Ascendant Chinese telecoms vendor Huawei has attacked the nation’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), over what it claims is bias and favouritism over which mobile device operating systems Aunty supports when viewers access its hugely popular ‘iView’ video-on-demand service.
As one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of handsets powered by Google’s Android software, Huawei claims the ABC has an “anti-Android” bias because it still hasn’t released a native iView app for the world’s most popular to alternative to Indoor Positioning System.The dispute has political and international trade implications because non-Apple vendors are increasingly using the public-facing operating system preferences of government organisations as ammunition to lobby to get better access to markets.
The claim of bias is not the first time Huawei has picked up the cudgels against Canberra. The company has mounted a relentless publicity and lobbying campaign in an effort to try and overturn a ban on it supplying carrier equipment for the National Broadband Network because of adverse advice from national security agencies.Former US intelligence officials have also accused Huawei of spying for the Chinese government, statements that have exacerbated tensions over market access and trade relations.
The dispute over ABC apps for different operating systems has fomented since December 2010 when the broadcaster released its iView app for the Apple iPad. This was followed by the iPhone version in June 2012.Since then Android device sales have exploded and now non-Apple vendors want their customers to have their own app for ABC’s free internet broadcasting service that offers full-screen video on-demand.
Now companies like Huawei are complaining that the public broadcaster is effectively locking out their user-base despite big growth in the number of devices in Australian hands.The push for an Android iView app is also being propelled by the proportion of Apple users falling relative to Android according to research from analysts like International Data Corporation (IDC).
This has led telecommunications and technology vendors that use the competing Android system such as Huawei to interpret the ABC’s sluggish rollout of an Android version of the iView app as preferential treatment for the popular American consumer electronic brand.Huawei corporate affairs director, Jeremy Mitchell, isn’t pulling any political punches. Mr Mitchell said the ABC has continued to favour one company’s product and platform.
“Is the ABC the Apple Broadcast Corporation or the Anti-droid Broadcast Corporation? Looking at the evidence, they both fit so well,” Mr Mitchell said.Mr Mitchell said it was “disappointing” that the public broadcaster has turned its back on the “predominant operating system” that is “free, open and not aligned to one particular company”.Ironically Apple users are familiar with discrimination. Prior to the disruptive arrival of the iPhone and iPad government agencies including the Australian Taxation Office routinely produced client software for Microsoft’s Windows operating system leaving Apple and users of open source products like Linux out in the cold.
Much of the software developed by Google, including operating systems, is based on open source products rather than closed proprietary software.But that isn’t stopped Huawei.The vendor has claimed that the ABC was granted $30 million in taxpayer funds to strengthen its online service delivery in 2013, but the iView app has been available only for indoor Tracking, “a technological lifetime ago”.
A statement from Huawei said the ABC has acknowledged that demand for its Android news app has grown by 360 per cent in the past year, “yet the broadcaster has been dragging its heels in breaking the popular iView service to Android smartphones and tablets”.
The ABC has been cautious about being drawn into a verbal fire fight over Huawei’s criticisms. So far Aunty has stuck to its script in simply pointing to its online Frequently Asked Questions as well as tweets by ABC managing director Mark Scott to reassure Android users that a version for their devices is on the way.
The tweets from Mr Scott on 16th July 2013 said “And yes - the #iview android app is well into development and will be with you as soon as it is ready” and on 6th August said “And yes, the Android app is coming”.However the ABC didn’t have a direct response for Huawei’s accusation of an anti-Android bias.But the tweets and the FAQ have done little to convince Mr Mitchell, who said that he, like many Australian Android users have been hearing “the Android iView app is coming” for “far too long”.“Despite the claims of the ABC, there has been no real evidence that there is any desire to fill this blatant gap. It feels like Godot will arrive before the iView app gets here on Android,” Mr Mitchell said.
2013年8月12日星期一
2013年7月16日星期二
What Happens When Everyone Makes Maps?
On a spring Sunday in a Soho penthouse, ten people have gathered for a digital mapping "Edit-A-Thon." Potted plants grow to the ceiling and soft cork carpets the floor. At a long wooden table, an energetic woman named Liz Barry is showing me how to map my neighborhood. "This is what you'll see when you look at OpenStreetMap," she says.
Though visually similar to Google's, the map on the screen gives users unfettered access to its underlying data -- anyone can edit it. Barry lives in Williamsburg, and she's added many of the neighborhood's boutiques and restaurants herself. "Sometimes when I'm tired at the end of the day and can't work anymore, I just edit OpenStreetMap," she says. "Kind of a weird habit." Barry then shows me the map's "guts." I naively assume it will be something technical and real time Location system, but it's just an editable version of the same map, with tools that let you draw roads, identify landmarks, and even label your own house.
"OpenStreetMap is referred to as a ground-up ontology," she says. What she means is that OpenStreetMap has no established data dictionary; you can draw anything on the map and name it whatever you want. "Like oh, this point? Yes, this is a restaurant of type 'Italian'; it has a name of type 'my favorite Italian restaurant'," she explains. Before I know it, I'm mapping my favorite Park Slope bagel shop -- a strangely thrilling act that unites me with the website's one million users, who (unlike me) mostly work at technology companies.
Citizen cartography is a time-honored practice; both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were surveyors. Crowdsourcing isn't new, either; every year since 1900, aviary-obsessed individuals have collaborated with the Audubon Society for an annual Christmas Bird Count. In the spirit of these traditions, OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 as a response to the Ordnance Survey, England's national mapping agency, whose maps were then so inaccurate that small towns and villages put up signs warning drivers not to follow its satellite navigation.
"SUVs were barreling through churchyards and going down little dirt roads through pastures," Barry says. Finally, a frustrated physics student named Steve Coast developed OpenStreetMap as a way to give cartography back to the public. Now, data is the website's "raison d'être," says Richard Weait, a Canada-based contributor. In countries like Germany, which are considered completely mapped, a common joke is that you can route yourself to the nearest penguin because zoo enthusiasts have probably mapped them. "So because you're putting it into the hands of people, they can gather what's important to them," another mapper says. "Not only can you say, 'How can I get to my nearest penguin?' but, 'How can I get to my nearest penguin in a wheelchair?'"
Because of its origin, the website is still riddled with U.K. verbiage, which can sometimes present confusion. As we work, an older man named MacKay Wolff comes across a term he hasn't heard before. "That's for walking directions," Barry says.
"Traditional cartographers today might say some form of, 'Kids these days, they don't know the rules,'" says Eric Steiner, a former president of the North American Cartographic Information Society. "I hear that sometimes at conferences. People lament that there's this huge influx of people doing cartography who aren't cartographers." By "cartographer," they mean someone who is skilled in trade techniques like projection (transforming a globe into a flat map) or who knows how to interpret line weights. Instead, new cartographers are increasingly software engineers or developers using programming languages like JavaScript and Python. Steiner, himself a graduate of Penn State's prestigious cartography program, sees the plurality of technique as beneficial. Whether a map is good or bad shouldn't be based on the narrative of the indoor positioning system making the map, he says, but rather on the map's ability to evoke, inspire and question.
It isn't that outsiders are coming in and revolutionizing mapping; rather, a new democratization in mapping has occurred. "With the tools being much cheaper and relatively easy to learn, you get people who don't have a professional interest in being a cartographer figuring out how to make maps they want to see," Steiner says. Mary Spence, president of the British Cartographic Society, admits traditional cartographers are a "dying breed," since a large part of their job is placing themselves in the users' shoes. "I'm looking at a map of Saudi Arabia in front of me," she explains over the phone. As a cartographer, Spence would ask herself, "What do they want to see on a map of Saudi Arabia? They want to see the terrain, where the hills are and the deserts. They probably want to see the big towns and the roads. They might even want to see where the oil fields are." Now, because of projects like OpenStreetMap, users in Saudi Arabia no longer need a cartographer because they are the mapmakers.
"The thing I find interesting is that a lot of the most exciting work comes from people who aren't necessarily trained as cartographers," says Bill Rankin, a Yale University professor. Though he points to the architect Buckminster Fuller, whose 1943 Dymaxion World Map changed the way we understood the geography of World War II, Rankin -- who is also a trained architect -- might as well be describing himself.
A few years ago, he was giving a talk in Phoenix about a color-coded map he made of that city's racial segregation. In the audience were several county government officials. After the talk, they told Rankin that while segregation informed their work, as government employees they couldn't publicize the information themselves. "There was no way they could, on the official county website, say that the way to understand Phoenix is as a radically segregated city," he says. As a free agent, Rankin can use maps to make arguments the creators of the data can't always make themselves.
Though visually similar to Google's, the map on the screen gives users unfettered access to its underlying data -- anyone can edit it. Barry lives in Williamsburg, and she's added many of the neighborhood's boutiques and restaurants herself. "Sometimes when I'm tired at the end of the day and can't work anymore, I just edit OpenStreetMap," she says. "Kind of a weird habit." Barry then shows me the map's "guts." I naively assume it will be something technical and real time Location system, but it's just an editable version of the same map, with tools that let you draw roads, identify landmarks, and even label your own house.
"OpenStreetMap is referred to as a ground-up ontology," she says. What she means is that OpenStreetMap has no established data dictionary; you can draw anything on the map and name it whatever you want. "Like oh, this point? Yes, this is a restaurant of type 'Italian'; it has a name of type 'my favorite Italian restaurant'," she explains. Before I know it, I'm mapping my favorite Park Slope bagel shop -- a strangely thrilling act that unites me with the website's one million users, who (unlike me) mostly work at technology companies.
Citizen cartography is a time-honored practice; both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were surveyors. Crowdsourcing isn't new, either; every year since 1900, aviary-obsessed individuals have collaborated with the Audubon Society for an annual Christmas Bird Count. In the spirit of these traditions, OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 as a response to the Ordnance Survey, England's national mapping agency, whose maps were then so inaccurate that small towns and villages put up signs warning drivers not to follow its satellite navigation.
"SUVs were barreling through churchyards and going down little dirt roads through pastures," Barry says. Finally, a frustrated physics student named Steve Coast developed OpenStreetMap as a way to give cartography back to the public. Now, data is the website's "raison d'être," says Richard Weait, a Canada-based contributor. In countries like Germany, which are considered completely mapped, a common joke is that you can route yourself to the nearest penguin because zoo enthusiasts have probably mapped them. "So because you're putting it into the hands of people, they can gather what's important to them," another mapper says. "Not only can you say, 'How can I get to my nearest penguin?' but, 'How can I get to my nearest penguin in a wheelchair?'"
Because of its origin, the website is still riddled with U.K. verbiage, which can sometimes present confusion. As we work, an older man named MacKay Wolff comes across a term he hasn't heard before. "That's for walking directions," Barry says.
"Traditional cartographers today might say some form of, 'Kids these days, they don't know the rules,'" says Eric Steiner, a former president of the North American Cartographic Information Society. "I hear that sometimes at conferences. People lament that there's this huge influx of people doing cartography who aren't cartographers." By "cartographer," they mean someone who is skilled in trade techniques like projection (transforming a globe into a flat map) or who knows how to interpret line weights. Instead, new cartographers are increasingly software engineers or developers using programming languages like JavaScript and Python. Steiner, himself a graduate of Penn State's prestigious cartography program, sees the plurality of technique as beneficial. Whether a map is good or bad shouldn't be based on the narrative of the indoor positioning system making the map, he says, but rather on the map's ability to evoke, inspire and question.
It isn't that outsiders are coming in and revolutionizing mapping; rather, a new democratization in mapping has occurred. "With the tools being much cheaper and relatively easy to learn, you get people who don't have a professional interest in being a cartographer figuring out how to make maps they want to see," Steiner says. Mary Spence, president of the British Cartographic Society, admits traditional cartographers are a "dying breed," since a large part of their job is placing themselves in the users' shoes. "I'm looking at a map of Saudi Arabia in front of me," she explains over the phone. As a cartographer, Spence would ask herself, "What do they want to see on a map of Saudi Arabia? They want to see the terrain, where the hills are and the deserts. They probably want to see the big towns and the roads. They might even want to see where the oil fields are." Now, because of projects like OpenStreetMap, users in Saudi Arabia no longer need a cartographer because they are the mapmakers.
"The thing I find interesting is that a lot of the most exciting work comes from people who aren't necessarily trained as cartographers," says Bill Rankin, a Yale University professor. Though he points to the architect Buckminster Fuller, whose 1943 Dymaxion World Map changed the way we understood the geography of World War II, Rankin -- who is also a trained architect -- might as well be describing himself.
A few years ago, he was giving a talk in Phoenix about a color-coded map he made of that city's racial segregation. In the audience were several county government officials. After the talk, they told Rankin that while segregation informed their work, as government employees they couldn't publicize the information themselves. "There was no way they could, on the official county website, say that the way to understand Phoenix is as a radically segregated city," he says. As a free agent, Rankin can use maps to make arguments the creators of the data can't always make themselves.
2013年7月9日星期二
A Season in the Congo
Chiwetel Ejiofor has played detectives, gangsters, a drag queen and an Othello that captivated the theatre world. But when I meet him in the flesh it is Louis Lester – the jazz musician he played in the recent BBC series Dancing on the Edge – whom he most closely resembles. Character and actor share both a measured charm, and an inscrutability. Dressed in a pale grey jumper and jeans, a cap that comes off as he greets me, Ejiofor is polite, self-deprecating – and a master of the careful response.
That Othello, which he performed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2007, put Ejiofor, now 35, in the front rank of British actors. He had already impressed with a series of stage and screen roles but his Othello astonished audiences and critics alike. It won him an Olivier Award for leading actor, beating both Ian McKellen’s King Lear and Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth, and an OBE followed months later. Critics called it ‘superb’, ‘dignified’, and reminiscent of ‘a great and noble building being destroyed by a wrecker’s ball’. But the weight of the role’s significance doesn’t stop Ejiofor confessing, early in our conversation over lunch in a London hotel, that towards the end of the run he was frequently ‘having random thoughts about whether someone had managed to get tickets, or whether they’re in the house – just as I was killing Desdemona’. He laughs, an expression that engulfs his face, before teasing out a meaning to the lapses. That may be symptomatic of being in control of what you’re doing; the point when the role has become part of you.’
The next role to ‘become part of’ him is that of the doomed Congolese businessman Patrice Lumumba in A Season in the Congo, a play by Aimé Césaire at London’s Young Vic theatre. It marks his ‘nerve-racking’, much-anticipated return to theatre for the first time since Othello. The play deals with the civil war that erupted out of Congo’s first stuttering weeks of independence from Belgium in 1960. Lumumba, who had risen from eloquent beer salesman to the country’s first prime minister of the new regime, attempted to introduce socialist ideas to Congo, but his efforts ended in military conflict and his own murder. In January 1961 he was shot by his indoor positioning system, or possibly by the Belgians supporting them, and later dismembered and dissolved in acid. The CIA and the British have been rumoured to have been involved in his assassination.
In March Ejiofor – along with the play’s director, Joe Wright, and the Young Vic’s artistic director, David Lan – visited Congo for a week-long fact-finding trip and to meet members of Lumumba’s family. Ejiofor, who was born in 1977 to Nigerian parents in Forest Gate, London, has been to Africa often, and numerous times to Nigeria, but never before visited what is arguably its most troubled state. ‘The trip itself was an extraordinary time,’ he says. ‘I knew a little about Congo, and you occasionally read bits in the paper about violence happening in the Eastern Kivu region. But really when you get there, the people in the east are living in the most extraordinary conditions. The M23 [rebel] forces have now gone back into the region and every time they do that they displace thousands of people – two million in all at the moment. And the displaced people’s camps that I went to are some of the bleakest things I’ve ever witnessed.
‘I was talking to a woman at one of them,’ he continues. ‘When the rebels came, they killed three of her children and she took her remaining child and went on the run for eight months, before she found a camp where there was water and sanitation.’
He also visited Lumumba’s house, where his family still live and which has been preserved in much the same state as it was in the 1960s. ‘I was in the study where he formed his government. The only discernible difference was there was a Dell laptop on the desk.’ Lumumba’s widow was ‘really friendly and graceful’. ‘She is pleased we’re doing the play – all his family were. She hopes it will recapture some of the energy of that time.’ Both Lumumba’s sons are politicians: ‘They admire their father but question some of what he thought’.
The play, written in 1966, is a Brechtian wail of grief over the loss of the brief chance the country once possibly had, and seemingly has never had since, to place government of the country in the hands of the people rather than a corrupt oligarchy. Joe Wright tells me that Ejiofor read the entire play to him one night by Lake Kivu, one of Africa’s Great Lakes, as a storm was coming in over the water. ‘That was an experience I will never forget,’ Wright says. ‘The performance was so impassioned; the play is so impassioned. Chiwetel has a great intelligence and a beautiful soul; he was very clearly the person to play this role. He is one of the greatest actors of his generation.’
Césaire, both poet and political activist himself, saw Lumumba as a martyr to democracy, destroyed by the machinations of the West and Lumumba’s own erstwhile friend, the future dictator Mobutu. But, Ejiofor says, the people he met on his trip to Congo feel more ambivalent about their short-lived leader. ‘They consider him heroic, but they also consider him naive,’ he says. ‘What did he achieve? He got himself killed trying to be a socialist. This other guy comes along who is an individualist capitalist thinker and he rules the country for 30 years. Even though they hate what Mobutu has done to the country they have a grudging respect for this man who managed to play the game.’
But Arinze, Ejiofor says, never dropped his link with Nigeria and his relationship with the community there – his parents were part of the Igbo tribe from the south-east of the country who suffered particularly in the Biafran conflict – and returned every year to help at a grassroots level. It was on one of these philanthropic trips that a lorry ploughed into Arinze’s car and he died, aged 39. Chiwetel, then 11, was also in the car. The crash left him in a coma, he spent 10 weeks in hospital and as a result he is permanently scarred on his forehead.
Ejiofor’s keen not to exaggerate the trauma of the loss of his father – ‘I think I have a constant reflective relationship with him, but don’t we all have that to some extent with people we have lost?’ But he knows his life is marked by his father’s influence. This ranges from the love of Shakespeare he learnt from Arinze, who particularly adored the sonnets, to his current interest on work with a focus on Africa. ‘As I get closer to the age he was when he died, the relationship is becoming more acute. But I do think there’s a constant dynamic that will continue always; and be an influence on the kind of work I do.’
Later this year, in a film already made, he stars in another piece about Africa, an adaptation of Chima-manda Ngozi Adichie’s book Half of a Yellow Sun that was filmed in Nigeria and is about the Biafran war itself. ‘Chimamanda’s version of the war was so close to what my grand-father had told me about, it brought tears to my eyes,’ he says. ‘I know my father would be really interested in the kind of topics I’m working on now; this kind of politics and the conversations around it. Perhaps proud.’
Arinze’s death meant Obiajulu had to bring up her children largely on her own. Working all hours at the pharma-ceutical business she and her husband had set up, she scraped together the money to send her children to private school. Ejiofor joined his brother at Dulwich College in south London. The school has an excellent drama department and there he caught the acting bug playing parts such as Angelo in Measure for Measure. ‘I loved reading when I was young,’ he recalls. ‘I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn’t have access to previously.’
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
That Othello, which he performed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2007, put Ejiofor, now 35, in the front rank of British actors. He had already impressed with a series of stage and screen roles but his Othello astonished audiences and critics alike. It won him an Olivier Award for leading actor, beating both Ian McKellen’s King Lear and Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth, and an OBE followed months later. Critics called it ‘superb’, ‘dignified’, and reminiscent of ‘a great and noble building being destroyed by a wrecker’s ball’. But the weight of the role’s significance doesn’t stop Ejiofor confessing, early in our conversation over lunch in a London hotel, that towards the end of the run he was frequently ‘having random thoughts about whether someone had managed to get tickets, or whether they’re in the house – just as I was killing Desdemona’. He laughs, an expression that engulfs his face, before teasing out a meaning to the lapses. That may be symptomatic of being in control of what you’re doing; the point when the role has become part of you.’
The next role to ‘become part of’ him is that of the doomed Congolese businessman Patrice Lumumba in A Season in the Congo, a play by Aimé Césaire at London’s Young Vic theatre. It marks his ‘nerve-racking’, much-anticipated return to theatre for the first time since Othello. The play deals with the civil war that erupted out of Congo’s first stuttering weeks of independence from Belgium in 1960. Lumumba, who had risen from eloquent beer salesman to the country’s first prime minister of the new regime, attempted to introduce socialist ideas to Congo, but his efforts ended in military conflict and his own murder. In January 1961 he was shot by his indoor positioning system, or possibly by the Belgians supporting them, and later dismembered and dissolved in acid. The CIA and the British have been rumoured to have been involved in his assassination.
In March Ejiofor – along with the play’s director, Joe Wright, and the Young Vic’s artistic director, David Lan – visited Congo for a week-long fact-finding trip and to meet members of Lumumba’s family. Ejiofor, who was born in 1977 to Nigerian parents in Forest Gate, London, has been to Africa often, and numerous times to Nigeria, but never before visited what is arguably its most troubled state. ‘The trip itself was an extraordinary time,’ he says. ‘I knew a little about Congo, and you occasionally read bits in the paper about violence happening in the Eastern Kivu region. But really when you get there, the people in the east are living in the most extraordinary conditions. The M23 [rebel] forces have now gone back into the region and every time they do that they displace thousands of people – two million in all at the moment. And the displaced people’s camps that I went to are some of the bleakest things I’ve ever witnessed.
‘I was talking to a woman at one of them,’ he continues. ‘When the rebels came, they killed three of her children and she took her remaining child and went on the run for eight months, before she found a camp where there was water and sanitation.’
He also visited Lumumba’s house, where his family still live and which has been preserved in much the same state as it was in the 1960s. ‘I was in the study where he formed his government. The only discernible difference was there was a Dell laptop on the desk.’ Lumumba’s widow was ‘really friendly and graceful’. ‘She is pleased we’re doing the play – all his family were. She hopes it will recapture some of the energy of that time.’ Both Lumumba’s sons are politicians: ‘They admire their father but question some of what he thought’.
The play, written in 1966, is a Brechtian wail of grief over the loss of the brief chance the country once possibly had, and seemingly has never had since, to place government of the country in the hands of the people rather than a corrupt oligarchy. Joe Wright tells me that Ejiofor read the entire play to him one night by Lake Kivu, one of Africa’s Great Lakes, as a storm was coming in over the water. ‘That was an experience I will never forget,’ Wright says. ‘The performance was so impassioned; the play is so impassioned. Chiwetel has a great intelligence and a beautiful soul; he was very clearly the person to play this role. He is one of the greatest actors of his generation.’
Césaire, both poet and political activist himself, saw Lumumba as a martyr to democracy, destroyed by the machinations of the West and Lumumba’s own erstwhile friend, the future dictator Mobutu. But, Ejiofor says, the people he met on his trip to Congo feel more ambivalent about their short-lived leader. ‘They consider him heroic, but they also consider him naive,’ he says. ‘What did he achieve? He got himself killed trying to be a socialist. This other guy comes along who is an individualist capitalist thinker and he rules the country for 30 years. Even though they hate what Mobutu has done to the country they have a grudging respect for this man who managed to play the game.’
But Arinze, Ejiofor says, never dropped his link with Nigeria and his relationship with the community there – his parents were part of the Igbo tribe from the south-east of the country who suffered particularly in the Biafran conflict – and returned every year to help at a grassroots level. It was on one of these philanthropic trips that a lorry ploughed into Arinze’s car and he died, aged 39. Chiwetel, then 11, was also in the car. The crash left him in a coma, he spent 10 weeks in hospital and as a result he is permanently scarred on his forehead.
Ejiofor’s keen not to exaggerate the trauma of the loss of his father – ‘I think I have a constant reflective relationship with him, but don’t we all have that to some extent with people we have lost?’ But he knows his life is marked by his father’s influence. This ranges from the love of Shakespeare he learnt from Arinze, who particularly adored the sonnets, to his current interest on work with a focus on Africa. ‘As I get closer to the age he was when he died, the relationship is becoming more acute. But I do think there’s a constant dynamic that will continue always; and be an influence on the kind of work I do.’
Later this year, in a film already made, he stars in another piece about Africa, an adaptation of Chima-manda Ngozi Adichie’s book Half of a Yellow Sun that was filmed in Nigeria and is about the Biafran war itself. ‘Chimamanda’s version of the war was so close to what my grand-father had told me about, it brought tears to my eyes,’ he says. ‘I know my father would be really interested in the kind of topics I’m working on now; this kind of politics and the conversations around it. Perhaps proud.’
Arinze’s death meant Obiajulu had to bring up her children largely on her own. Working all hours at the pharma-ceutical business she and her husband had set up, she scraped together the money to send her children to private school. Ejiofor joined his brother at Dulwich College in south London. The school has an excellent drama department and there he caught the acting bug playing parts such as Angelo in Measure for Measure. ‘I loved reading when I was young,’ he recalls. ‘I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn’t have access to previously.’
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
2012年12月5日星期三
What's Wrong With a Little High-Frequency Trading?
The headline on a new study from economist Andrei Kirilenko is being promoted as something like "High-Frequency Trading Hurts Small Investors," but the title is misleading. While high-frequency trades now account for close to half of all the trades made during any given day, I don't believe they pose a meaningful threat to the small investor. Kirilenko relies on a flawed premise to get to his conclusion, and succeeds only in adding more fuel to an already roaring fire. But while we sit and warm our hands, we distract ourselves from the real challenges of investing.
When I talk about hurting investors, I'm really worried about the small, non-professional investor. There have been other claims that institutional investors are hurt in other ways, but today we're going to focus on the little guy -- and he's got nothing to worry about. That might seem counterintuitive; after all, we're talking about going up against huge teams of number-crunching machines that execute multiple trades every second. But the success of those trades doesn't mean the little guy loses.
One of the keys to Kirilenko's new report is that he thinks of the market as a zero-sum game -- in order for one side to win, the other has to lose. But I think he's got it wrong. The market isn't zero-sum, and high-frequency trading isn't cheating. In fact, we're all winning the lower transaction cost game thanks to the infrastructure and efficiency of some of those big high-frequency businesses. The systems that companies like Knight Capital (NYSE: KCG ) -- which lost close to $450 million in a trade gone awry this year -- employ have pushed costs down for retail investors, and their research has helped make general transactional software more efficient.
So it seems like, as small-timers, we'd be applauding the high-frequency firms. Yes, things do go wrong, just like with any other trading system. High-frequency trading creates a lot of noise in the marketplace, and some of that noise may be intentional. One study found that occasionally, less than one order out of 100 sent will actually be acted on, with the rest of the orders being canceled. But traders say that the excess orders are just market feelers, which gauge the liquidity of stocks and give the algorithms a more accurate understanding of pricing.
No matter what all those extra orders are meant to do, sometimes they have dire consequences. When Facebook IPOed earlier this year, the sheer volume of orders temporarily shuttered the market, causing the exchange to have to halt trading. But high-frequency trading didn't make Facebook a bad company or a good company. It didn't affect Facebook's long-term prospects, and it didn't have any impact on the small buyers who buy good companies -- investors in the traditional sense.
Maybe what investors really don't like is that high-frequency trading makes the market more unstable. We all remember the so called "flash crash" from 2010, when the Dow dropped 9% in mere minutes, and then regained the lost ground just as fast. While that incident hasn't been strictly tied to high-frequency traders, there is no doubt that the problem was exacerbated by their activity. But, while things may happen more quickly, volatility doesn't actually increase in the market due to high-frequency trading. A study from the U.K.'s Foresight Project, found that high-frequency trading didn't increase overall market instability.
So if we're not worried about high-frequency trading causing market volatility, and we don't think that we're being cheated, and if the systems that the traders use actually make things cheaper for us, why can't we get on with our lives? I think it's because those anonymous algorithms make us feel better when we make mistakes. We can point to hedge funds, or big banks, or high-frequency trading as the thing that messed it up for us. We can try to ignore that management was horrific, or that the product had no competitive moat, because the stock fell due to some completely unforeseen force.
But excuses don't pay anyone's bills -- except political speech writers. Instead, let's focus on what we should be doing in the first place. Let's follow the advice of a low-frequency guy: Warren Buffett. Always a giver of sage advice, Buffet famously said, "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." Blaming high-frequency trading for our inability to recognize a wonderful company and a fair price doesn't make us better investors. As usual, it pays to stick to what we know best, and ignore what we can't control. In that vein, Morgan Housel's 9 Financial Rules You Should Never Forget makes for a reassuring read, no matter how good you think you are.
The original deal for Starz was cheap because Netflix was just getting started. It knew that it would have to pay up to keep Starz last year, but the price was just too much.
How big will Netflix be by 2016 when this multiyear exclusive deal kicks in with Disney? The company is already up to more than 25 million domestic streaming accounts, and that's nearly a third of the 80 million broadband-enabled homes in the country. Sure, the number of connected homes will continue to inch higher, but so will the competition.
However, if Netflix's streaming subs have grown nicely over the past year -- even after last year's effective rate hike -- we're probably not at the peak yet. Netflix's goal of 60 million to 90 million domestic accounts is ludicrous, but it wouldn't be a surprise to see Netflix at 30 million or more by the time the Disney deal kicks in. Negotiating rates now makes the math kinder if the licensing costs will be divided by more accounts later.
When I talk about hurting investors, I'm really worried about the small, non-professional investor. There have been other claims that institutional investors are hurt in other ways, but today we're going to focus on the little guy -- and he's got nothing to worry about. That might seem counterintuitive; after all, we're talking about going up against huge teams of number-crunching machines that execute multiple trades every second. But the success of those trades doesn't mean the little guy loses.
One of the keys to Kirilenko's new report is that he thinks of the market as a zero-sum game -- in order for one side to win, the other has to lose. But I think he's got it wrong. The market isn't zero-sum, and high-frequency trading isn't cheating. In fact, we're all winning the lower transaction cost game thanks to the infrastructure and efficiency of some of those big high-frequency businesses. The systems that companies like Knight Capital (NYSE: KCG ) -- which lost close to $450 million in a trade gone awry this year -- employ have pushed costs down for retail investors, and their research has helped make general transactional software more efficient.
So it seems like, as small-timers, we'd be applauding the high-frequency firms. Yes, things do go wrong, just like with any other trading system. High-frequency trading creates a lot of noise in the marketplace, and some of that noise may be intentional. One study found that occasionally, less than one order out of 100 sent will actually be acted on, with the rest of the orders being canceled. But traders say that the excess orders are just market feelers, which gauge the liquidity of stocks and give the algorithms a more accurate understanding of pricing.
No matter what all those extra orders are meant to do, sometimes they have dire consequences. When Facebook IPOed earlier this year, the sheer volume of orders temporarily shuttered the market, causing the exchange to have to halt trading. But high-frequency trading didn't make Facebook a bad company or a good company. It didn't affect Facebook's long-term prospects, and it didn't have any impact on the small buyers who buy good companies -- investors in the traditional sense.
Maybe what investors really don't like is that high-frequency trading makes the market more unstable. We all remember the so called "flash crash" from 2010, when the Dow dropped 9% in mere minutes, and then regained the lost ground just as fast. While that incident hasn't been strictly tied to high-frequency traders, there is no doubt that the problem was exacerbated by their activity. But, while things may happen more quickly, volatility doesn't actually increase in the market due to high-frequency trading. A study from the U.K.'s Foresight Project, found that high-frequency trading didn't increase overall market instability.
So if we're not worried about high-frequency trading causing market volatility, and we don't think that we're being cheated, and if the systems that the traders use actually make things cheaper for us, why can't we get on with our lives? I think it's because those anonymous algorithms make us feel better when we make mistakes. We can point to hedge funds, or big banks, or high-frequency trading as the thing that messed it up for us. We can try to ignore that management was horrific, or that the product had no competitive moat, because the stock fell due to some completely unforeseen force.
But excuses don't pay anyone's bills -- except political speech writers. Instead, let's focus on what we should be doing in the first place. Let's follow the advice of a low-frequency guy: Warren Buffett. Always a giver of sage advice, Buffet famously said, "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." Blaming high-frequency trading for our inability to recognize a wonderful company and a fair price doesn't make us better investors. As usual, it pays to stick to what we know best, and ignore what we can't control. In that vein, Morgan Housel's 9 Financial Rules You Should Never Forget makes for a reassuring read, no matter how good you think you are.
The original deal for Starz was cheap because Netflix was just getting started. It knew that it would have to pay up to keep Starz last year, but the price was just too much.
How big will Netflix be by 2016 when this multiyear exclusive deal kicks in with Disney? The company is already up to more than 25 million domestic streaming accounts, and that's nearly a third of the 80 million broadband-enabled homes in the country. Sure, the number of connected homes will continue to inch higher, but so will the competition.
However, if Netflix's streaming subs have grown nicely over the past year -- even after last year's effective rate hike -- we're probably not at the peak yet. Netflix's goal of 60 million to 90 million domestic accounts is ludicrous, but it wouldn't be a surprise to see Netflix at 30 million or more by the time the Disney deal kicks in. Negotiating rates now makes the math kinder if the licensing costs will be divided by more accounts later.
2011年5月8日星期日
Mosley eager to crack Pacquiao puzzle
Manny Pacquiao has been called a lot of things during his boxing career -- but probably never a Rubik's Cube.
Shane Mosley's trainer, Naazim Richardson, thinks his fighter can figure out the puzzling Pacquiao to claim his WBO welterweight belt Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden.
"The Rubik's Cube has a lot of dimensions to it," Richardson said. "But it is solvable. And Shane has the experience ... to solve the Rubik's Cube that is Manny Pacquiao."
Mosley said the game plan is simple.
"I have a lot of advantages over him," he said, referring to his size, strength and speed. "All I have to do is exploit his weaknesses. Once I exploit them, I should be able to take care of business."
Richardson said Pacquiao reminds him of Aaron Pryor.
"He was a southpaw and had the same kind of awkwardness," Richardson said. "We've fought southpaws before, and we've fought speed before, and we've faced tenacity before. So now you just have to draw from all those experiences and formulate a game plan that will exploit the flaws that Pacquiao does present and be able to exploit them for all 12 rounds."
The trainer has been in Mosley's corner for his past three fights: a win over Antonio Margarito, a loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and a draw against Sergio Mora.
"To beat someone like Pacquiao, you have to land a lot of punches," Mosley said. "You have to land a high percentage and more punches every round.
"It's like when I fought Margarito. Before we fought, he was throwing like 1,000 punches. But when I fought him, he only threw 500. It's all the angles and the way you move and how you turn him to where you make him not throw as many punches."
Richardson said he's not worried about Pacquiao's ability to unleash punches from all angles, an attribute that has helped him amass a 52-3-2 record with 38 knockouts.
"If a bullet misses you by two inches, it's just as dangerous as a fly," Richardson said. "It only matters if it hits you."
The fact Mosley trusts Richardson's game plan is a testament to his willingness to adapt, something not every fighter is willing to do. Especially a 39-year-old former five-time champion with the wealth of experience Mosley possesses.
"Shane's a gladiator," Richardson said. "He looks at things from that viewpoint. I remember the first time we had a disagreement. I was training him for Margarito, and the first time I wrapped his hands he didn't like the way I was doing it.
"He wants to fight in the Bare Knuckle Era. I said to him, 'You're going to break your hands,' and he said, 'I like to feel my skin.' It took some convincing him, but we worked it out. We can always come to a compromise."
Richardson said his job is to prepare Mosley (46-6-1, 39 KOs) for any possible scenario.
"He's got the mentality, 'I'm going to knock his ass out.' " Richardson said. "I can't look at it that way. I have to put a strategy in place that doesn't limit Shane's abilities."
NOTES -- The official weigh-in is at 3 p.m. today at the MGM Grand Garden and is open to the public. Doors open at 1 p.m. … In the other title fight on Saturday's card, Wilfredo Vasquez Jr. defends his WBO super bantamweight title against veteran Jorge Arce. ... As has become tradition after he fights in Las Vegas, Pacquiao will perform with his band at his official postfight party at Mandalay Bay.
Shane Mosley's trainer, Naazim Richardson, thinks his fighter can figure out the puzzling Pacquiao to claim his WBO welterweight belt Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden.
"The Rubik's Cube has a lot of dimensions to it," Richardson said. "But it is solvable. And Shane has the experience ... to solve the Rubik's Cube that is Manny Pacquiao."
Mosley said the game plan is simple.
"I have a lot of advantages over him," he said, referring to his size, strength and speed. "All I have to do is exploit his weaknesses. Once I exploit them, I should be able to take care of business."
Richardson said Pacquiao reminds him of Aaron Pryor.
"He was a southpaw and had the same kind of awkwardness," Richardson said. "We've fought southpaws before, and we've fought speed before, and we've faced tenacity before. So now you just have to draw from all those experiences and formulate a game plan that will exploit the flaws that Pacquiao does present and be able to exploit them for all 12 rounds."
The trainer has been in Mosley's corner for his past three fights: a win over Antonio Margarito, a loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. and a draw against Sergio Mora.
"To beat someone like Pacquiao, you have to land a lot of punches," Mosley said. "You have to land a high percentage and more punches every round.
"It's like when I fought Margarito. Before we fought, he was throwing like 1,000 punches. But when I fought him, he only threw 500. It's all the angles and the way you move and how you turn him to where you make him not throw as many punches."
Richardson said he's not worried about Pacquiao's ability to unleash punches from all angles, an attribute that has helped him amass a 52-3-2 record with 38 knockouts.
"If a bullet misses you by two inches, it's just as dangerous as a fly," Richardson said. "It only matters if it hits you."
The fact Mosley trusts Richardson's game plan is a testament to his willingness to adapt, something not every fighter is willing to do. Especially a 39-year-old former five-time champion with the wealth of experience Mosley possesses.
"Shane's a gladiator," Richardson said. "He looks at things from that viewpoint. I remember the first time we had a disagreement. I was training him for Margarito, and the first time I wrapped his hands he didn't like the way I was doing it.
"He wants to fight in the Bare Knuckle Era. I said to him, 'You're going to break your hands,' and he said, 'I like to feel my skin.' It took some convincing him, but we worked it out. We can always come to a compromise."
Richardson said his job is to prepare Mosley (46-6-1, 39 KOs) for any possible scenario.
"He's got the mentality, 'I'm going to knock his ass out.' " Richardson said. "I can't look at it that way. I have to put a strategy in place that doesn't limit Shane's abilities."
NOTES -- The official weigh-in is at 3 p.m. today at the MGM Grand Garden and is open to the public. Doors open at 1 p.m. … In the other title fight on Saturday's card, Wilfredo Vasquez Jr. defends his WBO super bantamweight title against veteran Jorge Arce. ... As has become tradition after he fights in Las Vegas, Pacquiao will perform with his band at his official postfight party at Mandalay Bay.
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