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This game can stop people from falling for COVID-19 conspiracies

Ruth Reader

October 13, 2020 |

FastCompany |

Text |

800-1500 Words

Response Location: United Kingdom, Cambridge, England

To combat the spread of conspiracy theories, researchers at Cambridge’s Social Decision Making Lab have created an interactive game that puts users in the shoes of "manipulators" to teach them how to "question social media posts that have the hallmarks of engineered virality." Although experts say playing the game just one time will likely not result in sustainable change, a similar game that focused on understanding how fake news was created found that users' beliefs in fake news decreased by an average of 21%.

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

Michael J. Coren

October 12, 2020 |

Hothouse Solutions |

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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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The Pandemic is Resurrecting India's Folk Arts by Forcing Performers to Make Their Online Debut

Mahima Jain

September 30, 2020 |

Vice |

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800-1500 Words

Response Location: India

Shaale.com is an online platform that hosts performances and learning content on classical and folk arts from India. The coronavirus pandemic meant lost income for most of the country’s performers, especially those in rural areas. So many have figured out ways to monetize their arts by putting them online where overseas and domestic subscribers pay to access the performances. Other platforms, such as the nonprofit Kalbeliya World, provides performers with a chance to earn money by offering classes to people from around the world. Most of the students are from the Europe and the Americas.

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Spots of hope: Some good news for South Africa's cheetahs

Tony Carnie

September 28, 2020 |

Mongabay |

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1500-3000 Words

Response Location: South Africa, Durban

A cheetah conservation project in South Africa has helped the cat population rebound over the years by securing them in wildlife reserves. The Cheetah Metapopulation Project started in 2011 when there were 217 cheetahs, but a decade later, there are now 419 across the reserves. While there is debate about whether the focus should be on the quantity of cheetahs or the quality of their enclosures, the project has been successful and they’re looking to share their cheetahs and conservation lessons with other countries.

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

Carl Miller

September 27, 2020 |

Reasons to be Cheerful |

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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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Soap on tap? A startup arrives in NYC with a plan to take the plastic out of cleaning products.

Claire Elise Thompson

September 21, 2020 |

Grist |

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800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, New York, New York

To make food and cleaning products more accessible to those experiencing economic hardship, the startup Algramo has installed more than 2,500 automated bulk-dispensing systems throughout Chile where people can purchase an item and come back to refill it using the same container. Instead of competing against other consumer good companies, Algramo works with them to help change their packaging practices to reduce their plastic waste. Algramo is scaling the service to New York City and Indonesia to help cash-strapped and eco-friendly shoppers.

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The Wayback Machine and Cloudflare Want to Backstop the Web

Lily Hay Newman

September 17, 2020 |

Wired |

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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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Will the Special Investigative Unit decrease gun violence in Flint?

Amy Diaz

September 15, 2020 |

Flint Beat |

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1500-3000 Words

Response Location: United States, Flint, Michigan

In the first full month since it was created to take illegal guns off the street, Flint's Special Investigative Unit seized 64 firearms and made dozens of arrests. The unit's predictive policing approach relies on data that tell the police where gun crimes are concentrated. Critics contend that focusing enforcement on historically high-crime areas creates a feedback loop of racially disparate policing, in that more cops in a neighborhood means more arrests, which in turn invites more enforcement. Targeted gun enforcement has a mixed record of crime reductions and racial inequities.

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

Sharon Kiburi

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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Maryland Stands Up Online Grants Application in Just 8 Hours

Andrew Westrope

September 02, 2020 |

Government Technology |

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800-1500 Words

Response Location: United States, Maryland

The Maryland Department of Information Technology adapted an existing system to quickly distribute small-business grants and loans due to Covid-19. The Maryland OneStop platform, a single site for state licenses, permits, and certifications, was built with an agile approach decoupling front-end user experience from the back-end where the program does the work, which allowed quick front end modifications to launch the loan and grants online when coronavirus hit. The system processed 18,000 applications in the first 3 days and 56,000 within a month. The success was preceded by many years of planning and work.

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