industryterm:partial solution

Oman’s Port Strategy – LobeLog
▻https://lobelog.com/omans-port-strategy

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Within the Arabian Peninsula, Duqm and Salalah have much potential to further shape geopolitical relations amid strategic shifts in the regional balance of power. Any major investments by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Duqm (and other Omani projects) should be watched closely for their effect on intra-Gulf politics. Some analysts contend that both countries are attempting to restrict the Sultanate’s geopolitical maneuverability as Muscat and Tehran try to maintain cooperative relations. As Riyadh and Abu Dhabi may use their petro-dollars to influence Oman’s future position in an increasingly polarized Gulf, they could use investments in Omani infrastructure projects as another way to gain leverage. Likewise, Oman’s trade infrastructure proved highly useful to Qatar last year when Doha needed alternatives to Jebel Ali as a logistics hub linking the emirate to the global economy.

It goes without saying that Iran itself is a key factor in this equation. If tensions in the Strait of Hormuz escalate, Duqm and Salalah would need to prepare for any trade-related ramifications. The Omani government must stay vigilant and aware of any escalations of friction amid increasingly harsh rhetoric from Washington and Tehran that threaten to unleash an armed conflict in or near the strait. Yet the ports’ advantageous geographic locations could help Gulf states continue to sell their oil and gas in the event of such a crisis, as shipments via Duqm and Salalah will not need to travel through the strait. Whereas Saudi Arabia has its Red Sea coast and the UAE has one Emirate (Fujairah) outside the strait, which would enable these two states to continue exporting oil in the event of the strait’s closure, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar are fully dependent on that artery for their hydrocarbon exports. As Amer No’man Ashour, chief analyst and economist at CNBC Arabia, explains:

We all know that more than 30 per cent of oil shipments pass through the Strait of Hormuz and with this shift via the Port of Fujairah and the Duqm port, the GCC countries will ensure that their oil shipments are safe, and this will decrease the risk and the cost of insurance on ships… Al-Duqm Port is one of the best ever solutions to the oil issue… It is 800 kilometres away from UAE borders. We know that the UAE has had a partial solution via Fujairah with a capacity of 1.1 million barrels per day, but the production of the UAE is almost 3 million barrels per day. Most of Kuwait, Qatari and Saudi oil is produced in the eastern parts of the Gulf area and this new Omani port will be very suitable for exporting oil to the world.

#oman #grand_jeu

Desert Air Will Give Us Water - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/desert-air-will-give-us-water

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A partial solution to the problem of punishing droughts may be to snatch water from the air, Dune-style.Photograph by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center / FlickrLast year, after a punishing four-year drought, California lifted emergency water-scarcity measures in all but four counties. Residents could sigh in relief but not without resignation. “This drought emergency is over, but the next drought could be around the corner,” California Governor Jerry Brown said at the time. “Conservation must remain a way of life.”He’s right. In April, a study in Nature Climate Change, based on climate model simulations, concluded that a 25 percent to 100 percent “increase in extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events is projected” for the rest of this century, “despite only modest changes in mean (...)

Decentralized identity and decentralized social networks | Read the Tea Leaves
►https://nolanlawson.com/2018/01/02/decentralized-identity-and-decentralized-social-networks

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It’s unreasonable to expect people to speak in the same voice in every social setting offline, so it’s equally unreasonable to ask them to do it online.

In the world of centralized social networks, users have responded to “real name policies” and “please use one account” by fracturing themselves into different proprietary silos. On decentralized social networks, we can continue fracturing ourselves based on instances, but these disparate identities are allowed to comingle a bit, thanks to the magic of federation.

I don’t expect everyone to use the same techniques I use, such as having a joke account and a serious account. For some people, that’s just too much of an investment in social media, and it’s too hard to juggle more than one account. But I think it’s a partial solution to the problem of context collapse, and although it’s a bit of extra effort, it can pay dividends in the form of fewer misunderstandings, fewer ambiguities, and less confusion for your readers.

#Identité #Médias_sociaux #Effondrement_contexte #Mastodon

Fake news is a red herring | World | DW.COM | 25.01.2017
▻http://www.dw.com/en/fake-news-is-a-red-herring/a-37269377

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Fake news, propaganda and “disinformatzya” are changing the media landscape - in the US, Russia and Turkey and across the world. The question is how to combat them.

Par Ethan Zuckerman (une véritable analyse des diverses composantes du monde post-truth)

Different types of fake news

It’s tempting to say that Trump is using “fake news” to mean “news I don’t like”, but the reality is more complicated. “Fake news,” in this usage, means “real issues that don’t deserve as much attention as they’re receiving.” This form of fake news was likely an important factor in the 2016 campaign. There’s a compelling argument that the release of Clinton and Podesta’s emails by Russian hackers - and the media firestorm that ensued - were key to the outcome of the US election. While media outlets overfocused on the non-scandal of the emails, this wasn’t “fake news” so much as it was “false balance,” with newspapers playing up a Clinton “scandal” to counterbalance an endless sequence of Trump scandals.

There’s another type of “fake news” that surfaces during virtually every political campaign: propaganda. Propaganda is weaponized speech that mixes truthful, deceptive and false speech, and is designed explicitly to strengthen one side and weaken the other. Propaganda has been around for a long time, preceding the era of mass media.

A third category of “fake news,” relatively new to the scene in most countries, is disinformatzya. This is news that’s not trying to persuade you that Trump is good and Hillary bad (or vice versa). Instead, it’s trying to pollute the news ecosystem, to make it difficult or impossible to trust anything. This is a fairly common tactic in Russian politics and it’s been raised to an art form in Turkey by President Tayyip Erdogan, who uses it to discredit the internet, and Twitter in particular. Disinformatyza helps reduce trust in institutions of all sorts, leading people either to disengage with politics as a whole or to put their trust in strong leaders who promise to rise above the sound and fury. The embrace of “fake news” by the right wing in America as a way of discrediting the “mainstream media” can be understood as disinformatzya designed to reduce credibility of these institutions - with all the errors news organizations have made, why believe anything they say?

One of the best known forms of disinformatya is “shitposting,” the technique of flooding online fora with abusive content, not to persuade readers, but to frustrate anyone trying to have a reasonable discussion of politics on the internet.

Solving the problem of sensationalistic, click-driven journalism likely requires a new business model for news that focuses on its civic importance above profitability. In many European nations, public broadcasters provide at least a partial solution to this problem - in the US, a strong cultural suspicion of government involvement with news complicates this solution. A more promising path may be to address issues of filtering and curation. Getting Facebook to acknowledge that it’s a publisher, not a neutral platform for sharing content, and that its algorithmic decisions have an impact would be a first step towards letting users choose how ideologically isolated or exposed they want to be. Building public interest news aggregators that show us multiple points of view is a promising direction as well. Unbalanced news is a problem that’s always been with us, dealt with historically by shaping and adhering to journalistic standards - it’s now an open question whether social media platforms will take on that responsibility.

Surprisingly, our best bets for fighting propaganda may come from a return to the past. Stanford historian Fred Turner wrote a brilliant book, “The Democratic Surround,” on how US intellectuals had tried to fight fascist propaganda in the 1940s through reinforcing democratic and pluralistic values. Rather than emphasizing critical reading or debate, the thinkers Turner documents designed massive museum installations intended to force Americans to wrestle with the plurality and diversity of their nation and the world. While exhibits such as “The Family of Man” might be an impossibly dated way to combat fake news, the idea of forcing people to confront a wider world than the one they’re used to wrestling with goes precisely to the root of the problems that enable fake news.

#fake_news #post-truth #passionnant