Support World Press freedom day

Today 3rd May is World Press Freedom day- here are some resources for finding out more!


What is World Press Freedom day?

It dates back to a 1993 resolution from the United Nations.which sought to promote press freedom.

The 3rd of May was chosen to honour the Declaration of Windhoek  a statement of press freedom principles put together by African newspaper journalists in 1991.

IFEX background guide to the day


2016 events

2016 World Press day is focusing upon freedom of information and access to information. Read the statement from the United Nations. 
Secretary General's message for 2016 

UNESCO 2016 day webpage
In addition to news and events. There are also links to UNESCO documents on journalism, press freedom.

Why is it necessary? The state of press freedom worldwide.

 2016 World Press Freedom report. The annual ranking from
Reporters without Frontiers ranks 180 countries according to the level of freedom accorded to journalists. This year it recorded growing obstacles for journalists.

Freedom of the Press 2016- Freedom House Report - declared press freedom at its lowest point in 15 years. 46% live in 'not free' press environments.

Committee to Protect Journalists- has listings of
Attacks on the press. the 2016 feature focuses on women journalists.
Journalists killed - 10 in 2016 already. It records deaths since 1992
Censorship 

World Press Freedom Committee - has a map of imprisoned journalists.

IFEX has reports on censorship of the press. See the latest one on the Arab world.

 The Media Institute of South Africa has created a website reviewing progress on the 25th anniversary of the Windhoek declaration.

Social Science sites of the week

Happy new year

Welcome to 2016 with the latest update of new and interesting sites for social scientists

 

New Year’s resolutions.

Try  the RSA social brain quiz to find out what new year’s resolution you should choose and how you can stick to it.

It is based on the findings of a recent Royal Society report Easier Said than done – why we struggle with healthy behaviours and what can be done about it. This 33 page report has some practical tips on positive lifestyle changes to encourage healthy walking, eating, sleeping and talking which are based on psychological research

See some links to insights from psychology research on our recent blog posting.

Central African Republic elections.

Elections finally took place on the 31^st December. Find out more about the human rights background plus get news reports and  press releases from the 2015 election observation teams on our elections blog.

Fat Cat Tuesday

On the 5^th January 2016 top bosses salaries  FTSE CEOS will already have exceeded the average annual pay of many workers (£27,645) according to the High Pay Centre

Find out how your wages compare using their pay calculator

Price Waterhouse Cooper conducts regular surveys on the state of executive pay in the UK

According to a recent survey from CIPD 71% of employees think CEO pay is too high in the UK.

In an associated report on the behavioural impact of high wages on CEO behaviour and motivation CIPD recommended that pay rises became evidence based.

NCVO conducted an inquiry into executive pay in the charity sector. The final report from 2014 can be downloaded from their website

Norton Rose Fulbright maintain a UK Corporate Governance portal which as a really useful collection of links to recent reports from the UK government, trade associations and other bodies on executive pay. These cover regulation, performance related pay and ethics related issues.

First Anniversary of Charlie Hebdo attacks

Twitter coverage of the anniversary

The University of Oxford has translated and made free on the Internet a book on tolerance. With extracts from key French philosophers and writers. The original text was

La Société Française d'Etude du Dix-Huitième Siècle (ed.), Tolerance: le combat des Lumières (Paris: SFEDS, 2015). Contents include:

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 1789
Voltaire, ‘Prayer to God’, from Treatise on Tolerance, 1763
Three aphorisms from Denis Diderot, Philosophical Thoughts, 1746; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748; and Voltaire, Portable Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
Nicolas de Condorcet, 'On Admitting Women to the Rights of Citizenship', 1790
John Locke, Letter on Toleration, 1686

Harvard University is in the middle of creating a physical and virtual archive of materials relating to the 2015 attack. See an explanation of the archive on its own pages. This page has some preliminary data visualizations of georeferenced tweets using the Je suis charlie hashtag

New York Times Learning Network lesson plans to encourage students to consider concepts relating to journalism and blasphemy

Newsmuseum – has archived front pages of over 900 newspapers which enables some brief comparison of coverage and headlines across the world. January 8^th 2015 coverage and

January 12^th Coverage

The Internet Archive has preserved over 3,000 pages from a variety of institutions and social media preserving contemporary responses to the attacks

What makes cities competitive?

Find out by downloading a recent working paper from the World Bank

Kilroy, Austin Francis Louis; Mukim, Megha; Negri, Stefano. 2015. Competitive cities for jobs and growth : what, who, and how. Competitive cities for jobs and growth. Its objective is to create a knowledge base on what  makes cities competitive, to improve the understanding of  job creation at the city level, and to establish a foundation for

a community of practice on this topic

The A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index (GCI) ranks 125 cities according to 27criteria  across five main themes  business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement.

JLL’s Global300 cities has a ranking of cities worldwide attracting the most commercial real estate activity.

Cities of Opportunity Price Waterhouse Cooper ranks 30 leading cities in terms of social and economic factors such as cost, transport infrastructure, safety, ease of doing business

‘Many Postgraduates are overwhelmed by their workloads’

According to the results of the latest Postgraduate Taught Experience survey published by the Higher Education Academy 72,000 students from over a 100 institutions took part giving their opinion on workloads, motivation, and quality of teaching and learning.

Some potentially interesting points arising for service providers problems relating to workload – can libraries help students organise their time / research more effectively/ develop time management skills?

Employability – large numbers of students mention that a key motivation in enrolling was to improve career prospects. Can libraries highlight / teach skills that will help students in the workplace or find jobs?

Find more free reports on HE education, teaching and learning on our scoop,it page

Agents of Future Promise: children’s burden or benefit?

During 2015 researchers at the University of Leeds, Cardiff and Huddersfield. Examined ideology in the portrayal of children in British and French history from the 19^th century to the post war era. The project website now has videoed discussion from the end of project workshop help in September 2015. Topics covered include toys and gender, toys and the British empire, the Vichy regime and children, the use of children to envisage the future in wartime Britain.

Top 100  Global Innovators.

Thomson Reuters has just released its annual ranking of the most innovative global organisations .  It analyses patent  and citation data across four main criteria: volume, success, globalization and

influence using Thomson Reuters solutions including Derwent World Patents

Index (DWPI), Thomson Innovation and Derwent Patent Citations Index (PCI). The site includes breakdowns by region and industry as well as details on the methodology used.

Coming soon: 2016 US elections.
RealClearPolitics: Election 2016

This site from RealClearPolitics offers readers daily updates on polls, interviews, speeches, and other news related to the 2016 election. It currently includes polls relating to the Republican and Democratic nominations.

Stunning images of Earth

As Tim Peake and space continue to dominate the news. View some amazing images of earth from the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. The site also has some free downloads of lunaserv mapping

Social Science sites of the week

Social Science sites of the week.
Here is our round up of new and interesting sites for social scientists 


2015 - Spending Review and Autumn Statement - try these free resources

The government published a joint Spending Review and Autumn Statement on 25th November

The official government website is a good starting point . It provides an explanation of the process.and contains the speeches and supporting documents
HM Treasury has supporting documents.
Office of Budget Responsibility has financial data and forecasts

A House of Commons briefing paper. gives detailed background on the context and aims of the review
See more on our blog posting http://alissresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/2015-spending-review-and-autumn.html

Working household poverty is worse
According to the latest annual poverty and social exclusion report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which provides data and analysis for the last 5 years . The Trussell Trust has also recorded rising foodbank usage Also this week analysis on lifetime wealth from IFS found that using data from the Wealth and Assets survey younger generations were likely to be less well off than their parents.
For more recent links to free onlne reports covering UK social policy, economics and more from think tanks see our blog at http://socialsciencecurrentwareness.blogspot.co.uk/
ISER is also conducting some interesting research into new ways of measuring poverty. Their blog links to a number of discussion papers.


European Data Portal
Launched this month a new resource developed by the European Commission offering free access to over 240,000 datasets from 28 European Nations. These are harvested from open government data from EU nations websites. It is possible to search or browse by category, records give source information, URLs and license terms. Datasets can often be exported in excel or xml formats. Eurostat provides access to official datasets from EU bodies and surveys

Want to find more free open access data portals?
Try this list from openinception it has mapped over 1600. Hover over the maps to get statistics on different nations. Then zoom in on individual areas to get direct links to individual websites. Some are national, some regional or local government Read this article to find out more.about the aims and process

Are women under-represented in the news?
Yes according to the latest Global Media Monitoring Project report which found that they represented only 25% of those heard read about of mentioned in the news 2015 . The same overall percentage as in 2010. The report gives finding s on news coverage and women journalists presenting the news in a variety of media worldwide.

For other sources on this see the IWMF Global report on the status of women in the media 2011 which examines their employment status in new organisations. Journalists.org has a useful collection of links to recent full text reports from a range of think tanks and monitoring groups.

Accountable Journalism site launched
New from the The Ethical Journalism Network and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri. This free database has the full text of ethics codes covering the media from nations worldwide. There is also an extensive bibliography of books on media codes and accountability

Examining UK government performance
Just released this week from the Institute for Government the Annual Whitehall Monitor 2015. This provides statistics and visual data on government department size staffing impact and transparency. There are 163 data tables

Last month the Alliance for Useful Evidence released a new framework tool to measure government departments in how transparent their use of evidence is in policy making decisions.


Finally starting xmas shopping how about some suffragette badges from the Womens Library@lse flick photo album . Or how about a suffragette hat as advertised in the December 23, 1911 edition of the Vote womens Freedom League newspaper. The lse has just made available a podcast of a discussion with the director of the recent suffragette film