serendipityoucity

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!

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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.

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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?

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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

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

via: Saving the Worlds Women: The Woman Crusade

The Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has done an assessment of the Sri Lankan Civilian Safety Zone (CSZ) and surrounding environs in the northeast by analysing high resolution images derived from multiple satellites: DigitalGlobe’s QuickBird and WorldView satellites; and GeoEye’s Ikonos and GeoEye-1 satellites. This work was done at the request of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International USA (AI-USA).  In addition, a set of photographs taken during a helicopter over flight of the CSZ by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on May 22 provided critical information which aided imagery analysis. These data were accompanied by ancillary information on mortar and artillery was derived from publicly available United States Army Field Manuals, as indicated below and also public statements from the Sri Lankan Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as well as media reporting.  The latter were not considered to be accurate.

In one assessment six images, spanning dates from 9 May 2005 through 24 May 2009, were compared to discover significant land cover change, human displacement and an expanded area cleared for graves. Between May 9-10

no outside parties were allowed access to the area during the timeframe in question, commercial high-resolution satellite imagery was one of the only options for gathering information.

This report summarizes results of satellite imagery analysis concerning possible indications of shelling, IDP movements, changes in gravesites, and possible artillery and mortar positions. Selected images and analysis results described below have been made available on GoogleEarth for public use. 

The report explains how the analysis is done, which visual cues to look for (e.g. raised rims, circularity, peripheral ejecta, bowl shapes and size to determine bomb craters) provides images and explains all data sources.  The images captured:

• the displacement of people,
  
• the destruction of permanent structures,
  
• changes in land cover,
  
• three graveyards with approximately 1350 unique graves counted
• possible artillery and mortar positions 

The AAAS has a number of other case studies to learn from.  This type of reporting accompanied by investigative reporting around the Balibo Five and its movie, makes it harder for atrocities to be lied about.  Now that it is hard to lie, what do we do to prevent these things in the first place! 

Balibo is a film about the story of two Aussies, two Brits and a Kiwi - who lost their lives ahead of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Gary Cunningham, Greg Shackleton, Malcolm Rennie, Brian Peters and Tony Stewart.

Via BBC news:  Revisiting East Timor deaths

I am writing about the work of Jeremy Wood at the moment, that is terribly late, and for some reason more difficult to do than expected.  Jeremy has a series of pieces called Mowing the Lawn that I was thinking about yesterday.  He the traces the lines of mowing his mother’s paddock using a motorized mower and the global positioning infrastructure.  Seems mindless really, but these are quotidian movements through space that millions of farmers, golf course owners, gardeners and suburban dwellers do.  So why not trace the lines, distance, time and the movement of going nowhere but doing it somewhere!

The early winter of 1996 marked the beginning of an idea of the MacLaren Art Centre to work in conjunction with the 1997 International Plowing Match (IPM) to create a plowed and planted work of art in a farm field—a big farm field. The MacLaren Art Centre’s Director and Curator, William Moore began by talking with internationally recognized Canadian artist Joe Fafard from Regina. Joe is known for his agricultural imagery and his ability to tackle big projects. An idea began to take shape.

The idea developed that a well defined image be planted in various crops suitable for aerial and elevated viewing at or near the International Plowing Match site. Roy Hickling, because of his background as a farmer and his abiding interest in art, was invited to act as the Curator and Project Coordinator. After a presentation to the1997 IPM committee, they agreed to incorporate MacLaren Against the Grain: The Fafard Field Project into their event.

A completely wonderful cooperative effort was born. Its connections linked farmer and artist, cultural and farming institutions, and the City of Barrie with its rural community. The MacLaren Art Centre is responsible for organizing and creating the work for the plowing match in exchange for the use of an adjacent fifty acre field that the match secured. The result is a truly unique growing installation exhibition. It represents the plowed image of a horse and is planted in different crops which, over the period it runs, will change with the seasons—like an animation.

Fafard’s work was exhibited last year at the National Gallery of Canada and there I saw a film of the changing seasons of the Horse.  This just stayed with me.  Especially the images of the farmers doing this work.  I am not much of a nationalist, but, this just seems like a Canadian’s thing to do.

A housing desegregation pact was just signed by one of the richest New York Counties.  Racial red-lining has been banned in the US for decades, but there are work arounds, such as property values, the loss of building permits, apathy and so on. But not for this place where a court order is

compel[ing] [Westchester] to create hundreds of houses and apartments for moderate-income people in overwhelmingly white communities and aggressively market them to nonwhites in Westchester and New York City.

The agreement calls for the [Westchester] county to spend more than $50 million of its own money, in addition to other funds, to build or acquire 750 homes or apartments, 630 of which must be provided in towns and villages where black residents constitute 3 percent or less of the population and Hispanic residents make up less than 7 percent. The 120 other spaces must meet different criteria for cost and ethnic concentration.

Some cities have almost gone bankrupt arguing against desegregation. It must have been brutal for the kids going to the white schools once the cases were won!  Imagine doing this in the Glebe, Rockliffe Park, Westboro, Westmount, Rosedale and so on.  The Anti-Discrimination Center successfully argued this case in court.  The Anti-Discrimination Center works

to prevent and remedy all forms of discrimination in housing, employment, education, and public accommodations through advocacy, litigation, education, outreach, monitoring, and research. The Center is a 501(c)(3)not-for-profit corporation organized under the laws of the State of New York.

NIMBY (not in my back yard) has been around for a long time.  Mostly, it is neighbourhood members coming together to get prostitutes & crack dealers out of their communities using vigilante style tactics because the police do little.  Usually the problem just moves to the neighbourhood next door and the social issue continues.  In other cases NIMBY coalitions come together to stop environmentally detrimental projects from coming to their hoods.  Often, but not always wealthier neighbourhoods win and poorer neighbourhoods that do not have the resources to fight and so get the unwanted projects.  Again, nasty development does not disappear or is made cleaner, it just moves. 

In Ottawa we see NIMBY in gentrifying neighbourhoods like mine - Chinatown, where first time home buyers realize that their house was cheap because it is beside a rooming house or public housing and so they organize to close these down or to stop the construction of new ones.  NIMBYs have successfully lobbied against payphones as these were used by drug dealers.  Too bad for the rest of the population such as the poor family that needs the phone!  Bref, instead of dealing with the real issues, poverty, social inequality and exclusion, we construct ugly social housing or concentrate all the poor and marginalized in one small area where we cannot see them or we displace them from prime real estate. 

Lebreton Flats is a classic example of this, where an entire community was expropriated in the 1960s as their neighbourhood was suddenly deemed a slum.  The area remained vacant for 40 years and now high end ugly condos are being built by a sole builder - Claridge homes! A deal that sounds much like those negotiated in the Wire. Claridge even has the nerve to call it one of Ottawa’s newest urban villages!  Good grief - it was one of Ottawa’s first neighbourhoods! We are still waiting for housing to show up, the bike paths to open and for a definition of affordable housing.  Funny that the housing just across the street on Lorne by Nanny Goat hill, Booth Street or Primrose has become high end.  It was the same kinds of housing that was on Lebreton Flats and some are considered as heritage districts. Go figure! Who gets to label a slum as a slum!

I read about great spatial location analysis of public housing strategies in the city of Montreal.  The objective was to locate public housing in mixed income neighbourhoods, with access to public transit, grocery stores, schools and daycares.  Then proposals were developed to build small numbers of affordable and/or subsidized units in those areas, but designed in such a way that they would blend into the neighbourhood look and feel.  This reduced public housing blight and does not ghettoize the poor. In Ottawa we have hid and concentrated high numbers of really horrid looking public housing in inaccessible neighbourhoods - no library, no transit, terrible walkability, no grocery store, no trees, no parks.  I am not a geographic determinist, but I am sure that these are not the best conditions for developing pride of place and for kids to thrive.  Class segregation is alive and well in Ottawa.

I love it! Vauban is an upper middle class German suburb designed without cars!  The

5,500 residents [who live] within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway…

Suburbs are responsible for 

emissions from an increasing number of private cars owned by the burgeoning middle class are choking cities. 

…the [US] Environmental Protection Agency is promoting “car reduced” communities, and legislators are starting to act, if cautiously. Many experts expect public transport serving suburbs to play a much larger role in a new six-year federal transportation bill to be approved this year, Mr. Goldberg said. In previous bills, 80 percent of appropriations have by law gone to highways and only 20 percent to other transport.

A community in the Oakland California is also developing a community that is less dependent on the car.

The Hayward Area Planning Association is developing a Vauban-like community called Quarry Village on the outskirts of Oakland, accessible without a car to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and to the California State University’s campus in Hayward.

 in Britain

“Development comprising jobs, shopping, leisure and services should not be designed and located on the assumption that the car will represent the only realistic means of access for the vast majority of people,” said PPG 13, the British government’s revolutionary 2001 planning document. Dozens of shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and housing compounds have been refused planning permits based on the new British regulations.

Vauban’s Website

NyTimes Article: In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars

Note: The comments to this article are also quite good!  There is none of the dribble I have been reading in the Globe’s comments and comment authors include their real names. 

The Globe has an article bemoaning the lack of universal and uniting theme songs in reference to a concert in honour of Peter Seger’s 90th birthday. True enough, but then again, the nature of music preferences and diffusion technologies means there is less a monopoly on style and language and concurrently a decrease in diversity on the airwaves because of corporate ads.  Also, interesting to note the kids on the stage with Peter were the biggies and anglo. 

There is a ton of great protest music that appears under many guises, languages and genres!  As I was reading and posting a comment (that has not yet been posted!) I listened to Jean Leloup, Manu Chao, les Cowboys Fringrants, Ani Difranco, M.I.A., Michael Franti and Chumbawamba. I then went and looked up an earlier post featuring the Peace not War compilations. Such good stuff! Then I discovered Peace not War TV and the New Pollutants: Blast the World 2 Space Dance Against the War video.  Awesome!

I would say, the themes, tunes, rhythms, languages they are a chagin’ but not the spirit!  We just need to reclaim the spaces for them to get heard!

I saw the film about Nathaniel Anthony Ayers tonight and just read this story about him.  The film is not always pretty and many times I cringed.  I also witnessed dignity and incredible respect.  I saw south central LA street life from the safe view of a truck window driven by an illegal Mexican immigrant a few years back.  It was hard to explain to my friend whose English was limited why I was crying as we drove by entire families and people in wheel chairs living in the worst of urban decay. One of the world’s richest countries and cities!