A LOL great find from Flowing Data for those of you who love data graphics.
a magazine “for people who give a damn”
Above is a great series of videos from the YouTube GOOD channel. This one was taped last year, and is quite timely for starting this year’s holiday season.
I love data visualisation blogs. There are so many infographics published every day, and these data scientists critique the transparency and fairness of the data, as well as the presentation of the message. One of the blogs I came across is GOOD, which is a quarterly US general-interest magazine founded in 2006 with a focus on social issues, politics, and sustainable living. Check out their website. It’s chock full of questions and features to stimulate dialogue and collaboration for solving some of the world’s biggest problems.
Billed in its first release as a “free press for the critical idealist”, it was launched in 2006 by Ben Goldhirsh, son of the creator of Inc. Magazine. Departing from the normative industry strategy, Good’s subscription fees go entirely to charity, and their marketing budget go to throwing block parties in large cities rather than to direct mail. While critics charge that this model is not viable– it has yet to break even after two years– the magazine has attracted a lot of attention and press, particularly from NPR, Foreign Policy, Washington Post and NYTimes. It’s also been nominated for several national magazine awards.
I’ll be giving a subscription to some friends this Christmas, before I leave again for Cambodia.
the Khmer side of SE Asia’s politics..
Young journalists and bloggers are not plenty in the Kingdom, but they are gaining in numbers and spine. From just a few bloggers you can count on one hand in the early 2000’s to, literally, hundreds today, these guys are now lending a decidedly Khmer voice to the contentious politics of Cambodia, the ongoing belligerence with Thailand and shrewd maneuverings with Vietnam.
Events have traditionally come from a skewed Western or Thai perspective. So I’m glad to see the increasing articulation of the Khmer point of view.
Here are two new bloggers I just found. Worth a watch? We’ll wait and see.
- Son of the Empire (politics)
- Tumnei, a Photo Diary (culture)
More fodder for hate
The nationalist fodder continues, tit for tat…
THE government took control of the Thai-owned aviation firm Cambodia Air Traffic Services (CATS) on Thursday and banned its Thai employees from the offices after the arrest of one of their co-workers on suspicion of stealing the flight schedule of fugitive Thai former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra during his visit to Cambodia last week.
The move, which is likely to further damage diplomatic relations between the two countries, comes amid accusations by a Thai opposition leader that Thailand’s foreign minister ordered the theft.
from the Phnom Penh Post
So CATS is now in the “caretakership of a Cambodian government official”. I might just have to delay my flight back into the country.
Movie rave: Hurt Locker
We just saw Hurt Locker, a film by Kathryn Bigelow about an American bomb squad in Baghdad 2004. It’s a great movie that centers on the intense daily routines of Sgt Will James lead expert on disposing improvised explosive devices, and his company. You gotta see it cuz it’s billed as the best of the recent dramatizations of the Iraq War.
Here’s why I bring it up: There’s a part where James is back home after duty, picking up cereal at the grocery store. In the scene he looks up one side of the cereal aisle and down the other, paralysed by the endless options. This is how I feel every time I come home. A quick trip to the store is never simple when your choices are endless. Green tea yogurt antibacterial wash? Pomegranate mango Purell? or…? or…?
Rave: research tool Zotero
In writing my report (effect of purchasing on quality of health service delivery in Kampot, Cambodia), I came across a useful tool I just have to rave about: Zotero. It’s a citation manager that works out of your Firefox browser which stores, retrieves, organizes, and annotates digital documents. Here’s a list of its main utilities, by Efficient Academic:
- Automatic capture of citation information from web pages
- Flexible notetaking with autosave
- Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags
- Runs right in your web browser
- Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
- Fast, as-you-type search through your materials
- Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services
- Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)
- Free and open source
Zotero integrates seamlessly into MS Word and Open Office (which I now use). Its biggest limitation seems to be, by comments on The Ideophone’s review, is:
…Compared to Endnote (which is proprietary), Zotero is light on citation styles currently. I expect this to change while Zotero builds up a userbase and a community (people will start contributing styles).
Although, at the time of writing, Mark at Ideophone writes that Zotero now supports hundreds of citation styles, with several being added each week; see http://zotero.org/styles/.
And the learning curve is fairly easy, which is good for not-so tech-savvy users (like me) who need a quick way to organise literature searches. A myriad of tutorials are available online, hundreds on YouTube alone.