This chart shows recent changes in the Chinese Internet Censorship Index (CICI) value. Values less than 100% shows that sites are being blocked in China (but not outside of China). Lower values indicate more censorship — we're aiming to get China 100% censorship-free!
That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases like An Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?
n June, Lori Drew pleaded not guilty to charges that she violated federal fraud laws by creating a false identity “to torment, harass, humiliate and embarrass” another user, and by violating MySpace’s terms of service. But hardly anyone bothers to read terms of service, and millions create false identities.
That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases like An Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?
Did you wonder whether our economy had grown a little overly precious? How can we really be producing value if we're all sitting around blogging and Facebook-friending each other?
1999 the British think-tanker Charles Leadbeater published the book Living on Thin Air. It was both an appealing notion and a scary one: that we no longer have to produce anything but ideas. And that was even before Web 2.0--a platform for everyone to share their ideas, opinions, favorite tunes, and relationship statuses with each other. It was all a lot of fun, but I occasionally wondered whether it was really good for economic productivity.
it wouldn't be a bad outcome if the current crisis led to a more diligent, industrious economic climate. Chatting and socializing are important things, but they're not the only things.
But it seems to me that many of the activities, business models, and assumptions behind social media are a bit fluffy, and that fluffiness is going to be difficult to maintain in the post-bubble environment we now find ourselves in.
Socializing as a distraction has always existed. Though there are more ways to do this now, people still have the ability to recognize that which produces real value in their life, both economically and socially. Balance between these has always been a challenge.
A few years from now, only the successful, profitable, and useful will survive.
Suppose that the value of the asset the Fed holds falls to zero after the trade. The trade was permanent, so there's no margin call or anything like that - the Fed owns the asset and it is worth nothing. Then, in the end, it is no different than the Fed simply printing that same amount of money and giving it to the banks as new reserves, it is an increase in the money supply.
If the central bank, or some other government agency, were to act as Market Maker of Last Resort and buy the impaired asset at a price no greater than its fair value but higher than what it would fetch in the free but unfair illiquid market, such a purchase would not be a bail-out. It would also be welfare-increasing...
My feeling is that it's not going to happen, mainly for political reasons. In this particular crisis, the distressed assets the Fed would end up buying would almost certainly be mortgage-backed bonds. But buying up mortgage-backed bonds looks very much like giving money to big banks and investors instead of giving it straight to struggling homeowners: the optics are simply terrible. If the collapse of Bear Stearns is seen as a bailout, this would be much worse. It might be a good idea, but its time
We are very excited to announce the release of The DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism. Following the recent protests in Moldova, the value of Twitter as a tool for digital activism is more prominent than ever. Yet in addition to bringing greater awareness to that tool, the hype surrounding Moldova revealed misunderstanding of the value of of Twitter for activism and, even though the realists responded strongly, there was not a stand-alone resource which clearly defined how Twitter could be used by activists. We hope this guide will fill that void.
One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risktaking jobs. As far as I can tell, during Iceland’s boom, there was just one woman in a senior position inside an Icelandic bank. Her name is Kristin Petursdottir, and by 2005 she had risen to become deputy C.E.O. for Kaupthing in London. “The financial culture is very male-dominated,” she says. “The culture is quite extreme. It is a pool of sharks. Women just despise the culture.” Petursdottir still enjoyed finance. She just didn’t like the way Icelandic men did it, and so, in 2006, she quit her job. “People said I was crazy,” she says, but she wanted to create a financial-services business run entirely by women. To bring, as she puts it, “more feminine values to the world of finance.”
Today her firm is, among other things, one of the very few profitable financial businesses left in Iceland. After the stock exchange collapsed, the money flooded in. A few days before we met, for instance, she heard banging on the front door early one morning and opened it to discover a little old man. “I’m so fed up with this whole system,” he said. “I just want some women to take care of my money.”
THE MCCAIN NEGATIVE WORDCLOUDWords Not in McCain’s Tech Policy
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Even if we ignore the cultural, social, and democratic aspects of the Net, even if we consider the Net to be nothing but a way to move content to “consumers” (his word), McCain still gets it wrong. There’s nothing in his policy about encouraging the free flow of ideas. Instead, when McCain thinks about ideas, he thinks about how to increase the walls around them by cracking down on “pirates” and ensuring ” fair rewards to intellectual property” (which, technically speaking, I think isn’t even English). Ideas and culture are, to John McCain, business commodities. He totally misses the dramatic and startling success of the Web in generating new value via open access to ideas and cultural products.
The two candidates’ visions of the Internet could not be clearer. We can have a national LAN designed first and foremost to benefit business, and delivered to passive consumers for whom the Net is a type of cable TV. Or, we can have an Internet that is of the people, by the people, for the people.
Is it going to be our Internet or theirs?
“Senator McCain’s technology plan doesn’t put Americans first—it is a rehash of tax breaks and giveaways to the big corporations and their lobbyists who advise the McCain campaign. This plan won’t do enough for hardworking Americans who are still waiting for competitive and affordable broadband service at their homes and businesses. It won’t do enough to ensure a free and open Internet that guarantees freedom of speech. It won’t do anything to ensure that we use technology to bring transparency to government and free Washington from the grip of lobbyists and special interests. Senator McCain’s plan would continue George Bush’s neglect of this critical sector and relegate America’s communications infrastructure to second-class status. That’s not acceptable,” said William Kennard, Former Chairman, Federal Communications Commission.
Central bank purchases of traditional reserve assets still dwarf sovereign wealth fund purchases of riskier assets -- as well as central bank purchases of equities. But over time, it is reasonable to expect that many over-reserved sovereigns will diversify their portfolios. The recent decision to increase the share of the CIC's initial $205-210 billion in capital that it can invest abroad and SAFE's increased willingness to purchase equities as well as bonds are examples.
A far more challenging issue is how the huge increase in financial assets managed by potentially non-economic agents will affect the efficiency of the global capital market and the allocation of risk and resources. ….
And then there is China. China enormous foreign asset growth in the first quarter implies that it might be able to add more to its reserves and sovereign fund in 2008 than all the oil-exporters combined even if oil stays at its current levels.
China consequently has an enormous latent capacity to alter the composition of global capital flows by changing the composition of its portfolio:
The offsetting risk is that state owners of assets will in some sense abuse their ownership rights, and use their rights to promote “state” objectives.
Qatar’s advertising in Forbes says as much: the QIA's evaluation criteria include “added value to the State of Qatar" such as "economic synergies or benefits for Qatar and its people." Mubadala has made a string of investments (Ferrari, the “National”) designed to elevate the profile of Abu Dhabi.
China’s fund, like Singapore’s fund, reports directly to the top levels of China’s state. It has yet to build up enough of a track record to show how it will be used. However, China’s management of its state stakes in domestic industries suggests the need for some caution. One example: Three of China's four large state commercial banks have been listed, but they still aren’t managed in a fully commercial manner.
The Peterson Institute’s Ted Truman recently updated his “sovereign wealth fund scorecard.” His impressive and detailed work is worth reading carefully.
Truman’s latest scorecard illustrates how the practices of many large existing sovereign funds – particularly those originating in non-democratic countries – differ from the practices of US state pension funds as well as Norway's government fund.
Kjaer’s framing implicitly raises a third issue, one that I don’t think has gotten enough attention. The surge in sovereign investment in safe government bonds that accompanied the surge in global reserve growth likely contributed to a “bond market bubble” – one that pushed down the real yields on government bonds in both the US. That contributed to a host of additional market distortions, as private investors scrambled to find higher returns.
"These people have been trained in an authoritarian system. They are at the same time victims of an authoritarian system, but they also behave in an authoritarian way towards others and are incredibly self-righteous," says a Chinese politics professor who asked not to be named.
"We should be more tolerant and respect the right of people to disagree with us but these people do not understand such values."The term fenqinghas been used in each of the past three generations to describe very different kinds of rebel.
There are no indications that the contemporary fenqing are members of the sort of organised nationalist movement seen in places such as Russia, where Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, has had a growing profile.Rather, "since the mid-1990s urban educated youth in China have become much more nationalistic rather than angry at the government", says David Zweig, director of the centre on China's transnational relations at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "There is a strong sense that the west, led by the US, is trying to keep China down and stop it from taking its rightful place in the world."
It acknowledges that design in the era of ubiquitous technologies means not only technical innovation, but deep understanding of behavior
This compels a new approach to design that is partly technical, but also deeply social and humanist.
Understanding activity means understanding values, needs, lifestyle, mythologies, aesthetics, social and cultural norms, and individual and social psychology
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That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases like An Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?
对于正面交手的双方，我不觉得哪一方更高尚，事情的本质不过是失败的沙皇借闹运会反对斯大林罢了。进而我还反对以救黎民于水火、结束了中世纪黑暗统治的贴金说辞为自己开脱。套用我们常用的一句话，选择什么样的制度由我们自己说了算，我们绝不照搬西方政治。那么，你凭什么推翻喇嘛们的中世纪制度呢？凭什么强令他们照搬斯大林主义呢？若真深合民公园。将它们贯通的则是曲折的街巷，用铅笔在城市地图上标出，它们就构成一个字母，准确地说，应该是个倒置的W，首尾意，敢让人家用手投票吗？世界上政教合一的中世纪国家并不在少数，老百姓没吃不饱穿不暖。何况，即使不劳我们大驾，今天的雪域高原也肯定不是五十年前的样子。![[back to MSN Money]](http://s.wsj.net/img/msnmoney_back_to.gif)
