Cleanest government money can buy
One way for Asian countries, home to a big share of the world’s households living on $2 per day, to boost their economies is to increase the pay of their civil servants. [...]
Of course, throwing money at corruption won’t make it go away. If it did, countries such as Kenya, which pays its members of Parliament handsomely — more than $13,000 a month — would be paragons of virtue instead of cellar-dwellers in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index.
Decent salaries are just one incentive that can tilt the cost-benefit analyses of potential bribe-takers toward probity: More important than reducing the potential financial benefits of corruption is increasing the probability of detection and meaningful punishment.
Having an independent and robust news media would help with detecting corruption, but that’s something that is not often mentioned. The level of journalism in Singapore still has some ways to go, as evidenced by the recent corruption case involving two top officials. The news only broke several weeks after they had been arrested!
Garbage
Fever Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter:
There is a hole in my heart dug deep by advertising and envy and a desire to see a thing that is new and different and beautiful. A place within me that is empty, and that I want to fill it up. The hole makes me think electronics can help. And of course, they can.
They make the world easier and more enjoyable. They boost productivity and provide entertainment and information and sometimes even status. At least for a while. At least until they are obsolete. At least until they are garbage.
Don’t fill up the hole in your heart with garbage.
Design: Apple vs. Microsoft
Joe Dombrowski does an analysis of the design philosophies of Apple and Microsoft:
It should be clear by now that Apple does not have the monopoly on design. Both companies, especially in the modern computing era, have been very design focused, but have adopted extremely different philosophies. Which is better? To be honest, that’s a matter of opinion. I’d personally almost always choose the new and exciting design when it first comes out, but as it ages, I start looking elsewhere.
500-year-old social media revolution
The Economist on How Luther went viral:
After decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.
A familiar sounding tale — except it happened 500 years ago.
Luther’s enemies likened the spread of his ideas to a sickness. The papal bull threatening Luther with excommunication in 1520 said its aim was “to cut off the advance of this plague and cancerous disease so it will not spread any further”. The Edict of Worms in 1521 warned that the spread of Luther’s message had to be prevented, otherwise “the whole German nation, and later all other nations, will be infected by this same disorder.”
Yes, Luther’s ideas were “going viral”.
Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.”
“There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9) Seems like the main improvement is in the speed of transmission. Certainly something worth thinking about in this age of seemingly unprecedented innovation.
A true Christmas feast
The verse from the sermon at my church’s Christmas Eve service:
“Come, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.Incline your ear, and come to me;
hear, that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.Behold, I made him a witness to the peoples,
a leader and commander for the peoples.Behold, you shall call a nation that you do not know,
and a nation that did not know you shall run to you,
because of the LORD your God, and of the Holy One of Israel,
for he has glorified you.“Seek the LORD while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;– Isaiah 55:1-6
Truly a Christmas feast for all of us to share in.
Play by their rules
Well, I guess that’s the end of my social media experiment. Facebook shut down my German Football Team fan page and merged it with the official Die Nationalmannschaft page (which is in German, that’s why I created one in English) because it wasn’t run by an official representative. It’s a bit painful because the page had accumulated >80,000 fans over the past few years and I have been regularly posting news and updates on the page, feeling a certain responsibility to keeping all these fans updated (as silly as that sounds).
Obviously there is some demand of an English-language fan page for the German team but if the German football association doesn’t want to put an effort towards that, there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It was fun while it lasted but we all have to play by Facebook’s rules…
Why is Android laggy?
An interesting technical analysis by Andrew Munn on Why is Android laggy, while iOS, Windows Phone 7, QNX, and WebOS are fluid?
Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:
- UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
- UI rendering has normal priorityEven with a Galaxy Nexus, or the quad-core EeePad Transformer Prime, there is no way to guarantee a smooth frame rate if these two design constraints remain true. It’s telling that it takes the power of a Galaxy Nexus to approach the smoothness of a three year old iPhone. So why did the Android team design the rendering framework like this?
Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry. The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.
This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritise UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.
Android makes so many changes from version to version that apps have to be rewritten anyway. Might as well bite the bullet and rewrite the rendering framework sooner rather than later.
Irrevocably dirty
Charmian Gooch, a Founding Director of Global Witness, said: “Nearly nine years after the Kimberley Process was launched, the sad truth is that most consumers still cannot be sure where their diamonds come from, nor whether they are financing armed violence or abusive regimes.”
[...]
Global Witness’ departure seals what has been apparent for some time: that, as an industry, the diamond business can’t help but be irrevocably dirty.
Don’t buy diamonds.
That $200 price tag
David Pogue reviewing the Kindle Fire:
Most problematic, though, the Fire does not have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad. You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger. Animations are sluggish and jerky — even the page turns that you’d think would be the pride of the Kindle team. Taps sometimes don’t register. There are no progress or “wait” indicators, so you frequently don’t know if the machine has even registered your touch commands. The momentum of the animations hasn’t been calculated right, so the whole thing feels ornery.
iPad killer, it is not.
Well, at least if you get so frustrated with the Fire that you throw it against the wall, it’s only $200 that goes up in smoke.