Homelessness in Hong Kong

Note to Diane: How can I use WordPress to lay out different elements? I tried to play around with it, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it other than in a regular blog post. In addition to these audio interviews, I’m planning to include a short text article, soundslides, a photo essay on the Homeless World Cup, one or more graphs showing Hong Kong homelessness demographics (particularly the homeless population broken down by age), and perhaps a map comparing average income across Hong Kong districts.

Tan Ping Sun, 49

Tan Ping Sun, 49

I feel that Hong Kong assumes that if you’re living on the streets, it’s because you have a problem. They don’t think of other factors that might put us on the streets.

 

 

 

Ng Ka Man, 32

Ng Ka Man, 32

I collect cardboard boxes and collect money for them. I make about 30 to 40 dollars a day. Other people treat me like I’m rubbish for collecting rubbish.

 

Grace, 26

I feel that people look at women on the streets in a way that’s worse than the men because they’re accustomed to seeing a man on the street.

SCMP uses citizen reporting to map environmental destruction

Today, the South China Morning Post launched Citizen Map, a project by JMSC alum Yolanda Ma that encourages readers to report environmental destruction in Hong Kong. Citizen Map is powered by the open-source crowdsourcing tool Ushahidi.

An article in today’s SCMP reported that Hong Kong’s understaffed Planning and Lands departments rely on the public to report illegal dumping and development in the New Territories. Almost 60 percent of government investigations into improper land use stem from citizen complaints, and the percentage rises to 90 percent for dumping.

The site also includes SCMP reports on individual incidents. According to the website, the project will eventually be expanded to cover other topics.

Citizen Map [SCMP]

DIY Balanced Budget

The New York Times offers an interactive feature that allows users to play around with tax and spending options until they eliminate the federal budget deficit.

The folks at Gawker say they fixed the deficit by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and returning taxes to Clinton-era levels.

Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget [NYT]

Can You Fix the U.S. Budget Deficit? [Gawker]

Left Behind by the Lunch Hour Rush: Accessibility at HKU

Elevator buttons aren't always easy for disabled students to reach.

We mastered the Soundslides program in class today, using it to document the difficulties of getting around the HKU campus in a wheelchair. Click the photo above to see what we came up with.

I joined Twitter. Now what?

Derek Powazek, the editor and publisher of Fray magazine, has some advice on how to use your Twitter account more effectively. Suggestions include going private, ignoring how many followers you have, and turning off retweets. My favorite:

Remember where you are. Any thought worth thinking takes more than 140 characters to write. Twitter is useful for a great many things, but nuanced discussion of important topics is not one of them. Twitter is like shouting over the band in a bar. You can do it, but you have to keep it short: “I love this song!” Don’t get baited into a back-and-forth with a stranger. The immediate, short nature of Twitter is good at amping up disagreement, and bad at reaching understanding.

Twitter for Adults [Derek Powazek]

WSJ previews Myanmar election

The Wall Street Journal has an amazing interactive feature on Myanmar’s upcoming Nov. 7 election, the first in 20 years. It includes videos, slideshows, graphs and politician biographies, as well as information on the country’s relations with the United States and its Asian neighbors.

Myanmar Keeps Election Under Wraps [WSJ]

Bloody Map tracks violent evictions in China

John Kennedy at Global Voices writes about Bloody Map, which uses Google Maps to record forced evictions in China and educate potential homebuyers.

Although the map, which anyone can edit, is not always accurate, it draws attention to cases like that of the Zhong family in Yihuang County, Jiangxi Province. On September 10 this year, three family members set themselves on fire to protest against the forced demolition of their home to clear the way for new construction. They were all hospitalized and one family member died on September 18.

As the Bloody Map creator said last month on a Sina microblog account, “When I say that new housing is being built right now on land covered in blood, people know what I mean” (translation by Global Voices).

China: Mapping violent evictions for homebuyer awareness [Global Voices]

Mapping Baghdad civilian deaths onto New York

Mike Brennan, a PhD candidate at Drexel University in Philadelphia, used Google Fusion Tables to map 65,649 Iraqi civilian deaths, thanks to information from Wikileaks.

To help users better visualize the impact of these deaths, Brennan also overlaid the data on maps of American cities including New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. Here’s New York:

Meet Eleonore

Eleonore is a master’s student in journalism at Sciences Po in Paris. She is at HKU for a semester on exchange. “It’s a great university, and I thought it was interesting to come to Hong Kong to see how it was to be in a country as China from the observatory point of Hong Kong,” she said. The Lyons native is primarily interested in broadcast. Her favorite class this semester is Video News Production.