Stanford Center for Internet and Society

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Via GlobalVoices, from cartoonist Emad Hajjaj.

This is how we are now portrayed in the minds of some in this world.

From an AP story by Ji-Soo Kim:

"This work can be done much better in Oriental hands," cloning master Hwang Woo-suk recently told the journal Nature Medicine.

"We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with the steel chopsticks."

Last year, Hwang, a professor at Seoul National University, and his colleagues became the first scientists to extract stem cells from a cloned human embryo.

This week they announced a startling advance: They dramatically improved their efficiency

I confess to being surprised that the Times editorial that I read (in the national edition in paper form) this morning misspelled Gandhi's name. I'm shocked that even at the end of the day, the Times website still has the name wrong.

What does this reveal about how much the Times senior-most editors know about the world? When the most important figure in the last century--who led the world to freedom long before Bush embraced it for "brown people"--has his name misspelled by the supposed American newspaper of record, what does it say about how much we care about the world?

From the Times website at 5 p.m., Pacific Time:

The photo shows a young man, a taxi driver in Afghanistan, who, according to reports, was brutally killed by American soldiers at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Here is the opening of the NY Times story by Tim Golden, based on government documentation:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting with Dr. Shirin Ebadi along with a few other faculty members here at UC Davis. The previous night she had given a public lecture in which she declared that the West should promote democracy in the Middle East by supporting women's rights.

She talked about the diversity of women's experience in the Islamic world--from Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which have all had (or currently have) women leaders, to Saudi Arabia, where women aren't even allowed to vote. In Iran, she said, women are powerful, and despite unequal conditions are asserting themselves broadly. She noted that women make up 63% of the student body in universities; in law schools, 70%. She said that a woman who has a university education or a job "will not be oppressed."

As a BBC report from April indicates, there are allegations that guards at Guantanamo put an inmate's face in the toilet and flushed repeatedly. What if it turns out that the guards were very cautious about respecting scripture, but not people?

Six Guantanamo Bay detainees are challenging US federal authorities to reveal evidence of abuse at the camp.

The six - all of Algerian origin and extradited from Bosnia - are suing the Bush administration as part of their effort to contest their detention.

They want the government to release documents which they say would prove that prisoners were tortured.

The economic difference on either side of the straits dividing Spain and Morocco are hard to believe. To the north, the average gross national income/per capita is $17,040, and to the south, it's $1,310 (2003 stats, from World Bank 2005 develelopment indicators).

The difference is sharp even considering PPP: $22,150 and $3,940.

Irshad Manji speaks out against "the bloody, fiery riots that, in the name of honoring Islam, are killing an increasing number of Muslims and non-Muslims."

Sony unveiled its new game machine a few days after Microsoft unveils its machine. The Sony machine seems amazingly powerful, with microprocessors far speedier than those in most personal computers.

The Chronicle suggests that the Sony microprocessor is more powerful, using some crude benchmarks:

Under the hood of PS3 is Sony's Cell microprocessor, which has nine cores. The main core, which is based on IBM's PowerPC chip, will run at 3.2 GHz, the same speed as Xbox 360's central processing unit. Xbox 360, however, has only three cores. Eight of the Cell cores will run at 3.2 GHz, Kutaragi said.