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Friday, October 19, 2007

The 7th Taipei International Hardware & DIY Show, organized by Kaigo Taiwan (The representative of Koelnmesse in Taiwan) and Koelnmesse GmbH, started on October 18-20 at Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall 3. This show has 183 participants using 300 booths to exhibit accessories and tools on esoteric fabricating, home-living applications, and security.

With people in Taiwan valuing on the quality of home-living, the organizer set a pre-show pavilion of “2008 Taipei Home & Lifestyle Fair” and invited B&Q & HomeBox holding DIY workshops for visitors.

This exhibition is conjuncted with industry and applications, and pursuing with three main topics of “Quality, Innovation and Competitiveness”. International factories such as Hitachi, Rexon, Ryobi participated this show for the export opportunity in the hardware industry.

After the “Product Certificates and Testing” pavilion in TAITRONICS Autumn, Bureau of Standards, Metrology & Inspection, M.O.E.A., R.O.C. (Taiwan) and DIY in Europe magazine were invited for speeches focused on certifications on hardware & DIY products and environment issues in EU.

• Spoty Enterprise Co., Ltd.

• Double Dynasty Co., Ltd.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Victoria Wyndham was one of the most seasoned and accomplished actresses in daytime soap opera television. She played Rachel Cory, the maven of Another World‘s fictional town, Bay City, from 1972 to 1999 when the show went off the air. Wyndham talks about how she was seen as the anchor of a show, and the political infighting to keep it on the air as NBC wanted to wrest control of the long-running soap from Procter & Gamble. Wyndham fought to keep it on the air, but eventually succumbed to the inevitable. She discusses life on the soap opera, and the seven years she spent wandering “in the woods” of Los Angeles seeking direction, now divorced from a character who had come to define her professional career. Happy, healthy and with a family she is proud of, Wyndham has found life after the death of Another World in painting and animals. Below is David Shankbone’s interview with the soap diva.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

The last day of the Wikimania 2008 conference saw Saturday morning sessions on a variety of topics. Wikinews attended a presentation by Eric M. Johnson from the United States Department of State. Eric, a former NCO in the U.S. Marines, is the lead for the Knowledge Management Action team in the department’s Office of eDiplomacy, and involved in department’s use of Web 2.0 technologies for knowledge management. This includes blogs, and the key focus of his talk, Wiki culture in the U.S. Department of State.

Eric opened his presentation with an introduction to the U.S. State Department, one of the oldest agencies of the American government, which today has around 57,000 employees worldwide. When formed in the 18th century their offices and diplomatic staff operated largely autonomously due to lack of ability to communicate rapidly. By the mid-20th century this had changed with the advent of telegraph lines, and changed again with the Cold War and security concerns bringing to the fore the well-known term, “need to know”.

Now, in the 21st century, the volume of internal communication generated by the department is a staggering 1,800,000 cables a year, 1.5 billion emails, production of around 500,000 print volumes, and maintenance of approximately one thousand websites. Both internal and externally facing.

A pilot project was set up, Diplopedia, a MediaWiki wiki running on the department’s internal network, which outside of the department of defence is one of the largest private networks operated by the U.S. government.

A grassroots effort, this project to promote knowledge sharing differs from the well-known Wikipedia in that it does not allow anonymous edits. There are around 1,000 registered users who have contributed over 4,400 pages. Integration with the Department of State’s internal search engine prioritises results from the wiki, increasing the popularity of the site such that it has received over 650,000 page views. Like Wikipedia, users are required to provide sources for entered information at the foot of the article, and users are warned that it is a starting point and not an authoritative source of information. Data on visa requirements and information from other static department sites has been incorporated into the wiki.

Eric described the project as just reaching critical mass and attracting increasing interest from other departments. Among the ingredients leading to the success of the project were the cultural change with increasing awareness of the technology from Wikipedia, the formation by the community of a welcoming committee, and the taking on of roles to carry out tasks such as drafting. A number of staff act as “gardeners” tending to the wiki content, keeping it fresh, and well cross-referenced. The continual updating is a novel concept to many of their employees.

Unlike Wikipedia, and many other projects using MediaWiki, none of the Diplopedia pages are locked or protected. This even includes their main page. To date there have been none of the content disputes that have been an issue on Wikipedia, and the use of the wiki to replace traditional websites which are far more time consuming to maintain is seen as a logical extension of the project.

Carried out with no outside help, and by learning from others’ mistakes, the department has adopted mechanisms for assuming that contributions are well-intentioned, and has a body for oversight in the event of a dispute.

With the success of the project, eDiplomacy plans to introduce a separate, classified wiki. They will also expand the effort to compile biographies of foreign leaders, which was pioneered by the U.S. missions in Italy and Germany. This effort has proven valuable when combined with a version of the site available on portable devices such as the Blackberry.

The future holds moves to seek more support from management and integration with their primary authentication system. Among the features on the main page to keep the project interesting to staff is a “Diploquiz” which poses a weekly trivia question which can be answered from somewhere within the wiki.

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Sunday, March 4, 2007

Several conflicts involving civilians occurred in East Timor at the same time that Australian-led peacekeeping troops stormed a town where a rebel former army officer and his men have been under siege.

The Australian soldiers, supported by helicopters and armored vehicles, stormed the town of Same, 50km south of the capital Dili, at dawn.

Four armed East Timorese men were killed and two others injured during the operation, but their leader, Major Alfredo Reinado, escaped the troops.

The operation was authorised by East Timor’s president, Xanana Gusmão, after Reinado refused to negotiate.

The Major was directly involved in the clashes with the government forces last May, and was later jailed by Portuguese troops for having in his possession dozens of weapons and explosives that he hadn’t handed over to the Australian troops in charge of disarming the rebels. Reinado escaped during a mass breakout from a Dili jail last August.

After the Australian-led operation started, many conflicts occurred simultaneously in different parts of Dili, with roads being barricaded and cut off by burning tires, rocks and trees. Many houses and vehicles were also burned, as violence between rival groups started on the streets.

The Vila Verde neighborhood, right in the center of Dili, was one of the most affected, with facilities of the Education Ministry being engulfed by a fire until the morning.

Benjamin Marty, finance manager for the Norwegian Council for Refugees in East Timor, has his house and office in Vila Verde, in the same street that connects the Portuguese Corporation Neighborhood to the United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) headquarters.

“I didn’t get too worried when a saw a group of people starting to hit the gate, but I called my boss, that said me to stay calm.” Bryn Bithell-Marty said.

“Ten minutes later, I see the GNR arrive and starting to fire rubber bullets to the right and to the left” of the street, Marty remembered.

“They called and asked me to open the gate, but initially I didn’t understood what they wanted, because I don’t speak Portuguese. Just in some minutes, I was inside a armored vehicle, and we got out of there at the same speed that they had arrived, deviating from the barricades with a lot of skill”, Marty added.

Benjamin Marty said he was “surprised with the professionalism” with which the Portuguese Republican National Guard (GNR) acted, but he was discontented with members of the United Nations Police (UNPol).

“There’s UNPol near my house, the patrol cars were always stopped and the police agents didn’t do anything», Marty said, adding that the UNPol agents also didn’t react “hours early when some people started to burn tires and hitting metal to call other people to the street”.

The clashes in Taibessi, Pité neighbourhood, and at the entrance of the UNMIT headquarters were the most severe, involving firearms in some locations.

In Banana Road, one of the main roads that crosses the city, a group of teenagers guarded a poster of Alfredo Reinado.

“We are the defenders of Major Alfredo, hero of the justice. We are ready to die to defend him”, said one of them.

In the streets of Taibessi since some days ago that the illumination posts and some trees have posters and banners of Alfredo Reinado.

As a response to the successive attacks by a group on the Pité neighborhood, 15 Portuguese Public Security Police (PSP) officers, organized themselves without orders from the UNPol, and for three hours the 15 officers faced the attacks.

Later back at the GNR headquarters, Benjamin Marty, found himself even more surprised. “Do you know how the Asterix and Obelix stories end?” he said. On the GNR headquarters there wasn’t a party with roasted boars, like in the Gaul village, “but there was a cow in the skewer”, he added.

All of the three GNR operational platoons then left their monthly festivity to the streets of Dili, for a operation that lasted seven hours.

Sunday, December 4, 2005

The US commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq said that he had no knowledge of the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq document released by the US President. This, along with speculation that the document was chiefly authored by a public opinion analyst recruited by the White House have led to some critics claiming that the drafted ‘strategy’ is targeting US public opinion, not the Iraqi insurgency.

The military, political and economic strategy for Iraq, outlined last week by President Bush in a speech at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, was based by a 35-page document titled the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. A metadata tag on the document posted on the White House website identified its author as a computer user ‘feaver_p’. It is believed to refer to Dr. Peter D. Feaver, a special advisor to the National Security Council staff.

A political scientist at Duke University, Dr. Feaver analyzed public opinion polls about the Iraq war and attitudes towards war casualties. Dr. Feaver found that US public opinion will support military engagement abroad, despite growing casualties, provided that the public believed that the war was being fought for a worthy cause and that victory was achievable.

Dr. Feaver was one of the people who helped “conceive and draft” the document, according to a White House staffer, who said that Meghan L. O’Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and her staff played a larger role. White House officials confirmed to the New York Times that the document’s “creation and presentation strongly reflected the public opinion research”.

The document “reflects the broad interagency effort under way in Iraq” according to an NSC spokesman Frederick Jones and had received major contributions from the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury and Homeland Security, as well as the director of National Intelligence.

On Friday, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, whose Multinational Security Transition Command is responsible for building Iraq’s security forces, told reporters that he had seen the strategy document for the first time when it was released to the public. The White House had said that not all senior officers in Iraq had necessarily seen the document and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that he had read and critiqued the document on several occasions.

Earlier, replying to questions about the President’s strategy, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said that the document was an “inter-agency document” and an “unclassified version” of the administrations “strategy for victory in Iraq” published for the public to view.

Christopher F. Gelpi, of Duke University, who co-authored Dr. Feaver’s work titled Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq, stated, “The Pentagon doesn’t need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion.” In their work together, Gelpi, Feaver and Reifler found that the most important factor which determines the US public’s tolerance for US military deaths in a war is the public’s beliefs about the likelihood of success, and a secondary, but still important, factor, was found to be the public’s belief in the rightness of a war.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Indonesian authorities said earlier today that they have uncovered a plot by rebels to assassinate several senior government officials, among them president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

National police chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri commented on the matter earlier today, saying that several rebels intended to conduct the attack and declare an Islamic state during the August 17 independence day ceremony. “They were confident that all state officials and dignitaries would be there. Killing all the state officials would have accelerated the transition from a democracy to a state controlled by Islamic Shariah law,” he said.

Danuri added that the attacks also included a plan to attack foreigners and hotels in the capital Jakarta — somewhat similar to the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 174 after rebels attacked tourist spots like hotels and a train station.

“Their plan was also to launch attacks in Jakarta against foreigners — especially Americans — and attack and control hotels within certain communities, imitating what happened in Mumbai,” the police chief said. “If we had not detected them and their military training had been successful, then they would have assassinated foreigners.”

The plot was revealed in part due to several anti-terror raids near the capital, which saw twenty people arrested. Many of those now in custody were reportedly trained at a camp in Aceh, and operated by a branch of the Jemaah Islamiyah group called al-Qaeda in Aceh.

This is reportedly the second alleged plot to assassinate the Indonesian president in a year; last August, security forces said they had evidence suggesting rebels would blow up a car by Yudhonoyo’s motorcade. The last large rebel attack was in last July, when suicide bombers targeted hotels in the capital.