Year: 2013

Steven A. Cook calls for the country’s liberal camp to “wake up,” since they don’t appear to be organizing in the post-Morsi power vacuum:

The Muslim Brotherhood’s egregious mistake and the military’s intervention have for better or worse given the groups that did not do well during the 2011-12 parliamentary elections a new opportunity at the ballot box.  There is no evidence that they are doing anything about this new lease on life provided courtesy of the Egyptian armed forces.  It’s entirely unclear if anyone on the non-religious end of the political spectrum is doing any political work or merely relying on the fact that the Brothers so botched their time in office that they will be a non-factor in politics for some time.  Maybe. Their supporters seem highly motivated.  Even if the Brotherhood says now that it will not legitimate the political process resulting from a coup, or the military makes good on its promise to clear the area around the Rabaa al Adawiya mosque, who knows what will happen in six or nine months.

The fact that some revolutionary groups and democracy activists, who claim to be liberal, have made common cause with remnants of the old regime and the military undermines their claims to be democratic.  It also makes them—if they are not careful—potential pawns in a game that anti-revolutionary forces are playing aimed at restoring some semblance of the old order.

Max Fisher is disturbed by the support liberals are lending to the brutal military crackdowns on pro-Brotherhood protests:

To me, the movement is starting to look less driven by liberalism than by secular nationalism, hardly a force unique to Egypt but one that has a deep history here, including under Mubarak’s reign. Many have pointed to parallels with the rise of Egypt’s first nationalist military leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the 1950s. Vendors in liberal-dominated protest areas of Cairo have been selling posters of the new military ruler, General Abdel Fata el-Sissi, alongside posters of Nasser and his successor Anwar Sadat (but not of Sadat’s successor, Mubarak; maybe it’s still too soon). The world has something of an ugly history with nationalist movements that celebrate autocratic military rulers and back state violence against fellow citizens, so people are naturally worried.

A reader writes:

One study from one guy done during one off-peak driving time of the day and you have a reader that responds “At last!”?  My guess is this is somebody who uses their phone while in the car on a regular basis, feels more than a bit defensive about it, and is grasping onto this one straw to justify their behavior. There have been plenty of studies showing an decrease in attentiveness and driving ability from cell phone usage. Regular handset usage is worse than driving over the legal alcohol limit of 0.08% and texting is much worse.

Here are a handful of articles in the CS Monitor about some of the problems. Before reading too much into a single study, it’s best to review all of the other studies out there.

Another piles on:

Here’s an article on a study done back in 2003 that showed that drivers on a cellphone were more distracted than those who were legally drunk.  And this was done even before the advent of widespread texting. Money quote:

Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked. That frustrates everyone.

Another chips in:

I know this study doesn’t include drivers specifically, but the awareness level of pedestrians who were just walking and talking on a cell phone was startling low.  Even if cell phone distractions aren’t causing wrecks specifically, I don’t believe that a driver using a cell phone in any fashion isn’t distracted.

One more:

Your reader suggests that cell phone distraction is offset by the attentiveness increase in performing an activity.  Here’s a perfect solution: Drive Stick.  It certainly keeps me more attentive when I drive, and I challenge anyone to text while driving stick in traffic.

Driving is a skill, and it should be honed daily.  You wouldn’t talk on the phone while you’re practicing the piano, would you?

Jessica Love deconstructs the image macro, or the captioned images that pervade the Internet:

As with most games, there are rules. Some image macros—those built around the sarcastic catchphrase Cool Story, Bro come immediately to mind—should only be posted in specific contexts, such as in response to a previous contribution that was overly long and personal.

Captions, on the other hand, tend to be generated according to templates that dictate how words are spelled (the vs. teh vs. th), how they are pronounced (Oh my God vs. O.M.G. vs. ermahgerd), and how they are strung together. Consider, for instance, one image macro series built around the self-portrait of 18th-century painter Joseph Ducreux. Here, captions are composed of modern-day rap lyrics translated into faux-formal, old-timey English (Gentlemen, I inquire: Who hath released the hounds?).

She notes that memes are “creeping offline”:

The Internet slang phrase “nom nom nom” can now be heard around the technophobe’s dinner table; what will be next to make the jump? Perhaps the use of –fag as a suffix? Brennan explains that the suffix was coined on the image-posting board 4chan in 2007 as an equal-opportunity descriptor: there were newfags who were new to the forum (and thus looked down upon), but also oldfags and musicfags and artfags. “Despite the homophobia and hate associated with the suffix, it’s been adopted and used as an identifier within some communities,” she tells me.

(Image from Know Your Meme)

Shane Harris has details:

The doomsday thinkers over at DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] are looking for researchers to “investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources.” The question is, could a determined data miner use only publicly available information — culled from Web pages and social media or from a consumer data broker — to cause “nation-state type effects.” Forget identify theft. DARPA appears to be talking about outing undercover intelligence officers; revealing military war plans; giving hackers a playbook for taking down a bank; or creating maps of sensitive government facilities.

The irony is delicious. At the time government officials are assuring Americans they have nothing to fear from the National Security Agency poring through their personal records, the military is worried that Russia or al Qaeda is going to wreak nationwide havoc after combing through people’s personal records.

Update from a reader:

A few points of information/correction:

– DARPA is not the NSA.

– Open-source and commercially-available data are not the same as (ostensibly) private “personal records” such as phone call metadata, emails, and chat contents.

– Government officials aren’t “assuring Americans they have nothing to fear from the NSA poring through their personal records”; they are trying to assure Americans that they don’t pore through their personal records, but instead that they (merely) collect lots of personal records to make it easier to identify which (supposedly tiny) fraction of records to pore over, and to make it feasible to do so quickly. Perhaps a distinction without a difference, but that’s precisely the crux of the controversy, IMHO.

In addition, the structure of the story here (such as it is) is parallel to the government saying “we need military weapons systems to protect you, but military weapons systems may be dangerous in the wrong hands.” You may disagree with their logic or the content of their assertions, but I don’t see any irony there.