Orgasmic Moments - New Indicators of Progress

If only Prime Minister Najib cares to measure how many orgasmic moments we have in a year. Isn't it our happiness and well-being the KPIs that matter most? Not GDP! Here's why.  
1.   Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research, and explains in his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness. Dan Gilbert believes that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes -- and fool everyone’s eyes in the same way -- Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss.

2.   Jack Welch, who is regarded as the father of the “shareholder value” movement that has dominated the corporate world for more than 20 years, has said it was “a dumb idea” for executives to focus so heavily on quarterly profits and share price gains. His comments, made in an interview for the FT’s series on the future of capitalism, come as the economic crisis has caused a radical rethinking by many leading executives and policymakers.

3. “Gross National Product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising and . . . the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play . . . the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life wothwhile.” Robert Kennedy, 1968.

The above three topics may seem totally unrelated. However, upon putting my radical rethinking hat while considering Prime Minister Najib’s key result areas and gov’t KPIs in relation to measures of progress of Sarawak people, these three subjects are indeed, totally related. Governments, businesses and citizens must focus on what really make us happy.

Sarawakians must now set out a radical proposal to the new state government to guide the direction of modern Sarawak and the lives of people who live in them. In contrast to the conventional narrow focus on economic indicators, we must call on the new state government to directly and regularly measure people’s subjective well-being: their experiences, feelings and perceptions of how their lives are going, as a new way of assessing societal progress.
Some 40 years ago, in my kampong, my parents and siblings lived better, healthier and happier lives, despite no electricity, no roads and none of today’s modern necessities. We cooked over wood fire, got our water from the cool mountain stream and plenty of harvests from the farms.

Today, the rivers and streams have fewer fishes, we use too much pesticides in the farms, we live too much on credit with our education, house and car loans and we have to work harder to pay many bills and to cope with higher and higher costs of living. In all, I’m more miserable than I was 40 years ago.

The roads and electricity supply in the modern kampong today are not making our planet any better. In fact, these modern amenities only serve to increase our carbon footprint. We’ll be leaving to the future generations, a planet that’s degenerated and too costly to clean up. Our Malaysian education system is failing our children and educating them out of their natural creativity. And why can't the government hospital in Bau provide the same quality of clinical outcome as the Gleneagles Hospital or Cleveland Clinic?


Not only our beloved Sarawak, but the whole world is facing a breakdown of communities, environmental degradation, global warming, continuing poverty, and climbing rates of hunger. It is the perfect opportunity to reconsider development, progress, and purpose in terms of what is truly most important in life. Development is under scrutiny as a cycle of more production for more consumption to boost gross national product. There is an urgency to reconsider development in a broader, holistic manner and reclaim the concept of progress as genuine desirable change.

Economists, policymakers, reporters, and the public rely on the GDP as a shorthand indicator of progress; but the GDP is merely a sum of national spending with no distinctions between transactions that add to well-being and those that diminish it.

Mike Pennock from Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI) Atlantic argued that measures such as Gross National Happiness provide a guideline for developing a framework of national accounting where suitable monetary value can be placed on assets such as the environment and voluntary work. Thus costs and benefits can be calculated and accounted for in a balance sheet, and policymakers in turn cannot overlook vital aspects of human, social, and natural capital.

Some pioneering visions of alternative progress have emerged in Asia, chief among them the concept of Gross National Happiness as coined by Former King of Bhutan Jigme Wangchuck. Gross National Happiness has four pillars: the promotion of equitable and sustainable socioeconomic development; preservation and promotion of cultural values; conservation of the natural environment; and establishment of good governance. Gross National Happiness values are measured by tracking wellness in seven domains: economic, environmental, physical, mental, workplace, social, and political.

Currently there are two parallel global movements. The first can be characterized by the World Economic Forum, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, supporting traditional notions of development. The second is the World Social Forum, Gross National Happiness, and allied movements that seek to redefine progress.

The new Sarawak state government, as a mainstream policy-making body, can be more sensitive to alternative approaches and start to measure Gross National Happiness and translate the indicators and data into public policy.

If Sarawak’s new policymakers measure what really matters to people—health care, safety, a clean environment, and other indicators of well-being—economic policy would naturally shift towards sustainability and real progress and happiness for all Sarawakians.

References:

Redefining Progress: Genuine Indicators of Progress

National Accounts of Well-being

Oxford University Human Development Initiative

Everyone Wants Sex, But Not Everybody Have It

Malaysians who find themselves affording less than their contemporaries overseas have distorted and inefficient markets, lack of competition, low wages and a weak ringgit to thank for their poor purchasing power, which in the case of KL, is only 34 per cent that of New York.

Despite government assurances stating that inflation is under control, Malaysians are becoming increasingly restive over the cost of goods in relation to wages, especially those who are able to compare the corresponding price-to-wage ratios in developed economies.

Malaysians who have experienced working and living abroad often experience sticker shock when they come back and see prices in KL.

“Oh my God, a Tiramisu is RM15!” said Calvin Lee, a Malaysian who has lived in Sydney, Singapore and now London, referring to what cafes in KL are charging for a slice of cake as compared to about GBP5 (RM25) in London.

Aidi Zalman, a consultant who studied in the UK, told The Malaysian Insider that salaries in London could go much further than KL.

He had worked part-time as a waiter in London and noted that a single day’s wages of about GBP50-60 was already enough for him to buy a pair of branded shoes and even a low-end iPod, a concept unthinkable for local waiters.

“GBP100 can feed two apartments of students for a week,” he said. “Here you can spend RM100 and get hardly anything.”

“I hate it when politicians make stupid statements like Malaysia is cheap,” said Edward Seah, an engineer who has previously worked in Singapore and the US. “Prices might seem cheap when you convert it to US dollars yes, but then we should also convert our salaries to US dollars.”

Victor Wong, a Malaysian expat in Sydney, said that Australians get more mileage out of their money.

A report by Swiss bank UBS AG shows KL residents have to work 22 minutes to afford a loaf of bread as compared with 18 minutes in Los Angeles.

He gave the example of clothes where he said he can get a good quality shirt for about AUD100 but would need to spend about RM200 to get similar quality in KL.

Wong pointed out that even Asian food could be more affordable for those living in Sydney than KL.

“You pay RM15 for a bowl of soup noodles in KL shopping centres but only AUD10 in Sydney shopping centres,” he said.

The 2010 Prices and Wages report by Swiss bank UBS AG show that residents in KL have only 33.8 per cent the purchasing power of their counterparts in New York, 42 per cent that of London, 33.7 per cent that of Sydney, 32.6 per cent that of Los Angeles and 31.6 per cent that of Zurich.

The same study showed that on average, KL residents have to work 22 minutes to afford a loaf of bread as compared with 18 minutes in Los Angeles, 16 minutes in Sydney, 15 minutes in Tokyo and 12 minutes in Zurich.

The figures grow much worse for imported items. To buy an iPod Nano, a KL worker would have to labour a whopping 52 hours as compared with just 9.5 hours in Los Angeles and Sydney, 12 hours in Tokyo and nine hours in Zurich.

A check on salaries and prices in selected developed country cities by The Malaysian Insider showed that despite being touted as one of the world’s least expensive cities, KL residents pay as much or even more for chicken, broadband, cars and mobile phones as a percentage of their income.

Communications, for example, is one area where Malaysians are paying notably more than residents in developed countries even after currency conversion.

A 5Mbps broadband package costs RM149 in KL while in London, a 10Mbps package would cost GBP13.50, in Melbourne a 5-8Mbps package costs AUD40 and in New York, a 7Mbps service costs USD41.95.

Those who want to buy an iPhone 4 in KL, meanwhile, would have to pay RM1990 with a basic 24-month contract while in London, residents can get an iPhone 4 for just GBP199 with a basic 24-month contract and in Singapore, it costs just SGD210 with a basic contract.

Maybank Investment Bank chief economist Suhaimi Ilias said that what is important is local perception and not official inflation figures which claimed that the inflation rate in Malaysia was only 1.7 per cent last year.

“I think on the ground, not many people feel we are cheap,” said Suhaimi. “They feel that the cost of living is high regardless of what the inflation figures are.”

He added that inefficiency and lack of competition are contributing to the higher prices in Malaysia.

“I can’t understand why a motorcycle should have to cost RM6,000-7,000 and a car like the Perodua Viva should cost over RM30,000,” he said.

RAM Holdings chief economist Dr Yeah Kim Leng said that cars are one of the sectors where the Malaysian market suffers the heaviest distortion.

Despite being touted as one of the world’s least expensive cities, KL residents pay as much or even more for basic items as a percentage of their income.

A Honda Civic in KL costs about RM115,000, or 20 times the average monthly salary of an auditor.

In Melbourne and London by comparison, a Honda Civic costs AUD25,000 and GBP19,000 respectively, or only about three times the average salary of an auditor in those cities.

The high cost of cars is part of the reason that Malaysians have leveraged themselves to a record 76 per cent of the country’s GDP.

Bank Negara statistics show that at the end of last year, 20 per cent of Malaysian household debt was due to cars, an asset which depreciates over time.

Yeah also said that the ringgit is undervalued and distorts the country’s purchasing power for imported goods.

“We need to ensure prices are right and that there are no market distortions, no subsidies and allow market prices,” he said.

But even if the ringgit is allowed to rise, there is no guarantee that savings would be passed on to consumers. The ringgit is now hovering at RM3.02 to the US dollar but Goldman Sachs predicated yesterday the currency could hit RM2.98 to the US dollar in the next three months.

When The Malaysian Insider contacted the director of wholesale and retail at government think tank Performance Management and Delivery Unit (Pemandu), Ravidran Devagunam about the higher prices Malaysians pay for branded goods, he acknowledged that some retailers will maximise profits on luxury items not readily available in Malaysia but said that the government is “unable” to compel them to discount their prices even after the abolishment of import duties as luxury goods and apparel are not controlled items.

“However, we believe that market forces and consumer education will eventually force a price reduction of these goods over time,” he said.

The Federation of Malaysian Consumers Associations Secretary General Mohd Shaani Abdullah said people should question the prices that they are currently paying.

“Consumer protection will only come about when people make noise,” he told The Malaysian Insider when contacted. “Only then will politicians act.”

Source: Malaysians plagued by poor purchasing power

By Lee Wei Lian, Yow Hong Chieh and Melissa Chi

Malaysian Insider April 19, 2011

Analysts say the undervalued ringgit distorts the country’s purchasing power for imported goods.

How Quality of Life is as Poor as Sex Life

For some time now, economists have become comfortable with catchwords that we once associated with the speech of psychologists. Even as they speak about money, profits and balance sheets, they no longer blush when they mention such things as emotional well-being, self-esteem and spiritual vitality.

And Malaysian politicians and technocrats have caught up fast in using these jargons. They are no longer talking about “standards of living” or “costs of living”, but rather the “quality of life”, as if it means anything to the poor Malaysian wage earner struggling to provide his family with three square meals.

Malaysia’s good old days are really not that old. Middle-aged Malaysians can still remember when you could have coffee with a friend for 20 cents. (We used dollars and cents then.) And if you had an extra 50 cents in your pocket, you could each have a roti canai or a bowl of mee or kuay teow. Your bus fare probably cost you 5 or 10 cents, and you could talk forever on the phone for 10 cents if it was a local call. If you earned around $500 a month, you could own a car.

In short, life used to be good. There was quality in it.

Today, an urban family earning a household income of RM3,000 a month would be lucky to survive the costs of food, utilities and transport. Try shopping with RM50 and see what you can take home to your family.

And now rumours are bouncing around that another round of price increases is in the offing.

Meanwhile, the issue of minimum wage is still in the dock.

Serious problem

Nothing has probably changed since the 2007 survey that showed that more than 57.8% of Malaysian households earned less than RM3,000 and 70.7% earned less than RM4,000.

Many villages in Sabah and Sarawak are still not connected by road and more than a quarter of households there do not have electricity. Furthermore, at least 50,000 families in the state are in need of new or restored houses.

In urban areas such as the Klang Valley, public transport remains a serious problem. Infrastructural coordination is poor and “networking” exists only in our dreams.

Municipal councils seem to be blind to the serious shortage of car parks, a shortage that takes its toll on housing estates and shopping centres and turns even the well-bred into inconsiderate motorists who have made a habit of double and even triple parking.

The rat population is increasing at an alarming rate in residential areas as night markets and hawker stalls sprout up everywhere and uncollected garbage pile up into mountains.

Quality sleep

Highways and expressways that cut across residential areas are causing so much noise that we can only daydream about having quality sleep.

It was once said that in Malaysia, as elsewhere in Asia, the affluent tend to surround themselves with comforts befitting their status, shutting out the plight of the less fortunate around them.

But times have changed. There are problems everyone suffers, regardless of income. The decaying environment, traffic congestion and rising crime rates make life lousy even if you are rich. Bad governance and inept public administration affects everyone.

In 2005, Malaysia was ranked 36th in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Quality of Life Index. By 2010, we had fallen to the 85th position.

If the quality of our life is not improving, should we change our lifestyle to suit our economic position or should we change the ruling regime? Perhaps Malaysians should be thinking instead of the quality of the government that they want.

source: Free Malaysia Today.

How To Revitalize - From Dysfunctional to Soulful Fullfilment

Education reform is a top agenda of the new Sarawak state government. We have seen that despite massive

spending by the Federal government and ambitious attempts at reforms, the performance of our education system has barely improved in decades. In fact, compared to school systems in the region, ours has seen a decline.

The Malaysian Smart Schools System - developed by a consortium led by Telekom Malaysia, and a flagship application of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) initiated by the then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir in 1997, has failed to bear fruit despite the billions of ringgits being spent. The Federal government’s 2009 National Key Results Area (NKRA) for education has not produced any report card to convince us that the NKRA initiatives are delivering results.

Children in Sarawak cannot be allowed to fall victim to Malaysia’s failing education system. It is a priority of the new Sarawak government to immediately and quickly establish a new education system that works to raise Sarawak children to a level as those in Korea, Finland and Singapore – countries that have that world’s best performing education systems.

The Sarawak Community Action Network (SCAN) has undertaken a year-long study to understand how to develop a high performing education system for Sarawak. The result of the study is to be used by the new Sarawak state government to establish an education system that truly works for children of Sarawak. The new government cannot afford to have a single child fail and that is what today’s adult Sarawakians owe to the coming generations of Sarawakians.

The study involved an analysis of selected education systems from different countries that have improved significantly, analysis of education systems that have been maintaining top positions, interviews with some thought leaders in those education systems and an analysis of the annual OECD PISA results from 2003 to 2009. During the course of the study, elements that are specific to the individual system and those that are of universal relevance were explored in order to help Sarawak’s new educational leaders replicate the success of high performing education systems.

This paper presents a summary of the findings of SCAN’s study.

The study began with these key questions: Why do some education syste

ms always perform better and improve at a faster rate than others? Why do some schools consistently succeed where others do not? What do successful school systems have in common? What methods and tools do they employ to improve learning outcomes of students?

The SCAN study found three most important universal elements that work:

1. Selective hiring of the right people to be teachers,
2. Develop them into highly effective instructors, and
3. Ensure that the system is capable of delivering only the best instruction for each student.

The successful systems demonstrate that significant improvement in desired results can be achieved in a short time – 3 to 6 years. The systems also show that by applying these practices, significant improvements is achievable in failing school systems and that the practices are applicable to any system, irrespective of culture and geography.The following commonly used approaches to improve education systems in many countries, including the US and the UK, have been shown to be least effective, in that they do not contribute significantly to student outcomes as measured by scores in mathematics, science and reading:

1. Increase in public spending per student,
2. Improvements in student-to-teacher ratio,
3. Decrease in class size,
4. Decrease in school size,
5. Structural reforms in the governance of schools, such as autonomy of schools governed by elected boards and decentralization of powers to local school districts,
6. Reforms in curriculum standards,
7. Changes in assessments and testings,
8. Funding of schools,
9. Inspection of quality, and
10. Reforming relationship of schools to communities.

The SCAN study shows unquestionable evidence: student learning cannot be improved without improving quality of instruction. It is also noted that almost every education system have undertaken the process of reducing class size. For example, most countries in OECD over the past 7 years have increased the teacher-student ratio. However, evidence shows that this effort does not significantly result in better student outcomes, except at the very early grades. More teachers translate to less money per teacher and systems cannot be selective about who could be teachers.

Evidence from the SCAN study suggests that the new Sarawak educational leaders must focus on quality of teachers as this is the main driver of the variation in student learning. The quality of any education system cannot be higher than the quality of its teachers.

For example, a seminal research in one education system shows that if 2 average 8-year-old children were taught by different teachers – one a high performing teacher and the other a low performer, the learning outcomes of the students diverge by more than 50 percentile points within 3 years. Reducing class size from 30 to 15 students improves an average student’s performance by, at most, 8 percentile points. In a study of another system, evidence shows that students in earlier years of schooling, when placed with low-performing teachers for several years consecutively, suffer from irreversible educational loss. In some systems, students who score in the top 20% on literacy and numeracy at age 7, are twice as likely to obtain a university degree as children in the bottom 20%.

Sarawak’s new education leaders now have evidence suggesting that even in good education systems, children who do not make good progress in their early school years because they are not taught by teachers of sufficient skills and competencies, have very small chance of recovering the lost years. All top performing education systems depend ultimately on the quality of its teachers.

All top performing systems from Dallas to Seoul and from Singapore to Helsinki, dispel the common belief that it is impossible to make teaching a preferred profession for good number of high-performers and that attracting better people requires the government to pay higher salaries. These systems have shown that making teaching the career of choice does not depend on high pay, but more on small, simple policy choices such as: designing and establishing robust hiring and training processes, giving attractive starting pay, and managing the status of the profession more carefully. For Sarawak’s new educational leaders, it means legislating an entirely new policy on education so that a new education system can be implemented rapidly.

By continuing the education system of the Federal government in Sarawak, we will only fail Sarawak’s future generation.

http://tinyurl.com/edsys2012

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?

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.

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.

Upgrading to Sexier, Touchier Handy Mate

If guys could have girlfriends like having the cellphones - extension of our hands to accomplish many things, and completely upgradable to new sexier, even irresistible version.

Three or four years ago, we were all happy with 2-megapixel cameras embedded into our phones--it was enough to get a pretty good picture, record a VGA-resolution movie, basically capture moments you'd otherwise never photograph because you take your cellphone to more places than your camera. But then the megapixel count began to creep higher.

There was the 5-megapixel LG KG920 and Sony Ericsson K850. Samsung's SCH-V770 pushed the figure to 7. Some kind of barrier was then broken and over the last year or so there was a flurry of 8-megapixel devices: the Sony Ericsson C905, the LG KC780 and KC910, the Samsung SPH-V8200--which was reportedly the first--and many others.

How many of us print out our pictures bigger than a standard letter-sized piece of paper? For that, you need only around a 6- to 7-megapixel image for that task--anything higher adds detail you will never see. For the standard 6 x 4-inch photo, about 5-megapixels will do. And that's just printing them out: To show photos on the HDTVs now beginning to grace Malaysians' homes, you need a maximum of 2.1-megapixels, and the average digital photoframe will do VGA resolution--that's 640 x 480, or only 0.3-megapixels.

And now 12-megapixel phones are here!

An an iPhone 4G that's not an Apple iPhone. It has an interesting, if excessive-sounding 12-megapixel camera there, looking like a super-slim pocket digital cam. It's powerful too, with masterpiece Schneider-Kreuznach optics, autofocus and a 3200 ISO rating. It's also got a proper xenon flash. And it records video in 720p HD. It's too iPhoney.

The handset comes complete with a new feature dubbed Intellizoom. Other camera stuff include ISO up to 3200, camera images geo-tagging and zero shutter lag, which presumably means images will be taken as fast as with a dedicated digital camera.

LG GC990 specs include:

• 3.2 inch touchscreen display with 16 million colors and unknown resolution
• S-Class Touch UI
• Accelerometer for UI auto-rotate
• Wi-Fi with DLNA
• GPS and A-GPS
• Bluetooth
• Wi-Fi with DLNA,
• camera images geo-tagging and zero shutter lag, which presumably means images will be taken as fast as with a dedicated digital camera
• TV-out
• DivX and Xvid video formats support.

LG GC990 Louvre's 12.1MP camera features autofocus, plus:

• Schneider Kreuznach lens
• ISO up to 3200
• Xenon flash
• Intellizoom and Touch Focus
• HD (1280 x 720 pixels) video recording at 30fps

Manufacturers should instead, spend all that R&D money improving the optics, autofocus and flash on the poor-performing models we already have, and let us buy a cellphone that takes great photos, irrespective of how many pixels it has.

And guys can stick to a single girlfriend without having to change to a new upgraded version.

Hot Agnes Monica at Bidayuh Gawai Festival?

How Bidayuhs Measure Up Today

If Agnes Monica's hot statistics are to reveal anything, it would be that many rural Bidayuhs also do not have enough clothing to cover their bodies. But Agnes Monica's exposure is nothing compared to UNDP statistics that reveal communities living in rural areas of Sarawak are among the worse off when compared to the rest of the country, and often face considerable hardships including securing land rights and other basic rights to development.

Many of the state’s communities such as the Bidayuh have, relatively low human capital, lack ready access to basic amenities and facilities, and because the physical infrastructure is underdeveloped in the areas where they live, they remain poorly connected to markets.

We know that for a strong Sarawak, we need quality human capital across races including minority groups such as the Bidayuh. However, our education system today is failing us. Quality health care fail to reach the majority of Sarawakians who are in the rural areas. GDP growth is concentrated only in major towns, not in the rural areas where most Sarawakians are.

The Bidayuh and other Dayak people have seen escalating erosion to their land tenure held under Sarawak Native Customary Rights (NCR), from first massive logging, and then giant plantations and dam building have robbed many Dayak communities of their land. Without land, the physical survival and the survival of their cultural traditions and ethnic identity are threatened.

Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact Foundation (AIPP) secretary-general Joan Carling urged Malaysia to take up the recommendation by other countries such as Mexico, which raised the issue of poor human rights record with regards to indigenous communities during the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) hearing in Geneva last year.

She said indigenous groups in Malaysia had long been fighting for their right to their native territories, and these struggles continue today. Although Malaysia adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in September 2007, there has been no real change on the ground to address the land-grab issue affecting many indigenous people, such as the Bidayuh.

Bidayuhs are a minority indigenous group in Sarawak. There are about 169,000 Bidayuhs, who constitute some 8% of the state’s population. Most of them live in Kuching, Padawan, Serian, Bau and Lundu areas in the 1st Division.

Bidayuh today remain one of the marginalized indigenous minority groups in Malaysia and represent a population of those living below poverty line. Like the other Dayaks, living mostly in the vast rural areas of Sarawak, many still live without basic amenities such as roads, jetties, clinics, treated drinking water, and electricity. Time for them has stood still since independence in 1963.

Issues of the Bidayuh Today
While the rest of the majority races in Malaysia progress in terms of socio-economic and education, the Bidayuh remain in the fringes of development and some Bidayuh communities live in poverty. Critical and urgent issues facing Bidayuh include:

1. Land are not titled and unaware of their rights under common law. Native Customary Rights land has been taken over by the state government for sale and development at any time. As Bidayuh are still dependent on subsistence farming, titled land is necessary to progress to modern farming.
2. Bidayuh participation in both the traditional and modern businesses are poor. This is hampered by limited business opportunity, highly dependent on public spending and government projects and poor networking. Some small sized firms made some inroads in small-scale construction sectors. However, none appears to be able to sustain their business due to easy entry and hence are very competitive.
3. Bidayuh form a large portion of the hardcore poor in Sarawak, living in poor housing with insufficient food supply and lack of access to quality health care, communication and transportation.
4. As most Bidayuh live in the rural areas, they are receiving the poorer quality of education than what people in the urban schools are getting. While good early childhood education is critical to the development of children, rural children are not getting pre-school development that urban children are getting. This leaves Bidayuh children to continue to lag behind others in education.
5. The high number of Bidayuh children not getting entrance into public institutions of higher learning, give rise to more Bidayuh children being left behind in the knowledge economy.

What Bidayuh Need to Achieve Equal Progress
There is widespread resentment among Bidayuh that they continue to be marginalized and continue to be left on the fringes of development. To achieve equal progress with other races, equal opportunities and privileges must be given to Bidayuh. The following are critical for the state government to provide the Bidayuh in order to achieve progress:

1. Immediate halt to indiscriminate acquisition of untitled native land by the state government.

2. Expedite the issuing of titles to all native land.

3. Allocate native land that have been designated as state land to Bidayuh families as temporary occupation for a minimum of 60 years for the purpose of modern farming. Land not developed within 3 years are to be taken back and allocated to other families.

4. Establish a well-funded and appropriately staffed Farming Program for Bidayuh that will among other things, do the following:

• Provide financial aid to Bidayuh families to develop their land for modern farming. Access to the aid must be easy and mechanism for repayment must also be easy.
• In addition to providing financial aid, the government must also provide quality professional assistance to upgrade the knowledge and skills of Bidayuh families on modern farming.
• Encourage Young People to Become Farmers: The Farming Program will establish a new program to identify and train the next generation of farmers. The program will also provide incentives to make it easier for new farmers to afford their first farm.
• Encourage Organic and Local Agriculture: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will help organic farmers afford to certify their crops and will also promote regional food systems.
• Strong Safety Net for Family Farmers: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide family farmers with stability and predictability and strengthen producer protections to ensure family farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.
• Support Small Business Development: The Farming Program for Bidayuh will provide capital for family farmers to create value-added enterprises, like cooperative marketing initiatives and farmer-owned processing plants. They also will establish a small business and micro-enterprise initiative for rural Bidayuh kampongs.
• Improve Rural Education for Bidayuh: From the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is their teacher. To improve the quality of education that Bidayuh children are receiving, the state government must provide incentives for talented individuals to enter the teaching profession, including increased pay for teachers who work in rural areas.

The government must create a Rural Revitalization Program to attract and retain young people to rural Bidayuh kampongs. More quality community colleges should be created and increase research and educational funding for community colleges in Bidayuh areas. Early childhood development centres must be established in Bidayuh kampongs and staffed by only trained and qualified professionals. The government must ensure all rural Bidayuh children have access to pre-school; provide affordable and high-quality child care that will promote child development and ease the burden on working families.

The government must ensure competent, effective teachers in rural schools that are organized for success. The government should provide service scholarships to recruit and prepare teachers who commit to working in underserved Bidayuh dominated districts. To support teachers, the government must foster ongoing improvements in teacher education, provide mentoring for beginning teachers, create incentives for shared planning and learning time for teachers. To retain teachers, the government must support career pathways that provide ongoing professional development and reward accomplished teachers for their expertise. An initiative must be taken to help eliminate teacher shortages in hard-to-staff areas and subjects, improve teacher retention rates, strengthen teacher preparation programs, improve professional development, and better utilize and reward accomplished teachers.

6. Increase the number of seats for Bidayuh students in public institutions of higher learning: In order for the Bidayuh community to come to equal progress in education with other races, more places should be allocated for the Bidayuh students in local public colleges and universities.

7. Improve Health Care for Bidayuh Communities: Rural health care providers are often less experienced and do not have access to the latest medical and healthcare practices in order to deliver the best clinical outcome. Rural folks have to come to Kuching city to get better medical treatment and that is often when illness become more serious. The government must increase rural access to quality care by promoting health information technologies like telemedicine and staff rural clinics and hospitals with more experienced and better trained physicians and nurses. A Nurse-Family Partnership should be established to all Bidayuh, first-time mothers each year. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to Bidayuh expectant mothers and their families in Bidayuh kampongs.

8. Establish a Bidayuh Business Development Assistance Program: As Bidayuh community lags far behind in participation in business and entrepreneurship, the Bidayuh need specific business development assistance. The assistance program will include allocation of government infrastructure projects to Bidayuh community, allocation of business premises in strategic locations and access to financial aid and grants. Rural infrastructure projects must be allocated to local Bidayuh contractors.

9. Expand Access to Jobs: The government must invest in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Bidayuh succeed in the workforce. The government must also create a program to directly engage disadvantaged youth in job opportunities to strengthen their communities, while also providing them with practical skills in important high-growth career field.

10. Establish At Least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs: The government must create at least 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs in areas that have high levels of poverty and low levels of student academic achievement in Bidayuh dominated districts. The Promise Bidayuh Kampongs have a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth development efforts and after-school activities, to an entire kampong from birth to college.

The government should work with community and business leaders to identify and address the unique economic development barriers of every one of the 20 Promise Bidayuh Kampongs. The government will provide additional resources to address community needs.

The government, by implementing all of the above with full commitment on a sustainable basis, can help bring the Bidayuh community on equal progress with other races. As Bidayuh progress, Sarawak and the nation thrives. The nation will be strengthened for further prosperity.