The MMDA Navigator

Finally, MMDA does something which shows some semblance of sense.

A few days ago, the Metro Manila Development Authority released its first attempt of making information actually accessible to the public. The MMDA Navigator, an application for iPhones, iTouch and iPads, became available for download through iTunes.

The product of Yves Gonzales’ inspiration (Yves Gonzales is a lawyer and an iPad developer – a cool combination indeed – maybe he can make a bar exam reviewer app sometime haha), it took 9 months in the making

The app promises to make available live traffic conditions along 6 major roads and highways in the Metro, including EDSA, Quezon Ave, Espana, C5, Roxas Boulevard and SLEX; and they are now working to include both Katipunan and Commonwealth, 2 of the usually more congested thoroughfares in the metro.

The app allows users to look at traffic through the system view which is color-coded for instant identification, with red indicating heavy traffic, yellow for moderate and green for traffic (traffic light colors for easier understanding).

These data is encoded from the MMDA’s network of CCTVs scattered around the metro; the traffic enforcers (who are always looking for “pang-merienda”) armed with hand-held radio sets, and the public (a very good idea considering that using the public is like multiplying eyes and ears a thousandfold) through twitter (@MMDANavigator) or through mobile messaging (0933-7401258). Information from the public is verified by traffic enforcers, if the area does not have a CCTV camera.

Personally, I think this is the best idea a government agency has had in ages when it comes to updating information dissemination, it is just sad that they made the app available only to Apple product owners; meaning only the upper middle class and the upper class are the ones who are, more often than not, able to access the information. However, according to a radio DJ, I heard last night that they are developing programs for other hand-held devices for wider access and distribution. This is a great thing, considering that the app gives out valuable information relevant to every commuting person. The app became the 14th most downloaded app in the Philippine App Store, just 10 hours after its release.

Maybe I should buy an iPhone… so I can download the MMDA Navigator. Haha! We’ll see. :)

Computer-Generated Journalism

"Wisconsin appears to be in the driver's seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russel Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the 44-3. The Badgers started the drive at UNLV's 28-yard line thanks to a Jared Abbrederis punt return."

These words were culled from a football-game news brief that was generated well within 60 seconds. Who do you think the author might be? Well, it was authored by none other than a computer.

Thanks to the brilliant minds comprising Narrative Science, artificial intelligence went up another notch. While previous outputs produced by artificial intelligence used "fill in the blanks," which was described as "still and reflectively robot-like," today's programs are now more able to mimic human reasoning and write with a more human-like voice.

With the evolution and progress of this kind of technology, the issue of whether applications of artificial intelligence will merely assist human workers or replace them props up. While these could mean savings for some companies and thus prevent the smaller ones from closing down, the same similarly spells unemployment especially for workers who fill "replaceable" positions. Should this kind of technology further progress in the coming years, ethical and accountability issues might possibly come up and be debated upon.

Interesting times lie ahead. What could possibly be in store for us in the years to come? How will the world evolve in the next generation? I simply cannot imagine.

Entry # 14 by Diana Margaret C. Lauron

Gamers FTW!

If you think gamers are nothing but dumbass slackers glued to their computers/gaming consoles 24/7, think again. These dudes might just save the world! Well okay, I'm exaggerating. But guess what? Gamers have recently cracked the structure of an enzyme that belongs to the same family as HIV. This AIDS enzyme puzzle that has baffled scientists for decades, took gamers only 3 weeks to solve through a video game that generated an accurate 3D model of the enzyme, far from the flat image offered by a microscope. This video game, dubbed 'Foldit', allowed gamers to compete to unfold chains of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins/enzymes) using a set of online tools. The resolution of this long-standing scientific problem proves vital in the efforts to understand the causes of many diseases, especially HIV, and develop new drugs against them.

Okay gamers, I'm impressed. You guys totally pawned that virus -- something beyond the realm of Warcraft, God of War, and Dungeons and Dragons. Consider the brilliance and ingenuity needed to design a game, and the spatial reasoning skills that it takes to figure one out. This just goes to show that the gamer pool is one overflowing with talents just waiting to be recognized and harnessed.

I applaud the idea of tapping this unconventional genre to advance the human condition. This innovative approach may very well be applied to other diseases such as cancer. Maybe we could even have gamers work on the economy! Why not base a game on the nation's debt or build our country into SimCity and see what gamers will do with it? I bet they'll do a far more better job than most of the politicians out there, haha!

So now that round 1 is up, gamers better ante up and think outside the damn box to get through the next level. I'm definitely looking forward to a lot more breakthroughs like this. Game on, guys!

Entry #14

The Google Wallet

Google has just recently announced their new technology known as Google Wallet. With Google Wallet, users are able to use their Android Phones to pay for real world products merely by tapping it onto computerized card readers. Currently this feature is only available on Sprint Nexus in the United States even with a Google Wallet enable phone. This limitation is due to the relative new technology and the risk of more problems if too wide a user base were allowed to use this feature. Google has decided to take things slow, one step at a time, after all, it does involve money of their users and legal problems could be abundant if a bug arose. At the moment, Google Wallet is compatible with Citi MasterCard and Google’s own prepaid card. There are plans however to allow Visa, Discover, and American Express as well.

This feature is a pretty interesting technological leap as it does away with standard credit cards and places even more importance on a person’s phone. Slowly society is moving towards having only a phone or some device that will hold all important personal belongings for maximum convenience. Hopefully the Google Wallet will have enough features to prevent misrepresentation and theft through proper identity checking each time a transaction is made and at the same time not too burdensome on the proper user.

Online Grievance: A Black Hole in eGovernance?

The Philippines recently declared its commitment to join a worldwide initiative for a more open government. President Noynoy, together with Obama and other world leaders, met up at the Google office in New York to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP) which seeks to promote openness and accountability by increasing the availability of information about governmental activities and support civic participation with the help of new technologies. According to their declaration of principles, the partnership intends to harness new technologies to make more information public in ways that enable people to both understand what their governments do and to influence decisions.

Even prior to this partnership, the Government has been taking on initiatives in engaging the citizenry to help the administration in its credos for the “Matuwid na Landas” and “Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap”. P-noy boasted of online campaigns like Pera ng Bayan (or the People’s Money website), the electronic Official Gazette and social networking accounts of other government agencies that interact with the citizenry for a more direct approach to governance.

How do these campaigns affect the ordinary person? Not much, it would seem. Take the Pera ng Bayan website for example. The site is supposedly a venue for tipsters against corrupt officials. But the campaign has been lackluster enough to go undetected by the net-savvy citizens for a year now. Who would’ve thought such a grievance mechanism exists. Surely, some sort of publicity could be of some help?

The campaign prides itself on having 127 reported cases, most for tax evasion of private individuals and corporations– but no updates as to what happened to these cases are recorded. The tips go from the web admin’s inbox and then forwarded to the government agencies like the Department of Finance and its affiliated agencies, the Bureau of Internal Revenue and Bureau of Customs. But as practice has it, whether online or in real life, the grievance filed appears to be sucked in a black hole. Filed but not prosecuted. Campaigns like this should recognize that netizens take the time and guts to complain against erring public officials. The least that the government could do is to show that it has the same time and guts to prosecute the same. The campaign, after all, is not a mere platform. It is a concrete step towards the ‘tuwid na daan’.

Without public awareness and progress reports, public interest in taking part in this open government partnership would remain a lofty goal. If this partnership seeks to make sustainable a people power movement in the internet, the government should realize that a website could only do so much. While netizens are willing, they are also exacting. Actualizing tips into real cases is the online Ombudsman that Filipino netizens are willing to be part of.

ENTRY 14.

Need or Luxury

I watched Contagion a few days ago. It’s a pretty good movie, mostly, because of how realistic it could be at times. In fact, it was so hauntingly real, I got really paranoid halfway through the film and felt like I was getting sick myself. Well, to my credit, it was really cold in the theater but, still, it was really just a psycho-somatic thing. One thing that struck me in the movie was the comparison made of the virus that was going around in the movie (they called it MEV-1) with that of the Spanish flu pandemic in the early decades of the 1900s (I wanted to indicate which century the 1900s was exactly but I’ve never really been able to figure that out; I’ll take a guess and say that the 1900s is the twentieth century). It made me realize that, no matter how much deadlier MEV-1 is if compared in absolute terms with the Spanish flu, the Spanish flu was just as lethal to human kind, considering the means that were available for dealing with the virus at that time. We are able to deal with deadlier viruses, at present, only because we have developed better technology. In fact, for a time in the movie, it seemed as if, even with all the advanced technology in the world, they wouldn’t be able to control the pandemic. But, of course, through the sacrifices of honorable people (it’s always easier to be an honorable person when you’re just an actor portraying a role in a movie) and through the employment of advanced technology (including ICT, as it allowed for faster communication of updates all around the world), the virus was conquered.

All this, in turn, made me think about whether or not developments in information communications technology are merely just luxuries? Or are they actually needed? I had always seemed to take for granted that they were merely luxuries. Well, I’ll admit that I always say I can’t live without the internet but it’s really an exaggerated opinion. I mean, I definitely would rather not live without the internet, but I’ve never really put it up there on the same importance as food, for example. At the back of my mind, I’d always believed that most ICT are luxuries we can live without, if push really comes to shove. We just can’t imagine it ‘cause we’ve been so used to the convenience it brings.

But the circumstances in the movie made me see things in a different light. Again, in the movie (which is definitely a very reliable source), the virus would never have been overcome if we didn’t have the technology to deal with it, including ICT. Which, thus, makes me think that, maybe, we really do need these developments in ICT. Nature seems to tell us that we need it. Maybe these developments in ICT are really part of a necessary evolution of mankind in order to deal with the more complex problems that nature is throwing at us. Maybe we just don’t see it this way because the driving force behind these developments are mostly business considerations, rather than considerations of need. But, no matter what the reason is, it would not take away the need for it. As an analogy, just because drug manufacturers create drugs primarily to earn profits does not mean that the medicines developed are not needed.

I have yet to make a conclusion, personally, about this. But, at the very least, I won’t view ICT as a mere luxury anymore.

Aldous Benjamin Camiso, Blog Entry #14.

Image Source: http://www.markallencam.com/?p=244

should-have-known

“Never in the field of human interaction has so many been able to publish so much so easily.” - Winston Churchill

It’s been half a century since Yamashita was held responsible for crimes committed by his subordinates under the principle of Command Responsibility. According to the Court, 3 requisites must concur for a superior to be held criminally liable under such mode of incurring liability: first, the superior has effective control over his subordinate; second, the superior knew or should have known that the crime was committed; third, the superior failed to prevent the crime or punish the subordinate.

In most cases of Superior Responsibility under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and other military tribunals, the superior interposes the defense of lack of awareness of the commission of the crimes. In the case of Prosecutor vs. Blaskic, the Appeals Chamber of the ICTR held that ‘a superior will be criminally responsible through the principles of superior responsibility only if information was available to him which would have put him on notice of offences committed by subordinates.’” Simply put, the defense of lack of knowledge is effectively negated by the availability of information.

Moreover, according to Prosecutor vs. Galic, (ICTY Trial Chamber), “It is not required that the superior had actually acquainted himself or herself with the information in his or her possession.” Presence of information presupposes knowledge. A newspaper by the doorstep would have been sufficient to impute awareness of criminal activities to the superior.

In this Information Age where information is as ever-present as the air around us, we don’t even have to consciously breathe in to take it in. It is beyond my imagination how news of atrocities and reports about unlawful enterprises of military subordinates would be ever “unavailable” to high-ranking military commanders. These days, word does not just get around; it is all around. If the Germans can interpose the defense of lack of knowledge because of poor communications and reporting systems, information-saturated superiors these days must be sufficiently blind or deaf to effectively feign ignorance to news, reports, communication channels as the Germans did decades ago. Unfortunately for them, we are in the age of should-have-known. Hence, the burden is shifted; it is for them to prove that they are stupid enough not to have known of the crimes committed right under their noses.

-Crisela Bernardino, entry #14