[PHOTO] Observation tower, 315 Bloor Street West

The new headquarters of the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs will be located in the building on 315 Bloor Street West that hosted first the Dominion Meteorological Office, then the University of Toronto's Admissions and Awards office. I've a photo of the entire building from July 2009 here.







Think of this post as an experiment. Which of the three different takes of the same subject at the same time do you prefer?

[CAT] Catpack in New York City

Catpack in New York City
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

This picture of a catpack--a meshed backpack for cats--is something I found at the blog Joe. My. God. who got it from Buzzfeed, and also on the blog Fucked in Park Slope. As a carrier, it might be suitable, although I've my doubts. I'm certain that Shakespeare wouldn't be fond of it at all, and that few cats would appreciate the recreational value especially with the jostling about.

If anyone can provide me with the ultimate source for this photo, I'd quite appreciate it.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On the Egyptian protests and social networking's role

The events in Egypt are starting to look revolutionary.

The headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party were ablaze in Cairo on Friday night, shortly after a curfew came into force, live footage carried by Al Jazeera television showed.

State television confirmed the building was set on fire.

NDP branch offices in several other cities around the country were also set on fire or attacked during the day, witnesses said.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in his capacity as head of the military, announced a curfew in main cities starting from Friday. “According to what some provinces witnessed in terms of riots, lawlessness, looting, destruction, attack and burning of public and private property including attacks on banks and hotels, President Hosni Mubarak decreed a curfew as a military ruler,” a state TV announcer said.

The curfew is to last from 6 p.m. (local time) to 7 a.m. in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez.

The live feed from al Jazeera is spectacular. The YouTube channel also has some good footage, like the below Dan Nolan street reportage in Cairo.

The interesting news comes from outside of Cairo, where protests are continuing in cities like Alexandria and (below) Suez. And yes, the curfew is being completely ignored.

Foreign Policy;s Blake Hounsell has photos from Suez.

If I'm to trust in my understanding of the media coverage, the event seems to lack leadership as such, although figures like Nobel laureate Mohammed ElBaradei are emerging as focuses. al Jazeera's critical coverage of Arab regimes played a major role from the conventional media perspective, but from the social networking perspective social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have played a critical role in letting information escape and permeate the Internet user population in Egypt, with effective bypasses letting social media continue, using third-party apps like my own Hootsuite. Malcolm Gladwell was quite, quite wrong about the weakness of online social networks' real-world networks.

Jeff Jedras has some nice coverage of the background.

In the countries where they don’t have the democratic freedom we take for granted, where they don’t have the free press we enjoy, where they live daily under oppressive and dictatorial governments, their perspective on social media was very different. For them, social media is a vital tool of empowerment and democracy promotion.

For countries without a free press, blogs are their free press, with actual citizen journalists reporting on events the government wants censored, and that wouldn’t be reported otherwise. And Twitter is their rapid response and organizational tool. Small handheld cameras and video sharing tools like YouTube add another layer, bringing video that would never be shown on state television.

[. . . A]s I read about the amazing events in Tunisia and Egypt, and as I watch the gripping live coverage from Egypt on Al Jazerra English, the speaker I keep thinking back to is Egypt’s Wael Abbas. Before Abbas’ presentation [at the World Blogging Forum in Bucharest in 2009], like many in the West I didn’t know much about Egypt, but I though it was a fairly friendly, free country, particularly compared to many of its neighbours.

Jedras' report is here.

[T]he situation in Egypt described by the next speaker, Wael Abbas, was completely new and shocking to me. Abbas is a blogger and human rights activist who was named Middle East person of the year by CNN in 2007.

In Egypt, said Abbas, there’s no protection for journalism, there’s censorship on supposed security grounds, copies of papers are often confiscated and presses delayed or closed, tapes confiscated from videographers, TV stations raided by security officials and tapes seized, all leading to an environment of self-censorship by the media to avoid confrontation with the government.

As a result, he said there was a dire need in Egypt for an alternative form of media to support civil society and provide real, uncensored news to the Egyptian people. The government had been blocking the Web but ended that practice when it wanted to encourage telecom investment. Instead, said Abbas, the government doesn’t censor blogs, but instead harasses, detains and arrests bloggers within the country instead in an attempt to intimidate then into ceasing their activities.

Blogging and citizen journalism first came into its own in Egypt when the mainstream media weren’t covering protests against President Mubarak, election rigging and police violence. Bloggers stepped in to fill that gap and while sometimes the barrier between blogging and activism blurred, the objective approach bloggers tried to take found public support. They presented video and pictures of what was happening and asked people to draw their own conclusions. The media were actually spurred-on by the bloggers, being encouraged to report more of what was actually happening, and publishing blogger content. Opposition parties also reached out to the new media.

Abbas himself drew negative government attention when he published photos of hired thugs that arrested female protestors, and exposed paid pro-Mubarak protesters, and posted controversial video. He has had his Facebook, YouTube and Yahoo accounts shut down under government pressure for his activities, and the government has accused him of being a criminal, a homosexual and having converted to Christianity in attempts to discredit him.

While at its peak around 2005, Abbas said bloggers helped push the envelope for press freedom and political freedom by the opposition, its still under attack and the government’s counter-attacks are working, causing him to lose optimism that real change will happen in Egypt.

Wael Abbas' blog is here.

[LINK] "Paging Davos, I never got my invite ..."

Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen wondered why he wasn't invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos. The predictions of some attendees that the world is set for a generation of strong growth are to blame; they're not quite supported by fiscal realities.

If governments choose to focus all their efforts on growth and let fiscal excess continue the already huge debt problem will become worse. And if they don't, they must face growth rates that are not only low, but perhaps even negative for a long period of time. A very recent shot fired across the bow today by the S&P comes in the form of the downgrade of Japan's sovereign debt.

I would then pose my spectators one simple question and ask to reflect on some simple issue. What is the trend growth in the OECD and her individual economies with a balanced fiscal budget? And once we have agreed on that answer the obvious next question would how the world will deal with a substantial part of its economies exhibiting negative trend growth rates for as far as the eye can see?

More than anything I think that this has probably yet to sink in to markets and policy makers alike. Indeed, after having pissed in the proverbial bunch bowl I would probably go on to talk about the necessity (although my praise for the apparent success of the Euro bond issuance) of substantial debt restructuring in the Eurozone.

Alas, at that point my microphone would have long been switched off and I would probably, to boot, have been taken out by the in-house Davos sniper tasked with the elimination of any spoilers of the good mood.

Claus was writing about First World economies. Conceivably, even if they stagnate (relatively) for the next generation, the world as a whole could still thrive, still enjoy a generation of prosperity, as it engages is catch-up economic growth. Hopefully; Third World debt certainly has been an issue in the past.

Go, read.

[LINK] "The Dark Side of Twittering a Revolution"

Blogger Jamais Cascio relinked to an old post he wrote during the 2009 Iran events. Social networking systems can be used to get the masses for something good, true; equally, they can be used for something bad.

In noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing mass change, I thought out loud for a moment about what kinds of dangers might emerge. It struck me, as I spoke, that there is a terrible analogy that might be applicable: the use of radio as a way of coordinating bloody attacks on rival ethnic communities during the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. I asked, out loud, whether Twitter could ever be used to trigger a genocide. The audience was understandably stunned by the question, and after a few seconds someone shouted, "No!" I could only hope that the anonymous reply was right, but I don't think he was.

iran twitterConsider, for a moment, what we're seeing happening in Iran: mass-action coordinated, at least in part, through Twitter; traditional media in Iran having lost any legitimacy for the angry populace, alternative media--like Twitter--increasingly becoming the sole source of information; and a growing sense of persecution and crisis, abetted by the limited streams of rumor-heavy news. Let me again emphasize that I don't think that what's happening in Iran is a misuse of social media; what I do think is that the same kinds of dynamics that have allowed for a potential democratic revolution in Iran could emerge just as readily in support of something far darker.

In a 1999 presentation for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Professor Frank Chalk noted five circumstances that would allow the maximum intensity of a media-driven response to a crisis:

1. the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter];
2. the use of a completely new style of communication;
3. the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists;
4. a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and
5. a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience.

All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well.

It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too.

The transparency of Twitter and like platforms does mean does mean it's relatively easy to keep track, and certainly the sort of monologue of Rwanda's famously anti-Tutsi Radio Mille Collines can't go unchallenged, but, nevertheless.