I’m worried this will keep me distracted for hours or even days. But then, it will also be highly useful to me on nearly a daily basis from now on. The USDA has created a “Food Environment Atlas,” which is basically a Google Map that users can manipulate to find out all kinds of things about America’s food system at both macro and micro levels, based on government data that can be mixed and matched with a click or two.

Just for example, you can see a coast-to-coast map depicting where grocery stores are dense and where they are scarce (note: that map might surprise you a bit), or fast-food concentration (above). Or you can see areas where a lot of poor people live and where the nearest grocery store is more than a mile away (food deserts). Or you can click down to the county level and get all the data for that county. There are dozens of data points in addition to those noted above, such as food prices, the number of restaurants, income data, and information on school lunch programs. 

The USDA explains the atlas here. 

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Important update: It turns out that the breast-feeding groups who issued this urgent call might have jumped the gun. Click here for more information. Disaster-relief organizations including the American Red Cross say donating milk will cause more problems than it solves, at least for now, and that it might go to waste. Other than this update, this post has not been revised or edited since it was posted earlier Friday.

Haitian infants urgently need breast milk, according to breast-feeding groups cited by the Los Angeles Times‘ health blog, Booster Shots.

The logistics and infrastructure are now in place to get donated breast milk to the babies, most of them premature or orphaned. Donors need to have their blood tested and answer some health questions (obviously, you can’t be a smoker or on illegal drugs. But also: no herbal supplements.) Donations must be at least 100 ounces. Milk can be taken to the closest chapter of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America. Most of those chapters seem to be located in metropolitan areas, and there are just 13 of them.

Keeping the milk fresh and cold on the journey is “a tall order,” says Booster Shots’ Melissa Healy. As of last week, UNICEF was saying it was still not possible, but, at least according to Healy’s sources, it apparently is now. Healy points out several reasons that donating infant formula is not a good idea. 

Meanwhile, distribution of food and water to the rest of Haiti’s population is still uneven, according to the U.S. military. Some areas are still hard to reach, and there has been some violence at distribution points, where people are fighting over places in line. Prices on the open market are soaring, making matters worse.

“We are still not up to meeting the needs of the Haitian people as far as the amount of supplies that are there,” said Air Force General Douglas Frasier, quoted by Voice of America. “There have been some isolated instances where we have been out to distribute aid to citizens, and there has not been enough food.  We have not anticipated the demand at each site.”

Still, amid the mayhem and confusion, commercial food sales have restarted – there is even fresh fruit available in some neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. Wholesale rices, though, are reported to be more than 50 percent higher than their pre-quake levels, angering both retail vendors and customers. Adding to the problem is the fact that the biggest wholesale food market in downtown Port-au-Prince was destroyed. The market is now “a wasteland,” according to Voice of America. 

Long time friend, colleague and Borderbuster fan, Paul Barsch, Global Services Marketing, Teradata (CA), who has weighed in thoughtfully from time to time on this blog (e.g., here and here), has written still another provocative piece for the Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog with a headline of: “Going For Growth … In China.”

Fortunately, I had the great honor and pleasure of being interviewed for part of it. I say fortunately because Paul has a way of making all information concerning China — palatable. And in this case, he doesn’t let us down. Here’s an excerpt:

Why all the difficulty? Western firms must deal with the fact that for all the excitement of capitalistic economic zones in China, most of the enterprises in China are state owned. That means Western companies must deal with plenty of costly and unending red tape from protective Chinese authorities. And while China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, there is much work to be done to level the playing field for Western companies to effectively compete.

So take a moment to read Paul’s post to learn tips and strategies for how to prosper in Chinese markets. The comments are enlightening too — be sure to add your own.

Many thanks Paul!

I received my first DMCA takedown notice today. I published publicly-available IRS information about the nonprofit Kwaze-Kwasa [USA] Inc. Kwaze-Kwasa sent a letter to my ISP asking that it be taken down. I do not know why they want to keep this public information off the Internet, but I do know that the law lets them.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act contained a section known as OCILLA (distinct from its also-famous anticircumvention provisions) that regulates publishing copyrighted material online.

There are three big parties with interests in this subject: copyright holders, who want strong tools to keep copyrighted material offline; ISPs, who don’t want copyright law to apply to them’ and Internet users, who want to be able to publish and read interesting content. OCILLA was largely written by ISPs and pretty much maximizes their interests at the expense of copyright holders and users.

I’m very glad that copyright holders get the short end of the stick — they want to modify the law to make sites like YouTube illegal, just because some people upload copyrighted material to it. If they had their way, websites based around user-generated content would pretty much be impossible.

But I am frustrated the law doesn’t do enough for users. The takedown notice I was sent was obviously bogus — it didn’t even allege a copyright violation, since the information I published wasn’t even copyrightable (it was all basic facts and statistics published by the US government). Yet my ISP informed me that if I didn’t take the page down, they’d take my entire website offline. And they have to do that because if they don’t, they can be sued under the copyright law and could face very heavy penalties.

To get the page backup, I have to swear under penalty of perjury that I think the takedown was a mistake (yet the sender of a takedown does not have to swear that they think the takedown is valid!), consent to a lawsuit if the sender disagrees, and wait two weeks. Two weeks!

In short, the DMCA lets you get any page taken off the Internet for two weeks. This isn’t just a law itching for abuse; it’s a law being abused.

Where to start when asked to produce a ‘maturity model’ for records management within the HE/HE sector? Maturity models and other benchmarking tools certainly seem to be popular at the moment in all sorts of areas, especially in relation to ICT. On the plus side they allow an organisation to think objectively and comprehensively about the subject in question. They encourage investigation and reflection and through the picture they paint allow organisations to celebrate their strengths and to address their weaknesses. Maybe it’s no surprise that such approaches are gaining in popularity at a time when budgets are being squeezed as a much clearer idea of spending priorities should emerge as a result of working through such a model. On the minus side I’m always slightly concerned about the terminology and the (unintended) slight which may be felt by those who cannot demonstrate full maturity in a particular area and who might, justifiably, be reluctant to admit to being ‘immature’.

I’m hopeful, however, that the emergence of maturity models for records management is, in itself, evidence of a new phase in the profession’s development. For these are not tools attempting to demonstrate the need for records management or to justify expenditure in it, they assume (rightly or wrongly) that that stage has already passed. No. The maturity model assumes that whatever it is that is being assessed – records management in this instance – is an accepted and valued function of the organisation and that what is required is an assessment of how well it is performing and the impact that it is having. Thus hopefully the very existence of such models are evidence of a new level of maturity for records management as a discipline.
But to return to my opening question: ‘where to start’ when asked to produce one? My first thought was that this is a potentially risky endeavour. After all, in order to assess ‘maturity’ this implies that you have a clear idea of what ‘mature’ records management should look like.

Starting from scratch in this regard seemed especially foolhardy. After all, it would be a pretty bold claim to assume that I alone or even we as a service were in a position to define what this would look like. Getting together a working group or consultation panel would have been another approach and would certainly have increased the chances of producing a more rounded model, but wouldn’t we then be in danger of trying to reinvent the wheel? After all, what we are talking about in terms of this picture of ‘mature’ records management is surely pretty similar to defining a ‘standard’ for records management – and, as we all know, there are plenty of those around already (as someone once said: the great thing about standards is that there are always so many to choose from!). And we certainly didn’t want to try to produce a JISC infoNet standard for RM for people to start comparing with and mapping against 15489 et al.

The most logical approach therefore seemed to be to make use of an existing definition of a mature RM system; one that is current, authoritative and which has been developed collaboratively. And this is where fortune smiled on us by allowing us to combine two parallel, but related agendas. For just at the time we were planning the maturity model so I was part of the working group helping the National Archives to revise the s.46 Code of Practice on records management which accompanies the UK Freedom of Information Act. Not only was this a statement of what RM should look like in a public authority in order to ensure compliance with the legislation which ticked all those boxes mentioned earlier, but was also an initiative that we would want to be supporting for the sector anyway. When the original COP was published JISC produced the Model Action Plan for FE/HE Compliance with the COP. We could have taken a similar approach and produced another sector-specific Model Action Plan for the updated Code but felt that a Maturity Model better reflected the fact that the sector is now nearly a decade further down the line and would better appreciate tools to help assess how they are doing, rather than one which assumes they are still yet to get started!

So although firmly based on the National Archive’s Code of Practice and developed with their knowledge and assistance it should be noted that this Maturity Model was developed separately to it and any mistakes or omissions are very much ours not theirs. It also therefore follows that this Maturity Model is quite specific in its focus and the model of mature records management that it represents – i.e. a model appropriate for UK further and higher education institutions who want to be able to ensure compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. Of course the benefits of achieving such a model should be felt much further and deeper than this and in many more contexts but this remains at its core.

The Maturity Model and guidance for its use are available from today and we look forward to hearing of your experiences in using it. We also hope that as many institutions as possible will submit their completed forms to us to enable us to get an overview of the current maturity of RM within the sector as a whole and thus help inform how we can best tailor our own efforts to continue to support it in the future.