55 years of - you decide

Exploring the relevance of Townsend’s ideas in the 21st century. Key points Abbreviated/picked over by Mark Aldiss About the study The research is mainly based on analysis of the first wave of the ESRC Understanding Society household panel survey. The data relate to almost 100,000 individuals in nearly 40,000 households that are representative of the UK population. The interviews were conducted in 2009 and 2010. The analysis of children’s participation utilises the separate Millennium Cohort Study; interviews were conducted with children and their parents or carers when the 19,000 sampled children were aged 8 in 2008. The findings are based on analysis using modern statistical tools. Poverty, participation and choice http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/society-poverty-participation-summary.pdf • Participation in society can be measured in terms of social relationships, membership of  organisations, trust in other people, ow...

via capwiz.com

REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Iceland, a nation of seafarers, has been stormed by pirates. They won't be forming the government, but online freedom advocates the Pirate Party were still big winners in the country's election. The party, just a few months old, took 5.1 percent of the vote in Saturday's poll, gaining three of the 63 seats in Iceland's parliament, the Althingi. It is the biggest electoral trophy yet for a movement founded seven years ago in Sweden by a group of rebellious file-sharing geeks and hackers who scoffed at copyright laws. Now, its Icelandic leader says, the party is "the political arm of the information revolution," dedicated to freedom of expression and political transparency, online and off. Birgitta Jonsdottir, the most senior of Iceland's three victorious Pirate lawmakers, argues that political and legal structures around the world have not kept pace with the technological change tha...

Welcome to the DIRHA EU project!  The DIRHA project addresses the development of voice-enabled automated home environments based on distant-speech interaction in different languages. A distributed microphone network is installed in the rooms of a house in order to monitor selectively acoustic and speech activities observable inside any space, and to eventually run a spoken dialogue session with a given user in order to implement a service or to have access to appliances and other devices. The multi-microphone front-end is based on the use of arrays consisting of analog microphones or Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) digital microphones. The targeted system analyses the given multi-space acoustic scene in a coherent way, by processing in a parallelized fashion simultaneous activities which occur in different rooms, and in case by supporting at the same time the interaction with users who may speak in different areas of the house. These very challenging objectives require a...

John Pilger is one of the world’s most prominent journalists, an author, a filmmaker with a litany of documentaries and someone whose fortitude has made a difference to the public record and the public interest. “It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it,” said John Pilger. In 1979, John Pilger, filmmaker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper entered Cambodia in the wake of the push of the Pol Pot regime out of the capital and into the western border jungles. They brought out a number of world exclusives. The first exclusive took up most of the UK’s Daily Mirror, which sold out. Pilger, Munro and Piper produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which took the genocide in Cambodia to the living rooms of Britain, then Western Europe and then the rest of the world.  The witness of the suffering of the Cambodian (Khmer) people le...

India’s population is now 1.21 billion New Delhi, Apr 30: India’s total population stands at 1.21 billion, which is 17.7 per cent more than the last decade, and growth of females was higher than that of males. According to the final census released by Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde today, India’s total population as on March 1, 2011 is 1,210,726,932 or 1.21 billion — an increase of 181.96 million persons in absolute number of population during 2001-11. There was an increase of 90.97 million males and increase of 90.99 million females. The growth rate of females was 18.3 per cent which is higher than males — 17.1 per cent. India’s population grew by 17.7 per cent during 2001-11, against 21.5 per cent in the previous decade. Among the major states, highest decadal growth in population has been recorded in Bihar (25.4 per cent) while 14 states and Union Territories have recorded population growth above 20 per cent. Altogether, 833.5 million persons live in rural areas as ...

2 months time set for biometrics enrolment Source: The Sangai Express Imphal, April 30 2013: A high level official meeting presided by Chief Minister O Ibobi today decided to complete the work of biometrics enrolment within two months which would be taken up under the National Population Register. The meeting was convened following strong instructions from the Centre regarding the biometrics enrolment programme. The meeting was attended by Deputy Chief Minister, Ministers, Chief Secretary, Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Census Director, Deputy Commissioners and officials of MANITRON and In-Media, an agency. Speaking to media persons after the meeting, Government spokesman M Okendro stated that the meeting decided to complete the biometrics enrolment work by June 30 . To ensure that biometrics enrolment work is completed within the said deadline, Ministers, MLAs and public representatives would cooperate fully with the officials concerned. After collecting biometri...