Sarah Vieweg‘s doctoral dissertation from the University of Colorado is a must-read for anyone interested in the use of twitter during crises. I read the entire 300-page study because it provides important insights on how automated natural language processing (NLP) can be applied to the Twittersphere to provide situational awareness following a sudden-onset emergency. Big thanks to Sarah for sharing her dissertation with QCRI. I include some excerpts below to highlight the most important findings from her excellent research.
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Patrick Meier has rapidly become the single most important focal point for the emergence of public intelligence in the public interest. This one post is so important that we have put it into a single ten page document for ease of study: Situational Awareness in Mass EmergencyWilliam Binney's Thin Thread–the cost effective meta data analytics program that respected privacy by drawing extraordinary insights from data in the aggregate–is now in the public domain. We view this as a tipping point.
In August 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of classified documents that cataloged the harsh realities of the war in Afghanistan, a group of friends – all computer experts – gathered at the New York City headquarters of the Internet company Bitly Inc. to try and make sense of the data.
The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night. Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.
This new book, Human Rights and Information Communication Technologies: Trends and Consequences of Use, promises to be a valuable resource to both practitioners and academics interested in leveraging new information & communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of human rights work. I had the distinct pleasure of co-authoring a chapter for this book with my good colleague and friend Jessica Heinzelman. We focused specifically on the use of crowdsourcing and ICTs for information collection and verification. Below is the Abstract & Introduction for our chapter.
Abstract
Accurate information is a foundational element of human rights work. Collecting and presenting factual evidence of violations is critical to the success of advocacy activities and the reputation of organizations reporting on abuses. To ensure credibility, human rights monitoring has historically been conducted through highly controlled organizational structures that face mounting challenges in terms of capacity, cost and access. The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) provide new opportunities to overcome some of these challenges through crowdsourcing. At the same time, however, crowdsourcing raises new challenges of verification and information overload that have made human rights professionals skeptical of their utility. This chapter explores whether the efficiencies gained through an open call for monitoring and reporting abuses provides a net gain for human rights monitoring and analyzes the opportunities and challenges that new and traditional methods pose for verifying crowdsourced human rights reporting.
The remarkable article below speaks for itself and, since it is long, I won't add much except strong encouragement for you to read it and a note that you can productively and enjoyably jump around in it (as I did) if you'd rather not progress from start to finish. Until I finished it, I didn't realize it was by Rebecca Solnit, whose PARADISE BUILT IN HELL I applauded in another recent posting. I need to track her more…
Here she writes about the rise of non-industrial food culture in the U.S. – especially urban agriculture and need-inspired DIY community gardening emerging in some of the most creative forms you can imagine. She comments on the many other products that can come from gardening other than food, including individual and collective connectivity and power. This trend, she notes, can generate – or distract from – the kind of revolutionary change that the U.S. urgently needs.
I am including this post in my Emerging EcoNomics series because food culture is a very big part of a radically different way of meeting our needs that is local, self-reliant, cooperative, innovative, socially and environmentally responsible and filled with gifting, sharing, and non-monetized work and exchange. That new economy is rising among us and all around us, from back yards to Main Street, from anarchists and indigents to academics and investors. Solnit's article explores how it is learning to handle food.
There are few things that give me more hope than this very powerful human economy.
An important and informative Tony Capaccio article (from Bloomberg; shown below) came out today. It summarizes (accurately) CBO's analysis of the budget effects of sequester: if sequester were to occur, the Pentagon's “base” (non-war) budget would be $469 billion for 2013. This is slightly above what was spent in 2006, and it is “larger than the average base budget during [the Reagan era of] the 1980s.” (See page vi and the table on page 11 of the attached.)
This amount is also significantly more than the Pentagon received, on average, during the Cold War, and it is multiples of the defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea–combined.
This $469 billion is the same amount that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta calls “doomsday,” that House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) calls a “catastrophe” and that others, both Democrats and Republicans, want to rescue the Pentagon from–by adding money above the $469 billion level.
These same people will likely argue that this new CBO report is a reason to spend more money, not less. The new report, “Long-Term Implications of the 2013 Future Years Defense Program,” is CBO's annual update of its re-estimate of what it would actually cost to implement the Pentagon's programs in the “FYDP,” in this case the 2013-2017 version. Basically, like its previous iterations, CBO says DOD would need $53 billion more than it received in 2012 for each of the next five years to accuratey fund all its programs, as currently planned and implemented.
Ergo, the spending advocates will argue DOD needs more money, not less. Their logic is that nothing in the Pentagon should change–other than the amount of money it receives.
How can it be that more money than Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush spent on defense, tens of billions more than spent all through the Cold War and multiples of what any conceivable combination of opponents spend on defense are all a catastrophe for the Pentagon?
Such questions are prompted by Tony Capaccio's article and the new CBO report.
When the House of Representatives debates the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for FY 2013 next week, will these basic questions to be asked, or will there be only more hysteria and table pounding for more money?
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government continues to lack intelligence and integrity on the fundamentals. The truth about defense spending, defense abuse of defense personnel, and defense corruption across all acquisition programs from small arms to big ships, is relatively easy to document–what is less easy is to get anyone to pay attention to the truth–the truth today lacks a broad constituency.
‘The idea behind www.gineagrotis.gr (the name means ‘Become a farmer’) is straightforward: citydwellers rent a patch of land from a farmer, tell him what they would like grown on it, and get their own fresh vegetables delivered to them weekly. And unlike some services elsewhere, it costs them on average 70% less than at the supermarket or greengrocers.
Phi Beta Iota: It is now documented that 47% of all food grown by mega-agriculture ends up as waste when combining the losses from farm to processing to sales to home to trash. The fastest was to cut waste from the system is to localize all money and most transactions.
