Tragedy at the mall

Death will unlikely feature among the expectations people harbor as they head to shopping malls. But death is never incapable of surprise, and the tragic loss this week of nineteen lives, most of whom toddlers, in a fire at one of Qatar’s largest shopping malls is a brutal reminder of that fact.

An investigation was promptly ordered into the causes of the fire. And arrest warrants were issued against, among others, the owner of the mall and the owner of the nursery that saw thirteen of its toddler customers and four of its teachers perish in the fire.

While commendable, those measures are far from adequate if the goal is to prevent such tragedies happening again.

Reportedly, the immediate cause of the fire is human error (a fire at a shop below the nursery) and technical failure (alarms not sounding off in a timely manner). To blame the tragedy on human error and technical failure, however, would be disrespectful of the dead and their families.

The underlying cause appears to be the version of “state capitalism” widely practiced in Qatar and the other fossil-fuel-rich countries of the Arabian Peninsula, whereby vast swaths of the private sector are owned by members of the sprawling royal families, their allies, or their associates. The result is an environment where corners are occasionally cut on various regulations, including on safety, to avoid offending the well-connected business owner, let alone those with the same family name as the country’s ruler.

The Villaggio fire seems to be a case in point. While the results of the investigation are yet to be announced, the facts so far known are telling. The nursery that bore the brunt of the tragedy was owned by the daughter of Qatar’s cabinet minister of culture, Sky News reported. Also, local newspapers revealed, the nursery, which had operated for years, was not licensed. The owner of the nursery is one of those targeted by the attorney general’s arrest warrants for “interrogation.” It is not clear if charges will be filed against her.

To be clear, the engagement of the Gulf countries’ ruling elites or their families into the private sector does not necessarily resemble what one can see in other developing countries where a predatory bureaucracy or a corrupt elite syphon off the fruits of market policies. Perhaps with the partial exception of Saudi Arabia, the largest of the six members constituting the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Gulf states are small emirates where the image of the state is overlaid on societies that are largely tribal in structure and relationships.

Granted, at times tribal allegiance is just bought off through grants of certain sectors in the economy (such as retail). However, absent a developed entrepreneurial class, the state sometimes has no choice but to lead the charge itself in owning and operating private enterprises in the sectors the nascent business community shows no appetite for.

This kind of “state capitalism” is nothing novel; Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, to mention just a few examples, have all adopted some form of it in the late nineteenth-century and mid-twentieth-century, respectively, as they sought to modernize their economies.

The difference between such precedents, however, and what one witnesses in the Arabian Gulf is the extent to which projects favored or partially owned by the state are exempt, fully or partially, from regulations.

This is particularly worrying in Qatar, which as anyone living here would say has witnessed a dramatic construction boom over the past six years, with tens of skyscrapers darting out of the landscape -- in Downtown Doha, towering over the Corniche, and elsewhere. And more construction fever is anticipated as Qatar prepares in earnest for hosting the World Cup 2022 games.

On the other hand, the malls in the Gulf countries are much more than shopping venues. Paco Underhil, the author of Call of the Mall, would probably say that malls have indeed transcended their shopping function everywhere. But two features specific to the Arab Gulf make the mall a particularly important component in the labor and social equation in those countries.

First, thanks to a combination of inclement weather most of the year and a conservative society that is at best uneasy about public places of social mingling, the shopping mall is the only truly public space where both nationals and expatriates can spend their leisure time.

Second, with hardly any cultural events and a paucity of entertainment options, the Gulf countries offer the mall as the answer to the routine question on the minds of expats, especially with families: where should I go on weekend? And we should remember that these countries rely heavily in their workforce on expats -- over 80 per cent in places like Dubai and Doha.

So instead of getting contented with an investigation and a few arrests, the Qatari leadership should re-envision its bureaucracy so as to ensure the latter’s autonomy and effectiveness in enforcing regulations. This would be the best way to honor those whose lives death claimed, unlikely, at the mall.

On the basic instincts of Twitter and Facebook

Many of those who use Facebook and/or Google+ are also active contributors to the Twitter chatter universe. Still it's not superfluous to ask what, if anything, distinguishes one from the other -- because they are indeed distinct.

My point of departure in thinking about Twitter on the one hand and Facebook (FB) and Google+ (GP) on the other is that they, while alike in many respects, diverge significantly when it comes to what can be termed their "core dispositions," their basic instincts. 

They are alike, crucially, in that they are massive content-screening machines that utilize human intelligence rather than algorithms to produce highly relevant recommendations regarding the stuff available on the Web. 

They are not like the Google search engine, which looks into the relationships among the pages published on the Web to suggest pertinent pages in the form or search results. And they are not like Amazon.com, which monitors the collective purchasing patterns of its users to offer purchasing recommendations ("Users who bought this item also bought that one.") 

The so-called social networks instead just make it vastly easy to build, well, a network of individuals. That network, not the algorithms, provides the recommendations regarding what in the unwieldy Web is worthy of one's attention.  Thus, to put it more succinctly, imagine a spectrum, where on one end there is pure algorithm content-screening machines (eg, Google search engine), and on the other pure human intelligence-fed content-screening machines (eg, Twitter; FB, GP). Amazon.com would be somewhere in between.

The success of FB and Twitter suggests that content-screening machines that stand on the shoulders of human beings, as it were, are gaining ground on their algorithmic counterparts.  This likely has to do with more than the precision and relevance of the recommendations from each option (human vs algorithm).  But let's steer clear from psychology, and just take this at its face value: human-intelligence networks seem to produce more precise content recommendations to their members.

Now if Twitter and FB/GP are networks of human intelligence, what sets one apart from the other? The complex configuration of how one builds a network on Facebook (and Google+) decreases the efficiency of what I take to be the core function of a social network (that is, to constantly utilize the intelligence of other humans to screen, filter, and recommend content from the Web).  On Twitter, by contrast, the imposed brevity, the comparatively austere site layout, and the simple network-building (in the binary of follow-unfollow as opposed to the degrees/rankings of "friendships" on FB) all make the former a much more efficient information-curating machine.

And this is what I meant by core disposition. Twitter's core disposition appears to be a minimal-exposure interaction. Members of the social network post their thoughts, or better yet, thoughts of others (in the form of links to articles, videos, etc.), without all the auxiliary noise (relationship status, hobbies, etc.) one sees on Facebook.  The focus goes mostly to what is actually contributed. And under the restricting 140-character limit, whatever is contributed has to be concise -- even links get to be clipped short.

Compared with Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are not minimal-exposure media.  So to the signal-delivery that Twitter seems good at, Facebook, and to a lesser degree Google+, lets into the network a lot of noise. And this makes each a less-efficient machine/mechanism for screening, filtering and recommending content. 

Granted, there are those who view the "social network" in a completely different light -- not in terms of efficiency and information-scouring, but as a tool to stay in touch with family or to combat existential boredom.  These are valid purposes too, of course. My thoughts here, however, are aimed at a different dimension of how social networks are thought about and used.

The Interface Man

Steve Jobs’s lasting legacy is that computers are machines that humans could love | OnIslam.net

If you , like many, often find yourself tempted to touch the glass displays of the gadgets you encounter, from phones and tablets to laptops and e-readers, expecting the stuff on the screen to morph at taps and roll at swipes, you can thank, or blame, for this Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who died on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56.

Yet while glass-fronted, touch-based devices are the most recent gadgets associated with Jobs, he may be remembered through different prisms: as the show-man, who would gleefully take the stage to unveil new, often much-rumored shiny gadgets; as the savior who in 1997 took Apple from over a decade in the wilderness back to a path of unprecedented success (surpassing in market capitalization, for the first time, Apple’s arch-competitor Microsoft in May 2010 and becoming the world’s largest technology firm); as the “control-freak” who tenaciously resisted the calls to license his admired software to other device manufacturers, allowing competitors who adopted the license model (Microsoft with its Windows in the mid-1980s and Google with its Android over the past four years) to outpace Apple in market-share despite the latter’s often more refined (but also more expensive) products; and as the man who, turning gaunt and frail in public appearances that grew shorter and far apart, was dying, as he was living, very much in public sight, drawing near-constant attention and admiration, the occasional disappointment and rage, and finally an out-pour of sorrow at the man’s death at a relatively young age.

Middle East: The growth of a desert jewel

Qatar's research machine is a work in progress, but its funding opportunities are already luring international scientists to its increasing number of institutions | Nature (subscription required)

Khaled Machaca enjoys the high-risk, high-reward aspects of a start-up project. His latest is particularly demanding. Machaca has been tasked with establishing a research programme at a newly founded medical college in Qatar: a small Middle Eastern country whose science enterprise, initiated only in the past decade, is itself a start-up of sorts.

The challenges are manifold. Machaca has had to convince funders, the larger medical community and the public of the importance of his work. He has also had to source lab equipment in a place with few suppliers. To foster international collaborations, crucial to Qatari researchers' success, he has had to help craft and customize a code of research ethics, created by Qatar's Supreme Council of Health, that complies with both US and Qatari laws. And he has had to convince young scientists that they can advance their careers and conduct cutting-edge science in a country known less for research than for hosting the news network Al-Jazeera and, as was announced this month, the 2022 soccer World Cup.

“We had serious challenges,” says Machaca, who is associate research dean at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC–Q), based in Doha. But he relishes the notion of building a programme from scratch. And the country has a big advantage: money. Scientists working in Qatar will find good funding and ample opportunities for big projects, but, like Machaca, they might have to deal with rigid bureaucracy, evolving research-ethics regulations and rules — on stem-cell research, for example — that could limit collaborative ventures. These trade-offs will help to determine Qatar's success as it attempts to build a sustainable science enterprise. >>>

A full, printer-friendly version of the story here.

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The great Web splintering

Facebook and smartphone “apps” may change the nature of the web as we know it | OnIslam.net

The rise of Google signaled the maturing of the Web as the medium that accommodated almost all other media, from text to audio and video content. Most users embraced that medium standardization. Suddenly Google, along with other search engines, became our indispensable guides into that world.

The success of Facebook, in contrast, marked the maturing of our Web habits, and thus the growing amount at every one's disposal of what author Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus” (the title of his latest book, though he has been using the term for several years).

That began with the routinization of our Web use. We knew when to peek into email and more or less what to expect. We dispatched Word Documents back and forth, with changes tracked and comments stacked in the margins. We skimmed and organized the daily harvest from our “feed aggregators.” We occasionally or obsessively went back to the familiar blogs. And, of course, all along we googled, initially cheered and surprised by its speed and accuracy at coughing back results, but only initially. And appropriately so — there is only so much admiration one (ordinary human being) can harbor for an algorithm.

The investigative journalism skeptic's manifesto

I’m an “investigative journalism” skeptic. And I’m right until the promoters of investigative journalism prove me wrong | The blog of the World Federation of Science Journalists

Let’s start with the latter. Associating “investigative” with “journalism” is almost equivalent to slapping “artistic” on “films.” It’s tautological. Good films are necessarily artistic as much as good journalistic pieces are naturally investigative. Therefore, those who insist on making the distinction have to justify it as we, the skeptics, invest our doubt-infested minds in less “investigative” endeavors.

Because of this (false) implication of distinction, I’m skeptical of so-called investigative journalism. If “investigative journalism” required a distinct set of skills or approaches, one would have an easier time accepting a distinct term for it. But it does not.

In Saudi Arabia, a pyramid of a different type

A drive in Saudi Arabia to open up local universities to cutting edge research at reputed science centers worldwide has King Saud University "twinned" with a Max Plack physics laboratory. How successful can such efforts be? | Nature (Middle East) (free registration required)

For Abdallah Azzeer, his long-term goal of turning Saudi Arabia into a regional hub for advanced laser physics starts with studying matter at short, or rather unimaginably short, time scales – racing against the hasty flashes of time lasting mere billionths of a billionth of a second.

To that end, the Saudi physicist is leading a collaborative research program involving King Saud University (KSU), where he works, and the famed Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Germany. "If you want the best outcome from a partnership, you must go to the best," Azzeer says.

Leading the MPQ side is Ferenc Krausz. The Hungarian physicist's Laboratory for Attosecond Physics is credited with expanding our knowledge about the behavior of electrons, through observing and measuring at the most fleeting of time durations, phenomena once deemed the preserve of theoretical physicists.

Full article on the Nature Middle East website ...

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