Chennai Super Weenies

It's as the old saying goes, they pulled defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Chennai Super Kings put on a master class tonight, in how to squander a brilliant defense that had resulted in the Kings XI Punjab squeaking out a bare 136 runs.

About 10 overs into Chennai's innings, it wasn't just that you sensed that the Kings XI had lost, but that this was going to be an absolutely crushing defeat, a defeat that would have been the crown jewel in their winless record.

Yet somehow, that defeat didn't materialize. Dot ball after dot ball, that niggling sense that Chennai might not be able to pull it off, began to grow.

And that sense was right. Somehow, someway, the Doni-less Super Kings lost the plot and forgot they were playing cricket. They managed to tie the Kings XI, forcing a super innings, but as Matthew Hayden walked onto the field with his Mongoose in hand, the match was a foregone conclusion.

While I don't feel too bad about the whole affair, as Rajathastan was, is, and always will be my team in the IPL, Chennai, like the Deccan Chargers, are a secondary team for me, one I cheer when there is no blue and gold out on the pitch.

What I do feel bad about, and absolutely curse Chennai for, is the sight of that legendary fathead Yuvraj Singh winning the game in the Super Over, with a sweeping hit that seemed to just nudge Muralidaran's spinner gently into the boundary. As the camera closed in on Yuvi's open mouthed, spittle expelling, celebrating face (Complete with non-stop fist pump action), I was mighty tempted to throw my remote right through the screen. But only tempted, mind you, as I had wisely put the remotes up on the shelf earlier, just to forestall that very possibility.

That, and I'm a bit broke, and not up for TV shopping at the moment.

Thanks Chennai. Now it's not just Madrasi food that gives me indigestion.

Yes, But is it Attested?

Just in the Gulf News this morning, out of that den of tolerance and wisdom known as Ras Al Khamiah, a couple has been arrested for having sex in their car. A Bangladeshi man and an Indian woman have been sentenced to a year in jail followed by deportation.

So far, so normal for the UAE, but there are a few niggling details that should give pause.

The first is that the car was covered, as in, you could not see into it at all.

The "witness" never actually saw the offense, but claims to have "heard some noises" coming from the car. At first blush that sounds plausible, except that unless the windows were open, how could anything be heard at all? Once I close the door to my car, I can't hear a peep from anyone inside, so unless this "concerned citizen" had their ear pressed right up the glass, I can't see how they would have heard anything at all.

So our concerned citizen did what "anyone" would do, they ran to the nearest police officer, flagged him down, and led him to the scene of the crime, where the illicit pair was caught "red-handed."

So far, so normal. It is the UAE, and illicit affairs are a no, no... Except that this was not an illicit affair.

The man and woman were married. They even produced a marriage certificate for the courts.

So to recap, a married man and woman have sex in a covered car, completely hidden from public view (Something I very much doubt is unheard of, if only going by the number of Landcruisers and Patrols with midnight-black tinted windows I see parked in the unlit sections of various beaches at night). Then they are arrested, go to court, prove the relationship was not illicit, only to have the judge notice that the couple hadn't paid the 150 AED to have their marriage certificate attested. So the judge ruled them unmarried, and sentenced them.

That's it. They didn't have the right stamp.

In the UAE no birth, no marriage, no education is officially recognized unless you fork over a handful of cash and get a wee little stamp recognizing the validity of the certificate.

The problem this case poses is for potential tourists.

It is doubtful that any tourist couple would line up to get a stamp on their marriage certificates after coming to the UAE, if they even brought them. And while it is RAK we are talking about here, and not Dubai, it is a distinction without a difference for most of the world.

After the spate of recent, tourist unfriendly incidents in the past little while, you have to wonder if we are seeing the beginnings of a real trend.

What is Stephen Harper Reading

In case you haven't heard (and chances are you haven't), there has been a pretty popular meme in the CanLit world for the past couple years regarding Stephen Harper. One day, Booker Prize winning author Yann Martel decided that the Prime Minister of Canada was not a sufficiently educated man, and endeavoured to correct that deficiency. To that end, he started mailing a book a week to the Prime Minister, accompanied by a long winded letter about how that book would help correct some or other fault Martel felt the Prime Minister possessed.

I was never a fan of Martel's stunt. It reeked of arrogance and condescension when he started it, and now that he has a book out detailing his years long bibliostalking, it just seems sad and tired.

Just to pick a book selection at random, take Martel's choice of Christian Bok's Eunoia. The opening of the letter says it all.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Have you ever felt limited by language? I’m sure you have....

And it gets better.

Look, Bok is a nice guy. I had him for a professor, and when we plied him with enough beer, he told us all about reading the dictionary from cover to cover numerous times, and spending eight years building a database that allowed him to separate words by vowel usage. It was an admirable feat, and Eunoia will certainly long have a place in the canon of language poetry, but what it has to do with running a country?... Sorry, but I just don't buy Martel's arguments.

I think John Ivison said it best back in 2007....

Can't judge a reader by his books
John Ivison , National Post
Saturday, Oct. 27, 2007

OTTAWA -Yann Martel is outraged. The Life of Pi author has been sending classic novels to Prime Minister Stephen Harper every two weeks since April, in an act of guerrilla arts advocacy aimed at securing more funding for the world of letters, and has been getting no response.

Mr. Martel would have us believe that by working his way through the prescribed reading list, Mr. Harper would undergo a New Testament-style conversion and boost public arts spending overnight.

Quite how the author thinks reading Animal Farm by George Orwell, a savage attack on statism, would induce anyone to increase state subsidies for the book industry is beyond me. But never mind. In reality, Mr. Martell knows this won't happen, so he is happy to convey to Canadians the impression that the barbarians have breached the gates of 24 Sussex Drive and are now using Pierre Trudeau's old swimming pool. Mr. Harper is left looking like someone who thinks Mr. Martel's excellent Man Booker Prize-winning opus is a study of either mathematics or Greek linguistics.

"I got a feel for a man who has no sense of the arts," Mr. Martel told the Carleton University student newspaper.

But it is Mr. Harper who should be outraged. Provided you take a pretty broad definition of "the arts," the Prime Minister is an avid patron. He is a keen movie-goer, a competent pianist and is currently learning a third language (Spanish). If further culture vulture credentials are required, he once named AC/DC's lilting ballad, Thunderstruck, as his favourite rock song.

That is being facetious -- but no more so than Mr. Martel's public relations campaign. Mr. Martel says he is trying to make suggestions to Mr. Harper's "stillness -- those quiet moments of reflecting on daily struggles and the purpose of life." I don't know about Mr. Martel, but after a day reading fiscal reference tables until my brain ached, I think I'd forgo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych (the reflections of a man dying a slow, agonizing death) or Francoise Sagan's tale of rich French people who have lots of sex but still aren't very happy, Bonjour Tristesse.

Small wonder that when the Prime Minister ditches his briefing books, he picks up Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl to read to the kids (which he does every night, apparently, regardless of workload), in preference to Mr. Martel's recommended reading. Other Harper favourites are said to include mystery novels, thrillers by such writers as Robert Ludlum and Total Hockey -- the Ultimate Hockey Encyclopedia by Dan Diamond. The Prime Ministerial nightstand is also said to contain the obligatory political biographies, such as Alan Greenspan's Air of Turbulence and Peter C. Newman's Secret Mulroney Tapes.

The Prime Minister is probably like a lot of us when confronted with a novel by August Strindberg or Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- we admire it, lay it aside making a mental note to read it at some point in the future and then never pick it up again (though I did labour through Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is about how long it took to read the damn thing).

Do we know Harper doesn't read that many books? Or a sizeable amount? He is an educated fellow, after all.

The issue here is Martel's hubris in prescribing a canon, with the unspoken corollary that only a philistine would read something other than these approved books.

What are Martel's thoughts on the "Great Books" canon, or the push to force students to study those relics white male-dom? It's the same arrogance.

If, say, Harper had agreed to a challenge, and they shared and compared reading lists, that would be one thing. But here, Martel unilaterally decided that Harper was a stupid man who needed some proper education, and he was going to provide it.

Would Martel have done the same for Le petit gars de Shawinigan? He had far less education, and far less of a reputation as a scholar. In fact, old Jean-ny boy had a real reputation as one who preferred to settle disputes with knuckle and skin rather than pen and ink.

Unintentional Poetry

From time to time a student hands over something that, unintentionally, is mindblowingly awesome. in this case, while practicing an IELTS Task Type 2 essay, a paragraph stood out, not as an example of incredible prose, but of, if not incredible, at least notable poetry. What follows is what was handed to me today, written by the student, with my input solely being limited to breaking up the lines and organizing the paragraph into stanzas.

The Internet
(There are a people how use it)

There are a people how
use the internet
in a bad way
like a hackers
and a virus made

There are a people how
use the internet
want to be famous
so they do a bad virus
that destroy a computer

There are a people how
use the internet
want to destroy
police security
to be famous

There are a people how
use the internet
to get bad things
from the internet
to steal the program
from the internet

There are a people how
use the internet
in a bad way

Data Transfer in the Classroom

One interesting issue that has arisen, which was never an issue in a traditional classroom, is the issue of data transfer. As educators shift more and more towards a true 1:1 eLearning model, there will be an ever increasing need to transfer large amounts of data to each and every student. We're not just talking sending e-mails with .docs or .pdfs, or the odd You Tube .flv. We're talking bandwidth hogging HD videos, lengthy audio files, and picture libraries used for creating presentations. Even 100 MB of data, which is a trivial amount for an individual, poses significant logistical problems for the educator.

Do you transfer via USB key? That's slow and cumbersome, and unless you buy multiple keys, creates a significant bottleneck.

Do you burn the data onto DVDs? If it is a one off activity, this method is time consuming and expensive. To make it worthwhile, you would need to burn a term or a semester worth of material onto disks to give your students. But the amount of data you might use over that length of time could easily outstrip the capacity of a DVD, requiring you to burn two, or even three per student. Again, cumbersome and expensive.

Do you upload it and have students download the file? That bypasses the one-at-a-time issue faced by USB keys, but then you and your students are dependent on the vagaries of network performance. Is the network busy that day? At what rate can that file be downloaded from where you are hosting it. Do you have to pay to have the file hosted online? Are there bandwidth limits on your account? Throw in the odd 1GB file, and over the course of a month, you could be facing a large bill.

What about the Public Folder system? Macbooks come equipped with Public Folders which your students can access at any time over the network. In theory this system is perfect for the classroom. The problem is that only 10 students can connect to your Public Folder at one time, and if any forget to properly disconnect, others will be blocked out. In addition, even a file as small as 100 MB will suddenly create a classroom management situation, as during busy network periods, the average download time could top 20 to 30 minutes. What do the students do while they are downloading? How do you keep track of who has fully downloaded the file, and who's downloads were interrupted?

Personally, I prefer using an adapted Public Folder method, where I go to one students at each table, directly connect my Macbook to theirs with a regular ethernet cable, and transfer the data. With the direct connection, transfer speeds are blazing fast, and a 100 MB file takes a few seconds to transfer. To over come the bottleneck issue, I have my students in groups of three, and I employ the Give and Get system. After I "Give" the file to one student, the other two direct connect to the first, and they "Get" the file from them. In practice, when done right, I have found that you can transfer 500 MB to 1 GB of data to each student in your classroom in between 5 to 7 minutes.

It's not a perfect system, and requires both technical knowledge, and specific tools (6+ small ethernet cables for student use), but I have found it to be the most efficient system to date.

Each method brings certain upsides and downsides. Which method works best for you?

One Final Indignity

This news story is old new by now, but for some reason I just couldn't bring myself to close the tab on my browser holding this story.

A little over two weeks ago, there was a bit of an incident in International City. International City is Dubai's attempt to create a multicultural gated(ish) community where professionals would go to love and commute into the city for work. For some time now International City has attracted more than a few expats of my acquaintance, mostly because the rents were dirt cheap (by Dubai standards) and the location seemed safely remote and out of the hustle of the city proper. Unfortunately, what most of these penny-pinching expats did not realize was that the entire development was created with a sewage system that could only handle, at best, 30% to 40% of the full population of the development. This led to a situation where, for a good period of time last year, large swathes of International City, especially the English area, were literally bathing in exposed sewage that had spilled out of the overtaxed pipes.

As if the constant stink and threat of cholera were not enough, the residents awoke recenbtly to discover that their area had been flooded by another form of sewage - organized crime.

It seems the ethnic gangs gave taken up root here in Dubai, which somewhat reminds me of Vancouver and Toronto back in Canada. There you can find Chinese gangs, Vietnamese gangs, you name it. Now you can find the same in Dubai. As the Gulf News told it -

"A police officer was moderately injured on Saturday evening during police raids on flats that were operating as brothels in International City.

Dubai Police managed to arrest members of Asian gangs, mainly Vietnamese, who were involved in running brothels in the development. They were also involved in inciting violent incidents among their competitors including, murdering an Indian man and seriously injuring another at the China cluster on Friday. Both men were among the competitors involved in the same illegal operations."

The police action, as the article states, was prompted by an escalation of violence where 20 gang members broke into an apartment, most likely stash house, for a shakedown. In the process they killed an Indian man, and subsequently attracted the attention of the police who, in their raid, discovered that at least 52 units in the International City Chinese sector were being used as brothels.

52. Not 5 or 2. 52.

It's not a sign that a problem is starting, it's a sign that a problem is well established and growing. Thankfully the police seem to be on top of the problem and dealing with it with alacrity.

As Time Slips Past at the Afternoon PD

some are dependent
some are independent

the technique will change
across a varied range

to incorporate flexibility
with mixed ability

pay attention
to retention

matching implementation
to execution

enhancing invention
which all,
of course,
goes without mention

The View from Festival City

I was in Festival City on Tuesday, the day before UAE Day, but it felt as if the celebrations had already begun.

It's not the best photo ever, but I was pretty darn proud of it. I thought of sending it in to the Khaleej Times or Gulf News, but thought better of it when I realized that do so would probably entail more effort than I was willing to undertake. So there it sits above, on this lonely blog.

As we walked along outside, however, we found that things had started to really come together at Festival City.



People were out in force, and the Disney Princess stage show brought huge crowds into the mall. We only caught the tail end of the 4pm show.



Luckily we there were a few attractions outside to keep us occupied until 6pm, or at least 5:30pm.



Eventually it was time for the stage show. I had managed, even arriving a half hour early, only to get a spot about eighty feet from the stage, but luckily a kind local offered to let my oldest daughter sit with his wife and children in the pit in front of the stage.

I can't say I understood what the story was supposed to be, but the singing and dancing Disney characters were a revelation for my daughter, who has not been able to talk of anything else since.

I think Disney hit it out of the park with their Princesses brand.

Is Dubai Too Big to Fail?

Is Dubai too big to fail?...

I liked Daniel Gross's Lehman analogy, only I find it a bit off, by a few orders of magnitude. Dubai is not Lehman Brothers, Nakheel is Lehman Brothers (And only metaphorically... Nakheel's debts amount to a high single digit percentage of what Lehman's were at the time of their collapse).

Yes, Dubai World and Nakheel are large companies, but in comparison to the size, not just of Dubai's economy, but of the large merchant families in Dubai (Futtaim, Galadari, Gargash, etc), they'd be like a sub-section of a department of a division were Dubai seen as a single corporate entity.

Yes, Dubai has seemed a bit flashy in recent years, but deceptively so, the way a sumo wrestler seems fat. There actually is a lot of substance underneath. As someone on the ground out here, I can tell you that the malls are jam packed (even the brand new mega malls), the roads are still clogged, the new metro is seeing increasing ridership every month, and major Dubai corporations like Dubal (7th largest aluminum producer in the world), Ducab (largest cable manufacturer in the middle east), DP World (Which, while a subsidiary of Dubai World, was excluded from DW's debt restructuring), and Emirates Airlines are all making money hand over fist.

The National's Wayne Arnold notes a few things the international media seems to have missed in their rubbernecking rush:

Dubai has never defaulted on or missed a debt (loan or bond) payment

Dubai is not a sovereign entity

Nakheel is a private company. (Nakheel's sukuk was never backed by the Dubai government and never even had a credit rating)

Dubai's traditional economic backbone has, and always will be trade facilitating infrastructure. This includes the Dubai Creek dredging, the Jebel Ali port development, the airport expansions, and now the Dubai Metro.

The money is there, but there are politics involved. Abu Dhabi's SWF alone has aver a trillion US$ in assets. The whole of Dubai's debts are a rounding error in the Abu Dhabi portfolio. The issue with Dubai World and Nakheel is not a lack of funds, on the part of either the Dubai government or the Abu Dhabi government. The issue is... something else.

Update: Ezra Klein gives a hat tip to an elightening graph that kind of garrotes the Dubai-Lehman analogy.

Moving Smoothly Along

I've been remiss lately, but mostly due to a sustained flurry of activity at work that reached it's final, climactic crescendo today. Our school has bee pursuing accreditation with one of the largest accrediting bodies in the United States, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), and today was the big visit/assessment/interrogation.

It will be a while before the results filter down to us, but regardless of the outcome, the process itself seems to effected an enormous amount of change already. As a colleague of mine noted, just the act of delving deeply into the practices of the school, and evaluating those practices with an objective standard, has forced a number of departments to really up their game, and look seriously not just at what is being done, but why.

This accreditation process really began about a year ago, and I was intimately involved with the drafting and editing of the initial assessment reports, which gave me a perspective on the school I had not had before.

Before this, I could look at a new initiative, or a current process, and see it cynically. I can't seem to do that anymore. Which is, perhaps, for the better.

In any event, there was actually something else on my mind today, something I noticed in class as I was teaching, or, more specifically, not teaching.

A week ago each student was finally given their shiny new MacBook Pros. Unfortunately for the students, the process was a little bit "nature red in tooth and claw," since there are a gand total of two IT guys who had previously served about a 100 and change admin and teaching staff. Throw on the implementation of an entirely new system, server architecture, plus 1000 new customers, and you have yourself a couple cases of cardiac arrest. Just to keep from being trampled to death by a constant stampede of flummoxed students, the IT boys had to basically show everyone the hand, and limit themselves to a small set list of specific tasks. The students, then, were left to their own devices.

As a long-time Mac user, and a more than a bit of a geek, I was able to get my students configured and running without a hitch. Unfortunately the transition has not been so smooth for most other staff, if only because OS X is entirely alien to them, and because of this, the entire process has been frustrating and bewildering.

Bit by bit, through workshops and informal chats, I, and a very few other colleagues, hope to help those digital immigrants among the staff who are having difficulty adjusting to the new landscape. Lucky for all of us, the students seem to have taken their difficulties in stride, and pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Today was a real case in point.

I had prepared a vocabulary lesson, which usually works moderately well in the classroom, but during those vocabulary lessons, there is always a non-stop torrent of requests to "tell" what a word means, or "give just one example" of how to use such a word in a sentence. When you are working wih the sheer number of words that these students need to, just to get their vocabulary up to a semi-acceptable level, those requests quickly become overwhelming.

But today, using their new Macs, and the slick (and beautiful, oh praise the Lord, it is!) Dictionary program that comes with the system, combined with Google's translate service, it was like I had become a mute accessory in the room.

They didn't even need me.

FInding the definition, writing down the Arabic translation, the part of speech, and creating a sample sentence for each word, now that they had the right tools, became doable tasks that kept them entirely engaged, and quiet.

It felt like I was in the Twilight Zone, for sure, but the truth is that, as long as ways can be found to use these new tools properly, the classrooms in thsi school will be unlike anything else in the UAE.