Category Archives: Analysis

Wikipedia at 15: In decline but condition isn’t terminal – so what may the future hold?

By Aleksi Aaltonen, University of Warwick

As Wikipedia reaches its 15th birthday, our perception of the free online encyclopedia feels quite different to when it launched. The controversy and excitement that surrounded the service in the early days has passed. This isn’t surprising. An encyclopedia is, after all, supposed to be merely a neutral collection of generally relevant knowledge.

Behind this sense of a coming of age are two opposing narratives – an incredible achievement, but also some signs of decline. First the positives: more than five million articles have been produced by more than 27m registered users in the English version alone.

The product that founder Jimmy Wales and his team have created is a story of explosive growth without the traditional foundations of organisations, such as managerial authority, contracts or revenue (donations aside). Wikipedia is said to be the seventh most visited website in the world.

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Happy birthday Wikipedia!

As Wikipedia turns 15 years old, it turns out that there is no richer source of information about Wikipedia than Wikipedia itself.

The circularity of being able to read about Wikipedia on Wikipedia, signals the intricate depth of this wonderful enterprise.

So, here’s a sampling of pages that provide doorways into the labyrinth (follow the links to read the complete articles):

Wikipedia’s description of itself: Wikipedia is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet’s largest and most popular general reference work.

History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia notability: On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article.

List of Wikipedias: This is a list of the different language editions of Wikipedia; as of January 2016 there are 291 Wikipedias of which 280 are active.

Wikipedia’s Top 5000 pages: This lists pages accessed during the last week (updated once a week).

Wikipedia’s contents overview: This is a portal that allows readers to explore content through a directory system.

Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia

Gender bias on Wikipedia

What Wikipedia is not

Wikimedia Endowment: “This Endowment will serve as a perpetual source of support for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. It will empower people around the world to create and contribute free knowledge, and share that knowledge with every single human being.

“With your support, we are only getting started. Help us ensure that Wikipedia lives forever!”

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The Middle East is now suffering from neoconservative sins of commission and realist sins of omission

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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes:  By now it is clear that US policy in Iraq and Syria is a disaster. In neither country has the situation been improved by the US military presence. In Iraq it empowers the same sectarian militias that forced alienated Sunnis into the arms of ISIS. In Syria it ignores, even accommodates, the regime whose brutality spawned the jihadi menace in the first place. In both its actions address symptoms rather than causes and alienate people without providing any commensurate security gains.

But would the situation improve if the United States were to withdraw? Ask the Yazidis of Iraq, whose tragedy would have been much larger had it not been for the timely US intervention; ask the Kurds of Syria, who would have been routed in Kobani had it not been for the sustained airstrikes that helped them repel an ISIS offensive. The Sunnis of Iraq might well ask who would protect them from the revanchist fury of the newly empowered sectarian militias, absent a US presence.

The issue then is not so much the fact of US military involvement as the nature of this involvement.

The United States bears responsibility for much of the current turmoil in the Levant. Had it not been for George W. Bush’s war and the fracturing of the Iraqi society, the region wouldn’t have turned into an incubator for jihadism. Had it not been for Barack Obama’s betrayal of the Syrian revolution — by making lofty promises and offering meager support; by following brave words with conspicuous inaction; and by demanding that Syrians submit their political aspirations to US security concerns — a quarter-million people would not have lost their lives, millions would not have been displaced, and thousands would not have drowned. The region suffers today from neoconservative sins of commission and realist sins of omission.

The United States could exit the Middle East and, in Sarah Palin’s immortal words, “let Allah sort it out.” But it would have condemned the region to perpetual war. Isolationism in the face of serious geopolitical challenges is not only an abdication of responsibility, but also a recipe for disaster. [Continue reading…]

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In Syrian town cut off from the world, glimpses of deprivation

The New York Times reports: Nisrine kept teaching school for months as the siege tightened around the Syrian town of Madaya, but had to give up a few weeks ago when her students got too weak to walk to class. A local medic has been surviving on the rehydration salts he gives patients, while a business school graduate picks grass to make soup for his 70-year-old father, consulting shepherds about which ones their long-since-slaughtered flocks liked best.

A dozen women waited anxiously in their doorways one recent evening as an antigovernment activist named Firas trudged slowly up their street handing out small batches of smuggled bulgur wheat.

Firas, though, was in shock. He had taken a meal to the house of Suleiman Fares, 63 and bone-thin, in hopes of saving his life, only to find him already dead. Frustrated, Firas declared that far to the north, rebels allied with those in Madaya ought to resume shelling two pro-government towns — towns full of civilians who are also suffering, tit for tat, a siege from the other side.

“Better to die fighting,” he said that night in one of a series of recent telephone interviews, “than to starve.”

The people of Madaya and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set of dynamics. There is the black market across blockade lines, for instance, and the quiet or unexpected ways this type of warfare can kill: heart attacks, stillbirths, a step on a land mine while foraging for food.

And there is the relentless physical and psychological contraction of their communities, only an hour’s drive from Damascus, Syria, and two from Beirut yet suddenly sealed off from the outside world. [Continue reading…]

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Middle East reality: An inconvenient truth for Obama

Joyce Karam writes: Characterizing events from Yemen to Syria to Libya as a “transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia” is not only a reality distortion by U.S. President Barack Obama, but also a dangerous fantasy that resigns American diplomacy to dismissiveness in the Middle East.

Shrugging off the Middle East’s largest upheaval in decades as a theological rift, and shying away from major diplomatic initiatives, is a slap in the face for U.S. role and stature, restricted today to responding and containing conflicts.

Blaming the chaos of the Middle East on centuries’ old battles is a perfect cop-out strategy for Obama, avoiding his legacy from being tarnished by the fragmentation of four states, two of which were bombed by the United States (Iraq and Libya).

Except, religious scriptures from a different era are not driving the current regional rivalry, or spurring ISIS. It’s oppression, civil wars, ISIS territorial gains, and unchecked regional bickering that is fueling the hellfire.

Obama’s narrative, however, is largely aimed at absolving his administration of any wrong doing in the Middle East, and attributing current infernos to a “transformation” across a whole generation that Washington apparently has little influence over. This claim self destructs in every conflict zone in the Middle East, three of them started on Obama’s watch four years ago. [Continue reading…]

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Obama ridiculed for saying conflicts in the Middle East ‘date back millennia’

The Washington Post reports: In his seventh and final State of the Union address, President Obama played up the state of the economy, played down the threat of the Islamic State, and introduced a new effort to beat cancer. He also found time for several not-so-subtle swipes at the Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

But for those versed in international relations, there was one line in particular that jumped out from his hour-long speech.

“The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia,” Obama said.

Thousands of years? Many of the conflicts in the Middle East don’t even date back a decade.

The Twitterati spotted the gaffe, and pounced. Obama was accused of peddling convenient falsehoods while others said he was espousing concepts unworthy of an undergraduate university student. Many said that Obama was not only excusing the conflicts, but in effect was making them seem normal and intractable. [Continue reading…]

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Q&A: Why did terror hit Jakarta’s streets – and what happens next?

By Noor Huda Ismail, Monash University

Explosions and gunfire on Thursday left seven people dead in Jakarta. The blasts and gunfight between Indonesian police and the suspected attackers took place near the busy Sarinah shopping mall in central Jakarta. Indonesian President Joko Widodo spoke of “acts of terror”.

Five suspected attackers are reportedly among those killed. What affiliation if any they had to a terrorist group is currently unknown.

Since 2000, Islamic hardliners in Indonesia have carried out several high-profile bombing attacks. Notably, the Bali bombings in 2002 killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

The Conversation spoke to Noor Huda Ismail, a counter-terrorism analyst from Monash University, on the landscape of Indonesia’s terror groups and the threat the country faces.

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Here’s how genetics helped crack the history of human migration

By George Busby, University of Oxford

Over the past 25 years, scientists have supported the view that modern humans left Africa around 50,000 years ago, spreading to different parts of the world by replacing resident human species like the Neanderthals. However, rapid advances in genetic sequencing have opened up a whole new window into the past, suggesting that human history is much more complicated.

In fact, genetic studies in the last few years have revealed that since our African exodus, humans have moved and mixed a lot more than previously thought – particularly over the last 10,000 years.

The technology

Our ability to sequence DNA has increased dramatically since the human genome was first sequenced 15 years ago. In its most basic form, genetic analysis involves comparing DNA from different sets of people, whether between people with or without a particular type of cancer, or individuals from different regions of the world.

The human genome is 3 billion letters long, but as people differ at just one letter in every thousand, on average, we don’t have to look at them all. Instead, we can compare people where we know there are these differences, known as genetic markers. Millions of these markers have been discovered and, together with a genetic sequencing technology that allows us to cheaply look at these markers in lots of people, there has been an explosion in the data available to geneticists.

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Pathogens found in Otzi’s stomach reveal unexpected insights into the coexistence of humans and bacterium

The European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC) reports: Scientists are continually unearthing new facts about Homo sapiens from the mummified remains of Ötzi, the Copper Age man, who was discovered in a glacier in 1991. Five years ago, after Ötzi’s genome was completely deciphered, it seemed that the wellspring of spectacular discoveries about the past would soon dry up. An international team of scientists working with paleopathologist Albert Zink and microbiologist Frank Maixner from the European Academy (EURAC) in Bozen/Bolzano have now succeeded in demonstrating the presence of Helicobacter pylori in Ötzi’s stomach contents, a bacterium found in half of all humans today. The theory that humans were already infected with this stomach bacterium at the very beginning of their history could well be true. The scientists succeeded in decoding the complete genome of the bacterium.

When EURAC’s Zink and Maixner first placed samples from the Iceman’s stomach under the microscope in their ancient DNA Lab at EURAC, almost three years ago, they were initially sceptical.

“Evidence for the presence of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is found in the stomach tissue of patients today, so we thought it was extremely unlikely that we would find anything because Ötzi’s stomach mucosa is no longer there,” explains Zink. Together with colleagues from the Universities of Kiel, Vienna and Venda in South Africa as well as the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, the scientists tried to find a new way to proceed. “We were able to solve the problem once we hit upon the idea of extracting the entire DNA of the stomach contents,” reports Maixner. “After this was successfully done, we were able to tease out the individual Helicobacter sequences and reconstruct a 5,300 year old Helicobacter pylori genome.” Continue reading →

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Why Putin loves Trump

Ivan Krastev writes: “Vladimir Vladimirovich, is war coming?”

The question is asked in the first frame of “Myroporyadok” (“World Order”), a manifesto-style documentary aired in the last days of December on Russian state television. And in the following two-plus hours, President Vladimir V. Putin, aided by diplomats, policy analysts, conspiracy theorists and retired foreign statesmen, attempts to provide an answer.

Though the Russian leader resists sounding the alarm, the audience is nonetheless convinced that if nothing changes in the coming months, the Big War could be imminent. And the Kremlin isn’t doing much to dissuade them: Days after the film’s airing, its new national security strategy, which declares NATO and the United States as fundamental threats to Russia’s future, was unveiled.

“Myroporyadok” is a powerful expression of the Kremlin’s present state of mind. It views the world as a place on the edge of collapse, chaotic and dangerous, where international institutions are ineffective, held hostage to the West’s ambitions and delusions. Nuclear weapons represent the sole guarantee of a country’s sovereignty, and sovereignty is demonstrated by a willingness and capacity to resist Washington’s hegemonic agenda. [Continue reading…]

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An attack on democracy? Worries over Poland mount in Brussels and Berlin

Der Spiegel reports: No, Frans Timmermans says, unfortunately he still hasn’t received an answer. The deputy head of the European Commission has written to the government in Warsaw twice in recent weeks to express his concern over the rule of law in Poland. Instead of the requested letter, all he got was gloating on the part of new Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszcykowski. Any EU official “who came to office via political connections” is “not a legitimate partner” for a government elected by the people, Waszcykowski scoffed.

Timmermans these days is having to exercise his utmost diplomatic skill in order to avoid an escalation of tensions. When, during a visit to Amsterdam on Thursday, Timmermans was asked about the Polish foreign minister’s jibe, he could have struck back. But there is already enough tension, so he chose to take a different tack, instead praising the transformation of Eastern European countries from socialist dictatorships to free societies. But, he added, true democracies include two important elements: the protection of human rights and adherence to the rule of law.

The fact that Timmermans had to utter something that obvious says a lot about the current state of the European Union — and developments in Poland. In less than two months, the country’s new nationalist-conservative government has succeeded in disempowering the constitutional court, passing a law establishing government control over public broadcasting and installing party-aligned political appointees at the head of its intelligence services. “We want to cure our country of a few illnesses,” Foreign Minister Waszcykowski told Germany’s tabloid Bild earlier this month.

It’s a choice of words most often associated with autocrats and has alarmed the European Commission. On Wednesday, the EU executive is expected to discuss whether or not it will open the so-called “rule of law mechanism.” Should it do so, it would mark the first time a member state has been subjected to that level of scrutiny for violating the fundamental values of the European Union. [Continue reading…]

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What ISIS speaking in an English accent tells us about the group’s strategy

By Alan Greene, Durham University

A new year brings with it the feeling of hope that can only come with starting afresh. It did not take long, however, for us to be abruptly reminded of the most unpleasant aspects of 2015.

The release of a new Islamic State execution video became almost common place last year, so IS obviously feels the need to ratchet up the shock factor.

The latest video, released on January 4, did just that. It showed a young child with an English accent threatening to kill all non-believers in the UK. The video is also notable for the appearance of a so-called “new Jihadi John” following the death of Mohammed Emwazi, the previous owner of that moniker, in a US drone-strike in November.

A key suspect in the scramble to identify this new IS executioner is Siddhartha Dhar, a British Muslim convert from east London who skipped bail and travelled to Syria to join IS in 2014. Dhar was awaiting trial for being a member of the prescribed organisation Al-Muhajiroun. He is also known as Abu Rumaysah.

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Iran’s swift release of U.S. sailors hailed as a sign of warmer relations

The New York Times reports: Iran’s release of 10 United States Navy sailors on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after they were detained on the Persian Gulf, is being hailed in both countries as a sign that their relations have evolved since the signing of the nuclear accord last summer.

Secretary of State John Kerry thanked the Iranians “for their cooperation in swiftly resolving this matter” and suggested in a statement that the quick resolution of the issue was a product of the nearly daily back-and-forth that now takes place between Washington and Tehran, after three decades of hostility and stony silence.

In an appearance later Wednesday at the National Defense University in Washington, Mr. Kerry said that his focus on diplomacy with a country “we hadn’t talked to for 35 years” before the nuclear negotiations had paid off.

“These are always situations that as everybody knows, if not properly handled, can get out of control,” Mr. Kerry said. “We can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago.” [Continue reading…]

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The cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid is a warning of what’s to come

By Nilufer Tuptuk, UCL and Stephen Hailes, UCL

When more than 100,000 people in and around the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk were left without power for six hours, the Ukrainian energy ministry accused Russia of launching a cyberattack on the country’s national energy grid.

Now reports released by security researchers from the SANS Industrial Control Systems team and the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team confirm their belief that a cyberattack was responsible for the power cut, making the incident one of the first significant, publicly reported cyberattacks on civil infrastructure.

This is a rare event, of which the most famous example is the Stuxnet malware used to destroy equipment in the Iranian nuclear programme. Many consider Stuxnet so sophisticated that national governments must have been involved. But as is frequently the case, attributing responsibility for Stuxnet has proved difficult, and it’s likely that, despite circumstantial evidence, it will be the same in this case. While the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and the international press were quick to blame Russian state-backed hackers, Moscow has remained silent.

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The deep space of digital reading

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Paul La Farge writes: In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,

… the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.

To read silently is to free your mind to reflect, to remember, to question and compare. The cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf calls this freedom “the secret gift of time to think”: When the reading brain becomes able to process written symbols automatically, the thinking brain, the I, has time to go beyond those symbols, to develop itself and the culture in which it lives.

A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril. The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has called “the shallows,” a frenzied flitting from one fact to the next. In Carr’s view, the “endless, mesmerizing buzz” of the Internet imperils our very being: “One of the greatest dangers we face,” he writes, “as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is … a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.”

There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips. [Continue reading…]

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The sound of beauty in sadness

Princess Ojiaku writes: Sad music might make people feel vicarious unpleasant emotions, found a study published last year in Frontiers in Psychology. But this experience can ultimately be pleasurable because it allows a negative emotion to exist indirectly, and at a safe distance. Instead of feeling the depths of despair, people can feel nostalgia for a time when they were in a similar emotional state: a non-threatening way to remember a sadness.

People who are very empathetic are more likely to take pleasure in the emotional experience of sad music, according to another study in Frontiers of Psychology. Others enjoy sad songs because they help them return to an emotionally balanced state, according to a review in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, published in 2015. And those more open to varied experiences might enjoy the songs because the unique emotions that come up when listening to the music fulfill their need for novelty in thoughts and feelings.

In fact, the quest for variety could also explain why some people crave dissonant or experimental music full of uneven, cacophonous or downright disorienting sound. Musical genres such as noise, no wave and experimental rock have a dedicated fan and artist base in thriving underground scenes. Research suggests that people who are more open to novelty are more likely to take pleasure in the uncommon elements found in these non-traditional types of music. A 2012 study in Psychology of Music found a positive correlation between openness to experience and liking jazz, a genre that often defies a traditional pop structure. [Continue reading…]

Arve Henriksen, voice and trumpet, from his album, Chiaroscuro, with an excerpt from the film, Labyrinth of Dreams.

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