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Category: Culture (Page 2 of 7)

How do Chinese citizens feel about other countries?

2023-07-19 /

Visual Capitalist »

Chinese Sentiment Towards Other Countries in 2023

Chinese Sentiment Towards Other Countries in 2023

The survey also found that 39% of Chinese people get their information on international security from Chinese state-run media (mainly through TV), with an additional 19% getting information from government websites and official social accounts. Conversely, only 1.7% get their news from foreign websites and foreign social media, partially due to the Great Firewall.

When asked about different international security issues, the biggest shares of Chinese citizens ranked the following as their top three:

  • Pandemics (12.9%)
  • Disputes over territory and territorial waters (12.9%)
  • China-U.S. relations (12.0%)

Canada’s safest cities

2023-07-15 /

A new report by Rentol.ca calculates that Ontario has some of the safest urban areas in the entire country, with Barrie securing the top spot. In fact, eight Ontario cities made up the top ten, according to the report.

The analysis looked at a number of different factors in order to compile the ranking, including the number of citizens per police officer, crime severity, the amount of violent and non-violent crimes, and the crime-solving rate.

Saint John, New Brunswick was the highest ranking city outside of Ontario, ranking in 5th overall.

Lethbridge, Alberta was the only other city outside of Ontario to rank in the top 10.  Alberta’s next safest cities, were Calgary in 20th, followed by Edmonton in 21st overall.

The reviewers concluded that while Québec City exhibits the lowest crime rate, it scored lower as “a significant portion of the crimes committed within the area are of a violent nature, and the ratio of its police force to the area’s population remains relatively small. Therefore, when compared to Lethbridge, which possesses the highest crime index, Québec City appears less secure.”

While Lethbridge has the highest crime rate among all Canadian metropolitan areas, “the majority of the offenses perpetrated are classified as non-violent.” The report goes on to state that, “Lethbridge maintains a sufficient number of police officers to ensure a high rate of crime detection.”

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68% of Americans consider immigration good for the U.S.

2023-07-14 /

Gallup »

While barely a quarter of Americans consider immigration a bad thing for the country, that view is far more prevalent among Republicans (43%) than Democrats (10%), with independents roughly matching the nation as a whole (28%). Still, half of Republicans consider it a good thing, as do 67% of independents and 87% of Democrats.

The poll was conducted after the Biden administration lifted emergency regulations employed during the pandemic, known as Title 42, that had allowed border control officers to immediately deport people caught entering the U.S. illegally rather than give them an asylum hearing.

 

The anti-ownership ebook cconomy

2023-07-14 /

Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy »

Have you ever noticed that you can’t really “buy” an ebook? Sure, when you click that “Buy Now” button on your ereader, tablet, or phone, it feels like a complete, seamless transaction. But the minute you try to treat your ebook like a physical book – say by sharing it with a friend, selling it to someone else, donating it to a school library, or sometimes even reading it offline, reality sets in. You can’t do any of those things.

With most ebooks, even if you think you “own” them, the publisher or platform you bought them from will say otherwise. Publishers and platforms insist that you only buy a license to access the books, not the rights to do anything else with them.

Big Brother » France set to allow police to spy through phones

2023-07-09 /

» Security and privacy. You cannot have a functioning democracy without both.

Le Monde »

French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by both the left and rights defenders as an authoritarian snoopers’ charter, though Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti insists it would affect only “dozens of cases a year.”

Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail. Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organized crime.

The provisions “raise serious concerns over infringements of fundamental liberties,” digital rights group La Quadrature du Net wrote in a May statement. It cited the “right to security, right to a private life and to private correspondence” and “the right to come and go freely”, calling the proposal part of a “slide into heavy-handed security”.

 

Canada and California absolutely must call Google’s and Facebook’s bluff on news

2023-07-06 /

Brian Merchant, LA Times »

California and Canada must absolutely not give in to the tech giants’ tantrum. This is a bluff, and not a particularly convincing one. For the sake of the beleaguered news industries in both places (yes, including this media outlet), the Canadian and Californian governments must absolutely call it.

For assurance, we should look to Australia, where a like-minded bill went into law in 2021, even after Google and Facebook made the same exact threats. Facebook did initially restrict access to news, but the ploy lasted barely a week before it backfired wildly, and Facebook agreed to comply, albeit after extracting some concessions.

That bill has already restored tens of millions of dollars in revenue to Australia’s troubled newsrooms, and, while far from perfect, has transformed the media environment dramatically.

First major survey of British doctors with Long Covid reveals debilitating impact on health, life and work

2023-07-05 /

BMJ »

Key findings include:

  • Doctors reported a wide range of symptoms, including fatigue, headaches, muscular pain, nerve damage, joint pain, ongoing respiratory problems and many more.
  • Around 60% of doctors told the BMA that post-acute Covid ill health has impacted on their ability to carry out day-to-day activities on a regular basis;
  • Almost one in five respondents (18%) reported that they were now unable to work due to their post-acute Covid ill-health;
  • Less than one in three (31%) doctors said they were working full-time, compared to more than half (57%) before the onset of their illness;
  • Nearly half (48%) said they have experienced some form of loss of earnings as a result of post-acute Covid;
  • 54% of respondents acquired Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, and 77% of these believed that they contracted Covid -19 in the workplace;
  • A small minority of doctors had access to respiratory protective equipment (RPE) around the time that they contracted Covid-19, with only 11% having access to an FFP2 respirator and 16% an FFP3 respirator;
  • More than 65% of doctors responding said their post-acute Covid symptoms had not been investigated thoroughly and effectively by an NHS long Covid clinic or centre. And almost half of doctors reported not even being referred to an NHS long Covid clinic at all.

The social network everyone wants is available now

2023-07-05 /

The social network everyone wants has no ads, no corporate surveillance, is ethically designed, decentralization, is available now, and won’t sell your data.

Facebook/Instagram/Messenger/WhatsApp/Meta/Threads

Alphabet/Google/YouTube

Twitter

Bluesky

» Mastodon ✅

Regain your independence and protect your privacy. Choose a social network that respects you and puts you in control – not a corporation.

Here is what Eugene Rochko, Founder and CEO of Mastodon, has to say about Threads.

Self-driving cars are “surveillance cameras on wheels”

2023-07-05 /

Bloomberg »

While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement — and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And it’s easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.

“We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We’re supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.”

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