How to start book sharing in public space? Cool way to reuse obsolete phone booths…

urbanbricolage:

Some Tools That Will Help

• Make the tasks look small and easy in your mind. (“I’ve written lots of excellent papers; this is just one more paper.”)
• Do only a small part of the task each time. (“I’ll just check out the books tonight. Later on, I’ll glance through them.”)
• Five-minute plan: Work on something for just five minutes. At the end of five minutes, switch to something else if you want. Chances are, you’ll get involved enough to keep going.
• Advertise your plans to accomplish something, and let peer pressure push you forward. (“I told everyone that I was going to finish this tonight.”)
• Use a good friend as a positive role model. If you have trouble concentrating, study in the presence of someone who doesn’t.
• Modify your environment - if you can’t study at home, find a place where you can study; or, change your study situation at home.
• Plan tomorrow and establish priorities - some students find that simply writing down reasonable starting and stopping times help them get going.
• Expect some backsliding. Don’t expect to be perfect even when you’re trying to get rid of perfectionism! So occasionally, your plans will not work. Accept setbacks and start again.

• When you don’t want to write, set an egg timer for one hour (or half hour) and sit down to write until the timer rings. If you still hate writing, you’re free in an hour. But usually, by the time that alarm rings, you’ll be so involved in your work, enjoying it so much, you’ll keep going.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment
• Don’t go to that boring, dusty computer without something in mind.
• When you get stuck, go back and read your earlier
• Use writing as your excuse to throw a party each week - even if you call that party a “workshop.” Any time you can spend time among other people who value and support writing, that will balance those hours you spend alone, writing.

‎”Scientists, with their many talents, have recently created a
vaccine for cocaine. Apparently the cocaine vaccine works in a way quite similar to that of other vaccines. A serum is administered to a patient and the effects of the drug are neutralized, just as how the effects of the flu are neutralized with a flu vaccine. However, and this is the crucial point, the
cocaine vaccine does not remove the cravings of addiction, which is to say the desire to acquire and use the drug. 
The cocaine vaccine is a perfect image for us. We still have the cravings, but we can’t get high. We have a liberation of individual desire and freedom, a liberation of openness. Never has desire and affective expression ever been so liberated. We have so many cravings today—for democracy, for food
and drink, for oil, for connectivity. But at the same time we are unable to realize the utopian pleasures of these promises. Our networks are weapons. Our webs are also our own snares. Interactivity is drudgery. Transparency comes at the cost of blackboxing everything. This is the condition of the digital citizen today. It is our task therefore not to spin new tails about the heroism of the network, but instead to offer a critical reconstruction in code, such that the very apparatus itself is recast as a tool for practice, not a tool for management as it remains to this day.” - Alexander Galloway

From “What Can a Network Do?”  Paper presented at the “Citizenship and Digital Networks” seminar at College Cásper Líbero, São Paulo, Brazil, November 4, 2009. 

this al jazeera piece (The US love affair with drones) begins by describing the threat of TaliBikers - Taliban staging attacks on bikes (supplied by the pakistani ISI). But the piece isn’t doing justice to the honda125. ask us karachiites, the 90s children what this bike is capable of.

“How do you know they’ll print it?”

On January 27at a busy intersection in Lahore a white foreigner sitting inside his SUV shoots two men on bikes. He then gets out of the car and shoots one of the injured men who was trying to get away twice in the back. He walks up to make sure they’re dead and then calmly takes photos of the dead men and the scene of the crime. He also calls for backup which comes in the shape of another speeding SUV, driving on the wrong side of the street. This car hits a motorcyclist who dies later in the hospital.

Needless to say it’s a big story. A story that became bigger when he shows the police his passport and IDs that identify him as an American, Raymond Davis who works for the US consulate in Lahore. Days later 20-year-old wife of one the men Davis shot committed suicide “fearing” Davis would be freed and justice will be denied.

The New York Times runs a story the next day titled ‘U.S. Official Shoots 2 Pakistanis During Apparent Robbery’ – the “apparent robbery” charge attributed to the police chief (who was essentially repeating Davis’ claim). The NYT story later goes on to say “the police indicated that they were no longer convinced that there had been an attempted robbery”, the journalist, NYT’s bureau chief in Islamabad did not see it fit to take the peg of the story from there and this sentence is slipped in. She ends the short piece with “Lahore residents said roadside robberies by armed men on motorcycles seeking mobile phones and other valuables from drivers are relatively common.”

The Pakistani media obviously did not cover it with such simplicity. The issue has been the key national story for over three weeks now. Publications from around the world have written, speculated and commented on the issue which has pretty much ignored completely by American TV. American papers have reported it off and on but no one went into any detailed investigation over Raymond Davis’ job description.

According to a detailed investigative news story in the Guardian

“A number of US media outlets later learned about Davis’s CIA role but have kept it under wraps at the request of the Obama administration, which fears that disclosure could inflame opinion in Pakistan and possibly put Davis at risk.

A Colorado television station, 9NEWS, initially made a connection after speaking to Davis’s wife, who lives outside Denver. She referred its inquiries to a number in Washington which turned out to be the CIA. The station subsequently removed the CIA reference from its website at the request of the US government. Nicole Vap, an executive producer, said: “Because of the safety concerns, we decided to amend the story. But it remains accurate.””

The NYT pretty much stopped carrying any reported pieces (they carried small blurbs from wire copy in the “world briefing” column) after Raymond Davis was charged with the murders the next day. The silence continued till February 9 when Perlez returned with a piece on how Davis’ release under diplomatic immunity has aggravated the already touchy Pak-US relations.

Ten days after the incident, when the issue instead of dying out became more contentious with Senator John Kerry dispatched to Pakistan to ease the tensions and President Obama issued a statement asking for Davis to be released under his diplomatic immunity the NYT carried started carrying regular stories. One of them on February 8 finally had some details about Davis:

“Mr. Davis spent 10 years in the American military, starting with basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1993. He moved to special warfare training with the Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 1998, and left the Army in 2003. His only overseas posting, according to his Army service record, was a six-month stint as a member of a United Nations peacekeeping force in Macedonia in 1994.

After leaving the military, Mr. Davis apparently decided to take advantage of the boom in the military contracting business. He and his wife, Rebecca Davis, set up Hyperion Protective Services in 2006 in Nevada, a company that appears to have sought government contracts for security services, according to company filings in Nevada.

The company does not appear to have won big contracts, and may have been in the business of offering just Mr. Davis’s services, according to a former Special Forces officer who reviewed the company filings.”

This information is obviously from an official source. The NYT made no attempts to call Davis’ wife (if they had and she didn’t want to speak, they would have written that). The “company filings” mentioned were also reviewed by a “former Special Forces officer” and were not the legwork of a local reporter.

Why such lax reporting? The NYT as understood by journalists around the world is an institution very closely aligned with the American government. Their exclusive stories are almost always based on unnamed government sources in DC. Journalists know when someone from the government is willing to talk about something its because they want it out and published. The NYT has willingly or not I can’t say has been consistently used as a government mouthpiece. In Raymond Davis’ case its coverage has been parallel to the American government’s efforts to get him released. Initially the pressure was behind the screen, as the issue became more and more contentious in Pakistan, the US government had to increase diplomatic pressure (with Kerry’s visit and Obama’s statement). NYT’s reporting reflects this change, but even now it refuses to touch upon the most obvious questions in the case and instead focuses on the wrong things, trivializing the matter and misleading the reader. 

2/19/11 4:03 PM