Policy by the Numbers: Improve Lives

Research explores how to lift barriers to Internet access in Africa

Monday, July 29, 2013

Jennifer Haroon is Access Principal at Google.Without Internet access, how would life be different? We go online to find a new doctor, research the best schools, and find creative inspiration. In Africa today, less than 16% of the population has reliable connectivity. Google recently sponsored the Internet Society (ISOC) to commission a report that examines some of the roadblocks to Internet access in Africa, proposing ways to lift some of these barriers.In the last five years, large investments have been made to improve access in Sub-Saharan Africa. Undersea cables have improved international connectivity. However, there is still a lag in terrestrial connectivity—whether national, cross-border, or local—that is needed to connect users to those undersea cables.The report highlights the need for terrestrial connectivity and recommends that policymakers remove barriers to its growth, including bureaucracy, limited cross-border permits, and stringent permit requirements. The report also highlights the need for governments to promote private-sector investment in extending terrestrial connectivity, such as allowing for infrastructure sharing, which can lower costs. Lastly, it highlights the need for agencies with the authority to make these regulatory changes and promote the growth of access.Although connectivity has improved, more can be done. The suggested policy changes and investments can lead to better infrastructure and increased competition, which can encourage lower prices and higher quality access for users.

Using online courses in Spain to teach entrepreneurship

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Francisco Ruiz Anton is a Policy Manager for Google in Spain.At the end of the third quarter in 2012, roughly 25% of adults in Spain were out of work. More than half of adults under 24 years old are unemployed. Recent graduates and young adults preparing to enter the workforce face the toughest job market in decades.The Internet presents an opportunity for growth and economic development. According to recent research, more than 100,000 jobs in Spain originate from the Internet and it directly contributes to the GDP with 26.7 billion euros (2.5%). That impact that could triple by 2015 under the right conditions.One of those conditions is making high-quality education accessible, echoed by a recent OECD report on the youth labor market in Spain. This is no easy task. University degrees are in high demand, straining the reach of our existing institutions.The web has become a way for learners to develop new skills when traditional institutions aren’t an option. Recent courses on platforms like Udacity, Coursera and edX have seen hundreds of thousands of students enroll and participate in courses taught by prestigious professors and lecturers.Google is partnering with numerous organizations and universities in Spain to organize UniMOOC, an online course intended to educate citizens in Spain and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world about entrepreneurship. It was built with Course Builder, Google’s new open source toolkit for constructing online courses.To date nearly 10,000 students have registered for the course, over two-thirds of them from Spain and one-third from 93 countries. It recently won an award for the “Most innovative project” in 2012 from the newspaper El Mundo.Spain’s situation is not entirely unique in Europe. Policymakers across the continent are asking themselves how best to create economic opportunity for their citizens, and how to ensure that their best and brightest students are on a path toward financial success. Our hope is that the people taking this course will be more empowered with the right skills and tools to start their own businesses that can create jobs. They will push not only Spain, but Europe and the rest of the world towards economic recovery and growth.The course is still running, and you’re able to join today.

Heading Towards Higher Well-Being for all Citizens of the World

Monday, November 19, 2012

Martine Durand is Chief Statistician at OECD.On October 16, 2012 almost 400,000 babies were born in the world. On that same day, approximately 1000 people from around the world, including economists, statisticians, policy-makers and representatives from business and civil society, met to talk about the future lives of these babies. The 4th OECD World Forum on Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making was held in New Delhi, featuring around 70 presentations, four roundtables, and several keynote lectures. The Forum provided a great opportunity for sharing knowledge and networking on Well-Being and Development.Issues discussed by participants included: factors shaping trends in poverty and inequalities; business models and practices holding greater promise to improve well-being at work and beyond; links between effective and responsive institutions and people’s well-being; obstacles to gender equality and the type of environment needed for the start-up and success of women-owned businesses; policies helping children and at-risk youth to move into adulthood; preventing environmental degradation; improving the capacity of people, business and policy-makers to manage the consequences of disasters and conflicts; how to strengthen social cohesion.The OECD World Fora on ‘Statistics, Knowledge and Policies’ have become one of the most important rendez-vous of the global community working on Well-Being. The 4th OECD Forum followed those held in Palermo (2004), Istanbul (2007) and Busan (2009). However, this forum marked a shift in the international well-being agenda. While previous Fora focused mainly on the “why” and the “how” to measure well-being, the 4th OECD Forum looks at how well-being can be made actionable. The OECD Better Life Initiative, launched in 2011 on the occasion of the Organisation’s 50th Anniversary—under the motto Better Policies for Better Lives—lies at the heart of this attempt to use improved well-being metrics to influence policy making. The OECD Better Life Initiative combines advanced statistical tools for measuring well-being with information on people’s aspirations and needs, as collected through the Better Life Index, a new innovative interactive platform.But knowing what matters to citizens and where societies want to go is not enough to ensure that we will get there; this is one of the main messages coming out of the discussions held in New Delhi. We need to build our knowledge regarding what works or does not work to achieve better lives. We need new evidence and models to understand how people think and behave, and how policies can raise well-being given our new understanding. Part of the evidence is already there, though, and models are being developed. But the journey is long and will require the involvement of all actors—researchers coming from a range of disciplines, decision-makers, business, ordinary citizens.Four additional key messages came out from New Delhi, and you can read the summary of conclusions here. The first is that the well-being agenda has made giant steps all over the world and that it is based on a common understanding of the issues. The second is that progress in measuring well-being has been uneven, with great advancements in areas such as subjective well-being but much more modest ones on measuring sustainability for example. The third is that more research is needed on the determinants of well-being, particularly on the role of policies. The fourth is that the well-being agenda is relevant for both developed and developing countries, although priorities may differ. The next OECD World Forum will take place in 2015 and be aligned with discussions on the outcomes of Rio+20 and the post-2015 agenda.. The 5th Forum will thus be an important landmark to judge whether Development Goals will have become, indeed, Well-Being Goals for all.

Twitter's Importance to Transportation

Monday, October 8, 2012

Sarah M. Kaufman is a researcher and Assistant Adjunct Professor at NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management.Accurate information is inextricably linked to urban mobility: Nearly half of all urban dwellers own smartphones, which makes it possible to travel seamlessly between subways, buses, taxis, bicycles and by foot. On-the-go information via smartphone is now the way people check schedules, stop locations, delays, and safest routes.Social media tools, such as Twitter, allow transportation providers to communicate directly with users: alert customers about service changes, suggest alternative routes, and amplify the message to friends and neighbors. Ideally, these actions would occur within moments of a delay. Twitter is superb platform, since it is free, fast and packed with dynamic features.But our research at NYU’s Rudin Center indicates that transportation providers in the New York Metropolitan region have yet to use Twitter to its fullest potential. Our research, based on all tweets from May 1 to June 30, 2012, offers policy recommendations for using Twitter in a transportation setting.The chart below displays metrics considered in this research:

*recorded on 8/6/12
** Self-reported by agencies on own websites and to American Public Transportation Association, except where otherwise notedAssuming that Twitter followers indicate a willingness to receive information and marketing posts from that organization, these findings demonstrate the relationship between ridership numbers and fans of the organization. There is a striking difference between public and private Twitter accounts: while the Port Authority of NY & NJ’s PATH has approximately 1 follower for every 20 riders, JetBlue has 20 followers for every 1 passenger. Although the airlines listed above have a lower number of daily users than transit organizations do, it is essential for both public and private transportation providers to promote their brands online to generate more messaging among users and fans.Twitter should be used for up-to-the-minute information, customer engagement, and strategic marketing—the right mix of which will result in more followers. JetBlue and American Airlines may direct more resources at customer service than public agencies. But Twitter-connected travelers will use the system more efficiently, feel safer, and have more knowledge of what to expect. Simply put, using social media to connect with travelers will save time and reduce uncertainty and even anxiety. Improving the content will produce more followers, which will, in turn, should lead to more informed, motivated and engaged travelers. Leveraging information technology is key to better transportation.Chart references:
¹Port Authority of NY & NJ. "Annual Airport Traffic Report," 2011.
²AMR Corporation. "AMR Overview," November 2010.
³JetBlue Airways Corporation. "JetBlue Airways Reports March Traffic", Press Release, April 11, 2012.

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.

The Economist: "The laws of the city"

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

The Economist recently published a great piece on the use of data to understand cities, titled "The laws of the city." The article offers a treasure trove of examples showing how researchers are using data to better understand urban trends and patterns in population, transit, and development.Carlo Ratti, who heads the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the first to sift through the data produced by telecoms networks. One aim was to find out how a country’s internal borders reflect human connections. In Britain the English and the Scots hardly talk, at least on landlines; west of London, where many of Britain’s high-tech firms are based, a new region is developing. American states such as Georgia and Alabama belong together, whereas California splits three ways. In Portugal, if a city is twice the size of another, people make 12% more phone calls per head. This gives weight to what urban theorists such as the late Jane Jacobs have long argued: that cities foster the exchange of ideas.like New York City

Maximizing research investment with open access

Thursday, June 14, 2012

The US Federal government spent $32.6 billion on academic research in 2009, 59% of all research done in the US. The European Union spent about €50.5 billion on research between 2007 and 2014, and will increase that to €80 billion between 2014 to 2020. Research is described as central to economic development and as an investment in the future. So how can policymakers maximize the impact of their investments?One way is to mandate open access to peer-reviewed articles developed from government-funded research. Open access requirements at benefit researchers and institutions, patients and citizens, and public and private institutions. As a recent report by the Committee for Economic Development found, "The benefits of increased access are so great than any delay in availability of research should be minimized."Different models for open access exist, such as licensing journal and articles under an open copyright license (e.g., a Creative Commons license). The Creative Commons Attribution license in particular grants anyone the right to reuse, remix, and redistribute content as long as they attribute the owner. Public Library of Science (PLoS), consisting of a growing body of open access journals, is a stellar example of open access.The benefits of open access to scholarly publications are starting to be recognized in the US, EU, and in institutions around the world. The UK Government recently tapped Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) to increase access to research. Europe's Horizon 2020 program, dedicating €80 billion to research over 6 years, will reportedly adopt open access requirements. NIH and Harvard University policies demonstrate strong support in the US as well.But what are the specific benefits of open access that make it worthwhile as a public policy? There are many, but to name a few:Saving money. A recent study claims that open access could save European countries hundreds of millions of Euros every year. And Harvard University argues that traditional journal subscription prices are too high; open access is a solution.Increasing the impact of research. As John Wilbanks explains, the process for developing new knowledge about the world depends on the work of others. Thus, the more people with access to the journal articles and publications, the faster we can develop new knowledge as a society. One way to measure that process is to look at citation rates between publications. According to a majority of related studies, open access articles tend to have higher citation rates and exposure, indicating higher impact.Engaging patients in disease treatment. Chordoma Foundation's Josh Sommer was diagnosed with a malignant bone cancer called a chordoma. During his treatment, he read numerous scientific articles so he could talk to doctors about his care, and ended up helping to conduct research in the field. Had he not been a student at a university with subscription access, he wouldn't have been able to retrieve research about his disease. Today he’s an advocate for open access to research.Josh's experience is not unique. Patients, researchers, international institutions, companies, nonprofits, and government agencies are all negatively impacted by restricted access to science and research contained within journals. It's time governments use the carrot embodied in research grant budgets to change the culture of scientific research. A culture that values sharing, collaboration, and openness will have greater impact on people’s health, society, and the economy.Alex Kozak is a Policy Analyst at Google.

"Big Data" for greater good

Monday, June 11, 2012

Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. This data comes from digital pictures, videos, posts to social media sites, intelligent sensors, purchase transaction records, cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This is “Big Data.”There is a great interest both in the commercial and in the research communities around Big Data. It has been predicted that “analyzing Big Data will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus,” according to research by McKinsey.But very few people seem to look at how data can be used specifically for solving social problems. Why is this? What can be done in the international research community to make sure that some of the most brilliant ideas do have an impact also for social issues?In order to make data’s potential for social good a part of the “Big Data” discussion, I invited a distinguished panel of experts to discuss how Big Data can be used to create Social Capital. The panelists are: Roger Barga (Microsoft Research, group lead eXtreme Computing Group, USA), Laura Haas (IBM Fellow and Director Institute for Massive Data, Analytics and Modeling IBM Research, USA), Alon Halevy (Google Research, Head of the Structured Data Group, USA), and Paul Miller (Consultant, Cloud of Data, UK).We asked the panelists if they believe it is possible to conduct research for a corporation and/or a research lab, and at the same time make sure that the potential output of our research has also a social impact. Is it possible to dig into Big Data to help people in need? Preventing/predicting natural catastrophes, helping offering services "targeting" to people and structures in social need?Just a few examples of leveraging current and future data tools and research for social good:

Paul Miller

Harvard researchers found that Twitter data could be analysed to track the spread of Cholera on Haiti in a way that proved “substantially faster” than traditional techniques. According to Mathew Ingram’s write-up of the research, “What the Harvard and HealthMap study shows is that analyzing the data from large sets like the tweets around Haiti isn’t just good at tracking patterns or seeing connections after an event has occurred, but can actually be of use to researchers on the ground while those events are underway. [Paul’s emphasis]

Alon Halevy

As one simple example, a recent Danish Journalism Award was given to a nice visualization of data about which doctors are being sponsored by the medical industry. The ability to communicate this data with the public is certainly part of the Big Data agenda.

Roger Barga

One such example in science is Jim Gray and Alex Szalay’s collaboration to build a virtual observatory for astronomy, which leveraged relational database technology. The SDSS Sky Server has since supported hundreds of researchers and resulted in thousands of publications over the years.

Laura Haas

Much of our "Smarter Planet" related research is around utilizing more intelligently the large amounts of data coming from instrumenting, observing, and capturing the information about phenomena on planet earth, both natural and man-made.

The full text of the interview can be read at the ODBMS Industry Watch Blog.Roberto Zicari is Editor of ODBMS.org and professor of Database and Information Systems at Frankfurt University.

Visualizing Economic Recovery: G+ Hangout Debate

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

At the end of March, we announced a data visualization competition we’re co-sponsoring with the Guardian Datastore.On May 15, we’ll gather three economic experts—Martha Lane Fox (lastminute.com, Antigone), John Kao (Institute for Large Scale Innovation, Daily Beast), and Larry Elliott (Guardian)—in a Google+ Hangout to discuss ways that the world’s economies might recover from the current recession as well as which countries are creating positive climates for new technologies. The Guardian’s Simon Rogers will chair the Hangout debate.The Hangout be broadcast via Hangouts on Air, which will stream live to Google+ and to YouTube.We want to know what you want to hear our experts talk about! Use the comment field on the Guardian post to let us know!

Data-driven peacebuilding

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The very nature of peace negotiations has fundamentally changed. Once an art involving a select few and practiced behind closed doors, negotiations are now broader social conversations that include the voices of diaspora. Except for cases of the most draconian censorship, high-level stakeholders in peace negotiations have very little control over this social hubbub, out of which vital concerns, critiques, ideas, and alternatives can emerge. Indeed, the very agenda of official negotiations can now be contested and debated in real time on the web. Thanks to reams of official texts, a plethora of social media updates, and mainstream media coverage, today’s peacebuilding and peacekeeping efforts generate, respond to, and are informed by massive amounts of data. We must forgive the negotiator or peacekeeper trained in traditional methods for feeling helpless and confused. This is a complex new world for peacebuilding, and one that is in constant flux. As more data becomes available, new insights threaten and even overturn staid assumptions. For example, an August 2011 Fast Company story reports on the US Department of Defense’s plans for the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) archive, funded by an $8.6 million grant from DoD. ESOC’s mission is to make available to academics previously hard-to-access data on global conflict. Fast Company reports, “ESOC discovered a previously unnoticed—and counterintuitive—correlation between unemployment rates and politically motivated violence,” where higher unemployment was associated with less politically motivated violence.

Sanjana Hattouwa's TED talk on citizen journalism.Contentious as it may seem, using data analysis to challenge assumptions and even predict outcomes is a growing trend. For example, The Grill’s computer modeling has been used globally to predict the outcomes of conflict. The PAX initiative “plans to launch a global digital system to give early warning of wars and genocide.” And the non-profit organization Benetech has been contracted by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to address controversial geopolitical issues via data science. Of note, in an exhaustive analysis of over 80 million documents from the secret files of Guatemala’s National Police, Benetech’s scientists employed random sampling to confirm that genocide was committed against the Mayan population during the country’s civil conflict, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. Image analysis is another area with potential data-intensive peacebuilding applications. The LRA Crisis Tracker combines images with a number of sources, including on-the-ground and situation reports from the UN system, to present a temporal and geospatial representation of one of the world’s most brutal terrorist groups in one of the world’s most unstable regions. The visual impact of this representation compels the viewer to investigate the conflict and ways to help, which may lead to meaningful and early intervention in crimes against humanity. All of these early examples hint at data’s potential to meaningfully impact the domain of peacebuilding and peacekeeping, but we cannot simply assume that predictive modeling, random sampling, and other “Big Data” applications are automatic, easy solutions. Figuring out how to effectively leverage massive amounts of data to save lives and build peace is going to be a challenge—but it is one worth taking on. Sanjana Hattotuwa is a TED Fellow and Special Advisor with the ICT4Peace Foundation.

Jack and Jill the Innovator, Episode 8: Art Neill, New Media Rights

Thursday, May 3, 2012

We’re back with another edition of our Jack and Jill the Innovator video series, which spotlights innovators of all shapes and sizes and gives them an opportunity to tell their stories.Our next episode features Art Neill, the founder of New Media Rights, a nonprofit that helps artists and entrepreneurs navigate the complex legal thicket around creating art and media online. To set the context for why this is important, you might also read John Tehranian’s Infringement Nation. Tehranian explores how, without committing anything close to copyright piracy, you might find yourself in a legal grey area when you create content online. “To illustrate the unwitting infringement that has become quotidian for the average American, take an ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical law professor named John...

“By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair use defense, he would be liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file-sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.”Derek Slater is a Policy Manager at Google.

2012: Driving down the information superhighway, in reverse

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Metaphors comparing the Internet to an information superhighway were common in the 1990s. They’ve since been replaced by other terms and abbreviations, such as the net, but this older comparison to a freeway is still applicable. In particular, digital citizens require a type of “driver training” program to be able to understand the cyber rules of the road and navigate to the online content that’s most important and compelling to them. Without knowing how the Net can change their world, users may not fully benefit from or value becoming digital citizens.

In America, it’s common for new automobile drivers to pass a driving instruction test with both a technical component teaching laws and procedures and, for all new drivers, a practical driving test demonstrating their ability to drive a car around town.

Similarly, digital citizens that learn the “technical” rules of the road are able to access the Net without revealing private information, avoiding unsafe practices and without leaving digital footprints that could adversely impact their future job prospects. ConnectSafely, Enough is Enough, iKeepSafe, Wired Kids, the Family Online Safety Institute, GetNetWise, the National Consumers League, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the National Cyber Security Alliance and Common Sense Media are just some of the important safety organizations that help organizations like mine teach non-users how to pass some of the technical parts of their online drivers training program and safely traverse the Net.

Unfortunately, some digital inclusion providers don’t spend adequate time on the “practical” parts—asking non-users what’s important to them in the “real world” so they can learn about the related content that is online and will make the Net relevant to them.   According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, most people that remain offline do not believe that the Internet is sufficiently relevant to justify the time, money and energy for them to become digitally literate. Most non-users haven’t been shown a compelling and personal value proposition, and without one, the Net is much less compelling and useful to them. Last year between May 2010 and August 2011, Pew reported that the number of adult Americans that don’t use the Internet increased from 21% to 22%! Because many users don’t have a personal value proposition that makes the Net important and useful, they exited the highway.

Culturally respectful grassroots initiatives with a national direction best leverage the synergies within the colorful mosaic of communities that comprise America. Net Literacy is a long-time proponent of tapping into the tens of millions of digital natives that attend high schools and colleges to form a Digital Literacy Corps that helps to reduce the digital divide. In 2009, the FCC recommended the creation of a Digital Literacy Corps in the National Broadband Plan presented to Congress. One non-user at a time, a Digital Literacy Corps could help individuals discover their personal value proposition and why they should accelerate to the onramp of the information superhighway.

Posted by Daniel Kent, Founder of Net Literacy

Family Caregiving: A huge and neglected challenge

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

We are a nation of caregivers. Every day over 44 million adults serve as unpaid caregivers to ailing or disabled relatives or friends, and annually 65 million do so—yet this form of work often goes uncompensated and is largely invisible. Unsurprisingly, inadequate awareness of the issues leads to inadequate policies and solutions.

Caregiving takes a huge toll on the economy. About 17% of full and part-time employees are also caregivers (in fact 73% of all caregivers are employed at another job). Businesses lose $34 billion/year in productivity from employees being distracted, cutting back hours, or leaving the workforce. Caregivers forsake income: their total estimated lost wages, pension and Social Security benefits is nearly $3 trillion.

Caregivers and care recipients span all demographics, but they are primarily women (66%) and ages 35-64 (64%). Of the 65 million adult caregivers, 4 million care for children, 49 million care for adults, and 13 million care for both adults and children.

Caregiving can be highly demanding. It involves far more than healthcare-in-the-home; it is about helping with life: activities of health and wellness (medications, therapies, exercise, tracking of symptoms, appointments, etc.); basic living (bathing, grooming, toileting, dressing, eating, etc.); basic chores (cooking, cleaning, shopping, money management, etc.) as well as social engagement and emotional support.

On average, caregivers spend 20 hours per week; a third average 47 hours per week. And it can go on for many years: on average 4.6 years, while 15% have been providing care for over 10 years. Unsurprisingly, the non-economic impact — physical and mental health deterioration of caregivers and the fraying of family relationships — is significant.

Demographic and economic realities are increasing need for (and demands on) family caregivers. People are living longer, and there are fewer offspring to handle their care. Paid home care workers are not filling the need. While the projected demand for such workers for 2008-18 is 50%, the growth of the 25-54 age female population (the main labor pool from which these workers are drawn) is only 2%. Low pay (barely above minimum wage) and low status of home care workers spurs high turnover, further aggravating the situation. Outsourcing is not an option, as few caregiving tasks can be performed remotely. Healthcare trends — cutbacks due to government and employer cost cutting, shorter hospital stays, and more home-care technologies — intensify the family caregiving burden.

Policy makers, technologists and entrepreneurs must appreciate the prevalence, toll and context of caregiving in order to address this growing crisis. Caregiving is not a simple one-to-one relationship, but usually involves networks of relatives and friends. It is not only a healthcare issue, but also about managing life. And it is not just a brief crisis requiring heroic actions, but an overwhelming (and seemingly unending) series of wide-ranging, mundane tasks with minimal (if any) compensation.

Caregivers step up to help friends and family in need; similarly, we must step up to provide support and solutions to help shoulder the burden of care. Much can be done; I suggest a couple of starting points. Design caregiver-support policies such that they acknowledge the primacy of the family in caregiving. Recognize that caregiving is about life and not just health, by reducing requirements for presence or approval of healthcare professionals. Develop tools and services that make management and coordination of daily caregiving easier, that are designed for long-term use, and are sufficiently flexible to accommodate un-foreseeable changes in specific care tasks. A brighter future is possible, if we can come together to create tools, systems and policies to accommodate the changing nature of how we take care of ourselves and others throughout life.

For more information:

New Realities of an Older America

Caregiving in the U.S. 2009

The Cost of Caregiving to the U.S. Economy

The Growing Contributions and Costs of Family Caregiving

The MetLife Study of Caregiving Costs to Working Caregivers

The MetLife Caregiving Cost Study: Productivity Losses to U.S. Business

Caring in America: A comprehensive analysis of the nation’s fastest-growing jobs: home health and personal care aides

posted by Rajiv Mehta, consultant and entrepreneur focused on technologies for personal and family health; co-organizer of the Quantified Self.

San Francisco bicycle count shows enormous growth in ridership

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Last week, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) released its much-anticipated 2011 City Bicycle Count Report. Among the data contained in the 22-page document is one overarching finding: San Francisco is experiencing a bicycling boom. Just how big of a boom? A dramatic 71% increase in the number of people biking in the last five years.

The city of San Francisco began conducting annual citywide bicycle counts in 2006 to measure bicycle ridership trends, evaluate the efficiency of the current bicycle network and influence future bicycle infrastructure planning. Each year, the SFMTA sets up manual bicycle counting stations at 23 locations around San Francisco, counting bicycles that pass through the area over a two-hour stretch of time. They then compare the counts from year to year. The results, in the SFMTA’s own words, have been “impressive.”

The 2011 report [PDF] showed that 22 of the 23 count stations, the numbers of riders increased in 2011. The count station at Market and 11th Streets, a major thoroughfare for downtown bicycle commuters, showed a 43% increase since last year, and a 115% increase since 2006. Market Street has a protected bike lane in this area, and bicycling advocates at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition attribute much of the increase in ridership at this count station to this separated bikeway.

Perhaps the most telling statistic is the increase of bicycle counts at locations with new bicycle infrastructure added this year. In 2011, more than 17 miles of bike lanes were added to San Francisco streets, including 2.5 miles of buffered bikeways. Bicycle count locations with new bike lanes showed an especially large increase in ridership. For example, Townsend Street had bike lanes striped in 2011 and showed a 54% increase in counts.

In addition to the positive findings, the Bicycle Count Report also shows that San Francisco has a long way to go before reaching the city’s official goal of 20% of trips by bicycle by 2020. The 2011 report shows that 3.5% of San Francisco trips are done by bicycle, higher than the national average, but still not there.

In order to move us closer to ridership goals and invite more people to bike, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has developed an ambitious vision for San Francisco of 100 miles of safe, comfortable and inviting crosstown bikeways called Connecting the City. The campaign’s website uses videos, interactive maps, computer-generated visual mock-ups, and illustrated schematics to help riders and policymakers imagine the potential benefits of each route.

What’s next for San Francisco biking? Mayor Edwin Lee has called San Francisco a national leader in biking, and the report says, “the SFMTA is committed to growing bicycle ridership, providing new infrastructure, and improving the safety of bicycling in San Francisco.” The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is working hard to help the city use this valuable data to begin immediately implementing the policy strategies that will increase bicycling even more dramatically in the years to come.

Posted by Kristin Smith, Communications Director at San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

Big data for economic development

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Will mobile phones transform the lives of the world’s poor? Pick up a recent issue of The Economist and it seems like a fait accompli. With over 90% of the developing world now receiving coverage, and the advent of innovative applications like telemedicine, ICT-based agricultural extensions and Mobile Money (a form of phone-based electronic currency akin to PayPal), mobile phones have the potential to provide a game-changing platform for international development.

Yet for all the hype, we know little about whether and how mobile phones will have a lasting impact. Countries with high rates of mobile phone penetration tend to be better off in a number of ways, but figuring out what caused what is no simple matter.

This is where “Big Data” can make a difference.

In a recent paper I wrote with Nathan Eagle and Marcel Fafchamps, we found patterns in ten terabytes of Rwandan mobile phone use data that help illuminate the role of mobile phones in Rwanda’s economy. Focusing on the micro-level behavior of individuals captured in the data enabled us to avoid many of the common pitfalls of making causal inferences based on trends in macroeconomic indicators.

We first noticed that after major shocks like earthquakes and natural disasters, individuals in Rwanda sent a significant volume of “Mobile Money” to the people affected. In the below video, you can see how dramatically the Lake Kivu earthquake affected patterns of mobile phone traffic in the country: Using econometric models, we quantified this response. Following the 2008 earthquake, a total of $85 was sent to the earthquake victims over the mobile phone network. Because of increased adoption over the past few years, we estimate that roughly $30,000 would be sent in response to an earthquake today. In a small country where most people earn only a few dollars a day, this is a sizable amount of money.

Perhaps more importantly, when we analyze the dynamics of the social network captured in the billions of phone calls and transfers, we find that the pattern of activity is most consistent with a model of risk sharing—i.e., John helps Jane when Jane is in trouble because he expects Jane to reciprocate in John’s time of need. In places like Rwanda, where banks are rare and people tend to have limiting savings, such risk sharing makes a major difference in insuring individuals against income volatility and protecting against the “poverty traps” that prevent people from moving out of poverty.

This is good news for advocates of expanding of mobile networks and services in developing countries. To the extent that Mobile Money facilitates risk sharing, results indicate that the technology can be a positive force for economic development.

However, not everything is positive. We observe that it is chiefly wealthy mobile phone owners, and the ones with the strongest social networks, who receive the lion’s share of the risk-sharing transfers. Taken together, these results indicate that the mobile network can improve the welfare of some but, absent intervention, the benefits may not reach those with the greatest need.

Josh Blumenstock is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

Transit transparency: Open data in action

Friday, January 27, 2012

A much talked about innovation in public policy recently has been the push to achieve greater transparency and accountability through open government strategies, where the public has access to government information and can participate in co-producing public services. At the Transparency Policy Project we have been investigating the dynamics behind one of the most successful implementations of open government: the disclosure of data by transit agencies in the United States. In just a few years, a rich community has developed around this data, with visionary champions for disclosure inside transit agencies collaborating with eager software developers to deliver multiple ways for riders to access real-time information about transit.
Transit agencies have long used intelligent systems for scheduling and monitoring the location of their vehicles. However, this real-time information had previously been available only to engineers inside agencies, leaving riders with printed timetables and maps that, at best, represent the stated intentions of a complex system that can be disturbed by traffic, weather, personnel issues and even riders themselves.

Recognizing the need for access to this information on-the-go and in digital format, Bibiana McHugh of Portland’s TriMet agency worked with Google in 2006 to integrate timetable data into Google Maps, eventually becoming Google Transit. McHugh went further, publicly releasing TriMet’s operations data: first the static timetables, and eventually real-time, dynamic data feeds of vehicle locations and arrival predictions. Local programmers have responded with great ingenuity, building 44 different consumer-facing applications for the TriMet system, at no cost to the agency.

Other transit agencies have adopted this open data approach with varying outcomes. The most successful agencies work closely with local programmers to understand which data is in demand, troubleshoot and improve the quality of the data feeds. Programmers also make the link between end users and transit agencies by filtering up comments from app users. This iterative feedback loop relies on a champion within the agency to build strong relationships with the local developer community. Of the five transit agencies we studied, Portland’s TriMet and Boston’s MBTA exemplify this approach and have generated the highest ratio of apps per transit rider (see table). Meanwhile, the most reluctant agency to adopt open data, Washington DC’s WMATA, only had 11 apps serving its customers in 2011.

Table: Transit Apps and Ridership by City

The number of apps built by independent developers is important, indicating the variety of options riders have in selecting which interfaces (mobile, desktop, map-based, text, audio) and platforms best fit their needs to access transit information. As we learned from our research on what makes transparency effective, simply providing information is not enough. Format and content matter, and should address the needs of a targeted audience. What we have seen in our study of transit transparency is that local programmers have been the critical intermediaries, taking raw data and generating a variety of information tools that transit agencies could not have imagined on their own. For other open government initiatives to spark this level of innovation and public benefit, they must identify their audience of information intermediaries and foster those relationships.

Posted by Francisca Rojas, research director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Transparency Policy Project

Meeting the challenge of our growing urban population

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Urban populations are currently increasing by more than one million people every week, and will continue to do so every week until 2050. Figuring out how to meet the needs of this massive influx of people is a major challenge of our time. Physicist Geoffrey West argues that cities are networks of people, and that scaling such a network requires analyzing universal mathematical frameworks that demonstrate how networks of life generally scale. Check out his fascinating TED talk, where he explains the formulas in plain-speak:

West observes that as organisms double in size, they only need 75 percent more energy to be sustained, so the pace of life decreases as animals get bigger, meaning there is an economy of scale. Meanwhile, as cities double, the pace of life increases. As a community, people produce 15 percent more income, crime, patents, AIDS cases and so-on, irrespective of differences in location or culture.

If biology says that we’re multiplying more quickly than we can scale, how do we prevent system overload?

The answer is some innovative discovery, like the steam engine or the Internet, that transforms our way of life. Each time we approach a collapse, some major innovation saves the day, resetting how our networks function. The catch, West says, is that as cities grow more quickly, innovation must accelerate. For policymakers, this means that fostering innovation isn’t just about getting ahead—it’s about survival.

Even with continuous innovations that keep urban populations going, West asks how we might avoid a “heart attack” after forcibly accelerating on a continual basis for an extended period of time. Futurist Paul Saffo writes that we often focus on the inflection point of an “S” curve—when the innovation takes off—rather than on the “inevitable precursors” that facilitate environments for world-changing events. Maybe if governments studied these instances and developed innovation-inducing policies accordingly, we’d be able trump the laws of biology for good.

Let us know what you think in the comments. Can West’s observation plausibly explain how we’ve transitioned from feudalism to capitalism or from an industrial to information society?

posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst at Google

Jack and Jill the Innovator, Episode 5

Thursday, January 19, 2012

This week, we introduced our Jack and Jill the Innovator video series -- which puts a spotlight on innovators of all shapes and sizes and gives them an opportunity to tell their stories—from start-ups building cool new gadgets to moms and dads using the cloud for more efficient carpools.

Our next episode features Malcolm Collins, who among other things, works at Neurosky, a company that makes “brainwave sensors for everybody.”

You can also see more of Neurosky’s devices in action in this CNet article, “Robotic cat ears for humans, an ears-on test.”

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google

Jack and Jill the Innovator, Episode 4

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Public policy should be about putting numbers in action—combining the best data and insights to forge policies that help our communities grow and change together. As a citizen, the number that matters most is you. Democracies are governed by the people, and it’s their votes, their values and their hopes that should determine what policies get implemented.

That’s why we want to start sharing this new video series on Policy by the Numbers; the first three episodes uploaded to our YouTube channel. We want to help innovators of all shapes and sizes tell their stories—from start-ups building cool new gadgets to moms and dads using the cloud for more efficient carpools. It’s about their biggest hopes, deepest fears, greatest successes, most troublesome failures—everything.

To do that, we’re asking a diverse array of people the same set of questions about their lives and sharing their responses on YouTube so that everyone can get to know your neighborhood “Jack and Jill the Innovator.” We hope that sharing these stories will inspire people to think big, be optimistic about the future, and consider the huge variety of ways to drive decentralized, bottom-up innovation. In order to foster data-driven, pro-innovation public policy that embraces the future, we need to build understanding by telling stories just like these.

We’re starting off our blog series close to home with Danny Kim, the founder of LitMotors.

Full disclosure: After I met with Danny and spent time learning about him and his business, I decided to make a small investment in his company.

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager at Google