Group items tagged

"...we have put together a selection of tools that we use the most and that we enjoy working with. It includes libraries for plotting data on maps, frameworks for creating charts, graphs and diagrams and tools to simplify the handling of data. Even if you're not into programming, you'll find applications that can be used without writing one single line of code."

PING is an online game made for secondary schools, forming a starting point to discuss the subject 'poverty' and what it means to be poor. Ping is aimed at the students of the secondary and third degree. The students become the main characters in the game. They can choose between Jim or Sofia, who, due to certain circumstances, end up on the street and need to find their own path. PING shows that games can help to introduce complex social subjects like poverty in the class room. The partners of the PING project want to contribute to the social debate encouraging the use of games at school as a tool to open the difficult discussion about poverty

EpiSimS is a stochastic, agent-based simulation engine that models the spread of disease in regions, allowing for the assessment of disease prevention, intervention, and response strategies. EpiSimS explicitly represents the daily movements and interactions of synthetic individuals in a city or region, including their interactions with others. It is used as an experimental test bed for analyzing the consequences, feasibility, and effectiveness of response options to disease outbreaks.

The HCSim model is used to gauge the impact of mass-casualty incidents on hospital capacity.

"Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site. "

The Social Simulator is a hands-on, private environment to practice using the language, tools and norms of the social web for social media PR and crisis response

Watch the video on the video at the link. It's a fascinating look at some of the "indie" approaches the US government is taking to using web technologies to reach people.

e-democracy?

An interesting look at how a political campaign tried and failed to use big data and web technologies to help reach and get out their supporters. Additional reporting at: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/orca-was-no-fail-whale-says-romneys-digital-director/ and http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-consultants-built-romneys-project-orca-none-of-them/

The current research examined the effects of a critical thinking (CT) e-learning course taught through argument mapping (AM) on measures of CT ability. Seventy-four undergraduate psychology students were allocated to either an AM-infused CT e-learning course or a no instruction control group and were tested both before and after an 8-week intervention period on CT ability using the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment.

A collection of tools and projects used for web-based participation, e-consultations, e-participation and online public engagement - with all of the content available now under a Creative Commons license.

An excellent example of collaborative argument mapping using MindMeister by Ralf Grötker's DebattenProfis team.

Government 3.0: Rethinking Governance and Re-Imagining Democracy for the 21st Century at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at NYU is a semester-long exploration of how to use technology to improve governance. Through conversations with leading technology and policy innovators, in-depth reading and, above all, personal reflection we will teach ourselves more about advances in technology, how those innovations can be applied to making decisions and solving problems and design new experiments that might help advance institutional innovation.

ManaBalss.lv is a web-based tool for citizen involvement in legislative change in Latvia. 15% of Latvians are reported to have used the tool and two new laws have been passed as a result.

GATE is over 15 years old and is in active use for all types of computational task involving human language. GATE excels at text analysis of all shapes and sizes. From large corporations to small startups, from €multi-million research consortia to undergraduate projects, our user community is the largest and most diverse of any system of this type, and is spread across all but one of the continents1.

HDI Forum III: The Health Datapalooza promises to bring together a diverse group of data experts, technology developers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, health care system leaders, CIOs, CTOs, and community advocates to support innovative applications of health and health care data. The Health Data Initiative (HDI), originally launched in 2010 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the Community Health Data Initiative, is a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark community action to improve health. The Forum will feature keynote addresses, an Apps Expo, demonstrations of new, cutting-edge apps, and thought-provoking panel discussions. There will also be plenty of time for networking and one-on-one interaction. It is a great opportunity to be in on the vanguard of data applications to improve health and health care. This year's event promises to be one you do not want to miss!

interesting case of data-intensive policy-making