The Lab Live

Social media, fake news, and the echo chamber

2017-04-30T03:32:00.000+03:00

We’re living in an age of unprecedented hyperconnectivity, technologists have provided us with many powerful platforms to communicate, connect, express ourselves, and spread information. But what was in theory the revolution of the information age, turned out to be another manifestation of that proverbial double edged sword.

Entertainment, fun stuff, and jokes are great things and we all need spirit up-lifters on almost a daily basis. But when most of the focus and the content becomes about pointless babble and different types of behaviors that can be categorized as the continuation of the annoying chain mails of the 2000s, then we’re doing something wrong; when writing a trivial tweet gets me tens of retweets and lots of engagement, and a pertinent tweet goes ignored then we must be doing something wrong.

The amount of distraction and the mechanical way by which we’re leading our lives into the future without enough interest in things that matter are just appalling, we’re drowned by the current moment without learning lessons of history nor anticipating enough for the future. But it still continues to be a race forward with whatever feeds selfishness and inflates egos.

Curiosity, the ability to take different ideas into consideration, and that will to learn and discover are all sided away. We look for what reinforces our convictions, confirms all kinds of knowledge(not necessarily true or factual) we hold onto so passionately, and reject everything else without even a minimal consideration. Which brings us to echo chambers, because social media isn’t broadly social, we’re not connecting for real, we’re not touching upon new ideas and starting new dialogues, we only push and amplify our convictions and prejudices, and we connect only with people who hold the same beliefs we hold, in a big echo chamber. We reinforce these beliefs for each other and amplify them, and what separates us from anything outside this chamber is a war line, the brutality by which people with different opinions attack each other is unbelievable, comments’ sections and twitter threads ooze with hatred whenever there’s discord.

And all this susceptibility to whatever confirms our beliefs made social media, with its international and instant reach, the perfect platform for fake news and propaganda. What is our biggest machine in size and complexity -the global communications network- has become a major tool of propaganda, and fake news cut through it like a hot knife in butter because we’re trapped within our narrow-mindedness, we instantly believe what’s in line with our points of view even if it’s fake, and reject what we don’t like even if it’s true.

And social media companies, who run algorithms that suggest to us things we like, amplify this vicious circle and make it even worse; they want more engagement, they thrive on it to get more clicks and more impressions on ads they post to pile up more cash, so they push us deeper into that echo chamber. And in reality they don’t have an economic incentive to fight fake news, on the contrary they benefit directly from it, so we’re left with whatever ethical standards these companies may or may not hold as the only defense line to curb this phenomenon.

Unfortunately, they have proven day after day that profits and control are their sole objectives; with an utter, complete, and total disregard for social responsibility and the concept of corporate citizenship.

I just want to make an appeal to all of us to just take a minute and think about rationalizing our behavior on social media, it’s a powerful tool, we can use it too to bridge gaps, acquire knowledge, and spread positivity. Let’s do more of that.

Enough with reactions, is it not the time to act in Lebanon?

2014-01-23T01:32:00.000+02:00

It's frustrating and disappointing how the only thing that the Lebanese youth does when it comes to events surrounding them is to react temporarily. Most of what the Lebanese blogosphere and social media figures/pages do is to -react- to events, a reaction that in the most generous descriptions can be called venting.

We, in Lebanon, sit and wait to see bombings/fighting, corruption, political masquerades etc. happening, and then we vent. We've seen many social media campaigns, previously and recently, and most of the blogging and the content on the social media was nothing more than a limited reaction that wears off in a couple of days, or a few days at most.

"I'm not a martyr", "police did this", "politicians did that", "Customs beaten up journalists" etc. just a sample of what we've seen on the social media and blogs, we only react for a limited amount of time then we move to react to the next event without even considering or thinking about an appropriate action to stop the chain of similar events, in cause and nature, that have been plaguing our country for the last 4 decades. We don't act to correct the problem and to prevent its consequences, we only vent and react repetitively as the problem happens continuously and repeats itself.

It's a fact and it's not unfair to say that all what the Lebanese blogosphere and social media have produced in the last decade, didn't change anything in Lebanon, didn't influence anything in Lebanon and didn't aim to make a change in the first place. And I guess the time has come to say, enough with the useless reactions, we need to act, to put the finger on the problem, to take the initiative to promote social dialogue and social cohesion, to make ordinary Lebanese get together, talk to each other, set common objectives together and to start working on them hand in hand, not for rosy and romantic or utopian motives but for the mere selfish interest of each one of us. We need to construct a better future for ourselves and the next generations, because if we keep on going this way the only losers are us.

In simple words we should act instead of politicizing the air we breathe, feuding about it, and then get killed, and then uselessly react, for example, in bomber costumes on Rawshe.

Note: Post compiled from tweets, thanks to @FaresHalabi for suggesting to put them in a single text.

On Open Access and Aaron Swartz

2013-10-04T03:37:00.001+03:00

We are all aware of how the Internet’s networking potential has offered the human race an unprecedented globalized means for immediate sharing and exchanging of media and information. However, and inasmuch as this sounds like a powerful tool to leverage human knowledge and help spread it among more human minds, this potential for sharing and exchanging has raised many problems to established industries dealing with publishing and delivery of media and information.

Cases like Napster, The Pirate Bay, Aaron Swartz and many others were all conflicts between an established way of doing things and a disruptive technology allowing us to do things in a different way. And which of these two ways is the best for us as a global human society and as a human race? What follows will try to provide an answer.

The freedom to access information by anyone who seeks it has never been possible before as much as it is today with the help of the internet, but even 18 years after the commercialization of the internet, a large amount of information still lies behind access barriers erected by publishing institutions and copyrights, thus making the access to it very limited and allowed only to the privileged few who can afford it.

However, and even when the publishing industry is deep rooted in the current ecosystem and armed with financial capabilities that allow aggressive lobbying among policymakers and lawmakers, it is too hard to put a case against open access, especially when it comes to research papers and specialized magazines/journals’ articles detailing results of advanced research. The simple reason for which it is hard to put a case against it is that Open Access benefits literally everyone; through it researchers’ work will get more exposure and will easily reach the audience they’re seeking to reach. And readers in their turn will benefit too because they will have access to a wide source of information, and knowledge will spread to reach a bigger number of interested individuals instead of being trapped and available only for a privileged few.

Is it a human right to have an access to the largest amount of information and knowledge possible? I personally believe it is, it is neither a sign of prowess nor intellectual superiority when certain people lock up information and knowledge, discovered and achieved mostly by the help of public funding, and deprive other people from reaching it. When information becomes available to every single inquisitive mind, anyone can become the next internet prodigy or the next superstar physicist or economist or medical researcher etc.
Someone, who is proactively seeking knowledge and information, has the right to reach it because he/she is willing to put the needed effort to harness its potential and transform it to something useful for him/her and for the society itself. And that’s why open access is of an essential importance, it promotes fairness in society, gives a chance to those who are willing to work and make an effort. It simply helps in accelerating research and consequently advancing knowledge and technology when more minds are putting their intellectual and mental processing power to improve, add, discover and build on the available information.

That’s how Open Access establishes a win-win situation for everybody, except for publishers who, by irrationally increasing prices, make exorbitant profit margins out of something they didn’t put any effort to create and produce. Which is a perverse way to do business, to say the least.

Open Access defined

In a minimalist definition, Open Access is the type of access provided by authors who, unconstrained by a direct motive of financial gain, allow their readers to reach the content they provide without charging a fee.

What makes it possible?

-Digitization and availability of information in its soft form instead of the traditional ink on paper and books, coupled with the ability to share at a global scale through the Internet.

-Copyright holder consent, and that’s what distinguishes two categories of content providers/authors. The first category consists of scholars, academics and researchers and the second consists of musicians, moviemakers and the remaining types of authors.
The difference between these categories stems from how they traditionally transfer their copyrights to publishers. Scholarly journals and publishers don’t pay authors for their research articles, while it’s not the case of musicians, moviemakers, and traditional novelists. And that’s why the scholarly authors group is free to consent to OA without losing revenue. The academics’ culture of writing for impact rather than money makes OA even more adapted to their goals and mindset, and it’s natural that OA is taking off among this group of authors.

How is it officially defined and framed?

Open access was officially defined in three public statements:

-The Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002.

-The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003.

-The Berlin Statement On Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in October 2003.

The three statements revolve around the main idea of the availability of information/knowledge on the public internet and the permission for the user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, etc. without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those required to gain access to the internet itself. The only condition for reproduction and distribution is to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Types of Open Access:

Open Access is usually offered in two degrees, Gratis Open Access and Libre Open Access.
Gratis OA guaranties a free of charge access but not more free than that, users should seek permission for any additional usage (reprinting, quoting significant amounts of text, etc.)
Libre OA is free of charge and also free of some copyrights and licensing restrictions. Usage permissions are usually defined by a creative commons license.

Varieties of Open Access:

There are two defined varieties through which OA is delivered, Green OA and Gold OA.

Green OA: It consists of specialized repositories where researchers/authors can deposit their work in a step that consists of self-archiving and public publishing at the same time. The published work is usually not peer reviewed and the interesting particularity is that most of the toll-access authors are legally allowed to publish their raw work in Green OA repositories before sending it to the Toll-Access journal.

Examples: The famous physics community repository arXiv.org, that later expanded to include astronomy, mathematics, computer science and many other scientific fields. It was in this repository that the aloof Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman has published his solution to Poincaré's Conjecture, one of the millennium prize problems that resisted a score of mathematicians since 1904.

Gold OA: It’s the open access counterpart of toll access journals. They are peer-reviewed journals that are accessible without a fee.
Example: The Springer open series of journals http://www.springeropen.com/ spanning many fields and offered by the traditional publisher Springer who partly opted for OA with this move.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was a prominent if not the most prominent personality in the effort to promote open access and make it mainstream. He ended his life in January 2013 as he was entangled in the implications of his bulk-downloading of a large number of academic journal articles from JSTOR.

JSTOR is a toll access digital library having the majority of its content only accessible by subscription. The library reached an agreement with Swartz regarding the incident but the US federal prosecution went on to press charges that exposed Swartz to a possible penalty of 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. The case was still pending when Swartz committed suicide.

With major software development achievements since his teen years, most of Swartz work revolved in one way or another around sharing information. He was involved in the creation of the RSS web feed format, the Creative Commons organization that is playing a leading role in the licensing and legal framing of open content, he also founded a company that later went on to merge with, and contribute to the development of Reddit, the social news sharing website.

He later moved on to become an Internet/social activist working to promote transparency in government and aiming to enact what he called progressive policies, and he played an instrumental role in blocking the Stop Online Piracy Act in the US that was threatening to a large extent the freedom of sharing information on the Internet.

But the turning point in his activism career that is in direct relation to the subject I’m discussing here was his notorious “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” that you can find here. It's a manifesto inciting people to join him in his struggle for Open Access. He started it with “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves” and went on demanding to fight back against large publishers and corporations locking up knowledge and information to greedily make enormous profits. He ended it by calling for a civil disobedience against unjust laws to oppose what he called a private theft of public culture. And he explicitly called to take information wherever it is stored and share it around in what he described as a Guerilla Open Access.
It is in this spirit that he went on to download the large amount of articles from the JSTOR. And one cannot question the nobility of what he was trying to achieve and most of all the important and positive implications of what he was demanding and what he was so passionately working to achieve. But his approach to solving the problem in a David vs Goliath style was extreme in my opinion and cost him his life at the end. The goal is achievable without falling in the trap of direct clashing with established laws that are clearly in favor of publishers who lobbied to create them in the first place. Change can be achieved with the right amount of pressure and with perseverance over time.

I believe that Open Access is a self-promoting issue, it just makes sense, it’s a simple concept beneficial to everyone and will help to further develop our society and the human civilization as a whole. You can’t oppose it without standing on immoral grounds and without being politically incorrect. And all it needs is further promotion, more awareness campaigns to point the attention of the general public to the subject and to push it to the forefront of public debates. Legislators and policy makers won’t be able to sustain the pressure of staying on the opposing side and reforms and changes in laws will be achievable. Because, and as Aaron Swartz himself said it “Try as you might, you can’t beat reality” and the reality here is that Open Access is what makes sense for everybody and nothing can hold it from taking over the way of how information and knowledge are distributed, all it takes is time.

In the mean time, the work and contributions of a large number of individuals in the open access movement to structure and define open access and create legal frameworks for licensing open content will further push the concept of Open Access and help in its proliferation among the public. There is a well-crafted solution at the table that is available for everybody; Open Access will be inescapable.

Even with the disagreements one can have with Aaron Swartz on how he approached the subject, we can only salute his fervent support for a right cause and his passion about making it a reality, he was an exceptional individual and what he faced was an injustice that he didn’t accept, ultimately deciding to put an end to his life.

It’s hard to understand how such a thing happens when for example people who almost put the US and global economy to their knees in 2008 walked away untouched, with large amounts of money and golden parachutes on top of it. But that’s how things are and maybe we don’t deserve people with strong ideals Like Swartz to stay with us for a long time.

But the legacy will continue and Open Access will continue to advance in bold steps, the latest of them was the adoption of the University of California of an open access publishing policy in which the university commits to make its research articles freely available to the public. More on it here.

Politicized in Lebanon: Playing with the black mud or looking for an escape hatch?

2013-01-04T02:48:00.001+02:00

Everyone is politicized in Lebanon, absolutely everyone, the old, the young and even (and I’m not exaggerating here) the pre-schooler. The fact that we consume politics without moderation is an undisputable one, and if we want to get closer to the truth and be more pertinent to reality, we’ll look at it the other way around; politics, actually, are consuming us and draining us. And what makes things worse is this deplorable situation where it’s all going to no avail, there’s neither an objective nor a destination for all this political activity in which we’re pouring so much energy on a daily basis.

It’s a serious question to be asked, why are we so consumed by politics? And specifically the young generation, what are we trying to achieve by inheriting the political rhetoric of the previous generation, as is, while we have at least 30 years of history to show us where it led us and what were the results of such an approach to doing politics in our daily lives. So in simple words, what’s the point? Is it pointless like an addiction? A useless hobby? A bad habit? Or is it a manifestation of a serious concern by citizens who are looking to improve their whole situation on all levels?

Anyone who’s been keen on following social media websites, blogs, and news outlets on the web with an objective eye, and for a long while will tell you, guilt free, that in Lebanon politics among the young generations is a “bashing sport”. Young people in Lebanon are full of inherited grudge, and the only thing they repetitively do is to take it out on each other in every possible way without having any objective other than, and here’s the ugly truth, consolidating their conviction that the other Lebanese are the lowest breed of human beings on the face of the planet; no one seeks to understand the other and no one has the courage to make a simple fact checking to verify how much truth there is in his/her version of reality.

Politics has become a big swamp of black dark mud, and everyday we’re sinking in it aimlessly. And there isn’t even a single person trying to find an escape hatch, this precious escape hatch that lies in breaking the evil cycle and withdrawing out of it.
It’s simple, if you want to criticize, start by yourself and by the side you support. The other Lebanese, they’re not your partners in Lebanon as the lame, low life Lebanese politicians keep on repeating. No they’re not because Lebanon is a country and it's not a company enlisted in the Beirut Stock Exchange in which each side owns a bunch of stocks. Lebanon is a country with a rich history and the other Lebanese they’re your people, they belong to you and you belong to them, and most of Lebanese families have branched into different sects and religions but we still all share the same origin, the same history, the same culture, the same fate, the same future and the same DNA.

If you think that you hold the absolute truth, think twice, because it doesn’t exist. The Lebanese who are on the opposite political side have their fears, their concerns and their aspirations, and if you put yourself in their place and think of it you’ll find that there’s a great deal of legitimacy in what they’re voicing.

That’s why we need to get rid of the egocentric views, the selfish attitude and to start thinking about making a room for each other in our country. We need to take steps towards each other because politics and political identities in Lebanon are not a biological feature, they’re not in our DNA, they’re just ideologies, stories from the past, fears, hatred, concerns engraved consciously and subconsciously in our minds, they’re abstract entities, they’re not in our DNA and we’re not condemned to carry them forever. We can get rid of these vices that are poisoning our lives and our future if we think a little bit, rationalize our prejudices and fears, and think more intensely about the common objective that should be our primary concern, the main objective of building our country and building a bright future for us and for our children.

We’ve all had enough from humiliation, from wars, from corruption, from being governed by the same rotten political class for over than 4 decades, from losing our brightest minds to other countries, from young and old Lebanese dying day after day on all fronts to keep a little bit of that ever so elusive dignity that keeps on slipping from our hands.

So it’s about time that we wake up and refrain from making that self-inflicted wound even deeper, we need to focus on coherence, solidarity and mutual respect, and on building a brighter future for us and our children.

Time is running and the more it runs the more we sink in the vicious aimless vortex of Lebanese politics, we need to get out of the “black mud swamp” way of politics and actively look for that escape hatch because the price to pay is getting heftier by the second, and because it’s the only way to reach what we, all the Lebanese, so dearly want: a homeland, a civilized country and a better future.

Forgotten things...that matter.

2012-09-08T05:15:00.002+03:00

A few days ago I was riding the train back home and in front of me was sitting a rather peculiar person. You can’t help paying attention to the amount of papers he was reading, juggling and comparing. And you can’t help paying attention to what he was wearing, and because of the content of what he was reading it seemed unusual that he dressed the way he did.

He looked like an ultra-clean version of the homeless men you usually encounter on the French metro or trains. He was wearing very clean but worn out pants, the main button on them didn’t exist anymore, probably fell off in the late nineties and an old belt tightly held the pants to his underweight thin body. His shirt wasn’t in a better condition, worn out but again very clean nonetheless.
But what he was reading and comparing was remarkable, very interesting at least to someone like me. His papers were full of long equations and it was clear to me that he was dealing with complicated stuff relating to quantum mechanics, optics and particle physics. I am nowhere near being very knowledgeable about the subject, but I’ve studied quantum mechanics and semiconductor physics and I was able to decipher some of the basic terms of his equations that left me really impressed. I googled his name and went to his webpage (Yes he has one), and the big surprise was that he is a leading scientist working on state of the art, cutting edge theories in particle physics.

Again I was very impressed but I felt sad to see him in such a condition, it is true that scientists don’t have time to even think about their appearances but such cases make you wonder also about their financial situation. It is a well-known fact that these people are underpaid, under estimated and some of them even struggle with their financial situation. We are indebted to people working in such fields and we owe them on so many levels, so the least we can do is show them some respect and pay them salaries that match the level of their brilliance, competence and most importantly their level of contribution to our societies and the human race, but we don’t.
The examples of their contributions that impacted and improved our lives are countless and I’ll leave you with one example, just one, to ponder on, the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). These guys through their dedication and hard work improved the quality of our lives and continue to touch all the aspects of our daily lives, even after their death, in so many ways. And in spite of all that, we let them lead an uneasy life full of insecurity and hardships that very often hold back their creativity and prevent them from giving us even more.

In the meanwhile and while brilliant hardworking scientists are struggling, footballers for example are millionaires, the media is saturated with their news and games, and even football isn’t about football anymore. It has become a consumed object that pins fans to the screens to give them their daily dose of opium, the remedy that makes them forget the imposed hardships of their daily lives; and people don’t even play the sport like they used to do before!

Football is one example, I can give many others, but the point here is that respect should be paid where it’s due, appreciation and recognition should be put where they’re due otherwise degradation is the inescapable fate of our societies. The media and marketers have blown the entertainment business out of its real proportions and it’s all happening at the expense of things that really make a difference and that really make a business. Because if we want to look at it from the financial point of view, creativity, innovation, and pushing the boundaries of our knowledge farther from where they are now is what really creates sustainable businesses that are based on real value.

The herds of passive watchers will continue to grow, but I always love to think and hope that those who are actively working and those who actually make an effort to look beneath the surface and appreciate real high impact things, their numbers will increase too and they will help people similar to the homeless-like scientist get the appreciation and support they need and deserve. Because we need more of these scientists and we can’t afford a decay in their numbers as we’re having now, the challenges lying ahead of us in the upcoming years are astronomical and it’s not a man kicking a ball nor another one firing fake guns on a movie set that will help us solve them, it’s the homeless-like scientist and his peers that will do it.
And this leads to the inevitable reality check question to be asked, in which category do you fall?

Public Education in Lebanon, the light at the end of the tunnel?

2012-08-19T03:36:00.002+03:00

Since the first few years of independence and up till now, we’ve been relentlessly recycling the “Lebanese crisis”. The civil war (civil in form and geography, but regional with its protagonists, causes and consequences) ended abruptly without a solution, it ended with an aesthetic exit partly because the militias got bored and lost the ecstasy of absurd fighting, and mainly because the regional and international conditions were ripe to move into another era of middle eastern geopolitics.

However, the main causes of the civil war, its ramifications, its residues, and the predominant mentality that governed that absurd epoch of the modern Lebanese history, they have all survived into our present time and they have gained momentum. Needless to say that what we’ve witnessed in the last seven years is a conspicuous proof that the Lebanese existential crisis is strongly alive as it has been, 20, 30, or 50 years earlier. Seven decades of history in the life of the Lebanese republic, and events that stand as a lesson to change and move ahead did not succeed in changing anything, anything at all, on the Lebanese socio-political scene.

We are all well aware of the nature of the Lebanese political system, the sectarian democracy with all its vices and few advantages; and we are all well aware of the Lebanese society and the main processes and mentalities dictating the social and political behavior and/or choices of the Lebanese people. The easiest and shortest way to diagnose the Lebanese problem is to blame the religious mosaic or fragmentation(if we want to choose a more realistic term) of the Lebanese society for being the main cause behind the major failure in constructing a modern, stable and viable state in Lebanon, but this view just scratches the surface.

Sectarianism is a concept, a behavior, a set of prejudices and ideas lived and practiced in the daily lives of the Lebanese people. It’s neither an independent organism nor a physical enemy; it’s within us, within our heads. No one is sectarian by birth, it’s something acquired and learned, consciously and subconsciously; and the solution against it, is to unlearn it and to stop teaching it.

And that’s where a reform in the Lebanese educational system can come to play a capital role to end the chronic and detrimental effects of sectarian xenophobism dominating the Lebanese socio-political scene.
The public school in Lebanon is weak, inadequate on both the infrastructure level and competency of the teaching staff level. While the private and, in most cases, religiously affiliated school thrives, the public school is neglected and left as the only cheap option for families living in the vicinity of the poverty line. The direct consequences of this reality is that the majority of the Lebanese students are brought up each group in its respective religious clan, in private schools supported and managed directly by religious institutions, whether Muslim or Christian. These schools implant in the heads of their students a set of convictions and ideals that are proper to each sect’s hard-line socio-political views and very often these views are blatantly contradicting national values, ideals and interest.

This has to stop! It has to stop because these hard-line views are mostly social and traditional projections on religion and they’re far from the core of the religious teachings; and because the amount of intolerance they create is poisonous to the Lebanese society.

These private schools played an important role during the ottoman rule (that destroyed and banned schools in the Levant for centuries) and during the French mandate rule but now it’s time for them to step aside. It’s time for us to put the significant amount of money poured into the private educational system into a regenerated public school that teaches the same ideals to all the Lebanese kids, and creates a coherent social fabric where they can all meet, bring their differences, live them, accept them, and respect them from a young age. The educational islands which the private schools are, are the opposite of this mentality, they create the total opposite and implement the social fragmentation based on sects and religion through the physical separation they make between Lebanese of different sects, and through their teachings that differ astronomically; and they end up injecting into the Lebanese society citizens with political and social convictions that are impossible to reconcile, and this problem is the mother of our all woes.

The public school is a necessity in a country like Lebanon, it’s the only fusion lab that can allow the Lebanese to see each other and learn about each other while they’re growing up and before cementing convictions and ideas, that are very often swollen with prejudice, about each other. The current neglection of the public school should end and it should be given a top priority without any delay.

Stuck in the past: Universities, research and innovation in Lebanon

2012-05-08T04:23:00.000+03:00

If you have read this blog before you’ll know that I’m getting back to a subject that I’ve always discussed, but it’s important, it’s essential and it deserves having more emphasis. Discussing it over and over again is the only way to promote how much important it has become.

To keep it brief, I don’t want to elaborate and write very lengthy paragraphs but I just want to say that throughout history and up till now, what defined a civilization were the things that it created and invented, innovation is what made civilizations great, and what gave to each of them its distinctive identity.

Our universities in Lebanon still provide top quality education but when it comes to research and innovation there’s an eerie void that shouldn’t last.

The education that we’re providing to our students is something from the past, it’s been discovered and formulated and it has become part of the history. Now what about giving them something for the future, what about involving them in crafting something for the future not only in applying information from the past, but also by using the leverage power of their minds to create things out of nothing, what about that? It’s beautiful and interesting, but unfortunately we’re far from it in Lebanon. Even the most prestigious universities in Lebanon have mediocre budgets for research and what is worse is that they have no strategy or vision to promote research and make it at the heart of the academic experience of their students, and at the heart of their existence as academic institutions as well.
The huge impact of this “stuck in the past” mentality is the unfortunate lack of innovation and creativity in our society and our economy. I’ve been following the start-up scene in Lebanon and the MENA region in general, and it’s really sad that we didn’t see any of these start-ups achieve an important success. The main reason in my opinion is the lack of innovation.

If I ask you to give me two start-ups from Lebanon and the ME region, what will be the first names to pop in your head? I’m sure that many of you won’t be able to give two names and for those who can give a couple of names please tell me what difference did these start-ups make and how much success did they achieve during the course of their life time? Not much, right?
If I want to answer that question the first two names that come up in my mind are Cinemoz and MarkaVIP. Cinemoz is simply a copy of the American Hulu, the difference is that cinemoz has a library of Arabic movies and series, surely some people will argue that it offered too a technical solution to overcome the hurdle of the underdeveloped infrastructure in the region used for streaming media, but a technical solution is an on daily basis engineering routine it’s not innovation, and the whole concept of cinemoz is essentially a replica of Hulu, we’re just following the trend.
MarkaVIP is an online discount store offering a wide range of mid to high end brands, again what’s new here? Nothing, we neither invented e-commerce nor came up with the e-discount concept, it’s a copy of an activity that has matured for a long while in the west.

People are not searching to innovate, in Lebanon being early adopters in the region for a foreign technology makes us feel like gods coming to life straight down from the greek mythology, and if you think of it it’s really ridiculous. Following the trend and just following the trend is silly. Start-ups, technology conferences, accelerators, are all by themselves imported concepts because they became the trend in the west, and all these events loaded with talks that hold less value than their form and size, are more about social events than real work. People tend to associate themselves with them to get a social status and to boost their egos while the work done and achieved is little, and if you find this statement as incorrect please enlighten me and give me details on results, what were the results of these events over the last few years?

Now back to universities and the lack of research, it is the main problem because it’s the reason why we lack this engine of innovation, most of the successful American start-ups and ventures were started by PhD students and PhD programs’ drop outs. It is extremely important to promote the “think, create, innovate” culture to be able to put forward something new and interesting, the social and economic impacts of such a culture will be huge so it’s about time that we start giving this sector the big importance it deserves. Researching and discovering new ways to do things is an essential factor for any civilization that wants to grow, to promote itself and to protect itself.

So think, create, and innovate and always ask yourself: Where do I want to go today? The possibilities are endless if you harness the potential you have in your mind.

Demystifying 3G (and mobile communications)

2012-04-25T20:51:00.000+03:00

“What’s 3G?” is a question that I’ve heard many times in the past few months, with the deployment of 3G in Lebanon many people around me started asking what is it about, what does it have to offer and why 3G?

Here’s an explanation that, albeit long, is easy to read (hopefully) for those who are not familiar with the field, and that is still detailed enough to be interesting, offering starting points for the curious inquisitive minds; there are many keywords that you can search and explore. The post will run in paragraphs quickly exploring the historical course of the development of the technology that led to the 3rd generation in mobile telecom networks, if while reading you get bored or feel that things got too detailed skip to the next paragraph.

How it all started? 0G

With the development of the radio communications technologies during the WWII and the need for connectivity while being mobile in the post war era, developments for mobile telephony solutions were carried and resulted in what is now commonly referred to as 0G telephone systems or pre-cellular telephone systems.
The 0G systems were mobile radio telephones that allowed users to make calls to numbers on the fixed telephone network and vice versa, they were basically traditional radio communication sets(similar to the ones used by the police and the military) that allowed people to usually connect to an operator who personally took the dialing request to call a number on the fixed network. And this operator was in charge of vocally announcing on the radio network that a call is bound from the fixed network to one of the customers in order to relay it if he/she gets a reply from that particular customer.
There was a number of 0G systems developed in different countries such as the Mobile Telephone System, Improved Mobile Telephone System, Advanced mobile telephone system, Mobile telephony system D, etc.
So in a brief description, the handset used was very bulky, usually fitted in a brief case and the system usually required a person to relay phone calls. Improvements were made to eliminate the need for an operator but the capacity was always very limited: few channels were available for a tower covering a wide area and each channel was capable of carrying one customer.

1st Evolution: 1G

As communicating while being mobile grew more popular in the 70s, the 0G systems suffered quickly from interference and congestion due to the limited resources of the design (few radio channels) and the lack of any multiple access scheme to allow more users to make simultaneous calls. A remedy was needed to solve this problem and to create a service that can be easily available for a large number of customers.

Key technology in 1G: Cellular networks.
The idea was smart and simple to implement, the creation of coverage cells with each cell servicing customers who are in its coverage area. This allowed to distribute the available channels on these cells and reuse them infinitely (relatively) in cells that are far enough from each other. By using higher frequencies in 1G compared to 0G it was possible to practically reuse these frequencies due to the fact that higher frequencies will attenuate more over the same distance, thus reducing interference. So it was possible to reuse the same frequency in cells that were relatively far from each other and this was a key factor in increasing the capacity of the system.

Handover, which is the technique that allows a user to remain connected to the system as he moves across the coverage areas of different cells was also created. It was an important feature that enabled mobility while being connected to the system.

The system was a big evolution compared to the old 0G systems however the handsets were still bulky. They were not easy enough to handle and carry in order to provide a comfortable mobile telephony experience. As the technology grew popular, the system suffered from congestion especially in dense urban areas.

Why congestion? The system was analog (in analog systems the voice as an acoustic pressure wave is converted into an analogous electrical signal, the latter one is transmitted through electromagnetic waves, received at the other end and converted back as is to an acoustic wave by the phone's speaker at the receiver’s end), that meant that each user occupied a frequency when he was calling and it couldn’t be used by another user, and since the number of allocated frequencies on each cell was limited, the number of users making calls in each cell simultaneously was very limited. Another limitation on the system added to the bulky handsets and limited capacity was the fact that the handsets consumed hefty amounts of power and even with the huge battery used on them they still needed to be recharged frequently; battery life was around one hour of talk time in a device that weighed around 730g, devices were slimmed down to around 300g by the late 80s and early 90s but the talk time was still around 1hour per battery charge.

Obviously, solutions to capacity problems, power drainage and the huge battery were needed and that’s what lead to the 2nd generation or 2G.

2nd Evolution: 2G

By the late 80s early 90s, mobile communications have become an integral part of the popular culture. Devices got relatively smaller and cheaper thus becoming more attractive and allowing a bigger number of people to access the service. However the nature of the 1G system was not able to accommodate such a growth due to physical limitations as we’ve seen in the previous paragraph, so a technical solution was needed to evolve and move to a better system. Many systems were developed around the world but the most popular and widespread one, was and still is, the GSM system.

Key technologies in 2G: TDMA & Digital Signal Processing (which were allowed by the digitization of the system), and using channels with a bigger bandwidth.

The main limitation of the 1G system came from its limited multiple access scheme, one frequency was equal to one user dedicated voice channel. A new access scheme was needed to use the available frequency bands more efficiently and that’s where TDMA(Time division multiple access) came to play its role. Instead of separating users by putting them on different frequencies only(frequencies that were limited in number) few users were made able to share the same frequency by allocating it to each user for a limited amount of time called a time slot (8 slots per frequency in GSM), and thus multiple users were able to talk simultaneously using the same frequency.

The digitization of the system allowed the usage of TDMA and opened the door for using digital signal processing techniques, especially compression. The voice acoustic signal is converted into an analog electrical signal first, the analog electrical signal is sampled then quantized and converted into a bit stream , that’s how it becomes digital, then audio codecs or vocoders are used to reduce the bit rate (from 64kbps down to as low as 9.6kbps for GSM) while keeping an intelligible and good voice quality. And this rate reduction resulted in a better usage of the allocated spectral bandwidth.

Definition: To avoid confusion with other metaphorical definitions, when I say Bandwidth I mean by it the spectral bandwidth which is the width in hertz of a dedicated space in the frequency spectrum used for a particular radio communication.

An additional benefit due to the digitization of the system was channel coding, which is the usage of special coding techniques (Block and Convolutional for GSM) to combat errors due to interference and fading on the wireless path.
All these techniques helped the 2G systems to achieve a better voice quality, increase the overall efficiency and capacity compared to the limited 1G.

Another feature worth mentioning is the increase of the channel bandwidth from around 30KHz for the 1G systems to around 200KHz for the 2G systems namely the GSM (although 30KHz are largely sufficient to carry the human voice that doesn’t go above 4 KHz normally). This increase helped to achieve the same channel capacity while significantly reducing the transmit power needed and that’s mainly how batteries got smaller and talk time increased.

This change was due to a better understanding of Claude Shannon’s work who is considered to be the father of “information theory”. To roughly explain how this bandwidth increase delivered this improvement I’ll cite the equation defining the capacity of the simplistic Additive White Gaussian Channel (white noise is the background noise normally found in nature) which was found to be:

B is the bandwidth, S is the signal power and N is the noise power.

We can quickly notice that the capacity is directly proportional to the bandwidth, whereas the signal power is inside the log which is an increasing concave function. And that means that the effect of signal power S on the channel capacity is severely dampened by the log function, thus the huge increase in signal power needed to reach a given capacity can be easily replaced by a much smaller increase in bandwidth to reach the same capacity.
The work of Shannon remained unfortunately relatively unknown in the engineering community for a long while due to various reasons, however I highly recommend his paper “A Mathematical Theory of communication” if you have a good mathematical background and have a taste for communication technologies, it’s one of my favorite papers for its clarity, elegance and revolutionary impact on the telecommunication technologies we have today http://circuit.ucsd.edu/~yhk/ece287a-win08/shannon1948.pdf

And that’s basically how 2G systems provided us a higher capacity and higher quality calls and grew so popular to accommodate more than 3 billion users in 2011.

3rd Evolution: 3G

The development of 2G systems started in the early 80s, and their deployment began in the late 80s and early 90s and that’s before the official commercialization of the internet in 1995. When 2G systems were designed, they were designed to efficiently carry voice calls, and these systems were similar to landline networks in being circuit switched, that means a dedicated physical circuit is established between the callers each time a call is made. This circuit switched nature is very different from the interconnection system used in the internet. The interconnection system of the internet doesn’t establish dedicated physical circuits between the source and the destination, it uses data packets labeled with destination addresses that are thrown into the network and left for transport protocols to deliver them, the way they please, based on the addresses labeling these packets.

Due to their design as voice carrying systems, all 2G systems were not compatible to carry packet switched traffic. GPRS (General Packet Radio Switching) was added to GSM to offer a solution but it remained limited in potential and capacity. Later on, EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) was developed but still didn’t satisfy the hunger for wireless data connectivity. By the end of the 90s with the exponential growth of the internet and the business potential and importance it carried, a dire need to introduce mobility to the internet appeared, and designers and standardization bodies started to release new standards for a new system that made it possible to connect to the internet while being mobile and that’s how we evolved to 3G.

3G key technologies: DSSS (Direct sequence spread spectrum), WCDMA (Wideband Code division multiple access)

DSSS is a technology that was initially developed for the military at the end of WWII and afterwards as a means to combat jamming, the main idea is to spread a certain stream of data that will be communicated by multiplying it with a code that has a much higher data rate(called chip rate in this case), the result of this operation is that the initial spectral bandwidth needed for communication is spread over a much larger one. This operation almost hides the signal under the noise floor, and at the receiving end, the receiver knows the code used and uses it to de-spread the signal using the same operation done at the transmitters end; it extracts the signal from the surrounding noise and spreads the latter one at the same time. This results in what is called a processing gain that further enhances the signal power to noise power ratio allowing the receiver to clearly receive the message that was hidden in the noise.

WCDMA is used to apply the DSSS technique (it provides the codes with which the initial signal is multiplied for spreading), and to allow multiple users to connect simultaneously.
In GSM we’ve seen that users were separated by frequency(FDMA) by having different users put on different frequencies, and those who are on the same frequency are separated by time (TDMA) by allocating that frequency for a defined period of time (Time slot) to each user.

In 3G the game has changed and the air interface has changed, all users can use the same frequency the whole time and they’re separated by orthogonal and pseudo-orthogonal codes attributed to them, orthogonality means that a perfect (or perfect enough) differentiation and separation can be achieved, you can think of it by lots of people in a room talking at the same time but each couple is using a different language so only those who are talking the same language understand each other and anything else they hear is just unintelligible noise that doesn't hamper their communication.

Example on orthogonal codes: Walsh Codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadamard_code

This technique allowed a better efficiency in the usage of the spectral bandwidth, there was no need to partition it into frequency bands and distribute them among cells, so the useful bandwidth available increased from 200KHz in GSM to 5MHz in UMTS, which increased the capacity on the system, gave a lot of room to increase the data rates, and hence allowed a better support for internet applications in addition to live video calls.

These are the main and most important factors that made the migration to 3G, further developments were made to achieve even higher rates (HSPA, HSPA+) that introduced additional techniques in the radio access network, new channels were introduced in the physical layer and transport layer, new faster packet scheduling techniques were introduced, Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request was introduced to guarantee error correction with minimum retransmissions, and adaptive modulation techniques were introduced in the physical layer (going from QPSK up to 64QAM) and MIMO (multiple input multiple output) was introduced starting from the release 7 of the 3GPP standard. All these techniques aimed at increasing the spectral efficiency to load more bits/s on each hertz of frequency thus allowing higher, much higher data rates.

So basically that’s in an extremely brief way what 3G is about and how mobile communications evolved to reach it. The system is obviously way much more complicated than this and you have experts specialized in each part of it, it’s not possible to be an expert in all its intricate details. However I want to mention a feature of the coverage in the radio access part that affects the users very much especially in Lebanon which is “cell breathing”.

Cell breathing:

In 3G and due to the fact that users are using the same frequency all the time, a base station (NodeB in 3G) constantly changes the range of the geographical area it covers. As the number of users increases in the cell the coverage shrinks to ensure proper service to the users and to force users at the edge of the cell to switch to other nearby cells. So the main idea behind cell breathing is “load balancing” to efficiently distribute users among cells and to avoid interference between users due to differences in their transmission power.

What you need to know in Lebanon:

-Cell breathing is a feature that affects cell coverage in 3G, and since the network was forcibly launched before achieving adequate coverage because of political reasons, the network still has many dead spots and cell breathing can make this even worse making the reception bars go from full to none while you’re sitting in your couch. Your phone will be forced to fall back to the GSM network through a hard-handover mechanism, and this means that a new connection has to be established with the GSM network and this in its turn means if you were in an active call it’ll be dropped and cut.

-Power consumption: Your battery won’t last in 3G mode same as in 2G, though the power per bit needed in 3G is less than in 2G but the amount of data that you transceive is significantly higher and the signaling (registering with the station, power control, etc.) with the base station (NodeB) is more important thus leading to more power drainage. Add to it an abnormal amount of hard handovers from/to GSM due to the reasons stated in the previous paragraph that will increase the signaling overhead, the power consumption will be higher even than in normal 3G operation.

What you can do:

- Never force your phone to 3G mode only, even in the best 3G networks the GSM remains as a backup network and still holds a significant amount of the voice calls and data sessions.
- If you’re experiencing lots of drops in calls, force your phone to GSM, its coverage is more mature in Lebanon and congestion is less likely to happen on it, switch back to GSM/3G dual mode when you want to connect to the internet and make heavy data sessions.
- Don’t forget that your phone will drain more power from your battery, charge well before you go out, forcing phone to GSM when not in need for heavy data sessions can significantly increase your battery life.
- And finally keep on lobbying and pressuring to improve the 3G network.

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to drop a comment.

Social injustice in Lebanon

2012-03-05T06:29:00.003+02:00

Social injustice is a problem getting worse every day in Lebanon. The gap between the poor and the rich is becoming wider each hour, and there’s a general unfairness that is becoming more present and visible in the Lebanese society.

Furthermore, what makes the problem worse is that social justice as an issue and a concept is totally absent from the Lebanese political life and remains unaddressed by both the government and the political class. The civil society itself is dormant and unstirred by such problematic issues; nothing moves the Lebanese citizen in general except populist notions that have a shallow sectarian nature.

Not only there’s a lack of vision and policies to address this problem, there are policies, laws, systems and privileges that deepen this problem instead of finding solutions for it. So let’s look at few examples:

- Have you ever heard about the Lebanese university professor who sends his/her kids to an expensive private university and gets more than 50% of the tuition fees reimbursed by the Lebanese state (i.e using all Lebanese tax payers’ money)? Outrageous, right? Well, not in Lebanon.

Same applies to teachers in public schools, you have the public high school principal who sends his/her kids to an expensive private high school and the Lebanese state pays a high percentage of their tuition. A middle class Lebanese citizen can only send his/her kids to the Lebanese university and low quality public schools run by those who send their kids to better schools/universities.

- Have you ever heard about the public sector employee who signs in at 8am and leaves and 8:30am to his private business then comes back to sign in at 3pm to get paid as an overtime employee, without working 1 single hour?

- Working hours in the public sector are generally way much less than in the private sector, the salaries however are better, public sector employees have salaries better than their counterparts in countries like France.

- The nature of employment in the public administration is for life and beyond, they don’t get fired except for criminal reasons and even with a lot of fraud crimes they are protected and continue with their jobs that offer them numerous benefits (health insurance etc.), and additional cash from bribes, while in the private sector employees are not protected and can be fired easily.

- Public sector employees have retirement plans and big amounts of end-of-service compensations while this doesn’t necessarily apply to the private sector. Professional orders for engineers/pharmacists/ doctors etc. can offer such schemes modestly, however, compared to the public sector; but lower profile professions, self-employed people don’t have any protection or retirement plans whatsoever.

- Public sector employees have historically had an easier access to loans from public sources and private banking sector especially for housing.

And there are many more examples that show how a public sector job is a privileged job while private sector employees and self-employed people are left for their hard work and luck to live their lives. Needless to say that this is the reason why people die on hospitals' doors, live in buildings that are on the verge of collapse, get humiliated when they become old and weak even after a life full of hard work. And this unbalance/injustice between the lucky who can get a job in the public sector and those who are self-employed or in the private sector is why the whole public sector has become a fiefdom for the corrupt political class, they have the power to appoint people in the public administration and give them these privileges, they have the power to remove them too, so they enslave people, and run the public administration the way they please as if it’s their private property.

We need a serious change in regulations and policies to create a system that respects all the Lebanese citizens in a just manner, it’s every citizen’s right to benefit from the public money to which he/she is contributing, fiefdoms and islands of privileges should be abolished if we’re looking to evolve and become a respectful prosperous country.

5 years of blogging

2012-01-29T12:08:00.004+02:00

It’s the 5th anniversary of this blog, and it’s one of those milestones where you look back at things to see what you have achieved. I can say that I am satisfied about the content of this blog, though dry and largely unpopular but it spoke and continues to speak about issues important to me, and in my personal opinion important in an absolute manner because they are priority issues affecting our lives, especially in Lebanon.

I am perfectly aware that this type of subjects is dry and unappealing and will not draw interest as much as blogs discussing lifestyles, reviewing movies and restaurants, or highlighting the latest fashion trends. Although, lifestyle, food, cinema, communication blogs are fun but these issues can’t be the center of our interest all the time, there are the more important issues shaping our future and our lives. So this blog is less about popularity and more about opinions regarding political, economic, and strategic issues that have a direct and severe impact on our lives and our future, that’s what this blog is striving to be.

Now moving to see how much this blog has been successful after 5 years, it’s been a total failure at drawing interest that’s for sure, but when it comes to content and the quality of content I am satisfied about it. It pointed the finger at vital issues, shed light on problems, tried to propose solutions and I can site many posts as an example, one of them is this post http://thelablive.blogspot.com/2010/03/untitled.html written two years ago and sounding the alarm on the deteriorating situation in the real estate sector, and warning from inflation and working class problems almost two years before buildings started to collapse and the wages crisis took place in Lebanon.

This blog has tried and will continue to try to shed light on the basic faults in the Lebanese system that are breeding an avalanche of continuous problems. It will also continue to tackle strategic issues concerning the region and the world.
Most similar blogs discuss things as they happen but over here it’s more about casting a vision for things, about establishing clarity to determine what is wrong and to determine the structural problems holding us back, because once you have identified where you need to improve you’ll be able to put effort and energy to make a change, otherwise we’ll continue to be lost and words will remain nothing more than ink on paper and pixels on screens.

So I’ll continue to look forward for your comments and ideas and I will try to improve the quality of the content on this blog, I'll be phasing out random personal writings to another blog and sticking to strategic political and economic issues on this blog.
So if you’re interested in such issues, keep coming back, things are about to get better.

Fragmentation

2011-12-24T03:39:00.003+02:00

The recent political and social situation in Lebanon is becoming more alarming day after day, Lebanon that was supposed to be a message about tolerance and common living is surfacing as a solid message about what to avoid and what to not become. We’ve grown to become a vertically fragmented society where communities have nothing in common other than the bad luck of existing together on the same piece of land. We ended up with xenophobic religious communities who elect and support xenophobic religious and political leaders who are in constant conflict over the share of power they can have, in order to control and loot whatever can be looted out of that ghost of state that is Lebanon.

The Lebanese society has proven in the last decade that it comprises a majority of zealots whose daily struggle in this country is about oppressing, controlling, and humiliating each other.

This situation is alarming because not only it’s killing the prospects of prosperity and growth in this country, it is dragging us down to levels that threaten the life and existence of the Lebanese people, it is suffocating them, but they stupidly continue their circus of bigotry and carelessness driven by a serious lack of ethics while judging things, and by brainwashed heads that cannot think outside the religious/ideological frame in which their minds are boxed since their infancy.

The whole recent wages problem is a direct result of this situation; we’re in a dilemma where without a wage increase even middle class people cannot meet their needs and a wage increase will force the companies employing them to go out of business. This is a direct result of a political class acting as a mafia that uses politics to serve its special and personal interests. Those politicians control the major economic sectors in the country and they run them in a way to serve their particular interests and to stay in control, and in parallel to that, they fight over how much each of them can control. And all that is happening while we are in a dire need for sound politics that build and develop the country and look into solving its flagrant structural problems that are all a threat to our national security.

I’ll give the example of the energy sector which should be at the top of the list, when a plant or a commercial company has a nano-gain margin because it pays an energy bill that is 4-5 times higher than the one paid by its competitors it’ll definitely go out of business if you force it to increase wages. And the problems in other types of basic infrastructure have similar effects, but where are we in politics from all these issues? We’re light years behind, no one is seriously working to solve them while we’re sitting on a serious threat that will grow exponentially out of control. With economic hardship comes increased misery, increased corruption and increased crime which all shoot back on the whole situation dragging it down furthermore, less growth, less attractiveness, less investments, and less jobs. Add to it lower quality of life, of education, of services etc.

My wish for the upcoming year is to see more fellow Lebanese getting out of the bigotry circle and expressing their refusal against this political class, starting by the ones they support before the ones they passionately hate, I wish to see a Lebanese youth feeling the urgency of the situation and working towards a healthy change, towards solutions for a brighter future on a national level and for a tolerant society that holds us together because the destiny of this country joins us together and the only other alternative is a black, dark one.
Happy holidays.

Political activism on the internet, why it's failing in Lebanon?

2011-09-04T23:50:00.004+03:00

After almost one year of revolutions in the Arab world, some of them are already half finished and the others still need a lot of efforts and sacrifice, however, all of them had the igniting spark and started the one way journey for change, freedom and a better future.

After all what is happening around us many of us are starting to ask about why the political cyber activism was fruitful in our neighboring countries but not in Lebanon, even when in fact we weren’t late in adopting new technologies and political activists’ blogs have existed in Lebanon since almost the beginnings of blogs on the web. So then why the status-quo in Lebanon is that strong? New technologies have been a powerful vector that helped in organizing and giving momentum to popular movements seeking justice and change, why not in Lebanon?

Well the answer is again in the structure of the Lebanese society and the Lebanese political system. In all neighboring countries, daring to speak was a threat to the regimes, the whole existence of the regimes was built on installing fear in the citizens, “whoever dares to defy will cease to exist “ and in installing in the consciousness of their citizens that actually no one dares to defy and Big Brother is always watching. The political blogs came to break this wall by defying, talking, exposing and helping people to wake up and see the truth that these regimes are just paper barriers that can be easily torn if they had to face the people’s will. So the name of the game for these activists was hitting on forbidden spots that actually are an inherent part of their civil rights, namely, the freedom of expression and speech. They defied the unjust regime and that’s how it worked.

In Lebanon, blogging and talking doesn’t have this effect, freedom of expression has been a tradition since the independence and the whole political system has grown an immunity against it, you can talk as much as you want it’s just your opinion and there are hundreds of other different opinions that would disagree, even on the obvious, and this situation is what makes the efforts of a serious political activist go in vain.

In terms of defying and breaking walls of control and fear, it’s not the case in Lebanon, almost everyone can talk, blogging and talking and exposing the reality doesn’t make a difference and in terms of spreading political awareness, what you say is just your insignificant opinion because there are hundreds of others that are claiming different things.

So the question is how can we use the technologies available on the internet to drive a change in Lebanon? The answer is to look for forbidden things that are part of our civil rights and concentrate on them. I’ll leave it to you to think about such things, one person is not enough to figure it out; the power lies in the crowds. But when it comes to me, I’m planning on going to vote in 2013 in a box that is not dedicated for my sect, just to make a fuss and raise the voice, because it’s my right to be considered as a Lebanese citizen and not as a citizen of my sect.

So, who’s in with me?

RNA10M

2011-06-18T16:27:00.006+03:00

في مكانٍ ما
فوق خدّكِ
تختبىء احلامي
وعند عينيكِ وثغركِ
وطيب ابتسامكِ

لا شمس لها
حول خصركِ تدور أرضي
ومن بين اناملكِ تولد ايامي

قد خبّأتُ لكِ ثوباً ابيضاً
واوراقَ وردٍ
واطفالاً
محياهم كمحياكِ
نبْضُ قلبي الذي كان سدىً
بات من اليوم لكِ
وايامي

RNA127001

2011-05-15T06:31:00.006+03:00

There’s a fire
that kept on burning my days
fed on every minute
while I watch the flame
dance and play

Seconds ticking
smelling
like gasoline.

I can’t tell time,
a thick carbon dust
on the clocks
is all what I can see.

And no don’t call
the fire brigade
let the orange glow, let it glow
let it come closer
burn in anger
as it watches me grow,
let it see how out of my hands
lights, colors and a scented breeze
like a drunk with love proposing on his knees;
will flow.

Startups in the middle east

2011-03-26T19:50:00.002+02:00

There’s a vibrant scene of startups that is starting to emerge in Lebanon and the Middle East in general, and this fact is naturally good news for the present and future of the region on both the economic and social levels. But one can’t help but noticing the fact that this entrepreneurial activity is still constrained to a large extent in one aspect: “online services”.

I wanted to talk about this issue after reading a tweet that mentioned the remark by which “Fadi Ghandour” has closed his keynote at the arabnet conference. (Fadi Ghandour is the founder of Aramex and a prominent figure in the Middle Eastern entrepreneurial scene). He was trying to stress the importance of the internet and how much essential it has become by saying: “instead of megawatts, you want megabytes!”

I totally understand how much essential internet has become and I guess we all agree on that, however I couldn’t understand this contrast between megawatts and megabytes, two quantities that belong to two worlds that are not in conflict with each other, and I don’t think that there are situations which necessitate a tradeoff between investments in electrical power and connectivity and internet, in reality the near future will further weave an interdependence between them with the advent of smart grids.

I didn’t have the chance to completely hear the keynote of Fadi Ghandour, so I can’t be sure about what he meant exactly by this comparison or what he exactly meant by megawatts and I’m not writing this post as a reply to what he said; this is just an attempt, to shed some light on “the startup” issue in the ME region and to give my personal opinion on it.

We have this habit in our region to follow the trend, and as a result we’re always lagging behind the trend setters for at least a couple of years, the time needed to figure out what is trending worldwide. And up till now that is how things are going in the Middle Eastern startup scene, we are trying to repeat success stories on the web that happened in the world by trying to tailor some solutions or services appropriately to fit our social and cultural environment. But I guess it’s about time that things move ahead, we need to start thinking in a more independent and creative way to create and deliver novel solutions that are not constrained to online services.

My disagreement about axing “megawatts” comes from my belief that the energy sector is where the next boom will be taking place. Renewable energies, energy storage and development of fuel cells, the electric X, whether X is a car or anything that depends today on fossil fuel, in addition to the developing mechanisms that aim to improve the low efficiency of energy conversion at the electrical power plants are very active fields that should not be ignored. And we have the smart grid, which will be rolling out in the future to provide a tighter and smarter grip on power generation, distribution and consumption.

So megawatts are a serious issue for the future, and people around the world are trying to bring in the next solutions to feed the hunger for power supply while in our region no one even thinks about it just because it’s not the trend yet. I would like to stress here on how much important it is to see the fertile ground for startups that this sector is, just Google “energy startup” to see how much effort is put in it, megawatts are very important and we want them too.

The second issue after the energy sector that I would like to talk about is the communications infrastructure, internet is not only about software products and online services it’s about the network and the infrastructure too, we see the bit rates growing from 56 kbps all the way up to 300 Mbps with FTTH, we see generations of cellular networks coming 2G, 3G, 4G and how much do we have to do with this development, nothing. To bring in the Megabytes, we need startups working in this field providing new technologies and services to improve the connectivity in the region and to lower its price. Startups have always played an important role in this field providing technologies that have driven this continuous available bit rate growth, we have world class experts and specialists in this field but they’re outside the Middle East for two simple reasons, lack of vision in the region (and the follow the trend mentality) and lack of funds. This brings me to the third issue I would like to talk about, technology investments in the Middle East and venture capitalism.

The third issue is funding and venture capitalism in our region, I believe that conferences such as the Arabnet should start to think about inviting important investors to be in direct touch with the technical and startup scene in the region. Funding is still scarce because investors are more interested in financial products and do not know about the existence of these investment opportunities. But it’s about time that they notice the importance of this field especially now that dictators have been toppled with social networks as the main tool of communication. Venture capitalists and angel investors exist around the world, searching to find the next investment opportunity while in the middle east which is one of the richest regions of the world, investors are more interested in western governments’ treasury bonds! This has to stop and it’s up to the young people and the digital sector community to approach them and lure them in.

So at the end I believe that we need startups we need growth, but we need to open our eyes to all the opportunities beyond online services. Energy, digital infrastructure, and online services are all important fields for investment and development and we need to put an important amount of energy on drawing the region’s capitals to fund this nascent startup scene.

Sectarian regime operational chart

2011-03-18T19:38:00.004+02:00

Click on image for a larger view

-The sectarian structure of the lebanese administration and governing bodies not only is a catalyst for corruption, but it also creates corruption.
-It leads to social fragmentation and provides a fertile ground for civil wars and internal clashes.
-One of the results of this structure is that the governing bodies are totally dysfunctional.

It's heart breaking to see how much time is being wasted and how much talent and potential are lost while this structure is hindering Lebanon from being what it should be, a country with loyal citizens instead of a pseudo-conglomerate of heterogeneous sects that are in a constant conflict.

That's why this hideous structure must go down.

RNA10B

2011-03-04T05:57:00.003+02:00

It’s been
an awful long while;
beautiful flower of the Nile
homesick for your eyes
without you
everywhere is a bitter exile;
your smile
is still living in my head
and I can’t forget
out of it
all the sweetness that spread
and then, the rush of my blood
and my veins that were almost burned
by all the words you said
and since I fell
for that spell
come back I want more
and I’m sure
it’s not too much to ask for
there must be something
that can be done
to end the echo of my voice;
it’s dreadful
when it’s coming back
from that closed door.

ارحلوا

2011-01-21T03:04:00.006+02:00

هو ذاك الطفل العالق بين حافتين، تمتصّان أيامه، وكلٌّ منها تبصقها دماً، في الاتجاه الذي يحلو لها، على حائطٍ مهترئ كروح مدينته.
تلك المدينة التي لم تملّ من لفظ انفاسها، تلفظها شباباً سبقوه الى الحياة وترميهم أحياءً أم أمواتاً في البحر.

ما زال صغيراً ليفهم ما يقال ولكن غداً، سيسلبون رائحة الصنوبر وزهور الليمون من جسده ولن يبقى فيه مكان إلا لفائض غبائهم وغضبهم. سيرث ذلك ويؤمن به دون ان يفقه شيئاً، سيتحوّل دميةً ويبقى كذلك. وان استفاق من هذا الهذيان سيصبح هائماً دون روح، دون وطن. بئس المصير، ارجعوا لي الصنوبر و زهور الليمون، يا من تعبقون برائحة الموت، اسمعوا، لكم غباؤكم وركام وطن، ولي ركنٌ مقدس يخبّئ ذكرى قبلة فارحلوا عنه.

Let's get involved

2011-01-16T17:06:00.004+02:00

We’ve all been happy to see the Tunisian people standing up for themselves against an oppressive corrupt regime, and we wished that we can catch this healthy virus in our country to get rid of the ridiculous political club of kids with gray hair ruling Lebanon. A 6 years transition period after the events of 2005 and still things didn’t crystallize into a clear form, 36 years after the start of the civil war and we’re still living parts of it and suffering from its consequences, and all those who caused our misery are still in their places, the same names since the 70s are still here and we’re wondering why things are still the same?

The situation in Lebanon is different than in Tunisia. Our problem is not of a centralized nature like in Tunisia and thus is harder; we don’t have an oppressive regime with its president to topple in order to make a change. Our problem unfortunately is of a distributed nature, there’s one hell of an element of diversity in the way the problem exists in Lebanon and fighting one side of it won’t lead to any important results. We need to find a solution against sectarianism, the political club of war lords and corrupts, the element of fear inside the Lebanese themselves from each other, the racist way through which kids are brought up to see others, threats from outside the borders, the political mafia and their network of corruption, etc.

There’s no solution other than getting involved in everything, the problem is of distributed nature we have to go to all the places where it is. Activists roll up your sleeves and go into action; we’re fed up from nagging on the social media. The Lebanese youth should work collectively to straighten things up, stand up for yourselves not against each other, unemployment in Lebanon is higher than any acceptable percentage and the country is being drained from its youth population what are you waiting for to go down on the streets and shout?! How many laws did the parliament pass the last year? They’re taking tax payers money to wear suits and appear on TV to tell us bullshit, why do we accept this?
The mentality of he’s “our chief” has to end, they’re nothing but a bunch of employees and we’re the Boss, we’re paying them to assume responsibilities in running this country and they fail, time to send them at least home if not to the exile am I right or not?

And how on earth do you accept such a group of mercenaries to run the country? How does a Lebanese politician dare to talk openly without being embarrassed about something like the “seen-seen” initiative so that the cabinet holds a meeting, how on earth did this become acceptable for a Lebanese citizen to see Syrians and Saudis negotiating so that their mercenaries in the Lebanese government hold a meeting, refuse this bullshit, say NO.

Say NO to all the daily lies they pour on us, we’re sick and tired of them so let’s make it heard loud and clear, I think we should get involved in refusing this by doing things that can go as far as organizing sit-ins outside TV stations that are having them for their talk shows.

We need to follow the details of how employment in the public administration is performed and expose that it’s not competence but loyalty to the political mafia that gets one in, we have to scream against that, we need to involve ourselves in deciding how our country is run.

The list of things that can be done is very long, and many ideas can be formulated to fight against this unacceptable situation, but the most important element here is that we need to work collectively, make that poke which will drive the domino effect, gain momentum and continue till the end to get a mafia free, prosperous, correct country. I have a dream, I love that dream and I would love to see it become a reality.

RNA13K

2010-12-26T03:40:00.005+02:00

I want to know you
to take a peek inside your heart
and be able
to recognize the scent of your hair 
even when we’re a hundred miles apart

I want to feel 
ripples of heaven
traveling
inside my chest
out of points touched by your lips 
and that’s just the start

Beautiful thing
I’m falling for you
my inside is crumbling apart
being near you is insatiable
can’t get enough of that
and all my senses
are your captives
shackles are sounding, aloud;
I’m being tortured
 and you master it
so naturally
like an art

All that shines

2010-11-14T02:56:00.006+02:00

Yes it's the same old cliche subject, but I'm still wondering when are we going to really start to look beyond the form? Most of us are caught up in our daily lives, and everything is done in such a rush that we forget to take a breath, and take a minute to examine what the substance of the things in front of us is all about.

We end up being carried with the wave, clapping hands just as the others are doing; it's what everyone else is doing but what's wrong in stopping for a minute to actually look at things and cast a real opinion, a well thought opinion and appreciate things that really shouldn't pass unappreciated, what's wrong in that? Why to limit ourselves to being dazzled from a quick look by all what seems to shine and deprive ourselves from savoring what's real and what's really amazing? Just a thought.

RNA12K

2010-11-08T01:41:00.003+02:00

Lights were sparkling
the last time you were around me
your smile, your warm voice
smoothly slid inside me
and the chills reached my fingertips,
my heart was galloping
galloping,
and galloping
beat after beat
wanting to go out of me
to go sleep and wake up
where you are now

And what’s with that pride
and you trying to hide away
thinking
you’re not at your best,
don’t let it drive you away
forget everything
you’re sort of living inside my chest
and yes
I adore you that much
I adore you that much

So drop that insecure look
in the corner of your eye
what you feel is beautiful
what you are
is beautiful
and when I come to you
please don’t talk
and then stand like a rock
that is about to fall
just put your arms around me
and give me
that very kissable smile….
lights will sparkle
yes I’ll see sparks

RNA11K

2010-11-04T04:52:00.009+02:00

Wind of love
you’ve uprooted my trees
you’ve messed up my ground
and I can barely see
you’re everywhere around
but there’s no room to breathe

Wind of love
where have you come from?
How I wish if you would tell me
where have you come from

Lift me up
I want to be the answer to the prayers
of that beautiful girl
that got you blowing
and I don’t know where from
how I wish if you would tell me
where have you come from

Wind of love
on the feet of hope I’m waiting
I’m enchanted
through my lungs you’re flowing
I can’t choose where to go
I’m just carried
Lift me up, make me better
I want to be an answer
there's a sweet girl praying

An open letter to Middle East's business men and investors

2010-11-01T03:33:00.005+02:00

I don’t understand till when the gap will be allowed to continue on growing and becoming harder and harder to close. Thanks to its deposits of natural resources the middle east region is one of the richest regions in the world, some might say it’s just luck, some others will say it’s a blessing from God but that’s not the point here, this valuable asset will not last forever and NOW is the time to do something about it before it’s too late.
The region is lagging behind in all sorts of forms and ways, the west is obviously by far ahead since centuries, and the east is by far ahead well since as of now, except for Japan.
Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, India are on the rise, economical powers that will set new rules in the international scene for the upcoming century.
The middle east is not better than the worst African countries, except in its ability to buy and import because it has natural resources to get money and buy, so I guess it’s time to stop investing any further in silicon enhanced girls for video clips, it was fun but what’s been done is enough and there’s no need to expand it any further. It’s time to invest in sectors that can put the region on the international map, that can create and contribute to the advancement of humanity, and that can characterize a civilization.
Briefly, here are the sectors that need immediate attention, and lots of money injection:
- Renewable energy production and energy storage, it’s the future of human kind. The Middle East region can export the sun it has if it works hard on developing the technology for it, green energy solutions will be the next big thing, Middle Easterns have to put a foot in this field before it’s too late.
We still don’t have a reliable mean to store energy, fuel cells are still an immature technology, a lot of work is still needed, it’s about time that someone in the middle east starts working on getting involved in this technology. The middle east rules the energy sector today, and it’s a strategic interest for everyone in it to remain so in 50 years from now.
- Robotics, electronics, artificial intelligence. Korea, Malaysia, India, China, they were not better than the middle east 30 years ago, now they’re by far ahead. So it’s about time that someone starts having an interest in those fields in order to start a proper industrialization and a proper viable and sustainable economy in the region.
- Telecommunications and informatics, the region is home to the biggest and richest operators but does anyone of them get an interest in establishing a research center? The answer is an emphatic NO! And I fail to understand why. Such centers can be of great economical interest to these companies too, if they had their eyes opened in the last 5 years they could’ve ridden the 4G wave imposing their own technology and breaking new grounds with it; unfortunately everyone in the region is happy to be an ignorant stupid consumer who pays a lot to import and to stupidly implement what’s been created in the east and west.
Same thing applies to information technology, so we use twitter and facebook and that makes us technologically advanced? What did the region contribute to this sector? Merely nothing, no serious activity is being done. This should be changed.
It’s very important that all the investors and business men in the Middle East understand that the time when we felt technology and creativity were out of our hands dates back to the colonial era, because now we are able to do, we are able to create and we are able to blaze trails in grounds where no one has been before. We have world class researchers working around the world, we have the knowledge, the expertise, but what lacks is the vision, the strategic decision, the intention to make this shift to the future. So enough with the investments in video clips, and enough with the western financial markets, enough with the empty skyscrapers that are home for no one but ghosts, it’s time for you to stop being a bunch of cowards, put your money where the serious stuff is. And hey, you won’t regret it.

RNA10K

2010-10-30T22:10:00.008+03:00

Hey you
Beautiful girl
you’ve got gravity fields
around those unearthly subtle curves
You got me feeling like a ghost
and you walk as if you don’t know
what your lines are capable of

Keep on pretending
I want to believe you
that you have no clue
about the sweetest charm
you fill the air with
but my vision is not blurred
this female specie
was extinct
in a blink of an eye
after the creation of the universe

You were so close
to make me believe
that my existence
is nothing but that ink
on my certificate of birth
but that glitter in your eyes
betrayed you
you can't hide
what’s revealed
through those adorable eyes of yours

Keep on pretending
keep on torturing me
I’m inside your cage
like a little helpless bird
but soon enough
you'll see
that revenge is a meal
best eaten cold.