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Monday, February 20, 2006 |
Keywords.
The Washington Post has "obtained a list of keywords used by a Chinese blog service provider to flag offensive material.Of 236 items on the list,18 were obscenities.The rest were related to politics or current affairs.Most words on this list can be posted on Chinese Web sites,but their presence quietly alerts editors to examine the messages that contain them and possibly take action.In tests,postings that included long sections of the list were allowed to remain on several sites, but quickly removed from others.One site also blocked the computer used to conduct the tests from posting anything else.In addition,on most sites,at least some of the sensitive phrases cannot be posted at all.Depending on the site,filters replace the offending words with asterisks or block the entire message".
Keywords Used to Filter Web Content [Smart Mobs]
2:41:09 PM 
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China, Wikipedia and Asia.
This week The Washington Post is running a series on “The Great Firewall of China.” Reporter Phil Pan wrote an excellent piece describing the history of Chinese Wikipedia and the saga of it being blocked three times over the last two years. (It’s still blocked as of this writing.)
While the stories in the U.S. have focused on Wikipedia’s weaknesses — the John Seigenthaler case, citation in college student papers, or comparisions with Britannica — I always remind folks that outside of the English-speaking world, Wikipedia’s impact is much more profound. Phil provides a small glimpse of the dynamics among PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong and “overseas Chinese” in the editing process. He writes:
To many educated in China, these governing principles of Wikipedia — objectivity in content, equality among users, the importance of consensus — were relatively new concepts. Yuan said he consulted the work of philosopher John Rawls and economist Friedrich Hayek to better understand how a free community could organize itself and “produce order from chaos.”
“We had heard of these ideas, but they really didn’t have much to do with our lives,” said Yuan, now a computer programmer. “In school, we were taught an official point of view, not a neutral point of view. And we didn’t learn much about how to cooperate with people who had different opinions.”
It’s important to realize that for most other languages, there is no general knowledge encyclopedia that is freely available, not to mention one that provides the “neutral point of view” that is Wikipedia’s calling card. The implications for Asia are enormous.
After stagnating for two years, the Arabic language Wikipedia recently surged to over 10,000 articles, forming a solid foundation for free educational content for the Middle East. Bangladesh media activist and photojournalist Shahidul Alam said at a recent conference that he finally saw a way for the true history of his country to be told, and it was through Wikipedia. In English language circles, we can debate the merits of Wikipedia’s value against well-established information sources. But for much of the world, it comes just at the right time. [Center for Citizen Media: Blog]
2:15:42 PM
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$1000 reward offered to nab camera-happy Houston police chief.
Matt Asher is offering a $1000 reward to the "first person who can provide definitive videotaped evidence of Houston police chief Harold Hurtt committing a crime, any crime."
This is in response to a Seattle Post Intelligencer article reporting that Hurtt wants to install surveillance video cameras "in apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls and even private homes."
"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?" he was quoted as saying. Link
[Boing Boing]
1:56:25 PM
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Unreasonable expectations (or, there are more dumb people than you think).
Commenting on my last post, Karl thinks PZ and I have missed the boat:
Janet said
"Science isn't just putting forward a point of view, it's inviting the audience to check it out and see how it holds up. Nothing for sale -- the audience already has the critical faculties that are needed."
no! No! and NO!
They do not. You and PZ are extremely intelligent people. You seem not to be able to accept how much less intelligent most of the populace is. After all, if they had critical faculties, they would be college graduates. They don't know and don't want to know how to "check it out". They need to have it spelled out in simple words - with pictures.
Think of who have been the most popular exponents of science in the last 20 or 30 years - Sagan and Feynman. What made them popular? Presentation! Demonstration! Pictures! Even in teaching college classes they were lively, animated, entertaining - fun to listen to.
You, who write all these science blogs are brilliant, informative, but duller than ...(can't think of a witty metaphor).
You seem to have the same attitude as a Republican administration toward the working class. They don't know what life is like when you don't have a couple of mil in the bank. Why would you need Social Security - just invest 40 or 50K in the stock market every year. And YOU seem to think that everyone has an IQ of 120 or higher. Just hit your local library, or the Internet, and read all the wonderful blogs explaining about science.
Well that can't happen. We need programs on network television that are attention-grabbing, dramatic, lively and geared towards the mass audience. (I've taken the liberty of adding bold emphasis to a couple of Karl's sentences.)
[Adventures in Ethics and Science]
1:56:20 PM
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