Now when the government of Kazakhstan pays for advertising space in the New York Times, as they are wont to do, it is clearly marked as a paid advertisement, although I don’ t think it tells you
who paid (And one wonders if the Kazakhstan government is aware that the articles are so clearly marked, if they really think anyone believes the articles were written by New York Times staff. And note that the New York Times archives do not list those paid ads. They are clearly separated from the real news.

However, having watched several “Eye on…” specials from CNN, I can tell you that they are not at all clearly marked as sponsored. Nor are they separated from other reports, either on TV or on the site. According to Eurasianet, sponsorship is mentioned by only briefly:

The spots are part of CNN International’s “Eyes On” series. Pay close attention and only the one-minute promo for the series ends with an announcement, “In association with the following,” leaving the viewer to try to read two logos on screen. One is clearly Samruk Kazyna, the state fund that owns all state assets. The other, particularly fuzzy, logo is the Astana Economic Forum, the brainchild of President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Both link to a page promoting Astana’s bid to host Expo 2017.

And again one wonders who the Kazakhstan government is fooling. Or perhaps they don’t even inform their embassy what is going on, as the Kazakhstan Embassy in the US just sent out a letter that seems to indicate that CNN’s interest in Kazakhstan is motivated solely by its importance on the national stage:

No 81 July 18, 2012
CNN’s “Eye on Kazakhstan” program
The world media has taken a growing interest in Kazakhstan. The nation has played a leadership role in nuclear non-proliferation. It has also been in the news lately as a key supporter of the Northern Distribution Network to Afghanistan and as the provider of educational opportunities to Afghan students at Kazakh Universities.
Kazakhstan’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world and it offers tempting investment opportunities for foreign corporations. The landlocked country is emerging as a transportation and logistical hub in Eurasia, linking China with Europe and Russia with South Asia. Its tourism is poised to grow as it invests in infrastructure making its natural beauty more accessible. Coupled with great hospitality of its people, Kazakhstan is emerging as tourists’ paradise in the region.
CNN, in particular, has taken notice and has been recently broadcasting stories titled “Eye on Kazakhstan.” The webpage of the program allows the visitors to watch these stories online: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/eye.on/index.html .
Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry and its Embassy in Washington, D.C., are pleased to welcome international media to Kazakhstan and hopes that introducing Kazakhstan to the world will make the country even more open to best ideas, technologies and international cooperation. [Italics mine]

Personally, I think it is shameful of CNN to broadcast sponsored advertisements as if they are objective news–Could you imagine people being able to pay for their own news reports about themselves?

I mention this partly because it’s always a good thing to have, partly because I know that some of my readers are web designers who live in Kazakhstan and they may be looking for something to do (10% for the idea is acceptable). And partly because with the news that Saks Fifth Avenue is opening in Kazakhstan, I was wondering whether there was a way of knowing if these Western stores opening in Kazakhstan have the same quality as the same stores abroad. I assume some of them are franchised or licensed and therefore are managed by different companies. Not that I usually shop at Saks Fifth Avenue…

I seem to remember Lance and Alberto talking about having to buy certain cycling equipment when they were abroad because they couldn’t get good quality stuff in Kazakhstan, but I can’t find a source on that. However, well sourced are the frequent radio breakdowns during last year’s Tour de France. More importantly Contador blames the breakdown a TV in the Astana pace car for Chaingate, when Andy Schleck, the leader, had to stop to change his chain. Although it’s bad form to try to beat the leader when he has a pit stop, Contador didn’t know he’d stopped and thus charged on ahead.

So it seems unlikely that Contador would want to return to Astana in any way, shape or form.

Interestingly, it sounds as if Barnes is looking at the camps not as death camps but as labor camps, literally realizing the Soviet ideology that labor in service of the motherland makes man free. The idea was never to ostracize, destroy or humiliate “enemies of the state”, but to rehabilitate them:

The most salient feature of the Gulag was an apparent paradox: forced labor, high death rates and an oppressive atmosphere of violence, cold and constant hunger coexisted with camp newspapers and cultural activities, a constant propaganda barrage of correction and reeducation and the steady release of a significant portion of the prisoner population.

The Bolsheviks could not escape their fundamental belief in the malleability of the human soul and they believed that labor was the key to reforging criminals. The very harshness of the Gulag was seen as necessary to break down a prisoner’s resistance in order to rebuild him or her into a proper Soviet citizen. If a prisoner refused correction, the brutality of the Gulag would lead to inevitable death, for the Bolsheviks were no humanitarians. If mistakes were to be made, they believed it was better to kill too many than too few.

It’s an interesting view and I look forward to seeing the research behind it, particularly statistics on how many political prisoners were set free after rehabilitating themselves. I’d also be curious where Kazakhstan in particular comes in. Of course, there were many labor camps in what is now Kazakhstan, but I wasn’t aware that they played a fundamental role.

From Kazakhstan into Space 50 Years Ago is a great account of Gagarin’s trip and has links to more great resources. I like the idea of celebrating Yuri’s Night

Via Engadget

I’m hoping this might a sort of public forum where civil servants and government agencies that don’t perform well will be outed publicly and information about what is being done to make the government more open and transparent will be posted.

Interestingly it doesn’t distinguish between Kazakh and Russian so searching for сын (Russian for “son”) matches the Kazakh сынауға as well as Russian words. And while it does well recognizing word forms that contain the search term (i.e. сын will match сыночок, сына and сынақтан and Назарбаев will produce results for not only Назарбаев, but also Назарбаева), it doesn’t do well with word forms that are shorter or vary from the search term, so looking for дочери will match дочерью but not дочь. This seems like something that a Kazakh/Russian language search engine should be able to do since there are so many word roots.

It also seems to do better with general terms rather than specific terms. So searching for крем gives you better results than searching for крем для глаза (No results) and searching for a brand name like eyesential also gives you no results. (This started while looking for a specific brand of eye cream for my wife).

It’d be interesting to run a comparison with Google or Yandex in terms of usefulness of results, but I leave that to IT people, statisticians, and those with more free time than me.