"You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects." - Will Rogers

***

My favourite periodical:


March 3rd:

Keeping a promise
SIR – As you say, in order to lift its boycott the Western world has set three sensible conditions on the Palestinian Authority (“A holy but puzzling alliance”, February 17th). But when will we set the same three conditions on Israel: to recognise Palestine, to renounce violence and to keep their side of previous agreements? How can we expect peace in the Middle East when we boycott the Palestinians yet reward Israel with billions of dollars of aid when both sides are ignoring the basic preconditions for peace? The conditions are simple. Apply them equally to both sides and peace will have a chance.

Kamal Hassan
Toronto

Blonde bombshell
SIR – I have long considered the influential lives portrayed in your weekly obituary to comprise a deserving, exclusive club, to which I could only aspire. However, now that you have immortalised the “pneumatic” Anna Nicole Smith (Obituary, February 17th), who was unskilled, uneducated and untalented, and despite her having absolutely no impact on the global economy, world politics or the advancement of the human species, it is clear that I must set my sights higher, or engineer bigger breasts.

Donna Anton
Hayle, Cornwall

"The wife of America's ambassador to Greece does not sit idly at home: she is America's ambassador to Albania, next door."

"According to Goldman Sachs, the latest jump in the Vix (a measure of stockmarket volatility) took it eight standard deviations from its average. If conventional models are correct, such an event should not have happened in the history of the known universe. Then again, the move in energy prices that caused the collapse last year of Amaranth, the hedge fund, was a nine standard-deviation event. Perhaps modellers do not know the universe as well as they would like to think."


March 10th:

"That said, there is more to handling call-centre queries than simply understanding language and looking things up in databases. Sheryl Brahnam, a researcher at Missouri State University in Springfield, suggests that it will also be necessary to program chatbots to deal with verbal abuse. In some cases, she says, companies that have used chatbots to handle online queries have found that when confronted by verbal abuse or sexual innuendo, the chatbots were programmed to respond inappropriately in kind, with insults of their own.

Dr Brahnam has also found that the appearance of the chatbot's on-screen persona, or avatar, has a significant impact on how much abuse is levelled at it. “My study showed that you get more abuse and sexual comments with a white female compared with a white male,” she says. Black female avatars were the most abused of all."


"While shopping one day at a mall in Jeddah, Mr Wright and a few of his fellow male reporters spotted two women. Both were wearing the niqab, fully covered except for their eyes. (Saudi men call such women BMOs or “black moving objects”.) Pointing to them, his companions whispered, without any sense of irony, “Check 'em out!” Mr Wright compares Saudi Arabian culture to a hypnotised chicken. Repressed and depressed, warped by sexual apartheid, young Muslims there seem to exist in a social coma."