The latest fleet of cars to hit Indonesia’s roads will carry an unusual logo, but one that the country’s wired population is more than familiar with: that of Google, as the Internet giant prepares to introduce Google Street View to the sprawling archipelago.
The project, launched Friday by Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy and Google Inc., will be one of the tech giant’s largest initiatives in Asia. Custom Google cars fitted with cameras have already been deployed across the country with the end goal of allowing anyone with an Internet connection a panoramic view of key cities through street-level images, not expected to be ready for a few years.
Indonesia will be the third Southeast Asian country to get Google’s Street View service, after Singapore and more recently Thailand, where Google also partnered with the country’s tourism authority. Like many other Street View initiatives, the primary target audience is tourists and other visitors, allowing them to check out hotels and other attractions before planning itineraries, as well as serve the potential market within Indonesia’s 250 million people.
This could be especially useful in Indonesia where infrastructure bottlenecks have hidden some of the most beautiful tourist destinations – including secluded beaches, pristine dive sites and legendary temples – away from keen visitors. Businessmen, too, are now flocking to Jakarta and other key cities in the hope of tapping into Indonesia’s strong growth, but often need to strategically plan meetings close to hotels and offices to avoid Jakarta’s notorious traffic jams.
“With these digital tools, hotels, tourism sites and businesses can be more creative in making it easier for visitors to find their stores, location and websites,” said Mari E. Pangestu, Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy, at the sidelines of an exhibition where the service was launched.
Google said in a press statement that the project will be a “long-term investment,” without giving a specific date for the introduction of Street View, though it expects some images to be online in the next few years.
The company has run into privacy issues elsewhere when capturing Street View data, which involves real-time panoramic images, allowing anyone to scope out various locales without leaving their screens. Though some find the service convenient, others have expressed strong sentiments against having their faces, car license plate numbers and the like potentially exposed to millions.
Her daughter arrived in 2009, and when Lori returned from maternity leave, even more leadership changes had occurred. She found the company was taking her lab in a completely new direction. She was also being asked to report to a colleague who she felt was not the right resource to lead the business unit. Lori reached out to leadership at the larger parent company where she had great relationships and explained her frustration. They created a new role for Lori: chief technology catalyst at a different business unit.
The big change for Lori was that travel used to be mainly for industry trade shows, speaking at events and meeting clients. But with this newly created position, Lori had to work with leadership and senior resources who were on the east coast while she was living on the west coast. For the better part of the next two years, her job focused on constant travel, and it was overwhelming.
The job was interesting, and Lori still desired to be the self described "powerful innovation girl," so she traveled with her nanny and her young daughter. She found this at least gave her more time together with her daughter, and she felt like she was balancing both worlds that she enjoyed. But the company wasn't funding her daughter's travel or the nanny's, so it became very expensive.
She says that she really felt the need to have the nanny in tow unless she traveled to a location where she had family.
Lori was exhausted after each trip and frustration was mounting. Then, after two years of non-stop travel, her role at the company was changing yet again and becoming very undesirable. Her mentor at the parent company who created the job left the company, and she could see her role's focus dissipating.
During 2011, her daughter started school at age two and Lori couldn't take her on trips anymore. The balance had shifted. She missed her daughter when she was traveling, even for just two or three nights. Lori says "It was a strong chemical reaction that I couldn't ignore."
The tipping point was in January/February 2011 when all of the tech conferences take place between Las Vegas, Florida and Barcelona. Lori says "While it sounds romantic and exciting and I was enjoying the intellectual stimulation during the day, I was miserable underneath. I was this strong business woman during the day and I cried at night."
Neither happy in her personal nor business life, Lori knew it was time to make the transition to something more balanced with motherhood. "This New York based role was definitely not working, and I had come to the tough realization that the job I signed up for was no longer there. So I began discussions with HR. I had a severance package that would give me some time to figure things out on my own."
In June 2012, Lori become a Mompreneur. She wanted this balance desperately, and she was determined to find a way. During her tenure at McCann, Lori was very active in her industry; she sat on boards, did many speaking engagements and moderated panels, making terrific contacts along the way. She believed she could find opportunity, but there was no guarantee of income and only six months of severance pay.
The first two months of being her own boss were a major adjustment. She bought a new computer, set up her home office, dealt with insurance and got a new phone plan. All the things that corporate had always taken care of for so long were now her responsibility. She struggled with being at home and learning how to balance being relaxed and enjoying her daughter while being productive and starting a business.
2012年11月26日星期一
2012年11月25日星期日
18 seasons of teaching players
It’s a Friday night and the lights are on over the Souhegan High School football field.
There are no more home games for the Sabers, but there are still about a dozen players in full uniform, running around the field. They’re taking turns throwing passes and kicking field goals, and doing something that their football coach has always wanted them to do – be kids and have fun.
The real reason the Souhegan players are out there is for a photo shoot, something they’ve done at the end of the last two seasons. A photographer has set up a few flashes, and a machine pumps out fog that envelopes each player as they pose for photos.
And they’re about be joined by a special guest.
The photo shoot followed the team’s first practice in almost a week, as the Sabers rested for a few days before preparing for the Thanksgiving game against Merrimack. A week before, Souhegan was knocked out of the playoffs in a heartbreaker to Goffstown, and after the game, head coach Mike Beliveau told the team he’d be stepping down at the end of the season.
The field grows quiet as the players realize their special guest is about to arrive. At the sound of clicking cleats, they turn and watch as a familiar figure, donned in a white Souhegan jersey and pads, makes his way on to the field.
Beliveau has suited up to join his players, and they greet him with a round of cheers and laughter.
Not many coaches would like having his players laughing on the football field. Not many coaches are Mike Beliveau.
“Mike is a guy who likes to have fun and he wears his emotions on his sleeve,” assistant coach Paul Landau said. “My first year here, I was coming out of UNH, and football was always a serious thing. Here we stopped practice one time for a sunset. That’s his personality.”
And that’s why so many players have enjoyed playing for Beliveau. Sure, there have been some who haven’t appreciated the coach’s unique ways, but there have been many more, players and coaches, who have.
Include the 2012 New Hampshire Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl team among them.
“It was a magical week,” said Merrimack coach Joe Battista, who was an assistant at Souhegan from 2002-07. “It was one of the best moments of my life. To see kids from different backgrounds, the way he was able to bring them all together and get them to play as a family, I think that team, per player, would come back and play for him in a heartbeat.”
Beliveau’s coaching career at Souhegan began the same year the school opened, in 1992. He spent that season as an assistant under Jim Mullaney, and after a year off, Beliveau returned to the sideline in 1994 as an assistant under Scott Laliberte. When Laliberte returned to Bishop Brady, his alma mater, for the 1995 season, Souhegan athletic director Bill Dod decided to stay inhouse and tapped Beliveau as the next coach.
“I think he believed in me more than I believed in me at the time,” Beliveau said. “It probably showed in the first year. I wasn’t as confident as I should have been.”
The Sabers went 2-6 in that first season, the only losing season in Beliveau’s 18 years. In 1998, they finally made it into the postseason, the first of 10 Division III championship appearances for Beliveau. But it would take until 2004 – and four title game losses – for Souhegan and its coach to get its first title.
That season, the Sabers were loaded, both on the field and on the sideline. Two players from that team – Sean Jellison (UNH) and Rich Lapham (Boston College) – went on to play Division I college football. And three of the assistant coaches – Battista, Kurt Hines (Bedford) and Justin Hufft (Goffstown) – moved on to become head coaches. Another assistant, Scott Prescott, was with Beliveau for 14 years, including this year.
At one point, four of Beliveau’s former assistants were running their own programs in New Hampshire. Milt Robinson, who had coached at Hollis Brookline for 10 years, also stepped down at the end of the 2012 season.
“I think his record speaks for itself, and not just record in wins and losses,” said Hines, who was an assistant from 1999-2006. “Look at the coaches he has mentored. He gave me my first coaching job, and I’m forever grateful for that.”
But before that group, the one coach who helped Beliveau right the ship was Vinny Perroni, who also coached at Manchester Central and at Milford.
“Vinny really did a heck of a job with my defense and got us over the hump of not being able to beat the Kennetts and Laconias,” Beliveau said. “It’s like Vinny jump-started us, the next group got the ball rolling, and the last group kept the ball rolling.”
That next group – Prescott, Hines, Hufft and Battista – helped the Sabers win a championship in 2004, but when Souhegan won three straight from 2008-10, it was the later group of Landau, J.T. Anderson and Mark Ginnard on the sidelines.
Ginnard is now an assistant with Hufft at Goffstown, but it should surprise no one if any of that group become head coaches.
“That staff, there was magic there, and we were all football junkies,” Battista said. “Coach B would give us assignments and ask us to do things and then let us run with it. I think that’s what molded us into head coaches, and allowed us to take on our own programs.”
Not long after becoming a head coach himself, Beliveau realized there were two things he needed to do if he was going to have success. One was to be himself; the other was to admit that his assistants might know things he didn’t.
“A long time ago, I decided that I have to be me when I coach,” Beliveau said. “I can’t fake it and be like other coaches who have different styles. Maybe they’re military style, or attention to every detail. Yeah, everyone wants those, but I made a decision to just be who I am, and either that’s going to work, or it’s not going to work. If it didn’t work, I was ready to accept that and let another style come in and lead the program.
“For me to sit there and say ‘I’ll take the defensive line and teach them great technique and they’ll play out of their minds,’ that would be not true. But Joe Battista could. That was his strength. He was a college lineman. I said ‘Joe, here is your space, here are your kids, here is the time I’m giving you.’ I might give some direction. Same with Justin, and even Kurt, coaching the freshmen, put your thumbprint on it. Give the kids a great foundation coming forward.”
It was Hufft who suggested the biggest change for the Sabers. After years of running the wing-T, Hufft, who graduated from Souhegan in 1995, told Beliveau he thought Souhegan should switch to a spread offense. It took a little coaxing, but Beliveau agreed and in 2006, the Sabers started running the spread.
“I can attribute most of that to Justin Hufft,” Beliveau said. “That young creative mind saying this is the way the game is evolving, Mike, will you give it a look and me being flexible and saying yeah. I had to be convinced that the spread running game would be as effective as running the ball out of the wing-T. I learned you can run it as equally as well.”
Hufft took the spread with him to Goffstown, but, just like the others, he also brought a little bit of Beliveau with him.
“The overriding majority of stuff was stuff I got from being around Mike for that long, especially dealing with kids, making it a fun experience for them,” said Hufft, who was an assistant from 1998-2008. “Football is a tough game and not everyone can do it. If at the end of the day, it doesn’t have a reward, other than wins and losses, it’s not worth it.”
In all, Beliveau estimates that the number of players he’s had go on to play in college is over 50, including two of this year’s seniors, Jake Kennedy, who committed to UNH in September, and Tyler Ford, who is being recruited by several schools. Going through the process with Beliveau was something that made Kennedy’s high school experience more enjoyable.
“I love the guy,” he said. “He is one of the greatest guys I know, on and off the field. He gets it. He did so much for me recruiting-wise, I’ll never be able to repay him for that. He always stuck his neck out for me. And not just for me, for every guy who wants to (play at the next level).”
With seven years between Division I recruits, Believau was able to understand and savor the experience of helping Kennedy find the right fit.
“Jake had verbal scholarship offers coming in in February of his junior year,” he said. “By the start of the summer, he had like eight. It’s been a while since we’ve had someone with that much scholarship interest.”
Beliveau also played a major role in Lapham’s recruitment, helping the offensive lineman land at Boston College. But it was something else that happened during his senior year at Souhegan that stands out.
“He had a way of motivating you, a way of keeping your head on straight that you don’t really see from the oustide,” Lapham said. “We were playing Kingswood in one of the first games of senior year, right after my collar bone injury.
“There was a big hit and I saw a kid laying on the ground. I had a tough time reliving what I went through, seeing it happen to another kid. People don’t pick up on that, but I had a conversation with Coach B about getting my head back in the game. He gave me the time of day and heard me out.”
It all goes back to treating the players like a part of the family, according to Battista.
“Treat them like you’d want your own son to be treated if he was playing for another coach,” he said. “It goes back to the way he molds young men. He gets them to play to their full potential and he takes advantage of what they do best. He doesn’t put them in situations where they aren’t going to excel.”
While he was close to the teams that won titles in 2008-09, Beliveau feels like this year’s group of seniors has been one of the tightest he’s ever coached.
“This group, they all hang around with each other and they like each others’ company,” he said. “They do things that kids should do. We made football fun and we proved that we could win at the same time.
There are no more home games for the Sabers, but there are still about a dozen players in full uniform, running around the field. They’re taking turns throwing passes and kicking field goals, and doing something that their football coach has always wanted them to do – be kids and have fun.
The real reason the Souhegan players are out there is for a photo shoot, something they’ve done at the end of the last two seasons. A photographer has set up a few flashes, and a machine pumps out fog that envelopes each player as they pose for photos.
And they’re about be joined by a special guest.
The photo shoot followed the team’s first practice in almost a week, as the Sabers rested for a few days before preparing for the Thanksgiving game against Merrimack. A week before, Souhegan was knocked out of the playoffs in a heartbreaker to Goffstown, and after the game, head coach Mike Beliveau told the team he’d be stepping down at the end of the season.
The field grows quiet as the players realize their special guest is about to arrive. At the sound of clicking cleats, they turn and watch as a familiar figure, donned in a white Souhegan jersey and pads, makes his way on to the field.
Beliveau has suited up to join his players, and they greet him with a round of cheers and laughter.
Not many coaches would like having his players laughing on the football field. Not many coaches are Mike Beliveau.
“Mike is a guy who likes to have fun and he wears his emotions on his sleeve,” assistant coach Paul Landau said. “My first year here, I was coming out of UNH, and football was always a serious thing. Here we stopped practice one time for a sunset. That’s his personality.”
And that’s why so many players have enjoyed playing for Beliveau. Sure, there have been some who haven’t appreciated the coach’s unique ways, but there have been many more, players and coaches, who have.
Include the 2012 New Hampshire Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl team among them.
“It was a magical week,” said Merrimack coach Joe Battista, who was an assistant at Souhegan from 2002-07. “It was one of the best moments of my life. To see kids from different backgrounds, the way he was able to bring them all together and get them to play as a family, I think that team, per player, would come back and play for him in a heartbeat.”
Beliveau’s coaching career at Souhegan began the same year the school opened, in 1992. He spent that season as an assistant under Jim Mullaney, and after a year off, Beliveau returned to the sideline in 1994 as an assistant under Scott Laliberte. When Laliberte returned to Bishop Brady, his alma mater, for the 1995 season, Souhegan athletic director Bill Dod decided to stay inhouse and tapped Beliveau as the next coach.
“I think he believed in me more than I believed in me at the time,” Beliveau said. “It probably showed in the first year. I wasn’t as confident as I should have been.”
The Sabers went 2-6 in that first season, the only losing season in Beliveau’s 18 years. In 1998, they finally made it into the postseason, the first of 10 Division III championship appearances for Beliveau. But it would take until 2004 – and four title game losses – for Souhegan and its coach to get its first title.
That season, the Sabers were loaded, both on the field and on the sideline. Two players from that team – Sean Jellison (UNH) and Rich Lapham (Boston College) – went on to play Division I college football. And three of the assistant coaches – Battista, Kurt Hines (Bedford) and Justin Hufft (Goffstown) – moved on to become head coaches. Another assistant, Scott Prescott, was with Beliveau for 14 years, including this year.
At one point, four of Beliveau’s former assistants were running their own programs in New Hampshire. Milt Robinson, who had coached at Hollis Brookline for 10 years, also stepped down at the end of the 2012 season.
“I think his record speaks for itself, and not just record in wins and losses,” said Hines, who was an assistant from 1999-2006. “Look at the coaches he has mentored. He gave me my first coaching job, and I’m forever grateful for that.”
But before that group, the one coach who helped Beliveau right the ship was Vinny Perroni, who also coached at Manchester Central and at Milford.
“Vinny really did a heck of a job with my defense and got us over the hump of not being able to beat the Kennetts and Laconias,” Beliveau said. “It’s like Vinny jump-started us, the next group got the ball rolling, and the last group kept the ball rolling.”
That next group – Prescott, Hines, Hufft and Battista – helped the Sabers win a championship in 2004, but when Souhegan won three straight from 2008-10, it was the later group of Landau, J.T. Anderson and Mark Ginnard on the sidelines.
Ginnard is now an assistant with Hufft at Goffstown, but it should surprise no one if any of that group become head coaches.
“That staff, there was magic there, and we were all football junkies,” Battista said. “Coach B would give us assignments and ask us to do things and then let us run with it. I think that’s what molded us into head coaches, and allowed us to take on our own programs.”
Not long after becoming a head coach himself, Beliveau realized there were two things he needed to do if he was going to have success. One was to be himself; the other was to admit that his assistants might know things he didn’t.
“A long time ago, I decided that I have to be me when I coach,” Beliveau said. “I can’t fake it and be like other coaches who have different styles. Maybe they’re military style, or attention to every detail. Yeah, everyone wants those, but I made a decision to just be who I am, and either that’s going to work, or it’s not going to work. If it didn’t work, I was ready to accept that and let another style come in and lead the program.
“For me to sit there and say ‘I’ll take the defensive line and teach them great technique and they’ll play out of their minds,’ that would be not true. But Joe Battista could. That was his strength. He was a college lineman. I said ‘Joe, here is your space, here are your kids, here is the time I’m giving you.’ I might give some direction. Same with Justin, and even Kurt, coaching the freshmen, put your thumbprint on it. Give the kids a great foundation coming forward.”
It was Hufft who suggested the biggest change for the Sabers. After years of running the wing-T, Hufft, who graduated from Souhegan in 1995, told Beliveau he thought Souhegan should switch to a spread offense. It took a little coaxing, but Beliveau agreed and in 2006, the Sabers started running the spread.
“I can attribute most of that to Justin Hufft,” Beliveau said. “That young creative mind saying this is the way the game is evolving, Mike, will you give it a look and me being flexible and saying yeah. I had to be convinced that the spread running game would be as effective as running the ball out of the wing-T. I learned you can run it as equally as well.”
Hufft took the spread with him to Goffstown, but, just like the others, he also brought a little bit of Beliveau with him.
“The overriding majority of stuff was stuff I got from being around Mike for that long, especially dealing with kids, making it a fun experience for them,” said Hufft, who was an assistant from 1998-2008. “Football is a tough game and not everyone can do it. If at the end of the day, it doesn’t have a reward, other than wins and losses, it’s not worth it.”
In all, Beliveau estimates that the number of players he’s had go on to play in college is over 50, including two of this year’s seniors, Jake Kennedy, who committed to UNH in September, and Tyler Ford, who is being recruited by several schools. Going through the process with Beliveau was something that made Kennedy’s high school experience more enjoyable.
“I love the guy,” he said. “He is one of the greatest guys I know, on and off the field. He gets it. He did so much for me recruiting-wise, I’ll never be able to repay him for that. He always stuck his neck out for me. And not just for me, for every guy who wants to (play at the next level).”
With seven years between Division I recruits, Believau was able to understand and savor the experience of helping Kennedy find the right fit.
“Jake had verbal scholarship offers coming in in February of his junior year,” he said. “By the start of the summer, he had like eight. It’s been a while since we’ve had someone with that much scholarship interest.”
Beliveau also played a major role in Lapham’s recruitment, helping the offensive lineman land at Boston College. But it was something else that happened during his senior year at Souhegan that stands out.
“He had a way of motivating you, a way of keeping your head on straight that you don’t really see from the oustide,” Lapham said. “We were playing Kingswood in one of the first games of senior year, right after my collar bone injury.
“There was a big hit and I saw a kid laying on the ground. I had a tough time reliving what I went through, seeing it happen to another kid. People don’t pick up on that, but I had a conversation with Coach B about getting my head back in the game. He gave me the time of day and heard me out.”
It all goes back to treating the players like a part of the family, according to Battista.
“Treat them like you’d want your own son to be treated if he was playing for another coach,” he said. “It goes back to the way he molds young men. He gets them to play to their full potential and he takes advantage of what they do best. He doesn’t put them in situations where they aren’t going to excel.”
While he was close to the teams that won titles in 2008-09, Beliveau feels like this year’s group of seniors has been one of the tightest he’s ever coached.
“This group, they all hang around with each other and they like each others’ company,” he said. “They do things that kids should do. We made football fun and we proved that we could win at the same time.
2012年11月20日星期二
Service Lets Business Monitor Geotags in Real Time
An Evanston, Ill.,-based company aims to give many businesses -- from restaurants and stores to news organizations and journalists to governments and first-responders -- a new way to look at -- and hear from -- the people they serve.
Geofeedia is a subscriber service which allows approved users to zero in on any location -- a building, a neighborhood, a town or even a country -- by either circling it online on a map or typing in an address. Then the user pushes a search button, and up pops every Tweet, Instagram, YouTube video, Flickr or Picasa photo coming from that location -- as long as it has been geotagged.
"Geotagging" is the process by which social media users can mark their posts by location. The posts are then mapped on the individual websites.
Geofeedia takes this mapping data from five websites and aggregates it into one location. It therefore makes it possible for someone to start with a location -- without knowing anyone in particular -- and discover anybody and everybody who has posted there.
The result is mesmerizing -- showing an array of chatter and photos and missives. It can also feel a little voyeuristic, even though the people have willingly tagged their messages. And it illuminates an issue with geotagging which could pose dangers to families and children.
But if done right -- and with restrictions -- it also has all kinds of potential, according to Phil Harris, Geofeedia’s CEO.
"Everyone is using social media, especially younger adults," said Harris. "But there’s so much data that it’s hard to find information that’s useful to you as a consumer or a business. With Geofeedia location services, [people] can actually tell others where they are, and what they’re experiencing there in real time."
"Individuals have the ability to express how they feel about an experience at a restaurant -- did they have a good experience at a store, or did they have a good experience when they went on vacation to Florida," he explained as examples.
He said a business could monitor its customers in real time and respond to them immediately and directly.
Geofeedia can also help journalists and news organizations, especially in breaking news situations. Reporters and news desks can monitor a story as it unfolds -- be it a fire or a hostage situation or a union protest -- while getting real-time, unfiltered perspectives from the direct participants on the ground. In fact, Geofeedia has just introduced a streaming service, where users can stream two, three, or even more concurrent locations to see the latest postings from each website.
Harris also pointed to "Superstorm" Sandy. In an instant, a first-responder using Geofeedia could call up videos and tweets posted in real time, focusing on a particular area to zero in on people needing immediate help. Harris said several towns are currently using the service and he hopes it becomes a common way for people to reach out in emergencies or other situations where immediate help is needed.
Harris noted that his company takes care to screen people who want to use the service -- double-checking e-mails and vetting potential users. But he also notes that Geofeedia is simply aggregating technology that is already available on individual social media sites. In other words, Geofeedia is not making anything public that isn’t public already from its original source.
"We’re developing new ways to use Geofeedia every day," said Harris. "We’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of interest. It all comes down to the basic fundamental that people just want to be heard. That’s the underlying trend. We’re just providing a way for organizations to access that data."
When PCMag analyst Jamie Lendino first got his hands on the Scout app early this year, he pointed out that TeleNav had built something more than a simple navigation app.
"Instead of just offering a point-of-interest database and address-based navigation, Scout offers ideas on where to go, when you should leave to get there, how to get there, and what you can do once you arrive," Lendino said.
Less than a year after its launch, TeleNav pushed the offline navigation update to the iOS app. Always There Navigation works any time, regardless of whether the phone has Wi-Fi or cellular coverage. The permanent feature is aimed at helping mobile users remain in constant contact with the map, even if they drive out of wireless coverage.
According to TeleNav, Scout version 1.5 also offers a faster app startup time, and a re-designed My Dashboard homepage, now with one-tap access to My Places.
When the app launches, the dashboard features real-time ETAs to the user's set Work and Home locations, as well as access to saved favorites and popular places nearby, with a map of their current location and the local weather.
Additionally, the new My Search includes popular restaurants, gas price listings, nearby parking lots, Wi-Fi hot spots, and real-time traffic information and speech recognition. For those looking to spice up their GPS map, Scout now offers 12 new car icons, including a convertible, motorcycle, SUV, minivan, muscle car, and sports car.
Geofeedia is a subscriber service which allows approved users to zero in on any location -- a building, a neighborhood, a town or even a country -- by either circling it online on a map or typing in an address. Then the user pushes a search button, and up pops every Tweet, Instagram, YouTube video, Flickr or Picasa photo coming from that location -- as long as it has been geotagged.
"Geotagging" is the process by which social media users can mark their posts by location. The posts are then mapped on the individual websites.
Geofeedia takes this mapping data from five websites and aggregates it into one location. It therefore makes it possible for someone to start with a location -- without knowing anyone in particular -- and discover anybody and everybody who has posted there.
The result is mesmerizing -- showing an array of chatter and photos and missives. It can also feel a little voyeuristic, even though the people have willingly tagged their messages. And it illuminates an issue with geotagging which could pose dangers to families and children.
But if done right -- and with restrictions -- it also has all kinds of potential, according to Phil Harris, Geofeedia’s CEO.
"Everyone is using social media, especially younger adults," said Harris. "But there’s so much data that it’s hard to find information that’s useful to you as a consumer or a business. With Geofeedia location services, [people] can actually tell others where they are, and what they’re experiencing there in real time."
"Individuals have the ability to express how they feel about an experience at a restaurant -- did they have a good experience at a store, or did they have a good experience when they went on vacation to Florida," he explained as examples.
He said a business could monitor its customers in real time and respond to them immediately and directly.
Geofeedia can also help journalists and news organizations, especially in breaking news situations. Reporters and news desks can monitor a story as it unfolds -- be it a fire or a hostage situation or a union protest -- while getting real-time, unfiltered perspectives from the direct participants on the ground. In fact, Geofeedia has just introduced a streaming service, where users can stream two, three, or even more concurrent locations to see the latest postings from each website.
Harris also pointed to "Superstorm" Sandy. In an instant, a first-responder using Geofeedia could call up videos and tweets posted in real time, focusing on a particular area to zero in on people needing immediate help. Harris said several towns are currently using the service and he hopes it becomes a common way for people to reach out in emergencies or other situations where immediate help is needed.
Harris noted that his company takes care to screen people who want to use the service -- double-checking e-mails and vetting potential users. But he also notes that Geofeedia is simply aggregating technology that is already available on individual social media sites. In other words, Geofeedia is not making anything public that isn’t public already from its original source.
"We’re developing new ways to use Geofeedia every day," said Harris. "We’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of interest. It all comes down to the basic fundamental that people just want to be heard. That’s the underlying trend. We’re just providing a way for organizations to access that data."
When PCMag analyst Jamie Lendino first got his hands on the Scout app early this year, he pointed out that TeleNav had built something more than a simple navigation app.
"Instead of just offering a point-of-interest database and address-based navigation, Scout offers ideas on where to go, when you should leave to get there, how to get there, and what you can do once you arrive," Lendino said.
Less than a year after its launch, TeleNav pushed the offline navigation update to the iOS app. Always There Navigation works any time, regardless of whether the phone has Wi-Fi or cellular coverage. The permanent feature is aimed at helping mobile users remain in constant contact with the map, even if they drive out of wireless coverage.
According to TeleNav, Scout version 1.5 also offers a faster app startup time, and a re-designed My Dashboard homepage, now with one-tap access to My Places.
When the app launches, the dashboard features real-time ETAs to the user's set Work and Home locations, as well as access to saved favorites and popular places nearby, with a map of their current location and the local weather.
Additionally, the new My Search includes popular restaurants, gas price listings, nearby parking lots, Wi-Fi hot spots, and real-time traffic information and speech recognition. For those looking to spice up their GPS map, Scout now offers 12 new car icons, including a convertible, motorcycle, SUV, minivan, muscle car, and sports car.
2012年11月18日星期日
ash brings hi-tech firepower to the fore
ClIsrael, armed with precise intelligence and newly developed munitions, has carried out hundreds of surgical airstrikes in a campaign meant to hit militants hard while avoiding the civilian casualties that have marred previous offensives.
Hamas, meanwhile, has not been stopped from firing its new longer-range rockets that shocked Israelis by reaching the areas around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time, and has revealed a variety of new weapons.
This battle zone is the result of meticulous efforts by both sides to beef up their abilities since a three-week Israeli offensive in Gaza that ended in January 2009.
At that time, Israel inflicted heavy damage on Hamas. But the operation caused widespread damage to the civilian infrastructure and killed hundreds of civilians. The heavy toll drew heavy international criticism and war-crimes accusations.
This time, Israel has sought to hit clear militant targets - relying on painstaking intelligence gathered through a network of informers, aerial surveillance and other hi-tech measures.
Israeli military officials say greater co-ordination between military intelligence and the Shin Bet security service has allowed deeper infiltration into Hamas ranks and quick decision-making on airstrikes.
An arsenal of high-flying drones constantly hovering above Gaza provides a live picture of movements on the ground.
Other technological means used to avoid collateral damage include specially designed munitions with smaller blowback, a system of sending text messages and automated phone calls to warn residents to vacate areas ahead of strikes and stun explosives that are deployed to create large explosive sounds - to scare off civilians before the real payload is deployed against militants.
The Israelis have carried out hundreds of surgical airstrikes against weapon depots, launching pads and other targets. On Saturday, a massive airstrike flattened the headquarters of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh but caused little damage to buildings directly adjacent to it. "Many of the targets . . . were in very densely populated areas, sometimes they were even near UN facilities or schools or recreation centres," said Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich, a military spokeswoman. "This leads us to develop and use very precise ammunitions in order to minimise casualties . . . they know Israel has a soft spot for civilian casualties. We have improved significantly in the area."
Uzi Dayan, a former general and national security adviser, said Israeli intelligence had been tracking Hamas individuals and locations for years, waiting patiently for the opportune moment to attack.
"When you discover a place, you don't strike it immediately. You track it and wait," he said. "Over time, these targets add up."
Israel's inability to halt the rocket attacks, after days of intense aerial bombardments, reflects its limitations. Just as Israel has raced to improve its military tactics, Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza have built up their arsenals with large numbers of powerful weapons.
Once limited to crude projectiles manufactured in Gaza, Hamas has used smuggling tunnels along the border with Egypt to bring in sophisticated, longer-range rockets from Iran and Libya, which has been flush with weapons since Muammar Gaddafi was ousted last year.
“There are so many out there, you can have a thousand in a year,” Hatfield said. “A lot of folks have that many.”
Both veterans said the Marion County GeoTrail was great for beginners. Novices, or “muggles” as they are called in the online community, are expected to take about a day to find every hidden box.
Those that complete the adventure and sign 17 of the 23 logbooks hidden in caches will earn a limited edition coin as a prize. Watson said about 80 of the 300 coins have been awarded in about three weeks. Coins are commonly used as trophies for notching geocaching achievements.
“I think the biggest catalyst is people like to collect coins,” she said. “That’s the goal.”
Geocache players from Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee attended the opening ceremony last month, which Watson deemed a success.
“Our mission is to bring people to the community to have an economic impact,” she said. “The economic impact is what we’re trying to achieve with the trail.”
Shawn Woerlein, steering committee member with North Central Ohio Geocachers, said opening GeoTrails are a great way to draw people in.
“People will come in and drop $200 on a hotel and gas for a $5 coin,” he said. “It brings people, especially coming from neighboring counties, into your community.”
The trail appears to be working as a good money-maker for Marion County. A form given to players on the opening weekend asked how much money they spent on their trip. Creasap said most answers ranged between $50 and $100, providing the economic boost Watson was looking for.
Hamas, meanwhile, has not been stopped from firing its new longer-range rockets that shocked Israelis by reaching the areas around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time, and has revealed a variety of new weapons.
This battle zone is the result of meticulous efforts by both sides to beef up their abilities since a three-week Israeli offensive in Gaza that ended in January 2009.
At that time, Israel inflicted heavy damage on Hamas. But the operation caused widespread damage to the civilian infrastructure and killed hundreds of civilians. The heavy toll drew heavy international criticism and war-crimes accusations.
This time, Israel has sought to hit clear militant targets - relying on painstaking intelligence gathered through a network of informers, aerial surveillance and other hi-tech measures.
Israeli military officials say greater co-ordination between military intelligence and the Shin Bet security service has allowed deeper infiltration into Hamas ranks and quick decision-making on airstrikes.
An arsenal of high-flying drones constantly hovering above Gaza provides a live picture of movements on the ground.
Other technological means used to avoid collateral damage include specially designed munitions with smaller blowback, a system of sending text messages and automated phone calls to warn residents to vacate areas ahead of strikes and stun explosives that are deployed to create large explosive sounds - to scare off civilians before the real payload is deployed against militants.
The Israelis have carried out hundreds of surgical airstrikes against weapon depots, launching pads and other targets. On Saturday, a massive airstrike flattened the headquarters of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh but caused little damage to buildings directly adjacent to it. "Many of the targets . . . were in very densely populated areas, sometimes they were even near UN facilities or schools or recreation centres," said Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich, a military spokeswoman. "This leads us to develop and use very precise ammunitions in order to minimise casualties . . . they know Israel has a soft spot for civilian casualties. We have improved significantly in the area."
Uzi Dayan, a former general and national security adviser, said Israeli intelligence had been tracking Hamas individuals and locations for years, waiting patiently for the opportune moment to attack.
"When you discover a place, you don't strike it immediately. You track it and wait," he said. "Over time, these targets add up."
Israel's inability to halt the rocket attacks, after days of intense aerial bombardments, reflects its limitations. Just as Israel has raced to improve its military tactics, Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza have built up their arsenals with large numbers of powerful weapons.
Once limited to crude projectiles manufactured in Gaza, Hamas has used smuggling tunnels along the border with Egypt to bring in sophisticated, longer-range rockets from Iran and Libya, which has been flush with weapons since Muammar Gaddafi was ousted last year.
“There are so many out there, you can have a thousand in a year,” Hatfield said. “A lot of folks have that many.”
Both veterans said the Marion County GeoTrail was great for beginners. Novices, or “muggles” as they are called in the online community, are expected to take about a day to find every hidden box.
Those that complete the adventure and sign 17 of the 23 logbooks hidden in caches will earn a limited edition coin as a prize. Watson said about 80 of the 300 coins have been awarded in about three weeks. Coins are commonly used as trophies for notching geocaching achievements.
“I think the biggest catalyst is people like to collect coins,” she said. “That’s the goal.”
Geocache players from Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee attended the opening ceremony last month, which Watson deemed a success.
“Our mission is to bring people to the community to have an economic impact,” she said. “The economic impact is what we’re trying to achieve with the trail.”
Shawn Woerlein, steering committee member with North Central Ohio Geocachers, said opening GeoTrails are a great way to draw people in.
“People will come in and drop $200 on a hotel and gas for a $5 coin,” he said. “It brings people, especially coming from neighboring counties, into your community.”
The trail appears to be working as a good money-maker for Marion County. A form given to players on the opening weekend asked how much money they spent on their trip. Creasap said most answers ranged between $50 and $100, providing the economic boost Watson was looking for.
2012年11月14日星期三
Get On Board With New Features
Remember five years ago, when brand pages didn’t exist, and companies were forced to erect jimmied personal profiles in order to be seen on the fastest-growing network on the Internet? I certainly do; brand pages alone were a huge step in the Facebook timeline (pun intended), and the opportunities for brand awareness have only grown.
It makes total sense; Facebook has a tremendous reach, with its numbers recently passing the milestone 1 billion mark. Today, one of two people online are signed up for accounts. To think about it globally, one of seven people in the world has a Facebook page. It’s no wonder that brands are trying more than ever to get their products and services in front of such an enormous, yet targeted, audience.
It’s not just about reach; Facebook’s engagement numbers are equally astounding. Every day, 2.5 billion content items are shared, with 300 million photos uploaded and 2.7 billion likes. Even more interesting than the vast volume of engagement per day is the quality of content sharing. Users are sharing everything in their lives, from the most profound to the everyday mundane. It’s not uncommon to see a coffee date and a birth announcement next to each other in a news feed. The moments we have in real life are the same that we share on Facebook. Essentially, the lines between our offline and online selves are becoming increasingly blurred. Thanks for that, Facebook.
Regardless of whether or not the increasing integration of online into our offline lives is right or wrong, Facebook is a no-brainer for any marketer or advertiser, and it’s only getting better, with new features rolling out consistently. Recently, Facebook has focused on giving advertisers what they want: better targeting, conversions, and discovery.
Facebook advertising is based on audience targeting, which has historically been the most valuable aspect of marketing with Facebook. The advantage of using the platform to advertise is the amount of user information. It’s super-easy to segment your audience based on gender, age, marital status, location, and even interests, and to serve your ads to the most qualified audience. Not even almighty Google AdWords can get that refined.
Recently, Facebook has gotten even more advanced with targeting with two new tools: Facebook Exchange and custom audiences.
Facebook Exchange allows for advertising retargeting by extracting users’ online behavior off Facebook. Advertisers can now retarget customers who have already shown some interest in the product or service. It’s a real-time bidding service for ads – big-time.
Custom audiences enables advertisers to marry information on potential customers with Facebook data. It allows you to take your own CRM database, compare it to Facebook’s data, and then create custom target audience clusters. Boom, instant better targeting.
Facebook’s new tool, collections, seeks to expand brand discovery. It’s essentially an online catalog that lives on Facebook with the addition of the want button. In my opinion, it’s basically Facebook’s answer to Pinterest for brands. Still, it’s an exceptional way to create brand awareness, buzz, and yet another way to increase engagement with customers.
Facebook is in a constant state of reincarnation, always looking two steps forward to make both the user and marketer experience better. I fell in love with Facebook more than eight years ago, and as my career took me into the world of tech, advertising, and search. I’ve only fallen harder. I am always excited when Facebook announces new additions, features, and interface modifications for both consumers and marketers.
I think these recent features are especially interesting and telling. It’s clear that Facebook is committed to maximizing marketing and advertising opportunities for brands to reach their target audience. I’d like to believe that these moves were based less on declining stock prices, and more about building an effective user experience and advertising platform. Either way, engagement is up, so y’all better take advantage of it!
It makes total sense; Facebook has a tremendous reach, with its numbers recently passing the milestone 1 billion mark. Today, one of two people online are signed up for accounts. To think about it globally, one of seven people in the world has a Facebook page. It’s no wonder that brands are trying more than ever to get their products and services in front of such an enormous, yet targeted, audience.
It’s not just about reach; Facebook’s engagement numbers are equally astounding. Every day, 2.5 billion content items are shared, with 300 million photos uploaded and 2.7 billion likes. Even more interesting than the vast volume of engagement per day is the quality of content sharing. Users are sharing everything in their lives, from the most profound to the everyday mundane. It’s not uncommon to see a coffee date and a birth announcement next to each other in a news feed. The moments we have in real life are the same that we share on Facebook. Essentially, the lines between our offline and online selves are becoming increasingly blurred. Thanks for that, Facebook.
Regardless of whether or not the increasing integration of online into our offline lives is right or wrong, Facebook is a no-brainer for any marketer or advertiser, and it’s only getting better, with new features rolling out consistently. Recently, Facebook has focused on giving advertisers what they want: better targeting, conversions, and discovery.
Facebook advertising is based on audience targeting, which has historically been the most valuable aspect of marketing with Facebook. The advantage of using the platform to advertise is the amount of user information. It’s super-easy to segment your audience based on gender, age, marital status, location, and even interests, and to serve your ads to the most qualified audience. Not even almighty Google AdWords can get that refined.
Recently, Facebook has gotten even more advanced with targeting with two new tools: Facebook Exchange and custom audiences.
Facebook Exchange allows for advertising retargeting by extracting users’ online behavior off Facebook. Advertisers can now retarget customers who have already shown some interest in the product or service. It’s a real-time bidding service for ads – big-time.
Custom audiences enables advertisers to marry information on potential customers with Facebook data. It allows you to take your own CRM database, compare it to Facebook’s data, and then create custom target audience clusters. Boom, instant better targeting.
Facebook’s new tool, collections, seeks to expand brand discovery. It’s essentially an online catalog that lives on Facebook with the addition of the want button. In my opinion, it’s basically Facebook’s answer to Pinterest for brands. Still, it’s an exceptional way to create brand awareness, buzz, and yet another way to increase engagement with customers.
Facebook is in a constant state of reincarnation, always looking two steps forward to make both the user and marketer experience better. I fell in love with Facebook more than eight years ago, and as my career took me into the world of tech, advertising, and search. I’ve only fallen harder. I am always excited when Facebook announces new additions, features, and interface modifications for both consumers and marketers.
I think these recent features are especially interesting and telling. It’s clear that Facebook is committed to maximizing marketing and advertising opportunities for brands to reach their target audience. I’d like to believe that these moves were based less on declining stock prices, and more about building an effective user experience and advertising platform. Either way, engagement is up, so y’all better take advantage of it!
2012年11月11日星期日
As Coal Boosts Mozambique
When Augusto Conselho Chachoka and his neighbors heard that the world's biggest coal mine was to be built on their land, a tantalizing new future floated before them. Instead of scraping by as subsistence farmers, they would earn wages as miners, they thought. The mining company would build them sturdy new houses, it seemed. Finally, a slice of the wealth that has propelled Mozambique from its war-addled past to its newfound status as one of the world's fastest-growing economies would be theirs.
Instead, they ended up being moved 25 miles away from the mine, living in crumbling, leaky houses, farming barren plots of land, far from any kind of jobs that the mine might create and farther than ever from Mozambique's growth miracle.
"Development is coming, but the development is going to certain areas and certain people," Mr. Chachoka said, taking a break from trying to coax enough food from his scraggly field to feed his six children.
Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world, broken by a brutal colonial legacy, a 16-year civil war and failed experiments with Marxist economic policy. But it is also one of the so-called African Lions: countries that are growing at well above 6 percent annually, even amid the global downturn.
Mozambique is poised for a long economic boom, driven by its vast deposits of coal and natural gas. Vale, the Brazilian mining company, is planning to invest $6 billion in its coal operation near here, and other coal giants like Rio Tinto will soon begin producing coal in the Tete region of northern Mozambique.
Gas projects could bring in far more, as much as $70 billion, according to World Bank estimates. Mozambique's location on Africa's southeastern coast means it is perfectly positioned to feed hungry markets in southern and eastern Asia. These investments mean that income from natural resources could easily outstrip the outsized contribution foreign aid makes to its $5 billion annual budget.
The country has been growing at a rapid clip for the past two decades, in fact, since the end of its brutal civil war. Yet, after a substantial drop in the first postwar decade, gains against poverty have slowed substantially, analysts say, leaving millions stuck below the poverty line and raising tough questions about whether Africa's resource boom can effectively raise the standard of living of its people.
"You get these rich countries with poor people," said the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who recently visited Mozambique and has written on the struggle of resource-rich countries to develop. "You have all this money flowing in, but you don't have real job creation and you don't have sustained growth."
It is a problem in resource-rich countries across Africa. In a largely upbeat assessment of Africa's growth prospects, the World Bank said in October that rapidly growing economies powered by oil, gas and minerals have seen poverty levels fall more slowly than countries without those resources.
In some nations, like Gabon and Angola, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has even increased as growth has spiked.
Most of Mozambique's people live in rural areas, and almost all of them depend on farming. Since commercial farming scarcely exists -- 99 percent of farmers are smallholders -- this means small-scale, family-based agriculture is the main, and in many cases the only, source of income for the vast majority of Mozambicans.
But the new gas and coal deals are wrapped up in multibillion-dollar megaprojects that rarely create large numbers of jobs or foster local entrepreneurship, according to an analysis by the United States Agency for International Development.
"The effects of megaprojects on living standards were found to be very modest," the report said. "These projects, over all, have created few jobs. And linkages to the public budget via tax revenues have also been small because of tax exemptions."
The plight of the people of this tiny, new village helps illustrate why Mozambique's rural poor have been left behind. Far from the centers of economic power, dependent on rain-fed agriculture and ignored by the government, the rural poor languish even as the country surges.
The coal deposits in Moatize represent one of the biggest untapped reserves in the world, and the Brazilian mining company Vale has placed a big bet on it. But to get to the coal, hundreds of villagers living atop it had to be moved. The company held a series of meetings with community members and government officials, laying out its plans to build tidy new bungalows for each family and upgrade public services. As the prospect of huge new investments in their rural corner of the world beckoned, villagers anticipated a whole new life: jobs, houses, education, and even free food.
Things didn't work out that way. The houses were poorly built and leaked when it rained. The promised water taps and electricity never arrived. Cateme is too far from the mine for anyone here to get a job there. The new fields are dusty and barren -- coaxing anything from them is hard.
Before he moved, Mr. Chachoka made a tidy living. He had a small vegetable patch, his wife made bricks from mud to sell in a nearby town, and he could pick up occasional work as a laborer.
Mr. Chachoka's move from peri-urban striver who salted away extra cash to struggling rural farmer who can barely feed his family is emblematic of a problem facing Mozambique and many other resource-rich but still deeply poor nations. Strong economic growth almost completely bypasses the rural poor, and in some ways can leave them even worse off. "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer," Mr. Chachoka said. "That is what is happening here."
Some resource-rich countries in Africa have managed to turn mineral wealth into broad-based development. Ghana, which recently discovered oil, has won praise for its careful planning for poverty alleviation. Botswana's diamonds have turned what was one of the world's most impoverished nations into a middle-income country. Mozambique says it hopes to do the same, striking a balance between exploiting its mineral wealth and improving rural farming so that all Mozambicans benefit.
"We are very optimistic," said Abdul Razak, deputy minister of mines and the man in charge of bringing Mozambique into compliance with international standards for transparency. "The level of poverty is going to be lower and the level of well-being is going to be higher."
The government has signed up to be part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a program set up by Britain and supported by the World Bank to ensure that governments and companies are honest about revenues. The government also says it plans to invest the proceeds of mining into antipoverty programs and to help rural farmers.
But Mozambique's experience also shows how hard it will be to get there. Even after two decades of strong growth, the country remains near dead last on the Human Development Index, just above Burundi, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By some measures, median income has actually shrunk, not grown, since its boom began.
The events that unfolded in Cateme explain why this is the case. Earlier this year, the people of Cateme sent a letter to local government officials and Vale demanding that their complaints about the resettlement process be addressed, threatening to block the railway line that passes through their village carrying coal to the port. When they received no reply, they occupied the rail line. The police descended upon them, chasing them away and roughing up those who resisted removal.
Instead, they ended up being moved 25 miles away from the mine, living in crumbling, leaky houses, farming barren plots of land, far from any kind of jobs that the mine might create and farther than ever from Mozambique's growth miracle.
"Development is coming, but the development is going to certain areas and certain people," Mr. Chachoka said, taking a break from trying to coax enough food from his scraggly field to feed his six children.
Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world, broken by a brutal colonial legacy, a 16-year civil war and failed experiments with Marxist economic policy. But it is also one of the so-called African Lions: countries that are growing at well above 6 percent annually, even amid the global downturn.
Mozambique is poised for a long economic boom, driven by its vast deposits of coal and natural gas. Vale, the Brazilian mining company, is planning to invest $6 billion in its coal operation near here, and other coal giants like Rio Tinto will soon begin producing coal in the Tete region of northern Mozambique.
Gas projects could bring in far more, as much as $70 billion, according to World Bank estimates. Mozambique's location on Africa's southeastern coast means it is perfectly positioned to feed hungry markets in southern and eastern Asia. These investments mean that income from natural resources could easily outstrip the outsized contribution foreign aid makes to its $5 billion annual budget.
The country has been growing at a rapid clip for the past two decades, in fact, since the end of its brutal civil war. Yet, after a substantial drop in the first postwar decade, gains against poverty have slowed substantially, analysts say, leaving millions stuck below the poverty line and raising tough questions about whether Africa's resource boom can effectively raise the standard of living of its people.
"You get these rich countries with poor people," said the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who recently visited Mozambique and has written on the struggle of resource-rich countries to develop. "You have all this money flowing in, but you don't have real job creation and you don't have sustained growth."
It is a problem in resource-rich countries across Africa. In a largely upbeat assessment of Africa's growth prospects, the World Bank said in October that rapidly growing economies powered by oil, gas and minerals have seen poverty levels fall more slowly than countries without those resources.
In some nations, like Gabon and Angola, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has even increased as growth has spiked.
Most of Mozambique's people live in rural areas, and almost all of them depend on farming. Since commercial farming scarcely exists -- 99 percent of farmers are smallholders -- this means small-scale, family-based agriculture is the main, and in many cases the only, source of income for the vast majority of Mozambicans.
But the new gas and coal deals are wrapped up in multibillion-dollar megaprojects that rarely create large numbers of jobs or foster local entrepreneurship, according to an analysis by the United States Agency for International Development.
"The effects of megaprojects on living standards were found to be very modest," the report said. "These projects, over all, have created few jobs. And linkages to the public budget via tax revenues have also been small because of tax exemptions."
The plight of the people of this tiny, new village helps illustrate why Mozambique's rural poor have been left behind. Far from the centers of economic power, dependent on rain-fed agriculture and ignored by the government, the rural poor languish even as the country surges.
The coal deposits in Moatize represent one of the biggest untapped reserves in the world, and the Brazilian mining company Vale has placed a big bet on it. But to get to the coal, hundreds of villagers living atop it had to be moved. The company held a series of meetings with community members and government officials, laying out its plans to build tidy new bungalows for each family and upgrade public services. As the prospect of huge new investments in their rural corner of the world beckoned, villagers anticipated a whole new life: jobs, houses, education, and even free food.
Things didn't work out that way. The houses were poorly built and leaked when it rained. The promised water taps and electricity never arrived. Cateme is too far from the mine for anyone here to get a job there. The new fields are dusty and barren -- coaxing anything from them is hard.
Before he moved, Mr. Chachoka made a tidy living. He had a small vegetable patch, his wife made bricks from mud to sell in a nearby town, and he could pick up occasional work as a laborer.
Mr. Chachoka's move from peri-urban striver who salted away extra cash to struggling rural farmer who can barely feed his family is emblematic of a problem facing Mozambique and many other resource-rich but still deeply poor nations. Strong economic growth almost completely bypasses the rural poor, and in some ways can leave them even worse off. "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer," Mr. Chachoka said. "That is what is happening here."
Some resource-rich countries in Africa have managed to turn mineral wealth into broad-based development. Ghana, which recently discovered oil, has won praise for its careful planning for poverty alleviation. Botswana's diamonds have turned what was one of the world's most impoverished nations into a middle-income country. Mozambique says it hopes to do the same, striking a balance between exploiting its mineral wealth and improving rural farming so that all Mozambicans benefit.
"We are very optimistic," said Abdul Razak, deputy minister of mines and the man in charge of bringing Mozambique into compliance with international standards for transparency. "The level of poverty is going to be lower and the level of well-being is going to be higher."
The government has signed up to be part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a program set up by Britain and supported by the World Bank to ensure that governments and companies are honest about revenues. The government also says it plans to invest the proceeds of mining into antipoverty programs and to help rural farmers.
But Mozambique's experience also shows how hard it will be to get there. Even after two decades of strong growth, the country remains near dead last on the Human Development Index, just above Burundi, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By some measures, median income has actually shrunk, not grown, since its boom began.
The events that unfolded in Cateme explain why this is the case. Earlier this year, the people of Cateme sent a letter to local government officials and Vale demanding that their complaints about the resettlement process be addressed, threatening to block the railway line that passes through their village carrying coal to the port. When they received no reply, they occupied the rail line. The police descended upon them, chasing them away and roughing up those who resisted removal.
2012年11月8日星期四
The Dark Side of Free Speech
In the years since social media sites have developed and shifted largely into news feeds and channels of information sharing -- where regular people are overnight transformed into reporters and editors -- a debate has been brewing about freedom of speech in the context of social media. With Hurricane Sandy recently ravaging several states across the east coast, and social media playing a large role in keeping populations with spotty Internet access and in-and-out cell phone reception informed, the issue of free speech has again taken center stage.
During the recent hurricane that swept through dozens of cities across the east coast, millions of people relied on sites like Facebook and Twitter to get out information and stay updated on the unfolding crisis, which claimed the lives of at least 157 people across the U.S., Canada and Caribbean, and left many more without electricity, heat, gas, cell phone reception and shelter.
The human curated news and real-time updates shared across social media sites -- which oftentimes turn into de facto emergency broadcast channels because of the unparalleled speed at which information can be posted and distributed -- during the natural disaster were largely factual and reliable. Information like updates on the location of the storm, where people could find access to the Internet and news on what parts of the city were under blackout, circulated across the curated channels.
But not all of the information swirling across these impromptu news outlets was helpful or factual. Trolls, like @comfortablysmug, whose identity was revealed by BuzzFeed as Shashank Tripathia, knowingly posted blatantly false information that could have caused mass panic and fear across an already devastated population.
Recent Tweets that were deliberately false -- claiming that the NYSE had been flooded due to Hurricane Sandy, that Con Edison was shutting down power to the entire city, that Con Edison workers were trapped in the New York power plant and that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was trapped in the city -- had critics claiming that posts like these should not be protected by freedom of speech. Blatantly misleading Tweets like these during a national disaster incite fear and panic in an already vulnerable population. What's more, the Tweets got picked up by major news channels like CNN, Reuters and The Weather Channel and were shared via social media sites hundreds of times before the Tweets were reported as false.
Several false images posted on Facebook and re-tweeted on Twitter, including one showing a shark swimming in the streets and another showing a massive storm cloud brewing above the Statue of Liberty, were shared so many times that the Atlantic published a post titled, "Think Before You Retweet: How to Spot a Fake Storm Photo."
The false tweets re-opened the debate about the boundaries of free speech -- something that New York Council Member Peter Vallone says is laid out in the New York Penal Law. Based on that law, Council Member Vallone is bringing a criminal case against Tripathia to the New York District Attorney's office.
"Unbeknownst to many, there's a law regarding falsely reporting an incident that covers this exactly. I've spoken to the Manhattan DA office and they're taking this very seriously," Council Member Vallone said, reading from the New York Penal Law on falsely reporting an incident. The law reads in part, "A person is guilty of falsely reporting an incident... when, knowing the information reported, conveyed or circulated to be false or baseless, he: Initiates or circulates a false report or warning of an alleged occurrence or impending occurrence of a crime, catastrophe or emergency under circumstances in which it is not unlikely that public alarm or inconvenience will result...."
"None of us think this [law] is something that should be consistently enforced," Council Member Vallone said, "The First Amendment is strong for a reason. But there are limits to even that. For example you're not allowed to yell 'fire!' in a crowded theater; this jerk [Tripathia] was yelling fire and New York was the theater."
Falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in the 1919 Schenck v. United States court case because it had the potential of causing a "clear and present danger." The rule was later partially overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, a case that limited the scope of banned speech to things that would "likely" incite "imminent" lawless action. Still, there is ambiguity to the terms "likely" and "imminent." But the law under which Council Member Vallone seeks to prosecute Tripathia on is the law against falsely reporting an incident or emergency under circumstances in which public alarm will result -- and Tripathia's comments on Twitter had the potential to cause alarm.
When asked about the case he brought to the New York DA against Tripathia, the New York Council Member said, "We're still at the very preliminary stage right now because the DA office still doesn't have power, but we will have upcoming discussions about this." (At the time of this interview, the DA office had still not been re-opened). "The Manhattan DA is taking this very seriously. I hope the fact that I'm asking for criminal charges to be seriously considered will make him [Tripathia] much less comfortable and much less smug."
Gerald Weber, of Gerry Weber's Law Offices, agreed that there should be limits to what people can say in certain instances. Weber explained that even in the United States, where freedom of speech is highly protected, there are instances when that protection can be lost. "If knowingly false speech is not reasonably identified as being fiction, and the speech can impact disaster relief and citizen preparedness in a disaster, there is a strong argument that free speech protections are lost. Though much will depend on the particular charges brought," Weber said.
But free speech stalwarts argue that it's exactly during tough times that free speech needs to be protected. Brian J. Buchanan, the managing editor at the First Amendment Center, said limiting freedom of speech could have a slippery slope effect -- essentially unraveling a constitutional right afforded to Americans under the First Amendment. "Making 'lies' illegal would be a slippery slope. If someone tweeted, 'Staten Island is in chaos' and others found that statement to be untrue, where would such a law draw the line between 'fact' and interpretation?"
Ken Paulson, a lawyer and former USA Today editor at the First Amendment Center, told GigaOm that freedom of speech -- no matter if the speech is true or not -- is one of the most highly protected rights Americans have. "Lies are constitutionally protected except in very rare exceptions. Someone recklessly tweeting is beyond the reach of the law except in rare exceptions," Paulson told GigaOm, adding, "Anything you want to outlaw on Twitter, you'd have to outlaw in conversation."
During the recent hurricane that swept through dozens of cities across the east coast, millions of people relied on sites like Facebook and Twitter to get out information and stay updated on the unfolding crisis, which claimed the lives of at least 157 people across the U.S., Canada and Caribbean, and left many more without electricity, heat, gas, cell phone reception and shelter.
The human curated news and real-time updates shared across social media sites -- which oftentimes turn into de facto emergency broadcast channels because of the unparalleled speed at which information can be posted and distributed -- during the natural disaster were largely factual and reliable. Information like updates on the location of the storm, where people could find access to the Internet and news on what parts of the city were under blackout, circulated across the curated channels.
But not all of the information swirling across these impromptu news outlets was helpful or factual. Trolls, like @comfortablysmug, whose identity was revealed by BuzzFeed as Shashank Tripathia, knowingly posted blatantly false information that could have caused mass panic and fear across an already devastated population.
Recent Tweets that were deliberately false -- claiming that the NYSE had been flooded due to Hurricane Sandy, that Con Edison was shutting down power to the entire city, that Con Edison workers were trapped in the New York power plant and that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was trapped in the city -- had critics claiming that posts like these should not be protected by freedom of speech. Blatantly misleading Tweets like these during a national disaster incite fear and panic in an already vulnerable population. What's more, the Tweets got picked up by major news channels like CNN, Reuters and The Weather Channel and were shared via social media sites hundreds of times before the Tweets were reported as false.
Several false images posted on Facebook and re-tweeted on Twitter, including one showing a shark swimming in the streets and another showing a massive storm cloud brewing above the Statue of Liberty, were shared so many times that the Atlantic published a post titled, "Think Before You Retweet: How to Spot a Fake Storm Photo."
The false tweets re-opened the debate about the boundaries of free speech -- something that New York Council Member Peter Vallone says is laid out in the New York Penal Law. Based on that law, Council Member Vallone is bringing a criminal case against Tripathia to the New York District Attorney's office.
"Unbeknownst to many, there's a law regarding falsely reporting an incident that covers this exactly. I've spoken to the Manhattan DA office and they're taking this very seriously," Council Member Vallone said, reading from the New York Penal Law on falsely reporting an incident. The law reads in part, "A person is guilty of falsely reporting an incident... when, knowing the information reported, conveyed or circulated to be false or baseless, he: Initiates or circulates a false report or warning of an alleged occurrence or impending occurrence of a crime, catastrophe or emergency under circumstances in which it is not unlikely that public alarm or inconvenience will result...."
"None of us think this [law] is something that should be consistently enforced," Council Member Vallone said, "The First Amendment is strong for a reason. But there are limits to even that. For example you're not allowed to yell 'fire!' in a crowded theater; this jerk [Tripathia] was yelling fire and New York was the theater."
Falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in the 1919 Schenck v. United States court case because it had the potential of causing a "clear and present danger." The rule was later partially overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, a case that limited the scope of banned speech to things that would "likely" incite "imminent" lawless action. Still, there is ambiguity to the terms "likely" and "imminent." But the law under which Council Member Vallone seeks to prosecute Tripathia on is the law against falsely reporting an incident or emergency under circumstances in which public alarm will result -- and Tripathia's comments on Twitter had the potential to cause alarm.
When asked about the case he brought to the New York DA against Tripathia, the New York Council Member said, "We're still at the very preliminary stage right now because the DA office still doesn't have power, but we will have upcoming discussions about this." (At the time of this interview, the DA office had still not been re-opened). "The Manhattan DA is taking this very seriously. I hope the fact that I'm asking for criminal charges to be seriously considered will make him [Tripathia] much less comfortable and much less smug."
Gerald Weber, of Gerry Weber's Law Offices, agreed that there should be limits to what people can say in certain instances. Weber explained that even in the United States, where freedom of speech is highly protected, there are instances when that protection can be lost. "If knowingly false speech is not reasonably identified as being fiction, and the speech can impact disaster relief and citizen preparedness in a disaster, there is a strong argument that free speech protections are lost. Though much will depend on the particular charges brought," Weber said.
But free speech stalwarts argue that it's exactly during tough times that free speech needs to be protected. Brian J. Buchanan, the managing editor at the First Amendment Center, said limiting freedom of speech could have a slippery slope effect -- essentially unraveling a constitutional right afforded to Americans under the First Amendment. "Making 'lies' illegal would be a slippery slope. If someone tweeted, 'Staten Island is in chaos' and others found that statement to be untrue, where would such a law draw the line between 'fact' and interpretation?"
Ken Paulson, a lawyer and former USA Today editor at the First Amendment Center, told GigaOm that freedom of speech -- no matter if the speech is true or not -- is one of the most highly protected rights Americans have. "Lies are constitutionally protected except in very rare exceptions. Someone recklessly tweeting is beyond the reach of the law except in rare exceptions," Paulson told GigaOm, adding, "Anything you want to outlaw on Twitter, you'd have to outlaw in conversation."
2012年11月6日星期二
Geotagging can help cities become 'smarter'
Leveraging big data and analytics will be key for those looking to becoming a 'smart' city, as technology can play its part in tackling the challenges brought about by urbanization.
One of the problems with urbanization is rising healthcare costs, especially in countries such as China, said Andrew Grant, director at McKinsey & Company Singapore. He was part of a panel discussion at the i.luminate 2012 conference organized by Singapore Telecommunications held here Tuesday.
"Healthcare costs in China will be 3 times in 10 years' time," said Grant, but noted one way of tackling this is by leveraging big data for preventive medicine. He was referring to China's disease surveillance network, where data is collected across the country to monitor the patterns and potential of infectious diseases--such as during natural disasters.
Such "crowdsourced" information can also be used to bring down healthcare costs, the executive pointed out, such as in emergency response which is one of the most expensive things governments provide.
For example, a number of cities have looked at hybridizing the existing response infrastructure with volunteers, Grant noted. Volunteers and defibrillators are geotagged, so when someone suffers from a heart attack the system triggers an alert to the nearest volunteer and the nearest defibrillator.
Cities can potentially get a lot of feedback from citizens to become more efficient and smarter too, but most do not capture it properly, the director noted. "For example, if a tree falls, I can geotag it and send it to the relevant department straightaway and this can help influence real-time workflows."
Agreeing, Doug Farber, managing director for enterprise in Asia-Pacific at Google, said it was important for governments to establish a foundation of standards on which services can be built on top of.
"A great example is geospatial infrastructure--having a single source of truth of what a country or what a city looks like," said Farber during the same panel discussion as Grant.
He cited the example of his experience in Queensland, Australia, where Google worked with local authorities after a hurricane struck two years ago.
"What made the problem worse was there were 15 to 20 different sources of truth to what the underlying data and the mapping data was. People didn't know what the disaster was, they didn't know where the property lines were. They didn't know where the flood plains started or ended," the executive said.
The search giant helped wade through the different data and unified them using Google Earth, and this single source of information then opened up opportunities for location-based services (LBS), he said.
"Once you set up that foundation, you can overlay other sorts of important information and send it out to a lot more constituents," he pointed out.
One of the problems with urbanization is rising healthcare costs, especially in countries such as China, said Andrew Grant, director at McKinsey & Company Singapore. He was part of a panel discussion at the i.luminate 2012 conference organized by Singapore Telecommunications held here Tuesday.
"Healthcare costs in China will be 3 times in 10 years' time," said Grant, but noted one way of tackling this is by leveraging big data for preventive medicine. He was referring to China's disease surveillance network, where data is collected across the country to monitor the patterns and potential of infectious diseases--such as during natural disasters.
Such "crowdsourced" information can also be used to bring down healthcare costs, the executive pointed out, such as in emergency response which is one of the most expensive things governments provide.
For example, a number of cities have looked at hybridizing the existing response infrastructure with volunteers, Grant noted. Volunteers and defibrillators are geotagged, so when someone suffers from a heart attack the system triggers an alert to the nearest volunteer and the nearest defibrillator.
Cities can potentially get a lot of feedback from citizens to become more efficient and smarter too, but most do not capture it properly, the director noted. "For example, if a tree falls, I can geotag it and send it to the relevant department straightaway and this can help influence real-time workflows."
Agreeing, Doug Farber, managing director for enterprise in Asia-Pacific at Google, said it was important for governments to establish a foundation of standards on which services can be built on top of.
"A great example is geospatial infrastructure--having a single source of truth of what a country or what a city looks like," said Farber during the same panel discussion as Grant.
He cited the example of his experience in Queensland, Australia, where Google worked with local authorities after a hurricane struck two years ago.
"What made the problem worse was there were 15 to 20 different sources of truth to what the underlying data and the mapping data was. People didn't know what the disaster was, they didn't know where the property lines were. They didn't know where the flood plains started or ended," the executive said.
The search giant helped wade through the different data and unified them using Google Earth, and this single source of information then opened up opportunities for location-based services (LBS), he said.
"Once you set up that foundation, you can overlay other sorts of important information and send it out to a lot more constituents," he pointed out.
2012年11月4日星期日
2012 Andrew Olle Lecture
First because I've attended all but one of these events - I was still posted overseas when the first one happened - and that means I'm intensely aware of being in the distinguished company of those who've spoken before me.
But second, because Andrew Olle was a good friend of mine, and probably the colleague I most admired as well. We first became friends in 1979, on the then-new program Nationwide. The program was led by John Penlington, a pioneer of current affairs television in Australia in the early days of Four Corners. Paul Murphy, Jenny Brockie, Richard Carleton and Geraldine Doogue were among the reporters and presenters. But Andrew stood out. He came to Nationwide already fully armoured as a journalist - Years of standing up to Joh 'feed the chooks' Bjelke Petersen saw to that. In fact one of Andrew's badges of honour was that Joh ended up refusing to talk to him.
We were friends from that time on, and we worked together again on Four Corners in the late eighties and early nineties. Andrew was a perfectionist and a stickler for facts. He also had a remarkable journalistic eye. Like every other reporter on the program, I used to write links for him to read before and after the story I'd put together. Andrew would retire to his office and shut his door, and after awhile, like every other reporter on the program, I'd find that he had torn my links apart and come up with something completely different. It would have been annoying, but in almost every case you had to admit that he'd improved on your work. He had a particular talent for finding the one key aspect of the story you hadn't emphasised enough, and bringing it to light.
Andrew was also at the time Australia's best interviewer. I think someone described it as tactful tenacity: but the fact that, as so many people remarked after his death, his politics were a mystery even to his friends, meant that he could be equally tough on either side. And Andrew's principles of interviewing, built around the base of close listening and short, well-researched questions, were just as effective in morning radio here in Sydney as they were in cross-questioning Bob Hawke or Alan Bond on Four Corners.
I still can't think without strong emotion of the day I answered the phone on assignment in Venice, of all places, to hear the news that Andrew Olle had been struck down. Whatever else happens tonight, please do give as much as you can to the evening's principal cause: research into brain tumours. Andrew was 47 when he died: as Annette and Nick and Sam and Nina would tell you, and as so many of his friends and his audience would agree, much, much too young.
It's Andrew I think of when I read, as I do daily now, attacks on what are variously called "old media", dead tree media", the MSM, for Main Stream Media, or the Lamestream media. Andrew with his meticulous attention to facts and his scrupulous fairness represented the best of old media. And let me say right up front, because much of what I say tonight will sound bleak or even apocalyptic, that I'm a journalism romantic.
I joined the ABC as a half-English dilettante with an arts degree and a Pommy accent. I remember going for an interview at the Herald. First mistake - I went to the Hunter St office, which was just their corporate headquarters, not the actual newspaper. Then I asked someone the way, but apparently the way I said 'Herald' was unintelligible, because I ended up at Harold Park. I did make it to Broadway on time despite all that, but the Herald found my minimal charm and talent easy to resist. Somehow, Aunty, where the BBC voice was still pretty prevalent in those days, saw something in me and, stylish in a denim jacket with patch pockets and a pair of flared trousers, I turned up on February the eleventh 1974 at 164 William St, headquarters of ABC News.
It was a time of turmoil in Australia and elsewhere. Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister. President Nixon was in trouble at home over Watergate, and losing the war overseas in Vietnam.
Britain, where I'd been at university until the previous year, was sinking further into a slough of intractable industrial disputes, three day weeks and power cuts. The Cultural Revolution in China was still not over, Brezhnev's stultifying rule still had a decade to run in the Soviet Union.
And so it was that a mere two months later, on what was effectively cadet work experience in Canberra, with most of my colleagues at lunch in the late lamented non-Members' bar, I found myself writing the ABC News story of the double dissolution of Parliament and the announcement of the Federal election.
"The aide said", wrote Suskind, "that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
So here we all are, and I imagine most of us here tonight would categorise ourselves as the reality based community, but we too are beleaguered.
Here in Australia we still regulate the airwaves. Not often, but sometimes. ACMA famously ordered fact-checking training for Alan Jones after he repeatedly used figures which were - egregiously - scientifically and mathematically wrong about carbon dioxide. But even if this has the desired effect on Jones, which I doubt, it's still shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. You no longer need Fox News or radio shock jocks to feed your prejudices and screen out the facts. You just create a world where you get all your news from the twitter and Facebook and blog sources you've chosen. And that world's already upon us. A September Pew research study showed that a third of under thirties in the US already get their news from social media - far, far more than newspapers and equal with TV. Australia's famously a land of technological early adopters, and I believe the figures here would be similar.
But second, because Andrew Olle was a good friend of mine, and probably the colleague I most admired as well. We first became friends in 1979, on the then-new program Nationwide. The program was led by John Penlington, a pioneer of current affairs television in Australia in the early days of Four Corners. Paul Murphy, Jenny Brockie, Richard Carleton and Geraldine Doogue were among the reporters and presenters. But Andrew stood out. He came to Nationwide already fully armoured as a journalist - Years of standing up to Joh 'feed the chooks' Bjelke Petersen saw to that. In fact one of Andrew's badges of honour was that Joh ended up refusing to talk to him.
We were friends from that time on, and we worked together again on Four Corners in the late eighties and early nineties. Andrew was a perfectionist and a stickler for facts. He also had a remarkable journalistic eye. Like every other reporter on the program, I used to write links for him to read before and after the story I'd put together. Andrew would retire to his office and shut his door, and after awhile, like every other reporter on the program, I'd find that he had torn my links apart and come up with something completely different. It would have been annoying, but in almost every case you had to admit that he'd improved on your work. He had a particular talent for finding the one key aspect of the story you hadn't emphasised enough, and bringing it to light.
Andrew was also at the time Australia's best interviewer. I think someone described it as tactful tenacity: but the fact that, as so many people remarked after his death, his politics were a mystery even to his friends, meant that he could be equally tough on either side. And Andrew's principles of interviewing, built around the base of close listening and short, well-researched questions, were just as effective in morning radio here in Sydney as they were in cross-questioning Bob Hawke or Alan Bond on Four Corners.
I still can't think without strong emotion of the day I answered the phone on assignment in Venice, of all places, to hear the news that Andrew Olle had been struck down. Whatever else happens tonight, please do give as much as you can to the evening's principal cause: research into brain tumours. Andrew was 47 when he died: as Annette and Nick and Sam and Nina would tell you, and as so many of his friends and his audience would agree, much, much too young.
It's Andrew I think of when I read, as I do daily now, attacks on what are variously called "old media", dead tree media", the MSM, for Main Stream Media, or the Lamestream media. Andrew with his meticulous attention to facts and his scrupulous fairness represented the best of old media. And let me say right up front, because much of what I say tonight will sound bleak or even apocalyptic, that I'm a journalism romantic.
I joined the ABC as a half-English dilettante with an arts degree and a Pommy accent. I remember going for an interview at the Herald. First mistake - I went to the Hunter St office, which was just their corporate headquarters, not the actual newspaper. Then I asked someone the way, but apparently the way I said 'Herald' was unintelligible, because I ended up at Harold Park. I did make it to Broadway on time despite all that, but the Herald found my minimal charm and talent easy to resist. Somehow, Aunty, where the BBC voice was still pretty prevalent in those days, saw something in me and, stylish in a denim jacket with patch pockets and a pair of flared trousers, I turned up on February the eleventh 1974 at 164 William St, headquarters of ABC News.
It was a time of turmoil in Australia and elsewhere. Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister. President Nixon was in trouble at home over Watergate, and losing the war overseas in Vietnam.
Britain, where I'd been at university until the previous year, was sinking further into a slough of intractable industrial disputes, three day weeks and power cuts. The Cultural Revolution in China was still not over, Brezhnev's stultifying rule still had a decade to run in the Soviet Union.
And so it was that a mere two months later, on what was effectively cadet work experience in Canberra, with most of my colleagues at lunch in the late lamented non-Members' bar, I found myself writing the ABC News story of the double dissolution of Parliament and the announcement of the Federal election.
"The aide said", wrote Suskind, "that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
So here we all are, and I imagine most of us here tonight would categorise ourselves as the reality based community, but we too are beleaguered.
Here in Australia we still regulate the airwaves. Not often, but sometimes. ACMA famously ordered fact-checking training for Alan Jones after he repeatedly used figures which were - egregiously - scientifically and mathematically wrong about carbon dioxide. But even if this has the desired effect on Jones, which I doubt, it's still shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. You no longer need Fox News or radio shock jocks to feed your prejudices and screen out the facts. You just create a world where you get all your news from the twitter and Facebook and blog sources you've chosen. And that world's already upon us. A September Pew research study showed that a third of under thirties in the US already get their news from social media - far, far more than newspapers and equal with TV. Australia's famously a land of technological early adopters, and I believe the figures here would be similar.
2012年11月1日星期四
New Details on Benghazi
On the night of the 9/11 anniversary assault at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the Americans defending the compound and a nearby CIA annex were severely outmanned. Nonetheless, the State Department never requested military backup that evening, two senior U.S. officials familiar with the details of military planning tell The Daily Beast.
In its seventh week, discussion about what happened in Benghazi has begun to focus on why military teams in the region did not respond to the assault on the U.S. mission and the nearby CIA annex. The only security backup that did arrive that evening were former special-operations soldiers under the command of the CIA—one from the nearby annex and another Quick Reaction Force from Tripoli. On Friday, Fox News reported that requests from CIA officers for air support on the evening of the attacks were rejected.
It’s unlikely any outside military team could have arrived in Benghazi quickly enough to save Ambassador Chris Stevens or his colleague Sean Smith, both of whom died from smoke inhalation after a band of more than 100 men overran the U.S. mission at around 9:30 p.m. that evening and set the buildings inside ablaze.
But military backup may have made a difference at around five the following morning, when a second wave of attackers assaulted the CIA annex where embassy personnel had taken refuge. It was during this second wave of attacks that two ex-SEALs working for the CIA’s security teams—Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods—were killed in a mortar strike.
Normally it would be the job of the U.S. ambassador on location to request a military response. But Stevens likely died in the first two hours of the attack. The responsibility for requesting military backup would then have fallen to the deputy chief of mission at Benghazi or officials at the State Department in Washington.
“The State Department is responsible for assessing security at its diplomatic installations and for requesting support from other government agencies if they need it,” a senior U.S. Defense official said. “There was no request from the Department of State to intervene militarily on the night of the attack.”
The president, however, would have the final say as to whether or not to send in the military. By 11 p.m. Benghazi time, 90 minutes after the assault began on the U.S. mission, Obama met with the National Security Council to discuss the attack. NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor said the president “ordered Secretary Panetta and Chairman Dempsey to begin moving assets into the region to prepare for a range of contingencies” at that meeting.
According to the senior Defense Department official, those assets included a special operations team from central Europe to be staged at the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Italy and other small teams of Marines deployed at U.S. Naval bases known as FAST platoons. (These details were first reported by Fox News.) By the time the special operations team and the Marines were prepared to go forward with the rescue mission, however, the first wave of the attack was over.
Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said, “I think what’s getting lost about that night is that four Americans were killed and dozens more were in harm’s way … Everyone in the U.S. government and at every agency immediately had the exact same goal of finding a way to help them.”
George Little, the chief spokesman for the Pentagon, said Wednesday, “I’m not going to get into the specifics of what we discussed with our State Department partners on the night of the attack. The fact of the matter is that all of us wanted to find a way to respond to the unfolding situation in Benghazi. Both the State Department and the Department of Defense acted quickly to identify response options and to start moving out quickly.”
Panetta said last week that he and the military’s leadership did not have enough “real-time information about what’s taking place” to send in reinforcement that evening. However, three U.S. Defense and intelligence officials confirm to The Daily Beast that a surveillance drone was at the scene of the attack while personnel were evacuated from the diplomatic compound to the CIA annex—though the drone was not present at the beginning of the attack.
In its seventh week, discussion about what happened in Benghazi has begun to focus on why military teams in the region did not respond to the assault on the U.S. mission and the nearby CIA annex. The only security backup that did arrive that evening were former special-operations soldiers under the command of the CIA—one from the nearby annex and another Quick Reaction Force from Tripoli. On Friday, Fox News reported that requests from CIA officers for air support on the evening of the attacks were rejected.
It’s unlikely any outside military team could have arrived in Benghazi quickly enough to save Ambassador Chris Stevens or his colleague Sean Smith, both of whom died from smoke inhalation after a band of more than 100 men overran the U.S. mission at around 9:30 p.m. that evening and set the buildings inside ablaze.
But military backup may have made a difference at around five the following morning, when a second wave of attackers assaulted the CIA annex where embassy personnel had taken refuge. It was during this second wave of attacks that two ex-SEALs working for the CIA’s security teams—Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods—were killed in a mortar strike.
Normally it would be the job of the U.S. ambassador on location to request a military response. But Stevens likely died in the first two hours of the attack. The responsibility for requesting military backup would then have fallen to the deputy chief of mission at Benghazi or officials at the State Department in Washington.
“The State Department is responsible for assessing security at its diplomatic installations and for requesting support from other government agencies if they need it,” a senior U.S. Defense official said. “There was no request from the Department of State to intervene militarily on the night of the attack.”
The president, however, would have the final say as to whether or not to send in the military. By 11 p.m. Benghazi time, 90 minutes after the assault began on the U.S. mission, Obama met with the National Security Council to discuss the attack. NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor said the president “ordered Secretary Panetta and Chairman Dempsey to begin moving assets into the region to prepare for a range of contingencies” at that meeting.
According to the senior Defense Department official, those assets included a special operations team from central Europe to be staged at the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Italy and other small teams of Marines deployed at U.S. Naval bases known as FAST platoons. (These details were first reported by Fox News.) By the time the special operations team and the Marines were prepared to go forward with the rescue mission, however, the first wave of the attack was over.
Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said, “I think what’s getting lost about that night is that four Americans were killed and dozens more were in harm’s way … Everyone in the U.S. government and at every agency immediately had the exact same goal of finding a way to help them.”
George Little, the chief spokesman for the Pentagon, said Wednesday, “I’m not going to get into the specifics of what we discussed with our State Department partners on the night of the attack. The fact of the matter is that all of us wanted to find a way to respond to the unfolding situation in Benghazi. Both the State Department and the Department of Defense acted quickly to identify response options and to start moving out quickly.”
Panetta said last week that he and the military’s leadership did not have enough “real-time information about what’s taking place” to send in reinforcement that evening. However, three U.S. Defense and intelligence officials confirm to The Daily Beast that a surveillance drone was at the scene of the attack while personnel were evacuated from the diplomatic compound to the CIA annex—though the drone was not present at the beginning of the attack.
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