Make Research Data Public? -- Not Always so Simple: A Dialogue for Statisticians and Science Editors

Putting data into the public domain is not the same thing as making those data accessible for intelligent analysis. A distinguished group of editors and experts who were already engaged in one way or another with the issues inherent in making research data public came together with statisticians to initiate a dialogue about policies and practicalities of requiring published research to be accompanied by publication of the research data. This dialogue carried beyond the broad issues of the advisability, the intellectual integrity, the scientific exigencies to the relevance of these issues to statistics as a discipline and the relevance of statistics, from inference to modeling to data exploration, to science and social science policies on these issues.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-STS320 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

PriCL: Creating a Precedent A Framework for Reasoning about Privacy Case Law

We introduce PriCL: the first framework for expressing and automatically reasoning about privacy case law by means of precedent. PriCL is parametric in an underlying logic for expressing world properties, and provides support for court decisions, their justification, the circumstances in which the justification applies as well as court hierarchies. Moreover, the framework offers a tight connection between privacy case law and the notion of norms that underlies existing rule-based privacy research. In terms of automation, we identify the major reasoning tasks for privacy cases such as deducing legal permissions or extracting norms. For solving these tasks, we provide generic algorithms that have particularly efficient realizations within an expressive underlying logic. Finally, we derive a definition of deducibility based on legal concepts and subsequently propose an equivalent characterization in terms of logic satisfiability.Comment: Extended versio

Foreword

The land trust community and governments at all levels have become married to conservation easements as their land conservation tool of choice. The numbers speak for themselves: as of the date of this writing, there were reportedly 1,700 land trusts that have protected twelve million acres of land by use of conservation easements. The bulk of this growth both in conservation easements and the land trusts that deploy them has occurred since the 1980s when federal income tax incentives became more fully utilized by conservation easement donors. But the parties to this marriage have become complacent and inattentive in the face of a rapidly changing world resulting from global ecological catastrophes such as climate change and accelerated species extinction

Foreword

The land trust community and governments at all levels have become married to conservation easements as their land conservation tool of choice. The numbers speak for themselves: as of the date of this writing, there were reportedly 1,700 land trusts that have protected twelve million acres of land by use of conservation easements. The bulk of this growth both in conservation easements and the land trusts that deploy them has occurred since the 1980s when federal income tax incentives became more fully utilized by conservation easement donors. But the parties to this marriage have become complacent and inattentive in the face of a rapidly changing world resulting from global ecological catastrophes such as climate change and accelerated species extinction

Firm-level survey provides data on Asia's corporate crisis and recovery

Researchers have decried the limited supply of objective, comparable firm-level data from developing countries. The author describes a new database that helps fill this information gap. The database has detailed records on 4000 firms operating in Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. A comparable survey instrument and sampling methodology was used in each country, and all five studies were carried out simultaneously. The data cover three years (1996-98), allowing for measurements of firm performance before and immediately after the East Asian financial crisis. The questionnaire focused on measuring the impact of the regional financial crisis at the microeconomic level and understanding the longer-run determinants of productivity, employment practices, and financial structure. This database--the first step in the important Firm Analysis and Competitiveness Surveys initiative that the World Bank is spearheading--will be joined by additional country databases. The aim is to fill the gap in much-needed microeconomic evidence using comparable instruments.Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Private Participation in Infrastructure,Microfinance,Small Scale Enterprise

Data standardization

With data rapidly becoming the lifeblood of the global economy, the ability to improve its use significantly affects both social and private welfare. Data standardization is key to facilitating and improving the use of data when data portability and interoperability are needed. Absent data standardization, a “Tower of Babel” of different databases may be created, limiting synergetic knowledge production. Based on interviews with data scientists, this Article identifies three main technological obstacles to data portability and interoperability: metadata uncertainties, data transfer obstacles, and missing data. It then explains how data standardization can remove at least some of these obstacles and lead to smoother data flows and better machine learning. The Article then identifies and analyzes additional effects of data standardization. As shown, data standardization has the potential to support a competitive and distributed data collection ecosystem and lead to easier policing in cases where rights are infringed or unjustified harms are created by data-fed algorithms. At the same time, increasing the scale and scope of data analysis can create negative externalities in the form of better profiling, increased harms to privacy, and cybersecurity harms. Standardization also has implications for investment and innovation, especially if lock-in to an inefficient standard occurs. The Article then explores whether market-led standardization initiatives can be relied upon to increase welfare, and the role governmental-facilitated data standardization should play, if at all

National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program Evaluation: Final Report, Rounds 3 Through 5

The Urban Institute completed a four-year evaluation of Rounds 3 through 5 of the National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program. Using a representative NFMC sample of 137,000 loans and a comparison non-NFMC sample of 103,000 loans, the Urban Institute was able to employ robust statistical techniques to isolate the impact of NFMC counseling on loan performance through June 2013.The final evaluation of Rounds 3 through 5 conducted by Urban Institute indicates that the NFMC program continues to have positive effects for homeowners participating in the program Counseled homeowners were more likely to cure a serious delinquency or foreclosure with a modification or other type cure, stay current after obtaining a cure, and for NFMC clients who cured a serious delinquency, avoid foreclosure altogether

The EU's dialogue on migration, mobility, and security with the Southern Mediterranean: filling the gaps in the global approach to migration. CEPS Liberty and Security in Europe, June 2011

Recent events in North Africa and the Mediterranean have had consequences in terms of human mobility, and are putting the foundations and components of EU’s migration policy under strain. The forthcoming European Council summit of 23-24 June 2011 is expected to determine ‘the orientations for further work’ under the Polish Presidency and the next JHA Trio Presidency Programme for the EU’s policies on crossborder migration in the Mediterranean and internal mobility within the scope of the Schengen regime. This paper constitutes a contribution to current and future EU policy discussions and responses on migration, mobility and security. It provides a synthesised selection of recommendations in these domains resulting from the research conducted by the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Section of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) during the last nine years of work. This Policy Brief argues that for the EU’s Global Approach to Migration to be able to satisfactorily address its unfinished elements and policy incoherencies, the Union needs to devise and develop common policy strategies focused on: first, new enforcement and independent evaluation mechanisms on the implementation of the European law on free movement, borders and migration, and the compatibility of EU member states and EU agencies’ actions with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. And second, the development of a kind of cooperation (dialogue) with third states that goes beyond security-centred priorities and that is solidly based on facilitating human mobility, consolidating fundamental rights and the general principles of the rule of law upon which the EU legal system is founded