Multilingual Web should be a priority for India: W3C chief
Six months into his new job, Jeffrey Jaffe, Chief Executive Officer of the World Wide Web Consortium has his work cut out
The World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, as it is better known, is where the industry meets to set standards for the Web. And Jeffery Jaffe – an IT industry veteran who held prominent positions at Bell Labs (Lucent Technologies), IBM, and more recently at Novell – as its CEO not only oversees the W3C's largest project in progress ( HTML5 standards group) but is also trying to ensure that the Consortium sharpens its focus on multilingual web standards for countries like India.
September 9, 2010
By Frederik Balfour and Tim Culpan
Foxconn founder Terry Gou might be regarded as Henry Ford reincarnated if only a dozen of his workers hadn't killed themselves this year. An exclusive look inside a postmodern industrial empire. On a crushingly hot mid-August day at Foxconn's Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen—where a dutiful army of 300,000 employees eats, sleeps, and churns out iPhones, Sony PlayStations, and Dell computers—workers indulged in a rare moment of celebration. First, there was a parade, an Alice in Wonderland spectacle of floats, blaring vuvuzelas, and workers dressed up as Victorian ladies, geishas, cheerleaders, and Spider-Men. This was followed by a two-hour rally inside a vast sports stadium featuring acrobats, musical performances, fireworks, and life-affirming testimonials punctuated by chants of “treasure your life” and “care for each other to build a wonderful future.”
Foxconn, the secretive Taiwanese company that produces Apple's iPhone and iPad, the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, and Dell computers, was forced into the limelight in May 2010 after a dozen employees committed suicide, most by jumping from company dormitories. As part of a much needed public relations effort, Foxconn granted Bloomberg Businessweek unprecedented access to the company's factory floors, worker dorms, suicide helpline operators, and the company's charismatic chairman and founder, 59-year-old Terry Gou. Here are some images of its sprawling facility in Longhua, a suburb of Shenzhen, China, where more than 300,000 migrant laborers work.
The cartels have grown so sophisticated, law enforcement officials say, that they are employing Cold War-era spy tactics to recruit and corrupt U.S. officials.
“In order to stay in business, the drug trafficking organizations have to look at different methods for moving product,” said Thomas Frost, an assistant inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security. “The surest method is by corrupting a border official. The amount of money available to corrupt employees is staggering.”
Phi Beta Iota: This is an especially well-done, detailed article by The Washington Post, and not one of the run-of-the-mill apologias from the camp followers. What is not fully discussed is the MASSIVE corruption as well as the in-extremis one-time recruitments (e.g. fishermen shown photo of their captive family, one run only) on all four borders–north and west as well as south-gulf-florida and east. Furthermore, the reality is that corruption starts at the top, and global corruption starts in New York City and Washington, D.C. Corruption riddles every aspect of US Government planning, programming, budgeting, and operations across the twelve core policies, from agriculture to water.
Max G. Manwaring, November 2004, Strategic Studies Institute
Phi Beta Iota: Every passing day reminds us that Dr. Col Max Manwaring has made so many extraordinary contributions to our strategic understanding across so many fronts, and yet his work does not appear to have been appreciated to the degree that we consider warranted. Below is one small portion of his teachings from this reference.
This monograph concludes with the idea that the complex realities of contemporary political-insurgency wars must be understood as holistic processes that rely on various civilian and military agencies and contingents working together in an integrated fashion to achieve mutually agreed political-strategic ends. In this connection, at a minimum, three strategic-level imperatives are needed to begin to deal effectively with unconventional conflict situations. They are:
(1) civil-military and military-to-military dialogue regarding viable security and stability,
(2) fundamental education and understanding requirements, and
(3) the strategic application of U.S. military power.
The associated recommendations take us beyond doing “something” for something’s sake to the cooperative, holistic, and long-term planning and implementation of the strategic ends, ways, and means that directly support the achievement of a political endgame.
A crowd gathered around as a man dressed as George Washington read a passage from the Bible during the Tea Party Tax Payer March on Washington on Sunday.
. . . . . . .
“I believe we’ve got the Republican Party’s attention — we’ve been beating the establishment all over the country,” said Dick Armey, the former Republican House majority leader and the chairman of FreedomWorks, to a burst of cheering. “It’s time we give the same lesson to the other party.”
Mr. Pence taunted the Democratic leadership: “A recession is when you your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. A recovery is when Nancy Pelosi loses her job.”
Phi Beta Iota: The Tea Party appears to have been captured by the Republicans. This is one of the reasons we are taking an interest in the Coffee Party, which appears to be genuinely committed to non-partisan deliberative dialog and fact-based consensus. We are still dismayed that Ralph Nader, Jackie Salit, Cynthia McKinney, Ron Paul, and Bob Barr, among others, cannot come together to lead a demand for Electoral Reform in two phases, half in 2010, half in 2012. That would appear to be the single issue where most can agree, and the single reform that would restore the connection between the public, public revenue, and public spending.
“Hacker News” has a welcome page and guidelines page offering an overview of what the organizers expect from those planning on posting comments and why it's good overall for the community. I (Jason Liszkiewicz) was impressed with this. Hacker News has a solid number of participants and provides a simple and mature format for exploring and contributing thoughtful feedback, insight and resources.
It has a jobs link (mainly for engineers and programmers) and the “Ask Hacker News” link which enables the community to share information and reply to what is shared. Such a model (deemed an “experiment”) that provides mature and thoughtful information-sharing is something we need more of. Communities inter-linking with communities (or at least over-lapping) to spill over each others insights can be invaluable and potentially priceless.
This simple and useful model is something I hoped would emerge + converge from the SMS/text messaging developers at ChaCha.com (humans online responding to text messaged questions) or somewhere else. Converging multi-community info-sharing online, offline, and through the mobile world on a global scale is an exciting possibility.
The next level to all of this exists in the form of ideas or fragmented applications but it seems not beyond that, yet.
Email earthintelnet|at|gmail.com or post something at this new forum to discuss these ideas. Or, provide some mature and thoughtful feedback at the Hacker News community.
EXTRACT: By the late 1970s, after fifteen years in the business, Bob Hare knew what he was looking for when it came to psychopaths. They exhibit a cluster of distinctive personality traits, the most significant of which is an utter lack of conscience. They also have huge egos, short tempers, and an appetite for excitement — a dangerous mix. In a typical prison population, about 20 percent of the inmates satisfy the Hare definition of a psychopath, but they are responsible for over half of all violent crime.
EXTRACT: The Psychopathy Checklist consists of a set of forms and a manual that describes in detail how to score a subject in twenty categories that define psychopathy. Is he (or, more rarely, she) glib and superficially charming, callous and without empathy? Does he have a grandiose sense of self worth, shallow emotions, a lack of remorse or guilt? Is he impulsive, irresponsible, promiscuous? Did he have behavioural problems early in life? The information for each category must be carefully drawn from documents such as court transcripts, police reports, psychologists' reports, and victim-impact statements, and not solely from an interview, since psychopaths are superb liars (“pathological lying” and “conning/manipulative” are PCL-R categories). A prisoner may claim to love his family, for example, while his records show no visits or phone calls.
