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ST: Marriage - an unsettling experience

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June 29, 2008
Life Lines - Anthony Yeo Marriage - an unsettling experience
In this fortnightly column on life issues, veteran psychotherapist Anthony Yeo talks about the pros and cons of saying 'I do'
People believe that June is a good month for marriage. Somehow this is the month for weddings, and with the recent series of activities in conjunction with enhancing family life in Singapore, marriage is certainly in the air. Weddings are usually much celebrated events often attended by enthusiastic guests, including single or unattached adults. Along with the carnival spirit infused into the celebration are those well-meaning married guests who inevitably accost singles with the inevitable 'So, when is your turn?' query. Single adults know all too well what this means and often respond with polite responses such as 'You'll know when it comes' or 'I guess it's not time yet'. Somehow we tend to believe that marriage is for everyone and, all too often, unattached adults are singled out as targets for prospective coupling in marriage. There is also a commonly held notion that to get married is to 'settle down', in contrast to being unmarried suggesting that the latter is to be saddled with an 'unsettled' state of life. Somehow there is a prevailing idea that this 'unsettled' state is synonymous with being uncertain, fickle-minded, frustrated or incomplete. With all the earnest drive to promote marriage in Singapore, singles tend to be unsettled by the idea that fulfilment and happiness in life is to be experienced primarily in 'marital bliss'. This prevailing idea seems to defy my observation of the many couples who have sought help for marital conflict. Each time I encounter married people afflicted with marital woes, I am reminded of how marriage tends to be an unsettling experience. I have also been left with the unsettled feeling, wondering why so many had chosen to be married when they could have had a less stressful life if they had stayed single. Of course, the other unsettling feeling is the painful journey I traverse with those who have the courage to go their separate ways. As I ponder over this issue, I sometimes wish that marriage was not held in such high regard, with less focus on the romantic ideals of a peak experience that marriage seems to promise. Those who contemplate marriage would do well to confront the reality that marriage can be an unsettling experience rather than one where couples live happily ever after. The way I see it, marriage promises to be unsettling as couples need to be prepared for a lot of adjustment to living with someone quite unfamiliar to oneself, learning to adapt to each other's idiosyncrasies, growing together as partners in life and coping with all the demands that marriage and family life brings. It is also prudent to be aware that romance, if it is ever experienced, is not everlasting and may in fact fade months after the honeymoon is over. Conflicts are inevitable and there will be many issues to be negotiated, such as relationships with the in-laws, work-home relationships and friendships with those outside of marriage. The more I work with couples with marital conflict, the more I am concerned that marriage should not be entered into lightly. It is also fallacious to believe that life will be incomplete and unfulfilling if a person is not married. There is more to life than marriage and no one should be made to feel deprived of what life offers if the choice is to be single . GET YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED If you have any questions about marriage, write to suntimes@sph.com.sg, with 'Life Lines' in the subject line. Anthony Yeo, a consultant therapist at the Counselling And Care Centre, will answer selected questions. ... more

FT: Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

Tea-shop boffin who pioneered business computing

By Alan Cane

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Amore incongruous sight would be hard to imagine, particularly in 1951. There, at the heart of a vast catering empire devoted to tea and cakes, was a pulsing sci-fi monster with endless rows of tubes filled with half a ton of mercury. The monster's name was Leo. It was the world's first business computer and its master, David Caminer, who has died at the age of 93, was one of the great pioneers of commercial computing.

Sixty years ago, nobody would have seen anything like Leo. Official secrecy meant that the public knew nothing of the spectacular progress made by British scientists in developing the code-breaking digital computer, Colossus, which helped win the second world war. Civilian computers did not exist and nor did the software to run commercial applications. Caminer was the intrepid, determined person who invented the first business programmes.

What made his achievements as the world's first commercial systems analyst so extraordi-nary was that he started from scratch. At the time he was the systems manager for J. Lyons and Company, then Britain's biggest caterer. The Lyons board had heard about the development of "electronic brains" in the US but those were all being used for scientific or military purposes. Lyons, which prided itself on its efficiency, took the remarkable decision to develop its own digital computer to automate the running of its catering business.

Caminer was the key member of a team of bright young technologists responsible for bringing to life the vision of the Lyons board. Leo - Lyons Electronic Office - ran a programme for the first time in September 1951. Under Caminer's tutelage, the Lyons team developed systems and ways of working that were groundbreaking for the time and are still relevant today. Indeed, if the rules for systems development laid down by Caminer had been taken to heart by succeeding generations, fewer computing disasters would have tarnished the image of the industry.

Caminer programmed Leo to take over routine office tasks and do them in a fraction of the time taken by clerks. Where it had taken eight minutes to calculate an employee's pay - Lyons had 30,000 workers - Leo could do it in 1.5 seconds. Leo was programmed to handle the daily deliveries from Lyons bakery to 200 retail outlets, to organise restocking, to calculate the overnight production requirements, such as how many miles of Swiss roll had to be made, and even to work out delivery routes for vans. Later, Caminer ran programmes that could detect patterns in the till receipts and pinpoint when the company's restaurants were busiest and which of its chocolate cakes and iced fancies were selling best. Today, businesses analyse such information as a matter of course but in the 1950s this marked a retail revolution.

Soon other major companies such as Dunlop, Ford and Imperial Tobacco were coming to look at Leo and learn from it. Lyons set up a subsidiary to make computers and 80 Leos were sold all over the world.

Caminer, a charming individual with exquisite manners and a delightful sense of humour, had a short fuse where programming standards were concerned. More than one of his colleagues had work literally thrown back for failing to meet his expectations. Yet Caminer himself had had no training in computing - hardly surprising because the subject was so new that everybody involved in Leo learned on the job. What was unusual was that Caminer was not even a mathematician and had no formal academic qualifications.

Born David Tresman in 1915, he was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant. His father died fighting on the Marne when he was three. When his mother married again, he adopted his stepfather's name. Raised initially in London's East End, he later went to the Sloane School in Chelsea but by his own admission he was not a natural student. He was more engaged by unemployment and the rise of rightwing dic-tatorships in mainland Europe. He spent his youth pamphleteering and, as he put it, "generally fostering the revolution". He marched against Oswald Mosley, the anti-Semitic British fascist leader.

Having failed to get into Cambridge - he said later that "university seemed an irrelevance in the days of mass unemployment and hunger marches" - he became a management trainee at Lyons through a contact of his mother's. The catering group, which served millions of meals every year, was known for its tea shops and Corner House restaurants with waitresses known as "nippies".

On the outbreak of the second world war, Caminer joined up and served at El Alamein, where he recalled the "wondrous sight of a desert fox crossing the shimmering sands at first light on the morning of the battle". After being wounded in the western desert and losing a leg, he returned to Lyons, becoming manager of the company's systems research office. It was then that he became involved in its computer project - on a salary of £5.05 a week.

Leo eventually became part of what was then the British computer champion, International Computers - ICL - and Caminer was appointed head of market development. He was asked to take charge of software for ICL's New Range 2900 series, its flagship through the latter part of the last century. He specified the ICL operating system VME/B, a brilliant concept that was in some ways too advanced for the machines on which it was expected to run.

Caminer completed his career by implementing the European Union's computer and communications network in Luxembourg. He was awarded the OBE in 1980.

He always believed that small, close-knit teams of the sort that worked on Leo were the ideal: "These days the spirit has changed," he complained just before his death. "Computer staff have become nine to five workers. Teams are so large I'm surprised they ever get anything done."

He is survived by his wife, Jackie, whom he married in 1945, and by their three sons and two daughters.

Alan Cane

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: 'I feel less afraid of the world'

And there are several more about the Dalai Lama, who, like Palin, is also known to laugh easily. "He came in and shook my hand and then he shook the hands of every member of the [film] crew," says Palin. "People just don't bother, they don't notice [the crew. But] he took each person in and I felt, 'I must remember that.' "

I notice my digital recorder appears not to be working. "Does it switch itself off when it's bored?" he wonders, the comic timing that first made him famous as part of the Monty Python team in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s still in evidence.

"I always bring it down to the personal experience," he replies. "The other thing is to give a voice to people who don't normally have a voice, who would not be interviewed generally and to go to places where people would not normally go."

am worried that this is a bit like telling Paul McCartney you never listened to the Beatles. "I'm immensely relieved," he says to my own relief. "In some people's eyes it makes one totally legendary. I find talking about Python not that exciting because people tend to want to hear about how their favourite sketch was written or some anecdote involving The Life of Brian ."

I laugh out loud but Palin goes on, more seriously, to say: "I'm not pretending there aren't dangers but I think saying, 'These are the places we should not go,' restricts communication and curiosity. I do a lot of talks and people sometimes ask you very earnest questions, 'What do you know about the world now?' And, God, I don't know anything. Whoever said travel is more about questions than answers got it exactly right. I get more confused but the one thing I do feel is less afraid of the world than I would if I didn't travel."

===

'I feel less afraid of the world'

By Rahul Jacob

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

When Michael Palin met the Dalai Lama a few years ago, the Tibetan leader said he recognised Palin from his television travel programmes. The two quickly discovered that they had shared a passion for geography from an early age. "It's just an assumption but I felt a certain empathy when he was talking about how atlases were his favourite books when he was young and I said they had been mine too," recalls Palin.

Palin met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in northern India, where he has lived in exile for nearly 50 years since fleeing China in a dramatic 15-day journey by foot. A few weeks later, Palin found himself in the Dalai Lama's apartments in the Potala Palace in Lhasa while filming a series on the Himalayas. "Looking out over the city and the plains, I thought, 'This is what he was doing growing up in the 1950s and there was me in Sheffield looking at an atlas also.' "

Palin has barely sat down at Wiltons restaurant in St James's before he is telling stories. First there is one about how he was once photographed during lunch and how acutely embarrassing it was. The photographer's enormous lamps had shone a spotlight on him in the middle of the restaurant. It was, he says, "admirable" that everyone else carried on as if this were entirely normal.

There is one about his own failure to show a similar level of restraint when, at a friend's wedding, the registrar read out all the bridegroom's middle names, including one that none of his friends had known before. Everyone was laughing "including his betrothed", Palin recalls, and the only way out was to look as if "we were very moved".

And there are several more about the Dalai Lama, who, like Palin, is also known to laugh easily. "He came in and shook my hand and then he shook the hands of every member of the [film] crew," says Palin. "People just don't bother, they don't notice [the crew. But] he took each person in and I felt, 'I must remember that.' "

I notice my digital recorder appears not to be working. "Does it switch itself off when it's bored?" he wonders, the comic timing that first made him famous as part of the Monty Python team in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s still in evidence.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the filming of Around the World in 80 Days , the BBC programme that marked the launch of Palin's hugely successful second act as a travel journalist. Its success prompted epic television adventures such as Pole to Pole (1992), Sahara with Michael Palin (2002) and Himalaya with Michael Palin (2004).

Aside from the great landscape shots, the charm of watching Palin's shows lies in his ability to put people at ease even when he doesn't share a common language. Watching Michael Palin's New Europe , first aired last year, I chuckled through an episode in Latvia where Palin is made to wear a wreath about the size of a bush and participates in a pagan dance, all of which he goes along with gamely. In Turkey, a young woman tells him she dated a man who participated in the local passion for wrestling in leather pantaloons after olive oil has been poured all over the combatants and Palin sets off to investigate.

In the book that accompanied the series, Palin writes of being on a boat at dawn, making its way along Croatia's coastline. "What I am looking out on now is Dalmatia and I'm not the only one excited by it . . . Shakespeare set part of Twelfth Night here. Dalmatia, homeland of the Illyrians, was settled 5,000 years even before the Greeks and Romans arrived. This is not new Europe, this is very old Europe."

Our first courses arrive remarkably quickly - gazpacho for me and smoked eel for him. Aware from my own experience as the FT's travel editor of the challenges of travel writing in an era when so many of us are frequent flyers, I ask how he keeps his work interesting and relevant. "I always bring it down to the personal experience," he replies. "The other thing is to give a voice to people who don't normally have a voice, who would not be interviewed generally and to go to places where people would not normally go."

The inspiration for New Europe came from his feeling, when waking up on a long-haul flight back to London, that he was flying above places that were just two hours from Heathrow but which he knew little about. I suggest the series resonated partly because so much of the workforce in Britain is from eastern Europe, not least the staff in restaurants. Later I ask the waitress where she is from and this leads to an animated conversation between her and Palin about her native Moldova. His empathy builds bridges with people he meets - and in turn with audiences around the world.

Our main courses - poached halibut for him and grilled salmon for me - have been brought as speedily as the first course and this prompts Palin to remark on how unusually attentive the restaurant's service is by London's standards. Before he came here he had assumed the quintessentially British Wiltons ("since 1742"), complete with green velvet banquettes in separate booths, would be the sort of place that "members of the House of Lords visited with their researchers". On his previous visit, however, he remembers a group of businessmen from Dubai trooped over to his table and asked him to look them up when he was next there. Palin says he picked the restaurant for our meeting today because it is quiet and apologises because it is expensive.

By this point, I am relaxed enough to confess that, having grown up in Calcutta, I never watched Palin in Monty Python's Flying Circus , the TV series that made him and the other Pythons - including Eric Idle and John Cleese - comedy legends, nor in the subsequent Python films. I am worried that this is a bit like telling Paul McCartney you never listened to the Beatles. "I'm immensely relieved," he says to my own relief. "In some people's eyes it makes one totally legendary. I find talking about Python not that exciting because people tend to want to hear about how their favourite sketch was written or some anecdote involving The Life of Brian ."

Palin traces his gift for comedy back to boarding school, where he enjoyed impersonating teachers. As a 10-year-old in 1953, he developed a mini-cabaret based on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. "I would tell this running story about the coronation and it was about the Duke of Edinburgh being taken short."

I ask whether it was ever performed on stage in school and this leads Palin to reminisce about how his father, an engineer at a steel mill, was wary of his son's interest in acting. "He just saw this as a folly that would lead to a life of dependence on him. I didn't realise until he died quite how little [money] he had. He put about a third of his salary, about £500 a year, into educating me at Shrewsbury."

When he was growing up, Palin had assumed that his father had a particular dislike of theatre. In fact, "it was all to do with his hoping that I would eventually get a good job, probably better than he got."

Returning to travel, Palin recounts how an Ethiopian approached him in London a couple of years ago and thanked him for not showing his country as a victim. "Everybody has a sense of pride about where they live," he says. "I don't think the way to help is to say, 'Help is on its way from the World Bank.' I remember being in Tanzania once and the World Bank representative was in Dar es Salaam to discuss the next five years of Tanzania's economic cycle. They all seemed in terrible awe of him. I am not an interventionist. I really find that when we intervene, we just cock it up."

We discuss a shared concern - the often overly alarmist travel warnings issued by the UK Foreign Office and US State Department against visiting many parts of the developing world - and this produces another rich anecdote. When Palin was filming a few years ago in the admittedly dangerous tribal areas of northern Pakistan, a posse of 10 local policemen was sent to accompany him and the BBC crew. He wandered into a local market "to watch people make guns".

"A man came up and talked quite aggressively about the British and our policy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan and I remember thinking, 'This could get nasty and I'm glad we have 10 security guys with us.' They were nowhere to be seen. It did not turn into a problem at all but I said later, 'Where were the guys?' It turned out that the police were so pleased to be with the BBC, they were having a group photo taken with the camera crew."

I laugh out loud but Palin goes on, more seriously, to say: "I'm not pretending there aren't dangers but I think saying, 'These are the places we should not go,' restricts communication and curiosity. I do a lot of talks and people sometimes ask you very earnest questions, 'What do you know about the world now?' And, God, I don't know anything. Whoever said travel is more about questions than answers got it exactly right. I get more confused but the one thing I do feel is less afraid of the world than I would if I didn't travel."

After decades of travelling, however, Palin, who turned 65 last month, has decided that he wants to stay home with his wife Helen, who once joked that she might have to divorce him because she had tired of answering questions from reporters about what a nice man he was. Being away for several weeks at a time has become a bore for Palin and he wants to enjoy watching his two-year-old grandson grow up.

Then, after allowing me to quiz him obsessively about my favourite actress, Maggie Smith, whom he has worked with, Palin thanks me and rushes off to another appointment. He was right about the bill - it is exorbitant - but, hearing the jollity prompted by Palin's goodbyes to the staff at the front of the restaurant, I think that you can't put a price on that ability to make people laugh.

'New Europe' by Michael Palin is out now in paperback (Orion Books, £7.99)

Rahul Jacob is the FT's travel, food and drink editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The dangers of banality

Excerpt
The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

==

The dangers of banality

By Harry Eyres

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil". Eichmann, responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, had the appearance and even the mentality of a petty bureaucrat or administrator, crunching numbers and logistics that could have concerned widgets but happened to involve the mass murder of human beings. The former employee of the Vacuum Oil Company was examined by a team of psychologists who pronounced him perfectly "normal" - "more normal at any rate than I am", as one of them said with black humour, "after having examined him".

When Arendt wrote, humanity was still reeling from the first total war in history, from the revelations of the Holocaust, the pitiful starvation of inmates at Belsen, the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evil loomed large and dramatic on the face of the planet, and it was something of a shock to find its incarnation in such commonplace, trite human beings as Eichmann and the thousands of others who were simply "obeying orders".

Evil has not disappeared from the planet in the intervening years, but in most of Europe and in North America it has retreated from the limelight. If finding banality was surprising for Arendt, it is now what we expect and what everywhere surrounds us. We might feel grateful for small mercies and rejoice that today's politicians do not stage Wagnerian rallies and line the streets with 100ft-high banners. We find it reassuring to hear commonplaces uttered and we watch television programmes that are engineered precisely for that purpose (anyone caught saying anything difficult or original gets short shrift from Big Brother ).

But I am beginning to wonder whether Arendt's formulation might not be reversed, and whether we should not concern ourselves more with the evil of banality. One petty example is sports commentary. At this time of year I turn couch potato for an hour or two each afternoon to watch tennis or listen to the cricket (I used to watch that, too, until it was sold down the river to Sky). Cricket in particular has produced its fair share of poetic commentary, from the burred Hampshire lyricism of John Arlott to the bone-dry crispness of Richie Benaud. But poetry, whimsy and originality are every day less in evidence.

Tennis commentators (apart from the admirable Frew MacMillan and the ever-more elusive John McEnroe) seem to be chosen for locker room bonhomie rather than any gift for language or analysis. Commenting on the tattooed quotation from Dostoevsky that the maverick Serbian Janko Tipsaverich sports on one arm, the ever-trite Andrew Castle joked to the equally uninspired John Lloyd: "Oh, he's intelligent too - that wasn't what we used to read, was it Lloydy?" The idea, it seems, whether you are a player or a commentator, is to be "one of the lads".

Test Match Special , one of the truly great English eccentric creations, the one sports programme that comes into its own when play is suspended during breaks for rain, has been steadily losing its unique flavour, reminiscent of the genteel English surrealism of the Ealing comedies. "There's really nothing to say," opined the New Zealand commentator Jeremy Coney recently - not a sentiment that could ever have passed the lips of the great Brian Johnston.

The most popular purveyor of classical music in the UK is Classic FM, the radio station that treats classical music as if it was chocolate - and not even good chocolate, but the kind of milky, sugary nothingness that should have been banned long ago by the EU. The early evening offering on Classic FM is called Smooth Classics , as if the music of Beethoven and Schubert should slip down the gullet like baby food.

So the effect of banal commentary, and banal thinking in general, is to turn everything into undifferentiated pap. What is banal is what has already been chewed over, a thousand times, by someone else, or thousands of others. What is wrong with that? In the 1950s, the Gestalt therapists Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman explored the connection between physical eating and spiritual nourishment: as adults, it turns out, just as we need to engage in an active process of selecting our food, biting, chewing and digesting, so "we need to be able to 'bite off' and 'chew' experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment . . . to the extent that you have cluttered your personality with gulped-down morsels of this and that, you have impaired your ability to think and act on your own."

The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

harry.eyres@ft.com

FT: Qatar's sharpest investor

Qatar's sharpest investor

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

W hen Qatar's sovereign wealth fund pulled out of its bid for J. Sainsbury, the UK supermarket group, bankers dismissed the state investment authority's chances of making its mark on the City of London in the foreseeable future. Six months later, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, the Qatar Investment Authority's chief executive, is back.

Qatar has invested more than £2bn ($4bn, €2.5bn) for a stake of up to 10 per cent in Barclays, the British bank, as part of a plan to put $15bn (€9.6bn, £7.6bn) into financial blue chips. The QIA, which is estimated to control $40bn-$60bn in assets, this week also lured NYSE Euronext to invest in Doha's stock exchange. Qatar is building up its financial centre in fierce competition with the established international hub of Dubai.

Sheikh Hamad will be feted at the top tables of international finance as hundreds of billions of dollars of surplus gas revenues flow into the investment vehicle that aims to keep this tiny Gulf state one of the wealthiest in the world long after its prodigious gas reserves run out.

His marriage of political power and commercial nous has made him one of the richest men in a region of very rich men. He has been foreign minister since 1992 and was also recently promoted to prime minister. The emir of Qatar is said to have quipped of his longstanding ally: "I may run this country, but he owns it."

Long before investments raised him to prominence, Sheikh Hamad's idiosyncratic foreign policy and backing of the free-speaking al-Jazeera satellite channel had already attracted attention. He talks openly of "his friends" in Israel, having forged relations with the Arabs' historical foe in the 1990s. At the same time, the Doha offices of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, receive Qatari largesse. The deserts south of Doha host the largest US base in the region, yet Sheikh Hamad is more critical of Washington's foreign policy than his neighbours.

In some ways, these positions reflect the split personality of Qatar, which follows the conservative Wahhabi Islam of neighbouring Saudi Arabia but is also banking on tourism.

Last month Sheikh Hamad's pragmatism gave Qatar its greatest diplomatic coup to date when he halted Lebanon's descent into another civil war by brokering a truce. Pro-western Lebanese had perceived him as too favourable to Iran and Hizbollah, the Shia group, but in the end his contacts with Syria helped him to succeed. By the fourth day of the talks at Doha's Sheraton hotel his casual but determined style had won over Lebanese critics.

Born in 1959 in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad's studies took him to Lebanon but he perfected his English in the UK, starting his government career at the office of his uncle before becoming minister of municipal affairs and agriculture in 1989. Three years later he became foreign minister, making him one of the main power brokers in what was then a sleepy, underachieving emirate failing to invest its oil revenues for the future. As the current emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, plotted against his father to speed Qatar's reforms, he found a willing ally in the foreign minister, who supported his cousin in a successful 1995 palace coup.

Sheikh Hamad's love of long Cuban cigars may fit the stereotype of the billionaire sheikh, but he is also a connoisseur of gourmet cheeses. Indeed, the former agriculture minister is fascinated by the technology behind food production. He is now leading Qatar's drive to invest in Pakistan and east Africa to clinch corporate farm investment deals in order to secure food supplies as global food inflation bites.

He divides his time between Doha and abroad, travelling often on foreign ministry or QIA business. His lack of protocol is also reflected in his management style. A quick decision-maker, he is also attentive to ideas from the small but growing team he is building at the QIA.

He has an extensive personal property portfolio, including, it is said, London's most expensive apartment at the Candy Brothers' One Hyde Park development, as well as other London area homes and hotels. In Qatar, his interests span the plush Four Seasons hotel in Doha and fast-growing Qatar Airways. His wealth has also generated envy. Sheikh Hamad is more likely than other leaders to stir quiet criticism from the loyal ranks of the Qatari populace. Qataris generally describe him as shrewd.

Sheikh Hamad had uncomfortable exposure in 2001 and 2002 when trust funds he controlled in Jersey were investigated by the island's authorities over payments made to them by a number of European arms makers, including BAE Systems. BAE has denied wrongdoing.

The case ended when the Jersey authorities closed it in 2002 on the grounds of public interest. At the same time, Sheikh Hamad paid the island's authorities £6m to compensate for any damage "perceived to have been caused" by the investigation and he continued to deny any wrongdoing.

The lines between the wealth of the Gulf states and their ruling families are blurred. Sheikh Hamad leads the QIA's investment strategy but often invests his own wealth in similar deals to the QIA's. This week's investment in Barclays included a tranche of his own money.

If his wealth is an issue for some Qataris, so are his reformist politics. Sheikh Hamad is a lightning rod for criticism from vested interests threatened by reforms the government is introducing as its increasing exposure turns the glare of international scrutiny on to its inner workings.

He often raises awkward questions about the need for Qatar's pampered citizens to play a more productive role in the economy. He has also likened the feudal system of sponsoring foreign workers, which forces most expatriates to seek permission if they want to leave the country, as approximating to slavery.

Once one of the main proponents of democratisation, he has cooled on prospects for expanding the electoral system beyond municipal councils, fearing the rise of Islamist sentiment and ruefully watching the political paralysis in the Gulf's most democratic state, Kuwait.

Outside foreign policy, Sheikh Hamad has enough on his plate as he builds the QIA's assets into an endowment that can one day cover the emirate's budgetary outlay, currently heading above $20bn a year. "I think if we invest it right, we can secure Qatar for a generation," he told the Financial Times last year.

Some in the region would wish him ill in his endeavours, but few would bet against him.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The ideology of teen pregnancy

The ideology of teen pregnancy

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Every year at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, three or four girls get pregnant. But not this year. This year 17 did. When Time magazine alleged that some of the girls had a "pregnancy pact", reporters and cameramen from around the world descended on the fishing port. Whether the pact was a teenage dare or a practical arrangement by the girls to give each other moral support has been hotly debated. No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. "Sweet!" one of them shouted in the school nurse's office. The school superintendent admitted: "They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant."

"Every child a wanted child" was the old slogan of the movement for birth control. But it is part of the folklore of feminism that no teenager ever wants a child. "Profoundly shocking," wrote the Gloucester Daily Times. "The idea of 15- and 16-year-old girls wanting to become pregnant, wanting to make such a life-altering choice so early in their lives - and others being 'disappointed', not relieved, when learning their pregnancy tests proved negative - is a notion that seems absolutely contrary to most of our psyches." This is untrue. Having babies at 16 is perfectly in line with our psyches, as a look at other cultures and our own history shows. What it is contrary to is our ideology. Pact or no, the Gloucester pregnancies are some kind of a rebellion.

Any talk-radio blowhard can find evidence that Gloucester High was either too lax or too stern. Massachusetts is the most sexually libertarian of the 50 United States - it was the first to allow gay marriage and gives wide latitude to cities and towns in the sex-counselling services they provide students. Yet Gloucester is a church-dominated Portuguese-, Italian- and Irish-American city. So its sex education is a mix of traditional and non-judgmental programmes. The school does not hand out condoms but has a crèche for teen mothers. Since Gloucester is a largely white city, commentators can give vent to all sorts of snorting stereotypes about pregnant teenagers, their parents and their culture, without fear of being called racist.

Like every debate over teen pregnancy, this one is a duel of dogmas. On one side is the view that chastity is a moral absolute. The chairman of the school board has suggested prosecuting the girls' boyfriends for statutory rape. On the other side is the view that, where birth control is available, girls forgo it only out of either ignorance or shame. This is the view of most news media and of Gloucester's mayor, who blamed her town's pregnancies on George W. Bush. His No Child Left Behind programme diverted to academics money that should have been spent on sex education, which is now taught only until age 15.

At the risk of sounding crude, though, the parts of sex education relevant to preventing teen pregnancy can be taught in five minutes. It may flatter our self-regard to believe that the modern, western pattern of child-bearing arises from superior knowledge and sophistication, but it does not. It arises from our priorities. The Gloucester pregnancies are not about information the girls don't have. They are about an argument the girls don't buy. It is a fool's errand to try to convince a girl that bearing a child is "sad" (a word used with appalling frequency in press accounts) or to argue that last year's hit movie Juno leads girls astray by glamorising pregnancy. (Apparently glamorising sex is all right, especially if it serves some transcendent purpose such as selling shampoo, but glamorising motherhood crosses the line.)

Having a baby is not sad. The reason not to have a baby in your teens is the risk that it will spoil something in your future - maybe your family life, your career or your economic prospects. In their landmark study of unmarried mothers, Promises I Can Keep , the US sociologists, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, noted that poor women need a "reason to wait" if they are to delay having children. It had better be a good reason. Time flies, after all. Whether or not a teenager's having a child is a misfortune, teenagers themselves may see it as a lesser misfortune than a 40-year-old's wishing for a child she cannot have.

The present ideology of family planning arose in a more fluid society than our own. It was constructed by college-educated baby-boom elites who, as they climbed from the middle into the upper-middle class, came to find pitiful the lives their mothers led as housewives. They chose careers over - or on top of - child-rearing and reaped substantial rewards. Whether those rewards are worth the risks of never having a child might be judged differently by the next generation.

As it gets harder to climb out of the class one was born in, the opportunity cost of being a young mother falls. Outside of the well-off, Ms Edin and Ms Kefalas note, the opportunity cost is already lower than it looks. Poor teen mothers "have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child". Given the increasing likelihood that a woman will raise her children alone, might not the teen years be a prudent time to become a single mother, while the financial and day-care resources of one's own parents are still available?

Baby-boom feminists did not replace a superstitious attitude towards teen sexuality with a rational one. They replaced one set of priorities with another. Their careerism prevented teen motherhood as reliably as did their mothers' moralism. The Gloucester girls appear equally unimpressed with both logics. If the old "pregnancy pact" that went by the name of marriage is no longer so readily available, they are not fools to look for a substitute.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The machine that spun the world around

The machine that spun the world around

By Michael Skapinker

Published: June 24 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 24 2008 03:00

Publishers see world-changers everywhere. There is a book called Tea: The Drink That Changed the World . There is Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and that paean to Japanese motor manufacturing The Machine That Changed the World .

Tucked away under a counter in your kitchen, or gurgling in your utility room, is another machine. It has barely altered its appearance, function or performance in nearly half a century, which is perhaps why no one has thought to publish The Washing Machine - Which Really Did Change the World.

The washing machine transformed our workplaces and our families. It freed women from their most time-consuming household task, allowing them to get out and work.

Historians attribute female liberation to several causes. There was women's experience running second world war production lines, a memory that survived the 1950s return to domesticity. There was the contraceptive pill. There was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique , with its account of the suburban wife, lying beside her husband after a day of household tasks, too afraid to ask: "Is this all?"

Without the fully automatic washing machine, which appeared in suburban homes around the time of Friedan's book, it might well have been all.

In their paper "Engines of Liberation" , Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu recount that, after the second world war, the US Rural Electrification Authority timed a farmer's wife doing the washing by hand and then with an electric washer.

She took four hours to wash 38 pounds of laundry by hand. Doing the same load with an electric machine took 41 minutes. And this was when the machines were more primitive than today. For example, she would have had to use a separate contraption to wring the clothes.

While the machines have changed, the essential process of washing has not. Since ancient times, people have poured water on their clothes and agitated them to get the dirt out. In their article, "An Introduction to the Historical Developments of Laundry" , Mark Stalmans and Walter Guhl recount how the ancients used to beat their wet clothes on riverside stones.

In Elizabethan England, washdays took place only every two to three months, but were dramatic occasions. The laundry was soaked in large wooden tubs. "All available women and girls hitched up their dresses and stamped and danced on the wet clothes," Stalmans and Guhl say.

In the 19th century, clothes were stirred with a stick. Manually operated wooden containers followed, allowing the clothes-washer to agitate the clothes inside. In the early 20th century, electric machines emerged. In 1937, Bendix of the US introduced the first machine with a wash, rinse and spin action to remove the water.

In the 1960s, washing, rinsing and spinning machines became the norm, turning laundry into something to be done between returning from work and feeding the family.

And that is where the cycle stopped. The industry boasts of progress since: special washes for wool, settings for half-loads, microprocessors (a dubious advance - at least mechanical processors could be repaired) and machines that sense laundry weight. But the method remained the same: pushing water through clothes or clothes through water.

Indeed, in one respect washing machines have remained the most conservative of businesses: there is no global product. Europeans have largely relied on front-loaders; Americans prefer to load their laundry from the top.

There is no doubt which is better. Consumer Reports, the US consumer organisation, has struggled to find top-loaders that wash as well as front-loaders. (Front-loaders' tumbling motion gives a better result.) This year, Consumer Reports trumpeted the news that it had found a top-loader to match front-loaders' cleaning quality. But top-loaders still used more energy and water.

Not that front-loaders are easy on water. Waterwise, a campaigning organisation, conservatively estimates that British households use 474m litres of water to wash their clothes every day.

Could we change our laundry habits? Researchers at Leeds University have come up with a way of washing clothes that uses only a cup of water. The dirt is absorbed by plastic chips that tumble with the clothes, which emerge almost dry. They can be briefly hung or ironed, eliminating the need for tumble dryers. Xeros, the university spin-out that is commercialising the technology, says the chips last for at least 100 washes.

The researchers expect almost waterless machines to be produced next year. Good luck to them. Washing machines may have revolutionised our lives, but the association of water with cleaning is as old as laundry itself.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT:Qatar's ambition revealed in plans for exchange

Qatar's ambition revealed in plans for exchange

By Anuj Gangahar, Jeremy Grant and Simeon Kerr

Published: June 25 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 25 2008 03:00

NYSE Euronext's deal to help Qatar revamp its stock exchange shows how seriously the tiny gas-rich state takes its efforts to develop its financial sector.

But it also illustrates how important the Gulf region has become in the global chess game of international exchanges.

This is NYSE Euronext's second foray into the Middle East, after in March signing a technology provision deal with the Abu Dhabi Securities Market. That came after the purchase in February of a 5 per cent stake in India's Multi Commodity Exchange, the sale of options trading technology to the Tokyo Stock Exchange in April.

The deal provides Qatar with a foreign partner with the technology and expertise to transform the Doha Securities Market, barely 11 years old, into a cash equities, derivatives and commodities platform.

If that seems ambitious enough - Dubai already has a head start with more developed exchanges - there are plans to roll the offering out into the broader region. NYSE Euronext is making its largest international investment yet to secure a slice of the fast-growing Gulf, where record oil prices are translating into a seemingly never-ending supply of liquidity. This is being ploughed into property, companies and stock exchanges.

Under the deal, NYSE Euronext will provide "management services and technology" - likely to be the equities trading platform used by Euronext in Europe, and the Liffe Connect futures system used by Liffe, the group's futures arm.

Duncan Niederauer, chief executive, says: "This is a much more strategic relationship [than with Abu Dhabi]."

It places NYSE Euronext at the heart of Doha's growth and reform strategy. As its huge gas exports kick in, Qatar is anticipated to become the fastest-growing Gulf state.

Doha, in the face of economists' doubts, claims it will be the second-largest economy in the region after Saudi Arabia by 2015 - leapfrogging the United Arab Emirates, which spans the oil powerhouse of Abu Dhabi and the business hub of Dubai.

The Qatar Financial Centre has attracted a modest number of international bankers and the country is set to finalise plans for the establishment of a single financial regulator.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al-Thani, Qatar's prime minister, said: "Our country's financial markets will be an integral part of a group which links together the world's major trading centres across the US, Europe and now the Middle East".

Yet Doha has thrown down the gauntlet to Dubai, which has staked out its claim to be the region's financial capital through the rapid growth of the Dubai International Financial Centre.

If the DIFC has an Achilles' heel, it is the Dubai International Financial Exchange (DIFX), where after almost three years listings are limited and trading rare.

Dubai is certainly waking up to Doha's challenge - founded on the country's vast current and future wealth.

But one official said Dubai still did not regard Doha as a serious threat.

Deutsche Börse is talking to the Kuwait Stock Exchange about a technical relationship, said one person familiar with the matter.

The KSE is a large, established bourse with sophisticated traders and offers some of the only derivatives products available across the Gulf. But it is a fairly inwardly-focuse market.

NYSE Euronext was preceded into the region by Nasdaq OMX, which last year joined the race for Gulf supremacy via a one-third stake in DIFX, part of the complicated deal that saw Dubai take a 20 per cent stake in the combined Nasdaq OMX group.

Yet NYSE Euronext is confident in the superiority of its offering, particularly built around its Liffe futures arm, especially with the emergence of exchanges trading oil futures.

Jean-François Théodore, deputy chief executive, says: "The vision we have there is that there is still quite some room for derivatives and commodities markets."

Up the road from Dubai, Abu Dhabi Securities Market (ADX) in March signed a technical co-operation agreement with NYSE Euronext to develop its cash equities market, but ADX also has plans to develop a Gulf derivatives market.

Additional reporting by Anuj Gangahar

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward

Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along. Gwendolyn Brooks

 

Economist: Circumcision - Cutting the competition

Circumcision

Cutting the competition

Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Mutilating male members may mar men’s mischievous matings

CIRCUMCISION and other forms of male-genital mutilation are commonplace in many societies around the world. The origin of these practices, however, puzzles anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. They wonder what benefit they could bring, especially given the obvious risks of infection and reduced fertility.

Explanations have ranged from the pragmatic (a ritual that marks the beginning of adulthood and bonds men together) to the Freudian (having something to do with the pain of the separation from the mother). However Christopher Wilson, a neurobiologist at Cornell University, has a different idea. In a recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior he suggests that male-genital mutilations are actually intended to prevent younger men from fathering children with older men’s wives.

Dr Wilson takes his cue from sperm-competition theory, which suggests that males of promiscuous primate species have evolved features that maximise their own sperm’s chances of fertilising an egg they might have to compete for. These features include large testicles which produce more sperm, and morphologically complex penises. Males of monogamous primate species, on the other hand, have smaller testicles and simpler penises. Human genitals are somewhere in between, perhaps reflecting the fact that people generally form pair bonds, but are susceptible to occasional bouts of promiscuity.

Some forms of genital mutilation have obvious effects on fertility. For instance, several African and Micronesian societies practice testicular ablation—the crushing or cutting off of one testicle. Some Australian aborigines engage in subincision, which exposes part of the urethra and thus causes sperm to leak out of the base of the penis. Circumcision does not have quite such clear-cut effects. But there are several ways it may affect fertility: most obviously, the lack of a foreskin could make insertion, ejaculation or both take longer. Perhaps long enough that an illicit quickie will not always reach fruition.

Older men are in a position to form alliances with younger men—passing on knowledge, lending them political support and giving them access to weapons. By insisting that the young undergo genital mutilation of some form as a quid pro quo, an older married man can seek to ensure that even if he is cuckolded, he will still be the father of his wives’ children. Of course, the older man has probably undergone genital mutilation too, and seen his own fertility reduced. But that, if anything, increases his incentive to make certain that the young bucks are similarly handicapped. And if all the older men in a society conclude this is a good thing, it will rapidly become a socially enforced norm.

To test this theory, Dr Wilson made several predictions. Among them, he suggested that mutilation is more likely to be practised in polygynous societies (since a man with several wives is more vulnerable to cuckoldry), and is especially likely in those polygynous societies where a man’s co-wives live in separate households from their husband. It should also take place in a public ceremony watched by other men, to avoid cheating or free-riding. And there should be a strong stigma against men who refuse it.

To test his predictions, Dr Wilson looked at a database of 186 pre-industrial societies. Some 48% of the highly polygynous ones practised a form of male-genital mutilation, and the number rose to 63% when co-wives kept separate households. By contrast, only 14% of monogamous societies practised mutilation. Moreover, and also as predicted, the mutilations were almost always carried out in public, often as part of a coming-of-age ceremony at puberty, with strong stigma attached to unmutilated men.

Dr Wilson’s paper does not definitely prove that sexual competition is at the root of male-genital mutilation. But it does provide a plausible explanation for a puzzling practice. It is not likely, however, to have much effect on attitudes toward circumcision. The men who enforce and undergo the rituals are no more aware of the underlying evolutionary motivations than of why their testicles are the size they are. Those who engage in the practice for religious reasons will surely continue to do so. Otherwise, most of the Western world has already largely abandoned routine neonatal circumcision, which is seen as an outdated and unfortunate medical fad.

The exceptions are America, where more than half of newborn boys are still circumcised, and Africa, where circumcision helps to stop the transmission of HIV, the AIDS-causing virus. There, infection really is a far greater threat to the number of children a man might have than the loss of his foreskin.

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.