Passing Comments

It’s a rare and up close look at the Congo and its people and their struggles today in the aftermath of the numerous wars there. It was broadcast in early April on the equally rare and remarkable American television program, “Bill Moyers Journal.”

Intro to the two part series:

THE JOURNAL takes viewers on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to follow aid workers and local relief efforts that are bringing hope to a forgotten land. “The aid agencies are almost substituting for a social welfare system that hasn’t operated in these areas for decades,” says Dominic MacSorley, Emergency Director for Concern Worldwide, an international aid organization.

Part I, above (25:30). Part two (18:17) is here.

A full transcript in English of the documentary series accompanies the videos.

The major Internet portal in China, SINA, announced yesterday that its English news site is now online. The recent massive earthquake in the country determined the timing, according to the press release:

It was truly a massive tragedy. We have chosen to launch our English news site now as we would like to provide up-to-minute coverage of the earthquake for overseas people who are concerned about the tragedy and easy access for those who wish to show their love and care or make their contributions.” said Charles Chao, President and CEO of SINA. “Over the longer term, we intend to make this site a window for international communities to have an easy access to China related information and to have better understanding about modern China.

Content on the SINA site is similar in format to that of Western online newspapers, including video and photos. Read the Guardian story here (”Chinese news site launches in English” by Jemima Kiss, May 19, 2008).

I found the link to this article at The Editors Weblog.org.

Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an article reviewing some new scholarly studies and opinion about why women seem to be avoiding en masse certain science and engineering careers (”The freedom to say ‘no” by Elaine McArdle, May 18, 2008).

Anyone who’s curious about this particular situation probably will find this article of interest. I was especially struck by a finding described in this paragraph midway or so in this longish piece:

Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don’t do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

Read the whole piece here. I found the link to this article at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) website.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science want a whole bunch of Good Samaritan type game players to log on to a new website they’ve created so as to give a little assist to their computers. I found out about this free fun zone at Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type blog from a post last week (”Von Ahn’s Gwap” May 16, 2008):

The site, called Gwap (an acronym for “games with a purpose”), is the brainchild of computer scientist Luis von Ahn (who also cofathered the Captcha). “We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see,” he explains. “But that shouldn’t matter to the players because it turns out these games are super fun.”

I clicked on to the Gwap site with the firm intention of spending five minutes checking out what was what. An hour and a half later, I broke away. Word to the wise, that’s all.

The Rough Type post has the breakdown of the various games here.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte is taking some heat from critics who are accusing him of selling out his principles in making a deal with Microsoft, according to an ars technica article yesterday (”Former security director blasts OLPC, suggests new strategy” by Ryan Paul, May 15, 2008).

The deal, described in an article today in the New York Times, was announced yesterday and provides for Microsoft’s Windows to be offered on all OLPC’s low low cost computers (”Microsoft Joins Effort for Laptops for Children” by Steve Lohr, May 16, 2008). In reference to the agreement with Microsoft, Negroponte said, according to the article, that the government officials of the countries whose poor children OLPC is trying to reach “are much more comfortable with Windows” (as an operating system for the computers).

In another piece in ars technica, also today, Negroponte is also speaking for himself about what his primary motive was in forming the alliance with Microsoft (”OLPC and Microsoft will make Windows available on XO” by Ryan Paul, May 16, 2008):

“From the beginning, the goal of OLPC has been to use technology to transform education by bringing connectivity and constructionist learning to the poorest children throughout the world,” said OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte in a statement. “Today’s announcement, coupled with future plans for a dual boot version of the XO laptop, enhances our ability to deliver on this vision.

So another way (in my opinion) of looking at Negroponte’s decision to go with Microsoft could be that he simply is keeping his eye on the ball — meaning his goal of getting computers into the hands of the millions and millions of poor children across the globe as soon as possible. Whatever it takes.

The inventor of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wants to help its users protect themselves from the lowlifes online who are trying to hide who they really are and what they’re really up to.

To fund this project, he plans to use the money coming to him as one of 16 winners named yesterday of the Knight News Challenge award, according to an article in InformationWeek (”Sir Tim Berners-Lee To Track Origins Of Digital Content” by K.C. Jones, May 14, 2008).

Jones’ intro:

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has received a grant to create a technology that will give users more information about the origins and sources of digital content.

As Jones notes, this is one of the biggest challenges of the moment in relation to the Internet. Read more here.

Last month, in an article in the Telegraph on the same subject, Berners-Lee discussed various aspects of the problem of “cyber imposters,” and his hope to find a solution (”Technology could be used to protect youngsters from internet predators,” by Tom Peterkin, April 30, 2008).

Zucchero — from Daily Motion:

A justifiable rage:

You don’t have to be cynical to do foreign policy, but it helps. A sigh of relief rose over the west’s chancelleries on Monday as it became clear that the Chinese earthquake was big - big enough to trump Burma’s cyclone.

Read more here (”As Burma dies, our macho invaders sit on their hands” by Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, May 14, 2008).

Kosmopolit is “a blog about politics and culture from a European perspective.” Last week the website posted the trailer for a new TV documentary about the Balkans. (”Return to Europe - A journey of discovery” May 5, 2008).

The documentary takes a look at how the Balkan people are recovering from the recent wars there, and how this European area is becoming a “region of hope.”

Read more about the documentary here.

That this so-named, younger generation has the potential and some very good reasons to solve a lot of problems now ongoing in the U.S. is the possibility posed and discussed by Bob Herbert in his column today in the New York Times (”Here Come the Millennials” by Bob Herbert, May 13, 2008).

Which segment of the American population are they, precisely? As Herbert writes:

The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million.

Reading these stats piqued my curiosity about the size of that other humongous segment of Americans, the baby boomers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, we amount to 78.2 million (as of July 2005).

From Slow Food, a short film — “We are what we lost” (Srdan Mitrovic):

In his keynote speech opening ROFLCon, held late last month at MIT, David Weinberger talks about fame. (For background on ROFLCon, see Guardian article here)

Teaser quotes from video:

Blogging is all about taking off the make-up… perfection is now the enemy of credibility… we are ceasing to believe that which is too perfect…

On a list of best website ideas of all time, I would be surprised if the Internet Archive didn’t rank right up there near the top. It describes itself so:

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

The website is particularly wellknown for its feature, The Wayback Machine. It archives versions of websites, thus allowing viewers to see old presentations of sites as well as the current ones. This last week, the website also was in the news after it won a major battle with the FBI over a privacy issue, as reported in The Washington Post here.

Helpful hint: Exploring Internet Archive can take a while. Since its launch in 1996, it already has archived 85 billion web pages (see here).

So an entry into this website can turn quickly into a gargantuan, kaleidoscopic treasure hunt. An example, as I was noodling around through the site, I came across what I consider to be a golden nugget, Fred Astaire’s Royal Wedding. The website allows you to view the classic, old movie online, or download it. You also can embed it in a website (see below).

Royal Wedding (1951) starring Fred Astaire and Jane Powell (1 hour, 31 minutes)

The missing ingredient in European culture is risk-taking, according to a post yesterday in the InformationWeek blog (”Where Is Europe’s Google?” by Andrew Conry-Murray, May 8, 2008).

The post focuses on a recently published book by Hervé Lebret, “Start-Up: What We Can Learn from Silicon Valley” (Nov 2007).

Summarizing the issue, Conry-Murray writes:

London may be eclipsing Wall Street as the world financial capital, and the euro is trouncing the dollar, but Europe has yet to prove the equal of the United States in technological innovation.

Author and engineer Hervé Lebret thinks he knows why. “There is a risk culture that’s missing. We don’t have an environment to be more ambitious and risk-taking.”

Another place where you can read a discussion with Lebret about his ideas on innovation, and about his book and its primary purpose, is a recent Q&A interview, “Entrepreneurship in Europe: Alumnus brings Silicon Valley culture across the Atlantic,” on Stanford University’s School of Engineering website (April 24, 2008).

Certainly should be, according to the Guardian’s political columnist Polly Toynbee. With its new constitution, to be ratified later this year, Europe is about to get its first-ever fulltime president.

Writing about the prospect this month in E Sharp, Toynbee runs through the short list of names up for the job (after first dismissing the chances of Tony Blair), and then poses the forgotten question (”Another Angle” by Polly Toynbee, May-June, 2008):

So what of the other runners and riders most often touted for the job? A trawl through names mentioned most frequently throws up these: Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourg), Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Denmark), José Manuel Barroso (Portugal), Aleksander Kwasniewski (Poland), Guy Verhofstadt (Belgium), Carl Bildt (Sweden) and Bertie Ahern (Ireland), whose resignation may now have ruled him out. But have you spotted the one overwhelming disqualification they all have? They are all men, every one of them. No doubt when Henry Kissinger famously asked, “Who do I call when I call Europe?” he assumed he’d be calling a man. But of course the new president must be a woman. No doubt about it — and here’s why.

After explaining her rationale, Toynbee then names the woman she considers the best candidate. That choice is Sweden’s Margot Wallstrom, currently vice-president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. Here’s why, she says:

She (Wallstrom) knows the EU institutions inside out, so is already better qualified for the job than most of the men on the list above. She wants the job, she deserves the job and has the nerve to step forward and say so.

Read more here (PDF file).

Here’s a video of Wallstrom being interviewed last fall from the European Union channel on YouTube:

The blog post is aptly titled “Why The ‘Right’ Gets Net Neutrality Wrong,” and it reviews this individual freedom issue both from an historical perspective and as it is today (Art Brodsky, May 2, 2008, Public Knowledge).

The info couldn’t be more timely. Tomorrow, a House subcommittee is scheduled to begin a hearing on Net Neutrality legislation.

An excerpt from Brodsky’s blog:

Perhaps the worst argument from conservatives about Net Neutrality is that “pervasive regulation,” as former FCC Commissioner Rachelle Chong called it, would somehow be such a burden to the poor, deprived telephone and cable companies that their incentives to invest and to innovate would just dry up. Opponents of an open Internet conjure up images of parents unable to protect their children, of government setting up business models, of companies unable to manage their networks.

Those tired-winged canards don’t quack here. Net Neutrality is neither pervasive nor burdensome. It allows for innovation and investment. It allows for telephone companies to sell different levels of service to different customers. Parents can still protect their children. What it doesn’t allow is discrimination. That’s why Michele Combs from the Christian Coalition supports an open Internet, and she is brave and correct to do so in the face of uninformed criticism of her fellow “conservatives.”

Read more here.

(I found the link to the article on The Huffington Post)

Linux, the superstar of open source software, “has shifted from being a volunteer effort to being a corporate initiative,” writes Nicholas Carr in his blog ROUGH TYPE (”Open source as corporate joint venture” April 21, 2008).

Quoting from a recent Linux Foundation report, Carr reports:

Of the many thousands of changes that have been made to the Linux kernel over the past three years, fully 73.2% came from employees working on behalf of their companies. (Three companies - Red Hat, Novell, and IBM - accounted for 28.4% of all the changes.) Only 13.9% of the changes came from volunteers without a corporate affiliation, and the remaining 12.9% of changes came from developers whose affiliation is unknown.

Read all about it here.

In the Financial Times this week, writer Pico Iyer uses words to create an unusually close-up and revealing picture of the human being who is the Dalai Lama (”The ascent of a man” by Pico Iyer, May 1 2008).

Iyer’s article is based on some rare perspectives, the most prominent being, as he writes, that he has been “talking to the Dalai Lama and visiting him in his home-in-exile in the British-built hill station of Dharamsala, northern India, for 33 years now.”

Two paragraphs from the piece:

I am surprised to find him much more realistic and persuasive than almost all the politicians I’ve met, some of whom stress the future, some of whom speak for the past. “Dream – nothing!” the Dalai Lama said when I was with him in Hiroshima 18 months ago. Do not wait or pray for a miracle; do something that might make your life and the lives of others a little better right now.

The world wants, at times, to place the Dalai Lama on a mountain top, but he has never had such a luxury and seems always in our midst, trying to remind us that we change the world by changing how we look at it. And to point out that suffering (the day-to-day reality of the world) is not unhappiness (the way we choose to respond to it).

Read more here.

I’m reaching back into March for this essay by Jonathan Raban in the London Review of Books, but it’s a retrieval well worth the doing (”Diary” March 20, 2008). Here, the extraordinary Raban captures Obama and his appeal as no one else has, that I’ve read:

As an example, two paragraphs:

Those who hear only empty optimism in Obama aren’t listening. His routine stump speech is built on the premise that America has become estranged from its own essential character; a country unhinged from its constitution, feared and disliked across the globe, engaged in a dumb and unjust war, its tax system skewed to help the rich get richer and the poor grow poorer, its economy in ‘shambles’, its politics ‘broken’. ‘Lonely’ is a favourite word, as he conjures a people grown lonely in themselves and lonely as a nation in the larger society of the world. (Obama himself is clearly on intimate terms with loneliness: Dreams from My Father is the story of a born outsider negotiating a succession of social and cultural frontiers; it takes the form of a lifelong quest for family and community, and ends, like a Victorian novel, with a wedding.)

The light in Obama’s rhetoric – the chants of ‘Yes, we can’ or his woo-woo line, lifted from Maria Shriver’s endorsement speech, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’ – is in direct proportion to the darkness, and he paints a blacker picture of America than any Democratic presidential candidate in living memory has dared to do. He courts his listeners, not as legions of the blissful, but as legions of the alienated, adrift in a country no longer recognisable as their own, and challenges them to emulate slaves in their struggle for emancipation, impoverished European immigrants seeking a new life on a far continent, and soldiers of the ‘greatest generation’ who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism. The extravagance of these similes is jarring – especially when they’re spoken by a writer as subtle and careful as Obama is on the printed page – but they serve to make the double point that America is in a desperate predicament and that only a great wave of communitarian action can salvage it.

Read more here.

Lyrics here.