za3tar

I have created a “Facebook Event” for the Blog About Palestine Day event. Please RSVP if you are interested, and please spread the word to your friends and colleagues.

The event is called “Blog About Palestine Day”, and here is a URL to it: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=12355034748

***UPDATE:*** A Facebook event for this initiative has been created. Please join the event and pass the message on to your friends (more info here).

Dear all,

May 15th of this year is the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba –which marked the beginning of the modern age Palestinian plight and suffering. This date is remembered annually on local, regional, and global levels.

I am certain that many in the blogosphere will dedicate some posts to commemorate this tragic event. However, inspired by the success of the “Blog About Jordan Day” initiative, i would like to start a formal initiative to encourage everybody to dedicate one post on Thursday, May 15th, to talk about Palestine or the Palestinian Experience.

There are no restrictions on what you can write, or the language that you can use. Really, anything that talks about Palestine, or the Palestinians; in the past, present, or future; political, social, economical, or any other aspect is welcomed. The goal of this event will be to share thoughts, and raise awareness about the Palestinian situation. Hopefully, with everyone’s support, this will be such a spectacular event that it will catch the eye of the mainstream media (specially that the Palestinian situation is inadequately and incorrectly represented in most of the western media outlets).

FAQ:

• Do I have to be Palestinian / Arab to participate ?
  No, everybody is welcomed to join in on this effort.
• Does it have to represent the Palestinian point of view (or be a positive article) ?
  No, you are free, and encouraged, to write whatever you want.
• Does it have to be about the Nakba precisely ?
  No, you can talk about the history of the Palestinian plight, current internal and external affairs, or outlooks for possible future resolutions to this conflict and how do you think can we achieve and maintain peace.
• Does it have to be a political article ?
  No, you are free to talk about any aspect of the Palestinian life inside and outside Palestine. You are free to talk about whatever you want.

I would appreciate it if you could help me spread the word about this event. For your convenience, i have created some simple counters and banners for this event. You can find their code below:

Thank you in advance for your help and support.

**UPDATE:** Thanks to Qwaider for mentioning that blogs *hosted* on Wordpress.com (and possibly other engines) might face some trouble embedding JavaScript code as is done above. If this is the case for you, you can use the following image banners below:

<a href="http://www.za3tar.net/2008/05/01/blog-about-palestine-day/"><img id="countdownimage" src="http://files.za3tar.net/pal-day/buttons/pal-day-en.jpg" border="0" alt="Blog About Palestine Day" style="background-color:#000"></a>

<a href="http://www.za3tar.net/2008/05/01/blog-about-palestine-day/"><img id="countdownimage" src="http://files.za3tar.net/pal-day/buttons/pal-day-ar.jpg" border="0" alt="Blog About Palestine Day" style="background-color:#000"></a>

<a href="http://www.za3tar.net/2008/05/01/blog-about-palestine-day/"><img id="countdownimage" src="http://files.za3tar.net/pal-day/buttons/pal-day-en-big.jpg" border="0" alt="Blog About Palestine Day" style="background-color:#000"></a>

<a href="http://www.za3tar.net/2008/05/01/blog-about-palestine-day/"><img id="countdownimage" src="http://files.za3tar.net/pal-day/buttons/pal-day-ar-big.jpg" border="0" alt="Blog About Palestine Day" style="background-color:#000"></a>

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I believe it is the actions of everyday people that shapes our lives. That is why i am usually especially cautious when presented with such material.

However, as a Palestinian who spent some time in the United States, i have definitely felt the media bias in support of Israel in our conflict. This bias forms a public knowledge that is erroneous, yet unfortunately people often translate it into “facts” on Wikipedia and other sites. While you should never trust Wikipedia blind-heartedly (specially on non-scientific topics), many people do in fact get introduced to subjects and form their opinions about things solely based on Wikipedia. This is specially true among school students.

A recent article on Desert Peace blog uncovered a series of secret email exchanges among members of a pro-Israel group called CAMERA (”Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America”). These emails reveal a plot to form a group of Wikipedia editors who would work slowly and individually to gain the trust of the Wikipedia community editors and administrators, at which point they would start modifying Israel and Palestine related articles to better suite their interests.

Again, please remember that i do not promote conspiracy theories. What i am talking about is very well documented in the email evidence.

The emails go on to mention how team members should pick usernames that would not show a pro-Israel personal opinion [page 4], and how that these members should start out by editing random, non-Israel-related, articles all over Wikipedia and then work their way to Israel related articles [page 5]. They talked about how they can collaborate together to turn votes on controversial issues to what they deem preferable (regardless of the truth) [page 12]. They even went into the level of details as to how to lure-in potential Palestinian editors in a way as to set them up to discredit them [page 7]. You can find out many more horrible schemes inside these exchanges.

In short, this series of email exchanges show hard evidence of a group of seemingly dedicated individuals who are plotting together to distort Wikipedia articles to the advantage of the Israeli point of view; disregarding factual historical facts, and predictably down playing the Palestinian and Arab suffering. One of the email writers describes this campaign as a “war” that they have to “build an army for, equip it, and train it” [page 11].

I am sure that many of you would shrug and say: “What’s new ? this has been happening all along, and for far more credible sites than Wikipedia”. While this might be true, in this case we do have hard evidence to document this. So this is something that we can, and should, bring to public awareness to highlight this understated aspect of the plight of the Palestinians and Arabs.

My fellow bloggers and readers, i ask you if you can please raise some awareness about this issue. If you have a blog, blog about this. Upload the emails to your blog (so that there would be many copies of that document online). If you are attending a University in the USA, Canada, or Europe, please try to write an article about this in your school’s newspaper (or at least print the emails pdf and send it to your University’s paper editors). Even more preferably, just mail a copy of these emails to your regional newspaper. Be it, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Post, or whatever big newspaper is big in your area, we have to get the point across. You don’t even have to put your name on the envelope if you want.

I also turn to big bloggers with big readership and fellowship, such as Qwaider, and many of those featured on Qwaider Planet. This is a perfect moment for citizen journalism. This is not just an issue local to Palestinians. Indeed the situation is similar for Islam related articles, as [page 7] also lists the article on “Dhimi” as “highly important”.

Here is the link to the email exchanges again:

click here to open the email exchange

Thank you for your help, and i hope together we can raise awareness of this dangerous issue.

يعني مش معقول … عمرها صارت معك (أو معكي)؟

اليوم طلعت من الحمام عل المكتب. وطول الوقت وأنا بغني “طلع الزين من الحمام” وبصفق (تسحيج) وبتهزهز زي أكني في عرس القرن. صار لي ساعتين على هذه حالة. زملائي في المكتب بفكروني مجنون أو إيشي من هذا القبيل. لسة الأضرب من هيك إنو سبب الغناء إنو أخيراً قدرت أشغل قطعت الـ “سيميوليشن” (بالعنقليزي) المطلوبة مني …. آخ يعني مش هيك البئوس

هي الأغنية .. يللا سوا

طلــــع الـــزيـــن مــن الحمـــام

اللّـــــه وإســــــم اللّــــه عليـــه

ويــا بــو الحطــــه والعقـــال

اللّـــــه وإســــــم اللّــــه عليـــه

منيـــن صـــايــد هـــالغـــزال؟

ونيـــالـــك يـــابــو حطـــــه

ويــا إم التـــوب مطـــرزتيــــــه

وحطيتـــي البـــلاوي فيـــــه

وعـــن جـــوزك خبتيـــــه

ويــــوم الـــزفــــة أطلعتيــه

يـــا حـــلالـــي و يــــا مـــالــــي

طلــــع الـــزيـــن مــن الحمـــام

اللّـــــه وإســــــم اللّــــه عليـــه

…

Unless you haven’t used the internet in the past 3 years or so, you are probably very well acquainted with CAPTCHAs already; they are these morphed letters or numbers you see on blogs and signup forms that are supposed to prevent spam. They are a product of research by the “human-based computation” / cryptography researcher Luis von Ahn (also here) at Carnegie Mellon University.

CAPTCHAs solve a simple problem; Spammers can write small applications that scan for input forms and fill out these forms automatically and repeatedly. If you run your own blog, you probably noticed this (spam actually isn’t written by people usually ). So the answer to this symptom is also simple, if spammers are using computer applications to automatically propagate spam, make part of the fill out form something that the computers can not recognize. So a CAPTCHA creates a sequence of characters and morphs it so that the program that is generating it itself can not read it (and hence other programs won’t be able to read it either), and puts it on the forms. We, being mostly human, are actually able to read and decode that morphed text, and thus by solving these little problems, we can assure the web application that is receiving this form, that we are indeed humans (not spam applications).

Needless to say, the idea of CAPTCHAs was a big hit. These things sprung all over the web and are now used everywhere. Recent studies put an estimate number of how many seconds does each average web surfers spend daily solving these CAPTCHAs. Although the amount is small for a single person, aggregating this amount over all internet users gives us a huge huge number of wasted “human cycles”. So, Luis decided to utilize that time.

As many of you know, there is a huge effort to digitize old books for which no electronic copies exist. Digitizing these books uses a process called OCR which is also provided by your average home scanner. Unfortunately OCR is a bit error prone and some words are not recognized correctly. However, given the awesome power of recognition that people poses, even though OCR programs might not be able to understand certain words, we can. But, who will be willing to sit in an office all day “recognizing” words ? This is a mundane job to say the least. Can we somehow outsource this job to the masses (without paying them ) ?

Introducing reCAPTCHA

Connecting the dots seems easy now, and a re-engineering of CAPTCHAs is made, and out comes reCAPTCHA (again by Luis and his team). A reCAPTCHA is just like your ordinary CAPTCHA, but instead of one morphed word you now have two. One of these words the server already knows the answer for, and the other one is unrecognizable by the OCR program. The thought is, if the entity filling out the form knows the answer for the thing that i already know, then it is highly likely that it also knows the answer for that other thing that i don’t know.

So, now every time you fill out one of these reCAPTCHA forms, (or comment on this blog ) you are helping digitize one word. If this spreads wide on the internet, we can have our old library digitized in no time.

Anyway, after this long introduction and motivation, i just would like to announce that i am adding reCAPTCHA to my blog. There is a ready wordpress plugin for it so i urge you all to add it if you can.

This is such a great quote:

First They Ignore You…
Then They Laugh At You…
Then They Fight You…
Then You Win.

Mohandas Gandhi

Isn’t this such a great quote! Anyway, along with this, here are is a collection of quotes that we now consider ridiculous:

1. The telephone has too many shortcomings to be serious considered as a means of communication.
   [Western Union 1876]
2. Everything that can be invented has been invented.
   [U.S. Patent Commissioner, 1899]
3. The phonograph has no commercial value at all.
   [Thomas Edison 1881]
4. The radio craze will die out in time.
   [Thomas Edison 1922]
5. The automobile has practically reached the limit of its development.
   [Scientific America 1909]
6. Man will not fly for fifty years.
   [Orville Wright 1901]
7. A rocket will never leave the Earth’s atmosphere.
   [New York Times 1936]
8. There is a world market for maybe five computers.
   [IBM’s Thomas Watson 1943]

This post’s contents were actually all taken from this commercial

Gosh, this commercial is at least 5 years old. I’ve actually never seen it on TV, only online. Unfortunately the company didn’t maintain an active link to it, but thanks to YouTube, it has resurfaced.

Never the less, this was one of my favorite commercials. It is really nice and really moving. …. just imagine if all of these experts were talking to you (well, with today’s technology they kinda are)

As an added bonus, here is another one with Mohammad Ali

Well, besides easy vector graphics, you can have something like this in one “image” file.

Note: the file might take a little while to load the images in the black boxes from flickr.

Have you ever felt the *NEED* and the *WANT* for an adrenaline rush ? If so, what do you do satisfy that desire ? I am really interested in what you have to say.

As for me, i usually try to satisfy that by playing a contact sport, or going to a relatively empty highway and driving fast (hopefully without getting a speeding ticket). Unfortunately, due to the “nice” weather i’ve been seeing here so far, my first option is virtually impossible. On top of that, since i relocated, the only “highways” near me are one-lane streets that make their way through woods, and i *really* don’t want to risk hitting a deer (thus rendering my car virtually useless).

Argh, the only excitement i’ve been exhibiting lately is either by writing an exquisite piece of code (sad, i know), or by making some nice progress on my research. Ahhh, that could be considered pathetic. So there is some excitement, i am working on a nice little interface enhancement for blog aggregators like qwaider planet, as well as another really exciting web application. But still, an extra boost of adrenaline couldn’t hurt (at least i think so).

Hahahaha .. this is hilarious.