Cambodia cow

Cow in Cambodia

taken in Preah Vihear province some time in March

Before long I heard of fictional character ’superman,’ who is an American cultural icon. He’s got superhuman abilities; and he’s very much known as the hero to save the world from catastrophe.

Recently I’ve learned that there are many more ways to express things and people at higher class in term of their capability. There is an informal term to refer to delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the presidential nominating convention of the United States Democratic Party; it’s commonly called ’superdelegate’. And in some case, the superdelegates might play a decisive role to nominate its candidate for the US presidential election 2008.

In computing, we talk about ’supercomputer’ to simply imply processing capacity of a computer, particularly its speed of calculation.

In English language, we can use this prefix ’super-’ to emphasize that something/somebody is above/over/upon. For instance, a superpower is a country with a leading position in the international system and the ability to influence events and project power on a worldwide scale. We know that the USA and USSR were the two superpowers during the Cold War. And China (not to mention the European Union, India, and Russia) is currently touted as a new superpower.

And well, in blogosphere, there is a so called: superblogger. Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft employee, is one of them.

I’m now not giving an English lesson, but rather I’m teaching myself some new vocabularies (by jotting down this note) as I’m sitting in a cafe and it’s raining outside. These days, it rains a lot as if the earth needs to get wet.

Crossing the river (neavea lea phai)
Taken with a 1.3 megapixel camera phone when I was crossing a river on a way to Kampong Cham province

According to an online English dictionary, ‘depression’ refers to the condition of feeling sad or despondent. Psychologically it leads to reduction in activity or force. In economic, however, there is a way to express a period of drastic decline: Great Depression.

It took all my fully-charged battery cellphone to read a feature article (8 web pages), written by contributing writer Sara Corbett for The New York Times. The news headline itself tells the story: Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? The writer traveled to Africa with Jan Chipchase, a human-behavior researcher for Nokia, a Finnish multinational communications corporation. One of the main points in the story is that Jan Chipchase, as part of his work, has been traveling to many parts of the world, mostly poor countries, to obtain facts and fictions about mobile phone users (and future users). He also runs a Weblog called Future Perfect. And what I like reading about it is how it looks into the tool and its technology making impact to large rural parts of the world.

Let’s take a look at Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s largest capital city, where businesses and politics take place. In recent years it’s the hub of communications of the nation. Landlines service is not as much popular as its counterpart mobile phone services. When you’re on a Phnom Penh street, chance is you can easily find a phone booth to make local call. The role of mobile phone here is: it at least creates job for unskilled people.

I’m also inclined in how low-cost technology can effectively help people in rural areas, where electricity among other things still insufficient. And more importantly, income generation is probably the final say in how people decide to buy and get introduced to new things.

Here is an overview of communications in Cambodia. It looks back the history of how communication system evolves and the latest trend.

I’m not in much of mode reading any novel, so I turned my attention to taste other stuff. I try to understand something in a book dedicated to Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, which I received from a Jorge Machado, who works for a library in Stanford University. It was in exchange with some digital photographs I took last year in Kampong Cham province. Meanwhile I also find latest world news good read, even I have to read them on the tiny screen. Some articles about Cambodia’s real estates and global inflation grab my attention. At the World Economic Forum in the Swiss, George Soros, a Hungarian-born American financial speculator and philanthropist, said that “it would be “very difficult” to avoid recession in both the US and the UK.” In another article in the International Herald Tribune, the reporter wrote the news headline: ‘Soros sounds the alarm again on world economy’. The billionaire investor also claimed lately that the boom in commodities is still in a “growth phase” despite the fact that prices for oil, wheat, rice, and gold have risen to records in 2008.

What’s else have I been reading recently? Of course, some nerdy stuff:

• Chinese Hackers aim DDoS attack on CNN
• India unveils ‘people’s phone’ for £10
• Install OS X on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required
• The offline cost of an online life
• BarCamp Is Coming to Phnom Penh

Happy Khmer New Year [Sousdey Chhnam Thmey!]