Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...
http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=ajRkanRVekNqSGdwZWw4ZX...
http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=dkxLMm1KTER2cG5jWkd2Z2...
http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=b1FveVRBQ2tyRlpWNjFMam...
I'd think the problem is that you're piling up two technologies known for being very approximate and the results would be likely to be pretty far off to the original meaning. Which is especially sensitive for the current situation.
It's because speech recognition does not exist for Egyptian Arabic.
There are some research programs, but no actual completed products.
This may be surprising to some, but speech recognition is only available in a small number of languages. Mainly European languages plus Chinese.
There is nothing preventing speech recognition in other languages, it's just no one has done it.
But I did not not know about them, and I did search. Perhaps Google doesn't either.
But that language is only used in public; books and newspapers uses the original language.
http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0...
Hi, this is Monasef from Cairo. I just wanted to let the world know that we have been disconnected from our last point of communications through the Internet .. and there is a strong word going around that we will be again disconnected from mobile phone calls. So I wanted everyone to know, in case we don't get .. in case you don't get any feedback from what's happening tomorrow .. and I didn't want anyone to worry about us.
They did this before ... the only difference is the last time when they did this I was completely freaked out I was so scared they are going to shoot us all and nobody would know about it. This time, I am not scared at all. I see that this .. like I wanna tell them bring it on! - we are excited we are happy we are going to be at Tahrir Square tomorrow, we are going to be huge and we are going to do our march and do our protest .. and Mubarak is going -- out -- <cry of relief/excitement> Be with us! byebye
The name of the lady is Mona Saif, who sent another tweet in Arabic (native speaker here): http://bit.ly/dTj11s
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_...
The ability to communicate thoughts, events, instantaneously, as they happen, and from the people actively involved in those events around the world, is unprecedented in human history.
The revolution has been tweeted. It does not depend solely on twitter and the like, but these are not tools to be underestimated.
Just compare the quality of the content you're getting by following people actively engaged in the revolution on twitter, with what you see on CNN. This is revolutionary.
Near the start of the uprising, parts of the protest pamphlet were leaked online (http://j.mp/hZf7uY) before the protest was set to take place. The pamphlet explicitly requested secrecy so that the details of the protest would not get into the hands of the government.
I was lying in bed in San Francisco, watching as news of this broke out on my iPhone twitter stream. Many people, myself included, were able to convince the author of the piece to delete his tweet with the link to the post, and while the post itself wasn't taken down, I wasn't able to find it from the publication's front page, and the post itself was edited to include a link to a video submitted by a twitter user of a man being shot and killed by the Egyptian police.
And that's just a small incident I happened to stumble across. I think that illustrates how profoundly the world has changed, where individuals, anywhere on the planet, can influence people and events in ways that can have significant consequences. All that, through a few tweets.
The networking capabilities of these appliations is what makes them useful to protesting organisations. Otherwise there woudl be a deluge of emails going out to notify of each individual update - rather than a simple, distributed notification which people can jump on at any point.
I think people are overestimating the importance of the internet here. The fact that the internet has been turned off seems to be pretty low on the list of greivances. The skyrocketing price of food would (for instance) seem to be a much more important driving factor.
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5962180-egyp...
That being said, the 'nonchalantness' in this line regarding the SayNow acquisition was quite funny, "We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality."
Well done Google.
Don't get me wrong, I want to know what is going on there, and anyone willing to leak that information out is doing something heroic imho - but the safety of these individuals could be in serious threat - or maybe I am just overly paranoid...
Regardless, personally I'd do both. While it's nowhere near comparable to the situation in Egypt, witnessing police brutality in English demonstrations (yes, FAR FAR FAR less severe than in Egypt, but still... one of my earliest memories was being on a political demonstration at age four in which troops of policemen on horses were charging at us with riot police behind) hasn't stopped me. And, where I in the Egyptians' situation, it wouldn't stop my then, either. The danger is far worse, but so the need for action is also far greater.
But here is a more amusing story: A boy has a group in Facebook and shared some photos of the interior minister. He left his information out. The cops caught him and brought him to the ministry and abused him. When he was kicked out of the ministry, he met with a TV reporter and told his story and in the end he said that he's going to start a page where he'll put all of the government abuses and funny pictures about the government. The story made my day.
Many things people in Egypt currently do would probably lead to punishment if they did it all on their own, the mass protects them (and that’s one of the reasons why revolutions can work at all). Even if the regime decides to do something about it they would have to use blunt force and not surgical precision, there are just too many things happening at the same time to deal with all of them individually.
This obviously doesn’t make it absolutely certain that there will be no problems, I just think it’s rather unlikely.
Alternatively, even if they pick "the right side", they might wind up inadvertently helping the wrong side, since the right side can then say "Hey look, our enemies are being propped up by foreign interests!"
Does this mean that foreigners can't take sides in political battles going on in other countries? No, but they should certainly be circumspect about it and do their research and not jump on a bandwagon just because it happens to smell nice.
The situation the way I see it is this: currently the bad guys are in power. The opposition forces are the not-so-bad guys (liberal democracy types) and the much worse guys (radical Islamists).
The Muslim Brotherhood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood) are, after all, not just radical Islamists -- they're pretty much the dudes who invented radical Islam. Their obtaining power would... well, it would be bad, especially for non-Muslims in Egypt. And probably anywhere else.
My opinion on whom to support? Well, I'm just thankful that it's none of my fricking business and I can't do anything to change the situation anyway, so I don't really have to make a decision. But I am uncomfortable with the level of optimism I'm seeing from some western folks who assume the good guys will necessarily triumph (or worse, that the Muslim Brotherhood aren't really bad guys after all because they say they're not in favour of violence and they only want to form a unity government with the liberal forces whom they're totally not going to kick out at the earliest opportunity).
If an oppressive new regime rises, then it's bad because it's oppressive, and you couldn't blame it on the existence of freedom of communication during the revolution. Of course I don't speak for Google in any of this, but I think it's simply supporting the notion that, when in doubt, more freedom of communication is probably better. (At least at this point, where the status quo is currently, "cut off from the outside world".)
Ultimately, this system is an interesting use of technology and makes for good infotainment. I have doubts to the extent which social networking impacts peoples lives in or moves events in Egypt. I see it as a cheap and easy way for news agencies to relate international news back to our lives in the west, possibly to make news stories more commercially viable.
I just don't like the precedents of companies taking activist roles in foreign countries.
You really didn't look closely at the tanks and guns on TV.
But you bring out a good point. The American government is approaching the crisis in a responsible, and moderate way precisely because they have an investment in Egypt and will have to deal with the consequences of the crisis.
Tech activists are behaving irresponsibly, and encouraging civil disobedience precisely because they have no investment in Egypt and can walk away if things there deteriorate. Armchair revolutionaries.
Many of our ills as a society are caused or perpetuated by too many individuals and corporations remaining amoral in the public arena.
Amiright?
Amiright?
Rules only exist for those who don't make them.
Wau Holland Foundation is responding by suing PayPal. That's how the law works.
Partisan politics has no place in business.
Posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa
Wait, yes, he's Egyptian: http://www.google.com/profiles/ak.mardini?hl=en
While I agree with your broader point, if this particular contribution comes from an Egyptian rather than an American it does seem to have some relevance for your original comment, which I took to pertain to this particular piece of software rather than to just be a general comment.
The real questions is: how does one 'take no sides' when dealing with international commerce? Is selling weapons to both sides, 'taking no sides?' Or is the only true way to 'take no sides' just to refuse to do international business at all?
The Babylonians didn't need Twitter when they rose up against the Assyrian Empire. The Inaros' didn't need Facebook when they confronted the Persians in Egypt (although they did have the help of the Greeks). Julius Caesar didn't tweet 'hey watch out Pompey' when he marched on Roma. Did the Sicilian Vespers need Twitter to alter the balance of European power under King Charles 1st. Maybe the great Peasant revolt in Medieval England would have been more successful had they used Twitter - although they did manage to keep the term poll tax out of the tax lexicon for 600 years. Then, of course, the period of history after Elizabeth 1st where pretty much everyone revolted at some point (even here in America) those all seemed to happen without need for social networking.
I think humans are perfectly well equipped to revolt without social media. The currency of revolt has always been large numbers and big sticks.
Maybe our (the HN community) sees the world through a lens that makes it impossible to accomplish what is an everyday occurrence (on the historical scale) without the internet.
Thousands of wars have been fought without guns.
Millions of businesses have been built, grown, and died without the use of the internet.
It doesn't mean that computers add no value to companies.
To be certain: The Egyptians don't need social media to get their freedom. Just the same, communication is essential to any group activity, and social media is an advanced, instantaneous form of communication. It's a force multiplier for anyone seeking to maximize the effectiveness of the revolution. If the Egyptian security forces have access to modern tools, it's in the interest of the revolution to have modern tools as well. Even if social media only gets 10% more people to show up for a given demonstration, at the numbers we're seeing now, that's tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
If communicating via the internet didn't help, why would Mubarak shut it down?
No offense intended, but... if that's your attitude, why bother reading anything on this site?
The Babylonians, Persians and so on had much smaller populations back then. It makes a difference. The scale of population we are dealing with currently is, as far as I know, unprecedented in the history of humankind. That means that things which worked historically will be insufficient to the current situation.
2. Think about how the organisation, weaponry, instruments of control and scale of governments has changed over the last several decades from anything ever seen before. Decentralised communications now mean a people can communicate perhaps even faster than their military, for example.
3. Perhaps you've missed that communication allows the voice of the people to reach the outside world in a more personal and representative way than traditional media, and inspires more people to bring pressure onto those governments and remind them the world is watching their actions. If you think that's unimportant, it's precisely what Amnesty International uses on a relatively small scale to great effect.
You are dead wrong in claiming that it happened without social media. They didn't have the same types of social media that we do today, but the version they did have they used to the hilt. Back in their day it was the printing press. Everything from pamphlets to Thomas Paine's Common Sense really were the social media of their day. And without them, the US Revolution could very well have failed.
Conversely were Thomas Paine alive today, can you doubt that he would have a blog and use twitter?
http://interfax.werebuild.eu/2011/01/31/fax-to-interfax-for-...
We all more-or-less own internationally syndicated newspapers now. Twitter is just the most common one.
It's nice and all, but just seems like a solution looking for a problem.
Display would be the same style as trending (maybe next to it and re-position the suggested users) where each "watched" user is displayed with a running tally of total tweets and next to that the # of new tweets since I last visited their page? I guess lists would be a temporary solution, but even they get saturated easily.
completely off topic, but maybe some others share the same desire, I figure this is a good topic to use as an example :-)
If you're on the move a lot, you can sync your columns across computers / phones, but that does involve trusting them with some of your account details.
doing my app with the google speech recognition API would be awesome!
Another thought: it actually seems like the reverse strategy of the aftermath of the floods in Australia. Where services need to keep the phone lines open for rescue workers and orgs, so people could tweet their distress msgs and location to relief orgs using broadband access over 3g.
Come on.
On the other hand sometimes revolutions do produce better governments. I think Indonesia kicking out the Soehartos and installing a fairly reasonable democracy is a good recent example.
I'm not sure the American Revolution counts as a revolution at all -- it was more of an independence movement, and I think these tend to have a better record than true revolutions.
I've asked an Egyptian friend living in the UK if he could offer translations (transcripts) of some of these.
I follow this account and get links that I have to click on and then click on the "play" button again in order to listen to some(or any)one's broken english?