Archive for August, 2008

I want to take a brief moment to explain some basic political concepts I’ve learnt during the past few days.

A Nation
A nation is a human group sharing common characteristics of culture, language, historical experiences etc.
There are about 200 states whilst there are about 2000 nations.

A Centralized State
This name is used when talking about states which are governed from the capital. Most states are centralized.

A Federal State (a union)
When power has been decentralized from the capital to different provinces the state has become federal. Examples include the USA.

A Government
The ruling party of a country including a set of institutions (ruling the country).
The government has power over the military and police, amongst other things.

A Parliament
This is the lawmaking body of a state.

The Head of Government
Also known as the prime minister, bundeskansler or statsminister (in German resp. Swedish).

The Head of State
The head of state can be a king or a president. Often this post only has a symbolic value, becoming more powerful during times of war.

A Constitution
A constitution is a set of fundamental laws about how to rule a country and fundamental laws about important values in society, e.g. human rights and freedom of speech.

Democracy

• Direct democracy: everyone is allowed to vote. Referendums are held.
• Indirect democracy: when representatives (to a parliament) are elected to make decisions.

What makes a state? How do you define a country? I will try to define, simplify and explain the main definitions below.

What do you need to call yourself a country?

• A territory with clearly defined borders.
• A population, preferably with a strong sense of cohesion. I.e a population who believe they actually are part of your country.
• Law and order with a strong basis, such as a constitution.
• A government with a monopoly of coercive power. I.e a government with the unhindered power to rule your country.
• Sovereignty. I.e no other state is allowed to violate your borders.
• Last but absolutely not least: you need recognition from your neighbors. I.e you can not just take a piece of land and call it your country, the surrounding states (as well as the superpowers) need to accept you.

The incident that “started” the first World War, as you may know, was the assassination of the Austrian crown prince, Franz Ferdinand.
But the real causes were many. Below I have stated some.
Some great powers grew weak, whilst some grew strong. This put the “Balance of Power” out of balance, essentially disrupting the European king’s reign.
The Balance of Power was disrupted in 1914 by the development of European politics, the main issues highlighted here:

• The emergence of Germany (unified in 1871) as a Great Power on the continent.
• The gradual weakening of the Ottoman Empire, which started when Greece became independent in 1830 and Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria in 1878. The term the sick man of Europe for the Ottoman Empire derived from this decay.

Also, socialist movements and their growth was a threat to the ruling elites of Germany. The aristocracy including Wilhelm II wanted to keep the growing number of industrial workers from supporting the socialist movement.
Instead, they wanted to rally the workers behind the emperor for the nationalist cause: by launching Wilhelm’s so-called “Weltpolitik” it was hoped that nationalist enthusiasm would keep the workers loyal to king and country.
Next article in the series: What makes a State?

In Vienna year 1815 the leaders of Europe met and organized a system to avoid wars and keep power between each other.
Whenever a nation needed help to suffocate a revolution or an other form of disturbing movement, they received assistance from nearby countries. Whenever two kings were arguing they decided to have a conference to discuss the issue. This way the countries could avoid wars and revolutions, thereby keeping a firm grip on the power over Europe.
These ideas from Vienna were for instance used when Great Britain and France raced to conquer Africa between 1885 and 1895. They decided beforehand on so called “rules” which kept the two Great Powers aside and avoiding a war.

Next article in the series: Origins of WWI.

I have, during the past few minutes, been installing and fine-tuning a reCAPTCHA engine on this blog.

When I first saw these new captchas, a year ago or so, I had no idea what the point of them was. But, as time went by, my interest of this thing grew, and today I started reading up on what it did.

A quote from the reCAPTCHA site:

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

You might be wondering how reCAPTCHA can know if you’re spelling the word right or wrong? It assumes that if you spell the first word right, you’re spelling the next word correct as well. Does it work? Yes, I think it does, and therefore I have added it to the comment- and contactform. Have fun digitalizing books!

During my two weeks stay at my summerhouse in the southern archipelago of Sweden I have been doing many fun things.
I’ve been working some on my motocross bike, an old Yamaha DT-50 65cc with loads of customized parts. It accelerates at an AMAZING speed and sounds wonderful.

When the weather is windy enough I do windsurfing, and when it’s calm I do waterskiing. The latter is something I do at very rare occasions, but something I am enthusiastic about.
During very calm period it feels like plowing through a big piece of butter with the skis, just an unbelievable feeling to say the least.
Those of you who have me as a Facebook friend know where to look for pictures, I might upload some here as well.

Do you do any watersports? Comment!