Bayosphere

Lee Kuan Yew was this city-state’s first prime minister. He’s now the “Senior Minister” of Singapore. Whatever you think of his politics, which emphatically do not conform to some fundamental American political values including untrammeled free speech, his leadership has been serious and strong.

Singapore is trying to move into a new era, and it’s facing some choices that clearly are uncomfortable for Lee and his colleagues in the government and industry. They are trying to move toward an economy based as much or more on knowledge as the manufacturing, financial services, transportation and tourism that have largely sustained this tiny place for the past generation.

Over the past four days I’ve interviewed Lee and leaders of the government’s economic and telecommunications agencies, and visited two of Singapore’s key research labs. They know what they want to do. Whether they’ll be able to pull it off is not something I can judge right now. But they are, it seems, doing some of the right things.

I’ll have more on this in coming days.

Hong Kong’s Amazing Telecoms

One of Singapore’s main rivals in the region is Hong Kong. Each has some advantages, but one of Hong Kong’s main strengths is its telecommunications scene — probably the world’s most competitive.

More in my latest column.

Singapore was described to me as resembling a golf course, ever-so-groomed and maintained. That’s true, but it’s also a work in transitition.

I visited one of the city-state’s national research centers on Friday. It’s called Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL), and it’s out by the National University of Singapore on the western side of this small island.

KRDL is an information-technology research lab, aimed mostly at software. It’s a key part of Singapore’s effort to move its economy into the new age. It thrived in recent decades on financial services, transportation and manufacturing — with high-tech manufacturing a particular expertise.

Can Singapore create a new economic force from brainpower? That’s not entirely clear.

Certainly some of the technologists here are as bright and capable as the ones who flock each year to Silicon Valley and the rest of the United States. I’m not sure if the local culture is as accomodating of creative thinking, of the individualism that seems to accompany the most successful entrepeneurship.

I’m meeting with government officials tomorrow. Singapore’s government is clearly the most important economic player, even in a largely capitalistic system.

The Bush Tactics

The Republicans’ hypocrisy is beyond belief. Their contempt for law and support of mob rule is frightening.

The Bush crowd screamed bloody murder when the Democrats, looking at the bizarre “butterfly” ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida, said it caused Gore voters to mistakenly vote for the right-winger Pat Buchanan. How dare anyone even think that these votes might be counted.

But the Republicans want to count absentee ballots (CNN) that are equally invalid. “A technicality,” scream the GOP public-releations hordes.

Then the Republicans started making noise about throwing out the Florida results if they don’t like what the recount shows. Maybe the Republican state legislature will vote for Bush electors. Maybe Congress.

These are people who would abandon the rule of law when it doesn’t suit them. They seem to be much more motivated than the Democratic activists, which is why they may win.

They are looking mighty hypocritical. They are also looking downright dangerous.

The Bush supporters used nothing short of goonish tactics to intimidate the Dade County elections officials into dropping their recount.

Two days ago, in my Thanksgiving column, I said the world was looking at the U.S. process not with disdain but with awe. We were following the rule of law, not mob behavior. I was wrong.

I am nearly ashamed of my country today. The Republican mob wants its man to be president, no matter what it takes. THere is a the cost to democracy, to the rule of law. They should think about what they’re doing, and so should their leaders in the GOP and their syncophants in the media.

I’ve been critical of the Gore team’s insistence on counting the so-called “dimpled chads.” But nothing Gore is doing begins to match the Bush crowd’s activities.

Bush may well take the oath of office as our next president. If he does, he will be a barely legitimate president in my view, though he will be a legal one and I will acknowledge his legal holding of the office.

But I will fervently hope Congressional Democrats have the courage to stand up to him and Trent Lott and Tom DeLay and the other right-wingers who want to turn America back decades socially and politically. And I hope they will resist the GOP’s rampage against law and order.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. If possible, we surround ourselves with family and friends. We pause to remember our blessings.

It’s also, as I’ve noted in this space in other years, an annual reminder that the world needs more pilgrims and fewer turkeys.

The pilgrims I admire take risks. They embark on journeys — metaphorically, at any rate — to new and often perhaps unfriendly places. Their vision transcends fear.

But that’s only part of their value. Their staying power and moral convictions take them far beyond self-centered hunger for wealth and power that increasingly holds sway in Silicon Valley and the rest of the world.

I fear that America in particular, awash in pettiness and greed and smugness, has all but lost its sense of exploration and wonder. Then I remember the pilgrims who refuse to accept the way things are, who reject pure grasping and complacence.

In Asia this month, I have watched the American election with something bordering on awe. We are not the object of ridicule among people who love freedom. We are an object of awe. America’s rule of law — messy and political as it can often be — is guiding the election process, openly and with relative calm. We will have a president next year, and no one will have been shot in the streets as part of the process.

In Shanghai last week, I saw a sadly universal sight these days. Amid ascendant capitalism we see heartbreaking poverty. An apparently homeless man sat against a wall in a tunnel that ran under a street. He held a sign pleading for help. A child, no more than two years old, huddled against him and slept fitfully. I could have seen the same in countless cities around the globe.

I just arrived in Singapore, where personal freedom has taken a back seat to the government’s economic and social policies. The average person there is materially far better off than a generation ago. At what spiritual cost?

My material table overflow with bounty. I’m grateful beyond words for my life of relative comfort.

I’m even more grateful for my opportunity to constantly explore and learn. I hope to sustain my pilgrimage — for life, for justice. And as we head toward Thanksgiving Day, 2000, I wish the same for you.

Stock market going down, anyone?

The elevators in Hong Kong can be highly informative.

Gore is Over-Reaching on “Dimpled Chads”

San Jose Mercury News: Ballots set to make dent in U.S. history. Democrats are arguing that local election officials should count ballots in which voters did not punch their ballots hard enough to dislodge the so-called chad that would signal their preferred candidate but did make a slight indentation in the chad. Democrats say the indentations clearly demonstrate a voter’s intent.

Al Gore and his allies have gone way over the line this time.

In its ruling okaying the hand counts in three disputed counties, the Florida Supreme Court did not, contrary to the Gore camp’s absurd claims, approve of counting these “dimpled chads.” The court only said that “voters should not be disfranchised where their intent may be ascertained with reasonable certainty, simply because the chad they punched did not completely dislodge from the ballot.”

Read that carefully. It says “completely dislodge” — and that is not an invitation to count a ballot where the chad hasn’t been at least partly dislodged.

An indentation is not a vote. It is not a clear indication of intent. It is a “Hmmm, maybe I should do this, or maybe not.”

Gore had a strong case for a hand recount. He offered the Bush campaign an entirely fair option, a hand recount of all counties in Florida. The Republicans declined.

Bush’s tactics have been sleazy all through this campaign. If he takes the oath of office in January he will not be a fully legitimate president in my view.

But the “dimpled chad” ploy is reprehensible. I voted for Gore, but if he persists in this line of attack he will deserve to lose.

The view from Victoria Peak can be spectacular, especially when the pollution level is lower than normal. This was one such evening.

Yahoo and the French Internet Censors

The Western world might consider shedding some of its pretenses of political superiority when it behaves just like the worst players on the international stage. Case in point: a French judge’s ruling that Yahoo should censor itself (Mercury News) when delivering content to France.

You can sympathize, to a point, with the French. The Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo’s site may well be offensive to lots of people.

I personally find it disgusting, though I also think it’s valuable to preserve a historical record. The difference between a neo-Nazi’s collection and historical society’s collection may be clear to me and you, but it’s not possible to be clear in a Web auction — and it’s none of Yahoo’s business why customers behave as they do.

In China, the powers-that-be don’t want their citizens to look at the New York Times on the Web or any number of other sites deemed politically untoward. The Chinese government is sharply limiting the number of Internet service providers and forcing them to block the supposedly offending sites.

France doesn’t have so many limits on ISPs, but it has decided Yahoo can determine the physical location of a Web surfer and then deny access to certain material just for people in certain places. This is technically impossible.

Yes, some companies are working on ways to make it more possible, but even if they succeed there will always be relay sites that pass along users’ requests. As John Gilmore has said so memorably, “The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.”

China’s Net-censorship policies remain a barrier to progress in the most populous place on Earth. It’s a shame to see France moving in the wrong direction.

Time Warner and EarthLink Make a Deal

San Jose Mercury News: Final hurdles for AOL-Time Warner. EarthLink access deal is a huge leap for merger plans.

I hope not.

One deal permitting a competitive Internet access provider to use Time Warner’s cable lines is not the same thing as open access. It’s a sop to the antitrust authorities who, I fear, may be looking for a reason to let American Online’s buyout of Time Warner go through.

Earthlink is an excellent ISP. So is AOL. That’s not the point.

The point is that these kinds of deals will create an oligopoly of ISPs, a cozy few “competitors” that ultimately will raise prices as they shut other ISPs out of the market. It’s not a coincidence that America’s Internet surge has coincided with the rampantly free market in Internet service, from mom-and-pop operations all the way up to AOL’s gargantuan and frequently anticompetitive system.

The cable companies should be required to do what the phone companies must do according to law: Offer access to anyone who wants it and can put in the right equipment to link up. This is not, contrary to the cable company’s protests, anything close to rocket science.

“Our partnership with EarthLink demonstrates our commitment to offer Time Warner Cable customers multiple choices in broadband ISPs,” Glenn A. Britt, president of Time Warner Cable, told the Mercury News’ Heather Fleming Phillips.

Maybe the commitment is real. But one deal sure doesn’t prove it.

Washington Post: Bush Cousin Made Florida Vote Call For Fox News. Which is why media circles were buzzing yesterday with the question of why Fox had installed a Bush relative in such a sensitive post.

Eric Mink (NY York Daily News): ‘Fair’? R-i-i-ght. Fox News Channel’s bias is clear

It was bad enough that the big TV networks “called” Florida for Al Gore on Election Night, then withdrew that announcement, then gave the state to George W. Bush and then withdrew that prediction. That sequence will go down in journalism infamy for its sheer arrogance.

The Fox News people were first to award Florida to Bush, and used the announcement to award him — also grossly prematurely — the presidency. The other networks, true to their lemming-like nature, rushed to follow that lead. And Gore has been fighting the possibly false perception that he lost ever since.

Now we learn that Bush’s first cousin, a man who was having regular conversations that night with the Republican candidate and Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, was partly or even largely responsible for the Fox News decision to declare George Bush the winner.

Does this stink, or what?

Now, Fox News is free to tilt to the political right, or even shill for the GOP and its candidates if it wants to. It should own up to its biases up front, however.

Meanwhile, it develops that Barbara Walters is shilling for Campbell Soup (Wall Street Journal) on an ABC TV program. ABC News doesn’t see the problem. No surprise there, either, sadly.

This masterwork of architecture, designed by I.M. Pei, is the Bank of China Tower. It’s not just one of the two or three the most striking buildings in Hong Kong. It’s one of the world’s great structures.

The tower symbolizes many things. One inspiration, according to the bank’s Web site, is the “elegant poise of bamboo,” where each section of the trunk propels new sections higher.

Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants in the world. That, too, seems symbolic. Hong Kong’s economy is a masterpiece of booms, where markets climb skyward like bamboo shoots that grow more rapidly than any other plant.

But Hong Kong’s markets don’t defy gravity for long. They tend to collapse, with devastating consequences for the people who got into the game late. It’s been that way for decades in the real estate market. More recently, mania arrived here in the guise of the technology revolution.

Nowhere have this entrepreneurial city’s manic-depressive financial tendencies been evident than in the Internet economy. It took off late last year and early in 2000. When the U.S. Internet market caught a serious flu last spring, Hong Kong’s dot-com wonders, many of which were the so-called “GEMs” of the local equities market, caught the proverbial pneumonia.

GEM is short for the Growth Enterprise Market,, which the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong launched a year ago. With a strong focus on technology stocks, it was another of the many NASDAQ competitors that have sprung up around the world in recent years.

In the heady days of the dot-com bubble it all seemed like a fine idea. Maybe it will be in the end.

But the subtitle on GEM’s home page — “A ‘Buyers Beware’ Market for Informed Investors” — seems to have been ignored by a lot of the tech-crazed folks who raced into the market.

Chinese portal sites were particularly huge. Now they’re “a graveyard,” says Dan Schwartz, publisher of the Asian Venture Capital Journal, which is based here and in Silicon Valley. “It was nuts.”

The GEM stock index is almost two-thirds off its high — the second-worst showing among tech-oriented exchanges in Asia, according to a recent survey by Reuters. The volatility is no surprise, given the specious business models of some of the companies that managed to pull off initial public offerings before the dot-com bubble deflated.

As of last week, 36 of GEM’s 49 listed companies were selling below their offering prices, said Reuters. Of the seven companies that were part of GEM at the exchange’s launch, not one was above water.

Oddly, in contrast to the slew of dot-com closings in the U.S., few of Hong Kong’s dot-com disasters have gone entirely out of business. The only significant failure was an online bookstore that was aiming to be the Chinese Amazon.

Cultural differences are one reason, says Poh Lee Tan, partner and head of the Information Technology and Communications Group at the Hong Kong office of Baker & McKenzie, a global law firm. She looks for lots of consolidation, but sees it happening in ways designed, in part, to save face for the people involved.

Not too many of the dot-coms are in a position to buy out others in the genre. Brick-and-mortar companies are now looking over the ailing dot-coms, but they’ll be looking more carefully than retail investors apparently did in the public markets.

“There are going to be deals,” Tan says. Potential buyers “can afford to do more due diligence, something that was seen to be a luxury only a few months ago.”

Ellison Doesn’t Give Up

Two years ago, Larry Ellison announced what sounded like a fairly audacious, if entirely sensible, plan. He and computer hardware partners would sell boxes that would act as Oracle-based servers and use no Microsoft software.

The notion hasn’t changed, and server appliances have become big business. Oracle has hardly been a leader in the category.

Ellison doesn’t give up, though. In an announcement at the Comdex show in Las Vegas yesterday, Ellison gave the scheme an upgrade (Mercury News).

It’s now bundled with Oracle 9i, the newest version of the company’s software, and has the fairly intriguing support of hardware giant Compaq Computer. The latest appliances will be Web and application servers.

They’re also part of Ellison’s jihad against Microsoft’s vision of client-server computing in favor of a fairly pure form of network computing. In the latter model, almost all of the intelligence — and all of the data — resides on servers, which dish out information to devices at the edge.

Ellison is right that personal computers are still too complicated and unreliable. He’s wrong, I suspect, if he really thinks all intelligence belongs in the center of the network.

The world has changed. Peer-to-peer computing, which uses the power of the machines at the edge, is making more and more sense. And it’s a lot closer to Microsoft’s vision of the world than Oracle’s.

There’s room for both, of course. But Oracle would be wise to look at lot harder at P2P, as it’s known. This wave is just starting to gain strength. Whether it’s a Tsunami is still unknown, but I’m not betting against it.

A Gift for All Time

My father said there were TV Monsters. They were evil televisions, and they lurked in a dark, scary forest where they loved to gobble up little boys and girls.

There was a way to get past the TV Monsters. They couldn’t hurt you if you held a book in front of your face.

I learned to read when I was very young. I love books, which take me into realms beyond TV and even real life. I hope you’re encouraging your own kids to read. I hope you read to them.

Not all kids in Silicon Valley are as fortunate as I was. That’s why I strongly support the Mercury News’ annual Gift of Reading book drive.

As the holiday season approaches, please help out. You can drop books off at the newspaper or participating libraries and bookstores. Or just send money — some of you have plenty to spare — and the organizers will buy and wrap the books. Look for posters with details or call (408) 920-5755.

Let’s show all of Silicon Valley’s kids the way past the TV Monsters.

Consider:

We measure leaders by the way they respond to crisis. Maybe my perspective, from this distant shore, is too removed from the scene in the United States to be trusted. But as I watch the way George W. Bush and Al Gore have responded to this test with an increasingly sinking feeling.

I voted for Gore. I expect Bush to be the next president, because I think when the absentee ballots in Florida are counted we’ll discover that he won a flawed — but not fraudulent — election.

Gore is absolutely right to wait for the absentee ballots to arrive and be counted before letting Florida go. But he will destroy his career, and tear the political fabric of our nation, if he or his surrogates pursue legal challenges to the ballot in Palm Beach County. The ballot was badly designed. It was a mistake, but it was blessed by Democratic officials before the election. We should not overturn elections because of mistakes that were not deliberately designed to sway votes.

Bush, for his part, is behaving outrageously. Not content to wait for all the ballots, he is trying to achieve squatter’s rights on the election. He believes he can claim victory prematurely and make it so, just as he thinks he can claim falsely to be a “compassionate conservative” and make that so.

Unless Bush and Gore summon the kind of courage — the kind of leadership qualities — that America needs right now, they will be leading us into a constitutional crisis of the worst kind. Today, they are in a poisonous race toward the gutter.

Based on their behavior so far, Bush and Gore are guaranteeing something neither should want. Barring an improvement in leadership, whoever takes office next January will be viewed, quite properly, as an barely legitimate president.

That isn’t something any of us should want.

They looked at me like I was, well, just a bit crazy.

They were my students at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre — a bright and capable group who’d assembled for the first of five weekly seminars. The topic of the class is technology journalism.

But for more than a half hour at the beginning of last night’s session, the topic was American politics.

I was trying to help them understand the Electoral College system that has thrown the 2000 presidential election into such chaos. They found my explanations odd, but they wanted to understand.

I tried to explain. We apportion electoral votes based on a state’s total representation in Congress, both House and Senate, I said. And we give the popular-vote winner all of a state’s electoral votes — except in the two states where we don’t do that.

It’s a mess, I told them. They nodded in strong agreement.

America, America: Next Steps

So what do we do about this mess?

You’ll be hearing and reading a variety of remedies in coming days and months. Clearly we need to upgrade the system by, first of all, doing away with the Electoral College, an anachronism that has been shown conclusively to create all kinds of trouble with almost no advantages.

Bad design seems to have played a role with the ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida, that plainly confused a large number of people into voting for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

To understand how unnecessarily stupid this was — and why usability testing, a staple in some product-design circles, would have avoided this disaster — see software pioneer Dan Bricklin’s detailed explanation.

Another needed upgrade is in the physical voting machines. We should require all communities to install standardized machines that tabulate ballots into a database and are connected via networks to the office of the Secretary of State in each of the states, or the equivalent office overseeing voting. Then we’d have instant results when the polls closed, and we wouldn’t put ourselves through this kind of madness.

Expensive? Sure. But this is something we, the taxpayers, should pay for on a national basis. The voting franchise is too valuable to our lives to leave to 19th century technology.

We shouldn’t settle on a single kind of machine. Rather, to promote competition, we should create a standardized platform, if you will, that vendors could bid to provide to individual localities.

There’s another “solution” some in the tech community are touting — a rapid adoption of Internet voting. This is an absolutely terrible idea in the near term, and only marginally acceptable over the long term.

I’ll need a major amount of convincing that any online system could both provide the necessary security against fraud and simultaneously save the secret ballot, a cornerstone of democracy. I’ll need even more convincing that we can prevent the literal stealing of elections by hackers.

Besides, the act of voting — going to a polling place and casting a ballot — strikes me as a civic and personal good. I’m not wedded to that notion; the state of Oregon mailed ballots to its citizens this year, with good results. But holding the ballot in your hands as you make these awesome decisions has enormous meaning, at least to me.

Did you vote? I did.