registries and other sources, eventually identifying 794 reefers—90 percent of the world’s total number of such vessels. They tracked instances where a reefer and a fishing vessel were moving at similar speeds in close proximity, labeling these instances as “likely transshipments,” and also traced instances where reefers were traveling in a way that indicated a rendezvous with a fishing vessel, even if no fishing vessel was present—fishing vessels often turn off their satellite systems when they don’t want to be seen. All in all there were more than 90,000 likely or potential transshipments recorded.

Even if these encounters were in fact transshipments, they would not all have been for nefarious purposes. They may have taken place to refuel or load up on supplies. But looking at the patterns of where the potential transshipments happen is revealing. Very few are seen close to the coasts of the U.S., Canada and much of Europe, all places with tight fishery regulations. There are hotspots off the coast of Peru and Argentina, all over Africa, and off the coast of Russia. Some 40 percent of encounters happen in international waters, far enough off the coast that no country has jurisdiction.

The tracked reefers were flying flags from some 40 different countries. But that doesn’t necessarily tell us much about where they really come from. Nearly half of the reefers tracked were flying “flags of convenience,” meaning they’re registered in countries other than where the ship’s owners are from to take advantage of those countries’ lax regulations….(More)”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/fighting-illegal-fishing-big-data-180962321/#7eCwGrGS5v5gWjFz.99
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Denmark is appointing an ambassador to big tech

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

Matthew Hughes in The Next Web: “Question: Is Facebook a country? It sounds silly, but when you think about it, it does have many attributes in common with nation states. For starters, it’s got a population that’s bigger than that of India, and its 2016 revenue wasn’t too far from Estonia’s GDP. It also has a ‘national ethos’. If America’s philosophy is capitalism, Cuba’s is communism, and Sweden’s is social democracy, Facebook’s is ‘togetherness’, as corny as that may sound.

Given all of the above, is it really any surprise that Denmark is considering appointing a ‘big tech ambassador’ whose job is to establish and manage the country’s relationship with the world’s most powerful tech companies?

Denmark’s “digital ambassador” is a first. No country has ever created such a role. Their job will be to liase with the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook.

Given the fraught relationship many European countries have with American big-tech – especially on issues of taxation, privacy, and national security – Denmark’s decision to extend an olive branch seems sensible.

Speaking with the Washington Post, Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said, “just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries, we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and so on. The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark.”….(More)”

Why We Make Free, Public Information More Accessible

Curated on February 18, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gabi Fitz and Lisa Brooks in Philantopic: “One of the key roles the nonprofit sector plays in civil society is providing evidence about social problems and their solutions. Given recent changes to policies regarding the sharing of knowledge and evidence by federal agencies, that function is more critical than ever.

Nonprofits deliver more than direct services such as running food banks or providing shelter to people who are homeless. They also collect and share data, evidence, and lessons learned so as to help all of us understand complex and difficult problems.

Those efforts not only serve to illuminate and benchmark our most pressing social problems, they also inform the actions we take, whether at the individual, organizational, community, or policy level. Often, they provide the evidence in “evidence-based” decision making, not to mention the knowledge that social sector organizations and policy makers rely on when shaping their programs and services and individual citizens turn to inform their own engagement.

In January 2017, several U.S. government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture, were ordered by officials of the incoming Trump administration not to share anything that could be construed as controversial through official communication channels such as websites and social media channels. (See “Federal Agencies Told to Halt External Communications.”) Against that backdrop, the nonprofit sector’s interest in generating and sharing evidence has become more urgent than ever…..

Providing access to evidence and lessons learned is always important, but in light of recent events, we believe it’s more necessary than ever. That’s why we are asking for your help in providing — and preserving — access to this critical knowledge base.

Over the next few months, we will be updating and maintaining special collections of non-academic research on the following topics and need lead curators with issue expertise to lend us a hand. IssueLab special collections are an effort to contextualize important segments of the growing evidence base we curate, and are one of the ways we help visitors to the platform learn about nonprofit organizations and resources that may be useful to their work and knowledge-gathering efforts.

Possible special collection topics to be updated or curated:

→ Access to reproductive services (new)

→ Next steps for ACA

→ Race and policing

→ Immigrant detention and deportation

→ Climate change and extractive mining (new)

→ Veterans affairs

→ Gun violence

If you are a researcher, knowledge broker, or service provider in any of these fields of practice, please consider volunteering as a lead curator. …(More)”

Why you should donate your data (as well as your organs) when you die

Curated on February 18, 2017October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Martin Shaw, J. Valérie Grossand Thomas C. Erren in The Conversation: “Most people are aware they can donate their organs when they die. Doing so is very important: Each deceased donor can save several lives if he donates his organs and tissue and they are used for transplantation. Support for organ donation among members of the public is very high – at over 80 percent in some countries, even if many people have not yet gotten around to registering as an organ donor.

But organs aren’t the only thing that you can donate once you’re dead. What about donating your medical data?

Data might not seem important in the way that organs are. People need organs just to stay alive, or to avoid being on dialysis for several hours a day. But medical data are also very valuable – even if they are not going to save someone’s life immediately. Why? Because medical research cannot take place without medical data, and the sad fact is that most people’s medical data are inaccessible for research once they are dead.

For example, working in shifts can be disruptive to one’s circadian rhythms. This is now thought by some to probably cause cancer. A large cohort study involving tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals could help us to investigate different aspects of shift work, including chronobiology, sleep impairment, cancer biology and premature aging. The results of such research could be very important for cancer prevention. However, any such study could currently be hamstrung by the inability to access and analyze participants’ data after they die.

Data rights

While alive, people have certain rights that allow them to control what happens to data concerning them. For example, you can control whether your phone number and address are publicly available, request copies of data held on you by any public bodies and control what Facebook displays about you. When you are dead you will no longer be able to do any of these things, and control of your digital identity after death is a controversial topic. For example, families often cannot access deceased relative’s iTunes purchases, or access the dead person’s Facebook page to indicate that he or she is now deceased.

When it comes to medical records, things become even more complicated. While alive, many people give their consent to participate in medical research, whether it’s a clinical trial of a new drug or a longitudinal study based on medical records. Without their informed consent, such research cannot normally take place. Medical confidentiality is rightly regarded as extremely important, and it can be suspended only with patient consent.

In most jurisdictions, the same applies once persons are dead – with the added problem that consent cannot be obtained from them at that point.

But it would be a serious mistake to assume that everyone wants such strict data confidentiality to persist after death. Just as in life, some people would provide their data for medical research in order to develop new treatments that could help save people’s lives…(More)”

First They Got Sick, Then They Moved Into a Virtual Utopia

Curated on February 17, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kristen French at BackChannel: “…Today, Second Life is mostly forgotten by the broader public. An estimated 800,000 users are active on a monthly basis, according to Second Life parent company Linden Lab. That’s tiny compared to the 1.86 billion users who are active on Facebook each month.

Yet some communities have quietly continued to thrive in the virtual world. One of these is the disability community, a sundry group whose members include people who are blind or deaf, people with emotional handicaps such as autism and PTSD, and people with conditions that limit their mobility, such as Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis. There are no official tallies of their numbers, but Wagner James Au, who has written extensively about Second Life, estimates they may account for roughly 20 percent of users. Some active members estimate the number higher — at as much as 50 percent.

Unlike traditional gaming, Second Life is governed by few rules. Residents can customize their avatars in an infinite number of ways. They can fly and teleport as easily as they can walk, run, and jump. They can build bespoke homes and islands almost from scratch, and buy and sell wares in virtual stores — from biker gear to bird song to the ability to swim like a mermaid. They can marry a Second Life lover, take a rocket to the moon, or simply tuck themselves into bed at night.

For many disabled residents, who may spend 12 hours a day or more in Second Life, the most important moments and relationships of their lives happen inside the virtual world. For them, the fevered fantasies of a decade ago have become reality: Second Life is where they live.

Second Life’s largest community of disabled residents is clustered on Virtual Ability Island, which is actually an archipelago of five islands — two public and three “residential,” where people can rent or buy homes. It’s the creation of a woman named Alice Krueger. In 2007, Krueger joined Second Life with a few disabled friends she knew from online chat groups.

At the time, she was becoming more isolated as her multiple sclerosis progressed. She’d lost her job, had to drop her volunteer work, and couldn’t even attend her children’s school events. Her friends had stopped coming to see her. She was 58….

As Fran and Barbara tell it, the more time Fran spent in Second Life, the younger she felt in real life. Watching her avatar hike trails and dance gave her the confidence to try things in the physical world that she hadn’t tried in a half decade — like stepping off a curb or standing up without any help. These were small victories, but they felt significant to Fran.

Fran’s story began to spread after Draxtor, a Second Life video artist, filmed a Youtube video about her. (His “World Makers” video series profiles the people behind the avatars in Second Life.) In the film, Fran recounts her experience of Second Life as a quasi-fountain of youth. It also describes the fundraising Fran and Barbara have done for Parkinson’s research through Second Life and Fran’s weekly virtual Parkinson’s support group. Suddenly Fran had a following. Some in Second Life’s disability community now use the term “Fran effect” to describe improvements in real-life functioning that they attribute to their experience in Second Life.

This is not just magical thinking. Abundant research shows imagining movement, without actually moving the body, can have positive effects on motor skills, balance, and learning. The same effects are found in athletes and people who are healthy. Researchers have even found that people who have been paralyzed by severed spinal chord can stimulate regrowth and repair by envisioning their limbs moving over and over again — though it requires great effort and takes time. Studies suggest the therapeutic benefits of virtual reality extend beyond movement disorders — to chronic pain, cognitive functioning in people with ADHD and PTSD, and social skills for people on the autism spectrum….(More)”

Organizational crowdsourcing

Curated on February 17, 2017August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Morgan at Lippincott: “One of the most consequential insights from the study of organizational culture happens to have an almost irresistible grounding in basic common sense. When attempting to solve the challenges of today’s businesses, inviting a broad slice of an employee population yields more creative, actionable solutions than restricting the conversation to a small strategy or leadership team.

This recognition, that in order to uncover new business ideas and innovations, organizations must foster listening cultures and a meritocracy of best thinking, is fueling interest in organizational crowdsourcing — a discipline focused on employee connection, collaboration and ideation. Leaders at companies such as Roche, Bank of the West, Merck, Facebook and IBM, along with countless Silicon Valley companies for whom the “hackathon” is a major cultural event, have embraced employee crowdsourcing as a way to unlock organizational knowledge and promote empathy through technology.

The benefits of internal crowdsourcing are clear. First, it ensures that a company’s understanding of key change drivers and potential strategic priorities is grounded in the organization’s everyday reality and not abstract hypotheses developed by a team of strategists. Second, employees inherently believe in and want to own the implementation of ideas that they generate through crowdsourcing. These are ideas borne of the culture for the culture, and are less likely to run aground on the rocks of employee indifference….

How can this be achieved through organizational crowdsourcing?

There is no out-of-the-box solution. Each campaign has to organically surface areas of focus for further inquiries, develop a framework and set of questions to guide participation and ignite conversations, and then analyze and communicate results in a way that helps bring solutions to life. But there are some key principles that will maximize the success of any crowdsourcing effort.

Obtaining insightful and actionable answers boils down to asking the questions at just the right altitude. If they’re too high up, too broad and open-ended, the usefulness of the feedback will suffer. If the questions are too broad — “How can we make our workplace better?” — you will likely hear responses like “juice bars” and “massage therapists.” If the questions are too narrow — “What kind of lighting do we need in our conference rooms?” — you limit the opportunity of people to use their creativity. However, the answers are likely to spark a conversation if people are asked, “How can we create spaces that allow us to generate ideas more effectively?” Conversation will flow to discussion of breaking down physical barriers in office design, building social “hubs” and investing in live events that allow employees from disparate geographies to meet in person and solve problems together.

On the technology side, crowdsourcing platforms such as Jive Software and UserVoice, among others, make it easy to bring large numbers of employees together to gather, build upon and prioritize new ideas and innovation efforts, from process simplification and product development to the transformation of customer experiences. Respondents can vote on other people’s suggestions and add comments.

By facilitating targeted conversations across times zones, geographies and corporate functions, crowdsourcing makes possible a new way of listening: of harnessing an organization’s collective wisdom to achieve action by a united and inspired employee population. It’s amazing to see the thoughtfulness, precision and energy unleashed by crowdsourcing efforts. People genuinely want to contribute to their company’s success if you open the doors and let them.

Taking a page from the Silicon Valley hackathon, organizational crowdsourcing campaigns are structured as events of limited duration focused on a specific challenge or business problem….(More)”

Corporate Social Responsibility for a Data Age

Curated on February 15, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Proprietary data can help improve and save lives, but fully harnessing its potential will require a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data….

We live, as it is now common to point out, in an era of big data. The proliferation of apps, social media, and e-commerce platforms, as well as sensor-rich consumer devices like mobile phones, wearable devices, commercial cameras, and even cars generate zettabytes of data about the environment and about us.

Yet much of the most valuable data resides with the private sector—for example, in the form of click histories, online purchases, sensor data, and call data records. This limits its potential to benefit the public and to turn data into a social asset. Consider how data held by business could help improve policy interventions (such as better urban planning) or resiliency at a time of climate change, or help design better public services to increase food security.

Data responsibility suggests steps that organizations can take to break down these private barriers and foster so-called data collaboratives, or ways to share their proprietary data for the public good. For the private sector, data responsibility represents a new type of corporate social responsibility for the 21st century.

While Nepal’s Ncell belongs to a relatively small group of corporations that have shared their data, there are a few encouraging signs that the practice is gaining momentum. In Jakarta, for example, Twitter exchanged some of its data with researchers who used it to gather and display real-time information about massive floods. The resulting website, PetaJakarta.org, enabled better flood assessment and management processes. And in Senegal, the Data for Development project has brought together leading cellular operators to share anonymous data to identify patterns that could help improve health, agriculture, urban planning, energy, and national statistics.

Examples like this suggest that proprietary data can help improve and save lives. But to fully harness the potential of data, data holders need to fulfill at least three conditions. I call these the “the three pillars of data responsibility.”…

The difficulty of translating insights into results points to some of the larger social, political, and institutional shifts required to achieve the vision of data responsibility in the 21st century. The move from data shielding to data sharing will require that we make a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data. We must incorporate new levels of pro-activeness, and make often-unfamiliar commitments to transparency and accountability.

By way of conclusion, here are four immediate steps—essential but not exhaustive—we can take to move forward:

Data holders should issue a public commitment to data responsibility so that it becomes the default—an expected, standard behavior within organizations.
Organizations should hire data stewards to determine what and when to share, and how to protect and act on data.
We must develop a data responsibility decision tree to assess the value and risk of corporate data along the data lifecycle.
Above all, we need a data responsibility movement; it is time to demand data responsibility to ensure data improves and safeguards people’s lives…(More)”

Rules for a Flat World – Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy

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

Book by Gillian Hadfield: “… picks up where New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman left off in his influential 2005 book, The World is Flat. Friedman was focused on the infrastructure of communications and technology-the new web-based platform that allows business to follow the hunt for lower costs, higher value and greater efficiency around the planet seemingly oblivious to the boundaries of nation states. Hadfield peels back this technological platform to look at the ‘structure that lies beneath’—our legal infrastructure, the platform of rules about who can do what, when and how. Often taken for granted, economic growth throughout human history has depended at least as much on the evolution of new systems of rules to support ever-more complex modes of cooperation and trade as it has on technological innovation. When Google rolled out YouTube in over one hundred countries around the globe simultaneously, for example, it faced not only the challenges of technology but also the staggering problem of how to build success in the context of a bewildering and often conflicting patchwork of nation-state-based laws and legal systems affecting every aspect of the business-contract, copyright, encryption, censorship, advertising and more. Google is not alone. A study presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2011 found that for global firms, the number one challenge of the modern economy is increasing complexity, and the number one source of complexity is law. Today, even our startups, the engines of economic growth, are global from Day One.

Put simply, the law and legal methods on which we currently rely have failed to evolve along with technology. They are increasingly unable to cope with the speed, complexity, and constant border-crossing of our new globally inter-connected environment. Our current legal systems are still rooted in the politics-based nation state platform on which the industrial revolution was built. Hadfield argues that even though these systems supported fantastic growth over the past two centuries, today they are too slow, costly, cumbersome and localized to support the exponential rise in economic complexity they fostered. …

The answer to our troubles with law, however, is not the one critics usually reach for—to have less of it. Recognizing that law provides critical infrastructure for the cooperation and collaboration on which economic growth is built is the first step, Hadfield argues, to building a legal environment that does more of what we need it to do and less of what we don’t. …(More)”