serendipityoucity

I am over my picture allotment on Blogsome so here is a link to a broadband map of undersea cables connecting Africa.

I have just read a few articles by Johann Hari. He is a really interesting writer, one that seems to do what I call research based journalism. A rare form these days! this article that got sent to a friend who is an eating disorder psychologist at CHEO and this one, that discusses among other things the population imbalance in India, Pakistan and China where there are 108 men per hundred women (India), 111 per 100 (Pakistan) and 107 per 100 (China) and he wonders where those women went. I am sending this one to my boys.

They roll their eyes all the time when I tell them this stuff, so now I send them articles that they actually read. It is so fascinating to hear how they find these articles biased, particularly my youngest, while the rest of the news is not? Meanwhile he makes a list of items he wants that from the soccer sportswear magazines he reads since the gear has all been scientifically tested by the manufacturer!

Frig is all I have to say! And what will we human dumbfoundadly think up next! Mafia ’sank nuclear waste ship’

When I lived in Japan I used to see trucks who were supposed to be disposing of toxic waste safely, having little tubes sticking out of them and dragging onto the pavement slowly but surely leaking their content as they drove around! We would see in Fujino illegal dumping of construction waste from Yokohama and my favourite were the sludge disposers sucking from outhouses in one hood then dumping their load in the hood next door! The high cost of disposal creates an underground economy of dangerously stupid behaviour! It is as if, no matter what we do we are doomed to stupidly intoxicate ourselves!

Addendum:

There is a 48 hour grace period for submissions until midnight Tuesday.

I also submitted the following addendum to my earlier submission based on a discussion on CivicAccess List between Jennifer Bell and Russell McOrmond and public education work over at Visible Government. Thanks to both of you!

Another solution to improve Canada’s Copyright law is to abolish crown copyright all together and follow the lead of the NZ Government Open Access and Licensing (NZGOAL) framework. Wherever Crown Copyright would be used, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) would be used instead. The proposal argues:

“Now more than ever is there a very present need to bring information the Government holds on behalf of its people into the public domain so that it may be used in ways that stimulate innovation, generate cultural creativity, social interaction and dialogue, while also kick starting economic growth.”

This is very interesting and could be very helpful for the dissemination of government data. Also, the 2009, UK government’s Power of Information Task Force final report found that Crown Copyright was a major barrier to the re-use of Public Sector Information, and recommended that Crown Copyright be changed to a ‘Crown Commons’ license to encourage re-use.

The creation of progressive unrestricted use licenses by some government departments has moved the access discourse toward citizen participation, these are not global enough across government, but are an extremely innovative and creative step in the right direction.

Today is the last day!

Below is my submission to the copyright consultation. I read a number of submissions, and clearly, I am more of a novice on the topic than I thought. I am not at all an expert in this area, but spoke about what I know, in my own language and hope other non experts will also add their view. I saw that many submissions are about art related content and have not yet come across science nor data topics. If you come across any can you point me to them?

Public Sector Information, Government Data, Government Digital Maps, Publicly Funded Research Data - belong to citizens.

Author: Tracey P. Lauriault

Contact information: tlauriau@gmail.com

I am a researcher and a geomatician. I have worked for many years with a number of community based organizations, not-for-profit groups, research groups and the private sector to create evidence based maps, indicators, tables, analysis, and reports for decision making. I have worked in housing and homelessness, environment, quality of life indicators, child care, education, public health, social planning, etc. I am also a founding member of CivicAccess.ca and a co-author of datalibre.ca.

The greatest impediment to my work has been the high cost of public sector data & information and restrictive licensing regimes that surround these. A few examples help illustrate this: Statistics Canada Data is cost prohibitive and data pricing seems arbitrary; Vital Statistics Data are very expensive; the database that links postal codes to electoral ridings is cost prohibitive; postal code base maps are very expensive; non-private health data from CIHI are very expensive again; there are arbitrary reasons for not releasing non private non security risk data from numerous federal governmental agencies, and there are very restrictive use licenses for public sector information in general and especially the aforementioned Federal organizations.

High costs, restrictive licensing, arbitrary policies and practices, and the government acting as a monopoly on access to public sector data - data citizens have already paid for with taxation - has greatly affected the kinds of research I can pursue, has strained the pocket books of charity organizations and has left citizens and community based organizations marginalized in democratic debates since they do not have access to the data they need to formulate their arguments.

I have tried, as a citizen to analyze the characteristics of my neighbourhood, compare those with others, develop a business plan, investigate the socio-economic profiles of school catchment areas and school closures, or do a spatial location analysis for a new park. I have the skill, knowledge and tools to do this work, however, the cost of the data and use restrictions either a) make it to expensive to do this work or b) restricts how I can disseminate the results.

There seems to be a lack of coherence from the Federal Government of Canada regarding access to and fair use of public data by the public. These are data that the public has paid for already. Crown Copyright and cost recovery for public data impede participatory democracy and puts citizens, community groups and small businesses at a disadvantage when it comes to evidence based planning. It also thwarts innovation since instead of focussing on value added activities, businesses, researchers, non-profit groups and citizens are scrambling to pay for and to adhere to multiply conflicting licenses as opposed to a license that makes it easy to use these data, share these data and add value to them.

To include citizens in the process of decision making I recommend an unrestricted user license such as that developed by two Federal Government programs GeoBase and Geogratis. Also, the government should act less as a monopolist regarding its public data and more as a public agency and abolish cost recovery policies, and create an infrastructure to share these data with their necessary metadata and licenses. We also need to consider the long term preservation of these to ensure they can be disseminated for the long term. This I believe will enable and facilitate the process of citizens and the Government working together. This will also provide a way for us to think together, particularly on troublesome issues such as homelessness.

Sincerely Tracey

Australian police have launched a war crimes investigation into the deaths in East Timor in 1975 of the “Balibo Five” group of journalists.

I always find interesting stories in the UK Independent. Today there were a bunch, two hot ones on women’s issues, one on over the top wealth and one on Mussolini’s crazy sounding right wing granddaughter. I am never going to get anything done at this rate!

1) the story of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, a 24 year old male journalist escapes and Afghan prison. He was sentenced to death for distributing literature about the right of women. His death sentence was eventually reduced to 20 years in prison, this was after he was given a death sentence in a 4 minute court appearance.

2) The story about the rampant sexism in the UK financial sector, where women’s bonuses are 40% those of men, starting wages are much lower for women, pregnancy means redundancy, work segregation, customer parties with lap dancers, strippers, golf and billiards, combined with harassing sexist comments on manner of dress or reducing pay because these women are expected to have babies so why pay them if they are going to leave. It seems like the British banking system is run by a bunch of spoiled frat boys! The study was done by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). I have heard of this kind of behaviour in engineering firms, the military, and other baby blue collar occupations such as fire-fighters, and to a lesser extent in legal firms, but not this outrageous! The EHRC acquires its data via the Equality Act 2006 which require firms to provide information on their working practices and policies.

3) An Article about the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit of objects owned by today’s Indian Maharajas. These folks are supremely rich. The Maharajas no longer rule the north, but they maintain their incredible wealth, this in a country that does not believe in universal education, has a deeply entrenched cast system and does not provide clean drinking water to its people - but hey - Bangalore here we come. Neverland move over, as these folks have been tackier and wing nuttier for longer than stars in the US:

a vast banqueting table with a diamond-studded train set on it for ferrying the port and wine to diners.

A silver-encrusted bed. The design was sent to Christofle in Paris calling for a bed of “dark wood decorated with applied sterling with gilded parts, monograms and arms, ornamented with four life-size bronze figures (of naked females) painted in flesh colour with natural hair, movable eyes and arms, holding fans and horse tails”. Some 290kg of silver was needed to decorate the bed. The four naked figures were European, representing women of France, Spain, Italy and Greece, each with a different skin-tone and hair colour. Through ingenious mechanics linked to the mattress, the Nawab was able to set the figures in motion so that they fanned him while winking at him, against a 30-minute cycle of music from Gounod’s Faust generated by a music box built into the bed.

The Patiala Necklace, part of the largest single commission that the Paris jeweller Cartier has ever executed. Completed in 1928, this piece of ceremonial jewellery originally contained 2930 diamonds and weighed almost a thousand carats.

4) a story about Mussolini’s granddaughter blocking a movie that labels her a ‘whore’, meanwhile she has some great one liners such as when she responded to claims by the transgender Italian politician, Vladimir Luxuria, that she was a “fascist” by reportedly saying: “Meglio fascista che frocio” – it is better to be a fascist than a faggot.

5) How Catholic Church holds a candle and a prayer for the internet generation, just go to the Santa Maria Regina Pacis di Ostia website and light your cyber candle! And of course lets not forget the Vatican launched YouTube channel.

Dam! I am only half way through the paper & Boing Boing may want to RSS feed this paper!

I was discussing the use of remote sensing images for a variety of purposes with my academic advisor who recalled a book about magicians who staged a variety of illusions to fool air photographers during WWII. We also discussed the time stamps on remotely sensed images and how some were nefariously used during the first Iraq war to show how the Iraqis were encroaching on Kuwait - photos going to the border but not the photos showing a turn around and move away from the border that were taken shortly after.

Things are not always as they seem and you cannot believe everything that you see!

Tawang became part of modern India when Tibetan leaders signed a treaty with British officials in 1914 that established a border called the McMahon Line between Tibet and British-run India. Tawang fell south of the line. The treaty, the Simla Convention, is not recognized by China.

This is a border dispute in India’s North East, a region I pay attention to as I have many friends from a state in the region called Nagaland. The McMahon Line and the Simla Accord are lines and rules that India seems quite able and vigorously keen on respecting. Interesting that accords signed with Nagaland are largely ignored! While it all sounds honourable that the Indian Army is mobilized to protect its territory, while the untold story is that the armed forces special powers act provides military personnel with the right to do whatever they want with complete immunity. In Nagaland, Manipur and Assam this means torture, rape, harassment, the burning of villages and disappearances carried out by the Indian army against local indigenous people. It also means, there is restricted access to the entire north-east region as India calls it a protected area and an area of border disputes. It also restricts communication infrastructures, disabling people in the region from communicating with the Nation and the rest of the world. And it controls very carefully what is said about the region by the locals. When people build mesh networks, try to set up cellphone towers or other wireless networks these are immediately torn down in the name of national security!

While India has filled the place with military personnel, it neglects this area socially and economically. It provides little or no national support to the region by way of schools, libraries, infrastructure, health care, internet connectivity, telephones, roads, trains, and so on.

So what is the point of protecting a border when you fail to protect and in some instances terrorize the people on the side you are protecting?