This summer UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon established the Independent Expert Advisory Group (IAEG) to provide concrete recommendations on how to achieve a Data Revolution for sustainable development. The IEAG report – due in early November – will be a crucial opportunity to explain how better quality and more timely data can transform development. The group is also looking for innovative approaches to data collection, publication, and use.
To solicit input from all communities of practice – particularly academia – the IAEG is hosting a public consultation at undatarevolution.org to solicit input into its work until October 15, 2015. In spite of the short notice, we strongly encourage you to submit your ideas and suggestions for the data revolution. Please share this message widely and provide your comments on the IEAG website.
My recent attendance at Findhorn's New Story Summit, combined with my reading of two books, Micah Sifry's The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet) and Darrell West's Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust, have come together to inspire a new book that seeks to unify the tribes with open source tools and aggregated money from four pots — UN SDG, Black Sheep Bilionaires, CEOs with angst, and USG. This is my winter project. North Atlantic Books, publisher of The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust, is on board contingent of course on my actually producing a useful book for their editor to work with — I cannot say enough good things about the editor that cut OSE in half and reduced all words by one syllable. Below is an early outline. I would be deeply grateful if you cared to read over the outline and give me feedback. At this point I am just asking two questions: 01 Do the phrases resonate? Should any of them be modified? 02 What am I missing — this is supposed to be a guide that brings us together for action rooted in spirituality, an end to lip service and me me me my hashtag or none fauz activism. What would you be looking for in such a book? Thank you for anything that might occur to you. I am most optimistic about the future. Blessings to you all, Robert
Colleagues Matthew Cua, Charles Devaney and others recently co-authored this excellent study on their latest use of low-cost UAVs/drones for post-disaster assessments, environmental development and infrastructure development. They describe the “streamlined workflow—flight planning and data acquisition, post-processing, data delivery and collaborative sharing,” that they created “to deliver acquired images and orthorectified maps to various stakeholders within [their] consortium” of partners in the Philippines. They conclude from direct hands-on experience that “the combination of aerial surveys, ground observations and collaborative sharing with domain experts results in richer information content and a more effective decision support system.”
Analyzing information sharing among the parts of a system can help explain its behaviors on different scales
Science News, 22 September 2014
EXTRACTS
It’s hard to find simple scientific principles from which to deduce all the multifaceted things that such complex systems do. But there is, for sure, one thing that they do all have in common. They all have a structure. And it’s by quantifying structure, three scientists suggest in an intriguing new paper, that complexity can be tamed.
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Supposedly, information theory provides the math for quantifying relationships among the parts of a system. “An information measure indicates how many questions one needs answered to remove uncertainty about the system components under consideration,” Allen (of Harvard), Stacey (Brandeis University) and Bar-Yam (New England Complex Systems Institute) point out. But traditionally, information measures have ignored the scale at which a system’s behavior is operating. Systems exhibit different behaviors on different scales. Only by incorporating the importance of scale can structure and complexity be properly accounted for, Allen, Stacey and Bar-Yam aver. An effective approach “requires an understanding of information theory in a multiscale context, a context that has not been developed in information theory nor in the statistical physics of phase transitions.”
Scale considerations are also often absent in the network approach, which emphasizes pairwise relationships (links) between two parts of a system. Network math can be tweaked to accommodate how pairwise links influence behaviors at higher scales, but it misses relationships that are intrinsically large-scale to begin with.
Working out the math to take scale more fully into account is at the core of Allen, Stacey and Bar-Yam’s new approach to coping with structure.
Each year, I teach a class called Advanced Analytic Techniques (AAT) here at Mercyhurst. It is a seminar-style class designed to allow grad students to dig into a variety of analytic techniques and (hopefully) master one or two.
The students get to pick both the topic and the technique on which they wish to focus so you wind up with some pretty interesting studies at the end. For example, we have applied the traditional business methodology of “best practices” to western European terrorist groups and the traditional military technique of Intelligence Preparation of The Battlefield to the casino industry.
Between 15th-19th of September, in the week leading up the first year anniversary of the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles, EFF and the coalition behind the Principles will be conducting a Week of Action explaining some of the key guiding principles for surveillance law reform. Every day, we'll take on a different part of the principles, exploring what’s at stake and what we need to do to bring intelligence agencies and the police back under the rule of law. You can read the complete set of posts online. The Principles were first launched at the 24th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on 20 September 2013. Let's send a message to Member States at the United Nations and wherever else folks are tackling surveillance law reform: surveillance law can no longer ignore our human rights. Follow our discussion on twitter with the hashtag: #privacyisaright
Human Rights Require a Secure Internet
The ease by which mass surveillance can be conducted is not a feature of digital networks; it's a bug in our current infrastructure caused by a lack of pervasive encryption. It's a bug we have to fix. Having the data of our lives sent across the world in such a way that distant strangers can (inexpensively and undetectably) collect, inspect and interfere with it, undermines the trust any of us can have in any of our communications. It breaks our faith not only with the organizations that carry that data for us, but the trust we have with each other. On a spied-upon network, we hold back from speaking, reading, trading and organizing together. The more we learn about the level of surveillance institutions like the NSA impose on the Net, the more we lose trust in the technology, protocols, institutions and opportunities of the Net.
