Protection Through Participation: Crowdsourced Tap Water Quality Monitoring for Enhanced Public Health

Lead contamination in municipal drinking water is a national public health issue and is generally the result of water contact with leaded distribution piping and on-premise plumbing. As a result, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Lead and Copper Rule requires point of use sampling methods at a small fraction of consumer taps on the public water distribution system. While this approach is practical, it leaves large gaps of consumers without direct monitoring and protection. In response, a novel contest-based crowdsourcing study was conducted to engage the public in monitoring their own water quality at their home taps and study factors that shaped participation in drinking water monitoring. Participants were asked to collect samples of their household drinking water through social media postings, kiosks, and community events with the chance to win a cash prize. The project distributed approximately 800 sampling packets and received 147 packets from participants of which 93% had at least partially completed surveys. Part I of this thesis investigated lead levels, participant recruitment and demographic patterns, and motivations for participation. On average, private wells were found to have higher lead levels than the public water supply, and the higher lead levels were not attributed to older building age. There was also no statistical relevance between the participants’ perceived and actual tap water quality. Survey responses indicated that citizens were motivated to participate in the project due to concerns about their own health and/or the health of their families. In contrast, participants reported that they were not motivated by the cash prize. Part II of this thesis investigated the influence of socioeconomic characteristics on participants’ environmental literacy, behavior, and social networks. When looking at actions taken in response to water quality issues, income, age, and educational groups had some of the largest, significant, paired differences. With regards to knowledge, this project showed success in potentially improving citizen’s scientific literacy relating to key lead information, and overall provided self-assessed educational benefits to those who participated. This project helps inform future public engagement with water quality monitoring, create new knowledge about the influence of personal motivations for participation, and provide recommendations to help increase awareness of water quality issues. It also demonstrates that the crowdsourcing method could be used to actively engage and inform citizen participants in water quality monitoring efforts, creating a more scientifically literate and active public

Scenarios for the development of smart grids in the UK: literature review

Smart grids are expected to play a central role in any transition to a low-carbon energy future, and much research is currently underway on practically every area of smart grids. However, it is evident that even basic aspects such as theoretical and operational definitions, are yet to be agreed upon and be clearly defined. Some aspects (efficient management of supply, including intermittent supply, two-way communication between the producer and user of electricity, use of IT technology to respond to and manage demand, and ensuring safe and secure electricity distribution) are more commonly accepted than others (such as smart meters) in defining what comprises a smart grid. It is clear that smart grid developments enjoy political and financial support both at UK and EU levels, and from the majority of related industries. The reasons for this vary and include the hope that smart grids will facilitate the achievement of carbon reduction targets, create new employment opportunities, and reduce costs relevant to energy generation (fewer power stations) and distribution (fewer losses and better stability). However, smart grid development depends on additional factors, beyond the energy industry. These relate to issues of public acceptability of relevant technologies and associated risks (e.g. data safety, privacy, cyber security), pricing, competition, and regulation; implying the involvement of a wide range of players such as the industry, regulators and consumers. The above constitute a complex set of variables and actors, and interactions between them. In order to best explore ways of possible deployment of smart grids, the use of scenarios is most adequate, as they can incorporate several parameters and variables into a coherent storyline. Scenarios have been previously used in the context of smart grids, but have traditionally focused on factors such as economic growth or policy evolution. Important additional socio-technical aspects of smart grids emerge from the literature review in this report and therefore need to be incorporated in our scenarios. These can be grouped into four (interlinked) main categories: supply side aspects, demand side aspects, policy and regulation, and technical aspects.

Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications

Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring low-volume unobservable communication.Comment: 13 Page

Public survey instruments for business administration using social network analysis and big data

Purpose: The subject matter of this research is closely intertwined with the scientific discussion about the necessity of developing and implementing practice-oriented means of measuring social well-being taking into account the intensity of contacts between individuals. The aim of the research is to test the toolkit for analyzing social networks and to develop a research algorithm to identify sources of consolidation of public opinion and key agents of influence. The research methodology is based on postulates of sociology, graph theory, social network analysis and cluster analysis. Design/Methodology/Approach: The basis for the empirical research was provided by the data representing the reflection of social media users on the existing image of Russia and its activities in the Arctic, chosen as a model case. Findings: The algorithm allows to estimate the density and intensity of connections between actors, to trace the main channels of formation of public opinion and key agents of influence, to identify implicit patterns and trends, to relate information flows and events with current information causes and news stories for the subsequent formation of a "cleansed" image of the object under study and the key actors with whom this object is associated. Practical Implications: The work contributes to filling the existing gap in the scientific literature, caused by insufficient elaboration of the issues of applying the social network analysis to solve sociological problems. Originality/Value: The work contributes to filling the existing gap in the scientific literature formed as a result of insufficient development of practical issues of using analysis of social networks to solve sociological problems.peer-reviewe

Scenarios for the development of smart grids in the UK: synthesis report

‘Smart grid’ is a catch-all term for the smart options that could transform the ways society produces, delivers and consumes energy, and potentially the way we conceive of these services. Delivering energy more intelligently will be fundamental to decarbonising the UK electricity system at least possible cost, while maintaining security and reliability of supply. Smarter energy delivery is expected to allow the integration of more low carbon technologies and to be much more cost effective than traditional methods, as well as contributing to economic growth by opening up new business and innovation opportunities. Innovating new options for energy system management could lead to cost savings of up to £10bn, even if low carbon technologies do not emerge. This saving will be much higher if UK renewable energy targets are achieved. Building on extensive expert feedback and input, this report describes four smart grid scenarios which consider how the UK’s electricity system might develop to 2050. The scenarios outline how political decisions, as well as those made in regulation, finance, technology, consumer and social behaviour, market design or response, might affect the decisions of other actors and limit or allow the availability of future options. The project aims to explore the degree of uncertainty around the current direction of the electricity system and the complex interactions of a whole host of factors that may lead to any one of a wide range of outcomes. Our addition to this discussion will help decision makers to understand the implications of possible actions and better plan for the future, whilst recognising that it may take any one of a number of forms

User's Privacy in Recommendation Systems Applying Online Social Network Data, A Survey and Taxonomy

Recommender systems have become an integral part of many social networks and extract knowledge from a user's personal and sensitive data both explicitly, with the user's knowledge, and implicitly. This trend has created major privacy concerns as users are mostly unaware of what data and how much data is being used and how securely it is used. In this context, several works have been done to address privacy concerns for usage in online social network data and by recommender systems. This paper surveys the main privacy concerns, measurements and privacy-preserving techniques used in large-scale online social networks and recommender systems. It is based on historical works on security, privacy-preserving, statistical modeling, and datasets to provide an overview of the technical difficulties and problems associated with privacy preserving in online social networks.Comment: 26 pages, IET book chapter on big data recommender system