Larry Page and Sergey Brin:

Mark Zuckerberg:

Facebook allowed the youtube videos and blog post from various opposition parties to be spread from friend to friend, without Facebook videos wouldn’t have gone ‘viral’. Together Facebook and Google were instrumental in allowing the opposition a platform to preach their good news in 2008–in 2013 they might just allow them to form a new government. 

Got a note from Malaysiakini today, for all you stingy-porkers out there who read all the malaysiakini news reposted by various parties, but never really paid for the subscription–here’s some good news.

Malaysiakini will go free from 17th April onwards, to pave the way for MORE adverts (like we didn’t have enough) but also to allow Malaysiakini to respond to attacks more effectively. Having to cater to two customer models makes responding to DDOS attacks a bit harder–though I can’t imagine why.

It’s however good news all-around. Malaysiakini will extend the subscription if you were already paying, and if you never were a customer, you now have access to all the news from Malaysia no.1 Online News Portal.

Now obviously, I’m expecting the spam rate to increase exponentially as we approach GE13, and to me that’s really bad news. In fact over the last month alone, I’ve received 5 text messages from the Barisan Nasional Yakini BN campaign–they know my FULL name, my contact number and even my place to vote. They know more about me than I’ve ever given out to ANYONE from any survey, and I consider this an invasion of my privacy.

Crowdsourcing week is a great idea that brings a whole bunch of great speakers including Jennifer Gustetic, an executive at the “Challenges and Prizes” program in NASA, Stephanie Grosser from USAID and Sean Moffit from Wikibrands. It’s also one of the first events on crowdsourcing that I know off occurring in the Asia Pacific region and if you’re in the neighbourhood I can almost guarantee it’ll be worth your time attending.

A Social Media Analytics firm recently reported that nearly 50% of Justin Bieber followers on Twitter–were fake. This meant that nearly 18 million followers on Justins twitter account either belonged to no ‘real’ person or belonged to a spam account–and that dear readers is a lot of spam!

That’s like a newspaper saying its circulation was 100,000 a day, but it was only being read by 50,000 people.

Now of course, even if the first 18 million twitter followers were nothing more than spam bots, there’s still another 18 million ‘real’ followers that Justin has–and not many people have even 1 million twitter followers, let alone 18 million, so Justin still has twitter-cred.

However, that does beg the question–how many followers of our Prime Ministers twitter account–were real? For the uninitiated, the Prime Minister tweets at @NajibRazak and has nearly 1.4 Million followers, about 10 times less than Justin Bieber–but nearly 7 times more than his political rival Anwar Ibrahim (who has ‘just’ over 250 thousand followers).

So were these followers real?

I’m not just talking about just Google failing here, I’m talking about the ENTIRE INTERNET failing!

Crowdfunding is exploding, and kickstarter is exploding with it.

In 2012 alone, Kickstarter successfully helped start 18,109 projects, from pledges of nearly 300 million. That’s a lot of cash from just random strangers hoping to help someone else realize their dreams, or to help the public in general.

Noteworthy projects include an open-source geiger counter to detect radiation levels in Japan, a kickstarter initiative that released recordings of Classical music to the public domain and funding a Bus Stop in Georgia.

Previously I wrote about a great report from MASTIC that surveyed the perception of the Malaysian public regarding Science and Technology. What I failed to mention or rather what I ‘chose’ not to mention at the time was a specific portion of the report that dealt with the Theory of Evolution, and the reason why I didn’t want to address it was to not distract from the original intention of that post.

This however, is a different post, one with a different intention that aims to ‘inspire’ some question regarding the Malaysian public attitude towards the Theory of Evolution and towards science in general.

What MASTIC says about Evolution

1. Human Beings as we know today developed from earlier species  of Animals (True or False)

2. The Universe began with a big explosion (True of False)

For both these questions, MASTIC believed that the answer was False! This is of course inconsistent with what the European and the American survey that deemed the right answer to be TRUE! More importantly– this answer is inconsistent with the scientific evidence at large.

When government officials begin to inject their personal beliefs into the scientific establishment without any regard for the evidence to the contrary– then we begin to see a decline in science, that’s when science itself comes under attack. Science is above all interested in the pursuit of truth, and that pursuit has led it to the theory of evolution that establishes a framework to understand the diversity of species in the known world–both past and present–and connect the past to the present via Darwinian natural selection. Evolution maybe a theory, but it definitely isn’t theoretical–and the scientific community has long accepted Evolution as ‘THE’ definitive theory that explains the diversity of species that exist today (and yesterday), while its supposed ‘competition’ receives no attention at all–mostly because the supposed competition of the theory of evolution are without basis and are not supported by the evidence.

The fact that MASTIC think that they can change the answers to something so fundamentally agreed upon by scientist the world over is disturbing–nearly all of biology involves a solid understanding of Evolution, and yet here is MASTIC denying a scientifically accepted FACT!

The Star today reported on ‘4D fortune teller’ who was arrested for in connection with a cheating case worth over RM1 Million.

Of course most of think that the guy got what was coming to him, however the question becomes how do we say a ‘4D Fortune Teller’ was cheating–to the point where we can charge him in court (under section 420A of the Penal code). The report goes on to state that:

DCP Mohd Shukri said the man would distribute pamphlets in various areas, highlighting his supposed ability to predict lottery numbers.

“When he gets a call from someone interested in his service, he would tell the person to deposit money into his bank account to perform special’ prayers to get the lottery number.”

“He would also scare the victims by telling them they would suffer bad luck if they did not deposit the money,” he said.

My only question is, why was this one particular person singled out?

Why not go after the entire Feng Shui industry in Malaysia–after all don’t they promise the same thing? Isn’t Lilian Too doing nothing more than promising her customers better luck? Isn’t this guy doing the same thing–promising his customers better luck (albeit in more concrete terms)

We haven’t even begun to talk about how Financial institutions make predictions of the stock markets by placing ‘buy’, ‘sell’ or ‘hold’ calls on various counters–does anybody do a thorough analysis on these calls to make sure they’re nothing more than just random guesses? In fact for the most part, many studies have shown that Index funds (that simply buy all the stocks in a given index at a weighted average) do better than actively managed funds (where a fund manager actively selects counters from a specific index). 

The study makes for a good read–but the main point I was interested though is this one question on how the Public Viewed science, in which 3 possible answers were given, either they thought Science did more good than harm, Science did more harm than good or that Science was neutral. In 1998, nearly half the population viewed science as causing more good than harm, but in 2008 that number increases to nearly 3 quarters. So we see a stark rise of about 25% of people going from being on the fence about science to believing it causes more good than harm.

However, there were about 8.7% of the population who believed science caused more harm than good, these are those who think that science has a negative effect on society, and what’s interesting is that the number of people in this country has barely changed in the last 10 years, remaining more or less constant around the 6-8% range.