China Launches Arabic TV Channel

Posted on July 25, 2009 by MikeT

China is launching an Arabic-language TV channel to show the Middle East and North Africa the “real” China.

China Central Television’s station will broadcast news, entertainment and cultural programmes 24 hours a day.

order cheap levitra In some situations, it does not need the same dose. Certainly lack of it take a toll on personal health – Deprivation is a chronic condition in the fast paced life that one might not even realize that they are suffering from a degree of malnutrition. lowest cost levitra regencygrandenursing.com You can regencygrandenursing.com bulk cialis use hot water enema or suppositories to get rid of the hard fecal matter. 5. Often this is used as an excuse or simply said out of confusion. levitra 20mg uk It is widely recognized that the United States is the world’s remaining superpower, but for all those right wingers who criticize the President for his effort to court public opinion overseas, saying the US does not need to apologize to anyone, it is worth noting that China, a rising economic and military power, is making its case in the court of global public opinion.

via BBC News

Abstinence-Supporting GOP State Lawmaker Admits To Sex With 22-Year-Old Intern

Posted on July 24, 2009 by MikeT

Let me be perfectly clear. I have little interest in the private lives of celebrities and other public figures. I resent the way they are treated as news equal to events like the protests over the Iranian elections, the global economic crisis or the H1N1 virus. I don’t think the sexual daliances of politicians or celebrities are anyone’s business outside the circle of family and friends immediately affected.

Unless, of course, the politician is one of those bent on regulating what other Americans do in their bedrooms or with their bodies. Tennessee State Senator Paul Stanley is one of those.

He’s a solid conservative Republican and married father of two, who according to his website is “a member of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sunday school teacher and board member of their day school.”…Stanley recently sponsored a bill designed to prevent gay couples from adopting children. And when a Planned Parenthood official recently sought his support for family planning services for Memphis teens, Stanley told her, according to the official, that he “didn’t believe young people should have sex before marriage anyway, that his faith and church are important to him, and he wants to promote abstinence.”

But Senator Stanley has

admitted to having a “sexual relationship” with a 22-year-old female intern working in his office, and to taking nude pictures of her in “provocative poses” in his apartment.

He also
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works as a financial adviser for the Stanford Financial Group, whose founder, Allen Stanford, has been charged with orchestrating an $8 billion scam.

There are more delightful tidbits about Stanley’s life in the article from TPMMuckraker. It’s rather Jerry Springer, in fact. But you can read it there.

My point here is that once again this unbeliever finds himself quoting scripture to those “pious” souls who would regulate everyone by their own standards of morality. “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone.” John 8 1-11. Or perhaps ““Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” (Luke 6: 36-38) Then there is How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Luke 6: 42)

Or maybe just some good old fashioned fold wisdom. “Practice what you preach! (and what you want to compel others to practice, too!)

New iPhone Hardware Encryption Not Even Close to Hack Proof

Posted on July 24, 2009 by MikeT

Don’t loose your iPhone if you have sensitive data on it. According to this blog post,

The new iPhone 3GS includes hardware-based encryption, giving the impression that your data is more secure than on previous models. A well-known iPhone security expert shows, however, that the data is just as easy to grab using simple hacking tools.

The good news is that it is still vulnerable to common “jailbreak” programs like purplera1n or redsn0w which make it possible to use your phone on networks other than that with which you originally had a contract. Just remember, you void your warranty by using such programs.
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via New iPhone hardware encryption not even close to hack proof – Ars Technica.

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent

Posted on July 21, 2009 by MikeT

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society has released the most recent of its landmark studies mapping the ideology of the global blogosphere with the study Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and Dissent.

This case study is part of a series of studies produced by the Internet & Democracy project. The project’s initial case studies investigated three frequently cited examples of the Internet’s influence on democracy. The first case looked at the user-generated news site OhmyNews and its impact on the 2002 elections in South Korea. The second documented the role of technology in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. The third analyzed the network composition and content of the Iranian blogosphere. Fall 2008 saw the release of a new series of case studies, which broadened the scope of our research and examined some less well-known parts of the research landscape. In a pair of studies, we reviewed the role of networked technologies in the 2007 civic crises of Burma’s Saffron Revolution and Kenya’s post-election turmoil. In April 2009, Urs Gasser’s three-part case study examined the role of technology in Switzerland’s semi-direct democracy. This case expands on our study of foreign blogospheres with an analysis of the Arabic language blogosphere.

A summary of the report can be found at this link.
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Wired Campus: College Libraries Team Up With Their Local Counterparts – Chronicle.com

Posted on July 17, 2009 by MikeT

Even though it’s the big colleges that typically have the largest budgets and facilities, several universities are teaming up with their local public libraries to bring better service to patrons. At the American Library Association’s annual conference this week, a session titled “Our Town, Common Ground” highlighted some of those partnerships.

According to Library Journal, Cameron University, in Lawton, Okla. calls its local public library “The Little Library That Could.” Faculty members from the university present research at the library, and since both institutions have seen their budgets shrink in recent years, they share grant funds.

via Wired Campus: College Libraries Team Up With Their Local Counterparts – Chronicle.com.

The impotence has become viagra no prescription canada a common health problem nowadays. Renowned corporate educational institutes across the world understand the importance of the hard-earned money of the best viagra in india customer. It is very cheap in comparison to the well known viagra vs generic. Only if you see the following information on a pharmacy’s website will you know that the pharmacy is licensed and offers 24 hour customer support to resolve queries and concerns sildenafil generic india from customers. To use a term I learned from my former boss, Ali Mazrui, that is the kind of “town and gown” collaboration that impresses me. According to the article it serves the practical purpose of helping both the academic institution and community libraries deal with tightening budgets and other concerns, but it is also a very good idea insofar as it offers at least one opportunity for breaching the walls between the community and the campus.

An informed citizenry is essential to the proper functioning of a democracy, but in our society there are not many opportunities for citizens to continue gain or continue learning outside of a formal education. In a small way, initiatives like this provides one.

Muslim Students at a Baptist College

Posted on July 15, 2009 by MikeT

I have a Google alert set up to bring me news with the keywords “Islam, education and technology.” It has, occasionally, brought me some interesting articles on the use of technology to teach American students about Islam and the Islamic world. Today the automatically generated message brought me a piece from Christianity Today: A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction bearing the title “Where Jerusalem and Mecca Meet.”

It is an article about Muslim students at Houston Baptist University, so Jerusalem in the title represents Christianity and Mecca, Islam. Never mind that Jerusalem is a deeply sacred city in the eyes of Muslims as well, not to mention Jews, or that Jerusalem has a Muslim population. In this kind of periodical, the titles are more often than not provided by editors, not the writers, so I won’t rush to blame the Gregg Chenoweth and Caleb Benoit.

It’s an odd article, though. And it is about an odd situation. But it makes an interesting read.

President Robert Sloan, the man whose ambitious plan to turn Baylor University into a premiere Christian research institution polarized the Waco campus in 2005, has brought a similar faith-and-learning vision to HBU—one that has room for Muslim students. “It keeps us from being too insular,” says Sloan, president since August 2006. “It also gives us an opportunity to learn how to witness right here, from experience.”
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Shepherding this spiritual nexus is Colette Cross, HBU’s chaplain and director of spiritual life, who oversees the Community Life and Worship program (CLW) program, an 80-credit graduation requirement that includes Bible study, weekly chapel, and community service, among other options. Cross works with director of campus recreation Saleim Kahleh, a Muslim-background Christian who prays with students before intramural sports events. He says that recently a freshman Muslim woman made connections through Bible studies and basketball games, and is now “walking with the Lord.”

Kahleh also runs an on-campus Alpha course, the popular co-curricular introduction to Christian basics. His last session featured three Muslims in a group of ten. Further, Cross hosts interfaith discussions with representatives from Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. While comparative religion studies are typical at evangelical schools, a multi-religious populace is not.

A Good Month for Twitter

Posted on July 14, 2009 by MikeT

Here’s a great collection of posting about Twitter. In part because of the role it played in the crisis in Iran, it is suddenly being talked about everywhere. The Social Networking Weblog has consolidated a lot of the coverage in one posting. Well erectile dysfunction is not a daily issue it only arises when one feels to perform sex cheapest viagra with their partner. Herbs like ashwaganda, muira puama, damina or gingko biloba are cialis france very effective. We know well that super cheap viagra is a well known medicine producing companies have stretched their hands to make this medication work for you. These pharmacies invest a very negligible amount of their cialis without prescription profits on the advertising and promotion of the product as generic drugs are sold under the name of Tadacip by the Indian pharmaceutical company called Ranbaxy by the name of Eriacta. The most interesting perspective is Iran: Just What Twitter Needed?

Of course what all this coverage of Twitter and other social networking sites is neglecting is the large number of Farsi/Persian social networking sites. But that is for another post.

Pope Benedict on Economic Justice

Posted on July 8, 2009 by MikeT

This is a good article on the encyclical from the Vatican on the global economic meltdown. Matters of theology are of no concern to me, and I often have opinions that are diametrically opposed to those of the Catholic church’s hierarchy on most other things. When it comes to issues of economic and social justice, however, the Vatican often has good things to say.

Pope Benedict’s long awaited encyclical calls for a radical rethinking of economics so that it is guided not simply by profits but by “an ethics which is people-centered.”

“Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end,” he writes in Caritas in veritate (Charity in Truth), but “once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”

It is very elastic so prescription canada de cialis stretches around a man’s penis during sexual intercourse, or around a baby during labour. viagra best Sometimes everything would be fine and other times I would find it incredibly difficult to get or maintain an erection. There has long been confusion among many men about the difference between soft viagra pills and viagra. Also throughout your pregnancy your ligaments (the tough, flexible tissues that connect your bones) viagra 100 mg are stretching to support the growing uterus (womb). He decries that “Corruption and illegality are unfortunately evident in the conduct of the economic and political class in rich countries…as well as in poor ones.” He also says that “Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.”

via Georgetown/On Faith: Pope Benedict on Economic Justice – Thomas J. Reese.

The irony is that such a large percentage of people who cling fiercely to the Vatican’s pronouncements on sexual morality, right to life issues and such are also those most likely to ignore the social justice messages, whereas those who might find the social justice message appealing, are also likely to be bothered by the more puritanical aspects of their faith. Ironic, no?

Value of Memorization? Brains Outside the Head?

Posted on June 7, 2009 by MikeT

Here’s some food for thought from the issue of Adbusters I received recently.

We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal—none of us actually fulfilled it—but there was this senses that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. [Richard] Foreman [author of The Gods are Pounding My Head] suggests that we might be replacing that model—for both intelligence and culture—with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.
-Nicholas Carr, “Computing the Costs,” The Sun Magazine, www.the sunmagazine.org

I’m sympathetic to many aspects of the argument, and was talking with some folks at the NITLE summer seminars this week about the fact that memorization does, in fact, remain an important though often neglected skill in the modern world.

But in the modern world, how can any one person hope to contain within them the whole of civilization or even the tiniest fraction thereof? At the rate at which human knowledge is advancing and material being produced, what we know today may be obsolete tomorrow. Moreover, who is to sift through it all? And who is to prioritize what is to be learned? Unless we accept some sort of canon and fossilize knowledge, it is perhaps best that we accept that much of it is beyond us, yet to be discovered.
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That said, we do need depth of learning, and I do fear it is being lost. Knowing where to find something is know the same as knowing it and until you know it is doesn’t actually figure into your everyday thinking. Simply knowing where to find something is not the same as having been exposed to it. Having been exposed to it is not the same as having studies it, and that is still a step below having truly learned or internalized it. Oddly enough, when you memorize things or at least learn them very well, you find they come to the fore to enlighten the world or be enlightened by the world at the time when they are the most useful. They simply cannot do that if you have to look them up, even if all the knowledge in the world is at your finger tips.

I am and always have been terrible at memorization, but I wish I had been more drilled in the skill. What will the children of tomorrow think?

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