Agnes Winarti , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Fri, 04/10/2009 1:39 PM | Sports
A position change for men's doubles pair Markis Kido and Hendra Setiawan did not shake off their status as world No. 1 after they won their first two matches at the Suwon Asia Championship in South Korea.
The pair had been training in different positions in thepast weeks, with Kido, still recovering from a knee injury, now playing in front and Hendra honing his skills as a back player.
The change was drawn up around Kido's knee injury. Kido is a back player renowned for his jumping smashes, the direction of which are often unpredictable, which effectively contribute to points.
"Although Hendra doesn't jump that much, he has the same powerful smashes," said Sigit Pamungkas, the men's doubles coach.
After a grueling second-round match, Kido/Hendra defeated China's Tao Jiaming and Sun Junjie 21-15, 7-21, 22-20 in 39 minutes Thursday.
"I still feel a bit awkward, though," Kido said after the win.
"The opposition's defense was tough. In the second set, our physical condition dropped slightly," he said of the lost second set.
They next face Taiwanese sixth seeds Cheng Hung Ling and Lin Yu Lang on Friday. In the first round, they defeated Japanese pair Komiyama Hajime and Hirobe Yoshiteru, also three sets 21-12, 17-21, 21-10.
Kido and Hendra are the only men's doubles team fielded by the Indonesian Badminton Association (PBSI) for the April 7-12 championship. The team's other players are currently preparing for the upcoming Sudirman Cup in May.
"The Asia Championship is their chance to get the feel of a championship atmosphere before the upcoming Sudirman Cup, and also a chance to evaluate the new formation strategy," Sigit said.
Due to the injury, the pair have been absent from championship events for the past month.
Meanwhile, fifth seed Indonesian mixed doubles pair Flandy Limpele and Vita Marissa were stopped in the second round by Koreans Kim Ki Jung and Eom Hye Won 21-12, 23-21 in only 22 minutes. They had previously defeated Vietnam's Pham Cao Hieu and Nguyen Thi Sen in a rubber set match in the first round.
Saturday, 11 April 2009
Kido/Hendra continue reign despite change
The fall of the twin towers - and old media
Mon, 03/23/2009 1:23 PM | Sci-Tech
I don't wish to belittle the tragedy that was 9/11 but it shaped this decade, not only in political terms, but also in something else.
Where we looked for information. Cast your mind back to that day. Where were you?
I was walking with my mother through the English countryside when I heard about it via SMS from a friend back in Indonesia.
By the time I got home and dialed into the Net none of the main news websites was accessible.
Everyone was trying to do what I was doing, and that jammed all the big news websites: CNN.com, MSNBC.com, Time.com and NYTtimes.com. At 8:49 a.m. East Coast time, three minutes after the first plane hit, both CNN's and MSNBC's servers collapsed.
It was the news website's big day in the sun, and they failed. In those days there were very few other ways of finding out time-sensitive information. So like everyone else we huddled around the television and gawped in disbelief.
This didn't stop people searching. And of course most of them went to Google. So much so Google ended up caching - saving copies of - news websites where they could.
But, somehow, 9/11 caused something of a sea change in the way that people looked for information.
An event of such proportions fed an appetite that TV and mainstream media could not satisfy, sending people online to use search engines to look for more information.
They looked for things like twin towers, bin laden, nostradamus, and they found them on sites that weren't by any stretch of the imagination news sites.
In the wake of 9/11, therefore, something rather odd happened.
Traffic to the big websites dropped off back to their pre-9/11 levels. CNN fell 27 percent, MSNBC 45 percent, New York Times 23 percent. But traffic to Google rose in the same period, by 12 percent.
Over the next few years traffic to Google - which, remember, was just a search engine - climbed until, in 2006, it had more or less caught up with the content giants Microsoft and Yahoo.
Google had been smart. On the day of 9/11 it figured out something important: That searching didn't have to be just - was no longer - about searching for old, historical stuff.
It wasn't just about looking for things that had happened. It was also about things that were happening. In other words, the distinction between news and everything else had blurred.
As the twin towers fell, we needed to know everything we could about this new threat.
Within a day of 9/11, Google had included a news link on its front page - the beginning of its Google News site which has now, for many, replaced the visit to CNN or New York Times.
Google was, in effect, saying: Find your news here.
The impact was clear. By 2004 Internet users were quite used to going to non-news sites to see material not covered by the mainstream media.
The Pew Internet Survey found that 24% of users in the US said "they have searched on the Internet for news stories, photographs or videos that other media outlets have decided not to publish or broadcast."
The era of mainstream media monopolizing current information was gone, because people had the means and know-how to find it elsewhere. Blogs blossomed, giving everyone a voice - not only for commentary, but also for muckraking and quality reporting.
In 1999 a Google crawler - little slices of code that wander around the Internet checking to see whether web pages have been updated - would take a month to detect a change to a web page. Now, 10 years on, it takes a few minutes.
All information is new, and all information is, potentially, news.
This is probably the biggest threat to traditional media, and yet, for the most part, it's gone unnoticed.
I've talked in this column previously about how Twitter - the link-sharing, status-sharing service - has challenged traditional ideas of media.
We're now just as likely to trust a well-informed acquaintance to keep us informed about developments in the world as we are a major news site.
On my Twitter feed I have both BBC news and the eccentric musings of Stephen Fry, the comedian. Twitter gives them equal weight.
But that change wouldn't have happened if this earlier sea change had not occurred: that we as users would not slavishly visit a mainstream news site to find out what was happening.
The downfall of big media would probably have happened anyway. But 9/11 pushed ordinary folk into looking elsewhere.
And once we'd done it, there was no turning back.
(c) 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd
This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com
Government surprise on Australian broadband plan
The Associated Press , Sydney, Australia | Tue, 04/07/2009 8:04 AM | Sci-Tech
Shunning private tenders, the Australian government announced Tuesday it would start a new company to build a long-awaited super-fast national broadband network for up to 43 billion Australian dollars ($30 billion).
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd saidthe plan to supply 90 percent of Australian homes with Internet connections of up to 100 megabits per second and the rest with 12 megabits per second was the country's largest-ever infrastructure project.
"It is the most ambitious, far-reaching and long-term nation-building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government," Rudd told a news conference the national capital, Canberra.
The government said none of the private tenders received from various telecommunications companies including SingTel Optus and groups of private investors had met the government's requirements for the network. Australia's largest telecommunications company, Telstra, was already out of the running because it failed to meet tender guidelines.
But Rudd said it was open to anyone to invest in the new company.
Replacing Australia's ad-hoc, technologically antiquated broadband services with a national network has proved a difficult task for successive governments, in part because of Australia's geography - cities clustered on the coast and separated by vast distances of the sparsely-populated Outback.
Rudd made a comprehensive network that would serve city dwellers as well as farmers and those living in the Outback a key plank of his campaign strategy at 2007 elections that brought him to power.
The tender process has proved tricky, however, including a dispute with Telstra about the guidelines.
Tuesday's decision appeared to be a bid to cut through the difficulties and get the project moving.
Rudd told a news conference in the capital, Canberra, that the government would hold a majority stake in the new company with the rest to be privately-owned.
Under the plan, the government will spend AU$43 billion ($30 billion) on the project over eight years, and will then sell its stake in the company gradually over five years after it is completed.
Rudd linked the project to his plans to help Australia stave off the worst effects of the global financial downturn, saying it would create 25,000 jobs a year during construction and was essential to boosting long-term economic growth in Australia.
Recreational sites crowded, city deserted
The Jakarta Post , JAKARTA | Sat, 04/11/2009 10:48 AM | City
As legislative candidates kept their eyes on the quick count results of the general elections, city residents spent their long weekend after election day flocking to the city’s recreational sites.
More than 40,000 people visited the Ancol leisure complex, also known as Taman Impian Jaya Ancol, in North Jakarta on Friday, which wasalso the Christian Good Friday holy day.
“We had 35 percent more visitors than during weekdays. We are hoping to see 80,000 to 100,000 more visitors come over the weekend,” Budi Karya Sumadi, the president director of PT Pembangunan Jaya Ancol that runs the Ancol leisure complex, told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
To reward city residents who participated in the elections, Ancol management offered visitors with ink-stained fingers a 50 percent discount on entrance tickets to three theme parks – Dunia Fantasi, Atlantis Water Adventure and Gelanggang Samudera.
“In the last two days, some 40 percent of our visitors showed us their ink-stained fingers,” Budi said, adding Ancol would repeat the two-day promotion during the upcoming presidential elections.
Elsewhere in the city, more than 10,000 visitors flocked to Ragunan Zoo, South Jakarta.
“We hope the weather will stay fine like today, so more visitors come,” Wahyudi Bambang, Ragunan PR officer, told the Post, adding the zoo operator expected to see more than 20,000 visitors on Saturday and Sunday.
Established in 1966, the 135-hectare Ragunan Zoo is home to more than 3,000 animals from 260 species. At Rp 2,000 (18 US cents) to Rp 3,000 a ticket, the zoo has become one of the city’s cheapest recreational sites.
Meanwhile in East Jakarta, the operator of the Indonesian Miniature Park (TMII) said they saw no significant increase in the number of visitors after the elections. On Friday, the park recorded more than 7,000 visitors.
“The numbers are the same as during the week. Maybe because we didn’t offer any special discounts or organize a special event this weekend,” said TMII PR officer Jerimias.
The normally crowded city of Jakarta was eerily quiet after the election day, as many residents from out of town left the city earlier to vote in their hometowns and many other permanent residents left the city soon after voting.
However, many malls were packed with holiday makers.
The Jakarta Police’s traffic management centre (TMC) reported no congestion in the city’s thoroughfares and seven inner turnpikes on Friday.
Less than a dozen police officers supervised Good Friday’s mass at the Cathedral, which was attended by some 2,500 city Christians.
“Road access to the city’s recreational sites is also undersupervised,” TMC coordinator Comr. Indra Jafar told the Post.
Although more people will visit those sites at the weekend, Indra said there would be little traffic in the city. (hwa/iwp)
Underage drinking
SHAMOKIN — Timothy Lee Jeremiah, 19, of 326 S. Coal St., Shamokin, was cited by Patrolman Raymond Siko for underage drinking and public drunkenness relating to an incident that occurred at 2:30 p.m. Thursday at the skatepark on North Rock Street.
Property Damage
COAL TOWNSHIP — William Korbich, of 1100 E. Kase St., Coal Township, reportedsomeone drove a vehicle over his front lawn between 6:40 and 8:20 p.m. Thursday, causing $72 damage to six solar lights and four Easter eggs.
Anyone with information about the incident should call Coal Township police at 644-0333.
Property Damage
COAL TOWNSHIP — William Korbich, of 1100 E. Kase St., Coal Township, reportedsomeone drove a vehicle over his front lawn between 6:40 and 8:20 p.m. Thursday, causing $72 damage to six solar lights and four Easter eggs.
Anyone with information about the incident should call Coal Township police at 644-0333.
