Archive for 2014

Debate: what's wrong with GM?

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This Storify gathers the relevant tweets from the recent debate organised by Scidev.net.

Panellists reflects on the importance of an healthy debate and an accurate risk/benefit assessment.
To view the entire debate with longer statements and many scientific resources go on the comments section of the webpage.

What's your opinion?
Do you feel safe with GMOs in the market? Do we need better labelling regulations?
Do small farmers in developing countries benefit or there are other methods out there?
Write a comment below and let's discuss...


10 years of floods: a fancy animated map. How many have hit your country?

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The map below shows all the 200 floods occurred all over the World during the last decade. 
Stop the animation clicking on the  button and explore the map on your month and year of interest.

 How many floods occurred?
How many hit your country?
The visualisation is based on figures provided by Dartmouth Flood Observatory and shows the constant occurring of floods all around the planet. Some countries are hit more than others though..
Read my previous post on the frequency of floods in Europe and how it is likely to rise in the future.

 Get here the data used for the map, with additional information on the severity of the floods. 
The figures cover the period 1990-2014.
Or read the Simon Rogers' tutorial on how to do a animated map using CartoDB and its new feature Torque.

Are some floods missing? Let me know in a comment below...

The numbers behind the floods in Europe. Romania the most struck in last 30 years

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Between the 14th and 18th of May severe floods and landslides hit the Balkans, claiming 50 lives and causing a level of destruction financially comparable to the 1992-1995 Balkan conflict, as Al Jazeera reported.

However, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, the most affected by the tragedy, are not the only ones who have been facing extreme natural events recently, as ten days earlier Italian town Senigallia suffered the same faith as well as the southern British Somerset region, which last January experienced the wettest month ever.
These are of course minor events compared to what happened in the Balkans and last year’s massive flood in Central Europe, but there's the terrible (and legitimate) concern that these extreme events are getting more and more frequent.


Explore some of the information on floods occurred since 1990 in the map by selecting one year in the drop-down menu




Is it getting better?


According to data collected by the Dartmouth Flood Observatory

As simple as that: how we designed the HS2 campaign tool

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This post is about the tool me and my team designed for our HS2 campaign in the "Build the news" event and how we came out with the the Fusion table-to-Twitter map with which we won the "Crowd" category. And, as the title suggests, the combination of tools I used are free and really easy to use.

The tool 

What we had in mind was to create a map showing the votes of MPs in the recent HS2 Preparation Bill by constituency, then allowing the users to tweet their opinion about the vote to their MP.
There is already

BCU team wins The Times' "Build The News"

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My team and me won the "Crowd" category of the Times' "Build The News" event.

Our project is called "HS2: have a say" and it allows citizens to tweet to Parliamentarians their opinion about the HS2 project, showing how MPs voted in the recent "Preparation Bill" debate, held in the House of Parliament. 

The High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill is a paving Bill to authorise further spending on preparation for the HS2 project. 

We created a map which shows how

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