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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

New Video Appears to Show How Predawn Raid Unfolded in Cairo

One day after Egyptian security forces killed more than 50 Islamist protesters camped outside a military facility in Cairo, 28-minutes of video recorded by a witness from a building high above the clashes appeared to offer the first clear images of the predawn phase of the confrontation.

A copy of video posted on YouTube on Tuesday, said to show an early-morning battle between protesters and the security forces in Cairo that left at least 54 people dead.

According to Mohamed El-Zahaby, a 33-year-old software engineer who uploaded the video to YouTube early on Tuesday, it was recorded Monday morning by friend who feared reprisal by the security forces and wished to remain anonymous. In an Internet exchange, Mr. Zahaby told The Lede that he was one of the youth activists who had supported the revolution that began on Jan. 25, 2011 and spoke with sarcasm of “our new democratic country,” where the police are “capturing a lot of youth nowadays.” Explaining why he wanted the video to be viewed as widely as possible, he wrote, “Our media is dealing with the matter in a very bad way… showing a lot of lies.”

Unlike most of the video clips of the clashes posted online Monday, which were recorded after sunrise and distributed by supporters of the protesters or of the military, this predawn video seems to have been recorded before 4 a.m. and was circulated by someone who claimed to oppose both the Muslim Brotherhood and Gen. Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, the defense minister who deposed the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, last week.

Mr. Zahaby wrote that he was indifferent to the Ikhwan, using the Arabic term for the Brotherhood, and accused Egypt’s powerful defense establishment of hijacking the 2011 revolution he had supported. “I don’t care about Morsi,” he wrote, “but simply it is a real coup. Most people here are happy to remove the Ikhwan regime, but they don’t know that 25Jan revolution is totally failed.”

“We are extremely disappointed,” he added, “we expect to be captured as well very soon.” He continued that being detained or even killed would be better “than living like dogs in a country which is supposed to be our county. We will fight and fight again (we here I mean youth, not Islamist people).”

Later on Tuesday, Mr. Zahaby replaced the entire soundtrack of the video at the request of the person who recorded it, removing the cameraman’s voice, and also covering the crackle of gun shots and tear gas rounds being fired with music. He said that he was aware, however, that dozens of copies of the original video had already been made and posted on other YouTube channels. (Before the soundtrack was changed, The Lede also downloaded a copy of the original video used in this post.)

The video appears to have been recorded above Salah Salem Street, near the officers’ club where supporters of Mr. Morsi believe the deposed president is detained. A mosque at the corner of Salah Salem and Youssef Abbas Street, where Morsi supporters reportedly took refuge after the initial clashes, is visible to the right of the picture.


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Among the video clips uploaded to YouTube on Monday, one appeared to show soldiers outside that mosque trying to convince the Morsi supporters inside its gate to allow the authorities to enter to provide medical care to wounded protesters.

Video posted on YouTube on Monday appeared to show Egyptian soldiers trying to convince Islamist protesters in a mosque courtyard to allow the authorities to enter.

The long video uploaded Tuesday by Mr. Zahaby begins with the sound of protesters close to the security forces banging on light posts, apparently to alert demonstrators camped in tents behind them that an assault had begun. When the camera pans back to the massed security forces, the air fills with tear gas and the sound of shots.

While these new images do not resolve the question of which side started the violence, this visual evidence does seem consistent with the written account of another witness, Mirna El-Helbawi, who watched much of Monday’s violence unfold from the balcony of her apartment. According to Ms. Helbawi, who described events in real time on her Twitter feed, and later posted a full account on Facebook, the violence began when the security forces moved to drive protesters out of the area with overwhelming volleys of tear gas, but only turned deadly after protesters responded with some kind of gunfire.

Writing on Twitter at 3:42 a.m. Cairo time on Monday, Mr. Helbawi reported: “they’re really banging hard under our house and saying ‘God is great’ in loud voices, it looks like there is shooting or some clashes and people are running.” She added her location with the hashtag, “#salahsalem.”

Seven minutes later, she wrote: “the police are shooting gas and the Brotherhood are shooting birdshot.”

In her retrospective Facebook account, Ms. Helbawi wrote that she first became aware of trouble in the street below her home shortly after the end of dawn prayers, when the protesters began to loudly bang on the lamp posts and chant “God is great” to warn that the military was beginning to move in. Then, she said, officers fired large amounts of tear gas and many protesters fled while others stood their ground.

“The protesters responded at first with rocks and stones, and then suddenly I heard the sound of gunfire â€" I could not tell if it was birdshot or live ammunition â€" and the police and army retreated very quickly to past the gas station and it became clear that these bullets were from the protesters’ side,” Ms. Helbawi wrote. It was when the security forces returned, she said, that the officers began shooting as well.

As our colleagues in Cairo, David Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported, while Ms. Helbawi did not see the very start of the conflict, others, “including both supporters and opponents of Mr. Morsi, said the military and the police had fired with little or no provocation, unloading tear gas, birdshot and bullets.”

Video images of three men on the Islamist side firing shots in the direction of the security forces, released on Monday by the spokesman for Egypt’s military, all appeared to have been recorded at a later stage of Monday’s clashes, after sunrise.

Another female resident of the area who told Sky News in English that she saw protesters cut down by live fire coming from the direction of the massed security forces, suggested that “the attack” looked like a planned operation by the police and army to remove the protesters from the area. In a second account of what she witnessed posted on YouTube, the woman described the security operation as “an ambush” of the protesters.

Arabic-language video of a woman in Cairo who said she witnessed Monday’s “Ambush” or protesters by the security forces.

Speaking in Arabic in the YouTube clip, the woman, who did not give her name, said the armored vehicles that moved in on the protesters “were exactly under my house.” She said that the security forces seemed to have little reason to fear the protesters who “were in lines, praying, and there wasn’t anything going on…. I don’t know what they were so afraid of.”

Describing her self as neutral â€" “I’m not with Morsi, I’m not with Sisi” â€" the woman was adamant that the demonstrators had not started the clash. “The ones opening fire and shooting birdshot were the armored cards from the Interior Ministry,” she said.

In her account, Ms. Helbawi also described seeing a large number of protesters seeking refuge in the nearby mosque, where some of the wounded apparently sought medical treatment before being taken away by ambulances. “Such a large number of protesters went in the mosque and sought shelter there that the sheikh said it was a million wounded people,” she wrote.

Soon, though, they barricaded themselves inside the mosque and refused to leave, while chanting in support of protesters who had been arrested by the army. One part of the new video appears to show protesters being detained near the mosque. On Tuesday, the Nadeem Center, a human rights organization in Cairo, released the names of 647 people arrested during Monday’s spasm of violence.

Ms. Helbawi also wrote that she watched a gunfight break out between soldiers and two protesters who she said climbed on the roof of the mosque. “One of the scenes that most stays with me, since I live on a high floor, was two people climbing the roof of the mosque and suddenly the army surrounded it, and then they started firing on the army from up on the roof,” she wrote.

Another video clip posted on YouTube on Tuesday, apparently recorded during Monday’s clashes, featured graphic images of Islamist protesters being gunned down later in the day on El-Tayaran Street, which leads from Salah Salem Street to the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, where Morsi supporters have rallied for days. That annotated video appears to have been edited down from a 17-minute clip uploaded to YouTube on Monday, which showed a number of men crumple to the ground as gun shots rang out.

Video uploaded to YouTube on Monday appeared to show Islamist protesters being gunned down in Cairo.

Permeating this video, apparently recorded by a protester, is a sense of the importance of documenting the armed attack by the security forces. Just before the four-minute mark, young men display shell casings for the camera and one says, “live ammunition.” Off-camera someone else says “film it.” Moments later a voice says, “They’re really shooting, they’re really shooting!” About a minute later, another man says, “Tell the world that we are here, we are here, and the army is shooting us with live ammunition.”

Around 11 minutes in to the clip, an injured man who looks like a teenager is evacuated by motorcycle from the front line. He screams, “No! I want a car, I want a car. No, dad! Dad! Dad! No! Dad!” A man behind him replies, “Wait! Get on! Hold on!” The young man is then rushed away for treatment.

Later, the protesters chant, “Leave, Sisi! Leave, Sisi!”



Live Video of Texas Lawmakers Debating Abortion Bill

Two weeks after State Senator Wendy Davis of Texas rocketed to national attention for blocking passage of a bill restricting abortion rights, state lawmakers returned to Austin this week and resumed debate on the bill that is scheduled for a House vote on Tuesday night.

As The Texas Tribune reports, the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives is expected to approve the bill, which sailed out of committee after thousands of people registered their positions and more than 500 people testified until 1:45 a.m. on Tuesday.

The measure would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and impose new regulations on clinics that supporters of abortion rights say would lead to the shutdown of multiple clinics and restrict access.

Although Ms. Davis, a Democrat from Fort Worth, successfully blocked the bill with an 11-hour filibuster as people from across the country rallied online and in the Senate gallery, the victory is very likely to be short-lived.

The bill is expected to also win approval in the Republican-controlled Senate later this week, then signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican whoannounced on Monday that he would not seek re-election.

Leading up to Tuesday’s vote in the House of Representatives, both sides of the debate descended on the state capital this week with supporters of the bill dressed mostly in blue and opponents dressed in orange. Some supporters carried baby shoes while opponents of the legislation waved wire coat hangers, including Democratic lawmakers.

Before dawn on Tuesday, supporters of the bill were already on the Capitol’s steps.

Also on Tuesday, Democrats announced a statewide bus tour with Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, with the goal of getting their message out about the impact of the Republican votes and agenda on women’s health care services across the state.

Ms. Davis posted a photo on Twitter of her speaking to opponents of the bill outside the Capitol.

Online, the debates and pleas for support on the issue continued.



Aftermath of Bomb in Lebanese Suburb

A car bomb struck Bir al-Abed in Beirut's southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has its offices and supporters, raising concerns of increasing spillover from the war in neighboring Syria.

The Money Side of Driverless Cars

In Washington, an average of six parking tickets are issued every minute of a normal workday. That is about 5,300 tickets on each of those days. Those slips of paper have added up to $80 million in parking fines a year, according to a report by AAA Mid-Atlantic.

As I noted in my Disruptions column this week, ”How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities,” the parking ticket could vanish from the future city as cars park themselves and refill parking meters electronically. (If there even are meters in the future.)

This has municipalities concerned.

“Automation is challenging all sorts of traditional revenue sources for cities and states,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a fellow of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “It’s challenging how states and federal agencies get their funds, and parking fees are clearly challenges that could be in the future.”

Mr. Walker Smith said that while traditional revenue sources from tickets, towing cars and gasoline taxes could dry up, cities and states will come up with new ways to make money on vehicles.

Of course cities probably wouldn’t be alone in losing revenue because of driverless cars.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 93 percent of all traffic accidents result from human error. If cars are smart enough to avoid accidents â€" and many researchers working on these cars believe they will be â€" the multibillion-dollar car insurance industry could completely change and be reimagined.

Then there are the workers that could lose a paycheck to automated cars. Taxi drivers, delivery trucks, parking enforcers, bus drivers and a long list of other people who drive cars for a living could find themselves out of a job, replaced by a computer chip and an algorithm.

When I spoke with Lawrence H. Summers, the economist, former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president, last year about these jobs possibly vanishing, he insisted that the decline in certain vocations would lead to a rise in jobs in new industries.

Mr. Summers likened the rise in autonomous vehicles and robots to the Industrial Revolution, which gave way to new types of jobs in the arts, manufacturing, technology and elsewhere. ”In reality, if people are freed up from one thing they are able to do something different,” he said.

Let’s hope Mr. Summers is right. And that the researchers who say the parking ticket could soon be a thing of the past are accurate with their prediction, too.



Fail Cheaper, Fail Better

There are lots of reasons for the current boom (some would say bubble) in data, including cheap computing, sensors everywhere and lots of new algorithms.

To all of those, perhaps we should add the rising likelihood of failure, both the expensive kind and the cheap kind.

The expensive kind is when your business or employer gets wiped out. That is happening with greater frequency. According to Richard N. Foster of Yale University, the average tenure of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 is now about 16 years, down from 60 years in 1959.

“The duration of your working life is now almost certainly greater than the lifespan of a company,” said Alistair Croll, an entrepreneur and author. “That makes everyone more willing to accept that they will be disrupted.” When people know there are reasons to think their business will be blown up by new market developments, he said, they’re more likely to seek data that helps them respond.

Mr. Croll is the author of the book “Lean Analytics,” which is about how companies, and start-ups in particular, can better focus on change by working with lots of different data sources.

More than big computers or huge databases, diversity of information is at the heart of what is called big data. That term may be somewhat hyped, but there is no doubt that analysis of standardized information is becoming the norm in more of our lives, from personal medicine to real-time analytics of big industrial machines.

It is also cheaper to take risks and fail, both for start-ups and corporate divisions. Many costs that existed even a decade ago have fallen sharply. Computer hardware and software are now rented through cloud computing, social media is a proxy for much of marketing and a burgeoning number of business applications are sold cheaply in Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS stores.

“When things like that happen,” Mr. Croll says, “companies focus less on costs, and more on experimentation about what is going to make their original idea work. There is more desire to experiment.”

Experimentation, of course, involves a lot of failure, as failure is where most learning takes place. Data around the failures of others are collected and studied as part of the overall process now. Data on failure is cheaper to create, and cheaper to come by. That is another way of saying that people are more likely to make new and interesting mistakes, instead of the same old ones, which is probably a good thing.

One big result of this failure-driven world, Mr. Croll says, is that organizational leadership is changing toward a more structured learning environment. “In the past, a leader was someone who could get you to do stuff in the absence of information,” he says. “Now it’s the person who can ask the best question about what’s going on, and find an answer.”



Fail Cheaper, Fail Better

There are lots of reasons for the current boom (some would say bubble) in data, including cheap computing, sensors everywhere and lots of new algorithms.

To all of those, perhaps we should add the rising likelihood of failure, both the expensive kind and the cheap kind.

The expensive kind is when your business or employer gets wiped out. That is happening with greater frequency. According to Richard N. Foster of Yale University, the average tenure of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 is now about 16 years, down from 60 years in 1959.

“The duration of your working life is now almost certainly greater than the lifespan of a company,” said Alistair Croll, an entrepreneur and author. “That makes everyone more willing to accept that they will be disrupted.” When people know there are reasons to think their business will be blown up by new market developments, he said, they’re more likely to seek data that helps them respond.

Mr. Croll is the author of the book “Lean Analytics,” which is about how companies, and start-ups in particular, can better focus on change by working with lots of different data sources.

More than big computers or huge databases, diversity of information is at the heart of what is called big data. That term may be somewhat hyped, but there is no doubt that analysis of standardized information is becoming the norm in more of our lives, from personal medicine to real-time analytics of big industrial machines.

It is also cheaper to take risks and fail, both for start-ups and corporate divisions. Many costs that existed even a decade ago have fallen sharply. Computer hardware and software are now rented through cloud computing, social media is a proxy for much of marketing and a burgeoning number of business applications are sold cheaply in Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS stores.

“When things like that happen,” Mr. Croll says, “companies focus less on costs, and more on experimentation about what is going to make their original idea work. There is more desire to experiment.”

Experimentation, of course, involves a lot of failure, as failure is where most learning takes place. Data around the failures of others are collected and studied as part of the overall process now. Data on failure is cheaper to create, and cheaper to come by. That is another way of saying that people are more likely to make new and interesting mistakes, instead of the same old ones, which is probably a good thing.

One big result of this failure-driven world, Mr. Croll says, is that organizational leadership is changing toward a more structured learning environment. “In the past, a leader was someone who could get you to do stuff in the absence of information,” he says. “Now it’s the person who can ask the best question about what’s going on, and find an answer.”



A Digital Diaper for Tracking Children’s Health

Talk about changing with the times.

A New York start-up called Pixie Scientific has developed a diaper that the company says can detect possible urinary tract infections, kidney dysfunctions, and dehydration, accompanied by a smartphone app that can transmit the information to a physician.

“I was driving with my wife and daughter one day, when my wife asked if the baby had wet herself,” said Yaroslav Faybishenko, Pixie’s founder. “I realized she was sitting in data.”

Other so-called quantified self products have been developed for adults, like products from Jawbone and FitBit that create digital records of calorie expenditure and sleep habits. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, a Taiwanese company called AiQ showed off shirts that it said could measure things like heart rate and other biometric signals.

In contrast to those things, the technology behind the diaper is relatively simple, and it owes as much to the quality of smartphone cameras as it does to clever chemistry.

At the front of the diaper is a patch with several colored squares. Each square represents a different interaction with a protein, water content or bacteria, and changes color if it detects something is outside of normal parameters. There is also a neutral white square, to more easily check for color changes in the other squares.

A smartphone app takes a picture and can make precise readings of the chemical data based on  color changes. The data is uploaded to a central location, where physicians can get information about how the child is doing and whether the baby needs further testing.

The diaper is expected to be tested at Benioff Children’s Hospital of the University of California, San Francisco this September. Columbia University’s children’s hospital is considering a similar study. If successful, the product may then be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for final approval.

Mr. Faybishenko said he thought the diaper, which he said would cost about 30 percent more than regular diapers, had potential as a consumer product, for parents who want to keep regular tabs on their child’s health. Rather than overwhelming parents with data, the app is likely to let them know whether they should see a pediatrician for one or more possible conditions. With the parents’ permission, the detailed urine analysis data could be sent to a doctor’s office.

“You really don’t want to overload parents with data they don’t understand,” he said. “Eventually the quantified self idea will be mostly silent and unobtrusive, just something inside the existing flow of life.”

Mr. Faybishenko said the company was working on other tests, but would not specify what they were.



A Digital Diaper for Tracking Children’s Health

Talk about changing with the times.

A New York start-up called Pixie Scientific has developed a diaper that the company says can detect possible urinary tract infections, kidney dysfunctions, and dehydration, accompanied by a smartphone app that can transmit the information to a physician.

“I was driving with my wife and daughter one day, when my wife asked if the baby had wet herself,” said Yaroslav Faybishenko, Pixie’s founder. “I realized she was sitting in data.”

Other so-called quantified self products have been developed for adults, like products from Jawbone and FitBit that create digital records of calorie expenditure and sleep habits. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, a Taiwanese company called AiQ showed off shirts that it said could measure things like heart rate and other biometric signals.

In contrast to those things, the technology behind the diaper is relatively simple, and it owes as much to the quality of smartphone cameras as it does to clever chemistry.

At the front of the diaper is a patch with several colored squares. Each square represents a different interaction with a protein, water content or bacteria, and changes color if it detects something is outside of normal parameters. There is also a neutral white square, to more easily check for color changes in the other squares.

A smartphone app takes a picture and can make precise readings of the chemical data based on  color changes. The data is uploaded to a central location, where physicians can get information about how the child is doing and whether the baby needs further testing.

The diaper is expected to be tested at Benioff Children’s Hospital of the University of California, San Francisco this September. Columbia University’s children’s hospital is considering a similar study. If successful, the product may then be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for final approval.

Mr. Faybishenko said he thought the diaper, which he said would cost about 30 percent more than regular diapers, had potential as a consumer product, for parents who want to keep regular tabs on their child’s health. Rather than overwhelming parents with data, the app is likely to let them know whether they should see a pediatrician for one or more possible conditions. With the parents’ permission, the detailed urine analysis data could be sent to a doctor’s office.

“You really don’t want to overload parents with data they don’t understand,” he said. “Eventually the quantified self idea will be mostly silent and unobtrusive, just something inside the existing flow of life.”

Mr. Faybishenko said the company was working on other tests, but would not specify what they were.



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