• Facelift for data.gouv.fr

    Steve WoodsOpen Data, Tech

    screenshot of French government's open data site
    Screenshot of the revamped French government open data site
    The French government’s open data site has undergone a facelift, according to Le Monde Informatique. Now more ergonomic and featuring more new data sets, the site wants to be the pivot for the policy to open up public data.

    The in-depth revamp of the data.gouv.fr has been given a high level relaunch. The French Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault and Ministers Marylise Lebranchu and Fleur Pellerin unveiled the portal developed by Etalab.

    The government has set three targets for the site, i.e.

    • to enable the user to access easily the most pertinent data to respond to the questions he is asking;
    • to allow any keeper of public data to share them in no time at all;
    • to enhance public data due to the improvements or interpretations of people who re-use them.

    Although the interface has been redesigned for better ergonomics compared with the old site which dated from 2011, it’s the content part which is benefiting from this. The portal claims it has 200 contributors of data including research centres, local authorities, representatives of collective organisations and civil society. Etalab has provided a non-comprehensive list of additional data sets, political parties accounts (2011 financial year), grants for parliamentary scrutiny (2012 financial year), number of students or lists of public contracts placed between 2008 and 2012, etc. Some work still remains to be done in some local authorities and territories to make their public data available.

    The data are also more numerous – 4 times as many as the previous site, i.e. some 1.45 mn. entries. Etalab explains that this information is destined to be grouped together into series for better legibility. On the old site 350,000 files were grouped into 2,900 series. Today the site comprises 13,000 freely available data sets. The site claims to be “the social network of a community of producers and users of public interest data who are involved in improving and interpreting these data”. The collaborative aspect is therefore highlighted with the involvement of citizens in improving, grading and reusing the data.

  • Bristol Post Balls – recycling rubbish

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media

    Today’s Bristol Post has a report on Bristol City Council’s waste contractors May Gurney and their planning application for their recycling operation, complete with a picture – kindly inserted by the Post’s Inappropriate Pictures Dept. ( whose work complements that of the Invisible Pictures Dept. featured yesterday. Ed. – of one of their new traffic congestion-busting refuse lorries!

    Below is the usual screenshot ready for when someone on Temple Way realises a mistake has been made. 🙂

    Bristol Post article screenshot

  • Recommended: Scribus

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    In the immediate aftermath of my mother’s recent death, I offered to prepare the order of service for her funeral. I felt this was one small service I could perform for her, as well as presenting me with an ideal opportunity to re-acquaint myself with Scribus, the free and open source desktop publishing (DTP) package.

    screenshot of Scribus
    My mother’s order of service being edited in Scribus. Click on image for full-sized version

    When it comes to operating systems, Scribus will run on Linux, other Unix-like operating systems, Mac OS X, Haiku, Microsoft Windows, OS/2 and eComStation; and that’s pretty impressive for a start.

    Scribus is designed for layout, typesetting and preparing files for professional quality image setting equipment. It can also create animated and interactive PDF presentations and forms. Example of its use include writing small newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters and books.

    Scribus supports most major bitmap formats, including TIFF, JPEG and Adobe Photoshop. Vector drawings can either be imported or directly opened for editing. The long list of supported formats includes Encapsulated PostScript, SVG, Adobe Illustrator, and Xfig. Professional type/image setting features include CMYK colors and ICC color management. It has a built-in scripting engine using Python.

    Text can be imported from OpenDocument (ODF) text documents, such as those produced by LibreOffice Writer, Microsoft Word, PDB (Palm OS) and HTML formats, although some limitations apply. OpenDocument text (.odt) files can typically be imported along with their paragraph styles, which are then created in Scribus. HTML tags which modify text, such as bold or italic will also be handled pretty well.

    Scribus is available in more than 24 languages and is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

  • Bristol Post Balls – getting the picture

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media

    One of the parts of the Bristol Post whose work is largely unseen is its Invisible Pictures Department, which spends its working day making sure photographs and other images are omitted from articles published in the paper, particularly its online version.

    Here’s screenshot of a fine example of its work taken first thing this morning from today’s online edition.

    screenshot of photo feature with no photos

    Update: Photographs were finally added to the post at lunchtime, i.e. some 4 hours after it was originally posted, which is no doubt indicative of how much the Post values its online readers.

  • British Library releases over 1 million images to public domain

    Steve WoodsMedia, Open Data, Open Standards, Tech

    The British Library has released over one million scanned images into the public domain. A post on the British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog reveals that the public domain – i.e. freely usable – images which have been made available via the British Library’s Flickr page, originate from 17th, 18th and 19th century books. They were digitised by Microsoft from 65,000 books.

    sample image from British Library collection
    “The Coming of Father Christmas” by Eliza F. Manning

    Microsoft and the British Library started collaborating eight years ago. The contents of 100,000 books should be searchable in the near future via Microsoft’s book search project.

    All the images are provided with details of their origin and year of publication. The British Library is planning a crowdsourcing project as the next stage for automatically classifying the content of the images. The images’ data has been made available on github by the British Library. The code is being made available under an open licence.

  • £17 million lost in translation

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    Figures for the thousands of court case delays caused by Capita failing to supply interpreters show that over £17 million pounds of taxpayers’ money has been lost since the contract began.

    In 2012 642 trials failed as a result of the contract and complaints figures for 2013, published in October by the Ministry of Justice, reveal an increase in cases where interpreters are failing to appear when requested by courts. There have been 9,800 official complaints since the contract began on 30 January 2012, with higher numbers of complaints in the second part of 2013 compared to 2012.

    PI4J logoProfessional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J), an umbrella group for professional interpreter organisations, estimates that court time costing £10.8 million was lost in 2012 and £6.7 million in 2013 up to November.

    Geoffrey Buckingham, Chairman of the Association of Police & Court Interpreters (ACPI), says: “£17 million lost in court time is a shameful waste of taxpayers’ money and makes a mockery of the claims by Government that £15 million of savings were made in year one.”

    ACPI, which aims to work in partnership with the Ministry of Justice to safeguard quality in justice sector interpreting, has in addition collected its own examples of nearly 1,000 instances where interpreters were not available, or arrived late or caused other delays, amounting to 366 days of wasted court and tribunal time. This represents a snapshot of the overall picture.

    PI4J attended a workshop with the Ministry of Justice where the group were invited to provide their input to the scope of the independent assessment of quality in the language service contract. The Ministry of Justice has now issued an Invitation to Tender for the independent review.

    Paul Wilson, Chief Executive of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, says: “The Ministry of Justice has finally begun its work on commissioning the independent review, which we hope will be independent, authoritative and substantive. We will then be looking to the new Justice Minister to act on the recommendations.”

    In a new independent survey of over 1,000 interpreters commissioned by PI4J, only 26% said they are working for Capita Translation & Interpreting and 77% of these said their experience of the private contractor is negative. A high proportion (68%) said they are not being treated fairly or respectfully and only 17% said they had been offered training.

    Typical comments about Capita were “poor experience led me to avoid them at all cost” or “low rate, unprofessional staff and no understanding of the nature of interpreters’ work and role”, or “staff are rude, no structure at distributing jobs, etc.”

    Keith Moffitt, Chairman of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, said: “The majority of professionally qualified and experienced justice sector interpreters will not work for Capita on principle and it appears that those that are working for them are feeling mistreated. Meanwhile the number of complaints is rising and our country’s reputation for delivering justice and the right to a fair trial is in jeopardy.”

    1,172 interpreters took part in the online survey in October 2013. This was the fifth in a series of similar surveys commissioned by PI4J over the past two years.

  • Linguists still missing court appointments

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    Despite the bluster of senior civil servants and ministers at the Ministry of Justice, the courts and tribunals interpreting contract with Capita is still causing delays and extra expense to the public purse (posts passim).

    The latest evidence of this comes from today’s Grantham Chronicle, which reports as follows:

    The case against a Lithuanian national had to be adjourned because there was no translator [sic] available in court.

    Algirdas Gerbenis, of Railway Terrace, Grantham, is accused of drink driving on St Catherine’s Road in the town and failing to stop after an accident on October 10.

    The case was adjourned to December 16.

    Mr Gerbenis was granted unconditional bail.

    As the Grantham Chronicle is apparently having some difficulty telling translators and interpreters apart, I suggest the paper makes my illustrated guide to translators and interpreters compulsory reading for its journalists. 🙂

    Hat tip: RPSI Linguist Lounge.

  • Bristol Post Balls: the return of the greengrocer

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    The Bristol Post is no stranger to the greengrocer’s (or superfluous) apostrophe (posts passim).

    There’s a fine example in the headline for a photo gallery in today’s online edition.

    screenshot of Bristol Post article
    Santa’s 2013 what, Bristol Post?

    The mandatory screenshot is included above as the occupants of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth may have realised or been alerted to their mistake (I’m sure they wait use your daily review of the paper’s contents as a proofreading tool. Ed.) by the time you read this.

  • A salutary lesson in social media for business

    Steve WoodsOddities, Social Media, Tech

    A message to all businesses: if you sack a member of staff, you should consider changing your Twitter password, particularly if that person had access to the account.

    The Plough, a pub in Great Haseley, Oxfordshire, didn’t… and at the time of posting it has nearly 1,700 followers.

    You can enjoy the results in the screenshot below.

    screenshot of tweets

    Update 12 noon, 16/12/13: According to Buzzfeed, Jim Knight, the chef in question, created the Twitter account with the permission of his now former employers. Furthermore, he has also now been offered a new job, in which I wish him well. 🙂

    Hat tip: Eugene Byrne

Posts navigation