Cyrus on: PRI’s The World (Jan. 13, 2010)

Dear Friends,

I’ve been informed that my piece on Google’s new policy towards China will be airing today.

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):

NYC – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 4 pm Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 2 pm Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

You can also likely find it on your local public radio station, and The World’s site later in the day and also on my site if you miss the broadcast.

Also, don’t forget about The World’s Tech Podcast, hosted by my boss, Clark Boyd. It comes out every Friday.

Lemme know if you hear it!

[audio:http://cyrusfarivar.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/011320105.mp3]

African Renaissance statue in Dakar angers locals

Apparently, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has commissioned a 160-ft high bronze statue commemorating the “African Renaissance.”

The statue, “shows a muscular man in a heroic posture, outstretched arms wrapped around his wife and child, who is balanced on one of his biceps,” reports the Associated Press. Plus, the entire group is coming out of a volcano. (Last I checked there weren’t any volcanos anywhere close to Senegal.)

Senegalese media reports that the statue will be dedicated in a grandiose ceremony on December 12, 2009, with various African leaders and Brazilian President Lula Ignacio da Silva in attendance.

There’s also apparently a poetry contest, too, on the theme of “African Renaissance,” open to “all of Africa and its diaspora”.

Poems can be written in any of the continents three major languages: French, English or Arabic. The first three winners in each language will receive a prize of one, two and three million CFA, respectively. That’s about $2,200, $4,400 and $6,600.

You can compete by sending your entry to:

Ministère de la Culture et de la Francophonie
Building administratif, 3ème étage
BP : 4001 Dakar
Sénégal

Or email: renafricaine@gmail.com.

Deadline: Friday, October 23, 2009, 16h00 GMT

The AP adds that the statue costs $27 million to build (the President insists entirely through private donations).

If all of that wasn’t weird enough, here’s where it gets really weird:

– President Wade, according to the AP: “[maintains] he is entitled to 35 percent of any tourist revenues it generates because he owns “intellectual rights” for conceiving the idea, with the rest to go to the government.”

– AP adds: “Nearly 50 North Korean workers from the state-run Mansudae Art Studio in Pyongyang were brought in to build the statue because of their expertise with bronze art, and some Senegalese have complained of its communist-era design.”

Huh? WTF?

In other North Korea news, the DPRK soccer team, which qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 1966, will be training and playing exhibition games in Nantes, France from Oct. 5-15.

AFP reports: “[North Korea] will take on second division side Nantes at La Roche-sur-Yon on October 9 and the Congo national team on October 13 at Le Mans.

The date for a third game, probably against a French footballer’s union side, is being arranged.”

And finally, China is getting deeper in Senegalese affairs: “We can say that China has done more for Senegal in four years than what the Western countries have for her in 10 or 20 years,” the Chinese ambassador to Senegal, Lu Shaye, said on Tuesday in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

August 27: Cyrus on PRI’s The World

Dear Friends,

I’ve been informed that my radio piece on the controversy over the “Songs for Tibet” album, iTunes and China, will be airing today.

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):

New York – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 4 pm Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 2 pm Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

Will be available on The World’s site later in the day and on my site if you miss the broadcast.

Lemme know if you hear it!

Update: Audio is here.

What I’m Reading

Ivan Krstic:

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

New York Magazine:

The Democratic Party is closer than it’s ever been to a political nightmare—a deadlocked convention. Though the odds of its actually happening are still remote, the idea is so rich with dramatic possibility that we asked Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., former West Wing writer-producer, to play out a scenario in movie-treatment form. The premise is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton arrive in Denver, neither having sufficient delegates to gain the nomination nor a decisive majority in the popular vote. And so it’s on…

The New Yorker:

In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.

The New Yorker:

To his fans, Li is less a language teacher than a testament to the promise of self-transformation. In the two decades since he began teaching, at age nineteen, he has appeared before millions of Chinese adults and children. He routinely teaches in arenas, to classes of ten thousand people or more. Some fans travel for days to see him. The most ardent spring for a “diamond degree” ticket, which includes bonus small-group sessions with Li. The list price for those seats is two hundred and fifty dollars a day—more than a full month’s wages for the average Chinese worker. His students throng him for autographs. On occasion, they send love letters.

Shanghai’s booming subway

If there’s one thing that I love to imagine, it’s how much more liveable Los Angeles would be if there was a decent transportation system.

Turns out, the future of LA’s public transportation might be in Shanghai:

Los Angeles Times:


In 1990, four years after Los Angeles broke ground on its Red Line subway, Shanghai began to build a subway system too.

Los Angeles was one of the richest cities in the world, with an extensive freeway network, top-notch engineers and serious congestion problems. Shanghai was poor, a decaying post-colonial metropolis shaking off decades of economic stagnation. Its streets were congested too — with bicycles.

Most Los Angeles residents know the story of what happened to the Red Line, which was designed to carry passengers from Downtown to the sea but hasn’t quite gotten there. Only recently have planning discussions seriously revived to add a rail line extending farther west.

Shanghai? It is well on its way to building the largest urban rail mass transit system in the world.

You can’t walk very far in a straight line in Shanghai these days without coming across construction of a new subway line or station. Already, Shanghai has opened five subway lines and 95 stations serving 2 million people a day, and as many as six more lines are scheduled to open in the next couple of years. Sometime in the next decade, its subway system probably will surpass the world’s largest and busiest systems, those in New York, Moscow and Tokyo.

An Estonian on China

Probably one of the most interesting things that I’ve heard on this trip, from a guy who is working on setting up more mobile data services in Estonia. Televork is buying equipment from a Chinese company, ZTE.

“Europeans are trying to enjoy their quality of life while the Chinese are trying to improve it.”

— Laur Lemendik
Services Development Manager
Televork
February 9, 2007
Tallinn, Estonia