Oil futures rose slightly due to potential US Gulf Coast hurricane and Libyan supply disruptions after recent losses

Alleged failures to address key issues lead to growing tensions between high-profile industry leaders in tech world

The study is the first to provide global picture of inadequate consumption of 15 micronutrients useful for humans

European Commission initially accused Apple of receiving "illegal" tax benefits from Ireland over two decades

Peaking prices of rich, traditional dishes have forced people to embrace frugality this chilly season

PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari addressing an event at the CM House in Karachi on October 14, 2024. — Facebook/@Bilawalhouse

Mocking the governments of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the provinces grappling with the smog crisis, Pakistan Peoples Party Chairman Bilawal...

Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Both leaders express concern over spread of coronavirus in country

Privacy: For our analog parents, a diary or a personal letter could rarely be touched by authorities, not even by law enforcement searching for evidence of a crime. Objects such as these had protection over and above the constitutional privacy safeguards. For our digital children, however, the equivalent diaries and letters aren’t even considered worthy of basic constitutional privacy.

In most jurisdictions, there is a constitutional right to privacy. Law enforcement in such countries can’t just walk in and read somebody’s mail, wiretap their phonecalls, or track their IP addresses. They need a prior court order to do so, which in turn is based on a concrete suspicion of a serious crime: the general case is that you have a right to privacy, and violations of this rule are the exception, not the norm.

However, there’s usually a layer of protection over and above this: even if and when law enforcement gets permission from a judge to violate somebody’s privacy in the form of a search warrant of their home, there are certain things that may not be touched unless specific and additional permissions are granted by the same type of judge. This class of items includes the most private of the personal: private letters, diaries, and so on.

Of course, this is only true in the analog world of our parents. Even though the letter of the law is the same, this protection doesn’t apply at all to the digital world of our children, to their diaries and letters.

Because the modern diary is kept on a computer. If not on a desktop computer, then certainly on a mobile handheld one — what we’d call a “phone” for historical reasons, but what’s really a handheld computer.

And a computer is a work tool in the analog world of our parents. There are loads of precedent cases that establish any form of electronic device as a work tool, dating back well into the analog world, and law enforcement is falling back on all of them with vigor, even now that our digital devices are holding our diaries, personal letters, and other items far more private than an analog diary was ever capable of.

That’s right: whereas your parents’ diaries were extremely protected under the law of the land, your children’s diaries — no less private to them, than those of your parents were to your parents — are as protected from search and seizure as an ordinary steel wrench in a random workshop.

So the question is how we got from point A to point B here? Why are the Police, who know that they can’t touch an analog diary during a house search, instantly grabbing mobile phones which serve the same purpose for our children?

“Because they can”, is the short answer. “Also because nobody put their foot down” for advanced points on the civics course. It’s because some people saw short term political points in being “tough on crime” and completely erasing hard-won rights in the process.

Encrypt everything.

TomTom Reaches Mapping Milestone: 1.5 Billion Updates in a Single Month

A season full of surprises didn't produce many when the first set of rankings on the road to college football's new 12-team playoff came out Tuesday.

The NCAA Division I Council on Thursday approved a rule allowing players with Canadian Hockey League experience to compete at U.S. colleges starting next season, a landmark decision that has the potential of shaking up the NHL's two largest sources of developmental talent.

Florida coach Billy Napier is getting a fourth season to try to get the Gators back to their winning ways.

Self-driving cars have the potential to dramatically change transportation, but collisions between humans and autonomous vehicles pose complicated legal challenges.

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is reportedly engaged in funding talks that could see the company secure a $40 billion valuation.

China's military forces are rapidly building up space warfare capabilities for use in a future conflict, two top American generals said on Wednesday.

The chief of ExxonMobil is pressing President-elect Donald Trump to stay in the Paris accord on climate, saying another withdrawal would confuse investors.

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With the finals of the Billie Jean King Cup and Davis Cup set to be played in Malaga, Spain, this month, the International Tennis Federation is making a donation to the Spanish Red Cross to support relief and recovery efforts for the recent catastrophic flooding in the country.

Vice President Kamala Harris' luring of celebrities out of their mansions to perform songs for middle-class voters struggling to afford groceries and rent was symbolic of an attitude that ultimately doomed her presidential campaign.

The Justice Department is suing to block UnitedHealth Group's $3.3 billion purchase of Amedisys, citing concerns the combination would hinder access to home health and hospice services in the U.S.

Simone Biles simply wanted to mix it up when the gymnastics superstar invited some of the top American men to join her post-Olympic Tour.

affaritaliani.it
 
 
08-11-2017.-
  
Alessandro Sahebi
 

The data repository invites community input on the future of data archiving at upcoming membership meeting

Dryad, a repository for data underlying the international scientific and medical literature, works with a variety of journals, societies and publishers to archive research data at the time of publication.  The project began in 2009 and has published more than 3,000 data packages.  In 2012, Dryad incorporated as a nonprofit organization with the mission to make scientific and medical research data permanently available to all researchers and educators free-of-charge without barriers to reuse.
For the past four years, Dryad has worked with its stakeholders to develop a sustainability plan to realize this vision.  Central to the sustainability plan is a one-time submission fee that will offset the actual costs of preserving data indefinitely. A variety of pricing plans are available for journals and other organizations such societies, funders and libraries to purchase discounted submission fees on behalf of their researchers.  For data not covered by a pricing plan, the researcher will be asked to pay upon submission, with waivers provided to researchers from World Bank low and lower-middle income economies. Submission fees will apply to all new submissions starting September 2013.  Dryad will also be supported in part by its membership, by grants for research and innovation, and by donors. Membership in Dryad is open to any organization that supports research and education.  Dryad is pleased to include Pensoft Publishers among its Charter Members.
The Dryad Membership meeting, to be held in Oxford, UK on Friday, May 24 is open to members, prospective members, researchers and other interested parties.  Attendees will hear about recent and upcoming developments in the repository and the nonprofit organization. In addition, there will be an Emerging Issues Forum with presentations from the community about future directions for Dryad, its members, and partner journals, including models for the technical and peer review of data, ideas for promoting the adoption of data citations, measuring data reuse, funder perspectives on the use of research grants for data management costs and the relevance of larger data networks.  
Dryad’s Membership Meeting is part of a series of free public events in Oxford spotlighting trends in scholarly communication with an emphasis on research data, including a Symposium on the Now and Future of Data Publication on Wednesday, May 22nd and an ORCID Outreach Meeting with a special joint Dryad-ORCID Symposium on Research Attribution on Thursday, May 23rd. Registration for these events closes on May 13th. Remote attendance will be available for those unable to attend in person.

For more information about submitting data, becoming a member or the sustainability plan, please visit http://datadryad.org. The website also offers an Ideas Forum where people can make their voice heard by suggesting and voting for new features and offering comments.

CONTACT:
Laura Wendell, Executive Director
lwendell@datadrayd.org
+1-919-668-4005 or +1-919-423-3889

Target group: programmers, developers and system engineers. The workshop is open to anybody who might be interested to learn more about the DINA-system.

Preliminary agenda:

• Presentations from all DINA-partners
• APIs, service oriented architecture and road map for distributed development, guidelines and principles on how to build a module and join the DINA-system
• Case studies
• Delivery options: creating installations from hosted environment, virtual machines down to code.

A detailed program will be available by the end of August 2014.

There will be a SETF-meeting for DINA consortium members on the 15th of September.

Welcome to register for the workshop here:

DINA - Technical Workshop 16-18 September, Stockholm

The workshop is an activity within WP 1 Task 1.4

The latest instalment of the Aichi Targets Passport is available now to download as an app from iTunes and Google Play.

As the flagship publication of the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (BIP), the Aichi Targets Passport provides annual updates on the global biodiversity indicators that monitor progress towards the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and the underlying Aichi Biodiversity Targets.

The suite of indicators presented in the Aichi Targets Passport was brought together by the BIP. They are as far as possible, global in their coverage, scientifically valid and peer reviewed, and relevant to the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. In particular, indicators are presented to highlight the progress that has been made towards each target so far and what baselines exist from which future progress can be monitored.

The Aichi Targets Passport was first released as a "proof of concept" in October 2012 and included one or two indicators for each Aichi Biodiversity Target. Since the release of the Beta version, the BIP Partnership has continued working to enhance and increase the number of global indicators available for each of the targets. In its app format, the information contained in the Aichi Targets Passport is at your fingertips at any time.

This latest edition of the Aichi Targets Passport has been released in tandem with the fourth edition of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-4). In addition to information on which of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets is on-course to completion and which targets require more action, GBO-4 presents options that could halt further biodiversity loss.

The indicators presented in the Aichi Targets Passport are those contained in CBD decision XI/3 with some additional indicators that have been, or are being, developed to fill gaps.

To download the Aichi Targets Passport visit: http://www.bipindicators.net/resource/aichipassport 

iTunes: http://goo.gl/dOWujN

Google Play: http://goo.gl/BN6AfG

A new report "A world that counts - Mobilising the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development" was recently published. The document points out the need for globally available and freely accessible data to monitor progress of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to hold governments accountable and foster sustainable development. This issue needs to be solved in a timely manner, as the gaps between developed and developing countries, between information-rich and information-poor people are increasing. Furthermore, better integrated, timely and validated information can lead to better decision-making and real-time feedback to the citizens. However, still some challenges remain, and the report points out recommendations to overcome existing limitations (countries have poor data, data arrives too late, many issues are barely covered), e.g. through a global "Network of Data Innovation Networks" that connects both organizations and experts. 

The report was written by UN-IAEG, which is the United Nations Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development and is available online here: http://www.undatarevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/A-World-That-Counts.pdf

One of our recent associated partners, the EU project GLOBIS-B has published its first paper: "Towards global interoperability for supporting biodiversity research on essential biodiversity variables (EBVs)". You can find the article here.

Abstract: 

Essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) have been proposed by the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON) to identify a minimum set of essential measurements that are required for studying, monitoring and reporting biodiversity and ecosystem change. Despite the initial conceptualisation, however, the practical implementation of EBVs remains challenging. There is much discussion about the concept and implementation of EBVs: which variables are meaningful; which data are needed and available; at which spatial, temporal and topical scales can EBVs be calculated; and how sensitive are EBVs to variations in underlying data? To advance scientific progress in implementing EBVs we propose that both scientists and research infrastructure operators need to cooperate globally to serve and process the essential large datasets for calculating EBVs. We introduce GLOBIS-B (GLOBal Infrastructures for Supporting Biodiversity research), a global cooperation funded by the Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework programme of the European Commission. The main aim of GLOBIS-B is to bring together biodiversity scientists, global research infrastructure operators and legal interoperability experts to identify the research needs and infrastructure services underpinning the concept of EBVs. The project will facilitate the multi-lateral cooperation of biodiversity research infrastructures worldwide and identify the required primary data, analysis tools, methodologies and legal and technical bottlenecks to develop an agenda for research and infrastructure development to compute EBVs. This requires development of standards, protocols and workflows that are ‘self-documenting’ and openly shared to allow the discovery and analysis of data across large spatial extents and different temporal resolutions. The interoperability of existing biodiversity research infrastructures will be crucial for integrating the necessary biodiversity data to calculate EBVs, and to advance our ability to assess progress towards the Aichi targets for 2020 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Original Source:

W. Daniel Kissling et. al. (2015) Towards global interoperability for supporting biodiversity research on essential biodiversity variables (EBVs). Biodiversity. DOI: 10.1080/14888386.2015.1068709