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Weiye Loh

Digital's Great Teenage Misunderstanding | ClickZ - 0 views

www.clickz.com/...itals-teenage-misunderstanding

Digital Habits Teenager Data Internet Social Social Media

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • To quote, "most noteworthy was the shift in e-mail usage, particularly among young people. Total Web-based e-mail use was down eight percent last year, led by a walloping 59 percent drop among 12 to 17 year olds." I must reemphasize, the data is only for Web-based e-mail usage (think Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc.) and that's an important distinction. A decline is a decline, but this certainly doesn't fully cover how e-mail is consumed in today's digital world.
  • Mark Zuckerberg offered this at the Facebook Messaging announcement: "High school kids don't use e-mail, they use SMS a lot. People want lighter weight things like SMS and IM to message each other."
  • There are two significant issues that must be added to the conversation though: Mobile's impact: The typical smartphone user spends almost half of her time on e-mail. This makes comScore's metrics marginal since it evaluated only Web-based e-mail usage. As e-Dialog CEO John Rizzi thoughtfully points out on a recent blog post: "In the 18-24 age group, unique visits increased 9%, while time spent decreased 10%. To me this points to the increasing use of mobile to triage inboxes on the go, and the desktop inbox being used to access specific e-mails and perform tasks like getting a code for a sale, or composing an e-mail reply that would be too onerous on a mobile phone. In fact, comScore found that 30% of respondents are viewing e-mail on their mobile phone, a 36% increase from 2009, and those using mobile e-mail daily increased 40% on average." Pew Internet recently evaluated how Internet users of different age groups spent their time online. Guess what? Even 90 to 100 percent of Millennials (ages 18-33) used e-mail. As you can see in the chart, below, e-mail was the top activity across all age groups.*
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  • Teenagers become adults: I may not win any scientific breakthrough awards for this statement, but people are missing the boat on this piece of the puzzle. What happens when a teenager becomes an adult in the workplace? Not only do they dress, speak, and act differently - they use different approaches to communicate, too. The first thing a new employee typical gets is…an e-mail address. And guess what? They use it, even if they have been reliant on social, IM, and texting for their primary communication channels. They will correspond for work via e-mail and opt in to e-mails from their favorite brands (including brands that they certainly did not like as a teenager). They likely will also "Like" their favorite companies on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, and opt in to SMS offers as well. They will also expect different value and information in each of these channels.
Weiye Loh

Scientists Are Cleared of Misuse of Data - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...25noaa.html

Climate Science ClimateGate Data Science Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The inquiry, by the Commerce Department’s inspector general, focused on e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 (NOAA is part of the Commerce Department). Some of the e-mails involved scientists from NOAA.
  • Climate change skeptics contended that the correspondence showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity.
  • In a report dated Feb. 18 and circulated by the Obama administration on Thursday, the inspector general said, “We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data.”
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  • The finding comes at a critical moment for NOAA as some newly empowered Republican House members seek to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, often contending that the science underpinning global warming is flawed. NOAA is the federal agency tasked with monitoring climate data.
  • The inquiry into NOAA’s conduct was requested last May by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has challenged the science underlying human-induced climate change. Mr. Inhofe was acting in response to the controversy over the e-mail messages, which were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, a major hub of climate research. Mr. Inhofe asked the inspector general of the Commerce Department to investigate how NOAA scientists responded internally to the leaked e-mails. Of 1,073 messages, 289 were exchanges with NOAA scientists.
  • The inspector general reviewed the 1,073 e-mails, and interviewed Dr. Lubchenco and staff members about their exchanges. The report did not find scientific misconduct; it did however, challenge the agency over its handling of some Freedom of Information Act requests in 2007. And it noted the inappropriateness of e-mailing a collage cartoon depicting Senator Inhofe and five other climate skeptics marooned on a melting iceberg that passed between two NOAA scientists.
  • The report was not a review of the climate data itself. It joins a series of investigations by the British House of Commons, Pennsylvania State University, the InterAcademy Council and the National Research Council into the leaked e-mails that have exonerated the scientists involved of scientific wrongdoing.
  • But Mr. Inhofe said the report was far from a clean bill of health for the agency and that contrary to its executive summary, showed that the scientists “engaged in data manipulation.”
  • “It also appears that one senior NOAA employee possibly thwarted the release of important federal scientific information for the public to assess and analyze,” he said, referring to an employee’s failure to provide material related to work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a different body that compiles research, in response to a Freedom of Information request.
Weiye Loh

How Politicians Get Burned by Modern Media - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13carr.html

Twitter Internet New Media Politics E-mail Celebrity

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • “A lot of those e-mails obviously weren’t meant for public consumption,” she told Chris Wallace of Fox News, where she is a source, a commentator and a subject, all wrapped into one.
  • She is of interest not because of what she did as governor but because she has almost perfected the modern hybrid of politician and celebrity: once your daughter appears on “Dancing With the Stars,” your celebrity is far more important that your position on off-shore drilling. That means that all those e-mails are destined for public consumption whether she likes it or not.
  • Like all other celebrities, politicians are expected now to be in constant digital contact with their fans/voters. Ms. Palin has excelled at this with her ubiquitous Twitter messages, her bus tour and her frequent appearances on Fox News. But unlike during the early days of the Internet, when a static Web site was all that politicians needed, communication these days travels not just one way or two, but in all directions. Being in touch means that people can touch you back.
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  • digital culture is the opposite of private
  • Obama may want to be your friend of Facebook, but he, like every other president, wants to maintain custody of the narrative. Now that he actually has to govern, his ratings — an operative word in both politics and media — have dropped.
  • Weiye Loh on 13 Jun 11
     
    Extensive efforts were expended over the weekend to comb through Sarah Palin's e-mails from her time as the governor of Alaska. Ms. Palin may have thought that she was just chatting with her staff and friends, but now every comma, every aside, every random thought is being picked apart for meaning. There may have been some legitimate news buried in the trove of e-mails, and she remains a person of significant public interest. So the press response makes sense, but she could not be blamed for feeling that she was under attack from a horde of biting ants.
Weiye Loh

Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...3

Security Computer hacktivism Anonymous Wikileaks Internet

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The attackers just needed a little bit more information: they needed a regular, non-root user account to log in with, because as a standard security procedure, direct ssh access with the root account is disabled. Armed with the two pieces of knowledge above, and with Greg's e-mail account in their control, the social engineers set about their task. The e-mail correspondence tells the whole story: From: Greg To: Jussi Subject: need to ssh into rootkit im in europe and need to ssh into the server. can you drop open up firewall and allow ssh through port 59022 or something vague? and is our root password still 88j4bb3rw0cky88 or did we change to 88Scr3am3r88 ? thanks
  • Thanks indeed. To be fair to Jussi, the fake Greg appeared to know the root password and, well, the e-mails were coming from Greg's own e-mail address. But over the course of a few e-mails it was clear that "Greg" had forgotten both his username and his password. And Jussi handed them to him on a platter. Later on, Jussi did appear to notice something was up: From: Jussi To: Greg Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit did you open something running on high port?
  • From: Jussi To: Greg Subject: Re: need to ssh into rootkit hi, do you have public ip? or should i just drop fw? and it is w0cky - tho no remote root access allowed
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  • So there are clearly two lessons to be learned here. The first is that the standard advice is good advice. If all best practices had been followed then none of this would have happened. Even if the SQL injection error was still present, it wouldn't have caused the cascade of failures that followed.
  • The second lesson, however, is that the standard advice isn't good enough. Even recognized security experts who should know better won't follow it. What hope does that leave for the rest of us?
Weiye Loh

RealClimate: Feedback on Cloud Feedback - 0 views

www.realclimate.org/...feedback-on-cloud-feedback

Science Politics Climate Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • I have a paper in this week’s issue of Science on the cloud feedback
  • clouds are important regulators of the amount of energy in and out of the climate system. Clouds both reflect sunlight back to space and trap infrared radiation and keep it from escaping to space. Changes in clouds can therefore have profound impacts on our climate.
  • A positive cloud feedback loop posits a scenario whereby an initial warming of the planet, caused, for example, by increases in greenhouse gases, causes clouds to trap more energy and lead to further warming. Such a process amplifies the direct heating by greenhouse gases. Models have been long predicted this, but testing the models has proved difficult.
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  • Making the issue even more contentious, some of the more credible skeptics out there (e.g., Lindzen, Spencer) have been arguing that clouds behave quite differently from that predicted by models. In fact, they argue, clouds will stabilize the climate and prevent climate change from occurring (i.e., clouds will provide a negative feedback).
  • In my new paper, I calculate the energy trapped by clouds and observe how it varies as the climate warms and cools during El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycles. I find that, as the climate warms, clouds trap an additional 0.54±0.74W/m2 for every degree of warming. Thus, the cloud feedback is likely positive, but I cannot rule out a slight negative feedback.
  • while a slight negative feedback cannot be ruled out, the data do not support a negative feedback large enough to substantially cancel the well-established positive feedbacks, such as water vapor, as Lindzen and Spencer would argue.
  • I have also compared the results to climate models. Taken as a group, the models substantially reproduce the observations. This increases my confidence that the models are accurately simulating the variations of clouds with climate change.
  • Dr. Spencer is arguing that clouds are causing ENSO cycles, so the direction of causality in my analysis is incorrect and my conclusions are in error. After reading this, I initiated a cordial and useful exchange of e-mails with Dr. Spencer (you can read the full e-mail exchange here). We ultimately agreed that the fundamental disagreement between us is over what causes ENSO. Short paraphrase: Spencer: ENSO is caused by clouds. You cannot infer the response of clouds to surface temperature in such a situation. Dessler: ENSO is not caused by clouds, but is driven by internal dynamics of the ocean-atmosphere system. Clouds may amplify the warming, and that’s the cloud feedback I’m trying to measure.
  • My position is the mainstream one, backed up by decades of research. This mainstream theory is quite successful at simulating almost all of the aspects of ENSO. Dr. Spencer, on the other hand, is as far out of the mainstream when it comes to ENSO as he is when it comes to climate change. He is advancing here a completely new and untested theory of ENSO — based on just one figure in one of his papers (and, as I told him in one of our e-mails, there are other interpretations of those data that do not agree with his interpretation). Thus, the burden of proof is Dr. Spencer to show that his theory of causality during ENSO is correct. He is, at present, far from meeting that burden. And until Dr. Spencer satisfies this burden, I don’t think anyone can take his criticisms seriously.
  • It’s also worth noting that the picture I’m painting of our disagreement (and backed up by the e-mail exchange linked above) is quite different from the picture provided by Dr. Spencer on his blog. His blog is full of conspiracies and purposeful suppression of the truth. In particular, he accuses me of ignoring his work. But as you can see, I have not ignored it — I have dismissed it because I think it has no merit. That’s quite different. I would also like to respond to his accusation that the timing of the paper is somehow connected to the IPCC’s meeting in Cancun. I can assure everyone that no one pressured me in any aspect of the publication of this paper. As Dr. Spencer knows well, authors have no control over when a paper ultimately gets published. And as far as my interest in influencing the policy debate goes, I’ll just say that I’m in College Station this week, while Dr. Spencer is in Cancun. In fact, Dr. Spencer had a press conference in Cancun — about my paper. I didn’t have a press conference about my paper. Draw your own conclusion.
  • This is but another example of how climate scientists are being played by the denialists. You attempted to discuss the issue with Spencer as if he were only doing science. But he is not. He is doing science and politics, and he has no compunction about sandbagging you. There is no gain to you in trying to deal with people like Spencer and Lindzen as colleagues. They are not trustworthy.
Jianwei Tan

Dominic Utton: How to scam a scammer |From the Guardian |The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...news.g2

Scam Scams Scammer Nigeria Nigerian 419scam Vigilantism Vigilante 419eater

shared by Jianwei Tan on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Jianwei Tan on 19 Aug 09
     
    Summary: Some people may have heard of the Nigerian 419 scams that were very infamous quite a few years back. These scammers who supposedly operated out of Nigeria created elaborate stories and solicited for help through e-mails. Although the initial intention of the e-mail is to ask for help, subsequent correspondences usually result in the scammer requesting for monetary aid through wire transfer. This person, Mike, has taken it upon himself to declare war on these scammers, baiting them to believe that he would send money to them but in actual fact plays pranks on them. The pranks played range from telling silly stories and wasting the scammer's time to persuading the scammer to get tattooed in order to get the money. Question: Scams are, without a doubt, unethical and probably criminal activities. However, is the act of scamming a would-be scammer an ethical thing to do? Problem: Let's imagine a situation where the scammer and the scambaiter (the person scamming the scammer) are from the same country or even the same state, thus both parties would be subject to the same laws. If the scammer were to try and launch a scam and instead was scambaited into severe consequences (I think getting tattoed is quite severe), should the scambaiter be prosecuted by the legal system?
Weiye Loh

McKinsey & Company - Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business tren... - 0 views

www.mckinsey.com/...ten_of_the_best.asp

Cloud Computing Crowd-Sourcing Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • 1. Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstreamIn the past few years, the ability to organise communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream. Wikipedia and a handful of open-source software developers were the pioneers. But in signs of the steady march forward, 70 per cent of the executives we recently surveyed said that their companies regularly created value through Web communities. Similarly, more than 68m bloggers post reviews and recommendations about products and services.
  • for every success in tapping communities to create value, there are still many failures. Some companies neglect the up-front research needed to identify potential participants who have the right skill sets and will be motivated to participate over the longer term. Since cocreation is a two-way process, companies must also provide feedback to stimulate continuing participation and commitment. Getting incentives right is important as well: cocreators often value reputation more than money. Finally, an organisation must gain a high level of trust within a Web community to earn the engagement of top participants.
  • 2. Making the network the organisation In earlier research, we noted that the Web was starting to force open the boundaries of organisations, allowing nonemployees to offer their expertise in novel ways. We called this phenomenon "tapping into a world of talent." Now many companies are pushing substantially beyond that starting point, building and managing flexible networks that extend across internal and often even external borders. The recession underscored the value of such flexibility in managing volatility. We believe that the more porous, networked organisations of the future will need to organise work around critical tasks rather than molding it to constraints imposed by corporate structures.
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  • 3. Collaboration at scale Across many economies, the number of people who undertake knowledge work has grown much more quickly than the number of production or transactions workers. Knowledge workers typically are paid more than others, so increasing their productivity is critical. As a result, there is broad interest in collaboration technologies that promise to improve these workers' efficiency and effectiveness. While the body of knowledge around the best use of such technologies is still developing, a number of companies have conducted experiments, as we see in the rapid growth rates of video and Web conferencing, expected to top 20 per cent annually during the next few years.
  • 4. The growing ‘Internet of Things' The adoption of RFID (radio-frequency identification) and related technologies was the basis of a trend we first recognised as "expanding the frontiers of automation." But these methods are rudimentary compared with what emerges when assets themselves become elements of an information system, with the ability to capture, compute, communicate, and collaborate around information—something that has come to be known as the "Internet of Things." Embedded with sensors, actuators, and communications capabilities, such objects will soon be able to absorb and transmit information on a massive scale and, in some cases, to adapt and react to changes in the environment automatically. These "smart" assets can make processes more efficient, give products new capabilities, and spark novel business models. Auto insurers in Europe and the United States are testing these waters with offers to install sensors in customers' vehicles. The result is new pricing models that base charges for risk on driving behavior rather than on a driver's demographic characteristics. Luxury-auto manufacturers are equipping vehicles with networked sensors that can automatically take evasive action when accidents are about to happen. In medicine, sensors embedded in or worn by patients continuously report changes in health conditions to physicians, who can adjust treatments when necessary. Sensors in manufacturing lines for products as diverse as computer chips and pulp and paper take detailed readings on process conditions and automatically make adjustments to reduce waste, downtime, and costly human interventions.
  • 5. Experimentation and big data Could the enterprise become a full-time laboratory? What if you could analyse every transaction, capture insights from every customer interaction, and didn't have to wait for months to get data from the field? What if…? Data are flooding in at rates never seen before—doubling every 18 months—as a result of greater access to customer data from public, proprietary, and purchased sources, as well as new information gathered from Web communities and newly deployed smart assets. These trends are broadly known as "big data." Technology for capturing and analysing information is widely available at ever-lower price points. But many companies are taking data use to new levels, using IT to support rigorous, constant business experimentation that guides decisions and to test new products, business models, and innovations in customer experience. In some cases, the new approaches help companies make decisions in real time. This trend has the potential to drive a radical transformation in research, innovation, and marketing.
  • Using experimentation and big data as essential components of management decision making requires new capabilities, as well as organisational and cultural change. Most companies are far from accessing all the available data. Some haven't even mastered the technologies needed to capture and analyse the valuable information they can access. More commonly, they don't have the right talent and processes to design experiments and extract business value from big data, which require changes in the way many executives now make decisions: trusting instincts and experience over experimentation and rigorous analysis. To get managers at all echelons to accept the value of experimentation, senior leaders must buy into a "test and learn" mind-set and then serve as role models for their teams.
  • 6. Wiring for a sustainable world Even as regulatory frameworks continue to evolve, environmental stewardship and sustainability clearly are C-level agenda topics. What's more, sustainability is fast becoming an important corporate-performance metric—one that stakeholders, outside influencers, and even financial markets have begun to track. Information technology plays a dual role in this debate: it is both a significant source of environmental emissions and a key enabler of many strategies to mitigate environmental damage. At present, information technology's share of the world's environmental footprint is growing because of the ever-increasing demand for IT capacity and services. Electricity produced to power the world's data centers generates greenhouse gases on the scale of countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands, and these emissions could increase fourfold by 2020. McKinsey research has shown, however, that the use of IT in areas such as smart power grids, efficient buildings, and better logistics planning could eliminate five times the carbon emissions that the IT industry produces.
  • 7. Imagining anything as a service Technology now enables companies to monitor, measure, customise, and bill for asset use at a much more fine-grained level than ever before. Asset owners can therefore create services around what have traditionally been sold as products. Business-to-business (B2B) customers like these service offerings because they allow companies to purchase units of a service and to account for them as a variable cost rather than undertake large capital investments. Consumers also like this "paying only for what you use" model, which helps them avoid large expenditures, as well as the hassles of buying and maintaining a product.
  • In the IT industry, the growth of "cloud computing" (accessing computer resources provided through networks rather than running software or storing data on a local computer) exemplifies this shift. Consumer acceptance of Web-based cloud services for everything from e-mail to video is of course becoming universal, and companies are following suit. Software as a service (SaaS), which enables organisations to access services such as customer relationship management, is growing at a 17 per cent annual rate. The biotechnology company Genentech, for example, uses Google Apps for e-mail and to create documents and spreadsheets, bypassing capital investments in servers and software licenses. This development has created a wave of computing capabilities delivered as a service, including infrastructure, platform, applications, and content. And vendors are competing, with innovation and new business models, to match the needs of different customers.
  • 8. The age of the multisided business model Multisided business models create value through interactions among multiple players rather than traditional one-on-one transactions or information exchanges. In the media industry, advertising is a classic example of how these models work. Newspapers, magasines, and television stations offer content to their audiences while generating a significant portion of their revenues from third parties: advertisers. Other revenue, often through subscriptions, comes directly from consumers. More recently, this advertising-supported model has proliferated on the Internet, underwriting Web content sites, as well as services such as search and e-mail (see trend number seven, "Imagining anything as a service," earlier in this article). It is now spreading to new markets, such as enterprise software: Spiceworks offers IT-management applications to 950,000 users at no cost, while it collects advertising from B2B companies that want access to IT professionals.
  • 9. Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid The adoption of technology is a global phenomenon, and the intensity of its usage is particularly impressive in emerging markets. Our research has shown that disruptive business models arise when technology combines with extreme market conditions, such as customer demand for very low price points, poor infrastructure, hard-to-access suppliers, and low cost curves for talent. With an economic recovery beginning to take hold in some parts of the world, high rates of growth have resumed in many developing nations, and we're seeing companies built around the new models emerging as global players. Many multinationals, meanwhile, are only starting to think about developing markets as wellsprings of technology-enabled innovation rather than as traditional manufacturing hubs.
  • 10. Producing public good on the grid The role of governments in shaping global economic policy will expand in coming years. Technology will be an important factor in this evolution by facilitating the creation of new types of public goods while helping to manage them more effectively. This last trend is broad in scope and draws upon many of the other trends described above.
Olivia Chang

The Phishing Problem - 7 views

URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7c03fd14-b011-11dd-a795-0000779fd18c.html Case Summary: The world of the Internet is slowly becoming dangerous ground to tread on. The onset of viruses, hackers and ...

phishing scams

started by Olivia Chang on 19 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Hacktivists as Gadflies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...hacktivists-as-gadflies

Hacking hacktivism Law Technology Censorship

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Apr 13
     
    "Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known as "Weev." When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not "hack" anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google Web crawlers do every second of every day - sequentially walk through public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole. For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying its customers of its own security failure. When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in Plato's "Apology." "You consider yourself a hero of sorts," she said, and noted that Weev's "special skills" in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence. I was reminded of a line from an essay written in 1986 by a hacker called the Mentor: "My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." When offered the chance to speak, Weev, like Socrates, did not back down: "I don't come here today to ask for forgiveness. I'm here to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life." He then went on to heap scorn upon the law being used to put him away - the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that prosecutors used to go after the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swart
Weiye Loh

Your Brain on Computers - Attached to Technology and Paying a Price - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07brain.html

Technology Computer Brain

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell's workstation.)
  • Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.
  • “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”
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  • juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.
  • These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive.
  • While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.
  • even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Jun 10
     
    YOUR BRAIN ON COMPUTERS Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » ClimateGate Follow Up - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...climategate-follow-up

ClimateGate Climate Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Recently the third of three independent reviews of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) e-mail scandal has been completed. All three reviews concluded that the CRU was not hiding, destroying, or manipulating data.
  • At the time there were those who believed the e-mails to be the innocent chatter of scientists and others who thought it was the smoking gun of scientific fraud. At the time I wrote: I don’t know what the lessons of climategate are yet – we need to see what actually happened first. But how people deal with climategate says a lot about their process. Those who are making bold claims based upon ambiguous, circumstantial, and out-of-context evidence, are not doing themselves or their side any favors.
  • after a thorough review there is no evidence of any actual scientific fraud, but the scientists were not adequately complying with FOI requests. It seems the climate scientists at the CRU had developed a bit of a bunker mentality and felt justified in frustrating what they felt were frivolous and harassing FOI requests.
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  • This, in turn, seems to be a symptom of an obscure scientific discipline (climate science) being thrust in recent years into the middle of a raging world-wide political controversy. There was not a culture among these scientists of dealing with the politically controversial aspects of their science.
  • This episode reminds us that scientists are human, and therefore science itself is a human endeavor and subject to all the foibles that plague any human activity.
  • there were charges that the CRU did not have backups of data they relied upon for their conclusions. But the CRU was never the primary source of this data – they simply aggregated and analyzed it. The primary data has always been available from the sources. As the BBC reports: “We find that CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data or tamper with it,” it says. “We demonstrated that any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis”.
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 10
     
    CLIMATEGATE FOLLOW UP by STEVEN NOVELLA, Jul 12 2010
Weiye Loh

The Fake Scandal of Climategate - 0 views

www.skepticalscience.com/fake-scandal-Climategate.html

Science Internet Climate Science ClimateGate

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The most comprehensive inquiry was the Independent Climate Change Email Review led by Sir Muir Russell, commissioned by UEA to examine the behaviour of the CRU scientists (but not the scientific validity of their work). It published its final report in July 2010
  • It focused on what the CRU scientists did, not what they said, investigating the evidence for and against each allegation. It interviewed CRU and UEA staff, and took 111 submissions including one from CRU itself. And it also did something the media completely failed to do: it attempted to put the actions of CRU scientists into context.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 21 Nov 10
       
      Data, in the form of email correspondence, requires context to be interpreted "objectively" and "accurately" =)
  • The Review went back to primary sources to see if CRU really was hiding or falsifying their data. It considered how much CRU’s actions influenced the IPCC’s conclusions about temperatures during the past millennium. It commissioned a paper by Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, on the context of scientific peer review. And it asked IPCC Review Editors how much influence individuals could wield on writing groups.
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  • Many of these are things any journalist could have done relatively easily, but few ever bothered to do.
  • the emergence of the blogosphere requires significantly more openness from scientists. However, providing the details necessary to validate large datasets can be difficult and time-consuming, and how FoI laws apply to research is still an evolving area. Meanwhile, the public needs to understand that science cannot and does not produce absolutely precise answers. Though the uncertainties may become smaller and better constrained over time, uncertainty in science is a fact of life which policymakers have to deal with. The chapter concludes: “the Review would urge all scientists to learn to communicate their work in ways that the public can access and understand”.
  • email is less formal than other forms of communication: “Extreme forms of language are frequently applied to quite normal situations by people who would never use it in other communication channels.” The CRU scientists assumed their emails to be private, so they used “slang, jargon and acronyms” which would have been more fully explained had they been talking to the public. And although some emails suggest CRU went out of their way to make life difficult for their critics, there are others which suggest they were bending over backwards to be honest. Therefore the Review found “the e-mails cannot always be relied upon as evidence of what actually occurred, nor indicative of actual behaviour that is extreme, exceptional or unprofessional.” [section 4.3]
  • when put into the proper context, what do these emails actually reveal about the behaviour of the CRU scientists? The report concluded (its emphasis):
  • we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.
  • we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.
  • “But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognize not only the significance of statutory requirements but also the risk to the reputation of the University and indeed, to the credibility of UK climate science.” [1.3]
  • The argument that Climategate reveals an international climate science conspiracy is not really a very skeptical one. Sure, it is skeptical in the weak sense of questioning authority, but it stops there. Unlike true skepticism, it doesn’t go on to objectively examine all the evidence and draw a conclusion based on that evidence. Instead, it cherry-picks suggestive emails, seeing everything as incontrovertible evidence of a conspiracy, and concludes all of mainstream climate science is guilty by association. This is not skepticism; this is conspiracy theory.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 21 Nov 10
       
      How then do we know that we have examined ALL the evidence? What about the context of evidence then? 
  • The media dropped the ball There is a famous quotation attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is more true in the internet age than it was when Mark Twain was alive. Unfortunately, it took months for the Climategate inquiries to put on their shoes, and by the time they reported, the damage had already been done. The media acted as an uncritical loudspeaker for the initial allegations, which will now continue to circulate around the world forever, then failed to give anywhere near the same amount of coverage to the inquiries clearing the scientists involved. For instance, Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian published no less than 85 stories about Climategate, but not one about the Muir Russell inquiry.
  • Even the Guardian, who have a relatively good track record on environmental reporting and were quick to criticize the worst excesses of climate conspiracy theorists, could not resist the lure of stolen emails. As George Monbiot writes, journalists see FoI requests and email hacking as a way of keeping people accountable, rather than the distraction from actual science which they are to scientists. In contrast, CRU director Phil Jones says: “I wish people would spend as much time reading my scientific papers as they do reading my e-mails.”
  • This is part of a broader problem with climate change reporting: the media holds scientists to far higher standards than it does contrarians. Climate scientists have to be right 100% of the time, but contrarians apparently can get away with being wrong nearly 100% of the time. The tiniest errors of climate scientists are nitpicked and blown out of all proportion, but contrarians get away with monstrous distortions and cherry-picking of evidence. Around the same time The Australian was bashing climate scientists, the same newspaper had no problem publishing Viscount Monckton’s blatant misrepresentations of IPCC projections (not to mention his demonstrably false conspiracy theory that the Copenhagen summit was a plot to establish a world government).
  • In the current model of environmental reporting, the contrarians do not lose anything by making baseless accusations. In fact, it is in their interests to throw as much mud at scientists as possible to increase the chance that some of it will stick in the public consciousness. But there is untold damage to the reputation of the scientists against whom the accusations are being made. We can only hope that in future the media will be less quick to jump to conclusions. If only editors and producers would stop and think for a moment about what they’re doing: they are playing with the future of the planet.
  • As worthy as this defense is, surely this is the kind of political bun-fight SkS has resolutely stayed away from since its inception. The debate can only become a quagmire of competing claims, because this is part of an adversarial process that does not depend on, or even require, scientific evidence. Only by sticking resolutely to the science and the advocacy of the scientific method can SkS continue to avoid being drowned in the kind of mud through which we are obliged to wade elsewhere.
  • I disagree with gp. It is past time we all got angry, very angry, at what these people have done and continue to do. Dispassionate science doesn't cut it with the denial industry or with the media (and that "or" really isn't there). It's time to fight back with everything we can throw back at them.
  • The fact that three quick fire threads have been run on Climatgate on this excellent blog in the last few days is an indication that Climategate (fairly or not) has does serious damage to the cause of AGW activism. Mass media always overshoots and exaggerates. The AGW alarmists had a very good run - here in Australia protagonists like Tim Flannery and our living science legend Robin Williams were talking catastrophe - the 10 year drought was definitely permanent climate change - rivers might never run again - Robin (100 metre sea level rise) Williams refused to even read the Climategate emails. Climategate swung the pendumum to the other extreme - the scientists (nearly all funded by you and me) were under the pump. Their socks rubbed harder on their sandals as they scrambled for clear air. Cries about criminal hackers funded by big oil, tobacco, rightist conspirators etc were heard. Panchuri cried 'voodoo science' as he denied ever knowing about objections to the preposterous 2035 claim. How things change in a year. The drought is broken over most of Australia - Tim Flannery has gone quiet and Robin Williams is airing a science journo who says that AGW scares have been exaggerated. Some balance might have been restored as the pendulum swung, and our hard working misunderstood scientist bretheren will take more care with their emails in future.
  • "Perhaps a more precise description would be that a common pattern in global warming skeptic arguments is to focus on narrow pieces of evidence while ignoring other evidence that contradicts their argument." And this is the issue the article discuss, but in my opinion this article is in guilt of this as well. It focus on a narrow set of non representative claims, claims which is indeed pure propaganda by some skeptics, however the article also suggest guilt buy association and as such these propaganda claims then gets attributed to the be opinions of the entire skeptic camp. In doing so, the OP becomes guilty of the very same issue the OP tries to address. In other words, the issue I try to raise is not about the exact numbers or figures or any particular facts but the fact that the claim I quoted is obvious nonsense. It is nonsense because it a sweeping statement with no specifics and as such it is an empty statement and means nothing. A second point I been thinking about when reading this article is why should scientist be granted immunity to dirty tricks/propaganda in a political debate? Is it because they speak under the name of science? If that is the case, why shall we not grant the same right to other spokesmen for other organization?
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 21 Nov 10
       
      The aspiration to examine ALL evidence is again called into question here. Is it really possible to examine ALL evidence? Even if we have examined them, can we fully represent our examination? From our lab, to the manuscript, to the journal paper, to the news article, to 140characters tweets?
Weiye Loh

Hashtags, a New Way for Tweets - Cultural Studies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-tweets-cultural-studies.html

Twitter Hashtag

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • hashtags have transcended the 140-characters-or-less microblogging platform, and have become a new cultural shorthand, finding their way into chat windows, e-mail and face-to-face conversations.
  • people began using hashtags to add humor, context and interior monologues to their messages — and everyday conversation. As Susan Orlean wrote in a New Yorker blog post titled “Hash,” the symbol can be “a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they’re joking.”
  • “Because you have a hashtag embedded in a short message with real language, it starts exhibiting other characteristics of natural language, which means basically that people start playing with it and manipulating it,” said Jacob Eisenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in computational linguistics. “You’ll see them used as humor, as sort of meta-commentary, where you’ll write a message and maybe you don’t really believe it, and what you really think is in the hashtag.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Hashtags then began popping up outside of Twitter, in e-mails, chat windows and text messages.
  • Using a hashtag is also a way for someone to convey that they’re part of a certain scene.
Weiye Loh

Hunch Blog | Blog Archive | You've got mail: What your email domain says about you - 0 views

blog.hunch.com/?p=34824

E-mail Stereotype

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • AOL users are most likely to be overweight women ages 35-64 who have a high school diploma and are spiritual, but not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, in a relationship of 10+ years, and have children. AOL users live in the suburbs and haven’t traveled outside their own country. Family is their first priority. AOL users mostly read magazines, have a desktop computer, listen to the radio, and watch TV on 1-3 DVRs in their home. At home, they lounge around in sweats. AOL users are optimistic extroverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team.
  • Gmail users are most likely to be thin young men ages 18-34 who are college-educated and not religious. Like other young Hunch users, they tend to be politically liberal, single (and ready to mingle), and childless. Gmail users live in cities and have traveled to five or more countries. They’re career-focused and plugged in — they mostly read blogs, have an iPhone and laptop, and listen to music via MP3s and computers (but they don’t have a DVR). At home, they lounge around in a t-shirt and jeans. Gmail users prefer salty snacks and are introverted and entrepreneurial. They are optimistic or pessimistic, depending on the situation.
  • Hotmail users are most likely to be young women of average build ages 18-34 (and younger) who have a high school diploma and are not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, single, and childless. Hotmail users live in the suburbs, perhaps still with their parents, and have traveled to up to five countries. They mostly read magazines and contemporary fiction, have a laptop, and listen to music via MP3s and computers (but they don’t have a DVR). At home, Hotmail users lounge around in a t-shirt and jeans. They’re introverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team. They consider themselves more pessimistic, but sometimes it depends on the situation.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Yahoo! users are most likely to be overweight women ages 18-49 who have a high school diploma and are spiritual, but not religious. They tend to be politically middle of the road, in a relationship of 1-5 years, and have children. Yahoo! users live in the suburbs or in rural areas and haven’t traveled outside their own country. Family is their first priority. They mostly read magazines, are almost equally likely to have a laptop or desktop computer, listen to the radio and cds, and watch TV on 1-2 DVRs in their home. At home, Yahoo! users lounge around in pajamas. They’re extroverts who prefer sweet snacks and like working on a team. Yahoo! users are optimistic or pessimistic, depending on the situation.
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Mar 11
     
    What your email domain says about you
Weiye Loh

Too Hot for TED: Income Inequality - Jim Tankersley - NationalJournal.com - 0 views

www.nationaljournal.com/...ted-income-inequality-20120516

TED Income Inequality Tax

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators.”
  • You can’t find that speech online. TED officials told Hanauer initially they were eager to distribute it. “I want to put this talk out into the world!” one of them wrote him in an e-mail in late April. But early this month they changed course, telling Hanauer that his remarks were too “political” and too controversial for posting.
  • "Many of the talks given at the conference or at TED-U are not released,” Anderson wrote. “We only release one a day on TED.com and there's a backlog of amazing talks from all over the world. We do not comment publicly on reasons to release or not release [a] talk. It's unfair on the speakers concerned. But we have a general policy to avoid talks that are overtly partisan, and to avoid talks that have received mediocre audience ratings."
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jun 12
     
    There's one idea, though, that TED's organizers recently decided was too controversial to spread: the notion that widening income inequality is a bad thing for America, and that as a result, the rich should pay more in taxes.
Weiye Loh

Studying the politics of online science « through the looking glass - 0 views

alicerosebell.wordpress.com/...the-politics-of-online-science

Online Science Blog Gender

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Mendick, H. and Moreau, M. (2010). Monitoring the presence and representation of  women in SET occupations in UK based online media. Bradford: The UKRC.
  • Mendick and Moreau considered the representation of women on eight ‘SET’ (science, engineering and technology) websites: New Scientist, Bad Science, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic, Science: So What, Watt’s Up With That and RichardDawkins.net. They also monitored SET content across eight more general sites: the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.
  • Their results suggest online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present. On some websites, they found no SET women. All of the 14 people in SET identified on the sampled pages of the RichardDawkins.net website were men, and so were all 29 of those mentioned on the sampled pages of the Channel 4 website (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 11).
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • They found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 7). Personally, I’d have really liked some detail as to how they came up with this, and what constituted ‘hyperlinking of women’s names’ precisely. It’s potentially an interesting finding, but I can’t quite get a grip on what they are saying.
  • They also note that the women that did appear, they were often peripheral to the main story, or ‘subject to muting’ (i.e. seen but not heard). They also noted many instances where women were pictured but remain anonymous, as if there are used to illustrate a piece – for ‘ornamental’ purposes – and give the example of the wikipedia entry on scientists, which includes a picture a women as an example, but stress she is anonymous (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12).
  • Echoing findings of earlier research on science in the media (e.g. the Bimbo or Boffin paper), they noted that women, when represented, tended to be associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, demonstrating empathy with children and animals, etc. They also noted a clustering in specific fields. For example, in the pages they’d sampled of the Guardian, they found seven mentions of women scientists compared with twenty-eight of men, and three of the these women were in a single article, about Jane Goodall (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12-13).
  • The women presented were often discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances, again echoing previous research. They also noted that women scientists, when present, tended to be younger than the men, and there was a striking lack of ethnic diversity (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 14).
  • I’m going to be quite critical of this research. It’s not actively bad, it just seems to lack depth and precision. I suspect Mendick and Moreau were doing their best with low resources and an overly-broad brief. I also think that we are still feeling our way in terms of working out how to study online science media, and so can learn something from such a critique.
  • Problem number one: it’s a small study, and yet a ginormous topic. I’d much rather they had looked at less, but made more of it. At times I felt like I was reading a cursory glance at online science.
  • Problem number two: the methodological script seemed a bit stuck in the print era. I felt the study lacked a feel for the variety of routes people take through online science. It lacked a sense of online science’s communities and cliques, its cultures and sub-cultures, its history and its people. It lacked context. Most of all, it lacked a sense of what I think sits at the center of online communication: the link.
  • It tries to look at too much, too quickly. We’re told that of the blog entries sampled from Bad Science, three out of four of the women mentioned were associated with ‘bad science’, compared to 12 out of 27 of the men . They follow up this a note that Goldacre has appeared on television critiquing Greenfield,­ a clip of which is on his site (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 17-18). OK, but ‘bad’ needs unpacking here, as does the gendered nature of the area Goldacre takes aim at. As for Susan Greenfield, she is a very complex character when it comes to the politics of science and gender (one I’d say it is dangerous to treat representations of simplistically). Moreover, this is a very small sample, without much feel for the broader media context the Bad Science blog works within, including not only other platforms for Ben Goldacre’s voice but comment threads, forums and a whole community of other ‘bad science bloggers’ (and their relationships with each other)
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11
     
    okmark
Weiye Loh

Geeks at the Beach: 10 Summer Reads About Technology and Your Life - Technology - The C... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...127762

Internet New Media Technologies

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • we're so excited about checking e-mail and Facebook that we're neglecting face-to-face relationships, but that it's not too late to make some "corrections" to our high-tech habits. It's time to turn off the BlackBerry for a few minutes and set some ground rules for blending cyberspace with personal space.
  • examples such as Wikipedia and a ride-sharing Web site as proof that "the harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways."
  • the transformative potential of the Internet, as more people use their free time in active, collaborative projects rather than watching television.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Mr. Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia and frequent contributor to The Chronicle Review, reminds readers that they aren't consumers of Google's offerings. Rather, their use of Google's services is the product it sells to advertisers. Both books look at the continuing evolution of the Google Books settlement as a key test of how far the company's reach could extend and a sign of how the perception of Google has changed from that of scrappy upstart with a clever motto, "Don't be evil," to global behemoth accused by some of being just that.
  • Is the Internet on its way to getting monopolized? That question underlies Tim Wu's The Master Switch. The eccentric Columbia Law School professor—he's known to dress up as a blue bear at the annual Burning Man festival—recounts how ruthless companies consolidated their power over earlier information industries like the telephone, radio, and film. So which tech giant seems likely to grab control of the net?
  • it feels like we're perpetually on the verge of a tipping point, when e-books will overtake print books as a source of revenue for publishers. John B. Thompson, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, analyzes the inner workings of the contemporary trade-publishing industry. (He did the same for scholarly publishing in an earlier work, Books in the Digital Age.) Mr. Thompson examines the roles played by agents, editors, and authors as well as differences among small, medium, and large publishing operations, and he probes under the surface of the great digital shift. We're too hung up on the form of the book, he argues: "A revolution has taken place in publishing, but it is a revolution in the process rather than a revolution in the product."
  • technology is actually doing far more to bolster authoritarian regimes than to overturn them, writes Evgeny Morozov in this sharp reality check on the media-fueled notion that information is making everybody free. Mr. Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, points out that the Iranian government posted "most wanted" pictures of protesters on the Web, leading to several arrests. The Muslim Brotherhood blogs actively in Egypt. And China pays people to make pro-authority statements on the Internet, paying a few cents for each endorsement. The Twitter revolution, in this book, is "overblown and completely unsubstantiated rhetoric."
  • Internet is rewiring our brains and short-circuiting our ability to think. And that has big consequences for teaching, he told The Chronicle last year: "The assumption that the more media, the more messaging, the more social networking you can bring in will lead to better educational outcomes is not only dubious but in many cases is probably just wrong."
Weiye Loh

On the Media: Survey shows that not all polls are equal - latimes.com - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...edia-20100703,0,7715000.column

Survey media bias

shared by Weiye Loh on 04 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Internet surveys sometimes acknowledge how unscientific (read: meaningless) they really are. They surely must be a pale imitation of the rigorous, carefully sampled, thoroughly transparent polls favored by political savants and mainstream news organizations
  • The line between junk and credible polling remains. But it became a little blurrier — creating concern among professional survey organizations and reason for greater skepticism by all of us — because of charges this week that one widely cited pollster may have fabricated data or manipulated it so seriously as to render it meaningless.
  • founder of the left-leaning Daily Kos website, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Oakland on Wednesday charging that Research 2000, the organization he had commissioned for 1 1/2 years to test voter opinion, had doctored its results.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The firm's protestations that it did nothing wrong have been loud and repeated. Evidence against the company is somewhat arcane. Suffice it to say that independent statisticians have found a bewildering lack of statistical "noise" in the company's data. Where random variation would be expected, results are too consistent.
  • Most reputable pollsters agree on one thing — polling organizations should publicly disclose as much of their methodology as possible. Just for starters, they should reveal how many people were interviewed, how they were selected, how many rejected the survey, how "likely voters" and other sub-groups were defined and how the raw data was weighted to reflect the population, or subgroups.
  • Michael Cornfield, a George Washington University political scientist and polling expert, recommends that concerned citizens ignore the lone, sometimes sensational, poll result. "Trend data are superior to a single point in time," Cornfield said via e-mail, "and consensus results from multiple firms are superior to those conducted by a single outfit."
  • The rest of us should look at none of the polls. Or look at all of them. And look out for the operators not willing to tell us how they're doing business.
  • Weiye Loh on 04 Jul 10
     
    On the Media: Survey shows not all polls equal
Olivia Chang

Slacktivism - 7 views

URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/opinion/edit-page/Pay-It-Forward-On-Being-A-Slacktivist/articleshow/5065543.cms The article talks about the point of view of a slacktivist. A slacktivist's ...

online activism

started by Olivia Chang on 30 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

No talk on politics and religion without license: NTU | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=7676

Censorship Politics Religion Blog

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Following the incident in which a student posted an ‘academic blacklist’ of international students, The Nanyang Technological University (NTU) sent out an email warning to its students about the school’s regulatory guidelines on internet postings.
  • The email, titled “Message on Exercising Freedom of Expression Responsibility“, warned students in particular not to ‘make comments that cause hatred or dissatisfaction with the Singapore justice system’ and not to create ‘web pages/blogs containing information on religion or politics’ unless the student has ‘acquired proper licences from the Media Development Authority AND the written approval of the University.’
  • While the list of regulations has a few sound guidelines on exercising exercising free speech on the internet, it makes no case to explain why dissatisfaction with the Singapore Justice system, if there was ever one, could not be freely expressed by its students. At the same time, the insistence on a complete blanket ban on blogs that discuss politics or religion without acquiring ‘proper licenses’ from MDA and the school contravenes the very tenets of freedom of speech.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Interestingly, judging from the contents posted, the blog TheLiberatingTruth, which was responsible for the e-mail reminder, would not have contravened any of the guidelines stated by NTU. Firstly, the blog is neither a site that discusses politics or religion, and neither is it a complete fabrication of allegations against the international students. The testimonials posted on TheLiberatingTruth, which has since shut down, are based on real-life experiences and encounters by classmates of these international students.
  • The guidelines for exercising freedom of speech responsibly on the internet seemed to have confused responsible commentary on the internet with ‘positive’ commentary — insofar as you only limit your opinions about another organization, person or entity to positive or nice-sounding words, you are deemed to have commented ‘responsibly.’
  • Weiye Loh on 09 Sep 10
     
    No talk on politics and religion without license: NTU
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