join folding@home

I just used my PS3 to sign up for Stanford University's Folding@Home project. The project basically uses millions of idle computers (and I guess game consoles now) to do "protein folding". I'm not fully sure what it is, but whatever it is, it's using your processor's power to help do medical research. How can it get better than that?

I created a team called "end Iraq war". The team number is 61764. Now you can fight disease while being anti-war as well. How great is that?

If any of you have PCs or PS3 turned on all day and sitting idle, why not help out the medical community?

For more information, following the link: http://folding.stanford.edu/

turning on the water works

It has recently been recently been reported that Coca-Cola is investing in water initiatives in Africa to expand supply. It's easy to be cynical about these altruistic moves. After all, they make billions of dollars, they can certainly afford to throw out a few million here and there if it makes them look good. A 15-nation study in Europe has shown that many people feel the same cynicism against corporations who don't seem genuine when they make these performances.

In general, I like to give corporations the benefit of the doubt as much as possible. I never believed that corporations were people, even though they reap all the benefits of being treated as an individual without any of the drawbacks. (See the excellent documentary The Corporation for this argument.) Whether a board of managers sit together in a room and say "We don't really care about people but let's pretend we do by making all these gestures" is not something I want to speculate. Mainly, I don't want to give the impression that corporations can't do anything good.

Of course, this doesn't excuse Coca-Cola or any other corporation for the ills they have committed. Certainly if all corporations made these gestures and others followed, our society would be a better place regardless of their sincerity.

activism report: amy goodman interviews anti-coke activist ray rogers

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, talks to anti-Coke activist Ray Rogers in this 2004 interview. In it, they talk about some of the details of the allegations, including the specific incidents that ties Coca-Cola to the crimes.

Below is the introduction to the interview. I encourage everyone to check this out in full. You can download the audio or stream the video of this interview from the website.

"On the morning of December 5, 1996, two men on a motorcycle arrived at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Antioquia, Colombia, where according to eyewitnesses they breezed past a guardhouse at the factory's front gate and onto plant grounds. The men approached Isidro Gil, head of the plant's union of bottling employees, and in plain sight of his co-workers shot him ten times, mortally wounding him. Just one hour later, another top union officer was kidnapped from his home, and that evening the union's offices were ransacked and burned to the ground. Two days later, after gunmen with the Colombian paramilitary group A.U.C. threatened further violence against employees, plant managers distributed union resignation forms to workers. All of them signed the forms.

"In July of 2001, the union representing Colombia's Coca-Cola employees filed suit in a federal court in Florida, alleging Coke contracted with paramilitary death squads to torture, kidnap, and murder union leaders at its bottling plants. Though the lawsuit was initially thrown out, charges of collusion with Colombian paramilitaries continue to dog the company. An amended version of the lawsuit was filed this month with the same federal court in Miami, and at Coke's annual shareholders' meeting in Wilmington, Deleware last Wednesday, Coke Chairman and CEO Douglas Daft went on the defensive, telling investors that his company had no role in the killings."

- From Democracy Now

activism update: indians fight coca-cola

activism update: WB 11 Investigative Piece On Killer Coke

Here's a somewhat dated piece by WB on Coca-Cola's alleged human rights abuses, with interviews with councilmembers and activists about their views on the issue.

social awareness guide #4: this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes...

When Vincent Ferrari tried to cancel his account, he met with the customer representative from hell. Good thing he decided to record the conversation and post it on YouTube (see below), creating great embarassment for AOL. (If you search for AOL on YouTube, this is the first thing that pops up.)

While Vincent's experience may be extreme, many of us have tried calling customer representative or tech support before and encountered our own share of hilarious and/or annoying frustrations. My suggestion is: every time you want to call customer service, record the conversation. Whether you decide to post it on YouTube or keep it for your records, that's up to you, but you never know what it could be good for. Sometimes the people who answer your call don't always record the conversation. I imagine that they must be sitting at a computer that has predetermined codes or boxes that they fill, and that they are given limited authorization to make changes. (E.g. Toshiba had extended my warranty for a year but it never shows up on my account when I call until I remind them.)

I'm not sure if recording and publishing these calls are any violation of any law so I don't want to encourage people to do that until you and I find out more. I don't think Vincent got in any particular trouble, and if it was a legitimate grievance, the company might be too embarassed to sue. Plus, even if you retract the video, given the power of the Internet, many others would've re-posted it.

So, make sure when you hear the automated recording say "This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes...", that you do the same.

How hard is it to cancel AOL?