Autárquicas: o Yin e o Yang compostos pela corrupção e pela Justiça

Sinto-me triste com a re-vitória do Isaltino em Oeiras. Palavra, Portugal é um país de gente curiosa. Tenho a certeza de que a maior parte das pessoas que votou no Isaltino deve ter participado em conversas de café em que se terão referido ao autarca como corrupto, que se anda a encher às custas da Câmara e dos negócios com os construtores. Durante anos e anos isto não passava de conversa de café apimentada pelos "casos verídicos" que uns iam contando aos outros por via do tio da sobrinha do cunhado de um amigo da senhora do talho que é conhecida do senhor das castanhas cujo primo é homem de confiança de um construtor e que sabe muito bem que o Isaltino terá recebido um apartamento pela licença de construção de um bloco de 4 edifícios. Durante anos e anos isto não passou de conversa de café e Isaltino lá foi ganhando e trabalhando e ficando mais rico. E fez de Oeiras um dos melhores concelhos para se viver em Portugal, é bem verdade. Durante anos e anos os eleitores de Isaltino vociferaram contra os corruptos que nunca vão a julgamento e os que vão mas que obviamente nunca são condenados. Porque em Portugal só os pobres vão presos. Mas em 2009 há um grande que finalmente é condenado. E é condenado a pena de prisão efectiva, de nada mais nada menos que 7 anos, suspensa apenas por interposição de recurso. Agora que podemos todos dizer que Isaltino é corrupto sem o risco de sermos processados por difamação, o que faz o eleitorado Oeirense? Volta a eleger o corrupto. Porquê? Porque o Isaltino pode ser corrupto, mas é o nosso corrupto. Nós, os de Oeiras, graças a esta condenação temos um luxo que muitos outros não têm. Temos a certeza de quem temos à frente do nosso Município. Temos um corrupto que tem feito obra.

Curiosamente, a Fátima perdeu a Câmara de Felgueiras. E isto é tanto mais curioso quanto, ao contrário do que aconteceu com Isaltino, a Fatinha conseguiu uma clara absolvição no processo do saco azul. Não faço ideia da competência da Dª Fátima como autarca, será que não é grande? Será que após todo o folclore do julgamento, da fuga à prisão preventiva, do regresso, recandidatura, reeleição e absolvição, a Fátima perdeu a inspiração autárquica e o amor dos felgueirenses? Ou será que depois de absolvida deixou de ser elegível? Afinal, quem é que quer um autarca que não é corrupto? Sobretudo um que não foi condenado a pena de prisão efectiva?

P.S.: Faço questão de esclarecer que não votei no Isaltino. Caso ainda não fosse evidente.

Just waterboard them all!

Following Techsassy's twit on a Playboy video where a reporter let's himself be waterboarded, a thing or two came to mind. First, by reading the comments made by most of the readers of that post, I get the distinct impression that the possibility that at least some of the waterboarded guys are not necessarily terrorists (as in "innocent of the accusations"), never even crosses their minds. The reason why there is a judicial system is because civilized societies have developed this expensive and (in the case of Portugal, at least) time consuming process to determine the guilt of people accused of crimes. In the Middle Ages, which some people for some reason call the "Dark Ages" (imagine ominous music playing while you read those two words), they had a much more expedite process to determine the guilt of people. The suspects' arms and legs would be tied and they would be thrown into a lake. The guilt or innocence would be determined by capacity of the accused to float. Their investigation methods must have been very good at that time because that process usually confirmed the suspicions.

Another thing which came to mind is that what the video demonstrates is, and I can only imagine, a very soft version of the waterboarding technique. For one thing, the reporter had the control of the situation. He could stop whenever he wanted to, which, in that case, was something like after 6 seconds. For some reason I don't think that the nice interrogators in the US Armed Forces would stop after just 6 seconds. Another thing that comes to mind is that only a bit of the process is shown. Terrorism suspects are waterboarded for the acquisition of intel. So I'm going out on a limb here and risk saying that the technique (torture) will be restarted as many times as needed until the subject babbles something that might be of interest to the tort... I mean, "intel acquisition specialists". So, for this demonstration to be closer to reality what should have been done was to try to get him to confess something. And I'm particularly curious to know how many times they would have to waterboard the reporter before getting his confession that he was the guy on the grassy knoll. Not so curious that I'm willing to let myself be waterboarded, mind due. I'm also left wondering how do the interrogators decide that they have the wrong guy. Because both the terrorist and the innocent will surely start by saying they don't know the answers to the questions. Maybe the trick is to see who keeps saying he doesn't know the answers after, let's say, twenty plunges.

Many people argument that waterboarding is not a form of torture because it doesn't inflict physical pain. Without even going into that, I would point out that United Nations Convention Against Torture's definition of torture includes severe mental suffering. I'm only guessing here, but I'd say that if the process is repeated over and over, severe mental suffering is more or less guaranteed. Again I'm guessing, but I'm pretty convinced that the subjects of real waterboarding will almost certainly suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now, I don't want to be unfair to the reporter. His aim was not to replicate the conditions under which terrorism suspects, or any other, are subject to waterboarding. He just wanted to be able to explain as best as possible what does a person who is waterboarded feel. So my own aim with these words is only to debunk the arguments of those who would use this video to argument that waterboarding is not torture.

Note to self on GMail

I recently added some very simple filters to GMail that will help me use it as a memory enhancer in a much better way then just simply sending mails to myself. GMail's filters allow you to automatically execute a number of tasks. So what I did was to create a filter which will add a "Book" tag to any mails received with "Book:" on the subject, mark the message as read and archive it. Mails that I send to myself with mentions of books are not for immediate action. I just want to register somewhere that I found an interesting book that I may want to buy someday. So it's ok just to archive those mails with a tag. For notes to self or tasks I have a simpler filter. It just adds the corresponding tag but the mail stays in the Inbox.

Now that I'm thinking about this simple hack it starts to make sense to create an Ubiquity command to extract the relevant information from an Amazon page and send the message to myself. Have to relearn how to program Ubiquity commands since there were changes to the parser engine.

Gotta stop multitasking. You should too.

Yesterday I was listening to the excellent BBC Science in Action podcast and on of the pieces was with an investigator who is writing a paper about multitasking. If I remember it correctly, the study started because of his perception as a teacher that many people, including his under-graduate students, are pressed into multitasking. Either on their jobs or on their leisure times, people increasingly multi-task through their lives. This was puzzling because every psychology study written on the subject to this day seems to clearly state that the human brain can't multi-task. It's not physiologically prepared for that kind of processing. So he (and a team, I think) started comparatively studying high and low multitasking individuals. He identified three characteristics needed for multitasking and compared the test subjects on them. The characteristics are:

1. Ability to filter irrelevant information - this should be one of the main characteristics for a multi-tasker. When provided with different sources of information the perfect multi-tasker should be able to discard irrelevant information and concentrate on the most important data.
   
2. High capacity to change between tasks - changing from one task to the other should be a fast and effortless process.
3. Using good mental sorting, storage and accessing strategies and capacities - since information is gathered from different sources, the perfect multi-tasker should be able to mentally sort and store that information in "brain cabinets" and should also be able to find and access that information in a fast and efficient way.

Now, funny enough, when comparing the heavy multi-taskers to the serial-taskers, the second group evidenced better ratings at all the three multitasking required characteristics. This means that heavy multi-taskers are terrible at multitasking. And this raises some interesting questions. If people are so bad at multitasking, why do they do it? Since they can't really do things faster by multitasking, do they get some other rewards instead? Do they get pleasure from the constant flow of information without even a reasonable processing of that information? And many more interesting questions he must have thought about, I'm sure.

After listening to that podcast I thought about how it applies to me. It's true I've been adopting a more multitasking posture. I'm reading mails, twits, looking for articles, following links. Looking back a bit, I think I need to change my stance towards Twitter. Many times I end up reading a number of articles for which I don't really care about. It's like since I've been made aware of a certain article I feel a certain obligation to read it. Which is silly, of course. Another thing that is worrying me is that I've been feeling a certain degradation on my mental capacities. For instance, last Monday something funny happened to me. I had this DVD to return to the rental club. I should also get the groceries that my wife had left in the car. I take these opportunities without the wife and children to get up-to-date with my podcasts so, before leaving, I set up the headphones on my HTC and started a podcast. Half the way driving to the DVD rental I look down to the passenger seat. Hmm... so where's the DVD I should be returning? I turn back, get the DVD, walk to the rental only to find out that it closes at 2300 hours. Great, not only did I spend the diesel for nothing, now I'll have to pay double for the rental. I drive home, park the car in the garage, take the elevator, open the door.

- Didn't you return home a while ago? - asks my wife.
- Yeah (grumble).
- Don't tell me you forgot the DVD?
- Yeah (grumble).
- Oh. I thought you had gone back to get the groceries...
- OH FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD!!!

So, I had two tasks to perform and ended up forgetting about them both. I didn't forget about my podcasts, though. I got the impression from the BBC podcast I mentioned, that, not only does multitasking not help in accomplishing more tasks done in less time, it might even hurt our brains. In face of this I think I'll adopt the following measures:

• Change my current policy on mail checking. This means lowering mail priority;
  
• Really rethink my usage of Twitter. I don't really need a social network and I definitely can get the good articles I get through Twitter by using other, less attention intensive means;
• Try to concentrate more on single tasks.

Hopefully I'll be able to increase my short term memory performance, which has been scary for some time now.

5 year olds know something about economy too

The other day I arrived at home and my wife says to my 5 year old: "so, tell your father what you have done". And the boy goes "I traded a Hot Wheels car for this card". I could not believe it! It's the second time he has traded something on his own initiative and both times he was ripped off. By another 5 year old. The first time he traded a Gormitti figure for another one of these awful looking Magic cards which was an equaly bad deal. And then I was explaining him why that was bad business: the car costs € 2.50 but a card comes in a 5 card package for 1 € or something. He got a bit upset because I think the chip finally fell so he was saying he was going to trash the card and was going to get the car back and so on. We calmed him down and I didn't give it another thought. But apparently he did. So, later on in the day he explains his mum why it was a good deal after all. His reasoning was that he didn't have many of those Magic cards, cause we never bought him any, but he had loads of Hot Wheels. So it made sense to trade something of which he had many for something he had almost nothing. And that actually makes economic sense... I think.

Ray Bradbury to Yahoo: "To hell with the Internet!"

Sci Fi Wire tells us about Ray Bradbury's reaction to Yahoo's proposal to put a book of his in the net. Apparently his answer wasn't as polite as one could expect, and I quote "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet." Apparently Mr. Bradbury has very strong feelings about the Internet. It took me some minutes to digest his reaction. Mr. Bradbury sees the Internet as a very real threat to the public libraries system. And perhaps with some reason. But the vehemence of his reaction led me to think a bit more about the subject. Mr. Bradbury is not like some old people who don't really know what the Internet is about. He actually does. I think that, in his mind, the Internet is an incarnation of the fire-fighters in "Fahrenheit 451". The Internet will ultimately be the match which will set fire to all the books. He seems to be afraid that books in their paper form will be consumed by it. That would explain why he feels so strongly about the subject. Although, and since psychiatry wasn't part of my academic life, I could be completely wrong. There's a very high probability of that.

Immediacy: addendum

Something very important I neglected to mention on yesterday's post. One of the insidious aspects of Twitter's immediacy is it's luring aspect. The engine that Twitter so cleverly assembled bombards it's users with a continuous stream of news, thoughts and feelings. It's so easy to just sit there under the pouring letters. Sure, you can retweet (RT) some, tweet back some others. It's like a magnet, like the call of the sirens that led sailors to death by drowning. You're always waiting for the next interesting thing. A new article, a new joke, instant news, whatever. And while you look at this continuous stream of letters you're actually not producing. And I'm not even talking about the work you get payed to do (yes, sure, that's what makes the world go round, but this text is about something else). I'm talking about taking those thoughts out of your head and say your piece, build knowledge, add a new, even if only slightly, point of view of things. I'm talking about releasing your creativity and provide it with a solid bridge to cross over to an humanity-accessible medium. 140 characters is kind of flimsy.

Immediacy

This is my first text in English in this blog. My previous policy regarding this blog was to write in Portuguese (PT-PT). When I created my Twitter account I decided to follow an language-flexible policy. Portugal related entries I write in Portuguese, otherwise in English. This may not work that well for international readers, but I think it works fine for Portuguese Internet dwellers. And anyway, I'm not exactly trying to captivate a network of followers so I'll do as it damn well pleases me. One thing that has always amused/surprised me was how one so easily falls into a set of self defined boundaries in terms of the published contents. One of the reasons this blog is anonimous is because when I created it I decided that I would write about anything I wished. So I would write about social issues, politics, movies, whatever, as pretty much everyone does, but I would also write the most pornographic stories that came to mind. Well, if you (an eventual reader of this blog entry) cares to take the effort of googling this blog you'll find exactly zero entries with such content. Why? Was it because no pornographic issues crossed my mind in more than 2 years of blogging? Well, nothing couldn't be further from the truth. I think that the main reason is that as time passes and you start getting regular visits from other bloggers you sort of don't feel comfortable showing them that side of your mind. So you unconsciously define a set of rules and just follow them. It seems to me that the best approach if one wants to have a serious blog and still write about such stuff is to build another persona and another blog and with it a newly created freedom will be available. This is just an opinion, of course. People should do whatever feels right for them.

Well, look at that. I wanted to write about the immediacy of twitter versus the more thought out stage of blogging and I ended up all that as an introduction. Anyway, better late then never. When I started a Twitter account I was pleased by the freedom it offered. I mean, there's a limited ammount of ignorance you can insert in 140 characters. And that sort of protects you a lot. After all, when I used to blog it took me a lot of time to research stuff so that commentators couldn't simply point out a non-fact or a lie. In twitter you don't really commit that much. There is no space for very elaborated thoughts and it's hard to discuss matters with other people. So the 140 characters are pretty much ok for a "what are you doing?" but not very good for "what do you think about the state of the world?". OTOH, Twitter is very good for "what is happening as we speak" while blogging is better for "what is the background of what just happened?". So, all in all, these two tools of the Web 2.0 are complementary. And Twitter is also a very good as a blog promotion tool, so one ends up working as a percursor of the other.

O despertar de um longo sono

Ora aí está. Aproveitando as férias decidi também reactivar o meu blogue que ficou parado no tempo qual Capitão América, suspenso num bloco de gelo. Está tal e qual como quando o deixei, mas sem os efeitos da passagem de 2 anos, 9 meses e 16 dias. Olhando para o blogue quase que esperaria ver os artigos cheios de pó, com espessas teias de aranha unindo os cantos. Mas não. Brilha como se nem um dia se tivesse passado. No entanto o longo sono a que foi forçado trouxe algumas vantagens. As pessoas que o conheciam e me conheciam a mim já se esqueceram que este blogue alguma vez existiu, pelo que posso retomar a minha escrita sem o desconforto de ter, por exemplo, o meu chefe a lê-lo nas minhas costas. Temo no entanto que este despertar seja temporário. A verdade é que, com muita pena minha, fora de férias pouco tempo tenho para escrever.

Decidi ligar esta minha personalidade webiana à minha personalidade twittiana. Vou usar a mesma lógica que uso no Twitter. Artigos relativos a Portugal escrevê-los-hei em português. Artigos de carácter internacional, escrevê-los-hei em inglês. Gostaria que o meu próximo artigo neste blogue fosse sobre Israel, mas é um artigo que quero fundamentar muito bem, o que levará algum tempo. Por isso desconfio que não será esse o meu próximo artigo... aliás, enquanto escrevo isto heis que me surge uma ideia alternativa.