The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

10 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 9 zens, starting with U.S. population and unemployment data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Sta- tistics, respectively. Later Environ- mental Protection Agency statistics and other data sets will be available. The new tool takes data and refor- mats them so that they are immedi- ately consumable, so that people don’t have to go through rows and rows of numbers to get the specific figure they want, David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, explained to Kim Hart of the Washington Post . It also al- lows the user to construct an interac- tive chart comparing data. Although the E-Government Act of 2002 requires government agencies to make information more accessible electronically, many agencies do not or- ganize their Web sites for easy indexa- tion by search engines. Some even embed codes to make certain pages in- visible to search engines, Girouard says. Google Public Data Project Man- ager Ola Rosling discusses the new tool on her official Google blog ( http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/ adding-search-power-to-public- data.html ). “The data we’re includ- ing in this first launch represent just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the Web. There are statistics for prices of cook- ies, CO 2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, the number of wildfires — and the list goes on,” says Rosling. “All the data we’ve used in this first launch are produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division. They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use,” she adds. Rosling and Google hope that the new tool will be useful in the class- room, the boardroom and around the kitchen table, allowing public data to play a more central role in informed public policy discussions. For a primer on the problem Google Public Data seeks to address, and some related initiatives to watch for, read cyberspace innovator and en- trepreneur Vanessa Fox’s March 24 blog, “Transforming the Relationship Between Citizens and Government: Making Content Findable Online” ( http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/tr ansforming-the-relationship.html ). — Susan Brady Maitra, Senior Editor Assessing the Status of Refugees Worldwide The status of refugees, especially in Africa and the Middle East, is a topic that has received increased attention from international organizations and civil society. At the end of 2007, there were about 31.7 million individuals of concern to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — includ- ing nearly three million stateless per- sons, about 13 million refugees and asylum-seekers, and some 13 million internally displaced persons —around the world ( www.unhcr.org ) . To get a more accurate and up-to- date reading on the scope of the prob- lem, the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees has launched a “Global Needs Assessment” in 2009 to com- prehensively map the real state of the world’s refugees and people of concern under its mandate. UNHCR plans to use the resulting data and report as a “blueprint for planning, decisionmak- ing and action with governments, part- ners, refugees and people of concern” to address the situation ( www.unhcr. org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/GNA ). The agency’s 2008 pilot program to assess needs conducted in eight coun- tries found significant gaps in the pro- tection and care of refugees, further revealing that UNHCR has only a por- tion of the budget it needs to protect all refugees and asylum-seekers. Specifically, the report showed that one-third of refugees’ basic needs in these countries remain unmet ( www. unhcr.org/protect/PROTECTION/ 48ef09a62.pdf ). The plight of refugees and inter- nally displaced persons in Africa and South Asia has significantly worsened. Beside the ongoing refugee crises in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Sri Lankan government’s effort to clamp down on the secessionist Tamil Tigers terrorist group has already uprooted some 171,000 people. In the eastern Dem- ocratic Republic of the Congo, more than 100,000 people have been dis- placed, as Congolese civilians flee their homes fearing attacks by the rebel Hutu militia, the so-called Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda. Another refugee drama continues to unfold in Kenya, where 60,000 So- malis recently crossed the officially closed border seeking shelter in camps that already house more than 260,000, according to a March 30 report, “From Horror to Hopelessness: Kenya’s For- gotten Somali Refugee Crisis,” from Human Rights Watch ( www.hrw. org ). In Sudan, half of the estimated four million persons displaced by the civil war and fighting inDarfur have re- turned, but remain under threat. An- other 200,000 are still in Chad. Another category of refugees is per- sons who are internally displaced by non-conflict factors, such as develop- ment projects, natural disaster and cli- mate change. These individuals are the focus of the International Refugee C Y B E R N O T E S