welcome to the longest post on infosthetics. the best written, the most informational & the post with the most images. this is Brad Stenger's guest blog report of the Computational Journalism Symposium.
"The Journalism 3G Symposium on Computation + Journalism took place February 22-23 at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Going in, we the organizers called it the most technically substantial conversation ever to take place between a group of journalists and computing professionals this large (200+ attendees). Not knowing exactly what would happen we crammed the panels full of programmers and journalists, as well as designers, entrepreneurs, managers, among all sorts of experts and thinkers. By all accounts, attendees were glad for the time they gave the meeting.
One thread running through the program, explicitly and implicitly, was Information Visualization. There was underlying intent for this. The data literacy, communication skill, and intellectual rigor required to practice coherent, understandable info viz make it a template for how computation can impact journalism, even though, as currently practiced, that impact occurs mostly at the margins of the news.
The Opening Keynotes from Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News, and Michael Skoler, creator of American Public Media's Public Insight Network, introduced the two communities to each other. And the implicit Info Viz program with the program started with the first panel discussion, one called Ubiquitous Journalism. The very first speaker, Mark Hansen, ranks among the most data literate people on Earth. A former Bell Labs statistician he holds joint appointments in the Statistics, Electrical Engineering, and Design departments at UCLA."
Earlier this month, crushing rains left 20 people dead and over 20,000 stranded when overwhelming rainfall left five feet of standing water in the low-lying areas. This is on top of already taxed landscapes that flooded when melting Himalayan glaciers burst the 200 rivers that web across the country last year. Bangladesh under water is seeming like a real and permanent possibility.
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — whose claims are usually conservative — said that Bangladesh is heading to lose 17 percent of its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050. That's like California and New York drowning, and the whole Midwest ceasing production of food.
If this happens, more than 20 million Bangladeshis will be without a patch of land to stand on. Though hardship in the country isn't entirely recent: since 1971, Bangladesh has endured over 200 disasters that have left a total of 500,000 dead and affected a total of 500 million people.
And I haven't even said anything about the plague of rats that's consuming all of their food. A plague of rats. I wish, wish there was more room for stories like this in the general consciousness — shouldn't we be hearing about this every night? Not to dwell on the gloomy, but just knowing about this makes the answer to this question pretty clear to me.
Reuters - The Polish prosecutor's office is
investigating allegations that there was a CIA prison in Poland
where al Qaeda suspects were questioned and guards might have
used methods close to torture, the prime minister's top adviser
said on Friday.
