US President Obama today is appointing Todd Park as the new U.S. Chief Technology Officer, with the important task of applying the newest technology and latest advances to make the Federal government work better for the American people.   For nearly three years, Todd has served as CTO of the U.S. Department of

Health and Human Services, where he was a hugely energetic force for positive change. He led the successful execution of an array of breakthrough initiatives, including the Continue Reading

I’ve been wondering about various social media metrics, more specifically fan growth and how they impact our public

image – then a thought popped in saying “well, like currency, wouldn’t the value of…



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It may sound unreal but I had never planned to attend a university abroad and, if you had asked me about application processes two years back, I would have probably greeted you with a blank face (yes, the cartoonish one). But life is truly unpredictable and in these past two years I have changed countries, attended a community college and, lastly, have been admitted to the University of Texas at Austin – a top-notch university in the USA. You can say I was as unprepared for studying abroad as anyone can ever be but, if I can get here, why can’t you?

There are two rules to applying to universities abroad (any university for that matter!) First of all, know the deadlines and secondly, do regular follow-ups. Too simple to be true? Applying to universities should not be an Armageddon; not if you know all your deadlines and plan details accordingly. So, let’s get started!

Make a list of all the universities you plan on applying to. Then, pick up a pen and jot down the deadlines (credit for this handy trick goes to my obsessive sister); if you are like me and hate the process of making lists, do not fret because you will only have to do this once. And, trust me, it’s worth getting this done sooner than later. Make sure you have deadlines for everything: from applications, transcripts to financial aid or scholarships. Now that you have this in order, take one application at a time and finish it (this will be easier if you have the necessary information collected in one place; (yes, the OCD sis to the rescue!) University applications are long and tedious yet they are not impossible. However, it will be a smart move to start well before time – for instance, if you are applying for the fall semester of 2012, I would recommend you get busy. Remember: the sooner you finish, the sooner the voices in your head will stop making you feel guilty at night (this one is on me).

On to the college essays! Before starting to write one, make sure you have read the topics for every university. Chances are they might be asking for the same thing, in different words. NOW YOU HAVE ONE LESS THING TO WORRY ABOUT! Not good with writing essays? Don’t sweat it! This is where your friends and teachers come in play. Write a rough draft for your essay (it does not have to perfect but one liners don’t count!); the easiest way is to imagine you are sitting in an interview and someone has asked you a question. You want to show some spunk, mundane tones will only put them to sleep (ZZzzz) but remember they are not your pals so refrain from being frank – be witty and concise. Personal examples are the best way to go, because, after all, essays are not there to torture you (though I had my doubts); they are there because they (as in, the university officials) want to know more about you as a person rather than just grades and numbers. If you write them early, your friends can help you polish it up. Using stylish English does not mean you are writing a good essay and, regardless of your writing capacity, be sure to revise it – never give your professor the first words that pop in your mind (you hate me right now, don’t you? No worries. You’ll thank me – and my sister, later!)

Once everything is submitted, take a deep breath and relax. Well done, you are almost through! Almost? Yes, almost – you see, with universities, you never know if they need something more from you or you forgot something that should have been there. If you don’t follow-up on the status of your admissions application, it might be too late to do anything once you find out. So here is what you should do – every day at 3, 6 or 9 p.m. (really, simply choose whatever pleases you) check your mail and your application status. This is extremely important if you have applied for financial aid or scholarship as these usually always need more information. Trust me, you don’t want to be the person who missed out on his/her admission because they didn’t check their mail on time (so lame.. hehe).

Now I hope you are ready to face any application process that comes your way. Make us proud! And, you’re welcome.

Source: Masooma Javaid

Exciting news from Adil Najam, Vice Chancellor of LUMS – for those who don’t know him, Dr. Adil Najam was the Frederick S. Pardee Professor of Global Public Policy at Boston University and served as a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), work for which the IPCC was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore. He left BU (where his office had the most gorgeous view overlooking the Charles River) to head the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Adil Najam
Date: Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 4:07 PM
Subject: A request… Help realize a dream!

Dear Friends

Having now been back in Pakistan more than half a year I write to you today with a special request.

I had planned to add an update but these last months have been so amazingly full as well as absolutely fulfilling that I cannot do justice to them in an email. I will await our next meeting to do so in full detail! At the personal front, the family is well and enjoying Lahore in all its glory. Professionally, the intellectual vibrance and excitement of LUMS keeps me constantly engaged and enthused. To give you just a glimpse of the what keeps me excited:

- The University’s social engagement and purpose is infectious; 40% of our students are on financial aid from LUMS (more than Rs. 250M this year only), and our students continue to break national and international barriers;
- Late last year we started a new undergraduate major in history;
- We followed this up by introducing a new Weekend EMBA option;
- Our new School of Science and Engineering is ready to graduate its first full class and our students are already amassing achievements;
- We just announced our 2012 Commencement Speaker – Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Pakistan’s first Oscar winner!

But today I write to request your help and support for a very specific initiative.

I am proud to announce that The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) has formally launched a campaign to create an Abdus Salam Chair at LUMS to honour one of Pakistan’s first Nobel Award winner, and one of our greatest scholar. Once funded, the Abdus Salam Chair will be a University-wide honor to be held by a Professor of international repute and distinction in any academic discipline who has already made major international contributions to his or her field of study. In establishing this Chair my hope is that we will be able to attract other Abdus Salams back to Pakistan and it will help create a new generations of Abdus Salams right here at LUMS.

Dr. Abdus Salam was the first Pakistani to receive the Nobel Award (in Physics) and he is widely considered to be not only one of the great physicists of the last century but also a builder of research institutions – including the establishment of the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, and also the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979, for his theoretical unification of the two fundamental forces of nature. A year before his Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London.

I am happy to say that we have already been receiving general and wide-spread support and have been able to raise about half the Rs. 85,000,000 goal for the Abdus Salam Chair. I would be delighted if we could announce having reached the full goal by June when we have our 24th Annual Convocation Ceremony. Details of the Abdus Salam Chair fundraising campaign here.

I am writing to you in the hope that you will be able to assist me and LUMS in this cause. You can do so in at least two ways:

1. For those of you who are in a position to do so, please contribute to the Abdus Salam Chair in whatever amount you can. It is as important to get a large number of individuals donating as it is to reach the required amount. Details on how to donate are available here (including how to give online via credit card, or give in USA and Canada with tax benefits).

2. Please spread the word to others in your circles of influence about this initiative and encourage them to contribute if they can. We want to not only reach our goal but to have as many people contribute to reaching that goal as possible.

I do hope that you will be able to join me in this good cause and contribute in whatever way you can. I am convinced that this will make a real difference in many deep and lasting ways.

Regards,

Adil Najam
Vice Chancellor, LUMS

By Eric Pfannier for The New York Times

Many countries censor the Internet, but few spell out their intentions as explicitly as Pakistan.

In an effort to tighten its control over the Internet, the government recently published a public tender for the “development, deployment and operation of a national-level URL filtering and blocking system.”

Technology companies, academic institutions and other interested parties have until March 16 to submit proposals for the $10 million project, but anger about it has been growing both inside and outside Pakistan.

Censorship of the Web is nothing new in Pakistan, which, like other countries in the region, says it wants to uphold public morality, protect national security or prevent blasphemy. The government has blocked access to pornographic sites, as well as, from time to time, mainstream services like Facebook and YouTube.

Until now, however, Pakistan has done so in a makeshift way, demanding that Internet service providers cut off access to specific sites upon request. With Internet use growing rapidly, the censors are struggling to keep up, so the government wants to build an automatic blocking and filtering system, like the so-called Great Firewall of China.

While China and other governments that sanitize the Internet generally do so with little public disclosure, Pakistan is being surprisingly forthcoming about its censorship needs. It published its request for proposals on the Web site of the Information and Communications Technology Ministry’s Research and Development Fund and even took out newspaper advertisements to publicize the project.

“The system would have a central database of undesirable URL’s that would be loaded on the distributed hardware boxes at each POP and updated on daily basis,” the request for proposals says, referring to uniform resource locators, the unique addresses for specific Web pages, and points of presence, or access points.

“The database would be regularly updated through subscription to an international reputed company maintaining and updating such databases,” according to the request, which was published last month.

The tender details a number of technical specifications, including the fact that the technology “should be able to handle a block list of up to 50 million URL’s (concurrent unidirectional filtering capacity) with processing delay of not more than 1 milliseconds.”

Following the Arab Spring, which demonstrated the power of the Internet to help spread political and social change, Pakistan’s move to clamp down has set off a storm of protest among free-speech groups in the country and beyond.

Opponents of censorship say they are doubly appalled because they associated this kind of heavy-handed approach more with the previous regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf than with the current government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

“The authorities here are big fans of China and how it filters the Internet,” said Sana Saleem, chief executive of Bolo Bhi, a group that campaigns against restrictions on the Internet. “They overlook the fact that China is an autocratic regime and we are a democracy.”

“What makes this kind of censorship so insidious is that they always use national security, pornography or blasphemy as an explanation for blocking other kinds of speech,” Ms. Saleem said, adding that her site had been blocked for several months in 2010 when it made reference to a ban on Facebook. Access to the social networking service had been restricted because of a page featuring a competition to draw the prophet Mohammed — something that is considered blasphemous by Muslims.

The Technology Ministry’s Research and Development Fund says in its tender that the Internet filtering and blocking system will be “indigenously developed,” but campaigners like Ms. Saleem say they think it is likely the agency will try to adapt Western technology for the purpose.

To try to prevent this from happening, Ms. Saleem wrote to the chief executives of eight international companies that make Net filtering technology, asking them to make a public commitment not to apply for the Pakistani grant.

On Friday, one of them, Websense, which is based in San Diego, responded, declaring in a statement on its Web site that it would not seek the contract.

“Broad government censorship of citizen access to the Internet is morally wrong,” Websense said. “We further believe that any company whose products are currently being used for government-imposed censorship should remove their technology so that it is not used in this way by oppressive governments.”

Websense had previously withdrawn the use of its technology from Yemen after facing accusations from the OpenNet Initiative, a U.S.-Canadian academic group, and other organizations that it had been used by the government of that country to stifle political expression on the Internet.

Governments around the world buy filtering and blocking technology to root out illegal content like child pornography. Some private companies employ it to restrict access to social networks and other distractions on company computers.

But the use of Western technology to rein in political speech in countries with repressive regimes has come under increasing scrutiny since the Arab Spring. The OpenNet Initiative said in a report last year that at least nine governments in the Middle East or North Africa had used such products, with the Western companies maintaining lists of sites to be blocked, including sites featuring skeptical views of Islam and even dating services.

Even before implementing its new system, Pakistan has been an active censor. The country was 151st, out of 179, on a ranking of media freedom by the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders in 2011.

“Reporters Without Borders urges you to abandon this project, which would reinforce the arsenal of measures for communications surveillance and Internet censorship that have already been put in place by your government,” the group wrote in a letter Friday to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

To free-speech advocates in Pakistan, the government’s seeming insouciance about censorship is a particular cause for alarm.

“This is a case study,” said Ms. Saleem of Bolo Bhi, which is based in Karachi and whose name means “speak up.” “No government has ever done this so publicly.”

Filed under: Arab, blasphemy laws, China, Freedoms, Islam, Pakistan, Pakistanis Tagged: Arab Spring, blasphemy, Censoring in Pakistan, Censors, Censorship, China, Facebook, Great Firewall of China, Internet, Middle East, national-level URL filtering and blocking system, North Korea, Pakistan, Pakistan Censors, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, Reporters Without Borders, URL, URL Blocking, Web Pages, World Wide Web, WWW

By Khalid Mazhar Qureshi

A parent came to me, quite annoyed, saying “how can I stop my kids using facebook?” continuing “I have tried all but my kids just don’t stop using it. Everything is being affected: their education and real social life. They stay away from me into a world with which I am not fully aware”. This was indeed a tough question and I couldn’t answer it but it made me think about it. Is digital social media inherently that bad? Or is there any flaw in our approach?

A social experiment was performed in 2009 by DARPA dubbed as— A Network Challenge, in which they spread ten big red balloons all over the US. The task was to spot those balloons in teams in 15-days at a prize of $ 40,000. The task was virtually impossible to accomplish for a single person or less connected group.  To their surprise the prize was taken away in 5 days by a team. This proves the power of social network.

If the same teams were living 20 yrs back would they be able to find balloons in a span of 15 days in third largest country? Unfathomably difficult! Digital Social media is a revolution of collaboration and information sharing—it empowers ordinary people. Let’s forget what happened in Egypt and Libya, consider the case of fourth graders in USA, who were very inspired about environment after reading “The Lorax” written by Dr. Seuss. When they heard that Hollywood is making a movie on the same story they went to the movie website excitement. Only after learning that the site is missing environmental themes, the fourth graders challenged the Universal Studio and set off their social network by filing a petition on Change.org to include environmental themes. They gathered 57,000 signatures and, in this way, fourth graders got their way against the Hollywood giant.

Despite having formidable strength, this media is severely looked down upon by parents and teachers alike. In many schools social networking sites are forbidden territories and discussing about them during school hours is a taboo. It is a big criticism on educationists that they were slow to adapt News Papers when they were first introduced then they were slow to embrace internet and now this fast and vast expanding internet social networking.

Already fistful of approximately one billion users, the digital media is still relentless and growing exponentially. It’s deemed as a main engine for global village. Social media is acting like a crucible where people of different race and cultural backgrounds are amalgamating and being unified as one digi-nation. Rapid social communication updates people about the latest information whether it is related to shopping, current affairs and education. They know more alternatives and exact price of a certain item. This helps users become smarter in their real life. So by not allowing children to use it openly, are we doing justice? Are we not furthering the gap between real life and the life under teachers and parents? And in this way, are we not making children more rebellious?

In October, 2010, Phoebe Prince, a high school student hung herself because of cyber bullying. In another accident, a Rutgers University freshman committed suicide because his friends dubbed his sex video and streamed it online. There may be several hidden cases around the world which will keep popping up in future. In social media bullying is a common phenomena and the statistics is quite shocking. A Consumer Reports survey conducted in the US in early 2011 reveals that
“One million children were harassed, threatened, or subjected to other forms of cyber bullying on Facebook in the past year”

In a paper entitled, “Poke Me: How Social Networks Can Both Help and Harm Our Kids,” Larry D. Rosen, PhD, professor of psychology at California State University, found that Teens who use Facebook more often show more narcissistic tendencies while young adults who have a strong Facebook presence show more signs of other psychological disorders, including antisocial behaviors, schizophrenia, mania, depression and aggressive tendencies. Facebook can be distracting and can negatively impact learning. Studies found that middle school, high school and college students who checked Facebook frequently achieved lower grades and had lowest retention of what they read.

The issues of morality also arise with the use of digital social media as Noam Chomsky once said in an interview, ““[I] think internet social network erodes normal human relations. It makes them more superficial, shallow, and evanescent.”  According to Steven Strogatz, PhD, a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University, “The distinction between genuine friends and acquaintances is becoming blurred. Users are spending time maintaining relationships with people they don’t really care about.” In a recent study out of USC, brain scans showed that volunteers needed at least four to six seconds to process stories of virtue or social pain in others. “It takes a certain amount of time to fully experience complex social emotions,” says the lead author, cognitive neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. Heavy reliance on the rapid intake of certain information—especially in younger, developing minds—could have consequences on our morality. It could also be “a whole new source of unhappiness,” says Strogatz.

But the thing is social media is well into our lives. Current generation love social networking and want to use it and will use it no matter how smartly we try to stop them; they will always find a way to use it. It has become an irreversible process. If we analyze anti-social media research it is standing on one reason —“frequent use”, isn’t that “frequent use” of everything is bad. As old adage goes: ‘excess of everything is bad’, too much watching of TV induces sleep deprivation, too much study does not take you anywhere, too much drinking of water may harm your kidneys and etc. However, my caveat is that we should not accept any new popular thing on reflex action but this media has passed its time of caution. The only way to deal with it is to change our side and accept it. Think about it if parents, relatives and teachers are added in the social network profile of their children/students then it will minimize the chance of being used in a negative and obsessive way. Change of side argument is historically proven for positive results.

Our real world is very rough and cruel but we still send our children outside homes for study or for all sorts of thing. Some fall prey to malicious stuff and some not, those who don’t is because their parents and teachers inculcated values in them. We now need to inculcate our values in their digital lives, they need simple and honest advices like the one President Obama gave to 9^th graders, “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff. ”