World Bank Embraces Open Access and Makes All of Its Research Freely Available 46
Fluffeh writes "The World Bank is taking steps toward greater transparency. It announced recently that it would be instituting a new 'Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge products' beginning July 1. The policy's full title is 'World Bank Open Access Policy for Formal Publications,' and the Bank says it will apply to 'manuscripts and all accompanying data sets... that result from research, analysis, economic and sector work, or development practice... that have undergone peer review or have been otherwise vetted and approved for release to the public; and... for which internal approval for release is given on or after July 1, 2012,' as well as the final reports prepared by outside parties for the Bank. Over 2,100 books and papers from 2009-2012 are already available in the repository"
Great Start (Score:2)
Can't wait for the rest of it to be transparent.
âoeThat which can be destroyed by the truth should be." - P. C. Hodgell
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Create currency out of nothing to monetize not wealth, but debt.
This is such nonsense. Debt has always been a part of wealth and power. Debt has always been monetized. Debt without monetization is meaningless, as is monetization without debt. All currency is based on trust in some entity, and trust that that entity will repay their debts.
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All currency is based on trust in some entity, and trust that that entity will repay their debts.
Really? So tell me, whom do I need to trust that gold coins will retain substantial value? Did someone discover an economical way to turn lead into gold that I don't know about?
No, you simply described all fiat currency. Not all currency. Even paper money is based on wealth and not debt if it's representative currency backed by gold or silver.
Why don't you take a few minutes sometime to read up on how the Federal Reserve works, how they create currency out of thin air in exchange for government IO
Re:Great Start (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you simply described all fiat currency. Not all currency. Even paper money is based on wealth and not debt if it's representative currency backed by gold or silver.
This is simply not true. Even paper notes which are backed by gold are only valuable because one trusts that they will be able to exchange their notes for gold, which is basically the definition of debt. You give me something "worthless" (a piece of paper), and I give you something valuable in exchange (gold), trusting that you will honor your obligation to give me the gold if I need it. You are indebted to me.
which means there is never enough money in circulation to repay the debt, which means the only possibility is ever-increasing debt? Just insisting really, really hard that this can't be so will not change the situation.
I'm not denying this. This is simply not a problem, unless people lose faith in the system. Why do we need to fix the amount of currency in circulation to that which physically has been printed, or been mined from the earth? Gold has no intrinsic value of its own... what is wrong with letting currency fluctuate based on other parameters than simply "the amount of gold which we have been able to, or foresee being able to, in the near future, dig up"?
As for your quotes, you seemed to have missed the point of them.
Lincoln was saying that money should not be enshrined over a democratic government.
FDR was merely saying that which everybody knows, ie, "wealth is power" (it doesn't matter the form said wealth takes, debt or diamonds).
Ford was saying the system benefits those who have wealth more than it does those who do not. I agree that we could work towards a more level playing field.
I don't know what to make of the anonymous Banker's magazine contributor. They seem to be trying to personify a Marxist "evil greedy capitalist".
As for Jefferson, the quote has no substance to it, it is merely his opinion. It may be true, but then again, Jefferson was a slave owner, so "depriving people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent" was something he did every day when he got out of bed. How can one trust his opinion on the subject?
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Again though, and I can't state this enough, Jefferson was an asshole to talk about the evils of debt-slavery when he owned actual slaves.
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Debt and promissory note property reclamation are not the same. If they were, then such storage would incur the same interest rates upon the holder for the risk of default.
They are the same, and they do incur an interest rate dependent on the risk of default, it's just that since the risk of default is essentially zero, so is the interest rate. And again, if I give gold to someone in exchange for a note, they are very much in my debt. They can do whatever they want with the gold so long as when I ask for it back, they give it to me.
Claiming to have ones property stored safely is not the same as claiming to be obligated to repay a loan over some amount of time.
You're the one with the misconception. A "loan" and a "debt" are not synonymous, but you seem to think they are, and by extension, think I shou
Feudalism is not the answer (Score:3)
Turning back the clock will only result in a single generation benefit for those that
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The answer is to clean up the corruption instead of throwing everything that works away as well.
You will never clean up the corruption in this system because when you create a center of power someone corrupt will always be trying to take it, and if you don't create a center of power then someone corrupt will. Consequently it is a truism that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
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Actually, you have it entirely backwards, and nothing in my comment supports your assertion. I think that a revolution is pointless (360 degrees and you're back where you started) because what we really need is to evolve (socially?) to the point where we take responsibility for our own freedom and get involved.
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No, you simply described all fiat currency. Not all currency. Even paper money is based on wealth and not debt if it's representative currency backed by gold or silver.
But I can't really do all that much with gold except make jewelry with it. Oh, and contacts on silicon chips. Guess we need some of it, but not that much. Silver's more useful, as it has anti-bacterial properties. Why again would we value those metals as much as you seem to think we should? They're just as much a kind of fiat currency, unless you can come up with a way to tightly bind those to the amount of work a person can do (and the value of that work). Nobody's ever succeeded at that, and if they could
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World Bank Hackathon (Score:2)
Let's say my company wants to sponsor a hackathon in NYC that uses these World Bank APIs and datasets to make demo apps and recruit developers. How would I go about producing and hosting the event? Is there an NYC org that's done this before for other industries?
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Neat! I would say you should look into the NYC Resistor [nycresistor.com] hackerspace, General Assembly [generalassemb.ly], and the people behind different hack days like Music Hack Day [musichackday.org] and Photo Hack Day [photohackday.org].
I don't know how many people you could get that would be interested in something like this since it probably doesn't have enough of a cool factor to draw people in. Maybe look at Code for America [codeforamerica.org] for some inspiration?
Heh, I'm not even from NY.
Interesting... (Score:2)
However, and the weasel wording(" or have been otherwise vetted and approved for release to the public; and... for which internal approval for release is given") in the announcement suggests this
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Problem with World Bank research and data, it was all answer driven. Here's the answers we want, create research and cherry pick data to match it, then hand to to our PR=B$ department to publish it and ensure the working in poverty nobodies all worship at the alters of the rich and greedy as they should (don't forget we have to break the back of the middle class, those uppity types need to learn their place).
To bad World Bank Research is more than useless (Score:2)
what about open access to Wolfowitz's war crimes? (Score:2, Insightful)
That particular international institution lost all credibility when a psychopath with the blood of one million people on his hands was appointed at its head. I was infuriated but well, it did let us know there was something wrong with it.
This is only one more reason for citizens in concerned countries to mobilize, organize and bring back democracy to themselves. We must fight back against the international financial dictatorship in order to keep a livable world for ourselves, and we must denounce western wa
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What is your idiotic point?
That if your goal is a better, more egalitarian society, you can't start it with hate-mongering, scapegoating and lynch mob style accusations?
We are all part of the system, in its current incarnation. If we want to make it better, we must work together, rather than simply blaming some for the inequalities of the world. Don't you see that statements like those of the OP only serve to entrench prior opinions, instead of furthering the ultimate goal of economic equality?
That's my idiotic point. If history
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I tried to avoid hatred when writing, but that you've felt some when reading it is telling. it just means that people, sometimes myself, can't stomach the truth. what can we do exactly if we can't clean up our western governments and if there are no consequence for committing the supreme crime?
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Confession of an economic hit-man (Score:3)
I wonder how many documents will mention Confessions Of An Economic Hit-man [amazon.com] by John-Perkins?
Keep this trend going (Score:2)
Open Letter to Grantmakers on Copyright Policy (Score:2)
From an essay I wrote about a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it i
A nice trend (Score:2)
Over the last several years the World Bank has been moving in this direction. It used to be that most of the World Development Indicators [worldbank.org] required a subscription. This is an extremely detailed country-level database of everything from GDP and prices to infant mortality and refugee populations. Now, the database in its entirety is free and it has been loaded into statistical applications like Stata and made available by these folks [graduateinstitute.ch] (along with other World Bank datasets).
It's been my experience that the a
On Economic indicators in developing countries (Score:2)
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It's still a long way from being able to cut out the for-profit journals, though some open-access journals do exist.
It costs some money to produce a journal and to keep it available to people long into the future. Given that, the options are to either have it paid for directly through taxes or to have it run by an organization that seeks to make a working profit. ("Non-profit" organizations do different things with that working profit than normal companies, but both are keen on not making a loss.) Instead, the real questions are 1) whether the costs should be borne by those seeking to get their research published or by t