Thursday, August 30, 2007
I will be working in West Asia for two weeks
I will be working abroad for the next couple of weeks and will probably be pretty busy and constrained by limited connectivity. I probably will not post much. Sorry!
"Knowledge Is Priceless but Textbooks Are Not"
Read the full article by MICHELLE SLATALLA in The New York Times, August 30, 2007.
Slatalla writes that buying required text books at the campus bookstore can cost the average college student $700 to $1,000 a year, according to a Congressional advisory committee report released in May.
Slatalla writes that buying required text books at the campus bookstore can cost the average college student $700 to $1,000 a year, according to a Congressional advisory committee report released in May.
Although oodles of online stores and marketplaces — like Biblio.com, Abebooks.com and A1books.com — have in the past five years built large inventories of both used and discounted new textbooks, there’s no single site where you can always get the best deal.....Comment: College textbooks are expensive for reasons too numerous to go into here. But even for the rest of us, these links are useful. Bookfinder especially is interesting when you want to find a really unusual book. JAD
Maketextbooksaffordable.org (is) a site operated by a coalition of student public interest research groups.....
Bookfinder.com, an umbrella search site that sifts through the inventories of hundreds of thousands booksellers worldwide, started a simple, easy-to-use textbook search tool. The way it works: enter a title, I.S.B.N. or author’s name in Bookfinder’s textbooks search box to navigate a huge database of 125 million new and used books. You can compare prices, shipping costs and the availability of less expensive editions published overseas....
A Bookfinder search last week for “Genki II: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese II” turned up 24 new and used copies, at prices ranging from $20.94 at Amazon.com to $110.62 at Amazon.de. For each of the 24 copies, total price (including shipping) is listed on a single page, along with information about how soon the book will ship. Some sellers offer expedited delivery. Amazon, for instance, offers overnight delivery and discounts of up to 30 percent off on new copies of 200,000 textbooks.....
A new copy of a first-year textbook like, say, “Biology, seventh edition” by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece, which lists for $153.33, was available for $57.45 last week at Valorebooks.com.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Differences in Internet Access Bandwidth Among Nations
Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future by Blaine Harden, The Washington Post, August 29, 2007.Excerpts:
DSL in Japan is often five to 10 times as fast as what is widely offered by U.S. cable providers, generally viewed as the fastest American carriers. (Cable has not been much of a player in Japan.)
Perhaps more important, competition in Japan gave a kick in the pants to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), once a government-controlled enterprise and still Japan's largest phone company. With the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, NTT launched a nationwide build-out of fiber-optic lines to homes, making the lower-capacity copper wires obsolete......
Japan's leap forward, as the United States has lost ground among major industrialized countries in providing high-speed broadband connections, has frustrated many American high-tech innovators.
"The experience of the last seven years shows that sometimes you need a strong federal regulatory framework to ensure that competition happens in a way that is constructive," said Vinton G. Cerf, a vice president at Google.
Japan's lead in speed is worrisome because it will shift Internet innovation away from the United States, warns Cerf, who is widely credited with helping to invent some of the Internet's basic architecture. "Once you have very high speeds, I guarantee that people will figure out things to do with it that they haven't done before," he said.
As a champion of Japanese-style competition through regulation, Cerf supports "net neutrality" legislation now pending in Congress. It would mandate that phone and cable companies treat all online traffic equally, without imposing higher tolls for certain content.
The proposed laws would probably save billions for companies such as Google and Yahoo, but consumer advocates say they would also save money for most home Internet users.
U.S. phone and cable companies, which control about 98 percent of the country's broadband market, strongly oppose the proposed laws, saying they would discourage the huge investments needed to upgrade broadband speed.
Yet the story of how Japan outclassed the United States in the provision of better, cheaper Internet service suggests that forceful government regulation can pay substantial dividends.
The opening of Japan's copper phone lines to DSL competition launched a "virtuous cycle" of ever-increasing speed, said Cisco's Pepper. The cycle began shortly after Japanese politicians -- fretting about an Internet system that in 2000 was slower and more expensive than what existed in the United States -- decided to "unbundle" copper lines.
How Dangerous is it to Listen to the Noise?
In Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life, Nassim Nicholas Taleb mentions that a lot of what we attend to is noise, random variation that obscures information carrying signal. Thus the day to day variation in the stock market average includes a lot of random variation that obscures significant longer term trends. Similarly, the daily news content in the media includes a lot of chaff that obscures the long term political and economic trends that are more important.
There is obviously value in information. Information allows us to make better decisions. There is even work to establish methods to estimate how much we should invest in information. Since it costs money, time and effort to obtain information, and since the returns to efforts to secure information are not uniform, there seems obviously to be a point where it is better to make decisions and accept risk than to keep trying to reduce that risk.
The question Taleb raises in my mind, however, is
There is surely a cost of obtaining noise, as we spend money to reach the media that is full of randomness. There is a cost of the effort to filter the signal from the noise, as we spend time trying to figure out what "news" is important and whether observed differences are harbingers of trends or random variations. If I read Taleb correctly, he focuses on the costs of incorrect decisions made when we mistake noise for information: stock transactions that are based on emotional responses to transient changes in market prices, for example. (Did the Bush administration make a series of disastrous foreign policy decisions when they mistook noise for information? When the believed the wrong intelligence, or when they mistook a few terrorist attacks for the beginning of a war?)
I wonder more generally about the social cost to society. We have built industries that exploit our monkey-like curiosity in the unusual, spending and earning untold amounts of money to create and disseminate noise. We then have to strengthen institutions that provide checks and balances to filter out the noise. One of the results is that society responds more slowly to truly important trends and problems than it might. And of course, there is the possibility that there exist synergies among the mistakes made by those fooled by noise. Economic bubbles and crashes cause losses not only to the mistaken investors, but to all of us hurt by their economic consequences. Wars fought in response to misinterpreted intelligence kill people who were not responsible for the decision to go to war.
There is obviously value in information. Information allows us to make better decisions. There is even work to establish methods to estimate how much we should invest in information. Since it costs money, time and effort to obtain information, and since the returns to efforts to secure information are not uniform, there seems obviously to be a point where it is better to make decisions and accept risk than to keep trying to reduce that risk.
The question Taleb raises in my mind, however, is
How costly is noise?
There is surely a cost of obtaining noise, as we spend money to reach the media that is full of randomness. There is a cost of the effort to filter the signal from the noise, as we spend time trying to figure out what "news" is important and whether observed differences are harbingers of trends or random variations. If I read Taleb correctly, he focuses on the costs of incorrect decisions made when we mistake noise for information: stock transactions that are based on emotional responses to transient changes in market prices, for example. (Did the Bush administration make a series of disastrous foreign policy decisions when they mistook noise for information? When the believed the wrong intelligence, or when they mistook a few terrorist attacks for the beginning of a war?)
I wonder more generally about the social cost to society. We have built industries that exploit our monkey-like curiosity in the unusual, spending and earning untold amounts of money to create and disseminate noise. We then have to strengthen institutions that provide checks and balances to filter out the noise. One of the results is that society responds more slowly to truly important trends and problems than it might. And of course, there is the possibility that there exist synergies among the mistakes made by those fooled by noise. Economic bubbles and crashes cause losses not only to the mistaken investors, but to all of us hurt by their economic consequences. Wars fought in response to misinterpreted intelligence kill people who were not responsible for the decision to go to war.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
As Brazil Defends Its Bounty, Rules Ensnare Scientists - New York Times
Marc van Roosmalen, with monkeys of a type he discovered.As Brazil Defends Its Bounty, Rules Ensnare Scientists - New York Times:
"Marc van Roosmalen is a world-renowned primatologist whose research in the Amazon has led to the discovery of five species of monkeys and a new primate genus. But precisely because of that work, Dr. van Roosmalen was recently sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison and jailed in Manaus, Brazil.
"Earlier in August, his lawyers managed to get him freed while they appeal his conviction on charges stemming from an investigation into alleged biopiracy. But scientists here and abroad are outraged, and they describe the case as only the most glaring example of laws and government policies they say are xenophobic and increasingly stifling scientific inquiry."
"Here or There? A Survey of Factors in Multinational R&D Location"
"Here or There? A Survey of Factors in Multinational R&D Location"© 2007 Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Excerpt from the summary:
Among the top factors going into new R&D siting decisions in both developed and emerging countries are market growth potential, quality of R&D talent, collaboration with universities and IP protection. How these factors influence the decision, however, depend on whether the site is in a developed or emerging country. In neither emerging nor developed countries was cost consideration the most important factor, which runs contrary to what has been reported by the media (according to an analysis of media coverage over the past few years in The Wall Street Journal and New York Times on multinational R&D locations).
Among the study's more surprising findings, according to the researchers, was the role university collaboration plays in the decision-making process for locating R&D facilities. In fact, collaboration with universities was particularly prevalent as a factor for expanding to emerging countries, even though these countries provide lesser degrees of IP protection.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Uganda Decentralized Services Delivery : a Makerere University Training Pilot Project
Campus of Makerere University, Kampala, UgandaThe project, jointly funded by the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation, support reforms of Makerere and partner universities in Uganda. The reforms were done in the context of making university education and services more relevant to building the capacity of local government in Uganda. The abstract of this final, evaluative report reads:
Ratings for the Uganda Decentralized Services Delivery Makerere University Training Pilot Project were as follows: outcomes were satisfactory, the risk to development outcome was moderate, the Bank performance was satisfactory, and the Borrower performance was satisfactory. Some lessons learned included: national universities in Africa are an under-used resource for the critical task of government capacity development; programs enlisting the intellectual resources of universities for government capacity building in Africa can stimulate positive change within the universities themselves, and lead to increased relevance and quality of education; local government officials benefit from intensified interaction with educational institutions on many level; public officials, upon completion of long-term training, will return to their employers; the benefits of World Bank-Foundation partnerships can outweigh the management costs; and monitoring and evaluation of the contributions of knowledge institutions to human capacity creation is complex and difficult to measure.
AAAS August R&D Funding Update on FY 2008 Appropriations - August 6, 2007
AAAS August R&D Funding Update on FY 2008 Appropriations - August 6, 2007:
"As of the August congressional recess, Congress is poised to add billions of dollars to proposed budgets for the federal investment in research and development (R&D) for fiscal year (FY) 2008. The House and Senate would endorse large proposed increases for select physical sciences agencies in the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) and would continue to support Administration plans to expand development investments for new human spacecraft. But instead of cutting funding for other R&D programs as requested, the House and the Senate would provide increases to every major nondefense R&D funding agency, and would turn proposed cuts into significant increases for the congressional priorities of biomedical research, environmental research (particularly climate change research), and energy R&D. The added billions in FY 2008 appropriations so far would turn a requested cut in federal support of basic and applied research into a real increase, after three years of decline. But these increases depend on an overall congressional budget plan allocating $21 billion more for domestic appropriations than the President’s budget; because the President has threatened to veto any appropriations bills that exceed his budget request, these R&D increases could disappear or diminish this fall in negotiations between the President and Congress over final funding levels."
Framing History -- a brief musing
I have been reading A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield and Nicolas Pelham, two British authors. It is a political history focused of western Asia, south-eastern Europe and north Africa, especially as influenced by western European powers, emphasizing the period since 1800, and written from the point of view of England. Here is the publisher's synopsis:Over the centuries the Middle East has confounded the dreams of conquerors and peacemakers alike. In this profound book, Peter Mansfield follows the historic struggles of the region over the last two hundred years, from Napoleon’s assault on Egypt, through the slow decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, to the painful emergence of modern nations, the Palestinian question and Islamic resurgence. The Middle East’s huge oil reserves gave it global economic importance as well as unique strategic value, and the result was massive superpower involvement.In the process of reading the book I have come to wonder about the framing of history. How does one chose a place and a time to write about and how does one chose what aspects of the situation in that time and place to focus on, and what perspective to offer on the description?
For this new edition, Nicolas Pelham has written two extensive new chapters examining recent developments throughout the Middle East since the Gulf War, including the turbulent events in Afghanistan, the troubled relationship between the US and Iraq, the continuing Arab-Israeli war and the rise of Islamic Jihad.
Incisive and illuminating, A History of the Middle East is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand what is perhaps the most crucial and volatile nerve centre of the world, and its prospects for the future.
Of course, the author is quite free to write about anything he/she chooses, the publisher (in our society) to publish anything it chooses, and the reader to choose among the smorgasbord of offerings. But it seems to me that some choices of framing are better than others.
The interaction among Turkish, Arab and Persian civilizations in the 19th and 20th centuries seems to be a very interesting topic. These civilizations have very deep roots, are geographically proximate and so rub up against each other all the time. I suspect that their historical interaction must be understood to grasp the current situation in a the current geopolitical hot spot. Yet these civilizations can not be fully understood in isolation from the influences of Britain, France, Russia, central Asia and other regions. Moreover, it seems to me that Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Berbers, and other cultures must also be seen as influences to understand the happenings.
My instinct tells me that the importance of historical causes diminishes as the interval between cause and effect lengthens in historical time. Thus it seems reasonable to me that to enhance understanding of the current situation in the region one should emphasize more its 20th century history than its 19th, more its 19th century history than that of earlier millennia. As classical painting gives clarity and detail to the figure and allows the background to be misted and muted, so a modern history must sketch the ancient precursors if current events in broad, impressionistic brush strokes.
So too, my instinct tells me that those who hold military, economic, political and/or intellectual authority have more influence over the course of history than do those without such authority. This perception seems to be shared by historians, and may of course be a socially constructed misunderstanding, like the flat earth hypothesis.
The choice of what to include in a discussion in part depends on what interests most the authors (and is likely most to interest the reader). We have parochial interests. It is not surprising that an English author writing for an English speaking audience would focus on the British interaction with the region he has chosen to write about. I suspect that the history, if written by and for Muslims from the Indian subcontinent would be different, as would histories emphasizing Turkish, Arab, or Persian points of view. My early engineering training suggest that it you want to understand a complex object, you need to see at least three orthogonal views. I suppose that too is the insight of cubist painters, of novelists like Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier) and Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet), and of film makers like Akira Kurosawa (Rashômon), not to mention all of those who teach methods for ethnographic research.
Factor analysis is a statistical technique to help make complex data sets with many dimensions more understandable. It seeks to find reduced sets of dimensions that can be used to portray the data while maintaining as much of its variance as possible. Factor analysis is but one of many data visualization techniques. I wonder if there are historiographic techniques for the selection of aspects of history that help display the complexity of situations in their most intelligible forms, or that are especially useful for those seeking to understand specific aspects of situations?
Specifically. is it more important to understand the evolution of per capita GDP, population density, environmental quality, technological systems, class structures, educational achievements, political institutions, or ruling dynasties to get a grasp on the booming, buzzing confusion that this complex region seems to the uninitiated? Which aspects of the situation are most useful to understand if one seeks to the others. Is understanding dynastic succession more important to understanding economic evolution than is understanding economic evolution to understanding dynastic succession?
Of course, the author of a popular history does not have unlimited choice. He/she can not draw upon information that does not exist in writing his/her history. Weak states and pre-modern states do not collect statistics, so adequate numerical data are not available for the taking. On the other hand, dynastic rulers tend to be careful in documenting the family history of the dynastic order, even if it has to be invented. Still, I wonder how much we really learn from knowing the names, birth and death dates of lines of long dead rulers of Mayan cities.
Thinking in time is important. Causes must precede their effects. The calendar is a framework on which historians hang their facts. Yet there is the well known logical fallacy, "post hoc ergo propter hoc". Too often, I suspect we draw incorrect inferences of causality from the fact that one event preceded another in history. Indeed, I suspect there are many epiphenomena in which side effects are attributed causality -- the fever is thought to be the cause of the illness, rather than a response to the infection.
Ultimately, I wish we had the histories of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and other countries in this region from the viewpoints of members of various different factions within those countries. A richer understanding of their points of view, of their perceptions of the important and interesting facts of history, might help to avoid the easy assumptions that have been too often made by foreigners and proven false by experience in the past.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Death by numbers - Los Angeles Times
Death by numbers - Los Angeles Times: A column by Meghan Daum
"On any given day, an average of 148,000 people will die. That means over a million people have died in the last week. Nearly 5 million have died since around this time last month, which, incidentally, was exactly when we were briefly bombarded with the news that 199 people were killed in a Brazilian airliner crash. Other deaths and possible deaths we've heard about since then include the 11 victims found so far in the Interstate 35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis; the six miners missing and three rescuers killed in a Utah coal mine; hundreds dead in the earthquake in Peru. To a somewhat lesser extent, we've also heard about 100-plus troops and the 2,000-plus civilians reportedly killed in the Iraq war in the last month. There was also news of the passing of several celebrities, including evangelist Tammy Faye Messner, talk-show host Merv Griffin and baseball's Phil Rizzuto.......
Based on estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were about 3,500 automobile-related deaths during that monthlong period. U.S. cancer deaths hover around 42,000 a month. As for heart disease, the American Heart Assn. tells us that someone dies of cardiovascular disease every 36 seconds. And that's just in this country.
As staggering as these numbers are, they don't seem to scare or interest us nearly as much as things like plane crashes, mountain lion attacks, deadly roller coaster mishaps or avian flu. And because the news media is savvy about (and complicit in) our fears and fascinations, we are fed an endless supply of death news that has little to do with how most people actually die. Nonetheless, death by falling asteroid seems infinitely more real than death by cholesterol.
Call it selective fear, selective mourning. It may be an act of denial, but it's also an act of self-protection. Figures from the National Center for Health Statistics suggest that the lifetime odds of dying in a plane crash are about 1 in 20,000. Those same figures put the chances of dying in a car accident about 1 in 100. So why, when our plane is taxiing down the runway, do many of us still indulge in various acts of magical thinking (if we can name the last 12 presidents the wing won't fall off) even after blithely getting in our cars and making what is, statistically speaking, the far more perilous drive to the airport? "
Comment: This really is a problem. We know that people have a selective recall of information. There is an availability bias, and people remember first things that recently interested them. So they are likely to overestimate the problem with mine safety and underestimate that with road safety, to overestimate the danger of terrorist attack and underestimate the risks of eating too much! JAD
"On any given day, an average of 148,000 people will die. That means over a million people have died in the last week. Nearly 5 million have died since around this time last month, which, incidentally, was exactly when we were briefly bombarded with the news that 199 people were killed in a Brazilian airliner crash. Other deaths and possible deaths we've heard about since then include the 11 victims found so far in the Interstate 35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis; the six miners missing and three rescuers killed in a Utah coal mine; hundreds dead in the earthquake in Peru. To a somewhat lesser extent, we've also heard about 100-plus troops and the 2,000-plus civilians reportedly killed in the Iraq war in the last month. There was also news of the passing of several celebrities, including evangelist Tammy Faye Messner, talk-show host Merv Griffin and baseball's Phil Rizzuto.......
Based on estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were about 3,500 automobile-related deaths during that monthlong period. U.S. cancer deaths hover around 42,000 a month. As for heart disease, the American Heart Assn. tells us that someone dies of cardiovascular disease every 36 seconds. And that's just in this country.
As staggering as these numbers are, they don't seem to scare or interest us nearly as much as things like plane crashes, mountain lion attacks, deadly roller coaster mishaps or avian flu. And because the news media is savvy about (and complicit in) our fears and fascinations, we are fed an endless supply of death news that has little to do with how most people actually die. Nonetheless, death by falling asteroid seems infinitely more real than death by cholesterol.
Call it selective fear, selective mourning. It may be an act of denial, but it's also an act of self-protection. Figures from the National Center for Health Statistics suggest that the lifetime odds of dying in a plane crash are about 1 in 20,000. Those same figures put the chances of dying in a car accident about 1 in 100. So why, when our plane is taxiing down the runway, do many of us still indulge in various acts of magical thinking (if we can name the last 12 presidents the wing won't fall off) even after blithely getting in our cars and making what is, statistically speaking, the far more perilous drive to the airport? "
Comment: This really is a problem. We know that people have a selective recall of information. There is an availability bias, and people remember first things that recently interested them. So they are likely to overestimate the problem with mine safety and underestimate that with road safety, to overestimate the danger of terrorist attack and underestimate the risks of eating too much! JAD
Mega Events in Geological History
A "black mat" of algal growth in Arizona marks a line of extinction at 12,900 years ago; Clovis points and mammoth skeletons were found at the line but not above it.Credit: Allen West, UCSB via the National Science Foundation
NOVA has a program titled Mystery of the Megaflood.
"About 15,000 years ago, in the waning millennia of the Ice Age, a vast lake known as Glacial Lake Missoula suddenly burst through the ice dam that plugged it at one end. In the space of just 48 hours, geologists believe, the collapse sent 500 cubic miles of water cascading across the Pacific Northwest, creating overnight such unusual landscapes as the scablands of eastern Washington."Lake Agassiz was an immense lake, bigger than all of the present-day Great Lakes combined, theorized to be in the center of North America at the end of the last ice age. In another mega-event, perhaps 7,500 to 8,500 years ago:
Much of the final drainage of Lake Agassiz may have occurred in a very short time — perhaps as little as one year — and may have been responsible for the "8.2 kyr event", a cooling episode of Earth's climate, visible in ice cores and other climate records.That is, the huge flow of fresh water into the North Atlantic may have shut off the Atlantic circulation, causing a significant change in weather over much of Europe and other parts of the globe.
Scientists are discovering or suggesting the existence of more and more ancient mega-events. Something, perhaps a comet caused fires that raged over much of the North American continent some 13,000 years ago, apparently causing the extinction of many species.
In 1998, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, geologists from Columbia University, suggested that about 5600 BC, as sea levels rose, the rising Mediterranean spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosporus. The event flooded 60,000 mile² (155,000 km²) of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and west. Ryan and Pitman wrote:
"Ten cubic miles [42 km³] of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls. …The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days."We don't often think of the Columbian Exchange in these terms, but after Columbus established sea connection between the old and new worlds there was a mega-environmental event. There was a human population crash in the Americas, and invasive species (including man and domesticated species) competed with indigenous species and radically changed the landscapes worldwide.
The Yellowstone volcano had a major eruption approximately 650,000 years ago:
The caldera that it left is 53 miles long and 28 miles wide. In the area surrounding Yellowstone, 3000 square miles were subjected to a flow of pyroclastic material composed of 240 cubic miles of hot ash and pumice. Ash was also thrown into the atmosphere and blanketed much of North America. It can still be identified in core samples from as far away as the Gulf of Mexico.According to Wikipedia:
Since this occurred more than a half million years ago this is all ancient history, right? Not quite. Yellowstone continues to be geologically active even today. Smaller explosions caused by hydrothermal activity (water or steam heated in an underground chamber until the top blows off) have been much more common and recent in Yellowstone's history than the massive caldera-forming eruptions. One of these happened as recently as 13,000 years ago, creating a three-mile wide crater that is now a portion of Yellowstone Lake called Mary Bay. Also, smaller volcanic eruptions with flows of lava, ash and pumice have occurred. Flows like these have filled in much of the old caldera since its creation.
Another catastrophic eruption is also possible. The effects of such a disaster are hard to even comprehend. Bill McGuire, professor of geohazards at the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre at the University College of London told the UK Daily Express, "Magma would be flung 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometers virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. One thousand cubic kilometers of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole USA with a layer 5 inches thick." He adds that it would once again bring "the bitter cold of Volcanic Winter to Planet Earth. Mankind may become extinct."
The Little Ice Age brought bitterly cold winters to many parts of the world, but is most thoroughly documented in Europe and North America. In the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, gradually engulfing farms and crushing entire villages. The River Thames and the canals and rivers of the Netherlands often froze over during the winter, and people skated and even held frost fairs on the ice. The first Thames frost fair was in 1607; the last in 1814, although changes to the bridges and the addition of an embankment affected the river flow and depth, hence the possibility of freezes. The freeze of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. The winter of 1794/95 was particularly harsh when the French invasion army under Pichegru could march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, whilst the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island's harbors to shipping.Krakatau erupted in 1883, in one of the largest eruptions in recent time. The 1883 eruption ejected more than 25 cubic kilometres of rock, ash, and pumice [1], and generated the loudest sound historically heard thousands of miles away.
Ash fell on Singapore 840 km to the N, Cocos (Keeling) Island 1155 km to the SW, and ships as far as 6076 km WNW. Darkness covered the Sunda Straits from 11 a.m. onthe 27th until dawn the next day.People do not often think in terms of 100 years, much less in terms of 1000 years, and so we tend not to recognize that mega-events are really possibilities rather than the stuff of scary movies -- no more real than vampires, or werewolves, Freddy Krueger or Jason of Friday the 13th. The records indicate however that they are real and do occur with distressing frequency. Social planning should take them into account, if not your individual planning of that of the nuclear family.
Giant waves reached heights of 40 m above sea level, devastating everything in their path and hurling ashore coral blocks weighing as much as 600 tons....
Fine ash and aerosol, erupted perhaps 50 km into the stratosphere, circled the equator in 13 days. Three months after the eruption these products had spread to higher latitudes causing such vivid red sunset afterglows that fire engines were called out in New York, Poughkeepsie, and New Haven to quench the apparent conflagration. Unusual sunsets continued for 3 years.....
The volcanic dust veil that created such spectacular atmospheric effects also acted as a solar radiation filter, lowering global temperatures as much as 1.2 degree C in the year after the eruption. Temperatures did not return to normal until 1888.
I suspect that we are facing anthropogenic environmental catastrophes of this magnitude by the end of the 21st century, and that we must begin to act now and act with continuing responsibility to ameliorate the damage and the consequences. If we fail to recognize that catastrophic events are not uncommon on such time scales, it is hard to mobilize the will to act.
There are people who do not believe the scientific record, preferring to believe the interpretation of the bible that says the earth was created as it now exists several thousand years ago. They will have great difficulty believing that we face a catastrophe of our own making. Fortunately, there are not only secularists but other evangelical co-religionists willing to take on these true believers and argue them into a stewardship of the earth.
Robotic Surgery
I watched a lecture yesterday by the head of surgery at Stanford University on robotic surgery. He spoke on the decades long experience with laparoscopy, and the the da Vinci Surgical System.
The latter allows a surgeon in one room to remotely conduct an operation on a patient in another room. Binocular vision is enabled via a binocular eyepiece connected to two cameras mounted on a cable inserted into the patient. Similarly, the surgeon controls instruments from his console that are mounted on the end of cables, and which can be moved with a large number of degrees of freedom to match the motions of his/her hands in the controllers. Very delicate maneuvers of the very small instruments can be made because there is a reduction calculated from the movements of the surgeons hands to the movements of the tiny instruments, while the binocular vision magnifies the images. The system weighs more than a ton, and requires extensive software which is apparently continually being improved and upgraded.
The technology was developed from the aerospace industry with thought to apply it to battlefield surgery or in outer space. But it is being applied to a number of delicate interventions, such as pediatric heart valve surgery. It has been used for some 25,000 operations, including one operation done by a surgeon in New York on a patient in Paris.
The speaker also mentioned the emerging possibilities in new micro0sensors and nanotechnological surgery. Thus one may soon be able to monitor blood pressure within the body; or maneuver tiny antibody loaded particles to cancerous tumors from outside the body using magnetic forces.
I was impressed on the one hand by the discussion of the the historical evolution of this technology which goes back decades (and indeed much longer when the antisepsis and anesthesia are taken into account), and thus seems quite old and established, and on the other hand how very rapidly this is progressing. I can't imagine that 50 years ago anyone would have imagined robotic surgery to be well established today, with some surgeons having performed hundreds of interventions using the technology.
I am also impressed by this as an example of the digital divide. In a world where billions of people have only the most limited financial access to health services, an elite has access to this "space age" care option. The difference between the family who can send their newborn for heart surgery using a million and a half dollar instrument operated by a large and very highly trained team of experts versus the Darfur escapee mother whose child must be dying as I write this for lack of oral rehydration salts and clear water is far more than the distance between those who simply have and do not have access to the Internet.
I was also impressed by the institutional challenges that are soon to be posed by this technology. Certainly one is the reluctance of professionals to accept the new technology. Surgeons have to learn new skills to use the new techniques effectively. There has to be a new relationship formed between engineers, programmers, and the doctors and nurses in the operating suite. Patients have to learn about the technology and its potential risks as well as benefits. Financing agencies and insurers have to develop policies. So to do the schools training surgeons.
We already have medical tourism in which patients travel from developed to developing nations to take advantage of lower cost medical services. What happens when a U.S. hospital outsource an operation in its own surgical suite to a surgeon in India? How is the licensing to be managed? Who has liability? Where is the liability insurance?
Distance education has raised many similar institutional problems, and advances in the application of distance learning that are possible with the available technology are not being fully realized due to our failure to solve the institutional problems rapidly. I suspect that will happen also in the case of ICT enabled medical services -- telemedicine in general and robotic surgery specifically.
The latter allows a surgeon in one room to remotely conduct an operation on a patient in another room. Binocular vision is enabled via a binocular eyepiece connected to two cameras mounted on a cable inserted into the patient. Similarly, the surgeon controls instruments from his console that are mounted on the end of cables, and which can be moved with a large number of degrees of freedom to match the motions of his/her hands in the controllers. Very delicate maneuvers of the very small instruments can be made because there is a reduction calculated from the movements of the surgeons hands to the movements of the tiny instruments, while the binocular vision magnifies the images. The system weighs more than a ton, and requires extensive software which is apparently continually being improved and upgraded.
The technology was developed from the aerospace industry with thought to apply it to battlefield surgery or in outer space. But it is being applied to a number of delicate interventions, such as pediatric heart valve surgery. It has been used for some 25,000 operations, including one operation done by a surgeon in New York on a patient in Paris.
The speaker also mentioned the emerging possibilities in new micro0sensors and nanotechnological surgery. Thus one may soon be able to monitor blood pressure within the body; or maneuver tiny antibody loaded particles to cancerous tumors from outside the body using magnetic forces.
I was impressed on the one hand by the discussion of the the historical evolution of this technology which goes back decades (and indeed much longer when the antisepsis and anesthesia are taken into account), and thus seems quite old and established, and on the other hand how very rapidly this is progressing. I can't imagine that 50 years ago anyone would have imagined robotic surgery to be well established today, with some surgeons having performed hundreds of interventions using the technology.
I am also impressed by this as an example of the digital divide. In a world where billions of people have only the most limited financial access to health services, an elite has access to this "space age" care option. The difference between the family who can send their newborn for heart surgery using a million and a half dollar instrument operated by a large and very highly trained team of experts versus the Darfur escapee mother whose child must be dying as I write this for lack of oral rehydration salts and clear water is far more than the distance between those who simply have and do not have access to the Internet.
I was also impressed by the institutional challenges that are soon to be posed by this technology. Certainly one is the reluctance of professionals to accept the new technology. Surgeons have to learn new skills to use the new techniques effectively. There has to be a new relationship formed between engineers, programmers, and the doctors and nurses in the operating suite. Patients have to learn about the technology and its potential risks as well as benefits. Financing agencies and insurers have to develop policies. So to do the schools training surgeons.
We already have medical tourism in which patients travel from developed to developing nations to take advantage of lower cost medical services. What happens when a U.S. hospital outsource an operation in its own surgical suite to a surgeon in India? How is the licensing to be managed? Who has liability? Where is the liability insurance?
Distance education has raised many similar institutional problems, and advances in the application of distance learning that are possible with the available technology are not being fully realized due to our failure to solve the institutional problems rapidly. I suspect that will happen also in the case of ICT enabled medical services -- telemedicine in general and robotic surgery specifically.
Thinking About Newton's Thinking
Newton's tomb and monumentin Westminster Abbey
I watched a good documentary last night about Isaac Newton. As my son pointed out, it is impossible to fully describe the 84 year long life of one of the great thinkers of human history in an hour's television program for a general audience. Still, I learned something and the program was an occasion for thought. One of the difficulties faced by the creators of the program was to convey to the modern audience the ways in which Newton thought as we do versus the ways in which he thought differently than we do.
When one has the concept of the social construction of knowledge, it seems clear that Newton understood the world in ways that were the product of the society in which he lived, as we understand the world in ways that are the product of our society. Indeed, he thought about the world in the language of his time. That meant that he thought about the nature of matter in the language of the alchemists (while many of us think about it in the language of physicists and chemists).
Newton's society did construe science to be different than religion or philosophy, and Newton appears to have been quite comfortable lumping his search for understanding of the nature of light and of mechanics as part and parcel with his philosophical search for an understanding of God's actions. Denied our historical perspective, he would not have seen his explorations into alchemy as different in nature than his explorations into the physics of light or celestial orbits. In our socially constructed system of scientific knowledge these seem very different, one from another.
We must presume that Newton, as a human being, thought as we think think today. His brain was anatomically and physiologically similar to ours. He was not an alien. It should be immediately obvious that modern people with similar minds think differently according to the culture to which they belong. Secularists think differently about the world than do the religious, albeit with the same human thinking equipment, as those from one religious culture think differently about the world than those from another (different) religious culture. We should then find it self evident that a man living in 17th century England would think differently within his culture than we do in ours, albeit with the same human brain.'
On the other hand, Newton clearly was smarter than almost everyone. Think about high school, and the person in your class who most understood science. Now think of that person in a group formed of individuals from all over the state, each of whom best understood science in his high school class in your year. Half of those people would lag the median in the statewide group, even though they had led their high school classes. Now consider a group made up with the best high school scientist from each state. Again, half of those would fall below the median level of the group, although each was the best of his age for an entire state. Consider finally that there are perhaps 20 times as many people living in the world as live in the United States. Look at the group formed by the best 20 high school scientists worldwide for each of ten classes. Again, half of them would lag the medium in this elite group.
We can conceive of Newton as comparable to those in the most elite of that elite final group. We can conceive of him as having a mind like ours, comparable to the minds of people we know, but one that worked faster and more clearly not only than most, but than all but the very very few. We can think of his mind as falling with the bell shaped curve of human intellectual ability, but at the very upper limit of the distribution.
But, as the program made clear, Newton was also at the upper end of the distribution of people in his dedication to his work. Indeed, he appears to have worked so long and so hard as to drive himself into a nervous breakdown in middle age.
Newton also appears to have been at the extreme of the distribution of human experience in terms of independence of thought from the existing socially constructed body of knowledge. He essentially worked alone. He did so most famously during the period in which he lived at home away from Cambridge during the plague years -- a period of exceptional intellectual creativity. But he did not publish much during his years of most productive thinking. His laboratory assistants appeared not to have understood his thought, not to have been intellectual collaborators.
On the one hand, it seems clear that if Newton's work was derivative from that of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. On the other hand, it also seems clear that his recognition of the importance of experiments was unusual for his time and was important in his intellectual achievements.
How many Newtons?
One of the scientists interviewed in the program commented that Newton's was a talent that comes along perhaps once in 500 years. I suppose he was commenting on the combination of intelligence, energy, and intellectual independence. I would prefer to think that the genetic makeup might occur once per so many million births -- that is, there are more potential geniuses born each year to our huge global population that were born each year from the smaller population of Newton's world.
But we would not remember Newton today had he died in childhood, nor had he suffered from severe mental and physical disabilities as a result of years of malnutrition and disease as a child. Indeed, had he not been able to be educated and to work at Cambridge University and had the funds to purchase his 1600 book personal library, nor the economic freedom to pursue his studies, we would not have his scientific production.
How many Newton's has mankind wasted? How many are we now wasting each year in which a billion people try to live on a dollar a day or less? How many potential intellectual giants remain unrealized in the world, never receiving the education to develop their talents nor the intellectual and economic freedom to exploit them?
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Out of Body Experience Explained"
Source: "Out-of-body experience recreated", BBC News, August 23, 2007.This long excerpt explains in part how the experiment worked:
In the Swiss experiments, the researchers asked volunteers to stand in front of a camera while wearing video-display goggles.Comment: This is a nice example of the the fact that what we perceive is not necessarily what is happening.
Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera view of their own back - a three-dimensional "virtual own body" that appeared to be standing in front of them.
When the researchers stroked the back of the volunteer with a pen, the volunteer could see their virtual back being stroked either simultaneously or with a time lag.
The volunteers reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the pen on their virtual back, rather than their real back, making them feel as if the virtual body was their own rather than a hologram.
Volunteers
Even when the camera was switched to film the back of a mannequin being stroked rather than their own back, the volunteers still reported feeling as if the virtual mannequin body was their own.
And when the researchers switched off the goggles, guided the volunteers back a few paces, and then asked them to walk back to where they had been standing, the volunteers overshot the target, returning nearer to the position of their "virtual self".
Dr Henrik Ehrsson, who led the UCL research, used a similar set-up in his tests and found volunteers had a physiological response - increased skin sweating - when they felt their virtual self was being threatened - appearing to be hit with a hammer.
Dr Ehrsson said: "This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are."
Out of body experiences have been seen by some as religious or quasi-religious experiences. Certainly there is nothing unnatural about those in this experiment. Just an indication that our brain works in ways that are unintuitive. I see it as analogous to the images used to illustrate the ideas of gestalt psychology. JAD
Boring women
Old woman front view
young woman back view
Old woman front view
young woman back view
Rubin face / Figure-ground vase
If you had any questions about the diffusion of ICT technology
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Some resources on technological innovation in development
Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development
This is a project of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. It appears to focus on three topics: 1. the changing role of international corporations and the pattern of interaction between international companies and indigenous ones; 2. the role of public research capabilities at universities and public laboratories in the catch-up process, and the extent to which these institutions are becoming increasingly important, both because of the greater importance today of scientific knowledge underpinning technologies; 3. the complex set of issues associated with the tightening of national and international patent regimes under TRIPs. The director of the project is Richard Nelson.I found two interesting conferences run by the program, with presentations available on their websites:
- Access to Medicines and the Financing of Innovations in Health Care
- Innovation in the Life Sciences: Intellectual Property and Public Investment for Pharmaceuticals and Agriculture
A Program of Study of the Processes Involved in Technological and Economic Catch up. The catch-up project is aimed at illuminating the key mechanisms and institutions that, in the current world context, can enable nations behind the scientific and technological frontier to catch-up, and how the opportunities and obstacles to catch-up today differ from those that faced countries that caught up in an earlier era. The project involves a large network of researchers and research organizations in different countries, both developed and less developed. UNU-MERIT/Columbia Earth Institute partner on Catch-Up Project Key partners are:The Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development
- Richard R Nelson, Roberto Mazzoleni, John Cantwell -- Columbia Earth Institute;
- Calestous Juma – Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University;
- Nick von Tunzelmann -- SPRU, University of Sussex J. Stanley Metcalfe – CRIC, University of Manchester;
- Claude Henry – Ecole Polytechnique, and IDDRI, Paris;
- Bengt-Ake Lundvall – Department of Business Studies, Aalborg University; and
- Akira Goto – RCAST, University of Tokyo, and Research Institute of Economy, Trade, And Industry Hiroyuki Odagiri—COE-RES project, Hitotsubashi University
CGSD manages the social sciences activities of the Earth Institute. Its mission is "to augment the intellectual community using social sciences approaches to address the most pressing international development problems of our time." This mission overlaps with those of social science departments across the Columbia University, with whose faculty CGSD staff collaborate. The hallmark of CGSD is interdisciplinary research and policy application. A partial list of its research programs includes:The United Nations University Maastricht Economic and social Research and training center on Innovation and Technology
- The Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development;
- The Center on Capitalism and Society (CCS),
- The Center for the Study of Science and Religion (CSSR);
- The Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD); and
- The Laboratory of Populations. The CGSD website includes publications which may be downloaded and links to events including presentations that may be downloaded.
UNU-MERIT is a joint research and training center of United Nations University (UNU) and Maastricht University, The Netherlands. The joint Institute was created in January 2006 following the integration of the former UNU-Institute for New Technologies (INTECH) in Maastricht , and the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology, MERIT, at Maastricht University. UNU-MERIT seeks to provide insights into the social, political and economic factors that drive technological change and innovation. The Center's research and training programs address a broad range of policy questions relating to the national and international governance of science, technology and innovation, with a particular focus on the creation, diffusion and access to knowledge.
"Legislation Would Restore Radio’s Community Presence"
Read the full article from the Nashville Tennessian via FreePress.Net (August 23, 2007), from which I excerpt the following:
With television and the Internet dominating communication systems these days, the power of radio is often overlooked.
And we’re not talking about the wattage, but the potential to affect people’s lives.
Small, low-power radio stations can serve a variety of roles that larger media cannot, such as keeping the community informed about emergencies and neighborhood school closings. They can also reflect the diversity of their community in ways that corporate-owned radio stations do not.
Yet, low-power FM is locked in a battle for survival. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 led to consolidation of radio stations to such an extent that, in 2000, the Federal Communications Commission told Congress there was too much consolidation and community radio was endangered.
With lawmakers poised to act, corporate radio owners and National Public Radio complained that low-power stations would interfere with their signals. As a result, Congress restricted the FCC to issuing licenses for low-power stations only in rural areas.
The FCC ordered an independent study in 2002, which found that low-power stations would cause no significant signal interference, but the restrictions have been allowed to stand because of the influence of corporate radio. Only 800 licenses, all in rural areas, have been issued since 2000, though thousands of groups have expressed interest.
Now is the time to act. In June, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., introduced the Local Community Radio Act of 2007, which seeks to remove those restrictions, while keeping in place a grievance process for large radio stations that believe they are harmed by signal interference. If it passes into law, educational groups, churches, nonprofits and municipal governments around the country are hoping to launch new radio stations that serve their local area.
The world health report 2007
The world health report 2007 - A safer future: global public health security in the 21st century
From the Summary: "More than at any previous time in history, global public health security depends on international cooperation and the willingness of all countries to act effectively in tackling new and emerging threats. That is the clear message of this year's World health report entitled A safer future: global public health security in the 21st century, which concludes with six key recommendations to secure the highest level of global public health security:
* full implementation of the revised International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) by all countries;
* global cooperation in surveillance and outbreak alert and response;
* open sharing of knowledge, technologies and materials, including viruses and other laboratory samples, necessary to optimize secure global public health;
* global responsibility for capacity building within the public health infrastructure of all countries;
* cross-sector collaboration within governments; and
* increased global and national resources for training, surveillance, laboratory capacity, response networks, and prevention campaigns."
Source: "WHO warns of global epidemic risk"
BBC News, August 23, 2007.
BBC News, August 23, 2007.
USAID To Require Security Checks of PVO Key Personnel?
Read "Foreign Aid Groups Face Terror Screens" by Walter Pincus, The Washington Post, August 23, 2007.
Lead: "The Bush administration plans to screen thousands of people who work with charities and nonprofit organizations that receive U.S. Agency for International Development funds to ensure they are not connected with individuals or groups associated with terrorism, according to a recent Federal Register notice."
The article suggests that officers and key personnel of PVO's receiving USAID funding will be required to pass a government security screening. The newly proposed regulations, scheduled to go into operation almost immediately, are apparently in response to new legislation which in turn was a response to concerns that USAID funding for activities in the West Bank and Gaza were ultimately reaching Hamas. Many NGOs are reported to be protesting the new regulations, including expressing concerns that compliance will be cumbersome and expensive.
Comment: This seems to illustrate decision making gone wrong. It makes good sense that the Congress exercise oversight to assure that the funding it allocates for poverty reduction is well spent. It makes good sense, if there are reports that some foreign aid funds have been misused to support terrorist organizations to put a provision in the law to prevent such things from happening in the future. It makes good sense in the bureaucracy to define regulations to implement the new provision in the law. Well intentioned people no doubt acted at each stage in the process. They did so under the various pressures on Congressional staff and executive branch officials. Non-governmental organizations then looked at the implications for them of the proposed regulations. Their staffs, no doubt well intentioned, acted under the pressures existing in organizations facing huge challenges, often with severely limited resources. The result is the proverbial horse designed by a committee that comes out with a remarkable resemblance to a camel. Perhaps it is more accurately an example that fully justifies the term of "garbage can" which has been used to describe a theory of organizational decision making.
Lead: "The Bush administration plans to screen thousands of people who work with charities and nonprofit organizations that receive U.S. Agency for International Development funds to ensure they are not connected with individuals or groups associated with terrorism, according to a recent Federal Register notice."
The article suggests that officers and key personnel of PVO's receiving USAID funding will be required to pass a government security screening. The newly proposed regulations, scheduled to go into operation almost immediately, are apparently in response to new legislation which in turn was a response to concerns that USAID funding for activities in the West Bank and Gaza were ultimately reaching Hamas. Many NGOs are reported to be protesting the new regulations, including expressing concerns that compliance will be cumbersome and expensive.
Comment: This seems to illustrate decision making gone wrong. It makes good sense that the Congress exercise oversight to assure that the funding it allocates for poverty reduction is well spent. It makes good sense, if there are reports that some foreign aid funds have been misused to support terrorist organizations to put a provision in the law to prevent such things from happening in the future. It makes good sense in the bureaucracy to define regulations to implement the new provision in the law. Well intentioned people no doubt acted at each stage in the process. They did so under the various pressures on Congressional staff and executive branch officials. Non-governmental organizations then looked at the implications for them of the proposed regulations. Their staffs, no doubt well intentioned, acted under the pressures existing in organizations facing huge challenges, often with severely limited resources. The result is the proverbial horse designed by a committee that comes out with a remarkable resemblance to a camel. Perhaps it is more accurately an example that fully justifies the term of "garbage can" which has been used to describe a theory of organizational decision making.
As the cowboy said, when asked why he had shed all his clothes and jumped into a cactus patch, "it seemed like a good idea at the time."JAD
Flaws Cited in Gene Variation Studies
From "Findings," The Washington Post, 8/22/07.
Excerpt:
One conclusion is that statistics is a tough business. It is easy to draw incorrect conclusions from data. I suspect that a lot of researchers are not nearly as well prepared in statistical methods as they should be, and have failed to develop the feel for their interpretation that is needed to do really good work.
Clearly, we are in trouble with gender issues. For far too long, our culture has assumed that gender difference existed and were important, where no such differences did exist or were not important. On the other hand, we seem to have ignored gender differences in areas such as medicine where they did exist and were important.
Still, it is hard and expensive to develop the data to isolate all the differences that make a difference in biomedical research. Perhaps with computers and the development of national health information systems, together with genomics and other techniques for reliably identifying individual differences, we will do better in the future. JAD
Excerpt:
"Most studies claiming to show that gene variations have different impacts on illness in men and women are flawed, scientists said.Comment: I assume that a meta-analysis published in JAMA has been peer reviewed and is credible (and that the WP reporter got the story right). On the other hand, the papers that are criticized as having used statistics incorrectly were also, presumably published in peer reviewed journals.
"Just 12 percent of 77 scientific papers that found a difference in the way gene variants affect disease in men and women were correctly analyzed, the researchers report in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
"Most of the studies weren't big enough to determine whether the mutations have different effects in males and females, said John P. Ioannidis, of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, who led the analysis."
One conclusion is that statistics is a tough business. It is easy to draw incorrect conclusions from data. I suspect that a lot of researchers are not nearly as well prepared in statistical methods as they should be, and have failed to develop the feel for their interpretation that is needed to do really good work.
Clearly, we are in trouble with gender issues. For far too long, our culture has assumed that gender difference existed and were important, where no such differences did exist or were not important. On the other hand, we seem to have ignored gender differences in areas such as medicine where they did exist and were important.
Still, it is hard and expensive to develop the data to isolate all the differences that make a difference in biomedical research. Perhaps with computers and the development of national health information systems, together with genomics and other techniques for reliably identifying individual differences, we will do better in the future. JAD
Differences in Bird, Human Flus Noted
From "Findings," The Washington Post, 8/22/07.
"Researchers have identified some of the changes that a flu virus needs to become a deadly pandemic strain, and they said the H5N1 avian influenza virus has so far made only a few of them.
Comment: This seems to be quite good news. The H5N1 has been considered to be a likely agent for a new flu pandemic, and its lethality in those infected to date has resulted in fears that if it did cause a pandemic, that pandemic would cause a very large number of deaths. The new finding seems to suggest that an H5N1 pandemic may not be as imminent as was feared. Moreover, if a large number of genetic changes are required to make the virus capable of causing a major epidemic, one might hope that the lethality will decrease as a result of those changes. JAD
"Researchers have identified some of the changes that a flu virus needs to become a deadly pandemic strain, and they said the H5N1 avian influenza virus has so far made only a few of them.
"The study may help scientists watch for the mutations most likely to make H5N1 a global threat.
"David Finkelstein of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis and colleagues looked at H5N1 virus samples from people who had been infected. They found none were anywhere near as mutated as flu viruses that caused the three most recent pandemics, notably the 1918 Spanish flu that killed tens of millions worldwide.
"Writing in the Journal of Virology, Finkelstein's team said they identified 32 clear-cut changes in influenza viruses that differentiated a human flu from a bird flu.
"Even when H5N1 viruses infected people, each one had made one or two of these changes at the most, Finkelstein said.
"'We think they need to get to 13 to be truly dangerous,' Finkelstein said in a telephone interview."Comment: This seems to be quite good news. The H5N1 has been considered to be a likely agent for a new flu pandemic, and its lethality in those infected to date has resulted in fears that if it did cause a pandemic, that pandemic would cause a very large number of deaths. The new finding seems to suggest that an H5N1 pandemic may not be as imminent as was feared. Moreover, if a large number of genetic changes are required to make the virus capable of causing a major epidemic, one might hope that the lethality will decrease as a result of those changes. JAD
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
GlaxoSmithKline as a Model of Corporate Responsibility
Face value | The nimble sumo | Economist.com:
"GSK's attitudes toward the poor are now regarded as a model for others. The firm encourages generics-makers to produce its formulations, so costs can fall further. It offers tiered pricing, linking the price of drugs to a country's ability to pay and offering subsidies for the poorest. Even the World Health Organisation, a United Nations agency not known for cosiness with the pharmaceutical industry, applauded GSK's decision in June to donate 50m doses of its new flu vaccine to be held in an emergency stockpile. This transformation, of both GSK and of its boss, suggests there is hope yet for the pharmaceutical industry. “Society puts up with Big Pharma only because we come up with innovative drugs,” says Mr Garnier. The world desperately needs a self-confident drugs industry willing to take risks to discover new therapies, but will no longer tolerate its arrogance and neglect of the poor."
"GSK's attitudes toward the poor are now regarded as a model for others. The firm encourages generics-makers to produce its formulations, so costs can fall further. It offers tiered pricing, linking the price of drugs to a country's ability to pay and offering subsidies for the poorest. Even the World Health Organisation, a United Nations agency not known for cosiness with the pharmaceutical industry, applauded GSK's decision in June to donate 50m doses of its new flu vaccine to be held in an emergency stockpile. This transformation, of both GSK and of its boss, suggests there is hope yet for the pharmaceutical industry. “Society puts up with Big Pharma only because we come up with innovative drugs,” says Mr Garnier. The world desperately needs a self-confident drugs industry willing to take risks to discover new therapies, but will no longer tolerate its arrogance and neglect of the poor."
The Distribution of Income Within Countries
The Graphs Say It All!
Read "Asia's rich and poor: For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more" from The Economist, August 9th 2007.
The Dashboard Collection
The "Dashboard of Sustainability" is a free, non-commercial software which allows users to present complex relationships between economic, social and environmental issues in a highly communicative format aimed at decision-makers and citizens interested in Sustainable Development.
The Dashboard Collection is a collection of presentations that were developed using the software, describing important relationships in international development, and illustrating the use of the software.
Presentations include:
Source: 2007 e-readiness Dashboard
Analysis view - scatterplot E-Readiness Index vs Social and cultural environment
The Dashboard Collection is a collection of presentations that were developed using the software, describing important relationships in international development, and illustrating the use of the software.
Presentations include:
- * The UN CSD Dashboard (From Rio to Johannesburg). This shows how the UN CSD indicator set could be used to assess the overall Sustainable Development performance of countries.
- The CIFP Fragile States Index Dashboard shows how the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy could be used to assess the overall fragility of countries.
- The Failed States Index Dashboard shows how The Fund for Peace & Foreign Policy indicators could be used to assess the overall performance of countries.
- The Commitment to Development Index Dashboard shows how the CDI indicators can be used to assess the overall efforts of rich countries to help the poor.
- The Environmental Sustainability Index variables Dashboard shows how Yale & Columbia Universities indicators could be used to assess the overall performance of countries.
- The Millennium Development Goals Indicators Dashboard is an attempt to show how the official UN Millennium Development Goals set could be used for assessing progress, or lack of progress, towards Sustainable Development.
- The IFPRI China Dashboard shows how IFPRI indicators could be used to assess the overall performance of China's provinces.
- * The Maternal & Neonatal Program Effort Dashboard shows how Constella Futures indicators could be used to assess the overall performance of countries in providing health care to children and mothers.
- The Privacy International Dashboard shows how Privacy International indicators could be used to assess the overall performance of countries.
- The 2007 e-readiness Dashboard shows how Economist Intelligence Unit indicators could be used to assess the overall performance of countries.
Source: 2007 e-readiness DashboardAnalysis view - scatterplot E-Readiness Index vs Social and cultural environment
A simple scatterplot may reveal interesting insights - for example, how is E-Readiness Index linked to "Social and cultural environment"? Malaysia scores "average" for E-Readiness Index (Y axis, 501 points for 501 Points) and "poor" for Social and cultural environment (X axis, 276 points). In contrast, Italy gets a "fair" for E-Readiness Index (Y=710 points for 710 Points) and "good" for Social and cultural environment (X=276 points).
For Wall Street's Math Brains, Miscalculations - washingtonpost.com
For Wall Street's Math Brains, Miscalculations - washingtonpost.com:
"Short for 'quantitative equity,' a quant fund is a hedge fund that relies on complex and sophisticated mathematical algorithms to search for anomalies and non-obvious patterns in the markets. These glitches, often too small for the human eye, can present opportunities for short- and long-term trades that yield high-profit returns. The models replace instinct. They try to turn historical trends into predictive science, using elegant mathematics seemingly above the comprehension of your average 401(k) participant or Wall Street fund manager. Instead of veteran, market-savvy traders waving fistfuls of sell slips, the elite quant funds employ Nobel nerds with math PhDs, often divorced from the real world. It's not for nothing that they are called 'black-box' funds -- opaque to outsiders, the boxes contain investment magic understood by only the wizards who conjured it up. But the 387-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average Aug. 9 and the continuing turmoil in the markets, in part attributed to massive sell-offs by the quant funds, have tarnished some of the quants' glimmering intellectual credentials and shown that, when push comes to shove, they can rush toward the exits as fast as a novice investor."
Comment: Mathematical models are not magic. These harness the computer to calculate more and faster than would be possible with the unaided eye and mind. But they are only as good as the model that they embody, the data on which their parameters are estimated, and the quality of the implementation of the theory in the model. One major weakness is that knowledge decays, and a model that was once good at describing the world can lose its power as the world changes. A model that was good at predicting the stock market when volatility was low may not be so good when volatility is high. Even more, a model that is predicated on the assumption that other people will not be doing what it is recommending that its users do, may be outmoded when lots of traders start using very similar models. And so it goes.... JAD
"Short for 'quantitative equity,' a quant fund is a hedge fund that relies on complex and sophisticated mathematical algorithms to search for anomalies and non-obvious patterns in the markets. These glitches, often too small for the human eye, can present opportunities for short- and long-term trades that yield high-profit returns. The models replace instinct. They try to turn historical trends into predictive science, using elegant mathematics seemingly above the comprehension of your average 401(k) participant or Wall Street fund manager. Instead of veteran, market-savvy traders waving fistfuls of sell slips, the elite quant funds employ Nobel nerds with math PhDs, often divorced from the real world. It's not for nothing that they are called 'black-box' funds -- opaque to outsiders, the boxes contain investment magic understood by only the wizards who conjured it up. But the 387-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average Aug. 9 and the continuing turmoil in the markets, in part attributed to massive sell-offs by the quant funds, have tarnished some of the quants' glimmering intellectual credentials and shown that, when push comes to shove, they can rush toward the exits as fast as a novice investor."
Comment: Mathematical models are not magic. These harness the computer to calculate more and faster than would be possible with the unaided eye and mind. But they are only as good as the model that they embody, the data on which their parameters are estimated, and the quality of the implementation of the theory in the model. One major weakness is that knowledge decays, and a model that was once good at describing the world can lose its power as the world changes. A model that was good at predicting the stock market when volatility was low may not be so good when volatility is high. Even more, a model that is predicated on the assumption that other people will not be doing what it is recommending that its users do, may be outmoded when lots of traders start using very similar models. And so it goes.... JAD
Could the Development Experts Be Wrong?
I have been wondering if the conventional wisdom is wrong about development.
Is building the Middle Class central to development?
The international development community has focused on poverty alleviation for decades. I wonder whether it might have been better to focus more on building the middle class. Two of the key development traps are war and poor governance (including corruption). Would a middle class have been effective in demanding more information from the media and more participation in society, and if so, would it be effective in opposing war and demanding better governance?
Certainly, the middle class where it exists plays a key role in running the economy and key services such as health, education and justice. These all have obvious benefits in terms of social and economic development.
The focus on countries
Donor agencies seem to work primarily in the framework the "nation state". That may make some sense in terms of political systems, but there are clearly large countries in which regions of the country are quite different one from another, and in which regional autonomy is important. On the other hand, as the European Union demonstrates, in some cases multinational governing bodies are quite important. Moreover, African countries demonstrate that political unrest affects neighboring countries as well as the country in which it starts.
In economics, it is perhaps even more clear that globalization encourages consideration of multinational economic systems. Regional markets and international trade agreements similarly suggest an economic focus that goes beyond the individual nation state to consider the larger market institutions. In contrast, large countries may have regional economies that are so little linked as to suggest that each region be taken as a frame of economic analysis.
I think of the emphasis on the nation state being created in Europe when there was a movement to draw all the speakers of a common language into a single nation. Even in Europe there are ethnic groups, such as the Basques that live in areas bridging borders of countries. In other areas, it would seem that the geographic areas best considered for programming and analysis of cultural issues might be other than nation states -- either smaller, as in the case of Africa in which some countries contain many ethnic groups, cross-national (e.g. Kurds), or larger (e.g. Arabs).
In terms of physical systems, water resources, diseases, wildlife, etc. do not respect national boundaries. The best frame of analysis and operation will again often be smaller or larger than the individual nation state, and will often involve geographic areas which cross borders.
Perhaps the emphasis on the nation state would better be replaced by complex networks of problem focused institutions that deal with problems at the scale and in the regions that make most sense. Should we not deal with river basins as wholes, rather than in the various pieces that correspond to the different nations through which the river runs?
Why don't they like us?
American foreign policy seems to be built on the assumption that if people only understood us better, they would like us more. Could it be that the government of the United States is increasingly disliked around the world because it is implementing policies that are disliked for good cause, and the citizens of this country are increasingly disliked because they boast that these bad policies are the result of good democratic processes>
My observation is that U.S. foreign policy has two major concerns -- security and economics. It seeks to protect the security of U.S. territory and citizens, and to serve the interests of the U.S. Economy. The United States is the worlds leading spender on the military, and the lest generous of OECD countries in terms of foreign aid. The United States government has been unwilling to sacrifice the country's short term economic interests to better secure long term global environmental sustainability. It has supported foreign governments that were odious where it seemed to advance U.S. economic or security interests to do so. And, of course, we continue to make military threats and start wars from time to time. Is it surprising that many foreigners see the United States, as personified by the actions of its government, as greedy and a bully?
Perhaps to make foreigners love us more, we should change policies, and act as a nation in ways that are more congenial and caring for the welfare of others.
What are the major foreign policy issues of the 21st century?
Perhaps the major ethical issue in international affairs is the increasing disparity between the have's and the have not's. The rich continue to get richer. Too many of the poor are trapped in their poverty. The distribution of income and wealth are getting less equitable in many countries, including the United States. This is true also of the distribution among nations, and only a few countries are successfully making the transition from poverty to relative affluence. Fortunately, those few seem to include the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) with large populations. Still, it seems unconscionable that large numbers of people are dying of hunger and preventable diseases in a world as rich as ours, and that so many people live lives blighted by poverty.
Still, I suppose that foreign policy will continue to be dominated by security and economic issues.
In terms of the economic, new players will be entering the competition for resources. Oil is obviously of concern, as existing reserves seem unlikely to be adequate for the demands to be placed on them in the rest of the century. With the growth of the BRIC economies, which represent nearly half of the world's population, the pressure on many resources should increase. Importantly, among these are arable land and water resources. Most of these are already in use, and as more people place greater per capita demands on these resources, we are likely to see prices rise and in the case of real shortages, conflicts arise.
Environmental degradation is increasingly a global problem. Most attention has been payed to climate change, and that would seem to be appropriate -- it is already apparent, and is likely to get much worse, especially if the world continues to procrastinate about the control of greenhouse gas emissions. But there are lots of other environmental problems that are also likely to worsen, including desertification, degradation of coastal zones, depletion of groundwater and snow pack water resources, loss of topsoil, etc. Not only will the global environmental problems exacerbate the competition for some resources and make life less livable, it will also potentially lead to conflict. When one country is polluting the environment in ways that cause real hardship in another, conflict seems likely. So too, the migration that will be increasing likely as people seek a better place to live is likely to cause conflict.
I fear that our diplomatic corps, as they seek to preserve and enhance our security and advance our economy will have to be far more concerned with the physical environment that they appeared to be in the 20th century.
And the competition for resources combined with increasing environmental degradation on a global scale, adding the social disruption that those forces will create, do not bode well for the poor.
Is building the Middle Class central to development?
The international development community has focused on poverty alleviation for decades. I wonder whether it might have been better to focus more on building the middle class. Two of the key development traps are war and poor governance (including corruption). Would a middle class have been effective in demanding more information from the media and more participation in society, and if so, would it be effective in opposing war and demanding better governance?
Certainly, the middle class where it exists plays a key role in running the economy and key services such as health, education and justice. These all have obvious benefits in terms of social and economic development.
The focus on countries
Donor agencies seem to work primarily in the framework the "nation state". That may make some sense in terms of political systems, but there are clearly large countries in which regions of the country are quite different one from another, and in which regional autonomy is important. On the other hand, as the European Union demonstrates, in some cases multinational governing bodies are quite important. Moreover, African countries demonstrate that political unrest affects neighboring countries as well as the country in which it starts.
In economics, it is perhaps even more clear that globalization encourages consideration of multinational economic systems. Regional markets and international trade agreements similarly suggest an economic focus that goes beyond the individual nation state to consider the larger market institutions. In contrast, large countries may have regional economies that are so little linked as to suggest that each region be taken as a frame of economic analysis.
I think of the emphasis on the nation state being created in Europe when there was a movement to draw all the speakers of a common language into a single nation. Even in Europe there are ethnic groups, such as the Basques that live in areas bridging borders of countries. In other areas, it would seem that the geographic areas best considered for programming and analysis of cultural issues might be other than nation states -- either smaller, as in the case of Africa in which some countries contain many ethnic groups, cross-national (e.g. Kurds), or larger (e.g. Arabs).
In terms of physical systems, water resources, diseases, wildlife, etc. do not respect national boundaries. The best frame of analysis and operation will again often be smaller or larger than the individual nation state, and will often involve geographic areas which cross borders.
Perhaps the emphasis on the nation state would better be replaced by complex networks of problem focused institutions that deal with problems at the scale and in the regions that make most sense. Should we not deal with river basins as wholes, rather than in the various pieces that correspond to the different nations through which the river runs?
Why don't they like us?
American foreign policy seems to be built on the assumption that if people only understood us better, they would like us more. Could it be that the government of the United States is increasingly disliked around the world because it is implementing policies that are disliked for good cause, and the citizens of this country are increasingly disliked because they boast that these bad policies are the result of good democratic processes>
My observation is that U.S. foreign policy has two major concerns -- security and economics. It seeks to protect the security of U.S. territory and citizens, and to serve the interests of the U.S. Economy. The United States is the worlds leading spender on the military, and the lest generous of OECD countries in terms of foreign aid. The United States government has been unwilling to sacrifice the country's short term economic interests to better secure long term global environmental sustainability. It has supported foreign governments that were odious where it seemed to advance U.S. economic or security interests to do so. And, of course, we continue to make military threats and start wars from time to time. Is it surprising that many foreigners see the United States, as personified by the actions of its government, as greedy and a bully?
Perhaps to make foreigners love us more, we should change policies, and act as a nation in ways that are more congenial and caring for the welfare of others.
What are the major foreign policy issues of the 21st century?
Perhaps the major ethical issue in international affairs is the increasing disparity between the have's and the have not's. The rich continue to get richer. Too many of the poor are trapped in their poverty. The distribution of income and wealth are getting less equitable in many countries, including the United States. This is true also of the distribution among nations, and only a few countries are successfully making the transition from poverty to relative affluence. Fortunately, those few seem to include the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) with large populations. Still, it seems unconscionable that large numbers of people are dying of hunger and preventable diseases in a world as rich as ours, and that so many people live lives blighted by poverty.
Still, I suppose that foreign policy will continue to be dominated by security and economic issues.
In terms of the economic, new players will be entering the competition for resources. Oil is obviously of concern, as existing reserves seem unlikely to be adequate for the demands to be placed on them in the rest of the century. With the growth of the BRIC economies, which represent nearly half of the world's population, the pressure on many resources should increase. Importantly, among these are arable land and water resources. Most of these are already in use, and as more people place greater per capita demands on these resources, we are likely to see prices rise and in the case of real shortages, conflicts arise.
Environmental degradation is increasingly a global problem. Most attention has been payed to climate change, and that would seem to be appropriate -- it is already apparent, and is likely to get much worse, especially if the world continues to procrastinate about the control of greenhouse gas emissions. But there are lots of other environmental problems that are also likely to worsen, including desertification, degradation of coastal zones, depletion of groundwater and snow pack water resources, loss of topsoil, etc. Not only will the global environmental problems exacerbate the competition for some resources and make life less livable, it will also potentially lead to conflict. When one country is polluting the environment in ways that cause real hardship in another, conflict seems likely. So too, the migration that will be increasing likely as people seek a better place to live is likely to cause conflict.
I fear that our diplomatic corps, as they seek to preserve and enhance our security and advance our economy will have to be far more concerned with the physical environment that they appeared to be in the 20th century.
And the competition for resources combined with increasing environmental degradation on a global scale, adding the social disruption that those forces will create, do not bode well for the poor.
FY 2009 Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities
Read the full White House memorandum to heads of Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government.
These are instructions to the Bush administration policy level officers for the preparation of the budget to be submitted to the Democrat controlled Congress in January 2008, to be put into law for the next administration to implement.
"Presidential Priority: American Competitiveness Initiative:
"The President is committed to the success of the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) announced in his 2006 State of the Union address. The ACI doubles investment over 10 years in key Federal agencies supporting basic research in the physical sciences and engineering. This innovation-enabling research includes high-leverage areas that develop and advance knowledge and technologies used by scientists in nearly every other field. President Bush has successfully begun the doubling path for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology core activities with an aggregate 17 percent increase in the first two years of the Initiative. To continue the doubling, these agencies should propose increases in FY 2009 that meet scheduled, ongoing facilities needs and provide for unique, high-value research opportunities. These proposals should be consistent with published out-year budget plans. We will evaluate the three requests together to determine final individual agency allocations. In addition to the doubling effort at these three agencies, real increases (above inflation) in the high-leverage basic research
of the Department of Defense should be a significant priority."
The memo defines"Interagency R&D Priorities" for:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/m03-15.pdf
These are instructions to the Bush administration policy level officers for the preparation of the budget to be submitted to the Democrat controlled Congress in January 2008, to be put into law for the next administration to implement.
"Presidential Priority: American Competitiveness Initiative:
"The President is committed to the success of the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) announced in his 2006 State of the Union address. The ACI doubles investment over 10 years in key Federal agencies supporting basic research in the physical sciences and engineering. This innovation-enabling research includes high-leverage areas that develop and advance knowledge and technologies used by scientists in nearly every other field. President Bush has successfully begun the doubling path for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology core activities with an aggregate 17 percent increase in the first two years of the Initiative. To continue the doubling, these agencies should propose increases in FY 2009 that meet scheduled, ongoing facilities needs and provide for unique, high-value research opportunities. These proposals should be consistent with published out-year budget plans. We will evaluate the three requests together to determine final individual agency allocations. In addition to the doubling effort at these three agencies, real increases (above inflation) in the high-leverage basic research
of the Department of Defense should be a significant priority."
The memo defines"Interagency R&D Priorities" for:
- Homeland Security and National Defense
- Energy and Climate Change Technology
- Advanced Networking and Information Technology
- National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI)
- Understanding Complex Biological Systems
- Environment
- Next Generation Air Transportation System
- Federal Scientific Collections
- Science of Science Policy
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/m03-15.pdf
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Iran frees U.S.-Iranian academic on bail | Reuters
Iran frees U.S.-Iranian academic on bail | Reuters:
"Iran on Tuesday released a U.S.-Iranian academic, who had been detained on security-related charges since May, after paying 3 billion rials ($320,000) bail. 'I thank all the people who made an effort ... so that I can go home now,' Haleh Esfandiari told a reporter from Iranian state television as she stood outside the gates of Evin prison in Tehran where she had been held. The footage showed her walking towards a small group of people standing outside the jail. Her lawyer, Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, had said her family had gone to the prison to pick her up and that she was now at home."
Comment: Great news. Apparently Lee Hamilton, the Director of the Wilson Center in which Esfandiari works and one of the great foreign policy resources of the United States, made a personal appeal to the top Iranian authorities. Now lets continue to ask for charges to be dropped and for Haleh Esfaniari to be allowed to return to her home and family. JAD
"Looking Past Blood Sugar to Survive With Diabetes"
Read the full article by GINA KOLATA in The New York Times, August 20, 2007.
I have Type II diabetes diagnosed a couple of years ago. I found this article very important and useful. It explained things better than did my doctor. I quote extensively:
I will however tie this posting into the focus of this blog, because it illustrates important points.
It is perhaps shocking that most diabetics don't realize that their lives are at risk from stroke and heart attacks, and that they could reduce the risks greatly by a simple medical regime.
It is perhaps even more shocking that physicians also sometimes do not realize this fact, due to failures in medical education and the ways in which knowledge gained from medical research is communicated to the profession. Whether due to lack of understanding of the public health problem or other factors, it seems from this article that physicians do not communicate the real risks to their patients. JAD
I have Type II diabetes diagnosed a couple of years ago. I found this article very important and useful. It explained things better than did my doctor. I quote extensively:
Blood sugar control is important in diabetes, specialists say. It can help prevent dreaded complications like blindness, amputations and kidney failure. But controlling blood sugar is not enough.Comment: I don't think I need an excuse to post such lifesaving information.
Nearly 73,000 Americans die from diabetes annually, more than from any disease except heart disease, cancer, stroke and pulmonary disease.
Yet, largely because of a misunderstanding of the proper treatment, most patients are not doing even close to what they should to protect themselves. In fact, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 7 percent are getting all the treatments they need.....
A recent survey by the American Diabetes Association conducted by RoperASW found that only 18 percent of people with diabetes believed that they were at increased risk for cardiovascular disease.
Yet, said Dr. David Nathan, director of the Diabetes Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, “when you think about it, it’s not the diabetes that kills you, it’s the diabetes causing cardiovascular disease that kills you.”.....
The science is clear on the huge benefits for people with diabetes of lowering cholesterol and controlling blood pressure. After multiple studies, costing hundreds of millions of dollars and involving tens of thousands of subjects, national guidelines were rewritten to reflect the new data, and professional organizations issued recommendations for diabetes care.
With cholesterol, the guidelines say that levels of LDL cholesterol, the form that increases heart disease risk, should be below 100 milligrams per deciliter and, if possible, 70 to 80. Yet, Dr. Brownlee said, diabetes patients with LDL cholesterol levels of 100 to 139 often are told that their levels — ideal for a healthy person without diabetes — are terrific.
“Many practicing doctors just don’t know that an LDL cholesterol number that is normal for someone without diabetes is not normal for someone with diabetes,” he said.....
The statistics are grim: A quarter to a third of all heart attack patients have diabetes, even though diabetes patients constitute just 9.3 percent of the population. Another 25 percent of heart attack patients are verging on diabetes with abnormally high blood sugar levels.....
There is something about diabetes itself, researchers say, that leads to high levels of LDL cholesterol and a form of LDL cholesterol particles that is particularly dangerous. Diabetes also leads to increased levels of triglycerides, which are fats in the blood that increase heart disease risk, and in diabetes is linked to high blood pressure.....
Being obese or overweight, in contrast, are “weak contributors to heart attack risk,” Dr. Nathan said.
Type 2 diabetes “does not exist in isolation,” Dr. Nathan said. “Underlying diabetes are all these cardiovascular risk factors.”....
The key to saving lives is to reduce levels of LDL cholesterol to below 100 and also control other risk factors like blood pressure and smoking. The cholesterol reduction alone can reduce the very high risk of heart attacks and death from cardiovascular disease in people with diabetes by 30 percent to 40 percent, Dr. Cleeman said. And clinical trials have found that LDL levels of 70 to 80 are even better for people with diabetes who already have overt heart disease......
In Type 2 diabetes, the most ambitious effort was a huge study in Britain. It found that rigorous blood sugar control could lower the risk of complications that involved damage to small blood vessels, a list that includes blindness, nerve damage and kidney damage. But there was no effect on the overall death rate. There was a small decrease in the number of heart attacks but it was not statistically significant, meaning it could have occurred by chance.....
The result, notes Dr. John Buse, president-elect for science and medicine at the American Diabetes Association, is that for people with Type 1 and, especially, for those with Type 2 diabetes, there are still questions about whether and to what extent blood sugar control protects against heart disease and saves lives.
That leaves cholesterol lowering, for patients with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, as the most effective and easiest way by far to reduce the risk of heart disease and the only treatment proven to save lives. But doctors say achieving the recommended cholesterol levels usually means taking a statin.......
Dr. Hirsch has a message for diabetes patients: If he had to rate the different regimens for a typical middle-age person with Type 2 diabetes, the first priority would be to take a statin and lower the LDL cholesterol level.
Dr. Brownlee agreed, but added that the two other measures to protect against heart disease, blood pressure control and taking an aspirin to prevent blood clots, should not be neglected.
“Right now, without waiting for lots of exciting things that are almost in the pipeline or in the pipeline, starting tomorrow, if everyone did these things — taking a statin, taking a blood pressure medication, and maybe taking an aspirin — you would reduce the heart attack rate by half.”
I will however tie this posting into the focus of this blog, because it illustrates important points.
It is perhaps shocking that most diabetics don't realize that their lives are at risk from stroke and heart attacks, and that they could reduce the risks greatly by a simple medical regime.
It is perhaps even more shocking that physicians also sometimes do not realize this fact, due to failures in medical education and the ways in which knowledge gained from medical research is communicated to the profession. Whether due to lack of understanding of the public health problem or other factors, it seems from this article that physicians do not communicate the real risks to their patients. JAD
"CARE Turns Down U.S. Food Aid"
Read the full article by EBEN HARRELL in Time magazine, August 15, 2007.While the U.S. is responsible for almost half of all food donations to the developing world, it is the only country to utilize "monetized food aid," a method by which grain is shipped to charities in the developing world, which then sell the grain in the local market and invest the proceeds for their own programs.
"CARE has decided to phase out all such monetized food aid by 2009, turning its back on $46 million a year in U.S. federal funding. The charity said selling food to fund its programs is inefficient and often delivers life-sustaining grain not to the hungry but to those who can afford it.....European countries all but phased out monetized food aid in the 1990s and the world's largest food aid distributor—the U.N.'s World Food Program—does not allow any of its grain to be sold by NGOs.
" Food aid was a sticking point at the 2001 Doha trade talks, amid complaints that the U.S.'s insistence that its food aid be grown at home amounts to a subsidy. Many European NGOs argue that this policy, coupled with the U.S. law that 75% of food aid be carried by U.S. ships, means food often arrives too late, floods local markets and damages indigenous farming.
"They argue that food aid should come, when possible, from the closest producer to the needy area. E.U. policy reflects this sentiment; less than 10% of its food-aid budget is now reserved for European-grown food. (Led by the British-based international charity Oxfam, many NGOs go further, arguing that cash injections into local economies is the best way to fight hunger)."
Comment: I see the argument that as the United States currently runs Food for Peace, it is a subsidy for American food producers and shipping companies. It has long been recognized that long term food assistance to a country can be damaging to its own farmers, who are facing competition from free food. Giving people money to buy food, to the contrary, increases the effective demand for food which can then be brought to where the demand exists by the cheapest means possible -- usually grown nearby.
There is of course a place for emergency shipments of food, such as when a natural disaster disrupts transportation systems. There is also, I think, a place for "food for work". If you take subsistence farmers off their land build some capital project, say a road or an irrigation canal that will eventually increase their income, it might be reasonable to pay them with the food that they would otherwise have grown.
Still, I would guess that the Bush administration is reluctant to give up this farm subsidy. The red states are after all among the most agricultural in the United States. JAD
Monday, August 20, 2007
"Warming Will Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts"
Read the full article by Doug Struck, The Washington Post, August 20, 2007.
Excerpts
As global warming heats the planet, there will be more desperate measures. The climate will be wetter in some places, drier in others. Changing weather patterns will leave millions of people without dependable supplies of water for drinking, irrigation and power, a growing stack of studies conclude.....Comment: I recently read that most Republicans don't believe the scientific evidence is conclusive that global warming is a problem. I hope it does not take another American dust bowl disaster to convince them. If so, it may be too late. JAD
Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pours himself a cup of tea and says the future is clear."As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That's settled science," he said. But where, and when, it comes down is the big uncertainty.
"You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.
"Global warming will intensify drought," he says. "And it will intensify floods."
According to the IPCC, that means a drying out of areas such as southern Europe, the Mideast, North Africa, South Australia, Patagonia and the U.S. Southwest.
These will not be small droughts. Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.The spacing of tree rings suggests there have been numerous periods of drought going back to A.D. 800, he said. But, "mechanistically, this is different. These projections clearly come from a warming forced by rising greenhouse gases."....
Seager predicts that drought will prompt dislocations similar to those of the Dust Bowl. "It will certainly cause movements of people. For example, as Mexico dries out, there will be migration from rural areas to cities and then the U.S.," he said. "There is an emerging situation of climate refugees."
Global warming threatens water supplies in other ways. Much of the world's fresh water is in glaciers atop mountains. They act as mammoth storehouses. In wet or cold seasons, the glaciers grow with snow. In dry and hot seasons, the edges slowly melt, gently feeding streams and rivers. Farms below are dependent on that meltwater; huge cities have grown up on the belief the mountains will always give them drinking water; hydroelectric dams rely on the flow to generate power......
The potential for conflict is more than theoretical. Turkey, Syria and Iraq bristle over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt trade threats over the Nile. The United Nations has said water scarcity is behind the bloody wars in Sudan's Darfur region. In Somalia, drought has spawned warlords and armies.
Already, the World Health Organization says, 1 billion people lack access to potable water. In northern China, retreating glaciers and shrinking wetlands that feed the Yangtze River prompted researchers to warn that water supplies for hundreds of millions of people may be at risk.
Wisdom from Egypt's famous Cavafy
Constantine Cavafy was born on April 29, 1863, lived most of his life in Egypt, and died on the same date in 1933 in Alexandria (Egypt).For the gods perceive things in the future, ordinary people in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen. In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside people hear nothing at all.Taleb comments:
C. P. Cavafy
Quoted in Fooled by Randomness (page 64)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The wise man listens to meaning, the fool only gets the noise.
Internet Stats
I just found some websites that I thought were really interesting.Internet World Stats which provided the above graph, among a wealth of information. Not only statistics, but lots of how too reports.
Its A-Stat-A-Day Blog.
Which lead me to the Online Publishers Association, which is full of interesting stuff including:
- its Internet Activity Index, and
- its White Paper titled "A Day in the Life: An Ethnographic Study of Media Consumption"
Sunday, August 19, 2007
"Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities for Science and Technology"
The UNU/UNESCO International Conference on
"Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities for Science and Technology"
was held 23-24 August 2006, Pacifico, Yokohama
"Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities for Science and Technology"
was held 23-24 August 2006, Pacifico, Yokohama
Globalization - the increasing cross-border movements of goods, money, information, ideas, and people, and the concomitant growing interdependency of people and institutions around the world - creates both opportunities and challenges for scientific and technological innovation. Globalization processes are driven by science and technology (particularly new information and communication technologies), but at the same time these processes are shaping the ways in which scientific knowledge and new technologies are produced.
This conference provided a forum for discussing harnessing scientific and technological progress to promote social and economic progress. Day One was a public symposium in which eminent experts discussed how globalization is changing science and technology, and vice-versa, and the opportunities that these changes offer. Day Two was a workshop with parallel working group discussions on the various aspects in which science and technology link with, and contribute to, peace and sustainable development.
This conference provided a forum for discussing harnessing scientific and technological progress to promote social and economic progress. Day One was a public symposium in which eminent experts discussed how globalization is changing science and technology, and vice-versa, and the opportunities that these changes offer. Day Two was a workshop with parallel working group discussions on the various aspects in which science and technology link with, and contribute to, peace and sustainable development.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
"Height, health, and development"
PNAS | August 14, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 33 | 13232-13237
Author: Angus Deaton
Abstract: "Adult height is determined by genetic potential and by net nutrition, the balance between food intake and the demands on it, including the demands of disease, most importantly during early childhood. Historians have made effective use of recorded heights to indicate living standards, in both health and income, for periods where there are few other data. Understanding the determinants of height is also important for understanding health; taller people earn more on average, do better on cognitive tests, and live longer. This paper investigates the environmental determinants of height across 43 developing countries. Unlike in rich countries, where adult height is well predicted by mortality in infancy, there is no consistent relationship across and within countries between adult height on the one hand and childhood mortality or living conditions on the other. In particular, adult African women are taller than is warranted by their low incomes and high childhood mortality, not to mention their mothers' educational level and reported nutrition. High childhood mortality in Africa is associated with taller adults, which suggests that mortality selection dominates scarring, the opposite of what is found in the rest of the world. The relationship between population heights and income is inconsistent and unreliable, as is the relationship between income and health more generally."
Author: Angus Deaton
Abstract: "Adult height is determined by genetic potential and by net nutrition, the balance between food intake and the demands on it, including the demands of disease, most importantly during early childhood. Historians have made effective use of recorded heights to indicate living standards, in both health and income, for periods where there are few other data. Understanding the determinants of height is also important for understanding health; taller people earn more on average, do better on cognitive tests, and live longer. This paper investigates the environmental determinants of height across 43 developing countries. Unlike in rich countries, where adult height is well predicted by mortality in infancy, there is no consistent relationship across and within countries between adult height on the one hand and childhood mortality or living conditions on the other. In particular, adult African women are taller than is warranted by their low incomes and high childhood mortality, not to mention their mothers' educational level and reported nutrition. High childhood mortality in Africa is associated with taller adults, which suggests that mortality selection dominates scarring, the opposite of what is found in the rest of the world. The relationship between population heights and income is inconsistent and unreliable, as is the relationship between income and health more generally."
Nobel Winner Evicted from Mexican Hotel
I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in GuatemalaStaff at Cancun's five-star Hotel Coral Beach appear to have assumed Rigoberta Manchu was another street vendor or beggar, so without asking questions they ordered her to leave. Rigoberta Menchu of course is a Nobel peace prizewinner, UNESCO goodwill ambassador, Guatemalan presidential candidate and figurehead for indigenous rights.
Source: Rory Carroll, Guardian Latin America correspondent via Free Internet Press, 2007-08-18
Friday, August 17, 2007
"U.S. News's College Rankings Face Competition and Criticism"
Read the full article by Valerie Strauss, in The Washington Post, August 17, 2007.
Excerpt:
Comment: Colleges are big places and the average undergraduate experience (if there is such a thing) may be quite different than the best or the worst at the same college. Of course, college ratings are at best estimates, and ideally those using them should be aware of the methods for making the rating and their limitations if the decision is a serious one -- as in the case of a student who would be accepted by many universities and is considering expensive options. Rankings should be used even more cautiously. I think the information involved in the distinction between the nth ranked university and the n+1th ranked is essentially zero. Having said that, it seems to me that there is information in the ratings, and something to be gained by knowing if a university is in the top ten or not in the top 100. Of course, misuse of the information may lead to worse decisions than would be made by a simple random process. (And you know how many 17 year olds are best described as simple and random processes.) JAD
Excerpt:
U.S. News will release the 2008 rankings online today and in the magazine Monday. But this year's list comes amid a growing backlash. Critics, some of whom produce their own college guides, have questioned the magazine's methodology. At least 63 college leaders have signed a letter agreeing not to fill out the reputation survey, which now accounts for 25 percent of the rankings. More are expected to join in the boycott.
Over nearly 25 years, U.S. News has seen its rankings gain unprecedented influence among schools; some have changed policy and awarded bonuses to presidents and administrators who spearhead a leap in rankings, according to educators. But as the magazine's influence has grown, so has the competition.
Princeton Review has a guide. So does Fiske. And Kaplan, which is owned by The Washington Post Co., does, too.
Comment: Colleges are big places and the average undergraduate experience (if there is such a thing) may be quite different than the best or the worst at the same college. Of course, college ratings are at best estimates, and ideally those using them should be aware of the methods for making the rating and their limitations if the decision is a serious one -- as in the case of a student who would be accepted by many universities and is considering expensive options. Rankings should be used even more cautiously. I think the information involved in the distinction between the nth ranked university and the n+1th ranked is essentially zero. Having said that, it seems to me that there is information in the ratings, and something to be gained by knowing if a university is in the top ten or not in the top 100. Of course, misuse of the information may lead to worse decisions than would be made by a simple random process. (And you know how many 17 year olds are best described as simple and random processes.) JAD
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Really Bad Consequences from the new Postal Law
Click here to go to the Free Press site that makes it easy to protest this law and its implementation.The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA, P.L. 109-435) was signed into law by President Bush on December 20, 2006. Clearly this was passed in the final days of the previous (Republican) Congress before the current (Democratic) Congress took office, and signed by the President at a time when it would not get much publicity.
The act was quickly put together in December (after the election) from somewhat divergent bills previously passed by the House and Senate. It included a provision that had not been included in either:
No letter of such a class of domestic origin shall be opened except under authority of a search warrant authorized by law, or by an officer or employee of the Postal Service for the sole purpose of determining an address at which the letter can be delivered, or pursuant to the authorization of the addressee.I find a report noting that:
in the signing statement, President Bush said he would ignore the law and "conduct searches in exigent circumstances."This is one of many examples of signing statements made by President Bush in which he basically tells the Congress he is not interested in their laws. We now depend on Attorney General Gonzales to protect our mail from being read without a warrant!
About Postal Rates
The PAEA was the first major change in the law governing the postal service since 1971. There is a good (if bureaucratic) website on the new law created by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). It notes:
The Act also establishes two separate product categories: Market-Dominant products and Competitive products. It prescribes a new process for setting prices, with increases for Market-Dominant products capped at the Consumer Price Index, by class. For Competitive products, the law creates new pricing flexibility.Thus Congress removed the named competitive products (priority mail, expedited mail, bulk parcel post, bulk international mail, and mailgrams) from the pricing policies of the previous legislation and the objectives and factors of the new PAEA. The "competitive products" are those over which the USPS does not hold a monopoly, but are offered in competition with other commercial providers. The intent here apparently was a good one -- keeping the USPS from competing unfairly with the private sector by subsidizing its competitive products with excess profits from its monopoly services.
Prior to the PAEA, the USPS in theory set prices to cover the costs of its services. However, the USPS has not in the past provided detailed financial information including product-by-product financial statements. Consequently, there have been some questions that there have been cross subsidies (e.g. bulk mail payed less than its fair share and John Q. Public more than his fair share of the costs). Accuracy and transparency are still important according to this article in DM News (Direct Marketing News):
The Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) chairman Dan G. Blair stressed the need for service standards and performance measures that are transparent and accountable when he appeared in front of the Senate postal subcommittee August 2.The first rate increases under the new law for the monopoly services (Market Dominant Products) show that there are going to be real problems!
Blair talked about the steps PRC is taking to implement modern service standards as required by Title III of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.
“Ensuring transparency and maintenance of performance levels is more critical than ever, since future postal rate increases are capped at inflation,” Blair told the Senate postal subcommittee. “Congress, after considerable deliberation, specifically chose the CPI as the index for the rate cap.
The PAEA created a system by which the price of USPS monopoly services was to be capped and to grow no faster than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The Postal Rate Commission is to oversee the system. As one might expect, the administration then had to figure out exactly what the law meant. Specifically, the postal service designates difference classes of mail, and charges differently according to the classification of the mail. How then was the cap to be applied to the different classes of mail.
Extensive public consultation was held. Looking over the filings, not surprisingly, big companies with a lot of money at stake according to how postal rates were set were very active as were their trade associations. The only consumer advocate seemed to be the Office of the Consumer Advocate of the USPS, which offered helpful if bureaucratic comment. However, I did not see civil society consumer advocates, nor the representatives of others who are very important sources of "knowledge for development". Nor did I see small publlishers, charities or other affected "good guys" represented.
So, what are the results?
I was first alerted to the problems of this legislation by my son, who sent me a link to "Time Warner Destroys America and a Political Mag Near You" by Josh Marshal in the TalkingPointsMemo. Marshall writes:
The short and sweet of it is that Time Warner has proposed and postal regulators have accepted a proposal which is actually reducing postage costs for mega-mags like Time and Newsweek while dramatically raising them for small independent publishers. From small mags on the right and left I've been deluged in recent weeks by letters saying the new rates are tipping them into financial crisis.On the same theme,Stephen Lendman wrote "New US Postal Rates Undermine Small Publications" for the CommonDreams.Org News Center:
Such is the state of things today, and it’s led to first time ever changes in postal policy directly subverting USPS’ own 215 year history. That’s according to the urgent message just sent his Free Press supporters (including this writer) by the organization’s founder, author, media critic, activist, and noted professor of media studies at the University of Illinois’ main campus in Champaign-Urbana Robert McChesney.What is the new rate schedule doing to charities?
He noted how rarely he sends out messages to “everyone in (his) address book (but did it this time on a matter he finds) “of staggering importance and urgency (because) There is a major crisis in our media taking place right now; it’s getting almost no attention and unless we act very soon the consequences for our society could well be disastrous. And it will only take place because it is being done without any public awareness or participation (going against) the very foundations of freedom of the press (in all) American history.”
McChesney goes on saying (unless stopped) the US postal system is implementing “a radical reformulation of its rates for magazines” to place a much larger cost burden on smaller periodicals than on the largest ones standing to benefit from the policy change. Up to now, postal policy “converted the (First Amendment’s) Free Press clause….from an abstract principle into a living breathing reality for Americans,” and it’s been that way “throughout our history.”
All that’s about to be scrapped with new rates scheduled to take effect July 15 under which small publications will pay postal rates as much as 20% higher than the largest ones in a willful plan to undermine them, weaken media competition further, and as McChesney explains: “make it almost impossible to launch a new magazine (or other publication) unless it is spawned by a huge conglomerate” wanting to get huger. This new postal policy, crafted “in the dark of night,” will adversely affect every small political journal in the nation including those providing the only print source of real news, information and analysis of vital world and national issues many readers rely on but may lose.
That’s the whole idea with the nominally independent US Postal Service (USPS) in bed with big media to stack the deck in its favor and in the process subvert the sacred First Amendment moving flank speed toward the dustbin of US history unless derailed. That’s no small statement with this policy less than 90 days from taking effect along with the still unresolved battle in Congress over Net Neutrality allowing readers access to this article they may not have if telecom and cable giants gain control of the internet so it’s no longer free and open.
McChesney notes the new postal rates “were developed with no public involvement or congressional oversight (in a scheme) drafted by (media giant) Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the nation.” McChesney believes responsible postal bureaucrats failed to consider how adverse their action is to a free and open press. This writer has darker thoughts, however, believing it’s another example of dirty political machinations with corporate America telling government and bureaucrats to jump and their responding how high.
McChesney continues saying how hard it is to exaggerate the “corruption and sleaziness of this” whole business with a big media lawyer he quotes admitting: “It takes a publishing company several hundred thousand dollars to even participate in these rate cases. Some large corporations spend millions to influence these rates.”
Another result is described in "Increase in Postal Rates Hits Some Charities Hard" by Peter Panepento in The Chronical of Philanthropy.
Under the new rate structure, nonprofit groups are paying an average of 6.7 percent more on postage for fund-raising letters and other types of so-called nonprofit standard mail.For a final tidbit, how about "Book charity priced out of doing good" by Mike Cassidy in the San Jose Mercury News:
The increases, however, are much steeper for organizations that mail calendars, annual reports, and other large pieces under the category of standard flat mail — a classification that now costs many nonprofit groups 20 percent to 40 percent more than before, says Anthony Conway, executive director of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers in Washington.
And a new mail category that covers bulky pieces that are not easily processed by automated Postal Service mail-processing equipment means that some pieces will cost far more to send, in some cases as much as four times what nonprofit groups paid in the past.
Lobbyists for nonprofit organizations unsuccessfully attempted to get the Postal Service to delay the introduction of the new category so that charities would have time to adjust their strategies and could move forward with already scheduled mailings without paying the higher costs.
Some organizations have decided to forge ahead with mailing plans.
Among the organizations that expects a major cost increase from the postal change is the Dollywood Foundation in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., which runs the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, a literacy program that mails about 5.5 million books to preschool children annually. Those books — which are distributed to nonprofit organizations and government agencies and are then mailed directly to children — must now pass a flexibility test to avoid being placed in the non-flat machinable category.
Those that pass the test — which involves bending the books by an inch or more while dangling them over the edge of a table — will cost about 10 percent more to mail starting today than they did in the past.
Those that fail will cost 60 percent, or nearly 25 cents per book, to mail says David Dotson, the foundation's executive director.
"Our hope is up to half of them can make it. But all you can call it is hope," Mr. Dotson says. "We have zero time to respond. It will take us nine months or more to change material and format and do anything else we'd have to do to research whether our books will bend an inch."
For years, Alice Gosak has been quietly collecting books and mailing them off to book-starved teachers and students in developing countries.....Cassidy posted more related to this article on his blog, with stories from others whose book efforts were adversely affected.
Gosak has joined an ad hoc group of do-gooders nationwide who say recent changes in postal rates have crushed their efforts to spread goodwill, literacy and learning.
They've come together on the Internet, where they've posted a petition asking Congress to roll back a book-rate hike that has increased mailing costs by up to four times.
"I have a garage full of books I was going to ship before this happened," Gosak says. And a car trunk full. And a basement full.
"I can't afford to do it."
Remember when a first class letter went up to 41 cents in May? At the same time, the post office boosted the cost of shipping books in bulk to a local address in, say Africa, from $1.05 a pound to $3.95 a pound.
Gosak is a global citizen from way back. In the 1960s, she served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. In the 1970s, she lectured in Serbia.
She knows Maryknoll nuns in Chile and Bolivia. She admires those helping in Romania. She's traveled to Poland, where she has relatives. And since the 1990s, at least, she's been sending books to those places......
The 500 or so books she's mailed so far might not sound like much. But there are many Alice Gosaks in the United States and a substantial number of bigger non-profits that exist to send books to the poor overseas.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Trade group: More government action needed on e-health - washingtonpost.com
Trade group: More government action needed on e-health - washingtonpost.com:
"U.S. lawmakers should avoid passing net neutrality laws as a way to help electronic-health initiatives move forward, an Internet provider trade group said Tuesday.
E-health and telemedicine applications will need to have priority routing over broadband networks in order to function properly, said David McClure, president and CEO of the U.S. Internet Industry Association (USIIA), which represents broadband providers and other Internet-based companies. Any legislation that would prohibit providers from prioritizing network traffic would be detrimental to e-health initiatives, he said.....
"U.S. lawmakers should avoid passing net neutrality laws as a way to help electronic-health initiatives move forward, an Internet provider trade group said Tuesday.
E-health and telemedicine applications will need to have priority routing over broadband networks in order to function properly, said David McClure, president and CEO of the U.S. Internet Industry Association (USIIA), which represents broadband providers and other Internet-based companies. Any legislation that would prohibit providers from prioritizing network traffic would be detrimental to e-health initiatives, he said.....
Consumer advocacy groups such as Public Knowledge and Free Press have pushed the U.S. Congress to pass net neutrality rules in recent years. Net neutrality rules would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors. Net neutrality advocates say large broadband providers shouldn't be able to give priority to an e-health application from a partner company and not give the same bandwidth to a competing e-health application.
Art Brodsky, spokesman for Public Knowledge, called USIIA's concerns 'nonsense.'
'What net neutrality strives to prohibit is favoritism,' Brodsky said in an e-mail. 'We don't want Kaiser (to pick one at random) to be the exclusive health-care provider of AT&T, so that customers of Aetna can't get the same monitoring services and the same emergency priority.'"
Comment: It should be possible to create regulations if desired that would privilege classes of use (e.g. health information, emergency reporting). I bet however that the industry will complain as soon as someone seeks to do to that it imposes too great a burden on the firms providing the pipes. JADTuesday, August 14, 2007
"Asia's Rising Science and Technology Strength: Comparative Indicators for Asia, the European Union, and the United States"
NSF 07-319, National Science Foundation, August 2007.
From the Introduction:
From the Introduction:
Science and technology (S&T) are changing the world in profound ways. Governments, having recognized the contributions of S&T to economic growth and societal well-being, are thinking strategically about their innovation systems and acting to make these systems more effective and efficient in an increasingly interdependent and competitive world. Policies that seek to strengthen countries' education infrastructure, the institutions that carry out research and development (R&D), and the innovation environment have become commonplace.
The major development over the past decade or more has been the rapid emergence of Asian[1] economies outside Japan as increasingly strong players in the world's S&T system, with South Korea and Taiwan being joined by Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and others. Although the world has experienced ubiquitous market- and policy-driven expansion of S&T capabilities, nowhere has this been as rapid and dramatic as in Asia.
The largest and fastest-growing actor is China, whose government has declared education and S&T to be the strategic engines of sustainable economic development. China has already become an important player in high-technology markets, has attracted the world's major corporations, and was a major recipient of foreign direct investment in 2004.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Coverage, Access and Quality | U.S. Life Expectancy Below That of 41 Other Nations - Kaisernetwork.org
Coverage, Access and Quality | U.S. Life Expectancy Below That of 41 Other Nations - Kaisernetwork.org:
"Life expectancy in the U.S. has reached its highest point ever, but it is exceeded by the rates in 41 other countries, the AP/Arizona Daily Star reports. The U.S. has been slipping for decades in international rankings of life expectancies as other countries are improving health care, nutrition and lifestyles, according to the AP/Daily Star. Countries that rank above the U.S. include Japan, most of Europe, Jordan and the Cayman Islands. A U.S. resident born in 2004 has a life expectancy of 77.9 years, placing the U.S. in 42nd place, down from 11th place two decades ago. "
Comment: For the richest nation in the world to be so low in the rankings for life expectancy is a major public health failing. It is of course largely the fault of the Bush Administrations which were in power during most of the time that the decline took place (and to the Republicans who torpedoed the Clinton health reforms). If we were to have strong programs to encourage life style reforms, health insurance for all of our people, and a more equitable distribution of income and wealth, we would not need to stay at 42nd! JAD
"Life expectancy in the U.S. has reached its highest point ever, but it is exceeded by the rates in 41 other countries, the AP/Arizona Daily Star reports. The U.S. has been slipping for decades in international rankings of life expectancies as other countries are improving health care, nutrition and lifestyles, according to the AP/Daily Star. Countries that rank above the U.S. include Japan, most of Europe, Jordan and the Cayman Islands. A U.S. resident born in 2004 has a life expectancy of 77.9 years, placing the U.S. in 42nd place, down from 11th place two decades ago. "
Comment: For the richest nation in the world to be so low in the rankings for life expectancy is a major public health failing. It is of course largely the fault of the Bush Administrations which were in power during most of the time that the decline took place (and to the Republicans who torpedoed the Clinton health reforms). If we were to have strong programs to encourage life style reforms, health insurance for all of our people, and a more equitable distribution of income and wealth, we would not need to stay at 42nd! JAD
"A General Call for 'Strategic Patience' in Iraq, Plus Discomforting Specifics"
Read the article by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, August 13, 2007
"Here are some cold facts for those contemplating the future in Iraq:
"The U.S. military has not only 160,000 troops and at least 100,000 contractors in that country, but also about 140,000 to 200,000 metric tons of valuable equipment and supplies, as well as 15,000 to 20,000 military vehicles and major weapons. These are spread through many cities and more than 100 forward operating bases.
"A secure withdrawal that includes all U.S. supplies and equipment and that phases out U.S. bases would take at least nine to 12 months and probably much longer. Two years is what many military experts think would be a rapid, but deliberate, pace. Such an effort should include transferring or destroying facilities and stocks that could fuel a civil war, as well as deciding the fate of more than $20 billion in aid projects and of the gigantic U.S. Embassy -- which may end up as the most expensive white elephant in the history of American diplomacy."The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq: A Trip Report
Anthony H. Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 6, 2007
Comment: This is information that should inform decision making in the U.S. Congress, the Bush Administration, and the U.S. election campaign. JAD
"Victory for generics in Indian patent case"
Glivec, the drug that started the controversySource: T. V. Padma, SciDev.Net, 6 August 2007
Lead: "An Indian court today (6 August) rejected a petition by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis challenging a clause in Indian patent law that prohibits the patenting of minor changes to existing drugs." The article continues: "A statement released by the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), quoting Tido von Schoen-Angerer, director of the MSF Campaign for Access to Essential Medicine, says, 'This is a huge relief for millions of patients and doctors in developing countries who depend on affordable medicines from India.' Novartis challenged the clause in the Chennai High Court in 2006 after its application for a patent for the anti-cancer drug Glivec was rejected on grounds that it was simply a newer version of an existing drug."
Comment: How could I disagree with MsF? JAD
"SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: Framing Science"
Read the full article by Matthew C. Nisbet1 and Chris Mooney in Science, 6 April 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5821, p. 56.
"Issues at the intersection of science and politics, such as climate change, evolution, and embryonic stem cell research, receive considerable public attention, which is likely to grow, especially in the United States as the 2008 presidential election heats up. Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively 'frame' information to make it relevant to different audiences. Some in the scientific community have been receptive to this message (1). However, many scientists retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists', and controversy would subside."
The authors give the example, among others, of climate change.
In democracies, the people get the government and the policy they deserve. If you accept policies that favor only a small minority to your own disadvantage and to the disadvantage of nearly everyone else out of ignorance, you deserve what you get. Understanding climate change is not rocket science.
It should be abundantly clear that this is a crucial issue of our time. All voters have a responsibility to understand this issue, and should take the time to become informed on it. JAD
Source: "Bangladesh: Up to their necks," The Economist, August 9, 2007.
"Issues at the intersection of science and politics, such as climate change, evolution, and embryonic stem cell research, receive considerable public attention, which is likely to grow, especially in the United States as the 2008 presidential election heats up. Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively 'frame' information to make it relevant to different audiences. Some in the scientific community have been receptive to this message (1). However, many scientists retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists', and controversy would subside."
The authors give the example, among others, of climate change.
many surveys show major partisan differences on the issue. A Pew survey conducted in January found that 23% of college-educated Republicans think global warming is attributable to human activity, compared with 75% of Democrats (6). Regardless of party affiliation, most Americans rank global warming as less important than over a dozen other issues (6). Much of this reflects the efforts of political operatives and some Republican leaders who have emphasized the frames of either "scientific uncertainty" or "unfair economic burden" (7). In a counter-strategy, environmentalists and some Democratic leaders have framed global warming as a "Pandora's box" of catastrophe; this and news images of polar bears on shrinking ice floes and hurricane devastation have evoked charges of "alarmism" and further battles.Comment: How about framing the issue as one of the responsibility of citizenship? By the end of the 21st century the climate will have changed greatly. The social and economic costs of that change will be huge. The greenhouse gas emissions of the United States are the major cause of this climate change, and the refusal of the Republican party in general and of the Bush administration in particular to act responsibly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions domestically or to lead in the effort to do so globally have hamstrung efforts to reduce the rate of growth of the problem, much less to reduce the problem.
Recently, a coalition of Evangelical leaders have adopted a different strategy, framing the problem of climate change as a matter of religious morality. The business pages tout the economic opportunities from developing innovative technologies for climate change. Complaints about the Bush Administration's interference with communication of climate science have led to a "public accountability" frame that has helped move the issue away from uncertainty to political wrongdoing.
In democracies, the people get the government and the policy they deserve. If you accept policies that favor only a small minority to your own disadvantage and to the disadvantage of nearly everyone else out of ignorance, you deserve what you get. Understanding climate change is not rocket science.
It should be abundantly clear that this is a crucial issue of our time. All voters have a responsibility to understand this issue, and should take the time to become informed on it. JAD
Source: "Bangladesh: Up to their necks," The Economist, August 9, 2007.Do you think it is unrelated to climate change that the fact that the Subcontinent is experiencing the worst flooding in living memory, with tens of millions of people flooded and a health emergency facing the world, in a year of exceptional weather in Europe? Are you willing to take the risk that this is only a harbinger of things to come?
Faster than the blink of an eye -- much, much faster!
The Electron Stopwatch -- Osborne and Yeston 317 (5839): 765 -- Science:
"The technology for tracking the time scale of nuclear motion in free molecules and solids was limited by the duration of a single cycle of visible light: approximately 0.000000000000001 second, or 1 femtosecond. Electrons move even faster than that, and for a long time, scientists could only watch their rearrangements as an indiscrete blur. Over the past several years, however, laser technology has crossed the threshold into the attosecond regime (a thousandth of a femtosecond)."
"The technology for tracking the time scale of nuclear motion in free molecules and solids was limited by the duration of a single cycle of visible light: approximately 0.000000000000001 second, or 1 femtosecond. Electrons move even faster than that, and for a long time, scientists could only watch their rearrangements as an indiscrete blur. Over the past several years, however, laser technology has crossed the threshold into the attosecond regime (a thousandth of a femtosecond)."
"The Cha-Cha-Cha Theory of Scientific Discovery"
Daniel Koshland Jr., the long time editor of Science magazine, died recently. He made a great contribution to scientific journalizm. This article of his appears in the current issue.
It is even on a subject dear to the heart of this blog:
It is even on a subject dear to the heart of this blog:
Scientific discoveries are the steps--some small, some big--on the staircase called progress, which has led to a better life for the citizens of the world. Each scientific discovery is made possible by the arrangement of neurons in the brain of one individual and as such is idiosyncratic. In looking back on centuries of scientific discoveries, however, a pattern emerges which suggests that they fall into three categories--Charge, Challenge, and Chance--that combine into a "Cha-Cha-Cha" Theory of Scientific Discovery. (Nonscientific discoveries can be categorized similarly.)
"Charge" discoveries solve problems that are quite obvious--cure heart disease, understand the movement of stars in the sky--but in which the way to solve the problem is not so clear. In these, the scientist is called on, as Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi put it, "to see what everyone else has seen and think what no one else has thought before." Thus, the movement of stars in the sky and the fall of an apple from a tree were apparent to everyone, but Isaac Newton came up with the concept of gravity to explain it all in one great theory.
"Challenge" discoveries are a response to an accumulation of facts or concepts that are unexplained by or incongruous with scientific theories of the time. The discoverer perceives that a new concept or a new theory is required to pull all the phenomena into one coherent whole. Sometimes the discoverer sees the anomalies and also provides the solution. Sometimes many people perceive the anomalies, but they wait for the discoverer to provide a new concept. Those individuals, whom we might call "uncoverers," contribute greatly to science, but it is the individual who proposes the idea explaining all of the anomalies who deserves to be called a discoverer.
"Chance" discoveries are those that are often called serendipitous and which Louis Pasteur felt favored "the prepared mind." In this category are the instances of a chance event that the ready mind recognizes as important and then explains to other scientists. This category not only would include Pasteur's discovery of optical activity (D and L isomers), but also W. C. Roentgen's x-rays and Roy Plunkett's Teflon. These scientists saw what no one else had seen or reported and were able to realize its importance.
"A Modern History Of White House Spin"
Read the full article by Peter Baker, The Washington Post, August 13, 2007.
Excerpt:
Excerpt:
Kumar, a Towson University professor, got most of the important figures of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies to talk with her about their strategies for spinning journalists -- including Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett and Joshua B. Bolten from this administration. What emerges is a portrait of a rapidly shifting environment in which the White House has had to adapt to keep a quicker pace because of cable news, talk radio and the Internet.When a politician speaks you can be pretty sure his mouth is moving, unless he/she is a ventriloquist. As for the rest???
Nothing is left to chance, she writes. Take the backgrounds during President Bush's speeches, which the White House makes sure are plastered with slogans so that the television shot conveys the chosen message even without sound. Bush, she reports, speaks from a special podium called "Falcon," designed so that it does not block the background message in televised close-ups. "Winning the picture is important," Rove told her.
Kumar recounts how the Bush White House shifted communications strategies in its second term, as political troubles accumulated. At first, she writes, the Bush team did not pay much attention to the daily news cycle. Bartlett, then the communications director, said Bush staffers considered themselves "more like long-term investors" while Democrats were "more day traders." By 2006, Bartlett's views had changed. The White House, he said, needed to be both or it would suffer the consequences.
SCIENCE - washingtonpost.com
SCIENCE - washingtonpost.com: "
A long-awaited analysis of the experience of 43 U.S. cities, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, disputes the conventional wisdom that neither communities nor individuals could have done much to alter the deadly march of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The study found that U.S. cities that closed schools, banned public gatherings, isolated flu patients and quarantined people exposed to them suffered less than cities that did not do those things. These 'non-pharmaceutical interventions' acted like drugs. The sooner they were taken, the higher the dose used and the longer the treatment, the better a city did."
Comment: Big surprise! Public health measures work. Still this is an important result given that a new flu epidemic is probably going to occur soon, and many countries would be able to use these older techniques effectively when it does. JAD
A long-awaited analysis of the experience of 43 U.S. cities, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, disputes the conventional wisdom that neither communities nor individuals could have done much to alter the deadly march of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The study found that U.S. cities that closed schools, banned public gatherings, isolated flu patients and quarantined people exposed to them suffered less than cities that did not do those things. These 'non-pharmaceutical interventions' acted like drugs. The sooner they were taken, the higher the dose used and the longer the treatment, the better a city did."
Comment: Big surprise! Public health measures work. Still this is an important result given that a new flu epidemic is probably going to occur soon, and many countries would be able to use these older techniques effectively when it does. JAD
"America Loses Its Stature as Tallest Country"
Read the article by Rob Stein, The Washington Post, August 13, 2007.The article says that trend from census to census of people in the United States getting taller on average seems to have stopped, while Europeans continue to grow from decade to decade. As a result, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and the Dutch males are all now taller than the average Yank. The situation seems to hold true even when Asian Americans are dropped from the averages.
It seems to me that there may be a problem in comparing people from the United States with just Scandinavians. Perhaps Scandinavian-Americans are taller than average here. Or perhaps there is some hight advantage in living in the north. In any case, one might want to compare North Americans with Europeans (and Aussies and New Zealanders) to see is maybe we have just grown as much as it is in our genes to do so.
"The Color of Health Care: Diagnosing Bias in Doctors"
Read the full article by Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, August 13, 2007.
"A new study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions affiliated with Harvard University provides empirical evidence for the first time that when it comes to heart disease, bias is the central problem -- bias so deeply internalized that people are sincerely unaware that they hold it....
"It was only when researchers studied physicians' implicit attitudes -- by measuring how quickly they made positive or negative mental associations with blacks and whites -- that they found a mechanism to explain differences in medical judgment.
"'Physicians who had higher biases against blacks were less likely to recommend thrombolysis for blacks,' said Alexander R. Green, the study's chief investigator and a faculty member at the Disparities Solutions Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"Thrombolysis is a clot-busting technique given when doctors suspect that a patient is having a heart attack. It is not to be given lightly, which is why a physician's judgment is crucial in telling patients who are merely having aches and pains apart from patients at death's door."
Comment: I think the idea of unconscious bias makes a lot of sense, as does the idea that unconscious bias against minorities results in inferior treatment. Still I am not sure that the association delay method is an adequate measure of bias.
More importantly, the estimate of a posteriori probabilities of disease given the presenting evidence depend on the a priori estimates. So too, the estimation of treatment outcome probabilities should depend on both the a posteriori probabilities of alternative presenting conditions and of the probable impacts of the treatment on the condition.
Race is not a very informative variable for estimating a priori probabilities but it is one. Again, race may not be a very informative variable, but it may carry information on likely impact of treatment alternatives. A physician should use the best available information and if no better information is available and race is specified in the psychologists experimental protocol, then physicians would be likely to use it in diagnosis and prescription, albeit without conscious understanding. So it is possible that the physician behavior was rational, not racist.
But unlikely. Still, the example gave me a chance to blog on a feature of diagnosis that is relevant to this blog. JAD
"A new study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions affiliated with Harvard University provides empirical evidence for the first time that when it comes to heart disease, bias is the central problem -- bias so deeply internalized that people are sincerely unaware that they hold it....
"It was only when researchers studied physicians' implicit attitudes -- by measuring how quickly they made positive or negative mental associations with blacks and whites -- that they found a mechanism to explain differences in medical judgment.
"'Physicians who had higher biases against blacks were less likely to recommend thrombolysis for blacks,' said Alexander R. Green, the study's chief investigator and a faculty member at the Disparities Solutions Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"Thrombolysis is a clot-busting technique given when doctors suspect that a patient is having a heart attack. It is not to be given lightly, which is why a physician's judgment is crucial in telling patients who are merely having aches and pains apart from patients at death's door."
Comment: I think the idea of unconscious bias makes a lot of sense, as does the idea that unconscious bias against minorities results in inferior treatment. Still I am not sure that the association delay method is an adequate measure of bias.
More importantly, the estimate of a posteriori probabilities of disease given the presenting evidence depend on the a priori estimates. So too, the estimation of treatment outcome probabilities should depend on both the a posteriori probabilities of alternative presenting conditions and of the probable impacts of the treatment on the condition.
Race is not a very informative variable for estimating a priori probabilities but it is one. Again, race may not be a very informative variable, but it may carry information on likely impact of treatment alternatives. A physician should use the best available information and if no better information is available and race is specified in the psychologists experimental protocol, then physicians would be likely to use it in diagnosis and prescription, albeit without conscious understanding. So it is possible that the physician behavior was rational, not racist.
But unlikely. Still, the example gave me a chance to blog on a feature of diagnosis that is relevant to this blog. JAD
Two Bills to Support in This Congress
Let us restore key constitutional rights in the United States!
Here is something on the second of these by Bob Geiger in The Huffington Post.
Memo Reviewing the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007 by the Harvard Law School National Security Research Group.
What You Should Know About Habeas Corpus.
- The Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007 (Senate S.576.IS and House H.R.1415.IH
- The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007 (Senate S.185.IS and House H.R.1416.IH
Here is something on the second of these by Bob Geiger in The Huffington Post.
Memo Reviewing the Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007 by the Harvard Law School National Security Research Group.
What You Should Know About Habeas Corpus.
"The religious state of Islamic science"
Read the full interview with Taner Edis by Steve Paulson on Salon.com.
Excerpts:
Excerpts:
"even conservative Muslims admit that the Islamic world lags far behind the West in science and technology. This is a big problem for Muslims who envy the economic and military power of the United States.....it's important to distinguish between basic science in, say, physics or biology, and more technology-oriented work. Muslims have been trying to catch up to Western countries for the past couple of centuries. Especially in military and commercial areas, they have put their emphasis on applied science rather than basic science. So there are lots of medical doctors and engineers in the Muslim world. But the contribution to scientific research is much lower......It permanently locks the Muslim world into a subordinate position in those aspects of modern life that depend on creativity in technology and science. And this is a huge swath of modern life......Didn't Western colonialism also contribute to the decline of science in the Islamic world? .....There is no overarching cause that single-handedly accounts for Muslim backwardness in science. Western colonialism has much to answer for.....a dilemma for many people in the Muslim world who are thinking about science and religion. On the one hand, there is a desire to catch up, especially in the technological realm which underpins the military and commercial superiority of the Western world. On the other hand, there is a desire to adopt modern science in such a way that local religious culture is not corrupted. So yes, they are very concerned not to go down the Western path......How does this play out in schools? What happens depends very much on which Muslim country we're talking about. In many Muslim countries, you don't have much creationism, but only because evolution does not appear in their textbooks in the first place. In countries that have had some exposure to conventional science education, such as Turkey, then you also have more of a public creationist reaction. In the last 20 years, we've seen creationism appearing in Turkey's official science textbooks that are taught in high schools. Turkey has also witnessed a very strong popular movement for creationism that has spread to the whole Islamic world......What makes it hard to be a physicist inTaner Edis is the author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam.Turkey? First of all, factors that have nothing to do with religion. Turkey is a poor country. The amount of resources that they can devote to basic scientific investigations is very low. The physics department in Turkey where I got my undergraduate degree had some very good teachers, but the resources we had were fairly poor compared to any American university."
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Does Not Compute - washingtonpost.com
Does Not Compute - washingtonpost.com:
"Lenders of Sowood Capital Management learned recently that the prices of senior and junior debt don't, in fact, always move in the same direction in the midst of a liquidity crisis. And investors in Campbell & Co. learned that the model investing their $11 billion never imagined that the yen carry trade might unwind at the same time as a stock market downturn. The secret trading strategies of a number of 'quant funds' were foiled by the fact that the other funds had pretty much the same strategies. Now that the failure of some of these models has caused huge trading losses, there is concern that turmoil on financial markets might spill over into the real economy. Not to worry, assures the Federal Reserve, citing its economic forecasting models."
Comment: First lesson of modeling is to get the theory right. (Then you want to get the data and the implementation right, then you want to be sure the users understand the use and limitations of the model.)
In The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward, Benoit B. Mandelbrot points out that stock markets do not follow the Gaussian distribution, and that extreme events (price increases or decreases) are more common that the Normal Distribution would predict. Since investors make or lose lots of money in days of extreme volatility, I assume those are the days that the models are most important. They are also the days when the assumptions (such as that of the Gaussian distribution) on which models are built are most likely to be wrong, or at least seriously challenged. JAD
"Lenders of Sowood Capital Management learned recently that the prices of senior and junior debt don't, in fact, always move in the same direction in the midst of a liquidity crisis. And investors in Campbell & Co. learned that the model investing their $11 billion never imagined that the yen carry trade might unwind at the same time as a stock market downturn. The secret trading strategies of a number of 'quant funds' were foiled by the fact that the other funds had pretty much the same strategies. Now that the failure of some of these models has caused huge trading losses, there is concern that turmoil on financial markets might spill over into the real economy. Not to worry, assures the Federal Reserve, citing its economic forecasting models."
Comment: First lesson of modeling is to get the theory right. (Then you want to get the data and the implementation right, then you want to be sure the users understand the use and limitations of the model.)
In The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward, Benoit B. Mandelbrot points out that stock markets do not follow the Gaussian distribution, and that extreme events (price increases or decreases) are more common that the Normal Distribution would predict. Since investors make or lose lots of money in days of extreme volatility, I assume those are the days that the models are most important. They are also the days when the assumptions (such as that of the Gaussian distribution) on which models are built are most likely to be wrong, or at least seriously challenged. JAD
Blackie's Google Power Saves Energy
Read "A Search Engine Wears Black and Thinks Green" in today's Washington Post for more details on Blackie.
"A blogger from Boston mixed some science with some math earlier this year and came up with a theory that a black background on the main Google search engine page could save 3,000 megawatt-hours every year, assuming Google gets 200 million queries a day and its page is displayed for 10 seconds per visit. An Australian company called Heap Media bought into the idea and developed a black-back Google search page, called Blackle."
"A blogger from Boston mixed some science with some math earlier this year and came up with a theory that a black background on the main Google search engine page could save 3,000 megawatt-hours every year, assuming Google gets 200 million queries a day and its page is displayed for 10 seconds per visit. An Australian company called Heap Media bought into the idea and developed a black-back Google search page, called Blackle."
Donna Edwards Official Campaign Office Opening Party
Official Campaign Office Opening Party
August 15th from 6:00 to 8:00 pm
August 15th from 6:00 to 8:00 pm
3737 Branch Avenue, Temple Hills, MD. When facing Iverson Mall, the campaign office is located just to the left of the Kids-for-Less store on the corner of Iverson St.
A potluck party to help celebrate the opening of Donna Edwards' Prince George's County campaign office. As with the opening of any office, office supplies are always needed and donations of supplies would be greatly appreciated. The candidate for Congress (the 4th district of the State of Maryland) wants to meet and talk with as many members of our district as possible.
The Dark Side of the ICT Force? ICT To Monitor and Police the Public
"China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People" By KEITH BRADSHER, The New York Times, August 12, 2007
At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets in Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, in southern China. Sophisticated computer software is soon to be installed using the images from the cameras to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity. Residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips are soon to be issued to most citizens of the city. "Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card. Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights."
Comment: Information and communications technology is powerful. Like most (all?) powerful technologies, ICT can be used for good or bad purposes. The Chinese example offers the possibility of being used by the police to protect citizens, prevent crime and catch criminals. However, it might also be used to extend coercive government control to an unprecedented degree. JAD
At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets in Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, in southern China. Sophisticated computer software is soon to be installed using the images from the cameras to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity. Residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips are soon to be issued to most citizens of the city. "Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card. Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights."
Comment: Information and communications technology is powerful. Like most (all?) powerful technologies, ICT can be used for good or bad purposes. The Chinese example offers the possibility of being used by the police to protect citizens, prevent crime and catch criminals. However, it might also be used to extend coercive government control to an unprecedented degree. JAD
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Two reports from the National Science Foundation
Changing U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003 by Derek Hill, Alan I. Rapoport, Rolf F. Lehming, and Robert K. Bell, NSF 07-320, July 2007.
These studies are trying to understand why the output of scientific publications from the United States is not increasing, in spite of the fact that there is more funding for science. I think it is too early to know the real causes, but flatlining is always a concern. JAD
In an unexpected development in the early 1990s, the absolute number of science and engineering (S&E) articles published by U.S.-based authors in the world's major peer-reviewed journals plateaued. This was a change from a rise in the number of publications over at least the two preceding decades. With some variation, this trend occurred across different categories of institutions, different institutional sectors, and different fields of research. It occurred despite continued increases in resource inputs, such as funds and personnel, that support research and development (R&D).The Changing Research and Publication Environment in American Research Universities by Robert K. Bell, with Derek Hill and Rolf F. Lehming, SRS 07-204, July 2007.
In other developed countries—a group of 15 members of the European Union (the EU-15) and Japan—the absolute number of articles continued to grow throughout most of the 1992–2003 period. During the mid- to late 1990s, the number of articles published by EU scientists surpassed those published by their U.S. counterparts, and the difference between Japanese and U.S. article output narrowed. Late in the period, growth in the number of articles produced in some of these developed countries showed signs of slowing.
The trend in number of S&E articles produced in four developing East Asian economies (the East Asia-4) was markedly different. This group exhibited strong growth in the number of articles, number of influential articles, and percentage of overall output classified as influential. Nonetheless, because the East Asia-4 began the period with a much less mature S&E research establishment than the three S&E publishing centers named above, it continued to lag behind them on the measures examined.
Those interviewed consistently reported that the research done in other developed countries and in several emerging Asian economies is getting better and becoming more abundant. In their view, improved capacity overseas is more likely to account for the increased share of S&E papers from foreign institutions than changes in what Americans have been doing. In an expanding literature, they see a continuing, even growing, American presence, but more marked growth occurring in other countries.Comment: The news here is not that other countries are producing more publications or that they are bearing more of the burden of advancing scientific knowledge. That is old, albeit very good news.
Advances in communication have made the international scientific literature more accessible to researchers in other countries. In this regard, advances in electronic communication loom large. As potential contributors to the literature, researchers can take advantage of improved electronic communication to collaborate more easily with distant colleagues and submit papers online. As readers, they can receive papers from colleagues via e-mail, find information in electronic archives and databases, and access scientific communications that cannot be found in a local university library. In addition to electronic communication, increased capacity worldwide to communicate in a common scientific language, English, has also played a role.
As the largest and most influential producer of scientific articles in the world and a nation whose native language is also the dominant language of science, the United States was already at the center of the worldwide system of scientific communication before these advances occurred. Thus, journals were already highly accessible to U.S. researchers, both as contributors and as readers, at the outset of the period studied. Improvements in communication may have had a greater effect on the ability of researchers elsewhere in the world—especially those in nations or at institutions that were not prominent in research in the late 1980s—to keep up with their fields, produce research of a reasonable quality, and report their research in journals with a wider audience and a greater impact.
These studies are trying to understand why the output of scientific publications from the United States is not increasing, in spite of the fact that there is more funding for science. I think it is too early to know the real causes, but flatlining is always a concern. JAD
Friday, August 10, 2007
Thinking About Measures of Innovation and the Knowledge Economy
Two from The Economist With Comments
"Innovation and the economy: The good, the bad and the ugly" (How Britain rates as a knowledge-based powerhouse), The Economist, August 2nd 2007.
Excerpt:
If you think about it, almost all technology for almost all nations is invented in other nations. The United States was the exception for a few decades after World War II because the R&D systems of more war torn nations were unable to function well. It makes sense, however, that with a couple of hundred countries, each must find most new knowledge discovered outside its own borders, and this is true for technological knowledge as well as scientific knowledge.
There is an advantage in inventing new products and processes within a nation's own borders, but there is probably even a greater advantage in being able first to commercialize such inventions wherever they come from. Market size helps, but so do institutions that foster innovation.
There is also the issue of "technological deepening". I tend to agree with others who have suggested that a great deal of economic benefit comes not from innovation in the sense of "adopting a technology that one has not used before", but from learning how better to utilize and how to improve a technology that one has been using. JAD
Excerpt:
Excerpt:
Comment: Lets think a bit about what kinds of investments are likely to result in economic benefits to a country. Research and development as a category is I think deceptive. It combines scientific activities which primarily add to the world's stock of knowledge (giving relatively little boost to the economy of the nation where those activities take place) and technological activities which lead to new or improved products and processes which may indeed by of commercial value. What, however, do we make of applied research and development that is done in a developing nation, such as that on contract from a multinational firm, which is specifically intended to be and will be commercialized in another (rich) country?
This blog has pointed out many times that knowledge is institutionalized in organizational structures and processes, and in other institutions such as markets for intermediate goods. We know that investments have been made in reengineeering organizations and restructuring productive sectors in response to opportunities to achieve economic gains made possible by new technologies, such as the technologies of the Information Revolution. (It is probably also the case that such investments are needed to take advantage of new opportunities created by improved human capital, or by discovery and exploitation of new natural resources.)
It may be useful to distinguish between the "invention" of new structures and processes and "innovation" that is through the adoption of models used elsewhere. It may also be the case, as with "deepening of technology", that there is a process of deepening of organizational engineering or deepening of industrial structure, achieved by perfecting reforms that have been made in the past rather than in innovating in structure or process.
I think that reengineering and restructuring are both typical of investments made in intangibles, as the article in The Economist would suggest. On the other hand, I think that there are aspects of the processes of improving social capital that are analogous to research and development, but are not included in the normal R&D accounting. The guys who figured out franchising fast food outlets could be said to have invented a new institution that had huge economic benefits. So too, the guys who restructured markets by creating e-commerce in the forms of Amazon.com and e.Bay.com made inventions that dramatically changed institutions and commercial efficiency. Their key inventions, however, were not the result of what we would count as R&D.
I suspect that comparable advances are available in social services -- education, health, police -- that would be greatly beneficial to the development of the "knowledge economy" but that would not be seen as either investment in intangibles (in the for profit sectors) nor as research and development. Indeed, I suspect that there will be a shift as countries embrace the knowledge economy to lifelong learning, with people teaching themselves by reading and using the media, away from schooling; learning outside of schools doesn't tend to appear on national accounts. Similarly, it would be great if major efforts were made to encourage people to live healthier lives -- eating better, exercising, and avoiding unhealthy food and drink for example; the improvements would not appear in national accounts, except perhaps as reductions in the GDP for health services. Inventions that would encourage such changes in behavior would seldom come from the activities contributing to R&D accounts, and indeed might not be seen is investments in intangibles.
How about creative activities -- writing books, making movies, making television programs, making musical recordings? In the knowledge society, I would expect more time to be spent on such inputs. Is the invention of new narratives or of new products such as books or recordings not comparable to the invention of new products? Should these not be seen as investments leading to increased commercial activity? J.K. Rowling, inventing the Harry Potter franchise, surely created an economic engine which has produced billions of dollars of revenues. Of course, the pay she forewent as she created the first of those novels was essentially negligible, and had little relation to the commercial value that would come from the fruits of her labor. JAD
"Innovation and the economy: The good, the bad and the ugly" (How Britain rates as a knowledge-based powerhouse), The Economist, August 2nd 2007.
Excerpt:Since June innovation has been enshrined, along with universities and skills, in the formal title of a ministerial department. In 2000 Europe's leaders committed the region to becoming “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world” by 2010.Comment: This last paragraph shows a misunderstanding of the terms "innovation" and "invention" as I believe they are usually used. When a developing nation invests in a new plant and equipment, it is often importing technology that it did not have before. That is innovation in the context of the developing nation. Developing nations often innovate in this way, combining low cost labor and other locally available factors with imported technology (and often imported capital) to create a comparative advantage in a new product.
Governments have good reason to foster innovation, for it is the mainspring of economic growth. Developing countries can grow quickly by investing heavily in new plant and equipment. But rich nations have already built up big capital stocks. If they are to sustain growth in the years ahead, they must be economic pioneers, pushing out the technological frontier through advances in knowledge.
If you think about it, almost all technology for almost all nations is invented in other nations. The United States was the exception for a few decades after World War II because the R&D systems of more war torn nations were unable to function well. It makes sense, however, that with a couple of hundred countries, each must find most new knowledge discovered outside its own borders, and this is true for technological knowledge as well as scientific knowledge.
There is an advantage in inventing new products and processes within a nation's own borders, but there is probably even a greater advantage in being able first to commercialize such inventions wherever they come from. Market size helps, but so do institutions that foster innovation.
There is also the issue of "technological deepening". I tend to agree with others who have suggested that a great deal of economic benefit comes not from innovation in the sense of "adopting a technology that one has not used before", but from learning how better to utilize and how to improve a technology that one has been using. JAD
Excerpt:
Britain, which has dismantled its old manufacturing industries faster and further than most, has made an especially big bet on its ability to thrive as a knowledge-based economy. So how innovative is it?"GDP redefined: Intangible measures" (Counting investments in knowledge reveals a new picture) The Economist, August 2, 2007.
There is no black and white answer, because performance varies according to the gauge that is used. There is a host of plausible measures, ranging from basic scientific work to patents and business research and development, from use of computer software to spending on broader types of knowledge-based activities such as instilling best managerial practice.
Excerpt:
ONE of the main snags in assessing innovation's impact on the economy is that official statistics trail behind the pioneers. The national accounts are good at measuring capital spending on things such as plant and equipment that matter in an industrial economy. They are not up to speed in incorporating investment in intangible activities such as R&D. How far would the existing view of the British economy alter if these were fully included?
“Fairly drastically”, says Jonathan Haskel, an economist at Queen Mary, University of London. A recent paper that he wrote with Mauro Giorgio Marrano and Gavin Wallis estimates the value of three broad categories of intangible investment in the business sector of the economy.*
With some minor exceptions, only the first, computer software, is already counted as investment in the national accounts. The second includes both scientific R&D—the traditional kind—and non-scientific research developing, for instance, new designs and financial products. The third is a broader category intended to capture the investments firms make to support their brands and organisational skills. The researchers count some of the money spent on advertising and market research, as well as the budget to train staff and expenditure designed to improve managerial expertise.
Comment: Lets think a bit about what kinds of investments are likely to result in economic benefits to a country. Research and development as a category is I think deceptive. It combines scientific activities which primarily add to the world's stock of knowledge (giving relatively little boost to the economy of the nation where those activities take place) and technological activities which lead to new or improved products and processes which may indeed by of commercial value. What, however, do we make of applied research and development that is done in a developing nation, such as that on contract from a multinational firm, which is specifically intended to be and will be commercialized in another (rich) country?
This blog has pointed out many times that knowledge is institutionalized in organizational structures and processes, and in other institutions such as markets for intermediate goods. We know that investments have been made in reengineeering organizations and restructuring productive sectors in response to opportunities to achieve economic gains made possible by new technologies, such as the technologies of the Information Revolution. (It is probably also the case that such investments are needed to take advantage of new opportunities created by improved human capital, or by discovery and exploitation of new natural resources.)
It may be useful to distinguish between the "invention" of new structures and processes and "innovation" that is through the adoption of models used elsewhere. It may also be the case, as with "deepening of technology", that there is a process of deepening of organizational engineering or deepening of industrial structure, achieved by perfecting reforms that have been made in the past rather than in innovating in structure or process.
I think that reengineering and restructuring are both typical of investments made in intangibles, as the article in The Economist would suggest. On the other hand, I think that there are aspects of the processes of improving social capital that are analogous to research and development, but are not included in the normal R&D accounting. The guys who figured out franchising fast food outlets could be said to have invented a new institution that had huge economic benefits. So too, the guys who restructured markets by creating e-commerce in the forms of Amazon.com and e.Bay.com made inventions that dramatically changed institutions and commercial efficiency. Their key inventions, however, were not the result of what we would count as R&D.
I suspect that comparable advances are available in social services -- education, health, police -- that would be greatly beneficial to the development of the "knowledge economy" but that would not be seen as either investment in intangibles (in the for profit sectors) nor as research and development. Indeed, I suspect that there will be a shift as countries embrace the knowledge economy to lifelong learning, with people teaching themselves by reading and using the media, away from schooling; learning outside of schools doesn't tend to appear on national accounts. Similarly, it would be great if major efforts were made to encourage people to live healthier lives -- eating better, exercising, and avoiding unhealthy food and drink for example; the improvements would not appear in national accounts, except perhaps as reductions in the GDP for health services. Inventions that would encourage such changes in behavior would seldom come from the activities contributing to R&D accounts, and indeed might not be seen is investments in intangibles.
How about creative activities -- writing books, making movies, making television programs, making musical recordings? In the knowledge society, I would expect more time to be spent on such inputs. Is the invention of new narratives or of new products such as books or recordings not comparable to the invention of new products? Should these not be seen as investments leading to increased commercial activity? J.K. Rowling, inventing the Harry Potter franchise, surely created an economic engine which has produced billions of dollars of revenues. Of course, the pay she forewent as she created the first of those novels was essentially negligible, and had little relation to the commercial value that would come from the fruits of her labor. JAD
Better Late than Never
"IS U.S. PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH, THE FATHER OF THE NEW INTERNATIONALISM?" by JEFFREY LAURENTI: 10/8/2007 (MaximsNews.com, U.N.)
"Is U.S. President George Bush now ushering in a new wave of multilateralism? Who woulda thunk it? Yet the evidence is accumulating that the American public, the Washington policy elites more reluctantly, and the Bush administration itself—most reluctantly of all—are rediscovering the indispensability of the global frameworks pioneered by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. President Bush, of course, had famously consigned the United Nations to irrelevance when its members refused to authorize his war against Iraq. He adamantly barred the United Nations from leading Iraq’s reconstruction after the triumph of American arms.
Yet this week the United States has asked the Security Council to approve a major new U.N. presence in Baghdad to help untie Iraq’s political knots and pull the country back from the abyss.
The president had much earlier come around to embrace the United Nations’ unique responsibility for dealing with Darfur."
Comment: But it would have been better still if the Bush administration had seen the value in the United Nations in 2001! JAD
"Is U.S. President George Bush now ushering in a new wave of multilateralism? Who woulda thunk it? Yet the evidence is accumulating that the American public, the Washington policy elites more reluctantly, and the Bush administration itself—most reluctantly of all—are rediscovering the indispensability of the global frameworks pioneered by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. President Bush, of course, had famously consigned the United Nations to irrelevance when its members refused to authorize his war against Iraq. He adamantly barred the United Nations from leading Iraq’s reconstruction after the triumph of American arms.
Yet this week the United States has asked the Security Council to approve a major new U.N. presence in Baghdad to help untie Iraq’s political knots and pull the country back from the abyss.
The president had much earlier come around to embrace the United Nations’ unique responsibility for dealing with Darfur."
Comment: But it would have been better still if the Bush administration had seen the value in the United Nations in 2001! JAD
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Global Science and National Policies: the Role of Academies
The Conference of the Academies of Sciences of Eastern and South Eastern Europe on the theme “Global Science and National Policies: the Role of Academies” was organized by the UNESCO Office in Venice (BRESCE), the UNESCO Office in Moscow and the International Council for Science (ICSU) . It was hosted by The Academy of Sciences of Moldova in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova from 4 to 5 May 2007.As a follow-up to the World Conference on Science (Budapest, 1999), UNESCO and ICSU decided in 2005 to take action to strengthen the interactions between the Academies of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (ESEE) countries and their involvement in international science cooperation. As a first step, a questionnaire was sent out in early 2006 to the concerned Academies to collect information on their activities and organizations, as well as on their aspirations and needs. As a second step, UNESCO and ICSU organized this Conference designed to bring all ESEE Academies together with a view to:
- review a set of strategic science issues relevant to regional and international cooperation, and the role that the Academies can play thereon;
- assess the role of the ESEE Academies in the national and regional contexts; and
- enhance the role of science in society and the building of knowledge societies in ESEE countries.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
What is the Problem of Weapons Supplies in Iraq?
"U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb Kills More Troops" by MICHAEL R. GORDON, The New York Times, August 8, 2007.
How many have been killed by the hundreds of thousands of weapons that were delivered by the United States to Iraq for Iraqi forces that were being trained. We know that no records were kept of who got those weapons, and that the recent GAO report says that hundreds of thousands can not now be located.
I wonder how many weapons are coming across the borders from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Syria, and how many people they are being used against. Are not the Sunni sources who finance terrorists and supply them with weapons in other places interested in supporting their allied factions in Iraq?
What is coming into Iraq from Turkey? Where do the Kurds get their weapons? Do weapons filter into the rest of Iraq from the Kurdish controlled areas?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions, in part because the news media have not provided me with that information. Why is that? Perhaps because it is easier to report from the press releases that the military hand out than to dig out the facts describing the broader picture and seek a more balanced report. Or perhaps the information I don't see is simply not important.
What does this all mean in terms of K4D?
In terms of this blog, I guess the message is that it is sometimes useful to think about the big picture and figure out what you should know. Lets take Iraq weaponry as an example.
What are the factions fighting in Iraq? We know about Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. Is it likely that Iran is supplying all of these factions with arms? I doubt it? Where are the others getting their weapons?
We have been informed that three Shiite factions are fighting in Basra, now that the Brits are pulling out of that city. So we know that the Shiites are not unified. Are the Iranians supporting all those factions? If not, where are the armed Shiite factions not supported by the Iranians getting their weapons. With the huge numbers of unaccounted for weapons that we think are in Iraq from before 2002 and supplied by the Coalition since 2002, what is the relative importance of imports from Iran?
Look at the map. Which borders are most porous? Which are controlled on the Iraqi side by what factions? Which are the factions supported by the countries on the other sides of those borders? Which bordering country governments are strong enough to control long desert borders? Which are likely to supply weapons to partisans in a neighboring country. Which of these countries has internal factions that might reasonably be able to supply weapons to those they favor in Iraq?
I can't resist a final comment. We know that the U.S. military has been strongly criticized because it could not supply its soldiers with armored vehicles or even adequate body armor. Yet the Iranians are suspected of being able to supply covert forces in another country with adequate weaponry? Is there a disconnect here?
Attacks on American-led forces using a lethal type of roadside bomb said to be supplied by Iran reached a new high in July, according to the American military.I wonder how many attacks have been carried out by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq using weapons that the Coalition forces failed to secure after the invasion. We know that the Iraqi military weapons depots were not secured after the military colapsed.
The devices, known as explosively formed penetrators, were used to carry out 99 attacks last month and accounted for a third of the combat deaths suffered by the American-led forces, according to American military officials.
How many have been killed by the hundreds of thousands of weapons that were delivered by the United States to Iraq for Iraqi forces that were being trained. We know that no records were kept of who got those weapons, and that the recent GAO report says that hundreds of thousands can not now be located.
I wonder how many weapons are coming across the borders from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Syria, and how many people they are being used against. Are not the Sunni sources who finance terrorists and supply them with weapons in other places interested in supporting their allied factions in Iraq?
What is coming into Iraq from Turkey? Where do the Kurds get their weapons? Do weapons filter into the rest of Iraq from the Kurdish controlled areas?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions, in part because the news media have not provided me with that information. Why is that? Perhaps because it is easier to report from the press releases that the military hand out than to dig out the facts describing the broader picture and seek a more balanced report. Or perhaps the information I don't see is simply not important.
What does this all mean in terms of K4D?
In terms of this blog, I guess the message is that it is sometimes useful to think about the big picture and figure out what you should know. Lets take Iraq weaponry as an example.
What are the factions fighting in Iraq? We know about Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. Is it likely that Iran is supplying all of these factions with arms? I doubt it? Where are the others getting their weapons?
We have been informed that three Shiite factions are fighting in Basra, now that the Brits are pulling out of that city. So we know that the Shiites are not unified. Are the Iranians supporting all those factions? If not, where are the armed Shiite factions not supported by the Iranians getting their weapons. With the huge numbers of unaccounted for weapons that we think are in Iraq from before 2002 and supplied by the Coalition since 2002, what is the relative importance of imports from Iran?
Look at the map. Which borders are most porous? Which are controlled on the Iraqi side by what factions? Which are the factions supported by the countries on the other sides of those borders? Which bordering country governments are strong enough to control long desert borders? Which are likely to supply weapons to partisans in a neighboring country. Which of these countries has internal factions that might reasonably be able to supply weapons to those they favor in Iraq?
I can't resist a final comment. We know that the U.S. military has been strongly criticized because it could not supply its soldiers with armored vehicles or even adequate body armor. Yet the Iranians are suspected of being able to supply covert forces in another country with adequate weaponry? Is there a disconnect here?
Biodiversity is a Priority -- Two New Reports
"Lost forest reveals new species", BBC News, 8 August 2007.An expedition to a remote forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo has uncovered six new animal species.
Conservationists discovered one new bat species, a new rodent and two new species each of shrews and frogs.
The region, which is in eastern DR Congo, near Lake Tanganyika, has been off limits to researchers since 1960 because of instability in the area.
"Rare river dolphin 'now extinct'" BBC News, 8 August 2007.A freshwater dolphin found only in China is now "likely to be extinct", a team of scientists has concluded.The researchers failed to spot any Yangtze river dolphins, also known as baijis, during an extensive six-week survey of the mammals' habitat.
The team, writing in Biology Letters journal, blamed unregulated fishing as the main reason behind their demise.
If confirmed, it would be the first extinction of a large vertebrate for over 50 years.
Comment: People are generally more interested
- in animals than in plants,
- in plants than in insects, and
- in insects than in microbial organisms.
Monday, August 06, 2007
How hard is statescraft?
Read "Turning Points: A historian examines crucial decisions made during the Second World War" by Vince Rinehart, the Washington Post, Sunday, August 5, 2007. This is a review of FATEFUL CHOICES: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 by Ian Kershaw.
Fateful choices is described as a very good and well documented book that discusses ten decisions made during World War II that had great import. Apparently the British seriously considered approaching Hitler in 1940 to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace, and a "fateful decision" was not to do so (at that time). Describing Mussolini's orders to invade Greece:
Fateful choices is described as a very good and well documented book that discusses ten decisions made during World War II that had great import. Apparently the British seriously considered approaching Hitler in 1940 to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace, and a "fateful decision" was not to do so (at that time). Describing Mussolini's orders to invade Greece:
"What passed for dictatorial decisiveness was in reality the merest veneer of half-baked assumptions, superficial observations, amateurish judgement and wholly uncritical assessment, all based upon the best-case scenario."Japan's long path to the Tripartite Pact and war with the United States was
a watershed moment in a decades-old path toward great-power status and its own colonial empire, with a military that answered only to the emperor and was ruled as much by fanatical mid-rank officers as by its generals and admirals. It was trapped in a war in China and faced an uncompromising, rearming United States. Kershaw's portrait of Japanese leaders is almost poignant; all, including the emperor, were fatalistic about their chances of winning the war without an immediate knockout blow. At the same time, they were utterly convinced that the only alternative to war was national humiliation and subservience. The real choices here, as Kershaw notes, were made over decades, with the support of much of the Japanese public; by 1940, Japanese leaders were largely in a straitjacket not entirely of their own making.Comment: Think about it, for a moment. These were difficult decisions. Ten of them, even if they were binary and they were not that, result in a thousand different outcomes. I suggest that no one could have accurately predicted the course of the war and the decisions that would have been made. Therefore, it seems to me that the statescraft depends on keeping options open and responding to the actions of ones allies and enemies, revising plans and decisions as needed. The important aspects of the war may well have been the openings and middle game strategy rather than the end game that we seem most to think about. By the time the end is evident, it is the opening of the next challenge to statecraft. JAD
Biotechnology Innovation Experience
I have been thinking about biotechnology, and thought I would share a couple of references. While the articles focus on the United States, the lessons they teach might be applied in developing nations.
Biotechnology will not repeat the path of information and communication technologies, but it is a burgeoning field with great promise for developing nations.
Mind to Market: A Global Analysis of University Biotechnology Transfer and Commercialization
Biotechnology will not repeat the path of information and communication technologies, but it is a burgeoning field with great promise for developing nations.
Signs of Life: The Growth of Biotechnology Centers in the U.S.
Summary: "Biotechnology is at the heart of a fast-growing new sector of the U.S. economy, and as the industry expands, it has become a focal point of many local, regional, and state economic development strategies. This report provides an analysis of biotechnology activity in the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas and finds that the industry is heavily concentrated in nine regions. These nine areas excel because they possess two key ingredients necessary for biotech growth: strong research, and the ability to convert that research into commercial activity. By comparing the 51 metro areas on their research and commercialization capacities, this report can help inform regions seeking to capture a share of the nation's biotechnology growth." Joseph Cortright and Heike Mayer, The Brookings Institution, June 2002.
Mind to Market: A Global Analysis of University Biotechnology Transfer and Commercialization
From the Summary: "In this study, Milken Institute researchers examine the biotechnology transfer process taking place at universities, from knowledge creation to technology transfer and early-stage commercialization. A key focus of the investigation is the role played by technology transfer professionals. Research is essential for commercial outcome, but the technology transfer professional is crucial in the successful conversion of knowledge to the private sector." Among the Key Findings: "* Harvard University ranks first in terms of biotech research, as measured by papers and citations, followed by the University of Tokyo and University of London. U.S. universities hold eight of the top 10, and 28 of the top 40 positions. California universities hold five of the top 25 rankings; the UK and Japan hold three each. * The University of Texas system scores first on our Biotech Patent Composite Index, followed by U.C. San Francisco — which is likely first among individual campuses since the University of Texas doesn’t report data on individual campuses — and Johns Hopkins. Nine of the top 10 patent holders are U.S. universities. The University of London ranks first among foreign universities (10th overall). * Our University Technology Transfer and Commercialization Index shows MIT first on outcome measures, which include such factors as licensing income and startups. The University of California system ranks second (led by U.C. San Francisco), with Caltech third, Stanford fourth and Florida fifth. The University of British Columbia was the highest-ranked Canadian institution, coming in eighth overall. * Among U.S., Canadian and European universities, the United States leads in invention disclosures, patents filed and granted, licenses executed and licensing income. However, European universities surpass their U.S. counterparts in startups established." Ross DeVol and Armen Bedroussian, with Anna Babayan, Meggy Frye, Daniela Murphy, Tomas J. Philipson, Lorna Wallace, Perry Wong and Benjamin Yeo, The Milken Institute, September 20, 2006.
Shankar Vedantam - Hot and Cold Emotions Make Us Poor Judges - washingtonpost.com
Shankar Vedantam - Hot and Cold Emotions Make Us Poor Judges - washingtonpost.com:
"Studies have found that, for some reason, an enormous mental gulf separates 'cold' emotional states from 'hot' emotional states. When we are not hungry or thirsty or sexually aroused, we find it difficult to understand what effects those factors can have on our behavior. Similarly, when we are excited or angry, it is difficult to think about the consequences of our behavior -- outcomes that are glaringly obvious when we are in a cold emotional state."
Comment: What we think depends on how we feel! JAD
"Studies have found that, for some reason, an enormous mental gulf separates 'cold' emotional states from 'hot' emotional states. When we are not hungry or thirsty or sexually aroused, we find it difficult to understand what effects those factors can have on our behavior. Similarly, when we are excited or angry, it is difficult to think about the consequences of our behavior -- outcomes that are glaringly obvious when we are in a cold emotional state."
Comment: What we think depends on how we feel! JAD
Death Points to Risks in Research
Death Points to Risks in Research - washingtonpost.com:
"Breaches of clinical research standards and a federal oversight system that allowed key decisions to be made behind closed doors may have helped draw Mohr into an experiment that was not, her husband says, what she thought it was."
Comment: This WP story is based on the death of a patient with a relatively minor ailment who was undergoing gene therapy. It is not known whether the experimental therapy triggered her fatal illness, so the story should not be taken too literally.
It does illustrate however that biomedical research involves risks. Ethical conduct is important, as are the rules to ensure such conduct. I would suggest that among the most important rules for ethical conduct is the requirement for informed consent of the research subjects. It is also important that efforts be made to assure that the potential benefits to the subject are commensurate with the risk that the subject is allowed to incur.
Still, without the research on human subjects, medical techniques would not expand and we would all be the worse in the future. JAD
"Breaches of clinical research standards and a federal oversight system that allowed key decisions to be made behind closed doors may have helped draw Mohr into an experiment that was not, her husband says, what she thought it was."
Comment: This WP story is based on the death of a patient with a relatively minor ailment who was undergoing gene therapy. It is not known whether the experimental therapy triggered her fatal illness, so the story should not be taken too literally.
It does illustrate however that biomedical research involves risks. Ethical conduct is important, as are the rules to ensure such conduct. I would suggest that among the most important rules for ethical conduct is the requirement for informed consent of the research subjects. It is also important that efforts be made to assure that the potential benefits to the subject are commensurate with the risk that the subject is allowed to incur.
Still, without the research on human subjects, medical techniques would not expand and we would all be the worse in the future. JAD
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Americans work longer, not more efficiently
"Americans are hard workers, but not necessarily the most productive workers, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. It has compared America's output per worker and output per hour with a clutch of other rich countries. It reckons that the average American worker produced about $90,000 of output in 2006, measured at purchasing-power parity. Only Norwegian workers, some of whom man oil-rigs, did better. But America's output per hour worked—just over $50—was less impressive. Employees in France, Belgium and the Netherlands were all able to squeeze more out of an hour of effort. In Norway, workers can churn out about $73-worth of goods and services in that time."
Saturday, August 04, 2007
The Economic Crisis in the United States
Everyone knows that there is something wrong with the U.S. economy. The rich are getting obscenely rich, and doing so faster than ever before. The poor are still with us in large numbers. The middle class feels threatened economically. Here are three recent sources of information with more details on the problem.
Bill Moyers Journal interview with Barbara Ehrenreich (August 3, 2007)
"Thy Neighbor’s Stash" by DANIEL GROSS, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, August 5, 2007. (A review of The Winner-Take-All Society
by Robert H. Frank).
However, public policy can help to reverse or at least ameliorate this trend towards the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. Lets vote to make that happen! JAD
Bill Moyers Journal interview with Barbara Ehrenreich (August 3, 2007)
Dr. Ehrenreich, a biologist, author and social activist, discussed the problems of the poor and working class in the United States as the distribution of income more and more favors the wealthy. This was not the only topic of conversation, but is the underlying issue behind her important and influential books: NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
"Thy Neighbor’s Stash" by DANIEL GROSS, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, August 5, 2007. (A review of The Winner-Take-All Society
by Robert H. Frank).
In his new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class,” Professor Frank deftly updates the argument for our current gilded age. The rise of an overclass, he convincingly argues, is indirectly affecting the quality of life of the rest of the population — and not in a good way.....Ehrenreich mentioned Lawrence Summers, who is also concerned about this issue. Read his piece, "Harness market forces to share prosperity" in the Financial Times, June 24, 2007.
What does this societywide arms race for goods have to do with income inequality? Frank trots out sobering data. Between 1949 and 1979, the rising tide of the American economy lifted all boats more or less equally. In fact, the incomes of the bottom 80 percent grew more rapidly than the incomes of the top 1 percent, and those of the bottom 20 percent grew most rapidly of all. But since 1979, gains have flowed disproportionately to top earners. In an economy where the wealthy set the norms for consumption and people at every rung strain to maintain the consumption of those just above them, that spells trouble. In today’s arms race, the top 1 percent are armed to the teeth and everybody else is scavenging for ammunition. Between 1980 and 2001, Frank notes, the median size of new homes in the United States rose from 1,600 to 2,100 square feet, “despite the fact that the median family’s real income had changed little in the intervening years.” The end result? Frank methodically presents data showing that the typical American now works more, saves less, commutes longer and borrows more to maintain what he or she views as an appropriate standard of living.
It can no longer plausibly be asserted that the income distribution is relatively static or that average wage growth tracks productivity growth. Indeed, in a recent paper on tax policy prepared for the Hamilton project, my collaborators and I concluded from Congressional Budget Office data that, since 1979, changes in income distribution had raised the pre-tax incomes of the top 1 per cent of the population by $664bn or $600,000 per family – an increase of 43 per cent.Comment: There are a lot of processes involved. The Information Revolution is increasing the value of knowledge workers and deskilling manual work. 12 million illegal immigrants are predominantly in the lowest paying jobs, increasing the supply of workers for those jobs (and consequently the market decreases their remuneration). Offshoring via the Internet allows a wage equalization for many jobs across nations (and oceans), much to the loss of American workers whose pay is affected. Globalization (made possible by improved transportation and communications technologies and infrastructures) means that there is more competition for the U.S. market from foreign producers who compete based on low cost labor and other inputs. I think it is not coincidental that the worsening of income distribution has also occurred during the period since 1979- which saw Republican administrations (Reagan, Bush I and Bush II) and a fiscally conservative Democrat (Clinton I) facing a Republican House of Representatives. The Republicans are after all the party most representing the wealthy classes in the United States.
By definition what one group gains from changes in the distribution of income another group must lose. The lower 80 per cent of families are $664bn poorer than they would be with a static income distribution, which works out to $7,000 less in income per family or a 14 per cent loss. To put this in some perspective, the total gain in median family incomes adjusted for inflation between 1979 and 2004 was only 14 per cent. If middle income families had shared fully in the economy’s income growth over the past generation their incomes would have risen twice as rapidly!
While the most recent data available for performing these calculations come from 2004, it appears that the trend towards increased inequality is continuing and may even be accelerating, and will continue even in years when the price of stocks and other assets does not rise abnormally. It also appears that these trends reflect far more than increases in the financial return from education, as the top 1 per cent of the population has pulled away from the rest of the top 10 per cent and the top 0.1 per cent has pulled away from the rest of the top 1 per cent.....
it is no longer credible, if it ever was, to argue that the goal of economic policy should be only to increase the size of the economy and that addressing questions of its distribution is populist or divisive. Given what has not happened to the pay cheques of average workers over the period of the information technology-induced acceleration in productivity and cyclical expansion, it is not plausible to suppose that policies that focus only on aggregate economic growth are sufficient to meet current challenges.
Equally, arguments that suggest the only way to raise the incomes of middle-class families is through measures to regulate business practices more heavily or to restrict increases in international trade are very dangerous. As much justified concern as we have about increased inequality, we need to recognise that it could be much worse if the economy had not been able to achieve the combination of under 5 per cent unemployment and sub-3 per cent inflation that we have enjoyed for much of the past decade. This surely would not have happened without the US economy benefiting from greater global integration. As western Europe’s long experience with unemployment rates that in some cases are more than double American rates illustrates, we would be taking great risks if, in the name of benefiting workers, we took steps that made production in the US less competitive in the global marketplace.
The right approach is activist but it embraces activism that goes with – rather than against – the grain of the market system. This is not a new idea. The enduring legacy of the New Deal is not the many measures taken to regulate prices or increase public employment. It is the measures such as securities regulation and Social Security that do not seek to oppose but channel market forces and mitigate their consequences.
The challenge for those running for president of the US in 2008 – a challenge very different from that faced by presidential candidates until very recently – will be to develop a mandate for policy approaches that can ensure prosperity is more fully shared without threatening its fundamental basis.
However, public policy can help to reverse or at least ameliorate this trend towards the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. Lets vote to make that happen! JAD
The Center for Measuring University Performance
I found this Center with great information on U.S. research universities.
| The Center's annual report, The Top American Research Universities , offers analysis and data useful for understanding American research university performance. The Top American Research Universities annual publication provides a comprehensive set of data on over 600 institutions, and on occasion includes analytical discussions of topics related to research university performance. It also publishes an institution specific series called Measuring University Performance. The Center 's data and analysis have attracted considerable attention around the country, and The Center (with support from the GTE Foundation) has participated with a number of institutions and individuals in the United States and abroad in discussions about incentive and reward systems that lead to improved university performance. Members of The Center staff have offered and continue to offer a graduate course ( Managing Universities ) on these issues in an effort to disseminate the analytical techniques and with the expectation that the critical discussions in this colloquium will refine and challenge the assumptions and data. |
Thinking about Iraq
How should the government think about Iraq? Perhaps it would be helpful to address the question of the process of thinking about Iraq.
Framing the question
Understanding the situation
Decisions depend on the understanding of the situation to which the decision is a response. It seems clear that the Bush administration very badly misunderstood the situation in Iraq before the invasion. I don't know that there is adequate reason to believe that the understanding of the situation is sufficiently improved to make good decisions now. As this blog has pointed out in the past, the issue is now whether a good understanding exists in the United States or in the government, which seems likely, but whether our best or even an adequate understanding can be brought to bear on the decision; will bad understanding drive out the good in the decision process that is used?
If the understanding of the military situation and the links between government and terrorists in Iraq that was brought to bear on the invasion decision, and of the culture of Iraqi's that was brought to bear on the expectations for the post invasion period were so inadequate, what hope is there that the understanding of the situation in the ever broader policy arenas described above will be acceptably accurate?
Contingency planning
How should the military organize the withdrawal from Iraq if ordered to withdraw? How should it increase troop strength if ordered to do so? How should it redeploy troops to change tactics from urban pacification to limiting foreign incursions if so ordered? How should the military redeploy if ordered to support Turkey in pacification of Kurdish anti-Turkish forces in the North. In these examples, the creation of a plan is relatively uncomplicated by the outside situation. Thus the military can plan for a change in troop strength in terms of the logistics of recruitment, movement and logistics of supply without too much concern for the political, economic, and cultural conditions in the wider region, leaving those larger issues to the diplomats and statesmen.
There seems to be a tendency in the media to publicize each discovered contingency plan made with respect to Iraq as if it is the one and only plan. I hope that all those people in the Pentagon are making many contingency plans. We should be able to move quickly to increase or to decrease troop levels, to withdraw or to move troops, or to do whatever the civilian authorities decide is to be done. Thus I would hope that there are a broad range of contingency plans that are continuously updated.
The broader issues of foreign policy and the involvement of a broad range of military, political, economic and cultural instruments brings even logistical contingency planning to a level of challenging complexity.
Projection of impacts
In foreign policy decision making, the most difficult aspect seems to me to be the projection of what will happen in response to the alternative actions under consideration. Again, the experience in Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and other locations suggests that the Bush administration has not been very good at such projections. The President now is projecting generally that the results of withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be very bad. He does not say exactly how they will be bad, nor the probabilities assigned to each possible outcome, nor the evidence on which those fears are based. Do we believe his projections now?
Implications
The complexity of U.S. foreign policy concerns at this time seems to make it very difficult to define tactics with a high probability of solving problems such as stabilization of Iraq, stabilization of the Gulf region, resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issues, reducing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, eliminating the threats of terrorism, and on and on. What then are we to do?
One suggestion is that we concentrate on building strong strategic positions which will allow us to respond to unforeseen difficulties and events that are sure to come in the future. Thus we should seek to assure the economy is strong, and that our military is not too stretched by current assignments to respond to new challenges should they arise. We should keep our alliances strong. We should observe neutrals and enemies closely.
Similarly, we should not make tactical decisions that assume that those who oppose us are naive or foolish, especially when those tactical decisions would be likely to result in a weakening of our strategic position were they to fail to achieve their purposes. If we act under conditions of uncertainty, the likelihood of adverse outcomes of precipitous actions must be considered to be high. I would put the decision to divert troops from dealing with the terrorist leaders in Afghanistan before they were eliminated in the category of such a bad tactical decision.
I suggest also that we adopt a long time frame for our thinking. These problems are not going to be solved in the year and a half remaining of the Bush administration, nor in the following eight years. We should therefore think of long term solutions to encourage changes of public opinion favorable to the United States, and changes in political and economic realities in other nations that will relieve strains that make them likely to act badly on the international stage.
I also suggest that we assume a more mature approach to international affairs. It seems to me that we should be willing to forgo some short term economic advantages in order to assure that environmental conditions do not deteriorate too much in the long term. We should negotiate in the understanding that other nations have legitimate aspirations and that compromise is not only fair but it is also in the long run the more effective way of dealing with conflicting aspirations. (These are things we should have learned to apply in personal dealings in kindergarten.)
I suggest that we also emphasize morality in decision making on foreign affairs. It is the right thing to do, and it is in the long run the most effective way to run our foreign policy. Responses to threats and attacks should be proportional to their magnitude. If the United States is seen as promoting the welfare of people all over the world, of fighting against oppression and for freedom, of being a solid and useful member of the community of nations, then all our international conflicts become easier to solve.
As we seek to replace the Bush administration in the next election, lets think about which party and which leadership is most likely to deliver a better decision process for international affairs. This is not just a question of which candidate is smarter or more ethical, but which is likely to create an administration that brings knowledge, wisdom and ethics most effectively to the process of foreign policy decision making.
Framing the question
- Is the issue how to bring stability to Iraq? Or is it to bring stability with a reasonably pro-U.S. government?
- Is the issue one of stabilization of the region involving Iraq, its immediate neighbors, and the trans-Gulf states?
- Is the concern broader, taking in an area from Israel and Palestine to Pakistan and India?
- Is the issue the overall relations of the United States with other nations, including the NATO states, Russia, China, etc.
- Is the issue security of the United States against terrorism, or does it include broader security issues, or does it include economic and other foreign policy issues as well?
- How does domestic policy and domestic politics enter into the calculations?
Understanding the situation
Decisions depend on the understanding of the situation to which the decision is a response. It seems clear that the Bush administration very badly misunderstood the situation in Iraq before the invasion. I don't know that there is adequate reason to believe that the understanding of the situation is sufficiently improved to make good decisions now. As this blog has pointed out in the past, the issue is now whether a good understanding exists in the United States or in the government, which seems likely, but whether our best or even an adequate understanding can be brought to bear on the decision; will bad understanding drive out the good in the decision process that is used?
If the understanding of the military situation and the links between government and terrorists in Iraq that was brought to bear on the invasion decision, and of the culture of Iraqi's that was brought to bear on the expectations for the post invasion period were so inadequate, what hope is there that the understanding of the situation in the ever broader policy arenas described above will be acceptably accurate?
Contingency planning
How should the military organize the withdrawal from Iraq if ordered to withdraw? How should it increase troop strength if ordered to do so? How should it redeploy troops to change tactics from urban pacification to limiting foreign incursions if so ordered? How should the military redeploy if ordered to support Turkey in pacification of Kurdish anti-Turkish forces in the North. In these examples, the creation of a plan is relatively uncomplicated by the outside situation. Thus the military can plan for a change in troop strength in terms of the logistics of recruitment, movement and logistics of supply without too much concern for the political, economic, and cultural conditions in the wider region, leaving those larger issues to the diplomats and statesmen.
There seems to be a tendency in the media to publicize each discovered contingency plan made with respect to Iraq as if it is the one and only plan. I hope that all those people in the Pentagon are making many contingency plans. We should be able to move quickly to increase or to decrease troop levels, to withdraw or to move troops, or to do whatever the civilian authorities decide is to be done. Thus I would hope that there are a broad range of contingency plans that are continuously updated.
The broader issues of foreign policy and the involvement of a broad range of military, political, economic and cultural instruments brings even logistical contingency planning to a level of challenging complexity.
Projection of impacts
In foreign policy decision making, the most difficult aspect seems to me to be the projection of what will happen in response to the alternative actions under consideration. Again, the experience in Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and other locations suggests that the Bush administration has not been very good at such projections. The President now is projecting generally that the results of withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be very bad. He does not say exactly how they will be bad, nor the probabilities assigned to each possible outcome, nor the evidence on which those fears are based. Do we believe his projections now?
Implications
The complexity of U.S. foreign policy concerns at this time seems to make it very difficult to define tactics with a high probability of solving problems such as stabilization of Iraq, stabilization of the Gulf region, resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issues, reducing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, eliminating the threats of terrorism, and on and on. What then are we to do?
One suggestion is that we concentrate on building strong strategic positions which will allow us to respond to unforeseen difficulties and events that are sure to come in the future. Thus we should seek to assure the economy is strong, and that our military is not too stretched by current assignments to respond to new challenges should they arise. We should keep our alliances strong. We should observe neutrals and enemies closely.
Similarly, we should not make tactical decisions that assume that those who oppose us are naive or foolish, especially when those tactical decisions would be likely to result in a weakening of our strategic position were they to fail to achieve their purposes. If we act under conditions of uncertainty, the likelihood of adverse outcomes of precipitous actions must be considered to be high. I would put the decision to divert troops from dealing with the terrorist leaders in Afghanistan before they were eliminated in the category of such a bad tactical decision.
I suggest also that we adopt a long time frame for our thinking. These problems are not going to be solved in the year and a half remaining of the Bush administration, nor in the following eight years. We should therefore think of long term solutions to encourage changes of public opinion favorable to the United States, and changes in political and economic realities in other nations that will relieve strains that make them likely to act badly on the international stage.
I also suggest that we assume a more mature approach to international affairs. It seems to me that we should be willing to forgo some short term economic advantages in order to assure that environmental conditions do not deteriorate too much in the long term. We should negotiate in the understanding that other nations have legitimate aspirations and that compromise is not only fair but it is also in the long run the more effective way of dealing with conflicting aspirations. (These are things we should have learned to apply in personal dealings in kindergarten.)
I suggest that we also emphasize morality in decision making on foreign affairs. It is the right thing to do, and it is in the long run the most effective way to run our foreign policy. Responses to threats and attacks should be proportional to their magnitude. If the United States is seen as promoting the welfare of people all over the world, of fighting against oppression and for freedom, of being a solid and useful member of the community of nations, then all our international conflicts become easier to solve.
As we seek to replace the Bush administration in the next election, lets think about which party and which leadership is most likely to deliver a better decision process for international affairs. This is not just a question of which candidate is smarter or more ethical, but which is likely to create an administration that brings knowledge, wisdom and ethics most effectively to the process of foreign policy decision making.
Friday, August 03, 2007
BBC NEWS | Health | Shamed scientist's 'breakthrough'
BBC NEWS | Health | Shamed scientist's 'breakthrough':
"Researchers said that the distinct 'genetic fingerprint' of the stem cells means they may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by the so-called 'virgin birth' method, or parthenogenesis.
This happens when eggs are stimulated into becoming embryos without ever being fertilised by sperm, and has been achieved in animals.
However, before Hwang, no one had managed to produce a human embryo using parthenogenesis which lived long enough to allow the extraction of viable stem cells.
Dr George Daley, who led the analysis, told the BBC's Science In Action programme: 'Unfortunately at the time they published their work they did not know what they had done so they had mistakenly isolated these parthenogenic embryonic stem cells, and yet misrepresented them as true clones.
'In fact they had produced the world's first patient-specific embryonic stem cell, and that is very valuable.
'Scientists interested in modelling complex diseases would like to be able to move a patient's own cells into a petri dish in their embryonic form.'"
Comment: There is a need to replicate this result, but if it holds up, it would seem to be very important. Another reason to overcome the Bush administration's Luddite restrictions on stem cell research funding by the government. JAD
"Researchers said that the distinct 'genetic fingerprint' of the stem cells means they may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by the so-called 'virgin birth' method, or parthenogenesis.
This happens when eggs are stimulated into becoming embryos without ever being fertilised by sperm, and has been achieved in animals.
However, before Hwang, no one had managed to produce a human embryo using parthenogenesis which lived long enough to allow the extraction of viable stem cells.
Dr George Daley, who led the analysis, told the BBC's Science In Action programme: 'Unfortunately at the time they published their work they did not know what they had done so they had mistakenly isolated these parthenogenic embryonic stem cells, and yet misrepresented them as true clones.
'In fact they had produced the world's first patient-specific embryonic stem cell, and that is very valuable.
'Scientists interested in modelling complex diseases would like to be able to move a patient's own cells into a petri dish in their embryonic form.'"
Comment: There is a need to replicate this result, but if it holds up, it would seem to be very important. Another reason to overcome the Bush administration's Luddite restrictions on stem cell research funding by the government. JAD
ICT in Disaster Relief
"Dealing with disasters: Flood, famine and mobile phones," The Economist, July 26th 2007. (Subscription required.)
Excerpt:
“Technology completely alters the way humanitarian work is done,” says Caroline Hurford of the World Food Programme (WFP), a United Nations body that is the single largest distributor of food aid. Once upon a time, when disaster struck, big agencies would roll up with grain, blankets and medicine and start handing them out. Victims would struggle to the relief camps, if they could. For aid workers (let alone recipients) there was no easy way to talk to head office.
Now, when an emergency occurs, the first people on the ground are often computer geeks, setting up telephone networks so other aid agencies can do their stuff. Donors keep track of supplies on spreadsheets and send each other SMS messages: this road has been attacked by bandits, that village cut off by floods. Transport agencies announce helicopter flights by e-mail. Aid providers can find out where exactly on an incoming ship their medical supplies are, saving hours hanging round the docks. Aid donors find it easier to locate the victims of disaster; and victims queue as eagerly for mobile-phone access as they do for food.
As a result, the organisation of aid is changing. On the ground, all big relief operations have communications centres where aid workers go to send e-mails, read the latest security updates and study satellite maps of the affected area. The UN's humanitarian-affairs office runs a portal called ReliefWeb, containing every map and document that might help aid donors; it got 3m hits a day after the Asian tsunami.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
"Chemical Society Presidents Pledge Support For Sustainable Development"
Read the full article by Linda R. Raber in Chemical and Engineering News.
The so-called C6 chemical societies, which are among the largest chemical societies in the world, have been meeting about every two years for the past eight years. They share experiences and challenges and generally develop a few collaborative programs.
The presidents of six leading chemical societies, representing nearly 300,000 members, pledged last week at a meeting in Paris to, in the words of a joint statement, "work together to promote global sustainable development, demand responsible use of resources, and ensure that the next generation of scientists protects and maintains the well-being of Earth and its inhabitants."
The presidents of the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the Chemical Society of Japan, the German Chemical Society (GDCh), the French Chemical Society, and the Dutch Chemical Society developed and signed the statement because "the need to address these intertwined issues is urgent, and chemistry is absolutely essential to the development of solutions," they wrote. They agreed that sustainable development presents scientific, political, social, and economic challenges that are far more complex and urgent than generally conveyed. Unless these challenges are more widely recognized, "we risk being lulled into a false sense of security," they said.
The so-called C6 chemical societies, which are among the largest chemical societies in the world, have been meeting about every two years for the past eight years. They share experiences and challenges and generally develop a few collaborative programs.
ICT and the New Architecture
EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECTSeattle, Washington
I watched Building the Ultimate: Extreme Curves on the Science Channel today.
Computers are revolutionizing the way architects design buildings, allowing them to seemingly defy old engineering principles. Frank Gehry has done more to push the envelope of mainstream architecture than any other architect alive.I was impressed how much the architecture of Frank Gehry is the product of modern ICT. Of course the designs come out of Gehry's mind, but I think they could not be built without computers and the Internet.
The most famous buildings a large and ignore the normal process of load bearing vertical walls and columns for shapes that flow and soar. As a result, there are huge engineering problems in actually constructing the buildings. Techniques pioneered in the aerospace industry and the development of the space station have been applied to Gehry's buildings. Not only is computer aided design employed to validate that the designs will actually stand up, but the computer generates huge parts lists. The designs involve tens of thousands of parts, each unique, that must be assembled in the proper order. Only the computer aided processes can generate the parts lists and detailed drawings sufficiently efficiently to make the construction projects feasible.
The computer data and software is shared between architects, engineering firms, construction firms and the firms making the parts for the buildings. Because of the Internet, specialist firms from all over the world can collaborate on the design in real time, without moving to a common location.
I am sure that the multiyear construction projects also utilize ICT based project management systems originally pioneered in the aerospace industry. Indeed, I would guess that the firms that made the titanium skin for the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum or the structural steel pieces for the large buildings also depend heavily on computers for the actual manufacturing processes.
We can trace the technology for building monumental buildings back to the ancient Egyptians and ancient Mesopotemia but Gehry's buildings seem really new, and I think that novelty is significantly due to the fact that modern computer and information technology makes the management of their complexity possible for the first time.
Copyright Enforcement out of Control!
Read "Out of the Theater, Into the Courtroom: Brief Taping Brings Charges" by Daniela Deane, The Washington Post, August 2, 2007.
A Marymount University sophomore was charged recently with a crime: illegally recording a motion picture. In the July 17 incident, she was at the Regal Cinemas Ballston Common 12 watching a matinee showing of the hit movie "Transformers". She "was enjoying the movie so much that she decided to film a short clip of the sci-fi adventure's climax to get her little brother hyped to go see it." Apparently two Arlington County police officers arrived in the darkened theater and ordering the student and her boyfriend out. They confiscated the digital camera as evidence and charged her with a crime. She "faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 when she goes to trial this month."
Comment: I am no lawyer, but as I understand it, there is a fair use exception for sharing excerpts of copyrighted materials that includes reviews of the material. If in fact all this student did was copy a short piece of the film to show her brother, I don't see why she was arrested. JAD
The article states:
Comment: Why exactly is a movie theater demanding prosecution for an offense that it believes may have occurred involving infringement of the copyright held by a movie studio? What kind of training do local police have in the enforcement of copyright laws? What is the liability if this was a false arrest? JAD
A Marymount University sophomore was charged recently with a crime: illegally recording a motion picture. In the July 17 incident, she was at the Regal Cinemas Ballston Common 12 watching a matinee showing of the hit movie "Transformers". She "was enjoying the movie so much that she decided to film a short clip of the sci-fi adventure's climax to get her little brother hyped to go see it." Apparently two Arlington County police officers arrived in the darkened theater and ordering the student and her boyfriend out. They confiscated the digital camera as evidence and charged her with a crime. She "faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 when she goes to trial this month."
Comment: I am no lawyer, but as I understand it, there is a fair use exception for sharing excerpts of copyrighted materials that includes reviews of the material. If in fact all this student did was copy a short piece of the film to show her brother, I don't see why she was arrested. JAD
The article states:
"Arlington police spokesman John Lisle said it was the decision of Regal Cinemas Ballston Common 12 to prosecute the case, a first for Arlington police."
Comment: Why exactly is a movie theater demanding prosecution for an offense that it believes may have occurred involving infringement of the copyright held by a movie studio? What kind of training do local police have in the enforcement of copyright laws? What is the liability if this was a false arrest? JAD
FCC Approves Airwave Use For All Phones - washingtonpost.com
FCC Approves Airwave Use For All Phones - washingtonpost.com:
"Consumers will be able to use any cellphone and software they want on a network built on airwaves to be auctioned early next year, according to rules approved yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission.
The vote sets the stage for the auction of public airwaves that will change hands from television broadcasters to a fast-growing wireless industry. The auction, scheduled for January, is expected to raise about $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury."
Good News!
"Consumers will be able to use any cellphone and software they want on a network built on airwaves to be auctioned early next year, according to rules approved yesterday by the Federal Communications Commission.
The vote sets the stage for the auction of public airwaves that will change hands from television broadcasters to a fast-growing wireless industry. The auction, scheduled for January, is expected to raise about $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury."
Good News!
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