Genetics, Biodiversity And The UAE

English: Cobs of corn (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was mildly alarmed to note a story filed by national news agency WAM recently that referred to a new law being studied by the UAE's Federal National Council. that had been referred to the FNC's Committee for Foreign Affairs. That bill was the 'bill on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture' and the second I saw that, I thought 'Uh-oh, here comes Monsanto'.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The debate over Geneticall Modified Organisms, GMOs to you, has raged fiercely since companies started to commercialise products built around the new and exciting science of genetics. Experimenting with, discovering more about genetics, is important research - it's only recently we have mapped the human genome, and our understanding of genomes in general is scant. Every step we take forwards opens vast new tracts of understanding and potential cures for humanity's ailments. Yet we understand so little about these incredibly complex building blocks - and the tiniest changes to them can have massive, far-reaching consequences. So glibly splicing, twisting and shaping genes for wide-scale commercial deployment has always given me the shudders.

Something like 85% of US corn is genetically modified. A good example of this is Monsanto's 'Roundup ready' (TM) corn, which is modified to make it resistant to Monsanto's Roundup (TM) pesticide. This allows farmers to use larger doses of stronger pesticide, increasing crop yields and helping them to pay for Monstanto's seeds - which they have to buy annually. It also, incidentally, ensures that traces of that pesticide are in the food you're eating. And you haven't been genetically modified to make you resistant to it. The market leading corn in the US is (and have a think about this name as you're eating one of those little polystyrene cups of hot corn with butter sauce down at the mall) Monsanto's triple-stack corn, combining  Roundup Ready 2 (TM) weed control technology with YieldGard (TM) Corn Borer (Bt) (TM) and YieldGard (TM) Rootworm insect control. Yummy!

It's not just corn, either. 91% of the US soybean crop (those yummy Planters peanuts are roasted in it) is GM and 88% of the cottonseed crop. Over 90% of the US (and 90% of the Canadian) Canola crops are GM - Canola is a brand name for a hybrid variety of rape that contains less acid (natural rapeseed produces a bitter oil not suited for food use - and Canola sounds so much nicer than rape, doesn't it?), originally developed in Canada and now grown all over the world. Canola is a hybrid, not inherently GM, but most of the current North American crop is GM.

About 90% of American papaya and sugar beet crops are GM. Other GM foods are also making their way into the American soil now, including courgette (zucchini to them). The bad news is that the EU has approved the sugar beet 'product' - and also that GM products can be imported into the EU if they are to be used as animal feeds. Ever smart to an opportunity, Monsanto has produced a genetically modified ('roundup ready') alfalfa - an animal feed crop.

All of this tinkering with our food has had one interesting side effect. Companies have raced to 'own' foods - Monsanto, for instance, makes its money on selling seeds (and pesticides) to farmers. And it wants to protect its intellectual property, so it has patents on its corn and other products - and duly licenses these to other companies. So food becomes Just Another Technology. Something to be abused at will by any dominant player.

Which is where the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture comes in. A number of the world's smaller countries spotted companies trying to patent various useful plants and objected to this 'genetic imperialism'. The treaty establishes a framework whereby food cannot, effectively, be patented in a way that prejudices the rights of farmers and communities and limits the ways in which companies can dictate the use of a food crop or product. For instance, Monsanto doesn't like farmers using 'farm collected seed' because then it couldn't sell 'em another bunch of seed every year. Farmers sign a contract with Monsanto which contains a number of provisions and restrictions and grants Monsanto a number of rights - including the right to monitor the farm to ensure the farmer doesn't save seed. That contract applies even if a farmer doesn't sign it but opens a Monsanto seed bag. This treaty acts against that sort of behaviour in a most timely fashion.

Although the treaty in no way limits the use of GM crops, it does limit the ways in which companies can use market dominance and the toolbox of other corporate egregiousness to dictate commercial terms to the world's less well off. And at its core is a commitment to biodiversity and the preservation of food producing communities.

That the UAE is a signatory to it is a little piece of rightness.

Half Thought...

Serial on BBC iPlayer, see The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a wayward youth (and you can be assured I was suitably wayward), I once found myself walking back from London with a pal in the dead of night. We'd been 'celebrating' and were hitching because we'd missed the last train. We got picked up by an old guy in an Aston Martin who was smoking a spliff. In all other respects he was unremarkable - friendly enough, took us up the road and dropped us near enough to our respective homes, which was kind of him.

But it did rather leave me wondering how unfair was a world where you had to be that age to own a car like that, when clearly it was a car more suited to someone my age.

I was reminded of this the other night purely because a load of programmes Sarah had downloaded from the BBC's iPlayer timed out before either of us had time to view them. And yet The Niece From Hell is jacked into iPlayer 24x7. She's got all the time in the world to consume content and wastes none of it getting about the business of being perma-connected.

It's not fair. Why don't I have all the time in the world to consume content and she does? Come to think of it, how come I don't have an Aston Martin, either...

Self Publishing Workshop Canned Alert

Empty seats (Photo credit: ΒЯІΑN®)

With sadness, I've cancelled my self publishing workshop at the Sharjah International Book Fair, scheduled to take place on Monday 12th November at 7pm.

The scheme came to be just a tad too late in the day and without confirmation of any registration arrangement, room, LCD projector or other facility I felt it would be a waste of time to go ahead. The Book Fair team ain't to blame, they have their hands full with a 500,000 person event and consequently have bigger fish to fry.

At some stage later this year I hope to do a similar event with the Dubai Literary Group. In the meantime, if you have questions about self publishing in the UAE, drop a comment here or hit me up on Twitter - @alexandermcnabb and I'll do the best I can to help out.

TTFN!

Book Post: Launching Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

The Middle East print edition of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller will be launched on December 1st 2012 at Jashanmal's book store, Mall of the Emirates at 7pm.

I'll be joined by friends - and friends of friends - and it should be a load of fun. I've been toying with the idea of readings as performances. Book readings are often dry things, all polite listening and stumbling renditions of pieces of text. I wanted to see what would happen if I gave up my book into the hands of performers. So the event will feature performances from a rapper, a poet, an actress and a well-known, larger than life figure. Each one will interpret what they're reading as they see fit, perform it as they see fit. It should be compelling stuff...

The cover is pictured above. If the spine seems a little wide, that's because the Beirut - An Explosive thriller Middle East edition is in standard 'thriller' format - 11x17.5 cm and is a whopping 456 pages long. Olives followed the larger 5x8 format dictated by POD machines. The Middle East Beirut has been reformatted - I might add lovingly - to a more attractive size.

I'll share more details next week as my ducks line up. In the meantime, I'm doing a workshop for UAE educationalists in RAK later this month on narrative in Arab culture and guesting on blogs like a blogpost guesting fiend.

A Tale Of Two Revolutions

Photo credit: Wikipedia

They are the best of times, they are the worst of times.

The Industrial Revolution changed the world and brought us to the world we have today. The compelling combination of innovation and communications transformed society, at first in the United Kingdom, where it had its roots, but then spreading to America, Europe and the rest of the world. The confluence of mechanisation, improvements in transport and communications and entrepeneurialism transformed agrarian societies and created industrial powerhouses that brought wealth and opportunity - and created poverty and appalling illnesses, too. It tore society apart and remade it. Constantly.

In the latter C18th and into the C19th, that revolution built cities as it emptied rural communities. The old ways had changed and people, from legislators down to the common man, had to find ways of adapting to the furious pace of change our world was suddenly pitched into. Life would never be the same again, from our views on community, family and morality through to the expectations we had of our rights and place in society.

Sound familiar?

Imagine, then, a country that took one look at the industrial revolution and threw up its hands in horror at the very prospect of change. Oh no, not for us these naughty steam engines, looms and ironclads! We'd rather stay tilling the land! These countries would arguably be the ones that would subsequently fall to the inevitable rush for empire - because an entrepeneurial revolution sustained by free market economics will inevitably cause expansion into new markets. And the sheer force of the explosion will open those markets by hook or by crook. As it did in the C18th, as Europe's powers jostled to dominate smaller, less able countries who were still in 'the dark ages' compared to these new, brash economies.

An alternative model might be to try and cherry pick from the revolution. We want the steam engine and the mill, but we'd rather not have looms if that's all the same to you. And we'll take canals, but pass on the roads. The trouble with this is that innovation revolutions are integrated - any part of the set of available innovations that is not embraced and made competitive will create a market opportunity for the expanding revolutionaries.

And so it is with the Internet Protocol in the UAE. And although the Internet is the core technology of our new revolution, it is merely a road network. The producers of raw materials, the refiners and manufacturers need hauliers to find their markets, but once the canals and roads are built, that's about it. You can build roads and charge tolls, but you can't own the traffic or the goods that pass over the roads.

Critically, you can't dictate to road users what they must pay to use your road if you are competing with other transport networks - the market then defines price. So when you have a Microsoft retiring Messenger and replacing it with Skype, the global VoIP provider whose website is blocked in the UAE, you face a very clear choice - one you have failed to face,  but known about, for years now. Do you reject the revolution (an attitude that has long been your inclination) or do you accept that you have no choice but to compete in the newly transformed environment or inevitably fail?

Both of the UAE's telcos now work on wholly IP based infrastructure. And yet we pay Dhs1.50 for a text message. That's the most expensive 160 bytes of data imaginable. Extrapolate that to a 1Gbyte month and you'd be shelling out about nine million dirhams ($2.5 million) for a normal data package. You can see how WhatsApp starts to look attractive, can't you?

Telcos have no choice but to adapt to the IP (and by that I mean VoIP) era. Their revenue models will have to change, they'll have to lean up and cut staff. I watched thousands of jobs go in the years I worked with Jordan Telecom going through just such a transformation. It's not pretty, but that's revolutions for you. They'll have to find new ways of creating products and services relevant in an IP world. I'd say the solution lies in transactional commerce over IP networks, but hell I'm just a PR guy what would I know?

Right now, we're busy sitting on a chair squawking 'go back' at the waves. But they're waves of innovation and they're inexorable...

Self Publishing Workshop Alert

English: Open book icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rather to my surprise, the workshop on publishing and promoting your book I gave at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature earlier this year was a sell-out. Given that tickets cost Dhs200 (about $55) a pop, I was impressed at the level of interest - it points to a larger coterie of would-be novelists out there than I thought existed.

I'm doing another one at the Sharjah International Book Fair. on Monday 12th November at 7pm. This one's free.

So if you want to know how self publishing works, if it makes sense compared to beating your head against the bastions of 'traditional' publishing, how to format a book for publication, which platforms to choose for ebook and print book editions and why, how to design a cover and how to negotiate the red tape of creating a book in the United Arab Emirates, come on down. It'll be about an hour of frenetic brain-dump that should answer all your questions and even some you hadn't thought about yet.

If you're Dubai based, don't worry. The traffic's not as bad as you think (but, yes, you will spend 30 minutes in the queues unless you decide to pitch up at about 4 or 5-ish and have a mooch around the exhibition halls before the workshop, in which case the traffic's fine), dragons and spiny tailed bandersnatches don't actually wander the streets of Sharjah eating unsuspecting maidens despite what you've been told and no, you won't catch diphtheria by contact because Sharjah's unclean. Incidentally, the exhibition halls are packed with publishers and books, with a strong turnout from international titles and there is literally something there for everyone.

Appropriate Technology

Digital Signature Authentication (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We changed healthcare insurance providers about a year ago, the new ones being cheaper but - as it transpires - infinitely more annoying. I'd say something like 'yer pays for what yer gets' but experience tells me this is rarely actually the case.

One of their more endearing quirks is requesting a medical report for every claim. This means a call to the provider to request the report and then a traipse down there to pick it up. It's yet another Little Job You Don't Need.

Imagine my glee, then, when the American Hospital's medical records people called to say the report was ready, they could send me a request form to fill out and send back and they would then email the medical report to me. We had, it appeared, finally emerged kicking and crying into the digital age.

This was nothing compared to my rapture when the form arrived gleaming and simply buzzing with potential in my inbox. This wasn't any old form - this was an Adobe EchoSign form. For those who haven't come across EchoSign, it's a cloud-based service that allows you to fill out and digitally sign forms and contracts, validating your identity via Adobe's server. It's smart, neat, secure, highly convenient and - for a Gulf-based organisation, incredibly leading edge. Impressed to bits, I filled out the electronic form and digitally signed it, then sent it back.

You know what's coming, don't you?

They called me up. No, sir, you have to sign the form. Yes, I signed it. No sir, you have to print it and sign it then fax it to us. Or you can scan it and send us the form that way.

But this is a digital form, with a digital signature. In fact, this form is produced using a technology that is entirely meant to support a digital signature. In fact, your hospital has actually paid for this technology as a specific form-signing digital signature solution. It's like buying a new car then pushing it home. It's like having a dog and barking. Do you have a dog? Who does the barking around your place? I mean, surely you're not serious.

Yes sir, we are. The form needs your signature.

I cannot begin to tell you how angry it made me. I don't know why, really. It's just yet another example of technology being used muckle-headedly, we see them every day. It's yet another example of an organisation not 'getting it', but we see those every day. I should be used to it, inured to it. I should shrug it off with a 'Pfft, another one'. I managed to wend through an entire morning of insane, time-wasting governmental bureaucracy getting my ISBN number last week giggling all the way. Why, then, did this little piece of idiocy reduce me to apopleptic, towering rage?

I've come to the conclusion I need a holiday.

Book Post - Shopping Beirut

Part of my list of the fourteen London publishers Robin shopped 'Beirut'  

to - pretty much a 'who's who' of publishing. One by one, I got to cross 'em off...

I started writing Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in late 2009, just after a reader working for British literary agent called Eve White rejected Olives - A Violent Romance after a ‘full read’ with the comment that it wasn’t dramatic enough. Right, I thought. If you want dramatic, mate, you can have it. It wasn't until I'd done with the book that I realised I had created precisely the type of novel I'd set out to spoof with my first attempt at a book, the amusing Space (although I have to point out that Space's first Amazon review cites the book as almost entirely unamusing!).

I finished in June 2010, but it wasn’t until spring 2011 Beirut was picked up by literary agent Robin Wade, who signed me on the strength of it.

Now, for the uninitiated, getting signed by an agent is quite a deal. Step one is typically a query letter which may lead to a request for the 'first three', which is the first fifty pages of your book and a synopsis. If this pushes more of the right buttons, an agent will ask for a 'full read' - by this stage you're very close to the top of the slush pile - let us not forget agents in the UK will receive something like forty brown envelopes full of someone's hope a day. If an agent signs you, you're bloody well made. They're not charity cases, these boys, they're running businesses with that most admirable of objectives in mind - making money. An agent signing you means they think you have commercial potential in the 'competitive market' they all remember to mention in their rejection letters.

I can't begin to tell you how much hope was packed in my heart as Robin touted Beirut - An Explosive Thriller around the London Book Fair. But I was giddy with it - 250 rejections from agents later, I was actually in with a chance here. Robin faithfully reported back on the reactions he got back from each editor. To a man, they rejected it. What's more, it took them seven months to get around to it! The rejection that hurt most praised the book’s qualities but noted the editor in question ‘couldn’t see it selling in supermarkets’.      

"There are lots of elements to it that I like – there’s an austere, almost Le Carre feel which I like and the author can clearly write. The dialogue and plotting stood out for me in particular. I’m afraid though that it is – for my purposes – a bit too low-key; the ‘commercial’ bit of my job title requires me to pick out titles which are going to appeal directly to supermarkets and the mass-market, and I feel that this would be too difficult a sell in that context. "     

It was that reaction pushed me over the edge into self-publishing. "Low key"? The book's an adrenaline soaked catalogue of machismo lunacy and violence! Caviling apart, there was clearly a major change – and massive contraction – taking place in the world of ‘traditional’ publishing and it wasn’t favouring a new author writing hard-to-peg novels about the Middle East.I was clearly wasting my time at the gates of Gormenghast castle. It was time to pack up my motley collection of carvings and take them to market myself.

The whole process had wasted a year. I lost little time in getting Olives into print in December 2011, with a view to following with Beirut the next Spring. In retrospect, this was silly - the whole wearying cycle of promotion sucks down time, as does editing and polishing - publishing Olives taught me an awful lot, not the least lesson being that there are readers out there. I'm not kidding - up until that point it had been about me and my books. Now it was about them and my books. Meeting readers, talking about the characters, their motivations and feelings with complete strangers changes the way you write, it really does. And then Beirut went off for editing and I started getting permissions, readying different files for print, Kindle, and ePub formats.

It's all taken pretty much a year. but a year better spent than one waiting around for publishers to think of new and inspiring ways to say no.

So on December 1st, at 7pm, the Middle East print edition of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller will launch at Jashanmal's book store at the Mall of the Emirates, Dubai. If you can't wait, or you're not in the UAE, you can buy your very own copy from the outlets listed here. The launch is going to be a lot of fun and I'll share details as I confirm things, but do mark the date in your diary!

The E-dirham - One Of The UAE's Best Kept Secrets?

Visa (Photo credit: DeclanTM)

The UAE federal government has quietly retired the old e-dirham card and replaced it with a spangly new card that is compatible with the Visa network. That means it's effectively a pre-paid Visa card and you can use it anywhere you'd use a conventional Visa card - shops, online and so on.


I'm not going to go into the considerable amount of pain I went through to discover this because it would be as tedious to read as it was to go through the process of discovery. Suffice it to say I was applying for an ISBN number for my Middle East edition of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and found myself holding an out of date e-dirham card with the need to get the new one. Note not all government departments are 'up to speed' on the new card - the National Media Council, for instance, took its fee for my 'permission to print' from an old, also known as 'G1', e-dirham card.

You can get the new 'G2' e-dirham from any branch of National Bank of Abu Dhabi. Just rock up and ask for it and, seven dirhams later, you're holding your own piece of pre-paid Visa. I got mine from the Ministry of Economy office which is on the fourth floor of the Etisalat building in Bur Dubai. There's no application process as such to obtain the card - just flash the cash and pocket the fantastic plastic!

Now you can use any NBAD branch ATM machine to charge the card (using cash) once ONLY. A second charge-up requires you to register the card. This takes ten minutes at any NBAD branch (including five minutes for the fragrant lady with an itchy shayla to get the IT wallah to fix her printer's paper jam) and requires a National ID card or passport and filling out a simple form. The process is instantaneous and now you are free to charge the card up and off you go! Their branches are all listed (as PDF's, oddly) at this here handy link.

This is great news for anyone who couldn't otherwise get a credit card or who doesn't trust themselves with one/want to pay the bank's stupid fees. You can, for instance, give yourself a few hundred dirhams 'splurge' money a month and know you can never overdo it. What's more, you've now got a safe online spending card that'll never expose you to any significant risk of fraud - and all for a once-only charge of seven dirhams - no more outrageous annual fees!

The odd thing is how little coverage there has been of this in local media...

How The BBC Microcomputer Became The Heart Of Your Mobile

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Warning - Ancient Geek Post

Ever heard of Advanced RISC Machines or ARM for short? Few people have, but this British company's designs power over 95% of smartphones and tablets in the world today and they're now starting to be used in next generation low-powered servers by major players like Dell and HP.

Where did that come from? From the BBC Micro, if you please. Any British Ancient Geeks out there will remember the cream boxes with the black and red keyboards that were made by Acorn Computer to accompany the BBC's computer literacy push back in the early 1980s. It was an odd offshoot of an odd little industry - long sidelined by Silicon Valley, the Brits had been consistent pioneers of computer technologies, but their innovation never seemed to gain traction and company after company was doomed to fail while US corporations powered to dominance.

One of the earliest pioneers of computing - in the 1950s - was actually British tea company Lyons, believe it or not. And the early 1980s was a time when it looked as if we might actually make it back to the top table of innovation - Acorn Computer, Dragon and Sinclair were at the forefront of the British microcomputer boom. It was an exciting time as I can testify as I was, albeit painfully young and utterly clueless, involved in a ground-breaking British startup myself.

Acorn got up to some ground breaking innovation in its BBC computers, which at one stage looked like they might conquer the US educational market as they had conquered the UK. One aspect of that innovation was its groundbreaking adoption of RISC technologies. Reduced Instruction Set Computing was an approach to processor design that threw less complex tasks at the processor at any one time, resulting in faster, more nimble systems. In fact, Acorn's follow-up to the BBC Micro, the Archimedes, was technically superior to its competitors, but it lacked one thing. It wasn't a PC. Acorn ceded the British educational market to PC clone maker RIM and its Nimbus machines.

Acorn span off its RISC chip design business into a joint venture with Apple and silicon valley chip maker VLSI Technology. By 1998 Acorn, now struggling to remain afloat, took the company to IPO, raising some $29 million. Though handy, the money wasn't enough to stop Acorn being split, stripped and sold. VLSI was to last no longer and was acquired by Philips. That left only ARM and Apple standing.

ARM carried on in the background, quietly designing its clever RISC processors and licensing the technology rather than trying to make the chips itself. Its smart, fast, low-power core processors and graphics chips were licensed by a growing number of chip makers around the world. And then in 2007, after almost three years of secretive R&D work, Apple launched the iPhone. At its core, the beating heart of its System on a Chip architecture, a high performance, low-power ARM Cortex 8 processor.

When Google's Android came along, based on the Linux open source operating system (which ARM had presciently worked to support), the world changed. The combination of Apple's innovation and Google's wide-ranging alliance with handset manufacturers transformed mobile, sidelining Nokia and creating a massive inflection point in technology. These new systems needed smart, powerful, small chipsets with low power consumption. And that's precisely what ARM was offering. This week saw Microsoft, painfully late to the market, unveil its Surface tablet computer based on Windows RT - its mobile operating system and the first Microsoft operating system ever to be based on a non Intel processor.

It's based on a chip from a small, 2,000 person company in Cambridge called ARM...