iakttakelser (observations)

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 to Liu Xiaobo for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has long believed that there is a close connection between human rights and peace. Such rights are a prerequisite for the “fraternity between nations” of which Alfred Nobel wrote in his will. Over the past decades, China has achieved economic advances to which history can hardly show any equal. The country now has the world’s second largest economy; hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Scope for political participation has also broadened. China’s new status must entail increased responsibility. China is in breach of several international agreements to which it is a signatory, as well as of its own provisions concerning political rights. Article 35 of China’s constitution lays down that “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, ...

The Nobel Peace Prize institute are quite resistant to pressure. In 1935 the pressure from Germany and Hitler was immense in order to prevent the peace prize award to Carl von Ossietzky . This summer and autumn, the Norwegian government, the Norwegian Parlament and the Nobel Committee has been threathed repeatedly from Chinese authorities, that awarding the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo will be hurting Norway. I'm proud, as an Norwegian, that the Nobel Committee resisted the pressure, and made honorable decision.

This is warming my heart. As an admirer of Vaclav Havel, I was surprised to know that Liu Xiaobo got the inspiration of the Charter 08 from Havel Charter 77.

He created the freedom charter in 2008, and 350 intelectual signed it. He was convicted to 11 years in prison.

Nobel lauderate Yunus and his Grameen bank have a good reputation in Norway. I´m delighted to see that Grameen has published their microlending software as open source. A blog post from O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging by Matthew Russell tells the story: How are you addressing mobile? AF:  In Africa and India you send SMS messages with your phone to access your bank account. It takes a few messages back and forth to move money from one account to another or to make a payment. But it's way better than having to drag yourself across a dusty city and use public transport to visit a bank branch where people may or may not discriminate against you because you're poor. Toward that end, we're integrating with a major mobile money system in Africa, a prototype called  M-PESA . There's also a mobile money system in India that we're looking at for pilot projects.

The Nobel lauderate Joseph Stiglitz is some I really like to read. Her I have copied from "Economist's View" by Mark Thoma: The blame game continues over who is responsible for the worst recession since the Great Depression – the financiers who did such a bad job of managing risk or the regulators who failed to stop them. But the economics profession bears more than a little culpability. It provided the models that gave comfort to regulators that markets could be self-regulated; that they were efficient and self-correcting. The efficient markets hypothesis ... ruled the day. Today, not only is our economy in a shambles but so too is the economic paradigm that predominated in the years before the crisis – or at least it should be.

Aftenposten har vært fast inventar i barndom, ungdom og som voksen. En gang tidligere sa jeg opp, etter deres tendensiøse dekning av EU kampen. Nå er det slutt igjen. De gir spalteplass til allehånde suspekte amerikanske "neocons" og enhver som har noe negativt å si om Obama. Så adjø Aftenposten - du er igjen kompromittert. Fra nå av blir det Dagsavisen. De har ihvertfall Sverre Lodgård.

Paragon of science or crackpot? : " The public generally views winning the Nobel Prize as reaching the pinnacle of scientific achievement, which raises an awkward question: does that mean it's inevitably downhill from there? For many laureates, research careers continue on regardless of the level of public recognition. But others take the prestige afforded by the Prize and use it to advance issues that aren't directly related to their work. The two researchers who were honored for their role in the identification of HIV provide a glimpse into how this plays out in both good and bad ways. Winning the Nobel Prize affords about the closest thing to celebrity that's possible in a scientific career and, based on interviews with prize winners (who chose to remain anonymous), it comes with some of the same issues: everyone wants a piece of your time or an endorsement. And some of the laureates take advantage of their new platform , using it to promote things like sc...

Image via Wikipedia  showing the availability of iPhone The # iPhone app will peak, and then become irrelevant. On the other side will webapps using HTML5  and CSS take over the 4.5 Billion handset market.This is what my crystal ball tells me after one week of vacation. And how do I dear say that? Now that all in this market is about apps, apps and apps. Study shows that the app market will be more than $30 billion in 2015. Apple just informed they had a $1.5 billion app revenue. Still, Apple holds only a 1% of the handset market. Follow me on this little travel through the three articles I read today. And, ironically, read in my RSSMobile app on my iPhone, and sent to my Instapaper for further processing, which I'm doing just now... In the article  An ISP Offers A Cloud for India - More Like AOL, Less Like the Open Web , Alex Williams from ReadWriteCloud tells how the Cloud is being implemented in India: Sify Technologies  is a a large Indian ...

Crugman has been working on this problem the last weeks. Today he came up with, as he says himself, a sort of a textbook. You should read the whole article  here . "Most press coverage of the eurozone troubles has focused on Greece, which is understandable: Greece is up against the wall to a greater extent than anyone else. But the Greek economy is also very small; in economic terms the heart of the crisis is in Spain, which is much bigger. And as I’ve tried to point out in a number of posts, Spain’s troubles are not, despite what you may have read, the result of fiscal irresponsibility. Instead, they reflect “asymmetric shocks” within the eurozone, which were always known to be a problem, but have turned out to be an even worse problem than the euroskeptics feared. So I thought it might be useful to lay out, in a handful of pictures, how Spain got into its current state. (All of the data come from the IMF World Economic Outlook Database). There’s a kind of classic simplicity a...

Paul Crugman , 2008 Nobel Prize of Economics lauderate, have just came with Crises , his "Mea Culpa". His view of the reasons that almost all economists, himself included, failed to see the financial crisis before it stuck us all. He ends the article like this: And despite the praise being handed out to those who helped us avoid the worst, we are not handling the crisis well: fiscal stimulus has been inadequate, financial support has contained the damage but not restored a healthy banking system. All indications are that we’re going to have seriously depressed output for years to come. ... Maybe policymakers will become wiser in the future. Maybe financial reform will rduce the occurrence of crises: major financial cises were much rarer between the end of Worl War II and the rise of fincancial deregulaiton after 1980 than they were before or since. Menwhile, however, the fact is that the economic world is a surprisingly dangerous place.

Some young Americans asked if we did this Nobel prosession with torches every year. I said yes, and added that that's the reason that every Norwegian gets a cold to Christmas ;-)

Jeg mottar denne hederen med dyp takknemlighet og stor ydmykhet. Det er en pris som vitner om våre høyeste ambisjoner – at trass i all ondskapen og lidelsen i verden, er vi ikke fanger av vår skjebne. Våre gjerninger teller, og de kan bidra til å dreie historien i retning av rettferdighet. Likevel ville jeg ikke være sannferdig om jeg ikke anerkjente hvor omstridt deres sjenerøse beslutning har vært. Delvis er det fordi jeg er ved starten, ikke slutten, av min innsats på verdens scene. Sammenlignet med noen av historiens giganter som har fått prisen – Schweitzer og King, Marshall og Mandela, er det jeg har gjort, lite. Og så har vi de menn og kvinner verden rundt som er blitt fengslet og slått i sin søken etter rettferdighet, de som arbeider i humanitære organisasjoner for å bekjempe lidelse, de millioner av ukjente hvis stille, modige og empatiske gjerninger er til inspirasjon selv for de hardeste kynikerne. Jeg kan ikke motsi dem som mener at disse mennene og kvinnene – noen kjente...

Her er NRKs sending av Obamas pristildelign og tale . Her er NRKs sending av hans bankett-tale .

Godt jobba alle i "Obama, vi trenger deg!" Nå er medlemstallet kommet opp i 753 - på tre dager! Obama fikk en lysende hyllest på terassen på Grand. Jeg var sammen med 4 fra "Obama, vi trenger deg!", og vi ble tom. intervjuet på NRK.  De andre jeg var sammen med fortalte meg at i den siste tiden hadde det blitt hippt å være skeptisk til Obama. Kanskje Aftenposten og NRK har vært rammet av dette. Det fantastiske er, at "Obama, vi trenger deg!", synes å ha bidratt til å endre denne holdningen. Yes we can!

The text of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, delivered Thursday in Oslo, Norway, as provided by the White House: Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world: I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations — that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice. And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jai...

Try google with  w ith the words "obama nobel peace prize watch" MSDN is sending on  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/22887506#22887506

J eg følger Obama på twitter - se twitter.com/mortjac Jeg bruker hashtaggene #obama #nobel #fredspris #peaceprize

Så ringte NRK - Jon Gelius, sjef for nyhetene, tok seg tid til å ringe. Han sa at han hadde lest mine innlegg og mail, og at han ikke var enig at NRK hadde en ubalansert oppfølging av fredsprisen. Han sa at han hadde dokumentasjon på at deres dekning var balansert. Han ville imidlertid ikke gi meg den dokumentasjonen, da jeg ba om det. På den annen side mente han at jeg var skikkelig ubalansert i min dekning. Det skulle bare mangle. Jeg er en lytter og en beundrer av Obama. Jeg kan dokumentere overtramp på enkelte sendinger, men ikke over tid. BTW - jeg er glad han ringte. Det betyr at NRK tross alt svarer - hvertfall når man forsøker to ganger å få deres kringkastningsjef i tale. Kjære venner av iakttakelser og "Obama, vi trenger deg!". Kan dere prøve å legge merke til om NRK nå endrer fokuset fra kritikk til støtte. Fra kl. 10 idag har det ikke vært flere sitater fra de neokonservative Obama-haterne i nyhetene på radioen. Bildet er hentet fra Jon Gelius side på nrk.no

Sverre Lodgaard i Dagsavisen: I morgen kommer han for å snakke om mellomfolkelig samarbeid og atomnedrustning. Det er mange skår i gleden, men la ikke arvesynden hefte ved ham. ... Komiteen treffer klokkerent når den snakker om hans ekstraordinære innsats for mellomfolkelig samarbeid og en verden uten atomvåpen. Det er første avsnitt i begrunnelsen, og der ligger hovedsaken. Det er likevel mange skår i gleden, men la ikke arvesynden hefte ved ham. Gi ham fratrekk for boet. Les hele artikkelen her .