How Trolls Win With Toxic Comments

At its best, the Web is a place for unlimited exchange of ideas. But Web-savvy news junkies have known for a long time that reader feedback can often turn nasty. Now a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggests that rude comments on articles can even change the way we interpret the news.

"It's a little bit like the Wild West. The trolls are winning," says Dominique Brossard, co-author of the study on the so-called nasty effect. Those trolls she's referring to are commenters who make contributions designed to divert online conversations.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Virginia's George Mason University worked with a science writer to construct a balanced news story on the pros and cons of nanotechnology. More than 1,000 subjects reviewed the blog post from a Canadian newspaper that discussed the water contamination risks of nanosilver particles and the antibacterial benefits.

Half saw the story with polite comments, and the other half saw rude comments like, "If you don't see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these products, you're an idiot."

"Basically what we saw," Brossard says, "is people that were exposed to the polite comments didn't change their views really about the issue covering the story, versus the people that did see the rude comments became polarized — they became more against the technology that was covered in the story."

Brossard said they chose the nanotechnology topic so that readers would have to make sense of a complicated issue with low familiarity. She says communication research shows that people use mental shortcuts to make sense of things they don't understand.

"We need to have an anchor to make sense of this," she says. "And it seems that rudeness and incivility is used as a mental shortcut to make sense of those complicated issues."

Brossard says there's no quick fix for this issue. While she thinks it's important to foster conversation through comments sections, every media organization has to figure out where to draw the line when comments get out of control.

"You don't want to be censoring opinions, but you don't want to allow neither points that are out of topic and that are offensive to the other people that are discussing," she says.

Some sites remove offensive comments, some have moderators to regulate the conversations, and others turn off commenting features once a certain number is reached. Brossard says it's important for people involved in journalism and online communication to realize the influence that comments can have and to formulate appropriate policies.

"I think what we need to define now on the Web, what is a good conversation? What are the things that are allowed socially? Also, as an audience, what do we let happen there?"

All good things to keep in mind before you post a comment below.

[Via npr.org]

Child Mortality in Detroit

Child mortality occurs at a higher rate in Detroit than in several Third World countries, according to a study conducted by Detroit News. After collaborating with national health departments, researchers discovered that the number one factor impacting Detroit’s high child death rates is prematurity, followed by a culture of violence.

The city of 713,000 is the only U.S. city with upwards of 100 deaths per 100,000 children. In what one doctor declared a “public health emergency,” 120 out of every 100,00 children in Detroit died in 2010. The infant mortality rate — which is higher than the rates in Panama, Romania, and Botswana — is another prominent issue. Between 2000 and 2011, 2,300 infants died within their first year.

Health concerns stem from the city’s long history of financial troubles; all told, 60 percent of Detroit’s youth were impoverished in 2010. Detroit’s economic conditions pose ongoing challenges for residents — including food insecurity, unsafe housing, and the inability access medical care — all of which impact child health, according to Dr. Irwin Redlene, a pediatrician and Columbia University professor.

There is a dearth of physicians in the area, and traveling to receive medical attention is hindered by a poor infrastructure. At this time, women who are not pregnant or nursing do not qualify for Medicaid, and the insurance is stripped away from them shortly after a baby is born. Dr. Elliot Attisha, who created a mobile clinic service that serves kids through the city, explained that children are not receiving necessary medical attention in this context, from “yearly checkups” to “treatment for their chronic conditions.” Many die of “common illnesses” like asthma and the flu.

High homicide rates throughout the city also foster a culture of trauma and stress among children. Officials recognize the extent to which gun violence particularly affects youth, although limited resources make it difficult to curb the problem. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Behavior Risk Survey concluded that many youth skipped school out of fear of violence, and more students were likely “to be threatened on school property with a weapon one or more times” than anywhere else. Altogether, thirty-six children died in Detroit as a result of violence in 2010.

While there is a concerted effort to expand medical services to youth, as hospitals and private organizations develop strategies to improve child health, Detroit’s economic chaos may foil those plans. Last year, Detroit became the largest city to file for bankruptcy — planting the seeds for 24,000 retirees to lose health benefits on March 1. The Motor City is far from economically secure enough to overhaul the systemic problems exacerbating child mortality. Nevertheless, 500,000 people throughout Michigan will be eligible for Medicaid in April, which will provide health insurance for many women with children.

[Via Thinkprogress.com] 

Bankrupt City

Detroit's history of industrial decline and financial failure has culminated in bankruptcy. So why have some companies been using the city's name to sell their products?

Detroit's woes are well documented - an economic powerhouse reduced to a shrinking, impoverished and decaying shell of its former self.

It is a story one might expect marketing and branding departments going out of their way to avoid.

But several companies have been trying to turn the brand of Detroit to their advantage, in a trend that marketing experts expect to gather pace.

The most striking example is Shinola, a resurrected shoe polish brand now being used to sell watches, bicycles, leather goods and journals, which plays heavily on its Detroit base.

The company, backed by the financial muscle of venture capital firm Bedrock, says it is the first in decades to produce watches on a large scale in the US. It uses local labour and, where possible, materials - though it sources many watch components from Switzerland and China.

The timepieces have been on sale for about six months in sleek stores with exposed brick interiors in Detroit and New York, but also in shops throughout the US, and in Paris and Singapore. London will be next.

"Across the board it's gone extremely well," says CEO Steve Bock. The company has made some 50,000 watches, which are priced at $475-$850, and says it is struggling to keep up with demand.

One stockist, the Tiny Jewel Box in Washington DC, says it has done a brisk trade, selling more than 60 of the watches since October.

Having "Detroit" on the dial was a source of fascination and pride for many customers, said watch seller Steven Katz. "People would be less likely to balk at the price because it's made in America."

Colette luxury shop in Paris began selling the watches in November and has parted with 50 to 100 so far, for up to 600 euros each. The store's PR manager Guillaume Salmon says the story of Detroit was one of the reasons behind the move.

Shinola's factory is in the former Argonaut building, once General Motors' first research and design studio and now owned by the College for Creative Studies.

Detroit's cheap rents and post-industrial spaces had already been attracting innovative businesses, generating a local buzz.

But before launching, Shinola's backers wanted to test the broader appeal of "made in Detroit", and created focus groups in Dallas.

It found that people seemed keen to give the economy in Detroit, and the US, a hand.

"There's great interest in buying products made in the United States, and I think when we talked about manufacturing products like leather and watches in Detroit that absolutely piqued people's interest," says Bock. "They were very interested in seeing the city rebound."

That marketing opportunity has not been lost on others.

GalaxE.Solutions is a healthcare IT company based in New Jersey that expanded its workforce in Detroit - currently 150 people - after judging that it made economic sense to be in the city.

The company created the slogan "Outsource to Detroit", to encourage others to join a burgeoning US-based IT hub rather than using cheap but sometimes unreliable labour overseas, says CEO Tim Bryan.

That's part of a broader reported trend of businesses being moved back to the US. Figures just released show that in November the US trade deficit fell to its lowest level in four years, a result partly attributed to rising consumption of US-produced goods and services.

GalaxE.Solutions' promotion of Detroit created lots of positive publicity, says Bryan. "The excitement around the renaissance of Detroit is a national phenomenon."

Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg school of management says Detroit is seen as an underdog and its financial misfortune has become an opening for companies.

"If you associate yourself with Detroit, you're associating yourself with a struggle, with managing through difficult times," he says.

Your brand "becomes a brand you want to root for, and a brand you hope will be successful".

Detroit's recovery has a long way to go. But the recent upturn in the sector that has long determined the city's fortunes, the auto industry, has given a big boost.

Chrysler, one of America's "big three" car companies along with GM and Ford, has also made Detroit a focus of its marketing.

The company, which was taken over by Italy's Fiat after a US government rescue, ran a TV advertisement in 2011 called Born of Fire, which starred Detroit rapper Eminem and ended with the slogan "Imported from Detroit".

The advert ran during the Super Bowl, won several awards, and generated more than 15 million views on YouTube when originally posted.

Chrysler's chief marketing officer, Olivier Francois, said the company had chosen to emphasise Detroit because "it's come to stand for a certain resilience".

"It stands for a brand of determination and a general refusal to quit."

Detroit's ties to the auto industry have also lent it an appeal as the "real man's city", says Scott Galloway, who teaches marketing at New York University's Stern Business School.

Detroit "reeks grit and toughness", he says, an association that is strongly male but can appeal to both sexes.

"Associating with a product that makes you feel manly or masculine is an incredible asset, and right now there is no more macho city than Detroit."

[Via BBC]

College Debt as Next Bubble

This much we know: College pays. You can lose your house to foreclosure, but never your education. Four-year college graduates’ pay advantage over high school grads has doubled over the past 30 years. If money for tuition is tight, the advice goes, borrow what you need. Students have been listening. In 2010 student debt exceeded credit-card debt for the first time. In 2011 it surpassed auto loans. In March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that student debt had passed $1 trillion. It grew by $300 billion from the third quarter of 2008 even as other forms of debt shrank by $1.6 trillion, according to a separate tabulation by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In a press briefing at the White House in April, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said, “Obviously if you have no debt that’s maybe the best situation, but this is not bad debt to have. In fact, it’s very good debt to have.”

If student loans are good debt, how do you account for the reaction of Christina Mills, 30, of Minneapolis, when she found out her payment on college and law school loans would be $1,400 a month? “I just went into the car and started sobbing,” says Mills, who works for a nonprofit. “It was more than my paycheck at the time.” Medical student Thomas Smith, 25, of Hamilton, N.J., is $310,000 in debt and is struggling to make ends meet even before beginning to repay his loans. “I don’t even know what I eat,” he says. “I just go to the supermarket and buy the cheapest thing I can and buy as much of it as I can.” Then there’s Michael DiPietro, 25, of Brooklyn, who accumulated about $100,000 in debt while getting a bachelor’s degree in fashion, sculpture, and performance, and spent the next two years waiting tables. He has since landed a fundraising job in the arts but still has no idea how he will pay back all that money. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an obsolete idea that a college education is like your golden ticket,” DiPietro says. “It’s an idea that an older generation holds on to.”

Even if you buy into the notion that education debt is good debt, at what point does it become too much of a good thing? Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, which researches financial aid, estimates that student debt, compounded by rising enrollments, is growing by nearly $3,000 a second.

“The question isn’t the debt per se. It’s what the students are getting in return,” says Richard Arum, a New York University sociologist who specializes in education. Many students are incurring heavy debts for an education (ethnomusicology, theater arts) that just isn’t worth it from a strictly financial viewpoint. (Money isn’t everything, but try telling that to the collection agency.) Education benefits society by creating a workforce that creates wealth, pays taxes, and stays off welfare. But state governments—whose schools educate 7 in 10 students—have raised tuition abruptly because of their own financial problems. So far the federal government has offset the state cutbacks by boosting financial aid, but Education Under Secretary Martha Kanter testified to Congress earlier this year that “this path is not fiscally sustainable.”

There’s a lot of speculation that college debt is the next bubble after housing, the latest sector in which prices leap above real value. American colleges may not be turning out the kind of graduates that employers want. In Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, NYU’s Arum and sociologist Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia write that employers are being forced to turn to foreigners or graduate and professional schools to fill jobs that they once filled with homegrown college graduates.

That’s the value side. The cost side is ugly, too. The economic slump that began in 2007 has forced people to pay more for college even as it has driven more of them into it as a refuge from an unfriendly job market. The National Center for Education Statistics projects that college attendance this fall will be up 19 percent from the fall of 2007. Meanwhile, state and local support for higher education last year was the lowest in 25 years of measurement, in inflation-adjusted dollars per student, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Two-thirds of college seniors graduated with loans in 2010, and those who did had an average of about $25,000, according to the Institute for College Access & Success.

The poor, who need the boost that a college education can provide, are suffering the most. Strapped colleges know that they can bring in more revenue from one student paying close to the full load than from a dozen low-income students. So some are bribing rich kids to attend with $10,000 a year they don’t need—grant money that otherwise might have gone to the truly needy. That’s just one of the reasons the lowest-income students are more than three times as likely as the highest-income students to be studying for a certificate or an associate’s degree rather than a four-year degree, according to an analysis of data compiled by FinAid’s Kantrowitz. That leads to lower-paying jobs. Equal opportunity in higher education remains more an ideal than a reality.

Ten years is considered a reasonable period to repay one’s student loans, but many students take 20 or 25 years under extended repayment plans. The New York Fed found that in the first quarter of 2012, people 60 and older were responsible for $43 billion in student loans. It’s not clear how much is from their own studies and how much because they co-signed on their children’s loans, but whatever the case it’s no way to head into retirement.

There are solutions, but each is bound to be resisted by at least some powerful constituency—students, professors, administrators, lenders, or governments.

One huge step would be to allow bankruptcy judges to wipe out education debt, as they could until Congress began to tighten restrictions in 1976. Under today’s punitive statute, judges can discharge student loans only in cases of undue hardship, which in many jurisdictions requires proof of “certainty of hopelessness.” (Congratulations, pal, you’re hopeless!) “The law is much too harsh,” says U.S. Bankruptcy Judge A. Jay Cristol in Miami.

Current law gives lenders no incentive to come to terms with overindebted borrowers. The National Consumer Law Center, in a July report, said “pursuing the most vulnerable borrowers until they die” is inefficient and imposes “significant costs to taxpayers.” To help debtors avoid defaulting in the first place, the center advocates placing them automatically in repayment plans that make the payment a percentage of the borrower’s income rather than a certain dollar amount. Under this “income-based repayment,” which the Obama administration has pushed, any outstanding debt is forgiven after 20 or 25 years.

Colleges should suffer more pain when federal loans go bad, argues Alex Pollock, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. That would make them more careful about raising prices and encouraging students to take out government loans.

Better disclosure would help, too. Some financial aid offer letters don’t even clearly identify loan components of aid packages as debt. Others abbreviate “loan” as L or LN. “Sometimes they have the excuse that they’re limited in the number of characters,” Kantrowitz says, “but they created the form.” The Education Department is developing a form that colleges can use to give prospective students standardized information about how much they will owe upon graduation, what the school’s loan-default and graduation rates are, and so on. In May, Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) introduced a bill to make a standard form mandatory. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators opposes portions of the bill.

School-provided financial aid, far from being charity, is a tool for legal price discrimination—i.e., charging different customers different amounts right up to the limit of their willingness or ability to pay. Most schools dole out grants based on how much they need to discount the sticker price to lure a given student to attend. Financial aid allows them to collect more revenue than if they had to charge every student the same amount. If oranges were sold the same way, a bag of them might cost one family $40 and another $5.

Some of the nation’s wealthiest universities—and some smaller schools such as North Carolina’s Davidson College—have eased the burden on students by replacing all loans with grants in financial-aid packages. That’s noble, but not a realistic solution for all of higher education. “Most colleges are not awash in money. It would be very difficult to dial back the competitive game” of doling out aid to maximize revenue, says Douglas White, a business consultant and higher-education expert in Richmond, Va.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney says President Barack Obama encourages students to take on more debt, “sending them the bill tomorrow.” But Romney is still living down advice he gave to college students in April, telling them to “borrow from your parents” if they need money for school or to start a business. (Parents’ contributions are already figured into financial-aid packages.) Romney also favors reversing a 2010 decision under which the Education Department has tried to save $60 billion over 10 years by making all new federal loans directly, eliminating middlemen.

The most straightforward way to deal with the student debt problem is to bring down the unreasonably high cost of higher education, which forces students to go into debt in the first place. “We can’t just keep shoveling money into a system that consumes resources at an ever-faster clip,” Kevin Carey, then policy director of a nonprofit called Education Sector, told the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions last winter. Carey, who now directs education policy at the New America Foundation, told the senators about cost-saving initiatives such as those at Virginia Tech, where students learn intro math courses in computer labs rather than watching professors at chalkboards, and the University of Minnesota’s new Rochester campus, whose classrooms and labs are in the former food court and movie theater of a mall. The Minnesota school collaborates with IBM and the Mayo Clinic for advanced courses such as computational biology.

Removing the campus altogether is even cheaper. Online operations such as EdX, Coursera, Khan Academy, and Udacity, among others, offer high-quality instruction at no cost to the student—but don’t yet award degrees. Accrediting agencies, dominated by incumbent schools, are skeptical. A survey published in June by Babson Survey Research Group and Inside Higher Ed found that 58 percent of professors surveyed have “more fear than excitement” about online learning.

Some day, low-cost online education that requires zero student borrowing may displace a big chunk of today’s entrenched establishment. The fact that it hasn’t yet says a lot about the durability of colleges and universities, several of which predate the country’s founding. Rather than places of learning, colleges have become expensive screening mechanisms. It’s not what you learn in four years at Harvard University that impresses potential employers; it’s the fact that you got into Harvard in the first place.

So maybe the real problem is that credentialism has trumped learning. That drives people to get degrees simply to displace others who don’t have degrees, says Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. He notes that the U.S. has more than 100,000 janitors with college degrees and 16,000 degree-holding parking lot attendants.

Political scientist Charles Murray would get rid of the bachelor’s degree altogether. In an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate last October in Chicago, he said education is or at least ought to be a lifelong process for everyone, diploma holders or not. “We are all engaged in the same process,” Murray argued. “We are not divided into professionals and service workers or blue-collar workers. We all start out as apprentices. We become journeymen, and we all strive to become master craftsmen.”

To tell the truth, though, many students are not exactly striving, if Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift is correct. Five-year colleges would be a better label for schools, since that’s the average amount of time it’s taking students to get through them. Financial aid is part of the problem: Students equipped with big loan packages can play schools against one another—and what students seem to want is good grades for light work, according to Arum’s research. To combat grade inflation, which has made college transcripts virtually useless to potential employers, Arum recommends that transcripts include the average grade given in a class next to the student’s letter grade. That would be like grading on a curve without having to grade on a curve. Students will presumably study harder, he says, if they know that their grades contain real information for employers and grad schools.

As for paying it all back, it would be going too far to direct students away from, say, ethnomusicology just because it’s less lucrative than nursing or petroleum engineering. Princeton University economist Cecilia Rouse points out that the liberal arts provide benefits to society beyond those that loan officers pay attention to. It’s hard, though, to argue against a standard disclosure form that would tell students about the debt load, unemployment rate, and average first-year income for graduates of the school and the major they’re thinking of committing their lives to.

It may be a while before it’s all solved. In 1939, the New Yorker published a short story called “Ah, the University!” about a well-to-do man who orders his only son to become a professional poker player because he doesn’t want to pay for him to go to college. “Certainly nothing in the world is more delightful than being at the university,” the father says. “The springtime of life! Pleasure after pleasure! … However, I’m not going to send you there.” Perhaps the gentleman was just ahead of his time.

[Via Businessweek]

Whose Employees Will Make Least Money for Rest of Their Lives

The fast-food industry has deservedly gotten a lot of flak recently for its rock-bottom wages. And it appears that those who end up working jobs in fast food also tend to make not that much money throughout their entire careers, not just while they're flipping burgers.

The data comes from the job search Web site Bright.com, which reviewed 8 million resumes of people who'd worked at a select basket of companies -- those who had listed current or previous employment at the companies -- and found out how many of themever made more than $70,000.

The results were predictable: Employees of fast-food restaurants and some retail establishments stayed low-income forever. Wendy's was the worst performer, with only 5.5 percent of its alumni reaching the $70,000 threshold, followed by the T.J. Maxx companies, Subway, Kohl's, McDonalds, and Macy's. Employees of telecommunications and manufacturing companies fared the best: 53 percent of Ford's employees eventually made more than $70,000, followed by Verizon, Chrysler, AT&T, and Sodexo.

Bright.com also assessed the distribution of salaries within a company's workforce. While the following graph is really difficult to decipher, you can basically tell that many more employees of companies like Ford, Chrysler, and AT&T make decent salaries, while very few people at companies like Wendy's and McDonald's make more than $60,000.

Now, there's no reason to believe that working low-wage jobs necessarily torpedoes your chances of earning a decent living down the road. It's more likely that the collection of circumstances that propel people into those jobs -- lack of education, geographic mobility, or better jobs -- continue to hold them back for the rest of their lives.

The data also calls into question the validity of what we usually consider to be "entry-level" jobs. If a job isn't an entry into a career that moves in a more prosperous direction, it's unclear what real value it really has.

[Via Washington Post]

How to Write about Africa

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa's situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You’ll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

[Via Granta.com]

Why Beethoven Ninth Symphony Is So Popular in Japan

The Symphony No.9 composed by Beethoven is affectionately called "Daiku" in Japanese. Concerts featuring the symphony "Daiku" are held throughout Japan in every December.

Why is "Daiku" so popular in Japan? Why is it performed in December? That facts are stranger than fiction.

Japan had been allied with Great Britain since 1902. When World War I occured in 1914, Great Britain engaged in warfare with Germany, so Japan also declared war against Germany.

The Japanese army using 29,000 soldiers launched a bitter attack on the Qing Tao Fortress in China where 4,300 German soldiers were stationed. Eventually, the German soldiers raised the white flag in surrender. They were detained in several camps in Japan.

There was one camp at a very small town, Bando, on the Shikoku Island during WWI. Captain Toyohisa Matsue ran the camp, but he was an odd director. He treated the prisoners humanely according to the Haag Convention, which was not well known among Japanese commanders then.

He came from the Aidu Domain in the northeast Japan. The Aidu Domain took sides with Shogun in the Meiji Restoration, so they were beaten and massacred by the Imperial Forces. Matsue was a son of an Aidu samurai, who survived the oppression from the Meiji Government, and then entered the military. He decided not to make any of the prisoners feel such humiliation.

The German prisoners of war were treated as such in order to restore their dignity. They showed the people of Bando their advanced skills and technologies in return. Before long, the locals respected the prisoners. There formed a strange friendship.

Then the Ninth Symphony was performed by an orchestra made up of a select group of the prisoners, for the first time. Some Japanese, who had been taught by the prisoners, joined the orchestra. The "Daiku" was very touching. 

Since then "Daiku" had often been performed by Japanese orchestra. It was played as the indication of friendship across nationalities then and became gradually popular.

On December 31, 1940, "Daiku" was conducted by Joseph Rosenstock, perfomed by the New Symphony Orchestra (currently, the NHK Symphony Orchestra) and broadcast live on the radio in order to commemorate the 2,600th anniversary of founding the nation. According to a myth, it is said that the first Emperor Jinmu took to the throne in the year 660 B.C.

When the concert producer was asked why "Daiku" was selected, he answered that there were special performances of the Ninth Symphony throughout Germany every December 31. This is partly because Japan have the tradition of having "Daiku" concerts near the end of the year. To tell the truth, only the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig has the annual concert on New Year's Eve, so the answer was incorrect.

The other reason is the financial problem of an orchestra member. Bill collectors always persecuted debtors in the recession after WWII. They used to demand full repayment from a borrower by New Year's Eve. Musicians were always poor and needed much money in December.

However when "Daiku" would be performed, the concert tickets are always sold out. So they wanted to perform "Daiku" near the end of the year.

[Via Lang-8.com]