Chris Stokel-Walker

Treading the boards with Shakespeare

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:33:09 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Prospero blog, 20 June 2012

ELIZABETHAN theatre remains a somewhat elusive world to scholars. Limited records have left wide gaps in our knowledge. So the recent discovery of the remains of a theatre in Shoreditch, east London, is a big deal. Built in 1577, before the more famous Globe, the Curtain playhouse hosted the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe, for two years in the 1590s, performing “Henry V” and many other famous plays, including “Romeo & Juliet”.

The remains were found by workers digging up the ground for a new development in the run-down area. Work stopped and the excavation began—led by Chris Thomas at the Museum of London Archaeology (which also excavated London’s first playhouse nearby, in 2008). Gallery walls and the yard in which the groundlings stood have already been unearthed, which give a sense of the theatre’s dimensions and should help scholars to better understand how plays were performed. The team hopes to uncover other clues, such as the boxes used to collect the takings for a performance. “Any hard evidence is gold dust,” says Shehzana Mamujee of Newcastle University and a former lecturer at Shakespeare’s Globe, the modern-day rebuild of the original theatre. “We know so little” about the theatre at that time, she adds, with only “scraps of documentary evidence” carefully pieced together.

English professional theatre was just starting out in the 1570s. The Curtain was one of the earliest purpose-built playhouses, and is considered to be as important as the Theatre, the Globe and Blackfriars to Shakespearian scholars, explains Ms Mamujee. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men took to the stage at the Curtain when their lease at the Theatre ran out in 1597. But soon they became too popular for the small Curtain, so they moved to the newly built Globe in 1599. Yet plays were still performed at the venue by various troupes, including Queen Anne’s Men and Prince Charles’s Men until its closure in 1622. “It’s not inconceivable that work by earlier playwrights like George Peele, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe” also graced the Curtain’s stage, says Ms Mamujee. The Bard himself performed there in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humour”.

The developers of the site have torn up their original plans, and now hope to highlight the old theatre at the centre of a new development with a “performance space”. Shakespeare wrote in “Henry IV Part II”: “Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?” When it can elucidate our understanding of an unknown world, certainly not.

Cloud gaming: Pick up and play

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:31:32 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Schumpeter blog, 25 July 2012

WHETHER as cassette tapes, cartridges or discs, video games have for ever been accessed through tangible media. They may not be for much longer. Downloadable content, including entire games delivered direct to a console via the internet, has significantly changed the way gamers play video games. What’s more, the streaming of games to consoles is set to increase in the same way that streaming movies to computers has taken off (accessing any online streamed form of media avoids having to download it to a hard drive).

Sony, maker of the PlayStation 3 games console, is embracing that path. It recently bought Gaikai, a cloud-gaming company that streams games to users rather than provide direct downloads, for $380m in the hope of integrating it with its next generation of games consoles. Rumours abound that Microsoft, which makes the Xbox 360 console, may be about to buy OnLive, a similar on-demand video-gaming service. The PlayStation 3 already partly incorporates Steam, which distributes downloadable games, into its interface. Steam sells more than 1,500 games at a digital shop to 40m customers around the world through computers, consoles and phones.

A large industry exists around downloadable additional content (DLC), which adds extra characters, features and gaming levels to increase the replay value of big-budget console titles. Throughout the first quarter of 2012 $3.4 billion was spent on gaming in the United States, according to figures provided by NPD Group, an industry analyst; $1.38bn—or 41%—of that was spent on digital purchases of games and additional content through services like Steam. Digital sales in Europe were £612.3m ($947m). NPD Group’s Online Gaming 2012 report found that if consumers are presented with a physical and digital product priced equally, 35% prefer the digital download.

In April EA Sports, the developer of the immensely popular FIFA football game franchise, released a Euro 2012-themed expansion that was available only as a download. EA Sports claimed that it was demand from gamers that led them to forgo traditional physical retail. “Gamers are growing more comfortable in acquiring content online” believes Liam Callahan, a video-games analyst. Full games streamed entirely over the internet could be the next step for the next generation PlayStation Orbis and Xbox 720 consoles, rumoured to be on sale in time for Christmas 2013.

For content producers, digital is a godsend, since it cuts costs on manufacturing and shipping. Developers can also easily track analytics to better hone their products based on user experiences. The use of digital rights management (DRM) locks on content—as used in the music industry—also prevents piracy, which has been a big problem affecting sales of physical games. Moreover, all those extra levels and characters draw in more revenue.

Digital has its drawbacks for developers and gamers alike, however. Until recently developers had viewed digital content as a safe haven from second-hand physical games sales, from which game makers do not profit. But a recent European court decision could allow gamers to sell on the rights to their second-hand digital content, which again cuts developers out of the equation. Game makers sometimes try to squeeze too many pennies from their customers; earlier this year players rebelled at Capcom for having to pay for downloadable keys to unlock content contained on the “Street Fighter X Tekken” game disc (which they had already paid for). Gamers also contend that the ability to easily release downloadable fixes to problems encourages developers to release games full of glitches without proper testing.

There are pitfalls and benefits to going digital. “Core video game players are a vocal bunch, never shy to voice their unhappiness over a sub-standard product,” explains Anita Frazier of NPD Group. One can be certain that they will have plenty of advice to give developers as they chart the future path of gaming.

Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong And The Video Game Industry's Big Bang

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 12:34:00 -0500

Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong And The Video Game Industry's Big Bang:

This story appeared on BuzzFeed, 29 November 2012

On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here’s how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today’s tech moguls.

Building bridges as the Eurozone buckles

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:11:00 -0400

Originally appeared on Tumblr’s Storyboard blog, 16 October 2012

Three years ago, graphic designer Robin Stam was at his favorite pizzeria in Rotterdam, waiting to pay after finishing his meal. Fingering the euro bank notes in his wallet, Stam focused on the depictions of bridges on the reverse side of the money.

Each euro note, introduced across 12 European countries on January 1 2002, has a purposely inoffensive aesthetic. Panoramas, designed to be simultaneously anywhere but nowhere in particular, are foregrounded by a fictitious bridge rendered in different styles, depending on the denomination of the cash. This gave Stam an idea. “The bridges were noted for being fictional — that was the whole point. I thought it was a funny idea to build the bridges as a tourist attraction.” A decade of careful preparation to make bank notes which didn’t remind people of anywhere was about to be undone by a guy paying for pizza.

Traditionally, money celebrates its country of origin in a riot of patriotism — think of the heroes of each country’s history which adorn most notes. But the euro note design from Robert Kalina of the Austrian National Bank was chosen because it could not possibly alienate anyone if the place depicted didn’t really exist (a European Monetary Institute report notes that the money was designed specifically to avoid “national or gender bias,” and to be “impartial”). So any of the European members who signed up to the monetary union couldn’t cry foul that they were being overlooked. The bridges also symbolized unity and stability (two characteristics in relatively short supply lately throughout the Eurozone).

Seven euro notes were issued in all: €5, €10, €20, €50, €100, €200 and €500. Each note was assigned a style of architecture under which its bridge would be designed. There was classical, Romanesque, gothic, Renaissance, baroque and rococo, the age of iron and glass, and 20th-century architecture. Kalina’s design beat out the work of 28 others because the judges said at the time that “it clearly represents European money.”

After his pizzeria epiphany, Stam sketched out the bridges in their garish pastel colors over the next few days, but “I didn’t have any experience building anything,” he explains. “I’m a graphic designer.” Luckily he did know Gert-Jan’t Hart, a councilor at Spijkenisse, a suburb 30 minutes outside of Rotterdam. “I had a chat with him and told him about the bridges idea.” At that point it was still nothing more than a joke. But Hart took him seriously, and he was very enthusiastic about the idea.

Spijkenisse’s council had recently passed plans for a housing project on an island. People would need access to their homes over the water. “It was perfect for the euro bridges. And it made the whole idea complete for me,” says Stam — “the bridges portrayed on the bank notes of Europe, actually being built around a new housing project in one of the biggest suburbs of Rotterdam?” He couldn’t quite believe it.

But it happened. After initial meetings, Stam found himself opposite a team of urban developers at Spijkenisse. The Bridges of Europe, Stam’s jocular idea, was becoming a reality, with €1 million of local council money backing it. The first bridges — a Romanesque in brick red and a dirty-brown Renaissance, copied precisely from the €10 and €50 notes respectively — were opened in October 2011 by local politicians. As each new bridge has been built and put in place, local, national, and international media have descended on Spijkenisse; the Bridges of Europe project has even been the subject of a quiz show question in the Netherlands.

Each bridge takes a few months to build. A team of engineers and architects work with Stam, now art director for the Bridges of Europe project. The concrete fascias are made at a factory owned by Waco Lingen, a Dutch construction company, while the steel structures are welded and wrought in a workshop at Haasnoot Bruggen, near the west coast of the Netherlands.

The €200-note bridge — a spindly pedestrian bridge in the Art Nouveau style — was loaded onto a ship and transported via the North Sea and inland waterways to Spijkenisse, where it will be formally unveiled on October 17. The day after, leaders of the European Union’s 27 nations will meet in Brussels, where amongst other topics they will discuss the future of the single currency, brought to its knees by the interdependence between strong and weak economies such as Germany and Greece.

“It’s a total coincidence, what’s happened with the Eurozone currency”, admits Stam. While much of Europe is struggling under an economic slowdown, Stam’s madcap idea to make the nonexistent bridges real has given him a small windfall big enough to start his own design company.

Two bridge-sized holes will remain in Spijkenisse after October 17 — big enough for the €100 and €500 designs to be installed in 2013. Then Robin Stam’s offbeat idea to confound Robert Kalina will be complete. The residents of Spijkenisse may (sooner rather than later) end up crossing the river to their homes on a memorial to a failed currency only a decade old. The Eurozone currency was meant to build bridges across Europe. Robin Stam is building literal bridges in the Netherlands as the currency’s metaphorical bridges break apart.

F for effort

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:09:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Game Theory blog, 2 August 2012

THE Olympics are supposed to offer spectators the world’s greatest athletes giving their best efforts in all 26 sports. The fans at a farcical women’s doubles badminton match between pairs from China and South Korea on July 31st were treated to substantially less. Both teams continually played poor shots into the net, without even a pretence of trying their hardest. They continued their half-hearted efforts even after the referee stepped in and warned them (pictured). Shortly thereafter, an Indonesian duo and another South Korean squad played out a similarly lacklustre match, prompting a chorus of boos from the crowd.

The players had good reason to throw their matches. For the 2012 Games, badminton adopted the model used by many other Olympic sports and divided its competition into two steps. It now starts with a round-robin group stage, in which the 16 teams are divided into four groups of four, who all play each other. The top two squads in each group then enter a single-elimination tournament.

At the beginning of the group stage, every team wants to ensure they win in order to advance to the tournament. However, as the matches progress, winning teams become highly likely or even guaranteed to advance to the next round. At that point, they start looking ahead to their expected matchups. If they believe that finishing second in their group gives them an easier path through the tournament than finishing first will, their optimal strategy is to lose.

By the time the Chinese duo of Yu Yang and Wang Xiaoli faced off against South Korea’s Jung Kyung Eun and Kim Ha Na, both teams had already punched their tickets to the knockout stage. The first-place team in their group was likely to face a second Chinese entry, which was seen as one of the strongest teams in the field, in the tournament’s semi-finals. In contrast, the runner-up was expected to face significantly weaker opposition in the knockout stage. Both teams believed that their best hope of winning a medal was to lose the last group match. They each duly did their best to secure a defeat. The Chinese proved to be more skilful match-throwers than the South Koreans were, and lost.

The tactic quickly caught on. Once the powerful Chinese team successfully managed to lose their last match, their position in the knockout tournament was determined. In its first round, they would play against the winner of a group-stage match between another South Korean team, consisting of Ha Jung Eun and Kim Min Jung, and the Indonesian contingent of Meiliana Jauhari and Greysia Polii. Neither of those two teams was particularly eager to face the Chinese team. So they too did what any medal-minded Olympian would do: played to lose. Once again, the South Koreans proved to be less wily match-throwers than their opponents, and were stuck with an unwanted victory. Perhaps the coaches in Seoul did not spend enough time training them to bury the shuttlecock in the heart of the net.

This spectacle proved too much for the Badminton World Federation (BWF). The sport’s organising body quickly decided to give the match-throwers the losses they sought—but for the duration of the Olympics, rather than for a single contest. All four teams were immediately disqualified from the entire competition for “not using best efforts” and “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport”, in violation of the BWF’s code of conduct. The South Koreans and Indonesians appealed against the decision, but their pleas were rejected.

The ugly display prompted an outburst of sanctimony from commentators. “In sport, morality should come before anything else,” wrote Xinhua, the Chinese state news outlet. “Whoever violated the rules should be criticised and looked down upon.” Gail Emms, a former silver medallist in badminton who now works as a sports consultant, said it would have been “disgraceful” if the match-throwers had been allowed to advance.

But as in every other walk of life, counting on athletes’ better angels when their incentives encourage them to misbehave is a hopeless proposition. Now that a precedent has been established that outright match-throwing will get you disqualified, players will simply start working on their acting, in the hopes of perfecting tactics that will lose them points while appearing to give their all. The only way to guarantee that athletes play to win is to make sure that winning is always in their best interest.

A simple solution would be to scrap the two-stage structure in favour of a double-elimination tournament, which preserves the incentive to win at every point while still allowing teams to remain in the field after suffering a loss. If the BWF is determined to retain the group system, it could assign the group winners and runners-up to places in the knockout stage via a weighted lottery, like the one used in the National Basketball Association’s annual draft. Alternatively, the four group winners could simply be allowed to select their opponents, picking in order of their record in the group stage, and then in order of their point differential for teams that are tied.

The other issue the sport must address is match-ups between teams from the same country. Badminton players are often willing to put overall national success above individual glory: according to Badzine, an online magazine focused on the sport, a fifth of the 99 professional matches between Chinese players in 2011 did not finish, because a side forfeited or was unable to play. In contrast, when Chinese competitors faced rivals from other countries, the non-completion rate fell to less than 1%.

Olympic badminton rules already limit each country to two entrants in a tournament. To avoid such malfeasance in the Olympics, organisers can start out by putting teams from the same country in different groups. If they both advance, they can be placed on opposite sides of the knockout bracket, so that they cannot meet until the finals. If the two teams both make it to the gold medal match, the outcome will have no effect on the country’s overall medal count. Under those conditions, even the most dedicated team players can be expected to play their hardest.

Driving lessons

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:06:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Schumpeter blog, 6 July 2012

DRIVING is expensive. The average Briton spends £1,200 ($1,800) on learning how to drive—before even considering buying a car, getting it insured, filling it with petrol and purchasing the all important pink fluffy dice to hang from the rear view mirror. After that, things don’t get cheaper: RAC, a British motoring organisation, says that in 2011 owning and running a car cost £6,689 per year—14% more than in 2010.

A growing number of consumers cannot afford such costs and so hire a car. More surprisingly, those who can buy appear to want the chance to claw back some of the cost of their investment—and sign up with one of the peer-to-peer (p2p) car-hire exchanges which have been sprouting up in big cities and near universities. These firms act as intermediaries between consumers, ensuring both parties are above board and fully licensed: lending an expensive piece of machinery to a stranger would be a daunting experience otherwise.

The Economist looked with healthy scepticism at London’s WhipCar as it prepared to launch in 2010, pondering whether people would welcome others using their prized possessions. But 19,000 cars owners have since signed up to the service (some of which are pinpointed on the map above). Financial pragmatism has drawn people to p2p car hire, believes Vinay Gupta, WhipCar’s co-founder. The company’s statistics seem to bear this out: in 2011, those who used the service at least once a month to rent out their car made £1,052 over the year.

Those who need a car also benefit. Finding £30 behind the back of the sofa to hire a car for a day is easier than producing enough for a long-term rental. The average booking through WhipCar is for 46 hours, though some users rent for longer: the longest continuous booking was for 57 days. And users take—and pay for—a car only for the time they need it.

WhipCar is not the only car exchange showing signs of success. Wheelz, which was launched at Stanford University in California, has since expanded to other universities in the state. Buzzcar, established in Paris last year, joining seven competitors, now boasts 6,000 members and 1,000 cars. Such car sharing shows “significant promise”, says Susan Shaheen of the Transportation Sustainability Research Centre at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yet launching such a venture can be difficult. Insurance policies, for instance, aren’t designed for car owners to rent to strangers; WhipCar teamed up with Lloyd’s of London to develop its own policy. Buzzcar found that many family cars are parked in inaccessible private garages. And initial hype can be misleading, says Robin Chase, the founder of Buzzcar. Its launch was an enormous success, until the firm realised that many car owners were not replying to hire requests.

More important, for p2p car hires to become a mass phenomenon, attitudes will have to change. In a recent poll by Dr Shaheen, nearly 70% of those surveyed said that they wouldn’t allow strangers using their personal vehicle. In a few years this share will be much lower, predicts WhipCar’s Mr Gupta: “The nature of people’s relationship with their car is changing. Many no longer see it as a product, but a service.” Tighter wallets and ballooning costs will drive this shift.

With sympathy

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:04:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Schumpeter blog, 28 May 2012

STOCK up on sympathy cards: Britain’s high street is mourning another loss. In a downsizing that began last week, Clinton Cards, a seller of greeting cards, is to close 350 shops and cut 2,800 jobs, about half of the total workforce. This was imposed by the administrators that were appointed when Clinton filed for bankruptcy a few weeks earlier.

Clinton did not fail for want of customers. Rather, it is a bloated behemoth, burdened by high product prices and pre-recession rent payments on its premises. Already owing money to suppliers, Clinton recorded a debt of £3.7m ($5.8m) in the second half of 2011; £35m of its loans were sold to American Greetings, an American card supplier, who called them in.

In contrast, the greeting-card industry itself is in rude health. Britons spent £1.4 billion in single cards in 2011 and send 31 cards per person each year, more than any other country, according to the Greeting Card Association (GCA), an industry body. Card giving is “a strongly embedded culture” in Britain, says Sharon Little, GCA’s boss. One in every six shops stocks cards, including big supermarkets and small specialist sellers.

And the market is likely to grow. Anyone who has spent panicked hours stood in front of a row of lacklustre designs knows the frustration of mass-produced greeting cards. They are by definition generic: shelf space is divided into “for him”, “for her”, “celebrations” and “sympathy” sections. Which is one reason why people are turning to print-on-demand websites that offer the chance to add a personal touch to greeting cards.

One such online retailer, Moonpig.com, uses a web interface that allows customers to change text and photographs on a range of designs across genres. Nick Jenkins set up Moonpig in 1999 with £160,000 made in a previous job as a Glencore commodities trader. Four years of losses ended in 2005 when Mr Jenkins’s company sold £3m worth of cards and turned a small profit. Last year Moonpig sold 12m cards, taking in £38m.

Moonpig has many competitors. Funky Pigeon (online card retailers are not known for their sensible names), backed by newsagent WH Smith, follows the same model. Apple has also developed an app, “Cards”, which allows users to create and post personalised cards for £3.99 each.

Customisable cards may also change one of the industry’s laws: more than two-thirds of greeting cards are bought by women. Men seem to like the concept because it allows them to show off their humour to loved ones. The worry is that men find themselves funnier than their partners do. Jabs meant in jest about a wife’s weight could easily be taken the wrong way by the recipient.

Project Unbreakable: Stories of Surviving Sexual Assault

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:01:00 -0400

Originally appeared on Tumblr’s Storyboard blog, 2 October 2012

“It’s time to talk about it,” is 20-year old Grace Brown’s message. “Sexual assault isn’t talked about. It’s time to talk about rape. We need to talk about it in elementary schools, and high schools, and middle schools, and we don’t. It’s not brought up.”

Her way of talking about rape is Project Unbreakable. Brown has a Nikon D90 DSLR camera and a desire to put the spotlight on a problem which is still too common. At high school, Grace had considered becoming a sexual assault counselor. In her last year at school, she began to take an interest in photography. “I went through a lot of guilt; photography was shallow in comparison to therapy,” she confesses. In her first year of college, Grace combined the two.

“I’ve always been surrounded by a lot of survivors of sexual assault,” she explains. “One day last October I was out with a friend one night, and she just blurted out her story. Even though I’d heard stories before, all too often — this one got to me.

“I felt so incredibly sad that night, feeling like this was just always going to happen to people I care about, and I was just going to have to continue hearing about it. And I woke up the next morning and had the idea for Unbreakable.”

Though Brown couldn’t directly stop assaults, she could provide men and women with a therapeutic outlet for their feelings, and a way to regain the power over their attackers. An army of 22,000 followers from all corners of the world support her and those who are brave enough to appear on the site, holding up posterboard marked with the words of their assaulters.

When she began taking the first photographs of sexual assault survivors, Brown was working on a school project — a photographic study called “Fifty Extraordinary Women.” To date, Brown has only captured 19 of her 50 extraordinary women through the lens. But she has photographed more than 200 other extraordinary survivors of rape, both male and female, and curated user-generated contributions from over 1,000 more. “I didn’t expect it to happen like this,” she readily admits.

Now, Brown and her staff travel around the country, meeting survivors of rape and photographing them. She can’t bring herself to read the words each man and woman writes on the posterboard they hold before them –- she used to, but she noticed it began affecting her too much. But through the lens, she finds the human and gives them the ability to talk back to their attacker, proving that life goes on after the unimaginable. “I just focus on the more hopeful part on it when I’m taking the picture,” she says.

Public debate over sexual assault is not always nuanced. The words of Todd Akin still ring painfully in the ears of most right-thinking people. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is credited as a hero for his work in holding power to account, while the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden that keep him in London’s Ecuadorean embassy are downplayed. British politician George Galloway recently recategorized what many class as rape as “bad sexual etiquette”. “That wasn’t the best thing to say,” but any sort of debate helps, Brown believes. “Now everyone’s talking about it.”

She works six days a week on Unbreakable, whether photographing people, talking to survivors, or managing the website. College has been put on the back-burner for a year. Recently, the Unbreakable team has expanded to five staffers, including a social media manager and an executive director … but the task of preventing rape is big, and there is only so much Unbreakable can do alone. The rest of the world needs to pitch in too.

“We need to change so much,” laments Brown. Society shies away from an open conversation about rape. In her eyes, “it needs to be where when I say what I do,” photographing survivors of rape, “people don’t get uncomfortable.”

One in three women and one in five men will face sexual assault in their lifetime –- though almost everyone agrees that the statistics don’t tell the whole story. Many victims don’t report the crimes, feeling ashamed or unwilling to confide in someone else. Every two minutes, someone in the United States is assaulted sexually.

The statistics are horrifying, but they don’t show the true hurt behind sexual assault. Unbreakable helps demonstrate that there are faces, lives, people, and stories behind hard facts. “It changes everything,” believes Brown. There is an ever-growing community of rape survivors — an unenviable social group.

“I’m proud of it turning into a community. Every woman who is photographed is given, through that image, a way of taking the power back. It’s an outlet for them -– a safe outlet. It’s a space for them to say ‘this did happen to me, and I’m working through it.’” The name “Unbreakable” was chosen with purpose.

Unbreakable directs survivors towards RAINN — the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network — for counseling and support. Brown is keen to stress neither she nor her team are professional counselors. “I didn’t start this to provide healing; I did it to draw attention to the problem.” After she photographs survivors, they thank her. “The way we interact … it’s really poignant.” Many of them remain in touch with Unbreakable.

People can donate to Unbreakable to help further survivors be photographed. Brown is heading to London soon, and she wants to travel to other countries -– including South Africa, where instances of rape are the highest in the world. But on a personal level, people can help out from their computers.

“If you read an article on rape, post it on Facebook,” Brown exhorts. “Begin the conversation. Don’t use your Facebook to talk about the ice cream you’re eating. Do what you can. Make a difference. Every person has the ability to be a good person and make a difference … it’s just a matter of figuring out what you can do.

“If someone knows a survivor who talks about their story, listen. Be supportive. Watch what you say.” Project Unbreakable is a year old next month. Thanks to Brown, people are talking about rape. The more people talk about it, the better society can tackle and eradicate it.

Bereavement to orientation tomes!

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:20:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Johnson blog, 30 April 2012

PETER MARK ROGET was, by all accounts, a bit of a nerd. Some kids collect stamps; others meticulously record baseball scores. Mr Roget made lists. Though many grow out of their childish obsessions, the British lexicographer didn’t. Aged 26, he began compiling lists of synonyms “to supply my own deficiencies” in language: God knows what he’d make of the lexically-challenged stars of Jersey Shore. He laboured over his list for 47 years, and at the grand old age of 73 finally felt willing to release it into the world. On April 29th, 1852—160 years ago yesterday—its first edition went on sale. Mr Roget wrote in its preface that he hoped it might “prove useful to others.” Little did he know he had created Frankenstein’s monster.

Pity the former president of the United States who thought his first term paper at boarding school lacked a certain oomph, and reached for his copy of “Roget’s Thesaurus”. A poignant moment, in which the future president mourns his sister’s death, has “lacerates” rolling down his cheek. No prizes for guessing the culprit: it was the 43rd inhabitant of the White House. As George W. Bush later learned, though spelled identically, “tears” (as in crying) and “tears” (as in ripping up) are not even homonyms, much less synonyms. And therein lies the problem with thesauri: they are deaf to nuance and context, and so almost no one uses them correctly.

Thesauri should add buff and polish, rather than substance, to a work. But linguistic overreach becomes much easier when you think you have the weight of a four-volume thesaurus behind you. The perceived power of the thesaurus causes users to choose flowery language when more utilitarian words will do not only just as well, but better. If the writer is struggling so much that he must consult a thesaurus, what hope does the reader have?

Today most people don’t meet the humble thesaurus in print, but through computers. Most good word processors these days come with a huge database behind the scenes, allowing easy access to a variety of synonyms with little more than a click of the mouse. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Take the title of this post, for example: it began life as “Death to the thesaurus” before being mangled into meaninglessness by Microsoft Word.

There is also the concern of accuracy. To quote perhaps the world’s most educated fictional egg, “when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Humpty Dumpty was not wrong. Words are like people: each is unique, with unique strengths and weaknesses. Some may be similar-looking, and even share some of the same characteristics, but they cannot be simply swapped one for the other. It would be like firing an architect and hiring a builder instead. Both are employed in getting structures set upright, but that does not make them interchangeable.

Roget had an admirable goal: he hoped to educate and expand the vocabulary of his readers. But he always intended his thesaurus to be used in conjunction with dictionaries. Today, thesauri seem relics of the past, useful mainly for children taking their first steps into language and learning the ways to describe new feelings, emotions and objects. 40 million copies of Roget’s work are out there in the wild, giving people false hope in their linguistic abilities. 160 years is two human lifetimes: perhaps the thesaurus’s time on this earth is up.

Up in flames

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:16:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Prospero blog, 26 April 2012

SOMETHING odd is happening at the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum (CAM), near Naples. Some paintings and sculptures are being torched. Great art has felt the lick of flames before, but often by ransacking or accident. Here, for more than a week, the director of the gallery has been the one setting the artworks alight.

Antonio Manfredi is burning some of the CAM’s most prized pieces in protest against the Italian government’s cuts to the arts. “The 1,000 pieces housed at Casoria are facing destruction already, thanks to the indifference of the government,” he says. “It’s painful to see work burning, but it’s an important action to save this museum—which is very important for the area.”

Pieces that make up the permanent collection at the Casoria gallery are being sacrificed with the permission of their creators. The result is a kind of meta-art, firmly entrenched in the protest movement. Last week four pieces were burned (three at the museum in Italy; John Brown, a sculptor, burned his piece ‘Manifesto’ at his studio in Wales), fanning the flames of frustration over arts cuts across Europe and beyond. This week, three more pieces will follow into the pyre: paintings by German, Italian and Chinese artists, demonstrating international support for the cause. Other works in the museum by Senegalese, Egyptian and Brazilian artists have also been earmarked for ritual burning, unless the government comes to Naples “to see how difficult it is to be a museum here with no money,” claims Mr Manfredi.

His Casoria museum has been privately funded for seven years, but Italy’s debt crisis has seen wealthy private sponsors retreating from charitable donations to museums and art galleries. Mr Manfredi believes it is now impossible to maintain the museum and wants the government to step in. “The museum is running the risk of dying,” he says.

But funds are tight in Italy. The government has quite a few expenses to pay that could seem more urgent than a contemporary-art museum. Mario Monti’s government has had to make swingeing cuts due to what Mr Manfredi deems a waste of public money by previous governments. Money has been systematically cut for the arts, with Rome’s Maxxi museum of contemporary art facing closure owing to a crippling lack of funds.

Mr Monti is praised internationally for his pragmatism and willingness to make tough decisions. But many in Italy’s artistic community—which was already struggling before the Eurozone crisis—complain that Mr Monti has little time for culture. Yet art is a public good, Mr Manfredi argues. Thus the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum’s truculent response.

But this is not only a protest against financial cutbacks; it is also protest art. The very action of setting alight works does what good art is meant to do: it poses questions and provokes debate. This is a martyrdom of art, which either lays waste to fine pieces or elevates them to a higher plane of meaning, depending on one’s view of Mr Manfredi’s actions. Thousands of euros worth of work have gone up in flames already.

The entire process has been turned into an exhibition with a poignant message: looking after these pieces costs money. Galleries and museums are trusted to care for artwork; without funding, they cannot do so. Mr Manfredi joins a pantheon of conscientious culturalists who seek to prod governments into change through art. It seems unlikely that the Casoria museum’s actions will be as well remembered as pieces like Picasso’s “Guernica” (indeed, unlike Picasso’s distinctively anti-war message, Mr Manfredi likens the ritualistic burning of the pieces to both war and revolution). But these burning sessions have inspired a larger conversation about arts funding in Italy and elsewhere—albeit one that seems akin to a hostage negotiation.

Hooray for Hollywood?

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:24:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Johnson blog, 17 April 2012

MEMORABILITY is something we all strive for, whether it’s making a big impression at a party or leaving a legacy to the world. Some are philanthropic; others are heroic. But for many—especially those in the writing game—it is for our words that we hope to be remembered (as Ovid wrote, “carmina morte carent”). By following science’s lead, you stand a better chance of making into a compendium of quotations.

Computer scientists at Cornell University think they’ve cracked the code for memorability, by going to the source of some of the most quoted phrases in human history. If you’re thinking Shakespeare or Churchill here, then you’re too erudite for today’s world. Hollywood provides many of the set phrases we deploy in everyday life. Whether at the bar or in the boardroom, movies permeate our language. Cultural osmosis means that this source material is oft-quoted both consciously and unconsciously.

Is there a formula for which catchphrases catch on? Johnson is wary of scientific papers that hang their hat on media-friendly propositions. Their sole reason for existence is often to be written about. But Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and his team back up their proposition well.

The team trawled through IMDb’s “memorable quotes” page for each of 1,000 films and drew out the most popular lines. They then took less notable sections from the same scene in the film, of a similar length and spoken by the same character (to mitigate any bias). A comparison of the two resulting corpora proves useful for those of us hankering for a place in the history books.

Syntactically, memorable quotes are quite basic. Unusual structures and plentiful subclauses may not survive the cross shredder of time. But in word choice, popular quotes diverge from everyday language. 60% of memorable quotes used language that was more distinctive than that the found in a standard corpus of words culled from news stories. As the authors of the paper write, “these results suggest that memorable quotes consist of unusual word sequences built on common syntactic scaffolding”: flowery wallpaper on the walls of an otherwise forgettable room.

But “wait a minute, wait a minute I tell ya! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Distinctive quotes should also be re-usable in a new context, which is why your correspondent can use the above (from 1927’s “The Jazz Singer”) in a post about linguistic analysis. Personal pronouns—save for the generic “you” used in the above quote—are noted to hinder a phrase’s memorability. When one of the memorable quotes is paired randomly with one of the non-memorable ones, the memorable one uses fewer (non-you) pronouns 61% of the time. Similarly, indefinite articles (57%) and present-tense verbs (54%) remove tethers to specific things and specific moments in the past. In other words, they render a phrase more pliable to all contexts. Test subjects recognised the memorable quotes whether they had seen the source movie or not.

The way a phrase sounds also helps improve its chances or worming into the brain. Memorable quotes use more front-vowel sounds (like ee and eh) than back-vowel sounds (such as u and o), the research finds. Sound symbolism is still a disputed science, but its proponents regularly find that front vowels are perceived as more lively (and therefore more memorable) than back vowels.

Shorn of their cinematic surroundings, the selected phrases—both memorable and forgettable—are involved in a struggle for survival of the fittest. It seems that the right combination of simplicity (in syntax) and distinctiveness (in word-choice) best gives a phrase a fighting chance of surviving through the generations. Your correspondent will be bearing all this in mind as he searches for immortality; no writer wants to find himself washed-up and moaning to his fellows “I coulda been a contender.”

Home groan

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:20:49 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Game Theory blog, 18 April 2012

SET to meet Portugal’s Sporting Lisbon on April 19th in the semi-finals of the Europa League, a tournament for top-flight European football clubs, Spain’s Athletic Bilbao has quickly become the bookmakers’ favourite to win the entire competition. Athletic has shown its mettle by beating England’s Manchester United and Germany’s Schalke, two well-regarded teams, in previous rounds. Its victories are unusual because Athletic is made up entirely of players from the Basque region of Spain, where it is based, in an era when most big clubs field multinational line-ups. That is a welcome development to the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), football’s governing body, which is always looking for proof that “home-grown” teams can be just as successful as international squads. If Athletic does make it to the Europa League final in Bucharest on May 9th, FIFA is likely to be cheering it on.

For several years, FIFA has groaned about the influx of foreign players into domestic leagues, which it blames for stymieing the development of national talent. In 2008, it attempted to mandate a quota that would have stopped teams from fielding more than five expatriate players in a starting 11. European Union (EU) authorities rightly rejected the so-called “6+5” rule as discriminatory, effectively scuppering the plan.

Since then, FIFA has backed away from quota systems based explicitly on nationality, but it continues to push for more representation of national players. In November last year, Britain’s Independent on Sunday newspaper reported on talks between FIFA and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) about a “9+9” quota, requiring nine players in an 18-man squad to have spent three years under the age of 21 training with the national association where their club is based. Under an existing UEFA rule, a team competing in a European competition must include at least eight such players in a 25-man squad. England’s Premier League has adopted the same regulation. Less overtly protectionist, the alternatives to “6+5” are more palatable to EU authorities. But they are similarly flawed.

In trying to cultivate national talent, FIFA can certainly learn from Athletic, which is one of just three teams that have never been relegated from La Liga, the top Spanish division, in the past 80 years. Along with several other high-profile Spanish clubs, Athletic pursues a cantera (or “quarry”) policy of focusing on local youth development. Having produced World Cup-winning players like Andrés Iniesta and Xavi Hernández (who play for Barcelona and rose through its training system), the academies that have flourished under this policy are today the envy of clubs elsewhere. They have given Athletic a rich pool of talent on which it can draw.

FIFA and UEFA evidently believe that imposing quotas will press clubs in other countries to adopt cantera systems of their own. After all, if Manchester United cannot rely heavily on expensive imports to compete in European tournaments against the best Spanish sides, it will have to invest in training youngsters. That should force other Premiership clubs to follow suit.

But increasing quotas is a back-to-front way of tackling the problem. Besides depriving domestic leagues of the sort of foreign talent that challenges and inspires hopeful young players, more intervention could upset fans. A self-imposed restriction works for Athletic as an accomplished club fiercely proud of its Basque heritage. At matches played in Bilbao’s San Mamés stadium, fans regularly chant a line that translates: “With cantera and our support, Athletic don’t need to import.” Yet few supporters of other clubs are equally nationalistic, and many hold foreign players in particularly high regard (notably, fans of Manchester United voted Eric Cantona, a Frenchman, the club’s greatest player of all time). Football is also one of Europe’s most successful exports and its teams need foreigners, such as South Korea’s Park Ji-sung (another Manchester United player), to attract a global audience and overseas sponsors.

To have their desired effect, such quotas might also need to make clubs start working with children from a very early age. Not many big teams have become involved with their players during the crucial formative period between the ages of five and 11, when cultural factors and junior coaching can make all the difference later. Mr Iniesta joined Barcelona’s academy when he was 12, while Lionel Messi, the club’s best player, came to it from his native Argentina as a precocious 13-year-old. Because he qualifies as a “home-grown” player under FIFA’s “9+9” proposal, it might simply persuade clubs in countries with poor grassroots infrastructure to spend more time scouting for talented teenagers abroad.

FIFA’s long-running concern may well be justifiable. England’s Premiership is seen as one of the most exciting football leagues in the world, but few of its biggest stars are English. Its national side has little hope of winning the European Championship this year, let alone the World Cup in 2014. But these shortcomings would not necessarily be fixed by tinkering at the top. If FIFA wants to have a positive impact, it should focus on grassroots initiatives and leave the market alone.

Pizza app: Britain's takeaway business

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:53:00 -0400

Appeared in 21 April print edition of The Economist. Originally appeared on The Economist’s Schumpeter blog, 5 April 2012

BRITONS love their takeaways. A £4.8 billion ($7.6 billion) industry has sprung up around the dietary needs of late night revellers and working families looking for a treat at the end of the week. But the recession has tightened belts both literally and figuratively: high calorie, high fat meals that give a taste of India, China and other nations are in decline. The industry has contracted on average 2.9% annually in the past five years, according to IBISWorld, a market research firm. Their message is clear: you can’t afford a korma if you aren’t earning a wage.

There is, however, more than a glimmer of hope for purveyors of fast food: the internet and mobile phone apps are changing the industry. Takeaway food profits from laziness: whether it is the lack of enthusiasm to stand in front of a stove and conjure up a meal, or being too languorous to drive to a supermarket and pick up ingredients. Home delivery is a major inducement when ordering from the local chip shop. Faceless transactions made through the internet or mobile phones make the process even easier.

Domino’s Pizza (which sells 12% of fast and takeaway food in Britain) has been quick to exploit this opportunity. In 2011, according to the firm’s preliminary results, 44% of sales in Britain, totalling £183m, were made online. This was up 43% from 2010. More recent figures show online orders making even further inroads. They accounted for 51% of delivered sales in the first three months of this year. And although only 16.4% of that were taken through an app, mobile orders are growing fast. In the first quarter they exceeded £1m in a single week for the first time.

Yet Domino’s is not the only firm profiting from this new avenue. Competitors Pizza Hut and Papa John’s also boast online ordering through their websites, and one-click apps that make buying pizzas simple. Just Eat, an online aggregator of takeaway shops that processes orders for customers, was visited 20 million times in the five months to February 2012. David Buttress, managing director of the company’s operations in Britain and Ireland, says that increasingly “the British public is going online to get its food.” More than 10,000 restaurants—most locally-operated businesses—have already signed up with the site, which claims to boost revenue by up to 25% a year (that figure seems fanciful, but one shop in the north-east of England says that turnover has increased markedly since it joined). Just Eat also has an app and is now exporting its model to other countries, including Argentina and India.

A big reason for the success online is a happy coincidence: the demographic that spends the most on takeaway food are youngish geeks. Those aged between 30 and 49 years splash out £11.70 a week on takeaways—46% higher than the average household, according to the Office for National Statistics. They are technologically engaged, and au fait with buying items (including food) online or via smartphone applications.

But one does not need to be a techie to understand the advantages of getting food with a few clicks. Hung-over students can order a Chinese from the comfort of their bed via laptop, and never have to leave the house. Working parents can order pizzas on the commute home to feed their family using a smartphone app, quelling the fear of an empty freezer.

So thanks to technology, the decline of the takeaway industry may be short-lived. But even without the convenience of apps and online ordering, Britons are unlikely to ever really fall out of love with their takeaways—especially in this day and age. They are, believes IBISWorld analyst Steven Connell, a “source of comfort in depressing times.”

An ugly game

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 06:49:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Game Theory blog, 4 April 2012

PROFESSIONAL football players have to put up with hostile crowds, angry coaches and scathing stories in the press no matter where they play. But in eastern Europe they live with more serious forms of abuse. According to a survey of more than 3,000 professionals in the region conducted by FIFPro, a players’ union, around 12% of players in eastern Europe have been victims of violence, perpetrated mainly by fans, coaches and managers. In a 180-page “black book” published in February, based on its survey findings, FIFPro describes a “terrifying lack of respect” for players.

The safety of professionals playing in eastern Europe has become a major concern for the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the sport’s governing body in Europe. At the organisation’s annual meeting in late March, Michel Platini, its president, noted in his speech to delegates that in some countries “players sign or terminate contracts under pressure or threats”. More must be done “to protect the players, without whom there would be no football,” he declared. Yet with corruption and lawlessness endemic in some countries in the region, UEFA’s task looks Herculean.

One of the best-documented cases of violence involved Spartak Gogniev, a 31-year-old Russian striker who played for FC Krasnodar, a Russian club, until earlier this year. Last November Mr Gogniev was sent off by the referee during a match in Chechnya between FC Krasnodar’s reserve side and Terek Grozny. While walking down the tunnel from the pitch to the changing room, he was attacked by men wearing police and Terek team uniforms. The assault left Mr Gogniev with a broken nose and ribs. The Russian Football Union (RFU), football’s governing body in Russia, fined Terek Grozny just 500,000 roubles ($17,000) for failing to provide security to Mr Gogniev. Even though RFU also banned the club’s administrator and reserve coach from the game for a year, FIFPro called the mild sanctions “unacceptable”.

In another high-profile case, staff at FC Kuban, another Russian club also based in Krasnodar, threatened to injure Nikola Nikezic, a Montenegrin footballer, for refusing to end his contract with the club. Two men—one of whom was carrying a gun—beat and strangled Mr Nikezic at the club’s premises in March 2011 until he signed papers allowing FC Kuban to get rid of him. Danko Lazovic, a Serbian striker playing for Zenit St Petersburg, is another example: he was shot with a Taser by a police officer in June 2011 after handing his shirt to a fan at the end of a match (pictured).

Such violence is often a reflection of broader social problems. Mr Gogniev’s assault took place in a region run like a medieval fiefdom by Ramzan Kadyrov, a militant-for-hire who expediently switched to the Russian side during the wars in Chechnya and was rewarded for that decision with Chechnya’s presidency. Mr Kadyrov was also the president of Terek Grozny until he resigned November 2011, reportedly on account of his heavy workload. It is highly likely that he retains a great deal of implicit control over the club.

Despite the violence, Russian clubs have continued to attract international players with the promise of rich rewards. Christopher Samba, a Congolese defender, was recently signed from Blackburn Rovers, a club in England’s Premier League, by Russia’s Anzhi Makhachala on a deal reportedly worth about £100,000 ($160,000) a week. Yet Mr Samba has already complained of racial abuse by Russian football fans. If that dissuades other players from following in his footsteps, it may send a message out to authorities about the need for change. Indeed, in the wake of Mr Samba’s complaint, the RFU announced the establishment of a special working group designed to root out “racism, xenophobia and extremism”.

Violence is one of many “scourges” of eastern European football, according to Mr Platini, alongside match-fixing, doping, player trafficking and illegal betting. UEFA says it is putting its full efforts into cleaning up the game. But Philippe Piat, the vice-president of FIFPro, has warned there is a long way to go, even if “we have taken the first step” towards improvement. Football may be the beautiful game, but it is far less beautiful in eastern Europe than anywhere else.

Journalese: a strange English dialect

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:36:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Johnson blog, 3 April 2012

TRAINS are a great place to meet people. Close proximity to a complete stranger for a finite period of time expands the horizons. Thus your correspondent found himself on the 17.02 train from Newcastle to York, iPad on lap, tapping out a post for Johnson last weekend. Sitting in the window seat was a young Edinburgh University student from China, on his way to London. We struck up a conversation.

Flicking through the iPad edition of last week’s paper together, we came across the China section and its article about internal resettlement in the north of the country. Midway through the first paragraph, he stumbled. Turning to your correspondent, he asked a simple question. “In China,” he began, “I can understand the English-language newspapers. Why not here?”

It’s a tough question. The student spoke very fluent English—in fact, the longest lull in conversation was on your correspondent’s behalf, fumbling over an explanation of cliché to a person whose internal dictionary doesn’t contain the word. (Perhaps there’s a reason we borrowed a French word; the concept may not be universal.) Yet he has a valid point. Newspapers, in Britain at least, converse in a unique gobbledegook with its own name: journalese.

Newspapers rarely, if ever, report the facts in the way you would in conversation. Failing to find an easy explanation to give the Chinese student, your correspondent turned to a working example. “Love rats” infest British newspapers, if not the real world. The same applies to the verb “to knife”; an editor at some point must have decided that simply “stabbing” wasn’t emotive enough. And of course the need for drama means mild criticism whispered in corridors become all-out “attacks” when rolled through the printing presses. Anyone who has committed any crime is tarred with the catch-all adjective “sick”, whether stealing sweets from a shop or leaving someone to die in the street. Journalese is part of the ink-stained wretch’s tradition (how’s that for a cliché?), handed down from section editor to reporter to reader over decades and more.

Journalese extends even to headlines. Can any native English speaker correctly parse “Perch ‘Twitter abuse’ probe” on the first attempt? Longer headlines online make stories like this clearer, but tabloid formats (and enormous headlines) require extreme concision. No wonder foreigners coming to newspapers with English as a second language have difficulty with our media. Journalists frequently remove all the helpful hints that English has developed over its generations of evolution, such as prepositions and articles, leaving a car crash of nouns and verbs that are impenetrable to our foreign friends.

The journalist’s greatest enemy is his or her word count. It always looms large, ticking down like a doomsday clock. So hacks lean heavily on verbal crutches to express complicated issues succinctly. But they are cant and code, baffling to someone who has yet to be inducted into the circle of consumers of mass media. A friend who writes for a national newspaper notes that not all codes are identical: “you write for your audience—broadsheet readers and tabloid readers are often very different.” The Economist wards its writers away from using journalese: the style guide devotes 649 words (almost the length of this post) to examples to avoid—then links to three other entries on similar topics. That doesn’t stop the paper’s writers from still deploying verboten terms on occasion, though. Hence my fellow traveller’s occasional difficulty.

For the best part of an hour your correspondent tried to explain why English language journalism, despite being some of the strongest and oldest in the world, adopts this lingo. We never got to the bottom of the matter; York beckoned. Journalese is a separate dialect, one which requires newcomers to put aside logic and bend the basic rules of grammar. Our press could express itself more clearly. But this strange language, with its own time-honoured rules, has its own function. It is not only concise, but winks at the reader familiar with it. People enjoy belonging to the circle. The philosophy John Reith brought to the founding the BBC applies today, both to print and to broadcast media: as well as informing, good journalism must entertain.

The word on the street

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:15:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Johnson blog, 26 March 2012

WANDER around the streets of any city and one is likely to find a rich patchwork of language. Linguists acknowledge the ever-changing coarseness of streets, rather than the stuffy offices where dictionaries are usually compiled, are often the best habitat to uncover the language of the age.

Captain Francis Grose knew this, and so he took to the streets in his mid-forties to produce a “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue” in 1785. That book remains lost to us today, but a revised edition—the 1811 “Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence”—survived. Captain Grose’s work was supplemented by a series of collaborators (including one named “Hell-Fire Dick”) for its expanded edition, and is a treasure trove of the language real people used two centuries ago, curses and all.

His compendium shows there is beauty and ingenuity worth recording in even the coarsest elements of our mother tongue. Though The Economist has a policy on swear words (“avoid them, unless they convey something genuinely helpful or interesting”), Johnson believes Captain Grose’s dictionary provides plenty of interest as an anthropological and historical study of language through the ages.

Thus we investigate the term “biter: a wench whose cunt is ready to bite her arse; a lascivious, rampant wench.” So too we admire those who insulted their friends by claiming an ill-judged liaison could result in the contraction of a “Tetbury portion” (“a cunt and a clap”), named after a town a hundred miles outside of London (and, presumably, its disease-ridden inhabitants). Though obscene, there is beauty and historical insight couched in these terms. The language of the day illuminates the way of life through each era. The time of Captain Grose was torrid, dirty and brash—largely a world away from ours.

There are other choice quotable cuts to be found amongst the filth of everyday life in nineteenth century London. Some are of their time. Crooks of the time would do anything to avoid a “wry mouth and a pissen pair of breeches”: death by hanging. “Laced mutton” and “trapes” are two words rarely—if ever—used today to refer to prostitutes, but were deployed frequently in the nineteenth century. Others are more permanent additions to the language. Barflies in America still drink “tall boys” (“a bottle, or two-quart pot”). “Clod hopper” remains as a pejorative term for a stupid person. British children still shout “cheese it!” to tell others to run away from wrongdoing in the playground, unaware they are deploying criminal slang that pre-dates Dickens.

Cursing is endlessly inventive. Simon Donald, who co-founded the coarse British comic “Viz” and will be taking a show called “School of Swearing” to this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe festival, believes that at heart swearing is “a secret language and so, by its nature, must continually be reinvented”. This constant reinvention can defy recording by traditional lexicographers. Back in 1785 (and later in 1811) it took someone like Captain Grose to wander the streets and note down the slang, idiom and jargon used in everyday life. Today, we have the internet, where thousands of amateur lexicographers work simultaneously in different cities across the globe.

Urban Dictionary collects some of the terms in everyday usage and posts them online. Like Wikipedia, anyone can add definitions to the site and so many terms will never have been used in conversation, never mind with regularity. (A surprising number of entries are little more than libellous attacks on former friends or colleagues.) Some entries are faddish in-jokes. Others capture a more widespread linguistic shift. Even if not necessarily documentary evidence of conversational usage, word fans can enjoy the inventiveness of terms like “introdouche” (“the way in which a douchebag would go about introducing his/herself”).

Humans seem inherently keen to play with language, from puns to portmanteaus to plain old playing on words. “Introdouching” is a good example of the Jenga-like qualities of our linguistic inventiveness. It relies on taking vogueish terms (“douchebag” being a recent favourite) from the bottom of the pile and adding them to the top, creating something new. Sometimes these coinages go too far, collapsing the tower. But occasionally they work, and stick in our collective corpora.

Sites like Urban Dictionary, and books like Captain Grose’s compendium chart the constant reinvention of our language. To see how we cursed is to see how we lived, warts and all. But more than that, it gives Johnson’s readers some old-school verbal ammunition with which to sting their foes in conversation.

Imperial language, please

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:21:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Johnson blog, 21 March 2012

JOHN HEMMING, MP, is a fearless campaigner. He was at the vanguard of the campaign against superinjunctions in the United Kingdom, outing Fred Goodwin and Ryan Giggs in parliament for seeking legal protection from the media reporting their transgressions. This week, Mr Hemming once again put his head above the parapet in the name of the greater good.

The Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley submitted Early Day Motion (EDM) 2893 to parliament on Monday. With the dull title “Use of the phrase ‘ton of bricks’” (EDMs are circumscribed to “a short title” and “a sentence no longer than 250 words” by parliamentary regulations), Mr Hemming took on the prevailing winds of linguistic change with nary a concern for himself.

His hackles were raised by “reports in the BBC and other media outlets of the intention of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to come down like a tonne of bricks on wealthy people who sell properties through offshore companies to avoid stamp duty”. Noting that an imperial ton is heavier than a metric tonne, and lamenting that metrication loses some of the weightiness of the original phrase, Mr Hemming “calls on the BBC and other media to cease the metrication of traditional phrases forthwith before people end up being exhorted not to give another 25.4 millimetres rather than not giving another inch.” The implicit concern is that giving even an inch on this matter will allow people to take a full 1,609m.

Though Mr Hemming is defending the metric system, he is also guarding a tradition of playfulness in language. Britons are staunch defenders of the mother tongue. While he stands alone in parliament (Mr Hemming’s motion has only his own support), there are plenty of non-parliamentarians who stand alongside him. When contacted by your correspondent about Mr Hemming’s epistle, Johnson’s editor (based in New York, and from America’s Deep South) suggested that 28g of linguistic prevention is worth 483g of cure. Though Britons like to believe that the English language is their dominion alone to defend, it is clear that revelling in the tapestry of images available to English speakers crosses borders. A rich seam of idiomatic expressions about weights and measures is a natural result of the British Empire’s past as a major trading power.

Expressions of quantity include ten a penny in English (inflated to a dime a dozen in America). And imperial weights and measures remain dominant. Take the inch, for example. We can come within an inch of victory; footballers miss the goal by inches, not centimetres (though Sunday league players miss by miles, not kilometres). The 18-yard box is not the 16.5 metre box; supporters munching on questionable pies in the stands may weigh a (metaphorical) ton, but they don’t—and shouldn’t—weigh 907kg. Linguistically challenged businessmen talk of going the whole nine yards for a client. Humans are constantly weighing up their options. For English-speakers, transmuting phrases into metric equivalents risks not only their vivacity but our sense of history.

What if when tired we were to take not forty winks, but twenty blinks? Would it sound the same if we precisely quantified a jiffy as a certain number of seconds? Our linguistic heritage is a treasure to guard carefully. Mr Hemming spoke to your correspondent the day after submitting his motion: “I am not going to give an inch in protecting the British heritage of language,” he declared. “Putting a quart into a pint pot has always been difficult. Long may it remain so.”

Geeks aren't known for their social skills

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:17:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Schumpeter blog, 21 March 2012

HOLLYWOOD portrayed Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, as aloof, disinterested and awkward in all manner of ways in “The Social Network”. During important meetings with venture capitalists and potential investors Mr Zuckerberg’s character became increasingly distracted and at one such appointment his business attire was a bath robe, pyjamas and slippers. (This made-for-the-movies moment actually stems from a real event, when Facebook made a pitch to Sequoia Capital.) Despite his apparent insouciance, Facebook secured enough capital to finance its business, turning it into one of the world’s largest companies. Facebook’s experience, however, is rare.

Most companies need to lay on the charm to get investors to prise open their wallets. When it comes to starting up a small tech business, having a good idea is the easy part. Financing that idea and marketing it is where many start-ups fall down. And geeks are not known for their social skills. Many struggle to come across well in the slick, fast-talking world of venture capitalists and angel investors. Esther Dyson, an American angel investor in tech companies, recently told peHUB, a private-equity website, that “it’s much easier to invest money than to attract it.” Those who do manage to get enough cash face another problem. All that time spent glad-handing businessmen and investors means the development of a product can stagnate. The geeks need to return to programming, error checking and developing, while juggling the composition of a commercial team from scratch. It is little wonder that so few ideas come to full fruition.

Young start-ups usually have had two financing options: hands-off venture capitalists that are willing to plough money into a company without rolling up their sleeves, or business incubators that are short on funds but wealthy in enthusiasm and knowledge. The Sandpit, a London-based entrepreneurial organisation, has come up with a third way by taking equity in promising start-ups, giving them a direct investment in their success. Founded by Simon Campbell, The Sandpit made its first big investment last year in SoDash, a social media-powered sales platform for companies that relies heavily on artificial intelligence algorithms to predict and track public perception of brands. The Sandpit put £125,000 ($200,000) into SoDash’s coffers, and provided staff and advice to the young company. Three months after partnering with The Sandpit an extra £120,000 of annualised sales to clients including RBS, Virgin Trains and Universal Music had been secured. SoDash won the PepsiCo10 competition, which highlights new technologies based in Europe.

Jonathan Grubin, head of product at The Sandpit, now splits his time between London and SoDash’s offices in Edinburgh. He explains that “Although we’re two separate groups on paper, we act and work as if the products are our own…we effectively become the commercial arm of the businesses we get involved with.” Because of their equity stake, it is in The Sandpit’s interest to see SoDash grow. Simply throwing money in (the old venture capital set-up) is seen as inefficient. The Sandpit wants real returns from its investment, and lends all the manpower it can muster to help achieve that.

A hands-on process is beneficial for start-ups. “Most entrepreneurs want to be plugged in to a network where they can get advice and help growing their business,” says Robert Scoble, a respected tech blogger once described as “a minor celebrity among geeks.” A personal touch is needed in order to succeed, with relationships that plug the monetary and expertise gaps that are bound to exist in nascent tech start-ups. That is precisely what the likes of The Sandpit provide.

Facebook was and is a rule unto itself. The rest of the world has to sweet-talk financiers into parting with their cash. Marketing is therefore all-important for start-ups. As Mr Scoble explains, “you have to be both good, and have a good bullhorn, to rise above the noise.”

What's in a name?

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:18:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Economist’s Prospero blog, 14 March 2012

JULIET CAPULET didn’t account for a world in which books can be published at a mouse click when she sighed “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Explanatory book titles such as Thomas Harriot’s “Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia” may have sufficed in the 1590s, but today publishers and authors need a bit more pizzazz to compete for readers.

The Diagram Prize, organised by the Bookseller magazine, has offered an annual award to the most outlandishly titled books since 1978. Judges recently announced the seven shortlisted titles for the 2011 award. “Cooking with Poo”, a cookbook by Saiyuud Diwong, may not smell that sweet, but its title ensures intrigued shoppers will buy it. Ms Diwong’s competitors are a varied bunch, and include plenty of explanatory ones: “A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two”; “A Taxonomy of Office Chairs”; “Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World”; and “The Mushroom in Christian Art”.

Other shortlisted titles include “The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria”, a self-published effort, and “Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge”. The latter title was chosen to “get everyone’s attention,” says Kate Cloughan of Royd Press, its publisher. The tactic worked: “Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary” has seen greater sales than a typical release by Royd Press.

As barriers to publishing are demolished, more and more books are competing for readers’ attention. The traditional supply/demand ratio for the printed (and electronic) word has been upended. Today anyone can tell their story to a potential audience of millions. Rising above the morass with an eye-catching title is important to ensure one’s book is plucked from shelves. Nowadays Googleability and uniqueness are also important factors, acknowledges Ms Cloughan.

Tim Parks, an author with 14 novels to his name, tries to give his work titles that “capture the spirit of the book” in question but also “attract attention” sitting on a shelf. “Many huge international bestsellers lean heavily on their titles”, he admits.

“Titles of books shouldn’t matter,” offers Sidney J. Levy, the Coca-Cola Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the University of Arizona, who has studied shopping psychology for several industries. “People see book titles, they read reviews, they see covers, they get word of mouth from friends and have preferences and aversions”—all of this contributes to the eventual choice to buy or not. “But before we can experience the content within we have to have our attention engaged.”

Durham county council drops 'unlucky 13' from new house numbers

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:50:00 -0400

Originally appeared on The Guardian’s Northerner blog, 13 March 2012

If there’s an obituary in tomorrow’s Guardian headlined ‘Promising young Guardian Northerner writer dies aged 22’, then you know I’ve made a grave miscalculation. Some people will think I am currently flouting Satan himself by making fun of superstition in an article published on the 13th. Okay, so it’s not Friday, but still dear reader, I am taking my life in my hands.

Some on Durham county council must be amongst those who subscribe to superstitious beliefs too, because earlier this month they decided to prevent new build houses being numbered 13.

That’s right. Hidden in Appendix 2: Street Naming and Numbering Policy and Procedures paragraph 8.6 is the council edict: “All numbers should be used in the[ir] proper sequence. The number 13 will be excluded from the numbering scheme unless it is advantageous for the Street Naming and Numbering Officer to include it.”

Leaving aside the obvious question as to when it would be advantageous to number a house 13, this is quite a development for a country (and a region) which prides itself on its no-nonsense stiff upper lip. The people of the north east are regarded – by those who live here, at least – as some of the most level headed people around. Cowing to superstition just isn’t done.

Except actually, there might be a sound economic basis behind doing so. Viewing Land Registry Data shows that triskaidekaphobics may be more common than we think. Recent research by FindaProperty.com uncovers that living at number 13 could mean your house is worth £6,511 less than other, less fate tempting, abodes. If there are people out there who feel uneasy enough to cut down your asking price, then maybe banning the number outright isn’t a bad idea after all.

Unproven fears may seem like a strange basis for making a major financial decision, but Andrew Smith of the Digital Property Group believes that “for some people, superstitions can play a big role” in whether they choose to buy or not.

A number of councils around the country have instigated similar legally-binding bans on the number 13, while a staggeringly large group of developers unofficially skip over the number when building their new estates. 28% of streets already don’t have a number 13.

Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire believes that humans are surprisingly superstitious. In a 2003 survey of 2,068 people he carried out, 77% of people said they were “at least a little superstitious and/or carried out some form of superstitious behaviour”. 42% were “very/somewhat superstitious.” A quarter of people admitted they get the heebie jeebies from the sinister number.

Prof Wiseman says now:

We were a superstitious nation back in 2003 when I did my research, and we still are. Irrational fear of a number is something innate in many people - and at an important liminal moment such as buying a house, we’re bound to let the irrational take over. Heading off that fear by eliminating the number 13 at source seems like a sensible move to me.

Of course, Britain isn’t the only country that doesn’t like certain numbers. We’ve all had the pub conversation about how the vagaries of the tonal Mandarin language has meant whole swathes of Asian hotels and tower blocks skip right from level 3 to 5 (the word for “four” sounds very like the word for “death”). Italians get weak-kneed at the sight of 17, and some Afghans can’t stand the number 39.

Is there a reason to fear numbers anymore, or is it a relic of a society which relied on religion and the occult? More pertinently for Guardian Northerner, are Durham county council being a bunch of Southern jessies? As always, we’re eager to know your thoughts.