Witness Confident: can a street violence map encourage more victims to report crime? | News Today a new map of crime called Street Violence is launched by the charity Witness Confident. Unlike Police.uk which displays official statistics of crimes at street level, the Street Violence map will display accounts of street robberies and attacks from witnesses and victims. The motivation for this, as Witness Confident explain, is that a signficant portion of violent crime is not reported, so making it easier and quicker to share information about crime can help to reduce these lost cases. The map also serves as a report to help people learn about how crime is tackled in their area. Perhaps the most important feature of the Street Violence map is the way it's connected to the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) through a form that will essentially email the Police as if you were using their own email service. Witness Confident intend that victims of street robberies and attacks use this facility to report crime to the MPS. In addition, the Met stated this weekend: So what do you think?
Every open spending data site in the US ranked and listed | News The Follow the Money 2012 report has this week revealed the good news that more US states are being open about their public spending by publishing their transactions on their websites. It has also exposed the states of Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Montana and Wyoming that are keeping their finances behind a password protected wall or are just not publishing at all. A network of US Public Interest Research Groups (US PIRGs) which produced the report, revealed that 46 states now "allow residents to access checkbook-level information about government expenditures online". The checkbook means a digital copy of who receives state money, how much, and for what purpose. In the UK councils have been publishing lists of their spending over £500 for just over a year. The government site Direct Gov provides a service to look up your local council's spending data. This is just the UK way. The value of good transparency is illustrated by some nice examples in the report. Data summary Download the data
Keeping these data-hungry technology companies at bay | Dan Gillmor The US Federal Trade Commission says mobile app developers are doing far too little to help parents protect the privacy of children who use phones and tablets. And, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the head of an app developers trade group agrees; he's quoted as saying: "Parents should have clear, simple, easy-to-use tools to protect their children's privacy." I have an even better idea for the mobile industry, and the tech industry in general: how about providing clear, simple, easy-to-use tools to protect every person's privacy? In recent days, one mini-debacle after another has demonstrated the tech industry's true nature. The latest round of surprise disclosures began when Path, a social networking company, was discovered to be surreptitiously uploading iPhone users' entire address books to its corporate servers. In many cases, the initial reason for the activity is benign. I have some sympathy for the app developers.
Maude praises UK progress on open data but private sector sees work to do | Technology An "open data" revolution kicked off by a Guardian campaign is gathering pace in the UK. The Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, is trumpeting the UK's success in making government data freely available - and pointing to examples of companies that have sprung up to create commercial businesses around free data from public bodies. Maude says that "companies including SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises] and startups are using open data to improve public services and create innovative products." But, he adds, he wants both "data holders" in government and new data-driven businesses to "promote the open data revolution". One of the newest apps to appear using government data is an iPhone all called Your Taxi Meter, which uses live data from local councils to find out from a car's registration number whether it is a licensed taxi - so that would-be passengers can check on it before they get in.
Android 'free' apps pass user data to ad networks, study finds | Technology Android: can 'free' apps access user information? Advertising networks used by apps in Android devices can get access to user information, according to an investigation by a UK information security company. MWR Infosecurity found that a significant number of the top 50 "free" apps which generate money for the developer and advertisers by connecting to an American advertising network pass on details about the phone's user to the network – a move that may breach European data protection laws. With roughly a quarter of the UK's phone users using Android phones, and with millions of apps downloaded every month – often for free, supported by advertising, rather than paid-for – the gap in security is a source of concern. The study was commissioned by Channel 4 News. The code that MWR Infosecurity found gave advertising networks access to contacts, calendar and location. Correction: the headline on an earlier version of this article said that user data was passed to advertisers.
Infographics old and new: top data visualisations, in pictures | News There is an infographic boom going on out there - with the internet flooded with data visualisations of the way we fight war, how we use Twitter, what music we like and how we use the, er, internet. But new as these are, there's a long tradition of telling stories using graphics. Information Graphics from Taschen, which includes work from the Guardian such as our public spending chart, tells the story of how information graphics came to rule our world. We've selected some of those from the past - to contrast with some key infographics from the past few years - albeit missing out hundreds of examples we could have chosen from the years inbetween. These are some of the images. What have we missed and which ones do you like? Information Graphics from the Guardian bookstore at a discount price of £35.99 1858 Histoire Universelle This Table of Universal History was published in Paris. 1926 Kahn 1940 Geis 2006 Esquire Body Parts. 2006 This is indexed This is Indexed. 2007 Stanford Two Mindsets. NEW!
OS mapping data: a new landscape unfolds | Technology The Free Our Data campaign has scored a major victory, with the announcement by the government that it intends to make Ordnance Survey maps free for use online by any organisation – including commercial ones – at resolutions more detailed than commercial 1:25,000 Landranger maps from April next year. The announcement of the opening of a consultation on the plan by Gordon Brown at Downing Street on Tuesday, as part of a seminar on making public data public – set in the wider context of public service reform, under the "Smarter Government" umbrella – indicates that the ideas underpinning the campaign have now been taken on board at the highest levels of government. "Mid-range" maps, with resolutions from 1:10,000 upwards, will be made available for re-use, under the plans announced by the prime minister, along with information on postcode areas and electoral and council boundaries. The issue appears to have gone to the top of government to be resolved.
Tesserac ou l'OCR Open source Bonjour Les programmes de reconnaissance de caractères OCR sous licence libre ne sont pas légion Mais ceux qui donnent de bons résultats sont encore plus rares (*) J'en ai pourtant trouvé un (qui intéresse Google également) Les sources sont disponibles Et j'ai pu l'installer sur mon ubuntu Edgy en suivant les indications de cette page NB La premiere fois que j'ai lancer la commande make il me manquait un paquet pour compiler correctement les sources à la lecture des logs j'ai compris qu'il manquait c++ , je l'ai donc installé et l'installation s'est poursuivie jusqu'à son terme. Les résultats sont bons pour une mise en page simple mais l'accentuation est perdue lors de la reconnaissance. Mes questions : 1) Quelqu'un aurait t'il déjà fait un script pournautilus Actionpermettant de lancer automatiquement la conversion d'un fichier image (clic droit > convertir en texte)
Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools To Convert Images Into Text Quite frankly, I wish I knew about this simple way to use freely available OCR software back in my school days. Of course, we didn’t have camera mobile phones or inexpensive Digicams, but wouldn’t it have saved hours of copying notes! Ah, modern technology is wonderful; take a scanned image (or take a snap using a mobile camera/Digicam) and presto – OCR software extracts all the information from the image into easily editable text format. Optical character recognition (OCR) is a system of converting scanned printed/handwritten image files into its machine readable text format. Maybe you have already come across our previous How to Extract Text from Images (OCR) post and used JOCR, a a free OCR software tool. We will be looking at 5 free pieces of OCR software and to start off let’s see the overlooked two that are already installed on our systems. OCR Using Microsoft OneNote 2007 For the occasional basic OCR stuff, MS OneNote’s optical character recognition feature is a timesaver. SimpleOCR
Open-Source OCR Software, Sponsored by Google Google sponsors the development of an open-source OCR software at the IUPR research group. "OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities." "The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use," explains Thomas Breuel, who leads the project. The software is partly based on Tesseract, the best open source OCR engine available for now. While the project is expected to be released at the end of next year and will be used for Google's book scanning project, the team has some interesting applications in mind:
Facts are sacred: the power of data - out now on Kindle and iBooks | News We have a new ebook out for Kindle and it's about how we work with data at the Guardian - and how that data is changing the world around us. It's available now in the US, Canada and around the world - having been published in the UK just before Christmas. What's in it? It's a combination of original writing and the best data coverage from the Datablog and Datastore. "Comment is free," wrote Guardian editor CP Scott in 1921, "but facts are sacred". It will be available on as an enhanced iBook soon too, complete with videos and graphics. • Buy it on Amazon.co.uk• Buy it on Amazon.com • Buy it on iBooks• Published as enhanced iBook soon You don't have to have a Kindle or an iPad - here's how you can read it on your PC or Mac. Contents include: • The first Guardian data journalism• UK spending broken down• How to make money from data• Crowdsourcing• Data around the world• Our top 100 numbers More open data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data
ScanR - use camera phones for OCR scanR is a free service that lets you transform camera phone pictures into PDF documents. You can take a picture of a document, send it to scanR by email and in less than a minute you'll get a PDF file. If you save the file as text in Acrobat Reader, you'll have the text contained in the document. You can also use it for whiteboard images. scanR requires 1 megapixel cameras for whiteboard scanning and 2 megapixel cameras for document scanning. I tested this online OCR service with Sony Ericsson K750i and the results were pretty good. Related:Use Gmail to break PDF DRM
ocropus - The OCRopus(tm) open source document analysis and OCR system