The Only Way For Greece is Up.

I read a Reuters article by Gareth Jones about the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index released this week by Transparency International, a non-partisan global coalition against corruption founded in 1993.  What first caught my attention was the headline, “Greece ranks worst in EU in global corruption index.”  My first reaction was the traditional Greek expression: Oy vey. More bad news for the old country.

I decided not to write about it.  Why pile on when the place is already reeling from all the body blows to its economy? There’s real suffering going on over there. Besides, the report was based on year-old data and is not measuring actual established levels of graft (though, how could it since those transaction are done in secret) but rather perceptions of graft.  So, I decided to shut my eyes and write something about the ancient Greek gods.

But the fates weren’t up for that idea.  Yesterday, I received an email from my friend, George Anthou, a delightful Greek-American living in the wilds of southwestern Pennsylvania close by our shared alma mater of Washington & Jefferson College.  George is a few years older than I (hard as it may be to believe there are any out there), a lawyer, and proud to the core of his Hellenic heritage.  Attached to his email was a different newspaper article on the same subject, this one headlined “Greece slips to 94th in corruption index as austerity makes it EU’s weakest link.” I’m sure it pained him to read that article, because it sure as hell(enic) pained me with how distinctly non-complimentary it was to a country we both love.

That’s when I knew I had to write this. You can’t run from a story making headlines around the world that ranks your country on a par for corruption with Benin, Columbia, Djibouti, India, Moldova, Mongolia and Senegal, and puts you twenty to thirty places behind Romania and Bulgaria, respectively, two countries the EU forbids from passport-free travel to other member states due to concerns over their corruption.

The “traditional” Greek way for dealing with such a story would be to attack the source (and/or the messenger), deny the facts, find someone else to blame, or dismiss it as part of some international conspiracy. But this time newspapers aren’t reporting that as the “Greek” reaction.  

A Greek political commentator is reported as saying, “To survive in such a hostile situation, you have to bend the rules.  There is no other way when things are so hard—you are forced to resort to corruption to deal with the state mechanism.”  And a Greek economics professor said, “People have been pushed to their limits [by wage cuts and unexpected taxes]. We should not be at all surprised by the report’s findings.” 

And the story goes downhill from there, fueling those who would like to say (as the article reports) that “Greece is not just an economic basket case that is only barely keeping bankruptcy at bay but entrenched in a crisis of values that, like its debt drama, refused to go away.”

OUCH. 

So, what’s the root problem?   And how does one begin to deal with it?  If you ask me the cause isn’t the financial crisis.  Corruption has been entrenched in Greece for decades.  For most it’s the only way they’ve known to get things done. In fact, if you find a Greek still willing to show a sense of humor on the subject, you’re likely to hear him complain that his politicians deserve to have the country ranked right down there at the bottom with North Korea, Afghanistan and Somalia (#174).

And don’t get them started on “perception.” To Greeks all of their politicians and most of the public servants they deal with are corrupt.  The recent highly publicized arrest of a former Defense Minister is dismissed with a wave of the hand as window dressing to let the rest of the crooks—some still in Parliament they’ll quickly say—get away.  

The Greek perception is “nothing will ever change.”

But wait.  Is it possible the times are in fact a changin’ there?

This week another story broke in the Greek newspapers.  The current and former mayors of Mykonos, two deputy mayors, and six employees of the municipality’s financial department are facing criminal charges in connection with a major fraud probe and tax evasion scheme.  Allegedly, between 2002 and 2009 six million euros of occupancy taxes were diverted from municipal coffers into the accused’s pockets—and that’s thought to be just a fraction of what was actually embezzled.  Eleven hotel owners are facing misdemeanor charges in the same case.

Mykonos Town Hall and Municipal Building

Mykonians are not surprised by the allegations, but I’m certain most are at the prosecutions.   Although guilt and innocence have yet to be determined, many who never before thought it possible that a politician would be called to account, are now openly wondering who might be next.  Could the unexpected ever happen and the “really big ones”—i.e., those tied to Parliament—be the next to fall?

Bringing the corrupt to task is the surest way of improving Greece’s image in the eyes of the world, but more important is the effect it would have on the Greek people.  Greece’s only way of regaining financial stability without suffering irreparable harm along the way is by the government regaining the confidence of its people.

But as long as “nothing will ever change” remains the national mantra, how can Greeks be expected to behave any differently than the “crooks” they perceive in power?  The public’s trust must be earned by the government, and to my way of thinking the best place to start doing that is by putting those who’ve betrayed that trust in jail.

‘Nuf said.  For now.

And for the curious among you, the least corrupt places on the index were Denmark, Finland and New Zealand, and among my MIE compatriots, here’s how their countries ranked:

Iceland 11, United Kingdom 17, United States 19, France 22, Brazil 69, South Africa 69, and Thailand 88.

Jeff—Saturday

The Blitz (2*)

I had always wondered why, at the end of the street where I live, the Edwardian semi-detached houses suddenly gave way to a row of newly built properties. What happened to the houses that stood there originally? I'm far too anti-social to spend time chatting with my neighbours, but I did mention this to the bloke across the road as we discussed the weather. The answer was simple, he said: the original houses were obliterated by a German bomb in the Second World War.

Wow, I thought, making a note to look into this further. I wondered why German bombs might have been dropped on Chiswick, which is neither central or a hive of vital industry. I've been doing some research on bombing raids recently, and the explanation was probably simple: the crew of the Luftwaffe bomber was probably too scared to fly over central London where the flak was heaviest and searchlight glares formed a web in the sky, so they dropped them as near as they dared and then hightailed it out of there.

I've been able to find out more because of this astonishing interactive map that shows every single bomb that dropped on London. Sure enough, near my house, there is a red dot that indicates several bombs were dropped, probaly the entire load on single German bomber. The map is so detailed and compulsaive, that I lost the next looking at where else the bombs had landed. It turned out two had fallen on the grounds of my cricket club and the park where I take my kids to play. Chiswick was not badly bombed, but it's landscape was changed by those bombs. Elsewhere in London whole districts were razed to the ground. As you can tell from the graphic above, in central London it's easier to see where the bombs didn't fall. It's amazing that London survived as intact as it did.


Cheers

Dan - Friday




*I've written about the Blitz and the effect its bombs had on London before

Smart?

We keep hearing that computers are smart.  We hear about smart tablets, smart phones, i-pads, laptops.  Certainly, these devices are truly amazing.  Not so much because they are clever – which I want to argue they are not – but because the people who designed and built them are brilliant geniuses, and yet they sell them to us for amazingly little money.  Computers are able to do calculations very quickly.  It’s getting to be the case that the speed of light is the limiting factor.  But that’s what they do.  Compute, period.  This fact tends to get hidden behind a flood of Gigabytes, Cycles, Megabits per second, Megapixels and the like.

In the early days of so-called artificial intelligence, there were high hopes that programs such as neural networks would not only be able to duplicate the functions of the brain, but would also provide models of how our brains worked.  In other words, we could better understand ourselves through the behavior of our artificial creations.  We’re about twenty years older and a lot wiser now.

There’s no area where the difference between intelligence and computational speed is as dramatic as in the area of images. It's people who are smart.  We look at pictures and, without giving it a thought, we discover shapes, motion, assess our environment, obtain information.  We have a pretty good idea about how our eyes take the reflected light from what they see and code that for the brain.  We have much less idea about how that coded data ends up as information – in color and 3D no less – in our minds. This is a massively difficult problem and the best computer codes are not impressive at doing it.  Yet we do it at a casual glance.

Computers can’t even do this stuff with letters – by far the easiest situation since what we see is already a conveniently set up code.  That’s what the Captchas are all about.  Sure the letters are a bit misaligned, maybe fancied up, different scale, different backgrounds, but so what?  We see what they are immediately.  Computers battle and usually fail.  The whole point of a Captcha is to separate computers from humans!

Most of practical image processing is about making pictures more attractive or useful to humans.  Fortunately this is a much simpler problem than computer vision.  We do know quite a bit about what makes things easier for us.  We pick out shapes and objects in pictures and classify them, and we do this by identifying edges in the picture.  When we complain that an image is blurred or “soft”, we're actually uncomfortable because the edges are less distinct. 

Raw Saturn

Saturn edge enhanced

Here is an example.  The picture on the left is a raw image of Saturn from a space probe.  The one on the right has been focused.  Right?  Wrong.  We’ve just marked in the edges more clearly - something a program can do easily – and nothing else has changed.

We are much more tolerant of color variation; obviously it's much less important to us in doing that classification stuff.  Of course we want our pictures and movies and TVs in color, but some of us are old enough to remember when they were in black and white (well TV anyway!)  We never had any trouble identifying what was going on in the picture.  Color is a nice-to-have.

So I see my corgi, Megan, wondering around the garden, looking and sniffing, and I really wonder what she's seeing (in black and white) and smelling and how she interprets it all in her mind.  How could one ever tell?  All I know for sure is that what she’s doing is one hell of a lot smarter than any computer.

Michael – Thursday.

Icelandic Santas - the Yule Lads

The Icelandic Santa Clauses are not really Santas in the jolly, Ho-ho-ho, chubby, white beard understanding of the name. These guys are decendants of trolls and have a wardrobe to match. No red velvet with white fur trimming for them. Not at all.

Although the Icelandic name for these figures is the same as what we use for the American/European Santa or „jólasveinn“ the translation really means Christmas guys or Yuletide lads.  There are 13 of them although the exact figure depends on the source, one mentioning them to be „one and eight“. The adding was required in order to fit with the rhyme of the verse. Fever words of any use rhyme with nine than eight in Icelandic.

To quote wikipedia the Icelandic Yuletide Lads: originate from Icelandic folklore. Early on their number and depictions varied greatly depending on location, with each individual Lad ranging from mere pranksters to homicidal monsters who eat children.

We have come a long way since. Well, perhaps not super long but a bit. The Yule lads are no longer homicidal although they can still be considered hooligans. Rather tame hooligans actually. Each is still named after his individual way of teasing the farmers of yore but the modern version has evolved to also include what has endeared them to the nation – they now brings gifts. I do not know how this development occurred but it was a smart move. No one really likes a hooligan. Even a tame hooligan.

The names of the Yule lads are not easily translated. They are clunky and old. Hallbergur Hallmundsson has translated a local favorite Christmas verse collection in which they each make an appearance and his translation of the names are shown below. I have only made small adjustments and added a bit of clarity to the descriptions of each. Note that aside from two they specialize in food-crime which is a testiment of how poor Iceland was at the time of their creation. No one had any gold. The rich had food.

Sheep-Cote Clod (Stekkjastaur): Harasses ewes and tries to drink milk from their teats, but due to a pair of peg-legs he is not very successful.

Gully Gawk (Giljagaur): Hides in gullies, waiting for an opportunity to sneak into the cowshed and steal milk. In the old times there were lots of gullies everywhere (I am assuming).

Stubby (Stúfur): Abnormally short, dwarfish. Note that at the time there was nothing known as being politically correct. If you were abnormally short you would be called Stubby. His thing is to steals pans to eat the crust left on them.

Ladel-Licker (Þvörusleikir): Malnourished and extremely skinny, although today he is considered fashionably thin. Steals ladels and licks them.

Pot-Scraper (Pottaskefill): Steals leftovers from pots. Today he would steal cold pizza slices from boxes.

Bowl-Licker (Askasleikir): Has an ugly head. Hides under beds waiting for someone to put down a bowl of food scraps for the cat or dog of the house, which he then steals. Today pets eat pet food and this guy would have gotten himself another food crime to focus on.

Door-Slammer (Hurðaskellir): Slams doors, especially during the night. Go figure.

Skyr-Gobbler (Skyrgámur): A Yule Lad with an affinity for skyr. This guy I get.

Sausage-Swiper (Bjúgnakrækir): Hides in the rafters and snatches sausages that are being smoked. He is hard up today as no one has any rafters anymore, much less do we smoke sausages. He now pinches pepperoni off pizzas.

Window-Peeper (Gluggagægir): A voyeur of the peeping Tom variety who looks through windows in search of things to steal. This guy is the happiest of the bunch with the advances of the modern age. Window panes are now much more see-through than before.

Doorway-Sniffer (Gáttaþefur): Has an abnormally large nose and an acute sense of smell which he uses to sniff out food – from the doorway. This guy would be institutionalized today for sure. It is not proper anymore to stand sniffing in doorways.

Meat-Hook (Ketkrókur): Uses a hook to steal meat. His English name is worthy of a serial killer while the Icelandic version sounds more like a crummy pirate‘s name.

Candle-Stealer (Kertasníkir): Sneaks behind children and follows them around in order to steal their candles and eat them (i.e. the candles). They don’t make candles like they used to (from fat). He is not all too happy these days.

So thirteen days before Christmas Eve these Yule lads begin their decent from the mountains where they live with their mother Grýla and their unemployed father Leppalúði. They tread the snow into the urban areas, one arriving per night. Each stays for two weeks before trodding back, the last one leaving on what is called „the Thirteenth“ or „Þrettándinn“ which takes place on January 6th and is celebrated with bonfires and what remains of the fireworks from New Year's.

Icelandic children put one of their shoes in the window of their bedroom before going to bed on the evening of the 11th of December. If they have been good they wake up in the morning of the 12th with a small present in the shoe from the first Yule Lad. This is repeated until they last such morning of the 24th which is the main day of Christmas celebration here. If they are bad they get a potato. Here we have no coal. Well we did not use to – they arrived with the barbeque.

 

We have no Santa specialized in stealing off barbeques.

 

Yrsa - Wednesday 

 

Yrsa - Wednesday

Bunkers and Cheese

In France a land known for it's cheese of which de Gaulle once remarked 'how can anyone govern a country with 432 cheeses'? 

 Many other pungent things lie beneath it's streets besides the sewers and Metro.

 Below the Gare de L'Est, the train station with railines leading to Eastern Europe lay the untouched remains of a German Bunker from the Occupation. A former command center for train operations and routing used by French railway, the German forces took it over in 1940.
Not only did they use it to monitor the trains they used it as a shelter.

This warren of tunnels, rooms dripping with moisture and rusted pipes and leftover equipement has been preserved.

Bunker tour to be continued next week..........
Cara - Tuesday

Libraries

We’re all united in this, aren’t we?

Our love of libraries?

What’s your favorite?

I hope it’s your local.

And that is as it should be.

But, when it comes to sheer beauty, there are two that stand out for me.

The tiny Biblioteca Joanina at Coimbra, in Portugal, is one. Construction began on this little jewel in 1717.

It’s 250,000 books date from the 12th to the 19th centuries, and deal mainly with civil and canon law, theology and philosophy.

Brazil’s most beautiful library is in Rio de Janeiro. And, although it’s not as venerable, and the exterior doesn't promise much, the interior is a knockout..

The seeds of its collection, like Coimbra’s, go back to the Iberian Peninsula.

On the first of November, 1755, a great earthquake, followed by a fire, shattered Portugal’s capital at Lisbon – and destroyed the royal library, the largest in the country at that time.

After the cleanup, the king asked this man, Diogo Barbosa Machado, the learned abbot of monastery of Saint Adrian of Sever to assemble a new one.

A mark of his success was that, in 1808, when the Portuguese Court fled to Rio de Janeiro to escape the invading armies of Napoleon, they were able to bring with them a collection that extended to some sixty thousand books and manuscripts. It was incorporated as the Royal Library of Rio de Janeiro and opened to the public in 1814.

When the French threat passed, and Dom João VI embarked, once again, for Portugal, he took the manuscripts with him.

But he left most of the books.

Rio’s National Library is, today, the largest library in Latin America.

 And either the seventh or the tenth in the world, depending upon which index you consult.

If you happen to be in Rio, a visit is well-worth it for the physical beauty alone.

The library’s collection runs to more than nine million volumes.

Leighton - Monday

News from the Land of the Rising Sun

Just as the very rich, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, are different from the rest of us, so is Japan.

Let's look, for example, at the ways some Japanese cope with insecurity about their appearance.  As attractive as the Japanese are, many of them seem to dislike their looks.  So they turn, naturally, to technology, since  Japan is, of course, the global home of technology used oddly (Tamagotchi, anyone?).  And when technology is applied to insecurity, you get things like this.

This is the Hana Twin Nose.  No, I don't know why it's called that, although I suppose sisters (or just good friends) could each buy one and, over time, produce twin noses.  Its manufacturers call it  "a much cheaper alternative to plastic surgery and it doesn't hurt either!"  And it's obviously convenient, attractive, and comfortable to wear.  This appears to be the version designed for mouth-breathers.

And then we have . . .

The Meijikara Anti-Wrinkle Glasses.  Imagine combating the pernicious effects of aging with these cheery yellow specs.  What could be easier?  And, just in case you're skeptical, the company that makes them hits that nail square on the head, saying, "It might seem like another wacky Japanese invention but in fact the Mejikara has been a sleeper hit here."

I actually find it reassuring that insecurity is so universal.  When I was growing up, I thought I had the market cornered.  Everyone else seemed so comfortable.   But look at these products.  Presumably, each was the subject of a business plan, and the most essential component of a business plan is identifying and quantifying the customer base.  If money actually talks, what it's saying here is that there are lots of us who are unhappy about the way we look!

But here's an entirely new level, at least as far as I'm concerned.  They're Japanese (of course) and young (because who else's self-esteem is so disastrous?) and maybe a little geeky--members, in short of the otaku subculture, obsessed with manga and video games.  For them, the easiest way to--well, ask for a date, for example--seems to be to do it while their faces are completely covered with a manga mask.  Here are two photos of a dating club that people attend wearing masks of their favorite characters in order to have the nerve to ask each other out.

And once they've made their choices, filled in the forms or whatever those pieces of paper are, off they go for an unforgettable night on the town.

Next-to-last, we've got something for people whose problems are more deep-seated than mere lack of confidence, issues rooted deep in the past, or perhaps in prior incarnations, all the way into L. Ron Hubbard territory.

This is a Shinjuku coffee house called Tokyo Hypnosis Cafe "Colors" where, in addition to a cup of joe, you can order up a mesmeric treatment for, according to the menu,

Basic Hypnosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ¥1,000
Diet Suggestion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ¥2,000
Traumas Erasure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ¥5,000
Stop Smoking Suggestion . . . . . . . . . . .¥2,000
Former Life Regression. . . . . . . . . . . . .¥15,000

If this were an American chain operation and you planned to rattle up more than one former life, you'd probably have to sit in a booth and order something for each of them.

And last of all, here's something (other than former life regression) I could actually use.  More to the point, it's something my wife, who reclines for hours watching movies with her laptop balanced on her chest, could use.  Imagine: a whole day, flat on your back, online, using this simple, if somewhat precarious-looking, stand.

By the way, 100% of these photos came from my new favorite site on Japan, www.japantrends.com.  But don't log on if you haven't got browsing time, and be careful drinking fluids over your keyboard because odds are pretty good you're going to laugh.  And the site is inspiring, too; the Japanese are so endlessly ingenious and so practical, in ways that occasionally amaze me.

Tim -- Sunday