VoS: Voice of the Shuttle
tags: reference, humanities, research, books, literature
The Secret to Landing Clients Nearly 100% of the Time - FreelanceSwitch - The Freelance Blog
tags: readastimeallows, clients, freelance, advertising, imported
Could This Be Your All-in-One Social Network? - ReadWriteWeb
Could This Be Your All-in-One Social Network?
Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / January 13, 2009 1:01 PM / 20 Comments
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Pic CC by Flickr user BohPhotoLong time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.
So far it's just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.
tags: readwriteweb, social networks
Luminotes: personal wiki notebook
tags: wiki, notebook, productivity, free, software
Musicovery : interactive webRadio
tags: music, radio, web2.0, webradio, audio
40 Unusual Websites you should Bookmark | MakeUseOf.com - Annotated
tags: websites, useful, cool, web, tools
Najem Wali: A journey into the heart of the enemy
A journey into the heart of the enemy
Exiled Iraqi writer Najem Wali travelled to Israel to uncover some uncomfortable truths about the Arab leaders
tags: israel, iraq, essay, politics, travel essay
Dubravka Ugresic: Radovan Karadzic and his grandchildren
Radovan Karadzic and his grandchildren\nKaradzic has been caught, but the war is not over yet for the heirs of Yugoslavia's war criminals.
tags: war crimes, croatia, bosnia, serbian, karadzic, journalism
Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Assheuer: Life after bankruptcy
Life after bankruptcy
The age of privatisation is over. Politics not the market is responsible for promoting the common good. Philosopher Jürgen Habermas talks to Thomas Assheuer about the necessity of an international world order.
Die Zeit: Herr Habermas, the international financial system has collapsed and a global economic crisis is looming. What do you find most worrying about this?
Jürgen Habermas: What worries me most is the scandalous social injustice that the most vulnerable social groups will have to bear the brunt of the socialised costs for the market failure. The mass of those who, in any case, are not among the winners of globalisation now have to pick up the tab for the impacts of a predictable dysfunction of the financial system on the real economy. Unlike the shareholders, they will not pay in money values but in the hard currency of their daily existence. Viewed in global terms, this avenging fate is also afflicting the economically weakest countries. That's the political scandal. Yet pointing the finger at scapegoats strikes me as hypocritical. The speculators, too, were acting consistently within the established legal framework according to the socially recognised logic of profit maximisation. Politics turns itself into a laughing stock when it resorts to moralising instead of relying upon the enforceable law of the democratic legislator. Politics, and not capitalism, is responsible for promoting the common good.
tags: economics, finance, international finance, philosophy
It's time Kundera talked
It's time Kundera talked
A dementi is not enough. Milan Kundera should come out with his version of the story, because Iva Militka and Miroslav Dvoracek deserve the truth.
tags: authors, scandal, kundera, czech republic
The eighty-year old Miroslav Dvoracek will probably die without knowing who betrayed him to the Czech police back in 1950, condemning him to 14 years hard labour in a uranium mine. The 79-year old Iva Militka who, in the same year told her then boyfriend and later husband, Miroslav Dlask, about Dvoracek's visit to her student hall of residence, will probably never know whether it was her husband who subsequently went to the police with this information, or his friend Milan Kundera, or indeed both. She will only know that her school friend Miroslav Dvoracek spent the rest of his life believing that she had betrayed him. This is not just about Kundera, this is about Iva Militka and Miroslav Dvoracek.
The only person who might be able to explain what happened is Milan Kundera. And it's high time he did so. He rebuffed Adam Hradilek's article, describing it as "pure lies", a mere dementi. But he has not said a word about the events at the time or about Miroslav Dlask. And Havel, Dalos, Schneider, Reza and Rusdie et al. have not asked him to. They are not interested in who denounced Dvoracek. In their defence of Kundera, Dvoracek and Militka play at most a marginal role.
Instead they are telling historians to treat the whole affair with kid gloves and to review it in the light of its time. But how we should assess Kundera's actions in 1950, whether he deserves criticism or whether his work needs re-reading, is secondary. First we have to know whether on 14 March 1950, Milan Kundera informed the police about Dvoracek's visit to Militka, or not.
If Gaza falls . . .
tags: lrb, gaza, israel, war, politics, palestine
If Gaza falls . . .
Sara Roy
Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption - The New York Review of Books
tags: doctors, pharmaceuticals, drugs, prescription drugs
Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption
Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial
by Alison Bass
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 260 pp., $24.95
Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
by Melody Petersen
Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $26.00
Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
by Christopher Lane
Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50; $18.00 (paper)
Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.
Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.
Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman's own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, "so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive."[1]
Hushed Into Silence : outlookindia.com
Hushed Into Silence
Rushdie's critics lost the battle - The Satanic Verses continues to be published. But they won the war. The argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case - that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures - is now widely accepted. .........
Kenan Malik
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The Satanic Verses was, Salman Rushdie said in an interview before publication, a novel about 'migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death'. It was also a satire on Islam, 'a serious attempt', in his words, 'to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person'. For some that was unacceptable, turning the novel into 'an inferior piece of hate literature' as the British Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar put it.
Within a month The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie's native India, after protests from Islamic radicals. By the end of the year, protestors had burnt a copy of the novel on the streets of Bolton, in northern England. And then on 14 February 1989 came the event that transformed the Rushdie affair - the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued his fatwa. 'I inform all zealous Muslims of the world', proclaimed Iran's spiritual leader, 'that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses - which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet and the Qur'an - and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death.'
Thanks to the fatwa, the Rushdie affair became the most important free speech controversy of modern times. It also became a watershed in our attitudes to freedom of expression. Rushdie's critics lost the battle - The Satanic Verses continues to be published. But they won the war. The argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case - that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures - is now widely accepted.
tags: rushdie, india, politics, literature
9 Is Not 11 : outlookindia.com
tags: no_tag
Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.
Why is India inviting the United States to meddle clumsily in our complicated affairs? A superpower never has allies, only agents.
9 Is Not 11 : outlookindia.com
ESSAY: TERROR IN MUMBAI
9 Is Not 11
(And November isn't September) .........
Arundhati Roy
tags: mumbai, arundhati roy, essay, india, politics, political theory
We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11". And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.
They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining
and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre. We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically, one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said 'Hungry, kya?' (Hungry eh?). It then, with the best of intentions I'm sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn't that war. That one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Lalgarh in West Bengal; in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa; and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities. That war isn't on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.
There is a fierce, unforgiving fault line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially 'Islamist' terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.
. The rest of my
