Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review -- a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal
On the MDGs
Who's going to pay for the MDGs? (Guardian Blog 23.01.2012)
OECD Development Centre publication 'Revisiting MDG Cost Estimates' estimates achieving the first six MDGs globally will require $120bn more to be spent every year on health, education and poverty reduction.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on the Millennium Development Goals
On gender equality
UN web portal launched: Girls in ICT (UN 24.01.2012)
The UN launched a web portal this week aimed at helping women access jobs, training and career advice in the information communication technology (ICT) sector. The Girls In ICT Portal aims to not only inspire young women to pursue careers in ICT but to develop a network of women working in a male-dominated industry.
See more and contribute to the Wikigender article on gender equality and ICTs
On WEF
Davos 2012 starts with worries about the Eurozone crisis (25.01.2012)
The Eurozone crisis is set to dominate the 42nd World Economic Forum, with over 40 heads of government and 19 of the world’s 20 most influential central bankers. Other issues on the agenda include the rise of China, the Arab Spring aftermath and financial regulation
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on economic growth
In the Spotlight:
Egypt, one year on
The uprising on January 25th 2011 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square began a wave of protest that spread throughout Egypt and lead to the fall of the Mubarak regime. In honour of the one year anniversary, the Thomson Reuters Foundation has released a documentary on the Egyptian revolution.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on progress and the Arab Spring in Egypt
We hope you will tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us @Wikiprogress or post it on our Facebook page
Yours in Progress,
Philippa Lysaght
Friday, 27 January 2012
Thursday, 26 January 2012
January Editor's Choice from Wellbeing Wales
By Danielle Klentzeris from Wikiprogress Correspondent, Lles Cymru Wellbeing Wales.
It is often said that childhood is the best time of our lives. However, according to new figures released by the Children’s Society, almost ‘one in ten children over the age of eight are unhappy’. Issues surrounding family life were found to have the greatest impact on children’s wellbeing and happiness, with relationships ‘within a household rather than the family "structure"’ being the main cause for children’s low sense of wellbeing. Speaking to The Guardian, Elaine Hindell, director of the Campaign for Childhood at the Children's Society, said ‘we want our country to be the best place for our children to grow up. Yet unless we act now we risk becoming one of the worst and creating a lost future generation’.
In light of the report, Cameron’s call to concentrate ‘not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing’ has great resonance not just for adults, but for the wellbeing of modern children also.
From the state of children’s wellbeing to the state of the planet. The Guardian’s Dean Baker argues for the need to prevent cuts in areas concerning environmental preservation. Defending the need to ensure progress in the technological, environmental and educational fields, Barker argues that spending cuts that ‘that affect our progress in these areas… will be making our children worse-off, not better-off’. The crux of Barker’s argument appears to situate around the simple fact that financial debt will eventually decrease and drop off whereas environmental debt may not be so easily repayable. Quick fixes may appear a tempting option to already struggling governments but if we lose sight of the long-term goals of environmental sustainability then efforts to protect future generations become fruitless given there may well be no planet left to protect.
Unhappy children, planetary decay- there certainly doesn’t feel like there’s much to smile about these days. However, according to The Independent, laughter may hold the key to lifting societies' woes. From a social tool to a means of curing illness, laughter allows human’s to ‘convey meaning more effectively than words and is a language in itself’. But far from being a sacred tool of human communication it appears that laughter has the power to transcended species. Whilst observing rats, Dr Jaak Panksepp, found that our rodent friends ‘produce ultrasonic chirps, particularly when they appeared to be playfully interacting with each other’. A marvel in itself but even more extraordinary when he later found that, upon tickling the rat’s stomach, these noises became ‘louder and more consistent with [the] familiar, dynamic rhythm’ of laughter.
As tempting as it is to try this experiment for myself, I don’t think the rats of Wales are quite ready for a quick rib tickle but the findings do raise an interesting point. Perhaps we are not so distanced from the creatures we share our planet with and recognising these supposedly ‘human’ traits in other animals may make us realise the importance of preserving the planet for the benefit of all future generations. Now that’s got to be something worth smiling about. :)
It is often said that childhood is the best time of our lives. However, according to new figures released by the Children’s Society, almost ‘one in ten children over the age of eight are unhappy’. Issues surrounding family life were found to have the greatest impact on children’s wellbeing and happiness, with relationships ‘within a household rather than the family "structure"’ being the main cause for children’s low sense of wellbeing. Speaking to The Guardian, Elaine Hindell, director of the Campaign for Childhood at the Children's Society, said ‘we want our country to be the best place for our children to grow up. Yet unless we act now we risk becoming one of the worst and creating a lost future generation’.
In light of the report, Cameron’s call to concentrate ‘not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing’ has great resonance not just for adults, but for the wellbeing of modern children also.
From the state of children’s wellbeing to the state of the planet. The Guardian’s Dean Baker argues for the need to prevent cuts in areas concerning environmental preservation. Defending the need to ensure progress in the technological, environmental and educational fields, Barker argues that spending cuts that ‘that affect our progress in these areas… will be making our children worse-off, not better-off’. The crux of Barker’s argument appears to situate around the simple fact that financial debt will eventually decrease and drop off whereas environmental debt may not be so easily repayable. Quick fixes may appear a tempting option to already struggling governments but if we lose sight of the long-term goals of environmental sustainability then efforts to protect future generations become fruitless given there may well be no planet left to protect.
Unhappy children, planetary decay- there certainly doesn’t feel like there’s much to smile about these days. However, according to The Independent, laughter may hold the key to lifting societies' woes. From a social tool to a means of curing illness, laughter allows human’s to ‘convey meaning more effectively than words and is a language in itself’. But far from being a sacred tool of human communication it appears that laughter has the power to transcended species. Whilst observing rats, Dr Jaak Panksepp, found that our rodent friends ‘produce ultrasonic chirps, particularly when they appeared to be playfully interacting with each other’. A marvel in itself but even more extraordinary when he later found that, upon tickling the rat’s stomach, these noises became ‘louder and more consistent with [the] familiar, dynamic rhythm’ of laughter.
As tempting as it is to try this experiment for myself, I don’t think the rats of Wales are quite ready for a quick rib tickle but the findings do raise an interesting point. Perhaps we are not so distanced from the creatures we share our planet with and recognising these supposedly ‘human’ traits in other animals may make us realise the importance of preserving the planet for the benefit of all future generations. Now that’s got to be something worth smiling about. :)
Friday, 20 January 2012
Week in review
Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review -- a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal
Yours in Progress,
Philippa Lysaght
The Internet goes on strike
The Sopa blackout protest makes history (Guardian 18.01.2012)
This Wednesday marked the largest online protest in the history of the Internet. Already nicknamed by some ‘Occupy the Internet’, websites from around the world “went dark” in protest against two bills, Pipa and Sopa, directed at stopping piracy of copyrighted material. Internet giants such as Google, Wikipedia, Tublr, Facebook and Twitter have all given their support to the protest to varying degrees.
Are you participating in the Sopa Strike? Tweet us your thoughts @Wikiprogress
On gender equality
This blog post by the World Bank explores the linkage between women who are employed in Ethiopia’s flower industry, increased rates of household income and the subsequent increase in domestic violence suffered by these women. Women who work in the flower industry are 13% more likely to experience physical abuse and 34% more likely to experience emotional abuse.
See more and contribute to the Wikigender article on domestic violence
On Rio +20
Scientists scrutinize first draft of Rio+20 agreement (Reuters 16.01.2012)
The draft document released last week in preparation for Rio+20 attempts to form the basis for negotiations between governments; the section on science and technology highlights the role innovation plays in promoting sustainable development and calls for greater international cooperation in investment and development of technologies. See a range of responses from scientists in this article.
See more and add information to the Wikiprogress Rio+20 event page
On child well-being
Schools strive for pupils’ happiness (Guardian 16.01.2012)
While governments and international institutions have made significant progress in developing measures of well-being, a little school in Norfolk has also been busy ensuring the happiness of the students is the number one priority and leading a new approach to child well-being and happiness.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on child well-being measurement
On money and happiness
We have included several articles in The Week in Review on the importance of measuring subjective well-being and the correlation between money and happiness. Dominic Lawson gives a critical analysis of David Cameron’s happiness agenda and the correlation is between income and happiness.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on happiness
In the Spotlight: Hightlights from the World Future Energy Summit
We hope you will tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us @Wikiprogress or post it on our Facebook page.
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
The pros and cons of the Canadian Superindex
This post by Donato Speroni originally appeared in Italian in the Numerus section Corriere Della Sera and was also published on the Istat BES blog.
Canadians are the only ones, along with the small and far away country of Bhutan, to have developed an all-encompassing "happiness index" to be compared with GDP (gross domestic product). This work took several years and finally came to a tentative conclusion: Roy Romanow, Chair of the advisory board of the University of Waterloo who created the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW), has announced that from 1994 to 2008, GDP in Canada has increased in real terms by 31%, while well-being has grown only 11%.
"There are some very, very troubling signs," Romanow said in an interview.
"I think if we continue on this trajectory we're going to have bigger and bigger disparities. You can never build a solid political, social and economic community with wide disparities."
The final report of the first conclusions of the CIW was released on October 20, 2011 and had a lot of attention in the local press, including the Huffington Post Canada. The methodology has been described previously on Numerus, and in fuller detail on Wikiprogress.
At a time when Italy is developing its BES (Benessere equo e sostenibile: fair and sustainable new measures of well-being), one wonders if the road to a single encompassing index which brings together the different sectors (in the Canadian case eight indicators, each based on eight different data, for a total of 64 series) is a useful and viable way. Without presuming to give a definitive answer, we can see the pros and cons.
Going against the Superindex is the fact that it is snubbed by many methodologists because its construction is clearly questionable. We have already seen how difficult it is to determine the weights of the different domains of well-being: is health more important, for example, or are social relations? The Canadians have solved the problem by giving all of the domains the same weight, while the OECD has instead allowed users to attach the weights they prefer. But it is clear that it does not arrive at a unique indicator.
In favour of Superindex is that it obviously has the most media impact, i.e. the possibility of building a truly alternative number or at least one that’s complementary to GDP. Proponents point out that construction of a composite index for each sector, encompassing for example all aspects of health or safety, is equally questionable, so you might as well go one step further and get to a single number.
A composite superindex undoubtedly involves a great loss of information compared to the so-called "dashboards" that present several important data simultaneously. But, as has been done in Canada, having the indices for each sector presented to the public as they become available, concentrating for example on the environment one month, then the relationship between citizens and institutions or education the month after, can attract continuous attention from the media about the different components of human well-being. At that point the Superindex would be a synthesis of all this work: an additional information, to complement the GDP, without hiding the wealth of information which was used to build it.
A composite superindex undoubtedly involves a great loss of information compared to the so-called "dashboards" that present several important data simultaneously. But, as has been done in Canada, having the indices for each sector presented to the public as they become available, concentrating for example on the environment one month, then the relationship between citizens and institutions or education the month after, can attract continuous attention from the media about the different components of human well-being. At that point the Superindex would be a synthesis of all this work: an additional information, to complement the GDP, without hiding the wealth of information which was used to build it.
We repeat, however, that the path to get to Superindex is very questionable. It is no coincidence that in Canada this process has been developed by an independent university and not by Statistics Canada. The CIW data come largely from official statistics, but the production was left to a private body. On the other hand, (on this controversial topic, there is always a pro and a con) can we imagine building consensus on a Superindex in Italy without the blessing of official statistics?
Friday, 13 January 2012
Week in review
The Week in Review 13.01.2012
Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review -- a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal
On information and the Internet
In a networked world, why is the geography of information uneven? (Guardian Poverty Matters 09.01.2012)
The rise of user-generated content on the Internet has had a phenomenal impact on the way information and knowledge is developed and understood. While optimists like Jimmy Wales believe that the Internet will become ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ it is ever more important that the uneven geographies of online information are addressed by rebalancing digital labour and focusing on the South.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on wikis
On progress in Haiti
Haiti: two years after quake tangible signs of progress (World Bank Blog 10.01.2012)
This week saw the second anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake that killed 220,000 people; currently, it is estimated that 520,000 people live in tents and almost 1 million Haitians are displaced. But there has been significant progress made. Since the earthquake in 2010, Education for All has provided free schooling to 405,000 children, with numbers growing.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on Haiti
Gender Equality – report release on gender equality in the Pacific
Human Development Report on Pacific: Gender, Culture and the Pacific (UNDP 11.01.2012)
A UNDP report released this week provides a deep understanding into how the culture in the Pacific impacts gender equality and human development. The paper analyses two key issues in the region: that gender is biologically determined and that culture is sacred and should not be adapted.
See a selection of article in the Wikigender Society and Culture category
On child well-being
UNESCO chief stresses the need for innovation to ensure equitable education (UN News 10.01.2012)
With 67 million children out of primary school and an estimated 793 million adults around the world illiterate, the United Nations has called for new and innovative approaches to education. While technology plays an important role in education, it must be integrated into learning and teaching styles.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on education
On data and prediction
The future of prediction (The Boston Globe 01.12.2012)
On Friday the 13th it seems inappropriate to say that tarot cards and tea-leaf readings are dubious in predicting future events; but this article says that the systematic use of data in prediction isn’t much better!
Do you know of any interesting projects to predict the future using data? Share them with us on Twitter @Wikiprogress
In the Spotlight: 2011 Democracy Index
We hope you will tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us @Wikiprogress or post it on our Facebook page.
Yours in progress,
Philippa Lysaght.
Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review -- a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal
On information and the Internet
In a networked world, why is the geography of information uneven? (Guardian Poverty Matters 09.01.2012)
The rise of user-generated content on the Internet has had a phenomenal impact on the way information and knowledge is developed and understood. While optimists like Jimmy Wales believe that the Internet will become ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ it is ever more important that the uneven geographies of online information are addressed by rebalancing digital labour and focusing on the South.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on wikis
On progress in Haiti
Haiti: two years after quake tangible signs of progress (World Bank Blog 10.01.2012)
This week saw the second anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake that killed 220,000 people; currently, it is estimated that 520,000 people live in tents and almost 1 million Haitians are displaced. But there has been significant progress made. Since the earthquake in 2010, Education for All has provided free schooling to 405,000 children, with numbers growing.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on Haiti
Gender Equality – report release on gender equality in the Pacific
Human Development Report on Pacific: Gender, Culture and the Pacific (UNDP 11.01.2012)
A UNDP report released this week provides a deep understanding into how the culture in the Pacific impacts gender equality and human development. The paper analyses two key issues in the region: that gender is biologically determined and that culture is sacred and should not be adapted.
See a selection of article in the Wikigender Society and Culture category
On child well-being
UNESCO chief stresses the need for innovation to ensure equitable education (UN News 10.01.2012)
With 67 million children out of primary school and an estimated 793 million adults around the world illiterate, the United Nations has called for new and innovative approaches to education. While technology plays an important role in education, it must be integrated into learning and teaching styles.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on education
On data and prediction
The future of prediction (The Boston Globe 01.12.2012)
On Friday the 13th it seems inappropriate to say that tarot cards and tea-leaf readings are dubious in predicting future events; but this article says that the systematic use of data in prediction isn’t much better!
Do you know of any interesting projects to predict the future using data? Share them with us on Twitter @Wikiprogress
In the Spotlight: 2011 Democracy Index
We hope you will tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us @Wikiprogress or post it on our Facebook page.
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)