"One Nation, Overseas"
Sometime ago, an LA-based friend directed my attention to this Wired Mag article on the Filipino diaspora. It's an interesting read on how the phenomenon of Filiino migration has served as both boon and bane for the Philippines.

Update: The global demand for workers generates about $6 billion in foreign currency annually for the country, about 8% of its GNP. In 2001, more than 97,000 of the 865,000 Filipinos who left to work overseas were educated professionals. Those who simply immigrate from the Philippines are not tracked systematically by the government. Source: Naik, G et al (2003). Age Gap Benefits Developing Nations. AWSJ 27 (125): A5

Accidental Email Forward
Forwarding an email could be a violation of privacy... really? A personal, for-friends-only account of "Class A hobnobbing" with the rulers of the Earth at Davos has turned out to be a Class A Privacy Spill. "A" as in "accidental." Here's a long-winded discussion of its implications.

Cooperation v. Competition
Lamark's (cooperation) and Darwin's (competition) evolutionary theories are competing models. But it appears Darwin's always wins (no pun intended) the day. For a long time, ant hills have been viewed as paragons of selfless co-operation for common good. Enter this report on Finnish researchers suggesting that some ant colonies are nests of nepotism and hidden selfish agenda. Here's the link to the original article.

Take It From the Senior, Bill!
A retiring Micro$oft exec tells his company to embrace the open source. This is his advice: "Open source software is as large and powerful a wave as the Internet was," says the exec David Stutz. "Microsoft cannot prosper during the open source wave as an island, with defenses built out of litigation and proprietary protocols" (not to mention people are increasingly running out of reasons to use Micro$oft or actively seeking alternatives). Well, way to go, David, to humble Goliath (for whom the world is not enought)! [ InTrO tO oPeN sOuRcE ]

On the other hand, while so much blood has been spilled over Open Source, perhaps equal zeal should also be focused on Open Data. (Here for the Open Data Format Initiative.) We should also take a look at the gift, and consider copyrights a crime. :)

Extreme French Cooking
Here's a case of French cooking taken to the extreme. One of France's most celebrated chefs kills himself after his restaurant has been downgraded by critics who probably can't prepare decent meals themselves. Well, after all, if you can't be an artist, be a critic. That's a lot better than agonizing over bad cooking.

Evidence- v. Race-based Medicine
This article from San Franscisco Chronicle reports of a controversy in AIDS vaccine research: whether the efficacy of a vaccine has some racial basis. A vaccine trial initially shows that among blacks, Asians, other non-Latino minorities, the vaccine appears to reduce infection rates by two-thirds, compared with a trial with other races where there has been no difference in infection rates between those who received the vaccine and those given shots of an inert placebo. Would this really constitute evidence-based medicine? Too early to say.

In Blog We Trust
Just came across these articles from Salon about blogging:

- 'Use the blog, Luke'
- 'Much ado about blogging'
- 'Fear of links'

I won't be saying much about them for now as I'm sleepy already. Basically they're debating about how to construe the latest craze on the Web called 'blogging'. Is it the "new journalism"? Or, is it something else? What's with blogging that would make you fight the urge to sleep just to finish an entry? Good night! In blog I trust. [ blog: charterization; history ]

Update: A survey says bloggers are mostly teenage girls. Makes sense! :)

Is Religion Hot Again?
My friend Tim Montes directed my attention to this article ('Kicking the Secularist Habit') from the Atlantic Online. This led me to ask how much "religious" orientation I've shed off myself over the years, in my exposure to philosophy and sociology as well as to a secular and academic lifestyle. I will certainly give this article some more serious thoughts. Meanwhile, I wonder if secularism isn't somekind of a religion itself. It might well have its own "gods" (like money perhaps) and rituals (like watching "Sex and the City" or the Oscars), canons (think of what all the punditry in your humanities and social science classes is all about) and "heresies" (well, basically anything going against the 'secular' worldview), heroes/victims.

Meantime, ambiguities characterize Mr Bush, supposedly a 'religious' president.

Hot date on KaZaA?
Here's an El Reg account of the new dating feature of Kazaa music download. Wew, the music file swapper can now become a date swapper! Hmmm.... on second thought, I'm waiting for my Hero.DVDRip.DivX5.02.AC3.popofox download to finish. 1412:36.17 hours to go!

Delight
After blogging past midnight, this comes as sheer delight from Illiad!

The Gramscian Turn
OK, this is a sociology class stuff and perhaps not appropriate for blogging. My personal spin on Gramsci has to do with his dictum "Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will" that I first read about back in college. O, that got me! In a roundabout way, it justifies (or I wish it does) my OC, bullhead behavior. Perhaps that's "the political is personal"/"the personal is political"! (whatever... except any reference to natdems, socdems, popdems, gaddems.)

I'm reporting on The Gramscian Turn in the Study of Popular Culture. Relevant materials:

- report outline (extended version commin' up!)
- Resources on Gramsci
- Gramsci at the Marxist Internet Archives; Gramsci and Marxism; Marxist Cultural Theory (Readings)
- Resources through PopCultures.com
- "hegemony" in Prison Notebooks
- Gramsci for beginners

- Gramsci of the Right? Here's a fascinating account of how Gramsci has been abandoned by the so-called "progressives" and appropriated by the Right.
- Mass Media Effects. This is a look at how media could be studied using the Gramscian approach.

I'll try to annotate these links some more. (But don't bet on it.) Incidentally, my class report has been postponed due to extended discussions on Adorno and Althusser. "Cya nxt mtg!"

What's Hot, What's Not?
Surges in the use of certain words in web blogging may suggest what's "hot" online, according to this New Scientist article. In a parallel vein, bursts in the google using certain key expressions may be linked to the rise of certain trends. Well, for a while, "sex" topped as the most frequently used word in Google, until "mp3" replaced it about 2 years ago. I wonder what that really means... your feedback please. :)

Soundless Music
I've thought my emotions were somekind of music playing in my head. (Lately it's been mostly Bartók and less of Mozart... sans actual sound, only the intensity.) Now, there are experiments on "soundless concerts" using infrasound, according to this report.

"Beam me up, Scotty (from Perth)!"
Arguably the possibility of a space elevator first concocted by Arthur C. Clark is increasingly becoming a reality. A company is planning to build one right in Perth, Western Australia. Perth is the sunniest and "farthest" city in the world! According to this article, Perth is chosen as the spot because (1) it's within 45 degrees latitude of the Equator, (2) has a gentle ocean, with lower than average tidal movements, (3) access to land, a city and international airport, (4) in or near an economically advanced and politically stable country.

IMHO, Perth, as a city, is unimpressive. That of course will not affect the space elavator. There's the hip neighbor city of Fremantle, though. Before you take off to space from Perth, perhaps you can hang out in "Freo" (as Fremantle is called fondly by its locals), with its friendly people, cool bars, old-Western style streets. Western Australia is also known for good wine. You might want to check out some estates that serve their products right next to oak barrels... What a lifetyle to precede one's journey into space!

Still speaking of space elevators, here's a /. review of a book that concludes space elevators a near-term feasibility. Beam (er, take) me up, Scotty!

Dating Guide
Perhaps this is rather belated, as I live in a +8 GMT country and Valentine's Day comes ahead of other time zones from where this matter has been brought to my attention. Nonetheless, Valentine's Day or not, we date. Here's Slashdot's "Some Geek Guides for Dating." If you're really handicapped, you may start with this Dating Flow Chart by Illiad. (And don't forget to speak her/his language.) Happy Geek hunting!

Tech Support
This piece by Illiad reminds me of my 'tech support' days. Hmm... that was like some patience and ages ago!



Incidentally, people are increasingly dissatisfied with commercial tech support nowadays. But tech support people contend that some users are just clueless if not irrational when dealing with tech support guys. Or could it be due to a general malaise with technology itself?

Diet
Lately Atkins diet seems to have staged a good comeback, challenging the traditional nutritional pyramid. But here's an alternative to both choices. (<-- just don't quote me :) )

'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'
Let's revisit that 1993 New Yorker cartoon. There's really nothing inherently wrong with being a dog, if we may add. I still wonder, however, why up to now no one has come up with some kind of a Turing's Test to distinguish human intelligence from dog intelligence on the Net. :)

Speaking of Internet and "smartness," here's a piece on "What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else," and find out why stupidity is bless when it comes to Internet.

Amara's Law

I've just blogged about Murphy's Law. This time, it's about another popular "law": Amara's. Named after Roy Amara, former president of the Institute for the Future, it states that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of technological change and underestimate its long-term impact. That's true with cars before and most true now with the Internet, with all the hype about it. One observation from Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater News puts it quite clearly,


"It strikes me that the conventions of news reporting introduce a bias into our understanding of new technologies and their place in society. And it's not just news reporting: scholars who want to get tenure are asked whether they have discovered something, and the easiest way to discover something in the social world is to declare that something is new: for example, that we have entered an "information age", a concept that has been renamed many times. (James Beniger's book, "The Control
Revolution", includes a huge table of these names, and it's already fifteen years old. Nowadays the table would probably extend to book length all by itself.) If you can't declare a vast world-historical discontinuity then you have to go to the trouble of analyzing the same old world more deeply than others have, and that's a lot of work.

"The hardest work, it seems to me, is analyzing just how the existing forces of society are transposed in a world of pervasive information and communication technologies..."

Such "transposition" takes a long time. By then most people would find it boring to talk about what happened.

The Japanese Ring

Based on a novel by Kôji Suzuki, this series of Ringu (1 and 2, plus 0) is the best horror film I've seen since Blair Witch Project. Hideo Nakata (director) makes the most of persistent supertition in modern life (this time, surrounding the video technology). Film's synopsis here. Interview with the director here. Some of my friends do not recommend watching this movie alone at home. Or if you must watch, make sure the phone ringer is off. :)