Monthly Archives: November 2015

It’s No Longer Our Policy to Put Out Fires

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There’s a great scene in West Wing about a fire in Yellowstone. “When something catches on fire, it’s no longer out policy to put it out?”

The scene was based off a real incident of fire management strategy. In 1988, Yellowstone suffered the largest wildfire recorded in it’s history, burning 30% of the total acreage of the park. The fires called into question the National Park Service’s “let it burn” strategy.

Implemented in 1972, this policy let natural fires run their course and remains policy today. As per a 2008 order from the director of the National Park Service, “Wildland fire will be used to protect, maintain, and enhance natural and cultural resources and, as nearly as possible, be allowed to function in its natural ecological role.”

The let it burn strategy may have had impact on the Yellowstone fires, but as a 1998 article in Science argued, the problem may have been that they hadn’t implemented the policy soon enough.

Using network analysis to model the spread of forest fires, the researchers conclude, “the best way to prevent the largest forest fires is to allow the small and medium fires to burn.”

This is because forest fires follow a power law distribution: small fires are more frequent and large fires are rare. Most fires won’t reach 1988 magnitude and will burn themselves out before doing much damage. Allowing these fires to burn mitigates the risk of larger fires – because large fires are more likely in a dense forest.

This logic can be generalizable to other systems.

A 2008 paper by Adilson E. Motter argued that cascade failures can be mitigated by intentionally removing select nodes and edges after an initial failure.

Cascade failures are typically caused when “the removal of an even small fraction of highly loaded nodes (due to attack or failure)…trigger global cascades of overload failures.” The classic example is a 2003 blackout of the northeast which was triggered by one seemingly unimportant failure. But that one failure lead to other failures which lead to other failures, and soon a large swath of the U.S. had lost power.

Motter argues that such cascades can be mitigated by acting immediately after the initial failure – intentionally removing those nodes which put more of a strain on they system in order to protect those nodes that can handle greater loads.

This strategy is not entirely unlike the “let it burn” policy of the park service. Cutting off weak nodes protects the whole and mitigates the risk of larger, catastrophic events.

 

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against methodological individualism

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According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (by Joseph Heath) methodological individualism “amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.” I find that I have written three blog posts that are critiques of methodological individualism from different angles. That makes me–I guess–an opponent of it.

In against methodological individualism, or why neighborhoods are not like broccoli, I proposed six reasons why not to treat the neighborhood in which a person lives as a variable that we can assign to the individual person as a causal factor. The neighborhood in which a person lives is neither straightforwardly the result of any individuals’ choices nor a factor that helps explain their actions. Rather, neighborhoods should be thought of as having their own place in causal models. The theorist who inspired these thoughts was Robert Sampson.

In more to life than individual attributes, I argued that we should study mechanisms, processes, and episodes as phenomena that we can generalize about and model, both as causes and consequences. If we always only try to understand rioters as individuals, we will miss what we could learn by studying riots as episodes. The theorists who inspired those thoughts were Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly.

And in is social science too anthropocentric? I offered a short review of Brian Epstein’s  The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. One of the conclusions of this book is: “facts about a group are not determined just by facts about its members.” For instance, it is a fact about the Supreme Court that it upheld the Affordable Care Act, but that fact was not determined by the opinions and votes of 9 members. Many other factors came into play, including the actions of the individuals who had created, constituted, limited, and chosen the court.

Many would agree with these points, none of which are original to me. But still a lot of social science is methodologically individualistic, especially the research that is meant to influence policy. In quantitative studies, often the data is a matrix with an individual in each row and a variable in each column. Instead of individuals, the rows may be cities, zip codes, years, or events like crimes or purchases. Still, those are really means or counts that describe groups understood as aggregates of individuals. (For instance, the poverty rate in a zip code is the proportion of the resident individuals who are poor.) And qualitative research is very heavily about what person A, who has descriptive characteristics X and Y, says about topic P in context C.

I think we are missing much that we could learn if we treated not only groups, but places, episodes, and other phenomena as causal.

Just Read, Florida! Civics Literacy Project

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jrfimage

Just Read, Florida! has decided to focus on civics this year, and are sponsoring a wonderful opportunity for schools and districts. In addition to a contest and in partnership with the Florida Lottery, Just Read, Florida! is taking the show on the road with the TOSS-UP Quiz Show tour. Just Read, Florida! will conduct a fun and exciting quiz show contest at schools around the state targeting middle school students and testing their mastery of the civics standards. Be sure to check out the Just Read, Florida! website for more information on the TOSS UP Quiz Show. The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship was involved in the crafting of the questions for the quiz show.

The Florida Department of Education’s Just Read, Florida! Office along with various educational partners are seeking project submissions created by elementary (grades K‐5), middle (grades 6‐8) and high schools (grades 9‐12) designed to promote good citizenship and enhance literacy in the state of Florida. The contest is being held in conjunction with “Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida! 2016” which will be January 25‐29, 2016.
The theme for the Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida! 2016 Literacy‐Civics School Service Project Contest is “Literacy Changes Our World”.

  • WHAT A COMMUNITY LITERACY‐CIVICS SERVICE PROJECT MAY CONTAIN:
    -An organized literacy‐based service project involving students, teachers and
    surrounding community partners.
    -A goal of enhancing citizenship in students, reaching others and expanding their
    literacy skills.
    -Evidence of the project’s successful impact on the targeted audience which may
    include those in the school, neighborhood, community and beyond.
    -Evidence of creativity and/or innovation in the selection and implementation of
    the project.
  • SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:
    -Documentation and written summary of the focus, goals, challenges and
    successes of the project. This may be done through, but is not limited to,
    narratives, photos, video, recordings and data collection.
    -Project Mission Statement (500 words or less)
    -Release forms should be included for any participant involved in video, photos,
    recordings and data collection.
    -By submitting your works, you are releasing publication and talent presentation
    rights to the Florida Department of Education and are certifying that the work is
    free of copyright violations.
    -Only one submission per school per level served (elementary, middle, high
    school levels) is permitted.
    -Student participation is required.
    -Submissions should be faithful to the topic, “Celebrate Literacy Week, Florida!
    2016 – Literacy Changes Our World.”
  • Be sure to review the rubric for this project! 

rubric

  • Submissions may be emailed to CLW2015@fldoe.org or mailed to
    Florida Department of Education
    Just Read, Florida!
    325 West Gaines Street, Suite 1432
    Tallahassee, Fl. 32399
  •  Submissions must include the following and be submitted by December 11,
    2015.
    o Documentation and written summary
    o Project mission statement
    o Release forms (Required for each student involved in video, photos,
    recordings and data collection
    o Completed application form
  • PRIZES:
    -The first place winning school from the elementary, middle and high school
    levels will be awarded a $1,000 cash prize or gift card.
    -The second place winning school from the elementary, middle and high school
    levels will be awarded a $500 cash prize or gift card.
    -The third place winning school from the elementary, middle and high school
    levels will be awarded a $250 cash prize or gift card.
  • The Just Read, Florida! Office reserves the right to limit awards when the total number of submissions received for one category is below ten or if the quality of submissions does not meet the standard of excellence as stated in the requirements.
  • Please visit http://www.justreadflorida.com/ and select Celebrate Literacy Week,
    Florida! for more information on this contest and the exciting events and activities
    scheduled for the week. For questions or additional information, email CLW@fldoe.org or follow us on Twitter @EducationFL or by using #CLW2016.

does empowering young people in a community boost the community’s economy?

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(Los Angeles) We made this announcement today on the CIRCLE homepage:

CIRCLE receives W.T. Grant Foundation Support to Study Social and Economic Effects of Youth Civic Empowerment and Participation

Much research by CIRCLE and others finds that civic activities have social, physical, and economic benefits for the young people who participate. For instance, volunteer service boosts academic success. Meanwhile, a growing body of research finds that the levels of civic engagement in a community as a whole are related to that community’s economic resilience, quality of education, and security.

This body of research has not so far focused on the specific question of whether engaging young people in civic activities improves social and economic outcomes for communities as a whole over time. We hypothesize that young people’s civic engagement is especially important for the economic vitality of their communities, and we will test that hypothesis using data from Chicago neighborhoods and national data for counties.

See also does service boost employment?, the benefits of service for low-income youth,  and against methodological individualism or why neighborhoods are not like broccoli.

Portland Gathering Catalyzes D&D-Journalism Connections

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We recently shared an invitation to join the Experience Engagement gathering on journalism and public engagement last month in Portland, which was supported by NCDD Board member Marla Crockett and NCDD Sustaining Member Peggy Holman. Well apparently it was quite the transformational gathering, and the team at Axiom News did a great write up on a few definitive experiences folks had there, and we encourage you to read it below or find the original Axiom piece here.

Renewed Hope for Journalism Creates Shifts

An energy for discovering and bringing to life journalism’s deeper promise is still pulsing days after a gathering in Portland, Oregon, inspiring participants to new connections and possibilities.

“My hope has been renewed,” says Renee Mitchell, admitting she had long bought into the pessimist view that journalism was basically a dying industry, gasping for its last breath, which “deeply saddened her.”

“But I now recognize that what is bubbling up in the void between what was and what is coming is not new journalism but next journalism, where the possibilities are endless on how to use technology to tell stories that build, empower and inspire community. That’s what’s so exciting for me.”

Hosted by Journalism That Matters and UO SOJC’s Agora Journalism Center, the gathering drew more than 100 journalists, community activists and others representing a diversity of professions. Called Experience Engagement, the highly participatory gathering or “unconference,” as it was called, centered on the question: What is possible when the public and journalists engage to support communities to thrive?

What’s now possible in the lives of three participants in the gatherings begins to answer that question.

Shaping a Community’s Soul

Amalia Alarcon Morris joined the Portland gathering as a government administrator responsible for civic engagement. Her bureau provides support to people at the community level to build capacity, develop leadership, identify issues that matter to them and build bridges back to city government, so that they can influence decisions that shape the community’s quality of life.

Amalia was encouraged to attend the events after participants at a conference on public participation heard her passionate reflections on the importance of story in shaping community.

“I was on a panel around equity and civic engagement and one of the things I said, which I firmly believe in, is that when we work in government, there is a kind of data lust that happens where people are constantly asking us for statistics; they want quantitative information to support the work that we do. But they don’t give the same respect to people’s stories.”

Quantitative data is fine, but people’s stories are the data, Amalia continues, and it is in “sitting down and listening to people’s stories” that hearts and minds are changed.

As a result of the Experience Engagement gathering, Amalia is now actively working towards forming collaborations with journalists in the city of Portland who have an orientation to the journalism that she saw might be possible.

“One of the biggest things that I walked away with was just this feeling of, ‘Oh my gosh, what influence could we have in the world if we approached the practice of journalism in that way,’” Amalia says.

“To walk into a room filled with people who are journalists or students of journalism who were talking about how to engage with community and approach journalism from an assets based perspective . . . to me, that was a completely new way of looking at journalism. It was amazing.”

Amalia adds one of her resonating reflections from the gathering was that if a community is always being portrayed negatively, what does that do to the soul of that community?

“My biggest ideal, my dream, would be some collaborative work so that together with the (traditional) investigative pieces there would be this collaborative storytelling about what else is going on amidst the chaos and the wrongdoing.

“How are people putting the pieces together or holding the pieces together or building community as opposed to tearing community down. To me, that would be the most exciting thing.”

Journalism Still Matters

Renee joined the Experience Engagement gathering to see if there was still a place for her, as a spoken word poet, multimedia artist and youth voice advocate, to connect with others based on the work she now does outside of traditional journalism.

“One of my aha moments was in the confirmation that hope is still alive, that journalism still matters, and that journalists still have an important role of facilitating conversations that help people find common ground,” says Renee, a journalist of 25 years who is now working outside of the industry.

“I was thrilled to see that there were so many other current and former journalists and non-journalists in the room who still cared deeply about the intention of why I got into journalism in the first place, which was naively to help save the world,” she adds.

“It was amazing to see so many others, 30 years later, who still believe in the potential of making a difference in the lives of others through journalism.”

As a result of her experience in Portland, Renee now feels supported to try things that engage the community more directly and to collaborate with other journalists in different cities in creating projects that excite her journalistic urgings and also empower her community.

One specific possibility now coming to life is her intention to create an interactive youth voice project she learned about from Terry Parris, Jr. who now works for ProPublica in New York City. Terry led a project that involved working with young poets who wrote about their dreams for their neighborhood. “He was so open in sharing information and ideas, while also giving me permission to duplicate the project, which I intend to do next year,” Renee says.

She also found tremendous support and inspiration for a new initiative she is leading, which is to create a career-technical track in journalism for a local high school.

Eager to avoid, the standard “me-teacher, you-student boring lecture approach,” Renee was envisioning project-based learning that offered students a chance to do social justice-based journalism that was relevant to their lives and to their communities.

“I walked away from the conference with so many ideas for really cool storytelling projects, so much enthusiasm for the potential of what my students can learn and create, and so much more direction, and confidence, really, about teaching  students to embrace the heart and intention of serving community through journalism,” she says.

It’s for all of these reasons that Renee says she has “fallen in love with journalism all over again.”

“I see this industry I loved so much and for so many years through fresh eyes now. I am reconnected to it in a way I didn’t expect. I am so grateful.”

Strengthening the Practice as a Tribe

As someone already venturing down the path of active community engagement, Ashley Alvarado with the Southern California Public Radio has been most thrilled to discover a “tribe” with whom to build and strengthen and amplify the possibilities in this “next journalism.”

As a public engagement editor, Ashley was especially struck by the various engagement practices and activities modelled through the Experience Engagement gathering, from Open Space Technology to the space made for group reflections on the experience as it unfolded. She is now looking at ways to bring some of these practices and activities back into her own work of engaging listeners and the broader community.

“I think lot of people at Experience Engagement found it was this transformative experience; it was renewing, and I’m excited to see what happens now so many people have found their people and what we can pull off when we get together,” says Ashley.

Intrigued by the possibilities in the rebirthing of journalism? Click here to learn more about Journalism That Matters, the host of Experience Engagement.

You can also sign up for a co-discovery experience Axiom News is hosting on Generative Journalism and the New Narrative Arts.

You can find the original version of this Axiom News piece at www.axiomnews.com/renewed-hope-journalism-creates-shifts.

The Shift from Open Platforms to Digital Commons

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Universitat de Oberta Catalunya -- Open University of Catalonia -- just published the following essay of mine as part of its "Open Thoughts" series.  The UOC blog explores the benefits and limitations of various forms of peer production: well worth a look!

From open access platforms to managed digital commons: that is one of the chief challenges that network-based peer production must meet if we are going to unleash the enormous value that distributed, autonomous production can create.

The open platform delusion
We are accustomed to regarding open platforms as synonymous with greater freedom and innovation. But as we have seen with the rise of Google, Facebook and other tech giants, open platforms that are dominated by large corporations are only “free” within the boundaries of market norms and the given business models. Yes, open platforms provide many valuable services at no (monetary) cost to users. But when some good or service is offered for at no cost, it really means that the user is the product. In this case, our personal data, attention, social attitudes lifestyle behavior, and even our digital identities, are the commodity that platform owners are seeking to “own.”

In this sense, many open platforms are not so benign. Many of them are techno-economic fortresses, bolstered by the structural dynamics of the “power law,” which enable dominant corporate players to monopolize and monetize a given sector of online activity. Market power based on such platforms can then be used to carry out surveillance of users’ lives; erect barriers to open interoperability and sharing, sometimes in anticompetitive ways; and quietly manipulate the content and “experience” that users may have on such platforms.

Such outcomes on “open platforms” should not be entirely surprising; they represent the familiar quest of capitalist markets to engineer the acquisition of exclusive assets and monetize them. The quarry in this case is our consciousness, creativity and culture. The more forward-looking segments of capital realize that “owning a platform” (with stipulated terms of participation) can be far more lucrative than owning exclusive intellectual property rights for content.

So for those of us who care about freedom in an elemental human and civic sense — beyond the narrow mercantilist “freedoms” offered by capitalist markets — the critical question is how to preserve certain inalienable human freedoms and shared cultural spaces. Can our free speech, freedom of association and freedom to interconnect with each other and innovate flourish if the dominant network venues must first satisfy the demands of investors, corporate boards and market metrics?

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Feminist Data Visualization

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I just had the opportunity to attend a talk by Lauren Klein of Georgia Tech on Feminist Data Visualization: Rethinking the Archive, Reshaping the Field.

Her work, she argued, is feminist not because it includes the works of female data scientists – though it does – but because it seeks to examine the cultural and critical dimensions of data visualization.

Data visualization has the ability to call attention to the scholarly process, and a feminist perspective on data visualization highlights the presence or absence of certain modes of scholarly thought.

Klein began her lecture by exploring the work of Elizabeth Peabody. Quietly at the center of America’s Transcendental movement, Peabody was the business manager of The Dial, the main publication of the Transcendentalists, and is credited with starting the nation’s first kindergarten. She was friends with Emerson and Thoreau. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann were her brother in laws.

An educator herself, Peabody’s work probed the question: who is authorized to produce knowledge?

Through the creation of elaborate mural charts, Peabody captured complex tables of historical events as aesthetic visualizations intended to provide historic “outlines to the eye.”

Her charts were challenging to create and to decipher – but that was an intentional pedagogical technique. Peabody believe that through the act of interpreting her work, a viewer would create their own historical narrative – they would have a role in generating knowledge.

Her large mural charts, intended to be physically be spread out on the floor, each took 15 hours of labor to create. Klein commented that this work is reminiscent of quilting – “a system of knowledge making that was considered women’s work and so has been excised from history.”

Klein compared Peabody’s work to that of William Playfair. Widely considered “the father of data visualization,” Playfair is credited with wth creation of the bar chart and the pie chart. His works are recreated by aspiring data artists and new data tools use his work to demonstrate what they can do.

Playfair’s work is beautiful and easy to read.

But, Klein asked, are we losing something by unquestioningly accepting that approach as the standard?

Klein pointed to the work of one other data visualizer – Emma Willard – who created a beautiful graphic, Temple of Time in 1846.

Her work is explicitly framed from the viewers perspective. The viewer stands at the fore as the history of time recedes into the past.

Willard’s work makes the implicit argument that data visualization is inherently a subjective process. While we take our bar charts and graphs to be unquestionable factual – Willard argues that data is inherently subjective.

In that way, we are indeed losing something by neglecting this alternative forms of data visualization and by not questioning the perspectives we take in interpreting data.

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Senator Sasse’s Moving Senate Speech

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Senator Ben Sasse. Link goes to the video of his maiden speech in the Senate.

Public Policy Leadership alumn Elliott Warren kindly sent me a link to this maiden address from Senator Ben Sasse, Junior Senator from Nebraska (R). It was an incredibly kind compliment for Elliott to say that this Senator’s speech reminded him of my classes here at the University of Mississippi. Senator Sasse calls for a renewal of the virtues of deliberation that the Senate is supposed to embody. He explicitly points to Socrates for insight, and to the methods of Socratic dialogue. He calls on his colleagues explicitly to avoid straw man fallacies and other errors of reasoning. It was the most elegant speech I have heard from a Senator in years.

The speech is 29 minutes long. You may not have that time right now. At some point, though, you will be glad that you watched Senator Sasse’s speech. I urge you all to find the time. Here’s his speech on C-SPAN.