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Benjamin McKeown

Facebook 'colonialism' row stokes distrust in Zuckerberg - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...technology-35547416

facebook ict internet

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 15 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • In centuries gone by, colonialism was about exploitation of resources. In the modern world, it's digital - moving in, setting up companies and building insurmountable user bases before any other company can.
  • That's arguably an extreme interpretation of the purpose of Free Basics - but it's the argument made by local businesses to India's telecoms regulator.
  • An Indian social network wouldn't stand a chance against free Facebook,
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Free Basics scheme to local companies, the inherent flaw of the programme was that Facebook remained the sole gatekeeper.
  • "Facebook stands for helping to connect people and giving them voice to shape their own future," Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday.Do people trust him? After this week, perhaps fewer will.
Benjamin McKeown

The most important thing about the new NAFTA deal is that it exists - 0 views

slate.com/...ta-deal-is-that-it-exists.html

NAFTA HL Globalization free trade

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • da has agreed to give United States farmers more access to its heavily regulated dairy market—thus assuaging Trump’s single most frequent complaint about Canada’s trade policies. Canada also signed on to stronger intellectual property protections sought by U.S. industries, and increased the dollar limit on the amount of merchandise Canadians can buy across the border before duties kick in (alas, we won’t be hearing about shoe smuggling any longer). However, the Trump administration gave Canada a win by dropping its demand to scrap a dispute-resolution system in which countries can challenge each others’ anti-dumping tariffs outside of each others’ courts. Overall, the changes are more than cosmetic, but perhaps a bit less than Trump promised when he vowed to renegotiate what he’s often called “the worst trade deal in history.” The deal is designed to benefit U.S. auto-workers by requiring that more of each vehicle be produced within North America to qualify for tariff-free treatment, and that a certain percentage of each car be built by employees making $16 an hour. It curtails the use of controversial investor-state dispute settlement panels. The IP protections are a boost—perhaps unfortunately—to copyright-holders and prescription drug companies. But progressive groups are already complaining that the agreement still lacks mechanisms to enforce labor standards in Mexico, among other issues. But more than the details, the most important thing about this deal is that it exists at all. One of the major questions about Trump’s approach to economic policy and globalization was whether he would simply light trade deals on fire, or use his sometimes unhinged rhetoric as a means to obtain some reforms. In the case of NAFTA, we have a solid answer. Whether you like it or not, it’s spelled USMCA. One more thing If you think Slate’s work matters, become a Slate Plus member. You’ll get exclusive members-only content and a suite of great benefits—and you’ll help secure Slate’s future. Join Slate Plus Join Slate Plus Tweet Share Comment Canada Donald Trump Mexico Trade
Benjamin McKeown

MWC 2016: Facebook uses AI to map people's homes - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...technology-35633915

HL internet

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 24 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • We believe this data has many more impactful applications, such as socio-economic research and risk assessment for natural disasters," Facebook said in a blog.
  • "I am torn in my reaction between excitement at the technical innovation and concern about the public policy issues," said Emily Taylor, an associate fellow at the Chatham House think tank.
  • customers
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But the British Red Cross charity said the initiative could potentially help it locate vulnerable communities.Finer details
  • Facebook intends to use the maps to inform its Internet.org initiative, which aims to connect more people to the internet.
  • The company is currently developing drones that would extend internet signals beyond cities via lasers beamed between the aircraft.
  • "There are many areas globally that still remain off the digital map," said British Red Cross maps expert Andrew Braye."These areas are also home to vulnerable communities at risk from natural disasters or conflict.
  • "Organisations that share open data are enabling the humanitarian sector to respond more rapidly."The information is then available to emergency responders and assists with decision-making."
Benjamin McKeown

Kayapo Courage - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...brown-text

HL remote society environment

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 14 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • five officially demarcated tracts of contiguous land that in sum make up an area about the size of Kentucky. T
  • 9,000 indigenous people, most of whom can’t read or write and who still follow a largely subsistence way of life in 44 villages linked only by rivers and all-but-invisible trails.
  • Kendjam,
  • ...89 more annotations...
  • Xingu,
  • itself a major tributary of the Amazon.
  • shorts
  • kids wearing only
  • ears of the youngest among them were pierced with conical wooden plugs
  • Kayapo pierce their infants’ earlobes
  • ifts for our hosts: fishhooks, tobacco, 22 pounds of high-quality beads made in the Czech Republic.
  • Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the United States–based Environmental Defense Fund,
  • chief, Pukatire,
  • wearing glasses, shorts, and flip-flops.
  • English he’d picked up on a trip to North America
  • dispute about logging.
  • Fissioning,” as anthropologists call it, is often the way Kayapo resolve disagreements or relieve the strain on resources in a particular area.
  • a generator in a government-built nurses’ station; a solar panel array enclosed in a barbed wire fence; satellite dishes mounted on truncated palm trees. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas. Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.
  • ngobe, or men’s house
  • shelling nuts and cooking fish wrapped in leaves and buried in coals.
  • crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter
  • loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet.
  • soccer ball
  • swallows; o
  • kingbird
  • evening baths,
  • caimans
  • persecution and disease that have ravaged nearly every indigenous tribe in North and South America.
  • In 1900, 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4,000. As miners, loggers, rubber tappers, and ranchers poured into the Brazilian frontier, missionary organizations and government agencies launched efforts to “pacify” aboriginal tribes, wooing them with trade goods such as cloth, metal pots, machetes, and axes. Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity. By the late 1970s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1,300.
  • 1980s and ’90s the Kayapo rallied, led by a legendary generation of chiefs
  • Ropni and Mekaron-Ti
  • organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure
  • even kill people caught trespassing on their land.
  • ar parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.
  • the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese
  • enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting,
  • 1988 the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory.
  • Kararaô Dam
  • Xingu River, which would have flooded parts of their land.
  • the Altamira Gathering.
  • Kayapo leaders made a brilliant translation of the Kayapo warrior tradition to the tradition of the 20th-century media spectacle,”
  • e Kayapo population is now rapidly growing.
  • shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.
  • hey have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.
  • based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil.
  • 1980s and in the 1990s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended.
  • Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves
  • the richest and most powerful of around 240 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. Their ceremonies, their kinship systems, their Gê language, and their knowledge of the forest and conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world are intact. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. “The Kayapo aren’t entering the 21st century as a defeated people. They aren’t degrading themselves,” Zimmerman told me. “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.”
  • At least for the moment. It’s one thing to teach the skills and ceremonies of traditional culture; it’s another to inspire a sense of why knowledge of how to make arrow-tip poison (from herbs and snake venom with beeswax as an adhesive) or stack tortoises or stun fish using oxygen-depriving timbo vines might be valuable to a generation beguiled by iPhones and the convenience of store-bought food. Interest in traditional dress, beadwork, and ancestral practices is still strong in Kendjam, but it’s not uniform, and even if it were, the threats from outside are daunting.
  • 400 Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.
  • a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. A
  • . The Kararaô project is back under a new name: the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex.
  • n Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts.)
  • two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors
  • a bow and arrows over his shoulder
  • Okêt a shotgun.
  • It was as obvious to Meikâre as the meat department of a Stop & Shop would be to me. He and Okêt darted ahead. Fifteen minutes later a shot rang out, then two more.
  • plugged the escape holes of a mole cricket nest in a sandbank and then had dug up and captured a batch of mole crickets, which they used to bait fishhooks and catch piranha.
  • peacock bass and piabanha.
  • Bic lighters a
  • freshly whittled skewers.
  • flashlight.
  • he only things we need from the white culture are flip-flops, flashlights, and glasses,”
  • his children had died of malaria not long after the founding of Kendjam.
  • Portuguese from missionaries
  • the program of pacification by the Indian Protection Service, a forerunner of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI,
  • “Before contact we were clubbing each other to death, and everybody lived in fear,” he said. “Without a doubt things are much better today because people aren’t hitting each other over the head with war clubs.”
  • “I am worried about our young people who are imitating whites, cutting their hair and wearing stupid little earrings like you see in town. None of the young people know how to make poison for arrows.
  • You can’t use the white man’s stuff. Let the white people have their culture, we have ours.’ If we start copying white people too much, they won’t be afraid of us, and they will come and take everything we have. But as long as we maintain our traditions, we will be different, and as long as we are different, they will be a little afraid of us.”
  • construction finally began in 2011 on the $14 billion Belo Monte.
  • he complex of canals, reservoirs, dikes, and two dams is located some 300 miles north of Kendjam
  • on the Xingu
  • Its supporters defend it as a way of delivering needed electricity, while environmentalists have condemned it as a social, environmental, and financial disaster.
  • the region’s indigenous people were not adequately consulted, Brazil’s federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a series of lawsuits to stop the complex, essentially pitting one branch of the government against another. The cases went to the country’s Supreme Court, but judgments have been deferred, and construction of Belo Monte has been allowed to proceed.
  • nflux of an estimated 100,000 workers and migrants. The dams will flood an area the size of Chicago. Official estimates project that 20,000 people will be displaced; independent estimates suggest the number may be twice as high. The dams will generate methane from inundated vegetation in quantities that rival the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants. The diversion of some 80 percent of the water along a 62-mile stretch of the Xingu will dry up areas that depend on seasonal floodwaters and are home to endangered species.
  • ho still wear the lip disk
  • carried a wooden war club,
  • woman approached, held his hand, and began to sob. In a different culture bodyguards might have hustled her away, but Ropni seemed unfazed and in fact began sobbing as well. The anguished weeping was not the result of some fresh catastrophe but a form of ritual Kayapo mourning for departed mutual friends.
  • “I don’t like Kayapo imitating white culture. I don’t like gold miners. I don’t like loggers. I don’t like the dam!”
  • the chiefs of the eastern part of the territory had been accepting money from Eletrobras. Boxes of brand-new 25-horsepower boat motors were stacked on the porch of the Protected Forest Association headquarters.
  • money that activists said was an attempt to dampen indigenous opposition to Belo Monte.
  • he consortium building the dam was investing in wells, clinics, and roads in the area and was paying a dozen villages nearby an allowance of 30,000 reais a month (roughly $15,000) for food and supplies, which Schwartzman describes as “hush money.”
  • More and more sad leaves were a part of Kayapo life,
  • specially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier.
  • pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.
  • In the old days men were men,” Ropni said. “They were raised to be warriors; they weren’t afraid to die. They weren’t afraid to back up their words with action. They met guns with bows and arrows. A lot of Indians died, but a lot of whites died too. That’s what formed me: the warrior tradition. I have never been afraid to say what I believed. I have never felt humiliated in front of the whites. They need to respect us, but we need to respect them too. I still think that warrior tradition survives. The Kayapo will fight again if threatened, but I have counseled my people not to go looking for fights.”
  • FUNAI paperwork authorizing various matters they had discussed. Mekaron-Ti, who was fluent in the Western world as well as the forest world, signed his name quickly like someone who had written a thousand letters. But Ropni held the pen awkwardly. It was striking to see him struggle with the letters of his name, knowing what esoteric expertise was otherwise in his hands, how deftly he could fasten a palm nut belt, or insert a lip plate, or whittle a stingray tail into an arrowhead, or underscore the oratory that had helped secure a future for his people. In the Xingu Valley there had hardly ever been a more able pair of hands. But in the realm that required penmanship, the great chief was like a child.
  • , 26 eastern Kayapo leaders met in Tucumã and signed a letter rejecting further money from the dambuilding consortium: “We, the Mebengôkre Kayapo people, have decided that we do not want a single penny of your dirty money. We do not accept Belo Monte or any other dam on the Xingu. Our river does not have a price, our fish that we eat does not have a price, and the happiness of our grandchildren does not have a price. We will never stop fighting... The Xingu is our home and you are not welcome here.”
  • painted faces carrying water in old soda bottles,
  • chopped off seedpods of the wild inga fruit.
  • Can you be a Kayapo and not live in the forest?” Djyti thought for a while, then shook his head and said no. Then, as if contemplating something unthinkable, he added: “You are still a Kayapo, but you don’t have your culture.”
  • In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species—the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish—and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?
  • now turning to those first inhabitants to save ecosystems recognized as critical to the health of the planet—to defend essential tracts of undeveloped land from the developed world’s insatiable appetites.
Benjamin McKeown

Louisiana five years after BP oil spill: 'It's not going back to normal no time soon' |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...years-not-going-back-to-normal

BP oil hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 20 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • the restaurants are still empty, FOR SALE signs are increasing in store windows, people are still moving away, and this marina on Pointe a la Hache – once packed most afternoons with oystermen bringing in their catch on their small boats, high school kids earning a few bucks unloading the sacks, and 18-wheelers backed up by the dozen to carry them away – is completely devoid of life, save one man, 69-year-old Clarence Duplessis, who cleans his boat to pass the time.
  • While some phenomena in the Gulf – people getting sick, fishing nets coming back empty – are hard to definitively pin on BP – experts say the signs of ecological and economic loss that followed the spill are deeply concerning for the future of the Gulf. Meanwhile, BP has pushed back hard on the notion that the effects of its disaster are much to worry about, spending millions on PR and commercials to convince Gulf residents everything will be OK.
  • the Gulf is recovering faster than expected,” Geoff Morrell, a BP senior vice-president for communications, said in an email.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • depleted oyster beds could be due to a variety of factors other than the spill – including the divergence of fresh water from the Mississippi into coastal marshes.
  • Anxiety seems to be the most prevalent emotion in this part of the state. Every cough and every cancer screening, every paltry catch and shrimp missing an eye raises the question – is it BP?
  • oystermen say their catches plummeted after the spill, and have only been getting worse.
  • In total, BP has so far spent $27bn in economic claims, its disaster response efforts, fines to various governments, and cleanup and restoration programs.
  • The company has been sued by dozens of entities since the Deepwater Horizon spill, including state, local and federal governments, and individuals claiming economic loss. It has so far agreed to pay $4.5 billion in fines and plead guilty to a host of criminal charges, including felony manslaughter.
  • total just under $10 billion to businesses suffering because of the spill, but has fought the interpretation of that agreement at every step, claiming it it too easy for businesses without any proof of the spill directly causing damage to their bottom lines to win claims. The Supreme Court recently rejected BP’s bid to hear their challenge to that case.
  • the average claim for his association’s members ranged from a couple thousand to about $25,000. That, he says, is paltry when compared to the years-long recovery he sees ahead of him.
  • “My Facebook feed is filled with my friends’ pictures of crabs with no eyes, shrimp and crawfish with one eye or things missing,” Misty Fisher, 24, said.
  • Southern Louisiana’s economy hasn’t only been ravaged by the spill, but by multiple hurricanes and the ever-encroaching coastline: Louisiana is losing a football field worth of wetlands every 48 minutes thanks to a combination of global warming and a history of oil companies failing to remediate the canals they dredge for pipelines and oil and gas production.
  • Fisher and her fellow waitresses say they all know people who are sick – respiratory infections, breast cancers, constant headaches – which they blame on the spill.
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