UAE Unifies Holidays - School's Out!

passport stamps from the UAE. Entry via Dubai, exit via Abu Dhabi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to today's soaraway Gulf News, school holidays in the UAE are to be unified and come in line with the UAE's Ministry of Education holidays. The move will "contribute to enriching stability of families" the paper quotes the Minister of Education as saying.

Right now, everyone sort of does their own sweet thing. We have the 'public schools' run by the Ministry, private schools run by all sorts of people that cater for different communities and Universities that follow a wide range of international curricula.

Schools in the UAE will re-open in one fell swoop after the summer break on the 9th September, although the academic year for staff will commence on the 2nd September. That's followed by a whopping holiday from December 16th through to January 6th (3rd for staff) and another break from the 31st March to the 14th April (11th for staff). The 2013 summer break will start July 7th and end September 1st.

I happen to be married to a teacher in a British curriculum school - Sarah and her happy colleagues follow the British National Curriculum and their classes are observed and inspected to that standard. The teachers, one suspects, will be torn between exasperation at having to fit so much more into so much less time and glee at getting (even) longer holidays. Schools in the UAE following international curricula already find it a challenge to incorporate the required amount of Arabic language instruction together with the curriculum they follow, but they're going to have a field day trying to fit things around these holidays. 

Worse than that, we have the spectre of a nicely unified mass exodus as everyone dashes for Dubai International to high-tail it out of here. Even with today's 'fuzzy' holidays, the traditional holiday periods around Christmas, Easter and Summer see thousands flocking to the airports and scenes of near-mayhem abound. With the unified holidays, every man jack of 'em will be on the move.

I get the feeling this one might be subject to clarification somewhere down the line...

Back

United Kingdom (Photo credit: stumayhew)

Sorry, I've been gone a while...

That must be the longest 'no blogging' break I've ever had, a combination of a very busy ArabNet (another brilliant event, hats off to Monsignor Christidis and team) and two weeks being pretty much offline in the UK. I also forgot my mobile for the UK trip, which turned out to be a remarkably enlivening event. The only thing I missed was not being able to mess about on Twitter when clothes shopping with Sarah, which would have been in any case rendered inadvisable thanks to Etisalat's ridiculous data roaming charges. I commend two weeks without a mobile to any who care to try it.

For what it's worth, I can report that the UK is already going jubilee/Olympics mad. If you're planning to be in London this summer, don't bother - the cost of an EK cattle class ticket has already gone up by over Dhs 1,000 and car hire is prohibitively expensive compared to other European capitals. God alone knows what the hotels are going to be getting up to.

We flew back on one of Emirates' A380s. I do believe if you're going to fly on Friday 13th you should pick a plane that has cracks in its wings. The experience is undoubtedly superior, the most striking thing of all being how quiet the plane is. A bonus was, as you will be able to guess from the fact you are reading this, the wings stayed in their proper place.

Masafi Recall - Trouble In The Hills?

Impact of water in a water-surface (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Masafi must have one of the worst websites I have seen in a very long time. The company's SEO is so bad it doesn't even make the first page of search results for 'Masafi' or even 'Masafi UAE'. You even get a fail with searching for 'masafi mineral water uae'.

How is this even possible? Part of the explanation may be that the website at www.masafi.com has been built using Flash (pretty pictures, SEO disasters). Consumers concerned at the recent media coverage of a recall order issued against the company after a sample of its water was found to have exceeded acceptable levels of bromate will find themselves listening to some cod-Arabic music and watching butterflies flapping around on their screens as they wait for the whole dull scenario to play out (with no 'skip' option, obviously) before some menus fly in to grace the screen with lovely pictures of beautiful things to remind us how very, well, natural everything is. Finally getting to the 'What's New' section tells us that Masafi was the supporting water of the Dubai Film Festival.

Not a word about a recall. Not a crumb for the concerned consumer. As far as Masafi is concerned, It Didn't Happen.

This isn't the first time the Ignore It And It Will Go Away strategy has been followed by the company, apparently. In December 2009, half a million bottles were recalled due to 'visible contamination', yet Masafi's website news section for that period merely reports a new cranberry flavour juice. Masafi's head of marketing told The National at the time the company would publish the results of its investigation within the week following its report (linked above) but there's no coverage of that I can find, no mention of it on Masafi's bug-strewn website and, shamefully, no sign that The National or any other newspaper followed up.

Given I have drunk almost nothing else for the past nineteen years, I'm quite angry. I'm a bit of a nut about water and even wash my teeth using Masafi rather than tap water. I'm rarely to be found without a 500ml bottle of the stuff on my person. I did a report on water for a magazine here once and had various waters assayed - Masafi came through as the real deal. Years later, an analytical chemist friend wouldn't let his family touch anything else after he'd put various waters through the wringer and found Masafi to be precisely what it said on the box. I don't trust other brands, especially those, like Aquafina, that are artifically mineralised waters from 'public sources' (a euphemism for 'tap'). Masafi is a brand I have long trusted absolutely.

And yet when the chips are down and I need a little more information, perhaps a little reassurance, they're making like the Wide Mouthed Frog.

The story appears to have been broken by Khaleej Times, back on the 23rd March. There is some irony to be enjoyed from the fact the news broke on World Water Day. KT's report was on the back of a news story filed on the national news wire, WAM. That story starts with the classic line:

Dubai Municipality said the level of bromate substance found in the bottled water does not include carcinogenic substances that pose direct threat to the health of consumers as the ratio of substance existing in the bottled water is very close to the maximum limit allowed by the Gulf specifications. 

And we all what that means, don't we? In fact, the levels of bromate found in a single sample of Masafi from a batch produced on the 17th January were 11 micrograms per litre. The World Health Organisation recommendation for an upper limit of Bromate is ten micrograms per litre. Although there is no direct evidence that bromate is a carcinogen in humans, studies have provided enough concern that these limits have been recommended. So this really wasn't 'a biggie'. And yet the story has flown around the BlackBerry network and been picked up nicely by Twitter (where I came across it first, in fact), let alone the newspapers. Arguably helping the story to gain traction, Masafi's official statement (as reported by Khaleej Times) was:

“We reassure that Masafi bottled mineral water is safe for consumption and does not pose any health risks. At Masafi, our commitment to the highest quality of our products remains our top priority for our consumers and their well-being. Our products are manufactured and packaged according to strict quality requirements.”

Rule one of issues management in communications? News expands to fill a vacuum.

In case you're interested, and because Masafi's not in a hurry to tell you, Bromate is formed in water when ozone purification (and some forms of chlorine purification) is used, converting naturally occuring bromine into potentially hazardous bromate. Levels of bromine are particularly high in salty water, in fact the Dead Sea is a major source of industrial production of bromine and it's to be found in desalinated water, too. Perhaps interestingly, the UAE's desalination plants had a serious bromate problem, which was apparently addressed, by Abu Dhabi at least, back in 2005. ( This report in Khaleej Times says levels of bromate in Abu Dhabi's desalinated water were up to ten times WHO limits has an ADWEA official stating, "We've solved it" but a post on ADWEA's own website dated 2/1/2006 talks about 'starting work' and 'instituting plans'.)

Yet another example of a head in the sand communication strategy going wrong. And a truly awesome, in my humble opinion, online fail. When there's cause for concern, however slight, today's consumer wants more than silence, obfuscation and corporate mendacity. And we deserve it, too.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off To ArabNet I Go!

Two years on from the first ArabNet Digital Summit in Beirut and the world has changed. I don't know that ArabNet can take the credit for that, but organiser Omar Christidis can certainly take credit for knowing when to start a serious regional digital conference with a focus on startups and 'the digital opportunity' in the Middle East.

As I posted at the time, the first ArabNet Digital Summit in March 2010 was something of an eye-opener. With low expectations confounded by a very high standard of event, ArabNet showed that there was undoubtedly a flowering of talent, innovation, interest and investment in the region's digital industries. The second ArabNet a year later cemented that, although a daringly expanded event did expose a couple of organisational weaknesses. That didn't really matter, the highly ambitious agenda was expanded to include a developer day event, the two day core conference and a community day. The ArabNet team went on a road trip around the region, literally taking a bus from country to country and arranging presentations, workshops and the like with the aim of uncovering, even fostering, the region's potential startups.

This year, the ArabNet Digital Summit is a five day event - the popular Developer Day has been expanded to the plural, the two day conference remains at the core of the event. There's a one day 'Industry Day' (taking place concurrent to the second Developer Day), which aims to examine how digital technologies are transforming a number of vertical industries in the region. It's a smart idea, because it means taking an approach to technology that is necessarily made relevant to each of the industries the day serves, which include healthcare, banking, travel, education, and government.

Then we have the two day ArabNet conference, the 'Forum Days' which include a number of keynotes, panels, workshops and the much-loved 'Ideathon' (pitch a startup idea from the stage) and 'Startup Demo' (Startup pitches its work and seeks funding) competitions. There's a third competition, as well, for agencies to case study their digital campaigns.

As usual, I'll be there causing trouble. I'm moderating a session on Industry Day, 'Social Media and Customer Relationship Management' and then during the main forum, I'll be presenting on how companies can, in fact need to, 'Take back your content' - how companies are going to need to plan and execute content strategies in this world of 'discoverability' we're carving for ourselves. Then I'll be moderating a panel on 'The Future of News' which will be, if I have anything to do with it, a real bunfight.

Apart from the stuff I'm doing from the stage, I'll be doing the usual at ArabNet - meeting smart and interesting people, learning about what's happening around the region and soaking up information and best practice from the speakers onstage.

See you there!

Here's the Spot On ArabNet page, BTW!

GeekFest Sharjah - It's A Wrap!

GeekFest Sharjah is over and it was fun. Official.  There are so many people to thank, I'm just going to get on and do it. To Nick Rego who made GameFest happen, selflessly giving up his evening so that other people could play silly dancing games, to Ali and the brilliant origami workshop team from JUKI, to the speakers and especially those (Nick, Rasha, Qais, Alexandra, Hanan and others) who braved The Impossible Journey from Dubai and in the process discovered the traffic has changed and a twenty minute drive in slow traffic is perfectly bearable when there's a GeekFest at the end of it. Rupert Bumfrey, very much the catalyst behind GeekFest Sharjah happening, gets a nice perspex award and all. To TechnoCase mobile types Nokia, supportive as always, another bright, shiny thank you.

The talks, as usual, were popular, fun and engaging, starting with a live music performance thanks to creative community website TripleW, which was different! Qais Sedki entertained, Alexandra Tohme provoked and I showed a 1937 movie about Sharjah Airport which rarely fails to fascinate watchers. Catalin Marin's post-processing workshop went down a storm - his stuff is always popular at GeekFest and he's got quite a fierce reputation among PhotoGeeks for his technical wizardry but also for his readiness to help others and share his knowledge. The team from Sharjah Museums came by and shared the amazing diversity of exhibitions and cultural programmes they're working on, which was lovely. They also brought chocolate, which is always appreciated! For what it's worth, I have been consistently delighted and impressed by the youth, commitment and enthusiasm of the Sharjah Museums people and if you haven't had a look at what they've got to offer the culturally interested visitor seeking a number of interesting day trips, you're just plain daft.

To Giuseppe and the team from Al Maraya go the biggest vote of thanks, they worked hard to help everything get off the ground with style and put up gracefully with the unstructured mayhem that is UNorganisation. I did try to warn them...

The turnout wasn't stellar, about 70 people pitched according to Mariecar from Gulf Today (being a journalist, she counted them), although that's how many we catered for in a pessimistic food order - an interesting result given the GeekFest announcement post on this very blog notched up over a thousand page views.

They've decided they all want to do it again in late May, but bigger and better. I'm looking forward to that, because GeekFest Sharjah had a strong cultural and artistic vibe to it that was unique and refreshing.

Strangely, tonight I got home to an email confirming GeekFest Jeddah, previously postponed, was going ahead as a two-stream event (geeks and geekas) in mid-April. There's a GeekFest Beirut in the pipeline, too.

And no, I didn't talk about Olives. Well, just the once...

Olives Reading In Beirut

Gloop 2 - The Dust Rides Out

Sawdust (Photo credit: ganatronic)

It's still there, the fine dust suspended in the air. It's worse over in Fujairah, apparently, where visibility is own to 500 metres and flights from the emirate's tiny airport have been disrupted.

You know those boards you get in hotels that look a little like a washboard, with the rows of felt runnels accepting letters pushed into them for events and the like? We were delighted when we dropped into Fujairah airport for a 'nose' to find those boards being used for arrivals and departures. That's how small Fujairah airport is.

It's all very Mission Impossible Four, isn't it? Which reminded me this morning of the pal who worked on the set of the film - the sandstorm scenes were made possible thanks to two metre high fans and a whole load of specially imported Hollywood sawdust.

Yes, sawdust. Sand doesn't show up on film cameras (neither does 'real' rain, BTW, they have to use rain machines to make super-heavy rain) so a very fine sawdust is used instead. They had to fit AC filters to the car radiators to stop them 'brewing up' because they quickly became clogged in sawdust.

To tell you the truth, I'd be happier with sawdust. This fine stuff is getting  everywhere and I've got a tickly throat. Hundreds are apparently presenting themselves at various hospitals around the country with respiratory problems.

Gloop

It's everywhere. A thin layer of incredibly fine dust has coated any exterior surface. The car was a light grey colour this morning and we drove out into a strange otherworld, the tiny particles so small they're suspended in the atmosphere like a mist.

People scurry past, handkerchiefs held up to their faces, eyes squinting. The ghostly atmosphere bears down on you, the dusty gloop everywhere. As drive inland it gets worse, the blanket denser. Everything's greyed out.

Apparently the gloop is sand from Saudi Arabia, blown here by the seasonal weather patterns, highs and lows conspiring to whip the sands of the huge desertscape high into the air, the finest particles scattered in a corona across the Northern Gulf.

We've had the damndest weather this year, high winds a couple of weeks ago followed by a warm snap that saw temperatures hitting a most unseasonal 35 Celsius, giving way to high winds last night and now waking up to this soupy atmosphere clogged with powdery sand particles in suspension.

Can't wait for the frogs and locusts...

Got Any Lebanese LIRA?

Pound for pound, the Lebanese LIRA is the daftest regulation you'll see in quite a while. It's yet another example of a government trying to define the role of online media as it struggles to manage the potential of unfettered human thought and opinion being freely shared, following hot on the heels of the American near-disasters we know so well as SOPA and PIPA. Once again, it shows legislators are hopelessly out of touch with the dynamic of that shifting, changing thing we know as the internet.

The Lebanese Internet Regulation Act requires owners of websites to register with the government. interestingly, the draft law was proposed at the start of a month where the region's most vibrant and important annual forum for the online and digital industries, the ArabNet Digital Summit, is to take place in Beirut. Debate on the regulation has been postponed for further discussion by the Lebanese cabinet, giving the public time to make its views known (not that anyone will be listening, I conjecture).

LIRA attempts to take the Internet and squeeze it into a square peg shape so it'll fit the Lebanese press law shaped hole. Any owner of a website would have to register with the Information Ministry and websites would be governed by the conditions imposed on journalists, media and broadcasters by the Lebanese press law, the law specifically mentioned in the new regulation is Press Law 382/94, which is the audiovisual media law - a law that, as far as I can make out, merely modifies and re-ratifies the existing 1962 press law. It does seem like a very lazy way of saying "See the press law? It holds true for the Internets as well, people" which, as we all know, simply won't cut it.

That's about it. There's absolutely no attempt to understand the dynamics of the Internet, let alone even defining what a 'website' is - does this law apply to blogs? Only to owned domain-hosted websites? Mobile Apps? Facebook pages? Twitter?

It'll be interesting to see if Lebanese information minister Walid Daouk will speak at ArabNet and, if he does, how he'll be received. There has been a very lively hashtag, #STOPLIRA, pinging around the Twitterverse for a few days now and it's likely quite a few of the 1,500 digital innovators, specialists and leaders who'll be attending will have some helpful hints and tips for the minister. As it is, the ArabNet organisers turn off the Twitter wall for the keynote session in which ministers traditionally like to tell the audience of web-heads how the Internet and youth are important to our future. You wouldn't want to be reading what Twitter says about that kind of thing, you really wouldn't...


A translation of the Arabic language regulation is to be found on Joseph Choufani's blog here.

Submitting Your Novel To Agents

Submission
Going down, down, dragging her own
Submission
I can't tell you what I found
The Sex Pistols

Calm down, now. This is a book writing post, not a music one.

Submitting to literary agents is all part and parcel of the wonderful world of writing books. Having received something like 250 rejections, I think I've got quite good at it over the years. The process is obviously of interest to a great many people in the UAE, certainly judging by Luigi Bonomi's two sell-out sessions on getting an agent at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, as well as the audience questions during our 'First Fictions' panel session.

In fact, I'm still getting questions from people, so here's a potted guide. The usual caveats - I'm just giving my own views here and I'm not necessarily the best person in the world to give advice to anyone about anything, but here it is anyway.

What agents ask for

• The first 50 pages of your book printed single sided in Times 12 point, double spaced with a 0.5cm paragraph indent, not hardbound (ie slide bound or even held together with an elastic band). Each page should include the page number and the title of the novel and name of the author.
• A synopsis, no more than two pages
• A covering letter
• An SAE

What Internet savvy agents ask for

• An email with a query, synopsis and first ten pages in the body of the email, no attachments.

or

• An email with the first three chapters and synopsis as attachments.

I would generally approach any agent via email first and had actively started avoiding 'postal submisions only' agents by the time I signed with my agent.

What you need
A novel
A synopsis
A blurb
A query letter
An SAE
An international postal coupon
An Internet connection
A thick skin and a good dollop of self belief

A novel
Ideally, you should have a whole novel. Some people tell me Luigi suggested you might like to write just the first three chaps and submit to see how it goes, but I can't see that working. If an agent comes back in response to your 'partial' and asks for a 'full' you're just going to muff it by trying to write a book in a couple of weeks. Getting those 'first three' chapters into top condition requires, IMHO, the experience and editing knowledge you'll gain from writing a book.

You need around about the first fifty pages of your novel, ideally ending somewhere sensible, so if that takes 46 or 52 pages, never mind. Check them for stupid mistakes, read them out loud as if you're giving a reading to a book club and correct the text. Print it out and go through it with a red pen. Ideally, upload it to a Kindle and edit it again. Then leave it for a few days and edit it on screen. It.must.contain.no.error.

A synopsis
Distil your novel down to a few pages, then print it out. Tell that story from scratch, doing your best to make it compelling, colourful and yet true to the movement of the plot. Do not lace it with 'in character' dialogue or phrases, keep it a straightforward piece of storytelling that clearly shows the KEY elements of your plot and story as a readable, flowing document. Now cut it. You should end up with it cut down to two pages.

A blurb
Imagine you're writing the dust jacket of your book. Write it up just like that, to focus on the key 'hooks' your book has to offer. Make the language compelling. Again, read it out. Imagine it as tweets - cut out any word you don't need in there. Make it elegant. Make me, the reader, want it.

A query letter
Agents like you to play it straight and don't award marks for individuality, humour or in-character stunts. There are lots of examples of query letters on the interwebs, but the best approach is to get straight in there with a two-paragraph (max)description of your book, (Olives is a stranger abroad story set in Jordan, where journalist Paul Stokes falls love as he finds himself caught up in a series of explosions that seem linked to him) followed by a short description the target market for the book, a bit about who you are (which ideally is in some way relevant to the topic/content of your book) and a signoff. You're looking at a page, max a page and a half.


An SAE
Increasingly, agents are taking email submissions which saves a load of wasted time, paper and money. It'll cost you about dhs60 to send a wodge of 50 pages of novel and an international reply paid coupon (together with an envelope addressed to yourself which will eventually contain the photocopied rejection slip) so it's no small beer once you get above ten agents. So I would definitely query agents that take email submissions first.

Which agents to approach?
You can go through the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook for agents - try and do it intelligently and find people who represent books similar in theme, genre or essence to yours. Here's a useful free listing, but it's a wee bit out of date now and I'd buy into the W&A thing, honestly.

Look at their websites
Agents will ALWAYS have submission guidelines on their websites and you should follow these. Don't waste time and energy putting together a package that doesn't meet the guidelines of each agent, because they'll just bin submissions that don't comply. Don't forget, agents get anything up to fifty brown envelopes full of hope every single day.

Use white envelopes.

If an agent's guidelines seem unusually onerous or ridiculous move on. Don't kill yourself jumping through hoops, there are plenty other agents in the sea.

Many agents will respond to a well-written query by email (use your blurb as the core of this) and many will accept an online submission from the UAE based on that query - do try this before posting off packages, each 'yes' you win will save you the price of a copy of Olives to gift a member of your grateful family.

Don't follow up
It can take three months for an agent to respond to a submission package. Do NOT phone them to chase your submission. They don't know who the hell you are, you're just another parcel on the great big pile in reception. Your rejection will come in time, don't worry.

When you get rejected
If you get a rejection with any feedback in it, count your lucky stars. This marks you as unusual and you should take it as a huge positive sign. Take the feedback on board and resubmit - including to the agent who gave you the feedback. Don't be in a hurry to do this, take your time - and make sure you've really taken that feedback to heart.

When you get a 'full' request
A full read means an agent has enough interest in your work to spend time and/or money on your work - they'll likely have 'readers' who charge a fee to read work and give an editorial report on it. This report will not be shared with you, although you might get a couple of lines of final feedback with the 'no'.

However, you might also get a 'yes'. This is, believe me, a very good moment. Savour it, roll it around in your mouth, then swallow gratefully. It's not the end of the process, your agent's got to find a publisher and that's a whole new ballgame. But you're pretty much through the gate and standing, blinking, in the inner keep...