Of all the reasons that, as I mentioned, I love Londoners, the sharp, self-deprecating humor is near the top. Danny Ayers spotted a great example of this. An American LiveJournaller set up a Web bulletin board "London Hurts", not unlike those that sprang up soon after 9/11 with a lot of lugubrious lament and jingoistic sloganeering. It seems Londoners are having none of that, please. I nearly fell off my chair reading the Haiku, especially given the slyly over-the-top background image:
it's a right mess, mate.
oh bugger, it's time for tea.
back in the tube, then.
gypseymission gave voice to his London version of agape.
Now I'm sure that the people who set this up were very well intentioned but the truth is we really are fine, we always will be because we don't give a fuck about anything or even each other. We are obstinate, argumentative, bloody minded people, and this kind of thing makes us look like powder puffs which is really just going to wind us up.
Right. Right. Up yours, bredren.
Anyways, this is not just the occasional London Web slicker affectation. Among those I contacted to check up after the bombings was family friend Agnes Mkpeti. Her response:
Thanx for the check up, we are all fine. Yesterday was mad, luckily I don't work in central London. As transport resumed semi-service before home time I was able to get home with minimum difficulty. I just got to work and its like a ghost town, completely empty. It's Friday and most events and shows have been canceled around London. IT'S SO SAD!!!!
Party on, Agnes.
Yeah. London will be just fine.
via Copia
A typically effervescent performance on Def Poetry Jam (love that show) tipped me into checking out the tale of Joaquín Murrieta. Thus I came across "Joaquin Murrieta: Literary Fiction or Historical Fact?", by William Mero. From the conclusion:
The tradition in Latin cultures of the bandit as a social revolutionary is well known. Eric Hobsbawm in his classic, Bandits, discusses the social implications of the Joaquin Murrieta legend and how it fits into the traditional Hispanic view of rural banditry. In fact the Chicano movement of the 1970’s adopted Murrieta as a symbol of the fight against “Anglo” oppression. Sadly, because of protests from a few in the Mexican- American community, Harry Love’s burial site has been denied a proper historical marker while Tiburcio Vasquez, convicted leader of the infamous Tres Pinos massacre, in a nearby graveyard has his final resting place marked by an elaborate monument.
Joaquin Murrieta along with Jesse James and Billy the Kid is one of America’s most interesting examples of myth creation. In contrast to the original Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest fame, enough written material remains to enable scholars to trace the evolution of a short lived, violent outlaw into a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. A scholarly investigation of this phenomenon probably tells us more about ourselves than it does about the real Joaquin Murrieta.
The Murrieta controversy does contain another lesson for us all. Historical truths are often elusive. The general public usually prefers a good story over verifiable facts from primary sources. Most popular histories are commonly viewed through the lens of current social and political prejudices. Perhaps that is another good reason why history should be studied and analyzed with as much care as any of the physical sciences.
But this is just wonderful. The slam poetry piece on Def Poetry Jam wove it all into a very tight and compelling piece (I'll have to hunt down the text for that performance some day). Sprinkled into the entire romantic arc were elements of Robin Hood, The Count of Monte Cristo, and even Spartacus. I expect that if this story is given another few centuries to percolate it will come to rival the hero tales of Jason and Theseus. Or is it the quoted article that exaggerates? Looking in other secondary sources, it seems everyone agrees that here has been some embellishment in the Murrieta legend, but Mero is the only one I've seen to claim such a complete divergence from historical fact.
via Copia
More on the aid to Africa issue. I can't help myself. I hear about it everywhere so now it's deep in the membrane. But in contrast to my last note on the matter, this is where I've gathered a few of my more whimsical thoughts. Speaking of the last entry, though. I forgot to mention Professor Sir Nicholas Stern's comments, which I think are very incisive regarding Africa's internal economic barriers, some of the causes, and the unfortunate effects.
The title is a pidgin expression meaning "just who do they think they are?" ("dash" means to give) That was the general response among folks I knew at school in Okigwe, Nigeria to Band Aid's "Do they know it's Christmas?"
And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime
The greatest gift they'll get this year is life(Oooh)
Where nothing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow
Do they know it's Christmastime at all?
Essaywhaman? Do whaaa? You what huh? Na wetin? Na who dash monkey banana? Ewu bekee think say nothing dey grow for Africa?. We figured it was worth inviting Geldof and clique to the Okigwe rain forest, where it was so fertile that you were lucky if an oil palm tree didn't shoot up under your feet and knock you off balance; where before the school administration in their infinite stupidity had chopped down almost all the foliage within the school compound boundaries, any hungry kid could climb the nearest mango, udala, icheokwu, orange or cashew (for the sweet, fleshly fruit, not the nut) tree and eat as much as they wanted. We figured it would be a worthwhile education for the Band-Aid brigade.
And sure we felt sorry for the folks suffering a local drought in Ethiopia, but our most immediate response was to feel sorry for the confused Brits. We were making our own "Do they know it's summertime" outreach long before the current version, inspired in part by Yellowman's "London cold" song ("Jamaica Nice/Take me home"). Ka anyi bute oku na obodo oyibo ("Igbo: let's take some warmth to the West").
And there won’t be any sun in England this Summertime
The biggest problems they’ll have this year are rife (Oooh) Where the sun never glows
The wind or is it snow
Do they know it’s Summertime at all
—Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie of AFFORD
Heeee heee! And then Michael Jackson did his thing. Okay, so no daft lyrics about snow-deprived Decembers on the continent, and the song was actually pretty good this time (the Quincy Jones magic, I guess). Some of the press statements at the time were a hoot, though. The galling point remains that pop stars see nothing wrong with the idea of patronizing an entire continent. Who dash monkey banana?
It's 2005. Here we go again. I don't even need to call it. Sokari does the job in "We're not whales"
My prediction that the presentation of African countries during Saturday's concerts would be a negative pitiful one was correct. We were presented with Africa as the “scar of the world”, passive, starving, diseased, dying and helpless. This was a conscious decision by the organisers of the concert to make the crowd sympathetic to their cause and at the same time make them feel good, make them feel as if they had made a contribution to saving Africa.
Not only does it infantilise Africans and Europeans, it also facilitates the continued appropriation of all things African and all things in Africa including our problems and reduces the issues to cheap sound bites and meaningless nauseating rhetoric that go down well in the kindergarten playground of liberal politics.
I don't agree with everything she says in that article, but it comes close enough to my views to save me a lot of typing. And Ethan Zuckerman does more than his fair share in "Africa’s a continent. Not a crisis." (via Emeka Okafor)
If the goal of Live 8 were to help people see the African continent as a place they want to visit, a place they want to open businesses in, a place they want to engage with, as opposed to a place they want to save, I’d be more likely to share Brian’s (of Black Star Journal) hopes.
But that would be a very different concert. It would be one that celebrated the cultural richness of the continent by putting African artists on stage, rather than inviting them - after Geldof was shamed by Peter Gabriel - to perform at a parallel event a hundred miles away from the main action. It would be one that put African leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators on stage, rather than using a silent young Ethiopian woman as a stage prop for Madonna and Geldof. It would be one that was more focused on changing the global image of Africa than on somehow changing the minds of the eight guys sitting around a table in Scotland..."
Another Ghanaian blogger with a different sort of quotable on the matter is Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah, probably familiar to Copia readers, who recently got to air his thoughts on the African aid buzz on the radio. To seize upon an aside:
I didn't mention the other statistic that underlies my point about Nigeria moving: the installation of 1 million cell phone lines in Nigeria in the past year. And anyone who has had to deal with the acumen of Nigerians in whatever sphere knows that if that society decides to advance, it will change in very short order. It will still be difficult, unwieldy and disorderly, but it will move and possibly even faster than India or China will.
Well, there's a bit of modesty going on here. Given that my own life was saved by a Ghanaian doctor in Nigeria after one British and one Nigerian doctor had given up treating me (long story), and given my other experiences with Ghanaian professionals, the nation of Black Stars has a whole heap of a lot to work with. And there is the object lesson about internal trade in the continent. The mutual respect of professionals will show the road to the achievements of China and India, if our leadership allows it.
But what about those leaders? They're off having to be lectured on dignity and the realities of aid by The Colonel. And check it out. The Nigerian government, singing that Johnny Kemp: "Just got paid, Friday night...", starts by tipping the back pocket at those world champion runner-up Flying Eagles. Maybe they should also buy a pair of glasses for the punk ass referee who gift-wrapped the championship game for Argentina. No, for real, maybe they should just pay Siasia, the over-achieving coach. I guess the expression "Who dash monkey banana" slices in multiple ways.
via Copia
Talk of the Nation had a show on debt to Africa. It was hosted by Lynn Neary, whom I do not like as hostess (she is too impatient and abrupt), but the topic was well worth it. James Shikwati, director of the Inter-Region Economic Network in Nairobi was the first guest, and he started with an overview of his reasons, as an African, for despising aid to Africa.
[Shikwati]: I'm concerned about the aspect of beggar mentality that aid creates. And then there is also the aspect of aid killing Africa's creativity and entrepreneurship. And also the aspect of aid destroying ownership of the African problem, by transferring it to developed countries.
[Neary]: What are the alternatives
[Shikwati]: The alternative is to get Africans learning how to do business, and to get African governments facilitating an environment that will make it easier for Africans to do business.
The first clause here surprised me. Africa is again a very diverse continent, but speaking for Nigerians at least, I don't think anyone needs to teach business. Nigerians are the second most ruggedly entrepreneurial people I think I know as a class (Lebanese being the most). The biggest problem has been the opposite of what Shikwati says: the public sector treating the public interest too much as an extension of the business interest of those in power.
[Neary]: Do you think African countries need help getting such entrepreneurial ideas off the ground
[Shikwati]: The African leadership should look inward to the causes of the African problem. The first one being artificial barriers that make it so difficult for Africans to trade among themselves. Africa is a market of 800 million people. In that case before someone from outside can come to help us, we can help each other by opening ourselves up.
There was also an American guest, Steven Radelet, but Shikwati really set the tone of the discussion. I have been very happy to hear more intelligent African voices weigh in on these important topics. It's not that such folks are a new phenomenon by any means, but it's only lately that the media seems to be ready to give voice to those Africans who do not speak in terms that Westerners have come to expect. It feels to me that we have a nugget of opportunity for breaking down some of the oh so tiresome stereotypes.
Shikwati expressed the view that short term pain that would come from curtailing aid would be worth the long term benefit. He also pointed out that a lot of the "aid" really comes in the form of loans, which even when directed to such important causes as malaria treatment and primary school education, adds yet more long-term burden to the receiving countries. Radelet did point out that there is a recent trend towards subsidized loans and even outright grants.
The first caller was another Uchenna (of the countless so named). He suggested that if the main problem has been that corrupt regimes steal aid money, why don't organizations provide aid in terms of actual (presumably illiquid) resources for projects rather than cash. Shikwati responded that what is really needed is a "radical shake-up" of the economics that drive Africa, and that such a tinkering measure is really not enough. Radelet did point out some examples of modest success stories from countries receiving aid, but I agree with Shikwati that most African countries need things to happen at a much larger scale, and that even successfully targeted aid will not achieve such scale.
One of the callers asked from the point of view of a business owner asking essentially "if Africa is a mess, why should I invest there?" To me, this just underscored the importance of Shikwati's points. Even though I personally dislike Africa's sloth in shedding dependence on aid, I do not agree with the typical Western economist who says "make it easy for Westerners to make money in Africa and it will be worth all the aid imaginable". They can keep that trickle-down bullshit on their classroom chalkboards. I'm perfectly happy not to have any Western investors in Africa. I don't think we need them. Between ther very large and very successful body of Africans in diaspora and the 800 million still on the continent Shikwati mentions, there is plenty of resource for a completely indigenous African marketplace. The barriers we need to remove in Africa are not barriers for Westerners to invest but rather all the unfortunate barriers to professional achievement even among natives. If lowering these barriers also draws some Westerners, that's all very well—I don't advocate protectionism, which is after all the way in which the West sabotages African development at the same time they offer aid— but Western investment should be understood as a very secondary matter.
Despite my worries about the practicalities of business based on merit in Nigeria right now, I've started to look into how I can use my professional profile and entrepreneurial experience in ways that take advantage of my local knowledge in Nigeria, which is not enormous, by any means (I've been away too long), but is not insignificant. I've come to the point where I can't avoid doing so because my parents are very seriously talking about moving back to Nigeria in their retirement.
There is the thread that for me connects the continental-scale macroeconomics of the Live 8 and G8 hullaballo to the microeconomics of personal entrepreneurial interest. The only thing a liquid dole from the West can do is distract the ruling African class from the important task of engaging their professional class, much of which is dispersed because of the starkness of this very class distinction throughout so much of the continent. Western aid in the large can really do very little more than provide indirect discouragement to my own ambitions in my native country, and that of my peers. What I and my peers have to offer is hard work and professionalism over a steady period of time, but we're stymied because there is so much more more superficial attraction in greased megabucks from Western coffers.
Related:
"Quotīdiē" 26 June 2005
"Africa and business on Talk of the Nation"
"Those despicable gas flares"
via Copia
I love London. It's my favorite major city. If I couldn't live in the Boulder area, London would easily be where I'd want to move (or the London environs, I should say, given financial practicalities). Like many Nigerians I have many friends and some family in London. Today's tragedy was far more immediate to me than any other terrorist attack of this troubled time.
If I'm a bit comforted, it's because I know that no one can bounce back from such an event like Londoners can. The main reason I love the city so is because of the wonderful populace, and the dignity and good sense with which they conducted themselves even at the very centers of the attack should be some indication of this quality. Londoners also went through the period of IRA bombings uncowed, and they will outlast this new threat. I certainly do not plan to let today's events affect any of my travel plans to the UK.
I cannot help, however, mentioning the disgusting response to this tragedy by some American conservative commentators. We've all heard of the appalling comments on Fox News (it's unbelievable that those who claim to be the enemies of these terrorists can bring themselves to gloat at the misfortune of London). Knowing the tremendous capacity of the today's middle American for apathy and docility, I imagine there will be no uproar here. But I hope those nitwits have to watch their backs if they ever happen to venture abroad. They are not one bit better than the terrorists.
via Copia
There has been a lot of good comment on my earlier entry on outline formats in XML. I've been pretty busy the past week or so, but I'd better get my thoughts down before they deliquesce.
Bob DuCharme pointed me at Micah's article which includes mention of XOXO. Henri Sivonen asked what I think of it.
Taking the name "outlining format" literally, it's actually just fine. As Micah says:
Some people might feel warmer and fuzzier with elements named outline, topic, item, and so on, or with elements in a freshly minted namespace, but microformats can still claim the semantic high ground, even when reusing XHTML. In the above, the parts of an outline are ordered lists and list items, exactly as the XHTML element names say.
The problem is that what made me start looking into outlining formats was the fact that I'd heard from others that these make such a great format for personal information space organization, and XOXO is just about useless in that regard.
Along that vector, I wonder what a pure outline format is useful for, anyway? I can't remember having ever needed a stand-alone outline document separate from what I'm outlining. If I'm writing a presentation or a long article, I'd prefer to have the table of contents or presentation outline section generated from the titles and structure of the full work. Sure, XOXO might be suitable for such a generated outline, but my exploration is really about hand editing.
In short I think XOXO is just fine for outlining, and yet I can't imagine when I'd ever use it. As others have mentioned, and as I suspected, the entire idea of outlining formats for general note-taking is a big stretch. Danny Ayers mentioned in a comment on the earlier format that for some attraction to OPML is a matter of neat outlining UIs. I've always been conservative in adopting UIs. I use emacs plus the command line for most of my coding, and after trying out a half dozen blog posting tool for posting to Copia, I ended up writing an e-mail-to-post gateway so that I can enter text (markdown) into a UI I'm already familiar with, Evolution's e-mail composition window.
As I said in the earlier entry, full-blown XHTML 2.0 makes more sense than an outlining format for managing a personal information space, and yet it seems too weak to me for this purpose. The weakness, as Danny points out, is semantic. If everything in my personal information space is just a para or an anchor or a list, I'll quickly get lost. As followers of Copia know, my brain is a rat trap of wandering thoughts, and I'm a poster child for the need for clearly expressed semantics.
As an RDF pioneer, I'm happy to use ideas from RDF, but I do not want to type RDF/XML by hand. I've always argued, as Danny Ayers hinted, that RDF should strive hard to by syntax agnostic, especially because RDF/XML is awful syntax. I agree with him that GRDDL is a good way to help rescue XHTML microformats from their semantic soup, and I think this is a better approach than trying to shovel all the metadata into the XHTML header (Dan Brickley mentions this possibility, but I wonder whether he tends to prefer it to GRDDL). GRDDL has a natural draw for me since I've been working with and writing tools for the XML+XSLT=RDF approach for about four years. But when I'm using markup for markup (e.g. in a personal information space) I'd rather have semantic transparency fitting comfortably within the markup, rather than dangling off it as an afterthought. In a nutshell, I want to use the better markup design of:
<to-do>
rather than the kludge of:
<ul class="to-do">
I think there's little excuse for why we don't have the best of both worlds. People should be able to enjoy the relative semantic cleanliness of RDF, but within the simplest constructs of markup, without having to endure the added layer of abstraction of RDF. That added layer of abstraction should only be for those aggregating models. The fact that people would have to pay the "RDF tax" every time they start to scribble in some markup explains why so many markup types dislike RDF. I'm not sure I've found as clear a case for this point than this discussion of extended uses for outlining formats.
Microformats are generally a semantic mess, from what I've seen of them. They do best when they just borrow the semantics of existing formats, as XOXO does, but I think they're not the solution to lightweight-syntax +clean-semantics that the GRDDL pioneers hope. GRDDL has too much work to do in bringing the rigor of RDF to microformats, and this work should be part of the format itself, not something like GRDDL. I think the missed opportunity here is that XML schema systems cling so stubbornly to syntax-only-syntax. As I've been exploring in articles such as "Use data dictionary links for XML and Web services schemata" (I have a more in-depth look at this in the upcoming Thinking XML article), one can make almost all the gains of RDF by putting the work into the XML schema, rather than heaping the abstraction directly into the XML format. And the schema is where such sophistication belongs.
But back to outlining and personal information spaces, I've tried the
personal Wiki approach, and it doesn't work for me. Again Danny nails
it: Wiki nodes and links are untyped. This is actually similar to the
problem that I have with XHTML, but Wikis are even more of a semantic
shambles. In XHTML there is at least a bit of an escape with
class="foo". The difficulty of navigating and managing Wikis
increases at a much greater rate than their information content, in my
experience. My Akara
project was in effect an attempt at a more semantically transparent Wiki, but since I wrote that paper I've had almost no time for Akara, unfortunately. I do plan to make it the showcase application for my vision of 4Suite 2.0, and in doing so I have an ally Luis Miguel Morillas, so there is still hope for Akara, perhaps even more so if I am able to build on Rhizome, which might help eliminate some wheel reinvention.
via Copia
Sorry couldn't help but commence round 3 (I believe it is) of Versa vs SPARQL. In all honesty, however, this is has to do more with RDF itself than it with either query language. It is primarily motivated by a very informative and insightful take (by Benjamin Nowack) on the problems regarding identifying BNodes uniquely in a query. His final conclusion (as I understood it) is that although the idea of identifying BNodes directly by URI seems counter-inituitive to the very nature of BNodes (anonymous resources) it is a practical necessity (one that I have had to use more often than not with Versa and caused him to have to venture outside the boundaries of the SPARQL specification for a solution). This is especially the case when you don't have much identifying metadata associated with the BNode in question (where if you did you could rely on inferencing - explicit or otherwise).
Well, ironically, the reason why this issue never occured to me is that in Versa, you refer to resources (for identification purposes) by URI regardless of whether they are blank nodes or not. I guess I would interpet this functionality as leaving it up to the author of the query to understand the exact nature of BNode URI's (that they are transient,possibly inconsistent, etc.)
via Copia
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
—The United States Constitution (See also the Amendments to the Constitution)
The country that has kindly granted me a second and very valuable citizenship deserves some moments of reflection outside the details of the days politics (no mean responsibility considering how worrisome politics have become lately).
The foundation of the U.S.A. is a remarkably sensible and prescient document which has endured through tremendous changes in every aspect of the country. But what is most remarkable to me is the fact that the constitution has endured so well in the face of changing mores. It is extraordinary for any national code in history to survive changes in mores, and yet this Constitution has been a steady guide, requiring no revolution through women's suffrage, the emancipation of slaves, the establishment of civil rights, the shift from insular to geopolitical tendency, the shift from agrarian to industrial and from industrial to service economy, and even all the explosive demographic changes since the turn of the 20th century. I think that this is ample proof that the principles enshrined in the constitution should inform the development of all sovereign nations, including my own native Nigeria. I know that the universality of these principles is a controversial idea, and for now I'll just say that it's practicality rather than idealism that makes me think so.
Here's looking forward to another 229 years of life for the U.S. constitution, and indeed, many more beyond that.
via Copia
Go go go go ma lo Funke, it's your birthday
We're going to drink palm wine like it's your birthday
We're going to drink ogogoro like it's your birthday
Girl, I don't really care it's not your birthday
You can find me in buka
Eating amala
Omo I got what you need
If you’re into drinking Star
I’m into writing checks
Can’t work behind the bar
Come give me a hug
If you can cook eba!
—JJC and the 419 Squad—from "50 Kobo and the Gidi Unit"
OK, this song made my day yesterday. I learned of it via Black Looks, "Naija Blog Roundup". Kobo is the hundredth unit of a Naira. "JJC" is Naija slang "Johnny just come" for a greenhorn of some sort. I've marked up the other Naija terms in abbr tags. Just hover your mouse over each one to get the gloss. The song is, of course, a parody of the smash worldwide hit "In da Club" by American rapper 50 Cent.
Find me in da club, bottle full of bub
Ma, I got what you need if you need to feel a buzz
I'm into having sex, I ain't into making love
So come give me a hug, if you into getting rubbed
Ah, 50 Cent is such a charmer, it seems. A pole away from 50's anthem to bling-bling, Ecstasy pills and frottage, JJC and co. rap a tongue-in-cheek form of Nigerian playa rap in Pidgin and Yoruba. A couple of other choice lines:
"When you see me up front, it's always Legedez Benz"
[...]
"I'm a Naija, toss it up to the good life"
The source site, Naija Jams is a find in itself. Every week or so they post a full mp3 of a Nigerian pop song. Some are new, like "50 kobo" and some are old, like Majek Fashek's "Send sown the rain" which was a hit back in 1987 or so when I was still in Nigeria. I must say I never heard the silly myth about Fashek's performance of that song ending a drought, and anyway the very idea of a single drought afflicting the all of Nigeria is just ludicrous.
By coincidence, via Jon Phillips today I found The African Hip Hop Project a page hosting over twenty Hip Hop tracks relating to the continent, most songs by African Hip Hop groups, including two different songs by JJC and the 419 Squad.
There's nothing quite like unanticipated riches.
via Copia