"အေးမြစမ်းရေ" by Brayton Youth:
Roger Cohen at the New York Times:
"Can't the United Nations help us?" one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. "So," she said, "we are on our own."
Yesterday, I went in for the visa interview at the U.S. Embassy here in Bangkok for my student visa application. Fortunately--I should say by the grace of God since I am a Christian--my visa application was approved. The embassy mailed my passport back today.
I don't want to get into details about the interview. Please don't ask me why.
Anyways, I will leave for the U.S. in the beginning of August. I really should be tying up all my loose ends here before then. I am currently working on the Shorto Mon dictionary to be able to put online before I leave. I will try to finish it as soon as possible.
What I learned today about the African National Congress:
Members of the African National Congress founded the organization as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) on 8 January 1912. Eight decades later, they achieved their goal of a democratic South Africa.
Celeste Chenard's article in Mizzima:
There are still shocking levels of poverty in some of the city's poorer districts, public transport is overcrowded, and for most of the population electricity remains intermittent at best. Infrastructure is in particularly poor shape, with badly decaying buildings, potholed roads and destroyed pavement - as if run over by a bulldozer - common sight.
An elderly, barefoot man with a hollowed chest makes his nightly rounds through the city - literally covering dozens upon dozens of blocks - hawking shrimp crackers he carries in a large plastic tub to those frequenting the open-air teashops. Children, grime from the streets caked to their skin and thankful for even a 10 kyat note, tug at the shirts of people watching movies and videos on television sets placed out on the sidewalks.
At the 50th Street Bar and Grill a group of young Burmese elite on a recent night mixed easily with the local expatriate population, talking of trips abroad and planning the weekend's reverie - in this case a concert by a band from the United States on Friday and poolside barbeque the following day. Priced in dollars, some of the Burmese in attendance that evening spent the equivalent of two percent the estimated average per capita income of their fellow countrymen and women.
I think the author perfectly described recent Rangoon.
Bullets Over Beijing by Nicholas D. Kristof.
One stocky rickshaw driver had tears streaming down his cheeks as he drove past me to display a badly wounded student so that I could photograph or recount the incident. That driver perhaps couldn't have defined democracy, but he had risked his life to try to advance it.
Calvin Liu, at 11:03am June 4, commenting on the above article in Facebook.
i agree with Sayem Ahmed and Rachel Kim. I'm an American born Chinese, with both parents from China. On the American political spectrum we run liberal, which often implies complaining against the "oppressive" regime of China. But I think that the Chinese are committed to nationalistic progress, and are willing to trade freedoms (as Americans see it) for economic development. You mentioned this, saying that life is better now in China. Someone else, I think, characterized this as a decline in morality. It's a strange progression, but Chinese has risen to first-world economic prosperity but remains at best a second-world country, socially/politically. I think time will lead them to democracy - although who is to say that our own democracy provides a good example for them? Tiananmen square is a tragedy, but it's a tragedy the likes of which would not be repeated now - so at least some progress has been made.
Keep note, Myanmar Teleport and MPT. Blocking blogspot.com, wordpress.com and youtube.com would be similar to making this kind of success story impossible.
Zee Avi, who, the day before her 22nd birthday, posted a melancholy holiday song on YouTube that she intended to be her last video posting in December 2007.
By the time she checked her email she had almost 3,000 messages, including a slew of label offers. One email came from from Ian Monotone, who had been shown the YouTube clip by Raconteurs' drummer Patrick Keeler, prompting a signing to his label. Avi is now managed by the same team who works with the White Stripes, M.I.A., The Shins and Vampire Weekend, among others. Earlier this year she was flown from her hometown in Malaysia to a recording studio in Los Angeles.
I successfully defended my thesis last Wednesday at the Asian Institute of Technology. My thesis is about bitext alignment for Southeast Asian languages. A bitext corpus is a collection of text in one language with its equivalent translation in another. Bitext corpora are useful for assisting human and machine translations, cross-language information retrieval and language acquisition. I tried to align sentences from several Thai-English bitext corpora. The methodology that I propose can be used to align English with other Southeast Asian languages such as Burmese, Khmer and Lao.
I have been busy with all the stupid requirements for graduating students.
I have been busy with all the stupid requirements for graduating students.
From NYT:
An American man has been arrested for swimming across a lake to sneak into the home of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
His keynote speech at the 5th Annual State of the Net Conference 2009 is great. The guy is visionary and thoughtful. He emphasizes the open access of data and collaboration among several entities of government.
The Pirate Bay is an online bittorrent tracker (bittorrent is a file sharing protocol that allows users to share big files online). Many people use it to search for and download torrent trackers for popular movies or TV shows. Its website claims that it is the largest torrent tracker in the world.
In Sweden yesterday, four people with links to the Pirate Bay were found guilty of "assisting in making copyright content available."
It's interesting that one of them has links to Thailand:
Fredrik Neij (born April 27, 1978) alias 'TiAMO':
Verdict: Guilty - 1 year in prison, damages to pay: $905,000
Similar to the other defendants, Fredrik Neij was not present to hear the verdict. He currently lives in Thailand from where he manages The Pirate Bay's servers.
I went to Emporium shopping mall to have lunch last Tuesday. Because of the state of emergency and Songkran water festival, there were no street vendors on Soi Rangnam, where I live. Here is the view from the food court.
There were some soldiers and a military jeep on Soi Rangnam. Here is a picture I took on my way back from lunch.
There were some soldiers and a military jeep on Soi Rangnam. Here is a picture I took on my way back from lunch.
This brought me to tears.
This film is about the hunger and poverty brought about by Globalization. There are 10,000 people dying everyday due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of the society. The people who live on the refuse of men to survive. What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left this people.
View this movie and more at cultureunplugged.com
This film is about the hunger and poverty brought about by Globalization. There are 10,000 people dying everyday due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of the society. The people who live on the refuse of men to survive. What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left this people.
View this movie and more at cultureunplugged.com
How suitcases are filled in by our Burmese friends when they travel from Burma to the U.S--from beans to tamarind.
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