Season's Greetings All

How Corrupt Is Your Country?

Those of us who live or have lived in Asia and other parts of the world know that levels of corruptions vary.  In some it also most impossible to do business or get any service without money or a favour changing hands.

I recall more than one such incident when travelling in India, the most blatant being a customs official in Calcutta who was running our luggage through a metal detection unit and asked for a 'gift' -  which he did not get I should add.

Now there is the Corruption Map of the World from Transparency International and reproduced in the Guardian.

It seeks to quantify the levels of corruption or lack thereof in individual countries. Their transparency index measures each country in the world on corruption. See how they compare by clicking on each country. Use the drop-down menu to see how scores have changed since 2008.

India has dropped 8 places this year signalling that the level of corruption is increasing rather than declining.

Singapore has been proactive for many years in trying to stamp out corruption, especially in government and ranks a reasonable 5th in the world.

New Zealand's rank is better at #1 but this does not mean that it is corruption-free; indeed no country could make that claim.

There have been several incidences of corruption highlighted int the press in recent years ranging from the fall of a local politician to immigration staff accepting bribes.   Most governmental corruption cases in NZ relate to immigration.

Related articles

• Corruption index 2011 from Transparency International: find out how each country compares | Data (guardian.co.uk)
• India Transparency International corruption index blow - BBC News (bbc.co.uk)
• The 10 Most Corrupt Countries In The World (businessinsider.com)

New Singapore-Based Designs

Click Here to see all of these original  Singapore Designs

Today's Print - Fossil

Fossil
Roger Smith 2011

A beetle photographed in Singapore, on Sentosa Island, and a pool of oily sludge in New Zealand are combined in the print.

More images at Worldlense.

Food For Thought But No Makan

Visit the PicturesSG site

I have discovered the PicturesSG web site which I would recommend to anyone with an interested in Singapore's social history.

The eleven categories in the collection give a good overview of the country's development and visitors are encouraged to tag images which will help reserachers compile more information on the image concerned.

I did a search using the tag 'Queenstown' to see what they had in their databases. There were 29 results, mainly architectural at this stage of the collections development. A search of 'makan' revealed nothing and given the national obsession with eating houses past and present I would have thought that at least a few& pictures would be tagged using this term?

The English term 'food' yielded what I expected for the above (see screenshot right) so I hope the National Library's metadata policy does not exclude local terminology.

One would have to hope though that they will also be able to pull in images from other sources and collections.

For example the Heritage Board's YesterdaySG site is an excellent reference point and draws contributions from bloggers with images and stories to tell about Singapore's past.

The Story of Lorong Mydin is one of a series in Pixels and Grains and Clarice Theo's contributions are first class, as are those by Noel Tan.

But there are other sources for images both contemporary and historical which should be captured or at the  very least integrated into the national Library's collection.

Here are a couple more.  HistoryPin promotes itself as a " a way for millions of people to come together, from across different generations, cultures and places, to share small glimpses of the past and to build up the huge story of human history"

HistoryPin

It may not be loaded with Singapore information at the moment but I predict that it has that potential as it combines social media functionality with features such as a sliding timeline.

In a more contemporary vein is Woophy which has been up and running since 2004 and so has a wealth of imagery associated with a variety of countries, including a small portfolio of 700 plus photos of Singapore.

Of course one of the largest collections is that housed within the passworded boundaries of Flickr. In just two groups alone on this platform there are some 224,000 images some of which deserve to be filed for posterity. Another is Singapore Memories which shares 1,700 images of Singapore's social history.

Then of course there are blogs such as this one which record a snapshot of time.

Now somehow if the new PicturesSG could somehow harvest these images as well what a truly wonderful resource it would be. But at least its a good start and I congratulate the National Library Board for their initiative.