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  • How a #Litterati army on Instagram sparked a global fight against litter

    October 12, 2020 |

    Hothouse Solutions |

    Text |

    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, San Francisco, California

    What started as a small group of people taking pictures of waste in their communities and tagging it on Instagram with the hashtag #Litterati, turned into a global effort, and even an app, to map and dispose of trash. Users can upload to the app an image of trash and machine-learning algorithm can tag it location, material, and company who made it. The city of San Francisco asked the makers of the app for help documenting cigarette butts and tobacco products on its streets and ended up winning a legal victory over the tobacco industry to increase the taxes on their products.

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  • Wisconsin election infrastructure is mostly secure — but inaccurate counts are hard to catch and correct

    October 10, 2020 |

    Channel 3000 |

    Text |

    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Wisconsin

    Same-day voter registration and the implementation of advanced cyberdefenses have bolstered Wisconsin's voting database, fortifying it against hackers and data breaches. Apprehension about election security prompted the formation of a watchdog group, Wisconsin Election Integrity, which regularly prompts the Wisconsin Elections Commission to update and improve the existing systems. Some machines have been identified as risky and measures to safely use and secure them are underway.

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  • In Rio, Mapping Gunshots Can Backfire

    September 29, 2020 |

    Bloomberg CityLab |

    Text |

    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: Brazil, Rio de Janeiro

    Crime-tracking mobile apps give millions of Brazilians crowdsourced data on urban violence, alerting people to dangerous places and filling gaps in government data on shootings, robberies, and other risks. But apps such as Fogo Cruzado (“Crossfire”) and Onde Tem Tiroteio (“Where There's a Shooting”) offer statistically crude glimpses of crime, distorted by media and racial biases that one expert blames for myths about the risks people actually face.

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  • Taiwan's Crowdsourced Democracy Shows Us How to Fix Social Media

    September 27, 2020 |

    Reasons to be Cheerful |

    Text |

    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: Taiwan

    vTaiwan is a mixed-reality, scaled listening exercise used by the government as a new way to make decisions. The platform provides an online space for citizens to debate and for politicians to listen to. The government lays out political questions, such as regulating Uber or changing time zones, and people can share their feelings, agree and disagree, but divisive statements and trolling are not posted. After debating for a period of time it became apparent that people converged around points of consensus. The government has implemented about a dozen laws and regulations based on the discussions.

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  • The state's emergency child-care centers kept COVID-19 in check. Here's how

    September 22, 2020 |

    The Boston Globe |

    Text |

    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: United States, Massachusetts

    Emergency child-care centers in Massachusetts have recorded only a small handful of cases of COVID-19 due to strict adherence to safety measures. Most notably, the centers have implemented a combination of contact tracing and mandatory two-week quarantine for anyone who could have been exposed, which applies to all school personnel, students, teachers, and family members.

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  • Can an Algorithm Help Solve Political Paralysis?

    September 18, 2020 |

    Scientific American |

    Text |

    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United Kingdom

    Citizen assemblies bring together residents for in-depth discussions about solutions to social issues. This alternative form of democracy led to policy changes in many countries, including legalizing abortion in Ireland. In the UK, an algorithm was applied to form a 110-person “climate assembly.” In a multistage process, the algorithm selected a representative sample of the U.K.’s population, sometimes oversampling harder to reach groups to ensure inclusion. A small stipend was also offered to offset costs for people with lower incomes. The group submitted a final report with climate policy recommendations.

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  • The Wayback Machine and Cloudflare Want to Backstop the Web

    September 17, 2020 |

    Wired |

    Text |

    Under 800 Words

    Response Location: United States

    The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawls and caches websites to preserve a history of deleted pages. The Wayback Machine has archived a large amount of the public web over the past two decades, adding more than a billion URLs a day to its databases. The archive has over 468 billion web pages in total, and more than 45 petabytes of data. A new partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which caches a static version of websites, has had promising results. Powering Cloudflare’s work with the Wayback Machine’s interface has allowed them to find more sites to archive.

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  • Health Board: Can't we all just get along?

    September 15, 2020 |

    The Boulder Monitor |

    Text |

    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: United States, Teton County, Montana

    When the coronavirus pandemic complicated matters for local government, the Teton County public health office devised a process to enact state mandate that was effective, transparent, and led to rational decision-making. Although discord continued to a degree, the model is still providing guidance to Jefferson County as officials determine "how to best serve the public health interests of its residents."

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  • Women Data Scientists Created GPS-Driven App to Help Kenya Keep Covid-19 Numbers Low

    September 11, 2020 |

    Zenger News |

    Multi-Media |

    Under 800 Words

    Response Location: Kenya

    Women in GIS Kenya created a digital tool that helps the government track the number of Covid-19 cases, recoveries, and confirmed deaths, as well as the number of tests administered. The online database combines a survey that assesses a person's symptoms with cellphone GPS data to create a map of current hot spots and recommend treatment locations. The government credits the tool, which can also predict high-risk areas vulnerable to future outbreaks, with helping to keep Kenya's COVID-19-related deaths relatively low compared to other countries. The tool is popular among younger, tech-savvy populations.

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  • When contact tracing works, families, friends and co-workers avoid infection

    September 11, 2020 |

    WCNC-TV |

    Broadcast TV News |

    3-5 Minutes

    Response Location: United States, Charlotte, North Carolina

    Health officials in North Carolina have shown that contact tracing can successfully identify those who have been exposed to COVID-19. The efforts of the contact tracers in one county resulted in 35 people being quarantined after an exposure to the virus during a child's birthday party, however that was only possible because of those individuals "were willing to be open and honest and forthcoming."

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