FW: Danger: America Is Losing Its Edge In Innovation

http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/01/20/danger-america-is-losing-its-edge-in-innovation/

Interesting take on engineers and their role in this world.

Posted by Eric Savitz
Written By Norm Augustine
Norm Augustine: We're falling behind.



I’ve visited more than 100 countries in the past several years, meeting people from all walks of life, from impoverished children in India to heads of state. Almost every adult I’ve talked with in these countries shares a belief that the path to success is paved with science and engineering.
In fact, scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the U.S., but rather as society’s leaders and innovators. In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers. In the U.S., almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics, and there is a virtual absence of engineers in our public policy debates.
Why does this matter? Because if American students have a negative impression – or no impression at all – of science and engineering, then they’re hardly likely to choose them as professions. Already, 70% of engineers with PhD’s who graduate from U.S. universities are foreign-born. Increasingly, these talented individuals are not staying in the U.S – instead, they’re returning home, where they find greater opportunities.
Part of the problem is the lack of priority U.S. parents place on core education. But there are also problems inherent in our public education system. We simply don’t have enough qualified math and science teachers. Many of those teaching math and science have never taken a university-level course in those subjects.
I’ve always wanted to be a teacher; in fact, I took early retirement from my job in the aerospace industry to pursue a career in education. But I was deemed unqualified to teach 8th-grade math in any school in my state. Ironically, I was welcomed to the faculty at Princeton University, where the student newspaper ranked my course as one of 10 that every undergraduate should take.
In a global, knowledge-driven economy there is a direct correlation between engineering education and innovation. Our success or failure as a nation will be measured by how well we do with the innovation agenda, and by how well we can advance medical research, create game-changing devices and improve the world.
I continue to be active in organizations like the IEEE to help raise the profile of the engineering community and ensure that our voice is heard in key public policy decisions. That’s also why I am passionate about the way engineering should be taught as a profession – not as a collection of technical knowledge, but as a diverse educational experience that produces broad thinkers who appreciate the critical links between technology and society.
Here we are in a flattening world, where innovation is the key to success, and we are failing to give our young people the tools they need to compete. Many countries are doing a much better job. Ireland, despite a devastated economy, just announced it will increase spending on basic research. Russia is building an “innovation city” outside of Moscow. Saudi Arabia has a new university for science and engineering with a staggering $10 billion endowment. (It took MIT 142 years to reach that level.) China is creating new technology universities literally by the dozens.
These nations and many others have rightly concluded that the way to win in the world economy is by doing a better job of educating and innovating. And America? We’re losing our edge. Innovation is something we’ve always been good at. Until now, we’ve been the undisputed leaders when it comes to finding new ideas through basic research, translating those ideas into products through world-class engineering, and getting to market first through aggressive entrepreneurship.
That’s how we rose to prominence. And that’s where we’re falling behind now. The statistics tell the story.
•U.S. consumers spend significantly more on potato chips than the U.S. government devotes to energy R&D.
•In 2009, for the first time, over half of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies.
•China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s number one high-technology exporter. •Between 1996 and 1999, 157 new drugs were approved in the U.S.  Ten years later, that number had dropped to 74.
•The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. #48 in quality of math and science education.
Innovation is the key to survival in an increasingly global economy. Today we’re living off the investments we made over the past 25 years. We’ve been eating our seed corn. And we’re seeing an accelerating erosion of our ability to compete. Charles Darwin observed that it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.
Right now the U.S. is not responding to change as we need to. But there is a way forward. Five years ago, I was part of a commission that studied U.S. competitiveness. We issued a report called Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which made some important recommendations and specific actions to implement them.  The recommendations were:
•Improve K-12 science and math education.
•Invest in long-term basic research.
•Attract and retain the best and brightest students, scientists and engineers in the U.S. and around the world.
•Create and sustain incentives for innovation and research investment.
Our report was received positively and enjoyed tremendous political support. I felt confident that we were finally getting back on the right track.
In 2007, Congress passed the America COMPETES Act, which authorized official support for many of the steps urged in the Gathering Storm report. When the stimulus package was passed early in 2009, most of the COMPETES Act’s measures received funding. There was an increase in total federal funding for K-12 education, the creation of scholarships for future math and science teachers, and financial support to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a new agency dedicated to high-risk, high-reward energy research.
Since the completion of our study five years ago, however, 6 million more kids have dropped out of high school in this country. What kind of future will they have? Likely not a promising one. It is quite possible that our nation’s adults will, for the first time in U.S. history, leave their children and grandchildren a lower standard of living than they themselves enjoyed.
Global leadership is not a birthright. Despite what many Americans believe, our nation does not possess an innate knack for greatness.  Greatness must be worked for and won by each new generation. Right now that is not happening. But we still have time. If we place the emphasis we should on education, research and innovation we can lead the world in the decades to come. But the only way to ensure we remain great tomorrow is to increase our investment in science and engineering today.



Norm Augustine is an IEEE Life Fellow and retired chairman and CEO of  Lockheed Martin.

Organic growth of innovation vs Centralisation of institutions, MRT

Innovation

1. Malaysian Government under Najib has a funny way of doing things. When things dont work, they undermine the whole system by duplicating the role. Take EPU. Planning without execution, botched megaprojects etc.. create PEMANDU.. hooray lots of megaprojects and EPPs for all ETP, which will meet the NKEAs being tracked by NKRAs. RMK10 throw in the dustbin. MOSTI not paying attention to the I, fine - create UNIK.
2. Leadership is about getting the right people on the bus, and making sure the wrong people gets off the bus. Especially in situation requiring hard decisions. Constrained resources. People respect you for doing the hard decisions, but you must explain yourself. The waffling, flip-flopping nature of Pak Lah's administration is now replaced by waffling, you-can-get-away-with-anything administration of Najib. At least, there are decisions. Wrong, but decisions nonetheless.
3. Now this creature of UNIK. What does it do first? Come up with an Akta that centralises innovation powers in its hand. The la-la hypothesis is that the Chief UNIK is a know-it-all and a snap of his fingers will cause the whole of Malaysia to tremble in fear and be innovative. Sounds like a Stalinist / Hitlerist maneouvre to me.
4. Why cant ppl in Malaysia be trusted to do the right things through incentivising innovative practices, and then discouraging stupid acts of giving some inflated contracts to unqualified people? Why cant the best global talents be facilitated into the country and lead and mould best practice entities, and hoping there is enough tech absorption by creating the environment for people to accept best practices? Why cant we do away with just giving some pieces of the cake to people we know who can talk their way out of trouble but probably lacks the competence and gumption to make a difference? Where are the innovative entrepreneurs (not the innovative rentiers) that the country has produced so far, and give them a free and facilitating hand to expand? What are incentives to offer to private capital to come in?
5. Instead, UNIK will have powers to 'streamline' existing funds and appoint innovation ambassadors. Fine, there are opportunities to improve, but these are incremental improvements, not game-changers as those outlined in Item 4. If UNIK can only do incremental stuff so that the game-changer explodes, I'm afraid innovation will still occur in Malaysia, but it will be inspite of UNIK not because of it.
6. Innovation will thrive when the environment allows it to. Lifelong education, primary, secondary, tertiary. Entrepreneurial training - engaging Entrepreneurs in Residence to mentor successful ventures. VCs and PEs need the deal pipelines in place, and this can be done by co-locating them into major innovation centers - and sorry, but somehow that means not in KL. Target sectors should be able to access global markets, but sorry, knowing a couple of MNCs may not be sufficient. Someone needs to tap local agencies with global reach, and large MNCs to open up market access. And this is no small matter if we look at some of the areas that we are interested in - large pharmas - US, Europe and India, industrial biotech - US, China, Europe, Brazil, ICT - mainly emerging markets, other sectors as relevant.  
7. If after no 6, what we do is centralisation, I'm afraid someone is hopelessly deluded. Innovation ecosystem and culture - and centralised in one single agency because the multi-agency committee / ministry failed to execute its function before. Perhaps this can be dismissed as just another Malaysian cynic. Maybe so. But if people up there are serious to do good, Rakyat Didahulukan and all that stuff, this is one hell of a strange way to carry out your functions - relying on one smartarse to perform what a ministry has failed to do.

MRT

1. It's shameful that the absurd costings and silly alignment that the EPP for MRT as shown in their open day kind of shows the shallowness of the proposal. The project feels and looks rushed. Accepting an unsolicited proposal from the private sector and after protests appointing the same company as a project manager, and then promising a Swiss Challenge is merely an afterthought. Just one question. Where is the bloody masterplan incorporating the whole transport planning for the Klang Vally and its adjacent satellite towns. If there isnt one, shame on PEMANDU, SPAD and everyone related to this proposal! Federal Highway will still be jammed because Subang Jaya isnt part of this planning. Where are the traffic forecasts? Where is the costing? Where is the inputs from the planning agencies from all the local authorities? Who is driving this - SPAD, PEMANDU, or GAMUDA? Who bloody cares about the increased property prices?
2. Worst thing (or Best of all) about all of this is a Citizen-watchgroup calling themselves TRANSIT has a proper masterplan and proposal to do this. Malu weh.

Malays, Chinese and other non-malays

1. Utusan went to town Saturday on PAS back-tracking and giving support to the Malay agenda. TERAS Chairman (?) said that the Malay economic issues must be addressed satisfactorily and not be glossed over by Pakatan Rakyat. In Primaya, there was this CNY celebration which was quite strange as it was the first time a Chinese celebration was held there after 3 years. Reading MI makes you want to knock your head against a wall when Chinese chauvinists go over the top in their criticisms of anything UMNO. (and you can sort of visualise the kid gloves when talking about MCA or other non-Malay partners in the BN)
2. There is truly a need to go to a common concensus on upholding basic principles. Addressing the truth for instance is a good start. So, call a spade a spade if you must, no covering up. (what was the word scully used again? obfuscation?) That goes not just to Chinese chavs, but also the more blinkered of all politicians.
3. Let's start by listing too many of the contentios issues and try to lay it down to rest once and for all. First, is UMNO a British stooge who won independence? To my knowledge, this is not true. Looking from the British perspective, once decolonisation became a policy due to the burden of maintaining far-flung colonies, there was only the question of who their preferred partner will be. Regardless of the fact that their insistence on the Alliance arose from the fear of "islamist" / left-leaning elements in Hizbul Muslimin or other less savoury alternatives, the due process was accorded and recognition must be given when there was support to the Alliance from the populace (through democratic elections) as well as the monarchs of the federated states. In the end, the federation model and its subsequent Constitution became the de facto model of the state. The question of a British stooge does not arise.
4. Social contract - citizenship in return for power, and later on the acceptance of Malay dominance through its monarchs and special position. That remains, and should not be questioned.
5. NEP was introduced, and was the right prescription for the issues of economic disparity amongst the races in the 60s. (It should have brought about greater social cohesion. The fact it does not means that the pendulum has swung too much the other way)
6. So now that I have affirmed UMNO's position, there is no issue right? Wrong. UMNO has made major mistakes - the vasectomy of judiciary prime amongst the loss of confidence in public policies. Malays are angry that the Malay-centric policies do not benefit the general classes, the non-Malays are angry at continued marginalisation due to the ineffective execution of Malay-centric policies as a whole. in 3/08, the Opposition made massive political inroads.
7. Then they started making a mess of things. Instead of taking on issues they were mandated to do, like becoming a more effective public administrator, they started to act like UMNO 2.0 and BN 2.0. Politicking about taking over the federal govt through the backdoor. Acting like schoolkids on the Perak takeover. Bleeding elected reps, members and supporters - no signs of coagulation yet. Talking daft things on changing State constitution, not recognising a Federally appointed State Sec, even when procedures have been followed etc. Token support for justice in the form of ISA etc, but full-blooded support when one of their own is "unjustly treated' - DSAI, TBH etc. If BN thot the voters are daft, PR acted like the voters are daft. At least, BN is actively wooing neutrals and fencesitters. PR acts as if the votes they gained in 2008 are their perennial property.
8. In the end, here we are. The Chinese electorate are invigorated. They are sophisticated, socially instinctive to safeguard their own interests and unwilling to take risks as regards to their self-interest. The Indians are too fragmented to impact on the political scene, so the stakes are between the large Malay electorate and the solid Chinese king-makers.
9. What of my personal view? The need to always speak the truth, stand up for truth. If anything, the issues are still issues of what people will bring to eat at the table. Looming global challenges are looming. Our politicians continue to squabble about the arrangement of the deckchairs on the Titanic after crashing into the iceberg. Chinese issues and Malay issues are different, but the solution is the same. Return to the needs of social justice and equality. The same concepts that Islam came to enforce. Let us not be too defined by the colour of our skin. Malays have progressed since 1969, we are no longer a race of fishermen and farmers. Many are now professionals. Unfortunately, the continued awkward execution of NEP means that we are now a race of government officers, GLC professionals, toll booth operators, bank tellers, and others. Create a level playing field. Let the Malays compete. Let them find the solutions. Let the government step back. Allow Islamists to dominate Malay society. At least we wont be reading daily news items of abandoned babies.

what's right with Malaysia

Continued from before:

11.    Understanding the weaknesses allows us to pinpoint the areas of our contribution, the priority points if you like.

12.    Education, first and foremost. Academic as well as inculcating characters. Academically, middle eastern universities are flourishing eg KAUST, Jordan U, even IIUM etc. Character building will have to be supplemented by usrah based on ukhuwwah and ilm. Hafazan schools with emphasis on sciences would be excellent.

13.    To be on the lookout and prepare for meta-trends of permaculture as a sub-genre of sustainability and earth stewardship, Islamic finance as a viable alternative to shenanigans in the prevailing economics of financial ecosystems, to be foremost in self-promotion and relationship building in an age of narcissistic primadonnas utilising the latest disruptive technologies of the internet, and to be ready to participate in the growth of these sub-genres as a possibility of commercial enterprise and livelihood.

14.    To supplement these actvities with promoting, leading and thinking about societal needs in education and offering the products necessary to stem the flow of gradual but inevitable decline of the existing societal worldview in Malaysia, whose alternative and successor at this moment is still unclear. The void needs to be filled by an Islamic principle based solution especially in the fields of education and funding. It is within these two realms that applied dakwah and offerings must be focused on.

15.    To think of ways and means to participate in shaping the political thinking that can help to expedite the changes to push it to an environment, a paradigm that could help the country to flourish and society to co-exist peacefully.

 

 

To address what's right with Malaysia, we need to stocktake things that are wrong with Malaysia now

1.       Titled as above so as not to look like this is trying to rundown this little country, my country, our country. Granted that the following is a rant that probably needs a lot more thought in categorization and such.

2.       Gradual decline of societal values, rise of violent crimes, petty crimes everywhere, porn vcds (pirated some more) available by the roadside, liberalism competing against rising extremism, murders most foul of a group, individuals, and helpless and weak babies. The list goes on.

3.       Abdication of responsibilities by our political leaders allowing racism, inequalities and injustice to prosper for the sake of self-interest and extension of political might, leaving their constituencies (their amanah it must be said!) to lead in the fight for civil rights (GMI, etc), charity (Mercy Malaysia) and the media’s gross over-sensationalisation of poverty and suffering in favour of commercial benefits, overemphasis on rights and privileges over developing internal capacity and capabilities.

4.       Increasing polarization arising from number 3 above.

5.       Declining economic competitiveness. Forget the rankings, surveys and stuff. When a survey is constructed and aggregated at such macro-level it has no value to the human spirit of competitiveness and innovation. What matters is at the personal level, what is the output, contribution that can be expected from the individual. Looking at the outputs from our high-level academic institutes now, there can only be depression at the lack of apathy, inarticulate, lack of moral standards and such. Those who could escape such a damning environment find that in the work environment lack of role models amongst their superiors to teach simple character-building, strong, principle-centred mujahid dakwah, or at the very least, good mentors to lead. The system just fails to produce enough critical mass for nation-building and cohesive society building.

6.       As a result of 5, bureaucrats, employees and the labour force turn to their survival instincts in the face of insufficient income levels to match with growing needs and demands and the various offerings available to the upper crust of society. Inflationary pressures by itself has created a need for the ‘proletariats’ to supplement their income stream with earnings from mlm and various other moon-lighting jobs (foot patch, score A, zhulian, stuff). Who can blame them?

7.       A whole generation of Malays are just lazy fat cats rolling around waiting for their rights and privileges to fall from the sky. Perkasa is just so wrong, so wrong on so many levels. By extension, so is Tun M. His time has passed, and maybe he should be passing time, although some are saying he should be doing time. The present leadership should stand up, look him in the eye, say the above and politely ask Tun M to stand down. The other implication is to tell our children that nothing falls down from the sky if we don’t work for it. Let’s not blame our inabilities on the wrongs perpetrated by others, as we are responsible for our own fate. Allah will not burden us with things that we cannot bear.

8.       Economic policies, subsidies etc. Yes, these are the rights of society upon the government, as this is the essence of Saidina Abu Bakr’s proclamation speech on his elevation as Khalifah, … speaking about the rights of the weak, the responsibilities of the strong, the essence of a democratically elected “representative” of a “popular” vote on the basis that he is the best to carry out the functions and purposes of a just, strong government… The Government should stop talking about the need to reduce subsidies and conduct an investigation into where the revenues coming from Petronas has gone to. At the end of the day, is there leakage and misallocation? How much? Where is it flowing to? How should the network of dependencies and patronage be decimated, or at the very least reconstructed so that merit prevails, and not patronages and corruption.

9.       Restructuring of society, allowing for the flourishing of Islamic sciences and research, allowing for the creation and sustainance of a proper Islamic industry so that there are no undue concerns and fears of compromised halal-ness, be it for food or even for funding and financing. Allowing that Muslims and non-muslims, all Malaysians respect the cultures and traditions of religion, the ummatic principle, the rational and tolerant basis of religion and spirituality and not the rituals and fear-mongering of religious adherents. Agree with LKY on the percentages of new townships so that there are no longer Kepong or Cheras Baru, which are antiques and should be removed as such. To begin with the decimation of Chinese schools and the reconstruction of Chinese private schools with curriculum that emphasizes Malaysiana.

10.   The reconstruction of education curriculum that emphasizes objectivity and respect. No such thing as a 5,000 year old civilization being superior to those which are newer and such. Base everything on the basis of scientific inquiry, rationalisation, curiosity, evidence-based, and infused with God-given spirituality to compensate for the limits and boundaries of scientific knowledge. Infuse national schools with learning of scriptures, hafazan, and deen-based knowledge as the overarching philosophy that binds all bodies of knowledge at a philosophical, pedagogical level that leads to the above.  

11.   Priorities, priorities. Leadership needs to take stock of all these weaknesses. Leadership needs to understand the destination of leading society. At a lower level, middle managers, executives need to understand the big picture. We all have a role to play in this.

 

 

Malaysian Politics and Economy

An admission – I’m just a layman not used to talk about policy-level issues on a local scale, let alone national scale. But I need to get this off my chest.

1.       KPIs are so last century, but hurray GoM is now implementing this as part of their alphabet soup of governance, as advised by the alphabet soup consultants!

2.       Sibu shows the Chinese electorate are a pretty sophisticated bunch who move as one big mass of body politic

3.       Hulu Selangor shows that the Malay-electorate can still be swayed by short-term financial perks – RM50k anyone? Same for Indian-electorate.

4.       Innovation & Technology, the pivot around where the NEM is supposed to sway on to bring us to the high-income territory, is just so bloody far away that I just cant see it happening

5.       The PM has shown that he’s no statesman – u don’t go around explicitly bribing your electorate

6.       Brain Drain shows no signs of abating, and I fear that it may pick up steam after the next GE “when” BN still wins majority seats because of no. 3 above

7.       The Opposition, while showing some promise to reverse some of these deep-seated fundamental problems, have major issues of credibility and leadership. Let’s take a look at national leaders – there’s DSAI – who has funnyman Saiful being a pain in the ass, quite literally – but beyond him….? LKS or LGE – oh please! Let’s not trade a bigot with another. Dzulkifly Ahmad, Nizar, Khalid Samad are too far away from the national consciousness.

8.       Malays are at an important crossroad – they must choose their future – let go of the easy money and be competitive OR milk the nation till everyone starves. You think they’ll be able to make the right choice?

9.       Malaysian sportsmen are our hope for a common, united Malaysia, but are let down by weak mentality. So hockey, badminton, football – not much success there to unite everybody. Squash – too much on the fringes.

10.   The most articulate young politicians are not given the platform to shape or to move policy, institutions or society. Those given opportunities are betrayed by inexperience, lack of ability, easily outmanouvered politically and most importantly in my opinion, let down by an inordinate exaggerated belief in one’s own ability. Personal conviction of youth is our main hope, and when we don’t have enough competition amongst apathetic, rotten, amoral, unethical, ambivalent youth raised in an ineffective education system to produce young leaders– we have a major problem.

11.   oh – item 10 – our education sucks. We need more of the Musleh schools – perhaps in an English medium, which makes them Adni schools. And that needs to be opened to all public, without restriction.

12.   Then there is the teachers – overworked, underappreciated, overwhelmed, stressed and scope creep continues unabated. But they get a nice big Selamat Hari Guru card from the PM… isn’t that sweet?

13.   Financial management of the country sucks. We have a Madoff-like institution giving out high returns regardless of its portfolio performance, we have a provident fund which is so risk-averse that at your retirement age, the average Malaysian will still not have enough, Zakat institutions that are.. I reserve judgment.

14.   We have in inordinate sense of self importance – why do we still protect Proton at the expense of all Malaysians? Btw TM stands for Terribly Mediocre – unbefitting of its status as a national fixed line operator that will soon rollout triple-play and quad-play products. Practise meritocracy and see what Digi does with this. And VW to partner Proton. Btw what happened with Proton’s acquisition of Lotus – Lotus is now dragged down to Proton’s level! CK says we can source out other hydro plants from Sarawak, but which will still need the submarine cable, which was too costly. Oh yeah, he won the Best CEO award, so we should be comforted. Come to think of it, who are the major shareholders of these companies?

Positioning: NEM, Islam in the real world

NEM

1. Economists have a disproportionate sense of self-importance when they dish out policy opinon based on simplified quantitative tools, based on historical data, often followed with a diametrically opposite opinion from a fellow economist using a different set of tools. Sorry- I don't buy into opinions of those with the loudest voices- rationality demands that we test the impact of various decision pathways and evaluate using our understanding of risks and opportunities of the foresseable future. Ie a scenario analysis.

2. NEM is a remarkable document for its fresh and candid views of Msia's economic problems and challenges, distinct from other official views edited for 'spin'.

3. Its policy prescriptions are just generalisations tho, and even then we still have bickering as to degrees of various shades of reasons and rationale of various prescriptions. These are distractions we don’t need when we don’t have any execution capability to exhaust all policy options. Execution needs to be prioritised when a level of comfort with solution is identified. But the important thing is to allow a mechanism for continued reflection and improvement to take place.

4. Hence, it is incumbent for organisations to institutionalise a system for perpetuating a system for improvement. This is captured in quality systems such as ISO9000, tho its importance should be emphasised much more than merely following the spirit of the letter. Policy review is just as important as policy development and policy execution. And within this space, we can allow for the economists to have their day in the limelight for whatever they wish to say.

Islam and the current state of being

5. People with leading edge Islamic thoughts to watch out for:

Society: Tariq Ramadhan – a message for understanding between two diverse cultures based on their own philosophical foundations. It’s a tough job, and personal costs are high in that he has been criticised from both sides, but he’s an acknowledged leader in this field, and should be supported as much as possible. Interesting that he’s been publicly quoted as disowning post-1949 IM, although the reason for his US travel ban was his donation to the precursor to Hamas in 1998.

Finance & Capitalism: Mohamaed Al-Erian- PIMCO boss, reputedly with links to IM, has business book of the year while taking his year out managing Harvard’s endowment funds. I like the philosophy behind PIMCO’s foundation. I’m a bit edgy about PIMCO’s involvement with conventional finance though.

Politics: Abd Wahab Al-Effendi: Sudanese ulama’ debunking the objectives of the khilafah. His book is a source of great debate and will likely shape the intellectual philosophy for Islamic moral leadership, rather than regulatory and political leadership.

This should be enough for now and adequate resource for debate and dialogue.

Media spin and benefits from improved US-Msia ties

1.       general comments first: this country’s media needs to improve its current spm-level reporting to something more incisive, critical and developmental. The whole country suffers when journalists and editors take a safety-first approach when reporting leadership activities. Cairo has a newspaper which is 8 pages thin, and Saudi not that much more.. an indication of an unwillingness to educate the public, as the risks of controlling an educated, demanding public could spiral out of control. This attitude is wrong, and more of emulating the attitude of “standing on the shoulders of giants” should be the norm.

2.       Najib was optimistic it would pave the way for “a new beginning” that could lead to a broad, multi-faceted development. =è Bloody spin!

“Economic and trade investment will be a key component of our bilateral ties as we move forward because the US is a big source, not only in terms of an export market for our manufacturing industry but also a source for new technology such as ICT and biotechnology. He pointed out that most fund managers and venture capitalists were US-based.” -  

Ha, this last remark is interesting. Are we looking to pave the way for greater networking and tech transfer with the US. Context is everything – and US is still reeling from its bloody nose from the last economic crisis. We’re actually in a good position and leveraged properly we could get great deals out of this collaboration. But if we go with the attitude of beggars and inferiority complex, we’re gonna get screwed long and hard by these buggers.

“Equally important to us is making the world a safer place.”

3.       And again, let’s not stoop to these buggers – detaining foreign students on Malaysian shores under ISA on the pretext of national security… was this a prelude to this meeting? Let’s first and foremost, build our principles, justice, and equality, and talk to these guys, head-to-head, shoulder-to-shoulder, and eyeball-to-eyeball if need be.

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Obama brings up topic of New Economic Model with Najib

14 Apr 2010

Local Source: The Star

By LIM AI LEE 

Date Published : 14 Apr 2010

 

WASHINGTON: Malaysia’s New Economic Model (NEM) was one of the issues discussed during the bilateral meeting between Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak and US President Barack Obama.

Obama, who raised the topic, wanted to know more about the NEM’s implementation.

The Prime Minister said he informed Obama of the Government’s goal of transforming Malaysia into a high-income economy and its liberalising policy.

“I explained that although Malaysia has been successful in its development approach in the past, it does not mean we will continue to be successful unless we look at a package that is more in tune with the new environment and can spur further development,” Najib said at a briefing for Malaysian journalists on Monday night.

Najib added that he brought up the example of Coca Cola investing RM1bil to illustrate how Malaysia had managed to convince huge American firms to invest in the country.

On his meeting with Obama that was held on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit, Najib was optimistic it would pave the way for “a new beginning” that could lead to a broad, multi-faceted development.

“Economic and trade investment will be a key component of our bilateral ties as we move forward because the US is a big source, not only in terms of an export market for our manufacturing industry but also a source for new technology such as ICT and biotechnology.”

He pointed out that most fund managers and venture capitalists were US-based.

“There are thus a host of economic opportunities that we can leverage on if we have good bilateral ties with the US,” Najib said.

He also stressed on collaboration in terms of security, counter-terrorism and sharing of information under bilateral ties, saying:

“Equally important to us is making the world a safer place.”

Najib said he extended an invitation to Obama to visit Malaysia, adding that the last president to step into the country did so in 1966.

Apart from meeting Obama, Najib also attended a working lunch with US vice-president Joe Biden and later had a face-to-face meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key.

The dark side of the internet

The dark side of the internet

In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography

Andy Beckett
Thursday November 26 2009
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet

Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.

"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about ? freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that.

His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky ? they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'"

Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: "At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend to get Freenet from friends." Last year Clarke produced an improved version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also, in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at all.

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions ("How much security do you need?" ? "NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country" or "MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse"). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of "freesites" available: "Iran News", "Horny Kate", "The Terrorist's Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists", "How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]", "Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more", "Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists". There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs ("Welcome to my first Freenet site. I'm not here because of kiddie porn ? [but] I might post some images of naked women") and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: "If you're reading this now, then you're on the darkweb."

The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness ? its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google they're getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it's a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don't know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."

Unfathomable and mysterious

"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" ? the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.

And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the confines of most people's online lives, there is a vast other internet out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future of life online or the past?

Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, 'It's probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"' he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."

In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet ? The value of deep web content is immeasurable ? internet searches are searching only 0.03% ? of the [total web] pages available."

In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. "A hidden web [search] engine that's going to have everything ? that's not quite practical," says Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep. "It's not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There's just too much data."

But sheer scale is not the only problem. "When we've crawled [searched] several sites, we've gotten blocked," says Freire. "You can actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone [searching] to grab all your data." Sometimes the motivation is commercial ? "people have spent a lot of time and money building, say, a database of used cars for sale, and don't want you to be able to copy their site"; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons. "There's a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business Network (RBN)," says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a leading online security firm, "and they're always jumping around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting."

The RBN also rents temporary websites to other criminals for online identity theft, child pornography and releasing computer viruses. The internet has been infamous for such activities for decades; what has been less understood until recently was how the increasingly complex geography of the internet has aided them. "In 2000 dark and murky address space was a bit of a novelty," says Labovitz. "This is now an entrenched part of the daily life of the internet." Defunct online companies; technical errors and failures; disputes between internet service providers; abandoned addresses once used by the US military in the earliest days of the internet ? all these have left the online landscape scattered with derelict or forgotten properties, perfect for illicit exploitation, sometimes for only a few seconds before they are returned to disuse. How easy is it to take over a dark address? "I don't think my mother could do it," says Labovitz. "But it just takes a PC and a connection. The internet has been largely built on trust."

Open or closed?

In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture ? the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog ? and both groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments as well as open ones. "Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in parallel with the internet," says Danny O'Brien, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for online privacy.

There are still secretive parts of the internet where this unlikely alliance between hairy libertarians and the cloak-and-dagger military endures. The Onion Router, or Tor, is an American volunteer-run project that offers free software to those seeking anonymous online communication, like a more respectable version of Freenet. Tor's users, according to its website, include US secret service "field agents" and "law enforcement officers . . . Tor allows officials to surf questionable websites and services without leaving tell-tale tracks," but also "activists and whistleblowers", for example "environmental groups [who] are increasingly falling under surveillance in the US under laws meant to protect against terrorism". Tor, in short, is used both by the American state and by some of its fiercest opponents. On the hidden internet, political life can be as labyrinthine as in a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

The hollow legs of Sealand

The often furtive, anarchic quality of life online struck some observers decades ago. In 1975, only half a dozen years after the internet was created, the science-fiction author John Brunner wrote of "so many worms and counter-worms loose in the data-net" in his influential novel The Shockwave Rider. By the 80s "data havens", at first physical then online locations where sensitive computerised information could be concealed, were established in discreet jurisdictions such as Caribbean tax havens. In 2000 an American internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand [http://www.sealandgov.org/" title="Sealand official website]. HavenCo announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden depths of the internet was hard to imagine.

In 2007 the highly successful Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay ? the downloading of music and films for free being another booming darknet enterprise ? announced its intention to buy Sealand. The plan has come to nothing so far, and last year it was reported that HavenCo had ceased operation, but in truth the need for physical data havens is probably diminishing. Services such as Tor and Freenet perform the same function electronically; and in a sense, even the "open" internet, as online privacy-seekers sometimes slightly contemptuously refer to it, has increasingly become a place for concealment: people posting and blogging under pseudonyms, people walling off their online lives from prying eyes on social networking websites.

"The more people do everything online, the more there's going to be bits of your life that you don't want to be part of your public online persona," says O'Brien. A spokesman for the Police Central e-crime Unit [PCeU] at the Metropolitan Police points out that many internet secrets hide in plain sight: "A lot of internet criminal activity is on online forums that are not hidden, you just have to know where to find them. Like paedophile websites: people who use them might go to an innocent-looking website with a picture of flowers, click on the 18th flower, arrive on another innocent-looking website, click something there, and so on." The paedophile ring convicted this autumn and currently awaiting sentence for offences involving Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth met on Facebook. Such secret criminal networks are not purely a product of the digital age: codes and slang and pathways known only to initiates were granting access to illicit worlds long before the internet.

To libertarians such as O'Brien and Clarke the hidden internet, however you define it, is constantly under threat from restrictive governments and corporations. Its freedoms, they say, must be defended absolutely. "Child pornography does exist on Freenet," says Clarke. "But it exists all over the web, in the post . . . At Freenet we could establish a virus to destroy any child pornography on Freenet ? we could implement that technically. But then whoever has the key [to that filtering software] becomes a target. Suddenly we'd start getting served copyright notices; anything suspect on Freenet, we'd get pressure to shut it down. To modify Freenet would be the end of Freenet."

Always recorded

According to the police, for criminal users of services such as Freenet, the end is coming anyway. The PCeU spokesman says, "The anonymity things, there are ways to get round them, and we do get round them. When you use the internet, something's always recorded somewhere. It's a question of identifying who is holding that information." Don't the police find their investigations obstructed by the libertarian culture of so much life online? "No, people tend to be co-operative."

The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges regretfully.

Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try hard enough."

As Kosmix and other search engines improve, he says, they will make the internet truly transparent: "You will be on the same level playing field as the bad guys." The internet as a sort of electronic panopticon, everything on it unforgivingly visible and retrievable ? suddenly its current murky depths seem in some ways preferable.

Ten years ago Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the web, wrote: "I have a dream for the web in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web ? the content, links, and transactions between people ? A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." Yet this "semantic web" remains the stuff of knotty computer science papers rather than a reality.

"It's really been the holy grail for 30 years," says Bergman. One obstacle, he continues, is that the internet continues to expand in unpredictable and messy surges. "The boundaries of what the web is have become much more blurred. Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else? Now the web, in a sense, is just everything. In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can't talk about how big the internet is. Because what is the metric?"

Gold Rush

It seems likely that the internet will remain in its Gold Rush phase for some time yet. And in the crevices and corners of its slightly thrown-together structures, darknets and other private online environments will continue to flourish. They can be inspiring places to spend time in, full of dissidents and eccentrics and the internet's original freewheeling spirit. But a darknet is not always somewhere for the squeamish.

On Freenet, there is a currently a "freesite" which makes allegations against supposed paedophiles, complete with names, photographs, extensive details of their lives online, and partial home addresses. In much smaller type underneath runs the disclaimer: "The material contained in this freesite is hearsay . . . It is not admissable in court proceedings and would certainly not reach the burden of proof requirement of a criminal trial." For the time being, when I'm wandering around online, I may stick to Google.

Prosperity without Growth

1.       All this malarkey about New Growth Model / High-Income Model etc is making me puke. It’s a shameless and misguided call for increasing GDP growth figures so that wealth will create happiness to people.

2.       TDM’s years have actually proven that placing this criteria above all else is mistaken. Back at the peak of the Asian crisis, our GDP growth figures held up reasonably compared to our peers, but that’s because of pump-priming, aka let’s build beautiful buildings in Putrajaya so that we can tell the world how we’ve got it made, and **** the masses cos the spillovers will benefit them. Fast fwd to now, and we have a country building up its debt levels with all these continuous deficit budgets, increased crime, fractured society and blameworthy politicians from both divides. While I’m being disingenuous if I were to blame all these problems to the construction of Putrajaya, I’d like to venture that that was a manifestation of spend to create growth, for GDP growth is the penis envy affliction of some country’s economic administrators.

3.       And here we are repeating the same mistakes with the NGM / MIM thing, and this SWF is lending its full support to execute this.

4.       What we need is a leader who knows that life in Dunya is only as preparation for the Hereafter, but this life in Dunya needs to sustain a happy, sustainable lliving for all. And again, this philosophy is superbly, comfortably captured in the Quran.

5.       The following extracts bring recency to this argument, although intuitively I sense certain gaps are missing as it’s still looking into merely “worldly” things, but it’s a fantastic start, and ideologues for Islamic economics would do well to pick this up.

Source: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/public-data/files/happy-planet-index-2-0.pdf

Excerpts from the report:

“To maintain growth, Western capitalist economies have a structural need to sustain demand for consumption.72,73,74 But this feature of the system sets it at odds with a widely noted fact about human nature – that once our basic material needs are comfortably met, more consumption tends to make little difference to our well-being. This is not just folk wisdom, although it is certainly the case that throughout history, and across all cultures and religions, people have cautioned against an excessive focus on wealth and material possessions. Research suggests that in most reasonably developed countries, material circumstances such as wealth and possessions play only a small role in determining levels of happiness – some psychologists estimate that they explain only around 10 per cent of variation in happiness at the aggregate level.75 Beyond a certain level of income, increasing wealth makes little difference.76 Much more significant are factors relating to individual differences in outlook and to the kinds of activities that people engage in: socialising, participating in cultural life, having meaningful and challenging work and so on.

But the requirement to maintain consumption growth at all costs has led to a situation in which, for decades, we have been presented with a poisonous combination of messages. First, we are constantly bombarded with messages from advertisers and marketers, all pushing the idea that buying this or that new product will make us happier. Added to this, in many countries we have been offered staggeringly easy access to credit with which to keep up our level of consumption. Quite apart from the environmental impacts, this has served us very poorly in a number of ways.

For one thing, levels of debt have soared in recent years; in 2007 and 2008, for the first time on record, UK personal debt exceeded total GDP.77 As recent research from the Institute of Psychiatry in London shows, debt is a large contributing factor to a person’s chances of developing clinically significant anxiety and depression, largely irrespective of their income.78 It is not hard to imagine why this might be. The stress of working just to keep up repayments is exhausting, the fear of defaulting constant and gnawing, and that’s without having to deal with the feelings of despair and inadequacy for having failed.

But there is also a more subtle and no less damaging aspect to all this focus on personal consumption. People who are strongly motivated by the idea of getting rich and famous are what psychologists refer to as materialistic. Using an engaging metaphor, psychologist and author Oliver James describes them as having caught the ‘affluenza’ virus.79 The scientific evidence for the negative impacts of materialism is overwhelming; they range from poorer personal relationships through fewer good moods and lower self-esteem, to increased prevalence of psychological symptoms.80 In short, people whose main aspiration is to be wealthy are inclined to be less satisfied with their lives in general than those who focus their energies elsewhere.81 What is worrying, but perhaps unsurprising, is the extent to which materialism is on the rise. Figure 2 shows data from an annual survey of college students in the USA. The proportion of respondents feeling that being very wealthy is important has doubled since the early 1970s, with a concomitant decrease in the number considering a meaningful philosophy in life to be important.”

turmoil, tsunami and armageddon? - causes

Well - I could spend some time to really understand and try to predict the right way of overcoming this, but the sheer complexity of the whole issue means it'll take time to comprehend, let alone undertake the necessary structural changes.

For a start, this is a brilliant encapsulation of the effects of greed, not a technical description of the mechanics of the failure, that I presume will be well covered in other areas - but also fittingly describes the failure of ribaa'...

http://timesbusiness.typepad.com/money_weblog/2008/10/10-people-who-p.html#more
Minsky:Dr. Michael Hudson - global research dot ca wrote:"A generation ago, for instance, Hyman Minsky gained a following by describing what he aptly called the Ponzi stage of the business cycle. It was the phase in which debtors no longer were able to pay off their loans out of current income (as in Stage #1, where they earned enough to cover their interest and amortization charges), and indeed did not even earn enough to pay the interest charges (as in Stage #2), but had to borrow the money to pay the interest owed to their bankers and other creditors. In this Stage #3 the interest was simply added onto the debt, growing at a compound rate. It ends in a crash.This was the flip side of the magic of compound interest – the belief that people can get rich by "putting money to work." Money doesn’t really work, of course. When lent out, it extracts interest from the "real" production and consumption economy, that is, from the labor and industry that actually do the work. It is much like a tax, a monopoly rent levied by the financial sector. Yet this quasi-tax, this extractive financial rent (as Alfred Marshall explained over a century ago) is the dynamic that is supposed to enable corporate, state and local pension funds to pay for retirement simply out of stock market gains and bond investments – purely financially and hence at the expense of the economy at large whose employees are supposed to be gainers. This is the essence of "pension-fund capitalism," a Ponzi-scheme variant of finance capitalism. Unfortunately, it is grounded in purely mathematical relationships that have little grounding in the "real" economy in which families and companies produce and consume.Mr. Paulson’s bailout plan reflects a state of denial with regard to this dynamic. The debt overhead is self-aggravating, becoming less and less "solvable" and hence more of a quandary, that is, a problem with no visible solution. At least, no solution acceptable to Wall Street, and hence to Mr. Paulson and the Democratic and Republican congressional leaders. The banks and large swaths of the financial sector are broke from having made bad gambles in the belief that money could be made to "work" under conditions that shrink the underlying industrial economy and stifle wage gains, eroding the market for consumer goods. Debt deflation reduces sales and business activity in general, and hence corporate earnings. This depresses stock market and real estate prices, and hence the value of collateral pledged to back the economy’s debt overhead. Negative equity leads to bankruptcy and foreclosures."He also states:The main impact will be to reinforce the concentration of wealth in the hands of creditors (the wealthiest 10 percent of the population) rather than wiping out financial assets (and debts) through the bankruptcies that were occurring as a result of "market forces". Is it too much to say that we are seeing the end of economic democracy and the emergence of a financial oligarchy ­ a self-serving class whose actions threaten to polarize society and, in the process, stifle economic growth and lead to the very bankruptcy that the bailout was supposed to prevent?Everything that I have read in economic history leads me to believe that we are entering a nightmare transition era. The business cycle is essentially a financial cycle. Upswings tend to become economy-wide Ponzi schemes as banks and other creditors, savers and investors receive interest and plow it back into new loans, accruing yet more interest as debt levels rise. This is the "magic of compound interest" in a nutshell. No "real" economy in history has grown at a rate able to keep up with this financial dynamic. Indeed, payment of this interest by households and businesses leaves less to spend on goods and services, causing markets to shrink and investment and employment to be cut back."
We all should be organizing to take our democracies back.