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Weiye Loh

Blogger jailed over critical restaurant review - Taipei Times - 0 views

www.taipeitimes.com/...2003506487

Blog Food Objectivity Review Freedom of Speech

shared by Weiye Loh on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 23 Jun 11
     
    OBJECTIVITY:The judge said the blogger should not have criticized the restaurant's food as 'too salty' in general, because she had eaten dried noodles and two side dishes The Taichung branch of Taiwan High Court on Tuesday sentenced a blogger who wrote that a restaurant's beef noodles were too salty to 30 days in detention and two years of probation and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to the restaurant.
Weiye Loh

Net neutrality enshrined in Dutch law | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...s-enshrines-net-neutrality-law

Net Neutrality Law

shared by Weiye Loh on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The measure, which was adopted with a broad majority in the lower house of parliament, will prevent KPN, the Dutch telecommunications market leader, and the Dutch arms of Vodafone and T-Mobile from blocking or charging for internet services like Skype or WhatsApp, a free text service. Its sponsors said that the measure would pass a pro forma review in the Dutch senate.
  • The Dutch restrictions on operators are the first in the EU. The European commission and European parliament have endorsed network neutrality guidelines but have not yet taken legal action against operators that block or impose extra fees on consumers using services such as Skype, the voice and video service being acquired by Microsoft, and WhatsApp, a mobile software maker based in California.
  • Advocates hailed the move as a victory for consumers, while industry officials predicted that mobile broadband charges could rise in the Netherlands to compensate for the new restrictions.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Only one other country, Chile, has written network neutrality requirements into its telecommunications law. The Chilean law, which was approved in July 2010, took effect in May.
  • In the US, an attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to impose a similar set of network neutrality restrictions on American operators has been tied up in legal challenges from the industry.
  • Weiye Loh on 23 Jun 11
     
    The Netherlands has become the first country in Europe to enshrine the concept of network neutrality into national law by banning its mobile telephone operators from blocking or charging consumers extra for using internet-based communications services.
Weiye Loh

New Statesman - Johann Hari and media standards - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...johann-hari-media-consistency

Journalism Churnalism Plagiarism Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Consistency is a virtue. One cannot attack - in any principled terms - the reactionary and the credulous, the knavish and the foolish, for a casual approach to sources, data, and evidence, or for disregarding normal journalistic standards, if when it is a leading liberal writer that is caught out it is somehow exceptional. It simply smacks of shallow partisanship.
  • inconsistency also undermines the normative claims for the superiority of a liberal and critical approach.How can one sensibly call out the "other side" on any given issue in terms which one would not apply to one's "own side"?
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Jun 11
     
    now that Johann Hari has apologised, one wonders if many who rushed to his support should apologise too. There were many liberal, rational, and atheistic writers and pundits who defended him on Twitter on terms they would never have extended to a conservative, religious, or quack writer or pundit exposed as making a similar sort of mistake. Naming names would be inflammatory; and they, and their followers, know who they are. What is important here is the basic principle of consistency and its value. Just imagine had it been, say, Peter Hitchens, Garry Bushell, Richard Littlejohn, Rod Liddle, Toby Young, Guido Fawkes, Melanie Phillips, Damian Thompson, Daniel Hannan, Christopher Booker, Andrew Roberts, Nadine Dorries, and so on, who had been caught out indulging in some similar malpractice. Would the many liberal or atheistic writers and pundits who sought to defend (or "put into perspective") Hari have been so charitable? Of course not.
Weiye Loh

Climate sceptic Willie Soon received $1m from oil companies, papers show | Environment | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ate-change-sceptic-willie-soon

Capitalism Lobbying Climate Science Denial Skepticism Funding

shared by Weiye Loh on 06 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN's leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Soon, who had previously disclosed corporate funding he received in the 1990s, was today reportely unapologetic, telling Reuters that he agreed that he had received money from all of the groups and companies named in the report but denied that any group would have influenced his studies.
  • "I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research," he said. "I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research."
  • Charles G Koch Foundation, a leading provider of funds for climate sceptic groups, gave Soon two grants totalling $175,000 (then roughly £102,000) in 2005/6 and again in 2010. In addition the American Petroleum insitute (API), which represents the US petroleum and natural gas industries, gave him multiple grants between 2001 and 2007 totalling $274,000, oil company Exxon Mobil provided $335,000 between 2005 and 2010, and Soon received other grants from coal and oil industry sources including the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute.
Weiye Loh

Search Engines Change How Memory Works | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...search-engine-memory

Memory Search Google Transactive Memory

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • study co-author and Columbia University psychologist Elizabeth Sparrow said it’s just another form of so-called transactive memory, exhibited by people working in groups in which facts and expertise are distributed.
  • A direct comparison of transactive learning by individuals in groups and on computers has not been performed. It would be interesting to see how they stack up, said Sparrow. It would also be interesting to further compare how transactive and internal memory function. They could affect other thought processes: For example, someone relying on internalized memory may review and synthesize other memories during recall. One small but intriguing effect in the new study involved students who were less able to identify subtly manipulated facts, such as a changed name or date, when drawing on memories they thought were saved online.
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 11
     
    Thanks to search engines, most simple facts don't need to be remembered. They can be accessed with a few keystrokes, plucked from ubiquitous server-stored external memory - and that may be changing how our own memories are maintained. A study of 46 college students found lower rates of recall on newly-learned facts when students thought those facts were saved on a computer for later recovery. If you think a fact is conveniently available online, then, you may be less apt to learn it.
Weiye Loh

Study: why bother to remember when you can just use Google? - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...en-you-can-just-use-google.ars

Memory Technology Transactive Memory

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 11
     
    In the age of Google and Wikipedia, an almost unlimited amount of information is available at our fingertips, and with the rise of smartphones, many of us have nonstop access. The potential to find almost any piece of information in seconds is beneficial, but is this ability actually negatively impacting our memory? The authors of a paper that is being released by Science Express describe four experiments testing this. Based on their results, people are recalling information less, and instead can remember where to find the information they have forgotten.
Weiye Loh

The Mechanic Muse - What Is Distant Reading? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-what-is-distant-reading.html

Data Literature Reading Digital

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of “digital humanities,” but Moretti’s approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.
  • People recognize, say, Gothic literature based on castles, revenants, brooding atmospheres, and the greater frequency of words like “tremble” and “ruin.” Computers recognize Gothic literature based on the greater frequency of words like . . . “the.” Now, that’s interesting. It suggests that genres “possess distinctive features at every possible scale of analysis.” More important for the Lit Lab, it suggests that there are formal aspects of literature that people, unaided, cannot detect.
  • Distant reading might prove to be a powerful tool for studying literature, and I’m intrigued by some of the lab’s other projects, from analyzing the evolution of chapter breaks to quantifying the difference between Irish and English prose styles. But whatever’s happening in this paper is neither powerful nor distant. (The plot networks were assembled by hand; try doing that without reading Hamlet.) By the end, even Moretti concedes that things didn’t unfold as planned. Somewhere along the line, he writes, he “drifted from quantification to the qualitative analysis of plot.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • most scholars, whatever their disciplinary background, do not publish negative results.
  • I would admire it more if he didn’t elsewhere dismiss qualitative literary analysis as “a theological exercise.” (Moretti does not subscribe to literary-analytic pluralism: he has suggested that distant reading should supplant, not supplement, close reading.) The counterpoint to theology is science, and reading Moretti, it’s impossible not to notice him jockeying for scientific status. He appears now as literature’s Linnaeus (taxonomizing a vast new trove of data), now as Vesalius (exposing its essential skeleton), now as Galileo (revealing and reordering the universe of books), now as Darwin (seeking “a law of literary ­evolution”).
  • Literature is an artificial universe, and the written word, unlike the natural world, can’t be counted on to obey a set of laws. Indeed, Moretti often mistakes metaphor for fact. Those “skeletons” he perceives inside stories are as imposed as exposed; and literary evolution, unlike the biological kind, is largely an analogy. (As the author and critic Elif Batuman pointed out in an n+1 essay on Moretti’s earlier work, books actually are the result of intelligent design.)
  • Literature, he argues, is “a collective system that should be grasped as such.” But this, too, is a theology of sorts — if not the claim that literature is a system, at least the conviction that we can find meaning only in its totality.
  • The idea that truth can best be revealed through quantitative models dates back to the development of statistics (and boasts a less-than-benign legacy). And the idea that data is gold waiting to be mined; that all entities (including people) are best understood as nodes in a network; that things are at their clearest when they are least particular, most interchangeable, most aggregated — well, perhaps that is not the theology of the average lit department (yet). But it is surely the theology of the 21st century.
Weiye Loh

The uncanny valley is right at our doorstep | Techgoondu - 0 views

www.techgoondu.com/...alley-is-right-at-our-doorstep

Uncanny Valley Simulacrum Simulation Virtual Reality

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • meet Eguchi Aimi. She is the latest member of Japanese pop band AKB48, and her perfect good looks and uncanny similarities to other AKB48 members have taken the Internet by storm. Well, no, not really. To put things into context, take a look at the video below: Just a bunch of kawaii Japanese girls advertising some candy, right? Looks tasty, too, like one of Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers. But take special notice of the girl in the center. Yes, the prettiest of the lot. Since the commercial went live on Japanese TV, she has attracted a lot of attention and a large fan base eager to learn more about her.
  • According to Channel News Asia, Eguchi Aimi took the best features of her real counterparts, namely Atsuko Maeda (eyes), Tomomi Itano (nose), Mariko Shinoda (mouth), Yuko Oshima (hair/ body), Minami Takahashi (outline) and Mayu Watanabe (eyebrows). Her voice was then provided by Yukari Sasaki.
  • Take a look at how the CGI was done: Astute observers have been pointing out her seemingly photoshopped qualities, so the revelation doesn’t really come as a surprise to many. To top it off, crushes on virtual girls aren’t all that uncommon in Japan or anywhere else.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • ery soon, we won’t be able to tell our reality from virtual reality. Eguchi Aimi looks pretty darn real to me, and if AKB48 and Glico had managed to pull off the ruse without anyone catching on, would they have continued using her in other promotional materials? At this rate of technological advancement, it won’t be ten years before we can see an entire movie made up of CGI characters looking like they real actors. And then what, synthetic life forms which look and behave exactly like us?
Weiye Loh

FleetStreetBlues: Independent columnist Johann Hari admits copying and pasting interview quotes - 0 views

fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/...ent-columnist-johann-hari.html

Journalism Objectivity Plagiarism Churnalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • this isn't just a case of referencing something the interviewee has written previously - 'As XXX has written before...', or such like. No, Hari adds dramatic context to quotes which were never said - the following paragraph, for instance, is one of the quotes from the Levy interview which seems to have appeared elsewhere before. After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”
  • So how does Hari justify it? Well, his post on 'Interview etiquette', as he calls it, is so stunningly brazen about playing fast-and-loose with quotes
  • When I’ve interviewed a writer, it’s quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they’ve said it more clearly in writing than in speech. (I know I write much more clearly than I speak – whenever I read a transcript of what I’ve said, or it always seems less clear and more clotted. I think we’ve all had that sensation in one form or another). So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview. Since my interviews are intellectual portraits that I hope explain how a person thinks, it seemed the most thorough way of doing it...
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • ...I’m a bit bemused to find one blogger considers this “plagiarism”. Who’s being plagiarized? Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own – whereas I’m always making it clear that (say) Gideon Levy’s thought is Gideon Levy’s thought. I’m also a bit bemused to find that some people consider this “churnalism”. Churnalism is a journalist taking a press release and mindlessly recycling it – not a journalist carefully reading over all a writer’s books and selecting parts of it to accurately quote at certain key moments to best reflect how they think.
  • I called round a few other interviewers for British newspapers and they said what I did was normal practice and they had done it themselves from time to time. My test for journalism is always – would the readers mind you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently? Both give an accurate sense of what a person is like, but one makes their ideas as accessible as possible for the reader while also being an accurate portrait of the person.
  • The Independent's top columnist and interviewer has just admitted that he routinely adds things his interviewees have written at some point in the past to their quotes, and then deliberately passes these statements off as though they were said to him in the course of an interview. The main art of being an interviewer is to be skilled at eliciting the right quotes from your subject. If Johann Hari wants to write 'intellectual portraits', he should go and write fiction. Do his editors really know that the copy they're printing ('we stare at each other for a while. Then he says in a quieter voice...') is essentially made up? What would Jayson Blair make of it all? Astonishing.
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    In the last few days, a couple of blogs have been scrutinising the work of Johann Hari, the multiple award-winning Independent columnist and interviewer. A week ago on Friday the political DSG blog pointed out an eerie series of similarities between the quotes in Hari's interview with Toni Negri in 2004, and quotes in the book Negri on Negri, published in 2003. Brian Whelan, an editor with Yahoo! Ireland and a regular FleetStreetBlues contributor, spotted this and got in touch to suggest perhaps this wasn't the only time quotes in Hari's interviews had appeared elsewhere before. We ummed and ahhed slightly about running the piece based on one analysis from a self-proclaimed leftist blog - so Brian went away and did some analysis of his own. And found that a number of quotes in Hari's interview with Gideon Levy in the Independent last year had also been copied from elsewhere. So far, so scurrilous. But what's really astonishing is that Johann Hari has now responded to the blog accusations. And cheerfully admitted that he regularly includes in interviews quotes which the interviewee never actually said to him.
Weiye Loh

Interview etiquette : Johann Hari - 0 views

www.johannhari.com/...interview-etiquette

Journalism Churnalism News Objectivity

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview.
  • if somebody interviewed me and asked my views of Martin Amis, instead of quoting me as saying “Um, I think, you know, he got the figures for, uh, how many Muslims there are in Europe upside down”, they could quote instead what I’d written more cogently about him a month before, as a more accurate representation of my thoughts. I stress: I have only ever done this where the interviewee was making the same or very similar point to me in the interview that they had already made more clearly in print.
  • after doing what must be over fifty interviews, none of my interviewees have ever said they had been misquoted, even when they feel I’ve been very harsh on them in other ways.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Gideon Levy said, after my interview with him was published, that it was “the most accurate take on me anyone has written” and “profoundly moved him” – which hardly fits with the idea it was an inaccurate or misleading picture.
  • one blogger considers this “plagiarism”. Who’s being plagiarized? Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own – whereas I’m always making it clear that (say) Gideon Levy’s thought is Gideon Levy’s thought. I’m also a bit bemused to find that some people consider this “churnalism”. Churnalism is a journalist taking a press release and mindlessly recycling it – not a journalist carefully reading over all a writer’s books and selecting parts of it to accurately quote at certain key moments to best reflect how they think.
  • I called round a few other interviewers for British newspapers and they said what I did was normal practice and they had done it themselves from time to time. My test for journalism is always – would the readers mind you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently? Both give an accurate sense of what a person is like, but one makes their ideas as accessible as possible for the reader while also being an accurate portrait of the person.
Weiye Loh

World Bank Institute: We're also the data bank - video | Media | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...orld-bank-institute-data-video

Open Open Government Data World World Bank Transparency Collaboration

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Jul 11
     
    Aleem Walji, practice manager for innovation at the World Bank Institute, which assists and advises policy makers and NGOs, tells the Guardian's Activate summit in London about the organisation's commitment to open data
Weiye Loh

Are the Open Data Warriors Fighting for Robin Hood or the Sheriff?: Some Reflections on OKCon 2011 and the Emerging Data Divide « Gurstein's Community Informatics - 0 views

gurstein.wordpress.com/...1-and-the-emerging-data-divide

Open Government Open Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The ideal that these nerdy revolutionaries are pursuing is not, as with previous generations—justice, freedom, democracy—rather it is “openness” as in Open Data, Open Information, Open Government. Precisely what is meant by “openness” is never (at least certainly not in the context of this conference) really defined in a form that an outsider could grapple with (and perhaps critique). 
  • the “open data/open government” movement begins from a profoundly political perspective that government is largely ineffective and inefficient (and possibly corrupt) and that it hides that ineffectiveness and inefficiency (and possible corruption) from public scrutiny through lack of transparency in its operations and particularly in denying to the public access to information (data) about its operations.
  • further that this access once available would give citizens the means to hold bureaucrats (and their political masters) accountable for their actions. In doing so it would give these self-same citizens a platform on which to undertake (or at least collaborate with) these bureaucrats in certain key and significant activities—planning, analyzing, budgeting that sort of thing. Moreover through the implementation of processes of crowdsourcing this would also provide the bureaucrats with the overwhelming benefits of having access to and input from the knowledge and wisdom of the broader interested public.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A lot of the conference took place in specialized workshops where the technical details on how to link various sets of this newly available data together with other sets, how to structure this data so that it could serve various purposes and perhaps most importantly how to design the architecture and ontology (ultimately the management policies and procedures) of the data itself within government so that it is “born open” rather than only liberated after the fact with this latter process making the usefulness of the data in the larger world of open and universally accessible data much much greater.
  • t’s the taxpayer’s money and they have the right to participate in overseeing how it is spent. Having “open” access to government’s data/information gives citizens the tools to exercise that right. And (it is argued), solutions are available for putting into the hands of these citizens the means/technical tools for sifting and sorting and making critical analyses of government activities if only the key could be turned and government data was “accessible” (“open”).
  • it matters very much who the (anticipated) user is since what is being put in place are the frameworks for the data environment  of the future and these will include for the most part some assumptions about who the ultimate user is or will be and whether or not a new “data divide” will emerge written more deeply into the fabric of the Information Society than even the earlier “digital (access) divide”.
Weiye Loh

Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...1935

Facebook Data Mining Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Facebook Friend Exporter wasn’t designed with Google+ in mind (version 1 was in fact released in November 2010), but it has exploded in the past week as Google+ beta users look for ways to port over all their Facebook friends to Google+. Facebook clearly noticed a spike in usage (the extension now has more than 17,000 users), and decided to block it. Mansour says that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension. He told me that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed.
  • “Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you,” Mansour told me in an e-mail. “Making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity. Nothing else is.”
  • As CNET points out, Facebook Friend Exporter technically violates Facebook’s Terms of Service. Section 3.2 states the following: You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission. Mansour doesn’t care about this, as he says in the extension’s description: Get *your* data contact out of Facebook, whether they want you to or not. You gave them your friends and allowed them to store that data, and you have right to take it back out! Facebook doesn’t own my friends.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • After he found out that Facebook was throttling the email field once his extension got popular, he wrote the following on his Google+ profile: I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything!
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