Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Atlas of Living Australia Gadget and Feed
The Atlas of Living Australia is a great new resource on biodiversity. We have added a search gadget and feed gadget to the Biodiversity Desktop.
Twitter Search Gadget for Biodiversity
We have added a Twitter Search Gadget to the Biodiversity Desktop. It's great for catching up on fresh tweets or searching for species and biodiversity tweets.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Desktop Themes
We have released a feed detailing the different themes provided by the Desktop. The feed is available at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ResearchDesktopThemes. This feed can be added to web page at http://researchdesktop.org/embed-feed.jsp?feedURL=http://feeds.feedburner.com/ResearchDesktopThemes.
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Places that works like Foursquare
Facebook has introduced a service called Places that works like Foursquare. To disable follow the instructions from Life Hacker
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Added Top Endangered Species Feed
We have added an endangered species feed that links to the Biodiversity desktop.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopEndangeredSpecies
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopEndangeredSpecies
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
Tableau Desktop
We are learning how to use Tableau Desktop analytics software at the moment. It is marketed as a data visualization and business intelligence tool. It produces some fantastic visualizations and there is a very good gallery of public images. It is worth visiting their gallery for some fantastic examples of what can be done. This is not exactly a home purchase but it is well priced for the desktop version and well worth the money. The easiest way to describe it is as rocket powered visual pivot tables. The charts and maps can be saved as images or into pdf. There is a free version called Tableau public that people can play with and free reader software. Well worth a try and I could see more researchers in universities using this tool.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Research Desktop Reaches Out
We have added two new facilities with the Research Desktop that allows branded RSS feeds or search facilities to be placed on other web sites. There is an example on our blogspot page http://sociomics.blogspot.com/.
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
Updates
We are updating the blog as our Research Desktop project moves along and we have added twitter and will be looking to create separate theme pages.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Civil Society Closing Statement from Access and Benefit Sharing Working Group 9, Cali Colombia
Final Statement on behalf of Civil Society Organisations
present at ABSWG-9
Dear Co-Chairs, I would like to link central concerns of civil society with the specific language of this ABS Protocol. I would also like to thank the Co-chairs and all Parties to give us access to information and effective participation at all levels of these negotiations.
1) Citizens around the world have a deep longing for justice, and in a globalised world this includes justice at the international level. “Affordable access to justice” including an “ombudsperson’s office” for us is the core, not the “minimisation of transaction costs”. Do not forsake our longing for justice!
2) Addressing “historical debt” and redressing past injustices is one of the difficult tasks we face. Access to genetic resources has a dark past of colonialism, transgressions, misappropriations and implicit injustices. A general amnesty for past political crimes, sometimes, is useful in re- establishing legal certainty. However, a general amnesty is not acceptable if the criminals and their descendants continue to gain large profits from these past acts. The ABS Protocol has not yet escaped the danger of becoming an instrument legitimising the profiteers of past injustices. Do not force us to fight an instrument under the CBD!
3) When citizens use their face creams and tooth pastes and get their vaccinations they are interested to know whether their consumer products have a history decent with regard to environmental impact and the rights of the original owners of genetic resources and traditional knowledge. A certificate and effective check-points under the ABS Protocol would facilitate progress towards inclusive sustainable consumption patterns, excluding biopiracy.
Do not put us to shame! Give us the instruments for decent behaviour!
4) Confidence and trust in fairness, equity and justice, also in international relationships regarding benefit sharing, are the basis and precondition for the necessary stable political will for the conservation objective of the CBD at the national level. The “temporal scope” for this is “for many generations to come”.
Do not undo the efforts of your citizens engaged in establishing such a stable basis for conservation!
5) Researchers are highly trained and intelligent people used to paperwork in the context of ordering equipment, scientific publications, project and funding proposals, contractual arrangements and patent applications. Dear researcher co-citizens, please apply your intelligence and training to do the small additional paper work for the ABS Protocol!
6) If progress in negotiations is getting difficult or stalls, the easy way out is to blame the process. Reflections on the lack of political will and the lack of inter-ministerial consensus may be more helpful to promote creative and productive engagement for the process ahead. Dear delegates, be mutually supportive with your citizens striving to create the necessary consolidated political will!
7 International negotiations are always addressing the task to get countries “into the boat”, even if they have very diverging minority views. But what to do if someone withholds all the elements with which could enable us to build a boat with decent seats for all of us? What to do if the whole boat is put into brackets or sunk?
Dear delegates, do continue your untiring efforts to bring the necessary elements for the boat back from your capitals! Civil society representatives, present here, will also resist post-negotiations depression and continue our best efforts towards establishing justice in the context of access and benefit-sharing.
presented by Ecoropa, Germany, Plenary Session, March 28, 2010
present at ABSWG-9
Dear Co-Chairs, I would like to link central concerns of civil society with the specific language of this ABS Protocol. I would also like to thank the Co-chairs and all Parties to give us access to information and effective participation at all levels of these negotiations.
1) Citizens around the world have a deep longing for justice, and in a globalised world this includes justice at the international level. “Affordable access to justice” including an “ombudsperson’s office” for us is the core, not the “minimisation of transaction costs”. Do not forsake our longing for justice!
2) Addressing “historical debt” and redressing past injustices is one of the difficult tasks we face. Access to genetic resources has a dark past of colonialism, transgressions, misappropriations and implicit injustices. A general amnesty for past political crimes, sometimes, is useful in re- establishing legal certainty. However, a general amnesty is not acceptable if the criminals and their descendants continue to gain large profits from these past acts. The ABS Protocol has not yet escaped the danger of becoming an instrument legitimising the profiteers of past injustices. Do not force us to fight an instrument under the CBD!
3) When citizens use their face creams and tooth pastes and get their vaccinations they are interested to know whether their consumer products have a history decent with regard to environmental impact and the rights of the original owners of genetic resources and traditional knowledge. A certificate and effective check-points under the ABS Protocol would facilitate progress towards inclusive sustainable consumption patterns, excluding biopiracy.
Do not put us to shame! Give us the instruments for decent behaviour!
4) Confidence and trust in fairness, equity and justice, also in international relationships regarding benefit sharing, are the basis and precondition for the necessary stable political will for the conservation objective of the CBD at the national level. The “temporal scope” for this is “for many generations to come”.
Do not undo the efforts of your citizens engaged in establishing such a stable basis for conservation!
5) Researchers are highly trained and intelligent people used to paperwork in the context of ordering equipment, scientific publications, project and funding proposals, contractual arrangements and patent applications. Dear researcher co-citizens, please apply your intelligence and training to do the small additional paper work for the ABS Protocol!
6) If progress in negotiations is getting difficult or stalls, the easy way out is to blame the process. Reflections on the lack of political will and the lack of inter-ministerial consensus may be more helpful to promote creative and productive engagement for the process ahead. Dear delegates, be mutually supportive with your citizens striving to create the necessary consolidated political will!
7 International negotiations are always addressing the task to get countries “into the boat”, even if they have very diverging minority views. But what to do if someone withholds all the elements with which could enable us to build a boat with decent seats for all of us? What to do if the whole boat is put into brackets or sunk?
Dear delegates, do continue your untiring efforts to bring the necessary elements for the boat back from your capitals! Civil society representatives, present here, will also resist post-negotiations depression and continue our best efforts towards establishing justice in the context of access and benefit-sharing.
presented by Ecoropa, Germany, Plenary Session, March 28, 2010
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
Creative Commons Peru Demonstration
An Access and Benefit-Sharing Commons by Paul Oldham is licensed under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-No comercial-Compartir bajo la misma licencia 2.5 Perú License.
Based on a work at papers.ssrn.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://sociomics.blogspot.com/.
Monday, 11 January 2010
Experimental Subjects Workshop 14th - 15th January, Lancaster IAS
Workshop 3: Experimental Subjects
Date
14 January, 2010 - 15 January, 2010
Location
Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University
Description
Participants in this workshop will explore the different kinds of subjectivity and relations of power produced by different forms of experimentality. Themes will include:
‘experimental subjects’, such as subjects of clinical trials or of behaviourist-inspired public policy interventions;
the self as the site of self-experimentation in popular culture, alternative spirituality, performance art, and human resource discourses
the experimenter as a form of subjectivity in science, technology, and finance capital.
For more info visit the experimentalities site: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality/event/workshop3
Date
14 January, 2010 - 15 January, 2010
Location
Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University
Description
Participants in this workshop will explore the different kinds of subjectivity and relations of power produced by different forms of experimentality. Themes will include:
‘experimental subjects’, such as subjects of clinical trials or of behaviourist-inspired public policy interventions;
the self as the site of self-experimentation in popular culture, alternative spirituality, performance art, and human resource discourses
the experimenter as a form of subjectivity in science, technology, and finance capital.
For more info visit the experimentalities site: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality/event/workshop3
Friday, 8 January 2010
Public Beta of Research Desktop 2.0
We are pleased to announce that our intermediate analytics web software Desktop 2.0 is now publicly available for public testing. Desktop 2.0 is a gadget based research tool that runs inside your browser. To test it out visit http://www.researchdesktop.org.
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