Denunciations of the report by the recently designated American ambassador at the UN, Nikki Haley, and by the firebrand Israeli diplomat, Danny Danon among others, is part of a trend in recent years in which supporters of Israel move to close down critical discussion rather than to respond substantively. Such tactics are a reflection of how weak Israel’s positions have become on such contested issues as settlements, excessive force, Jerusalem residency, discriminatory laws and regulations, and diversion of water.
According to LifeSiteNews, a Catholic publication, the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association is charging UNICEF and WHO with sterilizing millions of girls and women under cover of an anti-tetanus vaccination program sponsored by the Kenyan government. The Kenyan government denies there is anything wrong with the vaccine, and says it is perfectly safe.
$1.3 trillion a year or 11% of GDP in international dollars. This assumes conventional financing and conventional technologies and conventional processes.
This book shows us once again why Patrick Meier is a thought leader in leveraging emerging technologies for social impact. His book captures the enormous possibilities and avoidable pitfalls of big data, social media and artificial intelligence in crisis contexts. Digital humanitarians can be powerful agents for social change but ground-truthing what we see and hear digitally is more important than ever. —Aleem Walji, Chief Innovation Advisor, Leadership, Learning, and Innovation, World Bank Group
Phi Beta Iota: The book title and description from the publisher are misleading. This is not a book about Big Data. It is a book about distributed human networks using open source information technologies to achieve situational awareness with a speed and precision that the entire US secret intelligence community (which costs $100 billion a year) cannot match.
Beyond Data Monitoring – Achieving the Sustainability Development Goals Through Intelligence (Decision-Support) Integrating Holistic Analytics, True Cost Economics, and Open Source Everything
BACKGROUND RESEARCH PAPER
Submitted to the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda
Translatable Full Text Below the Fold
배 아래에 번역 전체 텍스트
Traduzível texto completo abaixo da dobra
النص الكامل للترجمة تحت طية
翻译全文下方折
Diterjemahkan Full Text bawah Lipat
ਫੋਲਡ ਹੇਠ ਅਨੁਵਾਦ ਪੂਰਾ ਪਾਠ
Перевести Полный текст ниже раза
This summer UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon established the Independent Expert Advisory Group (IAEG) to provide concrete recommendations on how to achieve a Data Revolution for sustainable development. The IEAG report – due in early November – will be a crucial opportunity to explain how better quality and more timely data can transform development. The group is also looking for innovative approaches to data collection, publication, and use.
To solicit input from all communities of practice – particularly academia – the IAEG is hosting a public consultation at undatarevolution.org to solicit input into its work until October 15, 2015. In spite of the short notice, we strongly encourage you to submit your ideas and suggestions for the data revolution. Please share this message widely and provide your comments on the IEAG website.
Designer Abeer Seikaly has developed a practical yet elegant solution to the need for lightweight, mobile, and structurally sound shelters for disaster zones.
The Canadian-Jordanian’s Weaving a Home project not only provides flexible, transportable shelter, but also incorporates water collection, solar power generation and solar water heating into the design.
Each tent has its own water collection system, utilizing the natural channels formed by the skin to direct water to the storage point. By using a fabric with strong thermal properties, the tents can alsoconvert solar radiation into power and heat collected water for showering.
“One function of a peace process can be understood as providing a structure to accommodate diverse or competing sources of, or claimants to, legitimacy in conflict-affected states and societies, and to cultivate broad consent on a satisfactory way forward for peace”
A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development: The Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda
My colleagues at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have just published a groundbreaking must-read study on Humanitarianism in the Network Age; an important and forward-thinking policy document on humanitarian technology and innovation. The report “imagines how a world of increasingly informed, connected and self-reliant communities will affect the delivery of humanitarian aid. Its conclusions suggest a fundamental shift in power from capital and headquarters to the people [that] aid agencies aim to assist.” The latter is an unsettling prospect for many. To be sure, Humanitarianism in the Network Age calls for “more diverse and bottom-up forms of decision-making—something that most Governments and humanitarian organizations were not designed for. Systems constructed to move information up and down hierarchies are facing a new reality where information can be generated by any-one, shared with anyone and acted by anyone.”
The purpose of this blog post (available as a PDF) is to summarize the 120-page OCHA study. In this summary, I specifically highlight the most important insights and profound implications. I also fill what I believe are some of the report’s most important gaps. I strongly recommend reading the OCHA publication in full, but if you don’t have time to leaf through the study, reading this summary will ensure that you don’t miss a beat. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes and figures below are taken directly from the OCHA report.
Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies at the Fukushima Daiichi plant sit in pools vulnerable to future earthquakes, with roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl.
The 2011 Global Study on Homicide has been conceived to provide a unique overview of the ultimate crime. The picture it paints is of a phenomenon marked by large disparities in distribution, demographics, typologies and mechanisms.
At one extreme, where homicide rates are high and firearms and organized crime in the form of drug trafficking play a substantial role, 1 in 50 men aged 20 will be murdered before they reach the age of 31. At the other, the probability of such an occurrence is up to 400 times lower.
There are many reasons for this but one of the links most clearly identified in this study is that homicide is much more common in countries with low levels of human development, high levels of income inequality and weak rule of law than in more equitable societies, where socio-economic stability seems to be something of an antidote to homicide.
Disparities not only exist in homicide typologies but also in their prevalence in different regions and countries, yet this study shows that intimate partner/family-related homicide is a chronic problem everywhere. Women murdered by their past or present male partner make up the vast majority of its victims worldwide, which explains why in many countries women are more likely to be murdered in the home than elsewhere.
Men, on the other hand, make up the vast majority of both victims and perpetrators of all types of crime, including homicide, and are more likely to be killed in the street. They are also more likely to be young, the street is more likely to be in a built up area and they are most likely to be killed with a gun.
It is the comprehensive cross-national and time series homicide data from 207 countries and territories, forming the backbone of the Global Study on Homicide, which has enabled the extensive multi-national team behind it to come to such concrete conclusions. Analysis of this nature is fundamental in understanding the forces that drive homicide so that measures and policies can be developed to help bring about its reduction.
