Female participation in chess around the world

November 27th, 2013 in · 1 Comment

I came across a post today by Fanou Lefebvrea, a young French woman writing and drawing about her experiences of sexism and abuse as a female chess player. She addressed the post to Magnus Carlsen, the newly crowned Norwegian chess world champion.

It’s a sad story, and as I was reading it, I began questioning how universal her experiences were in the chess world. Norway is ranked in the top few countries ranked according to gender equality (see the Gender Equality Index), so I wondered how the situation was in Norway, and how it was elsewhere in the world.

I have no way to measure abuse or sexism, so I took the closest proxy I could find and looked at the rating lists according to FIDE, the international chess body, to see how the ratio of male to female chess players stands for each country.

The topic of female chess strength comes up frequently, and, in most cases, the question is asked why men are stronger. There has never been a female world champion, and the top female players are far weaker than the top male players.

However, the discrepancy is almost entirely explained by participation rates, as this study indicates. Essentially, the ratio of male to female chess players at the top level matches the ratio of male to female players at all levels, so that there’s no significant difference in strength, simply a difference in participation.

So, let’s take a look at the levels of participation of some of the top chess countries, as well as a few others thrown in for geographical curiosity:

Country Male Female M/F Ratio
Armenia 411 84 4.89
Australia 877 87 10.08
Azerbaijan 430 131 3.28
Canada 1959 125 15.67
China 387 160 2.42
Cuba 1175 222 5.29
Czech Republic 4577 248 18.46
Denmark 2022 34 59.47
England 1844 116 15.90
Finland 666 20 33.30
France 11372 896 12.69
Georgia 420 196 2.14
Germany 16481 923 17.86
Hungary 370 56 6.60
India 10574 1237 8.55
Iran 2279 281 8.11
Israel 959 77 12.45
Italy 5395 210 25.69
Japan 104 11 9.45
Mongolia 104 60 1.73
Netherlands 2378 135 17.61
Norway 946 56 16.89
Pakistan 37 2 18.5
Poland 5533 902 6.13
Russia 14276 2316 6.16
Scotland 277 23 12.04
South Africa 221 54 4.09
Spain 13659 629 21.71
Ukraine 2377 338 7.03
United States 3089 178 17.35
Uzbekistan 286 58 4.93
Vietnam 225 140 1.61

The ratios listed above are likely to over-represent females. Since FIDE competitions are divided by gender, the existence of weaker female-only competitions and the need to fill teams, and therefore the higher likelihood of a female appearing on the list than an equivalently rated male, probably means that a higher proportion of females are rated by FIDE than are actually present in the overall chess-playing population. I know in South Africa, at the lower level, the ratio is certainly higher than 4 to 1. But for comparative purposes at least, the figures probably hold.

The first thing to note is that Norway fares very badly by this measure. There are almost 17 male Norwegian chess players rated by FIDE for each 1 Norwegian female. Other Scandinavian countries are even worse, with Denmark propping up the table at 59 to 1, while Finland is 33 to 1. There seems to be no correlation between gender equality in society in general, and an equivalent chess ratio.

Western European countries on the whole fare poorly. England is 16 to 1, Spain 21 to 1, France 13 to 1, Germany 18 to 1, Italy 25 to 1. Scotland, albeit with smaller sample, leads western Europe with a ratio of 12 to 1.

The situation in the United States is similar, 17 to 1, and Australia 10 to 1.

In eastern Europe, traditionally chess powerhouses and still dominant when it comes to the top players, both male and female, the situation is somewhat different. Armenia (where chess is compulsory in schools) has a ratio of 5 to 1, Ukraine 7 to 1, Uzbekistan 5 to 1, Poland 6 to 1, Hungary 7 to 1, Russia 6 to 1, Azerbaijan 3 to 1 and Georgia 2 to 1.

Further east, the ratio improves even more. China, Vietnam and Mongolia all have ratios of 2 to 1, with Vietnam’s 1.61 the best of any country in the sample. India and Japan don’t fare quite as well, both at 9 to 1, but still better than Western Europe. Looking at a few other areas in the world, South Africa has a ratio of 4 to 1, Cuba 5 to 1 and Iran 8 to 1, all substantially ahead of the Western European norm.

So, it seems there’s very little correlation between gender equality and chess equality, but there is a strong correlation with geographic location. Western countries have the worst ratios, and China and neighbouring countries the best.

It’s possible to do more with the data, and consider changes over time, growth rates. What are the differences between countries relatively new to chess, or experiencing strong growth rates, and those with a long, established chess culture.

I can only speculate on the reasons, but it’s clear that the west has a lot of work to do towards making chess a more inclusive pastime.

If any chess players, especially female chess players, do come across this post, I’d be interested in hearing about experiences in your part of the world in the comments below.



In memory of my mother

September 23rd, 2013 in

It was my mom’s funeral yesterday. It was a good day, and I enjoyed meeting some of her friends I hadn’t seen for years, especially from her days before I was born, and learning a little more about her.

Here’s a written adaptation of what I said, especially for those who couldn’t be there.

When someone dies, they take an entire universe with them. Everyone at the funeral, and even those reading this have in some way interacted with that universe, so these are some memories of the forty-one years I was lucky enough to interact with hers.

When I was born, she stopped working to take care of me. It was a sacrifice for her, and she looked back nostalgically at times to her days in the band – she played in Max Adler’s accordion band, which is where she met my dad – and to her time in the United Party youth, where I think she once won secretary of the year.


My dad’s 83rd birthday in 2011

With me at school and needing to get around for sports and the like, she learned to drive. She was in her early fifties by then, and even though the roads of Pinelands were much quieter then, it must have been tough to do, but soon she had my grandfather’s old silver Anglia and could take me around.

I played soccer at school, and, which is probably a surprise to those who knew her in later life, she was always the most vocal and expressive fan, the loudest supporter cheering and shouting from the touchlines. Luckily I was too young to be embarassed, and I always appreciated the support.

I remember scoring a goal once – I was a defender, and it didn’t happen often! I was the complete opposite of her, not at all expressive, so I didn’t do a Ronaldo, whipping my shirt off and sliding across the turf on my knees. Instead, I just turned around and casually walked back to my position while she went crazy on the sideline.

My mom loved research. Some of you may remember the Sunday Times competition from a few years ago where each week clues would be printed, and to find the answer you’d need to go and research in the library. She loved it, and used to spend hours looking up details. My cousin Jenni told me yesterday that she got the final answer right – but not the million rand prize!

But she didn’t only like researching for herself, she did for me as well. I was extremely lazy at school, and would realise the night before that a project was due the next day. However, she’d have everything ready, and would have written the entire project out. All I had to do was write it in my own writing to receive an instant A. Although I can’t remember much about Julius Caesar or Alexander Graham Bell from those projects. But she had a lot more fun doing them than I would have.

I never got any hidings at home, but did come close one day. She had told me I mustn’t run around in the lounge. One day she was out, and, of course, I ran around, and knocked over a glass rooster. It’s still in the lounge today with its patched up tail feathers. When she got back, she was extremely angry, and I remember it vividly, because I never ever saw her that angry. She chased me round the room with a stokie, but never managed to catch me. I’d never thought until a few days ago to ask what significance it had, but Jenni told me today that it probably came from her parents, and this would have been shortly after my grandmother died, so would have had strong sentimental value.

She had a friend, Lorna who lived across the road, and used to come visit most days after work. I used to eavesdrop on their conversations, which were especially interesting when my dad was away – he used to work night shift. Lorna was a strong, loud woman and even when she was whispering I could easily hear from my room. Lorna and my mom are probably responsible for me learning Afrikaans, because whenever they were really trying to keep something from me, they would switch to Afrikaans, but I quickly figured out what they were saying.

When I told Lorna’s son Craig about my mom, he wrote back saying that he remembered her generosity and how she always used to treat him as if he was one of her own. It’s not easy to realise at the time, but his words made me understand how widely her generosity spread – not just to me, or family – many of whom she helped look after, and in turn looked after their children, but to everyone she came into contact with. Even now, people regularly come to the door and she always gave food to anyone who asked.

Her dad, my grandfather, came to stay with us for a while, and he passed away at the house. He was in a lot of pain when he died, and I remember not getting much sleep for a quite a few nights. The night he died I was awake, and heard him die, and my only thought was “thank goodness, now I can go back to sleep”. The next morning my mom came in to tell me that he’d died, which I already knew, and also, trying to comfort me, said that he was in heaven now. I started crying. My mom thought I was crying because he’d died, but I used to have some strange beliefs about heaven and hell and I remember thinking that “no, he wasn’t the kind of person who goes to heaven” and I was crying about that.

A few days ago someone was remembering my mom’s kindness, and jokingly said that she was definitely in heaven. Even my judgemental twelve-year old self would have agreed!

She always supported me unconditionally, even when she didn’t agree with what I was doing. I remember when I wanted to study again – I’d studied IT, and then I wanted to go study English and Philosophy. My father was very against it, and thought I should go out and get a job, and I’m sure she did too, but she supported me. The Gilfillan’s are famously stubborn, but the Dawes’ (my mother’s maiden name) stubborness is even greater. She eventually got her way and I went to UCT to study again.

When I came back from overseas, I proudly brought back a coat. It was a bright, multi-coloured coat/poncho that I loved, and everybody else hated. I remember wanting to go somewhere with my cousin Janet, and she refused to be seen with me in the coat, insisting I leave it at home. Jenni told me recently how much my mother hated it, but she never said as much to me. She did however start to give me clothes vouchers for birthdays and Christmases. She was always good at getting her way in a non-confrontational, indirect way.

She hardly ever drank alcohol, but Christmas’s were an exception, and I remember one Christmas at the house, John and Lindsay suggested Fuzzy Duck as a game. If you don’t know the game, it involves saying “Fuzzy Duck” and “Ducky Fuzz” around in a circle, and changing direction unexpectedly. The main point of the game is that it’s easy to mix up the beginnings and the ends of the words, instead of saying f-u-z-z, you would say f-u-c-k, for example, and one time my mother got it wrong. I think she was the first to do so, so didn’t realise the point of the game, but she burst out laughing hysterically at her uncharacteristic language. I remember being happy that she was enjoying herself so much.


My mom’s 80th birthday in 2011

Everybody always comes back to her kindness. In my rebellious teenage years I remember having the thought once that if I ever had a child I would never let my mother look after them, but, when her grandson Dorje was born, I was very happy to have her helping look after him. They both loved their time together, and it was only a short while before she died that she cancelled his weekly visit. It must have been extremely hard for her to do, and then I think everybody realised how serious it was.

It’s only as I’ve got older have I understood what a rare blessing it is to have had a mother and been close to one so loving, so supportive, and so kind. She’s left me, and so many others, with a host of wonderful gifts for which I can never express enough gratitude.

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Trust and asking

July 1st, 2013 in and

When I was young, I would find it very difficult to ask anyone for help. I remember many stalemates with my father, where I would stubbornly not ask, and he would stubbornly not offer.

A university job cold soliciting advertising for the student newspaper helped immensely!

Not asking for help is a meanness of spirit, as most people are only to happy to have a chance to help. The giver receives a precious opportunity, often worth so much more than what was given.

Here are two inspiring examples of people asking for help, and placing trust in others.

The Ubuntu Girl left home in 2009 with a backpack, a camera, a phone and R100 and walked and hitchhiked for the next year through South Africa. Without a tent or sleeping bag, 150 families took her, a complete stranger, into their homes and provided her with food, shelter and welcome.

She’s crowdfunding a book based on her adventure, so you can help contribute if you wish.

Amanda Palmer is a successful musician. But her first job was as the eight foot bride, and taught her about the human need for connection. Here’s her TED talk on the Art of Asking, couchsurfing and crowdsurfing:

And to round it off, The Bed Song.

“If you’d only asked me, I would have told you.”



South Africa’s first electric car

June 13th, 2013 in

Nissan Leaf
I keep telling my son that by the time he can drive, cars won’t be the destructive beasts farting all over our planet they are now, but will run on clean electricity, and you’ll be able to stand behind one breathing clean air.

The first part of the puzzle is being put in place with the arrival of the first fully electric car in South Africa later this year, the Nissan Leaf.

I hear lots of arguments against electric cars. “They’re more harmful to the environment because they displace the energy production from the car to the coal power station.” This argument is simply nonsense, because, even in South Africa, where, sadly, almost all the electricity produced is with coal, the energy efficiency gains in producing power centrally in a power station far outstrip those of the highly inefficient internal combustion engine. And of course, as the energy production swings to renewable, the gains are dramatic.

More convincing is “the pricing is a ripoff and you’ll never make back in fuel savings the extra you pay upfront.” This is true in many cases, particularly for the early hybrids. But when it comes to pure electric cars, how do things stack up?

Edmunds.com have done extensive calculations on payback periods in the US of various hybrid and electric cars against their conventional equivalents.

Remember that calculations like these are based on quite rigid assumptions. The exchange rate will fluctuate, petrol prices will change, electricity prices will change, car prices will change. So extrapolating them over a long period of time is interesting, but will come nowhere near predicting the actuality.

However, at present rates, the payback period for the electric Nissan Leaf against the equivalent conventional, Nissan Versa, priced at $10,000 less, is 9 years if petrol is $3 a gallon, and 5 years if petrol is $5 a gallon.

That’s based on the US rates for petrol (ranging from $3 to $5 a gallon in the comparisons) and electricity ($0.12 a kWh), and an average usage of 15,000 miles a year. The sales prices are unknown, as are any possible government incentives, but assuming the same hefty R100,000 price difference, how does this compare in South Africa?

Petrol here is more expensive than in the US, a $4.69 per gallon according to my calculations at current rates, and certain to increase quite substantially in July. Electricity prices vary according to the city and other factors, but are generally slightly cheaper here. That means that the payback period is already at the better end of the scale (5 years), and only likely to improve.

So an electric car, or the Nissan Leaf at least, seems to make both environmental and financial sense in South Africa.

The only argument against it is the limited range, quoted as “up to 200km” by Nissan. For the vast majority of most people’s trips, it’ll do just fine, but it will require a change in habits for longer trips, especially for the early adopters, when the fast-charge infrastructure won’t be widespread.

My son’s still got quite a few years to go before he needs to worry about driving, but I’m positive that by the time he starts thinking about it, the cars and cities of his time will be much cleaner than today’s.

And perhaps his first car will be a 10-year old Nissan Leaf.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)



Hei Hei Hei

June 6th, 2013 in and

It’s been a while since my last “I’m learning” post.

Let’s see. There’s been:

So what’s the latest language I can add to the “learned and have forgotten everything” list? Buryat? Karelian? Maybe even Mi’kmaq?

The most important factor in learning a language is motivation, so while I’m sure those three languages are great fun to learn, I’m not going to be using them to speak to anyone in the forseeable future. If I was going to learn a totally useless languages, it would have to match Toki Pona’s 120-root word vocabulary, and the to-the-pointedness of lesson two’s “mi wile unpa e ona”.

I’m off to Finland later this year. The Finn’s mostly speak great English, but, in spite of the fact that after my two months of Finnish, I’ll be saying “hei hei hei” (hei is hello) and smiling maniacally, and anyone who hangs around will immediately switch to English, learning Finnish still sounds fun.

The Defense Language Institute has four levels of language difficulty for English-speakers. Category one, the easiest to learn, consists of other European languages with a shared vocabulary, such as French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as linguistically simple languages such as Swahili. Category two includes languages such as German, Hindi and Urdu. Finnish is in level three, up there with Russian, Vietnamese and Amharic. So, not easy. Category four is the shortest list, containing the most challenging languages for English speakers, such as Japanese, Mandarin and Arabic.

So how am I learning Finnish?

The most well-known language sites online, such as Busuu, Babbel and Duolingo don’t list Finnish. LiveMocha does, but it’s friendly “We don’t work in Linux” web app doesn’t inspire much hope.

So, my strategy so far has been:

1) Surface Languages – the standard sort of course, ranging from “hello” to, er, whatever comes next

2) Memrise – a learning tool I think has great potential, but which I’ve never had reason to try until now. Memrise was founded by Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory, and Greg Detre, a Princeton neuroscientist specializing in the science of memory and forgetting. A “Grand Master of Memory” is an award given to people who have achieved three feats. Memorise 1000 random digits in an hour. Memorise the order of 10 decks of cards in an hour. Memorise the order of one deck of cards in under two minutes. There are 196 million grand masters of memory in the world at the moment. No. No there’re not. There are 131 in the world as of the end of 2012, including two South Africans.

Memrise uses memory association in quite an innovative way, and spaced repetition, so seems to make great sense as a tool.

3) Finally, most fun of all, Youtube. I don’t mean people at their webcam counting to 1 million. So far I’ve watched Joki, a very good film, and An Unfinished Movie. This is probably the equivalent of watching Trainspotting to learn English, but I’m having fun.

Ask me in September how it went.

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Wiki Cape Town, Joe Slovo and a storyteller

May 26th, 2013 in

There was a Cape Town Wikimedia meetup this week, and I got to meet a couple of new people. Victor, a Wikimedia storyteller from San Francisco, is in Cape Town, mainly to document the inspiring story of a school in Joe Slovo Park that have successfully lobbied FNB Connect for free access to Wikipedia pages. A few people from Wikimedia ZA will be going to the school this week to tell people more about the project, and teach people to edit.

I also finally got to meet Dumisane Ndubane, who’s the president of Wikimedia South Africa. We’ve interacted online for quite a long time, so it was great to meet in person. Dumisane lives in Jhb and is passing through Cape Town after coming back from the Chapter’s Conference in Milan.

Oarabile Mudongo was also there, one of the few active Tswana editors. He’s hoping to get a Botswana Chapter started. Here’s a great video of Oarabile speaking about the impact Wikipedia has had on his life.

The Wikimedia South Africa board seems to be doing some good work, and the Joburgpedia project, which aims to encourage heritage institutions (government and private) to contribute high-quality content sounds like it’s making good progress.



WordPress spam, Akismet and Cookies for Comments

May 22nd, 2013 in

This blog gets about 1 spam comment a second.

Not bad for an obscure blog with, as I write this, only one post open for comments.

Akismet, the spam plugin does a great job of keeping the spam out, although recently a few more spam posts have been sneaking through for moderation, perhaps two a week. Still considering I get about 600 000 spam comments in that week, a miss ratio of 1 in 300 000 is rather exceptional.

The volume of spam shot up markedly after this post, which in retrospect, isn’t so surprising, since it contains every about spam phrase out there.

A feature I’d like to see in WordPress is the ability to automatically delete spam after a certain period. Apparently this is automatically set to one month, but since in that month I’d get about 2.5 million posts, and have to up the space on my backup server, I prefer to delete spam posts manually a little more often than that.

Deleting spam posts isn’t entirely smooth. If the number is too large, the script times out and I have to re-run a number of times. Since the spam arrives so quickly, I never have an empty spam folder, as by the time the deletion has happened, but before the page reloads, there’s normally a couple more posts.

After coming back from the weekend to 40 000 spam posts, I decided to look for a solution. It’d be easy enough to adjust the period in the code manually, but since I’d have to re-implement the change each time I upgraded, I prefer to look for an existing solution.

Enter Cookies for Comments. The solution is simple – the plugin sets a random cookie, which, if it doesn’t exist when a comment is posted, is almost a sure sign that the comment is being placed by a bot.

You can set the plugin to either automatically mark the comment as spam (effectively catching the two or so comments a week Akismet misses, but not solving my problem), or automatically delete the comment.

I set it automatically delete comments. Boom! Blissful silence with my recently-cleared spam folder now not moving from 247 comments.

You can play further and use an Apache rewrite rule to block the requests from even reaching WordPress, which I haven’t implemented yet, but looks hopeful in reducing unnecessary load further.

What’s that? You’re suspicious of cookies and have disabled them, and now you can’t comment on my blog? I doubt you can do much else on the internet either…

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May 2013 African language Wikipedia update

May 10th, 2013 in

There’s a current proposal to close the Xhosa Wikipedia for lack of activity, so I thought it’d be a good time to see the progress of the African and South African language Wikipedias.

Heading the list of African-language Wikipedias by article count, Malagasy is still racing ahead in creating new articles, mainly thanks to articles automatically created by bots. These articles aren’t always ones that you’d imagine would be high priority. There are currently over 200 galaxies with their own article, some with broken templates, for example the one on the NGC 953 elliptical galaxy in the constellation Triangulum. But no article on Nelson Mandela, or Omer Beriziky, the prime minister of Madagascar.

So it’s a somewhat artificial indicator, but there is still a reasonable level of activity, and it would be interesting to measure whether bot-activity helps encourage human activity.

Second is Yoruba, where the huge burst has slowed (again, many are bot-related, and the first random article I clicked on was minor space body 3011 Chongqing), but there’s still steady progress. Afrikaans in third continues well, and is probably in the best shape of any African-language Wikipedia. After being overtaken by Swahili, it has seen consistent activity, has a healthy community, and is growing far faster than Swahili.

Swahili and Amharic are still growing steadily, while Egyptian Arabic is growing quickly, and is on track to pass Amharic. Of the others with more than 1000 articles, only Kinyarwandahas has stalled, while Kabyle and Shona have seen good growth.

Language 1/1/2007 11/2/2011 13/4/2012 16/11/2012 9/5/2013
Malagasy   3806 36767 38753 45361
Yoruba 517 12174 29894 30158 30585
Afrikaans 6149 17002 22115 24821 26752
Swahili 2980 21244 23481 24519 25265
Amharic 742 6738 11572 11806 12360
Egyptian Arabic     8433 9341 10379
Somali   1639 2354 2525 2757
Lingala 292 1394 1816 1951 2025
Kinyarwanda     1501 1807 1817
Kabyle       1144 1503
Shona       1272 1421
Wolof   1116 1814 1129 1161

So overall, in Africa, some good progress.

Of the South African language Wikipedias, outside of Afrikaans, the state is as dismal as ever. Three have actually lost articles (usually due to removing spam), while a proposal has been made to close the Xhosa Wikipedia. Xhosa is the smallest-remaining African language Wikipedia still open. A number of smaller languages have already been closed. Growth in Zulu has slowed, Venda has shown flickers of activity, while Sotho has grown by 37 articles, although it’s still second-smallest, ahead of Xhosa.

Let’s not forget Ndebele, which as the least widely spoken official South African language, still has no representation.

South African Language Wikipedias

Language 1/10/2007 19/11/2011 13/4/2012 16/11/2012 9/5/2013
Afrikaans 8374 20042 22115 24821 26754
Northern Sotho 0 557 566 686 685
Zulu 107 256 483 568 579
Tswana 40 240 490 497 495
Swati 56 359 361 363 364
Tsonga 10 192 193 243 240
Venda 43 193 190 194 204
Sotho 43 132 145 151 188
Xhosa 66 125 136 141 148

Neville Alexander, a champion of multi-lingualism in South Africa, recently died, and there don’t seem to be prominent leaders taking up the mantle. While there are eleven official languages, English seems to be becoming ever-more dominant, there’s a dearth of local literature and language departments are shrinking in the country’s universities. A recent Wikipedia workshop at the University of Cape Town was co-ordinated by one of the Wikimedia South Africa board members, Douglas Scott, and in spite of being a standard lecture as part of the curriculum, not a single native-speaker turned up. The article-counts reflect this situation, so it seems unlikely there’ll be a change anytime soon.

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South Africa slumps in the 2013 World Press Freedom Index.

February 18th, 2013 in and

The 2013 World Press Freedom Index came out recently, and sadly, South Africa has slid alarmingly since I last blogged about it in 2007, and even more so when compared with its peak rating in 2003. Note that a lower score is better.

Year Score Ranking
2013 24.56 (-12.56) 52 (-10)
2012 12 (0) 42 (-4)
2010 12 (-3.5) 38 (-5)
2009 8.5 (-0.5) 33 (+3)
2008 8 (+5) 36 (+7)
2007 13 (-1.75) 43 (+1)
2006 11.25 (-4.75) 44 (-13)
2005 6.5 (-1.5) 31 (-5)
2004 5 (-1.66) 26 (-5)
2003 3.33 21 (+5)

Although the country still has a robust and critical press, it’s mainly the threat of the “Protection of State Information Bill” that sees South Africa slump well away from “good” to deep into the “satisfactory” category.

Sadly, things are even worse for the other BRICS countries, with Brazil (108th, -9) falling after a number of journalists were killed, India (140th, -9) also seeing increasing violence against journalists and increasing censorship, China still oppressively imprisoning many journalists (173rd, +1) and Russia (148th, -6) down too after an increase in repression.

Finland remains top for the fourth consecutive year, with a number of other Nordic and European countries filling out the “good” category, along with New Zealand and Jamaica.

Among African countries, Namibia and Cape Verde top the charts and are rated “good”, with Ghana, Botswana, Niger, Burkina Faso and the Comoros all ahead of South Africa with satisfactory ratings.

A number of other African countries saw big gains, including Malawi up 71 and the Ivory Coast up 63. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, recovering from its crackdown on the Occupy Movement, gained 15 positions up to 32nd in the world, while Canada lost ground after its obstruction of journalists during the “Maple Spring” student movement, and increasingly oppressive legislation, leaving Jamaica as the freest country in the hemisphere.

The gains are offset by a number of countries seeing worsening situations. Mali, after the coup and insurgency there, fell 74 positions, and Tanzania 36 positions after the murder of two journalists. The other big faller was Japan, down 31 positions after restricting all access to information about the Fukushima disaster.

Here’s hoping that, wherever you are in the world, 2013 will see you a little freer to have your say.

Read the full report on the Reporters Without Borders site.

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MySQL, MariaDB and relative asymptotics

February 14th, 2013 in and

In 2002 I wrote a book on MySQL. At the time, I was working crazy fulltime hours for IOL and I was exhausted by the end of the process. I’ve been approached quite a few times since to write an update, or to write other related books, but have never had the energy, time or interest. The most recent approach, by a publisher I won’t mention, was for a hilariously obscure topic. I’ve deleted the email, so can’t recall the exact topic, but it was along the lines of “Asymptotic Relative Efficiency in Python”. Not only have I hardly used Python, but I’m relatively inefficient in asymptotics. It did make me wonder about the quality of the rest of their books.

It’s obviously taken 10 and a half years for the memories to fade because although I’m as busy as ever, I’m considering an update to the book. I’ve been watching MySQL’s progress with interest, from the company’s purchase by Sun to the Oracle takeover.

With concerns about the direction of MySQL under Oracle, MariaDB is gaining widespread prominence, and it’s been good to see that Fedora and OpenSUSE are the first two Linux distributions to announce that they will move towards replacing MySQL with MariaDB.

MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but contains a number of enhancements and has been reported to perform better. Wikipedia were the first high-profile entity to begin switching, and their move has probably triggered similar moves elsewhere. MariaDB is administered by the non-profit MariaDB foundation in a much more open and transparent manner than MySQL currently, and employs some of the original MySQL developers.

Where Fedora goes, Red Hat follows, and it’s only a matter of time before MariaDB is widely available as a standard on most server setups.

Although I still use it myself regularly as a reference, the old book is quite dated now, so it’ll be interesting to get to grips with all the enhancements that MariaDB offers.



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