cce blog

schools 4 saudis

I heard on the radio today that George Washington University is creating a special distance learning program for kids from the Saudi royal family (Washington Post). The Saudi kids get an "American education": maybe a few professors will fly out, lots of lectures on the web, and then GWU diplomas after four years. GWU gets lots o' cash, and insist nothing's wrong with this deal, they've simply "responded creatively to an opportunity."

Compare this with the opportunity Cornell responded creatively to in 2001, with the Weill Medical College in Qatar, the first American med school in the Persian Gulf. They give out regular Cornell med degrees (no "Qatar" on the diploma) and swear their admissions & academic standards are every bit as rigorous as they are in New York. Cornell first announced this idea while I was still at Cornell, and it seemed kind of odd to me: why Qatar? What an odd tiny little country. Why not Liechtenstein or Andorra or maybe San Marino? And then I read on in the NYTimes article to find that Qatar was paying for the whole thing, including $750 mil in operating costs for the first 11 years, so that made a bit more sense.

So, uhm, I'd like to send a cheer of "Go Big Red!" to Doha, and "Go GW Colonials!" to Riyadh.

dream apt

michael, bryan & i found the best place ever. it's a nice house-like apartment building, 3 floors. it's set back from the street with its own gate and you have to walk up to get to the house. we'd get the whole second floor. two rooms on the back of the house look over a lawn/garden with birds etc. it's basically amazing, big, yet still in manhattan (inwood). we submitted an application, so cross your fingers.

woop woop

yay, finally some mainstream press on computer voting.

peta is completely nuts.

i want to go to grad school, sure, but why am i suddenly fantasizing about getting a PhD in ethnomusicology at columbia? or to study with macarthur-winner George Lewis at ucsd?

quickie bloggy updatey time

okay okay sorry. i'm a bad blogger. what did i do that was interesting.

ooh, went to a yankees game w/ dave & raza on saturday, that was pretty cool. it was "old-timer's day" so i got to see reggie jackson, dave winfield, don mattingly, yogi berra, and tons of other yankees lumber onto the field, then the healthier ones played 3 innings against each other. that was neat. then the REAL yankees beat the cleveland indians, and there were some home runs which were exciting, and i had two and a half hot dogs.

dim sum on sunday. justin suggested a place that was WAAY deep in chinatown, much deeper and more chinese than i ever knew existed in manhattan. 88 east broadway, in a mall set underneath the manhattan bridge, where the only white guy in the place was my friend dan. i cannot describe how much more chinesey that area is than the canal st area -- just like a building in hong kong, people selling roots & traditional medicines downstairs, tiny hair salons, duck in the windows, wow! i used to say that i'd miss hong kong, but after going down there i got my teeming-masses-of-chinese fix.

since then, eh, not much exciting going on except for the tremendous disillusionment bryan, michael and myself are feeling after hearing back from an apartment we were looking at (4BR, $1700/mo in inwood!). the guy said that another tenant in the same building wanted to upgrade to a bigger place and so the tenant has dibs on the place now. so we have to start hunting again, argh. i had such plans for that spare bedroom ...

late night out

just back from an evening at famed old irish pub mcsorley's, where the bartender actually had an irish accent and kept bringing us round after round of just two varieties of beer: "light" and "dark." when i showed up everyone was already drinking a round, so i asked for a beer, and he said (in a thick irish brogue) "you want another round?" and i said "no ... just one for me," which he responded with "well you're gonna have to wait for the next round, this isn't a coffee shop y'know." ouch! it was ian's birthday, so lots of new jersey kids, including a slightly tipsy raza. then an exciting late-night hot dog at gray's papaya.

it was late and i knew the express stopped running, so i caught a cab home. the ugandan taxi driver turned out to be one of the best conversations i've had in a long time, and we talked the whole long ride about african politics, the war in uganda (he's from the east, war is north), bush & his trip to africa, nelson mandela, desmond tutu & the truth and justice comission, tiger woods, other taxi drivers & their drug habits, the world bank & the IMF, undercover cops, apartheid, mixed-race issues, the difference between west and east africans (i'm told west africans are a lot more aggressive and shady), how white people run the world, the war in uganda, zimbabwe, kofi annan and his swedish wife, the rockefeller drug laws, the argentinian economy, and a whole bunch of other topics. it was perfect new yorkness. whoo

inwood vs. park slope

that's the question. jeff keeps telling me how great park slope is, while bryan, michael and i gawk at how high rents would be. so i finally read the nytimes' inwood profile, which has quotes from potential park slope buyers who decided to move to inwood instead. the way they talk about it makes me want to get a mortgage, buy a nice apartment, and wait to sell it in a few years. that's crazy though.

but the article mentions a lot of nice inwood community stuff and how there are actually yoga classes, river kayaking and places where i can practice loud music, all three of which i have to look into. so, cool. plus, i think living next to hong kong harbor & spending time on beaches has given me a compulsion to live near water, which inwood hill park (and this potential kayaking!) satisfies. so, hmm.

mah new phone!

i got a new phone. it arrived three days ago, but fedex gave it to an old lady next door instead, and i kept knocking on her door for two days until she gave it to me yesterday, mumbling that she didn't recognize me but that she trusted me anyway.

the phone is little and glows bright blue. it is a kyocera 2325 and i don't know what that means except that i can't compose my own ring tones, one of my favorite train-ride creative outlets. sophie's HK phone can attest to this, as it has my ring-tone versions of "rhapsody in blue" (with faux-simultaneous bass and melody lines), "freedom jazz dance" (sounds very cool as a ring tone) and the opening phrase of "scrapple from the apple."

it does have text messaging though, but people don't use text messaging in the US so much. and web browsing though i haven't been able to get it to work. and uhm tetris. so. phone-a-rific.

New from the DoD and Accenture: "eDemocracy"

I was real concerned about computerized voting machines a few months ago, and now I've got a new voting method to whine about: the Department of Defense's Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), a Windows-based Internet voting service which will be used in the upcoming presidential election.

I first heard about it in last month's American Consulate Hong Kong email newsletter:

Voting Information News

Voting goes "Internet" for Uniformed Services personnel and overseas citizens. Congress has mandated the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) project be conducted to gather data and make recommendations regarding the use of the Internet for registration and voting by Uniformed Services personnel and overseas citizens. SERVE is an alternative to the by-mail process. The SERVE system will be available on January 1, 2004, for Uniformed Services personnel and overseas citizens to submit voter registration applications and absentee ballot requests for the 2004 primaries in the participating States and for the November 2 Presidential election. The participating States are Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, and Washington.

Which led me SERVE's official site at serveusa.gov, which promises:

"In 2004, you can take part in an exciting new initiative called SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment), which will let eligible U.S. citizens vote from any Windows-based computer with Internet access, anywhere in the world!"

"Voters can register and vote from anywhere in the world using any Windows-based PC that has either Internet Explorer 5.x and above or Netscape 6.x and above browser software. This can be from home, work, an Internet cafe, or wherever they are comfortable voting. Citizens will receive a SERVE digital certificate as their identification and authentication credential."

Interesting, but what's this about the Department of Defense? They run the Federal Voting Assistance Program, geared at helping military personnel and expats vote. But if this Windows-based solution (apparently combining Versign certificates, public-key cryptography, DoD webservers, and local county election officials) is judged successful in 2004, more states could sign on, and SERVE could perhaps be used domestically some day...?

Or at least that's what Accenture seems to be betting on, in creating its new "eDemocracy Services" business unit (and acquiring "election.com"):

"To serve DoD clients and others in the government, Accenture launched a new business called eDemocracy Services that is focused on delivering services to election agencies around the world.

... 'We created our elections practice in response to the market need that emerged following the 2000 elections, and we continue to see tremendous global business opportunities in the election industry,' said Steven J. Rohleder, group chief executive of Accenture's Government operating group."

What a great, global business opportunity for Accenture! Finally private companies are helping the US to "export democracy." I find the idea of the DoD administering elections a bit creepy, and don't know what to think about them choosing Arthur Andersen's surviving sibling to make online voting a reality. But Accenture does has experience: it developed Florida's new central voter registration database for 2002. And sure, it's natural for companies to pony up to meet the demand from election officials for new technology (but scary nonetheless).

Sadly, I'm not living in Hong Kong anymore (nor is my state participating) so I won't get to try out SERVE and vote for the president from my favorite Pacific Coffee internet kiosk. David Dill of VerifiedVoting told me that some friends did a security review at recent meeting, but no write-up yet. Hopefully other lucky expats will be able to enjoy Internet voting, courtesy of our military...

Related links:
http://www.serveusa.gov/
http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2231671
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003/0630/web-serve-07-03-03.asp
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0603/062003td2.htm
http://www.fvap.gov/
http://www.election.com/

watch this

watch this. found it on demandmedia.net, censored cartoon from that SNL "TV funhouse" show, worth a watch.

realism vs idealism

I know that the state of the world today has left many people very jaded & cynical about political activism, leaving only the most fervent hippies still clinging to idealist dreams that "another world is possible." I've always been too much of a pessimist, I suppose, to really believe that the "revolution's a'coming", and thus have been floundering for a position that combines this pessimistic streak with an objective, concerned global view and a strong sense of ethics.

To this end, on my commute you can find me reading "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," Greg Palast's collection of corporate scandal exposés (basically, "free trade & capitalism are evil") or The Economist's "Capitalism and Democracy" issue last week (basically, "free trade & capitalism are wonderful, except for cronyism, which is a problem, but free trade is still the best thing since sliced bread").

This month's Mother Jones features two articles helping to refine this view, that of the "realist activist." They're both definitely worth a read. The second one, the cover article, is by the author of "A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis" which has been on my "to-read" list for a year now.

So check'em out: Paved With Good Intentions (use subscriber code MJ3203) and Goodbye, New World Order (free). What do you think?

happy commie HK day!

Today's the dubious holiday celebrating hong kong's not-so-joyous return to Evil Communist China. Sophie reported big (500,000!) protests, with some people even burning the communist flag, and i listened to pro-Democracy guy Martin Lee on BBC news talking all about it on my way to work this morning.

Of course, if Britain had simply chosen to hand Hong Kong back to the true, legitimate rulers of China -- that is, the Republic of China (temporarily based in Taiwan) -- there'd be no griping about press or political freedoms, no need for "one country, two systems." Just keep the capitalism, political freedoms and traditional writing system, rename a couple of streets after Sun Yat-Sen and Chiang Kai-Shek, and that's it! Unfortunately, I wasn't consulted on the matter when Thatcher signed the Joint Declaration on Colluding with Funny Little Men in Mao Jackets in 1984, so it never came about. But perhaps it's for the best: imagine how much worse SARS would have been in Hong Kong if Beijing denied them access to the WHO, as they did to Taiwan. I wish I were in Hong Kong right now: I'd wave a ROC flag in front of some Red Army soldiers...