Published on Oct 5, 2012
Puerto Rico is seeing a new wave of luxury development as the government implements tax incentives. WSJ's Alyssa Abkowitz takes a look. Photo: St Regis Bahia Beach Resort.
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Analysis: Puerto Rico faces uphill budget rush as 'junk' rating looms
MSN Money (Reuters) - Puerto Rico policymakers, desperate to keep the Caribbean island's massive debts out of the junk-bonds bin, are racing against a June 30 deadline to revive sales-tax hikes that are the backbone of the planned budget. With over $70 billion ... |
Jason Collins, Gay NBA Player, Marches In 2013 Boston Pride Parade With Joe ...
Huffington Post History was made in October 2012 when active professional featherweight boxer <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/orlando-cruz-comes-out-gay_n_1939204.html">Orlando Cruz of Puerto Rico came out</a>. He said in a USA Today article, ... and more » |
@giorodriguez: Yes, hacking is about technology. But it’s more about attitude
Neo.com's Evan Henshaw-Plath chats with hackers
On a day when Puerto Ricans all over the world are tuning in to a parade (it’s getting harder and harder to avoid the coverage) — and on a week that the rest of the world is preoccupied with government encroachment on citizen data — it’s right that we take time to reflect on an event that took place in San Juan this Thursday, where government leaders, business leaders, and the technology community came together to illustrate the power of data when it is placed in the hands of citizens.
The event: The Puerto Rico Tech Summit, June 6, at the San Juan Convention Center, where more than 900 people gathered not to just talk but to act upon Puerto Rico’s future. For the highlight of the event — beyond an impressive panel of speakers – was an all-day hackathon, running concurrently with the “main” event, leveraging a big first for Puerto Rico: the open sharing of 10 different sets of data from Puerto Rican government and quasi-government (businesses that serve the Puerto Rican public) entities.
Giancarlo Gonzalez
The hackathon, potentially, is history-making. And it’s the brainchild of collaboration between private citizens (including Puerto Rican techie/entrepreneurs J. Ramphis Castro and Ricardo Burgos) and a government leader (Giancarlo Gonzalez, CIO and Advisor to the Government of Puerto Rico). The collaboration itself is a microcosm of the ecosystem on display at the event, the fusion of two worlds that need to come together in Puerto Rico, said Gonzalez. And together they did on Thursday. At the end of the day, 31 teams presented working concepts for applications using police data, geographical data, power outages, etc.
The design of the conference was meant to fix a persistent challenge for the government sector.
“When you limit a government conference to talk, you don’t see any execution,” said Gonzalez. “The hackathon is probably the most disruptive thing we did. What better way is there to show that government is executing than to throw back the challenges to our tech community and work with them.”
I was in Puerto Rico exactly one week before the Tech Summit at a conference for the Puerto Rican diaspora. The innovation there was an interactive format known as “open space” — another first for Puerto Rico — and one of the big themes was the emergence of “hacker culture” and its role in the reconstruction of the Puerto Rican economy, its infrastructure, and potentially its brand.
I like the concept of hacker culture for at least three reasons. First, as Gonzalez shared with me over the weekend, technology as an accelerator for processes represents a big shift. “The main goal is to speed up processes to serve citizens, businesses, and government-to-government interaction.” It’s about Puerto Rico evolving to become more viable in an increasingly competitive global economy, and opening up data to developers might help Puerto Rico get there faster. Gonzalez also defended the ROI on open data projects. A number of recent studies have shown that open data can deliver a significant rate of return on investment either through reduced costs in government services or incremental revenue.
Second, Puerto Rican hacker culture could have an aggregate effect of creating a new regional hub for Puerto Rico. That’s in fact the vision that Burgos and others have for Puerto Rico, a Silicon Valley for the Americas (my term, not his) that can make Puerto Rico not just viable, but a force in the region. Other Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) are thinking this way, too. But there’s no reason to think that several hubs can’t emerge at once.
all together now
Finally, there’s an important point we need to make about the word “hacker.” Yes, for most people, the word connotes tech. But in a larger sense — e.g., when we say hacker culture — it’s more about attitude. It’s about getting things done, and quickly. It’s about engaging many people to work, on many different things. It’s about working iteratively, in small discrete pieces, understanding that you can’t fix the future all at once. And most of all it’s about believing, at a time when disbelief dominates most conversation.
“In the end, the opportunity is to get people to see the new business rules and see how the rules can get us beyond the 100 by 35,” said Gonzalez, referring to the dimensions of the island (100 by 35 miles) that Puerto Ricans often cite in discussions Puerto Rico’s role on the global stage. It’s a cultural challenge, Gonzalez admits. But there are ways — like hackathons — to show that the rules work.
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AFP - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice system was suffering from a "calamitous collapse in the rule of law", as Washington reeled from the sensational exposure of vast spy agency surveillance programmes.
Speaking in an interview with AFP at Ecuador's London embassy, where he has been holed up for almost a year, the founder of the whistleblowing website accused the US government of trying to "launder" its activities with regard to the far-reaching electronic spying effort revealed on Thursday.
"The US administration has the phone records of everyone in the United States and is receiving them daily from carriers to the National Security Agency under secret agreements. That's what's come out," said the 41-year-old Australian.
Two damning newspaper exposes have laid bare the extent to which President Barack Obama's intelligence apparatus is scooping up enormous amounts of personal data -- on telephone calls, emails, website visits -- on millions of Americans and foreigners.
Obama has defended the programmes, saying they are legal, necessary to combat terror, and balance security with privacy.
Assange, whose website has enraged Washington by publishing hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables and classified files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the Obama administration was engaged in a bid to "criminalise all national security journalism in the United States".
US soldier Bradley Manning is being court-martialled for leaking the huge cache of government files to WikiLeaks, while there has been an outcry in the US media after the government seized the phone records of journalists at the Associated Press and Fox News in a bid to root out government sources.
Commenting on Washington's spying on journalists and members of the public, as well as his own treatment by US authorities, Assange said: "Over the last ten years the US justice system has suffered from a collapse, a calamitous collapse, in the rule of law.
"We see this in other areas as well -- with how Bradley Manning has been treated in prison, with US drone strikes occurring -- even on American citizens -- with no due process."
Manning's long-awaited military trial finally began on Monday at the Fort Meade military base outside Washington.
Assange blasted the court martial as a "show trial" and warned that the future of journalism was at stake over US prosecutors' argument that by leaking the files, 25-year-old Manning had helped Al-Qaeda.
Aiding the enemy is punishable by death in the US, though prosecutors are not seeking this sentence in Manning's case.
"What's at stake in this trial is the future of press in the United States and in the rest of the world," Assange told AFP.
"They are going for Bradley Manning to erect a precedent that if any person in the US government speaks to a journalist, they are then speaking to the public, they are then speaking to Al-Qaeda.
"They're trying to erect a precedent that speaking to the media is the communicating with the enemy -- a death penalty offence."
Critics say the Obama administration has launched an unprecedented war on government officials who leak information to the media, prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined.
"This is an absolutely runaway process," Assange said.
A former computer hacker, Assange has not left the Ecuadoran embassy since June 19 last year, when he walked in claiming asylum in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over alleged sex crimes.
Ecuador granted him asylum but British authorities refuse to allow him safe passage out of the country, leaving him stuck inside amid a diplomatic deadlock.
Ecuador's foreign minister is due to fly to London for talks over Assange with his British counterpart on June 17.
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PONCE – La Copa Olímpica Juan Evangelista Venegas edición 2013 culmina su primer fin de semana de tres a celebrarse hoy, domingo, con eventos en canotaje, tiro y bolos. Los eventos de canotaje serán en el Complejo Recreativo y Cultural la Guancha y bolos en la Bolera Caribe ambos en Ponce. Mientras, tiro estará celebrándose en el Albergue Olímpico de Salinas. Todos los eventos están pautados para las 10:00 de la mañana en sus respectivas sedes.
La Federación de Canotaje de Puerto Rico logró que su Copa Olímpica 2013 tuviera la participación de Barbados y Guadalupe. Un evento que le sirve de ejercicio para su Campeonato Panamericana a celebrarse del 15 al 20 de octubre en el Lago Cerrillo, Ponce.
En los primeros dos días contó con la participación de 75 atletas. Mañana, domingo, cerrará con los 10,000 kilómetros en la modalidad Surfish con sede en la Guancha de Ponce.
En el evento de 1,000 metros K1 U-16, Anthony Lodin de Guadalupe cargó con el oro con tiempo de 4:06.56, seguido del puertorriqueño Andrés Centeno (4:19.48) y con el bronce el guadalupense Maverick Ceron cronometró 4:22.48.
Los boricuas de K1 U-18 en 1,000 metros se desquitaron al conseguir las primeras tres posiciones con Juan Pablo López, Kevin Figueroa y Samuel Figueroa, respectivamente.
Las féminas brillaron en los 500 metros K1 con el copo de las medallas con Maricarmen Rivera (2:02.61), Melissa Reyes (2:05.43), Anitza Villalobos (2:08.08) y en la cuarta posición Mirena Delophont de Guadalupe con 2:10.61.
En los eventos de 200 metros K 2, Puerto Rico conquistó oro y plata con los equipos D y A, mientras el bronce y el cuarto lugar fue para Guadalupe B y A.
Guadalupe demostró su fuerza en el evento de 200 metros K1 con Andrés Lodin e Ibrahim Sangare en la primera y segunda posición. Por los boricuas sobre salió Andrés Centeno con el tercer lugar.
Los 5,000 metros K1 Abierto tuvo la participación de 24 atletas. La medalla de oro la conquistó cómodamente Kevin Figueroa con 24:01.83. Por la medalla de plata hubo un luchado cierre entre el atleta Samuel Figueroa y su entrenador nacional, Jaime Ponce. En la meta, Samuel pudo mantener la consistencia para ganar la plata con 24:26.66 y Ponce quedarse con el bronce con 24:28.64.
Las primeras mujeres en llegar a la meta fueron las puertorriqueñas Maricarmen Rivera y Melissa Reyes al ocupar la séptima y octava posición, respectivamente. A nivel internacional, la guadalupense Delophont llegó en la decimotercer lugar y los alletas de Barbados, Nicholas Neckles y Stanley Brooker en decimoquinta y decimosexta posición.
Por su parte, remo compartió escenario con canotaje. La competencia de 1,000 metros masculino 1X Abierto ganó el campeonato Roberto González con tiempo de 3:55.87. El mixto de 1,000 metros principiantes lo dominó John Aponte con 4:39.70.
Por los Senior en 2,000 metros 2X ganaron Roberto González y Mario Mihalik con 7:2680. La final de 2,000 metros 1X Abierto fue para Jorge Díaz con 8:20.11 y los 1,500 metros 1X juvenil se coronó campeón, Carlos Casals.
Los resultados completos estarán disponibles en <a href="http://www.tiempodellegada.com" rel="nofollow">www.tiempodellegada.com</a> .
La Federación de Tiro de Armas Cortas y Rifles de Puerto Rico aprovechó el escenario olímpico para celebrar dos eventos en marco internacional: la Copa Olímpica 2013 y la XXXVII Copa Caribe en el Albergue Olímpico de Salinas. La actividad deportiva cerrará mañana, domingo, con la coronación de los campeones de ambas ramas entre las dos competencias.
En la distancia de 3×20 de rifle estuvo bien cerrada entre las boricuas. Amy Buck ganó 568-562 puntos a Yarimar Mercado la primera posición. Kayra Dávila llegó en el tercer lugar con 550 tantos.
Los varones estuvieron en la distancia 3×40 de rifle donde Edil Velázquez sobrepasó con 1,135 puntos a sus colegas Luis Mendoza (1,082) y Wilson Suárez (1,004).
En la competencia por equipos de pistola de aire el trío boricua confeccionado por Luis López, Luis F. Rivera y Giovanny González ganaron oro con 1,678 puntos. Barbados recibió de Bernard Chase, Chester Foster y Ronald Sargeant la plata (1,646 puntos). El bronce fue para Trinidad y Tobago con un junte de Clement Marchall, Rhodney Allen y Roger Daniel al acumular 1,639 puntos.
La Federación de Bolos de Puerto Rico cerrará mañana, domingo, su competencia en la Bolera Caribe en Ponce. La acción comenzará a las 10:00 a.m. con su modalidad Todo Evento.
La Copa Olímpica 2013 ha sido utilizada de preparación para el equipo nacional que representará a la Isla en el Campeonato Panamericano a celebrarse del 6 al 13 de julio en Ponce.
Entre las figuras prominentes del boliche nacional están compitiendo la campeona centroamericana adulto de 19 años, Kristy López y el veterano, Frankie Colón.
La competencia podrá ser vista por <a href="http://www.febopur.com" rel="nofollow">www.febopur.com</a> o accediendo a su fan page de Facebook, Federación de Bolos.
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