unusual language

A remarkable example of a plain-speaking UN report (Word)

• The project failed to understand the realities of Kosovo. Weapons in exchange for development (WED) only works when weapons are owned by the community. In societies where weapons are owned by individuals a communal approach does not provide the appropriate incentives.
• Incentives have to be attractive. Kosovo has received relatively substantial development aid and aid linked to weapons surrender was not so attractive as for communities who had not seen much aid prior to the WED project.
• Project administrators did not listen sufficiently to local people. Project administrators should have listened to the community leaders from the selected municipalities who informed UNDP that they could no longer participate as they could not guarantee to produce any meaningful results in terms of weapons collected against the background of a deteriorating security situation.
• The period for the amnesty of one month was too short.
• The project management made a ‘panic’ decision to extend to all communities half way through the collection process.

I guess admissions of failure are rare enough not to have become complacent and jargonised.

libraries

So, it's hard to get the original version of Beggin' by Frankie Valli on the internet. This prompted the following highly speculative stream of consciousness.

It's not Limewire that's poxy, it's the way the freedom of information exchange offered by the internet (perhaps ironically) narrows our choices through herd tendencies and averaging.

For clarity, my thought: the volume of Stuff increases exponentially, through increasing amounts of online presence (websites, blogs, file-sharing). So in theory, everything (every viewpoint, alternative history, version of a song) can be online, and a great deal of content is. But the internet is not an encyclodaedia, and is too big to make an encyclopaedia from; Google is not (yet) up to the task. Further, a) fashion persists, and things like the remix of this song come to be the only thing anyone is interested in; pieces of human experience from pre-digital times are especially vulnerable to being excluded. This is even more important in a time when Online is looked to as the resource for the world.

Obscure items, even if desirable, don't come highly up the page rank algorithm, and where accessibility is reinforced by links to your page , say, you have a negative feedback cycle, and obscure items become more obscure. At the same time, a lot of that volume of Stuff is very samey. Do ratings systems in Web 2.0 make for 'quality' items being kept for posterity? This is not new to the internet as an archiving/memory bank, but given that we are supposed to be perfecting the world, it's sad that it persists. One difference is that previously, recording history was done by relatively few people - in libraries, museums, and their prejudices or inaccessibility meant that much did not get kept. On a global scale, there are still perhaps relatively few people managing what gets kept, but it is incomparably easier to create content now than it was, and to share and transport it.

There are probably self-appointed guardians of taste and quality, in the form of online communities interested in particular issues, blogging networks, listservs and so on. But again those will be proliferating, and are not reliably signposted, certainly for casual surfers. The most you can hope for I guess is to get into a comfortable online zone and accept that the revolutionary promise of the internet is an illusion...

There was a b), but it's gone out of my head. And now I have to go and teach. Ahojte!

Quote of the day

Dear Crhis,

Unfortunately we do not have any “illustrative” photos for this field at all…As you may understand, taking photos of courtrooms or prisons is a bit problematic in Uzbekistan :) We do understand your concern that etc.

Silly me...

slavery

The small exhibition at the British Museum includes the factette that a bunch of big chocolate companies have agreed to phase out using cocoa produced from slave or bonded labour by the end of this year. Jaw-dropping, I know.

In related news, a friend of mine is looking for small donations to help him take his photoexhibition on a tour of Punjab. With a small troupe of musicians and performers, they will visit villages and country fairs trying to help local populations understand the legal situation of the hundreds of thousands of Indians living in bonded relations to their 'employers'.

You can give him money here, and the Brit-tax payers can get the government to give some too, or however Gift Aid works.
~
Weird thing I saw yesterday, on the form for proxy voting:

"If you have a long term illness or disability which makes it difficult for you to vote in person. It must besupported by one of the following:
either a registered medical practitioner, a registered nurse, a registered dentist, a registered dispensing optician or optometrist, a registered chiropractor, a person registered under the Health Professions Order 2001 or a Christian Science practitioner."

?

stupid dead fish

Joe has arrived big smiley face

hula = stupid
halla = dead
halak = fish

demos

A UN initiative to get municipal authorities better able to reduce poverty in their cities is being held in Athens, as this year is apparently the 2500th anniversary of the birth of democracy there. This, for an anniversary, is quite giant, especially when written in French (as 2500ieme is even longer).* The sceptic may say, This is a joke because Athens didn't have democracy for the vast majority of that period - but come now, be reasonable, can't we look back from having arrived at the final destination and say Look at what got us here? Of course we can. But hold on, was the democracy of Athens anything to celebrate, what with women and slaves being excluded? Sure, note the improvements that have been made, but also note that the attitudes of a time determine its institutions - we don't let children, prisoners or foreigners vote, is this right? But hold more on, are we really sure about our dating here? Even leaving Gregory aside, how are we so damn sure anything happened at a fixed point BC? Come - this is all symbolism, it's just a bit easier with some numerologically-pseudo-significant attachment to right now.

But Athenian democracy supposedly worked directly, on a scale appropriate for collective decision-making (albeit through excluding many people). Fair point, but in our ongoing and effusive efforts to improve our democratic system, ensuring representation of the views of people in a proportionate and substantial way, and (with the added and indispensible epithet 'liberal') fully respecting and promoting the rights of minority groups, we are trying to overcome what backsliding has happened in the last twenty-five centuries...

So long live Athens, democracy, backslapping and the Millennium Development Goals! (Nice typo in the draft press release: "...the MDGs, adopted by the world government at the UN in 2000..."!)


*An aside on the relationship of writing to speech: bigger numbers such as twenty-five hundred, or even two thousand five hundred, are shorter to say than one hundred and twenty-three, or eighteen hundred and seventy-six.

exceptions

There are always exceptions, but this wasn't one: a heart should be warmed in a place surrounded by pine forest, in the shade of a rockface and lit by Londunimaginable numbers of stars. Johnny, who is Janko, let me out of the car with a flourish and a bow, in his cloud of tinny hip-hop, and the smokers gathered round. This one is Pavol, this one Jakub, and these two are different variants on Michael. Matus gets out on the driver's side. One of the first questions is Why are your fingernails blue? I hadn't noticed, and tell them that perhaps they are far from my heart.

It is cold in rural Považšky Kraj, but children in two layers chat and boister as I shiver in my coat and hat. I am told it is the excitement of my arrival, though they seem like normal teenagers enjoying being up past their bedtime. Walking up the hill, my boots chew the ice in the tyre-furrows, and teenage boys hurl one another to the ground. Others ask 'Where from you?', 'Lives with dein mutter?' and so on. Matuš does a lot of translating.

From up the hill we look down on a small complex of buildings which house youth programmes in the summer holidays. For the last month, one of these has hosted an experimental school for nine boys who would otherwise be in the Slovak equivalent of English young offenders' institutes; this will carry on as a pilot until June, and hopefully become permanent (and involve a larger number of pupils) thereafter.

Some background: way, way back, between the Tescoes, I came across a man in a striped suit in a cage, and another handing out fliers. The flierer told me they are an organisation set up by a psychologist working to change the prison regime and for the rehabilitation of prisoners. I bought a little book about their work and philosophy, 'The Emperor is Naked', which basically says that if you treat prisoners badly, you create more problems and solve none. And interestingly, that the repressive and rehabilitative functions of prison should be separated, specifically with regard to the personnel involved in each. Their work in Slovakia is cut out. Anyway, this was all very inspiring, and when I came this time, I sent them a little email asking if they could use a volunteer. Turns out they have a new project for excluded school pupils, and were desperate to have an inspiring English teacher.

So at eight o'clock on Thursday, me and the older group sat down and did questions. It turned out they already knew the six honest serving men, so we did 'do', and went through the basics of life, likes and the like, but I still think they were bored. We moved on to hip-hop, taking the vocabulary and grammar from the chorus of The Message by Grandmaster Flash, which I think was too hard. Next week, Avril Lavigne, by the choice of the nicest kid in the group. I haven't yet decided what to do with the younger ones. Games are a good starting point, I expect.

It seems that music, short films, cartoons and so on are the way to go. They are interested in getting English, but not very open to or used to learning. Not teacher-at-board style, anyway. I know several teacher-type friends of mine may be reading this blog – if you have any advice, I will be grateful. The kids aren't misbehaved at all, but I'm not sure where their attention is.

Based on the biographies I have heard, these kids have nothing much to trust, hateful fathers and a woeful experience in schools (several have had their expulsion demanded by other kids' parents through petitions!). As I'm sure is the case in many places, the remedial system here has not dealt with them at all well, and several have already been in kid-prison. But on Friday, after teaching and before leaving, I sat on a big tree with my cup of horrible coffee and a lot of sunshine and thought: this place is a pure positive feeling. The only questionable aspect is the severe optimism at its foundation, and the only sad thoughts are that it might not work and that it will only reach a small number of those who need something similar.

It also felt good to hear second-hand their happiness to have me there. And it offers a contrast to the more abstract development work I am invovled in the rest of the time, as well as a nice adjunct to the overflowing conversations about language with flatmates and others. As far as you can tell things from eyes, we have there a lot of what the UN might call human capital. Perhaps because the alternative to being here is being in prison, they are not bad, and they are mostly pretty smart. The approach of the whole thing is to be on as equal a basis as possible with them, and I am not legally responsible for anyone (as, for example, their science teacher is). I have been warned not to get too emotionally attached, but I think there is not much chance of that: without a shared language (as good as my Slovak is, the emotional side is abysmal), I cannot offer them closeness, which is fine, as this is not my role. I am there to show them that English is spoken nicely, and to give them an idea of a world outside theirs.

loving hands (put out)

It may be the association with the holiday in spain with those wonderful people, but I can't get begging by frankie valli/the four seasons out of my head. It is a great song, the kind of song you want to come on just after you have danced a lot, so you can carry on dancing but don't mind that it's a bit slow.

(The dancing in this video is clearly good, but not how i imagine the song, which would be on a beach, warm, some rain, and veryvery dark. Better played and not watched, and turned up loud.)

Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons appear to have been fifties crooners, based on what i hear at youtube, which is normally a type of music i don't like. ergo, this being normal, the song that sam genius put on the mix is a remix by pilooski. I would love to hear how the original sounds, to see how it got from there to here. Web 2.0 makes us all able to share content (even if it's other people's), and it also means that more popular content gets promoted in a virtuous circle. But that also seems to mean, in cases like this, that the one example of the original that may exist somewhere gets buried under everythin more popular.

(caveat: with so much choice and the tendency to do this at work, we also don't have the patience to search out versions which were further than fingertip away.)

Clearly, we need a UN agency to oversee this stuff...

I'm now going to hear some Provokiev and some Schumann, in a pyramid... I hope it's good. Oh, and go for returns for the Bach Choir on Sunday.

homespun

For some reason, when abroad, the plays on words don't come so easily. This is quite possibly because they will not be appreciated, or because I worry that they won't. So they have started to come in other languages: the next time a Hungarian sneezes, we have A fejtöl tejföl! hahahaahahahahahhaaa. Puerile, but funny.