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Our own Kris Kotarski in The Calgary Herald:

Earlier this fall, British company Internet Eyes figured out a way to cash in on CCTV. It bills itself as “an online instant event notification system” that will allow “viewers” to “anonymously monitor random video feeds streamed from privately owned establishments.”

“Viewers” in this case are people. “Events” are crimes, imagined or real. And the “instant event notification system” must be the object of desire for every generalissimo in the world, aspiring or real.

Internet Eyes bills its service as a game, where people “report crime as it happens,” scoring “points” for “neutral” alerts when the “viewer” acts in good faith but does not report an actual crime, or “positive” alerts when a crime was actually committed. The first results in one point; the second in three. A “negative” alert brings zero points, which does not help when one aspires to win the £1,000 monthly prize, to be awarded to “the highest crime scoring member every month.”

“This is about crime prevention,” founder James Woodward told the BBC, as his company prepares to charge “viewers” £1 per alert and CCTV camera owners £20 each month to add their footage to the central database. “What we’re doing is we’re putting more eyes onto those cameras so that they are monitored.”

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

Numbers make modern life possible. “In a world without numbers,” University of Rochester neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon and her colleagues recently observed in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, “we would be unable to build a skyscraper, hold a national election, plan a wedding, or pay for a chicken at the market.”

The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s.

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

More here.

Darryl Campbell in The Bygone Bureau:

After all, almost no one in the under-30 set — certainly no one under twenty — can remember what it was like to grow up under the shadow of the Soviet Union. We Millennials grew up fearing nuclear power plants more than ballistic missiles; we’ve drawn our political battle lines around legalized abortion and gay marriage, not Marxism and its derivatives. And however we understand our nation’s role in the world, whatever present or future threats we might see in China, Russia, or the Islamic world, we know that we are far removed from the East-versus-West world of the Cold War. Soviet-style Communism has gone, in the words of Leon Trotsky, into the dustbin of history.

In a 1989 essay, Francis Fukuyama argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that there were no viable alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy. We’d arrived, in other words, at the “end of history.” I don’t know if his thesis is true or even provable — Fukuyama himself later backed away from it in his 2002 book Our Posthuman Future — but it seems to me that he’s at least got something right about our relationship to the past.

Those of us who grew up after the Wall fell may never completely understand what it was like before November 9th, 1989.

More here.

No offense to other etiquette guides, but Laura Claridge says these are impeccable.

From the Wall Street Journal:

1. On the Civility of Children’s Conduct

By Erasmus

1530

The great classical scholar of the Northern Renaissance, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, also had some thoughts about proper behavior. Teach manners early, Erasmus believed. To that end, he produced this small book addressed to children. It admirably commanded the attention of his young audience and remained popular for three centuries. “To lick greasy fingers or to wipe them on your coat is impolite. It is better to use the table cloth,” he counsels. Also: “It is not seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.” He returns repeatedly to the era’s apparently vexing problem of the gaseous bellows: “Retain your wind by compressing the belly” and “Do not move back and forth on your chair. Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind.” If attempts at restraint fail, he advises, then do what you must but “cough loudly” to cover the sound.

2. Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior

By George Washington

1748

Though often credited with writing this treatise on manners, the 16-year-old George Washington at best merely translated the rules compiled in 1595 by French Jesuits. A translation had already appeared in England long before the young Washington produced what may have been a school assignment, but in the folklore associated with our nation’s first president, his name has been attached to the advice given in “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior.” In any event, the American document retains its interest as a window into the standards of behavior that Washington thought, early on, to set for himself and, by extension, for his nation. One of the rules would become increasingly relevant to the leader after he received his ivory (not wooden) dentures: “Cleanse not your teeth with the Table Cloth Napkin Fork or Knife but if Others do it let it be done wt. a Pick Tooth.”

More here.

by Tolu Ogunlesi

To the outside world, we are all “Africans”.

‘Africa’, that continent of “colourful emergencies” (a term coined by novelist Helen Oyeyemi in a 2005 essay); ‘African’, that oversized brush dripping a paint handy for tarring every living thing found within a thousand-mile radius of the Sahara desert.

As Africans – and by extension African writers – we’re supposed to be united by geography, culture and experience (mostly of the negative sort), and thus a herd of interchangeable entities. There is after all such a thing as African literature, written by African writers, dealing with African issues – poverty, wars, AIDS, Aid, military dictatorships, coup d’états, corruption, civilian dictatorships, and very lately, dubious power sharings.

Never mind that Nigeria and Uganda are no more similar (in my opinion) than America and Russia. Or that Nigeria’s religious dichotomy (and the resulting tensions) confers on it a greater similarity with India than with South Africa. Or that Nigeria and fellow English-speaking Ghana are separated by two impregnable walls of language known as Benin and Togo. Or that a conference proclaimed as a “Festival of Contemporary African Writing” will very likely be no more than a Festival of Anglophone African Writing.

Chimamanda Adichie’s short story, Jumping Monkey Hill (first published in Granta 95, and which appears in her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck) – which William Skidelsky, writing in the Guardian (UK) calls “the most obviously autobiographical (and funniest) of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck” – tells the story of an “African Writers’ Workshop” for which the British Council has selected participants.

The workshop is overseen by Edward Campbell, “an old man in a summer hat who smiled to show two front teeth the colour of mildew.” Campbell is British, with a “posh” accent, “the kind some rich Nigerians tried to mimic and ended up sounding unintentionally funny.” He is also the final authority – using what one might call his “Africanometer” – on the quality and plausibility of the stories produced during the workshop.

At the workshop are a Ugandan, a white South African, a black South African, a Tanzanian, a Zimbabwean, a Kenyan, a Senegalese and Ujunwa, a Nigerian. East, West and Southern Africa are represented, the North is not, as is often the case in real life reporting about the continent where the term ‘Africa’ is used to refer to “sub-Saharan Africa” and North Africa is somewhat set apart like some entity off the coast of the real Africa. And, needless to say, the workshop is conducted in English, not French or Swahili.

One of the more interesting scenes in Adichie’s story is when all the writers (except for the Ugandan) gather to drink wine and make fun of one another, and make comments such as: “You Kenyans are too submissive! You Nigerians are too aggressive! You Tanzanians have no fashion sense! You Senegalese are too brainwashed by the French!

This scene took me right back to Crater Lake, venue of the 2006 Caine Prize workshop, in which I participated. NM, a young South African novelist and I were roommates at the Crater Lake resort where the workshop took place. As ‘African writers’, we should have instinctively known everything about each other’s countries. We should have been able to complete one another’s sentences.

But not exactly. We were different people, with little experience of each other’s daily realities.

I, as a Nigerian, had only encountered the ‘A’ word in theory. I had read about apartheid in books and in songs (the late Nigerian music icon Sunny Okosun was famous for his ‘Free Mandela’ campaign) and in history lessons. But it did not honestly exist in Nigeria in Nigeria. Our own inequalities or repressions were of a different sort.

And I was astonished when NM told me that growing up in the melting-pot that is Soweto made it possible for him to speak more than half a dozen local languages. I speak only one Nigerian language (two, if you include pidgin – the corruption of English that, in the absence of an indigenous lingua franca, approximates one.)

In a 2008 interview with Renee Shea (published in the Kenyon Review), Chimamanda explained: “Race is a very complicated thing in Africa and I think that I, as a West African, don’t feel equipped to fully understand it. I grew up not really understanding the concept of race while my contemporaries in Kenya and South Africa were very much aware of race because they grew up in countries that were racialized in ways that West Africa was not—and this is not to say that West African countries did not have their own problems, race was just not one of them…”

I agree. There are white South Africans and black ones, white Zimbabweans and black. As far as I know there are black Kenyans, and a sizeable number of Kenyans of Indian origin. But to the best of my knowledge no one is ever referred to as a “white Nigerian”, even though every year a sizeable number of white-skinned foreigners are officially conferred with the citizenship of Nigeria; even though the Lebanese for example have been settling here for decades.

At the workshop I met a Gambian novelist who bore a Yoruba name. The Yoruba form one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups. I am Yoruba. I was intrigued. She explained that there were many Yoruba migrant groups all along the coast of West Africa, all originating from the original stock. But at that moment the coloniser’s language was the only language we shared in common, and arguably the most potent ‘cultural’ bond between us.

Since NM and I had never been to each other’s countries, stories became our shared medium of exchange. Founded on nothing more than news reports and hearsay, these stories were largely overblown, and told with the intent of being sarcastic. NM recalled how a Nigerian novelist (and mutual friend of ours) had told him that in Nigeria, persons intending to become policemen were required to bring along their uniforms for the screening session. Now that was funny, and it hit me below the belt.

One morning, the sound of gunshots filtered into our camp. It must have been hunters or guards in the nearby mountains. I told NM to take it easy, there was nothing to get scared about, after all, this was not Soweto. No it wasn’t. For wasn’t Soweto the place where gunshots were like sunlight – awaited, necessary, unremarkable?

This was to become the pattern of our conversations. Vicious, yet lacking in malice. South Africa contending with Nigeria, not in a game of soccer (The Bafana Bafana versus the Super Eagles) but in a game of wits carried on by two ambitious writers. Post-Kenya, our email exchanges have taken on the spirit of our face-to-face encounter. When I sent NM an email informing him that I won a poetry contest, he good-naturedly asked for some of my “voodoo” (apparently the rest of Africa is aware, courtesy of Nollywood, that Nigerians are the most ardent practitioners of voodoo on the continent), and promised in return to buy me an AK47 rifle from Soweto. “[T]hey are cheap you know…” he added.

And in a postscript to another email in which I told him I’d be travelling to Sweden on a writing fellowship, he advised me: “[D]on’t take drugs to Sweden…I know you Nigerians.”

Later on in Jumping Monkey Hill, the Senegalese writer (who, by the way is lesbian), has to endure being told by Edward that homosexual stories of the kind she had written “weren’t reflective of Africa, really.”

Instantaneously Ujunwa retorts “Which Africa?”

Which is the trillion-dollar question for which I desperately wish I had an answer.

But it is hard to blame any foreigners for speaking so confidently of ‘Africa’ when public debates on issues like indecent dressing and homosexuality in Nigeria always have people arguing that such “immorality” is patently “un-African!” Or when the habit of late-coming at public events is more widely known as “African Time” than as “Nigerian Time”, even when no one has bothered to find out if the phenomenon is equally native to Algeria or Botswana or Madagascar.

At the end of Jumping Monkey Hill, Edward’s verdict on Ujunwa’s workshop story (about a Nigerian girl who gives up a lucrative banking job because she will not condone the sexual harassment from a potential client) is this: “The whole thing is implausible. This is agenda writing, it isn’t a real story of real people.”

Which is perhaps an apt description of much of what is written and told about the ‘continent of Africa’ today.

What makes economies grow? It’s a question that has occupied thinkers for centuries. Most of us would tick off things like education levels, openness to trade, natural resources, and political systems.

Here’s one you might not have considered: hell.

A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies – and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.

more from Michael Fitzgerald at The Boston Globe here.