Sit Still, I’m Trying to Steal Your Hair

By | November 22, 2011
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A Jakarta pickpocket tries to steal a woman’s hair to make keyrings:

Hair today, gone tomorrow for victim of mane mugger

The hazards of riding the city’s public buses are many — pickpockets, gropers, drivers who stop in the middle of the road, wandering musicians plunking away on ukuleles in the hopes of annoying a few rupiah out of passengers — but until Monday, commuters might have thought that at least their hair was safe.

Certainly Nuryamah, 35, did — until a thief cut 40 centimeters of her knee-length locks off while she sat aboard a bus going through Senayan.

“It took me six years to grow this,” she cried to police while filing a report.

She said she was on the Blok M-Bekasi bus at around 11 a.m. when she felt a tug on her scalp. She touched her hair and realized it had been cut to her waist.

Nuryamah said she saw a man attempting to leave the bus and called “thief”, attracting the attention of a nearby police officer, who arrested the man and took him to Jakarta Police headquarters.

The suspect, Agus Setiawan, 27, told the police he intended to make keychains from the hair and had done the same thing last year without being caught.

“I can sell hair keychains for Rp 10,000 (almost US$1) each,” he said.

The police detained Agus after questioning him for about three hours. They confiscated his backpack, in which they found the hair.

Agus works as a fried catfish seller at his mother’s stall in Warung Buncit, South Jakarta.

Nuryamah, who was born in Pelabuhan Ratu, West Java, said she was accompanied at the time by her mother, 52-year-old Enah, on her first visit to Jakarta.

“I started to grow my hair in 2001 when I was working as a migrant worker in Palestine,” she said. (JP/08)

What I like about this story are all the questions it raises:

  • What sparked Agus’ entrepreneurial spirit — diversifying from the helping mum sell fried catfish sector to the human hair keychain vending sector?
  • Where did he come up with the idea of a human hair keychain?
  • Who would knowingly buy a human hair keychain?
  • If they didn’t buy it knowingly, what did they think they were buying?
  • Where did he come up with the idea of covertly cutting people’s hair for his supplies?
  • How long was Agus looking for someone with such long hair?
  • And poor old Nuryamah. It’s not clear whether it was her first visit to Jakarta, or her mother’s, but you can’t help wondering what was going through their minds about city dwellers.
  • What did the arresting officer say when she told him her hair had been stolen? “Don’t worry, miss. I hear it grows back”?
  • What exactly did the police put in their report?
  • What did Nuryamah hope to achieve by filing the report? Was she hoping to get her hair back?
  • Is this part of a bigger hair racket? Should we all be on our guard for hair thieves?
  • If her locks really did go down to her knees, how exactly did Agus cut them off?
  • Shouldn’t Agus and Nurmiyah go into business?
  • Most important, where can I buy one of these rings?

The Jakarta Post – Hair today, gone tomorrow for victim of mane mugger

Wikipedia: Important enough to whitewash

By | November 22, 2011
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This is an edited version of my weekly column for Loose Wire Service, a service providing print publications with technology writing designed for the general reader. Email me if you’re interested in learning more.

Wikipedia has gone through some interesting times, good and bad, but I think the last couple of weeks has proved just how powerful it is.

Powerful enough for those who feel denigrated by it to have been trying to spin, airbrush and generally rewrite how history — or at least Wikipedia — remembers them.

Take WikiScanner, cooked up by a young student, Virgil Griffith. WikiScanner does something very simple: It searches the Internet addresses of an organization — government, private, company or whatever — and matches them with any anonymous edit of a Wikipedia entry.

This means that while the edits themselves may be anonymous, the organization where the person is based is not. We may not know who did it, in other words, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of whom they work for.

The results have been surprising. Users of WikiScanner have come up with dozens of cases of companies, organizations and government departments apparently changing entries to either delete stuff they may not like, or making the text more palatable.

Some examples of apparent — none of these is confirmed but the Internet addresses match — self-interested alterations that have hit the news in the last few weeks:

* Diebold removes sections critical of the company’s electronic voting machines

* Apple and Microsoft trade negative comments about each other

* Amnesty International removes negative comments about itself, according to the Malta Star

(My own searches threw up no examples at all of institutions in my current home of Indonesia spinning on Wikipedia. Shame on them. What have they been doing with their time? One Indonesian embassy official seems to have spent most of his day editing an entry on rude finger gestures, but that’s about it. Clearly these people are not working hard enough for their country.)

The point about all this: Wikipedia is often derided as irrelevant and unworthy. Clearly, though, it’s important enough for these people, either officially or unofficially, on their own initiative or at the behest of higher-ups, to rewrite stuff to make themselves or their employer look better.

You might conclude from this that Wikipedia is not reliable as a result. I would argue the opposite: These edits have nearly all been undone by alert Wikipedians, usually very quickly.

(Wikipedia automatically stores all previous versions of a page and keeps a record of all the edits, and the Internet address from where they originate.)

The truth is that Wikipedia has come of age. Wikipedia is now important enough for ExxonMobil, The Church of Scientology, the U.S. Defense Department and the Australian government to spend time and effort trying to get their version of events across. If it was so irrelevant or unreliable, why would these people bother?

Of course, coming of age isn’t always a good thing. A recent conference on Wikipedia in Taiwan highlighted how Wikipedia is no longer an anarchic, free-for-all, but has somehow miraculously produced a golden egg.

It is now a bureaucracy, run by the kind of people who like to post “Don’t … ” notices on pantry walls. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. We all hate such people until our sandwich goes missing. Then we turn to them — or turn into them.

WikiScanner reveals that it’s probably good that such people take an interest in Wikipedia, because it’s clear that the site is under threat from people who would censor history and whitewash the truth to suit them.

Thanks to Virgil and the Wikipedians, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

The Jakarta Post – The Journal of Indonesia Today

Welcome to Setarbak

By | November 22, 2011
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Not sure who to credit for this one. Let me know if it’s you. 

Not sure where this originates, but it’s doing the rounds. A terrible example of Indonesia’s rampant property rights abuse, or a reflection of Indonesian-ness? (For non-Bahasa speakers, just say the first word quickly. The second means coffee, not, in this case, copy. Although that would have been more apt.)

(This guy has a picture of the same stall, which he says is in Malaysia.)

Actually Starbucks has branches elsewhere. Like this one in Aceh from a couple of years ago:

Radio 68h

Bring your own Internet. The WiFi’s lousy.

Journalists Should Bite the Bullet

By | November 22, 2011
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image 
screenshot from CNN’s website

It’s the one area where old-style journalism hasn’t really made the strides it could. I can understand why: Journalism is a very, very conservative profession. But The Journalism Iconoclast, written by Patrick Thornton, makes a telling point when he points to a nice new feature of CNN.com’s website — the bullet point:

One of the features many people may have noticed with the relaunch of CNN.com earlier this year is that CNN offers succinct bullet points above articles about the key points of the story. Most people skim stories anyway, so why not give them the ultimate way to skim an article? Maybe they will read the whole thing, but use the bullet points to help them remember key points.

Patrick suggests newspapers adopt this for their online offerings; I would actually be in favor of their doing it for their offline offerings too. Buzzmachine, for example, is not the only one bemoaning a buried lede. Indeed, I often find the inverted pyramid approach outdated and less useful for the sort of rapid scanning we do now we’re so webcentric.

One commenter to the story, Marc Matteo, points to one of the key problems with newspapers introducing this kind of bullet-point approach: Shrinking budgets and harried editors. In which case I would farm the bullet pointing out to people who aren’t even journalists. As Marc himself points out, non-journalism websites don’t seem to have this problem. How about allowing readers to add the bullet points themselves? Indeed, it may even be possible to automate the process.

The nasty truth is that a lot of what we take to be good sound journalistic writing was designed for an earlier, slower time. Now we want to catch the gist of something in a few seconds, and we’re looking for reasons not to read them, rather than feeling we should, we have to, or (God forbid) we want to.

Bottom line: Newspapers and all traditional media should not just be looking for new ways to deliver their news, but new ways to write it too. An example of good, pithy writing is actually Techdirt, which rarely strays (unlike this blog) over 250 words, including story, background and (usually quite tart) analysis.  

The Journalism Iconoclast