Foreign Ministry abides by couple pattern

-- Senator Eugen Mihaescu unveils to the ZIUA readers the family related network in the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The senator, a vice president of senators' foreign affairs committee, argues that the 'ambassador husband-councilor wife' pattern seems to prevail in Romanian democracy. It is family networks instead of office relations that control foreign affairs. The senator comments: "They make the secret network in the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who does and undoes things. When they get appointed and they are to leave on mission, they approach it socially: 'I have sacrificed myself for the Ministry and for you, Mr. Minister, for so long ! Then get me that job and give my wife one too !' ".
Here are some married couples with high official positions abroad the senator mentions on his list: Ligor in Madrid, Davidoiu in Dublin, Gaginshi in Washington, Mircea in Alger, Rusu recommended for Rome, Stoian recommended for Strasbourg, Matache in London, Sava in Camberra, Montanu in Rio de Janeiro, Cojocaru in Paris. There are also couples of former Communist activists: Buje in Lyon, Opris in Paris.
Senator Eugen Mihaescu is demanding Adrian Cioroianu, Romania's foreign minister, now busy handling the sex scandal bursting out because of ambassadress Manuela Vulpe, to clean Romanian diplomacy so that he would stand a chance to remain in its history. (...)

E.M.
Ziua Joi 02 Iulie 2007 http://www.ziua.net/english

MPs cost thousands of Euro

The IPP (Public Policy Institute) released yesterday a study on the monthly expenses for the activities of Romanian senators and deputies.
One MP may cost us up to 7,425 Euro a month. Senators and deputies on hotel accommodation spend three times more than their colleagues in other dwelling places. In 2006 Romanian deputies spent on trips in the country a quarter more than in 2005.
These are some of the research conclusions unveiled yesterday, after an analysis of MP activity expenses in January 2005-October 2006.
In the study there is emphasized: "The IPP does not want to insinuate that such funds are necessarily too large, but to outline the need for total transparency on such expenses, which the parliamentarians should be the first to stimulate". (...)

Roxana Andronic
Ziua Joi 02 Iulie 2007 http://www.ziua.net/english

Our virtual Middle Ages

-- Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is the most impressive collective intellectual project ever attempted - and perhaps achieved. It demands both the attention and the contribution of anyone concerned with the future of knowledge.
Because of the speed with which it has become a fixture in cyberspace, Wikipedia's true significance has gone largely unremarked. Since its sixth anniversary in 2007, Wikipedia has consistently ranked in the top ten most frequently viewed Web sites worldwide. Everyday it is consulted by 7% of all 1.2 billion Internet users, and its rate of usage is growing faster than that of Internet usage as a whole.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia to which anyone with a modicum of time, articulateness, and computer skills can contribute. Anyone can change any entry or add a new entry, and the results will immediately appear for all to see - and potentially contest.
"Wiki" is a Hawaiian root that was officially added to English in 2007 to signify something done quickly - in this case, changes in the collective body of knowledge. Some 4.7 million "Wikipedians" have now contributed to 5.3 million entries, one-third of which are in English, with the rest in more than 250 other languages. Moreover, there is a relatively large group of hardcore contributors: roughly 75,000 Wikipedians have made at least five contributions in any given 30-day period.
The quality of articles is uneven, as might be expected of a self-organizing process, but it is not uniformly bad. True, topics favored by sex-starved male geeks have been elaborated in disturbingly exquisite detail, while less alluring matters often lie fallow. Nevertheless, according to University of Chicago Law professor Cass Sunstein, Wikipedia is now cited four times more often than the Encyclopedia Britannica in US judicial decisions. Moreover, Nature's 2005 evaluation of the two encyclopedias in terms of comparably developed scientific articles found that Wikipedia averaged four errors to the Britannica's three. That difference probably has been narrowed since then.
Wikipedia's boosters trumpet it as heralding the arrival of "Web 2.0." Whereas "Web 1.0" facilitated the storage and transmission of vast amounts of different kinds of information in cyberspace, "Web 2.0" supposedly renders the whole process interactive, removing the final frontier separating the transmitter and receiver of information. But we have been here before - in fact, for most of human history.
The sharp divide between producers and consumers of knowledge began only about 300 years ago, when book printers secured royal protection for their trade in the face of piracy in a rapidly expanding literary market. The legacy of their success, copyright law, continues to impede attempts to render cyberspace a free marketplace of ideas. Before, there were fewer readers and writers, but they were the same people, and had relatively direct access to each other's work.
Indeed, a much smaller, slower, and more fragmented version of the Wikipedia community came into existence with the rise of universities in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe. The large ornamental codices of the early Middle Ages gave way to portable "handbooks" designed for the lighter touch of a quill pen. However, the pages of these books continued to be made of animal hide, which could easily be written over. This often made it difficult to attribute authorship, because a text might consist of a copied lecture in which the copyist's comments were inserted and then perhaps altered as the book passed to other hands.
Wikipedia has remedied many of those technical problems. Any change to an entry automatically generates a historical trace, so entries can be read as what medieval scholars call a "palimpsest," a text that has been successively overwritten. Moreover, "talk pages" provide ample opportunity to discuss actual and possible changes. While Wikipedians do not need to pass around copies of their text - everyone owns a virtual copy - Wikipedia's content policy remains deeply medieval in spirit.
That policy consists of three rules: 1) no original research; 2) a neutral point of view; and 3) verifiability. These rules are designed for people with reference material at their disposal but no authority to evaluate it. Such was the epistemic position of the Middle Ages, which presumed all humans to be mutually equal but subordinate to an inscrutable God. The most one could hope for, then, was a perfectly balanced dialectic. In the Middle Ages, this attitude spawned scholastic disputation. In cyberspace, the same practice, often dismissed as "trolling", remains the backbone of Wikipedia's quality control.
Wikipedia embodies a democratic medievalism that does not respect claims to personal expertise in the absence of verifiable sources. To fully realize this ideal, participation in Wikipedia might be made compulsory for advanced undergraduates and Master's degree candidates worldwide. The expected norms of conduct of these students correspond exactly to Wikipedia's content policy: one is not expected to do original research, but to know where the research material is and how to argue about it.
Compulsory student participation would not only improve Wikipedia's already impressive collective knowledge base, but also might help curb the elitist pretensions of researchers in the global knowledge system.

Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He is the author of The Knowledge Book: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture.
www.project-syndicate.org

Steve Fuller
Ziua Joi 02 Iulie 2007 http://www.ziua.net/english

Opinion polls for rulers

Opinion polls prove attractive only at certain times of the political life: main events, electoral campaigns, confrontations, controversies and scandals. They become attractive when the temperature in the public arena grows high, when significant issues are at stake.
Otherwise, such instruments are useful at calm times too. At such times parties' experts proceed to analyses and plan strategies on grounds of estimated percentages. Still it doesn't stir public and media interest.
But why are these times for talking about opinion polls ? What is the issue now, in a summer bringing the heat wave, the drought and the global heating to the foreground ? There is enough time left till the next elections. It is the elections for MEPs, which doesn't seem to make spirits really hot.
Nevertheless, the present is more interesting than the summer holiday makes visible. A few months have elapsed since the referendum on the suspension of President Basescu. The passion faded away. And the confrontation between the head of state and the Democrat Party he comes from on the one hand, and the government together with the opposition on the other hand, has had more hot times, all of them unfavorable to Basescu: the pension law promoted by the Liberals and deadlocked for some time by the President, the Bordei Park controversy, the indifference of Adriean Videanu, a mayor of Bucharest, who was on a leave while the city was under the 'red code'. The elections for seats in Strasbourg are approaching. Local elections are due next summer. Then there follow the parliamentary elections and the presidential ones in 2009. Basescu has been dominating this electoral cycle and the referendum seems to have confirmed that his separation from the Liberals, the allies who have supported him to become a President, looks like a profitable decision. There has been much comment proving this success deceitful, since it was only a third of the electors who voted for Basescu. And all they did was choose a continuation of his mandate, without making an electoral option. But the prevailing general perception is that Basescu was a triumphant winner and that his domination is going on, hence the Democrats' score reaching close to 50% in polls.
Given the recent conflicts, with the Liberals gaining trust from the Romanian retired and the President losing it, polls are starting to show growing and decreasing popularity. According to Gallup, the popular trust Basescu enjoys has gone down from 63% last May (when the referendum was held) to 43% in July (after reaching 59% in June). 40% of the people questioned approve of the way Calin Popescu Tariceanu "uses his attributions as a PM of Romania" ( he got 21% in May, 25% in June). The same question asked about the President's conduct got a positive answer from 60%. As for vote intentions for the election of MEPs, the Democrats enjoy 41%, which means excellent, far from the prospects of making their own government after parliamentary elections. The Social-Democrat Party has got 20% and the National Liberal Party reaches 12%.
But there has also emerged a 'counter opinion poll' by the Public Policy Institute. The differences are big and they favor Basescu's side. A symptom that the competition is growing rougher. Therefore the present times are important because parties get repositioned before the electoral campaign and the vital target is the new government, what else? Unless the Democrats manage to keep the same score and gain majority, both the victory and the power will be on the side of the so-called 'anti-Basescu coalition', no matter how high the score the Democrats get by scrutiny and the President's popularity...

Ion Bogdan Lefter
Ziua joi 02 Iulie 2007 http://www.ziua.net/english