TOC Feature: participating in the IBA

Posted by theonlinecitizen on October 22nd, 2007

By Jeth Lee

Thanks to the kind sponsorship of TOC, I was able to attend the much talked about Rule of Law Symposium organised by the International Bar Association last Friday despite it being priced at a restrictively high 60 Sterling pounds (citizen journalists don’t get paid very well).

The symposium was a full-day programme that was widely hyped to be able to provide a clearer perspective of what the status and meaning of the rule of law are in Asia, especially in the host state of Singapore. With a stellar cast of speakers comprising Deputy Prime Minister Professor S. Jayakumar, Judge Hisashi Owada, a former Japanese Ambassador to the UN and Justice Albie Sachs, a renowned human rights and anti-apartheid campaigner, one could expect no less.

However, judging from the aims of the symposium and what transpired, I must say that the symposium has largely failed.

DPM S. Jayakumar’s speech part 1- déjà vu

It was perhaps expected that the keynote speech by Professor Jayakumar brought nothing new to the table in terms of our understanding of the rule of law in Singapore.

Most of us are already savvy to the concept of the rule of law. No one is above the law, as opposed to the rule by law, where laws posited by government are to be followed without question and the spirit of the law is subordinated to the legislative will.

Promisingly, the DPM first acknowledged that the rule of law embodied several universal principles despite its amorphousness, including clear limits to the power of the state, equality in application and protection of the fundamental rights of individuals.

He then predictably qualified the application of these universal principles in saying that while these principles must be maintained, a balance must be struck in view of each country’s own socio-political context. This led to the familiar refrain that Asian societies place greater emphasis on the community vis-à-vis Western societies, which shift the emphasis to the rights of individuals.

One would wonder if the drafter of the speech uncovered a dusty copy of the infamous Shared Values White Paper, released 16 years ago, and did the glorious job of cutting and pasting. A symposium of this scale was not needed for such rehashing. It certainly did not go towards the aim of improving the status quo as it stands here.

A 16 year-old ideology. Phew, I thought: the last thing you can accuse government ideologues of is having an imagination.

DPM speech part 2- Singapore is different

In the same vein, the DPM touched on the non-homogeneity of Singapore’s societal composition and how therefore we needed special laws to deal with it. He quoted an example of three individual bloggers posting racist remarks in 2006 and their subsequent charging under the Sedition Act, saying that in other countries such prosecution could be considered as infringement of freedom of expression.

And then he left the thought hanging.

I found it strange that the DPM did not attempt to explain why in Singapore that was not considered a similar infringement.

Are not the rights in the Constitution paramount and superior to all ordinary laws? And doesn’t it guarantee such freedoms, which should require justification before suspending?

What seemed so self-evident to the DPM was a conclusion the audience was left to come to themselves: that what is considered constitutional is then decided by the normative character of each country, and the fundamental rights of the individual (one that he considers to be a universal element of the rule of law) are free to be eroded accordingly through the application of laws.

But wouldn’t it mean that there is thus reason to doubt that what the DPM said at the start of his speech: that fundamental rights of the individual are a universal element of the rule of law that are applied in Singapore?

DPM speech part 3 – majority rule

By way of justification of Singapore’s strict criminal laws, Professor Jayakumar pointed to the low crime rate that we all enjoy and said that law and order have been maintained. Many (myself included) couldn’t help but nod in agreement.

However, what followed was an unnecessary, and I would say unjustified, reason for why we have the death penalty. The DPM said, and I quote in verbatim, “In Singapore, the death penalty is the will of the majority. A Straits Times survey in 2006 showed a large majority, 96% of the electorate in support of the death penalty.”

Firstly, the conduct of the survey was amongst 425 Singaporeans and permanent residents, hardly indicative of society at large. I also find it greatly disturbing that the newspaper managed to find 425 Singaporeans with such views – which dark part of Singapore did these reporters visit?

Secondly, the DPM’s assertions rest on a disturbing premise that seems to underline a similar position the government has taken on section 377a – majoritarian rule is the way to go. Have we truly learnt nothing about the tyranny of the majority in mankind’s history that we are to believe this to be true (think apartheid, segregation and slavery)?

I have no doubt that the majority of Singaporeans are in favour of stoning and castrating child molesters. Perhaps the government could consider that in a next Penal Code amendment.

Fireworks at Q & A

DPM’s assertion towards the end of his speech that Singapore’s laws have strengthened social fabric raised hackles amongst several in the audience.

Feeding frenzy began once the floor was opened for questions. First up was Mr. Timothy Cooper of the U.S.-based human rights advocacy group, Worldrights, who vigorously stated that the human rights community felt that the Singaporean judiciary was not as outstanding as claimed, but that instead there was no level playing field for opposition members to fight cases. Familiar examples of defamation suits were raised.

The DPM’s response was two-pronged: (1) that all defamation suits were won because the PAP hired good lawyers and were certain that the cases could be won at the outset before bringing an action and (2) that Singapore society still retained the old-fashioned view that leaders must be morally upright and superior in stature and leaders are bound to defend their honour (reminiscent once again of the junzi or gentleman concept in the Shared Values White Paper).

Dr. Chee Soon Juan also took the opportunity to wash some of the government’s dirty laundry. These included the preventive detention without trial of Chia Thye Poh, the world’s longest-serving political prisoner at 32 years, and Francis Seow, former Solictor-General and currently in exile. Dr. Chee’s pronouncement that he was “sure [the delegates] would want to hear what the reality of Singapore is” was met by thunderous applause in the audience.

As reported in the press, DPM accused Dr. Chee of turning the IBA conference into a “theatre on Singapore politics” and did not deal substantially with the questions asked.

It wasn’t very good theatre, I thought.

The panel discussion

After a short break, we convened once again to hear shorter speeches from a panel which included Associate Professor Simon Tay of the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, Ms. Sylvia Lim, Chairperson of the Workers’ Party and Non-Constituency MP, as well as Ms. Ambiga Sreenevasan, President of the Malaysian Bar.

Professor Tay offered that the “Asian values” debate has long passed and the tendency is now towards Singapore’s adherence to international standards. However, he further suggested that we should insist on a universal definition of the concepts within the rule of law, but not towards the content of laws.

In so saying, Professor Tay seemed to proffer that the content of the rule of law is normative and we cannot therefore directly impose foreign laws directly on Asian cities. Although I understood the nuanced theoretical paradigm shift, I found it difficult to distinguish this from the reasoning in DPM Jayakumar’s speech, since the practical thrust of the arguments are the same – that we can somehow justify deviating from what is internationally accepted by reference to our socio-political state as articulated by the government.

Ms. Lim stated that conferences like this were good to measure Singapore against international benchmarks, but subsequently qualified this by saying that Singaporeans must ultimately decide what type of country they want and there was no need for outsiders to canvass the agenda for us.

Personally, I find there to be some truth in this, that the fate of a country can only be determined by the will of its own people. Yet, as we can see in present day Myanmar, there is a limit to what an oppressed people can do if the power of government is so strong as to restrict any opposition to a mere squeak. International, or even regional pressure, is sometimes needed in order to assist in the dealing of rule of law issues within any state. (Read Ms Lim’s full speech here.)

I was rather impressed by Ms. Sreeevasan who spoke candidly about the state of the rule of law in Malaysia and about the lack of public confidence in the judiciary.

While not as openly activist as their causeway counterparts, I believe the Singaporean Bar matches the independence that its Malaysian counterpart possesses. The Law Society’s willingness to challenge the status quo from issues ranging from the death penalty and 377a to questioning high ministerial pay bears testament that lawyers in Singapore are not willing to be passive observers in the democratic process.

Breakout session – a saving grace

I was starting to feel slightly queasy from the barrage of speeches. Thankfully, it was soon announced that there would be a breakout session where participants would form smaller groups to discuss in greater detail matters concerning the rule of law.

I chose to partake in the facilitated group discussion on the independence of the judiciary. To the organisers’ credit, group sizes were kept to a cosy cap of 10 people.

My table looked something like the UN committee – the convener was a Venezuelan, while Canada, England, Japan, Liberia, Pakistan, Scotland, Singapore and Syria were all represented by lawyers from those countries.

The group sessions were the symposium’s saving grace for my IBA experience. My group engaged in a lively, sometimes heated, but always respectful discussion about improving the rule of law. Among the more interesting hypotheticals that went around the table was what would happen in our respective countries if an individual were to sue his government.

Going around the table, each participant offered information about the measures that his/her individual country has taken to ensure independence and the defects in their systems. I was thankfully spared any lectures on how to improve our judicial system, and was pleasantly surprised at the candour with which everyone was constructively criticising their judiciaries. As an English barrister I spoke to in the forum said, with a Canadian law professor concurring, there is no one country where quality of justice cannot be improved.

More tellingly, despite the focus of the discussion being on the independence of the judiciary and legal profession, the topic soon veered towards public confidence in the judiciary and accordingly on to the freedom of the press and freedom of expression in general.

Very clearly, there is no single subject of discussion with respect to the rule of law that can be dealt with in a vacuum. Instead, the interconnectedness of the issues necessitates that for the rule of law to work in any country, Singapore included, there needs to be a comprehensive system of institutional checks and balances.

We’ve still got some way to go.

About the author: Jeth Lee is a law undergraduate at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore and the Chief Editor of the Singapore Law Review. He believes the rule of law will one day be present in Singapore in its entirety – but not just yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 12:36 am and is filed under Current Affairs, Guest Writers, TOC On Site, TOC Reports.

[Source] http://theonlinecitizen.com/2007/10/22/toc-feature-participating-in-the-iba/

 

What’s next for the Internet

Nova Spivack is racing to bring meaning and order to the chaos of the Internet. And he’s not alone. Business 2.0 reports.

By Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine senior writer

After taking one of the first Internet companies — EarthWeb — public in 1998, Nova Spivack joined some friends at a weedy airstrip deep inside the new Russia for a trip into Earth’s stratosphere.

Having space travel on your resume is de rigueur for Internet entrepreneurs these days, but this was 1999, and not even the Russian pilots were sure how the flight would turn out. As Spivack was being strapped into a MiG-25 and prepped for his trip at Mach 3, about 20 miles straight up, he looked around for an ejection button or lever in case things went south.

There wasn’t one. “‘Don’t worry about eet,’ the pilot told me,” says Spivack, mustering his best Russian accent. “At the speed you will be going, even if you could eject, first your body would explode into vapor, then the vapor would freeze into ice crystals, and then the crystals would burn up on reentry.”

With that, they taxied down the runway for a quick ride to the edge of space.

Spivack returned in one piece ready to launch more startups, but the image of his body exploded into ice crystals and skittering into the stratosphere never left him. And in fact, it’s not a bad metaphor — in reverse — for what his newest venture is trying to do.

The Next Net: 25 startups to watch

If you think of the World Wide Web as a cloud of largely undifferentiated information, the mission of the company he’s about to unveil, Radar Networks, is to take that cloud and impose order on it. Not just any order, but a very special kind known to experts by one of the hottest buzzwords in computer science today: the semantic Web.

For all the wonders that today’s Web can deliver to your fingertips — the Norwegian word for ice cream, a seat on the next flight to Paris, the best price for a Clash CD — it has a fundamental flaw.

It’s basically a compendium of billions of text documents designed to be read by humans. You can search it for keywords, but the results aren’t much use until you sort through them to find the page that has the info you want.

To take the Web to the next level — to move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 — the information in those documents will have to be turned into data that a machine can read and evaluate on its own. Only then will computers be able to take over tasks we now do by hand: find the nearest restaurant, book the best flight, buy the cheapest CD.  

Think of it as the difference between two dimensions and three dimensions. “People will see the Web start to become smarter,” Spivack says. “Eventually it will have some reasoning capabilities built into it.”

We’ll get to how that happens in a bit. For Spivack, however, the semantic Web begins now with the data engine and user applications he and his team are prepping for launch — and ends somewhere in the future with artificially intelligent software agents handling all the online drudgery of your business and professional life.

Radar Networks isn’t the only company exploring the potential of the semantic Web. It’s a disruptive technology with the power to unseat today’s Internet titans — especially search engine giants like Google (Charts, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500) — and it’s being vigorously pursued by startups like Garlik, Metaweb Technologies, Powerset, and ZoomInfo, as well as big corporations like Citigroup (Charts, Fortune 500), Eli Lilly, Kodak (Charts, Fortune 500), Oracle (Charts, Fortune 500), and Google and Yahoo themselves.

One estimate pegs the market for products and services stemming from semantic Web technologies at $50 billion by 2010, up from about $7 billion today.

But for all the entrepreneurs ready to spin gold out of the semantic Web, there are as many skeptics convinced that it’s a pipe dream — a fancy name for a problem that will never be fully solved. Spivack, with the confidence of a man who has been to space without a safety net, is determined to prove them wrong.

The 50 Who Matter Now

Radar Networks is housed in a renovated warehouse not far from the ballpark where the San Francisco Giants play. Inside, massive redwood timbers span the high ceilings alongside thick clusters of data cable. A Nintendo Wii and a shiny new De’Longhi espresso machine are the only outward signs of anything being done here but mind-bending work.

There are 20 people at the company now, but there’s space for 50, and with just a bit less than $10 million in venture funding, Spivack and his senior executives are busy hiring.

The background of the Radar team includes deep expertise in statistics, bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence. Radar’s chief architect, Jim Wissner, is a Java ace. Chris Jones, director of products and operations, is a design and user interface whiz. CTO Lew Tucker got his start by mapping neural transmitters in the brain. Tucker and Spivack go back to the late ’80s, when they both worked for Danny Hillis at Thinking Machines.

Given all the firepower assembled at Radar Networks, you get the sense that this is not your typical Web startup. And it’s not. The task the company has set for itself — bringing the power of the semantic Web to the Internet — is not easy to describe. Even the man who invented the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, needs a little room to explain why it’s important.

Watch The New Disruptors channel

The term “semantic Web” first gained prominence in a 2001 article by Berners-Lee and two coauthors, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, in Scientific American. In it they described software agents roaming across the Web, making travel arrangements and doctor’s appointments and muting the stereo when the telephone rings.

It was a great vision, but it couldn’t be achieved with today’s Internet.

For the semantic Web to work, online information needs to be made readable by machines. Services like Google do a great job of sifting through all those webpages, but it’s up to people to recognize the things they want when they see them in the results. It’s also up to people to combine information to, say, plan a long-overdue ski trip.  

The Web just isn’t very smart yet; one webpage is the same as any other. It might have a higher Google ranking, but there’s no distinction based on meaning.

The semantic Web in the Berners-Lee vision acts more like a series of connected databases, where all information resides in a structured form. Within that structure is a layer of description that adds meaning that the computer can understand. (“Semantics” is the branch of linguistics concerned with meaning.)

On the semantic Web, a person — Nova Spivack, for example — isn’t just a name that comes up on webpages when you google him. He’s a fully described object endowed with certain well-defined properties: a date of birth, a job title, a home address, specific hobbies, the fact that he is the grandson of legendary management thinker Peter Drucker.

People on the semantic Web have unambiguous connections to the places they work, the people they’re related to, their friends, their calendars, and the things they’re interested in. Being able to connect those properties in seen and unseen ways is what gives the semantic Web its power.

Consider this scenario: Say you want to arrange a dinner at an upcoming conference. Today you might go through your address book and ping folks by e-mail to see who’s attending. Then you probably send out e-mail invitations to dinner. You go back and forth with the group on the place and time, somehow you all agree, and then somebody makes a reservation. Files fly back and forth, with humans at the center.

In the semantic Web, your software agent will “know” in advance what’s involved in arranging a dinner. Instead of you sending out a flurry of e-mails, the agent could cull the conference attendees and make a list of potential invitees.

 It might also look through your address book to see which of your friends live in the city where the conference is being held. Once a list of potential dinner guests has been approved by you, the agent would negotiate the date and time with everyone else’s agents via a calendar database, pick a restaurant from another database based on availability and your personal preferences, make the reservation, and send out directions. In a GPS-enabled world, it could even let you know how far a guest who is running late has to go.

The future of Web TV

Of course, it’s been six years since Berners-Lee put his vision out there, and you still can’t get that sort of service. Tagging is a start, and services like Flickr offer a sort of crude Web 2.0 version of the semantic Web. Google Base is another stab at bringing semantic technologies to the wider Web, serving as a place where anyone can enter data and have it searched, but it doesn’t use the semantic approach from start to finish.

Bringing a true semantic Web to the world is a chicken-and-egg problem. Until there’s enough data rendered in computer-readable form (resource description framework, or RDF, is the leading standard) with enough metadata attached to it to make it meaningful, nobody is going to be able to create any interesting services.

The agents of the semantic Web need the raw ingredients before they can make their soufflés.

But you can do some interesting things within subsets of the Web. Large pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly (Charts, Fortune 500) have been experimenting with adding a semantic layer on top of their drug discovery databases to help scientists see connections between drug molecules and diseases.

Amazon.com (Charts, Fortune 500) is keen on using semantic technologies to help customers search its databases. Kodak wants semantic tagging to help photographers organize their snapshots online. The CIA has been loading its databases of overseas phone taps into semantic “mills” to make it easier to sift for connections between people, places, and incidents — hoping to spot terror threats before it’s too late.

“But how do you make this thing really useful for ordinary people?” asks Radar CTO Tucker. “Not everyone is a CIA analyst.”

Spivack’s answer grew out of conversations he had with Drucker in the summer of 2001, about four years before the professor’s passing. “We would meet for two hours a day and talk about organizations vs. organisms,” Spivack says. Drucker was particularly interested in what he called the intelligence of organizations. “My grandfather helped me think about group minds,” Spivack says. “How groups get more intelligent, and how connections play into that.

“The quest for the perfect online ad

Since bringing the semantic Web into the world is a chicken-and-egg proposition, Radar Networks has built both the chicken and the egg. The chicken is the underlying engine the team has created that not only turns data into simple but meaningful digital objects via RDF but also scales up to hold hundreds of millions of objects that can be searched, swapped, and connected to one another. The egg is the user application that rides on top of it all.

The first consumer app Radar plans to launch is a sort of personal data organizer. It will allow you to bring in e-mail, contacts, photos, video, music –anything digital, really — from anywhere on the Web, turn it into RDF, and access it in one place.

Semantic tags are added manually, or automatically if the item is a photo from Flickr or a video from YouTube. “We add a new level of order to connect and interact with these things at a higher level than is possible today,” Spivack says. “We are letting you build a little semantic Web for your project, your group, or your interest.”

When it’s done, it should be like the best wiki you’ve ever used. To illustrate, Spivack flips open his computer and pulls up his own Radar-enabled page. On it are groups of people he knows and interests he’s pursuing, including the space industry, alternative energy, physics, Internet-related technology, and skiing. In each of these categories are objects that Spivack has collected and tagged or, if it is a topic that has multiple people included, that they have collected and tagged.

In the skiing topic, for example, Spivack has posed a question: Where should we go skiing? One of the responses is Alta, Utah. When Spivack clicks on that item, the Radar engine goes out and finds all the things in the Radar Networks database related to Alta. It “knows” that Alta, in this case, refers to a place (as opposed to the Spanish word for “high”), so there are hotel suggestions. There are also photos, videos, trail maps, and comments from people in his group who have skied there before.

In a sense, what Radar allows Spivack to do is build a database around any question, project, or interest he may have and then start looking at it from different perspectives: cost, distance from San Francisco, snow conditions in March, nearby restaurants, what his friends liked about a particular resort.

And if they liked Alta, what other places did they like? “You start to see new ways to look at the information,” Spivack says. “What gets me excited is what we can do when we have billions of objects and 10 million people using them.”

For that to happen, of course, people need to start adding their own digital stuff to the mix. The digital life organizer is the bait Spivack and his team are using to try to draw them in. The team will also open Radar Networks to outside developers to write their own applications. Those might involve travel, food, or a better way to manage large projects.

Radar hopes to be the engine powering all that, providing a massive, meaning-filled Web of data that can be infinitely poked and prodded and leveraged. The company will make its money from advertising and premium subscriptions; the basic service will be free.

But don’t expect a sci-fi software agent that takes care of your every whim — Spivack is quick to say that’s not what Radar is launching. “Those people who think we will be offering Hal 9000 when this goes public in October will be disappointed,” he says. “We’ve had the problem of overpromising in this industry; a lot of us who were working on semantic Web technologies early on saw the potential and got a little excited. It has taken much longer to realize than we thought. One thing Web 2.0 has taught everybody is that simpler is better. Find something useful and iterate on that.”

Tom Coates, whose day job at Yahoo involves working on just these issues, thinks the Web 2.0 crowd is already taking care of the problem. He points to tagging and microformats that add some of the same metadata to webpages that semantic technologies offer.

“I call it the dirty semantic Web,” Coates says from his London office. “It may not be the pristine Berners-Lee view of the world, but it is headed in the right direction.”

On a lark, Coates and a colleague created a site called Astronewsology that demonstrates the power of a semantic approach by combining news reports and horoscopes. Using it, you can search the news by the sign Capricorn and see whether that day’s horoscope had any bearing on what happened to people born between Dec. 22 and Jan. 20. Coates’s point is that you can extract meaning from the data without adopting the exacting standards proposed by Berners-Lee.

Growing in the shadow of Google

Things get even more interesting when the data starts to become interconnected.

“It’s in the combination that the real power of this comes out,” Coates says. “The mashup is an early example of the Web that is to come. Semantic technologies have not taken off as much as we’d hoped because people are finding more utility in other Web 2.0 technologies at the moment. The goal is the most important thing: reusable, repurposable, and reconnectable data. How we get there is not as important.”

The shift to a semantic Web is still in its very early days. Spivack envisions a time line of five to seven years. But the shift is clearly under way. James Hendler, one of the coauthors of that seminal Scientific American article, sees the same dynamics he did when the Web was first forming.

“Those of us who were involved saw little islands of the Web being created,” he says. “To most people, the Web seemed to happen overnight, because they hadn’t seen the first six to eight years of effort. We’re in that early phase of the semantic Web.

” Radar Networks, Google Base, and even Flickr are the first islands to pop into public view. Larger islands are being formed by corporations and government agencies. Many more will rise.  

Spivack is counting on those islands to eventually coalesce. That’s when the potential becomes reality. That’s when we can all kick back and let our software agents go out and bring some order to the chaos of our digital lives.

[Source] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/07/01/100117068/index.htm?postversion=2007070305

 

The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts

September 12, 2007

If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people?

 If a new crop of user-news sites—and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites—are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources, according to a new study.

The report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.

 In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites—Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us—were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth, according to the study.

The report also found subtle differences in three other forms of user-driven content within one site: Yahoo News’ Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed.

The question of whether citizens define the news differently than professionals is becoming increasingly relevant. It started with offering visitors a sense of what others found interesting: what news stories were most emailed and most viewed?

Soon, establishment news sites like CBSNews.com allowed users to make their own newscasts. Then, names like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us emerged as virtual town squares that became a way to measure the pulse of what the web community finds most newsworthy, most captivating, or just amusing. The trend continues, as even Myspace, the social networking site popular among 20-somethings, has launched a news page (http://news.myspace.com).

Indeed, these user-driven sites have entered the news business, or perhaps more accurately, they have entered the news dissemination business. Reporting is not a part of their charge.

Instead, they turn to others for content and then they bestow users with the task of deciding what makes it on the page.

What do individuals do with that power? What kind of events or issues do they choose to highlight? And how does it differ from the news the mainstream press offers?

To find out, PEJ took a snapshot of coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29, 2007, on three sites that offer user-driven news agendas: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, the Project studied Yahoo News, an outlet that offers an editor-based news page and three different lists of user-ranked news: Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed. These sites were then compared with the news agenda found in the 48 mainstream news outlets contained in PEJ’s News Coverage Index.

A total of 644 stories from the three user-driven sites and Yahoo News’s three most popular pages were coded for the study and then compared to 1,395 stories from the same time period in PEJ’s News Coverage Index. The report first compared the content of the user-sites to that of the mainstream press. Next, it compared the three user-sites to each other. Finally, the study looked at the three user-oriented pages on Yahoo News, comparing them to Yahoo’s editor-selected news page, to the other user-sites, and to each other.

Some key findings include:

• The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories users selected did not appear anywhere among the top stories in the mainstream media coverage studied. And there was often little in the way of follow-up. Most stories on the user-news sites appeared only once, never to be repeated again in the week we studied.

• The sources user news sites draw on are strikingly different from the mainstream media. Seven in ten stories on the user sites come either from blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news.

• The three user news sites differed from one another in subtle ways. Reddit was the most likely to focus on political events from Washington, such as coverage of Vice President Cheney; Digg was particularly focused on the release of Apple’s new iPhone; Del.icio.us had the most fragmented mix of stories and the least overlap with the News Index.

• On Yahoo News—even when picking from a limited list of stories Yahoo editors had already pared down—users’ top stories only rarely matched those of the news professionals.

• There were mostly similarities in what people are most likely to email each other versus what they recommend or view on Yahoo News. But there were some differences. Most Recommended stories focused more on “news you can use” such as advice from the World Health Organization to exercise one’s legs during long flights; the Most Viewed stories were often breaking news, more sensational in nature, with a heavy dose of crime and celebrity; and the Most Emailed stories were more diverse, with a mix of the practical and the oddball.

• Despite claims that the Web would internationalize consumers’ news diets, coverage across the three user-news sites focused more on domestic events and less on news from abroad than the mainstream media that week. Yahoo News, both on its main news page and three most popular pages, meanwhile, stood out for being decidedly more international that week.

In short, the user-news agenda, at least in this one-week snapshot, was more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory than that of the mainstream news media. This does not mean necessarily that users disapprove or reject the mainstream news agenda. These user sites may be supplemental for audiences. They may gravitate to them in addition to, rather than instead of, traditional venues. But the agenda they set is nonetheless quite different. This initial report is based on a limited sample—a one week snapshot—to get a first sense of differences and similarities in user-driven and mainstream media. PEJ intends in a future study to delve further into this area of research.

The Big Picture

Past research by PEJ has found that week-to-week mainstream media tend to focus on a handful of major events that they monitor continuously over the course of a week or a month. Whether it be floods in the Midwest, the death of Anna Nicole Smith or debate over the President’s “surge” policy in Iraq, a sizable amount of airtime or space is often spent on just a handful of “big” stories of the week.

The week of June 24 was no different. There were no major breaking events demanding special media attention, but a handful of stories emphasizing political events in Washington and conflicts abroad dominated.

During that week, the immigration debate led the coverage, accounting for 10% of all news stories in the News Coverage Index. That was followed by coverage of a major fire near Lake Tahoe (6%), the failed bombings in the United Kingdom (6%), events on the ground in Iraq (6%), Supreme Court decisions (5%), the 2008 presidential election (4%), flooding in Texas (4%), the policy debate in the capitol over the war in Iraq (4%), U.S. domestic terrorism (3%), and the missing pregnant woman in Ohio (3%). In all, the top ten stories that week accounted for 51% of all the stories in the Index.  

In the user-generated sites, these stories were barely visible. Overall, just 5% of the stories captured on these three sites overlapped with the ten most widely-covered stories in the Index (13% for Reddit, 4% for Digg, and 0% for Del.icio.us).

The immigration debate in Congress, the biggest single story of the week in the mainstream media, appeared just once as a top-ten story on Reddit, and not at all on Digg and Del.icio.us. Similarly, the war in Iraq accounted for 10% of all stories in the Index and seven percent in the Yahoo-user material. Across the three user-news sites, it amounted to about 1%.

What were the favorite stories on the user-driven sites? For the most part, there were no dominant ones. The only story with any real traction was the release of the Apple iPhone, and that was just on one site (it accounted for 16% of the stories on Digg that week). Otherwise, users put forth a mix of diverse and unconnected news events from day to day. On the morning of June 26 on Digg, for example, a story about intelligent design topped the list followed by a story about a woman suing record labels for malicious prosecution. But by 5pm that day, both had vanished from the top ten.

---

[1] Myspace launched its news page on April 19, 2007.The Project considered including MySpace News in the study but the site is still in Beta form and at the time the study, there was very little user activity. On average, the top stories received just one vote and some on the home page of the site had no votes whatsoever.

[Source] http://www.journalism.org/node/7493

 

“That is what we are elected to do” – MP Josephine Teo

By Andrew Loh

In a letter to the Straits Times Forum Page on September 25, MP for Bishan-Toa Payoh, Mrs Josephine Teo (right) said:

“I REFER to the Insight special on CPF reforms (ST, Sept 22). Journalist Li Xueying had raised a number of issues for discussion, one of which referred to an NMP’s comment that making annuities compulsory is the start of a slippery slope where the Government ‘interferes’ in what is essentially CPF members’ own money. She asked if I agree.

I replied that Government’s job is to intervene where necessary. That is what we are elected to do. Singaporeans will have to judge whether the intervention has helped to create better results”

If what Mrs Teo says is representative of the government’s views, then perhaps we should all be quite concerned. For it means that Singaporeans’ CPF money do not belong to Singaporeans anymore – that it is the government which has the final say on how and what Singaporeans do with it.

It would mean that Singaporeans have, somehow, surrendered their ownership and rights to their CPF funds.

Contrary to what Mrs Teo said, that “that is what we are elected to do”, I beg to differ totally.

Singaporeans elected the People’s Action Party (PAP) into government in the belief that the PAP would be a consultative government and one which respects the rights – and property – of Singaporeans.

Certainly, Singaporeans did not elect the PAP so that as the Government it can usurp Singaporeans’ rights and ownership.

Electing the PAP into Government does not, in any way, shape or form, give the PAP blanket approval to “intervene where necessary” into the personal lives and personal belongings of Singaporeans – no matter how well-intentioned such “intervention” may be.

It is the government which should be asking Singaporeans if they (the Singaporeans) approve of what the government intend to do with their CPF money – and not be presumptuous that being elected into Government means Singaporeans have given the PAP blanket approval to do as it pleases.Mrs Teo seems to have put the cart before the horse and have lost sight of what it means to be a “consultative government”.

*Bishan-Toa Payoh was uncontested in the last General Elections. (link)Mrs Teo’s full letter is reproduced below, along with a reply from Thomas Koshy which was also published in the ST (Sept 28):

MP tells why she fully supports CPF reforms

I REFER to the Insight special on CPF reforms (ST, Sept 22). Journalist Li Xueying had raised a number of issues for discussion, one of which referred to an NMP’s comment that making annuities compulsory is the start of a slippery slope where the Government ‘interferes’ in what is essentially CPF members’ own money. She asked if I agree.

I replied that Government’s job is to intervene where necessary. That is what we are elected to do. Singaporeans will have to judge whether the intervention has helped to create better results.

As a CPF member myself, I fully support the reforms. These are my reasons.

The most significant changes include the higher interest rates on CPF savings and the enhanced Workfare Income Supplement for mature workers. At the same time, Government will push the drawdown age later and introduce longevity insurance.

The higher interest rates are not a one-off measure affecting very few. Instead, it will benefit all CPF members and Government will pay at least $700 million more each year in interest payments to members. The enhanced Workfare will help many low-wage mature workers, and the price tag of $400 million a year is not low.

These are long-term commitments which will help Singaporeans provide for their retirement needs in significant ways.

These commitments must not only be met by the present Government, but also by future governments. To be sustainable, they must not place unreasonable burdens on future generations of Singaporeans. I think we should be prudent and stick to the present commitments for a start.

Likewise, compulsory annuities are a financially prudent and hence more sustainable way for Singaporeans to plan comprehensively for their retirement.

We do not like all the CPF reforms. But most would agree that changes are needed to better prepare us for our ageing population. With these changes, we have taken big steps in the right direction.

Josephine Teo (Mrs)
Member of Parliament (Bishan-Toa Payoh) 

Compulsory annuity and CPF members’ rights

IN RESPONSE to a Nominated MP’s comment that making annuities compulsory amounts to an interference with CPF members’ own money, Member of Parliament Josephine Teo said in her letter (’MP tells why she fully supports CPF reforms’; ST, Sept 25) that ‘Government’s job is to intervene where necessary’.

The implication seems to be that it is Government’s job to spend CPF members’ funds if Government deems it wise to do so.

In my opinion, this is a question that one should not be so quick to answer.

I have no doubt that the intentions of the current Government are noble and I even support the objectives.

However, there is a bigger, fundamental question at stake here. Do CPF funds belong to CPF members? If they do then, surely, members have a right to decide how to spend them.

To draw an analogy, is it the job of Government to step in and manage the personal bank accounts of citizens? Some are careless with savings. But even with the best of intentions, can it be the job of Government to take citizens’ personal funds and manage them more prudently for them? Every man has the basic autonomous right to deal with his property as he chooses.

So the fundamental question is this: Just because it is CPF funds, does Government have the right to decide how they should be spent on behalf of CPF members, even against the wishes of the members?

An affirmative answer would be unprecedented and would mark a definitive change in the nature of members’ rights over their CPF funds. The significance of that decision should at least be appreciated. There is more at stake here than whether an annuity is a good idea.

Apart from the compromise to the property rights of CPF members, consider the situation if a weak government should make bad decisions on how CPF funds should be spent. It will be CPF members who will have to pay the cost of such bad decisions which they had no say in.

If purchase of an annuity is the best way forward for CPF members then it would be best if Government educates and convinces the people to do so voluntarily, rather than take the admittedly easier option of making it compulsory at the expense of the rights of CPF members.

Sometimes it is worth compromising efficiency for propriety.

 Thomas Mathew Koshy

Posted by theonlinecitizen on September 27th, 2007

[Source] http://theonlinecitizen.com/2007/09/27/that-is-what-we-are-elected-to-do-mp-josephine-teo/

 

Why can Law Society have its run while others can’t?

28 September 2007

Mr Philip Jeyaretnam President
Law Society of Singapore

Dear Sir,

I congratulate the Law Society on its annual run tomorrow (see poster on the left). At the same time, I hope you will reflect on one issue while you’re out there keeping fit.

Have you given thought to the fact that while the Law Society is given permission to stage this public event, other groups of citizens have been denied that same right?

In 2001, I had applied for the Open Singapore Centre, of which Mr J B Jeyaretnam was the Chairman, to run a marathon to call for the abolition of the Internal Security Act. The application was, of course, turned down.

More recently, a group of gays converged by the Singapore River for a jog. As I understand it, they were stopped by the police and told that what they were doing constituted an offence.

And yet you are doing tomorrow exactly what we were trying to do previously, that is, organise a run.

As legal body, can you perhaps proffer an explanation as to why your activity is allowed while ours were banned?

These are not the only examples. There have been numerous occasions when opposition parties and non-establishment groups have applied for permits to hold public activities only to find them all rejected.

On the other hand groups belonging to the PAP and its affiliates regularly conduct such activities. In 2005, for instance, some women PAP MPs were allowed to stage a walk-a-thon to commemorate International Women’s Day.

Not long ago, a group of Singaporeans gathered in a public place and conducted what seemed like a very public event with placards and raised fists, an act the Government decries and bans. Of course, this was no ordinary group. It was led, as you can see from the photograph (left), by at least one PAP MP.

Based on what constitutional provision or statute does the Government make its decision to allow, for example, the Law Society to conduct its run but not the Open Singapore Centre? If there is a legal basis, can you please refer me to it? If not, would you consider such decisions discriminatory and arbitrary, and therefore antithetical to the concept of the rule of law?

Of course, I know that you know the reason behind the two sets of laws. What I am despondent about is that the Law Society maintains an excruciating silence on the matter.

If the flagship professional body of lawyers in Singapore cannot ensure that the law is applied equally to all citizens regardless of their creed and beliefs, in other words that justice is served, then what good is it to society?

For the sake of the public, I hope you will reply to my letter. Otherwise I look forward to your response when we meet during the International Bar Association’s Rule of Law Symposium in October.

I wish you an enjoyable run.

Sincerely,

Chee Soon Juan
Secretary-General
Singapore Democratic Party

[Source] http://www.singaporedemocrat.org/articlelawsociety_annualrun.html

 

Debt of Honour: Singapore’s Ties to Burma’s Junta

The crisis in Burma is escalating. For the first time in two decades, the people are taking to the streets. It started with protests against the doubling of fuel prices, and the sharp increase in prices of essential goods and services.

It has now become a call for democracy, and freedom.

The military has seen fit to respond with tear gas, arrests, beatings, and live rounds. State television claims that there are nine dead. Witnesses believe that the true toll lies in the hundreds.

The source of this must lie with the junta in power. After seizing power in 1962, the State Law and Order Restoration Committee embarked on the ‘Burmese Road to Socialism’, an economic policy that has done nothing but to impoverish the people.

The people are kept in line through intimidation, systematic rape, arbitrary detention, forced labour, and other tools of state terror. The junta and its cronies virtually control the nation’s wealth, making tremendous profits from sales of drugs, gems, and timber. This combination of poverty, inequality, and repression has exploded into the situation we see today.

That the regime was responsible for this is not in doubt. However, it could not have done so without the assistance of other governments. In particular, one country has provided the greatest economic and military assistance to the regime, enabling it to restore ‘law and order’ while enlarging its bank accounts. That nation is the Republic of Singapore.

Singapore’s business ties with Burma

Above the board, Singapore has done a lot of business with Burma. SingTel was the first firm to provide Burmese businesses and government offices with the ability to establish inter- and intra-corporate communications in over 90 countries. At the same time, all computers, software, e-mail services and telecommunications devices must be licensed, a feat whose difficulty rivals the application for a permit for a public demonstration in Singapore.

Coupled with the prohibitively high cost of computers in Burma, and it can be inferred that the regime is intent on keeping communications technology away from Burmese political opposition figures as much as possible. This act serves to enrich the ruling elites and further strengthen their grip on society.

Singapore invested S$1.57 billion in Burma in 2005, making her the largest direct foreign investor in the country from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Since 1988, Singapore has invested S$2 billion in Burma, mostly in tourism and the military.  A substantial portion of Singapore’s investments has gone into Asia World, a Burmese construction company, owned by drug traffickers and money launderers.

Lo Hsing Han is the chair of Asia World, founded in 1992. Ostensibly a successful businessman, he also served as ethnic advisor to former Burmese Prime Minister Khin Nyunt, and continues to oversee his drug operations in Burma. It is alleged that Asia World has been used as a front for drug trafficking.

His son, Steven Law, is the firm’s managing director, and runs various firms, which happen to be subsidiaries of Asia World. He also reportedly handles his father’s financial activities. Steven Law married his Singaporean business partner in 1996. She is alleged to have used her connections to the government to launder money for Burma’s drug barons, in addition to other legitimate business dealings.

Hypocrisy

It is ironic that we pride ourselves on hanging drug traffickers while we do business with drug lords, not to mention grossly hypocritical. It has been speculated that we allow Burmese drug barons to travel freely, and for the junta’s generals to visit Singapore for medical treatment, in addition to turning a blind eye to shady financial practices.

This is not the end. The Government has provided the instruments of force that keep the junta in power.

Singapore Technologies has built a state-of-the-art cyber warfare centre in Yangon. With it, the regime’s secret police can intercept a spectrum of communications, from telephone calls to faxes to e-mail, from over twenty countries. On October 6, 1988, hundreds of mortars, munitions and military supplies were unloaded in Yangon. They were marked “Allied Ordnance, Singapore“, which is a subsidiary of Chartered Industries of Singapore, now part of ST Engineering. The shipment also included license-built Swedish rockets, thereby violating an agreement with Sweden that required authorisation for arms exports.

The following year, Israel and Belgium shipped grenade launchers and anti-tank weapons via Singapore. In 1992, Singapore brokered a $1.5 million shipment of mortars from Portugal, violating a European Commission arms embargo. In 1995, Chartered Industries of Singapore built an arms factory in Burma. Singapore has armed the regime.These incidents are just the ones documented in the public domain; I would not be surprised if there were more shady deals between the governments of both states, the consequences of which could have surfaced in recently.

Manufactured in Singapore?

On the 27^th of September, a Singaporean was shot by Burmese riot police. According to a photograph of a recovered rubber bullet, there are two legible English words: ‘control’ and ‘rubber’. The official language of Burma is Burmese, with scant attention paid to the English language; it is therefore highly improbable that the round was made produced locally. Europe and the United States have enforced sanctions against Burma, so they can be ruled out. China, India and Thailand, Burma’s largest trading partners, probably would not use English markings on ammunition. Therefore, I suspect that the round was made in Singapore, and exported to Burma.

The Singapore Government has allowed the junta and its cronies to get richer and richer, while the people have to contend with Third World living standards and systematic oppression. Singapore has turned a blind eye to international criminal activity operating out of Myanmar, whose ringleaders visit Singapore every now and then. Most damning of all, Singapore has sold weapons to Burma, the same arms that are keeping the junta in place. Singapore is therefore indirectly responsible for the current state of affairs in Burma.

 What Singapore must do now

The world is watching. Singapore currently holds the chairmanship of ASEAN. ASEAN has condemned the junta’s response to the protests.  Singapore, in particular, is engaging in ‘quiet diplomacy’, and is backing United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari in his attempt to defuse the situation. But this is not nearly enough.

If Singapore truly wishes for an end to the crisis, and is genuinely concerned about the people of Burma, it is her duty to send a strong message to the junta. Singapore must declare, and cease, any and all arms exports to the military regime. Singapore must also impose economic sanctions on Burma, in particular targeting strategic resources and supplies destined for the military and the police.

Singapore must withdraw all investments in firms linked to the regime, or its cronies. Singapore must also investigate all reports of money laundering on local soil, and prosecute the guilty to the fullest extent of the law. All assets belonging to the junta and its cronies must be frozen.

 Finally, Singapore must bar the Burmese drug barons and junta members from setting foot in Singapore. Singapore owes the people of Burma a debt of honour. We have the means to expunge it. What we need is the political will, and the determination, to clean up the mess we have created.

Posted by theonlinecitizen on September 29th, 2007 by Benjamin Cheah.

[Source] http://theonlinecitizen.com/2007/09/29/singapores-debt-of-honour/

 

Web of cash, power and cronies

Singapore isn’t just skilled at mandatory executions of drug traffickers, running an excellent airport and selling cameras on Orchard Road. It also does a useful trade keeping Burma’s military rulers and their cronies afloat.Much attention is placed on China and its coming hosting of the Olympic Games as a diplomatic pressure point on the rampant Burmese junta. But there is a group of government businessmen-technocrats in Singapore who will also be closely monitoring the brutality in Rangoon. And, were they so inclined, their influence could go a long way to limiting the misery being inflicted on Burma’s 54 million people.

Collectively known as “Singapore Inc”, they gather around the $A150 billion state-owned investment house Temasek Holdings, controlled by a member of the ruling Lee family.

With an estimated $A3 billion staked in the country (and a more than $20 billion stake in Australia), Singapore Inc companies have been some of the biggest investors in and supporters of Burma’s military junta — this while its Government, on the rare times it is asked, suggests a softly-softly diplomatic approach towards the junta.

When it comes to Burma, Singapore pockets the high morals it likes to wave at the West elsewhere. Singapore’s one-time head of foreign trade once said as his country was building links with Burma in the mid-1990s: “While the other countries are ignoring it, it’s a good time for us to go in … you get better deals, and you’re more appreciated … Singapore’s position is not to judge them and take a judgmental moral high ground.”

But by providing Burma’s pariah junta with the crucial equipment mostly denied by Western sanctions, Singapore has helped keep the junta and its cronies afloat for 20 years, since the last time the generals killed the citizens they are supposed to protect.

Withdraw that financial support and Burma’s junta would be substantially weakened, perhaps even fail. But after two decades of profitable business with the trigger-happy generals and their cronies, that’s about the last thing Singapore is likely to do. There’s too much money to be made.

Hotels, airlines, military material and training, crowd control equipment and sophisticated telecoms-monitoring devices for its secret police — Singapore is manager and supplier to the junta, and the “cronified” economy it controls.

It’s impossible to spend any time in Burma and not make the junta richer, thanks to Singapore suppliers’ contracts with the tourism industry. Singapore’s hospitals also keep Burma’s leaders alive — 74-year-old junta leader Than Shwe has been getting his intestinal cancer treated in a Singapore government hospital, protected by Singapore security. Singapore’s boutiques keep junta wives and families cloaked in Armani, and its banks help launder their money and that of Burma’s crony drug lords.

Much of Singapore’s activity in Burma has been documented by an analyst working in Prime Minister John Howard’s direct chain of command, in the Office of National Assessments. Andrew Selth is recognised as an authority on the Burmese military. Now a research fellow at Queensland’s Griffith University, Mr Selth has written extensively on how close Singapore is to the junta.

Often writing as “William Ashton” in the authoritative Jane’s Intelligence Review, Mr Selth has described in various articles how Singapore has sent the junta guns, rockets, armoured personnel carriers and grenade launchers, some of it trans-shipped from stocks seized by Israel from Palestinians in southern Lebanon.

Singaporean companies have provided computers and networking equipment for Burma’s defence ministry and army, while upgrading the bunkered junta’s ability to network with regional commanders — so crucial as protesting monks take to the streets of 20 Burmese cities, causing major logistical headaches for the Tatmadaw, the Burmese military.

“Singapore cares little about human rights, in particular the plight of the ethnic and religious minorities in Burma,” Mr Selth writes.

“Having developed one of the region’s most advanced armed forces and defence industrial support bases, Singapore is in a good position to offer Burma a number of inducements which other ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) countries would find hard to match.”

Singapore’s Foreign Minister, George Yeo, is the current chairman of ASEAN.

Mr Selth says Singapore also provided the equipment for a “cyber war centre” to monitor dissident activity while training Burma’s secret police, whose sole job seems to be ensuring pro-democracy groups are crushed.

Monitoring dissidents is an area where Singapore has particular expertise. After almost five decades in power, the Lee family-controlled People’s Action Party ranks behind only the communists of China, Cuba and North Korea in leadership longevity, skilled in neutralising opposition.

“This centre is reported to be closely involved in the monitoring and recording of foreign and domestic telecommunications, including the satellite telephone conversations of Burmese opposition groups,” Mr Selth writes.

Singapore Government companies, such as leading arms supplier Singapore Technologies, dominate the communications and military sector in Singapore. “It is highly unlikely,” Mr Selth writes, “that any of these arms shipments to Burma could have been made without the knowledge and support of the Singapore Government.”

He notes that Singapore’s ambassadors to Burma have included a former senior Singapore armed forces officer, and a past director of Singapore’s defence-oriented Joint Intelligence Directorate, people with a military background rather than professional diplomats.

He writes that after the 1988 crackdown, when the junta killed 3000 protesters, “the first country to come to the regime’s rescue was in fact Singapore”.

When I interviewed Singapore Technologies chief executive Peter Seah at his office in Singapore, I asked about the scale model of an armoured personnel carrier made by his company on his office table. He said ST sold the vehicles “only to allies”.

Does that include Burma, I asked, given that Singapore controversially helped sponsor the military regime into ASEAN?

Mr Seah was non-specific: “We only sell to allies and we make sure they are responsible.” He didn’t say how. ST and Temasek don’t respond to questions about their activities in Burma.

Singapore is so close to Burma that one of its diplomats there wrote a handbook for its business people there. Matthew Sim’s Myanmar on my Mind is full of useful tips for Singaporean business people in Burma. “A little money goes a long way in greasing the wheels of productivity,” he writes.

A chapter headed “Committing Manslaughter when Driving” describes the appropriate action if a Singaporean businessman accidentally kills a Burmese pedestrian. “Firstly, the international businessman could give the family of the deceased some money as compensation and dissuade them from pressing charges. Secondly, he could pay a Myanmar citizen to take the blame by declaring that he was the driver in the fatal accident. An international businessman should not make the mistake of trying to argue his case in a court of law when it comes to a fatal accident, even if he is in the right.”

Mr Sim says many successful Myanmar businessmen have opened shell companies in Singapore “with little or no staff, used to keep funds overseas”. The companies are used to keep business deals outside the control of Burma’s central bank, enabling Singaporeans and others to transact with Burma in Singapore.

He may be referring to junta cronies such as Tay Za and the drug lord Lo Hsing Han. Lo is an ethnic Chinese, from Burma’s traditionally Chinese-populated and opium-rich Kokang region in the country’s east, bordering China. He controls a massive heroin empire, and one of Burma’s biggest companies, Asia World, which the US Drug Enforcement Agency describes as a front for his drug-trafficking. Asia World controls toll roads, industrial parks and trading companies. Singapore is the Lo family’s crucial window to the world, as it controls a number of companies there. His son Steven, who has been denied a visa to the US because of his links to the drug trade, married a Singaporean, Cecilia Ng, and the two reportedly control Singapore-based trading house Kokang Singapore.

A former assistant secretary of state for the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Robert Gelbard, has said that half Singapore’s investment in Burma has “been tied to the family of narco-trafficker Lo Hsing Han”.

Tay Za, who is romantically linked to a daughter of junta leader Than Shwe, is also well known in Singapore. He was prominent in the Singapore media last year, toasting the launch of his airline Air Bagan with the head of Singapore’s aviation authority. Dissident groups say the trade-off for Tay Za’s government business contracts in Burma is to fund junta leaders’ medical trips to Singapore.

Eric Ellis is an Australian journalist and correspondent in South-East Asia.

[Source] http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/web-of-cash-power-and-cronies/2007/09/28/1190486569946.html

 

The Idiot’s Guide To Blogging

Reep (2006) provides simple guidelines for designing print documents. But the guidelines on designing for online environments as opposed to print documents is voluminous, confusing with lots of new terms and techniques and frankly overwhelming, especially for a newbie blogger like myself.  My instinctive view is that one learns best from the exercise of regular blogging.  

But my reading of the guidelines for online environment threw up some simple takeaways I have taken to heart : 

a)     Walsh (2006, p.36)) is a useful starter to understand whether the reading of multimodal texts constitutes a different process from the reading of print-based texts. Whilst her research is not conclusive, she observes that whilst “…the process of meaning-making itself might occur in similar ways for print-based and multimodal texts, yet the ‘processing’ of modes is very different. It seems that the ‘affordance’ of different modes, within the purpose of a text, have an essential function in constructing meaning.” 

b)    Nielsen (1997) notes that 79% of Web users scan pages and rarely read word for word – a good web content should therefore be scannable. 

c)     Reep (1997, p.92) makes the seemingly obvious point that design is critical to any visual presentation regardless of topic or audience and this is a key starting point. Reep (2006, p.162) sums up neatly the key requirements of a well designed document – that it should guide readers through the text, help to generate interest and project the image that one wants to convey. The basic design principles are balance, proportion, sequence and consistency. Reep also touches in some detail on the use of written cues (to help readers find specific information quickly), graphic aids, formatting, white spaces(to assist readers to process text efficiently), colours, boxes and typographic devices (to highlight specific details or sections within a document). These basic design principles are relevant to print and multimodal documents and I have tried to follow them closely wherever possible. 

d)    Each time a user enters a new site, he or she should know immediately the point or idea of the site, how and where to get started with the site’s primary features, otherwise visitors will leave if the content is not easy to use (Keeker, 1997). 

e)     Finally I have taken note of Parker’s (1990) main points on desktop designing – Relevance, proportion, direction, consistency, contrast, total picture, restrain and simplicity. But frankly, there are just too many to note for a newcomer to the business of blogging and I take some comfort in Parker’s observation that     

“Successful graphic designs usually emerge from trial and error. Solutions are the result of a willingness to try various design options until one looks right.” 

 

Blog? What for?

Purpose of weblog 

I had begun by first focusing on a discussion of the hype over the new media. I am not persuaded that this is a phenomenon that can sustain itself and I thought it would be useful to prompt a discussion on the subject with likeminded people in cyberspace. 

Subsequently the focus shifted in the wake of the tragic developments in Myanmar. The world has been riveted over the past week by scenes of humble monks and ordinary people taking on a repressive and ghastly military regime. The shot that killed the lone Japanese photographer in Yangon remains etched forever in my mind. The military junta on its part has been doing its level best to wire up an electronic iron curtain around this sad, poor country but the technology of the new media has its own way of thwarting the best laid plans of men in uniform. Cell phone cameras, blogs, internet radio and all manner of digital innovation have made the Web a tremendous global force to be reckoned with by oppressive Governments.   

Which led me to define my objectives as below : 

a)     Is the “new media” just so much hype ? While some claim that, to paraphrase some academic I cannot recall, it puts a printing press in everyone’s hands – we need also to understand the limits of this revolution. Is it just the flavour of the month ? We have seen the evolution from websites, chat mail, podcasts, U Tubes, friendster, blogs, MySpace and more recently Facebook. What will it lead to next, if anything ?  What kind of media ecosystem will finally emerge? 

b)    And in light of developments in Myanmar – what should the domestic Singapore media and Government do or not do (or is already doing) in confronting this explosion in information on cyberspace ?      

 

Blog-a-what!

All Manner of Blogs

Blogs are like amoebas – they breed and they multiply and emerge in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Information on types of blogs is freely available on Wikipedia (2007) which provides a useful listing and differentiation of blogs, based on the way their content is delivered or written and originator :

By media type

A blog with videos is a vlog, and one with links is a linklog. A, a site containing a portfolio of sketches is a sketchblog or one comprising photos is called a photoblog and so on.

By device

Blogs can also be defined by which type of device is used to compose it. A blog written by a mobile device like a mobile phone or PDA is called a moblog.

Genre

Some blogs focus on a particular subject : political blogs, travel blogs, fashion blogs, project blogs or legal blogs.  While not a legitimate type of blog, one used for the sole purpose of spamming is known as a Splog.

Legal status of publishers

A blog can be private or for business purposes. Blogs used internally to enhance communications/culture within a coporation or for marketing, public relations purposes is called Corporate Blogs.

Predictably enough, weblog communities have sprung up along with the advent of blogging. With such a large number of weblogs populating the Internet, blog communities are a convenient way for people to meet fellow bloggers with mutual and like-minded interests. Search engines like Technorati have made their search even easier. Weblog publishing tools like LiveJournal also allow members to form communities based on a variety of factors from geographical location, favourite authors or films, and even sexual orientation.

Weblogs are transforming the way in which people communicate with each other. Many commentators have observed that weblog communities create major headaches for Governments as they tend to be inclusive, narrowly focused on areas of singular interest to them and they tend to shut themselves off from the rest of the world. Increasingly as people are moving away from traditional media and weblog communities prosper, the net result is seen in the low numbers of citizens casting their vote in the developed world in particular – US, UK, France etc. In his National Day Rally speech in 2006, Prime Minister Lee of Singapore was prompted to comment that : 

“The Internet is a tremendous tool which is changing the world. We should make full use of it to link up with the world, engage one another, and be a productive economy and vibrant society. But the Internet creates new problems too. Not everything on the Internet is reliable; it is not easy to tell apart fact from fiction in cyberspace; and instant communications can cause people to over-react hastily and unthinkingly to events.”

In short, blogs have evolved from simple offshoots of websites to incorporate all manner of features like video, sound and animation. The question now really is what the next technological revolution will bring forth ?