Greg Sanders

A peace between Wikipedia and professors?

Back when I was going to school, various instructors regularly made a point of noting that information on the internet wasn't necessarily reliable. This always seemed amazingly self-evident to me as it should be to anyone that's ever posted documents online. I'm not sure if the warnings were driven more by curmudgeonliness  or by receipt of far too many poorly sourced sourced papers. Regardless, I was pleased to see Jenna Johnson report in the Post that the Wikimedia foundation has found ways to encourage more productive engagement:

This school year, dozens of professors from across the country gave students an unexpected assignment: Write Wikipedia entries about public policy issues.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Web site, organized the project in an effort to bulk up the decade-old online encyclopedia’s coverage of topics ranging from the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 to Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Such issues have been treated on the site in much less depth than TV shows, celebrity biographies and other elements of pop culture.

Many students involved in the project have received humbling lessons about open-source writing as their work was revised, attacked or deleted by anonymous critics with unknown credentials…

"I start every semester with the typical speech: ‘If you are turning in a paper and cite Wikipedia, then we have a problem. We need to talk,’ ” said Matt Dull, who is Pearson’s professor at Virginia Tech. But this time, he gave that speech and followed it with the Wiki assignment.

As the article makes clear, this work isn't accepted with open arms by all wiki-editors. Nonetheless, the students seem to be having some productive engagements and the quality of content is being improved. One of the things I always found unsatisfying about school was the meaninglessness of the work I produced. Sure, I was learning things, but it still seemed like quite a waste. This is part of why I blog: even if my audience is rather small it's satisfying to know that my thoughts are recorded in an accessible way online. While nasty editors are a downside, editing Wikipedia entries is a step up from personal blogging. That online dictionary, like other open source projects, are public goods. Even if only a portion of changes make it by other editors, that small improvements makes things a little better for all internet users in the language in question. One of the instructors sums it up nicely:

“It’s the ability for students to feel that their work matters, that it doesn’t get trapped in the classroom,” said Adel Iskander, a Georgetown instructor who assigned Wiki entries in his graduate-level Arab media course. “We’re kind of challenging the academic establishment, in a way.”

Kudos to everyone involved and Jenna Johnson for a non-embarrassing write-up of an internet phenomenon. That's no mean feat.

The logitech harmony 300 remote has displeased me [Update!]

I got one for my mother in hopes that it could better handle complex operations. Cheaper universal remotes often have trouble bringing up the main menu or the like. Indeed, the Logitech's software recognizes all of our VCRs/DVDs/cable boxes/TV and presumably could support advanced functions with any of them. I wouldn't know for sure, as it's been completely unable to transfer that understanding to the remote. The tech support page just had the standard stuff about rebooting, turning off one's firewall and anti-virus, and the like. Not really what I'm looking for. I'm going to try to send an email in to tech support, this one might just have been a lemon. However, if they can't help me fix it or replace it, I'm switching brands and not coming back.

[Update: Swapping the batteries out seems to have done the trick. Which is a bit odd, as it was having problems from the start and lights on the remote were still blinking. I’m still not happy about my experience, but it looks like I might finally have a working remote.]

[Update 2: Fixed typo in title. Gah!]

4-19-2011 The journey to the valley of the kings and a question of legacy

Our next day began early for we were traveling to the desert. Going to the west, by bridge rather than boat this time, the journey was pleasingly augmented by views of hot air balloons. This is a popular area for ballooning as the sheer number of temples, tombs, and monuments means that you'll should have something to see whichever way the winds take you. That said, apparently the military used to get annoyed at certain balloon paths.

The desert makes quite a contrast after traveling through a mix of farms. The sudden change doesn't feel familiar to me at all, despite having spent some time in America's southwest. It may have something to do with the density of the Nile valley. In either a geographic or population sense, there's not room for settlements to slowly peter out.

I'll save a discussion of the valley of the kings itself for a future post, one that sadly will be bereft of pictures for historical preservation reasons. The sheer amount of history was fairly shocking, there hills at times seemed honeycombed with remnants of ancient Egypt.  We even saw some settlements that were displayed by the government due to the inhabitants penchant for selling artifacts they discovered under their houses. There does seem to be a great number of sites where the government merely attempts to preserve and not study. Some of that is likely a sensible approach; Egypt has millennia of legacy and when rising dam waters aren't a threat there's no great rush.

All this does raise the question of how much of Egypt's legend is a result of  its standing in the ancient world versus the preservative nature of the desert sands. I suspect it varies from era to era, but many of the sites we saw would be notable in most any era. On the other hand, perhaps the continuity between Egypt's Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom were in part a side effect of the desert.  The Roman empire might provide a way to test that hypothesis: is there a correlation between a preservative climate and the survival of Roman engineering? If so, did areas with such a climate maintain more Roman heritage during the dark ages? Under this theory, the desert did not lead to Egypt's greatness; it led to its continuity as one civilization rather than three.

Luxor temple photos up and a bit of shopping advice

I've gone back an added the slideshow of Luxor temple to an appropriate entry. I highly recommend visiting the temple in the evening so you have a chance to see it both in the light of the sun and the light of modern day. They do a rather good job illuminating the pillars and temple grounds; moreover I'm told that most temples aren't open at night.

After the temple we visited a local jewelry shop that was recommended by the tour company. Apparently under the old government there was rather a problem with certified sales that were not in fact of the quality that they claimed. Businesses would be shut down but could open up again in short order. Seeing a bit of the silversmithing process was rather neat but I sadly don't have any pictures to share.  I went on to get a cartouche for my wife but felt a bit underprepared. Transliteration into the hieroglyphics alphabet leaves a lot of discretion as to what symbols to do, so the smart thing would probably be to figure it out with the recipient before you travel. If you want something particularly authentic, maybe take a trip to the library first.

Back to urban life in Luxor 2011-04-18

After crossing the Nile to return from our rural west bank adventures, we had some free time in Luxor city. We decided to take a walk up to the promenade. This was probably a mistake, the walk itself was alright, but involved constantly turning down various carriage drivers. My guide and guide book both agreed to be careful with such rides, as drivers were known to take passengers away from the tourist area and then charge more to give the trip back. Nonetheless, taxis aren't a problem and they may have gotten us past the gauntlet to enjoy a more leisurely walk in the city center. That said, some of our fellow travelers walked the same route without incident, so perhaps it was something in the way we carried ourselves.

On the trip back, we paralleled our route one block away from the main street. This made all the difference in the world, Luxor is dense but it's no Cairo and the side streets on a workday are neither vacant nor bustling. The people we saw weren't looking to sell us things, they were just moving around their neighborhood, running errands, and the like. I don't travel in a search for authenticity, but I do enjoy seeing parts of other countries that aren't there to cater to me or sell me things. Of course, the incentives for vendors are particularly strong in the developing world: the ratio of per capita GDPs between the U.S. and Egypt 47,400 to 6,200. However, as we'd see in more detail in future days, Luxor, ancient capital of upper Egypt, is more than just a tourist town and has a pleasantly different character when you get oft the main strip.

2011-04-18 Visiting the home continent of rooftop restaurants

Wrapping up our first trip west of Luxor, we had lunch at the El Nakhil hotel and restaurant. I don't know if rooftop restaurants really originate in Africa, but the main one I go to around home is Ethiopian and that's good enough for a humorous assertion. The food in this place was a fairly standard Egyptian buffet style, but the rotisserie chicken was succulent and had a great blend of spices.

Traveling the Egyptian countryside was quite an experience and did feel quite distinct from my time in anywhere in rural America or in the Chinese countryside. I think I'll just need to see more of the developing world to better understand what difference can be attributed to culture distinctions versus climate versus ways things are made attractive for tourists.

Egypt was at times surprisingly familiar

The seamstress shop we visited had two rooms full of kids in child care. I'm not sure how representative this was, given international funding, but they really seemed remarkably normal. Enthusiastic kids doing songs that teach about body parts and the like. Mom recognized this piece of playground equipment from when she was growing up. A kid fell off and cried briefly before too long, which is probably why you don't see them much anymore, but it did look like fun.

Generally speaking, I don't blog about the familiar, but I think it's worth making the odd exception to avoid exoticizing the country. Now that I'm finally having some luck with Flickr, I'll close the section on Bearat village with a slide show that covers the seamstresses, the school and childcare, as well as a  few shots of the town itself.

My first experience with a Qur'anic recital

The first floor of the seamstress shop was a religious school. It was only enclosed on three sides with pillars being the only structure in the interior. There were students of a mix of ages represented and some of them were particularly talkative. "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?" appear to be some of the most commonly taught English questions. We didn't manage a full conversation by any means, although Mom had some luck with both french and English. We mostly spoke to the two gentlemen in the foreground, the lad in white hopes to be a journalist and the one in red a doctor. Near as we could tell both were pro-revolutionary, but that isn't a surprise really.. Our guide had mentioned that some English training is on the curriculum in the public schools, although special language schools are popular and offer an immersive approach.

The religious part of the education involved memorizing passages from the Quran. Homework involved taking home a slate with verses etched upon it, which actually reminds me of stories I've heard about the education of Abraham Lincoln. I think the poetic nature of the language helps the students. I suspect that despite the archaic language the King James version of the Bible might be easier to commit to memory than the New Revised Standard Version. One girl gave a lovely recital of some of the text she'd memorized. I did go through Sunday school, although there wasn't that much memorization involved and I'm glad of that. However, I suspect that it is a pedagogical technique that's fairly easy to deploy in places where educational resources are comparatively scarce.

And there he did both knock and call

We were visited by what we think was a toad on Sunday. He or she was resting directly next to our door bell, and indeed rested there through the night. Despite the title of the post she did not ring the bell or in fact come a'courting but it was still quite neat to see her there each time we stepped outside. Our other unusual stoop guests are slugs. They haven't ever climbed up by the door but they do seem to have a daily commute across our sidewalk. Out of respect for the lengths they go to get from one yard to the next we do actively try to avoid stepping on them. Sadly, I must confess that this required me getting steadily more conscientious about where I rest my feet, especially in the dark. I believe that two slugs over the years were victims to my inattention.

No such fate awaited our toad visitor. Instead she simply left by morning. Perhaps she was acting as a herald of good news, as my laptop arrived restored two days later much to my delight. Thanks again to my mother who was so kind as to loan me hers since our return from Egypt.

Shallow thoughts 04-18-2011

I was surprised to learn that ancient Egyptians had fished in part by slapping the water to drive the movements of their desired prey. The technique itself seems straightforward enough, but it seems puzzling that it isn’t a favored method of children everywhere. Perhaps it only works with certain kinds of fish or there’s been some parental conspiracy to keep it secret.

A seamstress shop in West Luxor 2011-04-18

In Egypt I was fairly consistently surprised by the high percentage of men in fields that are balanced or dominated by women in the States. Service industry jobs like clerks, maids, wait staff, and the like were disproportionately likely to be male. I think this can be fairly directly traced to low rates of labor participation by females and the high unemployment rate for men. The chart below is from the Population Council and while the labor participation rate increases for men as they age it stays low for women. I found the study via the viable opposition blog, it has a lot of other good demographic information.

 

The trip’s tour company, does charitable work in Egypt through the Grand Circle foundation and took us to see a seamstress shop that they’d provided with some start up capital and sewing machines. The hire widows, unmarried women, and other females who have insufficient other means of support. The west bank of Luxor is some mix of Rural and Urban Upper Egypt and as the chart above shows, women generally don’t find a lot of opportunities to work.

The woman in charge described how they try to reinforce the economic opportunities with education. The workers are told of the benefits of birth control, delaying one’s first child, and of spacing out children. The workers then tell their families and friends in an attempt to leverage the work in the larger community. They claim fairly dramatic success which would suggest that the high rural birth rate is driven in good part by ignorance of family planning methods rather than directly by cultural or religious pressures. This seems consistent with a Rand study by Mona Khalifa, Julie DaVanzo, and David M. Adamson. In the chart space refers to time between pregnancy and limit refers to restricting overall family size. I’d expect the west bank near Luxor to be one of the more prosperous parts of rural upper Egypt, but even so the need for family planning services is striking.

We picked up a few items in the shop and didn’t get a great deal on them, but I’ll skip the bargaining practicum as this is the sort of thing I’m willing to pay a premium to support.

Exterior home decoration, Egyptian-style 2011-04-18

When Ahmed’s mother took traveled to Mecca for the hajj, they commemorated it in style on the front of the house. For the record, he wasn’t the oldest brother. From what we saw primogeniture doesn’t seem particularly established in Egypt, even in large families. We heard another example during a dinner visit with a family in Aswan. In that case, the household would pass on through all of the males of the older generations before going to the oldest son of the next. In any event, Ahmed seems like the kind of guy that in an area with more opportunities would have been the first of his family sent off to college. Hopefully, that will be an option for his children. In any event, I found the painting on the walls quite charming and if you check through the slideshow on the farm general farm post once it’s online and you’ll see another example in the interior.

I don’t know if that sort of landscape is common, but I can confirm that bright paint on brick was a regular and welcome decoration that we witnessed on our Nile cruise. I haven’t spent that much time around the Mediterranean, but I believe the region is known for this. Given the heat, porches, patios, rooftops, and courtyards were often prominent and thus likely to be decorated. I think the impulse to paint patios is strengthened by the bland uniformity of the low cost brick construction that seemed omnipresent in areas that were more newly built up.

My favorite building artistry came at the end of the Nile cruise in Aswan. Nubian settlements are known for a mix of gold and turquoise that fits in with the surrounding sand and sky. At this point it seems to be a common style in southern Egypt, which somewhat confusingly was the Upper Kingdom. With any luck, I’ll have Flickr slideshows working properly by the time I start blogging about the trip down the Nile and to Aswan, as there’s much to see.

[Update: Some editing immediately after posting.]

Farm crafts 2011-04-18

For whatever reason, Flickr uploader is revolting against me. So for the time being I’m giving up on full slideshows and will just get back to blog entries. A few of my readers were more interested in that grinding wheel than I expected and it may come as no surprise to you that other goods were made on the farm. I suspect that this is fairly standard for subsistence farming. I’d already mentioned that Ahmed’s farm made their money off of furniture sales. We got a brief demonstration of the assembly process: cutting pieces of palm wood, hammering in holes, and then inserting smaller wet pieces into holes which seal when the wood dries.

We were also given a demonstration of the rope making process, which in formed a basic part of house assembly along with mud bricks and thatching. Much later on the trip, we’d see a reassembled ancient Egyptian craft held together by rope; I’d guess it might have been created from palm material using many of the same techniques. Needless to say, there’s a lot of ingenuity that goes into a largely self-sustaining household.

I suspect that rural development often involves specializing in more profitable farming or production and buying cheap mass-produced goods that were once produced on the farm. In addition, more sources of entertainment will likely propagate although Ahmed was hoping to hold out against television. I’m told that middle class farmers in Egypt tend to have two to three kids while the poor have six to seven. I fear some of that is driven by higher infant and child mortality, but it is likely also prompted by finding labor-intensive ways to make up  for lower quality land or to produce what a middle class farmer might buy.

I definitely like the cushiness of 21st century American living. That said, seeing all the clever ways humanity has found to survive and thrive is quite fascinating. This is a sentiment I encountered quite frequently in Egypt given the many monuments to the skills of people living millennia ago. And someday, we’ll have to figure out how to use all that ingenuity to sustain ourselves for generations in the hostile environment of the final frontier.

Death of Bin Laden

President Obama’s statement that he was not a Muslim leader but a mass murder of Muslims is accurate. While there hasn’t an attack on the same scale in the U.S. since 9/11, Al Qaeda affiliates have been directly targeted civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as other predominantly Muslim countries like Indonesia. Prior to 9/11 he plotted the death of hundreds in Kenya. His death provides a measure of justice for New York, for America as a whole, and for the world.

The location of his death seems pivotal. As Peter Baker, Helene Cooper, and Mark Mazzetti report: “When the end came for Bin Laden, he was found not in the remote tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive north from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. He was hiding in the medium-sized city of Abbottabad, home to a large Pakistani military base and a military academy of the Pakistani Army.”

The war in Afghanistan drove Bin Laden out, but this operation hinged on our intelligence in and relationship with Pakistan and not our occupation of Afghanistan. Even more important, there has been a move towards self-determination in the Middle East that is more consequential to the future of that region than our ongoing military operations, even if you credit operations in Libya with helping to sustain that momentum. I would agree with Yglesias, now is an excellent time to declare victory and change our strategy towards Afghanistan. Specifically bringing our people home in significant numbers before the year is out and working out a status of forces agreement to govern our future relationship.

I’m back home safe, but my laptop isn’t

Sadly the screen broke when I stowed it under the seat in front of me on the flight home. Aggravating to say the least. My files are safe and I’ve copied off the pictures. However, I wasn’t able to do any blogging or photo work on the flight and I still have a lot of photo managing to do as between myself and my mother we’ve got thousands.