It saddens me to write this article about Hong Kong but I want to express my deep admiration for ATV‘s senior news executives Leung Ka-wing (梁家榮) and Tammy Tam Wai-yee (譚衛兒) who resigned to defend press freedom. I hope I never had to make such decisions, but if I had to, I wish I had the moral fiber to resign in protest.
“Two senior news executives at Asia Television have quit over not being able to stop the station from airing an incorrect report on the death of former president Jiang Zemin.
The resignation of senior vice president of news and public affairs Leung Ka-wing was accepted by the broadcaster with immediate effect. His deputy, vice president Tammy Tam Wai-yee, tendered her resignation soon after ATV announced Leung’s departure around 5pm.
In a phone interview with ATV news, Leung said: “Why do I have to take full responsibility? It is because I failed to stop that news report from being aired despite my all-out efforts.“
He did not say who had insisted on running the report on July 6, only that he had tendered his resignation two days after the report was aired. ATV major investor Wang Zheng earlier denied suggestions he was the source of the announcement.”
“Former Asia Television news chief Leung Ka- wing has come under pressure from lawmakers to reveal everything surrounding his resignation at a Legislative Council panel meeting.
The request comes one day after Leung quit, saying he was taking full responsibility for not being able to prevent the station from airing an erroneous report on the death of former president Jiang Zemin.
His deputy, vice president Tammy Tam Wai- yee, tendered her resignation soon after ATV announced Leung’s departure on Monday afternoon.
Leung’s remarks sparked speculation that editorial independence may have been compromised by the station’s top management and there are now doubts as to whether those responsible for the report were impartial. Read the rest of this entry »
This afternoon, I had the pleasure to interview Sarah Hill, KOMU-TV 5pm news and the new U_News@4 anchor. I asked Sarah to travel back in time to July to share with us her first experiences with Google+ Hangouts. I also asked Sarah to tell us what she had to do to convince the bosses at KOMU to give Google+ Hangout a try. Sarah also talked about the origin of the concept of the new show U_News@4, launching in a few days on Sept 12th 4pm CST, and the various segments of the new show.
“U_News provides a new digital forum for U to personally share your news, opinions, kudos and community events. Our viewers will essentially co-host this newscast.”
“KOMU became the 1st local television station Thursday to air a live on-air Google Plus video chat.
The group video chat is called “Hangout” and it aired live during KOMU 8 News at 5. Google viewers were able to share their experiences with this new social networking site on-air with television viewers.”
A while ago, I was interviewed by Blayne Haggart, a Carleton University Phd student, for his doctoral dissertation on digital-copyright reform in North America (Canada, Mexico, and United States). We talked about my my work with the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group plus organizing an impromptu citizens’ meeting with the then Minister of Industry Hon. Jim Prentice in December 2007 (see report here and here).
I want to publicly congratulate Blayne for defending his Phd thesis successfully in May 2011. Congrats Dr. Haggart!
In my congratulation email to Blayne, I wonder out loud the dilemma we face. I wonder if we, the Canadians who have cared so much about Digital Copyright that we spent hours to protest and sent in our written submissions for government’s various consultations over the years, have won these battles in defeating bad Digital Copyright bills but may ultimately lose the war to the lobby groups because of a Harper majority government?
I hope the Harper majority government will have learned to respect Canadians’ views expressed in the previous failed Digital copyright reform. Even though I am not optimistic as the lobby groups are strong, I am willing to be hopeful, in fact, I have no choice but be hopeful. Because at this point, a new bad copyright bill will lead to new protests and I would rather be doing something else!
Canadians may find “CHAPTER 4: CANADA AND THE INTERNET TREATIES: ABORTED IMPLEMENTATIONS” (page 248 of the Phd thesis PDF file, and page 237 of hard copy) very interesting to read. Here is “Facebook activism comes to Canada” an excerpt from Chapter 4 subsection “ii. Facebook activism comes to Canada” under section “III. 2007-08: Bill C-61 and the triumph of the U.S. lobby” (page 297 of the Phd thesis PDF file, and page 286 of hard copy),
“ii. Facebook activism comes to Canada
Following his arrival at Industry Canada, Prentice attempted to introduce a DMCA- style copyright bill and ended up fomenting widespread public protests that panicked the government, confounded Cabinet colleagues and led to a six-month delay in the bill’s introduction that rendered it collateral damage when the September 2008 election was called. This uprising vindicated Austin and Bernier’s intuition about the political dangers of copyright reform. In the end, the Conservative’s Bill C-61, like the Liberals’ Bill C-60, never got beyond first reading.
In the October 16, 2007, Speech from the Throne, the Conservative government pledged to “improve the protection of cultural and intellectual property rights in Canada, including copyright reform” (Canada 2007). When the government placed An Act to Amend the Copyright Act on the Order Paper on December 10, 2007, observers of Canadian copyright expected that this new bill would be much closer to the DMCA than the Liberals’ C-60 had been.216
What happened next caught everyone off guard. The first weekend in December, Geist set up a Facebook page, Fair Copyright for Canada (FCFC).217 The site’s initial objectives were relatively modest: to inform people and to get people involved in opposing the bill. Its main demand was that the government listen to the public. Eventually, this demand became more specific: that the government hold public consultations on any new bill. Geist and others critiqued the upcoming bill by referring to it as the “Canadian DMCA.” This approach not only focused on a bad policy (i.e., DMCA-like law would be bad for Canada) but linked the issue to the always-latent sentiment of Canadian anti-Americanism. This symbolic bricolage, which played to a long-standing Canadian prejudice, was made more potent given the fact that the United States, and U.S.-based industries were the main groups lobbying for this bill. It was such a powerful linkage that it necessitated a direct rebuttal from the government, which insisted that the bill was indeed “Made in Canada” and his opponents were practicing base anti-Americanism.
With Geist’s Facebook page, the public interest in copyright that had been building for almost a decade exploded into view. After only a month (in January 2008), the page had almost 40,000 members; as of June 2010 it had just under 88,000 members. FCFC proponents argued these numbers represented frustration with the “resistance on the part of our policymakers to grapple with what’s really going on and to produce solutions that are right for us,” in the words of Toronto-based technology lawyer and FCFC member Rob Hyndman (Interview by author, April 22, 2008). In contrast, the government saw the protests as representing only a passionate minority causing “a lot of miscommunication, a lot of misinformation,” according to Jean-Sébastien Rioux, Chief of Staff to then-Industry Minister Jim Prentice (Rioux, interview by author, February 26, 2009).
Individuals also used the FCFC page to organize quasi-independent lobbying efforts, local FCFC groups and grassroots-action campaigns (Geist, interview by author, May 14, 2008). One member, Kempton Lam, a Calgary blogger, software engineer, consultant and documentary maker, used FCFC to organize an impromptu meeting (covered by the mainstream media) with Prentice during a Christmas Open House in his riding office on December 8. Between 40 and 60 people showed up and were eventually able to talk with the minister.218 This Facebook-based activism and the mainstream media press it attracted worried Conservative MPs, who had to deal with irate constituents on an unfamiliar issue, while cabinet ministers who understood the technology were also reluctant to move forward on this copyright bill (Austin, interview by author, April 30, 2008).”
Abstract
“This dissertation proposes an historical-institutionalist framework for understanding regional governance issues in general and North American governance in particular. Using digital- copyright reform as a test issue, it demonstrates that regional institutionalization can preserve differences and does not necessarily lead to regional policy convergence. This conclusion emerges from historical institutionalism’s focus on understanding the interaction of the policy-relevant ideas, institutions and interests shaping a region, no matter on what “level” they may be located. Regional governance processes must be understood within their own particular historical contexts. This approach allows the researcher to account for relevant influences that are either downplayed or ignored in other approaches to regionalism.
With respect to copyright, this dissertation finds that U.S. digital-copyright policy is shaped decisively by its own domestic ideas, institutions and interests, with international and regional factors playing a minimal role. For Canada and Mexico, while the United States has attempted to influence copyright reform in its neighbours, both countries’ copyright policies continue to be influenced significantly by domestic factors, and both countries continue to display significant copyright-policy autonomy. U.S. ability to influence its neighbours is constrained by the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) guarantee of market access, which limits the U.S. ability to link copyright reform to improved access to its market, suggesting that NAFTA’s rules play a role in maintaining policy autonomy and reducing the potential for policy convergence.”
Check out my friend Marta Blicharz’s report where her artwork submission was accepted into the Computational Aesthetics 2011 academic conference and art exhibition. Really cool looking arts and interesting report.
I’ve translated three TV entertainment series, 72 episodes, about 130,000 words form English to Chinese (both spoken and written). Google Translate has ben useful in my work but using it blindly can be outright dangerous. I will share with you 12 tips of how to use Google Translate wiser.
1) Sanity checks
If you don’t know the language you are translating into (e.g. Chinese), you should use it with extreme cautious. Don’t let Google Translate make you look like a fool. At a minimum, use Google Translate to perform a sanity check on itself.
What is a “sanity check“? Well, if you want to translate English to Chinese (or any language you don’t know), at least use Google Translate to translate the text right back to you.
“U.S. forecasters are warning a lumbering tropical storm Lee could bring floods and tornadoes to more south and central-eastern states as it moves northward Sunday after saturating the Gulf coastline.”
Sanity check is using Google Translate to translate the above Chinese to English. You see I added emphasis for the potentially problematic areas.
“The U.S. forecasters warned the storm could bring tropical logging floods and tornadoes Lee in more southern and eastern countries, as it moved north after the Gulf coast on Sunday saturated.”
Observation: The Chinese translation is actually quite confusing, much more confusing that the sanity check is showing.
Here is a “work around” that is not a guarantee “solution” but better than nothing. Use short sentences. Change your English words so that the sanity check won’t give you garbage.
2) Pronunciation
I love Google Translate‘s Chinese pronunciation. It just sound great. I wonder how good is Google Translate‘s pronunciations in other languages? Please add comments to this post if you speak other languages fluently and can judge Google Translate‘s pronunciations as a native speakers of those languages.
3) Google Translate is NOT your magic bullet
To me, the purpose of language is to communicate so I try my best to avoid miscommunication. I started writing this post because I’ve noticed some Chinese Google+ users using Chinese in their comments to English posts.
I think those commenters may be assuming their non-Chinese readers can simply use Google Translate to help understand the meaning of their words. Take the following Sept 1st, 2011 comment in this post for example,
“Can not sleep, can hangout, also considered is neglected, right?”
People may be able to guess what the author means. But the words “also considered is neglected” are annoying because you can’t be sure exactly what the commenter really meant. You see, what the Chinese commenter means is roughly,
“Can’t sleep but I can still hangout, not bad right?”
The commenter used the words “失之東隅” which is a Chinese proverb. I don’t think I will use Chinese proverb if I were the commenter. You see, isn’t it the point of leaving a comment so that other people, including author of the post, can understand what you try to say?
4) Closing comments
To me, I see clear and clean communication as the reason for languages. I use and love Google Translate as a tool. But it is a tool, at its current capability as of Sep 2011, it is a still a very young, immature, and not that reliable tool. It cannot be trusted blindly.
One final sanity check example to remind us why Google Translate can’t and shouldn’t be trusted blindly using the first sentence of this article.
“I’ve translated three TV series, 72 episodes, about 130,000 words form English to Chinese (both spoken and written).”
“I translated three television series, 72 sets, about 13 million words in English in the form of the Chinese (including verbal and written).”
Do you notice one glaring problem? How did 130,000 words become 13 million words? The stupid thing is that “13萬” is actually 130,00, totally correct! But turning “13萬” into “13 million” is just total rubbish!
I will share with you my concerns of what Eric Schmidt has said at MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV Festival, hopefully, without repeating many points others have expressed in their articles (see refs). Schmidt‘s words got me thinking about this faxlore/viral email,
“Heaven is where the police are British, the lovers French, the mechanics German, the chefs Italian, and it is all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German, and it is all organized by the Italians.“
Eric Schmidt‘s words about identity service and real names (see below with emphasis added) at Edinburgh raised some serious red flags. To me, hell is where Google (with Google+) is our Police, Judge, & Jury, all rolled into one.
In particular these words by Eric Schmidt have given me most concern.
“In the area of social media, we knew upfront 10 years ago that the Internet lacked essentially an accurate identity service. I’m not here by the way talking about Facebook, the media gets confused when I talk about this. If you think about it, the Internet would be better if we had an accurate notion that you were a real person as opposed to a dog, or a fake person, or a spammer or what have you.
And the notion of strong identity was never invented in the Internet. Many people worked on it – I worked on it as a scientist 20 years ago, and it’s a hard problem. So if we knew that it was a real person, then we could sort of hold them accountable, we could check them, [Kempton: "accountable"? How? Is where Google wants to play Police and Judge?] we could give them things, we could you know bill them, you know we could have credit cards and so forth and so on, there are all sorts of reasons.
And the Internet did not develop this in many ways because the Internet came out of universities where the issue of authentication wasn’t such a big issue. Everybody trusted everybody, you didn’t have these kinds of things.
But my general rule is people have a lot of free time and people on the Internet, there are people who do really really evil and wrong things on the Internet, and it would be useful if we had strong identity so we could weed them out. [Kempton: "weed them out"? Is this where Google wants to play Judge & Jury?] I’m not suggesting eliminating them, what I’m suggesting is if we knew their identity was accurate, we could rank them. Think of them like an identity rank. [Kempton: Again, is this where Google wants to play Judge & Jury?] [...]“
“[...] Well, the first comment is that Google+ is completely optional. In fact, many many people want to get in, if you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to.
[Kempton: I cannot agree. The old legal and economic model of "property rights" need to be modified/redefined when the acquisition, selling (via ads), ranking, weeding, etc of our personal identity & information are involved. The new expected and accepted behaviours should be shaped and defined by concerned users including myself, and not just unilaterally by the corporations (be it Google, Facebook, etc).].
The path to hell is sometimes/often paved with good intentions, and often good scientific intentions by “smart people”. The fact that these high tech systems and sensitive information can be seriously misused now and/or in the future cannot be left to sort out by future generations when it may be impossible for them to turn back the tide of horror.
I don’t think Google share 100% of the details and algorithms of how it does it searches and ranks its results (except a few high-level academic pappers). And judging from what it has done so far, I don’t expect it will change its mind with Google+ and be completely open. In fact, Google looks awfully close to “evil” now.
Even in our human based and reviewable judicial system, we often made serious and irrevocable mistakes. How can we trust Google’s automated system to “weed out” people and to hold people “accountable” without it being open and transparent? To remind us of the implications, just read up how the lives of Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard, Donald Marshall, and Maher Arar have been affected by a system that failed them.
Would you trust Google to be your Police, Judge, and Jury? My answer is an emphatic NO!
In 2008, with the help of Simon, who has 30 years of purchasing experience, we created a series of 15 parts “Tales of a Chinese Purchaser” (about 10 minutes long per episode). Few days ago, my friend Echo kindly told me that she is learning a lot about purchasing from the series and is helping her work. So I actually started listening to it again and find that I am also learning a lot (again). And it is fun to listen.
“Researchers [...] today reported promising results of a world-first cancer therapy trial in renowned journal Nature. The trial is the first to show that an intravenously-delivered viral therapy can consistently infect and spread within tumours without harming normal tissues in humans. It is also the first to show tumour-selective expression of a foreign gene after intravenous delivery.
The trial involved 23 patients (including seven at The Ottawa Hospital), all with advanced cancers that had spread to multiple organs and failed to respond to standard treatments. The patients received a single intravenous infusion of a virus called JX-594, at one of five dose levels, and biopsies were obtained eight to 10 days later. Seven of eight patients (87 per cent) in the two highest dose groups had evidence of viral replication in their tumour, but not in normal tissues. All of these patients also showed tumour-selective expression of a foreign gene that was engineered into the virus to help with detection. The virus was well tolerated at all dose levels, with the most common side effect being mild to moderate flu-like symptoms that lasted less than one day.
“We are very excited because this is the first time in medical history that a viral therapy has been shown to consistently and selectively replicate in cancer tissue after intravenous infusion in humans,” said Dr. John Bell, a Senior Scientist at OHRI, Professor of Medicine at uOttawa and senior co-author on the publication. “Intravenous delivery is crucial for cancer treatment because it allows us to target tumours throughout the body as opposed to just those that we can directly inject. The study is also important because it shows that we can use this approach to selectively express foreign genes in tumours, opening the door to a whole new suite of targeted cancer therapies.””
Posted by kempton 
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