The NYTimes has a great interactive multimedia article about the effects climate change on Arctic sea ice melting. The module is simple, explains the basics and is accompanied by some wonderful maps. (See two of the five images from the article below).

With the Arctic ice melt comes the opening of the seas and land, increased potential for exploration and fishing combined with international claims to the region accompanied by questions of sovereignty. This article Spatial Data Infrastructure: Implications for Sovereignty in the Canadian Arctic in particular speaks to that issue.

Currently in Canada there is excellent research ongoing in the Arctic as part of International Polar Year (IPY) and some projects are incorporating indigenous knowledge into climate research such as the Inuit Sea Ice Use and Occupancy Project (ISIUOP). IPY is innovative in many ways, in the case of the mandate of this blog and CivicAccess.ca the data policy is fantastic. To receive funding IPY researchers have to share their data and to archive them. There is also an IPY portal that will disseminate results. It is very rare to see funding tied to dissemination and preservation in this way. The IPY Data Policy is well worth reading and emulating in other contexts. Here is a small portion of what is in the

In accordance with

• the Twelfth WMO Congress, Resolution 40 (Cg-XII, 1995
• the Thirteenth WMO Congress, Resolution 25 (Cg XIII, 1999)
• the ICSU 1996 General Assembly Resolution
• the ICSU Assessment on Scientific Data and Information (ICSU 2004b)
• Article III-1c from the Antarctic Treaty
• the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission Data Exchange Policy

and in order to maximize the benefit of data gathered under the auspices of the IPY, the IPY Joint Committee requires that IPY data, including operational data delivered in real time, are made available fully, freely, openly, and on the shortest feasible timescale.

The only exceptions to this policy of full, free, and open access are:

• where human subjects are involved, confidentiality must be protected
• where local and traditional knowledge is concerned, rights of the knowledge holders shall not be compromised
• where data release may cause harm, specific aspects of the data may need to be kept protected (for example, locations of nests of endangered birds or locations of sacred sites).

ICSU (2004b) defines “Full and open access” as equitable, non-discriminatory access to all data preferably free of cost, but some reasonable cost-recovery is acceptable. WMO Resolution 40 uses the terms “Free and unrestricted” and defines them as non-discriminatory and without charge. “Without charge”, in the context of this resolution means at no more than the cost of reproduction and delivery without charge for the data and product themselves.

Collaborative natural science has always aimed at disseminating and sharing results and finally there is some teeth and financial backing to support that spirit.

Data Sources: National Snow and Ice Data Center; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; William Chapman, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign; Donald K. Perovich, U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory; Institute of Environmental Physics. 

Module Authors: Erin Aigner, Jonathan Corum, Vu Nguyen/The New York Times.

Looks like funding cuts are coming down hard on the US Census according to this NYTimes Editorial – Putting the Census at Risk

Whether the [U.S.] Census Bureau has the means to ensure the accuracy of the count — which determines everything from how federal aid is apportioned to how many Congressional seats are given to each state — will be decided this week. Right now, the portents for an accurate count are not good.

The power of Census data and access to these data to a democracy are incalculable, in Canada like the U.S. transfer funding from the Federal Government to fund health care for instance is determined according to Census counts:

An accurate count is essential to a healthy democracy.

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