Author: Newley

Hi. I'm Newley Purnell. I cover technology and business for The Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong. I use this site to share my stories and often blog about the books I'm reading, tech trends, sports, travel, and our dog Ginger. For updates, get my weekly email newsletter.

Categories
Journalism

By Me and a Colleague: Facebook’s Internet.org Iniative Faces Pushback

The story, which ran last week online and on the front page of The WSJ‘s global edition, begins:

When Muhammad Maiyagy Gery heard about a new mobile app from Facebook Inc. that provides free Internet access in his native Indonesia, he was excited.

But after testing it, the 24-year-old student from a mining town on the eastern edge of Borneo soon deleted the app, called Internet.org, frustrated that he was unable to access Google.com and some local Indonesian sites.

Mr. Gery said Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is an “inspiration in the tech world,” but added that the company’s free Internet effort is “inadequate.”

Mr. Gery’s reaction illustrates the unexpected criticism Facebook has encountered to its bold initiative to bring free Internet access to the world’s four billion people who don’t have it, and to increase connectivity among those with limited access. He is one of many users who say a Facebook-led partnership is providing truncated access to websites, thwarting the principles of what is known in the U.S. as net neutrality—the view that Internet providers shouldn’t be able to dictate consumer access to websites.

Embedded above and online here is an accompanying video. (You may recognize the narrator’s voice.)

There’s also a piece called “5 Things to Know about Facebook’s Internet Initiative.”

Categories
HOWTO Life

Scott Adams’s Life Advice in 28 Words — and More Wisdom from the Creator of Dilbert

Think of your life as a system. Think of yourself as the most important part of the system. Be useful. And make yourself more valuable as you go.

The quote above comes from Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, during his recent appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast*.

Very much worth listening to.

Here’s more from Adams on goals vs. systems.

Other stuff from Adams’s I’ve linked to in the past:

  • Happiness Engineering
  • How to Get a Real Education

    • And you should definitely check out his extremely simply advice on personal finance:

    — Make a will.
    — Pay off your credit card balance.
    — Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
    — Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
    — Fund your IRA to the maximum.
    — Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
    — Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.
    — Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement
    — If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.

    * I am not a regular listener of Ferriss’s podcast, but I see that he has interviewed some interesting folks.

    Vine of the Day: ‘Puppy caught eating paper decides killing witness is the only way out’

    Embedded above and on Vine here.

    Categories
    HOWTO Tech

    Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Taking Selfies But Were Afraid to Ask

    2015 09 16 selfies

    Aanand Prasad, pictured above, has written an amusing — and exhaustive — guide to taking selfies:

    Do you ever hate how you look in photos taken by other people? That’s because other people have no clue how to make you look good. But you can very easily learn how.

    Selfies have been a positive force in my life ever since I came across the wonderful #dudetime and its gently radical flipping of the default male gaze. If you think selfies are bad for any reason, I don’t want to know. I suggest getting in a bin and sharing your bad opinions with the other trash.

    The target audience is straight dudes, but there are tips in here for everyone. He covers topics like lighting, camera angles, facial expressions, backgrounds, composition, and more.

    Fun stuff.

    Categories
    Misc.

    Brian Eno’s Favorite Books; AeroPress Inventor; Creepy/Cute kangaroos; Creepy/Cute Drones

    Those are among the links I shared in the 25th edition of my email newsletter, Newley’s Notes, which just went out to subscribers.

    Sign up here and never miss another dispatch.

    Categories
    Misc.

    Productivity Tip: ‘Iterate Toward Perfection,’ But Forget Perfection Exists

    Matt Might, whose account of having a disabled child I mentioned previously, also has an interesting post on productivity tips for academics.

    The advice can be applied to people working in many professions, though, not just academia.

    I really like this bit:

    Iterate toward perfection

    Treat perfection like a process, not an achievable state. Perfectionism is crippling to productivity. I’ve known academics that can’t even start projects because of perfectionism. I know some academics that defend their lack of productivity by proudly proclaiming themselves to be perfectionists. I’m not so sure one should be proud of perfectionism. I don’t think it’s bad to want perfection; I just think it’s unrealistic to expect it.

    The metric academics need to hit is “good enough,” and after that, “better than good enough,” if time permits. Forget that the word perfect exists. Otherwise, one can sink endless amounts of time into a project long after the scientific mission was accomplished. One good-enough paper that got submitted is worth an infinite number of perfect papers that don’t exist.

    Yes.

    Categories
    Misc.

    Moving Account of Having a Disabled Child — and What’s Important in Life

    This post from University of Utah Computer Science professor Matt Might is very much worth reading.

    Might saw a question on Quora from a 16-year-old who said he wanted to have a successful career in computer science or medicine, but feared getting married and having a disabled child.

    Might wrote:

    First, your question is trivial to answer: to minimize the risk – to zero – that you’ll have a disabled child, don’t have a child.

    Any attempt to have a child will incur risk, although you can take measures described in other answers to lower it.

    But, let me tell you a story – my story.

    I am the father of a “disabled child,” yet I’m a professor in computer science at the University of Utah, and also currently a professor at the Harvard Medical School.

    Hopefully I’ve just dispelled your fear that having a disabled child is not compatible with “a strong career in computer science or medicine.”

    In fact, what if I told you that much of what I’ve done was the result of my having a disabled child? Because I too (naively) believe in love, and love my wife and son dearly?

    Read the whole thing.

    Categories
    Journalism Singapore Tech

    By Me Yesterday: Singapore Online Grocery Startup RedMart Hires Amazon Exec

    The story begins:

    Singapore-based online grocery-delivery service RedMart has scored some valuable new talent in its quest to conquer Southeast Asia.

    The startup said Thursday it has hired a longtime senior executive at Amazon.com Inc. who once spent two years as a technical adviser to Chief Executive Jeff Bezos.

    Colin Bryar, a former Amazon vice president, has joined Redmart as the company’s chief operating officer, and will oversee issues such as engineering, marketing and operations, according to RedMarket Chief Executive Roger Egan.

    Mr. Bryar has “such tremendous experience shadowing one of the top leaders in tech for two plus years,” Mr. Egan told The Wall Street Journal.

    Categories
    Bangkok Thailand

    Bangkok Bombing: Police Release Sketch of Main Suspect

    2015 08 20BKKbomb

    Following my post yesterday: Here’s the latest from my WSJ colleagues in Bangkok:

    Thailand’s prime minister urged the main suspect in the bombing that killed 20 people in Bangkok this week to turn himself in, while police released a sketch of the alleged bomber and described him for the first time as a foreigner.

    Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha’s remarks on Wednesday also acknowledged that the investigators were attempting to track down a wider-ranging network that they say is responsible for Monday’s blast at a shrine in the center of the city.

    Meanwhile, inserted above and on YouTube here: an embeddable version of the dash cam footage showing the blast.

    And here’s footage of the explosion at the Chao Phraya river on Tuesday.

    Categories
    Bangkok HOWTO Thailand

    Bangkok Bombings: Latest Updates and How to Follow the News

    2015 08 19bkkbomb

    A and I returned to Singapore Monday morning after a couple of weeks of traveling. Then that evening came the sad news about the bombings in Bangkok.

    From our latest WSJ story:

    Thai police said they were homing in on a suspect seen in security-camera footage of the bomb blast that killed at least 20 people, most of them foreign tourists, in the Thai capital.

    A second explosive device on Tuesday was thrown from a bridge over Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River. The bomb narrowly missed a busy pier where commuters waited for taxi boats, falling into the river where it exploded. No one was injured.

    The blast, which threw a column of water into the air, deepened the sense of unease in a city where many commuters chose to stay at home and some tourists avoided the usually bustling malls and temples of downtown Bangkok.

    The Economist has more on the context:

    Low-level political violence is not uncommon in Thailand—which is riven by a kind of class war in which two military coups have succeeded in less than ten years—but the attack on August 17th was unprecedented in scale. The blast, caused by a pipe stuffed with TNT, did only relatively moderate damage to the shrine itself and the buildings that surround it. But timed to explode during the evening rush hour, and positioned at an intersection often packed with shoppers and tourists, it was designed to kill and maim a maximal number of bystanders. The dead included visitors from China, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. A young girl was among the injured.

    Meanwhile, this dash cam footage shows the force of the Erawan Shrine bomb:

    วินาทีระเบิดที่แยกราชประสงค์ วันที่ 17 สิงหาคม 2015 ภาพจากกล้องในรถผมครับ

    Posted by Pimornrat Nana Puttayot on Monday, August 17, 2015

    Quartz has a roundup of pics and videos.

    For ongoing updates, here’s my public Twitter list of more than 100 media people in Bangkok and elsewhere in Thailand.

    I especially recommend longtime Thailand blogger Richard Barrow, who frequently tweets information of interest to tourists and others in the city.