Amazing Videos - Vote today (and everyday until 6/26)!

Two of our partners – Green Options Buffalo and the Massachusetts Avenue Project – have entered videos into the GrowWNY video contest. The prize is a much-needed $10,000. Please vote for our partners at the Facebook pages below. You can vote for two a day – perfect since we have two partners entered!

Please show your support – and share with your friends and colleagues. Get out the vote!


Green Options – Why I ride
VOTE!
http://apps.facebook.com/contestshq/contests/79940/voteable_entries/23324988?ogn=facebook




MAP – Green Thumb-It’s Catching On:
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http://apps.facebook.com/contestshq/contests/79940/voteable_entries/23393978?ogn=facebook

Last month mud, this month water

A road trip of disability sport discovery

Michelle Daltry of Disability Sport Wales tells us how Welsh sport is set to be more inclusive to disabled people:

In March 2011, Jon Morgan -Executive Director of Disability Sport Wales - and I set out on a road trip across Wales to present the new partnership agreements for 22 Local Authorities in Wales. 

In all honesty, despite my enthusiasm for the partnership agreements and roadside cafes, I was a little concerned that by the end of a few thousand miles cris-crossing Wales for hours in a car with Jon, his jokes and observations - life may begin to run a little dry!

We started our meetings with an early start from Cardiff to my homeland of North Wales, with Gwynedd, Anglesey and Wrexham hosting us.  Later that same evening,  we returned home tired but very excited after hearing some of the most positive and powerful messages from our local authority partners around the need for inclusive practise within their programmes. 

And by the time we had completed all 22 meetings, it became very clear that the future for disability sport in Wales is very bright and one that is shared right across Wales.

insport is the brainchild of the Disability Sport Wales team.  Inspired by the Australian Sports Commission Disability Sport unit’s model, Sports Connect, insport aims to support our key partners across Wales to encourage everybody to think about how disabled people can be involved in all aspects of sport – from participating to coaching or volunteering. 

The insport programme has three strands – National Governing Bodies of Sport, Local Authorities (Development) and Club.  Each one of these packages has a Ribbon, Bronze, Silver and Gold pathway and through the Disability Sport Wales team each of these key groups will be given all the support needed to help embed inclusive thinking in all elements of their work.

While we were on our cross country tour we were hoping to inspire a few local authorities to help us design and pilot the package for insport development.  What we were actually met with was unanimous support for the programme and more local authorities wanting to be involved than we could actually manage!

Caerphilly even approached us before we had  actually met them!!  The task of narrowing these down to a manageable group was completed after much deliberation and Wrexham, Conwy, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire, Newport, Torfaen and Caerphilly were last week announced as the seven local authorities helping to lead the way on developing fully inclusive sports development programmes. 

The first insport development group meeting will be held within the next few weeks, with the intention  of supporting all 22 Local Authorities to achieve at least the Ribbon standard by 2013.   

In the meantime, work behind the scenes is well underway to identify the next five National Governing Bodies of Sport to join insport trailblazers Welsh Athletics and Welsh Rowing who have already achieved the ribbon award. 

And whilst all this is going on, the 22 Disability Sport Wales Development Officers across Wales are hard at it supporting the insport club programme  to deliver appropriate sporting opportunities for all disabled people, bringing together the final key pieces of the inclusion puzzle.

If you've got any questions or comments, feel free to post them here or catch me on Twitter 

i started my day w/ a run w/ my hubbie and barron (promise we didn't abandon the kids, they are at the grandparent's house having a sleepover).  seriously, i wish we could do that every AM...it is the best feeling ever- almost makes me forget i need coffee.  hope y'all have a fab monday!
ps. sorry for not being around last week, we went to GA b/c our AC is acting up!!  fingers crossed it's fixed today!!

*images courtesy of unknown, shelter/ruthie sommers, sweetie pie pumbkin noodle, drew barrymore

Secure your networks, this time with feeling!

I know I've said that my research area is not security, but you'd think I was lying with all my recent posts on these topics.

The IMF has now been hacked. (Apparently by a foreign government). I read this in the NY Times article -

Because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece and Ireland — and possesses sensitive data on other countries that may be on the brink of crisis — its database contains potentially market-moving information. It also includes communications with national leaders as they negotiate, often behind the scenes, on the terms of international bailouts. Those agreements are, in the words of one fund official, “political dynamite in many countries.” It was unclear what information the attackers were able to access.

- and had two immediate thoughts:

1) How could it be unclear what information the attackers were able to access? Don't they have logs? And if the logs were vaporized, don't they have clever digital forensics experts who can figure out what happened?  This is the IMF for pete's sake.

2) All the data stored in these databases was encrypted with strong encryption, right? Oh, and all the traffic from client computers to the database was encrypted, right? And they keep a tight access control list, right? Right?

If you follow good practice to begin with, you don't have to worry quite as much when you're hacked. But so few organizations do, which is really depressing.

I used to bemoan the lack of good practice to friends who do work in this field, and they would chuckle and said, "Look, FCS, if you want to protect your data, write it on a slip of paper, burn the paper, dig a hole 10 feet deep, and put the ashes in the hole. Or better yet, don't write it down in the first place."

Yeah.