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Free Speech Online UnderAttack By Tim Karr, February 17, 2011

Republicans in Congress introduced a "resolution" in both chambers that would give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over Internet speech

If their resolution passes, the FCC would not just be barred from enforcing its already weak Net Neutrality rule, but also from acting in any way to protect Internet users against corporate abuses by AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

The SavetheInternet.com Coalition is two million everyday people who have banded together with thousands of nonprofit organizations, businesses and bloggers to protect Internet freedom. The Coalition believes that the Internet is a crucial engine for economic growth, civic engagement and free speech. We're working together to preserve Net Neutrality, the First Amendment of the Internet, which ensures that the Internet remains open to new ideas, innovation and voices. Because of Net Neutrality, the Internet has always been a level playing field. People everywhere can have their voices heard by thousands, even millions, of others online. The SavetheInternet.com Coalition wants our leaders in Washington to pass strong Net Neutrality protections. We're calling on the president, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to stand with the public and keep the Internet open.

Freedom Box is the name we give to a personal server running a free software operating system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy. Freedom Box software is particularly tailored to run in "plug servers," which are compact computers that are no larger than power adapters for electronic appliances. Located in people's homes or offices such inexpensive servers can provide privacy in normal life, and safe communications for people seeking to preserve their freedom in oppressive regimes.

Because social networking and digital communications technologies are now critical to people fighting to make freedom in their societies or simply trying to preserve their privacy where the Web and other parts of the Net are intensively surveilled by profit-seekers and government agencies. Because smartphones, mobile tablets, and other common forms of consumer electronics are being built as "platforms" to control their users and monitor their activity. Freedom Box exists to counter these unfree "platform" technologies that threaten political freedom. Freedom Box exists to provide people with privacy-respecting technology alternatives in normal times, and to offer ways to collaborate safely and securely with others in building social networks of protest, demonstration, and mobilization for political change in the not-so-normal times. Freedom Box software is built to run on hardware that already exists, and will soon become much more widely available and much more inexpensive. "Plug servers" and other compact devices are going to become ubiquitous in the next few years, serving as "media centers," "communications centers," "wireless routers," and many other familiar and not-so-familiar roles in office and home. Freedom Box software images will turn all sorts of such devices into privacy appliances. Taken together, these appliances will afford people around the world options for communicating, publishing, and collaborating that will resist state intervention or disruption. People owning these appliances will be able to restore anonymity in the Net, despite efforts of despotic regimes to keep track of who reads what and who communicates with whom. For a list of specific Freedom Box capabilities, check out our Goals page.

even great weather cannot be fully appreciated without looking at its political slant.In analyzing how meteorologists have contributed money to political candidates and committees over the years, the Center for Responsive Politics' campaign finance data shows that they collectively donated $146,000 during the 2010 election cycle. Meteorologists split their donations exactly in half, giving 50 percent of their contributions to Republicans and 50 percent to Democrats.The National Weather Service Employees PAC also was active during the 2010 cycle, donating slightly more than $67,000 to federal politics candidates. This particular PAC, however, significantly favored Democrats over Republicans in its donations, 87 percent to 11 percent.

There is a large expert consensus and strong evidence that below-cost energy efficiency measures drive a rebound in energy consumption that erodes much and in some cases all of the expected energy savings, concludes a new report by the Breakthrough Institute. "Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena" covers over 96 published journal articles and is one of the largest reviews of the peer-reviewed journal literature to date. (Readers in a hurry can download Breakthrough's PowerPoint demonstration here or download the full paper here.)

In a statement accompanying the report, Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote, "Below-cost energy efficiency is critical for economic growth and should thus be aggressively pursued by governments and firms. However, it should no longer be considered a direct and easy way to reduce energy consumption or greenhouse gas emissions." The lead author of the new report is Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough's Director of Energy and Climate Policy; Nordhaus and Shellenberger are co-authors.

The findings of the new report are significant because governments have in recent years relied heavily on energy efficiency measures as a means to cut greenhouse gases. "I think we have to have a strong push toward energy efficiency," said President Obama recently. "We know that's the low-hanging fruit, we can save as much as 30 percent of our current energy usage without changing our quality of life." While there is robust evidence for rebound in academic peer-reviewed journals, it has largely been ignored by major analyses, including the widely cited 2009 McKinsey and Co. study on the cost of reducing greenhouse gases.

N.Y.U. professor Clay Shirky—the author of “Cognitive Surplus” and many articles and blog posts proclaiming the coming of the digital millennium—is the breeziest and seemingly most self-confident

Shirky believes that we are on the crest of an ever-surging wave of democratized information: the Gutenberg printing press produced the Reformation, which produced the Scientific Revolution, which produced the Enlightenment, which produced the Internet, each move more liberating than the one before.

The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

The question that the audience member asked — and one that we tried to touch on a bit in the panel itself — was who has access to this raw data. Twitter doesn’t comment on who has full access to its firehose, but to Weil’s credit he was at least forthcoming with some of the names, including stalwarts like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo — plus a number of smaller companies.

In the case of Twitter, the company offers free access to its API for developers. The API can provide access and insight into information about tweets, replies and keyword searches, but as developers who work with Twitter — or any large scale social network — know, that data isn’t always 100% reliable. Unreliable data is a problem when talking about measurements and analytics, where the data is helping to influence decisions related to social media marketing strategies and allocations of resources.

One of the companies that has access to Twitter’s data firehose is Gnip. As we discussed in November, Twitter has entered into a partnership with Gnip that allows the social data provider to resell access to the Twitter firehose.This is great on one level, because it means that businesses and services can access the data. The problem, as noted by panelist Raj Kadam, the CEO of Viralheat, is that Gnip’s access can be prohibitively expensive.

Over the last three years, 35 researchers contributed to the Media Piracy Project, released last week by the Social Science Research Council. Their mission was to examine media piracy in emerging economies, which account for most of the world's population, and to find out just how and why piracy operates in places like Russia, Mexico, and India.

Their conclusion is not that citizens of such piratical societies are somehow morally deficient or opposed to paying for content. Instead, they write that “high prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous.”

When legitimate CDs, DVDs, and computer software are five to ten times higher (relative to local incomes) than they are in the US and Europe, simply ratcheting up copyright enforcement won't do enough to fix the problem. In the view of the report's authors, the only real solution is the creation of local companies that “actively compete on price and services for local customers” as they sell movies, music, and more.

Second, the turnover of ministers in comparable countries is relatively much faster compared to Singapore, where a minister can be in the Cabinet for decades with no fixed term limit.

Third, the candidates who enter politics, as is often seen in countries like the United States, may have already made their fortune, as in the case of former US treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who was chief executive officer of premier investment house Goldman Sachs before he joined the White House Cabinet. Such holders of high office can afford to serve their country out of conviction alone.

Singapore does not offer such luxuries because we are a small country with a small pool of talent that can be considered for key government positions.

icking from one channel to another, I often had to go past Channel NewsAsia (CNA). On two occasions, I stopped for a while to see for myself how they were reporting the Egyptian uprising compared to the others. It was pathetic.  Their reports were not timely, nor had they depth. Where Al Jazeera and the BBC had leading figures like Mohamed El Baradei and Amr Moussa on camera, together with regular on-scene interviews or phone interviews with the protestors themselves, and even CNN had the Facebook organiser Wael Ghonim, all CNA had was an unknown lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies from some institute or other in Singapore giving a thoroughly theoretical take, not on unfolding events, but on the background. And in a stiff studio setting.

This weekend, the bad news is the Richter 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Miyagi prefecture of Japan that produced a tsunami that was 10 metres high in places.

when I was at my father’s place, I wanted an update. All we had was CNA an so I turned to it for the eleven o’clock news. They had a reporter reporting from Tokyo about how transport systems in the capital city was paralysed last night and people walked for hours to get home. This topic was already covered on last night’s news; it is being covered again tonight. No other news agency with any self-respect is making “walking home” such a big news story (or any news story at all) when people are dying. CNA then followed that up with reports from Changi airport about flights cancelled and how passengers were inconvenienced. Thirdly, they had an earth scientist on air to explain what causes tsunamis. To soak up the time, he then had to field about four questions from the host repeatedly asking him whether tsunamis could be predicted — as if this was the burning issue at the moment.

Since then there has been dead silence among the powerful scientific leaders of the country, with one exception. Kiran Karnik, a former employee of ISRO and board member of Deva

when the scientists who understand the issue are not prepared to engage with the public, there can be little informed discussion. The cynical public, which sees scams tumble out each day, believes easily that everybody is a crook. But, as I said, the country’s top scientists have withdrawn further into their comfort holes, their opinion frozen in contempt that Indian society is scientifically illiterate. I can assure you in the future there will be even less conversation between scientists and all of us in the public sphere.

This is not good. Science is about everyday policy. It needs to be understood and for this it needs to be discussed and deliberated openly and strenuously. But how will this happen if one side — the one with information, knowledge and power — will not engage in public discourse?

While usage-based billing and data caps are often talked about in terms of their ability to curb congestion, it's rarely suggested that making Internet access more expensive is a positive move for the content industries. But Castro has a whole host of such suggestions, drawn largely verbatim from his 2009 report (PDF) on the subject.

Should the US government actually fund antipiracy research? Sure. Should the US government “enlist” Internet providers to block entire websites? Sure. Should copyright holders suggest to the government which sites should go on the blocklist? Sure. Should ad networks and payment processors be forced to cut ties to such sites, even if those sites are legal in the countries where they operate? Sure.

Castro's original 2009 paper goes further, suggesting that deep packet inspection (DPI) be routinely deployed by ISPs in order to scan subscriber traffic for potential copyright infringements. Sound like wiretapping? Yes, though Castro has a solution if courts do crack down on the practice: "the law should be changed." After all, "piracy mitigation with DPI deals with a set of issues virtually identical to the largely noncontroversial question of virus detection and mitigation."

Labelling the pump that dispenses in ml/hr in a different color from the pump that dispenses in ml/day would be an obvious remedy that would have addressed the KK incident. It's the common-sensical solution that anyone can think of.

Sometimes, design flaws like that really do occur because engineers can't see the wood for the trees.

But sometimes the team is aware of these issues and highlights them to management, but the manufacturer still proceeds as before. Why is that? Because in addition to design principles, one must be mindful that there are always business considerations at play as well. Manufacturing two (or more) separate designs for pumps incurs greater costs, eliminates the ability to standardize across pumps, increases holding inventory, and overall increases complexity of business and manufacturing processes, and decreases economies of scale. All this naturally reduces profitability.It's not just pumps. Even medicines are typically sold in identical-looking vials with identically colored vial caps, with only the text on the vial labels differentiating them in both drug type and concentration. You can imagine what kinds of accidents can potentially happen there.

the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer, published by research firm StrategyOne, which surveyed 5,075 "informed publics" in 23 countries on their trust in business, government, institutions and individuals. One of the questions asked of respondents was: "If you heard information about a company from one of these people, how credible would that information be?". Of the eight groups of individuals - academic/expert, technical expert in company, financial/industry analyst, CEO, non-governmental organisation representative, government official, person like myself, and regular employee - academic/expert came out tops with a score of 70 per cent, followed by technical expert at 64 per cent.

the film on the global financial crisis Inside Job, which won the 2011 Academy Award for best documentary. One of the documentary's themes is the role a number of renowned academics, particularly academic economists, played in the global crisis. It highlighted potentially serious conflicts of interests related to significant compensation derived by these academics serving on boards of financial services firms and advising such firms.

Often, these academics also played key roles in shaping government policies relating to deregulation - most appear allergic to regulation of the financial services industry. The documentary argued that these academics from Ivy League universities had basically become advocates for financial services firms, which blinded them to firms' excesses. It noted that few academic economists saw the financial crisis coming, and suggested this might be because they were too busy making money from the industry.

The figure above comes from the IMF World Economic Outlook released earlier this week in a chapter on "oil scarcity" (PDF).  The report explains the figure as follows: Most OECD countries saw a big switch away from oil in electric power generation in the early 1980s. After oil prices rose sharply compared with the prices of other fossil fuels in the 1970s, the power sector switched from oil to other input (Figure 3.6): some countries went back to coal (for example, the United States); others increased their nuclear capacity (for example, France) or turned to alternative energy sources.

digital "curators" choose and present things related to a specific topic and context. They "curate", as opposed to "aggregate", which implies plain collecting with little or no value add. Viewed in this context, Google search does the latter, not the former. So, who curates? The Huffington Post, or HuffPo, is one high-profile example and, it appears, a highly-valued one too, going by AOL numbers-crunchers who forked out US$315 million (S$396.9 million) to acquire it. Accolades have also come in for Arianna Huffington's team of contributors and more than 3,000 bloggers - from politicians to celebrities to think-tankers. The website was named second among the 25 best blogs of 2009 by Time magazine, and most powerful blog in the world by The Observer.

By sifting, sorting and presenting news and views - yes, "curating" - HuffPo makes itself useful in an age of too much information and too many opinions. (Strictly speaking, HuffPo is both a creator and curator.) If what HuffPo is doing seems deja vu, it is hardly surprising. Remember the good old "curated" news of the pre-Internet days when newspapers decided what news was published and what we read? Then, the Editor was the Curator with the capital "C".

But with the arrival of the Internet and the uploading of news and views by organisations and netizens, the bits and bytes have turned into a tsunami. Aggregators like Google search threw us some life buoys, using text and popularity to filter the content. But with millions of new articles and videos added to the Internet daily, the "right" content has become that proverbial needle in the haystack. Hence the need for curation.

Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader processes of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that, eventually, the best ideas prevail.

Modern science originated from an attempt to weed out such subjective lapses

Our individual responses to the conclusions that science reaches, however, are quite another matter. Ironically, in part because researchers employ so much nuance and strive to disclose all remaining sources of uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading and misinterpretation.

While many industrial veterans here put the blame solely on the “bo chap” attitudes of the students, I wish to point out the fact that those industrial veterans in the animation industry are just too afraid to admit that it was the fault of the tertiary education systems. It is true that while some students have an attitude problem, the lecturers in the polytechnics and universities have their fair share of the blame too. I also wish to speak up for students who have the passion for the industry but they are not shown the right path. Otherwise how do you explain that it took my mentor 2 years and only half the price of the poly fees to teach me all that I needed to know to find a job in the CG industry?

What is the truth regarding our local Animation industry, you ask? The truth is… our local industry… is dying. Dying from foreign competition from giants. Dying because our locals are not supportive of our native talents. Dying before we make an animation that is truly made in Singapore.

our education system has failed its citizens to make sure that we are up to the mark for the various requirements of the job market in whichever industry. This made us much more vulnerable to the influx of foreign animators, who can accept lower pay and produce higher quality work than the locals; effectively starving out the local animators and animation companies.

To make matters worse, the government managed to woo top foreign animation companies to set up shop in Singapore, effectively killing the local companies. Many of these foreign animation companies hire lesser locals and receive government funding while local companies are left to fend for themselves. If you think about it, with the billions of dollars it makes every year, does Lucasfilm Singapore require that government funding to set up shop in Singapore? My mentor’s studio once had courses that only costed $2K with government subsidy. But now with government funding cut, the courses now costs $10K. These put a lot of financial pressure on artists with the passion for the animation industry but are financially tight. I was one of the last batches who were under the $2K scheme. Many artists like myself have already been financially drained studying in tertiary education. What they need is a job to feed themselves or in some cases repay the bank! It is not helping given the fact that our locals are being out competed due to an incompetent education system.