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.

There’s not a lot of apps out there that target Kazakhstan specifically. There’s a few travel apps, including the intriguing Almaty Walking Tours (which costs $4.99 so I won’t be buying it anytime soon) and World Radio Kazakhstan which seems to get you world radio stations targeted to Kazakhstan like RFE/RL.

But I was impressed to see Navitel, a GPS app for Kazakhstan. It’s a free 30 day trial. After that you have to buy the map which costs $54.99–less than what systèmes GPS would cost anyway.

Navitel works pretty well for directions and tracking your position. The interface could be a little more user-friendly (c.f. earlier post on inconvenience in Kazakhstan), but the basic functions (search and route planning) are easy to figure out. There’s a fairly good database of businesses on there for Astana and Almaty although hopefully they’ll add more. Not sure about the regional towns. The voice module seems to go on and off. It doesn’t always tell you what to do, which makes it not great for driving.

But overall a good first step.

Other ways of getting an MBA from a Western university include an online business degree from accredited schools and someday perhaps, attending our very own Nazarbayev University. Of course some who go the online business degree route, forget to make sure that the school is accredited and reputable and not just a diploma mill. Not that international students going to bricks and mortar universities aren’t also taken in by schools like Oxford Brooks, not quite as reputable as Oxford University.