Shares of social network giant Facebook were officially floated on the NASDAQ on 18 May with an estimated value of $100 billion. The company’s IPO is priced at $38 per share, turning it into the largest tech IPO in history. The social networking website has a 900-million strong user base – a significant portion of whom reside in Africa.
Elections in Kenya are the most expensive in the world thanks to a high voter registration cost, administrative inefficiencies and outright theft of funds.
Estimates for the upcoming election presented by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) placing the cost at Sh36 billion translates to a cost per registered voter of Sh2,000 ($25), higher than any other on record.
The IEBC, which initially sought Sh41.5 billion, has been pressing its case for the reduced funding all week before the Parliamentary Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs.
Indian-origin councillor Abdul Razak Osman has become the first Lord Mayor of the Islamic faith to hold the high office in the multi-cultural town of Leicester, which has a large minority of Indian origin people.
Osman was born in Kenya and arrived in the UK in 1971. His late father Yousuf Razak worked on the East African Railway, and worked for a local engineering firm after moving to Leicester.
If you are involved in the tech space then you just have to sit back and admire what Mark Zuckerberg and Co. have done with Facebook over the last 8 years. They have completely changed the face of human interaction and how people communicate with each other. In the process creating a completely new industry loaded with new ways of doing things. But today Mark Zuckerberg opened the bell remotely from the company’s Menlo Park Headquarters to mark the first day of Facebook going public, trading on NASDAQ. Mark even updated his Facebook status at the same time
“Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others,”
It came…and yeah the biggest tech IPO took off at a high note trading 82Million shares in the first 30 seconds. Facebook share opened trading at 42.05 from the initial public offering price of $38 . The online social network raised as much as $18.4 billion making the biggest initial public offerings in U.S. history.
We say congrats
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Avalanches are a serious problem for mountaineers during their tours in the wilderness but lately they are increasingly happening much more also as natural phenomena due to uncommon snowfalls. More often they are being triggered in the neighbourhood of ski-areas by off-piste venture causing deaths and damages. Here we present a crowdsourcing initiative, based on the social mapping tool Ushahidi, aiming at improving avalanche awareness by capturing incidents from the practitioners and making such data freely reusable for a variety of large-scale applications.
http://geoavalanche.org/incident/
In recent decades back country tourism in the mountain area, during the winter, have led to a significant increase in the number of practitioners who tackle snowy paths or land prone to avalanche slide. This, often, is not commensurate with a quite equally preparedness in the evaluation of meteorological conditions and snowpack’s stability to deal with, which is the fundamental step towards a safe trip.
Despite exposure to avalanches is a variable dependent by many factors, including some unpredictable, often the lack of the necessary experience combined with a poor consideration of avalanche bulletins, makes snowy terrain potentially subject to such phenomena. In addition, the unpredictability of some events related to the stratification of the soil results that even in situations where you keep all the most safe conducts and although the risk may be at a level significantly low in the danger’s scale (5 –VERY HIGH, 4 – HIGH, 3 – CONSIDERABLE, 2 – MODERATE, 1 – LOW), the detachment of an avalanche is a phenomenon, which can continuously still happen. Especially while there always might be some discrepancy between local situations and areas of interest of an avalanche bulletin.
Fig. 1: Danger Level for an avalanche bulletin in a geographic area
Currently the most recent practices from professional rescue shows how self-rescue procedures are the sole proficient way to save lives when an avalanche buries some people, since the struggle is strongly time-dependent in order to being effectively decisive in. This can exclusively happen when practitioners have at their disposal the necessary equipment to find and dig someone out of an avalanche: ARTVA, shovel and probe. Nowadays, with the improvements reached on the new generation of beacons, rescue operations become quicker but often this is not easily enough. The knowledge of procedures and training on how to self-rescue has to be addressed in the community as much largely as possible to raise successful results when a such crisis happens.
Any incident is subjected to a further inspection when the professional rescue is claimed to an avalanche scene and the information related to are treated respectfully in a manner that follows regulations and operative procedures of reference. As a result all those details are captured as expected by the national Avalanche Warning Services, which collect incidents worldwide for driving avalanche awareness and prevention in each country. This scenario figures out the need of an innovative spatially aware tool for mapping such information which could be used for statistical purposes and mitigation measures and much more important to handle also avalanche incidents that are still remaining hidden.
Therefore, from a geographical perspective, the process of data capturing has to be addressed in a way that meets the spatial context of an avalanche incident. The power of Ushahidi is to make easily this job in order to meet how stakeholders are structuring this information and potentially to make democratized and valuable those data coming from crowdsourcing participation.
Avalanche incidents data were analyzed in order to being structured as well as compared with standards in use by Avalanche Warning Service worldwide. The benefits of using Ushahidi go beyond to developing an historical and extended database of avalanche incidents happened during years publicly available in the form of thematic maps and also as API RESTful mechanism for accessing data by citizens, stakeholders and governments.
This general explanation above figures out how the problem has been issued and why the initiative of Geoavalanche – a project born from the collaborative efforts by Geobeyond with mountain’s passion in mind – would leverage the awareness of risk using new forms of sustainable democratization over the Web 2.0. Geoavalanche aims at supporting the safety across mountains through the development of tools to better sharing avalanche information and data over the Internet. Maps are an approach to highlight new phenomena and display results in an easily understandable way. The idea behind this initiative is to harness the benefits of crowdsourcing information around avalanche incidents (making use of a large group of people being able to report on a story) and smoothly assist the sharing of knowledge in an environment where rumors and uncertainty were predominant.
Geoavalanche site uses Ushahidi platform for reporting incidents originated by an avalanche that may have been originated by a natural or human behavior. People can basically perform the following operations:
Reports from mountaineers, journalists, geeks can be filled through the completion of a number of fields that represent the framework of minimal information to describe, in a comprehensive and standard manner, an avalanche accident. A full story can be reported either in a totally anonymous circumstance or be accompanied by the optional contact information for a further review by administrators.
The location of where the accident occurred is one of the key elements and can be provided in an easily way through the addition of geographical coordinates (if available by GPS device) or being approximately calculated by looking for a place – performed through geocoding feature – typically of the mountain where the fact occurred.
We are aware how potential users are spread over a large extent of technical and non-technical subjects and thus the developed database includes both those mandatory fields expected by avalanche warning services and others optional which could be filled once more information will have been captured on those stories reported yet. A feature of Ushahidi, which we do really like is the ability to supporting a role based access control by controlling different kind of users and privileges over the data. We would just Among the obligatory set of information easily designed we have:
As optional information each single report can be further refined later since its submission and trusted with a subset of information provided only from granted users on these additional more technically fields below:
This social work is basically an experiment that would outcome effects as much possible as extended in a world where spatial information is not still diffused. Geoavalanche would expect to improve the educational use of such spatially enable data and help organizations and governments to better understand how the involvement of citizenship can be crucial for leveraging a real problem.
In fact, basically, there were two different promising approaches, which have been worthwhile to issue:
Ushahidi currently supports different manners to send a message for a report by:
A story is not immediately sent to being published and made available on the public map. In any case, all reports have the opportunity to be commented on to further prove the credibility and the details of the story.
The project was carried on with a deep focus on openness and sustainability to meet the educational goals identified for this sort of application mapping. Geoavalanche itself is an Open Source project and therefore Ushahidi was a natural choice as tool for crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap the underlying proper base layer for mapping. Furthermore Geoavalanche decided to make the data collected fully available to the public by adopting the Creative-Commons CC-BY-3.0 license that allows free use and possible reuse through the native RESTful API endpoints for fetching avalanche incidents data.
Since this kind of information is similar worldwide, indeed, such crisis mapping use case is transferable as a best practice to a large extent in order to make mitigation measures more reliable and statistically more robust for stakeholders.
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There's sun, sand and sex in Cannes Film Festival entry "Paradise: Love" — and they add up to a grim and unsettling holiday movie.
Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's film depicts middle-aged European women at a Kenyan holiday resort seeking romance with young local men.
Margarethe Tiesel plays a 50-year-old Austrian whose search for love turns increasingly predatory. But the actress says she does not judge her character's behavior. She says the movie is about female loneliness and how "people who are exploited at home travel abroad and become exploiters in turn."
Aside from smashing box office records, it seems that the recently released superhero flick, The Avengers, has also bumped up sales in another business – selling Shawarmas.
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