The recent elections in Iran have reminded me of something I was pondering for a while.
I listened to an interview with Ethan Zuckerman about the multilingual web and put it in the back of my mind. But now that the events in Iran are escalating the need for a multilingual web becomes even more important. In the first two days of uprising (June 13 and June 14) there was a lot of news reports coming in from people on the streets. They were filing them on social media (twitter and friendfeed) but mostly in Farsi. The at that point the rest of the world wasn’t able to make the most of these reports. There was even a meme created on twitter about how CNN missed reporting this election: #cnnfail. Slowly as the reports came in English, other sites tried to aggregate the torrent of news. I especially liked what twazzup did with their Iran Unrest site. They were smart enough to notice that more content can be added by search for Farsi keywords and capitalize on this gap.
I now fully agree with Ethan Zuckerman, and think we need the web to become inclusive of all languages. If we can easily and quickly translate between languages on the web, news and information can flow more freely. Of course there are inherent problems in translating various languages, and I think currently without human intervention that can’t be done easily. Case in point is that the site balatarin started to ask for volunteers to translate important Farsi language blog posts.
However, things like this will not take off until the big players get involved. And today I heard that google has entered the game by adding Farsi translation services. It still has a long way to go, but it’s a good start!
In a few hours people will be going to the polls in Iran. I think this will be a historic election, not because of the involvement of people. The people have woken up, and this wave is going to be hard to stop. Whoever gets elected will have to start listening to the populous. Iran has entered the 21st century and I am very excited for it!
And a song that shows an interesting parallel. The song was popular during the 1971 1979 revolution and is now the song of the front runner candidate (not that he’s in any way affiliated with the original movement that represented the song).
I tried out the Bixi bike rental system last weekend. Manypeople have already written about them so I thought I would add my cents as well.
Pros:
Convenient locations around downtown
Cheap prices if you get a yearly subscription and use less than 30 minutes each time
You can rent friggin’ bikes!
Promotes biking in the city
Cons:
Requires one credit card per bike rented
Puts a hold on $250 in your credit card each time you use it
Instructions for some things (like the 24-hr access) not very clear
Lack of billboard with info on nearby rental stations.
Another side-effect of the design of the system: When I tried to get a bike to go back home, the first station had no bikes, but luckily the one where I had returned my bike still had one left.
Oh, and here’s an official video from Bixi explaining how the 24-hr access works.
This weekend, the Main was closed from Sherbrooke to Mont-Royal and was turned into a pedestrian street. All businesses put out their merchandise, or food, or anything else and that part of the city was alive!
While on our way back home we ran into a breakdancing crew doing their thing, so I broke out the Qik camera.
Noteworthy: At around the 3 minute mark, the breaker in green seems to have hurt himself but I never figured out if he actually did.
I was walking home yesterday, when I saw a huge crowd and what appeared to be a protest next to Mount Royal Park. My first guess was the usual Sunday Tamtams, but when I got closer I saw a large number of Fleurdelisé. I assumed it was just a pro-sovereignty rally and continued walking to go record a bit of the tamtams madness. But last night while doing my rounds in the blogosphere I found this interesting article on the topic which answers my questions about the rally and I think it’s a good read.
And here’s the video I took yesterday, but unfortunately I had my earphones on and didn’t get any of the audio. I have to say the sounds of hundreds of drums playing was incredible!
What’s the hottest new thing these days? Why it’s twitter! And where people are, the spammers will surely follow. Like the parasites of the internet ecosystem, they will find a way in. Then they will start hammering away, sending messages until they get a click here and a click there.
I woke up this morning to see that 5 or 6 people had started following me on twitter. When I went to their profile to check who they were I was greeted with the page below.
This can mean bad things because twitter’s sign up page has the standard anti-spam measure of captcha. So either the spammers are using sophisticated technology to get in, or they’ve outsourced the sign up process to a large number of human workers. I would prefer if it was the latter since it means there’s a limit to how much spam I will get. Although I remember a reading a while back that Gmail’s captcha was broken.
It’s an interesting notion to use mathematics in the setting of political policies. What’s a little chilling to me is what would happen if the math suggested something like an all out attack on a nation? Are we to believe the math hard, cold math just because it is unbiased and doesn’t lie? Is the assumption (the 90% assumption) that reality will follow these predicitions?
Luckily what Bueno de Mesquita predicts is a good outcome for both Iran and the west.
A few weeks ago I went to Toronto to see Mohsen Namjoo in Toronto. I had a fantastic time, and enjoyed his work. But what got me into listening to his music was his views on Iranian music an its evolution. The day after the concert he held a question and answer session where he gave his opinions on music. It is worth a listen:
