The Bangladesh Today (04-02-2018)

More documents

Recommendations

Info

EDITORIAL SUNDAY, fEBrUArY 4, 2018 4 A race to the gutter Acting Editor & Publisher : Jobaer Alam Telephone: +8802-9104683-84, Fax: 9127103 e-mail: editor@thebangladeshtoday.com Sunday, february 4, 2018 Saving the wetlands around Dhaka N otwithstanding the apparent gloss and glitter of its high rise buildings, Dhaka is now a seriously endangered city. The once natural drainage system of the city with its many natural canals plus the surrounding wetlands that also helped the purpose of retention of drained waters and their gradual drainage, are largely things of the past. Only a few natural drainage canals remain though in heavily encroached conditions. The areas of the wetlands have also shrunk from the activities of real estate developers and other encroachers. Compared to their earlier non encroached sizes, the extent of the wetlands today are far smaller. Thus, any sensible person can see the imperative of saving these wetlands and remaining canals from grabbing in the name of developing them not to speak of trying to set them free from their present encroachments as well. The city of over 15 million turn into a flooded one in almost all of its parts even after a short period of heavy rains. It acquires the appearance of a city flood as water fails to drain off for days from the choked conditions of the city. Thus, the Detail Area Plan (DAP) for the city proposed that at least 21 per cent of the city's present and projected areas must be reserved as water bodies where no real estate development activities would be permitted. But this meritorious proposal triggered the wrath of the developers . They made it transparent that they would be prepared to go to any lengths of misconduct, piling of pressure and other tactics to have the DAP changed in their favour. Therefore, the responsibility becomes greater for the government to be even more firm in their commitment to DAP. DAP has been drawn up in the interest of a planned Dhaka, to save it from collapse due to all kinds of unregulated activities specially from real estate developers. The best interests of residents of the city cannot be allowed to be sacrificed at the altar of a limited number of greedy developers. However, it is also true that developers' interests cannot be so bluntly ignored either. Over the years, they intruded into the wetlands from a policy vacuum on the part of the government and no enforcement measures whatsoever against the same. They have also invested huge sums of money in partial attempts to develop the areas of the wetlands they intruded. In some cases, they have even taken money from private persons as plots sold to them. Therefore, the reasonable course would be government making some compromises in areas of the wetlands where the developers have already gone to work. But government's policy from now on should be one of sending very convincing signals to the developers that they have proceeded this far but won't be allowed to move further . This means that their further intrusion into the wetlands would be absolutely prevented in each such case from now on by the sternest application of the law. A wise coexistence of man and nature was visible at the initial days of development of Dhaka. Until 1950, development of the city took place on the higher terrain and the encompassing rivers, networks of canals and the wetlands were harmoniously used for transportation, defence, fishing or agricultural purpose. Vast tract of wetlands at close proximity to the central city has been attracting private developers since 1980s. After construction of the Western Flood Embankment, unplanned development stretched rapidly toward the low lying areas violating all the laws and regulations. Designated flood zone at the south and west of Dhaka are also experiencing the similar fate. It should be kept in mind, even after completion of the Eastern Embankment, a sizeable percent of land should be kept as retention area for storm water storage (according to the study of JICA). It was evident from catastrophic floods in 1988, 1998 and 2004 in the city that the poor discharge capacities of the existing natural drainage channels are responsible for the longer duration of floods. City dwellers experienced the severity of rain flood during the month of September 2004. Entire city collapsed at that time for poor drainage system of the city. Low-lying lands around Dhaka works as natural retainers of storm water, acts as natural drainage network and certainly help to keep balance in ecosystem. Land filling activities in those restricted areas have been going on even after enactment of the Water Body Conservation Act 2000 which prohibited any kind of development in the wetlands. It is a myth that today no wetland remains for conservation. Expert studies show that Dhaka is still left with 19.3% of wetland, which requires immediate attention. Wetlands are like living beings. Once they are destroyed, they cannot be brought back to life again. Programme for restoration of wetlands of Dhaka can be termed as the life saving drug for the survival of our beloved city and its surroundings. Development authorities in collaboration with experts, NGOs, media personnel and civil society must undertake a dynamic role to protect the wetlands. Natural resource conservation always requires active participation of, and therefore must include, the local inhabitants. ICan’t say I'm a big fan of the Supreme Court's current trend of taking on suo motu cases regarding everything wrong in Pakistan. In fact, if our judiciary were to clear their backlog of 1.8 million cases pending before it, our litigious country would breathe a sigh of relief. The whole business of granting stay orders at the drop of a hat needs a thorough judicial review: just consider the fact that TV channels charged with contravening the Pemra code of conduct have filed no less than 600 stay orders with various courts, thus rendering the regulatory body totally impotent. Meanwhile, they go their merry way, vilifying their targets, and occasionally putting their lives at risk. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions like the recent unmasking of one of Pakistan's most popular anchors, by Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, who took notice of his bizarre accusations. By claiming that the main accused in the brutal Kasur rape and murder of little Zainab was at the centre of an international child pornography ring, the anchor's allegations could have derailed the investigation. As it is, the State Bank almost immediately debunked his claim that the killer had 37 bank accounts. Even after his claims have been discredited, the anchor in question is still defending himself on his channel. In one incoherent broadcast, he rejected the oft-repeated charge that he had no journalistic background but had parachuted into senior broadcasting positions at large media houses. Naming well-known TV anchors and broadcasters abroad who had no degrees in journalism, he sought to Imagine that you, like me, are a typical product of Western liberal democracy, and are invited to give a lecture to a group of Chinese students in Beijing or Shanghai on its benefits. Ignoring the fact that, in reality, the Chinese government would never allow such a lecture, ask yourself: What would you say? First and foremost, it would be advisable to acknowledge that you do not speak from a position of moral superiority. Western civilization in the first half of the 20th century was not very civilized. Human rights were trampled. Class war destroyed entire political systems. There were large-scale violent conflicts and much ethnic cleansing. Given this history, Westerners are in no position to lecture on civil liberties or humane values. It is also worth noting that the global march toward democracy, which seemed nearly inexorable after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now seems to be reversing. According to Stanford University's Larry Diamond, several countries that were democracies at the beginning of this century have since shifted to different systems. Of course, elections alone do not a democracy make. Consider those cases when elections empower a majority ethnic or religious group, which then rides roughshod over minorities - an outcome that has been seen all too often in the Balkans, for example. Then there place himself in their ranks. Often anchors peddle half-baked opinions as facts. In fact, the subject one studies at university has nothing to do with journalistic standards and ethics. In reputable TV channels like the BBC and CNN, presenters and anchors, no matter how famous and well paid, have to stick to the script written and cleared by the news desk. If the story is controversial, additional vetting is called in. In Pakistan, however, anchors are the public faces of TV channels, and are extremely well rewarded. Some among the very popular ones have a direct link to the owners, bypassing the normal professional and managerial hierarchies other journalists are subordinate to. They thus produce their own scoops, and sprinkle their stardust on the channels they work for. But this constant battle to top the popularity chart often becomes a race to the gutter. Although the chief justice has set up a joint investigation team to further probe the anchor's accusations, are the cases when the election of a leader is treated as if it somehow legitimizes the subsequent emergence of dictatorship. This has been the case in Russia, which, since President Vladimir Putin's first electoral victory in 2000, has become a Potemkin democracy. This year, another election, neither free nor fair, will give Putin another term in office. In a real democracy, free and fair elections are complemented more broadly by the rule of law, due process, an independent judiciary, an active civil society, and freedom of the press, worship, assembly, and association. In fact, it is theoretically possible - though unlikely - for political systems to have all these elements without elections at all. (The political scientist Samuel Finer, in his irfAN hUSAiN it appears that there is not much to look into. Had there been any evidence, surely the anchor would have presented it by now to his increasingly sceptical audience. However, he is not alone. Not that long ago, another senior anchor pushed a claim by a so-called inventor that he had discovered the secret of making a car that ran on water. Evening after evening, the anchor would lament about how a Pakistani genius was being Even after his claims have been discredited, the anchor in question is still defending himself on his channel. in one incoherent broadcast, he rejected the oft-repeated charge that he had no journalistic background but had parachuted into senior broadcasting positions at large media houses. Naming wellknown tV anchors and broadcasters abroad who had no degrees in journalism, he sought to place himself in their ranks. chriS PAttEN ignored by the scientific establishment. Finally, his persistence paid off, and the miracle car was publicly tested. Surprise, surprise, the whole thing was a hoax. In most such cases of false claims and accusations, no apologies or explanations are ever forthcoming, either from the anchor or the management. And Pemra, as we have seen, has been made a spectator to this unprofessional conduct through a spate of stay order notices so easily granted by our courts. Print journalism, by contrast, has comprehensive study of different sorts of government, found just one society that was liberal but not democratic: colonial Hong Kong.) Democracies depend on institutional software, not just hardware. The people who make them work accept a set of norms that often do not have to be codified. The problem comes when the people - or, worse, their leaders - refuse to adhere to democratic norms Democracies depend on institutional software, not just hardware. The people who make them work accept a set of norms that often do not have to be codified. The problem comes when the people - or, worse, their leaders - refuse to adhere to democratic norms. That is what is happening today in the United States, higher standards for the verification of stories. One reason is that reporters are in a chain of command, and, for the most part, no newspaper staffer can bypass the editor to approach the owners. In reputable publications like this one, their stories are normally subjected to cross-checking and factchecking. Much to my occasional irritation, the editor of these pages and I don't always see eye to eye with changes that appear in my published columns. But more often than not, I see that the alterations have been made due to either policy concerns, or where I have made a genuine mistake. The odd argument aside, my editor and I are literally on the same page. This kind of back and forth is only possible because the deadlines in print journalism aren't as tight as they are in TV where vicious rivalries and 24/7 rolling news often force ill-considered decisions, and the news editor's role is severely curtailed. The results of this kind of journalism on the run are clearly visible in the shape of mindless discussions and poorly informed debates that have become the norm. Half-baked opinions are peddled as facts, and the same talking heads are invited to offer the same views night after night. Unproven accusations are thrown around liberally, while most anchors encourage the most outlandish comments without challenging them. In this environment of mediocrity and cut-throat competition, it is no wonder that unethical so-called media professionals flourish. Source : Dawn in defense of democracy during challenging times North Korea, if not stopped, will build an arsenal with multiple nuclear missiles meant to threaten the United States homeland and blackmail America into abandoning its allies in Asia. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un will sell these weapons to state and nonstate actors, and he will inspire other rogue actors who want to undermine the USbacked postwar order. These are real and unprecedented threats. But the answer is not, as some officials of the administration of United States President Donald Trump have suggested, a preventive military strike. Instead, there is a forceful military option available that can address the threat without escalating into a war that would likely kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans. When I was under consideration for a position in this administration, I shared some of these views. Some may argue that US casualties and even a wider war on the Korean Peninsula are risks worth taking, given what is at stake. But a strike (even a large one) would only delay North Korea's missile-building and nuclear programmes, which are buried in deep, unknown places impenetrable to bunker-busting bombs. A strike also would not stem the threat of proliferation but rather exacerbate it, turning what might be a North Korean moneymaking endeavour into a vengeful effort intended to equip other bad actors Democracies depend on institutional software, not just hardware. the people who make them work accept a set of norms that often do not have to be codified. the problem comes when the people - or, worse, their leaders - refuse to adhere to democratic norms. that is what is happening today in the United States, as President Donald trump challenges some of the foundational rules, norms, and principles of American democracy. against the US. I empathise with the hope, espoused by some Trump officials, that a military strike would shock Pyongyang into appreciating US strength, after years of inaction, and force the regime to the denuclearisation negotiating table. I also hope that if North Korea did retaliate militarily, the US could control the escalation ladder to minimise collateral damage and prevent a collapse of financial markets. In either event, the rationale is that a strike that demonstrates US resolve to pursue "all options" is necessary to give the mercurial Kim a "bloody nose". Otherwise, he will remain undeterred in his nuclear ambitions. Yet, there is a point at which hope must give in to logic. If we believe that Kim is undeterrable without such a strike, how can we also believe that a strike will deter him from responding in kind? And if Kim is unpredictable, impulsive and bordering on irrational, how can we control the escalation ladder, which is premised on an adversary's rational understanding of signals and deterrence? Some have argued the risks are still worth taking because it's better that people die "over there" than "over here" [in America]. On any given day, there are 230,000 Americans in South Korea and 90,000 or so in Japan. Given that an evacuation of so many citizens would be virtually impossible under a rain of North Korean artillery and missiles (potentially laced with biochemical weapons), these Americans would most likely have to hunker down until the war was over. as President Donald Trump challenges some of the foundational rules, norms, and principles of American democracy. Trump threatens (as Richard Nixon once did) to use his power to pervert the rule of law to target his opponents - most notably Hillary Clinton, whom he wants "locked up." He assaults the freedom of the press, implicitly encouraging supporters to attack journalists, say, by tweeting a (since-deleted) parody video of himself body-slamming a man with a CNN logo on his head. He attempts to subvert America's system of checks and balances. And he seems to place a higher priority on advancing his family's own commercial interests than the interests of the American people. While some parts of America's democratic political system - for example, the judicial check on executive authority - have proved resilient, others are breaking down. But Trump is a consequence of this breakdown, not its cause. The real problem is that the Republican Party has, over the years, become a hollow instrument of lobbyists and extremists, and both Democrats and Republicans seem to have abandoned their commitment to governing by consensus. As a result, the constitutional brakes that America's founders created to prevent the election of a huckster like Trump have failed. Source : Asia times Giving North Korea a ‘bloody nose’ risks hurting the US Victor chA Some may argue that US casualties and even a wider war on the Korean Peninsula are risks worth taking, given what is at stake. But a strike (even a large one) would only delay North Korea's missile-building and nuclear programmes, which are buried in deep, unknown places impenetrable to bunker-busting bombs. A strike also would not stem the threat of proliferation but rather exacerbate it, turning what might be a North Korean moneymaking endeavour into a vengeful effort intended to equip other bad actors against the US. While the American population in Japan may be protected by US missile defences, the US population in South Korea, let alone millions of South Koreans, has no similar active defences against a barrage of North Korean artillery (aside from counterfire artillery). To be clear: The US president would be putting at risk an American population the size of a medium-sized US city - Pittsburgh, say, or Cincinnati - on the assumption that a crazy and undeterrable dictator will be rationally cowed by a demonstration of US kinetic power. An alternative coercive strategy involves enhanced and sustained US, regional and global pressure on Pyongyang to denuclearise. This strategy is likely to deliver the same potential benefits as a limited strike, along with other advantages, without the self-destructive costs. There are four elements to this coercive strategy. First, the Trump administration must continue to strengthen the coalition of United Nations member-states it has mustered in its thus far highly successful sanctions campaign. Second, the US must significantly up-gun its alliances with Japan and South Korea with integrated missile defence, intelligence-sharing and anti-submarine warfare and strike capabilities to convey to North Korea that an attack on one is an attack on all. Source : Gulf news
SCIENCE & TECH sunDAy, feBruAry 4, 2018 5 youtube: ‘Where fiction outperforms reality’ PAul leWIs youTube's algorithm distorts truth. There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 "up next" clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen. Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube's growth. In one of the few public explanations of how the formula works - an academic paper that sketches the algorithm's deep neural networks, crunching a vast pool of data about videos and the people who watch them - YouTube engineers describe it as one of the "largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence". Lately, it has also become one of the most controversial. The algorithm has been found to be promoting conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas mass shooting and incentivising, through recommendations, a thriving subculture that targets children with disturbing content such as cartoons in which the British children's character Peppa Pig eats her father or drinks bleach. Lewd and violent videos have been algorithmically served up to toddlers watching YouTube Kids, a dedicated app for children. One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos - which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets - told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google's algorithm. "That's what got us out there and popular," he said. "We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm." Google has responded to these controversies in a process akin to Whac-A-Mole: expanding the army of human moderators, removing offensive YouTube videos identified by journalists and de-monetising the channels that create them. But none of those moves has diminished a growing concern that something has gone profoundly awry with the artificial intelligence powering YouTube. Yet one stone has so far been largely unturned. Much has been written about Facebook and Twitter's impact on politics, but in recent months academics have speculated that YouTube's algorithms may have been instrumental in fuelling disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. "YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016," Zeynep Tufekci, a widely respected sociologist and technology critic, tweeted back in October. "Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines." If YouTube's recommendation algorithm really has evolved to promote more disturbing content, how did that happen? And what is it doing to our politics? Those are not easy questions to answer. Like all big tech companies, YouTube does not allow us to see the algorithms that shape our lives. They are secret formulas, proprietary software, and only select engineers are entrusted to work on the algorithm. Guillaume Chaslot, a 36-year-old French computer programmer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, was one of those engineers. During the three years he worked at Google, he was placed for several months with a team of YouTube engineers working on the recommendation system. The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed. "YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online," he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. "The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy." Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away. The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. "Watch time was the priority," he recalls. "Everything else was considered a distraction." Chaslot was fired by Google in 2013, ostensibly over performance issues. He insists he was let go after agitating for change within the company, using his personal time to team up with like-minded engineers to propose changes that could diversify the content people see. He was especially worried about the distortions that might result from a simplistic focus on showing people videos they found irresistible, creating filter bubbles, for example, that only show people content that reinforces their existing view of the world. Chaslot said none of his proposed fixes were taken up by his managers. "There are many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and diversity of videos people see," he says. "I tried to change YouTube from the inside but it didn't work." YouTube told me that its recommendation system had Photo: Tubefilter evolved since Chaslot worked at the company and now "goes beyond optimising for watchtime". The company said that in 2016 it started taking into account user "satisfaction", by using surveys, for example, or looking at how many "likes" a video received, to "ensure people were satisfied with what they were viewing". YouTube added that additional changes had been implemented in 2017 to improve the news content surfaced in searches and recommendations and discourage the promotion of videos containing "inflammatory religious or supremacist" content. It did not say why Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, waited over a decade to make those changes. Chaslot believes such changes are mostly cosmetic, and have failed to fundamentally alter some disturbing biases that have evolved in the algorithm. In the summer of 2016, he built a computer program to investigate. The software Chaslot wrote was designed to provide the world's first window into YouTube's opaque recommendation engine. The program simulates the behaviour of a user who starts on one video and then follows the chain of recommended videos - much as I did after watching the Logan Paul video - tracking data along the way. It finds videos through a word search, selecting a "seed" video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the "up next" column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube's generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm's preferences. Over the last 18 months, Chaslot has used the program to explore bias in YouTube content promoted during the French, British and German elections, global warming and mass shootings, and published his findings on his website, Algotransparency.com. Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial. When his program found a seed video by searching the query "who is Michelle Obama?" and then followed the chain of "up next" suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she "is a man". More than 80% of the YouTube-recommended videos about the pope detected by his program described the Catholic leader as "evil", "satanic", or "the anti-Christ". There were literally millions of videos uploaded to YouTube to satiate the algorithm's appetite for content claiming the earth is flat. "On YouTube, fiction is outperforming reality," Chaslot says. He believes one of the most shocking examples was detected by his program in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. As he observed in a short, largely unnoticed blogpost published after Donald Trump was elected, the impact of YouTube's recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton. "It was strange," he explains to me. "Wherever you started, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro-Trump direction." Trump won the electoral college as a result of 80,000 votes spread across three swing states. There were more than 150 million YouTube users in the US. The videos contained in Chaslot's database of YouTuberecommended election videos were watched, in total, more than 3bn times before the vote in November 2016. Even a small bias in the videos would have been significant. "Algorithms that shape the content we see can have a lot of impact, particularly on people who have not made up their mind," says Luciano Floridi, a professor at the University of Oxford's Digital Ethics Lab, who studies the ethics of artificial intelligence. "Gentle, implicit, quiet nudging can over time edge us toward choices we might not have otherwise made." Chaslot sent me a database of more YouTube-recommended videos his program identified in the three months leading up to the presidential election. It contained more than 8,000 videos - all of them detected by his program appearing "up next" on 12 dates between August and November 2016, after equal numbers of searches for "Trump" and "Clinton". It was not a comprehensive set of videos and it may not have been a perfectly representative sample. But it was, Chaslot said, a previously unseen dataset of what YouTube was recommending to people interested in content about the candidates - one snapshot, in other words, of the algorithm's preferences.Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, who reviewed the code used by Chaslot, says it is a relatively straightforward piece of software and a reputable methodology. "This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube's political ecosystem," he says. "That has not been done before." keeping bedroom a phone-free zone Alex hern I never quite fell in love with smartwatches, but I do credit my brief time with one for sparking the most positive change to my life for years: relegating my smartphone to the hallway. With only one plug socket by my bed, and no space for an adaptor, I had to choose one device to win the hallowed bedside charging position. Thanks to my desire to eke out one final hour of standing time to goose my activity tracking, the watch won. It turns out that keeping your bedroom a phone-free zone is a really, really good thing. Within days, I was reading more in the evening, and getting out of bed faster in the morning. Within weeks, I was sleeping noticeably better, and feeling fewer symptoms of my anxiety disorder at night. Not that any of this should have surprised me. There's a growing body of evidence that pulling out your phone in bed is one of the worst things you can do. Matthew Walker, UC Berkley professor and author of Why We Sleep, places the blame on light in general, and screens in particular: "Stay away from screens, especially those LED screens - they emit blue light that actually puts the breaks on melatonin. And those blue-light emitting devices fool your brain into thinking that it's still daytime, even though it's nighttime and you want to get to sleep." Some phones now attempt to compensate for the blue light emission. Since 2016, iPhones have had an optional feature, Night Shift, which changes the colour balance of the phone after sunset. As an optional feature, though, A bedroom without phone can result in quality sleep and less anxiety. with a sliding scale of intensity, it's not really clear whether it actually works: even Apple will only go so far as to note that "this may help you get a better night's sleep". And anyway, the physiological effects of blue light are only one reason to keep devices out of the bedroom. Far worse - in my experience, at least - is the psychological damage. In short, social media sucks, and if you have a phone near your bed, it all but guarantees that some social network will intrude into your consciousness in those precious minutes before sleep. A study published in 2017 in the journal Sleep found that "social media use in the 30 minutes before bed is independently associated with disturbed sleep among young adults". And the trend seems to be linear: the more social media use there is, the more likely sleep is to be disturbed. It feels telling that I exiled my phone from my bedroom around the same time I began reading the horror bestseller House of Leaves, yet still found myself with fewer sleepless nights. Although, admittedly, what nightmares there were were much worse until I moved on to lighter fare. Lest it sound like I'm presenting myself as a virtuously technology-free ascetic, living a life of paper, ink and face-to-face conversations, don't worry: the phone has been replaced with a Kindle. In fact, the starkest biggest advantage of changing my habits? I get out of bed quicker. Not because I've had more sleep, though - just that, well, I've still got to check my notifications within seconds of waking up. Now, though, that involves getting on my feet first. Look, it's a start, OK? Photo: getty Images Bitcoin - the currency of choice for online drug dealers and cybercriminals. Photo: The Merkle What digital money really means for our future Technology Desk In a word, yes. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, and is still the biggest, but in the eight years since it was created pretenders to the throne have come along. All of them have the same basic underpinnings: they use a "blockchain", a shared public record of transactions, to create and track a new type of digital token - one that can only be made and shared according to the agreed-upon rules of the network, whatever they may be. But the flourishing ecosystem has provided a huge amount of variation on top of that. Some cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin or Dogecoin, fulfil the same purpose as bitcoin - building a new digital currency - with tweaks to some of the details. Others, such as Ethereum or Bat, take the same principle but apply it to a specific purpose: cloud computing or digital advertising in the case of those two. A bitcoin doesn't really exist as a concrete physical - or even digital - object. If I have 0.5 bitcoins sitting in my digital wallet, that doesn't mean there is a corresponding other half sitting somewhere else. What you really have when you own a bitcoin is the collective agreement of every other computer on the bitcoin network that your bitcoin was legitimately created by a bitcoin "miner", and then passed on to you through a series of legitimate transactions. If you want to actually own some bitcoin, there are exactly two options: either become a miner, or simply buy some bitcoin from someone else using conventional money, typically through a bitcoin exchange such as Coinbase or Bitfinex. A lot of the quirks of the currency come down to the collective agreement about what constitutes "legitimacy". For instance, since the first bitcoin was created in 2009, the total number in existence has been growing slowly, at a declining rate, ensuring that at some point around 2140, the 21 millionth bitcoin will be mined, and no more will ever be created. If you disagree with that collective agreement, well, there's nothing stopping you from splitting with the wider network and creating your own version of bitcoin. This is what's known as a "fork", and it's already happened multiple times in the past (that's what competitors such as Litecoin and Dogecoin are). The difficulty is persuading other people to follow you. A currency used by just one person isn't much of a currency. In theory, almost anything that can be done with a computer could, in some way, be rebuilt on a cryptocurrencybased platform. Building a cryptocurrency involves turning a worldwide network of computers into a decentralised platform for data storage and processing - in effect, a giant hive-mind PC. In practice, however, the available uses are rather more limited. Bitcoin can be used as a payment system for a few online transactions, and even fewer real-world ones, while other cryptocurrencies are even more juvenile than that. The excitement about the field is focused more on what it could become than what it actually is. At their heart, cryptocurrencies are basically just fancy databases. Bitcoin, for instance, is a big database of who owns what bitcoin, and what transactions were made between those owners. In its own way, that's little different from a conventional bank, which is basically just a big database of who owns what pounds, and what transactions were made between those owners. But the distinction with bitcoin is that no central authority runs that big fancy database. Your bank can unilaterally edit its database to change the amount of money it thinks you have, and it does so often. Sometimes that's to your advantage and sometimes it's not.
Page 1 and 2: Sunday Dhaka : February 4, 2018; Ma
Page 3: METRO SUNDAY, FeBRUARY 4, 2018 3 Ba
Page 7 and 8: INTERNATIONAL SUNDAy, fEbRUARy 4, 2
Page 9 and 10: SPORTS SUNDAy, FEBRUARy 4, 2018 9 M
Page 11 and 12: MISCELLANEOUS 11 SunDAY, FebRuARY 4

The Bangladesh Today (04-02-2018)

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?