Nicholas Feltron’s Personal Infographics
For the past 6 years, Feltron has appropriated the language and grammar of corporate annual reports and infographics to tell personal stories. His latest annual report looks at his dad.
Via Infosthetics.com
Supreme Court re-affirms limits on access to Ministerial information
A decade-long battle for access to simple scheduling information for then Prime Minister Jean Chretien has ended with today’s Supreme Court ruling against the federal Information Commissioner and a raft of media and civil liberties types. The decision seems to hinge on definitions of what is or isn’t a “government institution” (pols rule the government institutions but are not themselves part of them) and when something is “under the control” of a government institutions.
Fine. We lost, the politicians win because that’s how the wrote the Freedom of Information laws - to exempt themselves from this scrutiny. So we just have to elect people who will change the law.
Oh.
Province sneaks in Hospital secrecy clause to protect them from FOI’s
(From a Canadian Press story)
Liberals on the finance committee used their majority Thursday (May 5, 2011) to give hospitals an exemption from the freedom of information law for data on “quality of care,” an exemption they buried deep in the 2011 provincial budget.
The Ontario Health Coalition, a patient advocacy group, said the Liberals “snuck” a clause into the budget that had nothing to do with finances, but amounts to a “blanket FOI exemption” for hospitals.
“We’re calling it the hospital secrecy clause,” said the coalition’s Natalie Mehra. “It really is a very uneven attempt to protect hospitals from having to disclose embarrassing information to the public.”
However, Health Minister Deb Matthews said it was a “very narrow” exemption so health care professionals and other hospital staff can frankly discuss problems without concerns the information will become public. The Liberals are the first to extend freedom of information rules to cover hospitals, she added.
“We did not go as far as the Ontario Hospital Association and the Ontario Medical Association wanted us to go, which was a full exclusion where you can’t even request the information,” said Matthews.
The Beauty of Maps
A fabulous BBC special available on YouTube (chopped into pieces, ‘natch). It’s fascinating to see the different ways people have thought about maps - their graphical conventions, their proper utility (story telling versus mere cartography), etc. - and what that tell us about how people actually thought…
(via Teaching Online Journalism » 10 useful resources about data visualization)
A really useful aggregation of data visualization information. But as I noted in the comments, I despair that all but a very, very few newsrooms will never be able to afford the kind of specialization needed to get good in this field. (Maybe 6 in all of Canada?)
Rather stunningly, the City of Hamilton’s websites prohibit linking to them without written permission. Good on Ryan for taking them to task over this..
Maybe this is why they released the code for IT Dashboard? On the block are: Data.gov, Apps.gove/now, USASpending.gov and the IT Dashboard
A History of the World in 100 Seconds (by Gareth Lloyd) - Lloyd has created a data visualization mapping time and place found in Wikipedia articles, a remarkably ‘simple’ way of “seeing” our history (or at least the version that ends up in Wikipedia - a heavily Euro-Western centric view…
