Magic Statistics

Michel Kilo has been jailed by the Syrian Baathist government because he made the mistake of noting that the state-controlled press publishes two classes of obituary.

The latest trouble for Mr. Kilo stems from an article he wrote in May for the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. In it, the 66-year-old writer made the seemingly innocuous observation that there were two types of obituaries in his hometown of Latakia, a port city that also happens to be the ancestral home of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

On the one hand, he wrote, there were the obituaries of the urban, largely Sunni Muslim population who lived and died as civilians, working in "liberal professions." And then there were the rural folk. They were mainly Allawites, like Mr. Assad, members of a sect of Shia Islam. And their careers were spent largely in the military and the security services. This division, Mr. Kilo wrote, "threw a clear light on the social demarcation lines and the politics of one city."

It was a carefully thrown literary dart, aimed at bursting the balloon of the Syrian Baathist regime's claims to be a secular democracy that represented the entire country. Without writing it in so many words, Mr. Kilo was shouting what few in Damascus dare say out loud: that the Syrian regime was a military dictatorship that concentrated power in the hands of Mr. Assad's fellow Allawites, a sect that makes up just 12 per cent of Syria's population.

The article appeared on 13 May; the following day, Mr Kilo was tossed in the clink for "inciting religious and racial divisions", and, of course, "defaming the President."

A judge ordered him released for lack of evidence two months ago, but he was promptly jailed again on new charges even more ridiculous than the first: "inciting civil rebellion" and "exposing the country to the threat of aggressive acts."

This is far from Kilo’s first rebellious act. He helped to write the Beirut-Damascus Declaration, calling upon Syria to accept that Lebanon is a genuinely separate and sovereign nation.  He has been jailed several times in the past for advocating social and political reforms.  These latest charges are the most serious yet, however, carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

In other news from the contemptible little police state, Christian Solidarity International reports that the Christian community of Syria, which at one time comprised the majority, has been reduced to a tiny fearful group.  Not only are Christians subject to frequent discrimination, they have been kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed.

h/t for Agape Press: Big News Network.com - Breaking Religious News

Fewer British tourists have been visiting Paris lately, so the official Paris tourist office has launched a new campaign to entice more Brits to visit the City of Lights.  The concept behind the new tourism promotion?  It’s easy to be just as arrogant and bad-mannered as the French.  Here’s how.

Parisians do not usually mock themselves to please the British, but a cut in the number of cross-Channel visitors has inspired a tongue-in-cheek campaign to show les anglais how to be as rude as the French without learning the language.

In an attempt to recast the city’s image, the regional tourist board has issued a guide to, mostly offensive, Parisian gestures.
. . .
The British, accounting for one in five tourists, are the most frequent visitors to the capital region but the total fell by almost 1 per cent last year. A survey showed that two thirds of British visitors find conversing with Parisians difficult. “They say that Parisians are arrogant, pretentious and strange,” the board said.

The new Paris tourism website reassures Brits that the French aren’t so hard to understand.  “You don’t need to speak French to understand Parisians or to blend into the crowd.”  The Attitude Game page illustrates and describes eight classic French gestures.  The key to Camembert (below), I think, is the deadpan expression, signifying utter indifference.

Award-winning cartoonist Matt Pritchett offers his take in today’s Daily Telegraph (right).

Times of London correspondent Charles Bremner can think of a few gestures the Paris tourist people left off their website.  Apparently, there are limits to how far the French will go in their quest for more pounds sterling.

Apart from the bras d'honneur, the standard Latin F—off with hand on arm and fist in the air, I was thinking of the squiffy, or drunk, gesture, turning the hand anti-clockwise before the nose, as if holding a bottle (In the Russian version, you tap under your chin). And there is the contemptuous gesture of drivers in traffic — hitting the steering wheel with both hands and letting them rebound into the air. Sometimes you see a whole line of jammed drivers performing it in unison.

The concept of enticing tourists by ridiculing yourself was actually started by the English.  The Channel train company Eurostar recently ran Londres à deux, a campaign to increase visits from France to London, with a photo showing a naked British couple streaking across a soccer football field in front of a capacity crowd.  Then there’s the current Eurostar promotion Londres en amoureux with a cringe-making illustration you can see here.

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• New destination for adventure travelers: Chechnya
• Yukon gets lots of tourists
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One of the first rules that recruitment experts pass on to everyone seeking professional employment is: You must have good writing skills.  Whatever you write should be accurate and easily understood.  According to a survey of professional recruiters, however, job hunters in the UK are damaging their prospects by submitting CVs with spelling and grammatical errors.

Nearly half of the recruitment agencies questioned said the majority of CVs they receive contain grammatical errors.

For many job-seekers, the mistakes start before they have even begun to chronicle their careers and achievements.

At the top of their CV they write "Curriculum Vitae" - the Latin for "course of life" - but get the spelling wrong. One applicant wrote "Kuriculam Vitay", the study said.

The misuse of the apostrophe is the most common mistake, such as a reference to "Wale's largest computer warehouse".

The survey found that errors are committed most often by younger applicants and are more common among men than women.

Almost 60% of recruiters surveyed said that including hobbies and non-work interests on a CV is “a waste of space”.

Previous related post: How not to get a job

The Washington Pest has taken a close look at the reasons why polar bears are said to be endangered, and pinpoints the problem.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service has proposed classifying the polar bear as a threatened species. What makes this unusual is that the bear is not threatened by humans. The polar bear is threatened by computer models.

This action could set a really fat precedent because computer models are much more dangerous than humans. It is estimated that at least one half of all living species are threatened by computer models. Mitigating all these threats could keep the FWS busy, not to mention rich and powerful, for years to come.

The problem is that some computer models say the Arctic ice cap will disappear in about 40 years, give or take a century. Polar bears live and work on the ice so this might be a problem for them, we don't really know.

Just to be sure the FWS wants to invoke the Endangered Species Act, to give them dictatorial, sorry, administrative powers now to help the may someday be out of work bears.

If we allow computer models, rather than real events, to set public policy, we are all in big trouble because that would give statisticians carte blanche to rule the world.

I am only half joking about that.  At a Statistics Canada meeting a few years ago, I heard a presentation from a Canadian statistician working for OECD arguing that the assembled experts should give full support to the Kyoto Protocol because enforcement of its terms depends on statistics gathered by national and international statistical agencies.  In order to know whether CO2 emissions, etc., are being reduced per Kyoto targets, data must be gathered and analysed from emissions sources.  Kyoto therefore depends crucially on the work of statisticians.

This fellow presented Kyoto not just as a make-work project for statisticians, but as means of wielding power.  I kid you not.  Fortunately, based on the discussion after the presentation, no one in the audience was very enthusiastic about his perspective.  Some, myself included, were rather taken aback.

h/t: Greenie Watch and Ken Maize’s POWERblog

Previous related posts:

• Environmentalist power trip inflicts collateral damage on Inuit people
• Polar bears are “vulnerable”. No, wait, I take that back.

Late last month, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) proposed to name the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  Nunavut Environment Minister Patterk Netser has now gone on record against the proposal.

Faced with another examination of its wildlife practices, the government of Nunavut is preparing to defend its polar bear policies where it believes they need to be defended — the court of southern public opinion.

"That's where the problem is," Patterk Netser, Nunavut's Environment Minister, said yesterday from Coral Harbour. "The problem is down there. Not here."

Nunavut is being caught between environmentalists using the powerful predators as a lever to move the U.S. government on the issue of climate change and politicians seeking an opportunity to look good, Mr. Netser says.

See also this statement by Dr Mitch Taylor, Polar Bear Biologist with the Nunavut government, pointing out that there is no evidence that Canada’s polar bears are endangered.  (More from Dr Taylor here.)

An Iqaluit newspaper charges that the proposal to list the polar bear as endangered arises, not from scientific consideration of the bear and its habitat, but from a political fight to force the Bush administration to acknowledge global warming.

The announcement is a response to a petition launched in February of 2004 by an environmental organization called the Centre for Biological Diversity. In December of 2005, two other groups, the Natural Resources Defence Council and Greenpeace U.S.A., joined the effort and helped launch a lawsuit against the U.S government.

Those groups say shrinking sea ice threatens polar bear populations. Their goal is to force the Bush administration to acknowledge the reality of climate change and adopt policies aimed at reducing the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Those groups are now declaring victory, because they believe they’ve forced the Bush administration to stop denying the science that reveals the true extent of global warming.

“It’s an affirmation that global warming is real,” Brendan Cummmings, a lawyer for the Centre for Biological Diversity, told the Guardian newspaper last week.

Swell.  Environmentalists score political points against hated Washington Republicans, and the livelihood of Inuit hunters in northern Canada is mere collateral damage.

US Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) recalls that, only a few years ago, the US Geological Survey reported that Alaska polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs”.  Sen Inhofe argues that the proposal to list the polar bear as endangered shows that the Endangered Species Act is “broken”.

h/t for Inhofe statement: Greenie Watch

Previous related posts:

• Polar bears are “vulnerable”. No, wait, I take that back.
• Bizarre bear shot on Banks Island

UPDATE (5 Jan.): Follow-up: Polar bears threatened by computer models