CODATA has just released the following special journal issue –

Open Data for Global Science

Lots of great FREE articles from a variety of perspectives – Public policy, standards, case studies, etc. -  on access to scientific data.

A great post on Michael Geist’s blog about really really checking the numbers! Read – Misleading RCMP Data Undermines Counterfeiting Claims.

An excellent article by CBC online today –
Mixed-race identity: The Current looks at the growing number of mixed-race Canadians.  It is a great look at how statistics and social change are ways to help us understand the composition of our societies, their increasing complexity and how this information leads to change in public policy.  The release of the 2006 Census data has fueled some great articles in the Ottawa Citizens, one on how Same-sex couples now part of tall. Seems like there are more males than females in same sex relationships, 9% of the couples have children and these are found predominantly in the two mom categories.  Toronto, Montreal, West Coast Vancouver and Ottawa have the highest population of same sex couples.  In addition seems like Married people now in the minority in Canada but that people remain in committed relationships and rear children!  According to the article this is not much concern providing that:

Canadians continue to form families that fulfill the societal functions they always have — providing economic stability, raising children, instilling values — the categorization of those relationships can be “completely irrelevant.”

But Ms. Tipper said the rise in the number of some family groupings, such as those headed by lone parents, explains part of the increase in the unmarried population and that represents a significant social and economic challenge for Canada.

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.

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.

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.

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 

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.