I was perusing the usual collage of semi-news, trivia, and fluff on CollingwoodToday recently and noticed a poll at the bottom asking “How old are you?” It piqued my interest enough to add my vote. I’m always interested in demographics and statistics, and am curious about changing media engagement, especially
Continue readingTag: data
Things Are Good: Canada to Update Digital Privacy Laws, Hold Companies Accountable for Breaches
Last year Canadians witnessed too many data breaches of their data and the federal government is reacting. Large Canadian corporations didn’t do enough to protect their databases against attackers and as a result personal data of Canadians is now in the hands of criminals. Canada will now follow the lead
Continue readingThings Are Good: How to Resist Surveillance Capitalism
Surveillance capitalism is a truly 21st century innovation which is having a major impact on society. Policies around data protection and privacy aren’t strong enough yet and trade deals don’t rightly aim to protect data privacy either. How our data is used and exploited isn’t up to us and it
Continue readingThings Are Good: This Artist Wants You to Buy All His Personal Data on eBay
Oli Frost got inspired by companies earning profit from his data and decided to sell it directly to anybody who wants it. He’s downloaded all his data from Facebook (and you can too) and put it up on eBay for anyone to buy. Proceeds from the sale of his Facebook
Continue readingThings Are Good: Iceland Wants to Help Journalists Expose Real Threats
Iceland continues on it’s quest to be the ‘Switzerland of data‘ and is extending its program to do so for journalists. Part of the country’s plan to become a haven for people exposing the immoral and questionable behaviour of powerful people is already in action. Iceland is quickly achieving its
Continue readingThings Are Good: Will Iceland be the “Switzerland of Data”?
Iceland is the de facto home of Wikileaks and is also a country concerned with privacy issues. The country is now considering leveraging their experience and reputation of being digital-data friendly to the next level. Presently, the country is considering branding itself as the “Switzerland of Data.” If Iceland does
Continue readingThings Are Good: LHC Data Freely Accessible from CERN
The Large Hadron Collider run by CERN is making huge insights into the fundamental workings of the universe. Already it has found evidence the Higgs-Boson and other groovy particles in physics. Now CERN is setting all that data that’s been collected free to use! Now you can use research generated
Continue readingThings Are Good: Surfing Oceanic Data
The ocean is massive and it’s experiencing massive change thanks to climate change and humans depleting its resources. We know this, but we don’t know the extent of the harm done to the oceans nor many other aspects of life in the seas. A surfer and engineer, Benjamin Thompson, decided
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: US Journalistic Sensationalism in Aftermath of #OttawaShooting
CNN, in their attempt to fill air time after the apparent terror attack in Ottawa (#OttawaShooting), began asking American pundits whether their Northern border with Canada was safe. Erin Burnnett accompanied that discussion with a graphic comparing their Northern border with their Southern border with Mexico which distorted the facts
Continue readingMelissa Fong: Getting drunk will get you raped = How you should NOT interpret this data
… Now, I know a lot of people are going to interpret this data wrongly. You are going to be tempted to think, “Well, more reason to act like a proper lady and not get drunk at bars. If you don’t get drunk, you won’t be taken advantage of.” This
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Canada’s Luxury Index is through the roof
Numbers season is over but good inequality data is still missing. January sees us regularly bombarded with a whole range of economic statistics about the previous year. GDP growth: likely 1.7%, low but looking brighter for next year. Unemployment: 7.2%, low but lots of workers leaving the job market altogether
Continue readingParliamANT Hill: Security gaps found in destruction of top-secret military data
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/security-gaps-found-in-destruction-of-top-secret-military-data-1.2490752
Continue readingeaves.ca: The Past, Present and Future of Sensor Journalism
This weekend I had the pleasure of being invited to the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School for a workshop on sensor journalism. The workshop (hashtag #towsenses) brought together a “community of journalists, hackers, makers, academics and researchers to explore the use of sensors in journalism;
Continue readingopenalex: écoHackMTL: An excellent launch
We had an excellent turnout for the écoHackMTL launch. A big thank-you to everyone who helped me put it together! If you missed the action you can see a few photos over on our facebook page.
With close to 75 people in the room the energy was phenomenal, and we had a good mix of developers, community activists and NGOs, and representatives from the city. Those were exactly the connections that we were trying to make possible.
Now the questions is how much of that momentum we can translate into concrete projects between now and the hack itself in October.
Stay tuned. And for more info check out www.ecohackmtl.org.
Continue readingopenalex: écoHackMTL: An excellent launch
We had an excellent turnout for the écoHackMTL launch. A big had for everyone who helped me put it together! If you missed the action you can see a few photos over on our facebook page. With close to 75 people in the room the energy was phenomenal, and we
Continue readingopenalex: écoHackMTL: An excellent launch
We had an excellent turnout for the écoHackMTL launch. A big thank-you to everyone who helped me put it together! If you missed the action you can see a few photos over on our facebook page. With close to 75 people in the room the energy was phenomenal, and we
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Idle No More Might Be Popular No More: Polls
A few online polls suggest Idle No More is not supported by a majority of Canadians. Though there appears to be no major polling done as of yet, three recent online polls give some idea about the popularity of Idle No More. The larger of the polls was on Jan.3,
Continue readingTrashy's World: OCDSB survey
You might remember that I wrote about this last year. Now the Ottawa public school board has some results to talk about. And they are for sure talking about it. The big takeaway for them is the diversity of the student population. Now, anyone can see this for themselves by
Continue readingOpenMedia.ca: Huffington Post: Netflix exec says "Canadians have almost third-world access to the Internet"
Big telecom companies across Canada are continuing to employ ‘usage-based billing’, an punitive billing practice that restricts data allowances. Though many of you fought back against UBB via the Stop The Meter campaign—you prevented it from being imposed across the entire Internet service market—Big Telecom continues to use it to
Continue readingeaves.ca: Lying with Maps: How Enbridge is Misleading the Public in its Ads
The Ottawa Citizen has a great story today about an advert by Enbridge (the company proposing to build a oil pipeline across British Columbia) that includes a “broadly representational” map that shows prospective supertankers steaming up an unobstructed Douglas Channel channel on their way to and from Kitimat – the
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