Tracing our every move: Big data and multi-method research

by Ericka Menchen-Trevino 30/04/2015

There is a lot of excitement about ‘big data’, but the potential for innovative work on social and cultural topics far outstrips current data collection and analysis techniques.

by Ericka Menchen-Trevino 30/04/2015

Using anything digital always creates a trace. The more digital ‘things’ we interact with, from our smart phones to our programmable coffee pots, the more traces we create. When collected together these traces become big data. These collections of traces can become so large that they are difficult to store, access and analyse with today’s hardware and software. But as a social scientist I’m interested in how this kind of information might be able to illuminate something new about societies, communities, and how we interact with one another, rather than engineering challenges. Social scientists are just beginning to grapple with the technical, ethical, and methodological challenges that stand in the way of this promised enlightenment. Most of us are not trained to write database queries or regular expressions, or even to communicate effectively with those who are trained. Ethical questions arise with informed consent when new analytics are created. Even a data scientist could not know the full implications of consenting to data collection that may be analysed with currently unknown techniques. Furthermore, social scientists tend to specialise in a particular type of data and analysis, surveys or experiments and inferential statistics, interviews and discourse analysis, participant observation and ethnomethodology, and so on. Collaborating across these lines is often difficult, particularly between quantitative and qualitative approaches. Researchers in these areas tend to ask different questions and accept different kinds of answers as valid. Yet trace data does not fit into the quantitative/qualitative binary. The trace of a tweet includes textual information, often with links or images and metadata about who sent it, when and sometimes where they were. The traces of web browsing are also largely textual with some audio/visual elements. The quantity of these textual traces often necessitates some kind of initial quantitative filtering, but it doesn’t determine the questions or approach. The challenges are important to understand and address because the promise of new insight into social life…

Mapping, Social Data Science

After dinner: the best time to create 1.5 million dollars of ground-breaking science

by Khairunnisa Haji Ibrahim 24/04/2015

The Zooniverse is a predominant example of citizen science projects that have enjoyed particularly widespread popularity and traction online.

by Khairunnisa Haji Ibrahim 24/04/2015

Count this! In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA's Great Observatories—the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory—collaborated to produce this image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy. Image: Nasa Marshall Space Flight Center

Since it first launched as a single project called Galaxy Zoo in 2007, the Zooniverse has grown into the world’s largest citizen science platform, with more than 25 science projects and over 1 million registered volunteer citizen scientists. While initially focused on astronomy projects, such as those exploring the surfaces of the moon and the planet Mars, the platform now offers volunteers the opportunity to read and transcribe old ship logs and war diaries, identify animals in nature capture photos, track penguins, listen to whales communicating and map kelp from space. These projects are examples of citizen science; collaborative research undertaken by professional scientists and members of the public. Through these projects, individuals who are not necessarily knowledgeable about or familiar with science can become active participants in knowledge creation (such as in the examples listed in the Chicago Tribune: Want to aid science? You can Zooniverse). The Zooniverse is a predominant example of citizen science projects that have enjoyed particularly widespread popularity and traction online. Although science-public collaborative efforts have long existed, the Zooniverse is a predominant example of citizen science projects that have enjoyed particularly widespread popularity and traction online. In addition to making science more open and accessible, online citizen science accelerates research by leveraging human and computing resources, tapping into rare and diverse pools of expertise, providing informal scientific education and training, motivating individuals to learn more about science, and making science fun and part of everyday life. While online citizen science is a relatively recent phenomenon, it has attracted considerable academic attention. Various studies have been undertaken to examine and understand user behaviour, motivation, and the benefits and implications of different projects for them. For instance, Sauermann and Franzoni’s analysis of seven Zooniverse projects (Solar Stormwatch, Galaxy Zoo Supernovae, Galaxy Zoo Hubble, Moon Zoo, Old Weather, The Milkyway Project, and Planet Hunters) found that 60 percent of volunteers never return to a project after finishing…

Politics & Government

Wikipedia sockpuppetry: linking accounts to real people is pure speculation

by taha yasseri 23/04/2015

Conservative chairman Grant Shapps is accused of sockpuppetry on Wikipedia, but this former Wikipedia admin isn’t so sure the evidence stands up.

by taha yasseri 23/04/2015

Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps gives a speech on free trade at the Institute of Directors in London.

Reposted from The Conversation. Wikipedia has become one of the most highly linked-to websites on the internet, with countless others using it as a reference. But it can be edited by anyone, and this has led to occasions where errors have been widely repeated—or where facts have been distorted to fit an agenda. The chairman of the UK’s Conservative Party, Grant Shapps, has been accused of editing Wikipedia pages related to him and his rivals within the party. The Guardian newspaper claims Wikipedia administrators blocked an account on suspicions that it was being used by Shapps, or someone in his employ. Wikipedia accounts are anonymous, so what is the support for these claims? Is it a case of fair cop or, as Shapps says in his defence, a smear campaign in the run-up to the election? Edits examined This isn’t the first time The Guardian has directed similar accusations against Shapps around edits to Wikipedia, with similar claims emerging in September 2012. The investigation examines a list of edits by three Wikipedia user accounts: Hackneymarsh, Historyset, and Contribsx, and several other edits from users without accounts, recorded only as their IP addresses—which the article claimed to be “linked” to Shapps. The Hackneymarsh account made 12 edits in a short period in May 2010. The Historyset account made five edits in a similar period. All the edits recorded by IP addresses date to between 2008 and 2010. Most recently, the Contribsx account has been active from August 2013 to April 2015. First of all, it is technically impossible to conclusively link any of those accounts or IP addresses to a real person. Of course you can speculate—and in this case it’s clear that these accounts seem to demonstrate great sympathy with Shapps based on the edits they’ve made. But no further information about the three usernames can be made public by the Wikimedia Foundation, as per its privacy policies. However, the case is different for the IP addresses. Using GeoIP or…

Development, Economics

A promised ‘right’ to fast internet rings hollow for millions stuck with 20th-century speeds

by Bianca Reisdorf 24/03/2015

Tell those living in the countryside about the government’s promised “right to fast internet” and they’ll show you 10 years of similar, unmet promises.

by Bianca Reisdorf 24/03/2015

All geared up but no internet connection. Anne-Marie Oostveen, Author provided

Reposted from The Conversation. In response to the government’s recent declarations that internet speeds of 100Mb/s should be available to “nearly all homes” in the UK, a great many might suggest that this is easier said than done. It would not be the first such bold claim, yet internet connections in many rural areas still languish at 20th-century speeds. The government’s digital communications infrastructure strategy contains the intention of giving customers the “right” to a broadband connection of at least 5Mb/s in their homes. There’s no clear indication of any timeline for introduction, nor what is meant by “nearly all homes” and “affordable prices”. But in any case, bumping the minimum speed to 5Mb/s is hardly adequate to keep up with today’s online society. It’s less than the maximum possible ADSL1 speed of 8Mb/s that was common in the mid-2000s, far less than the 24Mb/s maximum speed of ADSL2+ that followed, and far, far less than the 30-60Mb/s speeds typical of fibre optic or cable broadband connections available today. In fact a large number of rural homes still are not able to access even the previously promised 2Mb/s minimum of the Digital Britain report in 2009. Serious implications As part of our study of rural broadband access we interviewed 27 people from rural areas in England and Wales about the quality of their internet connection and their daily experiences with slow and unreliable internet. Only three had download speeds of up to 6Mb/s, while most had connections that barely reached 1Mb/s. Even those who reported the faster speeds were still unable to carry out basic online tasks in a reasonable amount of time. For example using Google Maps, watching online videos, or opening several pages at once would require several minutes of buffering and waiting. Having several devices share the connection at a time wasn’t even an option. So the pledge for a “right” to 5Mb/s made by the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, is as meaningless as…

Health, Social Data Science, Wellbeing

How can big data be used to advance dementia research?

by admin 16/03/2015

As dementia is believed to be influenced by a wide range of social, environmental and lifestyle-related factors, this behavioural data has the potential to improve early diagnosis

by admin 16/03/2015

Image by K. Kendall of "Sights and Scents at the Cloisters: for people with dementia and their care partners"; a program developed in consultation with the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Columbia University, and the Alzheimer's Association.

Dementia affects about 44 million individuals, a number that is expected to nearly double by 2030 and triple by 2050. With an estimated annual cost of USD 604 billion, dementia represents a major economic burden for both industrial and developing countries, as well as a significant physical and emotional burden on individuals, family members and caregivers. There is currently no cure for dementia or a reliable way to slow its progress, and the G8 health ministers have set the goal of finding a cure or disease-modifying therapy by 2025. However, the underlying mechanisms are complex, and influenced by a range of genetic and environmental influences that may have no immediately apparent connection to brain health. Of course medical research relies on access to large amounts of data, including clinical, genetic and imaging datasets. Making these widely available across research groups helps reduce data collection efforts, increases the statistical power of studies and makes data accessible to more researchers. This is particularly important from a global perspective: Swedish researchers say, for example, that they are sitting on a goldmine of excellent longitudinal and linked data on a variety of medical conditions including dementia, but that they have too few researchers to exploit its potential. Other countries will have many researchers, and less data. ‘Big data’ adds new sources of data and ways of analysing them to the repertoire of traditional medical research data. This can include (non-medical) data from online patient platforms, shop loyalty cards, and mobile phones — made available, for example, through Apple’s ResearchKit, just announced last week. As dementia is believed to be influenced by a wide range of social, environmental and lifestyle-related factors (such as diet, smoking, fitness training, and people’s social networks), and this behavioural data has the potential to improve early diagnosis, as well as allow retrospective insights into events in the years leading up to a diagnosis. For example, data on changes in shopping…

Ethics, Governance & Security

Should we use old or new rules to regulate warfare in the information age?

by Mariarosaria MT. Taddeo 09/03/2015

Information has now acquired a pivotal role in contemporary warfare, for it has become both an effective target and a viable means.

by Mariarosaria MT. Taddeo 09/03/2015

Critical infrastructures such as electric power grids are susceptible to cyberwarfare, leading to economic disruption in the event of massive power outages. Image courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Before the pervasive dissemination of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the use of information in war waging referred to intelligence gathering and propaganda. In the age of the information revolution things have radically changed. Information has now acquired a pivotal role in contemporary warfare, for it has become both an effective target and a viable means. These days, we use ‘cyber warfare’ to refer to the use of ICTs by state actors to disruptive (or even destructive) ends. As contemporary societies grow increasingly dependant on ICTs, any form of attack that involves their informational infrastructures poses serious risks and raises the need for adequate defence and regulatory measures. However, such a need contrasts with the novelty of this phenomenon, with cyber warfare posing a radical shift in the paradigm within which warfare has been conceived so far. In the new paradigm, impairment of functionality, disruption, and reversible damage substitute for bloodshed, destruction, and casualties. At the same time, the intangible environment (the cyber sphere), targets, and agents substitute for beings in blood and flesh, firearms, and physical targets (at least in the non-kinetic instances of cyber warfare). The paradigm shift raises questions about the adequacy and efficacy of existing laws and ethical theories for the regulation of cyber warfare. Military experts, strategy planners, law- and policy-makers, philosophers, and ethicists all participate in discussions around this problem. The debate is polarised around two main approaches: (1) the analogy approach, and (2) the discontinuous approach. The former stresses that the regulatory gap concerning cyber warfare is only apparent, insofar as cyber conflicts are not radically different from other forms of conflicts. As Schmitt put it “a thick web of international law norms suffuses cyber-space. These norms both outlaw many malevolent cyber-operations and allow states to mount robust responses”. The UN Charter, NATO Treaty, Geneva Conventions, the first two Additional Protocols, and Convention restricting or prohibiting the use of certain conventional weapons are…

Interviews, Politics & Government

How do the mass media affect levels of trust in government?

by Greg Porumbescu 04/03/2015

Challenging the conventional wisdom that suggests greater exposure to mass media outlets will result in more negative perceptions of the public sector.

by Greg Porumbescu 04/03/2015

The South Korean Government, as well as the Seoul Metropolitan Government have gone to great lengths to enhance their openness, using many different ICTs. Seoul at night by jonasginter.

Ed: You examine the influence of citizens’ use of online mass media on levels of trust in government. In brief, what did you find? Greg: As I explain in the article, there is a common belief that mass media outlets, and especially online mass media outlets, often portray government in a negative light in an effort to pique the interest of readers. This tendency of media outlets to engage in ‘bureaucracy bashing’ is thought, in turn, to detract from the public’s support for their government. The basic assumption underpinning this relationship is that the more negative information on government there is, the more negative public opinion. However, in my analyses, I found evidence of a positive indirect relationship between citizens’ use of online mass media outlets and their levels of trust in government. Interestingly, however, the more frequently citizens used online mass media outlets for information about their government, the weaker this association became. These findings challenge conventional wisdom that suggests greater exposure to mass media outlets will result in more negative perceptions of the public sector. Ed: So you find that that the particular positive or negative spin of the actual message may not be as important as the individuals’ sense that they are aware of the activities of the public sector. That’s presumably good news—both for government, and for efforts to ‘open it up’? Greg: Yes, I think it can be. However, a few important caveats apply. First, the positive relationship between online mass media use and perceptions of government tapers off as respondents made more frequent use of online mass media outlets. In the study, I interpreted this to mean that exposure to mass media had less of an influence upon those who were more aware of public affairs, and more of an influence upon those who were less aware of public affairs. Therefore, there is something of a diminishing returns aspect to this relationship. Second, this…

Collective Action, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Don’t knock clickivism: it represents the political participation aspirations of the modern citizen

by Max Halupka 01/03/2015

Is an action only ‘political’ if it takes place in the mainstream political arena; involving government, politicians or voting?

by Max Halupka 01/03/2015

Following a furious public backlash in 2011, the UK government abandoned plans to sell off 258,000 hectares of state-owned woodland. The public forest campaign by 38 Degrees gathered over half a million signatures.

How do we define political participation? What does it mean to say an action is ‘political’? Is an action only ‘political’ if it takes place in the mainstream political arena; involving government, politicians or voting? Or is political participation something that we find in the most unassuming of places, in sports, home and work? This question, ‘what is politics’ is one that political scientists seem to have a lot of trouble dealing with, and with good reason. If we use an arena definition of politics, then we marginalise the politics of the everyday; the forms of participation and expression that develop between the cracks, through need and ingenuity. However, if we broaden our approach as so to adopt what is usually termed a process definition, then everything can become political. The problem here is that saying that everything is political is akin to saying nothing is political, and that doesn’t help anyone. Over the years, this debate has plodded steadily along, with scholars on both ends of the spectrum fighting furiously to establish a working understanding. Then, the Internet came along and drew up new battle lines. The Internet is at its best when it provides a home for the disenfranchised, an environment where like-minded individuals can wipe free the dust of societal disassociation and connect and share content. However, the Internet brought with it a shift in power, particularly in how individuals conceptualised society and their role within it. The Internet, in addition to this role, provided a plethora of new and customisable modes of political participation. From the onset, a lot of these new forms of engagement were extensions of existing forms, broadening the everyday citizen’s participatory repertoire. There was a move from voting to e-voting, petitions to e-petitions, face-to-face communities to online communities; the Internet took what was already there and streamlined it, removing those pesky elements of time, space and identity. Yet, as the Internet continues…

Economics, Governance & Security, Interviews

Does a market-approach to online privacy protection result in better protection for users?

by Yong Jin Park 25/02/2015

Examining the voluntary provision by commercial sites of information privacy protection and control under the self-regulatory policy of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

by Yong Jin Park 25/02/2015

Ed: You examined the voluntary provision by commercial sites of information privacy protection and control under the self-regulatory policy of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In brief, what did you find? Yong Jin: First, because we rely on the Internet to perform almost all types of transactions, how personal privacy is protected is perhaps one of the important issues we face in this digital age. There are many important findings: the most significant one is that the more popular sites did not necessarily provide better privacy control features for users than sites that were randomly selected. This is surprising because one might expect “the more popular, the better privacy protection”—a sort of marketplace magic that automatically solves the issue of personal privacy online. This was not the case at all, because the popular sites with more resources did not provide better privacy protection. Of course, the Internet in general is a malleable medium. This means that commercial sites can design, modify, or easily manipulate user interfaces to maximise the ease with which users can protect their personal privacy. The fact that this is not really happening for commercial websites in the U.S. is not only alarming, but also suggests that commercial forces may not have a strong incentive to provide privacy protection. Ed: Your sample included websites oriented toward young users and sensitive data relating to health and finance: what did you find for them? Yong Jin: Because the sample size for these websites was limited, caution is needed in interpreting the results. But what is clear is that just because the websites deal with health or financial data, they did not seem to be better at providing more privacy protection. To me, this should raise enormous concerns from those who use the Internet for health information seeking or financial data. The finding should also inform and urge policymakers to ask whether the current non-intervention policy (regarding commercial websites…

Economics, Governance & Security

Will digital innovation disintermediate banking—and can regulatory frameworks keep up?

by Peteris Zilgalvis 19/02/2015

The role of finance in enabling the development and implementation of new ideas is vital—an economy’s dynamism depends on innovative competitors challenging and replacing complacent players in the markets.

by Peteris Zilgalvis 19/02/2015

Many of Europe’s economies are hampered by a waning number of innovations, partially attributable to the European financial system’s aversion to funding innovative enterprises and initiatives. Image by MPD01605.

Innovation doesn’t just fall from the sky. It’s not distributed proportionately or randomly around the world or within countries, or found disproportionately where there is the least regulation, or in exact linear correlation with the percentage of GDP spent on R&D. Innovation arises in cities and countries, and perhaps most importantly of all, in the greatest proportion in ecosystems or clusters. Many of Europe’s economies are hampered by a waning number of innovations, partially attributable to the European financial system’s aversion to funding innovative enterprises and initiatives. Specifically, Europe’s innovation finance ecosystem lacks the necessary scale, plurality, and appetite for risk to drive investments in long-term initiatives aiming to produce a disruptive new technology. Such long-term investments are taking place more in the rising economies of Asia than in Europe. While these problems could be addressed by new approaches and technologies for financing dynamism in Europe’s economies, financing of (potentially risky) innovation could also be held back by financial regulation that focuses on stability, avoiding forum shopping (i.e., looking for the most permissive regulatory environment), and preventing fraud, to the exclusion of other interests, particularly innovation and renewal. But the role of finance in enabling the development and implementation of new ideas is vital—an economy’s dynamism depends on innovative competitors challenging, and if successful, replacing complacent players in the markets. However, newcomers obviously need capital to grow. As a reaction to the markets having priced risk too low before the financial crisis, risk is now being priced too high in Europe, starving the innovation efforts of private financing at a time when much public funding has suffered from austerity measures. Of course, complementary (non-bank) sources of finance can also help fund entrepreneurship, and without that petrol of money, the engine of the new technology economy will likely stall. The Internet has made it possible to fund innovation in new ways like crowd funding—an innovation in finance itself—and there is no…

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