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Weiye Loh

Australian media take note: the BBC understands balance in climate change coverage - 0 views

theconversation.edu.au/n-climate-change-coverage-2462

Climate Change Journalism Objectivity Politics Science Climate Science Communication

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • It is far from accurate to refer to “science” as a single entity (as I just have). Many arguments that dispute the consensus about climate change being the result of man made activity talk about “scientists” as though they are “all in it together” and “supporting each other”. This implies some grand conspiracy. But science is a competition, not a collusion. If anything they are all against each other. No given person or research team has the whole picture of climate science. The range of scientific disciplines that work in this area is vast. Indeed there are few areas of science which do not potentially have something to contribute to the area. But put a geologist and a geneticist in a room together and they can barely speak the same language. Far from some great conspiracy, the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come to a consensus about climate change is truly extraordinary.
  • So the report is recommending that journalists do what they should always have done – investigate and verify. By all means ask another expert’s point of view, determine whether the latest finding is in fact good science or what its implications are. But we need to move away from the idea of “balance” between those who believe it is all a big conspiracy and those who have done some work and looked at the actual evidence. The report concludes that in particular the BBC must take special care to continue efforts to ensure viewers are able to distinguish well-established fact from opinion on scientific issues, and to communicate this distinction clearly to the audience. In other words, to remember that the plural of anecdote is not data.
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Aug 11
     
    On Wednesday the BBC Trust released their report "Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC's coverage of science". The report has resulted in the BBC deciding to reflect scientific consensus about climate change in their coverage of the issue. As a science communicator I applaud this decision. I understand and support the necessity to provide equal voice to political parties during an election campaign (indeed, I have done this, as an election occurred during my two years writing science for the ABC). But science is not politics. And scientists are not politicians. Much of the confusion about the climate change debate stems from a deep ignorance among the general population about how science works. And believe me this really is something "science" as an entity needs to address.
Weiye Loh

Miss Malaysia Toy Boy - 7 views

Yes, commodification has led to liberation. After all, capitalism is all about creating new markets for more production and consumption. Beauty has all along been commodified since the oldest trade...

started by juliet huang on 08 Oct 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 09 Oct 09
kenneth yang

SD ballot measure would ease restrictions on stem cell research - 1 views

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) - A proposed ballot issue to ease restrictions on stem cell research will strike a chord with South Dakotans because nearly everyone has had a serious disease or knows someone who...

ethics rights stem cell

started by kenneth yang on 21 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Gurstein - 0 views

firstmonday.org/...1027

Open Data Digital Divide Digital Access

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 05 Jul 11
     
    A huge industry has been created responding to the perceived social malady, the "Digital Divide". This paper examines the concepts and strategies underlying the notion of the Digital Divide and concludes that it is little more than a marketing campaign for Internet service providers. The paper goes on to present an alternative approach - that of "effective use" - drawn from community informatics theory which recognizes that the Internet is not simply a source of information, but also a fundamental tool in the new digital economy.
Weiye Loh

journalism.sg » Racial and religious offence: Why censorship doesn't cut it - 1 views

journalism.sg/...sorship-doesn%E2%80%99t-cut-it

Community Regulation New Media Hate Speech Censorship Race Religion

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • All societies use a mix of approaches to address offensive speech. In international law, like at the European court of human rights and more and more jurisdictions, there is growing feeling that the law should really be a last resort and only used for the most extreme speech – speech that incites violence in a very direct way, or that is part of a campaign that violates the rights of minorities to live free of discrimination. In contrast, simply insulting and offending others, even if feelings are very hurt, is not seen as something that should invite a legal response. Using the law to protect feelings is too great an encroachment on freedom of speech.
  • Our laws are written very broadly, such that any sort of offence, even if it does not threaten imminent violence, is seen as deserving of strict regulation. This probably reflects a very strong social consensus that race and religion should be handled delicately. So we tend to rely on strong government. The state protects racial and religious sensibilities from offence, using censorship when there’s a danger of words and actions causing hurt.
  • in almost all cases, state action was instigated by complaints from members of the public. This is quite unlike political censorship, where action is initiated by the government, often with great resistance and opposition from netizens. In a string of cases involving racial and religious offence, however, it’s the netizens who tend to demand action, sometimes acting like a lynch mob.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • in many cases, the offensive messages were spread further by those reporting the offence.
  • What is the justification for strong police action against any form of speech? Why do we sometimes feel that it may not be enough to counter bad speech with good speech in free and open debate, and that we must instead use the law to stop the bad speech? Surely, it must be because we think the bad speech is so dangerous that it can cause immediate harm; or because we don’t trust the public to respond rationally, so we don’t know if good speech would indeed triumph in open debate. Usually, if we call in the authorities, it must be because we have a mental picture of offensive speech being like lighting a match in a combustible atmosphere. It is dangerous and there’s no time to debate the merits of that match – we just have to put it out. The irony of most of the cases that we have seen in the past few years is that the people demanding government action, as if the offensive words were explosive, were also those who helped to spread them. It is like helping to spread a fire while calling for the fire brigade.
  • their act of spreading the offensive content must mean that they did not actually believe that the expression was really that dangerous in the sense of prompting violence through reprisal attacks or riots. In reposting the offensive words or pictures, they showed that they actually trusted the public enough to respond sympathetically – they had faith that enough people would add their voices to the outrage that they themselves felt when they saw the offensive images or videos or words.
  • This then raises the question, why the need to involve the police at all? If Singaporeans are grown-up enough to defend their society against offensive speech, why have calls for prosecution and censorship become the automatic response? I wonder if this is an example of the well-known habit of unthinkingly relying on government to solve all our problems even when, with a little bit of effort in the form of grassroots action can do the job.
  • The next time people encounter racist or religiously offensive speech, it would be nice to see swift responses from credible and respected civil society groups, Members of Parliament, and other ordinary citizens. If the speaker doesn’t get the message, organise boycotts, for example, and give him or her the clear message that our society isn’t going to take such offence lying down. The more we can respond ourselves through open debate and grassroots action, without the need to ask law and order to step in, the stronger our society will be.
  • Weiye Loh on 11 Mar 12
     
    No matter how hard we work at developing media literacy, we should not expect to be rid of all racially offensive speech online. There are two broad ways to respond to these breaches. We can reach out horizontally and together with our fellow citizens repair the damage by persuading others to reject harmful ideas. Or, we can reach up vertically to government, getting the authorities to act against irresponsible speech by using the law. The advantage of the latter is that it seems more efficient, punishing those who cross the line of acceptability and violate social norms, and deterring others from doing the same. The horizontal approach works through persuasion rather than the law, so it is slower and not foolproof.
Jude John

Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade - 3 views

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/world/americas/12iht-currents.html 1. "President Obama declared during the campaign that "we are the ones we've been waiting for." That messianic phrase held the ...

democrcacy technology

started by Jude John on 14 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Paul Melissa

Warning over 'surveillance state' - 9 views

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7872425.stm The article effectively speaks of how CCTV cameras and DNA database are threats to privacy. Though many states have reasoned them for being...

Privacy Surveillance

started by Paul Melissa on 08 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Olivia Chang

Boys in blue raid Perth's Sunday Times - 2 views

Story URL: http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/boys-in-blue-raid-perths-sunday-times/ Summary of the article: In February, a Sunday Times reporter Paul Lampathakis wrote an article about a ...

censorship free press

started by Olivia Chang on 02 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Low Yunying

Pirate Party wins surprise Euro seat, calls for Web freedom - 3 views

Case study: Link: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/06/08/pirate.party.eu.win/index.html Summary: A Swedish political party campaigning the legalizing of file-sharing on the Internet won ...

copyright digital rights file sharing

started by Low Yunying on 25 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

New voting methods and fair elections : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...100726crbo_books_gottlieb

Democracy Methodology

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Jul 10 - Cached
  • history of voting math comes mainly in two chunks: the period of the French Revolution, when some members of France’s Academy of Sciences tried to deduce a rational way of conducting elections, and the nineteen-fifties onward, when economists and game theorists set out to show that this was impossible
  • The first mathematical account of vote-splitting was given by Jean-Charles de Borda, a French mathematician and a naval hero of the American Revolutionary War. Borda concocted examples in which one knows the order in which each voter would rank the candidates in an election, and then showed how easily the will of the majority could be frustrated in an ordinary vote. Borda’s main suggestion was to require voters to rank candidates, rather than just choose one favorite, so that a winner could be calculated by counting points awarded according to the rankings. The key idea was to find a way of taking lower preferences, as well as first preferences, into account.Unfortunately, this method may fail to elect the majority’s favorite—it could, in theory, elect someone who was nobody’s favorite. It is also easy to manipulate by strategic voting.
  • If the candidate who is your second preference is a strong challenger to your first preference, you may be able to help your favorite by putting the challenger last. Borda’s response was to say that his system was intended only for honest men.
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  • After the Academy dropped Borda’s method, it plumped for a simple suggestion by the astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was an important contributor to the theory of probability. Laplace’s rule insisted on an over-all majority: at least half the votes plus one. If no candidate achieved this, nobody was elected to the Academy.
  • Another early advocate of proportional representation was John Stuart Mill, who, in 1861, wrote about the critical distinction between “government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented,” which was the ideal, and “government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people exclusively represented,” which is what winner-takes-all elections produce. (The minority that Mill was most concerned to protect was the “superior intellects and characters,” who he feared would be swamped as more citizens got the vote.)
  • The key to proportional representation is to enlarge constituencies so that more than one winner is elected in each, and then try to align the share of seats won by a party with the share of votes it receives. These days, a few small countries, including Israel and the Netherlands, treat their entire populations as single constituencies, and thereby get almost perfectly proportional representation. Some places require a party to cross a certain threshold of votes before it gets any seats, in order to filter out extremists.
  • The main criticisms of proportional representation are that it can lead to unstable coalition governments, because more parties are successful in elections, and that it can weaken the local ties between electors and their representatives. Conveniently for its critics, and for its defenders, there are so many flavors of proportional representation around the globe that you can usually find an example of whatever point you want to make. Still, more than three-quarters of the world’s rich countries seem to manage with such schemes.
  • The alternative voting method that will be put to a referendum in Britain is not proportional representation: it would elect a single winner in each constituency, and thus steer clear of what foreigners put up with. Known in the United States as instant-runoff voting, the method was developed around 1870 by William Ware
  • In instant-runoff elections, voters rank all or some of the candidates in order of preference, and votes may be transferred between candidates. The idea is that your vote may count even if your favorite loses. If any candidate gets more than half of all the first-preference votes, he or she wins, and the game is over. But, if there is no majority winner, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. Then the second-preference votes of his or her supporters are distributed to the other candidates. If there is still nobody with more than half the votes, another candidate is eliminated, and the process is repeated until either someone has a majority or there are only two candidates left, in which case the one with the most votes wins. Third, fourth, and lower preferences will be redistributed if a voter’s higher preferences have already been transferred to candidates who were eliminated earlier.
  • At first glance, this is an appealing approach: it is guaranteed to produce a clear winner, and more voters will have a say in the election’s outcome. Look more closely, though, and you start to see how peculiar the logic behind it is. Although more people’s votes contribute to the result, they do so in strange ways. Some people’s second, third, or even lower preferences count for as much as other people’s first preferences. If you back the loser of the first tally, then in the subsequent tallies your second (and maybe lower) preferences will be added to that candidate’s first preferences. The winner’s pile of votes may well be a jumble of first, second, and third preferences.
  • Such transferrable-vote elections can behave in topsy-turvy ways: they are what mathematicians call “non-monotonic,” which means that something can go up when it should go down, or vice versa. Whether a candidate who gets through the first round of counting will ultimately be elected may depend on which of his rivals he has to face in subsequent rounds, and some votes for a weaker challenger may do a candidate more good than a vote for that candidate himself. In short, a candidate may lose if certain voters back him, and would have won if they hadn’t. Supporters of instant-runoff voting say that the problem is much too rare to worry about in real elections, but recent work by Robert Norman, a mathematician at Dartmouth, suggests otherwise. By Norman’s calculations, it would happen in one in five close contests among three candidates who each have between twenty-five and forty per cent of first-preference votes. With larger numbers of candidates, it would happen even more often. It’s rarely possible to tell whether past instant-runoff elections have gone topsy-turvy in this way, because full ballot data aren’t usually published. But, in Burlington’s 2006 and 2009 mayoral elections, the data were published, and the 2009 election did go topsy-turvy.
  • Kenneth Arrow, an economist at Stanford, examined a set of requirements that you’d think any reasonable voting system could satisfy, and proved that nothing can meet them all when there are more than two candidates. So designing elections is always a matter of choosing a lesser evil. When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Arrow a Nobel Prize, in 1972, it called his result “a rather discouraging one, as regards the dream of a perfect democracy.” Szpiro goes so far as to write that “the democratic world would never be the same again,
  • There is something of a loophole in Arrow’s demonstration. His proof applies only when voters rank candidates; it would not apply if, instead, they rated candidates by giving them grades. First-past-the-post voting is, in effect, a crude ranking method in which voters put one candidate in first place and everyone else last. Similarly, in the standard forms of proportional representation voters rank one party or group of candidates first, and all other parties and candidates last. With rating methods, on the other hand, voters would give all or some candidates a score, to say how much they like them. They would not have to say which is their favorite—though they could in effect do so, by giving only him or her their highest score—and they would not have to decide on an order of preference for the other candidates.
  • One such method is widely used on the Internet—to rate restaurants, movies, books, or other people’s comments or reviews, for example. You give numbers of stars or points to mark how much you like something. To convert this into an election method, count each candidate’s stars or points, and the winner is the one with the highest average score (or the highest total score, if voters are allowed to leave some candidates unrated). This is known as range voting, and it goes back to an idea considered by Laplace at the start of the nineteenth century. It also resembles ancient forms of acclamation in Sparta. The more you like something, the louder you bash your shield with your spear, and the biggest noise wins. A recent variant, developed by two mathematicians in Paris, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, uses familiar language rather than numbers for its rating scale. Voters are asked to grade each candidate as, for example, “Excellent,” “Very Good,” “Good,” “Insufficient,” or “Bad.” Judging politicians thus becomes like judging wines, except that you can drive afterward.
  • Range and approval voting deal neatly with the problem of vote-splitting: if a voter likes Nader best, and would rather have Gore than Bush, he or she can approve Nader and Gore but not Bush. Above all, their advocates say, both schemes give voters more options, and would elect the candidate with the most over-all support, rather than the one preferred by the largest minority. Both can be modified to deliver forms of proportional representation.
  • Whether such ideas can work depends on how people use them. If enough people are carelessly generous with their approval votes, for example, there could be some nasty surprises. In an unlikely set of circumstances, the candidate who is the favorite of more than half the voters could lose. Parties in an approval election might spend less time attacking their opponents, in order to pick up positive ratings from rivals’ supporters, and critics worry that it would favor bland politicians who don’t stand for anything much. Defenders insist that such a strategy would backfire in subsequent elections, if not before, and the case of Ronald Reagan suggests that broad appeal and strong views aren’t mutually exclusive.
  • Why are the effects of an unfamiliar electoral system so hard to puzzle out in advance? One reason is that political parties will change their campaign strategies, and voters the way they vote, to adapt to the new rules, and such variables put us in the realm of behavior and culture. Meanwhile, the technical debate about electoral systems generally takes place in a vacuum from which voters’ capriciousness and local circumstances have been pumped out. Although almost any alternative voting scheme now on offer is likely to be better than first past the post, it’s unrealistic to think that one voting method would work equally well for, say, the legislature of a young African republic, the Presidency of an island in Oceania, the school board of a New England town, and the assembly of a country still scarred by civil war. If winner takes all is a poor electoral system, one size fits all is a poor way to pick its replacements.
  • Mathematics can suggest what approaches are worth trying, but it can’t reveal what will suit a particular place, and best deliver what we want from a democratic voting system: to create a government that feels legitimate to people—to reconcile people to being governed, and give them reason to feel that, win or lose (especially lose), the game is fair.
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Jul 10
     
    WIN OR LOSE No voting system is flawless. But some are less democratic than others. by Anthony Gottlieb
Weiye Loh

Our conflicted relationship with animals - Pets. Animals. - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Vegetarianism Animal Rights

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • In his fascinating new book, "Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat," Hal Herzog looks at the wild, tortured paradoxes in our relationship with the weaker, if sometimes more adorable, species.
  • it's the human-meat relationship. The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote "Animal Liberation" [in 1975]. We eat probably 20 percent more meat than we did when he wrote that book. Even though people are more concerned about animals, it seems like that's been occurring. The question is, why?
  • What was it about the two giant viral videos of the past few weeks -- the London woman, Mary Bale, who tried to trash that cat; the Bosnian woman who threw puppies from a bridge
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The bigger thing is they're both pet species, though. I've been thinking about this. I just went back this morning, and I uncovered a piece in the New York Times from 1877. And it's actually fascinating. They had a stray dog population, so what they did is they rounded up 750 stray dogs. They took them to the East River, and they had a large metal cage -- it took them all day to do this -- they would put 50 dogs at a time, 48 dogs at a time in this metal, iron cage, and lower it into the East River with a crane.
  • they both involved women. And this is a little bit of an anomaly, because if you look at animal cruelty trials and (data), I think it's that 90 to 95 percent are men behind them. So that's one reason why this went viral; it's the surprising idea of women being cruel in this way.
  • drowning animals was actually an acceptable way of dealing with pet overpopulation in 1877. Now it seems horrifying. I watched that girl toss those puppies into the river, and it was just horrifying.
  • rooster fighters had a fairly intricate set of moral logical framework in which cockfighting not only becomes not bad, it becomes actually good for the moral model for your children, something to be desired.
  • the most common rationale is the same one that you hear from chicken eaters: It's natural. It's really funny, I was telling a woman one time about these cockfighters, and she was telling me how disgusting it was and somehow it came around to eating chicken. I said, "Whoa, you eat chicken, how do you feel about that?" and she said, "Well, that's different because that's natural." That's exactly what the rooster fighters told me.
  • the cockfighters take good care of them, as opposed to the chicken we eat, which usually live very short, very miserable lives.
  • the fact is, there is actually less harm done by rooster fighting than there is by eating chicken.
  • There's a number of people that are bitten by pets every year. There's a shocking number of people that trip over their pet and wind up in the hospital. There's the fact that pets are the biggest source of conflict between neighbors
  • Weiye Loh on 08 Sep 10
     
    Our conflicted relationship with animals Why do we get so angry with animal abusers, but eat more animals than ever before? An expert provides some clues
Weiye Loh

Analysis: Midterm election results to limit Internet regulation | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...idUSTRE6A442020101105

Net Neutrality Communication Technology Political Economy

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Republicans are traditionally against onerous regulation of private industry, and many campaigned on promises to rein in government before the midterm elections, which saw the GOP pick up 60 House seats to secure the majority.
  • As a result, Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc and Comcast Corp have gained the upper hand in the long-fought battle over net neutrality rules,
  • The underlying idea of net neutrality is that high-speed and mobile Internet providers should not be allowed to give preferential treatment to content providers that pay for faster transmission.Companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast have lobbied against such regulations, saying they could crimp profits and lessen investments.At stake is how quickly handheld devices, like Research in Motion Ltd's BlackBerry and Apple Inc's iPhone, can receive and download videos and other content.
  • Weiye Loh on 05 Nov 10
     
    Republican takeover of the House of Representatives will mean fewer regulations for technology and telecommunications companies and a tough road ahead for the Federal Communications Commission.
Weiye Loh

'I Am Spartacus:' Man Convicted For Tweet; Virtual Protest Erupts : The Two-Way : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-tweet-virtual-protest-erupts

Twitter Freedom of Speech

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Earlier this year, Paul Chambers was concerned that he would miss a flight to Belfast. In jest, he tweeted: Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week..otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high. Well, the government came after the 27-year-old accountant and in May convicted him of sending a menacing electronic communication. He appealed the conviction and the 1,000 pound fine but the Guardian reports that, yesterday, he lost.
  • The BBC quotes a civil rights group analyzing the verdict: "The verdict demonstrates that the UK's legal system has little respect for free expression, and has no understanding of how people communicate in the 21st Century," said the [Index on Censorship's] news editor Padraig Reidy.
  • thousands of twitter users all over the world decided to protest virtually by reposting Chambers' exact tweet. They identified the protest with the hashtag #iamspartacus in reference to the scene in the 1960, Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus. In it, one-by-one slaves proclaim that they are Spartacus in order to keep the real Spartacus, a gladiator leading a slave rebellion, from detection. Minutes ago, the #iamspartacus hastag was the second most popular on all of Twitter.
Weiye Loh

Climate scientists plan campaign against global warming skeptics - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

articles.latimes.com/...na-climate-scientists-20101108

Climate Science Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday's election.
  • American Geophysical Union, the country's largest association of climate scientists, plans to announce that 700 climate scientists have agreed to speak out as experts on questions about global warming and the role of man-made air pollution.
  • John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate change skeptics, is also pulling together a "climate rapid response team," which includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows.
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  • "This group feels strongly that science and politics can't be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists," said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York.
Weiye Loh

Ellsberg: "EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me an... - 0 views

www.ellsberg.net/...public-accuracy-press-release

Wikileaks Pentagon Papers

shared by Weiye Loh on 09 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures
  • The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
  • How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that’s right, Russia’s Pravda): “What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic … After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when … government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. …”
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  • shame on Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and all those who spew platitudes about integrity, justice and accountability while allowing war criminals and torturers to walk freely upon the earth. … the American people should be outraged that their government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.
  • As part of their attempt to blacken WikiLeaks and Assange, pundit commentary over the weekend has tried to portray Assange’s exposure of classified materials as very different from — and far less laudable than — what Daniel Ellsberg did in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg strongly rejects the mantra “Pentagon Papers good; WikiLeaks material bad.” He continues: “That’s just a cover for people who don’t want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”
  • WikiLeaks’ reported source, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, having watched Iraqi police abuses, and having read of similar and worse incidents in official messages, reportedly concluded, “I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.” Rather than simply go with the flow, Manning wrote: “I want people to see the truth … because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public,” adding that he hoped to provoke worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.
  • The media: again, the media is key. No one has said it better than Monseñor Romero of El Salvador, who just before he was assassinated 25 years ago warned, “The corruption of the press is part of our sad reality, and it reveals the complicity of the oligarchy.” Sadly, that is also true of the media situation in America today.
  • The big question is not whether Americans can “handle the truth.” We believe they can. The challenge is to make the truth available to them in a straightforward way so they can draw their own conclusions — an uphill battle given the dominance of the mainstream media, most of which have mounted a hateful campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks.
  • So far, the question of whether Americans can “handle the truth” has been an academic rather than an experience-based one, because Americans have had very little access to the truth. Now, however, with the WikiLeaks disclosures, they do. Indeed, the classified messages from the Army and the State Department released by WikiLeaks are, quite literally, “ground truth.”
Weiye Loh

BBC News - Cleaners 'worth more to society' than bankers - study - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8410489.stm

Capitalism Equality

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid. It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy. They reportedly destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn. Meanwhile, senior advertising executives are said to "create stress". The study says they are responsible for campaigns which create dissatisfaction and misery, and encourage over-consumption.
  • And tax accountants damage the country by devising schemes to cut the amount of money available to the government, the research suggests. By contrast, child minders and waste recyclers are also doing jobs that create net wealth to the country.
  • a new form of job evaluation to calculate the total contribution various jobs make to society, including for the first time the impact on communities and environment.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Pay levels often don't reflect the true value that is being created. As a society, we need a pay structure which rewards those jobs that create most societal benefit rather than those that generate profits at the expense of society and the environment".
  • "The point we are making is more fundamental - that there should be a relationship between what we are paid and the value our work generates for society. We've found a way to calculate that,"
  • The research also makes a variety of policy recommendations to align pay more closely with the value of work. These include establishing a high pay commission, building social and environmental value into prices, and introducing more progressive taxation.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Dec 09
     
    Cleaners 'worth more to society' than bankers - study
Weiye Loh

After Wakefield: Undoing a decade of damaging debate « Skepticism « Critical ... - 0 views

www.skepticnorth.com/...ng-a-decade-of-damaging-debate

Debate Vaccine Medicine

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Mass vaccination completely eradicated smallpox, which had been killing one in seven children.  Public health campaigns have also eliminated diptheria, and reduced the incidence of pertussis, tetanus, measles, rubella and mumps to near zero.
  • when vaccination rates drop, diseases can reemerge in the population again. Measles is currently endemic in the United Kingdom, after vaccination rates dropped below 80%. When diptheria immunization dropped in Russia and Ukraine in the early 1990′s, there were over 100,000 cases with 1,200 deaths.  In Nigeria in 2001, unfounded fears of the polio vaccine led to a drop in vaccinations, an re-emergence of infection, and the spread of polio to ten other countries.
  • one reason that has experienced a dramatic upsurge over the past decade or so has been the fear that vaccines cause autism. The connection between autism and vaccines, in particular the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine, has its roots in a paper published by Andrew Wakefield in 1998 in the medical journal The Lancet.  This link has already been completely and thoroughly debunked – there is no evidence to substantiate this connection. But over the past two weeks, the full extent of the deception propagated by Wakefield was revealed. The British Medical Journal has a series of articles from journalist Brian Deer (part 1, part 2), who spent years digging into the facts behind Wakefield,  his research, and the Lancet paper
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  • Wakefield’s original paper (now retracted) attempted to link gastrointestinal symptoms and regressive autism in 12 children to the administration of the MMR vaccine. Last year Wakefield was stripped of his medical license for unethical behaviour, including undeclared conflicts of interest.  The most recent revelations demonstrate that it wasn’t just sloppy research – it was fraud.
  • Unbelievably, some groups still hold Wakefield up as some sort of martyr, but now we have the facts: Three of the 9 children said to have autism didn’t have autism at all. The paper claimed all 12 children were normal, before administration of the vaccine. In fact, 5 had developmental delays that were detected prior to the administration of the vaccine. Behavioural symptoms in some children were claimed in the paper as being closely related to the vaccine administration, but documentation showed otherwise. What were initially determined to be “unremarkable” colon pathology reports were changed to “non-specific colitis” after a secondary review. Parents were recruited for the “study” by anti-vaccinationists. The study was designed and funded to support future litigation.
  • As Dr. Paul Offit has been quoted as saying, you can’t unring a bell. So what’s going to stop this bell from ringing? Perhaps an awareness of its fraudulent basis will do more to change perceptions than a decade of scientific investigation has been able to achieve. For the sake of population health, we hope so.
Weiye Loh

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13search.html

Search Engine Optimization SEO

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.
  • Exploiting those hovels for links is a Google no-no. The company’s guidelines warn against using tricks to improve search engine rankings, including what it refers to as “link schemes.” The penalty for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company sinks in Google’s results.
  • In 2006, Google announced that it had caught BMW using a black-hat strategy to bolster the company’s German Web site, BMW.de. That site was temporarily given what the BBC at the time called “the death penalty,” stating that it was “removed from search results.”
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  • BMW acknowledged that it had set up “doorway pages,” which exist just to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving users, adding “if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have to take this into consideration.”
  • The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.
  • He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.
  • He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months. “Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do,” he said. “But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I think we do an amazing job.”
  • You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and they’re eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness.
  • Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger.
  • PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.
  • “Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.” And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.
  • At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.” Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
Weiye Loh

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13search.html

Search Engine Optimization SEO

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.
  • Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.
  • Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google’s natural search?”
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  • Asked if Penney received any breaks because of the money it has spent on ads, Mr. Cutts said, “I’ll give a categorical denial.” He then made an impassioned case for Google’s commitment to separating the money side of the business from the search side. The former has zero influence on the latter, he said.
  • “There is a very long history at Google of saying ‘We are not going to worry about short-term revenue.’ ” He added: “We rely on the trust of our users. We realize the responsibility that we have to our users.”
  • He noted, too, that before The Times presented evidence of the paid links to JCPenney.com, Google had just begun to roll out an algorithm change that had a negative effect on Penney’s search results. (
  • True, JCPenney.com’s showing in Google searches had declined slightly by Feb. 8, as the algorithm change began to take effect. In “comforter sets,” Penney went from No. 1 to No. 7. In “sweater dresses,” from No. 1 to No. 10. But the real damage to Penney’s results began when Google started that “manual action.” The decline can be charted: On Feb. 1, the average Penney position for 59 search terms was 1.3.
  • MR. CUTTS said he did not plan to write about Penney’s situation, as he did with BMW in 2006. Rarely, he explained, does he single out a company publicly, because Google’s goal is to preserve the integrity of results, not to embarrass people. “But just because we don’t talk about it,” he said, “doesn’t mean we won’t take strong action.”
Weiye Loh

Found by James » Notes » Amnesty International: Chop Pencils - 0 views

foundbyjames.com/...sty-international-chop-pencils

Human Rights Campaign China

shared by Weiye Loh on 31 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Saatchi & Saatchi placed chopsticks that are actually pencils at Chinese restaurants encouraging people to write to the Chinese government rejecting torture. A nice gesture to raise awareness and drive activism about human rights violations in China with an emphasis on prisoners of conscience, torture and executions.
  • Text on the package: Tuck under thumb and hold firmly. Write the Chinese government to help end torture. Take further action at amnesty.org/china. Don’t let human rights violations by the Chinese government give China a bad name.
  • by Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, USA
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