serendipityoucity

Such a great piece of cyberspy revelatory work by these Citizen Lab fellows at U of T and I am glad His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s team called upon them!

Citizen Lab Ghostnet

Globe article: Meet the Canadians who busted GhostNet

This was a great article! I saw the movie Buddha from Suburbia some time ago and was not aware of how earth shattering it was. The article fascinatingly discusses how our critical thinkers who once had free reign over their words have been questioned, tempered, and censored - but not by publishers but by fear & culture! Also, the article discussed what it means to try and control the future and how weird power practices show up in the strangest of places - born again muslims like born again christians adopt and practice strange interpretations of their holy books indeed!

Kenan Malik talks to Hanif Kureishi about the Rushdie fatwa and why no one would write such a book today

See the visualizations I made on DataLibre.ca UK Guardian Data + ManyEyes = ISAF Troops Contribution Story

Now here is a job for me! Idlers beware! Only in New York and other parts of the US though , I think I would have to modify the outfit a little but I know this job would give me pleasure and I see no other way to enforce these issues.

Polluters, Beware: These Eco-Police Officers Are for Real

Officer Stevens’s uniform is olive green, not blue, and he wears a Stetson hat that gives him a friendly Smokey Bear look. But drivers of smoke-bellowing trucks, owners of oil-oozing body shops, vendors of undersize fish and other city dwellers underestimate him at their peril. As a member of a small force of police officers whose sole focus is enforcing environmental laws, Officer Stevens carries a gun and handcuffs and can haul a suspect off to jail. These environmental conservation officers number barely 20 in New York City, out of about 300 around the state, but issue about 2,000 summonses for violations and criminal charges annually.

read more here…

The key, or keyhole rather, is in the postmodern emphasis on perspective.

In the early 1930s, the anthropologist Ruth Bunzel went to the small Guatemalan village of Chichicastenango to conduct her field work. The resulting ethnography, published in 1952, remains firmly rooted in its time, yet has a lasting appeal for historians of anthropology. Bunzel realized that she was exploring new methodological terrain, and did her best to articulate selfconsciously her assumptions and assert her presence in the ethnography. At the same time, she recognized the uncertainty inherent in her work, noting that in the practice of social anthropology, “there is no magic formula, but there are many paths to partial truths. ‘’

Elisabeth Kaplan, 2002, Many Paths to Partial Truths’: Archives, Anthropology, and the Power of Representation, Archival Science 2: 209-220.

I am in the process of co-authoring a paper on cartographic heritage with some colleagues. Fortunately I decided to leap out of my usual pragmatic reading of technological and institutional reports on the topic of data archiving and leaped into the realm of historical cartography and archival history. What a delight! Today, I read the following paper:

Churchill, Robert R., 2004, Urban Cartography and the Mapping of Chicago, The Geographical Review, 94 Vol. 1, January, pp. 1-22.

And extracted some great quotes:

Maps often are made not on the basis of the territory itself but on some preconceived sense or vision of the territory. Informed by these maps, subsequent actions move the territory toward the vision(Churchill, 2004:11)

and eventually changing the maps themselves.

Maps can inspire great change, William Stead, a muckraking journalist in Chicago created a map of the state of an immigrant neighbourhood and published it as a frontispiece. These maps inspired the creation of the Hull-House Maps and and Papers which included demographic information of wages and nationalities. These maps were used to

inform and reform (Churchill, 2004:13).

Shortly thereafter, an urban planner informed by these early demographic maps created his own urban plans

And until the Great Depression, Burham’s views – expressed most lucidly in maps and views – changed the map of the city (Churchill, 2004:13).

The expense of continually updating maps was too great, and therefore many map were updated with neighbourhood modifications pasted onto the old sheets. This was particularly the case in Chicago after the great fire and the creation of the Sandborn Maps:

the mottling, wavy lines, and occasional offset in lines on this map bear evidence to several layers of correction sheets applied sequentially to the original. Over an extended period of time, these maps became quite weighty pamlimpsets of urban development in the most literal sense (Churchill, 2004:16).

Finally, on the importance of maps a narrators of place”

the kinds of maps produced, their subject, their purpose, and their audience change systematically through time, yet in this sequence maps are more than static representations of the city at any particular moment, more than artifacts of an evolving technology, more even than icons of the city as a dynamic entity. Maps are proactive agents in shaping the city – both cause and effect (Churchill, 2004:20).

Ada Lovelace Day on Wikipedia, the Collection and the pledge.

This is just the awesomest! Obamas to Plant White House Vegetable Garden

Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) is

Canada’s national science library and leading scientific publisher, provides Canada’s research and innovation community with tools and services for accelerated discovery, innovation and commercialization.

CISTI has just suffered very serious budget cuts - 70% cut- that can affect scientific innovation, access to scientific data, the dissemination of Canadian Science and open access publishing.

The Government of Canada and the National Research Council of Canada have decided that the journals and services of NRC Research Press will be transferred to the private sector.

In a sense they are a victim of their own success. The NRC frames it as follows in a letter to their clients (e.g. Depository Service Program):

this transformation is not the development of a “new business” but the movement of a successful program into a new legal and business environment. It is our belief that this new environment will afford us more flexibility to manage our publishing activities.

However the Depository Services Program (DSP) and the delivery of online access to journals to Canadians cannot be funded by an entity outside of the Federal government, and it is expected that the termination date to journals will be sometime in 2010.

This means less access to scientific journals to Canadians. Research Canadians have paid for! CISTI journals were sent to the DSP which has the:

primary objective is to ensure that Canadians have ready and equal access to federal government information. The DSP achieves this objective by supplying these materials to a network of more than 790 libraries in Canada and to another 147 institutions around the world holding collections of Canadian government publications.

In addition, hundreds of government scientists, librarian and research jobs are expected to be lost. NRC has to cut back its budget by $35 million in annual expenditures

This plan includes a reduction in NRC’s a-base funding totalling $16.8 million per year by 2011-2012 (announced in Budget 2009) as well as reductions in revenue-generating activities.

Hmm! Why do we dislike science so much in this country? What of our Federal Minister of State for Science and Technology thoughts about science?

Here are a few articles:

Actions: Canadian Health Libraries Association - 10 things you can do for CISTI

I went over to experiment with ManyEyes. And I really liked the following output of the addendum intro text I tested earlier. It is interesting that this is ManyEyes’ inclusion of wordle in their repertoire of visualization tools.

Here is the tag cloud version for two word series of the same text as above. I find it less visually interesting but users can scroll over a word to see its use frequency times. In the end both are useful as they help you interpret text in different ways.

Here is the proposal introduction using the same tool.

and again using tag clouds

I am going to have to see how I can incorporate this way of seeing text into my work. It was useful to experiment with a text that I know well. I am guessing this might be a nice way to look at paper abstracts, or if writing a proposal one image could have the call for proposal text and the other the answer to the call and compare the two. Might also be handy when writing to see where one is focusing as one is moving forward. Hmmm!