Masood Mortazavi's Weblog

Saturday January 27, 2007

[ Society ] Payvand

Payvand, a Silicon Valley Persian community web site, has published a summary of "Answering the Charges Against Iran: Dispelling the Demonising Myths" report by U.K.'s Campaign Iran. You will need to scroll down through Payvand's introduction to see the list of charges and the summary debunks.

Another article on a roughly similar topic has been written by Edward Herman and David Peterson for Z Magazine. The latter article contains some misunderstandings regarding the social make-up of Iran although it does expose some of the other demonizing myths propagated by the mainstream mass media. In their article, Herman and Peterson have included a scholarly exposé, complete with references, of the realities hiding behind the rhetoric against Iran including those of the Democratic party leaders.

Less tersely, you can partake of a youthful skier's visit to Iran on YouTube. (It was the first video listed under Iran on YouTube.) You need to be patient through the introduction but I think recreational skier Jasin Nazim has done a much better job of reporting than many other professional journalists who have visited the country. I certainly learned quite a lot from the video. It motivates me to ski the same mountains!

2007-01-27 02:36:47.0 -- Comments [5] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
myths politics skiing

[ Telecommunications ] Identity and e-Government

Fulup Ar Foll, a Sun colleagues and one of my good friends with whom I recently had dinner in Palo Alto, is not only a true and rare genius but an engineer with a great reservoir of practical wisdom about computing, Internet and telecommunications protocols. It is out of pure good fortune that I came to know him better while representing Sun at the Open Mobile Alliance some years ago. Every time I have the chance to meet Fulup, I learn a great deal from him. No young engineer interested in systems, open source technologies, Internet and telecommunications can have a better mentor than him. If you want to catch him speak and learn something from him, try the Oasis Symposium 2007 (April, San Diego). He will be speaking on the "New Generation of Identity-Aware E-Government Applications." (I should add that Fulup also maintains fridu.org and builds and supports SIP systems for the school in his local community in Brittany.)