of mice and men or hoodoo economics

Though it is hard to say how well the experiment's participants were shielded from the fact that they were subject to research, since knowing that one is taking part in a psychological or behavioural study makes people act in strange ways, trying to prove their cleverness or uniqueness—the observer-expectancy effect, sort of like a clinical Stockholm Syndrome, the Frankfurter Rundschau (via the English daily the local) features the work of a sociological battery of test conducted in Bamberg, raising the stakes, to illustrate how a competitive environment can quickly undermine our convictions and values.

It's really horrible to contemplate that human participants were willing to speculate and bargain, a race to the bottom, with the certain death of lab rats (though I am sure no animals were harmed in the name of that particular study and maybe as the opportunists were thinking too), but selling out one's morals, rather than being abetted by an embarrassment of choices and conscientious alternatives, goes unaided and even further compromised by the prospect of a bargain, since even with an extreme example (reductio ad Hitlerum, seriously) we are failing to recognise that our consumer decisions are easily overturned and the consequences of those choices become marginalised, buying known or strongly suspected goods produced under objectionable conditions or taking the more expedient route when we ought to know better. What do you think? The unbraided market and government policies are strong influences but not moral imperatives. Is the chance to make a deal indicative of sellers' remorse and moral bankruptcy?

heel, toe or a shoe-horn, the kind with teeth

Every time there is a strong gust of wind, the astroturf on my balcony of my little apartment flies up at the edges and forms bubbles across the surface. When the winds calms down, I try to flatten it out and readjust it against the edges, which is difficult to do since portions of where it was pasted to the concrete still hold fast and there's no where to step where the carpet shouldn't be—and I am not going to attempt bracing myself up since I am not on the ground floor and should not try any dangerous acrobatics. I decided I needed a weight to hold the edges and a planter or anything heavy would have sufficed, but I got it in my head that I should have one of those “anchors” I always see at flea markets.
I always thought that they looked kind of cool but I could not imagine until now what they might be good for, besides stubbing one's toes on. I did not spy any for a couple of weeks, and even asked and told H about my idea—“You know, those little anchors.” No one knew what I was talking about, especially something that one can always find. I found one, but it turns out it's not an anchor at all, but I suppose could be modified for that purpose, but rather a cobblers' tool, like a little anvil for forming and beating a shoe into shape. It always works for the purposes of holding down indoor-outdoor carpeting.

prism break or needle in a haystack

Little Brother with the GCHQ (Government Communi- cations Headquarters) and fibre-optics wire-tapping programme is certainly nothing to scoff at and possibly out-does its America cousin in terms of brute invasiveness and bookkeeping, with a platform called Tempora. These examples are surely not the lone, or even principle players, in the global vying for data collection and probably one could assume that any armament exporting countries have built the same infrastructure, pawning off excess capacity and physical liabilities to importing nations as red herrings, though flawed maybe in confusing data with intelligence but petit-sophisticates in realising dominance and prosecuting wars in a tidy and more profit-saving way.
Surely Germany has a Stasi-Rebooted programme in the fight, which probably explains the dispro- portionately mild accusations and demands for explanation levied against the Americans—for fear of looking like hypocrites for having the same aspirations and no country is trusting and completely innocent. The internet is always adapting and a few steps ahead of the surveyors and here are a few professional tips and upgrades that you can use to stave off (or at least watch) the nosiness and eavesdropping—that is, if you can believe this resource is not a front thrown together to get people to load software on their communication devices to make prying them open even easier.

of malls and mosques

Writing for the Spectator, Norman Stone has an interesting primer on the developing situation in Turkey, which challenges some of the stereotypes and assumptions that pooled a lot brave and bracing defiance into a batch of plainly detrimental expectations. Maybe the Western world really wants this place to live up to their idea of an acceptably Muslim and swarthier version of Germany, and of course in Germany and anywhere else home to a diaspora, there's discomfort and a certain sort of blanket surmising and feeling of being crowded out balanced out with an imperfect logic of thinking that the immigrants (anyone vaguely Turkish-ish) weren't able to hack it back at home, so Deutschland is not recipient of the choicest of masses.

Of course, those are not matters for polite conservation and obscure the fact that activists and hardliners have their hopes and ambition—their bourgeoisie, their dogmatists, both secular and religious. Turkey's bids for inclusion in the European Union, courting its own set of proponents and dissenters alike in a sort of macroscopic rallying point, may shape protest and response to perhaps keep up appearances and maybe an allotment for reform, but such tempers cause people to stick with old attitudes and prejudices. What do you think? Is such pressure a conduit for for positive change or just fitting comfortably into a pattern?

one hand clapping or monkey see, monkey do

The science desk of the BBC features an interesting study and meta-analysis of the mentality and momentum of audiences, concluding basically that applause is a social contagion. Watching footage of hundreds of endings to live speeches and other performances showed that the catalyst was the clapping of one or two individuals, sustaining the ovation, until an equal sampling of the audience stops.

Researchers found that the immediate acclaim had no relation to the quality or reception of the show but rather stemmed from the stimulus. There is of course a lot to be said for etiquette and politeness, but I wonder how such mimicking behaviour is reflected elsewhere, like the indiscriminate sharage and championing of all causes and comers in social networks. A few years ago, sociologists revealed that in many cases guilt, an undutiful kind, rather than genuine interest, underlies civility when it comes to accepting amicable invitations or joining up to play some virtual game, when beckoned, and joining such a platform over another in the first place, I imagine. I also wonder if echo-chamber, not peer-pressure, represents something new. Are such phenomena merely easier to observe—or with the spread of the known and the knowable, easily referenced, are we loosing our ability to discriminate and judge what's deserving of cheer? Live studio-audiences used to have a scripted cue and opera-companies in France used to employ professional applause artists to encourage, and booing (though possibly just as contagious) has been relegated to snarky and mean-spirited commentary, whereas the audience used to lob rotten vegetables for bad acting. I am not sure which critique was more civilised.