In the past 6 months, I’ve received more than 20 political SPAM sms’ from the Barisan Nasional Yakini BN campaign, various political surveys and two from my local MP from PAS (Dr. Siti Mariah Mahmud). Now obviously, I’m expecting the spam rate to increase exponentially as we approach GE13, and to me that’s really bad news. In fact over the last month alone...
Crowdsourcing has come to the Asia Pacific region–and it’s come in a big way. A couple of months back, I was contacted by the people organizing Crowdsourcing week in Singapore to attend the event, unfortunately due to personal commitments I was unable to make it–bummer! Crowdsourcing week is a great idea that brings a whole bunch of great speakers including Jennifer Gustetic, an...
A Social Media Analytics firm recently reported that nearly 50% of Justin Bieber followers on Twitter–were fake. This meant that nearly 18 million followers on Justins twitter account either belonged to no ‘real’ person or belonged to a spam account–and that dear readers is a lot of spam! That’s like a newspaper saying its circulation was 100,000 a day, but it was...
Danny Hillis talks about a backup plan for the internet, and on the face of it — the idea sounds absurd. Why would anyone have a backup plan for the internet? There isn’t a single IT project worth it’s salt that would register the entire internet failing as a risk, the internet after all was built as a decentralized communications medium that couldn’t be taken down with a...
Crowdfunding is exploding, and kickstarter is exploding with it. In 2012 alone, Kickstarter successfully helped start 18,109 projects, from pledges of nearly 300 million. That’s a lot of cash from just random strangers hoping to help someone else realize their dreams, or to help the public in general. Noteworthy projects include an open-source geiger counter to detect radiation levels in...
Previously I wrote about a great report from MASTIC that surveyed the perception of the Malaysian public regarding Science and Technology. What I failed to mention or rather what I ‘chose’ not to mention at the time was a specific portion of the report that dealt with the Theory of Evolution, and the reason why I didn’t want to address it was to not distract from the original...
The Star today reported on ‘4D fortune teller’ who was arrested for in connection with a cheating case worth over RM1 Million. Of course most of think that the guy got what was coming to him, however the question becomes how do we say a ‘4D Fortune Teller’ was cheating–to the point where we can charge him in court (under section 420A of the Penal code). The report...
I recently discovered a really good study conducted by the MASTIC in Malaysia to determine Public Awareness of Science in Malaysia. The study was conducted every 2 years from 1998 till 2008, which gives us 5 really great data sets to determine not just the public awareness of science in a particular year–but also how that perception changes over the decade. The study makes for a good...