Warrant for Data + thoughts

[Tracey P. Lauriault-2]

Greetings CivicAccess Folks;

I found the following article and hesitated to send it. It is absent of  
CanCon, elections and ways to get data and so on.  But, here it is
anyway. It speaks to why data are so important, it is a warrant for what
COACID is about for some, and it discusses how hard it is to act, decide
and hone limited resources where, when and how needed without data and
information. It is also a reminder about the power data.

Alternatively, the article presents an important dilemma, how some
states work really hard to not collect certain types of data (think
Foucault's Governmentality) "we have no problems", in this case"our
women are fine", but also more critically, how a reliance on data and
the scientific process can lead to inactivity even when there is so much
other compelling evidence to suggest there are problems.  How science &
its methods almost always wins! How we need more non-scientists, geeks,
artists, activists, to play with data and reveal their stories in
another way, so that our hearts & minds absorb and act on what data and
the science are and could tell us if we had some!

Finally, for COACID, Canada is a data rich country, but its citizens are
information poor because the data referred to in this article are
collected, in so much more detail, they are also more reliable, accurate
and authentic, but alas we do not have access to them. IP and cost
recovery policies are thriving.

So I am, excited about this list and the groups potential.  I am really
passionate about data and information issues (i love talking about .shp
files and restaurant sanitation records - the real stuff  :-) ) and look
forward to learning from you all on how to play with data in a new way,
to discuss the social and political economy of the data
industry/machinery, to get informed about the legal issues, and to work
towards getting civic data into the the hands of citizens.

Also, to follow-up on what Michael asked earlier, I would really like to
hear what drives the new folks on the list to be here, and what your
interests are, what you think we should be doing together (nathalie,
daniel, michael G, gabe, hugh, robin, darin, joe, graham, russel,
chebu...).  There are a few others who are in the process of joining in.

Cheers all & Play in the snow (the fortune derived from today's data is
- plenty of snow frollick  -
http://text.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/forecast/city_e.html?on-118)!
Tracey

PS-Les francophones, sur la liste, SVP réponder en français.  Je vais
(re) commencer à lire des journaux numériques en français et si vous
pouvez me pointer à des listes ou de l'info dans cette très belle langue
que je commence à oublier, sa me ferais un très grand plaisir. je dois
me ré-éduquer!

***************************
NYTimes - January 21, 2006


  U.N. Reports Lack of Data on Women in Poverty

By CELIA W. DUGGER
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=CELIA%20W.%20DUGGER&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=CELIA%20W.%20DUGGER&inline=nyt-per>
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/21/international/21poverty.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Rock stars, movie actresses and heads of state have shined a bright
light on global poverty in the past year, often highlighting the
particular burden on women, but a report from the United Nations
released this week painstakingly details the huge gaps in data needed to
understand how poverty - in all its ugly guises - affects women.

Many poor countries simply do not collect the most basic facts about
births, marriages and deaths by sex and age, or the employment status
and wages of men and women.

The dearth of information makes it difficult to pinpoint where girls are
being married off while they are still children, or where female fetuses
are being aborted because boys are preferred, or where girls are dying
because they get less food and medical care than boys, says the report,
which was released Wednesday.

Its authors, and specialists in the field, say better information is
urgently needed if the world is to fashion sensible, effective solutions
to reflect conditions that are constantly evolving and vary greatly even
within a single country.

Africa, the world's poorest region, has the weakest systems for data
collection. Four in 10 Africans live in countries that did not conduct a
census in the past decade, and 8 in 10 live in countries with inadequate
national collection of vital statistics.

India and China, home to half of the world's poor, carried out censuses
but have weak systems for registering births and deaths, information
needed to understand trends in health and sex discrimination at the
local level, said Mary Chamie, who heads the demographic and social
statistics branch of the United Nations statistics division.

"If we don't know what the problem is, how are we going to fix it?" she
said. "And if the situation is changing, how will we know there's been a
shift if we plan based on information from a decade ago?"

The myriad reports published each year about poverty in developing
countries often include caveats about flaws in the data, but such
warnings are often over shadowed by sweeping conclusions. The new
report, "The World's Women, 2005: Progress in Statistics," is the first
to comprehensively analyze which countries collect official statistics
by sex and which do not, its authors say.

Jody Heymann, director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at
McGill University in Montreal, has spent a decade studying working
families globally. She said she had found that many developing countries
did not collect data about hours worked, benefits provided or sex gaps
in wages. "And there's practically nothing on who's caring for the
children," she said.

Statistics about the diseases that cause deaths in African adults are
inadequate, said Angus Deaton, an economics professor at Princeton
University. Household surveys can help determine how many babies and
children have died, because their parents usually survive to tell about
it. But when parents die, families often splinter and no one is home
when a surveyor knocks.

International organizations like the United Nations that are charged
with assembling data about how many Africans die of causes related to
AIDS "have only scattered clues," Professor Deaton said. As to how many
African women die in pregnancy or childbirth, he said, "That's a
complete black hole, because we don't know about adult mortality."

A lot has been written about the missing women of South Asia and China -
the female fetuses aborted or the girls who died prematurely because of
sex discrimination. Attention has also been paid to worsening life
expectancies for men in Eastern Europe and Russia. But better data are
needed to address many such problems, the report concludes.