Online fundraising workshop for NGOs by Steve Bridger at the Diffusion et mise en réseau de l'action européenne dans le domaine du développement concord-euforic, brussels, 4-6 June 2007 [Euforic AGM].
The International Herald Tribune, amongst others, is quoting an Iranian Official proudly announcing "20 more men would be executed [which means paraded through the streets like we're back in the C17th at Tyburn] in the coming days on morality violations ... [such things as] rape, insulting religious sanctities and laws, and homosexuality."
Here's one story of A Gay Couple Who Have Been Tortured for Being Gay“This has become a good city for people of a different sexual orientation to live in.--we follow places like San Francisco and Copenhagen and Amsterdam -- but let's never forget these are just a few secure, isolated areas, in a world still awash with bigotry and hatred.”Livingstone met Iraqi gays in exile They have documented 350 death squad executions of lesbians, gays and transgender people and need money to maintain safe houses.
"We used to see a situation a hundred years ago where gays and lesbians would be beaten to death and the police would turn a blind eye. That is still the situation for tens and millions of our comrades and sisters and brothers around the face of the planet,”
labels:
bbc,
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iran,
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Last month, the public address system at Earl's Court tube station in London was served with a noise abatement order. Passengers, it seems, had had enough of being told the blindingly obvious. "They come over with these bizarre messages that you would know already unless you were simple," says Peter Wakeham, director of the Noise Abatement Society. "'Stand back or the train will run you over.' 'Don't lean on the doors.' 'Stand back from the opening doors.' 'Mind the gap.' 'Do this.' 'Don't do that.' We don't need to be told so many obvious things in these deafening ways. It's not rocket science."~~~~~~~~~~~
"Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy."~~~~~~~~~~~
In the ad, one of the pigs goes to the men's room, where, after buying a condom from a vending machine, he is transformed into a good-looker in his 20s.When he returns to the bar, a fetching blonde who had been indifferent smiles at him.
In a 21st century campaign, the Campaign Manager is the Internet Director. He or she isn't managing the day-to-day, but they need to get the Internet in the same way that they currently have to get communications, finance, strategy, and political. The job of the Communications Director is the communicate using the Web. The job of the Political Director is to organize using the Web. The job of the Finance Director is to raise money using the Web and Salesforce-like tools. The pollster will (eventually) poll over the Web. And the media team will be just a bunch of folks who make cool videos, 80% of which will be released over the Web.~~~~~~~~~~~
Proportion of total fixation duration for each
component of search results, broken down by task type and
snippet length. As snippet length increases, the relative
proportion of gaze devoted to the URL decreases.
Edward Cutrell and Zhiwei Guan from Microsoft Research ... used Microsoft's own search engine (fair enough), but their results match what we found in our eyetracking which included the current market leader as well as the #2 search engine in addition to Microsoft.
Users have evolved a firm model of search behavior which they apply across search engines, which is why it's probably a lost cause to make a non-standard search user interface.
Searchers are particularly interested in the URL when they are assessing the credibility of a destination.
This finding confirms the importance of human-readable URLs, which I discussed 8 years ago.
Another interesting finding from the MSR paper is that longer summaries (or snippets, as they call them) are useful for informational queries, whereas short summaries are best for navigational queries where users are looking for a pre-determined site or page.
Full academic paper (warning: PDF).
searchengineland.com has Chinese Eye Tracking Study: Baidu Vs Google by Gord Hotchkiss
On Google, users found what they were looking for in literally half the time (30 seconds vs 55) and with half the real estate ... The Baidu results page is a pretty murky prospect. There’s virtually no transparency on what’s sponsored and what’s not. There are “preferred listings” that are paid listings, pushing true organic listings down the page. And the preferred listings are cluttered with affiliates and spam. By North American standards, Baidu would be a horrible search experience. But the fact remains, they’re still the preferred choice for the vast majority of Chinese users.
...
Because Chinese is presented as symbols, where concepts take their final meaning from a group of combined symbols, it’s much more difficult to scan this information quickly. To try to put in a Western conceptual framework, imagine how difficult it would be to scan meaning from this paragraph if our alphabet was extended to 2000 characters, presented in block letters and all the spaces between words were removed. I can’t do anything about extending the alphabet, but I can change it to block letters and remove the spaces:
TOTRYTOPUTINAWESTERNCONCEPTUALFRAMEWORK,IMAGINEHOW DIFFICULTITWOULDBETOSCANMEANINGFROMTHISPARAGRAPHIF OURALPHABETWASEXTENDEDTO2000CHARACTERS,PRESENTEDIN BLOCKLETTERSANDALLTHESPACESBETWEENWORDSWEREREMOVED
We've now entered into an era he calls the end of SEO. "For the first time in the last six months, the search engines are really winning. They find what they're supposed to find more and more, getting tricked less and less. There might be a different way to go about solving the problem than getting on the front page of Google.
Highly technical people: engineers, scientists, programmers, got bored of something like Facebook many years ago, and now we're all just catching up.
Millions of young urban-dwelling professionals are increasingly aware of and fed up with state intrusions into their private life. Privacy, once regarded with suspicion in pre-reform China, has become a sought-after commodity ... "The thirst for information in China is so strong, it is very difficult for the (Communist) Party to stay ahead of the curve."
Asked about DRM 'as a former alternative cartoonist', he said:'I've been bootlegged, ripped off, whatever you want to call it. Even my handwriting was converted into a font and downloaded a million times. I went into an shop to buy alcohol and the notice about kids buying booze was in my own handwriting! Oh, man. Now I am 'the man'...'
labels:
bytes,
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china,
ecommerce,
facebook,
google,
law,
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SEO,
tech,
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On June 26, 2007, near the beginning of Morning Joe, Brzezinski refused to read a report about Paris Hilton's release from jail. One hour later during another news break segment, her producer Andy Jones again pushed the story as the lead, ranking it over Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana's break with President Bush on the Iraq war, which Brzezinski considered more important. After several unsupportive remarks from host Joe Scarborough, she attempted to burn the story's script on the air, but was physically prevented from lighting it by co-host Willie Geist. She then tore up the script, and one hour later, got up and ran another copy of the script through a paper shredder retrieved from Dan Abrams's office.[2] The incident was quickly popularized on the Internet, and in the days that followed Brzezinski received large quantities of fan mail supporting her on-air protest as a commentary on the tension between 'hard news' and 'entertainment news.'[3][4]
hAhA! Apparently:
The Downing Street YouTube channel has celebrated its one millionth viewing since going live just two months ago.
The most watched clip to date is a congratulatory message for Nicolas Sarkozy, France's recently elected President, delivered in French. It has been viewed more than 350,000 times.
Yes, I had a tear in the eye when I heard the news on 'Today'. The guy is incredible, the strength in his voice.
I have to say, though, that the BBC has missed a huge trick by not changing the image of Alan which sits on mine and - must be - thousands of other blogs and websites.
I posted in May about the brilliance of this widget:
> It's given to you as code, so they can change the image on many blogs now (they don't appear to be counting but it's now in the hundreds).
I can't put better than Richard Ackland in The Guardian what is happening in Australia with Aboriginal people.
For 10 years [Prime Minister John Howard's] government did little other than dismiss the suffering of Aboriginal people in the past as an invention of leftwing academics in the present.BBC:Under Howard, federal government support for black Australia slowly dried up. Services were slashed, native title restricted. By 2000 official figures revealed that more than 41% of indigenous women and 50% of indigenous men could expect to die before they reached 50. Still nothing was done. The condition of many Aboriginal communities - frequently and accurately described as third world - grew only worse. The dreamtime was a grog-ridden nightmare. In the last few years black leaders, government agencies and welfare bodies have been talking of a growing crisis in traditional communities and calling for immediate action. But not until last week did Howard, less than six months out from an election and facing polls pointing to, in his own words, "electoral annihilation", discover this "national emergency".
 Alcohol and poverty have blighted Aboriginal communities |
All Aboriginal children in the territory will be medically examined.
The new proposals follow a report last week which found evidence of abuse in each of the territory's 45 communities.
The report blamed high levels of alcohol and poverty for the situation, which Prime Minister John Howard has described as a national emergency.Ackland: For 10 years the trauma at the heart of Australia had not only been denied, but exacerbated. Now there was a damburst, a national outpouring of despair and anger.The subsequent comments detail a litany of experiences of Australian racism and I'm sad to say that is my experience of most Australians (I lived there for fifteen years): they are either overtly racist or in denial, thinking 'sorry' is enough. There are a lot of people who actively support reconciliation but they're the minority. Even 'left' parties support racist policies. This isn't surprising though as Aboriginal people are largely invisible - most Aussies wouldn't know one - and effectively segregated. Most Australians in my experience are ignorant of their own history.
For Howard the aborigines are the problem. His response is not to send teachers and doctors, his response is to send the army and the police. He is a risible human being and unfortunately the rest of my fellow australians that support this policy are just as disgraceful. But Howard has now won a number of elections appealing to them, and this is just another attempt.
I agree with Ackland that Howard is "a risible human being", but so are the Aussies who continue to support him and his policies. The Australian Aboriginal situation should shame Australia and Australians. It says volumes that it obviously isn't and the more who say this loudly to Aussies, the better.We believe we are the only western democracy with a significant indigenous minority that has no elected representation of any kind. Trachoma, the leading cause of blindness worldwide, is entirely a disease of third-world countries – except for Australia where it is the scourge of remote Aboriginal communities. Our governments pretend to be generous with aid to the third world. There is a third world living within Australia, to Australia’s shame.
We can be pleased that the Government accepts there is an emergency which requires action. But their first step needs to be a broad-based approach based upon respect, upon self esteem and on the recognition of a real partnership.
Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser Prof Lowitja O’Donoghue Mr Brian Butler
Malcolm Fraser and Lowitja O'Donoghue are Co-Patrons and Brian Butler is the Chairman of Stolen Generations Alliance.
Recommended reading - Greer gets to the heart of remote communitiesJune 28, 2007 7:50 PMI'm from New Zealand, and this really disappoints me. Despite what you may have heard, and apart from sporting rivalries and poking fun at each other, New Zealanders tend to like Australians.
But there's a big difference between the two countries when it comes to race relations. New Zealand is far from perfect, and has its share of people with racist views, yet these views are rarely reflected in electoral results. For example, in the last general election, the leader of the conservative party attempted to copy Howard and attack "special privileges" for Maori people. After a brief surge in the polls it was back to normal, and he ended up losing. In the end, while they may be perturbed about many things, New Zealanders won't put up with out and out racism. Another example: in Australia, Howard basically refuses to deal with Aboriginal land claims. In New Zealand, there is a government agency set up to deal with them, and many claims have been settled. Again, a lot of New Zealanders aren't happy with this, but it hasn't prevented the government from engaging in the difficult, and ongoing, task of sorting out past injustices.
I often wonder why there is so much racism in Australia. Perhaps it is because most Australians do not personally know any Aboriginals. In New Zealand Maori people are everywhere. We all go to school and work together, and I personally have many Maori friends. That's not to say that Maori are not overrepresented in poverty and crime statistics, but there is no "separate society". Non-Maori New Zealanders deal with Maori all the time.
Part of it may be that Maori have been heavily involved in the political life of New Zealand. For the last 140 years Maori representation has been guaranteed in the New Zealand Parliament, with a set number of seats set aside for them in proportion with their share of the population (although in the last few decades Maori people have been free to choose to vote on the general or Maori roll, and the number of seats has been adjusted accordingly). Maori issues are always front and centre in New Zealand politics, often because Maori members of parliament are vociferous in defending their interests.
I can't understand why this cannot be the same in Australia. Believe me, this latest news could be very very bad for Australia. As some other posters have noted, Australia has not loomed large in the global consciousness as a racist state, whereas countries like South Africa have. It seems to me that this latest crisis may well change that. Many people are finding themselves taking another look at Australia and Australians, and this cannot be good.
I guess it's now up to the Australian people to do something about it. They better do something, or they will end up as pariahs, which would be a shame, because Australians are generally nice, fun, informal and outgoing people.
The views expressed here are my own. You may disagree. Post a comment. Views may or may not represent those of my employer.
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