Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

recent posts

about

An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • A Tale of Two Aid Programs

    Madonna’s little incursion into Africa has failed, while Bill Gates has single-handedly stamped out Polio in India. Well, not quite single-handedly – he had help from the World Health Organization (WHO), and pretty much every major aid-giving nation on the planet (including Australia). It’s a little unfair to compare him with Madonna, even though she never produced a product as flawed as Windows, because he’s an awful lot richer than her, and a little less … unpredictable. But still, the two Sydney Morning Herald articles show a tale of two aid programs. One is a well-thought-out attempt to deliver life improvements to very poor people, and one is a silly and vain attempt to build a few schools. The scope of this achievement in India is really staggering and important – the article says 200,000 cases of paralysis a year have been stopped (which seems a little high to me), and that has huge ramifications for those families who would otherwise have been affected by this cruel and evil disease. I should mention here that I have personal “experience” of polio, because my Father was a victim of the disease in his childhood, and is actually suffering renewed symptoms from the stupid disease now in his dotage. Eradicating this disease as we did smallpox has been a major goal of the international health community for a long time.

    The article on Madonna’s efforts paints a picture of an aid program in the old style much favoured by governments 20 years ago – jet in, do something pretty useless at exorbitant cost, don’t even try to make it sustainable after you’re gone, pay kickbacks and bribes rather than do the hard work to establish a viable community effort, and make sure that you feather your own nest while you’re at it (not that Madonna was feathering her own nest – I’m sure she was genuine about the whole thing, but like most stars she seems to have been surrounded by idiots). I imagine Madonna – who seems to be a pretty savvy woman, for all her strange religious delusions – will learn from this and make an effort to improve future projects done in her name. But it’s sad because what she’s trying to achieve here – improved secondary school education for girls – has been identified as a very good way of improving health and reducing inequality (of all kinds) in developing nations. Better-educated girls marry later, have less children, have more children survive, and have better income than their peers, and it’s a worthy effort. Malawi has a 12% prevalence of HIV and, although it has made significant inroads into its child and maternal mortality rates (addressing which is not rocket science), educational improvement will help to further reduce those mortality rates. So 15 million dollars wasted on a school project is a crying shame.

    Compare this with Bill Gates’ understanding of this issue, and his approach. In his annual letter, he explains the importance of vaccination in the developing world and makes clear an important link that people in the West often fail to understand: reducing infant mortality reduces population growth. This is because people try to plan for a certain family size, and if they know that infant mortality is a significant risk they have extra children to account for the risk, which in many instances leads to over-shooting the target (while, of course, those whose children die keep producing more children until they reach the target). This overshoot also leads to poverty, since childbirth, the death of a child, and raising surviving children are all expensive tasks. So, if you can reduce infant mortality and the associated disability (as in India with polio) you can reduce family sizes and improve family planning in those countries, which leads to a range of economic and employment improvements in those countries. In Malawi, with a 12% HIV rate, taking women out of the workforce to care for children who have a high chance of dying by the age of 5 is madness, when 12% of the working age population is too sick to work. Infant mortality has not just personal economic consequences, but also plays into the nation’s ability to develop, and development is what these nations need.

    Bill Gates also notes that, in addition to being efficient means of reducing population growth and improving economic outcomes, vaccines are a good way to intervene in corrupt nations, because programs like Madonna’s school program attract kickbacks, while a vaccine program has nothing of interest to offer anyone. A training program for a bunch of nursing assistants, and a huge box of drugs with no use to anyone except a baby… not a particularly corruptible program. So it’s a very efficient way of reducing infant mortality compared to, say, building girls’ schools or hospitals. Of course, governments can’t and shouldn’t follow his advice on avoiding kickbacks – a government program can’t be seen to be subverting the order of things in a foreign country, and modern aid programs should, wherever possible, try to confront and reduce corruption rather than avoiding it. But Gates’ point is a good one, in that programs designed to be uninteresting to corrupt authorities are a good idea, and  as a private entity he is able to do whatever he likes – and with remarkable consequences in India.

    Since I have started teaching public health and statistics to people from developing nations, the cruelty and unnecessary inequality of the international order has become really clear to me. I always knew about it, of course, but it takes on a more personal and understandable aspect when the people you teach have to take your teachings back to their nation and apply them in the breach. Sometimes it makes me quite angry to consider how different the lives of my students’ patients are, compared to my own. So it’s nice to see someone with the wealth and authority of a man like Gates actually making a genuine effort to address these problems in a constructive and thoughtful way, rather than grandstanding, and genuinely making a difference in the world. So tonight, in honour of his achievements and with an eye to countless Indian kids never having to experience the disability that my Father did, I’m raising a toast to Bill Gates.

    But I’m still writing this on a mac…

     

     

  • Paperless-ification

    I learnt a strange new Japanese word today, while scanning through the commencement documents for my new job. In Japanese one can add the word “ka” (化) to a noun to add the meaning “-ification” to the end of the noun. For example, the word ango means “cipher, code” so angoka is “encryption.” The word genkin means cash, and some companies here offer credit card genkinka, in which you can get cash from a card that doesn’t directly offer you a cash withdrawal service (presumably you buy a 1000 yen pen at a hugely exaggerated price and keep the difference). In this case the literal translation would be “cashification.”

    Japanese also offers many imports from foreign words, and one such word is “paperless.” You could probably write this in Japanese as something like mushisei (無紙), which would translate literally as “essence of no paper” but this is never done – one always says “Paperless.” So today, my work informed me that they are going to communicate official matters to me primarily by email for purposes of … paperlesska. That’s right, they’re paperless-ifying the office. This is an official word in Japanese: paperless-ification.

    Imagine Judge Dredd as a desk cop in Japan: “This office has been paperless-ified!”

    Incidently, this ka is also the bake in bakemono, a word all role-players should know: bake is the stem of the verb “to corrupt.” In the Japanese language, words meaning change or transformation can have many bad meanings. For example, “troublesome” is literally written as taihen (大変）, the characters for “big change” and a strange person is a hen na hito, literally a changed person. I think this is one of the ways in which the conservatism (in the literal sense of that word) of Japanese society and culture shows directly through language.

    Anyway, as a form of corruption, both of the English language and of office practice, I think “paperless-ification” is an excellent idea!

  • Current Viewing: The Man of la Mancha

    What they are about to do to you should be illegal…

    This is one for the OSR: it’s heart is in the right place but it’s production values are terrible. I was lured into watching this movie originally by hearing a sample on the Vanishing Point song A Day of Difference, and thought it must be a great movie on the basis of Peter O’Toole’s effort therein. Unfortunately, the movie is based on a musical, which is in turn based on a play. This is a tragicomedy in action. Everything that needs to be said about plays has been said by the Daily Mash; musicals are of course the worst art form ever invented; and 70s TV can be very hit and miss at the best of times, let alone if it’s projecting a projection of a projection. The result of this farcical combination can be seen in this clip, which jerks from Peter O’Toole’s superb prose, which is delivered with that strained grace one gets used to in theatre, to a truly terrible moment of song in such a jarring way as to spoil the effect of the original speech completely. In fact, I had to watch this movie over a series of 30 minute viewings, and was regularly distracted during the worst of the songs.

    The basic story concerns the imprisonment of a travelling playwright called Don Miguel de Cervantes, who is captured by the Inquisition and thrown in a shared oubliette with a bunch of petty criminals along with his servant, a fat stupid American. They plan to steal his belongings and destroy his life’s work, which is some kind of book, but he demands the right to a trial before they do so. His defense at this trial is the dramatic presentation of one of his stories, which concerns itself chiefly with the importance of seeing the world as it should be, rather than as it is. The central character of the play is a mad old man who thinks he is a Knight and sees all around him glory and beauty where there is only rot and decay. In the presentation of this moral tale, he is foiled principally by the prisoner who plays the role of prosecutor, a cynical and sarcastic wit; and a debased young woman who plays the part of the prostitute he exalts as a noblewoman. The former tries constantly to find fault with his moral lesson, while the latter denies that there is any goodness to be seen in the world.

    The central idea of this story is a powerful moral story about always aiming to see things as they ought to be, rather than being dragged down by the bonds of ordinary mortality, told by someone who is doomed to be tortured by the Inquisition for speaking out against the church; the story is delivered in a manner that parallels one of the tales of Don Quixote, I think, and is perhaps meant to represent one stage in the life of the author of that book. The acting is brilliant and the script combines wit, classical references and some brilliantly crafted English to produce some very powerful dialogue. Unfortunately, the whole thing is spoiled irrevocably by the absolutely awful music, and the terrible soundtrack. Consider, for example a comparison of O’Toole’s speech:

    I’ve been a soldier and a slave. I’ve seen my comrades fall in battle or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I’ve held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning “Why?” I don’t think they were wondering why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams – -this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all – -to see life as it is and not as it should be.

    with some lyrics from the song The Knight of the Woeful Countenance, which is probably (shudder) one of the better ones in the tale:

    Fare to the foe,
    They will quail at the sight
    Of the Knight of the Woeful Countenance!
    Oh valorous Knight,
    Go and fight for the right,
    And battle all villains that be,
    But oh, when you do,
    What will happen to you
    Thank God I won’t be there to see!

    What was the person who wrote the former thinking when they penned the latter? Or, perhaps, what was the person who adapted the former from the stage thinking when they were so foolish as to think they could do any justice to it by penning the latter? This movie is an exercise in lining up beautifully crafted, carefully developed prose and then destroying it with awful, pantomime-standard music. Like all musicals ever made, it is good in spite of the terrible job that was done with the music. The director really should have been told not to proceed with this diabolical plan.

    I can’t help but recommend it though because if you can bear the music, the acting and the speech in between are at times close to perfection. Have a book, and possibly a bucket, on hand and you may have a chance to enjoy an elegant presentation of an interesting moral tale, sadly interrupted every 5-10 minutes by a pack of squawking fools. There should be laws against this sort of travesty but, sadly, there aren’t, so one just has to show some fortitude and bear it. Good luck!

  • What can Rugby League Teach the RPG World?

    Rugby league is the one that’s like American Football played backwards, not the one with the awesome haka, i.e. not the one that’s actually engaging to watch. Rugby league is also a game that’s been plagued by image problems, and is suffering from onfield and off-field violence, both by players and coaches in the professional and amateur world. There are also significant problems in children’s league, involving bullying parents, high expectations, and the (huge) problem of fielding children of vastly differing sizes against each other.

    The consequence of these problems, of course, is that children try the game and hate it, so drop out; and mothers – the prime determinants of what sport children are allowed to play – send their children to the (in my opinion) vastly superior sport of Aussie Rules Football (AFL), which has been growing where league is floundering. AFL has already introduced significant changes in particularly its childrens league, has spent years trying to mellow the off-field antics of its players, and is also targeting girls. Rugby Union, soccer and AFL all understand that the key to a good adult competition is having a large pool of children from which to select talent, even though most of that pool will be second rate and of no value. This isn’t a problem for soccer in, say, the UK or Europe, because (outside of France) there is no challenge to the supremacy of “the beautiful game.” Not so in Australia, where 4 football codes are engaged in a vicious war of attrition for fans.

    Rugby League’s traditional response to this has been a resounding “fuck it!” They haven’t wanted to change the way the game is played at junior level because they have been following the worn out traditional idea that you can only damage the game by changing its image, or changing its training and development practices to suit children or (heaven forbid!) women. There has not historically been any recognition that the elite level of rugby is not attractive as a participation sport for 99% of people who play it, and that you can’t get people into this by just slapping them in the face with a rugby ball and saying “smash ’em!” You need to make the game appealing to a wide base of people, and from them draw your intense and elite players.

    Recently the role-playing blogging world has had a few kerfuffles about women in the game, with a common idea put forward that changing the game to encourage women’s participation would a) weaken the game and b) not work anyway. I find proposition a) particularly frustrating, because it contains so many misogynist ideas about the effect of women joining in a male activity; and I find b) frustrating because it pre-supposes there is no way girls would want to participate in a hobby that doesn’t involve ponies and pretty clothes. I have previously written about this issue in kickboxing, which (in Australia at least) is booming amongst women through a few simple representational and practical changes, which in the end benefit beginning male players as well as women. I wrote there that I think kickboxing’s approach to attracting women to the hobby presents a good model for how you can change the means of participation in the sport without changing the sport itself; you can draw in a wider range of people willing to try the game, and from amongst them you can channel people into various types of participation. I don’t see why the same can’t happen with regards to women in gaming (and, by extension, actual minorities like e.g. migrants, gays, etc.)

    In today’s Sydney Morning Herald Phil Gould – who by all accounts is not the most charming of representatives for the game – has a column on reforming Rugby League to encourage participation and prevent drop out. It turns out that the macho old ideas of “just grin and bear it” haven’t been working so well for retaining young players, because enjoying the game as it is played is not a sufficient condition for remaining engaged when, for example, the people you play against are bigger and rougher. He has solicited suggestions from parents and coaches and got huge feedback, and the common feedback has been to find ways to manage the violence inherent in different sizes of children playing against each other. i.e. parents and coaches all want to get rid of the idea that the only way you can play the game is being dropped into the game-as-it-is-played-now and expected to sink or swim. There is explicit recognition amongst participants of this sport that clinging to a single definition of the way of playing the game is destroying its acceptability. But you won’t find any of these people arguing that the game in its elite form should change.

    The column is long but the final part, entitled “My Awakening” is particularly interesting because it shows an example of a group of children working this stuff out naturally for themselves. There’s also a real hint of “old school” style in the way the kids house-rule the game of rugby to suit their circumstances. These are the enthusiasts who know the game and want to get it to work; anyone who falls into that group is going to be fine. The problem is that the majority of people aren’t going to fall into rugby through that group, but through the professionally practiced juniors game Gould contrasts them with. This, he sees, is the problem – those kids are suffering for the game and will put it away, because they are being forced to bend to the game, rather than the other way around. I think this is true in our hobby as well, that the majority of people will enter the game through an accepted channel (a gaming shop, or through joining an established group that shares many of the inflexible ideas I saw in the blogs about women’s participation in gaming); or they will just pick up the game books themselves and find nothing that encourages them to join, nothing that appeals to their understanding of how a game should be played or what is necessary for fun to be had. Those people might in turn move on to the “elite” gaming that many of us nerdy bloggers are used to; but we won’t be able to pick up those potential recruits if they get turned off by their first experience of the game, by the nerdy equivalent of being put up against someone bigger and rougher than them who really, in reality, wants to be playing a different game.

    There’s also a few comments at the end of the article about how professionalization has ruined the enjoyment of amateur participation. I wonder if anyone at WoTC is reading it? I doubt it…

    And a final note: a lot of the people talking about women in RPGs seem to be American or British, and I get the impression that they have very different stereotypes of women than Australians have. When I raise the example of sports adapting to encourage women, they seem to not understand. I think this is because American and British women are much less sporty than Aussies or Japanese women, and thus male gamers from those countries are not familiar with the idea that by changing a few details of the representation of a sport you can get women into it in droves. It seems to  be a secret that only Antipodeans (and Japanese) understand. Maybe this is because the dominant games of those Northern hemisphere cultures are so obssessively macho, yet simultaneously insecure. Or something. But – as is usual in all matters of importance in this world – I think those Northern hemisphere cultures could stand to learn a lot from the Antipodes…

  • Female Genital Cutting in Nigeria

    I have become involved in research on Female Genital Cutting (FGC) in Nigeria, as part of my work, and in preparation for this work I had to read a report on the prevalence and distribution of the practice in Nigeria. This report makes for interesting reading, and in particular it seems to run counter to a lot of the stereotypes and propaganda being put out by various individuals, organizations and movements on this much-discussed topic. Some of the findings in the report I read really contradict what I think is the prevailing wisdom, and so I thought I’d give a little summary and discussion of the contents of the report here. None of the work presented here is my or my department’s research, and I don’t intend to say anything about our research because it’s not published, and I don’t want to present anything in the public domain in any way shape or form until it’s been published officially. This post then is my review of someone else’s research report, with a few opinions and some musing that are entirely my own. Also, I’ll use the term “Female Genital Cutting” (FGC) here rather than “Female Genital Mutilation” (FGM) because that’s the term the report uses, and (for reasons I think we’ll see) it’s probably a more accurate term.

    The report I’m talking about here is Chapter 18 of the 2008 Demography and Health Survey of Nigeria (more information on that below), which can be downloaded here.

    Female Genital Cutting

    FGC is the practice of cutting into or excising parts of the female genitals, or (in its most extreme form) closing up part of the female genitals, with or without the removal of some flesh. The most severe forms of FGC, infibulation, can have potentially life-threatening and/or (usually “and” I think) fertility-impeding results. It’s not clear that all forms of FGC are harmful, though I am told there is a lot of debate about the health consequences of the most minor examples of the practice. The term FGC covers a much wider range of practices than male circumcision (which is also, obviously a form of cutting); from small ritual scars, removal of flesh (e.g. the clitoral hood); excision of the clitoris; and infibulation. I don’t think there’s any debate about the health effects of the more extreme forms of FGC, which are generally accepted to cause loss of sexual arousal and function, physical harm, trauma, sometimes difficulty with basic functions, and extreme difficulty in childbirth, with increased risk of maternal and infant mortality.

    In the popular press over the past 10 years, FGC has been associated with Islam, and is presented as a common, even ubiquitous practice amongst muslim communities through north Africa and the middle east. I think you can probably find people claiming it is prevalent all the way across to Indonesia, though I doubt the people you’ll find saying such things are credible, and they probably also have published blog posts on how the unmarked helicopters will soon come for your carbon. Many muslim activists and feminists have pointed out that FGC is prevalent in non-muslim communities in Africa, and that it comes in different forms and isn’t necessarily popular with men or women in the countries where it is practiced. It is also a highly controversial topic in western political debate, often presented as a pressing example of why the west needs to “act” to instill our “civilized” values in these countries; discussion of FGC is entangled with the complex of post-colonial and post-9/11 thought that delivered us the “Arab Exception” (Arab countries can’t support democracy), “liberal intervention” (bombing people can be a viable way to introduce democracy) and, to my mind most odious of all, claims to be defenders of women’s rights from the neo-cons who orchestrated the slaughter of a million people in Iraq.

    Of course, discourse that is tangled up with these issues inevitably tends to avoid inconvenient things like “facts,” or tedious tasks like “assaying the available evidence.” I don’t intend to stray from this time-honoured tradition by giving a complete review of the literature on FGC. But I do want to talk about the facts as they have been gathered in this DHS Report. Consider it my small contribution to 0% of fuck all on the topic.

    Nigeria

    Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, and is characterized by a wide diversity of geographical regions and a large number of different tribal and ethnic groupings. It was ruled under a dictatorship until about 1999, and is a member of the Commonwealth. Like a lot of countries it is home to a lot of different religions, but primarily Christian and Muslim in a roughly 50-50 split. Nigeria’s first census was in 1866 and its current population 140 million. It has significant oil reserves and the exploitation of these reserves by Shell (and other companies) has been a matter of some controversy, with accusations of both reckless behaviour and a low level conflict between residents of the oil-drilling areas and the central government. I think there are areas in the North of Nigeria where some sort of tribal and/or Sharia law applies. Nigeria is an ex-British colony, which presumably means it has a cricket and a rugby team. The wikipedia run-down on Nigeria is probably all you need to get an overview of a diverse and interesting country still struggling with its post-colonial problems and the (sadly typical) legacy of a post-colonial military dictatorship. Like most developing nations in Africa, it is rapidly reforming and improving its health sector to try and meet the Millenium Development Goals, focussing on those connected to population planning (i.e. maternal and infant mortality). Nigeria’s HIV prevalence is low compared to some African countries – about 3.6% – but still punishingly high by international standards, and primarily transmitted heterosexually.

    The Demography and Health Surveys

    The Demography and Health Surveys (DHS) are a standard population survey funded and developed by USAID and implemented in a variety of developing nations on a roughly 5-yearly basis by local statistics offices in conjunction with USAID and sometimes the UN (in Nigeria, the UN Population Fund has been involved). The surveys are conducted nationally and are intended to provide a representative sample of the population. They focus on population-planning and women’s health issues, especially fertility and infant mortality, because these issues are the crucible in which health development happens. Some surveys include sub-samples for examination of specific topics, including fingerprick samples to estimate HIV prevalence. In many instances these surveys are the only way in which developing nations are able to get a snapshot of key health problems like infant mortality, due to poorly-functioning central population registers, or limited funds for aggregation of data.

    The DHS are implemented in a door-to-door interview style on a random sampling basis that is analysed in a manner similar to the analysis of  national household surveys in the west – for example Australia runs a National Drug Strategy Household Survey every 5 years along similar lines. The data is then analysed and published in reports on the DHS website, and also made available free of charge upon application to interested researchers (e.g. Yours Truly). They provide a wealth of opportunities for research into development and health issues in the developing world. The 2008 Nigerian DHS sampled about 33,000 women and 16000 men, which is a huge sample by anyone’s standards, and an excellent opportunity to ask all sorts of interesting questions of Nigerian women. Note that the DHS surveys usually only concern themselves with women aged 15-49, and that is what “women” in the remainder of this blog post should be taken to mean.

    FGC in Nigeria

    So, chapter 18 of the report first gives us the rather surprising result that only 61% of women aged 15-49 have ever heard of FGC in Nigeria. Assuming that those who have never heard of it have never experienced it, they then calculate a stark figure of 30% of all Nigerian women having experienced some form of FGC. This figure doesn’t seem to be afflicted by missing values, but we can see from Table 18.1 that a mighty 45% of all women who have had FGC do not report the type they have received. The DHS divides FGC into three categories, and 45% of women who had experienced FGC classed themselves in the “cut, flesh removed” category. What this means is not clear and inspections were not done, so whether these women were mostly seriously affected or suffered nothing more sinister than a female equivalent of male circumcision is not known from this data. Eighty percent of women had been cut before their first birthday, suggesting that this practice in Nigeria is not a coming of age ceremony or adulthood rite, but something committed largely post childbirth. The majority of cutting was administered by a traditional circumciser or traditional birth attendant, but 2% were performed by doctors.

    Some of the demographics of FGC are show in Table 18.1, and here we start to see our western notions of the causes and reasons for FGC running into the brick wall of reality. FGC is much more prevalent in urban rather than rural areas, and its prevalence is proportionate to wealth. That is, the richer you are, the more likely you are to have experienced FGC. My original image of FGC was that it was a phenomenon of poor, rural women but the opposite appears to be the case. We’ll get on to discussing confounders for this conclusion in a moment, but let us first consider one other remarkable fact – the more educated a Nigerian woman is the more likely she is to have experienced FGC. Rather than being a phenomenon of poor, ignorant rural women is it actually a fad of the urban upper class? Perhaps a cohort effect? There does appear to be a linear relationship between age and circumcision and, since circumcision occurred mostly before age 1 this linear relationship does suggest a cohort effect.

    The problem we have with drawing strong conclusions about the demographics of FGC from this report is that there is no multiple regression model. We note that FGC is more common in urban areas, but we can also see that it is much more common in the South than the North; and Nigeria’s cities are all in the South. If a tribe is distributed unevenly across the country and has a strong history of FGC, then it will confound conclusions about the demographic associations. It could also be that there is some historical effect, perhaps because a tribe that controlled access to education and wealth during the dictatorship also had a high prevalence of FGC. Nonetheless, the closest you can come to an iron law of development and health is that education improves women’s rights, so it’s interesting that FGC is more prevalent amongst educated women. However, in the absence of a multiple regression model, conclusions about the meaning of these demographics are weak.

    Religion and Tribal Effects on the Prevalence of FGC

    Looking at Table 18.1 again, we note that FGC is much more common in the South than the North – overall prevalence in the North is about 13% vs. about 35-40% in the South. It’s almost non-existent in the North East. These, incidentally, happen to be the areas of Nigeria with the largest Muslim populations, while the South has the highest prevalence of Christians. Unless there is a seriously skewed distribution of FGC between Muslims and non-Muslims, the striking conclusion of that result is that Muslim women appear to be much less likely to have experienced FGC than non-Muslim women. In fact some areas of the North the majority of women don’t even know what FGC is. One noteworthy point though is that Northern circumcision is more likely to be reported as the most severe kind (sewn closed); but also the lowest rates of refusal to report the type of FGC are in the North. Of course, the broad categories of definition and the large proportion of missing data make this information almost meaningless.

    The authors wisely chose to eschew reporting on religion and its relationship to FGC, which is a no-win game for all concerned. If you find high levels of FGC amongst Christians, then right-wing cultural warriors will crucify you for attacking religion; if you don’t report them, right-wing cultural warriors will accuse you of covering up the true prevalence amongst Muslims. The best thing to do is to try strenuously to avoid your health research being used to confirm or disconfirm other people’s biases. Our concern as health researchers is behaviour, not categories of people, and categories of people are only of interest in so much as they form useful markers for behaviour, or useful media for changing behaviour; this is why HIV was renamed from GRID (Gay-related Immune Disorder) when the behaviour that caused its transmission was identified – the category was no longer analytically useful. Categories like “gay” or “Muslim” (or indeed, I suppose, “gay Muslim”) may be useful as health promotion tools (you can, for example, disseminate health promotion messages in gay mosques!) but as analytic categories they are always superceded by direct research into behaviour. Especially when, as in this case, “Muslim” as a category is so general that it spans multiple regions, levels of wealth and education, and tribe.

    Next we can also notice a large variation in rates between tribes. I am under the impression that most Nigerian tribes include members of several religions, though I could be wrong. I can’t find evidence online for the proportion of the various tribes that are Islamic and I don’t trust Wikipedia on this (the source is given as the “World Christian Database” and some of the “tribes” listed there don’t seem to match those in the DHS), but if we assume that the three biggest figures given there are correct in at least their ranking, we can see that the three tribes with the largest Muslim populations (Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani) have the two lowest rates of FGC (and one has the highest). Again there is huge confounding here, since the Yoruba tribe is mostly in the Southwest (a hotbed of FGC) and also has a heavy mix of religions – Wikipedia puts the Muslim population at 8 million, but the overall Yoruba population in Nigeria at 29 million. Similarly sketchy Wikipedia accounts suggest the Fulani are primarily Muslim, and they have a very low prevalence of FGC (8.5%). So, we can do ecological analysis wikipedia style[1]: a tribe with a minority population of Muslims has a very high FGC rate, while a tribe with a majority population of Muslims, credited by wikipedia with spreading islam to Nigeria, has a very low FGC rate.

    Shall we join the dots? There is weak evidence from this DHS report, relying on an ecological-level analysis of population prevalence of FGC, that being Muslim is protective against FGC, and FGC is most prevalent amongst Christians. The only way to know if there is any substance to this conclusion is to do a multiple regression at the individual level, adjusting for wealth, education and location, to see whether there is any association between religion and FGC. My guess is that when one does this one will find that FGC is a cross-religious phenomenon, driven primarily by class- and tribe-specific cultural factors that transcend religion.

    Opinions on the Continuation of FGC in Nigeria

    Men and women were asked in this survey what they thought the reasons for FGC were, and whether they would submit their own daughters to it. Responses to the former question for men and women seem broadly similar: there are no benefits to FGC is the commonest response for both sexes (Tables 18.6.1 and 18.6.2). The second most common response (and it’s a distant second overall) was “to prevent pre-marital sex and preserve viginity” and this was heavily over-represented in the South, where the practice is most common. Seven percent of men indicated it was done to improve sexual pleasure for men, vs. 4 % of women. This set of results hardly supports the view from abroad of populations of benighted savages, ignorant of the true consequences of FGC and persisting in silly notions about its benefits. This foreign view of FGC is further dispelled by women’s reports of whether they aim to subject their own daughters to circumcision: only 6% of circumcised women intend to do this, and the proportion of women intending to do it is lowest amongst the highest-educated. That is, where it is most prevalent it is least popular. It is also least popular with the youngest women, who are most in control of girl children’s fate.

    I think there is a well-established counter current of feminist thought in the West – so well established that I can’t even be bothered googling it – that women play a significant role in decisions about whether to circumcise daughters, as part of the generally well-established role that women play in policing the boundaries of femininity. This idea is well presented in the inscription at the front of Alice Walker’s book on FGC, in which the trees in the forest notice that the woodsman’s axe has a wooden haft. I think it’s pretty likely that the traditional birth attendants and circumcisers responsible for cutting the majority of women in this sample are also mostly women. So at the point where women decide it’s not happening to their daughters then it probably doesn’t take much in the way of empowerment of those women’s decisions to see their will enacted.

    Interestingly, the DHS includes a lot of questions about the household’s attitudes towards women’s equality, couched in practical terms (“he lets me make purchasing decisions”) and ideological questions (“it’s okay to beat a woman if she burns dinner”). So it is possible that some enterprising social scientist could analyse attitudes to the continuation of FGC and work out exactly what is required to empower women’s decisions to make it go away. However, I suspect the most likely answer will be “nothing.” Nigerian women appear to have decided they don’t want the next generation of girls to have FGC, and my guess is that will be sufficient for the practice to die out by itself within 2 generations.

    Conclusion

    This report presents weak evidence against two commonly-held stereotypes of FGC:

    • It is a predominantly Muslim practice
    • It is a problem of poor, uneducated rural women

    at least in Nigeria. It also gives weak evidence in favour of the possibility that FGC is much more common in Christian communities; or at least that being Muslim is protective against FGC. These conclusions cannot be drawn definitively without individual-level analysis of attitudes and practices in a proper multiple regression, that adjusts effects of religion and tribe for region, personal beliefs, wealth and education. To do such analyses is not the responsibility of health researchers, who should be avoiding feeding the fires of this kind of debate (in my opinion) and focussing on the practical aspects of the issue. Maybe. It’s also possible that there is a cohort effect in the prevalence of FGC in Nigeria, in that it may have been widely practiced 20 or more years ago and/or amongst a particular tribe or group of tribes.

    This report also suggests that FGC is going to disappear rapidly in Nigeria through natural attrition, and that the single cheapest, easiest way to make this happen is to empower women to have full control of the perinatal process. When women can choose the timing of childbirth and have access to good medical care, and are able to assert their own authority over the child-rearing process and associated decisions, the results in this report suggest that they will choose overwhelmingly against FGC for their own daughters. The report also suggests that the majority of men don’t have strong views on the importance of FGC, and so it is unlikely to continue even if western feminism does nothing about it. As is usual in development health, the simplest way to reduce the dangers to women’s health and to improve children’s health is to enable women’s self-empowerment. But in this case it is not clear that increasing girls’ access to education will protect them against the phenomenon.

    This really is a topic crying out for detailed sociological research and I hope it’s being done!

    A side point on the analysis of hysterical political campaigns: as usual, the right wing shock-jocks are wrong, and my standard method for making a first-pass judgement about a political problem worked. This method is: if group A hates group B, and group A is claiming that group B do nasty behaviour x (child-eating, FGC) then probably the opposite is true. In this case group A is right wing shock jocks / neocons (and some feminists); group B is that most nefarious and broad of categories, “Muslims” and my conclusion is, as ever, correct in all of its particulars.

    —

    fn1: i.e. get it completely wrong!

  • Lies, Damned Lies and Statisticians: A F.A.T.A.L Deception

    Yesterday was April Fool’s Day, so I put up a fake report on a campaign I never ran using the Game That Shall Not Be Named. I appear to have fooled one otherwise quite perspicacious individual, so I figure I fooled a few other readers too.

    So, how does this lie rate?

    Degree of Difficulty: I think it should be quite difficult to fool your readers on April Fool’s Day on a blog with an ongoing series about how good a liar you are. So I’m giving this a 4.5.

    Degree of Preposterousness: In this report I claimed to have played F.A.T.A.L. That’s pretty preposterous. Also I claimed to have played the Date Rape Game with a radical feminist, which is doubly preposterous – radical feminists don’t role play (that should be a badge!) and certainly not in this system. Furthermore I’m occasionally accused of being left-wing, so that should have rung some bells too. But then, on the other hand, I am known for a bit of infernalism, human sacrifice, etc. so maybe people thought this was consistent with such a gaming style. If so, I should hang my head in shame. But it was F.A.T.A.L., and I claimed to have GMd it – that’s preposterous. I’m giving this a 4.

    Degree of Success: To be fair, only one person commented, so I can only assume that I fooled one person. But that’s still one more than should have, and it can safely be said that he left the scene fooled. However, my main aim was to get a few outraged comments that I could then deflate with this follow up post, so I think, sadly, I failed. I didn’t outrage enough people, which pretty much means I lost the internet. I’m giving this a 2.

    Overall Rating:13.5 out of 25. Barely a pass. Better luck next year…

  • Old Campaigns: F.A.T.A.L. Sandbox

    UPDATE [2018/3/21]: I’ve noticed that this post has been added to a wiki about FATAL and some people are taking seriously, so I’ve added this update to point out to my readers that this post was an April Fool’s Day post. I’ve never played FATAL, this is not an AAR, and it is not possible for a FATAL sandbox campaign to end up being a story of ecofeminist crusade. Also while some of the player identities here are based on people I actually met in life, none of the sexual tensions described here are real and none of the identities in question ever gamed with me! But I hope you enjoy the story anyway.

    This is a report of a FATAL campaign I GM’d many years ago in Australia. This was back in my student days, and my group consisted largely of the student activists I ended up hanging around in those days: a young labor party activist called Danny (something of a mentor for me); a radical feminist Jewish left-wing Zionist who flirted constantly with me and nearly broke my heart and who for the purpose of this review I’ll call Miss R[1]; a no hoper stoned-out kid who could have been brilliant but had some kind of serious problem of motivation, who I’ll call Mr. Obscure; and the overly energetic arty kid (at some Sydney art school whose name I now forget) called Ted who suggested we try out “this wickedly complex game, hey man it’ll be challenging for you Mr. Rolemaster! Pass me a spliff, Mr. Obscure!”

    So we ended up playing FATAL, an enormously complex, pretentious and yet simultaneously juvenile game whose name is an acronym for “From Another Time, Another Land.” The game system itself certainly is – I took it on in response to Ted’s challenge, because I’d been GMing Rolemaster (“Mr. Rolemaster”) for some years and in a drunken, stoned (well, everyone except me and Miss R, who “didn’t want to lose control” so wasn’t even drunk, but still managed to bat her eyes at me all night long) conversation my players revealed to me they were bored of watching me juggle critical hit charts like a pro and wanted to see if my “semi-autistic” (again, Miss R[2]) brain could handle a higher challenge. So, like the reckless young risk-taker I was, I took them up on the challenge, and (without even knowing the term) within a month I was running a sandbox campaign with the most complex system anyone has ever designed.

    FATAL has, looking back, no good points except its juvenility, which is about the only refreshment you get from the unrelenting and exhausting task of managing the rules. Combat leaves Rolemaster in the dust for complexity, handling magic is hideously complex, and any skill check requires thumbing through hundreds of pages of tables to find the chart you need (and they are poorly laid out, too). But for all its complexity and the continual challenge of trying to see the wood when the trees are so thick and dangerous, it has many rewarding points. For about 3 months Ted played his character with significant brain damage after a left brain hemisphere injury whose results took 10 minutes to resolve in the middle of a crucial combat, but in fact this brain injury was the transformational moment in the campaign. Not only did all the players see that FATAL’s combat system is genuinely dangerous and unique, but Ted chose to play his brain damage as a kind of divine inspiration, and from that inspiration our campaign shifted from a mere series of consecutive dungeon crawls to a campaign at another level of intellectual and spiritual achievement.  His character started having visions, Miss R’s character started treating him as a prophet (as a consequence of some servile character traits she’d rolled up during the two session long character creation process) and with my help the party went from disconnected dungeon crawling in a standard fantasy world to a kind of world salvation crusade.

    Ted’s characters dreams were, spontaneously I think[3], visions of bloodlust, murder and rape, and he was able to use his artistic sensibilities to really get the feeling of a character being driven to some deeper truth through tortured visions. He (the player) would even draw sketches of violent import for us and we slowly built up a portfolio. We used the various tables on rape and murder contained in the rules (which I subsequently heard, and I think in general for good reason, were heavily criticised in the role-playing world) to inform his tales, and a picture slowly emerged of a world under threat from an insidious, world-destroying power that was slowly poisoning the earth and unleashing hellions to attack the women of the world. The party would move from village to village, Miss R’s character guiding Ted’s wizard while they told their tale of despair and rapine and gathered evidence of the enemy. From Ted’s images I slowly gathered together a tale of a brooding dark lord who used evil, woman-hating magic to draw forth dark beasts, which increasingly assailed the characters during their travels.

    Slowly the characters unravelled the truth of the dark lord’s behaviour, through a combination of traditional capture/torture techniques on his bad guys, and through investigating the dark lord’s activities and servants in various towns and villages. The FATAL rules, which are so hard to work in combat, were a huge help here, enabling me to generate all sorts of challenging social and interrogative interactions. Slowly, the campaign turned under Ted and Miss R’s guidance (and my response) into a kind of eco-feminist quest, to undo the slow darkening of the world and hunt down and destroy “the WR” (The World-Rapist) before he could achieve his goal of unleashing a new corruption that would turn the entire world and all its descendants to his cause. In the game this was envisaged as a kind of ultimate rape, a roll of 100+ on one of FATAL’s many enormously juvenile and offenseive sex tables. And in the end the PCs faced off with the dark lord, destroyed his servants and wrecked his plans, though Ted lost his (second – the first one’s brain damage took him before the final confrontation and he played his new, useless character very recklessly) character, and Miss R was forced to cut down Mr. Obscure’s PC after a particularly evil spell turned him on the party. In the end the campaign finished with Miss R the only one standing, and this created a lot of bad blood which means that none of us talk anymore[4].

    So there you have it: a FATAL sandbox campaign that turned into an ecofeminist crusade under the inspiration of a crazed artist and his sometime radical feminist lover, under the guidance of yours truly. FATAL is a hard game to run that I would never recommend to anyone – I certainly won’t ever be doing it again, and in general I think the juvenile sex obsession of its authors lets it down, but with the right players it can be taken to great heights. So I suppose the lesson of this campaign was that system is no impediment to good gaming, and that every system has some point (even if it’s tables of sexual encounters and organ size) that can, with the right dice roll, drive a story to new heights of achievement.

    But in general it’s better if you don’t have to wade through 8 or 10 tables spread over 58 pages in order to get there.

    —

    fn1: she has an important job in a government body now so I can’t really identify her as a gamer

    fn2: I’m a little drunk, but I don’t want this to come across as some kind of cathartic rant; I’m well over Miss R.

    fn3: Fucking artists

    fn4: I never got to sleep with Miss R but Ted did[3], however he was a bit of a jealous sort[3] and his (apparently legendary) boudoir skills weren’t sufficient to stop Miss R flirting with me[5], and Ted started assuming there was a thing going on[3], which led to a lot of bad blood, so that when Miss R was the only left standing of course he assumed I’d killed him off out of spite. In truth, I’d made a promise to myself early on in this campaign never to fudge any dice rolls, which was a first for me and after this experience not something I ever was so foolish as to repeat.

    fn5: What can I say? I’m just that good[6]

    fn6: but not quite good enough to compete with Ted[3]

  • Heavy Metal’s Profound Influence in the Middle East

    How can they lose with inspiration like this?

  • Japanese Data Visualization Skills, with a Radioactive Example

    Japanese people in general seem to have excellent skills in data visualization, as well as quite advanced mathematical ability and a robust approach to science. Japanese appreciation of data visualization, particularly, seems to exceed anything similar in the West (at least, that I’m familiar with). In my favourite magazine, Tokyo Graffiti, for example, ordinary people are regularly asked to describe their hairstyle or their favorite shoes in terms of spider charts, a form of data visualization also used to describe the fruit and vegetables at my local supermarket. The local guide to hot springs in Steamy Beppu contains a chart that plots key ingredients of the hot spring water on two axes, and then clusters the data into areas through different coloured data points so that you can easily judge which tourist area to visit depending on your health needs. Most pamphlets about health issues in Japan include a brief description of the epidemiological evidence, and usually a chart or two that lay out the data in a visually attractive way.

    Of course it’s not the case that these representational methods are unique to Japan, but what is unique is their degree of dissemination, with ordinary shops using them to depict basic information about their products, and information that would be reserved for the fine print (or not presented at all) in the UK or Australia being given front page, graphical representation under the assumption that even the most ordinarily-educated of individuals is capable of understanding it. This is both a refreshing assumption about the mental capacity of the average consumer on the part of ordinary companies, and a huge bonus for your average statistician. People not only understand the basic idea of what I do, but they appreciate it and think it’s cool. This is, to say the least, a novelty.

    Of course this has come to the fore in the last week, when the nuclear “crisis” hit. The Japanese media have been very quick to present detailed diagrams of the nuclear plants, and used all sorts of cute charts to give clear presentation of the risks of radiation, in a refreshingly straightforward and unpatronizing way that assumes the best of the audience. The channel I was watching in Beppu, NHK, even had a guy whose official job was “Explainer” (説明者）。They also presented a variety of basic charts and pictorial representations (especially the triangle describing risk) clearly and directly. But the best example I’ve seen so far of presentation of this data is this visualization, which unfortunately for most of my readers is in Japanese. Here is an explanation:

    The visualization has 12 little pictures in 3 lines of 4. The top 4 show (left to right) the world average hourly exposure; the upper limit for a worker who deals with radiation; the amount required for a 0.5% increase in cancer risk; and the amount at which you should run for the hills. The next 8 boxes (left to right, top to bottom) are places in Japan. The first (left-most of the middle row) is the Western edge of the Fukushima exclusion zone. To its right are three towns heavily affected by the Tsunami. On the bottom left is my colleague, Ms. Middle-of-the-River’s hometown of Saitama. Next is my friend Miss Wisteria Village’s workplace of Chiba; then is an area near me; and lastly is a town near Yokohama to the Southwest of Tokyo. These places are all in the Greater Kanto area so some distance from the plant, but as you can see from the falling dots, they have a similar amount of “rain” to those in the area around the plant.

    This is classic visualization material, giving an engaging presentation of key facts in such a way that visual comparisons are easily done without losing key basic information. It’s also done with the classic Japanese minimalist aesthetic, and somehow manages to produce an overall calming image, while giving a clear sense of panic to the danger zone image while smoothly contrasting it with the reality that surrounds it.

    I don’t know why the Japanese are so good at and familiar with visualization, but I think that their writing system, being pictorial, must be connected in some way. Is this also true of China and Korea? They are also countries with world famous mathematical education, and a pictorial writing system, but I don’t know enough about them to judge. I am, however, confident that less foreigners would have run away from Tokyo if the English-speaking world were more comfortable with this sort of representational style.

  • New Monster: obake-yashiki

    The obake-yashiki, or “Twisted Mansion,” is a mystery to all reputable scholars, be they Japanese or foreign. Found on lonely mountain paths, or just slightly off of pilgrim trails and disused trade routes, the obake-yashiki takes the form of a building such as a peasant’s hut, a shrine, a hot spring bathhouse or some other place that might be inviting to weary travellers. From a distance it appears completely normal, its only unusual or distinguishing feature being its placement, which is inevitably in wilderness or uninhabited settings rarely visited by anyone but the hardiest of wayfarers.

    No one knows whether the obake-yashiki survives by consuming the souls or the bodies of its victims, and it is unclear whether the absence of corpses around its location arises from a supernatural capacity to erase the remains of its victims, or a supernatural ability to transport to a new remote location after its grisly deed has been done. But all scholars agree that the obake-yashiki is a deadly hunter, that sets traps for exclusively human prey to lure them to their death. Usually these traps take the form of some inviting sound, smell or sight such as befits the disguise the monster has taken: drifting clouds of fragrant incense from a shrine; the sound of pretty ladies giggling in a garden; the silhouette of people bathing in an outdoor hotspring; or the delicious smells of an evening meal from a peasant’s hut. This lure first acts in a completely natural fashion, but if the passing wayfarer does not respond to it with sufficient curiousity, the obake-yashiki exerts its supernatural influence, and attempts to charm its victims closer. Those who are successfully charmed in this way enter the building directly, and are lost forever unless prompt action is taken to rescue them.

    If unenchanted victims come within the immediate vicinity of the building, the obake-yashiki attacks them. The form of the attack varies depending on the structure of the building: an onsen may lash out with gouts of steamy hot water; a shrine’s fox guardians may come to life and attack; the tools from the peasant’s hut may animate and strike. However, this is only the first line of attack. Should the beast’s outer guardians disable or distract defenders, the shrine will lash out with some form of appendage – again, reminiscent of the building’s form, though sometimes a more naked representation of the dark magic that animates the building – to ensnare a victim and drag them through its portal. Once inside, the victim is likely beyond help, or will be destroyed permanently and completely unless their companions immediately rush to destroy the main building. The shrine’s outer guardians can also be disabled permanently by attacking the building itself, though they will fight hard to defend it. Of course the building is both resilient and possessed of great strength, but there are two forms of attack against which all obake-yashiki are weak: fire, and earthquakes. Magical attacks that inflict either such effect on the building will destroy it quickly, or cause it to eject any recently-consumed victims and disappear.

    Obake-yashiki can be driven away from an area by a suitably-skilled priest, and are vulnerable to exorcism or abjuration magic. They are impervious to slashing weapons, and take damage only slowly from bludgeoning weapons. It is said that foxes and tanuki hate them, and obake-yashiki rarely visit areas that are known to be in the territory of an enchanted fox or tanuki. To permanently destroy an obake-yashiki, so that it is rendered down to the form of a mere ruined building, requires the intervention of a priest, who will chant sutras that hold the building in place while it is destroyed with fire. Once this is done, adventurers can search the remains of the building and often will find a rich treasure gathered together from the remains of the building’s previous victims.

    It is said that evil magics exist that give priests and wizards power over these buildings, and that sometimes undead or evil wizards live within them, and move around with the building. Whether this is true or not has never been confirmed, because few people survive encounters with the obake-yashiki. It is also rumoured that obake-yashiki are created from the evil deeds of past occupants, or from their unresolved rage at some past injustice. In this case, it may be possible through some quest of redemption or vengeance to quell the obake-yashiki without the aid of a priest. If this quest is successful the obake-yashiki will simply become a normal building, in whatever place it was last situated, and the person who quietened it will be forever honoured in local folklore.

    However, the numbers of those honoured for such deeds is far, far smaller than the numbers of those who have died  at the hands of these vicious and deceptive beasts.

    —

    Note: obake-yashiki means “haunted house” in official Japanese, but I got the idea for this monster from the earthquake. Yesterday my colleague told me that our workplace seems like “obake-yashiki” because the earthquake alarms were going off randomly, and the halls are dark and cold (not to mention quivering in aftershocks). In Japanese, obake means “transformed” or “metamorphosed,” and thus was the idea born. I haven’t given statistics for this monster, but I think the idea is good for a random encounter or adventure trigger, and in my imagination these beasts can be as weak or as strong as the building they are formed from. The beast could also have a place in a modern manga-style Japanese campaign, set in a world like that of Witch Hunter Robin, in which case even a portaloo or an ATM hall could be an obake-yashiki. I suspect a particularly powerful and terrifying modern incarnation of this beast would be a pachinko parlour…