Internship: Research on the Arab Uprisings

Apologies for the prolonged radio silence, I am not dead - this blog post should at least provide enough proof to make it relatively plausible that this the case - while I was typing it, in any case. Unless there's been a zombie apocalypse, in which case I might be a zombie (but I'm not sure if that counts as dead, probably, I'd not be dead, but undead instead) - in any case, and in absence of a zombie apocalypse, I'm doing an internship. Although really, it feels more like a a crazy hobby sometimes.

The internship entails research on Gender, New Media and the Arab Spring, although all of those words are problematic, so really, it does not entail that at all. However, I do not wish to bore you to death with all the technicalities (yet), so let's just keep it at Gender, New Media and the Arab Spring, also known as "the thing I tell my parents and friends because otherwise I could never have a short conversation about my internship ever again."

Attentive readers might notice the mentioning of a crazy hobby in the first paragraph (well done you!) and it is to this aspect of my internship I wish to turn today. One of my weird hobbies, among many others, is the reading of scientific studies. The topic does not matter much, because if you can think about it, someone has probably done research on it. An example of this is research about the perception of a computer's gender, or the research of a friend of mine who recorded the growing of plants with a very impressive computer and made nice graphs of that data, so she could predict things about plants that might grow in the future. 

The most awesome aspect of my internship at the moment, is all the weird papers I get to read in the name of 'research' - for example, the one I'm reading now is attempting to map out who 'the revolutionaries' in the Arab Spring were, by charting out variables such as 'are male, are single, are more xenophobic, feel secure, have higher perceived control' and so forth. Personally, I'm waiting for 'Always eat chicken on tuesdays,' because I think that there is a correlation between being or becoming a revolutionary and consuming chicken on a specific day of the week.

There's also a mathematical formula that charts the dynamics of a revolution and helps predict the chance of an outbreak of revolutions based on things they observed in the Arab Spring. I'm now imagining some scientists that go "well, the BBC reported on Egypt today, also, it is raining AND there's a female who crossed the street earlier today near the Tahir Square. On the other hand, she did wear a headscarf so I'd say... 40% chance of revolution happening in the Arab World...? Maybe a bit more or less depending on things Morsi does today." ... "What's that you say? Oh, wet snow... Fine, 45% chance of revolution, then." 

And that's why I love my internship. And also because of the view. Because look at it, it is amazing:

"That's not wet snow! You can't even tell different kinds of snow apart? Why did I hire you? It's not important you say?! ARE YOU MAD!? We'd better start preparing for World War three, statistics say it's imminent!"