Communication

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the Cambridge Analytica scandal with ads in multiple US and British newspapers Sunday.  JENNY KANE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

usatoday.com - by Marco della Cava - March 25, 2018

As Facebook continues to buffet winds of criticism, its founder took out full page ads in U.S. and British newspapers Sunday to apologize to consumers for not properly securing their personal data.

"This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time," Mark Zuckerberg said in the signed ad, which was published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and six British papers. "We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can't, we don't deserve it."

The ad refers to the misuse of 50 million Facebook profiles, which were mined through an app created by a Cambridge University professor and then sold, in violation of Facebook's terms of service, to Cambridge Analytica, a company that used the profiles to create election ad-targeting tools for the campaign to elect Donald Trump.

Humanitarian aid workers help fight cholera in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo: OCHA/J-L. Mbalivoto

unmultimedia.org - 22 December 2017

Access to data is crucial for humanitarians responding to various crises worldwide.

For example, aid workers feeding hungry people in Nigeria use a mobile-based platform to monitor the price of rice and other staples to know when costs increase.

To better assist these professionals, the UN has opened a global humanitarian data centre in the Netherlands that aims to improve lives by connecting people and data.

Veronique Durroux spoke to Javier Terán Castro, a statistician with the UN humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, who explained how it functions.

http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2017/12/un-centre-aims-to-connect-people-and-humanitarian-data-to-improve-lives/#.Wj0Cma3MzFR

The Centre for Humanitarian Data - https://centre.humdata.org

HDX - https://data.humdata.org

nbcnews.com - by Yuliya Talmazan - September 20, 2017

Dominica's main hospital "took a beating" from Hurricane Maria while buildings serving as shelters had their roofs ripped off, an official said as the first images showing the devastation unleashed by the storm emerged Wednesday.

The Category 5 storm hit the tiny Caribbean island late Monday, cutting off communications and leaving the rest of the world in the dark about the storm’s aftermath.

Video footage shot by the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency shows large swaths of the island suffered heavy damage, with roofs missing and debris scattered for hundreds of yards.

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Badlands National Park in South Dakota is pictured in this July 16, 2014 handout photo.
Badlands National Park/Handout via REUTERS

reuters.com - by Steve Gorman - January 26, 2017

Employees from more than a dozen U.S. government agencies have established a network of unofficial "rogue" Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.

Seizing on Trump's favorite mode of discourse, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and other bureaus have privately launched Twitter accounts - borrowing names and logos of their agencies - to protest restrictions they view as censorship and provide unfettered platforms for information the new administration has curtailed.

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