Articles by Tracey

I like data and think it should be shared at not cost! Especially public data!

Superfund 365 – Toxic Data Visualization

September 5, 2007 in datasets, geo by Tracey | 1 comment

Very cool! Albeit in flash and some ui issues when trying to see the map, the legend and there is no way to link to the docs or access explanations associated with the timeline at the bottom but very interesting to see an attempt at making this kind of toxic data accessible!

Superfund365, A Site-A-Day, is an online data visualization application with an accompanying RSS-feed and email alert system. Each day for a year, starting on September 1, 2007, Superfund365 will visit one toxic site currently active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We begin the journey in the New York City area and work our way across the country, ending the year in Hawaii. (We will need a beach vacation by then!) In the end, the archive will consist of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund’s National Priorities List (NPL). Along the way, we will conduct video interviews with people involved with or impacted by Superfund.

Superfund365

I wish I could find more Canadian examples!

US reduces spending on economic census

September 4, 2007 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

A NYTimes Editorial What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You, discusses the real cost of not having information and the politics of the US Census.

Just before the break, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would cut $23.6 million from the bureau’s 2008 budget for compiling the nation’s most important economic statistics. A cut of that size would result in the largest loss of source data since the government started keeping the statistics during the Great Depression, impairing the accuracy of figures on economic growth, consumer spending, corporate profits, labor productivity, inflation and other benchmark indicators.

Real time data from the Hudson

August 31, 2007 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

Imagine the Ottawa River Keeper having access to this type of data! Or for the folks along the St-Laurent Sea Way! How wonderful for citizens to be able to view a 3D model of their rivers and their conditions at any time of day!

This is exactly what is going on along the Hudson where IBM and the Beacon Institute, a nonprofit scientific-research organization in NY are collaborating on the development of the River and Estuary Observatory Network (REON) which is a

distributed-processing hardware and analytical software, the system designed to take heterogeneous data from a variety of sources and make sense of it in real time. The software learns to recognize data patterns and trends and prioritizes useful data. If some data stream begins to exhibit even minor variations, the system automatically redirects resources toward it. The system will also be equipped with IBM’s visualization technologies; fed with mapping data, they can create a virtual model of the river and simulate its ecosystem in real time.

The type of data that will be gathered from sensor reports are

temperature, pressure, salinity, dissolved oxygen content, and pH levels, which will indicate whether pollutants have entered the river. Other sensors will be directed toward sea life, says Nierzwicki-Bauer, and will be used to study species and determine how communities of microscopic organisms change over time.

It is expected there will be many hundreds of sensor required for this project that will rely on fibre optic cables and wireless technologies. Eventually the system will be connected to Ocean sensor and monitoring networks.

REON

Ah! Nice to see some exciting data collecting activities!

Via:
Networking the Hudson River: The Hudson could become the world’s largest environmental-monitoring system. By Brittany Sauser.

Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators

August 25, 2007 in canada, datasets, geo, government by Tracey | Permalink

Check out the Statistics Canada Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators report.

It discusses three main indicators:

Air quality indicator tracks Canadians’ exposure to ground-level ozone—a key component of smog and one of the most common and harmful air pollutants to which people are exposed.

The greenhouse gas emissions indicator tracks the annual releases of the six greenhouse gases that are the major contributors to climate change. The indicator comes directly from the greenhouse gas inventory report prepared by Environment Canada for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol.

The freshwater quality indicator reports the status of surface water quality at selected monitoring sites across the country. For this first report, the focus of the indicator is on the protection of aquatic life, such as plants, invertebrates and fish.

The report also has some links in the references to some of the data used to build these indicators. Also check out the methodology section to get the low down on how to use these data. Perhaps some data and ideas to play with!

But now that we know that

the three indicators reported here raise concerns for Canada’s environmental sustainability, the health and well-being of Canadians, and our economic performance. The trends for air quality and greenhouse gas emissions are pointing to greater threats to human health and the planet’s climate. The water quality results show that guidelines are being exceeded, at least occasionally, at most of the selected monitoring sites across the country.

What do we do?

Tele Atlas is mapping Toronto’s Streets in 3d

August 9, 2007 in canada, datasets, infrastructure, Uncategorized by Tracey | 1 comment

This CBC.ca video gives a brief on how 2d and 3d street view data are collected. In this case it is the city of Toronto and the data collector is Tele Atlas. The things cartographers do to make maps! Tele Atlas seems to be selling georeferenced landmarks, street networks, and a variety of other data it collects simply by driving the streets with cameras and GPS mounted on the roof of cars. At 500 km a day and terrabytes of data, these folks are collecting and selling tons of geo-information that we like to play with on google earth, help find places in mapquest, and allow city planners or police forces to prepare evacuation plans, understand the characteristics of the route planned for a protest or know the point address in a 911 call.

The video also briefly discusses privacy issues, seems like the street is public space and if you happen to be naughty going into some taudry establishment and your act happens to be caught on film, well, so be it, either behave or accept the digital consequences of your private acts in public space, or so the video suggests!

Regarding access to these data, well, my guess is a big price tag. It is a private company after all!

Information Machine, The (1958)

August 6, 2007 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

The Information Machine is a short film written, produced and directed by Charles and Rae Eames for the IBM Pavillion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Animation by John Whitney. Music by Elmer Bernstein. The topic is primarly about the computer in the context of human development but I think it also represents our fascination and need to collect, organize data and abstract the world around us. Since it was written in 1958 it does go on about he, his, him, man and men’s yada yada at nauseaum, it nonethelss remains a cute informative short film in the public domain and captured in the Internet Archive and does represent ideas as relevant to us today as they were then!

via: Information Aesthetics 

Aging Infrastructure Data

August 3, 2007 in infrastructure by Tracey | 3 comments

I have been paying attention to infrastructures lately. More recently, I seemed to be coming across more stories about infrastructural failures, Submarine Cables in Asia, or in the Ring of Fire. The most recent failure being in Minneapolis. Today’s Globeand Mail online has a story that links to some AP video data and this one in particular – U.S Infrastructure under scrutiny – does a good review on how engineers gather their primary data, the nature of that data, and the making of safety reports. Seems like those reports get shelved allot! William Ibbs from UC Berkely an expert on construction risk said it well with a knowing smirk on his face:

well, ah, we’ve had had ah maybe some other social priorities for the past few years in the nation and public works have taken, ah, a bit of a back seat.

The map below shows the distribution of deficient bridges in the US. I thought I was hearing more stories and this data seems to support that my assumptions were not entirely off base!Bridges US

Then I wondered about Canada so I did some superficial digging and found the following report – The Age of Public Infrastructure produced by Statistics Canada. The great thing about all of their report is that you can access their methodology documents, data sources and contacts which is great education material for amateur data geeks who wants to collect data themselves and want to find a systematic and statistically sound way to do so. I also found an Infrastructure Canada report that discusses the Government’s Infrastructure Assets and their management. The collapse in Minneapolis created a media context and receptivity on the subject as seen here – Canada’s infrastructure needs urgent attention, while some specialized think tanks look at particular infrastructures related to investment and stock prices in the energy industry – Aging Energy Infrastructure Could Drive Molybdenum Demand Higher -which is loaded with data particular to engineers in that field.

Why, talk about that here! Well, mostly because infrastructure is a boring thing that we rarely think about yet there is a ton of citizen money locked into these very huge material physical artefacts, also because there is little citizen generated data on the topic and the data available or the decisions that are being made rarely have a price tag or the name of the responsible agent attached to them! Yet without infrastructure we can cannot function! Infrastructure is what distinguishes a good city to live in versus a not so good city to live in, and well infrastructure is an inseparable part of our human habitat.

Imagine a concerted effort by citizens to collect data about satellite dishes, or receiving ground stations, server farms, isp offices, aging bridges, cool sewers, following the complete cycle of ones local water purification plant, or telephone switching station, where one’s poo goes once flushed, where one’s data is stored, and sharing and visualizing all that data on a map. We are starting to see some really interesting adventurer/art urban exploration projects or how some boyz are navigating the 3d elements of a city’s hardware in parkour. I love stuff like this Pothole reporter, could we develop collaborative tools to report missing manhole covers, Ottawa’s thriving road side ragweed cultivations, where the public washrooms are/are not along with public water fountains, Montreal’s missing trees in sidewalk planters (Michael‘s idea on location portal content gathering) and so on.

3 most common scientific roadblocks?

August 2, 2007 in academia, Access, openmovement, web by Tracey | Permalink

  1. Accessing literature,
  2. obtaining materials,
  3. and sharing data.

Science is a collaborative endeavour and these 3 roadblocks are impeding scientific discovery according to John Wilbanks, executive director of the Science Commons initiative, founder of the Semantic Web for Life Sciences project and the Neurocommons.

New Social Science Data Infrastructure for Ontario Libraries

July 25, 2007 in academia, Access, canada, datasets, infrastructure, Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

I met with Wendy Watkins at the Carleton University Data Library Carleton University Data Library yesterday. She is one of the founders and current co-chair of DLI and CAPDU (Canadian Association of Public Data Users), a member of the governing council of the International Association of Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) and a great advocate for data accessibility and whatever else you can think of in relation to data.

Wendy introduced me to a very interesting project that is happening between and among university libraries in Ontario called the Ontario Data Documentation, Extraction Service Infrastructure Initiative (ODESI). ODESI will make discovery, access and integration of social science data from a variety of databases much easier.

Administration of the Project:

Carleton University Data Library in cooperation with the University of Guelph. The portal will be hosted at the Scholar’s Portal at the University of Toronto which makes online journal discovering and access a dream. The project is partially funded by the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) and OntarioBuys operated out of the Ontario Ministry of Finance. It is a 3 year project with $1 040 000 in funding.

How it works:

ODESI operates on a distributed data access model, where servers that host data from a variety of organizations will be accessed via Scholars’ Portal. The metadata are written in the DDI standard which produces XML. DDI is the

Data Documentation Initiative [which] is an international effort to establish a standard for technical documentation describing social science data. A membership-based Alliance is developing the DDI specification, which is written in XML.

The standard has been adopted by several international organizations such as IASSIST, Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and several governmental departments including Statistics Canada, Health Canada and HRSDC.

Collaboration:

This project will integrate with and is based on the existing and fully operational Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA), which is cross boundary data initiative. CESSDA

promotes the acquisition, archiving and distribution of electronic data for social science teaching and research in Europe. It encourages the exchange of data and technology and fosters the development of new organisations in sympathy with its aims. It associates and cooperates with other international organisations sharing similar objectives.

The CESSDA Trans-Border Agreement and Constitution are very interesting models of collaboration. CESSDA is the governing body of a group of national European Social Science Data Archives. The CESSDA data portal is accompanied by a multilingual thesaurus, currently 13 nations and 20 organizations are involved and data from thousands of studies are made available to students, faculty and researchers at participating institutions. The portal search mechanism is quite effective although not pretty!

In addition, CESSDA is associated with a series of National Data Archives, Wow! Canada does not have a data archive!

Users:

Users would come to the portal, search across the various servers on the metadata fields, access the data. Additionally, users will be provided with some tools to integrate myriad data sets and conduct analyses with the use of statistical tools that are part of the service. For some of the data, basic thematic maps can also be made.

Eventually the discovery tools will be integrated with the journal search tools of the Scholar’s Portal. You will be able to search for data, find the journals that have used that data or vice versa, find the journal and then the data. This will hugely simplify the search and integration process of data analysis. At the moment, any data intensive research endeavour or data based project needs to dedicate 80-95% of the job to find the data from a bunch of different databases, navigating the complex licensing and access regimes, maybe pay a large sum of money, organizing the data in such a way that it is statistically accurate then make those comparisons. Eventually one gets to talk about results!

Data Access:

Both the CESSDA data portal project and ODESI are groundbreaking initiatives that are making data accessible to the research community. These data however will only be available to students, faculty and researchers at participating institutions. Citizens who do not fall into those categories can only search the metadata elements, see what is available but will not get access to the data.

Comment:

It is promising that a social and physical infrastructure exists to make data discoverable and accessible between and among national and international institutions. What is needed is a massive cultural shift in our social science data creating and managing institutions that would make them amenable to the creation of policies to unlock these same public data assets, some of the private sector data assets (Polls, etc.) and make them freely (as in no cost) available to all citizens.

Deconstructing CRIA Numbers

July 19, 2007 in Uncategorized by Tracey | Permalink

The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) releases all kinds of data related to sales.  It is also an organization that has quite a bit of power with the Canadian Government.

Michael Geist has an interesting piece on interpreting CRIA sales data!  It is an industry I know very little about and I would probably have just accepted their reported numbers as I would not have had the contextual knowledge to frame what they were saying otherwise!

Numbers are tricky rascals at best! Especially when an industry is trying to lobby for its own interests and at times politicians just believe any ole number thrown at them!  Worse the wrong numbers, or numbers out of context get picked up by newswires and get repeated at nauseam!  Just depends who’s ear a particular industry has I guess and how much homework a reporter does.

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