A police officer sees a man searching for his coin under a streetlight. After helping for several minutes, the exasperated officer asks if the man is sure that he lost his coin there. The man says “No, I lost them in the park a few blocks down the street.” The incredulous officer asks why he’s searching under the streetlight. The man replies, “Well this is where the light is.”[1] This parable describes the “streetlight effect,” the observational bias that results from using the easiest way to collect information. The streetlight effect is an important criticisms leveled against the use of social media for emergency management. This certainly is a valid concern but one that needs to be placed into context.
I had the honor of speaking on a UN panel with Hans Rosling in New York last year. During the Q&A, Hans showed Member States a map of cell phone coverage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The map was striking. Barely 10% of the country seemed to have coverage. This one map shut down the entire conversation about the value of mobile technology for data collection during disasters. Now, what Hans didn’t show was a map of the DRC’s population distribution, which reveals that the majority of the country’s population lives in urban areas; areas that have cell phone coverage. Hans’s map was also static and thus did not convey the fact that the number cell phone subscribers increased by roughly 50% in the year leading up to the panel and ~50% again the year after.
Of course, the number of social media users in the DRC is far, far lower than the country’s 12.4 million unique cell phone subscribers. The map below, for example, shows the location of Twitter users over a 10 day period in October 2013. Now keep in mind that only 2% of users actually geo-tag their tweets. Also, as my colleague Kalev Leetaru recently discovered, the correlation between the location of Twitter users and access to electricity is very high, which means that every place on Earth that is electrified has a high probability of having some level of Twitter activity. Furthermore, Twitter was only launched 7 years ago compared to the first cell phone, which was built 30 years ago. So these are still early days for Twitter. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is clearly very little Twitter traffic in the DRC today. And just like the man in the parable above, we only have access to answers where an “electrified tweet” exists (if we restrict ourselves to the Twitter streetlight).
But this begs the following question, which is almost always overlooked: too little traffic for what? This study by Harvard colleagues, for example, found that Twitter was faster (and as accurate) as official sources at detecting the start and early progress of Cholera after the 2010 earthquake. And yet, the corresponding Twitter map of Haiti does not show significantly more activity than the DRC map over the same 10-day period. Keep in mind there were far fewer Twitter users in Haiti four years ago (i.e., before the earthquake). Other researchers have recently shown that “micro-crises” can also be detected via Twitter even though said crises elicit very few tweets by definition. More on that here.
But why limit ourselves to the Twitter streetlight? Only a handful of “puzzle pieces” in our Haiti jigsaw may be tweets, but that doesn’t mean they can’t complement other pieces taken from traditional datasets and even other social media channels. Remember that there are five times more Facebook users than Twitter users. In certain contexts, however, social media may be of zero added value. I’ve reiterated this point again in recent talks at the Council on Foreign Relation and the UN. Social media is forming a new “nervous system” for our planet, but one that is still very young, even premature in places and certainly imperfect in representation. Then again, so was 911 in the 1970′s and 1980′s as explained here. In any event, focusing on more developed parts of the system (like Indonesia’s Twitter footprint below) makes more sense for some questions, as does complementing this new nervous system with other more mature data sources such mainstream media via as GDELT as advocated here.
Diversity – Zacqary Adam Green: The earth-shattering thing about bitcoin isn’t its fixed money supply. It’s not the carefully tuned algorithm that keeps its growth at a steady rate, or the inability of a political body to play with its value. What’s new and government-toppling about bitcoin is that it’s a framework for starting a new economy.
Gold and silver have coexisted with governments and nation-states for thousands of years. If the economic properties of bitcoin — its finite supply — were inherently state-smashing, we’d be living in a very different world before the computer were even invented. No, bitcoin’s revolution isn’t what the Bitcoin Foundation calls its “non-political economy.”
In fact, you could argue that “non-political economy” is an oxymoron. If we define “political” as only referring to the workings of a state, then sure, you can have a non-political economy. But in the colloquial way that people often talk about “politics” — the “internal politics” of a workplace or social club, for example — there’s no such thing as a non-political economy. Any kind of money — whether it’s gold, dollars, bitcoin, or licking things to claim them as your own — only has any value if everyone in the economy agrees that it does.
What about supply and demand?
You could say that this observation doesn’t challenge the neoclassical economic theory of money very much at all. For example, bitcoin has value because there’s a demand for it, plus it’s in short supply. This is like saying that general relativity is consistent with the Genesis story, because the Earth could have been created in six “relative” days. It’s not technically wrong, just not a very helpful way of looking at the world.
[Money] is not a “thing” at all. You can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter. Units of currency are merely abstract units of measurement…If money is just a yardstick, what then does it measure? The answer [is] simple: debt. A coin is, effectively, an IOU.
Perhaps we can tinker with the word ‘money’ itself. It’s a mass noun, like you’d use for some kind of tangible substance, and it makes money sound like a ‘thing-in-itself’. As a kind of mental discipline, I prefer to use a different word: COGAS. It stands for ‘claims on goods and services’, which is all money really is.
So money is just a way of measuring who owes what: you give me something or do something for me, and now I owe you something equally valuable in return. That’s a social relation. And if a big group of people get together to agree on how their social relations should work, it suddenly starts to look political. Even the decision to use bitcoin requires the initial political decision to not screw with its politics in the future.
But wait just a minute. You see what just happened? A group of people decided that instead of using a national currency, with properties they don’t like and can’t control, decided to instead use bitcoin. That’s your revolution.
Bitcoin’s real contribution to the world is its source code. The blockchain, the network protocol, the cryptographic verification — anyone can take this and build a currency with any economic properties their community needs. I’m not convinced that bitcoin’s Austrian School properties can sustain a global (or even local) economy, but you know what? That’s okay. If I ever feel the bitcoin economy has become too unequal, unbalanced, or stagnant, it’s now trivial for me to start my own damn currency.
A single bitcoin belongs is a measurement like a centimeter, but the bitcoin community is a social network. People use bitcoin because other people they trade with use bitcoin. If my town is running low on bitcoin but has a lot of resources to share internally, we can create our own local currency to free up bitcoin for importing and exporting. Or I could join an online network of artists who work on one another’s projects, and we’d create our own internal currency that plays by whatever rules we need it to.
There is no perfect monetary system for every situation. Bitcoin is not going to be the one world currency, and it doesn’t need to be. A lot of people compare Bitcoin to the Internet, but it’s more like CompuServe. It’s the first of many digital, non-state currencies to come, that will all interoperate with each other in ways we can’t even dream of yet.
More on currency diversity
Definitely read the whole Brett Scott article quoted above. It’s a great piece on the nature of money, and what inventing a bunch of different currencies could mean.
“Arguing that Big Data isn’t all it’s cracked up to be is a straw man, pure and simple—because no one should think it’s magic to begin with.” Since citing this point in my previous post on Big Data for Disaster Response: A List of Wrong Assumptions, I’ve come across more mischaracterizations of Big (Crisis) Data. Most of these fallacies originate from the Ivory Towers; from social scientists who have carried out one or two studies on the use of social media during disasters and repeat their findings ad nauseam as if their conclusions are the final word on a very new area of research.
The mischaracterization of “Big Data and Sample Bias”, for example, typically arises when academics point out that marginalized communities do not have access to social media. First things first: I highly recommend reading “Big Data and Its Exclusions,” published by Stanford Law Review. While the piece does not address Big Crisis Data, it is nevertheless instructive when thinking about social media for emergency management. Secondly, identifying who “speaks” (and who does not speak) on social media during humanitarian crises is of course imperative, but that’s exactly why the argument about sample bias is such a straw man—all of my humanitarian colleagues know full well that social media reports are not representative. They live in the real world where the vast majority of data they have access to is unrepresentative and imperfect—hence the importance of drawing on as many sources as possible, including social media. Random sampling during disasters is a Quixotic luxury, which explains why humanitarian colleagues seek “good enough” data and methods.
The sharing economy movement is taking a new stride in the Arab World, and many platforms have taken the initiative of implementing the methods of collaborative economy. We dig deep and scrutinize the factors and the potential which could see this industry grow bigger in the region at a quick rate. Here we offer some successful stories.
The sharing economy in the Arab World has been witnessing an ongoing shift in the trend that has envisaged owning rather than accessing. This shift has turned things around, where now the value of the product in the Arab World day after another has become one of usage- not in its outright ownership anymore; as was the case with mainstream consumer models. Used products are more fashionable, thanks to the popularity of online platforms for buying and selling used goods.
People are also adopting what could be called collaborative lifestyles, and depend on each other in circulating and spreading all what occupy their daily interests and concerns like we have seen in the turbulent upheavals of the Arab Spring where the power of social media and its effect on society have accelerated the rate at which relationships develop and information is shared.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The sharing economy movement in the Arab World has seen a positive eruption in the recent few years, especially in the last one. We’re beginning to share more and more in the Arab world —; boats (fishfishme); skills (Taskty); carpooling (Kartag); swapping goods (Swaphood ) or selling used goods (krakeebegypt, dubizzle.com, Avito.ma In Morocco, a classified ads website has become the second most-visited website in the country. and Takemine the first online marketplace for peer-to-peer goods sharing in Dubai that will open (launch) soon.
It’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the powers that be: A sizable number of Americans think the undead would do a better job than our Representatives in Washington, D.C.
Americans ages 18 to 64 express slightly more confidence in zombies to run things than in the federal government. Seniors have more faith in the government.
Do over-the-top political attack ads work?
The political advertising cycle is about to heat up again and outrageous attack ads are already hitting the airwaves. A new political advertisement attacking San Diego mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher is raising eyebrows because it is from a political action committee: Zombies for Responsible Government:
Published reports said the documents filed with the San Diego City Clerk show the group was registered by David Bauer, a treasurer with the conservative Sacramento Valley Lincoln Club. However, those documents are not clear as to who is really behind the group.
Swarm Management: In many ways, success can be harder to handle than failure, because it sets expectations most people have never felt. These are some of the most important experiences on how to not make a wild success crash on its maiden flight into a painful failure.
Will future college degrees be based more on experience than classroom time?
