Transparency with Maximum Sexual Appeal

Here’s how to maximize the sexual appeal of anything related to the functioning of the government. Do most Malaysians care about functions of the government?

Observing the comments on the Prime Minister’s 1Malaysia blog, there’s a good indication that we care most about those which directly impact us personally. If we go to any magazine stand, there’s almost nothing offered that’s related to the workings of the government. At any display, most of the glossy magazines offer maximum sexual appeal. That’s what people people are attracted to and perhaps care about.

How can maximum sexual appeal be given to MACC’s report that 60% of government allocations for vital infrastructure projects in Sarawak have been misappropriated and diverted elsewhere? The fact that billions of ringgits of taxpayer money have been siphoned off has no appeal, except perhaps to anti-establishment species.

Do we care about why the Minister in-charge, Dr. George Chan, have not owned up and resigned? Do we ask why the minister needs to investigate the MACC report and to find out who is responsible when obviously he is the only one responsible? Many would care if the report was about how many young girls from China the minister is keeping, given that Sarawak is now a haven for China girls.

But it does not have to be sexual to be appealing. The sexual appeal of things related to the functions of the government can be maximized by using augmented reality. A company called Sunlight Labs, has done this by opening up the US government. The US government provides a portal, www.recovery.gov, for anyone to track where government money is being spent, who receives how much. The portal allows for reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.

Sunlight Labs published the marked-up recovery.gov contract data and the results are fascinatingly appealing. You can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients to where you are. Some are surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in their neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road.

This is a great and sexy example of how government functions can be presented to improve transparency.

The Government’s official data set is published on the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Layar, is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the cinema you're trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.

This is the kind of sexual appeal, similar to recovery.gov, that the new Sarawak state government must adapt. But while the recovery.gov website is beautifully designed, it does not provide raw or bulk data that would allow for open-ended analysis by the community at large. Until a government opens up access to the bulk data for other people to analyze, reporting its own data on its own websites does not equate to transparency.

Source:
Sunlight Labs
The Star

Minister Dr George Chan Must Take Full Responsibility

For the billions of taxpayer money siphoned off, Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Dr George Chan can only have himself to blame, take full responsibility and resign immediately. Who else is responsible for the misappropriation of more than 60 percent of Government allocations for vital infrastructure projects between 2002 and 2008? Any person with a gram of intelligence knows that answer.

As reported in The Star, the Deputy Minister now wants to find out who was responsible and take appropriate action against them. Dr Chan, who is also State Industrial Development Minister and State Minister for Agriculture Modernisation must own up instead of ordering another internal investigation into the findings by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC). An investigation will be another waste of taxpayer money and undermine the work and independence of the MACC.

MACC Deputy Commissioner Datuk Zakaria Jaffar had earlier issued a statement that the MACC had uncovered cases in Sarawak where up to 60 percent of Government allocations had been ''diverted'' away from the projects for which the funds were meant. Zakaria claimed that such misappropriation of funds had happened between 2002 and last year and that MACC investigations had shown that only 40 percent of the money given by the Government for the projects was spent on the projects proper while the other 60 percent were leaked to elsewhere.

No wonder Sarawak’s rural population continue to live below the poverty line.

One question we need to ask now is, why is that MACC have not prosecuted any party?

New Drug Halts Cancer Regrowth

A new class of anti-cancer drugs have been developed, bringing new hope to humanity. More so for those with advanced or spreading lung and pancreatic cancer.

As reported in Science Alert, cancer biologist Dr Adam Patterson said, "Our experiments show that this new prodrug is much more active than the current gold-standard drug treatment for advanced or spreading lung and pancreatic cancer. It’s very common for tumours to start re-growing after you stop administering this type of cancer drug. But after we stopped doses of this prodrug, the tumours still hadn’t re-grown 30 days later. The prodrug appears to act like slow-release chemotherapy.”

Dr Adam Patterson and medicinal chemist Dr Jeffrey Smaill, investigators with the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery, made the discovery after a decade of work on the prodrug.

Read more here.

Threesome, still no choice in Swingers Club

While many join the swingers club, some stick to one. While some prefer to do it slowly, others tell us to cut the bull and get on with it. Before you make the cut, consider a sexier option, if there is one. Coming ahead of P1’s shout to cut to WiMax will be 4G wireless broadband called LTE.

While many carriers around the world are planning 4G networks, for our only 3 wireless operators, having built their networks using the global standard GSM, the current 3G wireless technology called HSPA still has some legs left. If a lot of Malaysians make the same choice as I do to ignore the shout to cut to WiMax, by end of 2010, WiMax could be dead.

Celcom, Maxis and Digi have not stopped shouting about being the fastest and widest wireless broadband as they all continue to provide mediocre speed and while many of us swing from one to the other. They may likely upgrade existing infrastructure with the latest 3G wireless technology, HSPA Plus, to increase speed. HSPA Plus will match the speeds of current 4G such as WiMax. Current 3G HSPA offers download speeds less than 700 Kbps, but typically I get less than 100 Kbps.

4G WiMax download speed is between 4 Mbps and 6 Mbps, about the same as HSPA Plus’ speed. WiMax’s slow rollout and lack of mobile devices such as WiMax embedded phones will eventually kill it. Nokia, one of the initial backers of WiMax, cancelled its N810 WiMax Edition tablet and no one is likely to develop such devices until WiMax network is more extensive.

Because there is little difference in speed between WiMax and HSPA Plus, many operators worldwide are opting to invest in upgrading to HSPA Plus while planning to eventually migrate to LTE. This means that we’ll be getting a lot of 3G HSPA Plus mobile devices in 2010, but probably not too soon in Malaysia as our operators are typically slow in rolling out advanced technology.

Assessing the 4G landscape, LTE or Long Term Evolution, is likely to dominate over WiMax. Some experts say initial speed will exceed 4 Mbps and expected to be within 15 Mbps to 20 Mbps. Elsewhere, AT & T, Verizon and T-Mobile will be launching their LTE networks in 2010 and 2011. It's OK if you've made the cut. Expect MCMC to put their act together about LTE in a decade from now.

While we Malaysians, will continue to be contented with whatever slow networks the 3 telcos provide us. And we really don't have a choice, even with 3 operators, they're all the same.

Playboy on Sarawak Civil Service Innovation Portal

Innovation Portal!!! My foot!

Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud recently launched the Sarawak Civil Service Innovative Ideas Portal (SCS-ii). The portal hopes to transform the state civil service into a more resourceful, creative and innovative organization. State secretary Datuk Morshidi Abdul Ghani said the SCS-ii aims to encourage officers, teams or agencies to propose new and innovative ideas that could make positiv difference to the civil service.

Here's my smart ass idea that would definitely serve all the above purposes - REMOVE Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud and REPLACE him with Mr. Baru Bian.

After accessing the portal, I have a fair idea of the kind of innovation that Sarawakians will continue to be getting if Taib Mahmud remains as Chief Minister for another month.

The portal takes a while to load. When it has been loaded on your browser, you get a full blank screen. You'll need to scroll down one full page before you get to the content.

Ahhhh . . . so much for innovation.

Who ever designed and developed the website can learn a lot from Playboy. And it's free.

Sexual Correlationship

Is this reality? “Women with bigger breasts found to be smarter.” – this report published by The Star can be found quoted all over the Internet. But it seems that the study that the paper referred to never existed. If the study did exist, it must have been conducted by a woman with big breasts. How is that none of the world’s 50 most influential women in technology today are not busty?

The real reality could be that for a woman to afford RM16,000 to augment her real bust, she could be a smart woman; successful in her business or career. At the recent two-day inaugural Asian Breast Aesthetic Symposium (ABAS), it was noted that smart Malaysians could one day prove that they are one of the most aesthetically blessed people in the world, joining the ranks of their Brazilian and Swedish counterparts, if the number of patients seeking consultation for cosmetic surgery is anything to go by. A consultant plastic, reconstructive and cosmetic surgeon at Penang’s Loh Guan Lye Specialist Centre, Dr Lee Kim Siea, receives up to 20 new appointments for consultation per week.

Augmenting and shaping up the breast may cost between RM10,000 and RM16,000, and most of the patients being Chinese. Dr Charles Randquist, a world-renowned plastic surgeon from Sweden and the man behind ABAS, said that breast augmentation done with implants is a good way in improving the quality of life.

Here’s a correlation to augmented reality – sex life and quality of life. Two out of three Malaysian men and three out of four women are not satisfied with their sex lives. This was found by the Asia-Pacific Sexual Health and Overall Wellness survey conducted by Pfizer. Malaysians are ranked sixth among 13 countries but, if it’s any consolation, Singaporeans fared worse. They are in eighth spot.

According to Dr Rosie King, who led the Pfizer study in the Asia Pacific region, greater sexual satisfaction is strongly associated with greater satisfaction with life overall. Generally, men and women who are highly satisfied with their sex life have a more positive outlook on their relationships and life.

Breast augmentation and sexual satisfaction, seemingly disparate elements, apparently both improves quality of life.

Here’s an alternative method of augmenting reality: Leading lingerie firm Ultimo has unveiled the Mega Boost ‘Day to Night Bra’ that promises women a double lift to their cleavage in seconds. Office workers preparing for a night on the town can boost their bra size two cup sizes - from a 34B to a 34D - in an instant with the removable silicon pouches. The UK lingerie giant made its mark 10 years ago with the patented silicon technology behind the Ultimo Fixed Gel Bra.

Watch the reality here:

How Journalists In Sarawak Have Better Sex

As of October 2008, the Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/, century-old newspaper and winner of 7 Pulitzer Prizes, switched its daily to entirely Web.

Read more here http://www.tinyurl.com/scimonitor. Several other great old newspapers have gone Web-only as well.

We continue to witness the rise and fall of species as evolution presents a different playground for newspapers and journalists. Are we witnessing that soon, there may be no need, not only for newspapers, but also no need for organizations of journalists?

The pressure from the suppressed Malaysians has hastened this process of evolution. Can we have a guided pathway to evolve?

The investigative piece, published by the Los Angeles Times on July 12, highlights a pathway to the evolution of alternative news sources and journalism in Malaysia. The piece is about the failure of a nursing board that oversees 350,000 registered nurses to remove nurses with histories of misconduct, drug abuse, negligence, violence against patients and incompetence. If these nurses were fired from one hospital for such misdeeds, they simply took their licenses down the street to another hospital, often to begin a new cycle of mistreatment and endangerment.

Read more here http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nurse12 2009jul12,0,2185588.story.

One thing that stands out from the report is that it was written and reported by two reporters, Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, who do not work for the Los Angeles Times. They work at ProPublica, http://www.propublica.org/ , a New York–based non-profit and nonpartisan team of investigative journalists founded in 2008 and funded by philanthropy.

Certainly no blogger would have the luxury of such time for the many painstaking months to assemble the evidence necessary to demonstrate that it was taking the nursing board unconscionable lengths of time to dig into these cases. Reporters risked being sued for libel or slander if they misidentified any of the miscreant nurses or mischaracterized their behavior. No bloggers can afford to lose - or even to defend - a RM10-million libel case. Databases needed to be built, analyzed, and made Web-friendly. Few bloggers have the quantitative or technical skills to do this.

Perhaps then, that’s the reason Malaysian bloggers prefer to blog about biased opinions, hearsay, rumours, gossips and half-truths.

The LA Times’ piece amply demonstrates the importance of journalism and of journalistic organizations like the LA Times and ProPublica. Without such people and institutions, there is no way such a report would have emerged on the Web.

Malaysians need an institution like ProPublica to extend the practice of investigative or “accountability” journalism. The institution can empower citizens by creating a database enabling anyone to review budget and federal stimulus spending down to the kampong level. Bloggers can dig into the database to produce stories on the impact of the spending in their communities. At least, with that institution, we can minimize the threat to accountability and thus to our democracy.

The process of finding and communicating news may no longer require newspapers. But the process will still require journalism and journalists, to smoke out the most difficult-to-report situations, to test glib assertions against the facts, to probe for the carefully contrived hoax. These are reporting activities that take a great deal of time, money, and skill.

Today, newspapers like The Star, The Borneo Post, The Eastern Times and the New Straits Times publish only crappy work of inexperienced reporters and the usual political spins. Now, these newspapers have become robbers of the important bulwark of our democracy.

We need the kind of journalism that is intended to shine a spotlight on abuse of power and failure to uphold the public interest, and by so doing to give the public the information needed to produce positive change.

Guess how many investigative journalists are on the payroll of Borneo Post, NST and The Star, compared to total staff?

Mainstream media have no reporters digging into possible domains of corruption. This means that not only is there corruption that won’t be reported, but also that politicians, cronies, and others who might have toed the line before will now be tempted to cross it, because nobody will be watching. Who will be watching over to ensure that abuses highlighted in the Auditor General’s report do not get repeated year after year and that the culprits do not continue to stay in their positions?

Institutions like ProPublica can save our democracy and provides the pathway to evolve the Malaysian blog sphere.

Three Out Of Ten Prefer Mobile Phones Over Sex

Since the past several weeks, a few of my office colleagues have been talking ecstatically about getting company-issued smart phones. We have probably come to the time when finally, mobile phones are better than sex or nasi dagang ( a Terengganu staple diet). Just a few months ago I came across a survey conducted amongst 1,000 people in Britain which found that 85 per cent of people would rather give up chocolate, sex or alcohol for a month than their mobile phone handset.

An annual survey commissioned by Samsung Mobile to determine just how much of a priority people give to their cell phones found that three out of ten people said they’d give up sex for a year rather than giving up their mobile phones. Asked which they'd prefer -- sex or keeping their cell phone -- 36 percent of women interviewed and 15 percent of the men selected the phone. (Does this explains why 3 out of every 10 new marriages in Terengganu ends up in divorce in 3 to 5 years?).

OK girls, here’s the mobile phone, now gimme the sex!

You’d have thought that only people having affairs would never let go of their mobile phones (which would always be on vibrate mode). So that seems to unveil a new truth – tantric sex is in the mobile phone. Or have 36% of women arrived at the age of phone sex?

With Gartner’s report that 269.1 million mobile phones were sold worldwide in Q1 2009 ( a 8.5% decrease from Q1 2008), does it look like mobile phones is now replacing sex as a fundamental part of our being? Or is it going to be smartphones?

According to Gartner, worldwide smartphone sales in Q1 2009 surpassed 36.4 million units, a 12.7% increase from Q1 2008. Smartphone sales represented 13.5% of all mobile device sales in Q1 2009, compared with 11% in Q1 2008.


AdMob’s Mobile Metrics Report indicates that mobile web is on for explosive growth. The smartphone, iPhone and its non-smartphone counterpart, the iPod Touch, is powering the growth of mobile web. According to AdMob, these two devices accounts for 43% of all mobile web data traffic worldwide. According to Gartner, the Android smartphones sales will grow dramatically to be the iPhone’s contender and overtaking Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry smartphones.

Could the smartphones be the thing that replace sex as our fundamental being? Or could it be the iPhone?