In a study by MediaCurves, Americans were asked to judge a women’s personality based on a picture. The trick was that all participants were given a picture of the same woman, but 50% of the time she was wearing a headscarf and 50% of the time she had her hair down and was wearing an open-collar shirt. Guess what?

There’s a nice nice summary on MonkeyCage:

1) The covered woman was perceived as more “traditional” and, in personality terms, less “warm.” She is also described as living a more insular life…The covered woman was perceived as wealthier…Slightly more considered the covered woman “beautiful” (27%) than did the uncovered woman (16%)…The vast majority of respondents thought the uncovered woman was “an American” (82%). The vast majority of subjects thought the covered woman was “a Middle-Eastern person” (78%) and also Muslim (87%)….While 89% said that they would like the uncovered woman as their next-door neighbor or in their neighborhood, only 62% said that about the covered woman. One-fifth (19%) actually said they wanted her to live “outside of the US.”

It amuses me because while a lot of this is predictable, and accurate for me as well–If I see a woman in a hijab I will tend to assume she is Muslim, religious, traditional, and therefore more insular–I also had the opportunity once to be in a mentoring position to some traditionally Muslim children and for several months after that, if I saw a headscarf, I became instantly nurtuing and protective. Even of total strangers on the street. Some sort of Pavlovian response, I suppose.

According to Turkish news sources, a group of 30 masked men in Almaty attacked 40 Turkish workers Thursday night. The workers were employees of the Turkish company B.N.N. Pegasus (which I assume is a construction company since it has a “camp”, but honestly I can’t find anything about this company written in English) and staying at the company camp. The attackers were allegedly armed with knives and guns, but only 4 men were injured. One assailant was captured and taken into custody by police.

The executive director of the board of B.N.N. Pegasus apparently thinks the group were terrorists, but it is not the first time there has been violence between Turkish workers and citizens of Kazakhstan. In October of 2006, there was a major brawl in Atyrau between Turkish and Kazakh workers. There have been any number of similar clashes and commentary on Internet bulletin boards and news sites seems to indicate tension between natives of Kazakhstan and Turkish workers working in this country. Some Kazakhstany have complained that Turks take jobs that could have gone to Kazakhs, receive preferential treatment from Turkish supervisors, and treat Kazakhs as second-class citizens. On the other hand, some Turks seem to feel that Kazakhs are not grateful that many Turkish companies work in Kazakhstan and boost the economy.

As construction is almost frozen in the country due to lack of credit and striking workers, any social tension might well be multiplied. In any case, it is a horrible tragedy that workers were attacked and hopefully it was an isolated incident.

An interesting article on RFE/RL, Kazakhstan: Corruption, Idle Promises Blamed For Mining Accidents, indicates that while the company Areclor-Mittal claims to have spent money on improving safety conditions, workers and local NGO workers say the mines are extremely unsafe. Others accuse the central and local government of overlooking problems in order to boost foreign investment and the output of raw materials in Kazakhstan.

What I find particularly sad about the whole event is that the after an accident miners go on strike for higher salaries. Then they go back to work. If the mines are really unsafe, a higher salary is not going to help you–it won’t even help your widow or orphaned children. I hope this time the miners stay on strike until they get better safety conditions.

Walking by bus stops in Astana, particularly those near universities, you might see ads that read like the one illustrated here: “Will write research papers and dissertations (in Russian or Kazakh). Selection of texts and translations. Written to schedule, high-quality, CHEAP!” Other ads highlight that they write course papers in Kazakh, a big help to those students whose grasp of the language isn’t up to par.

In the US professors struggle with similar problems from fraternities that keep file cabinets full of essays to students who cut-and-paste from Wikipedia, to ads on Craigslist that advertise paper-writing services. A friend of mine recently brought to my attention an ad posted near my old university where a student was soliciting someone to write their paper for them. Plagiarists who copy from the Internet, or who resubmit a paper from a past class are easily caught–professors have google and long memories. Students who use paper writing services are harder to catch.

It’s sad that something like this can be advertised so freely on bus stops. One would hope that professors or administrators might see them and call them up in order to find out who they are and catch them, or at least learn their trademark styles in order to recognize the style of such services. But more than that, one might hope that the general public would be disgusted by such blatant cheating. Hiring someone to write a paper for you will teach you absolutely nothing and make your paper worthless–plagiarists at least have put in some research time! I certainly wouldn’t want a doctor who had used such a service operating on me. Or a lawyer or economist consulting my company!

But it isn’t surprising that students will find ways to cheat or that the market will find ways to help them. An informal interview with some students indicates that the average student sees term papers and dissertations as bureaucratic hoops to jump through. They are happy to use such services and some express admiration for the people who run paper-writing businesses, saying they must make a lot of money. One acquaintance even argued that it was an honorable profession because the guy was using his brain. It was the dumb students who were in the wrong.

In any case, few are surprised that a new form of cheating has come to Kazakhstan.

Crossposted on Chalkboard

Another one of my beloved posts on a food product and/or interesting marketing campaign. I love this packaging for sugar, which is made by a Kazakhstan company in Kazakhstan. It’s called Zaxar, which is sort of clever although it did lead me to believe the company was Ukrainian or Czech or something. And every bag has a little funny cartoon on it! This one shows chickens talking to the man carrying an axe, whose name is Zaxar and saying:

Zaxar, why do you love us only for our legs, but you don’t value our minds?

Which I thought was pretty clever. Plus there were a variety of cartoons in the store at the same time!

For all my loyal fans who can’t get enough of my prose style, I have been kindly invited to post on the Transitions Online education blog Chalkboard. So you can check out periodic posts there and read it to keep up with what’s going in education in the former CIS.

Rakhat Aliyev’s first trial in absentia is over. He was found guilty of kidnapping, organizing a criminal group, extortion, robbery, misappropriation of state property, and fraud, and sentenced him in absentia to 20 years in prison along with the confiscation of his property. ”

The judge also recommended that he be stripped of all state titles and awards, something only the President can do.

The sentence of 20 years will begin when he is arrested–if, of course, he is arrested.

As RFE/RL notes, there are a number of unanswered questions as of yet, including:

who gets Aliev’s confiscated property? When his wife Darigha, President Nazarbaev’s eldest daughter, divorced Aliev last year she received some of his possessions and property. Does she get the rest now? And what about their eldest child, Nurali, who now, at the age of 22, is chairman of the board at Nurbank, the company in which his father used strong-arm tactics to acquire a majority stake? It seems he will keep his position.

And there are also questions of the exact legal status and conditions for a trial-in-absentia. Or why the government chose not to wait until he was detained to try him.

The next trial will begin 23 Jan and will be a military tribunal to determine if Aliev and 12 confederates plotted a coup d’etat and disclosed state secrets.

English Advantage Blog has a post up linking to a story about missionaries who use ESL courses as a cover for converting people in Bosnia. I’ve heard of this sort of thing going on in Kazakhstan and other countries for that matter.

I was told one story, which might be apocryphal, about an “English lesson” to demonstrate the use of the present progressive: Mohammad is burning in hell for his blasphemy
We use present progressive is burning to show that he is still in the process of burning, like all sinners burn for eternity. The discussion then went on to discuss how Mohammad sinned against the one true Christian God by setting himself up as false prophet, denying Jesus’ divinity, etc. and how all Muslims should convert unless they too want to suffer eternal damnation. Good English lesson there.

It’s sad because besides propagating the stereotype that Westerners are here to ram ideology down people’s throats, it also gives a bad name to Christians. There are some Christian groups who come to genuinely help and their faith is a motivation for their desire to come to a strange country and do good work. But that faith doesn’t get in the way of their mission to teach English or fund raise for orphans or volunteer for a hospital.

So please evangelists, stop giving Christians a bad name. Be straightforward and if you want to convert people, invite them to Bible Study or church service, not “English lessons!”

After this great article on potential directions an agreement with Eni might take in Kashgan by Ben, it appears a settlement has been reached. KazMunaiGas, the state oil company, will have its share of the project increased “equal to that of the largest shareholders,” according to a statement from KazMunaiGas. According to the AFP report:

Previously, Italy’s ENI, France’s Total, US ExxonMobil and Dutch-British Shell each held an 18.52-percent stake. ConocoPhillips, also of the United States, owned 9.26 percent while Japan’s Inpex and Kazakh state energy company Kazmunaigas each held 8.33 percent.

US business daily the Wall Street Journal on Monday quoted a source close to the negotiations as saying that ENI, Total, ExxonMobil and Shell would now see their stakes fall to 16.6 percent, while Kazmunaigas’ stake would rise to the same level.

The paper said Kazmunaigas had paid 1.78 billion dollars (1.2 billion euros) to increase its stake.

The Kashgan oil field is the only Caspian Sea project in Kazakhstan. No oil has been pumped out of it yet, but the original plan to have it online by 2011 may still be realized. Some predict that the Caspian Sea oil may give Kazakhstan the second or third largest oil reserves in the world, but no one knows how much oil is really down there. The project is high profile enough that the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, Karim Massimov met with Eni officials over lunch on Sunday, and President Nazarbayev met with the head of Eni several months ago. Both leaders were apparently confident an agreement could be met without drastic measures like forcing Eni to withdraw or penalize them with heavy fines. And apparently that has happened!

Having been away in the US for the holidays and returning to Kazakhstan, I feel like I am going through a renewed wave of culture shock. It’s not that everything is unfamiliar, it’s that certain things that I had gotten used to are newly irritating. There are a number of every day experiences that certainly got under my skin before, but that I quickly brushed off. Now I suddenly feel angry, “Oh God, not this again!”. It’s perhaps unfair of me, as if I expected the country to change in three weeks just to suit me. Nevertheless it provides an index of what is hardest for an American in Astana. So what follows is a list of the five daily experiences that I am newly rubbed raw by:

1) The elevator doesn’t work. Returning home with a lot of heavy bags, we are met by a broken lift. It did get fixed that afternoon, only to break again in the evening and remain broken for 2 days. Just an irritating reminder that things in Astana don’t always work–or get fixed.

2) I went out to get some sausage, milk, bread and cheese for breakfast our first day back. At the store we regularly shop at, the woman who sells sausage wasn’t in yet and the woman who has to hand you the cheese over the counter was also missing. So even though there was sausage and cheese there, I couldn’t buy it. I went to another store which had a sausage lady, but no cheese. At a third store, they had milk but only whole milk and I wanted 2.5% fat. So I had to go to a fourth store to get cheese. As I tell people at home, you can get anything you want here; you just can’t get it all the time or in the way you want it. It’s also annoying that even small convenience stores sublet space out or have certain things you can’t get yourself, so even if the store is open, not all the products are available all the time.

3) Ok, the cold is horrible but I don’t think anyone can do anything about that so I won’t complain. I will complain however, that no one plows the small roads or sidewalks. They run a tractor over them, which presses the snow down turning it into ice. Uneven ice at that. Why do I have to walk on ice from November to March? And I don’t mean only on small roads or in the yard of my apartment complex–I mean on side streets off the main street. Meanwhile the parks are clear of snow in case anyone wants to go have a picnic in February!

4) I had also not missed everybody’s favorite game: “Guess which door is open?” Going to the supermarket, of the three outside doors only the one on the far right was unlocked. But getting out of the entranceway, only the far left inside door was unlocked. Why is there always only one open door? Don’t stores want people to be able to come in easily and efficiently? I suspect there is some logic at play here, since many stores tie doors shut with tape or rope, so dear readers enlighten me.

5) The pushing! I had forgotten that no matter how close to a store window or store counter you stand, someone will still try to push in front of you. Or coming up to a bus stop, if you are not pressed right up to the door, someone will push their bag in front of you, to open a gap and then push you back. I did love being able to look in the windows of stores without keeping my elbows out to threaten anyone who tried to block my view or get in first.

I hope that this list doesn’t offend–it is written partially tongue-in-cheek. But for a country that is trying to build international tourism, maybe you could work on some of these things instead of building five-star hotels where the elevators still won’t work, people won’t come to work on time and you will fall on your butt two seconds out the door. Please!

EDIT: Chris Merriman has posted his own list of pet peeves for foreigners, so check that out too if you like.