Agdam Bagdam

Saturday, October 23, 2010

WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil

"Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.

He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends."

Read further...WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil

Monday, October 18, 2010

Bihar’s tomorrow

"Speed dating takes on a literal meaning in Patna. People share auto-rickshaws like buses, like restaurant tables. They don’t know the person sitting next to them. Every day, several young people hop on to auto-rickshaws with no destination in mind, whispering into each others’ ears, doing things that couples do in backseats. They are strangers to the world. People can see. They don’t."

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Islamic law and democracy: Sense about sharia

"All the more reason for calm thinking about what sharia means, and the dilemmas it poses (see article, article). It can refer to many things, ranging from a pious way of life to a system of corporal and capital punishment, laid down in Islamic law but practised in only a few places. It can also refer to the ideas underpinning Islamic finance (which eschews interest)—and, most significantly for public policy, to a form of family law."

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Sunday, October 17, 2010

Why social networks have grown so fast

"The most important reason for their phenomenal growth is something called the 'network effect'. Originally coined to describe the rapid spread of telephones, this states that the value of a communications network to its users rises exponentially with the number of people connected to it. This implies that the audience of a social network will grow slowly at first, then explode once it passes a certain point. Jeff Weiner, the chief executive of LinkedIn, which now has some 58m members, says it took the company 16 months to reach its first million users, whereas the most recent additional million came on board in only 11 days. Facebook has had a similar experience. It took almost five years to drum up its first 150m users, but just eight months to double that number"

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