SLOW Movement

NY Times: Is Algebra Neccessary

 

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July 28, 2012

Is Algebra Necessary?

By ANDREW HACKER

A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t.

My question extends beyond algebra and applies more broadly to the usual mathematics sequence, from geometry through calculus. State regents and legislators — and much of the public — take it as self-evident that every young person should be made to master polynomial functions and parametric equations.

There are many defenses of algebra and the virtue of learning it. Most of them sound reasonable on first hearing; many of them I once accepted. But the more I examine them, the clearer it seems that they are largely or wholly wrong — unsupported by research or evidence, or based on wishful logic. (I’m not talking about quantitative skills, critical for informed citizenship and personal finance, but a very different ballgame.)

This debate matters. Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower. I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers. My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.

The toll mathematics takes begins early. To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.

Shirley Bagwell, a longtime Tennessee teacher, warns that “to expect all students to master algebra will cause more students to drop out.” For those who stay in school, there are often “exit exams,” almost all of which contain an algebra component. In Oklahoma, 33 percent failed to pass last year, as did 35 percent in West Virginia.

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. In New Mexico, 43 percent of white students fell below “proficient,” along with 39 percent in Tennessee. Even well-endowed schools have otherwise talented students who are impeded by algebra, to say nothing of calculus and trigonometry.

California’s two university systems, for instance, consider applications only from students who have taken three years of mathematics and in that way exclude many applicants who might excel in fields like art or history. Community college students face an equally prohibitive mathematics wall. A study of two-year schools found that fewer than a quarter of their entrants passed the algebra classes they were required to take.

“There are students taking these courses three, four, five times,” says Barbara Bonham of Appalachian State University. While some ultimately pass, she adds, “many drop out.”

Another dropout statistic should cause equal chagrin. Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math. The City University of New York, where I have taught since 1971, found that 57 percent of its students didn’t pass its mandated algebra course. The depressing conclusion of a faculty report: “failing math at all levels affects retention more than any other academic factor.” A national sample of transcripts found mathematics had twice as many F’s and D’s compared as other subjects.

Nor will just passing grades suffice. Many colleges seek to raise their status by setting a high mathematics bar. Hence, they look for 700 on the math section of the SAT, a height attained in 2009 by only 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women. And it’s not just Ivy League colleges that do this: at schools like Vanderbilt, Rice and Washington University in St. Louis, applicants had best be legacies or athletes if they have scored less than 700 on their math SATs.

It’s true that students in Finland, South Korea and Canada score better on mathematics tests. But it’s their perseverance, not their classroom algebra, that fits them for demanding jobs.

Nor is it clear that the math we learn in the classroom has any relation to the quantitative reasoning we need on the job. John P. Smith III, an educational psychologist at Michigan State University who has studied math education, has found that “mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school.” Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials — science, technology, engineering, math — considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required. Toyota, for example, recently chose to locate a plant in a remote Mississippi county, even though its schools are far from stellar. It works with a nearby community college, which has tailored classes in “machine tool mathematics.” 

That sort of collaboration has long undergirded German apprenticeship programs. I fully concur that high-tech knowledge is needed to sustain an advanced industrial economy. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe the solution is largely academic.

A skeptic might argue that, even if our current mathematics education discourages large numbers of students, math itself isn’t to blame. Isn’t this discipline a critical part of education, providing quantitative tools and honing conceptual abilities that are indispensable — especially in our high tech age? In fact, we hear it argued that we have a shortage of graduates with STEM credentials.

Of course, people should learn basic numerical skills: decimals, ratios and estimating, sharpened by a good grounding in arithmetic. But a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above. And if there is a shortage of STEM graduates, an equally crucial issue is how many available positions there are for men and women with these skills. A January 2012 analysis from the Georgetown center found 7.5 percent unemployment for engineering graduates and 8.2 percent among computer scientists.

Peter Braunfeld of the University of Illinois tells his students, “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.” He’s absolutely right.

Algebraic algorithms underpin animated movies, investment strategies and airline ticket prices. And we need people to understand how those things work and to advance our frontiers.

Quantitative literacy clearly is useful in weighing all manner of public policies, from the Affordable Care Act, to the costs and benefits of environmental regulation, to the impact of climate change. Being able to detect and identify ideology at work behind the numbers is of obvious use. Ours is fast becoming a statistical age, which raises the bar for informed citizenship. What is needed is not textbook formulas but greater understanding of where various numbers come from, and what they actually convey.

What of the claim that mathematics sharpens our minds and makes us more intellectually adept as individuals and a citizen body? It’s true that mathematics requires mental exertion. But there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x² + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)² leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis.

Many of those who struggled through a traditional math regimen feel that doing so annealed their character. This may or may not speak to the fact that institutions and occupations often install prerequisites just to look rigorous — hardly a rational justification for maintaining so many mathematics mandates. Certification programs for veterinary technicians require algebra, although none of the graduates I’ve met have ever used it in diagnosing or treating their patients. Medical schools like Harvard and Johns Hopkins demand calculus of all their applicants, even if it doesn’t figure in the clinical curriculum, let alone in subsequent practice. Mathematics is used as a hoop, a badge, a totem to impress outsiders and elevate a profession’s status.

It’s not hard to understand why Caltech and M.I.T. want everyone to be proficient in mathematics. But it’s not easy to see why potential poets and philosophers face a lofty mathematics bar. Demanding algebra across the board actually skews a student body, not necessarily for the better.

I WANT to end on a positive note. Mathematics, both pure and applied, is integral to our civilization, whether the realm is aesthetic or electronic. But for most adults, it is more feared or revered than understood. It’s clear that requiring algebra for everyone has not increased our appreciation of a calling someone once called “the poetry of the universe.” (How many college graduates remember what Fermat’s dilemma was all about?)

Instead of investing so much of our academic energy in a subject that blocks further attainment for much of our population, I propose that we start thinking about alternatives. Thus mathematics teachers at every level could create exciting courses in what I call “citizen statistics.” This would not be a backdoor version of algebra, as in the Advanced Placement syllabus. Nor would it focus on equations used by scholars when they write for one another. Instead, it would familiarize students with the kinds of numbers that describe and delineate our personal and public lives.

It could, for example, teach students how the Consumer Price Index is computed, what is included and how each item in the index is weighted — and include discussion about which items should be included and what weights they should be given.

This need not involve dumbing down. Researching the reliability of numbers can be as demanding as geometry. More and more colleges are requiring courses in “quantitative reasoning.” In fact, we should be starting that in kindergarten.

I hope that mathematics departments can also create courses in the history and philosophy of their discipline, as well as its applications in early cultures. Why not mathematics in art and music — even poetry — along with its role in assorted sciences? The aim would be to treat mathematics as a liberal art, making it as accessible and welcoming as sculpture or ballet. If we rethink how the discipline is conceived, word will get around and math enrollments are bound to rise. It can only help. Of the 1.7 million bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2010, only 15,396 — less than 1 percent — were in mathematics.

I’ve observed a host of high school and college classes, from Michigan to Mississippi, and have been impressed by conscientious teaching and dutiful students. I’ll grant that with an outpouring of resources, we could reclaim many dropouts and help them get through quadratic equations. But that would misuse teaching talent and student effort. It would be far better to reduce, not expand, the mathematics we ask young people to imbibe. (That said, I do not advocate vocational tracks for students considered, almost always unfairly, as less studious.)

Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.

Andrew Hacker is an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and a co-author of “Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It.”

NY Times: A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?

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April 7, 2012

A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

CAN men and women be friends? We have been asking ourselves that question for a long time, and the answer is usually no. The movie “When Harry Met Sally...” provides the locus classicus. The problem, Harry famously explains, is that “the sex part always gets in the way.” Heterosexual people of the opposite sex may claim to be just friends, the message goes, but count on it — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — something more’s going on. Popular culture enforces the notion relentlessly. In movie after movie, show after show, the narrative arc is the same. What starts as friendship (Ross and Rachel, Monica and Chandler) ends up in bed.

There’s a history here, and it’s a surprisingly political one. Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. Men and women occupied different spheres, and women were regarded as inferior in any case. A few epistolary friendships between monastics, a few relationships in literary and court circles, but beyond that, cross-sex friendship was as unthinkable in Western society as it still is in many cultures.

Then came feminism — specifically, Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of feminism, in the late 18th century. Wollstonecraft was actually wary of platonic relationships, which could lead too easily, she thought, to mischief. (She had a child out of wedlock herself.) But she did believe that friendship, “the most sublime of all affections,” should be the mainspring of marriage.

In the 1890s, when feminism emerged from the drawing rooms and genteel committees to become a mass, radical movement (the term “feminism” itself was coined in 1895), friendship reappeared as a political demand. This was the time of the “New Woman,” portrayed in fiction and endlessly debated in the press.

The New Woman was intelligent, well read, strong-willed, idealistic, unconventional and outspoken. For her, relationships with men, whether or not they involved sex, had to involve mental companionship, freedom of choice, equality and mutual respect. They had, in short, to be friendships. Just as suffrage represented feminism’s vision of the political future, friendship represented its vision of the personal future, the central term of a renegotiated sexual contract.

Easier said than done, of course. But the notion of friendship as the root of romantic relationships started to seep into the culture. The terms “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” also began to appear in the 1890s.

We take the words for granted now, but think of what they imply, and what a new idea it was: that romantic partners share more than erotic passion, that companionship and equality are part of the relationship. A boyfriend is a friend, as well as a lover. As for husband and wife, Wollstonecraft’s ideal has long since become a cliché. Who doesn’t think of their spouse — or claim to think of them, or want to think of them — as their best friend?

So friendship now is part of what we mean by love. Still, that doesn’t get us to platonic relationships. For that we needed yet another wave of feminism, the one that started in the 1960s. Friendship wasn’t part of the demand this time, but the things that were demanded — equal rights and opportunities in every sphere — created the conditions for it. Only once the sexes mixed on equal and familiar terms at school, at work and in the social spaces in between — only once it was normal and even boring to see a member of the opposite sex at the next desk — could platonic friendships become an ordinary part of life.

And that’s exactly what has happened.

Friendships with members of the opposite sex have been an important part of my life since I went to high school in the late 1970s, and I hardly think I’m alone. Consult your own experience, but as I look around, I don’t see that platonic friendships are actually rare at all or worthy of a lot of winks and nudges. Which is why you don’t much hear the term anymore. Platonic friendships now are simply friendships. But doesn’t the sex thing get in the way? At times, no doubt. It’s harder for the young, of course — all those hormones, and so many of your peers are unattached. In fact, one of the most common solutions to Harry’s quandary is to have sex and then remain friends. If the sex thing gets in the way, the answer often seems to be to just get it out of the way.

But it doesn’t always get in the way. Maybe you’re not attracted to each other. Maybe you know it would never work out, so it’s not worth screwing up your friendship. Maybe that’s just not what it’s about.

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand.

We have trouble with mentorship, the asymmetric love of master and apprentice, professor and student, guide and guided; we have trouble with comradeship, the bond that comes from shared, intense work; and we have trouble with friendship, at least of the intimate kind. When we imagine those relationships, we seem to have to sexualize them.

Close friendships between members of the same sex, after all, are also suspect. Even Oprah has had to defend her relationship with Gayle King, and as for men and men, forget about it.

I cannot think of another area of our lives in which there is so great a gap between what we do and what our culture says we do. But maybe things are beginning to change. Younger people, having grown up with the gay-rights movement and in many cases gone to colleges with co-ed dormitories, are open to a wider range of emotional possibility.

Friendship between the sexes may no longer be a political issue, but it is an issue of liberation: the freedom to love whom you want, in the way that you want. Maybe it’s time that we all took it out of the closet.

William Deresiewicz is an essayist, critic and the author of “A Jane Austen Education.”

WSJ: When Stress Is Good for You

WORK & FAMILY
JANUARY 24, 2012

When Stress Is Good for You

It's Disparaged as Dangerous, but Healthy Levels of Stress Can Pump Up Both Mind and Body

By SUE SHELLENBARGER

Stress: It can propel you into "the zone," spurring peak performance and well-being. Too much of it, though, strains your heart, robs you of memory and mental clarity and raises your risk of chronic disease.

A little stress is helpful for peak performance, but too much can literally shut down the brain. Sue Shellenbarger on Lunch Break looks at how you stay in the good stress zone and tell if you're tipping into bad.

How do you get the benefits—and avoid the harmful effects?

By learning to identify and manage individual reactions to stress, people can develop healthier outlooks as well as improve performance on cognitive tests, at work and in athletics, researchers and psychologists say.

The body has a standard reaction when it faces a task where performance really matters to goals or well-being: The sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus, pituitary and adrenal glands pump stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, into the bloodstream. Heartbeat and breathing speed up, and muscles tense.

What happens next is what divides healthy stress from harmful stress. People experiencing beneficial or "adaptive" stress feel pumped. The blood vessels dilate, increasing blood flow to help the brain, muscles and limbs meet a challenge, similar to the effects of aerobic exercise, according to research by Wendy Mendes, an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and others.

The body tends to respond differently under harmful or threatening stress. The blood vessels constrict, and "you may feel a little dizzy as your blood pressure rises," says Christopher Edwards, director of the behavioral chronic pain management program at Duke University Medical Center. Symptoms are often like those you feel in a fit of anger. You may speak more loudly or experience lapses in judgment or logic, he says. Hands and feet may grow cold as blood rushes to the body's core. Research shows the heart often beats erratically, spiking again and again like a seismograph during an earthquake.

Another hallmark: "Can you turn it off? Or are you a prisoner of your mind?" says Martin Rossman, an author on healing and stress and a clinical instructor at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School. People under harmful stress lose the ability to re-engage the parasympathetic nervous system, which drives the body's day-to-day natural functions, including digestion and sleep. While individuals vary in how long they can tolerate chronic stress, research shows it sharply increases the risk of insomnia, chronic disease and early death.

Home builder Carl Weissensee used to be "addicted to stress," he says. Managing thousands of details and multiple risks for each of the multimillion-dollar houses he builds, he spent years rushing around with "one foot off the ground 20 hours a day, running the same scenarios through my mind time and time again, and being unable to put it aside," says Mr. Weissensee, 58, of Mill Valley, Calif.

In an important marker of harmful stress levels, his agitation disrupted his life. "I would sleep four to six hours a night, and even that wasn't good sleep." His wife complained, and his young daughter painted a small rock for him with the words, "You work too much."

A heart attack, followed by problems with cardiac arrhythmia, forced him to find the line between good stress and bad. "I don't believe it's possible to do a good job without a certain amount of stress. It's necessary to get things done," he says.

He has brought it down to a healthy level by using relaxation techniques, including deep breathing and guided imagery—lying still and imagining stressful tasks turning out well. After seeing Dr. Rossman, reading his book and doing one of his relaxation CDs daily, Mr. Weissensee learned to acknowledge his worries instead of recycling them in his head, then practice "skipping over" them and telling himself that "everything works out in the end," he says. He has managed to stabilize his heart condition without large doses of medication.

Falling Levels

People who say their stress level is an 8, 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale, where 1 is 'little or no stress' and 10 is 'a great deal of stress.'

2007	32%
2008	30
2009	24
2010	24
2011	22

Source: American Psychological Association and Harris Interactive

"By practicing over and over, I seem to be changing the path my thoughts take from, 'I'm doomed,' to, 'Things will be OK,' " he says. "My goal is to worry just enough to do my job well."

That kind of positive attitude tends to produce good stress, based on research by Dr. Mendes and others. In a study of 50 college students, some were coached to believe that feeling nervous or excited before a presentation could improve performance. A control group didn't receive the coaching. When the students were asked to make a speech about themselves while receiving critical feedback, those who received the coaching showed a healthier physiological response, leading to increased dilation of the arteries and smaller rises in blood pressure than the control group.

In a similar study, students who received the same coaching before taking graduate-school entrance exams posted higher scores on a mock test in the lab and also on the actual exam three months later, compared with controls, according to a study co-authored by Dr. Mendes and published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They also posted higher levels of salivary amylase, a protein marker for adrenaline that is linked to episodes of beneficial stress.

People react differently to everyday stress. At-home or mobile biofeedback devices can detect spikes in the heart rate. Hand-held thermometers also can be used to note when the temperature of one's hands falls below 95 degrees, says Kenneth Pelletier, a clinical professor of medicine at both the University of Arizona School of Medicine and the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco.

Illustration by Mike Right

Toronto psychologist Kate Hays tells patients to imagine a stress scale "ranging from 1, where you're practically asleep, to 10, where you're climbing off the ceiling." Then, she asks them to recall a past peak performance and figure out where their stress at that moment would have ranked. Many people say 4 to 6, but responses range from 2 to 8, says Dr. Hays, who specializes in sports and performance psychology. That becomes their personal stress-management target.

For most people, hitting that target requires new skills. With practice, though, they can learn to relax completely in a few seconds, says Dr. Pelletier.

In addition to thinking positively about stressors, deep abdominal breathing and training in meditation and mindfulness, or regulating one's own mental and physical states, help moderate stress.

All have been shown in research to help heal such chronic problems as heart disease, according to a 2010 research review co-authored by Bonnie Horrigan, director of public education for the Bravewell Collaborative, Minneapolis, a nonprofit that advocates integrating health and medical care. When Ford Motor Co. tested various ways of helping employees with chronic back pain several years ago, corporate medical director Walter Talamonti says, training in reducing harmful stress to healthy levels was linked to reductions in employees' pain and medication use.

Dr. Edwards is seeing 15% to 20% annual increases in patients at his pain clinic seeking biofeedback and other help with stress and stress-related ailments. As many as 35% of them actually want to generate more good stress; many are referred by counselors, parents or coaches.

Many workplace wellness programs have also begun coaching people to hit "the optimal performance zone"—with enough stress "to be stimulating, to focus you, to challenge you" without taking a physical toll, says Dr. Pelletier.

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at [email protected]

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: Religion for Everyone

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
FEBRUARY 18, 2012

Religion for Everyone

The decline of religion in the West has brought a decline in community spirit. Could the secular world draw useful lessons from religious life? Alain de Botton offers new ways to find shared meaning.

By ALAIN DE BOTTON

One key thing lacking in much of modern society is the sense of community provided by churches and other religious institutions. In a discussion about his new book, "Religion for Atheists," Alain de Botton talks with WSJ's Gary Rosen about how our sense of kinship and belonging might be reattained in a more-secular age.

One of the losses that modern society feels most keenly is the loss of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighborliness that has been replaced by ruthless anonymity, by the pursuit of contact with one another primarily for individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love.

In attempting to understand what has eroded our sense of community, historians have assigned an important role to the privatization of religious belief that occurred in Europe and the U.S. in the 19th century. They have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbors at around the same time that we ceased to honor our gods as a community.

This raises two questions: How did religion once enhance the spirit of community? More practically, can secular society ever recover that spirit without returning to the theological principles that were entwined with it? I, for one, believe that it is possible to reclaim our sense of community—and that we can do so, moreover, without having to build upon a religious foundation.

Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is "What do you do?," our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned.

In these competitive, pseudo-communal gatherings, only a few sides of us count as currency with which to buy the goodwill of strangers. What matters above all is what is on our business cards. Those who have opted to spend their lives looking after children, writing poetry or nurturing orchards will be left in no doubt that they have run contrary to the dominant mores of the powerful, who will marginalize them accordingly.

Religion in Secular Life: A Proposal

Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgso

A university alive to its true responsibilities would teach students about things like the tensions of married life, with books like 'Anna Karenina' and 'Madame Bovary' on the syllabus.

Given this level of discrimination, it is no surprise that many of us choose to throw ourselves with a vengeance into our careers. Focusing on work to the exclusion of almost everything else is a plausible strategy in a world that accepts workplace achievements as the main tokens for securing not just the financial means to survive physically but also the attention that we require to thrive psychologically.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two of the prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.

Consider Catholicism, which starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their confines there will reign values utterly unlike the ones that hold sway in the world beyond. A church gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane.

The composition of the congregation also feels significant. Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values. We are urged to overcome our provincialism and our tendency to be judgmental—and to make a sign of peace to whomever chance has placed on either side of us. The Church asks us to leave behind all references to earthly status. Here no one asks what anyone else "does." It no longer matters who is the bond dealer and who the cleaner.

Zackary Canepari/Panos;

We all stand to learn something from the ways in which religion promotes morality, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life.

The Church does more, however, than merely declare that worldly success doesn't matter. In a variety of ways, it enables us to imagine that we could be happy without it. Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, it establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to it.

It is the genius of the Mass to confront these fears. The building in which it is performed is almost always sumptuous. Though it is technically devoted to celebrating the equality of man, it often surpasses palaces in its beauty. The company is also enticing. As the congregants start to sing "Gloria in Excelsis," we are likely to feel that the crowd is nothing like the one that we encounter at the shopping mall or the bus stop. We gaze up at the vaulted, star-studded ceiling and rehearse in unison the words "Lord, come, live in your people and strengthen them by your grace." We leave thinking that humanity may not be such a wretched thing after all.

As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community that imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.

If the Mass has done its job and we are awake to its lessons, it should succeed by its close in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes. It should also have given us a few ideas for mending some of the more dispiriting aspects of our fractured modern world.

One of these ideas relates to the benefits of taking people into a distinct space where they can be isolated from the usual ideology of the mercantile world. The venue itself ought to be attractive enough to evoke enthusiasm for the notion of a group. It should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favor of a joyful immersion in a collective spirit—an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern so-called "community centers," insultingly designed structures whose appearance paradoxically serves to confirm the inadvisability of joining anything communal.

The Mass also contains a lesson about the importance of rules for directing people in their interactions with one another. The liturgical complexity of a Missal—the way in which this book of instructions for celebrating a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points—speaks to an essential aspect of human nature. To foster a sense of communal intimacy and to ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than simply leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.

A final lesson from the Mass is closely connected with its history. Before it was a service, before the congregants sat in seats facing an altar behind which a priest held up a wafer and a cup of wine, the Mass was a meal. What we now know as the Eucharist began as an occasion when early Christians put aside their work and domestic obligations and gathered around a table (usually laden with wine, lamb and loaves of unleavened bread) in order to commemorate the Last Supper. They talked, prayed and renewed their commitments to Christ and to one another. Like Jews at the Sabbath meal, Christians understood that it is when we satiate our bodily hunger that we are often readiest to direct our minds to the needs of others.

Kyoko Hamada/Gallery Stock

The contemporary world is not lacking in places where we can dine well in company, but what's significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

In honor of the most important Christian virtue, these gatherings became known as agape (love, in Greek) feasts and were regularly held by Christian communities in the period between Jesus's death and the Council of Laodicea in A.D. 364. Complaints about the excessive exuberance of some of these meals eventually led the early Church to the regrettable decision to ban agape feasts and to suggest that the faithful eat at home with their families instead—and only afterward gather for the spiritual banquet that we now know as the Eucharist.

But the Mass is hardly alone as an instructive example, and community is certainly not our only unmet need in the modern world. My premise is that even those who aren't religious can find religion sporadically useful, interesting and consoling and should consider how we might import certain religious ideas and practices into the secular realm.

Everyone stands to learn something from the ways in which religion delivers sermons, promotes morality, engenders a spirit of community, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life. In a world beset by fundamentalists of both the believing and the secular variety, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the death of loved ones and our own decay and demise.

Religions are a repository of occasionally ingenious concepts for trying to assuage some of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life. They merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition and for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture—a range of interests whose scope puts to shame the achievements of even the greatest secular movements and innovators.

Masterfile

Cathedral La Seu in evening light, Palma de Majorca, Spain

It feels especially relevant to talk of meals, because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company—cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants—but what's significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

The large number of people who patronize restaurants suggests that they are refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanism for introducing patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which they segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. At a modern restaurant, the focus is on the food and the décor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections.

Patrons tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city (libraries, nightclubs, coffee shops), restaurants know full well how to bring people into the same space, but they lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant. Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangement, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of being in the space, guests would be signaling—as in a church—their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

Though there wouldn't be religious imagery on the walls, some kind of art that displayed examples of human vulnerability, whether in relation to physical suffering, poverty, anxiety or romantic discord, would bring more of who we actually are into the public realm, lending to our connections with others a new and candid tenor.

Religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of food are propitious to moral education. It is as if the imminent prospect of something to eat seduces our normally resistant selves into showing some of the same generosity to others as the table has shown to us. Religions also know enough about our sensory, nonintellectual dimensions to be aware that we cannot be kept on a virtuous track simply through the medium of words. They know that their captive audience is likely to accept a trade-off between ideas and nourishment—and so they turn meals into disguised ethical lessons.

Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

Temple to perspective: This structure would represent the age of the Earth, with each centimeter of height equating to 1 million years. A tiny band of gold a mere millimeter thick at the bottom of the roughly 150- foot structure would stand for mankind's time on Earth.

Before our first sip of wine, religious communities offer us a thought that can be swallowed with the liquid like a tablet. They make us listen to a homily in the gratified interval between two courses. And they use specific types of food and drink to represent abstract concepts, telling Christians, for example, that bread stands for the sacred body of Christ, informing Jews that the Passover dish of crushed apples and nuts is the mortar that was used by their enslaved ancestors to build the warehouses of Egypt and teaching Zen Buddhists that their cups of slowly brewing tea are tokens of the transitory nature of happiness in a floating world.

Taking their seats at an Agape Restaurant, guests would find in front of them guidebooks reminiscent of the Haggadah (the text followed at a Passover Seder) or the Missal, laying out the rules for how to behave at the meal. No one would be left alone to find their way to an interesting conversation with another, any more than it would be expected of participants at a Passover meal or in the Eucharist that they might manage independently to alight on the salient aspects of the history of the tribes of Israel or achieve a sense of communion with God.

The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions that the youngest child at the table is assigned by the Haggadah to ask during the Passover ceremony ("Why is this night different from all other nights?" "Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?" and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of pride ("What do you do?" "Where do your children go to school?") and toward a more sincere revelation of themselves ("What do you regret?" "Whom can you not forgive?" "What do you fear?").

The liturgy would inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures. One would be privy to accounts of fear, guilt, rage, melancholy, unrequited love and infidelity that would generate an impression of our collective insanity and endearing fragility.

Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to climb ever higher in social status.

The notion that we could mend some of the tatters in the modern social fabric through an initiative as modest as a communal meal may seem offensive to those who trust in the power of legislative and political solutions to cure society's ills. But these restaurants would not be an alternative to traditional political methods. They would be a prior step, taken to humanize one another in our imaginations.

Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have made significant contributions to political life, but their relevance to the problems of community are arguably never greater than when they depart from the modern political script and remind us that there is also value to be had in standing in a big hall singing a hymn or in ceremoniously washing a stranger's feet or in sitting at a table with neighbors and partaking of lamb stew and conversation. These rituals, as much as the deliberations inside parliaments and law courts, are what help to hold our fractious and fragile societies together.

—From "Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion" by Alain de Botton, to be published March 6 by Pantheon. Copyright by Alain de Botton.

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FT: Far-sighted but no visionary

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/90804618-f8b0-11e0-ad8f-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1cEY0I254

October 21, 2011 10:19 pm

Far-sighted but no visionary

By Harry Eyres

Steve Jobs was an undoubtedly impressive human being, but I am still not convinced that it qualifies him to be called a visionary

Claudio Abbado rehearsing at the Royal Festival Hall

It would have been too easy (reader, I was tempted) to write a column dismissing all the hype about the late Steve Jobs. I must say for a non-Apple user – I have never owned a Mac, an iPod or an iPad – the effusiveness of the tributes, and in some cases the grief, was hard to fathom. The last time I remembered anything comparable was after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Whatever his other achievements, it appeared that Steve Jobs had arranged a posthumous coup: he had made sure his obituaries were written by his own PR department.

President Obama mourned him as a “visionary” who “changed the way each of us sees the world”. With still less restraint, the philosopher Alain de Botton gushed: “there are businesses that redraw the landscape entirely, creating needs we never knew we had, and remoulding our sense of what we have to have in order to be happy.” Goodness, was I only dreaming when I thought I still recognised those blue remembered hills? Might it be an advantage to remain unaware of needs I do not know I have?

You can imagine a Slow Lane line on all this: that, after all, the man had only been a creator, or refiner, of gadgets, which I for one have managed to get along quite happily without. Maybe Jobs “transformed our lives” (Obama again) somewhat, making them even more full of annoying electronic gizmos that render living in public spaces progressively less bearable. Perhaps I am missing something, but we seem to be just as fractious and addicted to short-termism as we have ever been.

But this was all just knee-jerk stuff. Not only was I not an initiate of the Apple cult but, frankly, I had little idea who Steve Jobs was. Reading his famous Stanford address was a sobering experience. Here was an undoubtedly impressive human being, a man of substance and originality.

Jobs was unusual in many ways, and not least in his approach to education. In contrast to the ever more streamlined, synchromeshed idea of expensive university degrees leading seamlessly into jobs (the normal kind), Jobs needed to drop out of university to find his way. More precisely, he dropped out of the required classes he found boring, in order to drop in to classes which inspired him. One of them was a calligraphy class which influenced all his subsequent thinking, and ensured, as he said with no false modesty, that personal computers would have “the wonderful typography they do”.

That was a very considerable achievement. I am still not convinced that it qualifies Jobs to be called a visionary. One of the qualities of visionaries is that they see far ahead; not just 10 years ahead but maybe a century or two. Often visionaries are little appreciated in their own time, dismissed as oddballs or madmen. Jobs might have been a maverick but was hardly an unappreciated one – and he became one of the richest people in America.

Might it be an advantage to remain unaware of needs I do not know I have?

A week after Jobs died I was in the Royal Festival Hall listening to Claudio Abbado conducting Anton Bruckner’s towering Fifth Symphony. If there was a Jobs connection, it might have been that Abbado has fought life-threatening illness; he made a remarkable recovery from cancer and, though he now looks gaunt, skin stretched tight over his long bony face, he stood spry and upright as he conducted the immense symphony from memory.

I am not sure Abbado would consider himself a visionary. I see him more as a supreme facilitator, a great clarifier of textures. He looked humble, not full of ego, as he took waves of applause and a standing ovation at the end of the symphony, and eventually stood to one side of the podium, as if to direct the applause away from him, towards his hand-picked Lucerne Festival Orchestra(I have never heard more hushed and precise pianissimo playing from a string section), and ultimately towards Bruckner himself.

I have a feeling that Bruckner and this symphony in particular are finally coming into their own 135 years after the Fifth was completed (amazingly, Bruckner never heard the work performed by an orchestra). For the composer Arnold Bax, hearing the corrupt Schalk-conducted version in 1906, it was a monumentally boring piece of Austro-German pedantry.

I didn’t find it boring when I first heard it, as a teenager at the Proms. It was certainly extreme; extremely long, extremely slow, extremely desolate, extremely unruly and extremely loud, especially at its thrilling ending, one of the grandest perorations in music. I found the extremes exciting (as teenagers tend to). It was like being taken on a tour of the Arctic, or Patagonia, a landscape of arresting splendour and strangeness.

Yes, Bruckner did change the way I saw the world, and myself within it. It felt vaster and more thrilling; and, if it also felt frightening, the fear was tempered by the fact that a brave soul had been there before me and charted the territory.

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More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Forget dong the 'math' and stick to proper English

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/be8ae0b0-eabc-11e0-ac18-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1aGV775ud

October 3, 2011 2:52 am

Forget doing the ‘math’ and stick to proper English

By Lucy Kellaway

Last week, I was sent an email from a “work-life balance expert” offering tips on staying cheerful in times of financial strife.

What struck me most about this message – apart from its trite fatuousness – was the assumption that we need cheering up when the economy is down.

I have never seen any evidence that happiness moves in tandem with economic activity. I’m no less happy now than I was in the boom of the mid-2000s. And if I am upset, it’s not because of the economy but because the ceiling has just fallen down in my hall and so there is grit in my bed and in the fridge.

In fact, it’s possible that happiness may even rise in recessions. There was a study a couple of years ago that showed that people in work are marginally more content during hard times because they are grateful to have a job.

However, according to last week’s press release, the path to good cheer in recession lies through “living exponentially”. Just looking at this phrase causes my happiness levels to suffer a dip. The word “exponential” has taken a lot of abuse from managers who use it to describe any growth that is more than sluggish. Whereas in maths an exponential graph goes swiftly from almost flat to almost vertical, this pattern is seldom traced by any market I’ve ever come across.

But now the term seems to have slipped free of its mathematical moorings altogether: living “exponentially” involves having “quality time with yourself” and “living in your own truth”.

Speaking from the vantage point of my own truth, I find some things are truer than others. Truest of all are mathematical truths, and it is therefore upsetting to see them being pilfered shamelessly by innumerate managers eager to lend an aura of fact to what is usually a glob of guff.

Exponential is the least of it. Now every happening in business is called a “data point”, and change is increasingly known as “delta”, as in “what’s the delta on that?”

“Inflection point” is similarly debased. In maths, this is when the curvature goes from positive to negative but to managers it is a grandiose way of saying maximum or minimum. Last month, I saw it had been degraded further in a gung-ho article on the Huffington Post by a social entrepreneur entitled “The Inflection Point, The ‘Aha’ Moment” – in which it meant nothing at all.

Managers have a long history in playing fast and loose with percentages to make themselves look good. When it comes to effort, an impossible 110 per cent used to be regarded as a bare minimum.

Now hyperinflation has taken hold. A few weeks ago in Australia, the highest ever illegitimate percentage scoring was recorded when ex-cricketer Tim Nielsen said he was “100,000 per cent behind Australia being the best team in the world”.

All sorts of other things are just plain wrong when they are translated from maths to business talk. “To decimate” means to reduce by one-tenth; it does not mean to slash. “Infinite” means immeasurably large; it isn’t a general term to mean a lot. And “quantum” is something very, very small, not something very, very big.

More distressing than any of the above, however, is the phrase “Do the math”. This would be fine if it were a genuine invitation to whip out one’s slide rule. Instead it is a slightly threatening way of asserting: I’m right and I have logic on my side.

Last month, Barack Obama claimed that his tax package “isn’t class warfare. It’s math.” But it wasn’t math, really. It was politics. Yet at least President Obama is American, and so the phrase sounds better on his lips. On BBC Radio Four last week, I heard a Brit taking about the far right in UK politics, urging listeners to “do the maths” – which sounded even worse.

The strangest thing about all this misuse of mathematics is that when there is an actual need to discuss figures, managers go all coy, and proper numerical terms are nowhere to be seen.

Indeed, in business, numbers are not called numbers any more – they are called “metrics”. Which is a bit bizarre, when you think that metrics are about the study of metre in poetry. And in the mouths of modern managers, numbers no longer do anything as basic as go up and down: they go north and south as if they were points on a map.

Last week in a meeting I heard a finance manager say the following words: “We’re looking to see our metrics coming in north of the 3 mill mark.”

If he had done the maths before opening his mouth, he might have put it rather better and said: the number will be bigger than three million or X>3m.

[email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011

FT: Cheers to those with a half-empty glass

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/47001718-a40d-11e0-8b4f-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1X5e8PV4s

July 3, 2011 8:12 pm

Cheers to those with a half-empty glass

By Lucy Kellaway

In business, optimism is good and pessimism bad. Optimists have a monopoly on success, on happiness and even on longevity. Pessimists, with their long faces and dark thoughts are pariahs, thought fit for nothing in the gung-ho corporate world except possibly careers in journalism (where bad news is good news). Otherwise, they have a choice between the couch, the closet or the comedy circuit.

But now pessimism may be coming back to the mainstream. The turn came last Monday, when management guru Tom Peters tweeted enthusiastically about a book that extols negative thinking. This is an extraordinary turnround for a man whose logo is a colourful exclamation mark and who for decades has been relentlessly, exhaustingly upbeat. The fact that the inventor of “Wow!” and “Brand Me” is now dabbling with negativity is the most exciting thing I’ve heard in a long time.

More

On this story

• Lucy Kellaway Six little words and one very big question
• Lucy Kellaway Staying on through worlidays
• Lucy Kellaway Unrequited love and corporate idiocy
• Lucy Kellaway A need to please can get you into trouble
• Lucy Kellaway Path to happiness runs through the office

Unlike Mr Peters, I was born pessimistic. I expect a sudden downpour to spoil every summer party; I am confident that every initiative will end in failure; at least half the dresses in my wardrobe are grey. Were it not for the fact that I never celebrate anything in advance just in case it doesn’t happen, I would be dancing a jig at the idea that people like me are going to be rehabilitated.

I’ve dashed to look up the book Mr Peters recommends, which turns out to be written by Julie Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College. She spent 18 years doing careful research only to reach the sensible – if taboo – conclusion that it’s a good idea to think about all the things that might go wrong before embarking on something. Unfortunately she has limited her scope to people who are anxious, but it seems to me she has stumbled on a truth that applies universally.

Even more unfortunately, the publishers have sugarcoated the slightly subversive message with a brainlessly upbeat title: The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Use Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety & Perform at Your Peak. Still, Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day, and perhaps Prof Norem has now softened up the market for negativity sufficiently to prepare it for the book I’d like to write myself (if Mr Peters doesn’t get there first). I might call it: Pear-shaped: Why Things Always Go Wrong at Work, and How to Cope When They Do.

The trouble with optimists is that they don’t do well in a pear-shaped world. In prisoner of war camps in Vietnam, the people who died first were the positive thinkers: they fully expected to be back home by Christmas and fell to pieces when they weren’t. Admittedly, the world of business isn’t exactly like a prisoner of war camp, in that you can nip out for a latte and you can sleep in your own comfy bed at night. But it can be grim and relentless and one bad thing can happen after another and being always prepared for the worst seems to me the only wise course of action. Woody Allen put it best: “Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”

Even though a rehabilitation of pessimists is to be welcomed, there is little point pushing the point in self-help books. Optimists and pessimists were born that way; there is no change that can come from picking up a tip or two in a book, the only change comes through time – which tends to soften all extremes. I fancy I’m marginally less pessimistic than I was 30 years ago, having discovered that, once in a while, things can actually pass off rather well. Optimists eventually discover the reverse – and perhaps a drastic version of this is all that is happening with Tom Peters (who has also taken to tweeting cheesy quotes from Mother Teresa, which is never a good sign).

In any case, it is stupid to argue about which view of the world is best, when both views are clearly needed all of the time. Every organisation and every partnership should be carefully balanced to include both optimists and pessimists. A marriage also needs both – my own experience has taught me that it’s good to have an optimist to come up with endless wild schemes for picnics and outings and a pessimist to swash the maddest ones and temper the rest with paracetamol and umbrellas.

Businesses need both even more to have just the right mix of daring and caution. Diversity of optimists and pessimists is the most important sort there is and should be actively sought at board level and every level below. Corporate pessimists should be de-stigmatised and beckoned out of the closet. Above all, they should stop having to pretend to see the glass half full just to suit the fashion. They should be proud to declare that for them, it has been half empty all along.

Cook and Share A Pot of Curry on 21 Aug 2011

Tom Yam Curry by yours truly. This was a dish that I had prepared for my family dinner held on Singapore's National Day (9 Aug). Curry is a well-loved dish by most if not all Singaporeans and I sincerely hope that the new migrants to the little red dot will learn to adapt to our way of life.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=254441147918239

This is a Facebook Page created by a group of Singaporeans after a report came about that a mainland Chinese family (from China) told a local Indian Family not to eat curry and not to cook curry. The appointed mediator - a certain Madam Giam facilitated the case in such a way that : the Indian family could cook curry only when the mainland Chinese family is not at home. (mediation agreement).

So far, more than 60,000 around the world (mostly Singaporeans!) are joining in. Cook a pot of curry or buy a take-out from a restaurant (if you can't cook or too busy to do so). A meaningful event to spread the importance of interculural understanding between countries and also between the different races and nationalities within one country.

===

Excerpt from Facebook Page:

http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC110808-0000102/Number-of-neighbour-disputes-hit-high (this is the link)

and this is the clarification to the case:
http://app2.mlaw.gov.sg/Highlights/tabid/168/Default.aspx?ItemId=568

and 16th Aug 2011 (The Law Minister's clarification)
http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20110816-294757/2.html

How we feel
------------------------------
How could a appointed mediator facilitate the case in such a way that restricts the lifestyle and cooking norms of the Indian family? Or any other local family who practices a cultural lifestyle that we have all made our own? In this case, Curry has always been part of our culture since the 1800s. It can be anything else that you or I hold dear.

There is a native Malay proverb "Di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung" ("You should hold up the sky of the land where you live") - ie one should respect the country in which you choose to live in. ( ie blend/ assimilate/ understand/ tolerate / integrate into the community of your chosen choice)

What we wish for
-----------------------------
When the new immigrants arrive here, we wish for them to respect / embrace the cultural / lifestyle and linguistic norms of this nation. We wish for all new immigrants and citizens to understand and appreciate the various and diverse cultural aspects of the various ethnic-minority groups we have here.

This is Singapore and we are part of Malayan culture. Our hinterland previously was Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago. Our ancestors came, met and mingled and through an adventurous and open mindset, created something unique and beautiful... (thus our local culture as such- curries/ spices/ a vast melting pot of people and mixed heritages)

* A message to all new citizens: We sincerely hope you integrate into our local culture and make attempts to assimilate and embrace/ appreciate the various multi-ethnic cultures we had built up so painstakingly over the decades. Because at the same time, we are definitely open to taking the best that you have to offer, and to create new and beautiful Singaporean things.

*We Singaporeans are basically nice and tolerant people. We will accept you as new citizens and hope you blend in and integrate with us well.


Upset with CMC
-----------------------
We are mainly upset with the "Community Mediation Centre's" mediation action of actually facilitating such a mediation agreement. It is the inalienable right of the Indian family to cook curry at any time they wish to within the four walls of their home. (having said that, let us all- natives, new citizens or otherwise, embrace the multi-cultural aspects of our nation)

Every Singaporean should just cook a pot of curry and eat it (regardless of race / language / religion). We are Singaporeans and we LOVE our curries - be it chicken curry / fish curry / lamb curry / beef curry / beef rendang / lontong / mee siam/ laksa / Petai sambal belachan / ayam buah keluak etc

Thank You Very Much for supporting "Cook A Pot of Curry" Event!

- from the Admin Group

FT: My shallow affair with Twitter

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db87a0e2-a401-11e0-8b4f-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1VXkE736U

July 8, 2011 10:10 pm

My shallow affair with Twitter

By Harry Eyres

Tweets are the perfect mode of (pseudo) communication for the age of narcissism

Readers, I have to confess to a foolish dalliance. Perhaps it was her sheer youthfulness that seduced me. Surely it was not the fact that she couldn’t string more than two sentences together. Or was it just that I, a middle-aged man, wanted confirmation that I could still attract – followers?

If you asked me what induced me to sign up to Twitter, I would say it was a vague desire to connect, combined with a fair dose of feline curiosity. Like the proverbial cat, I should have been wiser: what was I to expect from a medium designed (by its founder Jack Dorsey) to deliver “short burst[s] of inconsequential information”, 40.55 per cent of whose content was found in a survey in August 2009 by Pear Analytics to consist of “pointless babble”. Now that I am no longer under its spell, Twitter seems to me one of the greatest time-wasters ever conceived.

Pear Analytics classified 37.55 per cent of tweets in its survey as “conversational” but there is quite a difference between having the vague characteristics of a conversation and consisting of a true conversation. A conversation requires that you know whom you are addressing; it is predicated on a certain courtesy. People who simply shout, scream or throw comments into the air are not conversing; they may well be mad.

The lack of a sense of address is the problem with many or most political tweets. I haven’t yet received any from Barack Obama, but some of the most leaden-footed on my Twitter page have emanated from the new British Labour leader Ed Miliband. Comedians rightly made fun of a message he sent out on the eve of the big union demonstration on March 26 against the cuts: “See some of you there”, it went, provoking unfavourable comparison with some of the more stirring rallying-cries in history (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends”, “We shall fight on the beaches” etc). Another recent Miliband tweet ran as follows: “I’m looking forward to setting out some important changes ahead for Labour in my speech to the national policy forum on Saturday.” If anyone can imagine a less appetising taster for anything, let me know.

Fleetingly I had a notion that Twitter might be a medium for poetry – in particular for the haiku. One distinguished musician I followed approached this level in some of his tweets – aperçus of delicate beauty. But I fear I am too selfish; if I wrote what I thought was a good haiku I would not post it on Twitter.

The other literary form to which a tweet might aspire is the aphorism. I was impressed that the author Alain de Botton bothered to post aphorisms on Twitter but disappointed by examples such as, “The world is hardly short of good ideas – the challenge is how to make them take hold and stick.” This seemed more of a truism than an aphorism. Good aphorisms have a quality that is both distilled and poignant, the ability to pierce through the veils of ordinary perception to a bitter truth. This example verged on the vapid, like so much else on Twitter. But then, if you coined a really good aphorism, surely you would put it in a book.

No doubt I was foolish to expect conversation, or poetry, or philosophy from Twitter. Apart from being an amplifying chamber for rumour and gossip, it is the perfect mode of (pseudo) communication for the age of narcissism. I read tweets from perfectly intelligent people that informed me that they still had a sniffly cold or were making their third cup of tea of the morning; one went something like this: “I.REALLY.MUST.GET.DOWN.TO.WORK.” A psychoanalyst might have something to say about that: a displacement of a displacement?

The fundamental thing about tweets is they are nearly always about “me”; in fact, many might as well read, “Me! Me! Me!” If they do not describe some irrelevant detail of everyday life, their aim, whether confessed or covert, tends to be self-promotion. They are the product of what historian Christopher Lasch called the “the new narcissist ... who doubts even the reality of his own existence.”

Twitter is not just a phoney form of conversation, it is a deceptive medium for discussion. Because of the limit on characters, tweets move towards closure, and this is where the aesthetics and the politics of Twitter combine in a sort of negative synergy. Haikus and aphorisms are tight, terse forms achieved under intense pressure; they justify their brevity because of their concentration, like a reduced sauce. But Tweets are just short; they give the impression of decisiveness without having said anything decisive. After “Me! Me! Me!” they say “I’m right”.

God help anyone who appealed to Twitter as a court of justice. Good arguments or exchanges need the long, slow haul, not the addictive jabber of Twitter. But, for all that, Twitter did perform one service for me, helping me to survive the recent royal wedding as I read irreverent tweets about the choice of music and the archbishop’s mad hair.

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: When words fail us all

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b2a412e2-c723-11e0-a9ef-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1VXjX6lRZ

August 19, 2011 10:10 pm

When words fail us all

By Harry Eyres

If the riots in English cities both invited and defied commentary, that was surely because they seemed so inarticulate

Response: Riot police in front of a burning building in Croydon, south London, on August 8

If the riots in English cities, including my home city of London, both invited and defied commentary, that was surely because they seemed so inarticulate. The BBC began by calling these outbreaks “protests” but withdrew this description when, after the original non-violent demonstration about the shooting of Mark Duggan, what appeared to be taking place was more or less random acts of destruction, arson and looting. Those arrested were shame-faced and silent rather than defiant and vocal. People on the streets heckling politicians or being interviewed by journalists did have things to say but their remarks, however suggestive, did not really amount to reasons for action.

So these were not protests in any articulate sense – in the sense, that is, of having a defined target or grievance at their core. They were different from the only other riots in London that I can remember, the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985 and the poll tax riot of 1990; the former arising out of long-standing tensions between the black community and the police, as the subsequent Scarman report confirmed, and the latter arising out of a demonstration against a levy very widely seen as unfair. They were also different from the essentially non-violent protests of the Spanish indignados, people with defined grievances, especially concerning unemployment, able at least to articulate their own mood. They were certainly different from the protests in Tahrir Square, marked by bravery and eloquence.

An inarticulate protest is both easier and more difficult to respond to. You can respond with punitive authoritarianism, on the grounds that if those responsible for violence cannot come up with reasons for their actions, then they have no reasons and should be sent to prison – an experience which, no doubt, will create a whole new set of reasons. That is the way of repression, at both a social and an individual, psychological level. In the second of his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud develops a suggestive analogy to explain the nature of repression; a noisy heckler at his lecture, “whose ill-mannered laughter, chattering and shuffling with his feet are distracting my attention”, is manhandled out of the room by three or four strongmen, who barricade the door. But that may well not be the end of the story; perhaps the expelled individual, “who has become embittered and reckless, will cause us further trouble”.

Repressing inarticulate protest may well cause further trouble. I think the first thing to do is to look at the thing which defines these protests – inarticulateness itself. You can view these events as a peculiarly English tragedy of inarticulateness. Being inarticulate means being unable to express yourself clearly, fluently or intelligibly. My dictionary gives as a suggestive example the phrase “inarticulate suffering”. Inarticulate suffering is no less real than articulate suffering; in fact it may be even more painful, because giving expression to suffering tends to alleviate it.

You can view these events as a peculiarly English tragedy of inarticulateness

A week or two before the riots, I was listening to an astonishing feature on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the language deprivation of many young British children. According to the British government’s “poverty tsar” Frank Field, some children arriving for their first day at school do not know their own names. The government’s communication champion for children, Jean Gross, quoted a young mother talking about her small child: “He don’t [sic] speak to me, so I don’t speak to him.” The point made by a Manchester head teacher, Neil Wilson, was that many parents are no longer speaking to their children, beyond the most basic level, so it is no wonder that the children have difficulty learning to speak, or developing a satisfyingly rich vocabulary. Here is the tragedy of inarticulateness in its starkest form.

It is something you can see being passed on from generation to generation and, though there may be biological bases for some cases of language impairment, it is obviously at least partly associated with social deprivation. I doubt there are many instances of middle-class mothers not speaking to their toddlers.

Widespread civil disorder, as opposed to essentially peaceful protest, has occurred very rarely in Britain in the 20th century. In my lifetime it has happened only under very specific circumstances, when austerity programmes were being pushed through in the teeth of recession, or when there was a general sense of manifest inequity. To attribute it to “criminality, pure and simple”, as the British prime minister and others have done, is to commit the language crime of tautology. Of course criminality is criminality. But that gets you no closer to understanding anything.

Here the ruling classes seem as inarticulate as the so-called rioting underclass. Perhaps we should not be surprised, since in England (not in Scotland, Ireland or Wales) there is an inarticulateness of the upper classes, the mumbling, stumbling inability to perceive what is staring you in the face.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Sweet nothing

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/27439c18-bf7b-11e0-90d5-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1V1JyiqqL

August 12, 2011 10:08 pm

Sweet nothing

By Harry Eyres

We tend to avoid that awkward pause or gap and fill it with something, but the idea that anything is better is dubious

I don’t know whether this has to do with advancing age but, increasingly, I catch myself doing absolutely nothing, especially on Tube journeys. I resist the tawdry allure of free newspapers; I even leave the London Review of Books and my battered old Loeb edition of Horace’s Odes in different pockets of my old leather shoulder bag. Of course, I might be reading a coruscating political essay or a piercing fragment of lyric poetry but it all seems too much of an effort – to add to the effort of maintaining composure while being carted around with too many others in a tunnel dug 60ft into London’s clay.

Philosophically, you could call this an embrace of nothingness or what the Spanish call la nada and the French (and Jean-Paul Sartre in particular) call le néant. Nada sounds particularly emphatic in Spanish. I remember, from when I lived in Spain, quite a lot of conversations ending with the formula, “Pues, nada”, and being rather puzzled by it. “Well, then, nothing,” sounds more than odd in English: it might sound defiant, rude or nihilistic; probably not something you would say in polite society.

But my Spanish interlocutors were not being rude or defiant; they were simply acknowledging that there was no more to say at that moment. The Spanish seem rather to like the word nada (think of the phrase “de nada”, meaning “you’re welcome”); not to be embarrassed or ashamed of it. When the young Carmen Laforet came to write the defining postwar Spanish existentialist novel (the equivalent of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse), she could only choose one title: Nada.

But I suppose most of us, in the Anglo-Saxon world, certainly in England, are afraid of nothingness, la nada, le néant. We tend to fill it with something, anything. Many of my mother’s generation were schooled in a conversational manner that avoided nothingness, the awkward pause or gap, at all costs. When I taught American students in London, I realised that they took a dim view of any moment of silence in class; what I regarded as a pause for thought, they considered an embarrassing failure of fluency.

In Tube trains the fear of nothingness may be especially acute – who wants to spend time thinking about the fact that they are in a lightless place deep underground, at the mercy of power lines, computers, train drivers, track maintenance people, transport police? Much better to stuff your face with Pret A Manger sandwiches (quite good actually) and your mind with the not-especially nutritious offerings of free newspapers Metro and City AM.

Why do I go to such lengths to avoid something as undemanding as sitting in a chair for half an hour?

But the idea that anything is better than nothing is, to say the least, dubious. By the time you have reached the outskirts of middle age, you have surely had quite a few experiences of “anythings” that were, on balance, worse than nothing: films or plays you would rather not have seen (so often when I was a drama critic I wished I was out of the theatre, on my own, in a pub, with a pint), holidays that would have been better spent at home, unfortunate entanglements. In his great sonnet “A Une Passante” (“To a Passerby”), Baudelaire records an exchange of glances on a Paris street with a statuesque, mourning beauty: a love that might have been, an impossible possible, a love that might have killed him.

Doing nothing, or not doing anything, is, of course, only part of the approach to nothingness. As I sit in the Tube carriage not reading, not texting or tapping, I am, of course, thinking, though that is perhaps too grand a word. My mind is certainly full of stuff. Embarrassingly, I may be reliving some rally from the previous evening’s game at the tennis club: that sweet little lob, the backhand pass that might have been.

This kind of daydreaming, however enjoyable, is hardly what a Buddhist or an existentialist would call a true embrace of nothingness. All the things we do, all that self-important busyness with computers and so on, may be partly or largely a distraction from the even more preoccupying stuff whirling around in our heads, the memories, desires, regrets, recriminations, awareness of mortality and so on. To stop doing the obvious, visible activities only makes us more prey to the invisible workings of the mind.

That is why meditation is so damned hard, or why I go to such lengths to avoid something as apparently undemanding as sitting in a chair for half an hour.

For an existentialist such as Heidegger, meditation, or the moment when you stop running away from yourself, puts you in touch with angst, the anxiety that throws human beings back upon their “authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world”.

That sounds both terrifying and exciting. Mindfulness of breathing, the basic meditation practice that I don’t practise nearly often enough, on the other hand, can bring me in touch with something simpler and calmer: the sheer joy of inhaling and exhaling what Philip Larkin called “the deep blue air, that shows/ Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless”.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: E-mail contract is not worth the kilobytes

E-mail contract is not worth the kilobytes

By Lucy Kellway

Published: June 5 2011 20:47 | Last updated: June 5 2011 20:47

This column may be illegal. In writing it, I am inviting Philips, the Dutch electronics company, to sue me – and I’m rather hoping it will. Then I would be the first person in history taken to court for disobeying the most annoying and most pointless legal paragraph ever drafted.

The contract I’m about to break is the one that sits at the bottom of almost every business e-mail. In simple terms, it says that if the e-mail isn’t addressed to you, you must delete it at once, notify the sender and not tell a soul. I’m not the first to ignore such a command, indeed it is flouted hundreds of thousands of times every hour – almost every time that anyone forwards anything at work.

The other day I received a message that was most definitely not intended for me, but was passed on by a reader who thought I might like it. It was written by Frans van Houten, the new chief executive of Philips and sent to all his 100,000 employees to tell them about a management initiative.

“We agreed a new set of values ... as they are better suited to unlock our full potential in a fast moving world,” he said. He explained that these new values “would replace the 4 D’s” – which turn out to be such dismal, dull, derivative and depressing things as “Delight customers” and “Develop people”.

He quoted Gandhi (who surely would never have uttered the words “Be the Change”, had he known just how many scores of dodgy management initiatives would be launched on the strength of them). He finished by inviting underlings to go with him on a “journey” named Accelerate! “We have asked the 200 leaders ... to own and drive Accelerate! ... Please join me and Accelerate! to win together.”

Immediately below this stirring sign-off came the normal disclaimer. It said the message was confidential, and “intended solely for the addressee(s). If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, forwarding, dissemination, or reproduction of this message is strictly prohibited ... please contact the sender by return e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message.”

Rather than do as instructed, I have decided to follow the common law of the internet. This decrees that whenever you get a crass message, you must forward it to everyone in your address book, or post it on your blog, or, if you are fortunate to have such a thing, write about it in your newspaper column.

In so doing, I am at least notifying the sender, though maybe not in the way his disclaimer intended. My justification for passing the e-mail on is that the world needs to know when public companies are indulging in flabby management nonsense. I think it’s fair to bet that Accelerate! – despite the additional oomph that comes from the exclamation point – is not going to “unlock full potential” in any world, fast-moving or not.

Of course, Philips could now see me in court. If it does, I don’t think it’s going to win. I’ve consulted some experts who assure me that in European law it’s pretty much impossible to foist this sort of contract on someone unilaterally. Legal disclaimers on e-mails are not only unenforced but unenforceable – making one wonder why they are so popular. The only plausible explanation is that companies use them simply because others do; no one dares be odd one out.

Last week I got a short e-mail from someone who works at the French bank BNP Paribas with a long disclaimer that made the Philips one look restrained.

It started off by doing some legal defining of terms, explaining that message will hitherto be denoted by “message”. Having done this in English, it went on to do it in French as well.

Finally, after a whole series of heavy warnings given in both languages, it bossily instructs the recipients: “Please consider the environment before printing.”

This is a damned cheek. Anyone who elects to print out this e-mail (a decision is surely up to the recipient, not to the sender) is thus forced to waste a lot of additional ink and paper as these paragraphs are automatically and needlessly reproduced in hard copy.

I’m happy to report that e-mails sent from the FT system are neither bossy nor threatening, and come in just one language. Every e-mail finishes thus: “This e-mail was sent by a company owned by Pearson plc ... Registered in England and Wales with company number 53723”.

This is good for being brief, though less good for containing a numerical fact that I bet no one who has ever received an e-mail from me has ever found even slightly diverting. There is a way of making this automatic sign-off better and briefer still: do without it altogether.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: The long and the short of coffee

The long and the short of coffee

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 21 2011 00:05 | Last updated: May 21 2011 00:05

On a recent trip to Italy I heard a man order an espresso “un po’ lungo” (a little bit long). I was expecting he would receive the Italian version of a caffè Americano; a strongish coffee but served in a decent-sized cup and long enough to provide a few minutes of meditative sipping. Not a bit of it: when the coffee arrived, it was to my eyes indistinguishable from a normal espresso or even what in London coffee houses is called a ristretto (not a term I have ever heard anyone use in Italy). In other words, it consisted of about a teaspoon and a half of incredibly strong black coffee, concentrated to the point of viscousness, topped with that tawny foam that is the good espresso’s equivalent of the creamy head on a pint of Guinness.

Perhaps it took him 45, rather than 30 seconds, to knock it back. That, for him, was un po’ lungo.

Back in London, I attended the opening of the Southbank Centre’s 60th anniversary celebrations of the Festival of Britain (on which more later). Trying to wake myself up, I had one cup of so-called coffee and then another. Each contained at least five times the liquid volume of the espresso un po’ lungo but nothing of that beverage’s intensity, flavour or drama. Eventually, arriving back home, I had to make myself a proper cup. By this time I had had far too much coffee, yet not enough.

All this prompted wider-ranging reflections on length and shortness, not just as they affect coffee. Although many chains of coffee bars in the UK and in the US claim to be Italian either in origin or inspiration – Caffè Nero promises “the best espresso this side of Milan” – in fact, the coffee experience and philosophy they offer is a pale shadow of the Italian one. The fact is that English and American people, on the whole, cannot and do not want to drink coffee in the way Italians do. For Italians, coffee is something very short, very intense and done standing up – a sort of gastronomic knee-trembler. Even an Italian cappuccino is not much longer than an espresso – it is beautiful, served in a small cup, and designed to be dispatched swiftly. Hardly anyone sits down at a table to drink one; not least because they know they will be charged three times as much.

The success of Starbucks is based on an entirely opposing philosophy. Everything is predicated on size. Even the smallest Starbucks coffee is called “Tall”, and if it consisted of coffee as Italians understand it, it would be enough to send three human beings into orbit. Thank goodness it consists mostly of water, or some watery perversion of milk.

Many Starbucks customers like to sit on their own, often with a computer, less frequently, alas, with a book or notebook, slowly sipping their hot coffee-based beverage while dealing with e-mails. Italians, on the other hand, intensely social creatures, nearly always drink their coffees in company, conversing with someone, a friend, colleague or the barista (who is never called a barista).

Length as opposed to intensity, volume rather than flavour: here we have not just two ways of making coffee but two philosophies of life. Is it better to draw something out as long as possible, or, as the poet Andrew Marvell put it in another, erotic, context, to “roll all [its] strength and all [its] sweetness up into one ball” so that we can “tear our pleasures ... thorough the iron gates of life”?

While these reflections on the length of a cup of coffee were unfolding, I was reading and listening to the news from government statisticians that one in four of today’s under-16s “can expect to live to be 100 years old”. Apart from the fact that extreme longevity sounds like something to appeal more to the Starbucks habitué than the espresso drinker, I wondered about both the claim and the use of “expect” and “expectancy”, which have become normal parlance in discussions of lifespan.

The fact that, statistically, the mean of lifespan is 80 or 82 or 102 does not mean that any individual can expect to live that long, in the way that a Starbucks customer can expect to receive a cup with 12 or 20 fluid ounces of coffee. For a single individual, for all sorts of obvious reasons, there is absolutely no way of knowing how long he or she will live.

Presumably, “life expectancy” depends to some extent on how one chooses to live one’s life. Someone as brave as Tim Hetherington, the photojournalist and documentary-maker killed recently in Misrata in Libya, was less likely to comb grey hair than an employee of the Inland Revenue living in suburbia. But then, as the great cartoon by HM Bateman shows, and as Italian coffee drinkers instinctively know, the roof can fall on the head of the most cautious and risk-averse of human mice.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Must I remember my kids' ages just to log on?

This is oh so familiar.... having to remember multiple passwords :P

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Must I remember my kids’ ages just to log on?

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 8 2011 17:00 | Last updated: May 8 2011 17:00

Returning to the office last Tuesday after a long weekend, I couldn’t start work as I’d forgotten my computer password. Perhaps it was the combined excitement of a spectacular wedding followed by a spectacular death, but my brain was no longer able to retrieve a simple sequence of seven characters.

In the early days of computers I never forgot my password. But that’s because the top secret word I’d chosen was “Kellaway”, which I found could be effortlessly recalled even in the most fraught moments. Things only started to go awry when the computer security experts told me this password would no longer do. Reluctantly, I went for something a bit more elaborate and, to make sure I didn’t forget it, I wrote the word on a Post-it note and stuck it to my screen.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: Dull monikers - May-01

Lucy Kellaway: Drivel is in the detail on pay - Apr-17

Lucy Kellaway: You might be a genius, but I won’t tell you - Apr-10

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’ - Mar-27

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

But now Post-it notes are frowned on and the computer insists that my new password must contain a confusing mixture of cases, numbers and squiggles and be endlessly changed. To help me cope, I have devised a system: I rotate people in my family, with capital letters, punctuation and ages. Yet, as I found on Tuesday, this system is not foolproof. I daresay it is simple enough for any hacker to crack in a nanosecond, but it is complicated enough to foil me. I can’t remember which family member’s turn it is, whether it’s a full-stop or a comma, or how old they are.

It would be bad enough if there was just one password to remember. But I have passwords for my bank, e-mail, Amazon and for everything else I’ve ever bought online. Most of these are variations on a theme, some longer than others, but which is which?

I take some comfort from the fact that my remedial performance is better than that of some. A recent study of 23m passwords showed that by far the most popular password is still 123456. Of words, “Password” is in first place, followed by “Iloveyou” and then – bafflingly – by “princess” and “rockyou”.

There is a new App that will shortly be available on iPhones offering a series of pictures to help us remember random passwords, but it looks a bit complicated to me. Instead, I can think of a simpler mnemonic based on the only thing I can ever remember perfectly – Beatles’ lyrics. Thus a splendid password could be H!Ins, H!Nja – (“Help! I need somebody, Help! Not just anybody”). But there are two problems with this. First, I’m not sure I have the punctuation right, and, according to a recent academic study, mnemonic passwords may be no more difficult to hack than your kid’s names.

Many sites try to make things more secure by asking supposedly memorable questions. But I find the answers to these tend not to be memorable at all. Indeed, I often have to invent answers and then write them in my diary so that I don’t forget them. Which zip code were you born in? Er, no idea. What was your father’s middle name? He didn’t have one.

Even worse are the websites that think preferences are more secure than facts. Whenever I want to check how much money I have in my account, my bank asks me: What is your favourite food? As I don’t really have a favourite food, I found myself writing: Maltesers, but this didn’t feel quite right. Worse still is being asked to name your best friend. Like most adults I’ve advanced beyond the stage of having one. So do I write down my best friend from primary school? And should I still write her down even though we’ve had a bit of a falling out?

In the end, however obscure your password, we now know that it isn’t safe. Whoever hacked into the PlayStation network last month now has access to 100m passwords, and even though these are apparently “hashed” – ie scrambled – with a bit of further hacking they can presumably be unhashed. And given that most of the users probably use the same passwords for everything, the hackers could well have a high old time dipping into bank accounts and spending other people’s money online.

The few real techies I know have tried to protect themselves by buying software that generates an endless stream of random passwords and remembers the lot of them. There is a problem with this, too. You have to remember a master password to get into the system.

In the end, I can’t help wondering why it’s all so complicated. In order to do the most sensitive thing of all – get my hands on my own cash – all I need is a plastic card and a simple PIN code of four numbers. I don’t need to know my favourite food or remember how old my children are. Why is it that we still can’t do the same thing on a computer?

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

ST: Pen pals for life

This article resonates with me :D

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Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Reflect > Story

Apr 24, 2011

Pen pals for life

Every now and then, I must go to stationery shops to buy pens - the unsung heroes in this digital age

By Ignatius Low

-- ST ILLUSTRATIONS: ADAM LEE

 

Last week, I went to the bookstore Kinokuniya at lunchtime, but it was not to buy a book or to browse magazines.

Once in a while, I get this urge that I cannot control. I simply have to go to a stationery store and buy pens.

It's been a guilty habit of mine since I was a child. And over the decades, I have found that this pleasurable and borderline fetishist experience hasn't changed much.

This is why I am dedicating this column to the unsung Japanese corporate heroes of my life that have too long been under- appreciated.

In this digital age, who even bothers to remember the difference between trusty old Pilot, its marginally flashier cousin Zebra and unfortunately named Uni-ball?

Yet they soldier on and produce a mind-boggling array of products that greet you at stores.

In fact, every time I go to the pen department of a stationery store, I find that a few more intriguing sub-species of a particular genus of pen have emerged.

If I'm lucky, a new technological breakthrough in ink or gel has led to the formation of a new genus or family altogether.

It's all for the advancement of the whole order, I think to myself, as I happily attack the shiny plastic army before me.

I inevitably start with Pilot pens because they hold, for me, many bittersweet memories of my time in school when I used their trendy Hi-Tecpoint V5 liquid ink pens by the carton.

I started with pens such as the Papermate Kilometrico (ugh!) in primary school but soon realised that while they cost less than a dollar, these pens were tough on a writer like me.

I tend to press down so hard on the paper I leave an imprint several sheets in, so both skinny pens and ballpoint pens make my fingers ache. Besides, they were ruining my wonderful handwriting.

So the first time I tried a Pilot Hi-tecpoint V5, it was like my entire inner being had suddenly become unclogged.

Never mind that my hard-writing style bent and even broke the nibs, the words came out smooth and beautiful. I felt I could write forever with the thing, until of course the ink in the super cool transparent window ran out.

It got to a point where I became convinced that my grades would actually suffer if I went into the exam halls with the wrong type of pen.

Since then, it's been an unstoppable habit - from V5 to V-Ball Grip, G2-EX to the signature Signature Pen. In the 1990s, I became a fan of the Mitsubishi-owned Uni-ball, going through countless versions of the Signo before arriving at the sublime Vision Elite.

I hover, as I always do, for a good half hour at Kinokuniya, trying out all of these instruments, as if on a voyage through history.

I used to wonder what I should write when I test a pen on the 'testing paper' the stores tape to the glass shelves.

I used to sign my name, until I realised one day that this - or my handwriting - would give me away too easily as the class pen nerd. Now I just do 'waves'.

I try the Zebras again (confirming that I don't like them for some irrational reason) and glance very, very discreetly at the Pentels with their girly J-pop colours. When no one is looking, I've been known to bust a couple of pink ones out and write 'Takeshi Forever!'.

Finally, I bought three Uni-ball Jetstream rollerball pens that pumped out a unique shade of dark blue on a lovely 0.4mm writing line. It's smooth as butter with rubber grips to die for and has the oh-so-perfect 'new sensation air suspension click'.

Appetite sated, I ended my ritual by sitting alone in a cafe afterwards and spending 10 minutes carefully peeling away the price tags, so as not to mar their stylish blue-grey plastic bodies.

My friends and colleagues have often asked me why I don't just save myself the trouble and buy a 'proper' pen, such as a Parker, Sheaffer or even a Mont Blanc.

If you're successful, your pen should say it, they argue.

Besides, a nice pen can also impart a sense of occasion. You use it to sign your name on important documents, said one friend, slightly scandalised that I signed the papers to buy my house with a $2 pen.

I don't know. There have been brief flirtations with [ixi:z] pens (a 'must have' for all cool kids in the 1980s) and some Lamy pens by design gurus such as Konstantin Grcic, but I have not really found reason over the years to spend more than $5 on a writing instrument.

Perhaps it is because in my profession, pens are utilitarian objects that we tend to chuck around and often misplace.

Maybe I have, like many others, come to mentally associate designer pens (especially Mont Blanc) with pushy sales people and insurance agents in their matching suits.

But I think I have resisted it mostly because I love the sacred ritual of pen buying too much.

I've studiously avoided stationery shops in Tokyo for this very reason - afraid I will get sucked into a vortex of pen-testing delight, never to return.

The sad thing is that although writing pens have more or less survived the IT wave for decades, I sense they are now starting to lose the battle with technology.

The inks are now water-resistant, quick-drying, eraseable and even eco-friendly, and there are state-of-the-art ink flow systems even for simple ballpoint pens - but these innovations are low-tech compared to the writing technologies in computers and tablet PCs today.

More and more schools are ditching paper altogether and migrating their lesson materials and student assignments entirely onto standard-issue notebooks and iPads.

In offices all around the world, there is hardly any need to physically write anything on paper. Applications and proposals are put up and approved all electronically.

Even journalists are discarding their pens and notebooks in favour of digital recording devices and transcribing interviews directly into computer files.

These days, the urge to go and buy pens at the store usually coincides with some special assignment.

Last week's outing, for example, was inspired by my being asked to judge some essays for a competition. (I resisted the temptation, this time, to buy a red pen.)

I write these words not to urge people to bring the practice of physical writing back, but to pay tribute to an underrated joy that it brought.

The world must of course move on, but it was great while it lasted.

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NY Times: In a Data-Heavy Society, Being Defined by the numbers

 

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April 22, 2011

In a Data-Heavy Society, Being Defined by the Numbers

By ALINA TUGEND

I HAVE a confession to make. I started using Twitter about six months ago and eagerly watched my “followers” rise — 20 to 30 to 40. I made it to 60 and suddenly plateaued — a few would follow and then (heartbreak) “unfollow.”

At one point, I signed up my sons, who didn’t even use Twitter, to follow me. While part of me was laughing at myself — how senseless was this? — I also took some pleasure in seeing my numbers rise.

Numbers and rankings are everywhere. And I’m not just talking about Twitter followers and Facebook friends. In the journalism world, there’s how many people “like” an article or blog. How many retweeted or e-mailed it? I’ll know, for example, if this column made the “most e-mailed” of the business section. Or of the entire paper. And however briefly, it will matter to me.

Offline, too, we are turning more and more to numbers and rankings. We use standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and students. The polling companies have already begun to tell us who’s up and who’s down in the 2012 presidential election. Companies have credit ratings. We have credit scores.

And although most people acknowledge that there are a million different ways to judge colleges and universities, the annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report of institutions of higher education have gained almost biblical importance.

“Numbers make intangibles tangible,” said Jonah Lehrer, a journalist and author of “How We Decide,” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). “They give the illusion of control.”

Too many people shopping for cars, for example, get fixated on how much horsepower the engine has, even though in most cases it really doesn’t matter, Mr. Lehrer said.

“We want to quantify everything,” he went on, “to ground a decision in fact, instead of asking whether that variable matters.”

Even before we could measure — and flaunt — numbers online, some had long been a reference point. Consider the many years that fans have meticulously followed baseball statistics.

And we often do need to find ways to measure and evaluate people and products in as objective a way as possible.

The trouble, though, is when we mindlessly and blindly rely on those numbers to tell us everything, said Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies of science and technology and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Initiative on Technology and Self.

Numbers become not just part of the way we judge and assess, but the only way.

“One of the fantasies of numerical ranking is that you know how you got there,” said Professor Turkle, who is the author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” (Basic Books, 2011). “But the problem is if the numbers are arrived at in an irrational way, or black-boxed, so we don’t understand how we got there, then what use are they?”

My colleague Michael Winerip recently wrote an article about an excellent and exceptionally dedicated middle-school teacher, with terrific performance evaluations. But a formula used by the New York Department of Education put the teacher in the seventh percentile of her teaching peers.

That formula used 32 variables plugged into a statistical model that “appears transparent, but is clear as mud,” Mr. Winerip wrote.

And even if we understand the numbers — something as apparently clear-cut as how many books an author sells — they aren’t always helpful.

Robin Black, author of the short story collection, “If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This,” (Random House, 2010) wrote a blog post on how fretting about the different ways to measure her book’s success has overshadowed why she wrote it in the first place.

“I go to a place where everything has a number,” Ms. Black told me. “How many advance copies, how many reviews, how many sales.”

Amazon recently made it possible for authors to check how many books they’ve sold and, using interactive maps, it even zeroes in on how many sales occurred in which cities.

“Twenty years ago, maybe every Sunday you looked at The New York Times best-seller list,” she said. “Now you can torture yourself 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It becomes an exercise in scab-picking.”

And those black-and-white statistics, while arguably irrefutable in one way, really tell us almost nothing. Amazon’s rankings of book sales, for instance — which anyone can view — can vary wildly based on the sale of very few books.

All those numbers help us lose sight of why we’re really doing what we’re doing. Ms. Black, for instance, said her books were largely about loss.

“I’ll get a letter from someone who says, ‘My daughter died, and reading your book really helped,’ ” Ms. Black said. “That’s so meaningful. How do I measure that against 500 Twitter followers?”

Eric Frankel is founder of a company called 10 Minutes to Change, which works on human resources strategies and talent management, which means figuring out how to improve workers’ performance.

He’s also a certified public accountant, so he knows the importance of numbers. But, he said: “Just because we have the skills and ability to put metrics on everything doesn’t mean we should. People are ever-changing, fascinating and incredibly frustrating.”

Metrics to evaluate employee potential, teamwork and salesmanship can’t and shouldn’t replace hands-on interpersonal skills and instinct, Mr. Frankel said. Even professional baseball scouts, who have access to every conceivable statistic, know true worth is “steeped in the intangibles garnered by close observation, team orientation, makeup, work habits, leadership skills and professional presence,” he said.

This reliance and overweening trust in numbers is to some extent generational, said Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“For almost anybody in the United States under the age of 25, the only models are quantifiable rankings,” he said.

So when students are researching a paper, how do they decide where to turn for the greatest expertise? Often, he said, by looking at what articles or papers online have the most hits.

“Let’s take Britannica versus Wikipedia,” said Professor Gardner, who is the author of “Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed” (Basic Books, 2011). “Should it be that whatever has the most hits or the most editors makes it better than someone who spent his life studying Kant?”

The obsession with numbers, he said, means we don’t trust or even look for the intangibles that can’t be measured, like wisdom, judgment and expertise.

We also lose a sense of ourselves as anything but a number and a rank, and start feeling bad if our numbers don’t measure up to others.

Mr. Lehrer, in a blog post titled Online Status Anxiety on his Web site, wrote, “What I’m most troubled by is the desire of individuals (especially myself) to constantly check up on these numbers, and to accept these measurements as a measure of something meaningful.”

He went on, “That’s why I wish there was a popular social platform that didn’t measure anything. I doubt such a platform will ever exist — we clearly want the explicit hierarchies, even when they drive us crazy — but it sure would be a relief.”

By the way, 320 people “liked” that blog post.

The most frustrating thing for those of us who have a tendency to obsess over rankings is that we know we can simply refuse to keep checking. And if we must see how our blog or book or number of online friends measure up, we can also remind ourselves that those statistics have only as much importance as we’re willing to invest in them.

Or as Ms. Black put it: “I have to stop worrying about numbers. I have to reclaim the ambiguous part of my own intelligence.”

E-mail: [email protected]

FT: You might be a total genius, but I wouldn't tell you so

You might be a total genius, but I wouldn’t tell you so

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: April 10 2011 17:19 | Last updated: April 10 2011 17:19

Last week, when a woman in our travel department booked me a flight, I sent her an e-mail: “That’s absolutely marvellous – thanks so much.”

In congratulating her so warmly for doing her job, I thought I was being charming and gracious, but now I see I was actually doing something rather darker. Not only was I debasing the language, but was pushing a drug that turns people into demotivated, infantile, praise-dependent junkies.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’ - Mar-27

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

Lucy Kellaway: Pen and paper are a forgotten management tool - Mar-06

Lucy Kellaway: Female quotas would target the wrong women - Feb-27

Lucy Kellaway: Talk like a loser and you might win - Feb-13

This rethink was brought on by a discussion with a columnist friend who has just gone to work for a rival newspaper.

He told me that his first column was declared by his new editor to be “utterly brilliant”. The second was deemed “a simply extraordinary piece of writing”. And when he filed the third, he got an e-mail back before the editor had even had time to read it saying: “Got it – you’re a total genius.”

When I said that this sounded rather nice, he gave me a scornful look. It made him think his editor stupid, which made him feel stupid by extension. To be considered a total genius for merely delivering his column on time was degrading all round.

My friend may not, in fact, be a total genius but is definitely a total weirdo – at least by comparison to me. I am exceedingly fond of being called a genius; even though I prefer to have genius status granted for big things, I’m prepared to accept it for any achievement at all, even for pressing send on my computer.

In fact there is no amount of praise that sets my teeth on edge. Mine is a debased condition, but is at least perfectly normal. There was a study done recently by a woman at the University of California, Berkeley, who found that you can go on and on laying on the flattery and it goes on working. There is no level when people say: stop, now you’ve gone too far.

This means we all go too far all the time. In the US, people have been over-egging praise for generations. But now in Britain, proud traditions of cynicism and understatement have been cast aside. The most banal observation counts as an “insight”, while anything that vaguely makes sense is said to have “compelling logic”. In the UK, all workers are called “talent” no matter how profoundly untalented they actually are, and even this is not enough. At KPMG, every member of staff is a genius. “We have 138,000 outstanding professionals,” it says on its website, an exaggeration so gross that I would think twice before allowing KPMG anywhere near my audit.

The result of such inflationary pressure is that language has ceased to be a store of meaning. One evening last week I was judging some awards for business TV programmes and one of my fellow judges described his favourite entry as “moderately interesting”. At the time I was faintly disgusted by his lack of enthusiasm, but now I see he was quite right: most business TV is pretty feeble and so to be moderately interesting is pretty high praise.

The same day, I’d observed an editor in my own office tying himself in knots trying to describe an article that he genuinely admired. “What can I say?” he asked, paused, and then went on: “To edit copy like this . . . is . . . a privilege.”

Congratulation inflation not only damages language, it is bad for us psychologically. Praise is a Class A drug and we crave more and get upset when we don’t get any in sufficiently pure form.

When I was told recently by someone that they had “liked” my column I felt downcast. Liked? I thought, reaching what seemed to me the inevitable conclusion that they therefore hated it.

The most worrying thing about over-egged praise is that it makes us less good at our jobs. Not because it makes us complacent, but because it makes us neurotic.

There was a fascinating experiment done a decade ago at Columbia University, comparing 10-year-olds who were praised for being clever to those who were praised for diligence. The first group got distressed and demotivated when faced with any task that they couldn’t do easily. The second met failure with composure: they simply worked harder to succeed next time.

As most workers are similar to 10-year-olds, praise at work should be doled out in the same way – never for inspiration, always for perspiration. Fortunately, according to this distinction, I deserve some praise for filing this column. The wireless router at home is on the blink, and so getting online has required many hours of extreme aggravation on the phone to Virgin, and then calling a neighbour to use their wireless network. Thus, by dint of successfully having pressed send, I am a total genius, after all.

[email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

WSJ: Two Tsunamis - Japan's Tragedy Contrasts with '04

ASIA NEWS
MARCH 30, 2011

Reporter's Journal

Two Tsunamis

Japan's Tragedy Contrasts With '04

By ERIC BELLMAN

SENDAI, Japan—Yoshi Kameya wouldn't be out of place in any of the Western world's cozy city suburbs. Standing near the rubble that used to be his frozen-food company, he pulled an iPhone out of his bright blue North Face jacket to flip through photos he had taken of the tsunami damage.

The confident, cosmopolitan 43-year-old said he had enough food. But when a seaweed-wrapped rice ball was offered, his hand snatched it before his mouth could say thank you.

Mr. Kameya's hungry hand reflected one of the many unsettling aspects of Japan's tragedy. The disaster has thrown one of the world's wealthiest countries off its axis, leaving once-affluent victims in desperation, while underscoring how even the best-prepared places aren't immune from disaster. The developed-world technologies residents fill their homes and pockets with weren't much help, either.

The 2004 tsunami, which this reporter covered for The Wall Street Journal, was different. In terms of lives lost, it was far, far worse: 200,000 people dead across Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other countries, compared with 11,000 confirmed dead and more than 16,500 missing.

But in other ways, that disaster was easier to comprehend. The scale of visible damage was actually smaller in many areas, and the relative lack of dependence on technologies such as mobile phones, cars and complex supply chains sometimes proved to be an advantage for those who survived.

In Sri Lanka, a line of beachfront resorts and fishing villages was flattened. However, since the communities were smaller and poorer, damage was often limited to simple settlements hugging the seashore, and were easier to rebuild. In Japan, piles of rubble including cars and homes stretch for miles inland. While this is partly because the deadly waves had traveled hundreds of miles before they hit Sri Lanka, it was also because most victims there didn't have cars, televisions, two-story homes, kitchen tables or the closets full of clothes.

The cost of damage from Japan's tsunami may be as high as $300 billion, economists estimate. The Indian Ocean wave caused about $10 billion in damage.

In Koggala, Sri Lanka, then-24-year-old Rosmand Wickramanayake had to bury his father, mother, sister and brother in the sand after the deadly waves came and went. A year later, life for his remaining family, which includes another brother, an uncle and others, had basically returned to normal.

The few thousand dollars they got from the government was enough to rebuild a one-car-garage-size hut, and restart a small shop. It's impossible to gauge how the family was doing emotionally, but economically their simple lives had been relatively simple to fix.

Survivors like Mr. Wickramanayake also didn't have to worry too much about food after an initial emergency period passed. He was usually only one or two middlemen away from suppliers of his basic necessities. If one fish vendor was killed or a market was washed away, he switched to another. Farmers with chickens or coconuts outside the tsunami-soaked zone were never far away.

In Japan, like other wealthy countries, residents are now cut off from the farmers and factories that feed and clothe them. Consumers in the developed world often ignore how store-bought products like apples, milk, shoes, rice, brooms, fish and soap get to the shelves. Now, with the power out, highways closed and trains frozen, the constant flow of products has been severed.

Each 7-11 store in Japan, for example, usually gets more than three daily deliveries. This "just-in-time" distribution helps it sell more soda, cigarettes and sandwiches from its limited shelf space.

Only two days after the quake, 7-11s in Fukushima had little left on their shelves other than ice cream and hard liquor. By the third day, most convenience stores (even some 20 miles from the coast) were closed, and there were long lines of people at the few grocery stores still open. Today, most stores in the affected areas remain closed.

Another problem for Japan, with its reliance on mobile communication devices, has been the pain of being out of touch. In Sri Lanka, most of the survivors were able to quickly reconvene. Other than a few migrant workers, relatives and friends often lived nearby, and rarely traveled far from home.

More than two weeks after the disasters in Japan, many people are still unsure which friends and family survived. When the waves hit, family members were often miles from home, working or shopping in places easily reached by car or public transport.

With cars, buses and trains damaged or gone, many Japanese were unable to get home through the rubble. Cellphone towers were out, so they were unable to call anyone. In the early days, countless people were in the streets staring at their cellphones, praying for even one bar of network connectivity so they could check on their loved ones.

After a week, the phones disappeared. Everyone's batteries had died.

There are still daily reunion stories in Japan as people find their way home or to phones. The agonizing separations weren't because the tsunami had spread people far and wide, but because their lives had dispersed them much farther and wider than is common in poor countries.

The sophistication of Japan's developed economy didn't always work against its people. Almost all the buildings untouched by the tsunami remained intact, even though the earthquake itself was one of the worst ever in Japan. The durability of Japan's buildings was a testament to its construction industry and strict building codes.

Further, unlike the 2004 Indian Ocean disaster, most Japanese had been taught from a young age exactly what to do when a quake hits. They had practiced it repeatedly over the years, running to higher places mapped out by the government at any threat of a tsunami. Without such plans, thousands more would have died.

Still, it will likely take more than good building codes and education systems to get Japan's economy back on its feet. Unlike Sri Lanka, where it was mostly a function of getting bridges, boats and houses rebuilt, Japan needs roads, electrical power networks, and ports to be fixed or replaced as well as tens of thousands of homes and cars. Then people will need their cellphones, cable connections and Internet. Factories that make everything from Kirin Beer to Sony videotape will have to be repaired and then the intricate web of supplies that delivers everything from radial tires to rice balls has to be slowly knit back together.

Evidence of the unexpected needs of the Japanese consumer was on display in Sendai on Sunday. With nearby Starbucks and McDonald's still closed, long lines formed in front of one of the only international food chains to reopen: Mr. Donuts. But it wasn't the doughnuts that people in line missed so much, but rather the familiar experience of stopping by a shop for a little break.

Another contrast between Sri Lanka and Japan's reactions to the wicked waves has been the role of religion.

In Sri Lanka, people fled the tsunami to temples, mosques and churches. Religious leaders were in the newspapers every day commenting on what it all meant. In Japan, few have flocked to Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines.

"For their practical needs, people are not praying to some god for help," said Masato Miura, a monk at a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Sendai. "They are just going to the store."

Write to Eric Bellman at [email protected]

More Coverage of the Japan Earthquake

• At Plant, a Choice Between Bad, Worse
• Tokyo Approves Budget Amid Fight
• For a Few Hours, a Respite From Crisis
• The Lighter Side of Plutonium
• Letters From Fukushima: Tepco Worker Emails
• Japan Searches for Its Missing
• Traces of Radiation Detected in U.S.
• Debate Begins on Tepco's Future
• Disaster Claims to Hit AXA
• Quakes Echo World-Wide
• Weeklong Look at Market Reaction
• Monitoring the Reactors
• Map: Latest | Video
• More: WSJ.com/JapanQuake

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Why We Travel

 

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April 1, 2011

Why We Travel

By PAUL THEROUX

After the end of World War II, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was the uneasy entry point to the Iron Curtain. Now it is a popular site for tourists, with no bar to crossing.

IN the bungling and bellicosity that constitute the back and forth of history, worsened by natural disasters and unprovoked cruelty,  humble citizens pay the highest price. To be a traveler in such circumstances can be inconvenient at best, fatal at worst. But if the traveler manages to breeze past such unpleasantness on tiny feet, he or she is able to return home to report: “I was there. I saw it all.” The traveler’s boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience — shocking though it may seem at the time — is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.

“Don’t go there,” the know-it-all, stay-at-home finger wagger says of many a distant place. I have heard it my whole traveling life, and in almost every case it was bad advice. In my experience these maligned countries are often the most fulfilling. I am not saying they are fun. For undiluted jollification you bake in the sun at Waikiki with a mai tai in your fist, or eat lotuses on the Côte d’Azur. As for the recognition of hard travel as rewarding, the feeling is mainly retrospective, since it is only in looking back that we see how we have been enriched. At the time, of course, the experience of being a bystander to sudden political or social change can be alarming.

Throughout history the traveler has been forced to recognize the fact that leaving home means a loss of innocence, encountering uncertainty: the wider world has typically been regarded as haunted, a place of darkness: “There Be Dragons.” Or as Othello reported, “Cannibals that each other eat, /The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

But it is the well-known world that seems particularly dire at this moment. Egypt has been upended, and I smile at the phrase “peaceful mob” as an oxymoron; all mobs contain an element of spitefulness and personal score-settling. Tunisia before the mass demonstrations and the coup was a sunny shoreline popular with European vacationers, and the chief annoyance to the traveler was the overzealous rug dealer.

The recent disaster-in-installments in Japan of earthquake, tsunami, damaged nuclear reactors and near-meltdown is a particular shock; Japan has long been regarded as one of the safest countries in the world. And now it seems a perilous place of inundated cities and contaminated air and undrinkable water. The earthquake itself was enough to inspire a sense of deep insecurity. And the idea that Christchurch, New Zealand, could be flattened and feel dangerous — this polite, orderly, beautiful, underpopulated, provincial, hymn-singing place — is yet another surprise.

Many people think of global travel as though presented on a menu, one of those dense, slightly sticky volumes that resemble the Book of Kells. But it is a changing menu, as certain places are “discovered” and others deleted. Libya is now a war zone, but only the other day the Libyan tourist board was encouraging visitors with promises of Roman ruins and cusucs bil-hoot (the Berber version of couscous with fish). Baghdad may have been the Paris of the ninth century, as Richard Burton described it, but James C. Simmons points out in “Passionate Pilgrims: English Travelers to the World of the Desert Arabs” that it has disappointed most travelers since then as, in their words, “a city of wicked dust,” “odorous, unattractive, and hot,” with an “atmosphere of squalor and poverty” — and these descriptions are from travelers in the 1930s, long before the invasion, war and suicide bombers.

Afghanistan in the 1960s and ’70s for all its hassles (gunslingers, scolding mullahs, ancient buses, bowel-shattering cuisine) was astonishingly rich in tradition, ancient pieties and dramatic landscape, shimmering with the still-intact Buddha sculptures in Bamiyan, and penetrated with the sense of the medieval. There were robes, ragged turbans, daggers and even a certain dusty romance — dark eyes peeking from a Shmoo-like burqa. Kiss that goodbye. I well remember the jolting bus ride from the border city of Meshhad in Iran, the walk across the stony frontier to Islamic Qaleh, and finally the small-scale magnificence of the ancient city of Herat. It will be a long time before any farang with a backpack takes that bus ride again. And in Pakistan, the stupendous Greco-Buddhist ruins of Gandharan monasteries in and around Taxila, not far from Peshawar — only a dozen years ago a must-see spot — are now unvisited except by jihadis whose only mission is to deface them.

For the modern traveler there are recent and sharp reversals — the overthrow of longstanding governments, earthquakes, a volcano, the release of radioactivity into a blue sky and cows’ milk — all in the span of a few months. What then is the traveler to do except huddle and observe?

Tourists have always taken vacations in tyrannies — Tunisia and Egypt are pretty good examples. The absurd dictatorship gives such an illusion of stability that the place is often a holiday destination. Myanmar — yet another place recently traumatized by a deadly earthquake — is a classic example of a police state that is also a seemingly well-regulated country for sightseers, providing they don’t look too closely. (The Burmese guides are much too terrified to confide their fears to their clients.) Kenya’s 24 years under the kleptocracy of President Daniel arap Moi, which ended in 2002, never discouraged safari-goers, and in fact might have encouraged them to believe they were safe with so many conspicuous cops around. It is only relatively recently that tourists and hunters have begun to stay away from Zimbabwe. At a time when President Mugabe was starving and jailing his opponents in the ’90s, visitors to the country were applying for licenses to shoot elephants and having a swell time in the upscale game lodges.

By contrast, the free-market-inspired, somewhat democratic, unregulated country can make for a bumpy trip, and a preponderance of rapacious locals. The Soviet Union, with nannying guides, controlled and protected its tourists; the new Russia torments visitors with every scam available to rampant capitalism. But unless you are in delicate health and desire a serious rest, none of this is a reason to stay home.

 

“YOU’D be a fool to take that ferry,” people — both Scottish and English — said to me in the spring of 1982 when I set off at Stranraer in Scotland for Larne in Northern Ireland. I was making my clockwise journey around the British coast for the trip I later recounted in “The Kingdom by the Sea.” At the time and for more than 10 years later, a particularly vicious sort of sectarian terror was general all over Ulster.

How do I know this? I was there, keeping my head down, eating fish and chips, drinking beer and observing the effects of this confederacy of murderous dunces, the splinter groups, grudge bearers and criminal hell-raisers of the purest ignorance. “I’m a Muslim!” a man cries out in a Belfast street in a dark joke that was going around at the time. And his attackers demand to know, “Are you a Catholic Muslim or a Protestant Muslim?”

The narcissism of minor differences was never more starkly illustrated than after that rainy night when I boarded the ferry from Scotland and made the short voyage into the 17th century, setting off to look at the rest of Northern Ireland. What I found — what I have usually found after hearing all those warnings — was that it was much more complicated and factional than it had been described to me. And that there were unexpected pleasures. For one thing, the Irish of all sorts were grateful to have a listener. This is a trait of the aggrieved, and to be in the presence of talkers is a gift to a writer. Yes, there were checkpoints, roadblocks, bomb scares, metal detectors, pat downs. There was the occasional outrage. Ambushes by and against British soldiers were fairly common, as were other features of uprisings from Israel to Sri Lanka — the kicked-down door, the humiliated civilian, the stone-throwing children. But the prevailing quality of war is not noise or gunfire. It is suspense, something like boredom; nothing happens for long periods and then everything happens at once in indescribable confusion.

What I saw in Ulster on that trip was unforgettable. It was first of all the recognition of the utter uselessness of the conflict and its self-destructive element. But it was also the way in which, in the worst situations, life goes on. Market day was observed even though a bomb was now and then detonated in a market square. Rituals were observed, like the one in Enniskillen in 1987 during which 11 people were killed when the I.R.A. detonated a bomb at a Remembrance Day ceremony — murdered as they were mourning their dead. Still, life continued: a cake sale, a bike race, farmers mowing their fields, the sound of a choir from a church, “Have a cup of tea?,” birds singing on the country roads where I waited for a bus, the blackening rain coming down and the exasperated good humor of humane people who were sick of it all.

It was all a revelation that has become a rich and enlightening memory. It had not been the first time I was warned against a place. “Don’t — whatever you do — go to the Congo,” I was told when I was a teacher in Uganda in the mid- and late 1960s. But Congo was immense, and the parts I visited — Kivu in the east and Katanga in the south — were full of life in the way of beleaguered places. In the mid-1970s I was setting off from my West Berlin hotel toward the train into East Berlin, when the writer Jerzy Kosinski begged me not to go beyond the Brandenburg Gate. I might be arrested, tortured, held in solitary confinement.

“What did they do to you?” he asked when he saw me reappear that evening. I told him I had had a bad meal, taken a walk, seen a museum and generally gotten an unedited glimpse of the grim and threadbare life of East Germany.

Not all warnings are frivolous or self-serving. In 1973, I was warned not to go to Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia, and that was advice I heeded. It seemed to me foolhardy to go to a country in a state of anarchy. I wouldn’t go to present-day Somalia or Afghanistan either. Nor is Pakistan very tempting.

I traveled to Vietnam that same year, just after the majority of American troops withdrew and about 18 months before the fall of Saigon. The country — though a government was intact — was adrift in a fatalistic limbo of whispers and guerrilla attacks. It was less a war zone than a slowly imploding region on the verge of surrender. My clearest memory was of the shattered Citadel and the muddy streets and the stinking foreshore of the Pearl River in Hue, up the coast, the terminus of the railway line. Now and then tracer fire, terror-struck people, a collapsed economy, rundown hotels and low spirits.

Thirty-three years later I returned to Vietnam on my “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” journey, which was a revisiting of my “Great Railway Bazaar.” I went back to the royal city of Hue, and saw that there can be life, even happiness, after war and, almost unimaginably, there can be forgiveness. Had I not seen the hellhole of Hue in wartime I would never had understood its achievement in a time of peace. Seven million tons of bombs had not destroyed Vietnam; they had if anything unified it. And Hanoi, which had suffered severe aerial bombardment over the many years of the war, looked to me wondrous in its postwar prosperity, with boulevards and villas, ponds and pagodas — as glorious as it had been when it had been the capital of Indochina. It is certainly one of the most successful, and loveliest, architectural restorations of any city in the world.

Just a few years ago Sri Lanka emerged from a civil war, but even as the Tamil north was embattled and fighting a rear-guard action, there were tourists sunning themselves on the southern coast and touring the Buddhist stupas in Kandy. Now the war is over, and Sri Lanka can claim to be peaceful, except for the crowing of its government over the vanquishing of the Tamils. Tourists have returned in even greater numbers for the serenity and the small population. (Amazingly enough, almost the same number of people live in the Indian city of greater Mumbai than occupy the whole of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.)

At one point Sri Lanka was on the Could Be Your Last Trip list of the traveler Robert Young Pelton. He has made a career of clucking about hazards, descriptions of which fill his books, notably “The World’s Most Dangerous Places.” On the one occasion when we met in the late 1990s — on a TV show taped in New Jersey — he came across as a genial if torpid Canadian, except when he was talking about the horrors of Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Colombia. I had made pleasurable trips to all three, I said. And I was compelled to point out to him that we were on the outskirts of Newark, at the time advertised by its own newspaper, The Star-Ledger, as New Jersey’s homicide capital.  

The earth is often perceived as a foolproof Google map — not very large, easily accessible and knowable by any finger-drumming geek with a computer. In some respects this is true. Distance is no longer a problem. You can nip over to Hong Kong or spend a weekend in Dubai, or Rio. But as some countries open up, others shut down. And some countries have yet to earn their place on the traveler’s map, such as Turkmenistan and Sudan. But I’ve been to both not long ago — one of very few sightseers. And along with oppression and human rights violations, I found hospitality, marvels and a sense of discovery.

In my own “Tao of Travel,” the fact that a place is out of fashion, forgotten or not yet on the map doesn’t make it less interesting, just more itself, and any visit perhaps more of a challenge. But travel maps have always been provisional and penciled in, continually updated. The map of the possible world being redrawn right now — parts of it in tragic and unsettling ways — might soon mean new opportunities for the traveler who dares to try it. Travel, especially of the old laborious kind, has never seemed to me of greater importance, more essential, more enlightening.

PAUL THEROUX is author, most recently, of “The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments From Lives on the Road," which will be published in May by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

FT: Pen and paper - the forgotten management tool

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ae0e089e-46ab-11e0-967a-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1Htze1mAH

Pen and paper: the forgotten management tool

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: March 6 2011 22:12 | Last updated: March 6 2011 22:12

Last week I went out for a pizza with a man I hadn’t seen for a while. The bill was low; I picked it up. Two days later, a small, cream envelope arrived on my doormat. Inside was a folded piece of paper on which he had written a short note saying how much he had enjoyed the occasion.

This letter, which arrived in the same post as four items of junk mail and a credit card statement, pleased me beyond reason. I was almost moved to snatch up my pen and write a thank-you letter in return to thank him for his.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

Lucy Kellaway: Female quotas would target the wrong women - Feb-27

Lucy Kellaway: Talk like a loser and you might win - Feb-13

Lucy Kellaway: Banks, a conman and a homeless bloke - Feb-06

Lucy Kellaway: My measure of a good employer - Jan-30

Lucy Kellaway: Pointless conditions should not apply - Jan-23

Handwritten thank-yous are so thoroughly effective as a way of making other people feel good, it is mad that no one writes them anymore. In the last year I think I’ve only written one – and that was to thank my mother-in-law for the ham she always sends at Christmas. Had she owned a computer, I don’t think I would have written any at all.

In the office, the handwritten thank-you is even more powerful – and even more underused. Every time an employee makes a special effort they are doing the equivalent of buying a pizza or giving a ham to their employer. But they don’t expect thanks for it – which is just as well, as they don’t generally get any.

They do sometimes get a blanket thank-you to everyone (“thanks to all our people for their unstinting dedication during 2010” etc, etc) but such broad and bland declarations of gratitude have no effect on morale at all. Very occasionally, bosses take it into their heads to spit out an individual thank-you face to face (which is nice but wears off quickly) or send one by e-mail (which is nicer as it lasts longer but is somewhat flat).

One man who knows the power of the thank-you note is Doug Conant, who has been running Campbell’s Soup for a decade. In a recent blog for Harvard Business Review he says that every day he spends time with an assistant combing the company for people deserving thanks and then writes them a letter. Over the past 10 years he has fired off 30,000 of them – more than 10 each day.

My first thought on reading this is that the man is a genius.

My second thought was that he is an idiot to have revealed his secret, and thus devalue his currency. Who wants to treasure a note of thanks when they know there are 29,999 others in circulation?

Yet as I read the many gushing comments posted online by his employees, I saw I was quite wrong. The handwritten thank-you seems to be a currency that holds its value. Each letter, by definition, is written individually, so it doesn’t matter how many others there are. And once received, it can be kept in a drawer for reading until it falls to pieces.

The thank-you letter is not only incredibly effective, it costs nothing and has no nasty side effects. It doesn’t demotivate others – unless the recipients have the poor taste to frame their letters and stick them up above their desks. All in all, the ratio of effort in writing letters (very low) to pleasure on receiving them (extraordinarily high) must make this the most remarkable motivational technique there is.

Readers of the blog seem to agree: “Doug, What an inspiring post! The positive energy in written notes is healing in the workplace. Positive, genuine feedback is uplifting to our human wholeness. Thanks for sharing!” writes one.

But if these notes are so uplifting to our human wholeness, why is Mr Conant so unusual in writing any?

There seem to be three reasons. First, chief executives think their own contribution is more valuable than that of others, and as no one ever writes them thank-you letters they don’t write any themselves. Second, they aren’t close enough to the business to know who deserves thanks, and third, they have forgotten the strange human truth that almost everyone would do almost anything in return for a simple pat on the back.

On the rare occasion when they want to say thanks, they probably don’t pick up a pen because they have forgotten how to hold one or think it is going to take too long.

I’ve just put this to the test. Admittedly the start was slow as I had to rummage round in the stationery cupboard to get the right kit. But after that there was no stopping me. I took the lid off the pen and wrote: “Lucy, what an inspired column! Great positive energy! Thanks for sharing.” I put it in an envelope and wrote my name on the front. My handwriting is jagged from disuse, but still readable. Total time taken: 55 seconds.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.