Extreme Poverty and Human Rights: A Case Study of the United States of America
Interesting article. The “usual talk” about eradicating extreme poverty, but applied to an unusual suspect: the US.
Extreme poverty, defined as a composite of income poverty, human development poverty and social exclusion, is not only a problem of poor developing countries, but a phenomenon that is found in most countries in the world. But the fact that the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, also suffers from persistence of extreme poverty is a paradox.
There are no significant trends to indicate that extreme poverty is being reduced over time. In fact, there is qualitative and anecdotal evidence pointing towards a rise in extreme poverty.
[…]
The international community should recognise the existence of conditions of extreme poverty in the United States as indications of the worst form of indignity inflicted upon human beings, which should be regarded as a denial of human rights. Once it is recognised as such, it would be possible for the United States government to adopt programmes based on human rights principles which would surely contribute to the eradication of extreme poverty.
Paul Maassen appointed as OGP Civil Society Coordinator at Hivos
Open Government Partnership (OGP) is supported by an international network of donor organisations united in the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI), of which Hivos is a member. The OGP CSO coordinator will promote and facilitate the active engagement of civil society in the OGP. The coordinator position is hosted by Hivos, but supports and reports to the civil society members of the OGP Steering Committee. The post is independent of the OGP secretariat.
Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing. Dr Mike Taylor in The Guardian
For Elsevier, the biggest of the barrier-based publishers, we can calculate the total cost per article as £1,605m subscription revenue divided by 240,000 articles per year = £6,689 per article. By contrast, the cost of publishing an article with a flagship open access journal such as PLoS ONE is $1,350 (£850), about one eighth as much. No one expects open access to eliminate costs. But we can expect it to dramatically reduce them, as well as making research universally and freely available.
Pictures at a Revolution
Data visualization can offer some unique insights into social upheaval. But the data artists are just getting started.
Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in Technology
Hacker School is a New York-based project described by its founders (David Albert, Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, and Sonali Sridhar) as “a three-month, immersive school for becoming a better programmer. It’s like a writers’ retreat for hackers.”
And Etsy is setting a goal to have more women participate:
The summer batch of Hacker School will be 40 students, and our goal is to have them accept at least 20 women, with Hacker School retaining full control over the admissions process. In other words, 20 times the number of women in the current batch.
The World Bank is taking next steps in making sharing and re-use of data and information easier, by adopting an open access policy (in July) and starting an Open Knowledge Repository
Source: openknowledge.worldbank.org
Journalism, Storytelling and the Ethics of Attention
Ethan Zuckerman, on KONY2012, Mike Daisy, and advocacy versus reporting.
A short excerpt from Professor Robert Chambers’ public lecture on 23 January 2012 in which he lists the words which can be found in the Paris Declaration and those that cannot.
Beneblog: Crypto is Not Broken
Benetech provides secure communication tools for human rights activists, based on RSA encryption, so obviously they wanted to know more about the recent studies exposing weaknesses in RSA implementations. Patrick Ball’s blog post sketches a pretty clear picture that the problems mainly are with the seeds used to generate random numbers in particular devices, like routers and firewalls.
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