Policy by the Numbers: Explore Future

Celebrating data-driven innovation in Brussels

Monday, April 8, 2013

Sylwia Giepmans-Stepien is a Public Policy and Government Relations Analyst for Google in Brussels.We now create as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. And this rich flow is destined to accelerate. McKinsey projects 40% growth annually in global data generated. To showcase the potential of data for Europe’s economy and society, we recently teamed up with the European Innovation and Technology Foundation, the Bavarian Representation to the European Union and Euronews.The forum, Data-Driven Innovation: The New Imperative for Growth, debated how data can improve the delivery of public services, provide accurate healthcare diagnosis, and generate higher business productivity. Androulla Vassiliou, European commissioner for education, culture and multilingualism, and Neelie Kroes, European commissioner in charge of the digital agenda, both called for unleashing a Big Data revolution in Europe. "This is the new frontier of the information age," Vassiliou said. "In the current path to stimulate European growth and jobs, there has never been a more critical time to harness the potential of data."

Androulla Vassilou

Alfred Spector

Senior representatives of the education, research, policy and business communities presented compelling evidence of how data could address big societal challenges. Computer-powered DNA sequencing open the possibility of accelerating medical diagnoses. Online college courses could revolutionize education. Google's own Vice President for Research Alfred Spector showed how we use data for products such as Google Translate.Data also is powering entrepreneurs. New online business models make sense out of data include social media power startups such as news organiser Storify. Its founder Xavier Damman explained how established organisations and top politicians such as BBC, the White House or UK Prime Minister David Cameron use his company’s services to share knowledge from different online data sources, including Twitter, Google+, and traditional media websites.The concluding panel looked at the ethical aspects of collecting, sharing and using data. Among other examples, they discussed how organizations such as DataKind are bringing together data scientists and NGOs to address social problems ranging from dirty water to urban sprawl. While speakers stressed that data-driven innovation is not based exclusively on data about people, they acknowledge, that all data regardless the source and type requires making tough ethical choices. The Innovation Forum aims to inject data-driven innovation on the Brussels policy agenda. As well as focusing on privacy and data protection, we also need to encourage the unprecedented economic potential of data.

Data on the changing role of libraries in the digital age

Friday, February 8, 2013

Derek Slater is a policy manager at Google.Ten years ago, the U.S. Congress looked at Internet access in libraries as "no more than a technological extension of the book stack." In fact, the Supreme Court cited this statement in the United States v. American Library Association decision, upholding government regulations requiring that, as a condition of funding for Internet access in the library, libraries must install content filtering software. The Court asserted that "A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order … for Web publishers to express themselves."Ten years later, data suggests otherwise. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center shows that today Internet access plays a much bigger role in libraries. Over a quarter of Americans say they get Internet access at libraries, with "African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely than whites to access the internet at their local library, as are parents of minor children, those under age 50, those living in households earning less than $30,000, and those with at least some college experience." What's more, a Gates Foundation report finds that "people use library computers to perform both life-changing and routine tasks," both in discovering information and as a means of expression. For example, over a half-million Americans used library computers to start a local club or nonprofit group.What impact has Congress' initial judgment and policy had as technology use has changed? It's clear that all filtering tools are overbroad and block some lawful speech, but we’re not aware of any studies analyzing what the economic and social impact of filtering has been. As Congress and states look at how to support libraries in a time of shrinking government budgets, this empirical question is worth tackling.

Silicon Valley Works to Improve Career Pathways for Community College Students

Friday, November 30, 2012

[Cross-posted from Homeroom, the Department of Education's blog]Joe Barison is the Director of Communications and Outreach for ED's San Francisco Regional Office.With a putting green, 18 cafeterias, gardens and even a giant statue of a dinosaur, one may not associate Google's massive headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., as a place where Department of Education officials, educators and business leaders come together to discuss career pathways for community college students.Yet during a recent stop by U.S. Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter, the novelty of Google's complex were the last thing on the mind as leaders from Google, Cisco Systems, Lockheed Martin—Space Systems and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group came together for a panel discussion on innovative strategies to improve career pathways for community college students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).The 90-minute discussion—in front of a large audience comprised of regional industry leaders, community college presidents, K-12 educators, local policymakers and students—included Kanter's detailed description of the Obama Administration's support of STEM education at community colleges, highlighting the $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training grant program that funds the pairing of community colleges with workforce partners to ensure that graduates are career-ready with the knowledge and skills that employers need.After the formal program and a Q-and-A session ended, many of the participants stayed to continue the discussion. Dennis Cima, senior vice president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, an association of 380 Silicon Valley employers, talked about the value of linking K-12 schools, community colleges and businesses."We know how important it is to create connections between education and industry," Cima said. "Because once those connections are made, then industry has the ability to really help education fill its own needs. This was an opportunity to open people’s eyes about how important those public-private partnerships are."Google’s director of education and university relations, Maggie Johnson, who was a panelist, said that she found the session to be a good start because it brought the right people together."I really liked the part that came out around how there are very many different sectors that need to come together and coordinate in order to really make something happen," Johnson said. "We got the community colleges in the room; we have industry; we have government. So at least we got everybody in the room. Where it goes from here, we’ll have to see."Kanter's assessment of the value was similar to Johnson's. "I think it was the beginning of what I hope will become a call to action, so the different sectors of education, business, philanthropy, government, labor, and community partners can come together to say, 'How can these stakeholders—working together across sectors—architect a plan for this region to lead the way, through innovation, to make sure that every student gets the best possible education and is prepared, college-and-career ready, for the jobs now and for the future?'"

Data Hangout on Air #3

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Andy BrooksRobbie AllenAutomated Insights

Creation Versus Consumption: Technology Education and Estonia

Monday, October 15, 2012

Adrienne St. Aubin is a Policy Analyst at Googlewrite code starting in first gradeour major tech/education initiativesEstonia has fully embraced the Internetsomething that's literally just a joke in the USonly half of Estonia’s 1.4M citizensto learn to readto learn plumbinglearn computational thinkingoverwhelmingly male and white

Alleviating Youth Unemployment Through Entrepreneurship

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Brittany Smith is a Policy Associate at Google.Unemployment numbers are pretty grim all around, but unemployment among youth is a particularly worrisome trend. In the United States, numbers from a recent jobs report indicate how hard it is for teens and early twenty-somethings to find work. The chart below, from The Atlantic, sums up the findings:

In Europe, youth unemployment numbers are even worse. As of May 2012, nearly 11 million young people were out of work across OECD countries. Youth unemployment has reached an alarming rate of 17.1%, more than double the unemployment rate affecting the general population. Greece and Spain have fared the worst, burdened with youth unemployment rates of more than 50%. And the near-term outlook is not much better: In, 2015, approximately 660 million young people will either be working or looking for work—an increase of 7.5% over the 2003 figure. What can we do to change course? We can start by creating an economic environment that nurtures entrepreneurship. While not a cure-all for general economic malaise, data supports the assertion that entrepreneurs are net job creators in an era with high unemployment and an economy that can’t create jobs at a sufficient pace to employ everyone entering the workforce. As new entrants to the workforce, youth and recent college graduates are particularly susceptible to slow job creation. Entrepreneurship is critical for economic growth, and its appeal to youth is something that policy initiatives should address. The notion of entrepreneurship as the solution to youth unemployment is gathering steam globally. One recent article describes tech startups as the “last refuge of Spanish optimism,” and another on CNN as being nearly the only option for young university graduates in Greece, who are pioneering a “digital renaissance” and aiming to reinvent the Greek economy. These articles point to an inspiring trend: Not only does entrepreneurship get young people into jobs, it means they’re creating jobs for everyone else, too. The challenge of realizing the economic benefits of youth entrepreneurship is (at least) two-fold: individuals and society need to embrace the reality of risk and the fear of failure, and we need an increased institutional capacity for rewarding entrepreneurial attitudes and cultivating an environment that makes entrepreneurs successful and enables recovery from failure. Innovative sites like Young Entrepreneur and Teens in Tech are playing a vital role in this regard, creating tools, resources, and networks for youth to create innovative businesses. By bringing resources tailored toward youth entrepreneurs online, youth can find and join a community of other entrepreneurial youth with whom to vet ideas, learn new skills, and fail and start over. Increasing the number and scope of programs like these will be important for bringing more youth into the entrepreneurial fold, shifting cultures and attitudes about what it means to be an entrepreneurial and what it means to be successful.While the global economy struggles to recover and many young people are unable to secure employment, encouraging entrepreneurship is a sustainable policy objective that can ensure growth. If you’ve seen other sites, companies, or resources dedicated to this issue, let us know in the comments!

Visualization: A National Report Card

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Design firm Kiss Me I'm Polish put together a set of infographics for the American Schools section of the October 2012 issue of The Atlantic. "A National Report Card" visually summarizes the "educational successes and failures of the past year" in the United States across a range of measures and metrics. This set of charts from the spread shows the improvement in urban school test scores over the last several years:

Download the spread as a PDF here.

Calming Parental Anxiety While Empowering Our Digital Youth

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Stephen Balkam is Founder and CEO of Family Online Safety Institute.Our kids are no longer growing up in a world where everything takes place in the backyard or neighborhood streets. Rather, their worlds are increasingly digital. They live in the world of social media, where boundaries are constantly being pushed and more information than ever is being shared.It can be unnerving to allow our children to interact in an atmosphere where bullying, sexting and online predators make the nightly news. The media senses our fears and has played up the negative impact of the digital world. However, these reactions are not necessarily healthy or helpful. The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) seeks to provide a researched- focused voice in the conversation surrounding families and technology. Our latest white paper, "Calming Parental Anxiety While Empowering Our Digital Youth," helps parents and teachers guide kids in this new digital world by calling out common myths and providing principles to help families make good decisions about their kids’ online activities.Consider this: more bullying takes place face-to-face than through social media. A recent study shows that 18% of students say that they have been bulled in person, whereas only 5% have been bullied online. Additionally, it is commonly believed that social media can make kids feel isolated and depressed. However, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 78% of teens reported positive personal outcomes from social networking and 65% say they have had interactions through social media that have made them feel good about themselves.In order to help kids and teens make smart decisions online, we need to guide them through the digital world. We need to help them build media literacy skills so they can have the effective digital training they need to become confident digital citizens. By focusing on the good of social networks, we can provide our children the freedom to use the Internet for good while fostering an environment that provides safeguards that families are comfortable with.This year, FOSI launched a new website, A Platform for Good (PfG), emphasizing the power of the Internet to promote collaboration and learning. PfG equips parents and teachers to help teens responsibly navigate the Internet—using the Internet to promote good and connect online. PfG provides tools for teachers to use in the classrooms and resources for parents to connect with their teens to help them become responsible digital citizens.Now, we need to work together to provide our children with a strong foundation that will enable them to convert digital citizenship to a means of doing "good" across their entire lives. We all have a role, from policymakers to parents, teachers to industry leaders—even kids! Take responsibility for your actions to create a safe place, conducive to collaboration and good.The Family Online Safety Institute is here to help embrace the challenges that come with the new digital world. There is no doubt that caution should be practiced, but by coming together and using the Internet as a learning tool, we can help ensure a positive, enriching online environment for all.

Using "Big Data" to Shape Public Policy

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Thomas Byrne is a Research Assistant Professor at the School of Social Policy and Practice at University of Pennsylvania.The term “big data” is often associated with the private sector, but an increasing number of governments on all levels are harnessing their vast stores of administrative data. These data, collected for the day-to-day operational purposes of public programs, provide a valuable basis for creating more effective and efficient public policies and programs. Places ranging from Philadelphia to Washington State have created integrated data systems (IDS) that link administrative records from their health, mental health, education and other human service systems into one data warehouse. Such systems provide policymakers to comprehensive and timely information that is often crucial for understanding—and in turn addressing—complicated problems. In short, as this report notes, IDS allow for “leaps of understanding” that can only occur when an issue is examined from the perspective of multiple public systems or agencies, instead of only one.My colleagues—Dennis Culhane, Stephen Metraux, Manuel Moreno and Halil Toros—and I recently completed a study, funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, that is an example of how IDS can apply the power of big data to improve public sector services. Our study used an IDS created by Los Angeles County’s Office of the Chief Executive—called the Enterprise Linkages Project (ELP)—to examine young adult outcomes for 23,000 youth who had a history of involvement in the juvenile justice and/or foster care systems. As the graphic below shows, the results were quite striking. Within four years of being discharged from the juvenile justice system or from foster care (roughly when they were between 18-24), youth used $15,986 and $12,532 worth of county funded, health, mental health, drug/alcohol treatment, criminal justice and public welfare services, respectively. For those youth who had been involved in the juvenile justice and foster care systems—called "crossover youth"—the total was more than twice as high.

The study, which provides information at a scope that would have proven impossible in the absence of the ELP, points to the need for increased and more effective forms of assistance to facilitate successful transitions to adulthood by youth who are exiting juvenile systems of care. We anticipate that our findings will inform the ongoing implementation of state legislation that will extend the age of eligibility for child welfare services in California.Studies such as ours can be linked across sites as well to provide a body of evidence on a particular issue that is of more general value to a broader range of jurisdictions and policymakers. As a report from the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy points out, IDS like the ELP can be a cost-effective means to conduct scientifically rigorous studies of programs and interventions that promote positive outcomes among youth aging out of juvenile systems of care, and other populations.From a broader perspective, the demand for the unique type of information that comes from IDS is only likely to grow. The current fiscal environment makes it imperative that public resources are used in a cost-effective manner. This memo from the federal Office of Management and Budget makes it clear that evidence-based policy is on the rise, and that IDS and administrative data will have a large role to play in supplying the necessary evidence. That should be viewed as encouraging news by stakeholders from across the board.

GetRaised: Examining a Data-driven Solution

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Matt Wallaert is Lead Scientist at GetRaised.com.Most of the time, when we talk about “policy by the numbers,” we are talking about using data to identify the existence of a problem. But I want to tell a somewhat different kind of story: that numbers can be not just identifiers, but solutions.The story still starts with identification. A few years ago, I was the Head of Product at Thrive, a personal financial management site (like Mint.com) that was sold to LendingTree. Our main job was to help people change their financial behaviors: spend less, save more. But when we looked at our data, we found women were falling far behind in savings simply because they made only about 75% of what men did. This meant that even if we created the best budget program imaginable, women would still fall behind unless we could raise their income level to that of men.Enter data as the solution. We created GetRaised.com, a free, entirely data-driven product to help women ask for, and successfully get, raises. On the surface, the process is relatively simple: figure out if someone is underpaid, help them generate a letter to do something about it, track the progress and process around that letter, from handing it over to a manager to meeting to discuss.But the true engine of change in GetRaised is the data that sits behind it. Figuring out if someone is underpaid means pulling from a mashup up of data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and user-contributed data. Indeed, one of the hardest parts developing GetRaised was translating the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) used by the BLS into job titles that match up with the titles that women are likely to enter on the site.Generating a raise letter means more data. Besides the salary numbers, we scrape job postings, and match similar open jobs in a user’s market that pay a higher salary than what the user currently receives. And we used large survey data from our interviews with human resources professionals to figure out how much is the right amount to ask for in a raise. (Statistically speaking, 8% is the sweet spot.)The headline value of GetRaised, of course, is not the math that drives it but the math that comes out: to date, approximately 70% of women who turn in a GetRaised Raise Request letter receive their raise, and the average raise is ~$6,500. But for data scientists and policy makers, perhaps more important GetRaised's success is that it exists at all.As was well said at the recent DataGotham conference in New York City, analysis is useless without action. While the majority of data analysis in academia is used to drive larger policies, products themselves can be based on data, not just as methods of problem detection but as actual solutions. We need more systems that need increasingly smaller amounts of human intervention to introduce increasingly larger amounts of change. Indeed, I can imagine a GetRaised that already knows your job title and salary data, and that monitors your work output to quantify it in a raise request. Data can be more than just looking at the patterns and problems; data-driven solutions can be developed for problems we already know exist.

What Gets Measured Gets Noticed: The need for more gender data in policy & development

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Policy and development initiatives to address women’s economic empowerment face staunch barriers in a lack of relevant and reliable data to inform advocacy for gender-sensitive policy. “Sex-disaggregated data” offers essential insight into the ways that policies on paper come to life in the experiences of a particular community. Such data also allows for parties to make appropriate decisions and accurate conclusions. The lack of such data precludes the advancement of informed and high-impact gender policies, thus impedes the integration of more women into the global economy. Gender equality and female empowerment are increasingly recognized as core development objectives and key to effective outcomes across a range of issues, from food security to climate change. Thus, demand for sex-disaggregated data will only increase over time.The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report provides a measure of economic participation and opportunity, but as noted here, we still need more data. We need data that captures women's economic status across countries, data that takes into account variables such as participation in the informal economy, and data around access to assets such as land or finance. Steps in the right direction are in place—there exist key initiatives focused on improving the availability of gender indicators, centralizing data held by different entities, identifying gaps in knowledge and new indicators, and expanding national capacity to collect and analyze sex-disaggregated data. Knowing where these gaps exist is important, and the onus to fill them falls jointly on the public and private sectors to expand capacity for gathering and consuming sex-disaggregated data for policy and business objectives.Data shows policymakers how to better integrate women into economies and can be a motivating factor behind the advancement of gender-inclusive development. According to the World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development, gender equality is simply smart economics. The report asserts that greater gender equality can enhance productivity, improve development outcomes for the next generation, and make institutions more representative. At 40% of the global labor force and more than half of the world’s university students, overall productivity will increase if women’s education and economic participation are enhanced. Greater gender equality also enhances and improves other development outcomes. For example, eliminating barriers against women working in certain sectors or occupations could increase output by raising women’s participation and labor productivity by as much as 25 percent in some countries—just through better allocation of womens’ skills and talent.In order to take advantage of accelerated growth that women’s economic participation can bring to economies, it is important to design and implement policies that empower women to overcome existing barriers. In remarks about the gender data gap, US Secretary of State Clinton recalled an old adage that what gets measured gets noticed, and it couldn’t be more fitting. Data provides evidence for not only what’s needed but also what’s possible. When we consider what’s possible by economically empowering women, data must inform what we do and how we do it.

Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century [HBR]

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Thomas Davenport (Harvard Business School, Deloitte) and DJ Patil (Greylock Partners) co-authored a piece for Harvard Business Review titled "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century," about the explosion of data science professionals onto the business scene. As businesses move to capture the value of data to drive innovation and decision-making, the role of the data scientist becomes essential to business strategy. In the piece, Davenport and Patil provide a profile of the data scientist: Data scientists’ most basic, universal skill is the ability to write code. This may be less true in five years’ time, when many more people will have the title “data scientist” on their business cards. More enduring will be the need for data scientists to communicate in language that all their stakeholders understand—and to demonstrate the special skills involved in storytelling with data, whether verbally, visually, or—ideally—both.

But we would say the dominant trait among data scientists is an intense curiosity—a desire to go beneath the surface of a problem, find the questions at its heart, and distill them into a very clear set of hypotheses that can be tested. This often entails the associative thinking that characterizes the most creative scientists in any field. For example, we know of a data scientist studying a fraud problem who realized that it was analogous to a type of DNA sequencing problem. By bringing together those disparate worlds, he and his team were able to craft a solution that dramatically reduced fraud losses.

Perhaps it’s becoming clear why the word “scientist” fits this emerging role. Experimental physicists, for example, also have to design equipment, gather data, conduct multiple experiments, and communicate their results. Thus, companies looking for people who can work with complex data have had good luck recruiting among those with educational and work backgrounds in the physical or social sciences. Some of the best and brightest data scientists are PhDs in esoteric fields like ecology and systems biology. George Roumeliotis, the head of a data science team at Intuit in Silicon Valley, holds a doctorate in astrophysics. A little less surprisingly, many of the data scientists working in business today were formally trained in computer science, math, or economics. They can emerge from any field that has a strong data and computational focus.

It’s important to keep that image of the scientist in mind—because the word “data” might easily send a search for talent down the wrong path. As Portillo told us, “The traditional backgrounds of people you saw 10 to 15 years ago just don’t cut it these days.” A quantitative analyst can be great at analyzing data but not at subduing a mass of unstructured data and getting it into a form in which it can be analyzed. A data management expert might be great at generating and organizing data in structured form but not at turning unstructured data into structured data—and also not at actually analyzing the data. And while people without strong social skills might thrive in traditional data professions, data scientists must have such skills to be effective.The article goes on to discuss recruitment strategies, including how to attract and maintain data scientists, and close with a summary of the extraordinarily lucrative future of the evolving role.

Lessons from Stockholm

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Benoît Felten is co-founder of Diffraction Analysis.Toward the end of the last century, governments around the world who had partially or completely owned telecommunication networks liberalized the telecoms market. For the most part, they exited it by selling their stakes in incumbent operators. The prevailing vision at the time was that the private market would provide.A few decades on, it has become apparent that while the private market has thrived, it hasn't invested in renewing the underlying telecommunications networks as much as it should have. As the copper networks that the incumbents inherited age and strain under the end-user demand for bandwidth, many communities are left wondering if they will ever get state-of-the-art service—and how.Incumbent operators have focused their investments on better broadband in highly profitable areas, either disregarding or divesting from more expensive or less promising locales. The result is a growing digital divide that separates broadband users into haves and have-nots. As a consequence, the question of whether local governments should get involved in broadband—and therefore telecommunications—has risen again.In 1994, the municipality of Stockholm launched what was at the time a novel fiber infrastructure initiative called Stokab. Stokab now passes close to 400,000 homes and offices in the Greater Stockholm area and neutrally and transparently wholesales the dark fiber to all market players. It has become a beacon and a blueprint for many municipal fiber projects around the world since. Yet, until now, the project hadn’t been examined in detail, particularly from a financial perspective. A white paper I recently wrote for research firm Diffraction Analysis, "Stockholm's Stokab: A blueprint for ubiquitous fiber connectivity?," offers such an examination.The paper shows that Stokab developed at no cost to the taxpayer, and, in fact, generated significant direct benefits to the municipality over its 17 years of existence. The cumulative profit generated by the operation from 1997 to 2010 is over 750 million Swedish Kronas ($114 million US), and in recent years the profit has grown significantly despite heavy investment in network extension. In addition, while harder to quantify financially, Stokab has generated indirect benefits as well: higher connectivity for citizens and an increase in the attractiveness of Stockholm to tech companies and, more generally, international businesses. Stokab has also allowed the City of Stockholm to embark on a massive redesign of their public services and internal processes, leveraging the near ubiquitous connectivity to improve services they deliver to citizens and lower costs.Could Stokab be replicated today? Maybe not in large cities, where incumbents and their competitors have been cherry picking business and residential areas with fiber, therefore degrading the overall business model for a municipal broadband project. However, in Tier 2 cities, which are largely untouched by the modernization of the access network, the opportunity exists. Political consensus, a bold approach, and a willingness to collaborate with private players are keys to replicating Stockholm's success.

Androids in Space: Reducing the Cost of Space Exploration

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Alex Kozak is a Policy Analyst at Google.Space exploration has traditionally been a costly endeavor. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), which recently landed the Curiosity rover on Mars to investigate climate and geology of the planet’s surface, ran a total cost of about $2.5 billion USD.Part of the cost associated with launching a project of this magnitude results from strict project design requirements. Launching a robot into space is no simple task, and the technical components must be designed not only to weather the extreme conditions of outer space but also to minimize risk of failure. Add to that the number of components needed to reach the depths of the solar system—which require coordination between diverse and specialized teams—and you end up with long lead times and higher overall costs. Proposals for the design Curiosity rover design, for example, were developed nearly a decade before its eventual launch.You would be hard pressed to find people who disagree with the principle of exploring space. Those who object to space exploration tend to cite the high cost of development relative to the return on investment. So what are some ways that we might consider reducing the overall cost of exploration?NASA is exploring cheaper and faster models of technology development. Its new PhoneSat program examines how "off-the-shelf" consumer software and hardware could be used as a platform for space exploration: NASA PhoneSat engineers also are changing the way missions are designed by rapidly prototyping and incorporating existing commercial technologies and hardware. This approach allows engineers to see what capabilities commercial technologies can provide, rather than trying to custom-design technology solutions to meet set requirements. Engineers can rapidly upgrade the entire satellite's capabilities and add new features for each future generation of PhoneSats.This new model stands to change the face of space exploration. Rather than making several large bets on technical solutions with little room for error or risk, engineers could explore opportunities to rapidly prototype, iterate, and launch less costly robotics. Future space programs might make hundreds of smaller bets with individually higher chances of failure, but this would effectively lower the aggregate chance of failure over large bets designed to minimize risk within a singular technology.

Visualization: Education Policy and Data Center

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The Education Policy and Data Center, a collaborative effort including WorldBank and UNESCO, has a robust part of their website dedicated to data visualizations and tools for exploring global education data. In particular, their pre-generated dynamic maps leverage Google Earth to show sub-national economic indicators. Users can also search a library of graphs and maps to use in reports and presentations. For example, the image below is a pre-generated map of the secondary gross attendance rate for Peru, 2007.

tutorials

Data collaboration for social good

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Governments making more data available to the public could create a new, data-driven society in which we all govern and are governed more effectively. Cities could use the data to become more efficient, governments could improve their shared practices, and both new kinds of citizen engagement and private sector opportunities could take root.Yet, open data does not immediately mean useable data, and few know what to actually do with the growing wealth of open government data. Contributing this problem is the fact that important stakeholders are often not plugged into what data is available or why—that is, the data scientists who know how to process and analyze data aren't necessarily asking the right questions, while the nonprofits and foundations who ask the right questions don't necessarily know how to process and analyze.At DataKind, we've started working toward solutions. We were thrilled to support the Safety Data Initiative recently launched by the White House Office of Science Technology and Policy and the US Department of Transportation to hold a DataDive in Chicago in May, a weekend event at which non-profits, data scientists, and government employees worked together to solve social problems with non-profit and open government data.We've teamed non-profits with data scientists before, but this event added a new element. The White House and the US Department of Transportation had just recently launched safety.data.gov, a government portal to an extensive amount of safety data, including data sets on everything from pedestrian safety to food safety. Members of the White House team worked with non-profits ahead of time to bring safety data into their problem definitions. By fostering cross-domain collaboration from the beginning, non-profits could ask their questions of the data, government pointed stakeholders to the "right" data, and data scientists found answers to the non-profits' questions. We invited three high-impact non-profits who could benefit from this work:

The Chicago Red Cross wanted to use data to understand where fires were likely to occur. We gave them data on local building safety and fire occurrences, and they built a map showing locations of likely fires and analyzed the demographics of those neighborhoods (shown below).

Children's Memorial Hospital wanted to build a database of youth violence prevention programs. We pointed them to data sets on violence in the city, from which they were able to scrape together an automated list of youth violence prevention programs.

Enlace wanted to understand the correlations between education and crime in their neighborhood of Little Village. From 311 call data about abandoned buildings, Enlace got their first looks into how neighborhood wellness correlated with their efforts.

More important than the visualizations and insights that came out over the weekend were the collaborations. These micro-communities of non-profits, government officials, and statisticians made for dream teams that were able to utilize government data to solve real problems. Many of the teams continue to work together and will carry the projects beyond the weekend. We are only at the beginning of a revolution in data’s valuable applications for social change. We are heartened to see the government working not to be the authority, but an equal player and a leader in coaxing the value out of open data. Jake Porway is the Executive Director of DataKind.

The American Community Survey: An innovation that measures America

Friday, June 29, 2012

One of the unique aspects about the United States is that we have been an informed democracy from the start. James Madison, credited with writing most of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, added questions to the nation's first census in 1790, which was overseen by Thomas Jefferson. Both of these founding fathers understood the importance of having information on the nation's progress. In that census we learned how many military-aged men there were in the country. The 1810 Census obtained information on manufacturing for the first time. Ten years later, we gained insights on industry because respondents were asked if they were engaged in agriculture, commerce, or manufacturing activities.The collection, processing, and distribution of census statistics have also evolved over the past two centuries. In the 1790 Census, U.S. Marshals were tasked with asking the questions. In 1830, a uniform census form was used for the first time. For the 1890 count, a census employee by the name of Herman Hollerith designed electric machines that greatly sped up data tabulation, allowing for the processing and publishing of the results to be completed ahead of schedule and under budget. Today, it remains the job of the U.S. Census Bureau to collect information about the nation. In addition to the population census taken every 10 years as required by the U.S. Constitution, the Census Bureau conducts other censuses and surveys, including an economic census beginning this year. One very important survey is the American Community Survey (ACS).The ACS, which replaces the census sample survey—commonly known as the “long-form”—used from 1940 to 2000, is a yearly survey that today is sent to about 3.5 million households. In addition to basic demographic information like age, sex, race and ethnicity, it collects information on educational attainment, occupation, income, veteran status, disabilities, and health insurance status. The Census Bureau reports these characteristics about the population on a yearly basis down to the community level. The billions of ACS statistics are used to make funding, programmatic, and business decisions by governments at all levels as well as the private sector. Starting next year, there will be an Internet response option for the ACS, another step in the innovation of data collection.Here is an example of the type of information available from the ACS. In 2009, we began asking respondents what type of bachelor’s degrees they had. Results reported earlier this year reveal that of the 56 million people aged 25 and over with a bachelor’s degree, nearly 20 million of them held a degree in a science and engineering field. The 2009 ACS also showed that people with only a bachelor’s degree in science and engineering tended to earn much more than people with only a bachelor’s degree in education ($63,000 compared with $42,000). It also gives clues on the future workforce when, as in the chart below, it shows how younger women have increasingly gravitated towards degrees in science and engineering.

The Census Bureau will continue to lead the way in collecting and analyzing data to tell America about our people, places and economy. That is in the spirit of being an informed democracy and right in line with what Jefferson and Madison would want us to do.James Treat is Chief of the American Community Survey Office at the US Census Bureau.

Data analytics for "preemptive government" in NYC

Thursday, June 28, 2012

On Monday of this week, O'Reilly's Alex Howard published an interview with Michael Flowers, New York City's director of analytics for the Office of Policy and Strategic Planning in Mayor Bloomberg's office. In the interview, "Predictive data analytics is saving lives and taxpayer dollars in New York City," Mike discusses the ways that he and his team have used predictive data analytics toward "preemptive government" and some of the positive results they've achieved, including improved process efficiency and effective detection of crimes, such as fraud and bootlegging. An excerpt:

When you combine human capital with technological tools, what's the outcome downstream? What are you able to do and what results have you achieved?

Flowers: We never wanted to be a solution in search of a problem. By way of example, the city receives roughly 20,000 to 25,000 complaints for something called an 'illegal conversion' every year. An illegal conversion is a situation where you have an apartment or a house that’s zoned for six people to live in safely and a landlord’s chopping them up and putting 60 people in there. They represent significant public safety hazards—and not just from fire, but from crime and from epidemiological issues. To throw at those 20,000 to 25,000 complaints, we have roughly 200 inspectors to the Department of Buildings.

What we’ve done is come up with a way to prioritize those [complaints] which represent the greatest catastrophic risk, as a structural fire. In doing that, we built a basic flat file of all 900,000 structures in the city of New York and populated them with data from about 19 agencies, ranging from whether or not an owner was in arrears on property taxes, if a property was in foreclosure, the age of the structure, et cetera. Then, we cross-tabulated that with about five years of historical fire data of all of the properties that had structural fires in the city, ranging in severity.

After we had some findings and saw certain things pop as being highly correlative to a fire, we went back to the inspectors at the individual agencies, the Department of Buildings, and the fire department, and just asked their people on the ground, “Are these the kinds of conditions that you see when you go in post-hoc, after this catastrophic event? Is this the kind of place that has a high number of rat complaints? Is the property in serious disrepair before you go in?”

And the answer was yes. That told us we were going down the right road.

What we’ve done now is run every new complaint that comes in against that flat file. We find those [complaints] which represent the top five percent for historic fire risk and then send that top five percent back out to the inspectors to follow up on with urgency.

The rest of the interview is definitely worth reading. The city's use of data is a great example of the data-driven innovation in the public sector.

Choosing a college for the job that comes after

Monday, June 25, 2012

This piece appeared in longer form as a May 2012 blog on the Washington Post's website.High school students across the country are now making choices about the colleges they will attend next fall. Whether choosing from among elite private colleges and flagship public universities, or from a list of open-access state four-year and community colleges, how will they and their families make those decisions?Until now, it has been almost impossible for students to include in their deliberations what graduating from specific colleges and their programs is likely to yield in terms of post-graduation jobs and salaries. But that is starting to change. This year, new information will begin to become available that will enable students to say: “If I go to College X and earn a degree in Y, I’m more likely to get a good-paying job after graduation than if I receive the same degree from College Z.”The primary source of new information the Wage Records Interchange System 2, a Labor Department-driven, data-sharing partnership among states. This data system could allow colleges to work with their states to track the success or failure of their alumni, no matter where they live. Twenty-two states have signed on so far. However, the data sharing system will only work if all 50 states sign the agreement. For students thinking about where to go to college, this could help them pick programs more likely to lead to earning a decent living. This is especially important for the growing number of minority and low-income students today on America’s campuses, largely at community colleges and open-access four-year colleges.But students are not the only ones who can benefit from this new information. Colleges will have a chance to examine whether their degrees are matched to labor market needs. In March of 2012, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 3.74 million unfilled jobs. The National Association of Manufacturers reports 600,000 jobs go unfilled because there are not workers available with the skills to fill them. Colleges that assess employment outcomes for their graduates can see where such jobs are in their communities and expand programs that lead to solid jobs. This does not require dismantling philosophy, visual arts, or other disciplines that instill critical and creative thinking employers want. It does mean evaluating whether students can get what they need for good jobs while paring certain programs whose graduates are not getting jobs.Colleges can also use labor market information to assess and improve program quality. If an assessment of the local labor market matches college programs but program graduates aren’t being hired, that suggests a problem with program quality. Colleges can use employment data to understand which programs need improvement—whether in their information technology, engineering, or history degree programs—and then speak to employers about what graduates are missing that may be keeping them from being hired or earning competitive wages.That is a quantum leap from where we have been, and will begin to make labor market outcomes a key metric of value and excellence in the college sector. It’s time for states to make sure this happens by entering the data-sharing agreement. It’s the right thing to do for colleges striving to get better. It’s the right thing for students, their families, and the students’ future employers.Josh Wyner is executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute, an international nonprofit that seeks open-minded dialogue and enlightened leadership.

The state of broadband Internet access in Kansas City

Friday, June 22, 2012

Google is all about building data-driven products. When users of Google Navigation wanted the ability to circumnavigate heavy traffic, we began to use real-time traffic data to suggest alternate routes. When Google engineers began to tackle the problem of automatic translation online, they relied on translation data from hundreds of thousands of websites in many languages.Similarly, as we're in the process of bringing Google Fiber to Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO, we need to first understand how many people here already have access to broadband, and more importantly, how many don't. In order to get a grasp on the situation we partnered with a group that's full of community experts—the Mayor's Bistate Innovation Team (MBIT)—to commission a study on broadband adoption and digital literacy in Kansas City. Today, we're gathering with MBIT at the Kansas City, MO Central Library to release and discuss the data that we've collected.The good news is that a lot Kansas Citians seem to recognize the value of the web. Those surveyed said that the Internet can be helpful when it comes to job hunting, getting health information, and learning new things.

Unfortunately, our study also illustrates that there is a real digital divide in both Kansas Cities. We found that 25% of Kansas Citians don't have broadband at home, 17% are not going online at all, and 8% are only using dial-up or slow speed wireless connections.These stats lead to a follow-up question: why are one-quarter of Kansas Citians not connected to the web at home? We found that one of the primary reasons is cost. 28% of those who don't use said that they don’t go online because they don't have a computer, or because Internet access is too expensive. Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they don't go online because they just don't think it's relevant to their lives.This is a big deal. Using the Internet isn't just about checking email and social networking. Access to broadband—and knowing how to use it—has become essential when it comes to jobs, education, business and much more. The web provides a wealth of information and services for Internet users, and people who aren't online are, simply put, at a huge disadvantage. A job search, for example, is much harder today without the ability to review job listings and apply online. Similarly, computer skills and digital literacy have become perquisites for the majority of job opportunities.From a policy standpoint, we can try and address these issues by encouraging policies that will make computers and Internet access more affordable, and promote digital literacy initiatives.But a lot of outreach and education needs to take place on a community level. And that's why this morning we’ve joined representatives from amazing local nonprofits, schools, libraries, city governments and other community experts in a discussion about how to take action and get Kansas Citians online using broadband Internet access. We'll post the video of our discussion here as soon as it's ready. In the meantime, you can peruse or download the full results of our study.The Google Fiber project is about making the web better and faster. But it's also about making the Internet more accessible for people throughout Kansas City. Digital inclusion here is a priority for Google, and it's clear that it's also a priority for community nonprofits and the local governments.Posted by Kenneth Carter, Policy Counsel at Google