Members of the North Korean female music group Moranbong Band arrive at a hotel after concert rehearsal on December 11, 2015 in Beijing, China. Photography by ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images
Hit songs include “Do Prosper, Era of the Workers’ Party”
What do you get when you combine South Korea’s pop music with North Korean totalitarian dictatorship? The Moranbong Band, a pop group with striking similarities to a military orchestra (think: absolute structure, harmony, and national anthems).
North Korea’s version of the Spice Girls is a collective of about two dozen female musicians, each of whom wear identical Soviet-style uniforms during performances. Seeing them them on stage is like going back in time to the 80s: a time of bad hair, lots of synth, and, well, communism. Song titles include: “My Country is the Best!”, “Let’s Support Our Supreme Commander in Arms”, and “Do Prosper, Era of the Workers’ Party.”
According to the New York Times, Moranbong is a favorite of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, and each member is rumored to have been handpicked by him. Now, the band is off to Beijing for a weekend of “friendship performances” meant to improve North Korea’s relations with China.
The Times reports that Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said about the visit: “The good-will visit and performance of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea art groups in China are not within the remit of the Foreign Ministry.” However, she noted that “state-to-state exchanges and cooperation in various forms will help increase mutual understanding and friendship between the peoples.”
Painted with the faces of
celebrities like Bob Marley and Tupac Shakur, and furnished with disco
balls that lurch and twinkle as they weave through traffic, the
thousands of matatus on the roads in Nairobi are bright and loud.
Blaring music and honking their way through congestion, these mini-buses
are the main mass transit network in the Kenyan capital, and 70 percent
of the population uses them to get around. They’re cheap and
convenient, filling the public transit void. But the system is chaotic.
Individual matatu buses and routes are privately owned and operated,
which means schedules and ticket prices can change at the whim of
whoever’s in charge. Even finding the right stop can be tricky. You just
kind of have to…know. If you choose the wrong line, you could waste
half a day on an already long trip. Since most routes run through the
city center before going back out, the roads—not designed for the
megacity that Nairobi has become—are flooded with matatu congestion. One
or two accidents on the main thoroughfares can shut down traffic for
hours.
The situation makes it difficult for riders, who could save time if
they knew about better routes, and challenging for major transit
projects meant to improve city life. A recent highway project in Nairobi
didn’t plan for the matatus, and the informal highway stops they make
are dangerous, adding traffic that the planners didn’t anticipate. A
full picture of the matatu system would be useful, to say the least.
That picture now exists: In a collaboration called Digital Matatus,
researchers from MIT, Columbia University, and the University of Nairobi
along with the design firm Groupshot released a map of the entire
matatu system last year—a first for a non-formal transit system. And on
Wednesday, it became the first informal network to be launched on Google
Maps. Just as New York commuters can plot their subway routes on the
service, residents of Nairobi can now jack into the matatu system on
their smartphones.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryRoute 8 takes people from Kiberia Slum to City Square. Google
“Hats off to Digital Matatus and Google for doing this,” says Robert
Cervero, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of
California, Berkeley. “This is a very important pilot test demonstration
and if the data can be put to good use designing better systems, it can
have tremendous benefits.”
The idea to map the matatus began in 2012 when Sarah Williams and
Jacqueline Klopp, two researchers working on land use projects in
Nairobi, connected with Groupshot co-founder Adam White. “Adam and I
started talking about the problem of working on sustainable
transportation,” says Klopp, an associate research scholar at the
Columbia Center for Sustainable Urban Development. “There were all these
transportation projects going on, but there was no basic data about the
existing transit system in Nairobi.”
The annals of the city government held some matatu data, but not
much. Digital Matatus found records for about 75 percent of the routes,
but they only included the start and end points, making it impossible to
know how the buses navigated through the city. So armed with
smartphones, ten university students spent four months riding the
matatus, noting the name and location of each stop in a purpose-built
app, which also used GPS to track the route. In dangerous neighborhoods,
they followed behind the brightly painted buses in private cars.
By the end, the students recorded almost 3,000 stops on more than 130
routes. Next, all that data needed to be put in a
usable format—specifically, a global standard called the General Transit
Feed Specification (GTFS), which is compatible with open-source
software used to make routing apps like Google Maps. But GTFS, developed
in 2005, is geared towards formal transit systems, ones with fixed
times and schedules.
That’s when Digital Matatus connected with Google Maps. Along with
the rest of the robust GTFS community, Google agreed to update the
global standard to make room for flexible transit networks with
constantly changing schedules, routes, and stops. Nairobi was a perfect
test bed. “In our efforts to expand public transportation on Google
Maps, it was a good place to go next because there were people eager and
willing to work on it,” said Mara Harris, a Google rep.
In the meantime, the Digital Matatus team turned to the project of
visualizing the entire matatu system in one map. When they plotted the
GPS coordinates in their software, they generated a neuron-like mass of
overlapping routes and colors. Separating and structuring that mass into
a formal subway-style map, designers at the MIT Civic Data Design Lab
gave each of the main corridors going through the city center a
different color, with well-known landmarks such as the Karura Forest and
Ngong Road Forest anchoring the map in the city. A little over a year
after starting the project, Digital Matatus released the Nairobi Matatu
Routes paper map and the free GTFS transit data in January 2014.
Click to Open Overlay GalleryThe official Matatu map of Nairobi developed by the project team. Sarah Williams and Wenfei Xu, MIT Civic Data Design Lab
City officials, who had been passively attending project meetings
throughout, finally made it their official transit map. And, crucially,
they also started using it as a guide for their evolving mass rapid
transit proposals. The strength of an ad-hoc system like the matatus is
that over time—over many traffic jams and missed
appointments—trial-and-error driving can lead to more efficient,
emergent routes.
The tech community pumped out five routing apps for smartphones and
old-school feature phones as well as one payment app that calculated
actual ticket fares in an effort to combat price fluctuations. Matatu
drivers began planning more routes to underserved areas and alternative
routes to avoid congestion. And citizens were shocked to see all the
routes on the map, said Williams. They could find more efficient routes
that they didn’t even know existed. “There were interesting observations
from women, especially, who said ‘This is really valuable because at
night, I want to make sure I’m on the right matatu,’” said Klopp. “‘I
don’t want to get on the wrong one where I don’t feel safe.’”
Click to Open Overlay GallerySarah Williams identifying locations for new Matatu routes with transit stakeholders. Adam White
Launching the matatu routes in Google emphasizes the need to study
the informal transit networks that shuttle masses of people around in
sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia, and south Asia. “You’re saying this
is part of the system,” said Klopp. And since the GTFS data structure
and the Nairobi data are open source, Digital Matatus gives other groups
in Mexico City, Manila, Dhaka, China, and elsewhere a plan to collect
and disseminate data on their transit. The collaboration has already
received requests from around the world to map their cities.
Digital Matatus has also started talks with four more cities in
Africa—Kampala, Accra, Lusaka, and Maputo—to use the same methods to map
their informal mass transit systems. “So many of our problems in
developing cities where you have extreme poverty and awful environmental
conditions—they’re always tied in some way to the transport sector,”
said Cervero. “It’s very chaotic and unmanaged, so this is a huge first
step towards enhancing those services.”
People in Nairobi still use the paper maps because the matatu routes
have not changed since their release, and the ultimate goal is a formal
transit system with set maps, times, and prices. But hopefully “formal”
will still mean you enjoy your commute with twinkling disco balls and a
good beat.
Donald Trump thinks asking Bill Gates to close the internet will defeat Isis
Donald Trump suggests asking Bill Gates to close the internet will stop Isis terror attacks in the USReuters
Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump has called on Bill Gates and other
technology figureheads to "close up" the internet. Trump believes this
would help prevent Islamic State (Isis) from recruiting Americans.
Speaking
at a campaign rally at the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier in South
Carolina on 7 December, Trump said he believed that "closing that
internet up in some ways" would prevent acts of domestic terrorism in
the US. During the same speech, Trump demanded that the US shut its
borders to all Muslims.
Trump said: "We're losing a lot of people
because of the internet. We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of
different people that really understand what's happening. We have to
talk to them about, maybe in certain cases, closing that internet up in
some ways. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.'
These are foolish people."
It
is not clear if Trump wants to censor the internet, clamp down on
websites and communication networks run by IS (Daesh), or if he lacks a
basic understanding of how the internet works. Trump's vision for a
closed internet went down well with the crowd of 500 supporters, who
cheered him on.
Later in the day, Amazon chief executive Jeff
Bezos tweeted to suggest that he send Trump into space on the company's
Blue Origin rocket, presumably with a one-way ticket. Trump had earlier
criticised Bezos's ownership of the Washington Post newspaper, claiming
he bought it "for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit
company, Amazon".
What is the Difference Between a Quick and Full Format?
The term formatting is used for different things.
First it is used for low-level formatting of a hard disk. This
includes taking the disk and dividing it into small units – the blocks,
which can be accessed by the operating system. Nowadays the
manufacturers configure the sector size (like 512 bytes or 4096 bytes)
and low-level format the disk. Normally the user can’t low-level format a
hard disk anymore.
Second, formatting is used for high-level formatting of a hard disk.
This means that the operating system is writing a file system structure
to the disk. With good old FAT (File Allocation Table)
for example, the system would write a boot sector to the first disk
sector and an empty FAT to the following sectors. Empty in this case
means that all entries in the File Allocation Table are marked as
unused.
High-level formatting might include scanning the disk for bad sectors
(check if every sector can be read), and it might include writing
zeroes to all data sectors on the disk.
When you format a disk, Windows XP does a high level format and it
writes a file system structure to the disk. When you say full format,
then Windows XP also scans all sectors on the disk for bad sectors (see MSKB 302686). Since Windows Vista, a full format writes zeroes to all data sectors (see MSKB 941961).
Accessing each sector on the disk takes much more time than the quick
format, which only writes the blocks that contain the file system
structure. So normally a quick format is what you want because it is
much faster. But there are cases where you might want to do a full
format. 1. You might have a disk that you want to destroy or
give away. If you just do a quick format, then the file data is still
on the disk, only the file system structure (file names and information
where the files are stored on the disk) are deleted. With specialized
programs someone might try to “undelete” your files – the data is still
there, the task of the program is to guess/know which data block belongs
to which file. 2. You might not be sure if the hard disk is in a
good state. Then a full format is a good idea because it accesses every
sector, so if any sector is bad, this will be recognized. With a quick
format only a few sectors will be written to. With bad luck you end up
with a successful quick format, and when you want to write data to the
disk later, it fails. Then you will probably be wishing you had done a
full format that would have checked the entire disk right at the
beginning. Of course you can always run a ‘chkdsk /r’ later to scan a
disk for bad sectors.
You asked about risks and consistency. I wrote about the risks above.
Regarding consistency there is no difference. With every format the
operating system writes the file system structure, and this structure is
the starting point for every file system access. It does not make any
difference if unused sectors are zeroed out or filled with random data.
Windows installation of 7, 8, 8.1, 10 hard disk format.
When you first pop-in your
Windows disk, the operating system will prompt these choices for you to
choose from. Here are the format options:
Format the partition by using the NTFS file system (Quick)
Format the partition by using the FAT file system (Quick)
Format the partition by using the NTFS file system
Format the partition by using the FAT file system
When
you choose to run a Full format on a volume, files are removed from the
volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad
sectors. The scan for bad sectors is the reason why the Full format
takes twice as long as the Quick format.
If you choose the Quick
format option, the format removes files from the partition, but does not
scan the disk for bad sectors. This option is best when your hard disk
has been previously formatted and you are sure that your hard
disk is not damaged nor has bad sectors. This can be a problem later
because bad sectors that are not located can cause damage to the hard
drive. For example, if data is later installed on this “bad sector”, the
data will read errors or as corrupted files.
In
simple terms, a Full format will truly scrub through the hard drive
from scratch, rebuild all of its file structures, and scans the drive to
make sure that everything is on a satisfactory level. On the other
hand, what a Quick format does is lay down a blank FAT and directory
table without checking for bad sectors.
This is why when you buy a
brand-new unformatted hard drive, you cannot give it a Quick format.
The drive needs a Full Format because it needs the entire file
structures set-up, so the FAT actually has blocks and sectors to track,
rather than a chaotic mess. However, like we mention earlier, if your
hard drive is already has a clean slate and has no bad sectors, a Quick
format will be suitable.
Also, If you installed Windows on a
partition that was formatted by using the Quick format option, you can
check your hard drive by using the chkdsk /r command
after the installation of Windows is completed. In conclusion—don’t be
lazy. You already went the distance with the tedious task of
reformatting. Select the Full Format and both your computer and you will
live in harmony… until the next format.
