“The School of Data is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). The School will provide online training for data ‘wrangling’ skills – the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.”
The School of Data is a collaborative and community-orientated project, and we welcome partners and participants. We’ve already had exciting conversations with several organisations and individuals, and we look forward to drawing upon their expertise during the development of the School. We are particularly excited to welcome the Tactical Technology Collective to our sprint next week, and look forward to benefiting from their wide-ranging experience (see e.g. their drawing by numbers project). We hope many more will join us – read on to find out how you can take part!
For the forthcoming International Social Transformation Conference on energy currencies, Community Forge is preparing a paper on grass roots strategies for sustainable currency implementation.
Phi Beta Iota: Good ideas overly complicated. The core idea is that software eliminates overhead — no printing of money, full transparency (end to end accountability, e.g. “your” money can be tagged to never fund prisons, wars, or political action campaigns…). The authors fail to review the Open Money source literature, do not link to the many examples they do provide, and completely miss the vital fact that with software, you have both a Global to Local Range of Needs and Gifts Table, and a Global to Local sparse matrix of mixed forms of currency–labor, reputation, location, time convergence, etcetera. While critical of gold, the authors do not make the point that you cannot eat gold, and that the ultimate sustainable currency is one that is immediately and without risk exchangable for goods and services that support a sustainable life. Precious metals do not do that. Right now the money system is optimized for the concentration of wealth, the allocation of funds to pay for wars, weapons, prisons, and many other things that are not needed, and the blockage of needed capabilities such as honest locally-engaged agriculture, energy, and health.
“Practices like ‘open source nano-innovation’ offer game-changing avenues for bypassing inhibitive start-up costs and ensuring scientific knowledge is freely shared,” said Dr Maclurcan, an Honorary Research Fellow with UTS’s Institute for Nanoscale Technology.
“For the first time in modern history, the right ingredients have surfaced for us to seriously consider innovating without economic growth,” he said.
A US $254 billion market in 2009, recent data – outlined in the books – shows an expected rise to $2.5 trillion by 2015. More than 60 countries are engaging with nanotechnology research and development at a national level, including 16 ‘developing’ countries.
“Nanotechnology research around the world is largely focussed on creating unnecessary products that ensure big gains for multinational corporations and bigger losses for our ecosystems,” Dr Maclurcan said.
“In a world with biophysical limits and vast injustices, our survival depends on the redirection of science towards human need, not human greed.”
The books were officially launched last week by Dr Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis, former head of nanotechnology at the CSIRO.
The power of OPEN *. You might think that the media would be doing this, but one would be wrong….they are content to be spoon fed lies, more lies, and damn lies…..it takes the public to pull back the curtain and expose what is really going on….that may be a reason the IC doesn't like Open Source, it would continually show their inefficiencies…..
An innocuous-seeming U.S. Air Force press release. A serendipitous satellite image in Google Earth. Snapshots from a photographer on assignment at a Spanish air base. The crash of an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in the United Arab Emirates. These are some of the fragments of information that Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti has assembled to reveal the best picture yet of the Pentagon’s secretive war in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.
In a series of blog posts over the past two weeks, Cenciotti has described in unprecedented detail the powerful aerial force helping wage Washington’s hush-hush campaign of air strikes, naval bombardments and commando raids along the western edge of the Indian Ocean, including
terror hot spots Yemen and Somalia. Cenciotti outlined the deployment of eight F-15Es from their home base in Idaho to the international air and naval outpost at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, north of Somalia.
. . . . . . . . .
But arguably the most interesting vessels in the area are also the least flashy. Lewis and Clark-class supply ships, normally used to carry fuel and cargo, have also been used as Afloat Forward Staging Bases — in essence, seaborne military camps for housing Special Forces and launching helicopters and small boats. The ships can be configured with makeshift jails for holding captured pirates and, in theory, terror suspects.
WASHINGTON, April 10, 2012 – The World Bank today announced that it will implement a new Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge products, effective July 1, 2012. The new policy builds on recent efforts to increase access to information at the World Bank and to make its research as widely available as possible. As the first phase of this policy, the Bank launched today a new Open Knowledge Repository and adopted a set of Creative Commons copyright licenses.
The new Open Access policy, which will be rolled out in phases in the coming year, formalizes the Bank’s practice of making research and knowledge freely available online. Now anybody is free to use, re-use and redistribute most of the Bank's knowledge products and research outputs for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
“Knowledge is power,”World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said. “Making our knowledge widely and readily available will empower others to come up with solutions to the world’s toughest problems. Our new Open Access policy is the natural evolution for a World Bank that is opening up more and more.”
The policy will also apply to Bank research published with third party publishers including the institution’s two journals—World Bank Research Observer (WBRO) and World Bank Economic Review (WBER)—which are published by Oxford University Press, but in accordance with the terms of third party publisher agreements. The Bank will respect publishing embargoes, but expects the amount of time it takes for externally published Bank content to be included in its institutional repository to diminish over time.
The World Bank will be adopting an Open Access Policy as of July 1. In addition, the Bank recently launched the World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) and became the first major international organization to adopt a set of copyright licenses from Creative Commons. As a result, a wealth of Bank research and knowledge products are now freely available to anyone in the world for use, re-use, and sharing.
Why is this so significant?
How can open access contribute to the goal of eliminating poverty?
How does the new policy impact the Bank's researchers and authors?
How will the OKR benefit users of Bank knowledge, in particular those in developing countries?
Join us in person at the World Bank or online for a lively conversation about these and other aspects of open access to research, and its potential for development progress.
FEATURED GUESTS:
Peter Suber Director of the Harvard Open Access Project and a leading voice in the open access movement
Cyril Muller Vice President for External Affairs at the World Bank
Michael Carroll American University law professor and founding board member of Creative Commons
Adam Wagstaff Research Manager of the World Bank's Development Research Group
Over 11,000 academics have pledged to boycott Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant, for profiting off their work and making it unavailable to the general public. Now Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is about to turn the world of corporate academic publishing on its head, in the same way that his website effectively took down Encyclopedia Britannica.
Elsevier is part of the Anglo-Dutch company Reed Elsevier, which had 2010 revenues of $9.3 billion and annual profits of over $1.67 billion. It publishes over 250,000 articles in some 2,000 journals a year that range from global publications like the Lancet to more specific ones like the Journal of the Egyptian Mathematical Society.
Publishers like Elsevier knew they were onto a good thing because before the arrival of the Internet, there was no other way for researchers to tell their peers about the important work they were doing, or vice versa. Plus getting published in a respectable journal was also the key to keeping academic jobs and getting promotions, so the researchers and professors – like rock musicians and best-selling writers – were leery about giving away their work for free.
“(P)ublishing companies became the de facto gatekeepers to scientific knowledge, restricting who could see the latest ideas rather than allowing ideas to spread as far as possible,” writes Aloke Jha in the Guardian.
Just as retro ideas from a bygone era can inspire modern fashion, film, and TV trends, today’s researchers are being empowered by the revival of an innovative technology concept from the past: open-source hardware.
Open-source hardware is the public availability of designs, mechanical drawings, or schematics of physical technology, such as computer processors or network switches. The Arduino electronics board is one popular example.
The concepts behind open hardware have been around for decades. But, with the rise of intellectual property in the 1980s and 1990s, open hardware fell out of favor. Today, perhaps thanks to the success of the open-source software movement, open hardware is back, according to its proponents. In 2012, it allows researchers to measure the time-of-flight of neutrinos, enables poor rural communities to communicate freely, and creates new business markets.
