Complex Insight - Understanding our world

I had the great pleasure of co-authoring the International Peace Institute's (IPI) unique report on "Big Data for Conflict Prevention" (PDF) with my two colleagues Emmanuel Letouzé and Patrick Vinc...

From the fight against polio to fixing education, what's missing is often good measurement and a commitment to follow the data. We can do better, writes Bill Gates.

Vincent Huang has a great set of posts at Ericsson labs on preserving privacy in big data analytics. Over the last few years there has been a growing trend in the international development world to highlight the use of big data for development. Using mobile telephony call records, twitter postings etc as raw data sets that can be mined for indicators of social circumstances and systemic change. A key first step in this process is anonymizing the data so individuals cannot be easily identified from distilled results. Vincent's work discusses the requirements and algorithms used and is both a fascinating and essential read for anyone working in this area. Must read posts if you are involved in big data for development or working with private individual identifiable data sets. Click on the image or title to learn more.

Interesting article on social-ethographic research and social cognition. Key quote "it is important to pay attention to what people articulate as their own understanding of how social processes work and how they as individuals might negotiate the complex social terrain, rather than simply looking at their actions…." Worth a read

The UN says that each person needs between 20 and 50 liters of safe freshwater per day for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. Yet more than one in six people worldwide don’t have access to this amount—and some 2.5 billion live without access to even basic sanitation facilities. Combined, these have a shocking impact: Globally, diarrhea is the leading cause of illness and death. But the failure of international intervention has left the door open for grassroots solutions: In both Indonesia and the Philippines, a small entrepreneurial approach to safe water provision has achieved massive scale in an extremely short time span. The “water refill” industry, which utilizes low-cost technology to purify water on site in locally run businesses, has received little attention in the West, but it represents possibly the most effective means for water delivery in the developing world.Molecular biologist Ranjiv Khush and hydrologist Jeff Albert are now hoping to replicate the Asian model in other parts of the world, beginning in East Africa.  Click on the image or title to learn more.

Despite the new agey title - interesting article at the design observer on mapping development timescales to those of the underpinning ecological systems that are required to support it, using balinese rice production as an example.  Worth a read. Click on image or title to learn more.

A new assessment of Madagascar's lemurs shows they are far more threatened than previously thought. A group of specialists is in Madagascar - the only place where lemurs are found in the wild - to systematically assess the animals and decide where they sit on the Red List of Threatened Species. More than 90% of the 103 species should be on the Red List, they say. Since a coup in 2009, conservation groups have repeatedly found evidence of illegal logging, and hunting of lemurs has emerged as a new threat. Click on image or title to learn more...

A good review of Open House: Smarter cities, smarter thinking meeting on the 28 June, 2012 . 

This year’s conference centred on the cohesive development of our cities. Delegates from BDP, Hawkins Brown, Nicholas Hare Architects, Pick Everard and Foster + Partners were among those present at the second day of the Open House Worldwide Conference 2012 hosted by CBRE in London. Worth reading. Click on image or headline to learn more.

This is an old presentation by Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute from May 5, 2010.  Petabytes of data about human movements, transactions, and communication patterns are continuously generated and may hold important insghts into global development.