The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal:
The Guardian published an edited extract from Bad Pharma, by Ben Goldacre. A horrific story of where we have let the pharma industry take us. As terrible as the global banking crisis, with people actually dying…
Fundstücke published this week:
Announing a new publication: “An Information Platform for Business Intelligence in the Aid Sector based on Open Data and Documents; Integrated Access to structured and unstructured data using the document-oriented database CouchDB”, by Michiel Kuijper.
Earlier this year, I was approached by Michiel Kuijper, who was working on his Bachelor degree at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and was looking for a project to combine Business Intelligence and text mining. Together, we started exploring how to apply this in the development aid sector.
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) provides a standard to publish information on aid activities, and is intended to be used by (and useful for) all actors in development aid.
Interest is definitely growing and several organisations are investigating how to implement the standard. In several countries, national platforms of civil society organisations (CSOs) are engaging in discussions with their respective Ministries how to encourage and support implementation of IATI by CSOs. In the UK, DFID is even making IATI-compliant publication of data a condition for funding. Implementing IATI brings to the surface various issues that need to be addressed, some specific for CSOs.
Within IATI, a dedicated informal working group is discussing these implications for CSOs. This CSO Working Group has produced a Background Paper, attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of such issues, and to work towards ways forward.
Fundstücke published this week:
Fundstücke published this week:
BBC Internet Blog: Building the Olympic Data Services:
The Olympic achievement behind the scenes: building a linked data architecture to deal with XML message streams, a complex domain ontology, near-real-time video on demand linked with additional information, with real-time adjustments to performance and prioritisation, future-proof and gracefully degrading.
DFID Open and Enhanced Access Policy Published at Long Last:
From November 1st, all recipients of DFID funded research must make their findings freely available.
[…]
Under the new policy, researchers will be required to make peer-reviewed journal articles open access through one of two routes: open access publishing (gold open access) or self-archiving (green open access).
It also is intended to give a boost to the DFID Research 4 Development (R4D) portal.
Marc Goodman: A vision of crimes in the future (by TEDtalksDirector)
What can (also) be expected with drones, 3D printing, the internet of things and DNA sequencing…
TEDxCambridge – Scott Summit’s beautiful artificial limbs (by TEDxTalks)
3D printing lets us move away from mass-produced identical items, to personalised experiences