serendipityoucity

As is the case when I am procrastinating a mountain of work, I discover stuff that takes the guilt away and then I share what I find. This morning I sent the following email to the Feminist Listserve I subscribe to and my oldest pal Christina.

Sometimes it is nice to honour the ladies that paved the way, irrespective of this one’s current conservatism, she is considered to be one of the first female rock and rollers who played guitar on stage and was the first to perform some great iconic songs that challenged what a woman should do, e.g. Silver Threads and Golden Needles, or Hard Headed Woman. The lyrics are great, turning Eve into a tough gal tellin’ Adam what to do! Youzee! According to Jack White, White Stripes:

“She’s influential to every modern female singer, whether they know about her or not,” Mr. White said. “She broke down those walls in the beginning, when it was the hardest to do.”

The songs would not be that risky today, but then, wow, talk about radical.

Jack White, is producing her new album, and this video, shows the reverence he and the band have for her. I thought it really quite touching, and wonderful to discover this woman.

You’re watching Thunder on the Mountain Feat. Jack White. See the Web’s top videos on AOL Video

Christina and I got to exchanging emails, and wondering about awesome women in Canada that should be posted in Wikipedia. Christina is a consultant for an aboriginal consulting firm, so I asked about aboriginal woman. Lots of back and forths with the circle completed with second discovery of a cool contemporary feminist musician from Iqualuit that opened for the White Stripes in the North. Lucie Idlout! She is a bit gritty, hard hitting, rocker, political and hot! Along with that, a kickass artist.

Whiskey Breath is a raunchy rock and roll song that has me playing air guitar!

Follow that up with E5-770, My mother’s name, about the practice the Canadian Government had or renaming and referring to the Inuit with a disc number they had to wear around their necks as they naming system did not fit into states way of officially recording people.

“Lovely Irene”, a reworked version of her song “Angel Street”. An early demo version of that song had previously inspired Iqaluit mayor Elisapee Sheutiapik to launch a campaign to call attention to the issue of domestic violence in Canada, by asking Canadian cities to name a city street Angel.

She is just so cool and hard hitting - Irene, high heels on a gravel road. Christina found Lucie as I had pointed her to Elisapee Sheutiapik who was amazing on the Senate Committee investigating the Census issue. A morning of convergences!

Now this is just plain refreshing!

I love this visualization!

but only because I have been doing some crazy amounts of work over at datalibre.ca and have started a professional blog space, which I will make more public when it is ready.

The Census_lessness has been eating up a bunch of my time as you will see on Census Watch and many of the posts on datalibre.ca. The digital economy strategy consultation that went good for open data and really bad on the census ate another chunk of time and energy.

It also means that i have been doing more and reflecting less, which is fine for a time, but, it has made be more frantic, rushed and less patient. And a little more shallow on the emotional front! It is hard to balance it all.

I also started a new part-time job on the Community Social Data Strategy working with 17 data consortia across the country who collectively group purchase government data and find creative ways to share these amongst themselves, build capacity and do national research. We are building a new web infrastructure that is in draft mode at the moment and implementing a new governance structure while hoping that we will still have decent data to work with in the future. I am also involved with advancing a more open user agreement with the 4 cities with Ottawa as the lead that have become open data. Finally, I am supposed to be writing my PhD dissertation, and I will soon get my you A&&ed kicked on that front.

I have made a couple of visits to Montreal, a cottage weekend, had friends visit from Kitchener Waterloo, Winnipeg and Toronto and also got to spend a fantastic weekend with my niece and nephew. That is the brief on the fast paced summer!

On the more disconcerting front, my eldest son who joined the Canadian Military as an infantryman, will be off to Afghanistan next week for his first posting. To be frank, I have not processed that yet, so I cannot say much about it for the moment. I hope to spend a great week with him before he goes. You just do not ever know what your babies are going to grow up to be, and I could not have foreseen this as a part of his life’s journey. They do what it is they wish to and the best I can do is be supportive.

So thanks Omar for the push for me to write something here!

What a depressing week it has been to be female. A psychopathically violent woman-beater and murderer is lionised. A film director who drugs and then sodomises a 13-year-old girl is let off. A famous actor tells his ex-partner she deserves to be “raped by a pack of niggers”. And the Catholic Church elevates women’s ordination to the same level of offence as child abuse. Thanks, chaps.

And that was just in the UK!

Via the UK Guardian: Mary Ann Sieghart: Women on top? You’ve got to be joking - For at least 20 years, we have been fed the line that the ‘Future is Female’. But the future has always failed to materialise

“There is a certain age when a woman must be beautiful to be loved, and then there comes a time when she must be loved to be beautiful.”

and

“A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off you.”

ah! It just so not Ottawa!

via - NY Times: Aging Gracefully, the French Way

After reading and writing about the census, I enjoy some shallow reading and where is my lipstick!

Saturday July 17, from 11am-4pm

Ottawa City Hall, 110 Laurier Avenue

The tag/hashtag for the event is #cco10

You can register through EventBrite, or contact us at changecampottawa@gmail.com

ChangeCamp is a free participatory web-enabled face-to-face event, which addresses the demand for a renewed relationship among citizens and government. The mission of ChangeCamp is to innovate how Canadian governments engage with citizens in an age of mass participation on the Internet. The event aims to develop action plans, for initiatives to improve participation in municipal governance utilizing web-technologies.

Building on the success of ChangeCamp 2009, ChangeCamp 2010 is an event being organized by the Ottawa community to bring together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy makers, political players, change-makers and government employees to discuss participatory governance at the municipal level in a web-enabled world. The key theme of this event is:

Data liberation and open, transparent and participative government

Are you interested in exploring ways better your community through improved access to information managed by various governments in the National Capital Region? Imagine being able to combine budgetary, health and voting information from all three levels of government to better understand how your tax dollars are being spent. Recently the City of Ottawa adopted the principles of Open Government and approved a contest for the creation of mobile and web applications to make use of its data with $50 000 in prizes and incentives.

ChangeCamp is a solutions playground open to anyone, where admission and ideas are free. ChangeCamp Ottawa is a unique opportunity. It is taking place in one of the most technologically connected and politically charged environments in the country.

ChangeCamp Ottawa is looking for those interested in e-governance, communications and policy. Are you in?

Register now: http://changecampottawa2010.eventbrite.com/

Yesterday I was despaired by the fragile state of the Canadian democracy, that media relations people are now the new purveyors of truth, and what stood as truth is being tampered with by our Clement as he edits his own public consultation! By the end of the day, chest was tight and the best I could do, in my despaired state, was sit back and watch bad cop shows! (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

But then, BoingBoing delivers this awesomeness, a reminder, why small losses in objective knowledge, the loss of evidence based policy making, cultures of secrecy and unquestioned power, that grow and take away piece by piece what democracy is about can lead to the worst in government systems. It also, reminds me why I keep at it.

Holocaust survivor, his daughter, and his grandchildren dancing to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive at various concentration camp sites throughout Europe.

One day left…

There is one day left folks! Go nuts and vote.

You have to login, your info is confidential, see top right navigation bar. Once you do, then you can vote.

1) Save the Census: http://de-en.gc.ca/2010/07/06/reinstate-our-census-long-form-aka-questionnaire-2b/

2) For Open Data: http://de-en.gc.ca/2010/06/10/open-access-to-canadas-public-sector-information-and-data/

You will see both of these nested within Canada’s Digital Content!

Also read here to find out about Census Actions & Media - . If you come across any new material or actions, do not hesitate to share! I am updating that blog daily. (that is why I have neglected you here a little lately!)

BBC: Study examines scientists’ ‘climate credibility’

Some 98% of climate scientists that publish research on the subject support the view that human activities are warming the planet.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Expert credibility in climate change

1. William R. L. Anderegga, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305;
2. James W. Prallb, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S
3. Jacob Haroldc, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Palo Alto, CA 94025; and
4. Stephen H. Schneidera, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 Contributed by Stephen H. Schneider, April 9, 2010 (sent for review December 22, 2009)

Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.