Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
Didn't find what you were looking for?
E-mail this blog's author, Bruce Umbaugh:  |
|
 |
Tuesday, July 27, 2004 |
Google - Yahoo market battle threatens freedom of expression.
Reporters Without Borders is denouncing the "irresponsible" policies of Yahoo ! and Google which, in their efforts to conquer the Chinese market, are "making compromises that directly threaten freedom of expression".
"The US government is supposed to be at the cutting-edge of the fight for online freedom, especially since the Global Internet Freedom Act was voted," Reporters Without Borders underlined in letters to two top US officials. "Yet it places no restrictions on private-sector activity even when firms work with some of the world's most repressive regimes. We condemn this hypocrisy and demand that companies such as Yahoo ! and Google drop their irresponsible policies and pledge to respect freedom of information, including abroad."
The organisation is calling for a code of conduct to be imposed that would also concern other companies, such as Cisco Systems that has sold several thousand routers to enable the regime to build an online spying system and the firm's engineers have helped set it to spot "subversive" key-words in messages. The system also enables police to know who has looked at banned sites or sent "dangerous" e-mails.
From RSF, via Noticiasdot.
[Smart Mobs]
Loads of background at A blog doesn't need a clever name. I'll add that the discussion around this was one of the most interesting things at CFP this year. See my post, Technology Transfer, Technology Dumping from the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy blog experiment.
8:51:35 PM 
|
|
Top Research Universities by Number of "Highly Cited Researchers".
The Institute for Scientific Information compiles detailed data on citations to faculty research in the natural and social sciences, including medicine and law, but not in any of the humanistic fields. Citation counts are always problematic proxies for quality, but across whole universities their limitations presumably even out (presumably, e.g., each major university has its share of highly cited productive drudges, and the like). The primary limitation of this data is that it does not include humanistic fields, so universities with strong research profiles in the humanities will underperform in this study. The data also gives a slight preference to larger schools, though it is doubtful that there are any large major research universities that consist of, e.g., two dozen highly cited researchers superimposed on thousands of non-researching mediocrities.
In addition, because medicine turns out to be a high-citation field, any university with a good medical school will often have a quarter to half its highly cited researchers located there. I've marked below with an * schools that do not have a medical school, noting how many researchers would be added to their count if the nearest medical school in that university system were included.
[The Leiter Reports: Editorials, News, Updates]
8:34:26 PM
|
|
Live from the distributed Peanut Gallery.
The Bush Administration reacted to 9/11 by taking the country to war against "terrorism," and defined that term in an extremely simple way. We're fighting evil. And You're with us or against us. In the context of the attacks of 9/11, the Bush Case makes deep and clear sense.
The whole context, however, is much more complex. We had history, however unintentional, behind the 9/11 attacks. We supported Osama, Saddam, the Taliban and various other bad guys in the past. In many ways, our war against terrorism (especially in Iraq) has amounted to fighting fire with gasoline. Carter is right that we squandered massive quantities of good will and sympathy after 9/11. We held the high moral ground at that time; then we decided to act as if the only high ground that mattered was military force.
Which was exactly why we got our asses kicked in Vietnam.
Right now I'm reading John Robb's Global Guerillas while Jimmy Carter is being interviewed on TV. John is far more compelling, in his specifics:
To al-Moqrin and Islamic global guerrillas in general, all companies providing "outsourced" support services to the Saudi and American governments fall under the "Halliburton" label.
A focus on "Halliburton" is in line with global guerrilla strategy. The market for outsourced services provided by western and associated companies are critical to the reconstruction of Iraq, the logistics of the US military, and the operation of critical infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. It's our "soft underbelly." Because these services form a market network, global guerrillas can use the dynamics of the marketplace to amplify the impact of their attacks.
How these attacks work
The endless series of hostage dramas and assaults on contractors in Iraq form a pattern. They are aimed at the fault lines in the "outsourced services" market. This pattern is quickly being copied via stigmergic learning by a rapidly proliferating number of groups. Global guerrillas are using the following methods to disrupt this market:
- Companies. Assaults on employees in Saudi Arabia forced the engineering company ABB to withdraw their employees. Within Iraq: Siemens, Tekhnopromexport, GE, etc. have withdrawn employees due to direct pressure. Focused attacks on specific employers can create pressures within boardrooms and among employees/families back home to withdraw.
- Nations. An indirect method of coercing companies is to target employees of specific nationalities. Attacks on South Korean, Chinese, and Russian employees have resulted in government pressured evacuations of workers of those nationalities from Iraq. The attacks in Saudi Arabia targeting Americans, has caused the US government to urge that all Americans leave the country. This strategy will increasingly widen to include nations outside the US coalition (Egypt, Kenya, China, and Russia have already been targeted). Nations will increasingly tire of the crisis management and domestic political fallout caused by these attacks.
- Individuals. Beheadings and seemingly random assassinations, in particular, have created a climate of fear among employees of outsourced service companies. This fear has driven thousands of Americans and Europeans working for companies in Saudi Arabia and Iraq back home.
The impact of this disruption
The ongoing attacks against these companies and their employees are increasingly undermining the operation of the market for outsourced services. In large part this is due to the reaction of the marketplace to these systemic insults. These reactions include:
- Higher transaction costs. The need to protect employees has driven up costs across the board. Approximately 25% (although recent reports indicate that this may have risen to as high as 50%) of all reconstruction expenditures are now for private security services to protect employees (an impact that will be measured in billions of dollars). Lengthy security procedures severely limit the workday (by up to 1/3) for domestic employees of "Halliburton" companies. Companies are also being forced to offer substantial bonus pay (often exceeding 100% of pay) as a risk-premium to entice expatriate employees to work in these areas. Additionally, insurance costs have skyrocketed.
- Systemic chaos. Many of these attacks have been focused on workers involved in corporate logistics/transportation. This disruption has had a systemic impact on all work being done in Iraq. Critical parts, military supplies, food, etc have been interdicted. The loss of key engineers, through departures or injury/death due to attacks, have left critical projects in Iraq's electiricity reconstruction in piles of parts on the floor.
- Stalled decision making. These attacks have increased uncertainty to the level necessary to impair the allocation of investments and the contracting process. The recent disclosures that the vast majority of Iraq's reconstruction funds are still uncommitted, demonstrate this problem. This uncertainty makes it difficult to: entice companies to participate in reconstruction work, to determine metrics of success (profit/loss), to secure insurance, etc. (basically, everything necessary to build plans for the future). The end result, is that business decisions are put off into the future in the expectation that eventually, the security situation will improve and uncertainty will be reduced.
What this means
Global guerrilla attacks and abductions will continue. However, the bazaar of violence in the country will continue to reward innovation and its networked participant organizations will quickly implement these advances. The result will be an acceleration of the outsourcing market's current distress. While many new methods will be tried, the innovations that will gain the most traction are the following (although they will require participation of al Qaeda or al Tawhid for international operations during the initial phases)
"We aided terrorists by harboring an uncontrollable desire to go to war with Iraq," was the point Carter just made to the News Hour panel on PBS (which I'm watching because it has no ads). Carter wants us to bring France, Germany and Russia in on the real war that's still going on, against a strengthened enemy. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
7:43:09 AM
|
|
Techies Reshape 9/11 History. The 9/11 Commission Report was a best seller the moment it was released, but Internet users find several ways to make it more accessible and useful. By Staci D. Kramer.
PDF versions of the report (PDF) and an executive summary were published online simultaneously July 22 at 11:30 a.m. EST by the commission and the Government Printing Office. At the same time, printed versions published by W.W. Norton and the GPO went on sale. The book quickly became a bestseller.
Blogger and Web designer Jason Kottke used a free conversion tool to translate the executive summary into HTML. . . . .
Michele Catalano remembers trying to read the Starr Report online in 1998 and giving up in frustration. This time she went in a different direction, getting help to produce a text version about one-sixth the size of the 7.5-MB PDF report and posting it on her blog, A Small Victory. . . . .
"I hate PDF," said Catalano. "You can't refer someone to the exact part. Ideally, the best thing would be to have the entire thing in HTML and searchable." She praised the commission for getting the information out fast. "I think that's a hallmark of democracy, making all of this information public immediately," Catalano said.
Now she wants government to take another big step by recognizing the different ways people use technology, and by publishing versions of important documents in multiple formats, such as text and HTML.
. . . . Search company Vivisimo, which specializes in making information searchable at the paragraph level, indexed the report and organized it into groups or clusters according to topic. Clusters are then labeled, for example, "Saudi" or "Taliban." Users can also create their own clusters. More than 20,000 searches took place in the first three days, according to a spokesman. The most frequent "non-canned queries" were "Berger Clinton Iraq Bush Iran."
. . .
It takes more effort to create an HTML edition, Steward said, but integrating a large PDF document with a website using an HTML portal is another "baby step that goes a long way to encourage folks to dive in." Steward believes government information should be made available in HTML editions, citing a law that mandates eliminating barriers in information technology.
Blogger Andrew Grumet used Steward's version to extract the commission's recommendations and to provide contextual links. He also produced an XML version of his list.
It took a little longer to deliver a spoken-word version. Audible.com quickly farmed out sections of the report to a half-dozen voiceover artists, making the audio version of the 31-page executive summary available last Friday free with registration. The full version is still in production, with plans to publish by Wednesday, and will be sold as an audio book for $10.
[Wired News]
7:37:28 AM
|
|
|
