The Taiwanese elections may be over, but Gothamist LLC’s Shanghaiist.com still manages to pick up a couple of interesting Weibo (China’s Twitter) reaction from Mainland China.

If it’s at all possible to assign scores for democracy, then today’s Taiwan is probably a lot more democratic than many of the more established democracies of the world. These people are like you and I — yellow skinned, brown-eyed, speak Mandarin, and eat Chinese food. Those people that think democracy is not suitable for the Chinese people can now shut up. Those people that say democracy is not possible because the Chinese people are not well-educated enough, or that China is too unique for it, can now shut up. Those people that are still going on about how socialism is superior — please, either go to North Korea for a taste of real socialism, or shut up.
如果民主可以分度数，那么今日台湾要比许多老牌民主国家更民主，这些人和你我一样，黄皮肤，黑眼睛，讲中文，吃中餐，那些认为民主不适合中国人的，可以闭嘴了；那些以素质论、国情论来否定民主的，可以闭嘴了；那些仍在坚持社会主义优越性之说的，要么去朝鲜体验一下真正的社会主义，要么可以闭嘴了。

Some of those ‘tweets’ (seriously, what do you call Weibo updates) seem indicate some sort of dreaming about how a democratic China would look like. This reminds me of the interview I saw over the TV on Channel News Asia, where a local Taiwanese said she was encouraged with the improvements in Cross-straits ties under Ma Ying-Jeou (KMT), and that it is good for Taiwan to get closer to China. She continues, “That way we can show China what democracy is about and hopefully change them.”

I guess she may be onto something.

28c3 (The 28th Chaos Communication Congress)

My video picks from 28c3:

These are some of my picks which are selected to be as comprehensive and interesting without being overly technical. If you have a slight interest in computing and politics, these should be very interesting to you.

The coming war on general computation (must watch)
Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation
The copyright war was just the beginning

Keynote – Marriage from Hell
Evgeny Morozov: Marriage from Hell
On the Secret Love Affair Between Dictators and Western Technology Companies

Reporters Without Border: From Press Freedom to the Freedom of information
This talk is about: Information freedom and the issues for the citizens

Data-mining the Israeli Census
Yuval Adam: Data Mining the Israeli Census
Insights into a publicly available registry

Resilience Towards Leaking or Why Julian Assange Might Be Wrong After All
Kay Hamacher: Resilience Towards Leaking or Why Julian Assange Might Be Wrong After All.
An historical look at the philosophy behind Wikileaks

Changing techno-optimists by shaking up the bureaucrats
Meet the Netherlands: a nation filled with techno-optimists protecting our freedom by puting in place restrictions on what you can do, reducing our privacy and have technology as a solution for anything and everything. When you make a trip we store your details for two years, your airplane meal selection from two years earlier is good data to test with and when migrating the government website we keep the old website running in an unmaintained state. If you have nothing to hide nothing can go wrong and there is nothing you can do. Well not quite.

Interesting Shorter clips (less than 10 min each):
Dead Drops

Project “Memopol”
Memopol is an art project that maps person’s personal information sphere. Wishes to work with German ID-card.

Hacking a Train’s intercom

Wished I could watch (non-English):

Politik hacken

Piraten im AGH von Berlin
A short story about the Pirate Party Berlin entering the parliament of Berlin and what we want to do with our data

For more videos, head on over to the 28c3 youtube channel.

I’ve updated my open-sourced SG-MP-Absentee script to capture the new records from the 12th Parliament.

Some notable changes happened in this update:
- Switched from ‘catdoc’ to ‘pdftotext’ as the main text conversion tool as the reports released are now in PDF format instead of DOC
- Updated the script to respond to the new HTML elements from the newly revamped Parliament website

Some old posts:
22nd May 2010 – Record of MPs absent so far in the 11th Parliament (Singapore)
3rd August 2010 – Singapore MPs Absentee Record script updated

12th Parliament’s attendance record so far

Total number of Parliament Sittings so far: 8
—————————-
Absentees on Last Parliament Sitting: 22/11/2011
—————————-
Mr Cedric Foo Chee Keng of Pioneer
Ms Grace Fu Hai Yien of Yuhua
Ms Indranee Rajah of Tanjong Pagar
Mr Lui Tuck Yew of Moulmein-kallang
Ms Sim Ann of Holland-bukit Timah
Mr Edwin Tong Chun Fai of Moulmein-kallang
Mr Zaqy Mohamad of Chua Chu Kang

—————————-
Stats
—————————-
Top 5 absent MPs:
Associate Professor Dr Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim with 5
Dr Lily Neo with 5
Mr Arthur Fong with 5
Ms Irene Ng Phek Hoong with 5
Mr Lee Kuan Yew with 4

Top 5 wards with highest number of absentees:
Tanjong Pagar with 12
Tampines with 7
West Coast with 7
Moulmein-kallang with 6
Nee Soon with 6

Commentary: 4 MPs have already missed more than 1/2 of the Parliament sittings held so far. The first Parliament sitting had 0 absentees.

Summary of the 11th Parliament

Total number of Parliament Sittings: 127

—————————-
Absentees on Last Parliament Sitting: 10/03/2011
—————————-
Mr Inderjit Singh of Ang Mo Kio
Mr S Iswaran of West Coast
Mr Lee Kuan Yew of Tanjong Pagar
Ms Sylvia Lim of Non-constituency Member
Mr Sin Boon Ann of Tampines
Mrs Mildred Tan of Nominated Member
Mr Wee Siew Kim of Ang Mo Kio

—————————-
Stats
—————————-
Top 5 absent MPs:
Mr Lee Kuan Yew with 55
Dr Balaji Sadasivan with 43
Prof. Thio Li-ann with 38
Dr Ahmad Mohd Magad with 28
Dr Loo Choon Yong with 28

Top 5 wards with highest number of absentees:
Nominated Member with 170
Ang Mo Kio with 97
Tanjong Pagar with 90
Pasir Ris-punggol with 84
Aljunied with 75

Commentary: Interesting to note that the top 5 wards (excluding NMPs) which has the highest absentee rates are considered to be the ‘safe wards’ of the 11th Parliament. I wonder if there’s any correlation between having the sense of security (from losing the ward) and absentee rates.

As usual, here is the attendance database for the 11th Parliament in SQLite format. (172 KB)

The database is released under the CC 3.0 license, so please feel free to manipulate and share the database.

The source code is released under the MIT License so you are also free to make use of the code for your own projects. But please let me know what cool stuff you’re working on :)

I also encourage you guys to fork the project on github and make your own changes and improvements to the script. Please send me a pull request so that we can keep this going.

If you’re curious, the next version of the script will:
- Allow you to choose between pulling from the 11th Parliament and the 12th Parliament
- Allow you to pull data from the 10th Parliament.

Edit: Some people have asked me how does this script work. In very layman terms, this script is the equivalent of asking lots of interns to download each individual votes and proceedings document from the Parliament website to then look in it for the ‘ABSENT’ section and then add the names and wards of the Members who were absent that day into a shared database. The only difference is, instead of spending money on hiring interns, I ‘slave’ my cpu cycles to do the job for me.

With 4 out of 5 of Taxi Operators here in Singapore, announcing that they will be raising their prices in tandem with ComfortDelgro, perhaps it is time for us to start thinking about how we can liberalize the market again to bring some form of real competition into the picture.

Bring back the Yellow-top taxis. Allow individuals to own their own vehicles again. Let them set the price. Let them decide how to conduct their business and then we’ll have a real free market. PTC can come in to make sure that no player undercuts each other to a point of becoming loss leaders, but keep government regulation to the minimal. Safety and Comfort has to be regulated but everything else, let the capitalists decide how much to set on their own.

With real competition, the real winners would be you, the commuters. Let us bring back entrepreneurship.

Draft.

Faith has always been a cornerstone of all religion whether it is monolithic like the Abrahamic faiths or polylithic like Hinduism and Taoism. All religion in one way or another talk or describe events and people that may sound not only far-fetched but also impossible to have taken place in the natural physical world. It calls on its followers to have faith and believe that such events did happen or take place.

Now I am not going to talk about religion in this post as I think that religion is a very personal thing and no one can ever take that away. Instead, I’d like to ask the question, does politics require faith?

After all, isn’t believing in political ideology almost the same as believing in a religion? Both follow a set of doctrine and dogmas, and both has not been fully implemented, tested and proven to be the one and only ‘true’ system.

Communism in theory is supposed to be the provider of a utopian society where everyone lives fairly and in abundance, but look at how Russia, Cuba and China turned out? Poverty, strife and tyranny.

Liberal democracy is supposed to give citizens the power to choose, elect and despose their leaders and is supposed to be the most efficient form of governance which some like Francis Fukuyama calls the ‘final form of human government’ (The End of History), but yet look at how American politics turned out. Political bickering and deadlock between the parties prevent any form of solution to pull the country out of its economic mess.

Just like religion, every different political believer believes that their chosen ideology is the right one and in many case, some would even be willing to die for it (Taliban, Weather Underground, freedom fighters).

So which is the right political ideology? Who’s right, who’s wrong and will there every be a single one that becomes the ultimate truth?

Its been slightly more than a month since the Pirate Party’s won seats in Berlin’s State Parliament. While it is still to early to say what the movement’s recent wins in both Sweden and Germany will mean to liberal politics, I thought it would be nice to just compile a couple of selected videos that tries to explain their platform.

Enjoy.

Sweden

Amelia Andersdotter – Pirate Party – Member of European Parliament (MEP)

Germany

UK

Pirate Party International (PPI) Collective

In other news, 80s sitcom, ‘Second Chance’ almost predicted Gaddafi’s death by the wire. They were just off by about 3 months :P
(2 min onwards)

CNN

Hong Kong (CNN) — Hidden amid the multi-million dollar high-rise apartments and chic shopping malls of Hong Kong’s urban centers are scores of tiny, unseen tenements — some no bigger than coffins — that many people call home.

Through Mak’s eyes, there are two Hong Kongs: The one seen through his only window, personified by the glitz and glamour the city is famous for. And the one inside, that has allowed less fortunate citizens fall through the cracks.

I’ve just read this BBC article about the emergence of the V for Vendetta masks as a symbol of anarchism and the anti-establishment movement and I read this quote by Rich Johnston, a commentator on comics, where he is quoted:

The idea of the V mask being appropriated as a political symbol is inherently ridiculous, he suggests.
“It’s like assuming you can bring down a government using a light sabre or a He-Man sword.”

I can’t help but feel that he has unfortunately missed the point and the symbolism of the mask. While the BBC article made a very valiant attempt at deconstructing it, I can’t help but disagree that this is just another one of those examples of pop-culture meeting popular people movements (see: Che t-shirts).

I would think that in Alan Moore’s V’s mind, wearing the mask brings home the point that it is not about the individual anymore. When you don the mask in a group, you are no longer you. You are no longer an individual and there’s nothing to distinguish you (physically) from the others, and as such people can only focus on the one thing which is graspable. Your idea.

And I think this is why the V masks are so popular. Too often in today’s media and age, we are just too fixated with the person and not the idea behind his/her actions. The protesters recognize it and uses it to represent their frustration in wanting to bring attention back to the issues and not the personality.

I’ll leave you with a quote which still remains etched in my mind today and I hope that it will have an impact to you as it has to me.

Creedy: (starts shooting the approaching V) Die! Die! Why won’t you die? (his gun clicks empty) Why won’t you die?

V: Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.