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Greeting Customs

Greeting customs vary greatly across cultures, influenced by context, relationships, age, and gender. In Europe, giving kisses is a common way to greet close relatives and friends, though men typically skip the kisses when greeting each other.

In Belgium, one kiss is customary, while in certain French regions, people greet with up to four kisses. Understanding these nuances can enhance our intercultural interactions and show respect for different traditions.
How do you greet people in your culture?

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Mongolia

Mongolia has a vast landmass, but only about three million inhabitants. Mongolia has a long and fascinating history. The most famous Mongol of all time was undoubtedly Genghis Khan, the fierce warrior-ruler who created the Mongol Empire. Since that time, many people have claimed descent from him, and modern DNA testing suggests that most of them are right! Approximately 8% of all the men in an area of Asia from northeast China to Uzbekistan have genetic markers showing that they are descended from Genghis Khan. That’s equivalent to about 0.5 percent of all the men in the world!



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Liechtenstein

With a population of less than 40,000, and an area of just over 160 square kilometres, German-speaking Liechtenstein is one of the smallest nations in the world. It is a semi-constitutional monarchy under the Prince of Liechtenstein and has the dubious distinction of being the last European country to give women the vote. In 1984, Liechtenstein held a referendum on women’s suffrage—in which, obviously, only men were allowed to vote. The motion barely passed, with just 51.3% voting in favour. Three of Liechtenstein’s municipalities resisted giving women the vote in local elections until 1986. 



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Ulster Scots

Ulster Scots can be a contentious issue. Many linguists consider it a dialect of Scots, some a dialect of English, while others even a language. Everyone agrees that Scots arrived in Ulster in the early 1600s as the spoken language of the planters from lowland Scotland, and that it gradually became distinctively Ulster in nature over the years that followed. Today, about 2% of the population of Northern Ireland claims to speak Ulster Scots and the British government is legally required to facilitate those who speak it. 

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Madagascar’s Ancestor Dance

The Malagasy people of Madagascar practice a tradition that involves removing the bodies of their deceased loved ones from family crypts every seven years, wrapping them in fresh shrouds, and writing their names on their shrouds to ensure that they will not be forgotten. They dance carrying the freshly wrapped remains before returning them to their resting place. Malagasy people often look forward to these events, which are not just sombre, but also an occasion for extended families to come together to spend some quality time. 



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The Island of Guernsey

The island of Guernsey is closer to France than to Great Britain, but it is actually a British Crown Dependency, which means that it is not technically part of the United Kingdom, even though the government of Britain handles its defence and foreign affairs. The name “Guernsey” comes from Old Norse, but the island has been settled since the Neolithic period. When a peace treaty was signed between Britain and France in 1483, Pope Sixtus IV issued a Papal Bull stating that anyone who bothered the Guernsey islanders would be automatically excommunicated.

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Interesting Fact: Qatar

Qatar has a population of over 2.5 million, but only about 12% are actually Qatari citizens, with the remainder expatriates from a large number of backgrounds, including South Asians, Filipinos, Egyptians and Europeans, drawn to the service and finance industries. While Arabic is the official language, English is the most common second language, and is often used as the language of commerce. Since the late twentieth century, Qatar has had a lively literature movement and, unusually for the region, a large number of published women authors.

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Svalbard

Svalbard is a tiny Arctic archipelago, about halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and the most northern settlement in the world with a permanent civilian population. Over 2500 people live in Svalbard year-round. Since 1925, Svalbard has been recognised as part of Norway, and it is also a free economic zone and a demilitarised zone. Despite belonging to Norway, residents come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, including Russians and Ukrainians. Even though summer temperatures peak at about six degrees Celsius, the people of Svalbard come together to play soccer at one of their three football pitches.

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Interesting History | Cyrpus

Cyprus has a famously complex history and set of identities, but not everyone knows that some parts of Cyprus are still under British governance. The small areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia have been British Overseas Territories since Cyprus became independent in 1960. Cyprus has been asking for the return of these territories ever since, but so far Britain has resisted giving them back because of their strategic location. To maintain the situation, Britain forbids the permanent settlement of these areas by local residents. 

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Culture Interesting facts

LLMs are opaque search engines – change my mind

I am going to start with stating the obvious, and continue in a bit of a roundabout way, so please bear with me here…

When someone enters text into a search engine, their purpose is not normally to see how many or which web pages contain those words, but to find something out, say for example how to clean the filter on their dishwasher, or how to buy a widget. So far, so obvious.

So, in a way, Large Language Models (LLMs) are very much like search engines: they distil the content they find and present it in a way that, hopefully, will result in the user finding the answer they seek. The problem is that LLMs are much less transparent in how that occurs.

Now, I may be showing my age, but I remember when the first search engines came online. Initially, they were simple systems that used something akin to SQL queries to search pages containing certain keywords and presented them to the user. If I wanted to find out how to clean the filter on my dishwasher, for example, I would type “+clean +filter +dishwasher” into Altavista and it showed me the pages containing those three words in the hope that at least one would contain the relevant information.

This system relied on the assumption that the authors of the indexed pages wrote them without considering that they would be indexed by, and accessed through, a search engine. Once more people started using search engines to access information, the authors of web pages realised that their visibility, and therefore their revenue, depended on the results delivered by search engines. This changed how content was written and presented – one stopped writing for readers and started writing for search engines. It was the birth of Search Engine Optimisation. At that point, Internet users started encountering pages created specifically to take advantage of the search engine, with titles like: “Clean the filter on your dishwasher” followed by a deluge of spam and virus links, which the search engine was not equipped to filter out.

Search evolved with “smarter” engines like Google, which devised search technologies to outsmart SEO techniques and keep the results of the search relevant to the users.

As everyone here knows, an online search has three actors with often divergent goals:

  • Users want to find the information they are looking for.
  • Search engines want to keep users coming back but also to direct them to paid advertising.
  • Content strategists want to either “trick” the engines into sending users to their advertising pages as if they were informative or accept the advertising model – in other words, to adopt a SEO and/or a PPC strategy, respectively. Even here, it is in the engines’ interest to maximise the amount of money that advertisers pay for each actual lead, which against the advertisers’ interest.

 

This divergence of interest, especially between search engines and page optimisers, has created an “arms race” of techniques. SEO tries to create content so that search engines will present it as relevant, while search engines try to filter out that content so that people will either click on paid content or find actual information.

Again, nothing new here.

Back in the day, search engines like Altavista worked on the assumption that the web pages it indexed had not been created specifically to game the system. Today, Google works on the assumption that it can always stay a few steps ahead of the pages that actually aretrying to game it (with varying degrees of success). Similar to Altavista, today’s LLMs rely on the fact that the content they process was not designed with them in mind. In other words, they are using a “naïve” dataset. This won’t last long, however.

Right now, only a minority of people use LLMs like ChatGPT to get answers. But as LLMs are used by more people, the commercial potential of nudging those tools will become greater. Because of the lower transparency of the LLMs in distilling the content of their training sets, this is more complicated than stuffing a page with keywords. If there is a “LLM-optimisation” industry it’s still in its infancy, but it’s likely that the conflict of interest between the tools used to digest the Internet’s content, and the makers of that content, will create the same problems of relevance in the LLM world as they do for search engines today.

It is also possible that there will be insurmountable technical obstacles to influencing the output of LLMs – more than there are with Google results today. After all, SEO was a lot easier with Altavista. Today, it is much more difficult, largely because of the relative lack of transparency in how Google produces its results. LLMs are very opaque regarding how the knowledge they collect from their datasets is distilled into an answer. It would be quite unprecedented in the history of internet searches for it to become impossible to trick search engines, but ultimately it may come down to the difficulty of creating sufficiently large “biased” datasets.

As LLMs become mainstream tools, we will see the same scenarios that we saw with search engines play out: conflicts of interest between users, LLM providers and creators of content, as long as the latter can shape their output to sway the results of LLMs in their favour. And lurking above all this is the eye of regulators, who will certainly have plenty to say if LLMs start to substantially influence what people think about the world.