Europe in the global competition for talent

"Europe's “blue card” plan: Not the ace in the pack"
The Economist, October 25th 2007

"The best educated seem keener to go almost anywhere but the European Union. In Australia nearly a tenth of the employed population are highly qualified foreigners, in Canada more than 7% and in America just over 3%. The EU manages a paltry 1.7%, or roughly 70,000 highly skilled non-Europeans in the workforce."

Of course, Australia and Canada have relatively small populations, so a small number of immigrants makes a large change in the workforce. But still, why is the U.S. unable to attract more of the best and the brightest from abroad? I suppose a part of the explanation is that so many immigrants have become U.S. citizens. Still, if the Aussies can manage ten percent of the workforce as highly qualified foreigners, the U.S. should not worry about increasing from three percent.

e-Government Leadership, CIOs and e-Champions

I attended a seminar yesterday titled "The Human Factor in Re-engineering Government: e-Government Leadership, CIOs and e-Champions". I found it stimulating. It certainly included a number of speakers, each of whom had years of important and useful experience. The video is online in case you want to watch.

The emphasis of the speakers was on the importance of leadership from the top. Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of organizations are needed who understand ICT and its application in government, and who support the reengineering of the organizations that they head. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are needed who understand the technology, the organization and its purposes, how to manage the ICT staff of the organization, and how to link with the CEO and senior staff. I can't disagree with this position. It is nice to have effective leadership in reengineering government organizations from great CEOs and CIOs.

What is wrong with this position?

But what do you do if you don't have that happy situation? What if the Dilbert conditions apply, and you are faced with pointy-headed managers who don't manage very well? (Dilbert, according to Scott Adams a few days ago, had the following dialog with the trashman:

D: Why does it seem that most of the decisions in my workplace are made by drunken lemurs?

T: Decisions are made by people who have time, not talent.

D: Why are the talented people so busy?

T: They are fixing the problems made by the people who have time.)

A speaker from Sri Lanka mentioned in the meeting that there were 600 CIOs in that small developing country. The odds are overwhelming that not all of them can be good, nor unfortunately are all of the 600 CEOs in their 600 organizations likely to be paragons of virtuous e-leadership.

Assume for the moment that there is an index of the ICT leadership quality of CEOs and one for CIOs. Then, for the sake of this argument, we may assume that CEOs are distributed around some average value, half better than average and half worse than average. So too, we can assume that half the CIOs are better than average, half worse than average.

What does that mean? Assume perfect correlation: that the better the CEO then the better the CIO he is able to recruit. Then half of all organizations would have the sad experience of being led by worse than average CEOs and worse than average CIOs. Alternatively, assume zero correlation. Then three-quarters of organizations would either be led by a worse than average CEO or a worse than average CIO. Are we to write off these organizations because they don't enjoy the quality leadership in their formal authority structure that is desired?

Guerilla leadership.

Leadership can be the result of "legitimate" authority conferred by top positions in the hierarchy of a formal organization. However, some authority is from expertise. (I started out working in research laboratories in which we had a manager and a chief scientist. The manager had formal authority for most purposes, but the chief scientist had the authority of expertise legitimated by a formal position in the organizational structure of the lab.) People look to those around them who best understand the situation and what needs to be done for leadership, Leadership can also be established by initiative, by the person who gets out in front and leads.

What is the likelihood that the person with most talent for intellectual leadership in reengineering for e-government in a large organization is also the person with the formal role of CEO or CIO in that organization? Probably fairly small. Indeed, a couple of the speakers in the seminar suggested that a critical role for the formal leaders was to empower those subordinates in the formal organization who had the needed talent, and to reward them when they exercised that needed intellectual leadership. Anyway, we all know that it is the younger people among us who most often identify with the new technologies and with new ways of doing things, while formal leadership roles in large organizations most often go to older folk with experience and the authority attributed to age.

My words are for those who have the needed talent in greatest abundance, but who do not enjoy formal authority nor the luxury of good leadership from above. First, form a coalition with like minded, comparably talented members of your organization. Then form a "gorilla movement" within the organization to educate and inform the others in your organization of the potential benefits of e-government, and processes needed to successfully reengineer the organization in order to achieve those benefits and avoid the potential pitfalls. Remember, the formal organization is just a cultural construct. It is not a reality like a tree or a rock. Some of your most valuable allies will be found outside the nominal boundaries of your formal organization -- in academia, industry, civil society, and other government agencies. Bring them in as consultants, advisers, speakers and guest experts.

Paradigm shifts

I remember when personal computers were called word processors, and had very limited software. In my government agency at the time there was a formal policy that only secretaries could have these simple personal computers, and professional staff could not use them. I recall later when in 1992 I organized a seminar in my agency on inter-networking, and people wondered what it was and why a government agency might be interested in so esoteric a concept. I have lived through the paradigm shifts that lead to a personal computer for every staff member, networked to the Internet, with universal use of the world wide web in large organization in most of the world.

Invariably, in my experience, the intellectual leadership in the early stages of these paradigm shifts within government agencies came from mid-level staff within the agencies or from outside advisers and consultants. During yesterday's seminar, someone mentioned Chandrababu Naidu, who while Chief Minister in Andhra Pradesh (India) provided the leadership to transform his government through the use of information technology. Others have told me of his combined intellectual leadership, formal leadership, and initiative, and I am really impressed. But he is the extreme high-end tail of the CEO e-government leadership distribution. Do not wait for a Naidu to appear to lead when the next IT paradigm shift approaches. The chances are 1000 to one he will not appear in your organization.

John Maynard Keynes said, "practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Isaac Newton said, "if I have seen further....it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." I suspect that even Dr. Naidu would acknowledge that his success in Andhra Pradish owed much to the intellectual leadership of people who convinced him that e-government was a right step for the future of Andhra Pradesh, and that the line of influence traces back to some (probably now defunct) e-government theorist.

A question from the audience

In the seminar a member of the audience noted that it is well established that most IT project fail. On the other hand, governments almost everywhere are far more computerized and networked than they were a couple of decades ago. That is an apparent contradiction. He asked how that conundrum could be resolved.

Perhaps part of the answer is that much progress occurred virally. Set up the right climate, reward innovation, permit experimentation recognizing that most experiments will fail, and a thousand flowers will bloom.

(Another part of the answer is that the process of creating a technological system like that of e-government is not adequately described in terms of projects, and that there are externalities from projects which do not meet their nominal objectives which contribute significantly to the development of the overall system supporting e-government.)

There is of course a suitable place for the planning of major initiatives. Interoperability of systems is important, and will generally not be achieved without leadership from the top and coordination among organizational units and different organizations. Economies of scale are available, sometimes large, and again require collective action to achieve that scale.

However, one of the paradigm shifts I remember was when the networked personal computers came in over the resistance of the managers of central mainframe computer departments in large organizations. Centralization can be the bureaucratic enemy of viral progress, The trick is to manage a process in which centralization and planning as well as decentralization and individual initiative are each allowed to play their appropriate roles.

Superstition versus expert knowledge

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets," makes the point that with thousands of people in leadership roles, some of them will by chance be more successful than others. Those riding the advancing wave of the Information Revolution, like those riding the advancing wave of a bull stock market, are likely to be successful on the average. People being people, the successful will seek retroactively to understand the reasons for their success. Indeed, people being people, they and we will tend to attribute success to superior performance. Taleb suggests that success is often due to the luck of being at the positive end of a random distribution. His experience in the stock market indicates that over the long run, more cautious investors who realize that things can go wrong may outperform those who shine in the short run with aggressive tactics. He knows that attribution of wisdom to the traders who shone brightest during the bull market may be a false attribution. He suspects, and I suspect, that attributing unusual wisdom to those who ride to success on other favorable circumstances is also often a mistake.

We know that correlation is not causality. Superstitious beliefs occur when we observe correlation and assume causality. Indeed, most cultures for most of history seem to have been marked by superstitious beliefs about the nature of the world. CEOs and CIOs who have presided over successful e-government innovation programs seem to me likely to form superstitious beliefs about "what they did that achieved those successes". Listen to them because they like to be listened to. They may be right about the reasons for their success. But.....

On the other hand, there are organizational scientists who conduct systematic observations of large organizations guided by theory. Theirs is a descriptive science, but a science nonetheless. They too may be wrong in their conclusions, their paradigms for understanding leadership may change, but theirs is a form of knowledge that provides an important counterpoint to that of the practitioner.

Final words

Ultimately, let me say that I too believe leadership from CEOs and CIOs is important. I suggest that the Information Revolution has been progressing long enough that strong leaders have emerged and have learned their business from theory and experience. Finding these guys and gals, and giving them the chance to make our organizations better through e-government innovations is a very good idea. Indeed, training an expanded cadre of people with the multiple talents for these roles is also a very good idea.

But I also suggest that leadership is easy when things are going well. A well endowed organization, serving a knowledgeable clientele, in a conducive socio-economic environment (with good ICT providers, access to good external advice, and local examples of good practice, forming a strong cluster favoring innovation), utilizing a rapidly developing technology in proven ways is easy to lead.

It is harder to provide the intellectual leadership when things are going badly, when the formally designated authorities in the organization don't understand what needs to be done, when the clientele are resistant, when the organization is impoverished, and when the socio-economic environment is not conducive to success. Those of us who work in development assistance are not willing to write off all the organizations nor all the countries that suffer from these problems.

We need intellectual leaders to step forward and make e-government work better everywhere, even where such leadership is not easy. If those intellectual leaders happen also to have formal authority of CEOs and CIOs, so much the better. But in so many cases, we must substitute intellectual authority and initiative for formal authority.

Read "The pharmaceutical industry: Beyond the pill" in The Economist of October 25th 2007.
Subtitle: "Drugs firms are casting about for new business models"

Excerpts:

“THE future is not terribly bright for most drug companies,” says a new report from Sanford Bernstein, a respected New York investment firm. Such blunt talk is unusual on Wall Street, but it is no exaggeration. Drugs firms, once rich and the favourites of investors, are urgently seeking cures to a variety of ailments.

One is the erosion of patent protection. Not only are the copy-cat manufacturers of cheaper generic drugs becoming emboldened by cost-conscious politicians and legal rulings in their favour, but big pharmaceutical companies are also facing an unprecedented wave of patent expirations over the next five years. Pfizer alone will lose some $13 billion in revenue a year when Lipitor, its blockbuster cholesterol drug, goes off-patent as early as 2010.......

As the Bernstein report notes, the global industry saw 24 new drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1998 on the back of $27 billion spent on R&D. Last year, the industry spent $64 billion, but only 13 new drugs were approved by the regulator.

And even new drugs can no longer reliably command the huge premiums they once did. Peter Lawyer, of the Boston Consulting Group, reckons the global drugs market doubled in value to $600 billion in revenues in the decade to 2005, chiefly from growth in America. But there is little chance it will double again by 2015, he argues.

Marcia Angell recently said on Frontline:

[The pharmaceutical companies'] R&D costs are very high, in absolute terms. But they're quite small relative to their other expenditures and profits. The drug companies spend on average, by their own figures, last year, 15 to 17 percent on R&D. And that's a lot of money. But their profits are higher. Their profits are 18.5 percent. And what's really interesting is what they spend on marketing and administration, by their own figures, is on average 35 percent. That's over twice as much as what they spend on R&D. So if they point to their R&D costs as some sort of justification for the high prices, what on earth can they say about their marketing costs, which are over twice that much? ...

Comment: If you believe the stock market is efficient, the prices of stocks reflect the future earnings potential of the companies. If pharmaceutical profits are high now, and you believe they will stay high, buy the companies. But maybe The Economist is right, and these profit margins will not last. Maybe the current value of the companies reflect both the current profits, expected future profits, and risk due to future market uncertainties.

In part the high marketing cost of drugs is related to the system in which physicians make the purchasing decisions for their patients, and generally don't face the need to pay for that which they prescribe. But it also reflects the reality that it is hard and costly to provide the information to hundreds of thousands of physicians and others with authority to write prescriptions with the information they need about drugs, their uses, and their risks. JAD

A Thought on the Use of Factor Analysis

Derek H. C. Chen and Kishore Gawande have written a paper titled "Underlying Dimensions of Knowledge Assessment: Factor Analysis of the Knowledge Assessment Methodology Data". It refers to the data provided by the World Bank with the Bank's very nice Knowledge Economy Index toolkit.

The authors make the basic point, which I accept, that the 83 variables chosen to indicate the readiness of nations to develop knowledge based economies are highly correlated. The vast majority of information contained in the measurements of these variables can be communicated by using a smaller number of factors. They make the further point that the principle factors from a factor analysis do not convey that information in as intuitive a manner as other dimensions might, and thus that other combined variables might be better suited to enable the user to build knowledge.

It occurs to me that the purpose of the Knowledge Assessment Methodology simply descriptive, but evaluative. It seeks to enable its users to understand how ready a country is to develop socially and economically in certain directions. Comparing values of the Knowledge Readiness Index from one time to another is to help analysts to determine whether the country is moving appropriately in those directions.

The methods used by the authors discard information. How do they know that the information that they discard is not useful in the predictions that the database in intended to help users to make, and not simply noise. Unfortunately there is no real indicator of success in developing a knowledge economy that could be used for regression analysis.

Is it not the case that simply looking for combined variables that contain most of the information in a data set might result in a reduced set of information that looses key information for predictive purposes.

For example, might it not be that those countries which value scientific and technological information a little more than might be expected and that are a little more open than might be expected from their general level of development are exactly those nations that will move more rapidly towards a knowledge economy?

Where does all the computer power go?

Read "All systems go" in The Economist, October 25th 2007.

A complex computer model of a heart, developed over more than 40 years, is being used to improve understanding of the ways in which drugs cause arrhythmias; around 40% of the compounds that drug companies test cause these arrhythmia, and if the side effect could be reduced or eliminated, drugs would be safer. Denis Noble of Oxford University, the creator of the beating-heart model, is now part of a consortium involving four drug firms — Roche, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca — that is trying to unravel how new drugs may affect the heart.

Virtual drugs are introduced into the model and researchers monitor the changes they cause just as if the medicines were being applied to a real heart. The production of some proteins increases while others are throttled back; these changes affect the flow of blood and electrical activity. The drugs can then be tweaked in order to boost the beneficial effects and reduce the harmful ones.

Systems biology thus speeds up the drug-testing process. Malcolm Young is the head of a firm called e-Therapeutics, which is based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Using databases of tens of thousands of interactions between the components of a cell, his company claims to have developed the world's fastest drug-profiling system. In contrast to the two years it takes to assess the effects of a new compound using conventional research methods, Dr Young's approach takes an average of just two weeks. Moreover, the company has been looking at drugs known to have damaging side effects and has found that its method would have predicted them......

Ultimately, the aim is to build an entire virtual human for researchers to play with. But reductionism is still needed to get there. Human bodies are made of cells, and the best way to build a model body might be to construct a general-purpose virtual cell that can be reprogrammed into being any one of the 220 or so specialised sorts of cell of which the human body is composed. That, after all, is how real bodies develop. And a collaboration organised by the European Science Foundation is hoping to do just this, through what it calls the Blue Cell project.

Keeping track of the data needed to carry out systems biology on this scale will be a Herculean task, and may turn out to be the driver of future developments at the heavy-number-crunching end of the computer industry. Dr Noble is in negotiations with Fujitsu, a Japanese computer firm that is developing a machine capable of performing some ten thousand trillion calculations a second. That would make it the world's fastest computer, but it comes with a price tag to match—about a billion dollars. This is a little more than the $6m paid for that fictional bionic man, Steve Austin, even allowing for inflation. But it is only about a quarter of what the Human Genome Project cost. And this time, it might produce some answers that prove immediately useful.

Comment: I have been suggesting that connectivity to cell phones or to the Internet is but one kind of index of the digital divide. Those of us who use personal computers may feel that we understand the technology, but there is a huge gap between the power of a PC and that of a $10 billion computer used to model a human being at the level of sub-cellular chemical and genetic activity.

The firms that first master the technology described in this article should have a huge advantage in drug discovery. Even now, the discovery of really new pharmaceutical products is dominated by huge ethical pharmaceutical companies, which are the only ones that can afford the hundreds of millions of dollars per drug to prove safety, efficacy and effectiveness. These firms may devote a fifth of their sales income to research and development. They also dominate the sales of ethical pharmaceuticals globally, with huge incomes.

The big guys are likely to be the ones to appropriate super computers for drug discovery. They are likely to use the technological power from the models and super computers to dominate the value chain in pharmaceuticals. Firms in developing nations may participate in the value chain, perhaps packaging product and selling it in developing markets. They are unlikely to be able to appropriate a large portion of the benefits from the drugs, seeing the lions share going to big pharma giants.

Unless means can be found either

• to give enough purchasing power to the victims of diseases of poverty (or to surrogates acting on their behalf) to develop a market attractive to big pharma, or
• to subsidize the development of pharmaceutical products for the diseases of poverty

poor people in poor countries are not going to benefit very much from this exciting, but expensive information technology. This is an aspect of the digital divide that gets too little attention! JAD

A couple of Quotes from Yeats

I especially like the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Here are a couple of quotes:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
From Sailing to Byzantium


An aimless joy is a pure joy,’
Or so did Tom O’Roughley say
That saw the surges running by,
‘And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.
From Tom O’Roughley

Green Holloween

Patti Sanner and Stephanie Bianchi of the National Science Foundation Library in their great email newsletter write:

What colors do you associate with Halloween? Most would answer orange and black as traditional Halloween colors. But more and more people are celebrating a green Halloween! The Environmental Defense Fund reminds us annually of tips for celebrating an eco-friendly Halloween. And beyond these tips, parents and students will find wonderfully engaging 'green' activities to bring life to any celebration. And we can't forget the 'green' influence on our candy choice!

Copenhagen Consensus for Latin America and the Carribean

The Copenhagen Consensus Center analyzes the world's greatest challenges and identifies cost efficient solutions to meeting these challenges. The Center works with multilateral organizations, governments and other entities concerned with mitigating the consequences of the challenges which the world is facing.

The Copenhagen Consensus for Latin America and the Caribbean took place in San José, Costa Rica, 22-25 October 2007. The challenges considered were:

• Democracy,
  
• Education,
• Employment and Social Security,
  
• Environment,
  
• Fiscal Problems,
  
• Health,
• Infrastructure,
  
• Poverty and Inequality,
  
• Public Administration and Institutions, and
• Violence and Crime.
  

An expert panel of nine distinguished economists considered research about each major challenge and its potential solutions.

The panel ended its brief report with the following paragraph:

Top priority was given to Early Childhood Development programs. These are interventions that improve the physical, intellectual and social development of children early in their life. The interventions range from growth monitoring, day-care services, preschool activities, improved hygiene and health services to parenting skills. Besides improving children’s welfare directly, the panel concluded these programs create further benefits for family members, releasing women and older siblings to work outside the home or to further their own education. Evidence shows that the benefits are substantially higher than the costs.

Engineering Thinking

Check out the CDIO Syllabus, created by an international consortium of engineering schools to promote the reform of engineering education. Notice the thinking skills that it calls to be formed in student

2.1 ENGINEERING REASONING AND PROBLEM SOLVING [e]
2.1.1 Problem Identification and Formulation

Data and symptoms

Assumptions and sources of bias

Issue prioritization in context of overall goals

A plan of attack (incorporating model, analytical and numerical solutions, qualitative analysis, experimentation and consideration of uncertainty)
2.1.2 Modeling

Assumptions to simplify complex systems and environment

Conceptual and qualitative models

Quantitative models and simulations
2.1.3 Estimation and Qualitative Analysis

Orders of magnitude, bounds and trends

Tests for consistency and errors (limits, units, etc.)

The generalization of analytical solutions
2.1.4 Analysis With Uncertainty

Incomplete and ambiguous information

Probabilistic and statistical models of events and sequences

Engineering cost-benefit and risk analysis

Decision analysis

Margins and reserves
2.1.5 Solution and Recommendation

Problem solutions

Essential results of solutions and test data

Discrepancies in results

Summary recommendations

Possible improvements in the problem solving process
2.2 EXPERIMENTATION AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY [b]
2.2.1 Hypothesis Formulation

Critical questions to be examined

Hypotheses to be tested

Controls and control groups
2.2.2 Survey of Print and Electronic Literature

The literature research strategy

Information search and identification using library tools (on-line catalogs, databases, search engines)

Sorting and classifying the primary information

The quality and reliability of information

The essentials and innovations contained in the information

Research questions that are unanswered

Citations to references
2.2.3 Experimental Inquiry

The experimental concept and strategy

The precautions when humans are used in experiments

Experiment construction

Test protocols and experimental procedures

Experimental measurements

Experimental data

Experimental data vs. available models
2.2.4 Hypothesis Test, and Defense

The statistical validity of data

The limitations of data employed

Conclusions, supported by data, needs and values

Possible improvements in knowledge discovery process
2.3 SYSTEM THINKING
2.3.1 Thinking Holistically

A system, its behavior, and its elements

Trans-disciplinary approaches that ensure the system is understood from all relevant perspectives

The societal, enterprise and technical context of the system

The interactions external to the system, and the behavioral impact of the system
2.3.2 Emergence and Interactions in Systems

The abstractions necessary to define and model system

The behavioral and functional properties (intended and unintended) which emerge from the system

The important interfaces among elements

Evolutionary adaptation over time
2.3.3 Prioritization and Focus

All factors relevant to the system in the whole

The driving factors from among the whole

Energy and resource allocations to resolve the driving issues
2.3.4 Trade-offs, Judgement and Balance in Resolution

Tensions and factors to resolve through trade-offs

Solutions that balance various factors, resolve tensions and optimize the system as a whole

Flexible vs. optimal solutions over the system lifetime

Possible improvements in the system thinking used

s:

Commercialization of Technology at UCLA

Read the new edition of UCLA Impact with examples of innovations it has developed and moved to commercialization.

Driving Innovation to Market
Technological advances are necessities for a healthy global economy. Ranked #2 in the U.S. for academic research and development spending — UCLA is situated to make the most of California's innovative drive.

Through technology transfer, the process of developing applications for the results of scientific research, UCLA plays a vital role in bringing new innovation into the marketplace. Thus, new startups based on UCLA discoveries are launched every year.

UCLA builds relationships with private industry to accelerate the development of UCLA discoveries. The UCLA Office of Intellectual Property (OIP) creates partnerships among researchers, investors and industry, serving as a conduit between the faculty and the business community, both locally and around the world. By providing guidance to faculty and university researchers and building relationships with investors and industry leaders, OIP helps move faculty inventions and helps fuel advances in many fields, including biomedicine and computer modeling.

Since 1990, UCLA’s portfolio includes more than 1,100 inventions and 2,569 faculty inventors.

Small Schools Can Help Their Communities Compete in High Tech

There is an interesting article by Francesca Di Meglio in the October 16 issue of Business Week titled "Small Schools' Big Tech Dreams". The commercialization of academic research is big business. According to a study by Innovation Associates, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, in the last 10 years academic institutions have nearly doubled the number of licenses executed and more than doubled the number of startups launched. Universities that responded to the Association of University Technology Managers Licensing Survey reported that gross license income from licenses to corporations and startups in 2005 totaled about $1.6 billion.

Most university science and engineering research is done large, research intensive universities. However, the study highlighted a number of smaller programs that are developing new technologies through academic research, licensing the inventions, and helping launch businesses that use them. With fewer resources than the big players these schools think creatively to contribute to the greater economic development of their state or region.

Read:

• The full article.
• The supporting piece highlighting ten successful schools
• The executive summary of the Innovation Associates study titled "Technology Transfer and Commercialization Partnerships"
  
• The executive summary of a previous Innovation Associates study titled "Accelerating Economic Development Through University Technology Transfer"
  

World Bank Knowledge Assessment Methodology

I have been using the World Bank's online tools in the website for the

Knowledge Assessment Methodology

They are quite good and interesting. Here is an example of a comparison of readiness of Ireland for the Knowledge Economy as compared to the United States and the United Kingdon. It took only a couple of minites to create and download.

Do the Baby Boomers Understand the World Economy?

At the end of World War II, the United States was the only developed nation with it economy intact. Indeed, during the war the United States had developed its industry to unprecedented levels to support the war effort. Its population had saved a great deal since there were few consumption goods to buy, full employment for years, and a vivid memory of the depression. Starting after the war, the United States invested heavily in human resources -- the GI Bill, alone sent millions of returning veterans of the war through college. Having learned the importance of technology in the war, the United States began to build its scientific and technological capacity. And of course, it benefited greatly from an influx of the intellectual leaders from Europe, who fled the Nazis and the European devastation caused by the war.

The Truman administration through the Marshall Plan stimulated the economic restoration of Europe. So too, it supported reforms in Japan that lead to the development of Japanese economic power in the second half of the 20th century. The tripartite growth of these economies resulted in synergies, and indeed helped the U.S. economy to continue to grow in the aftermath of the war. The creation of the European Common Market helped to continue European economic growth, and the accession of Central and Eastern European nations to the Europe has resulted in further strengthening of the European economy. Europe again is a comparable economic power to North America.

Following the growth of Japan, the Asian tigers followed by China and (later) India have participated in enormous growth in Asian economies. Asia, with more than half of the world's population is joining Europe and North America as a comparable global economic power. While the Western European economic restoration can be seen as repairing the damages of the first half of the 20th century (World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II), the Asian economic restoration can be seen as part of a longer historical process, repairing not only the damages of the wars and depression of the first part of the century, but of colonialism, in the previous centuries, and of failed experiments with centrally planned economies in the latter half of the 20th century.

The Cold War suggested that the Soviet Union was a comparable global power to the United States in the immediate post World War II period, but that was not true. Soviet economic power did not match its military power and was far inferior to that of the United States. Russia, and the Russian speaking nations seem now to be repairing the damage caused by central planning. Indeed, one may hope that Russia and other large nations -- Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico -- will grow their economies That leaves Sub-Saharan Africa, the Islamic countries and parts of Latin America and the Caribbean as trailing economies. Still the world economy is now global, and the balance is quite different than that of the 1945-1975 period.

The Baby Boomers, born between 1945 and 1965, grew up in a world in which the United States had exceptional domination of the world's economy, and thus exceptional power and influence. That generation is now of an age that they dominate the halls of power. They occupy the top jobs in big corporations and in the government. They are the senior professors in the universities, and run foundations, think tanks, and other civil society organizations. Lets hope they can adjust the attitudes formed in the 60's and 70's to the new economic realities, and the resulting power relationships among countries and regions.

"Third of primates 'under threat'

Read Steve Jackson's article on BBC News, October 26, 2007.

Lead: "Almost a third of the world's primates are in danger of extinction because of destruction of their habitats, a report by conservation groups has warned. The article continues: "The report says many apes, monkeys and other primates are being driven from the forests where they live or killed to make food and medicines. The research is being presented at the International Primatological Society (IPS).......It was compiled by a team of 60 experts led by the World Conservation Union."

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK

The fourth Global Environment Outlook: environment for development (GEO-4) assessment is a comprehensive and authoritative UN report on environment, development and human well-being, providing incisive analysis and information for decision making. It has found that water, land, air, plants, animals and fish are all in "inexorable decline". More than 2 million people are possibly dying prematurely of air pollution, and close to 2 billion are likely to suffer absolute water scarcity by 2025. Put bluntly, the report warns that the world's 6.75 billion people had reached a stage where "the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available". United Nations Environment Program, October 2007.

Click here to go to the Global Environmental Outlook website.

Read a Aussie newspaper story on the new report.

Ignore This if you hate local media and favor media consolidation in the USA

The FCC is holding an official media localism hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007. But the public wasn't notified until the last minute.

In his march to push through sweeping changes in media ownership rules that would allow the biggest media conglomerates to swallow up even more local outlets, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has again pushed the public out of the process. He gave the public just a week's notice about this vital event and is providing only limited time for public testimony.

Official FCC Localism Hearing
Oct. 31, 2007, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Room TW-C305 following open commission meeting
FCC, 445 12th Street SW, Washington, D.C. 20554 (map)

Check out StopBigMedia.Com

Bush Administration Cuts Science Testimony on Global Warming

Read "Sen. Boxer Seeks Answers On Redacted Testimony: White House Cut Climate Warnings" by Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post, October 25, 2007.

Excerpts:

Bush administration officials acknowledged yesterday that they heavily edited testimony on global warming, delivered to Congress on Tuesday by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after the president's top science adviser and other officials questioned its scientific basis.....

White House officials eliminated several successive pages of Gerberding's testimony, beginning with a section in which she planned to say that many organizations are working to address climate change but that, "despite this extensive activity, the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed," and that the "CDC considers climate change a serious public concern.".....

several experts on the public health impact of climate change, having reviewed Gerberding's testimony, said there were no inconsistencies between the original testimony and the IPCC's recent reports.

"That's nonsense," said University of Wisconsin at Madison public health professor Jonathan Patz, who served as an IPCC lead author for its 2007, 2001 and 1995 reports. "Dr. Gerberding's testimony was scientifically accurate and absolutely in line with the findings of the IPCC."....

Michael McCally, executive director of the advocacy group Physicians for Social Responsibility, said the editing means that the "White House has denied a congressional committee's access to scientific information about health and global warming," adding: "This misuse of science and abuse of the legislative process is deplorable."

Comment: I have long been concerned that the health effects of climate change on a global basis have been seriously underestimated.

A billion people live on US! per day or less. These folk have no ability to deal with new problems. Another couple of billion live on $1 to $2 per day, and have very, very limited ability to deal with unforeseen problems. If subsistence agriculture fails, people go hungry, and hungry people die not only of malnutrition but of the diseases of hunger and poverty. All the indications I have seen suggest that global climate change is likely to increase agricultural risks, and I expect it will cause more failures in subsistence agriculture.

Climate change will also be expected to change vector densities. Vectors will reach levels that will support disease endemicity, disease epidemics, and hyper endemicity in new areas, in all probability. Public health officials will be hard pressed to deal with such novel problems, and in the poorest countries will probably often fail. Remember, millions of people die each year from malaria, and there are other vector born diseases.

Other communicable diseases may also change their temporal and geographic patterns due to climate change, and again, poor people and poor countries have real problems in meeting unexpected health problems.

Dr. Geberding is no doubt doing her job in trying to alert our lawmakers to the need to deal with the public health impacts we can foresee in the United States as a result of climate change. However, this is a rich country, and if we are willing to apply our selves I suspect we can accommodate the changes without damage to public health.

The situation is not that good in developing nations, where literally billions of people are at risk. If there are not only direct impacts due to food shortages and changing disease patterns, but climate change induced migrations and conflict, the viscous cycle will get still worse for these people. JAD

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

We are already using a very large part of the earth's bioproductivity, and indeed, the rich countries are drawing on that of poor countries. Climate change is not going to be easy for the global population to accomodate.

The Bush administration should stop denying the problem exists, and begin to help us to plan for its amelioration!

Expenditures for U.S. Industrial R&D in 2005

"Expenditures for U.S. Industrial R&D Continue to Increase in 2005; R&D Performance Geographically Concentrated" National Science Foundation InfoBrief NSF 07-335, September 2007.

Companies spent $226 billion in current-year dollars on research and development (R&D) performed in the United States during 2005 compared with $208 billion in 2004, according to estimates from the Survey of Industrial Research and Development. Funding from both the company's own and other nonfederal sources and from federal sources for R&D were higher in 2005 than in 2004. Company funding during 2005 amounted to $204 billion compared with $188 billion during 2004, and federal funding amounted to $22 billion during 2005 compared with $20 billion during 2004. After adjusting for inflation, company-funded R&D increased 5.4%, and federally funded R&D increased 4.9%.

During 2005, the top 10 states accounted for two-thirds of the industrial R&D performed in the United States. Companies in California, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Washington, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut (listed by decreasing level) reported aggregate R&D expenditures of $152 billion. California alone accounted for 22% of the U.S. industrial R&D total.

Check out the Natural Hazard facet of the NASA Earth Observatory

Satellite image of the California wildfires and the smoke they generated,

GERD in the Americas 2000

Source:"Science, Technology, Engineering and Innovation for Development: A Vision for the Americas in the Twenty First Century"

Getting Lies From Interrogations

"A tale of two decisions (or, how the FBI gets you to confess)"
Steve Bergstein, Psychsound.

Bergstein writes:

Last week, my eyes lit up when I checked the daily decisions and saw that one case involved a guy who claimed he was forced to confess to a crime that he did not commit. This scenario surfaces from time to time for murders and other crimes, but this case was different because it involved the crime of the century: the 9/11 hijackings which launched this country into a new era.

The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice.

Comment: The FBI is of course a law enforcement agency, and is seeking means to convict criminals. The coercion in this case might have gotten a conviction had the pilot not showed up, but it did not get useful intelligence. Coercion is not only morally wrong, it would seem often to be counterproductive in acquiring truthful information, JAD

Getting Truth From Interrogations

Yesterday I watcher a TV interview by Charlie Rose of Michael Hayden, director of the CIA. Hayden who, as one would expect, was articulate and an effective spokesperson for his agency. He emphasized that the CIA is not police nor a prison agency, and holds people only when doing so contributes to the gathering of intelligence, and even then only under very clearly defined guidelines and conditions.

He emphasized that the CIA approach to obtaining information from a person it holds is best termed "debriefing". The interrogator and the prisoner sit across from each other at a table and talk. He said that were he able to describe the process in detail, most Americans would be very comfortable that the methods are appropriate and not overly coercive. On the other hand, he said that he would not fully describe those methods, because to do so would allow trainers of terrorists to better prepare them to resist debriefing.

I thought it interesting that he stressed that the most effective means to improve interrogation results was to provide the interrogator with more information. An interrogator who is able to show the person who is being interrogated that the questioner understands the situation, probably has more information than the prisoner, and who can challenge false statements with correct information is likely to be successful.

Of course, people can become very skilled at getting others to talk. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and ethnographers are professionally trained to do so, not to mention reporters and policy interrogators. People can also become very skilled at recognizing lies and evasions. Indeed, there was a report some time ago that there is a game in Iraq in which one person tries to identify which of a panel of opponents is lying; Iraqis were characterized at good at both deception and detecting deception in this game,

A couple of years ago,Harvey Rishikof and Michael Schrage wrote an article in Slate titled "Technology vs. Torture". They wrote in part:

The tools for radically transforming tomorrow's interrogations can be found in hospitals worldwide. They're helping to painlessly diagnose Alzheimer's, dyslexia, epilepsy, schizophrenia, insomnia, and brain tumors. The past decade has seen revolutions both in brain-scanning technologies and in drugs that affect the brain's functions. Like personal computers and digital camcorders, these technologies are getting faster, better, and cheaper. And they may have uses in the interrogation room that will render moot debates about the excesses of Abu Ghraib-style treatment of prisoners.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans, for example, have improved so dramatically that they can now produce high-resolution movies of brain activity. Functional MRIs can measure how the brain reacts when asked certain questions, such as, "Do you know Mr. X?" or, "Have you seen this man?" When you ask someone a question, the parts of the brain responsible for answering will cause certain neurons to fire, drawing blood flow. The oxygen in the blood then changes the brain's magnetic field so that a neural radio signal emitted becomes more intense. Functional MRI scanners detect and calibrate these changes. And by comparing the resulting images to those of the brain at rest, a computer can produce detailed pictures of the part of the brain answering or not answering the question—in essence, creating a kind of high-tech lie detector. Indeed, a Pentagon agency is already funding Functional MRI research for such purposes.

Engineers are also using less-expensive technologies such as infrared* to track blood flow in the brain's prefrontal cortex, the region associated with decision-making and social inhibition. Electroencephalography, which is painless and noninvasive, has dramatically improved in the last 10 years so that it is now able to detect, for example, where the ability to speak a second language resides in the brain. And when electroencephalography data are read alongside Functional MRI scans, we can gain even richer insight into how the brain is functioning.

Concurrent with these strides in brain-imaging, scientists are learning more about how drugs influence the brain. Pharmaceuticals like Paxil, Zoloft, and Prozac have now been in general use long enough that neuroscientists are beginning to observe how they affect brain behavior and individual responses to conversation and questions. It now appears that there are safe drugs that reduce conversational inhibitions and the urge to deceive.

Polygraphs have been around for a long time, and they seem to be helpful to a trained person in interrogations. They may not give the level of confidence that is needed in U.S. courts to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and while they apparently can be fooled by a trained person, they illustrate the potential of technology.

The U.S. intelligence community spends a lot of money on technology. I suspect that they have been spending some of that money for decades on technological support for interrogation. Some technologies, such as ICT to organize information and help interrogators understand patterns, and technology enabling experts to replay interrogations and collaborate on their analysis would seem likely to be available.

Hayden said, if I recall correctly, that since 9/11 some 9,000 intelligence reports have been obtained from some 100 detainees. That suggests the interrogation is effective, and I would infer that it is being done by very skilled interrogators supported by advanced technology.

Indeed, Hayden mentioned that the Army interrogation manual was written for military interrogators, who generally would be relatively young and untrained in interrogation techniques, and that is written to set forth guidelines that can be used on the battlefield by people under great pressure. He asked why anyone would assume that those guidelines would be applicable to professional, highly-trained CIA interrogators working in carefully controlled circumstances. Again, I would infer that the CIA guys are good at their job, and that they work in a high tech environment designed to enhance their effectiveness.

R&D in U.S. Universities

"Universities Report Stalled Growth in Federal R&D Funding in FY 2006", U.S. National Science Foundation InfoBrief NSF 07-336, September 2007.

The National Science Foundation has published results from its latest survey of 600 leading U.S. research universities. Science and engineering research funding in those universities was almost 48 billion dollars in 2006. Thirty percent of the total was located in the top 20 universities, each of which accounted for more than $500,000,000. Six of the top 20 are in California.

Science Sensei

My old friend Eliene Augenbraun who runs ScienCentral has created Science Sensei to provide science news in a format that works for 14 year olds. A YouTube video covers a couple of science stories in an upbeat manner, with short text support pieces, linked to longer original print media publications for adults.

Eliene says the show

discusses science studies that just came out... In ways you’ve never seen before. Think NOVA meets Ask a Ninja. It stars a guy who is a Duke-educated engineer with a black belt in jujitsu and a very strange sense of humor.

Check out Science Sensei 1.

Go directly to the YouTube Videos for ScienCentral.

Or to the YouTube Video for Science Sensei 1.

A Benchmark Passed

I am an editor of several communities on the Development Gateway:

• ICT for Development (10,100 public members)
  
• Nanotechnology for Development (2,300 public members)
  
• Space Applications for Development
  
• Monitoring and Evaluation (ICT Projects)
  

I am also a frequent contributor to others, especially:

• Knowledge Economy (8,500 public members)
  
• Aid Effectivemess (7,500 public members)
  

It is six and one-half years since I joined the Development Gateway. According to my DG profile, I have now contributed 15,000 resources to the resource base on the Gateway. That of course does not include highlights, news, events, and comments.

This has been a pleasure, and I hope a service to the community of people interested in development cooperation and especially science and technology for development.

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Vinod Khosla to Larry Page

While Vinod Khosla made this comment in a different context, it seems to me to fit the upcoming conference on Israel and Palestine perfectly. In an op-ed piece in today's Washington Post (which for some reason does not seem to have made it to the web) Henry Kissinger says that the outcome of the peace talks should be clear -- a two state solution with a withdrawal of Israel to something like its boundaries before the expansion into the West Bank. Who am I to argue with Kissinger?

The situation spanning the geographic area from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan has gotten so much worse in this decade that it certainly can be classified as a crisis. The U.S. government has considerable leverage with the Israelis, and I think should use all of that leverage to push for real Israeli concessions in the current peace negotiations. I hope that the U.S. government and others will similarly use their influence with the parties in the region to promote the peace. Lets not waste this crisis, but rather use it to really advance the peace process!

The Economist Innovation Special Report

The Economist magazine published a long special report on innovation in its October 11, 2007 edition.

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Vinod Khosla to Larry Page

The report divides the process of innovation into an initial, "creative" phase and an "implementation" phase, suggesting that only a few percent of the process is creativity and that more than 90 percent of the process of commercially successful corporate innovation is implementation. It also suggests that keys to successful corporate innovation strategies are:

• investigating lots of creative ideas, but weeding out the less promising ones quickly;
• stopping doing what the corporation has done (successfully) in the past and adopting a new approach when a disruptive innovation is about to occur. (Polaroid failed to recognize that digital cameras would overtake the polaroid process, and went bankrupt when it failed to abandon its film based technology in a timely fashion.)

The report suggests that globalization and the Information Revolution are making innovation occur more rapidly than in the past, and that firms need to respond to the changing environment that they face by innovating more rapidly. Thus, corporations are moving to open innovation systems; big firms are depending more on other sources of creativity and implementation, and perhaps less on their R&D labs and in-house implementation.

The report also suggests that geographical clusters are becoming less important than they were, as geographically dispersed networks become more important in the innovation process. With the Internet, networks are no longer so geographically constrained as they were. The report also suggests that total reliance on cluster development by national planners is a form of magical thinking; Germany may have wasted $20 billion investing in a biotechnology cluster which may well fail to compete with those centered in the United States.

OECD economies are now largely service oriented, and the innovations that count are often new services, new business processes, or importantly, new business models. The traditional R&D lab was of course focused on new products and new manufacturing processes. These are obviously still important, and I suspect that the R&D labs will remain important in manufacturing industries. They may, however, more often be networked with labs in start-up high tech firms, in government and in academia.

An important fact recognized in the report is that the countries that reap the economic benefits from inventions are not necessarily the countries where the inventions take place. Too much a concentration on subsidies for R&D, and too little concentration on creating conditions conducive to firms implementing innovations is probably a recipe for commercial failure. On the other hand, The Economist seems to me too focused on the business of doing business, and inadequately focused on the social and economic climate that favors creativity and acceptance of the new and different in individuals.

While the report is very interesting and illuminating, I was concerned that it may not adequately recognize the differences among industries. Certainly the report suggests that, since the manufacture of cell phones and of automobiles now involves a lot of software and computer chips, firms in these industries are ripe for disruptive change. But I would suggest that the aircraft industry, the heavy equipment manufacturers, the pharmaceutical industry, and the software industry all have unique characteristics (reflected in their attitudes towards the protection of intellectual property) which call for different innovation strategies.

A couple of quotations suggest the changes that are coming:

The emergence of Asian world-beaters exemplifies the two forces driving innovation. Globalisation and the spread of information technology allow the creation of unexpected and disruptive business models, like the one used by Chongqing's motorcycle-makers. Other examples include the design networks established by Taiwanese contract-producers in the textile industry. Groups of innovative just-in-time suppliers abound in Asia, feeding Western fashion and consumer-goods companies. They are often managed by supply-chain experts, like Hong Kong's Li & Fung. Unlike Japan's keiretsu, which bound companies and their suppliers together with interlocking shareholdings, these firms are free to leave their alliances. They stay together only if they continue to learn and profit from the experience. In some ways they resemble the nimble networks of firms that underpinned Silicon Valley's success.

Low labour costs may have given such firms a head start, but that is a transitory advantage. India's software innovators were once sniffed at as merely low-cost offshoring and back-office operations. But firms like Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have become world leaders in business-software services. S. Ramadorai, TCS's chief executive, says his firm sees “innovation as a key enabler of its productivity edge”. He points out that his firm has been investing in R&D for 25 years and holds several dozen patents and copyrights. Navi Radjou of Forrester Research, a technology consultancy, applauds TCS's “global innovation ecosystem” which brings together academic labs, start-ups, venture-capital firms, large independent software firms and some of its most important customers.

Innovation is also changing the pharmaceuticals industry. Small biotechnology firms, using networked approaches, are getting ahead of Big Pharma. This too opens the way for Asian competitors, like Ranbaxy and Dr Reddy's Laboratories. These firms were once copycats, trampling on Western patents to make cheap generic versions of drugs. But increasingly they are shifting to process innovation and even new drug discovery.

And:

OHN KAO is an innovation guru described as “Mr Creativity” by this newspaper a decade ago. Now he is concerned about America losing its global lead and becoming “the fat, complacent Detroit of nations”. In his new book, “Innovation Nation”, he points to warning signs, such as America's underinvestment in physical infrastructure, its slow start on broadband, its pitiful public schools and its frostiness toward immigrants since September 11th 2001—even though immigrants provided much of America's creativity. The rise of Asia's innovators is a “silent Sputnik”, he argues, invoking a cold war analogy. What America needs, he reckons, is a big push by federal government to promote innovation, akin to the Apollo space project that put a man on the moon.

"Feeding a Hungry World"

Norman Borlaug, Editorial, Science Magazine, 19 October 2007:.

"Next week, more than 200 science journals throughout the world will simultaneously publish papers on global poverty and human development--a collaborative effort to increase awareness, interest, and research about these important issues of our time. Some 800 million people still experience chronic and transitory hunger each year. Over the next 50 years, we face the daunting job of feeding 3.5 billion additional people, most of whom will begin life in poverty. The battle to alleviate poverty and improve human health and productivity will require dynamic agricultural development."

Borlaug, who was the awarded the Nobel Prize and other awards for his role in the Green Revolution which has saved so many lives and done so much to alleviate poverty over the past several decades says:

Although sizable land areas, such as the cerrados of Brazil, may responsibly be converted to agriculture, most food increases will have to come from lands already in production. Fortunately, productivity improvements in crop management can be made all along the line: in plant breeding, crop management, tillage, fertilization, weed and pest control, harvesting, and water use. Genetically engineered crops are playing an increasingly important role in world agriculture, enabling scientists to reach across genera for useful genes to enhance tolerance to drought, heat, cold, and waterlogging, all likely consequences of global warming. I believe biotechnology will be essential to meeting future food, feed, fiber, and biofuel demand.
.

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"How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting"

Read the full article by LOUISE STORY in The New York Times, October 22, 2007.

Organizations buying online advertising depend on services such as those offered by ComScore and Nielsen/NetRatings to measure traffic on websites. Organizations running those websites depend on their own measurement of site usage. According to this article, the internal measurements often exceed those of the external services.

"A main source of the discrepancies is over how to measure Internet use in the workplace. Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore both track the Web use of representative panels of people, and use those traffic patterns to extrapolate the total number of visitors to a Web site. But online publishers say that their systems drastically undercount people who use the Web during work hours, particularly in offices where corporate software makes the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems. The issue is most pronounced at sites like CNN.com and Forbes.com, which say that high numbers of people read them in the workplace. Mr. Spanfeller of Forbes.com says the ratings companies’ figures at times have 'no relationship to reality'; they in turn say that executives like Mr. Spanfeller are simply deceiving themselves about the popularity of their sites......the ratings panels still have problems. Condé Nast met with ComScore late last year to dispute the figures for Style.com. 'They couldn’t really explain it, and they admitted as much,' he said. Condé Nast counts international readers and ComScore and neilsen/NetRatings do not, but that does not fully explain the discrepancies, Mr. McDonald said. He finds fault with the panels that both companies use, saying that they do not include enough of the wealthier people whom Condé Nast says frequent many of its sites.Complaints about the panels do not end there: some Web publishers say the panels lack representation from students on college campuses, Hispanics and other demographic groups. 'The results you get from a panel will reflect the choices you’ve made as you select the panel,' said Rob Grimshaw, advertising strategy director at The Financial Times. 'There’s a natural bias from panels. And on the Internet, we can have a genuinely more accurate system.'"

Do Literate People Think More Complex Thoughts

Colin Wells in Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World suggests (in his discussion of the transfer of literacy to Russia from Byzantium via the Cyrillic alphabet) suggests that people who can read and write learn to thing through more complicated arguments than illiterates are able to make. My book club discussed this comment briefly, with several people saying the idea was interesting.

I wonder now whether this is simply prejudice of an author from a literate society toward people in illiterate societies. Does Wells think Homer could not follow a complicated thought, or that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not complex? Indeed, it seems to me that people with trained memories who did not have a lot of things to divert their minds from complex thoughts may be better able than we to deal with complexity.

"HIV prevalence estimates: Fact or fiction?"

Read the full article by Kristen Jill Kresge in IAVI Report.

In recent years HIV prevalence estimates have been revised for many nations. The revised estimates, based on improved data, in almost all cases are lower than previous ones, sometimes dramatically so. "A few years ago UNAIDS estimated that 42 million people were HIV infected. Now the number stands just below 40 million, according to the 2006 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic.....HIV prevalence estimates are generated by epidemiologists using HIV infection data from small subsets of the population that can be extrapolated using mathematical models. These models combine national population estimates and epidemiological data collected in a country and then churn out estimates of national HIV prevalence, based on a series of assumptions.......Previous prevalence estimates have been based primarily on sentinel surveillance data collected from pregnant women who visited antenatal clinics, one of the few settings where there is mandatory HIV testing.....'Data from antenatal clinics help monitor trends over time,' says Karen Stanecki, a senior advisor at UNAIDS in Switzerland. 'The intent [with data from pregnant women] is to monitor changes, not to predict the actual number of people who are infected,' says Prabhat Jha, professor of epidemiology at the Center for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto.....Following pressure from donor organizations to come up with more accurate prevalence estimates, more countries began conducting population-based surveys, often leading to a drop, sometimes precipitous......Now 30 countries have conducted population-based surveys to help better gauge the extent of their HIV/AIDS epidemics. In Benin, Mali, and Niger the results from these surveys were very similar to the figures estimated using sentinel surveillance data from antenatal clinics, but in the majority of cases the new figures were lower......Population-based surveys have several advantages—they reach more individuals in rural areas and include men. But they have disadvantages as well. 'The other side of the coin is that people may refuse HIV testing,' says Stanecki. 'This introduces a bias.' These household surveys are also limited to countries where there is a well-developed HIV/AIDS epidemic. "We don't recommend that they be conducted in countries with low-level prevalence," Stanecki adds. Population-based surveys are only applicable in countries where 1% or more of the population is HIV infected, which excludes many Asian countries where the HIV epidemic has not progressed as rapidly as in sub-Saharan Africa.

Comment: The collection of information requires resources, and resources are scarce. The resources needed to get good epidemiological data are quite scarce anywhere, and especially so in developing nations. Therefore those resources should be allocated so as to obtain the most important and useful information for decision making.

Sometimes, therefore, it is appropriate to allocate these resources to the collection of information that is very easily available, but only of limited utility.

Clearly it makes a lot of sense to test pregnant women coming into antenatal clinics for HIV infection, since medication of the HIV infected women is a cost effective means of prevention of transmission to the children to which they will give birth. Keeping track of this data is easy, and important for resource planning for future service delivery as well as for detecting trends that are relevent to the planning of prevention campaigns aimed at such women and their sexual partners.

Similarly, it is reasonable to test sex workers and other very high risk people for HIV infection, both as case finding for treatable disease and for monitoring the effectiveness of key prevention campains.

When making estimates of national prevalence and incidence of HIV (or any other disease), it makes sense to utilize a wide variety of information sources, including many sources that were designed (primarily) for other purposes.

It is important to realize that information also only has to be "good enough" for its purposes, not perfect. Does the difference between a worldwide prevalence of 42 million and 40 million make any difference in the decisions that are made relevant to HIV/AIDS? If not, either estimate is "good enough" for the global decision making. On the other hand, it may be important to know whether the incidence of HIV infection is increasing or decreasing globally, regionally, and nationally. If one is inferring incidence from changes in prevalence (combined with death rates), the need for accuracy in the prevalence estimates is greatly increased.

It is important, however, to understand how the estimates are made, and how and why the data was collected on which the estimates are based. Estimates of prevalence based on national sample surveys done specifically for the estimation of that national prevalence are different than those based primarily on extrapolation from clinical records of prevalence in specific target populations. The latter may be "good enough" for many practical purposes, especially if a nation deems it a poor use of epidemiological survey resources to make more precise estimates.

Governments do play politics with morbidity estimates, and it is sometimes important not to be fooled by a government official seeking to spin or even falsify that information. However, inaccuracy in estimates that were made with a reasonable allocation of available resources, and deemed "good enough" for their purposes by reasonable decision makers need not be meritricious. JAD

Two Stories Today From Iraq -- Without Comment

"State Department Struggles To Oversee Private Army:
The State Department Turned to Contractors Such as Blackwater Amid a Fight With the Pentagon Over Personal Security in Iraq"
By Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post, October 21, 2007.

Last Christmas Day in Baghdad, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad received a furious phone call from Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi. An American -- drunk, armed, wandering through the Green Zone after a party -- had shot and killed one of his personal bodyguards the night before, Mahdi said. He wanted to see Khalilzad right away.....

Within 36 hours of the shooting, Blackwater and the embassy had shipped him (the alleged perpetrator) out of the country.....as with previous killings by contractors, the case was handled with apologies and a payoff. Blackwater fired Moonen and fined him $14,697 -- the total of his back pay, a scheduled bonus and the cost of his plane ticket home, according to Blackwater documents. The amount nearly equaled the $15,000 the company agreed to give the Iraqi guard's family.

"US raid kills Iraqi 'criminals'"
BBC News, October 21, 2007

Forty-nine Iraqi "criminals" have been killed in three separate raids in Sadr City in the capital, Baghdad, the US military says.

"The operation's objective was an individual reported to be a long-time Special Groups member specialising in kidnapping operations," it said.

Iraqi sources said women and children were among those killed, but the US said it was not aware of this.....

US military said its troops had returned fire after coming under sustained attack from automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades from nearby buildings as they began to raid a series of buildings in the district.

Ground forces then called in air strikes.

Biotechnology Regulation in Africa

Read "Calestous Juma: Protect Africa from technological vandalism" in Business Daily (Africa), October 21, 2007.

Lead: "African countries should adopt laws that protect the region’s research efforts against technological vandalism, argues Calestous Juma"

The article begins:

The Kenyan parliament is debating a bill to enable the country to regulate agricultural biotechnology. Critics, however, argue that passing the law would pose threats to the environment, threaten the welfare of farmers and expose the people to unknown health risks.

To the contrary, failing to adopt the law will condemn Kenya to the backwaters of technological innovation. Adopting biotechnology will do for African agriculture what the mobile phone has done for telecommunications. It will revolutionize agriculture, offer new tools for managing the environment and expand economic opportunities for farmers.

Calestous Juma argues, as he has done begore, that biotechnology is a powerful approach that would benefit African nations if used appropriately.

Juma is a professor at Harvard who has done a lot to promote the appropriate use of science and technology in developing nations, and who has been especially important in raising consciousness of the potential benefits and perils of the application of biotechnology.

I of course agree fully that biotechnology offers African nations important opportunities to improve agriculture, health services, environmental protection, and industry. If applied well, it can help reduce the burdens of disease, hunger and poverty.

I think the question is not whether Kenya should adopt laws for the regulation of biotechnology. It seems to me obvious that countries need good laws for that purpose. (And laws in each country should reflect the real risks faced by that country as well as the willingness of people in the country to accept risks.) The more important question should be whether the proposed Kenyan law is indeed a good one. Does it appropriately balance the need to protect against risks yet allow benefits to flow from the application of biotechnology?

Even with a good law, however, there is an issue of the ability of Kenya to enforce the law. Indeed, one might include enforceability as part of the criteria of "good". Too many countries with weak enforcement of laws seem to spend their time inventing laws to solve their problems rather than by creating the institutions needed to enforce the laws, or indeed a culture of "rule of law".

I would also point out that the laws and policies needed to promote the rapid adoption of biotechnology go far beyond those needed to regulate against risks from the consumption of inappropriate genetically modified foods. There have to be laws that favor the transfer of useful technologies, often involving foreign direct investment and protection of intellectual property rights.

Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater

Jeremy Scahill

Bill Moyers Journal had a good program featuring Jeremy Scahill last night. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. The book appears to be the result of years of reporting, and discusses the corporate mercenary military firms (some 170) that are multinational in recruiting and sales, and which have many tens of thousands of armed employees here and abroad.

The program, as it was no doubt planned, raised serious issues about the control and accountability of these mercenaries, the cost to the U.S. government of our dependence on them rather than a citizen army, the implications in terms of our policy processes of depending on foreign mercenaries so heavily, and the risks they pose to our international reputation as well as to the people on whom they are inflicted.

Moyers raised the issue of the weak coverage of Blackwater by the traditional media. I was also left with questions as to whether Scahill was confounding the corps of armed mercenaries with the more general (and larger) class of contractors in Iraq, and how important Blackwater was compared with the other corporate mercenary firms.

Scahill raises the really difficult problem of how these mercenaries can be controlled and brought under rule of law. Will the government officials they protect set the needed policies? Is it practical to enforce laws on thousands of armed and trained mercenaries in a war zone by other than military means?

He also posed a difficult political issue. These organizations, Republican lead, receive huge and very profitable government contracts, and their executives make large political contributions, which guarantee them a voice in Congressional policy making. Is this an aspect of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower would have warned against most strenuously if he could have imagined its emergence in the United States?

In retrospect, it seems to me that the emergence of multinational corporations providing mercenary military services was an obvious development of globalization. After all, the multinational corporation is our current best model for the organization of management, and mercenaries have been around for millennia. But I admit, I had not thought about the phenomenon.

I wonder what will be the unforseen consequences of the use of these corporate mercenaries in Iraq and other areas. Will they be as bad as those from the use of Islamic militants to fight the Russians in Afghanistan -- a policy that resulted in the rise of the Taliban and the supply of military trained people to fuel insurgencies and terrorism in many lands. Blackwater is apparently recruiting and training mercenaries from Chile and Colombia (as well as many other countries). What will they do after they are no longer needed in the current war zones? Where will the corporate mercenaries offer their services next, and for what purposes?

"Strict Visa Regulations Discourage Visiting Artists"

The Hallé's orchestra" Education Program
The orchestra, at 150 is Britain's oldest
The orchestra recently canceled a US tour
due to the cost and difficulty of getting visas.

Read the full article subtitled "Post-9/11 Process Adds Costs and Red Tape" by Sarah Kaufman in The Washington Post of October 20, 2007.

The article states:

To perform in this country, foreign artists of all stripes -- punk rockers, ballet dancers, folk musicians, acrobats -- are funneled through a one-size-fits-all "nonimmigrant" visa process whose costs and complications have become prohibitive, according to booking agents, managers and presenters, such as the Kennedy Center, who program and market the performers. Visiting businesspeople face similar security hurdles put in place since Sept. 11, 2001. But artists' visa petitions also require substantial documentation to satisfy the "sustained international recognition" requirement for the type of visa (called a "P-1") issued to many performing artists.

Comment: Cultural diplomacy has been a great way to build understanding among nations. Having visiting artists helps Americans appreciate the value of other cultures and understand other cultures. Artists don't seem likely to be terrorists, but the Bush administration seems to be afraid of anything foreign. JAD

The Internationalization of U.S. Science and Engineering

Chapter 3 in Science and Security in a Post 9/11 World: A Report Based on Regional Discussions Between the Science and Security Communities, Committee on a New Government-University Partnership for Science and Security, National Research Council, 2007.

The report notes that:

• Foreign-born PhD scientists and engineers constituted 37.3% of the U.S. S&E workforce in 2000, and increase from 23.9% in 1990.
• Foreign student enrollment in U.S. universities decreased in the years following 9/11, in part due to the security measures introduced by the U.S. government.
• Thirty years ago the U.S. accounted for 54% of the world's PhD degrees, but by 2001 that portion had dropped to 41%.
• Participants in the meetings held during the preparation of the report were concerned about increasing difficulties in attending scientific meetings abroad and bringing visiting faculty and scholars to the United States.
  
• Participants also complained about the expansion of the Technology Alert List which regulates access to dual-use technologies.
  

Comment: Innovation is increasingly taking place in international networks, rather than within companies. I would guess that foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States and U.S. educated scientists and engineers abroad are the best assurance that U.S. industry will be plugged into these networks.

Read the News Release on the Report.

Listen to an Audio Webcast made at the release of the Report.

On the occasion of the opening of the World Bank's Semiannual Meeting

Robert B. Zoellick

"Zoellick's Next Challenge Is Redefining Bank's Role: Global Economy Diminishes Influence"
By Neil Irwin, The Washington Post, October 19, 2007.

Excerpts:

"I believe we've been able to calm some of the waters while starting to navigate a course ahead," Zoellick told reporters yesterday.

Figuring out what that course is could be the hard part. That's because the role that the World Bank was created to fill -- making loans to poor nations to help them modernize -- is now filled ably by world financial markets.

Some $647 billion in private capital flowed into developing countries in 2006, according to the bank's data. That dwarfs the $24.7 billion that the bank's two major arms committed to development in the last fiscal year.....

Last week, Zoellick, a former chief U.S. trade negotiator, deputy secretary of state and Goldman Sachs executive, sketched out his vision for keeping that from happening. In a speech at the National Press Club, he said he envisioned the World Bank playing a key role to making sure the benefits of global capitalism are dispersed.

"Globalization must not leave the 'bottom billion' behind," Zoellick said, referring to the world's poorest inhabitants.

He wants the bank's 10,000 staffers to coordinate the efforts of a vast array of government, charitable and business resources that play a role in making poor countries less poor. He mentioned a wide range of specific goals: improving health care, fighting corruption, building financial markets, addressing global warming, overcoming violent conflict and more.....

This weekend, as finance ministers from around the world descend on Washington for meetings of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the G-7 group of major industrialized nations, Zoellick's immediate task is to get commitments to fund the International Development Association, which provides aid to the very poorest nations, mostly in Africa.

The World Bank has already committed $3.5 billion of its own capital to fund the IDA, and Zoellick has said he wants to persuade national governments to contribute billions more, aiming to get those commitments by the end of the year.

The nations that would benefit from IDA do not have the same access to private capital as middle-income nations like China, India and Brazil, so World Bank aid can do them more good, Lerrick said. But the very things that keep them from being able to raise private money, such as corrupt or unstable governments, make it difficult to ensure that aid goes to help poor people, rather than to line the pockets of bureaucrats.

Senate and Bush Agree On Terms of Spying Bill

Subtitle: "Some Telecom Companies Would Receive Immunity"
By Jonathan Weisman and Ellen Nakashima
The Washington Post, Thursday, October 18, 2007

I quote:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.

Comment: I hope it is not too late to rectify this problem, and resuscitate the House version of the law. Lets hold people, even rich powerful people, responsible for what they do. Don't set a precedent that will bear bitter fruit in the future. JAD

NO IMMUNITY FOR TELECOM COMPANIES

Donna Edwards, a candidate for Congress for the 4th Congressional District of Maryland sent me the following message last week:

OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES DESERVE PROTECTING

Temple Hills, MD - Yesterday the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees passed The Responsible Electronic Surveillance That Is Overseen, Reviewed and Effective Act of 2007 (The Restore Act). This legislation seeks to restore the necessary checks and balances over how the government conducts its surveillance program. The critical provision of this act reinstates the authority of the FISA court and requires the government to obtain a warrant if the target of the surveillance is located within the United States.

"It is critical that the intelligence community be given the necessary tools to conduct surveillance while protecting the civil liberties of Americans," said Donna Edwards. "I am confident that we can and will find a way to safeguard our national security under the watchful eye of the FISA courts without throwing away our civil liberties."

President Bush, however, stated that he would not sign any legislation into law unless it provided telecommunications companies, several of which aided the government in its warrantless wiretapping activities, retroactive immunity from prosecution. Large corporations such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., and others are lobbying hard to have immunity included into any new bill.

"Congress must not give in to the President on the issue of immunity for telecommunications companies who have violated the law," continued Ms. Edwards. "These companies and their powerful lobbyists have given generous contributions to members of Congress including Congressman Wynn. They must be held accountable. These companies had a choice and some chose to break the law and violate our civil liberties. No amount of money or influence should prevent the companies and their senior decision makers from being held accountable if they broke the law. Corporations cannot be allowed to break the law under the thinly veiled guise of 'national security' and walk away without penalty."

STI in LDCs

On Second Thought: Donor Support to Science, Technology and Innovation for Development; Approaches in the Least Developed Countries
Sara E. Farley
Background Report to the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s
The Least Developed Countries Report 2007
July 2007

Sara Farley finds that in the last two years many donor agencies have clarified their policies for the assistance of science, technology and innovation, and that "the enthusiasm for increased support to STI is palpable. As enthusiasm for STI grows so too do the loudening cries for a coherent donor approach." The report is based on a literature survey as well as a review of 170 donor agency initiatives related to science, technology and innovation in the preparation of this report. She groups those projects into four clusters:

1. Global or regional public goods initiatives


2. Initiatives that deepen local (i.e., sectoral, sub-national or national) STI capacity (84 of the 170 projects)


3. Linkage initiatives (53 projects)


4. Integrated initiatives

”The report draws a large number of conclusions and recommendations. It is available online in two parts:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
   

The report is an extension of an 2005 report by the same author titled "Support to Science, Technology and Knowledge for Development: A Snapshot of the Global Landscape".

Andrea Ottesen is a Winner

Andrea Otteson has been featured in this blog in the past. She is a scientific illustrator and scientist, who combines a great eye and an understanding of what information is to be conveyed, with a mastery of the technique of digital photography. She has just had a cover of Science magazine in recognition of her tie for first place in the photography category of the National Science Foundation/Science 2007 Visualization Challenge.

Here is the Science description of the photo:

The slimy, glistening mass of seaweed washed up on a sandy beach seems light-years distant from this feathery, dendritic image of Irish moss (Chondrus crispus) created by Andrea Ottesen, a botanist and molecular ecologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. "If you pull Chondrus out of the ocean, it's folded on itself--really curled up," she says. It wasn't until after she had "pressed every one of those little ends down with sea stones" and left it to dry for 2 days that the seaweed's beautiful, simple shape was revealed.

Ottesen uses only a black background, a Canon ELPH 7-megapixel digital point-and-shoot camera, and natural lighting to photograph many of the plants she encounters in her work. Her winning photo shows a piece of Irish moss she collected off the coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, while cataloging the use of kelp products as fertilizers for a sustainable agriculture experiment. "You can get just as good light--or even better--with natural light" than with strobes and spotlights, she says.

The 15-centimeter-wide red algae seems exotic in this abstract portrait, but it is ubiquitous both in nature and in our day-to-day lives. Besides being one of the most common seaweed species on the Atlantic coast, says Ottesen, Irish moss and algae like it are sources of natural thickeners and stabilizers called carrageenans, which are widely used in processed foods as diverse as lunch meat and ice cream.

"There was this gasp when this photo came up on the screen," says panel of judges member Felice Frankel. "We shouldn't forget that we don't need [complex equipment and techniques] to create beautiful representations."

US Aid is too little and too poorly directed

Source: "AID, GROWTH, AND POVERTY REDUCTION: Toward a New Partnership Model", François Bourguignon and Danny Leipziger, The World Bank, April 2006. (PDF, 21 pages.)

Commitment to Development Index 2007

Blind Spots on the Map of Aid Allocations: Concentration and Complementarity of International NGO Aid

Source: "Blind Spots on the Map of Aid Allocations: Concentration and Complementarity of International NGO Aid" by Dirk-Jan Koch, UNU-WIDER Research Paper No. 2007/45, August 2007.

The budgets of development NGOs have risen dramatically over the last decades. In stark contrast to bilateral donors, the geographic choices of NGOs remain virtually unexplored. Using a new dataset and Lorenz curves, this paper shows that NGOs are very active in some countries and hardly active in others. A clustering of NGO activity takes place in UN-labelled high priority countries, but ample room for improved targeting exists. Aid concentration curves provide insight into whether NGOs target the same countries as bilateral donors. The article concludes that this is the case and that NGOs are thus acting as complements. The drawback of this complementary approach is that it reinforces the donor-darling/donor-orphan divide. The paper concludes with some research suggestions and preliminary policy implications.

Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007

Source: Reporters Without Borders

According to Reporters Without Borders latest edition of its press freedom index:

"There were slightly fewer press freedom violations in the United States (48th) and blogger Josh Wolf was freed after 224 days in prison. But the detention of Al-Jazeera’s Sudanese cameraman, Sami Al-Haj, since 13 June 2002 at the military base of Guantanamo and the murder of Chauncey Bailey in Oakland in August mean the United States is still unable to join the lead group."

Reporters Without Borders compiled this index by sending a questionnaire to the 15 freedom of expression organisations throughout the world that are its partners, to its network of 130 correspondents, and to journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists. It contained 50 questions about press freedom in their countries. The index covers 169 nations. Other countries were not included because of lack of data.

The Bush Administration in the Back Pages of the News

Several from today's Washington Post (links to original articles in first line of quotation), without comment:

1. The House yesterday passed a resolution 395 to 21 condemning the State Department for its refusal to divulge public details on Iraqi corruption in a new showdown with the Bush administration over the war and its classification policies. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sponsored the nonbinding resolution, which states that the administration abused its power by classifying U.S. assessments on corruption inside Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government. The measure is one of several challenges to President Bush's management of the war by Democrats, who lack a veto-proof majority to order troops home. Republicans called it a political stunt.

2. The oxygen-depleted "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico cannot be remedied unless federal and state agencies cooperate to reduce agricultural nutrient and urban storm-water runoff along the 2,300-mile Mississippi River, according to a report from the National Academy of Sciences. Though the river passes through 10 states, the report says there is no one agency, coalition or comprehensive strategy overseeing its health.

3. The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception. Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings. In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. "We're quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease," said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.

4. In a magazine arriving in mailboxes this week, National Institutes of Health Director Elias A. Zerhouni suggests that embryonic stem cell research should be expanded. "All avenues of research need to be pursued," Zerhouni says in the newest edition of Medline Plus, a journal published jointly by the NIH and Friends of the National Library of Medicine. He adds: "We must continue the research at all levels, or there will be no progress." Those views put Zerhouni, who serves at the pleasure of President Bush, at odds with his boss. Bush has twice vetoed legislation that would do exactly what Zerhouni is espousing: expanding research on new embryonic lines.

In Southern Darfur, Signs of Another Massacre

Arghh!

How about some real action against a government that is really bad!

Congressional Vote on Genocide of Armenians

Read "Support Wanes in House for Genocide Vote" by CARL HULSE in the New York Times, October 17, 2007.

What a stupid idea for the Congress to spend its time on a 90 year old tragedy. If our elected representatives want to deal with issues in which they can make a difference, let them look at Darfur, Burma, or (especially) Iraq.

Not only would a resolution on Armenia provide no information and have no positive effect, it would further complicate U.S. relations with Turkey at a moment in which they are critically important and very fragile.

The news tells us that the Bush foreign policy is in disarray. Bush just offended the Chinese by meeting with the Dalhi Lama, apparently to please his conservative Christian supporters. The Indians may not ratify the recent atomic energy agreements because a growing faction in that country distrust the United States. Pakistan is facing internal pressures, in part due the support for U.S. policy and in part due to the pressures the government is putting on them to deal with insurgents we allowed to get established in Pakistan's frontier provinces. Afghanistan and Iraq are likely to be huge failures of U.S. foreign policy, ranking as among histories worst. The Russians are showing their disdain for U.S. interests in Putin's recent summit with the Iranians, who are joining North Koreans as hot points in a failed foreign policy. The November conference on the Israel-Palestine peace process does not seem to be on a positive track (although the Bush administration deserves credit for trying to do something useful here).

Environmental policy is a mess, and the scientific community is up in arms over the ways the Bush administration has sought to suppress scientific opinion on environmental issues. Not only has no progress been made on greenhouse gases in the last seven years, the problem has gotten worse. The increasing demand on natural resources from China and India raises international problems which are harder to approach because of the intransigence of the Bush administration and generally of the U.S. government in dealing with environmental negotiations in the past.

The economy is facing huge deficits, rising oil prices, and a falling dollar. The Social Security financing crisis is sitting hugely on the financial horizon! Housing foreclosures are increasing, and one assumes that the construction industry is about to tank.

Domestic policy is still unable to provide health care to all Americans. Our life style seems likely to create a major health crisis, and the government seems to have no approach to that public health problem. Immigration policy is no better than that which resulted in 12 million illegal immigrants, and has not addressed the problem of the large numbers of knowledge workers here from abroad who need permanent status with their families. The income disparities are continuing to increase, and an underclass seems to be becoming ever more permanent.

Our constitution is threatened by the Bush administration's belief in an imperial Presidency. (By the way, Frontline had a very good program describing the efforts of the Vice President to increase Presidential power.) The Bush administration has established torture as a U.S. policy, and apparently continues to hold prisoners without any legal redress.

So, I say to the Congress, get back on track and work on the real problems facing the United States and the world today!

World Food Day

Today is World Food Day. It is a day not only to remember that there are 800 million hungry people in the world -- more than the total populations of the United States, Canada and western Europe -- but to resolve to try to do something to help.

I note that the United States, which is the major donor of food aid, has cut the amount of grain provided in that aid in half since 2000. The Bush administration has other priorities!

Food aid is tough to use well. Too often in the past it has been used as a means to subsidize farmers in this country while undermining farmers in developing nations by giving the consumers in their markets free food. It can also be appropriated by the wrong people and used for evil ends.

But it can be very useful, making up for shortfalls in food production due to floods or droughts, supporting people in emergencies such as the one occurring in Darfur, or as compensation for subsistence farmers diverted from their farming for useful projects such as road construction or soil conservation,

E-Commerce in Crafts from Developing Nations

Josiane Hanta Bakoly Razafintsalama Ramanitra
1st laureate of the UNESCO Crafts Prize 2002

I got talking with a craftsman yesterday who is helping a village in Kenya to develop a leather working craft. I suggested that he consider encouraging them to market their products internationally. I am writing him an email identifying some resources that might help in such an effort, and it occurred to me that others might be interested. Here then is that content:

The Development Gateway provides resources for a community interested in culture and development. Here is its website:

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/culture

On the right column of the page you will find a key issue called "production and marketing of cultural products". Click on that and you get a long list of resources. The list is here:

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/culture/rc/BrowseContent.do~source=RCContentUser~folderId=3762

That list now has more than 800 items, so let me recommend some that are especially interesting with respect to e-commerce of crafts.

UNESCO has a program to support crafts people in developing countries, including offering a craft prize:

http://portal.unesco.org/culture/admin/ev.php?URL_ID=2460&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201

Aid to Artisans is supposed to be a very good organization. It provides help to people trying to do craft work for international markets.

http://aidtoartisans.org/

Design for the World is another similar organization, but I don't know much about it:

http://www.designfortheworld.org/

The Pangea Artisan Market and Café is related to the International Finance Corporation, with its site in their building. It too markets crafts from developing nations:

http://www.pangeamarket.com/

http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/media.nsf/Content/PangeaCafe_Opens

SERRV International imports crafts from developing nations, and distributes them through a network of stores in the United States. Many of the distributers are church related.

http://www.agreatergift.org/Default.aspx

Overstock.com runs a site called Worldstock Handcrafted, selling crafts from developing nations online. I understand that it is a part of the company’s social responsibility program.

http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=DEPLIST&dep_id=91

Here is a source for help from the Canadian government:

http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/arts/menu-en.asp

PeopLink in the past offered a free software package for people in developing nations who wanted to build an online catelog and sell crafts online. The website suggests now that they provide website design services based on that software and do some online sales of crafts. If you simply want access to the software, you might contact them:

http://www.peoplink.org/EN/

This is a guide to creating a free online store for crafts:

http://blog.floatingatoll.nu//2004/09/one_hour_from_n.html

And this: National Craft Association Resource Center: Internet Tools

http://www.craftassoc.com/rcomp.html

African Arts and Crafts

http://www.homemade-handmade.com/HmPg/IFA/africa_arts_and_crafts.htm

Check out "Life in Africa" which used to be interesting, but is now revising its website.

http://lifeinafrica.com/

"Interim Heads Increasingly Run Federal Agencies"

Read the full article by PHILIP SHENON in The New York Times, October 15, 2007.

"With only 15 months left in office, President Bush has left whole agencies of the executive branch to be run largely by acting or interim appointees — jobs that would normally be filled by people whose nominations would have been reviewed and confirmed by the Senate. In many cases, there is no obvious sign of movement at the White House to find permanent nominees, suggesting that many important jobs will not be filled by Senate-confirmed officials for the remainder of the Bush administration. That would effectively circumvent the Senate’s right to review and approve the appointments. It also means that the jobs are filled by people who do not have the clout to make decisions that comes with a permanent appointment endorsed by the Senate, scholars say.'

Comment: The Bush administration appointees have not been that great to begin with, and eliminating the Congressional checks and balances is not likely to make the situation better. JAD

Labor rigidity in India

Source: "A Himalayan challenge"
The Economist, October 11th 2007

"THE Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has long lectured its rich member countries about pursuing free trade, privatisation and flexible labour and product markets. It has now produced its first economic survey of India, which once had some of the world's most interventionist economic policies. India wins much praise for its reforms over the past two decades, but the OECD reckons that the country still has a long way to go: on many measures India scores badly relative to both member countries and the other emerging giants."

The Employment-Protection Legislation Index seems very useful. Unfortunately, the OECD only seems to calculate it for member nations and for a few special studies. Other authors use the Index for their studies, but there seems to be no comprehensive, reliable source to compare all nations There is a bried from the OECD on "Employment Protection: The Costs and Benefits of Greater Job Security" that employs the index.

Labor legislation and more generally labor policy seems really important. On the one hand, it offers protection for workers from exploitation by the economically powerful. On the other hand, excessive or poorly conceived labor legislation can deprive the economy of the flexibility it needs to respond quickly to new market challenges and new technological opportunities. I understand that one of the keys to the various economic tigers has been peaceful labor relations, which apparently can be promoted by good policies as well as good laws.

Check out the OECD Employment Studies Program Website.

There are, I suppose other important forms of policy and legislation that might be considered in the area of labor, which influence the development of knowledge led development. For example, professional licensing, immigration (especially the immigration of "rainmakers" and technologically specialized workers), and educational laws and policies all all influence the knowledge base of the labor force.

Scandal at Oral Roberts University

ORU President Richard Roberts &
ORU First Lady Lindsay Roberts

Oral Roberts University (ORU) based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was founded by televangelist Oral Roberts, and is described by Wikipedia as "a charismatic Christian university". It has an enrollment of about 5,300 students, including students from most U.S. states along with a number of international students. The university's president since 1993 has been Oral Roberts' son, Richard Roberts.

According to KOTV, Oral Roberts University, ORU's president Richard Roberts, and other school leaders have been named in a wrongful termination and defamation lawsuit.

The lawsuit against ORU, President Richard Roberts, the ORU provost and several other administrators was filed by three former professors. Two of whom, talked to reporters along with their attorneys at a news conference Tuesday morning.....

According to the lawsuit, the professors also went to ORU regents with concerns about an internal university report, documenting allegations of questionable expenditures and management of the university. According to the lawsuit, the report itemizes dozens of instances of misconduct.

"Misuse of funds, misuse of assets at the university. Misuse of University personnel, all sorts of issues that we thought would be damaging for people to know," said Dr John Swails, Ph.D.

The professors believe they were punished for being whistleblowers.

A following story by KOTV stated:

The lawsuit accused Roberts of lavish spending at donors' expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter's senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

Lindsay Roberts is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as "underage males."

Today KOTV reports:

Former professors add to their lawsuit against Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. The lawsuit names new defendants, makes new allegations, and releases more information......

The suit now claims the regents didn't properly oversee the university and its president Richard Roberts.

The former professors also say Oral Roberts University allowed a man who previously confessed to "exposing himself to a 15-year-old boy in a school locker room" to mentor college kids.

The plaintiffs say it's just another example of the school's poor leadership.

Their attorneys have also now released a packet of information that they say led to the professors' dismissals. The packet is a list of rumors compiled by Richard Roberts' sister-in-law, his community and government liaison.

The list includes details about Oral Roberts University’s first lady Lindsay Roberts' alleged relationship with an underage boy.

The report says she spent the night with the boy in a guest house at the university nine times; she was photographed with a boy after curfew 29 times and was smoking with the boy at her house.

The allegations, if true, would suggest that there may be tax problems for ORU, implying that there were unjustified tax ememptions. Moreover, the New York Times reports that the suite includes "a claim that he illegally mobilized students to campaign for a Republican mayoral candidate."

Tax law strictly limits the political activities of nonprofit groups, as well as the use of a charity’s assets by insiders like the Roberts family. The university’s reported ownership of a plane might also raise questions, lawyers said. Harvard, the nation’s wealthiest nonprofit institution, does not own a plane.

In the 1960s, the I.R.S. ruled that a college could require students to work on political campaigns as part of a class assignment. But the agency did not address whether a nonprofit group could direct students to work on a specific campaign in the way the suit contends that Oral Roberts students were managed.

The suit raises potential problems for the university that could jeopardize its tax-exempt status, said Marcus S. Owens, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington who previously ran an I.R.S. division that oversees nonprofit groups.

If it is determined that university officials misled the tax agency in the inquiry on the political activities, the Justice Department could begin a criminal investigation, Mr. Owens said.

Comment: This seems to me to be an important story, given the visibility of ORU and similar institutions, and their apparent importance in American political life. At least it seems more important than the press coverage I have seen, until I Googled the story, So I have blogged it in some detail.

I don't want to rush to judgment, but wait while the legal system adjudicates the charges. Still, what a sad moment for the parents of the kids in ORU, who presumably are paying for a private school with a religious orientation to give their kids a good moral foundation. I am a strong believer that educators do much of their work by setting an example of how to behave in the world. Parents of ORU students must be wondering what their kids are learning from ORU.

More generally, Republican candidates have enjoyed strong support from Christian conservatives playing the "values" card. There have been many recent news stories suggesting that many Republican legislators have poor moral compasses, and this story adds to those suggesting that televangelists are all too human. Lets look at what politicians actually do, and not fall for the false claims to moral superiority of scoundrals. JAD

Household Consumptionn and Wage Trends

Source: "A workers' manifesto for China,"
The Economist, October 11th 2007.

China has seen the growth of its gross domestic product accompanied by a reduction of the portion of GDP going to wages and going to private consumption. The Economist attributes this to China's labor surplus and to its capital intensive growth, which in turn it attributes to the ability of state owned companies to retain earnings for investment in productive plant, to the small amount of private ownership of industry and the weakness of the owners in appropriating profits, and to the government's policy of keeping the value of the yuan low. It occurs to me that the policies maintain China's competitive advantage in international trade of low labor costs.

Many countries have seen a fall in the share of labor income in recent years, but nowhere has the drop been as huge as in China.....

In America, the fall in the share of labor income in recent years has been offset by rising investment income, so total household income has stayed fairly steady as a portion of GDP.

Comment: Am I correct in inferring that the American experience -- fall in wages and increase in return to household investment -- means that the rich who have household wealth invested in productive enterprises are getting more of the pie while the working poor are getting less? I think that that is consistent with the increasing disparity in income and wealth in the United States. JAD

Gore, U.N. climate panel win Nobel Peace Prize

The UN Session on Climate Change

Read about the award on Yahoo! News.

This is a great award. If we don't do something now about global warming, the repercussions will be bad for peace in the world. People will fight for survival, and the changes in rainfall patters, agricultural potentials, and other factors will almost surely engender conditions in which people resort to violence. This is an occasion in which the Peace Prize can help to avoid future conflict by drawing attention to the need to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, and help empower those who are leading in that campaign,

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an impressive and original creation, doing great work. Indeed, I took the privilege of nominating its former chair for the AAAS International Scientific Cooperation Prize this year.

Commitment to development

Source: "Commitment to development", The Economist, October, 11th 2007.

The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden have the most effective policies to help poor countries, according to a report by the Center for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, DC. The report grades 21 rich countries each year on how well they support development in poor countries. Each country is assessed on its policies in seven areas including aid, migration, investment and trade. Denmark and Sweden rank highest on aid-giving. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and America give less aid but are more open to trade with poor nations. Austria and Switzerland are the most accessible countries for migrants from the developing world. Greece and Japan are ranked at the bottom of the overall index

"A Death in the Family"

Christopher Hutchins has written a very sad article in Vanity Fair about the death of a young soldier, Mark Daily, who was killed in action in Iraq.

An earlier Irish soldier from our extended family, Anthony O'Daly, was killed by his enemies, and memorialized in the following words:

Since your limbs were laid out,
The stars do not shine!
The fish leap not out in the waves!
On our meadows the dew
Does not fall in the morn,
For O'Daly is dead!

Not a flower can be born!
Not a word can be said!
Not a tree have a leaf!
For O'Daly is dead!

Anthony!
After you,
There is nothing to do!
There is nothing but grief!

Anthony O'Daly
Poem by James Stephens from "Reincarnations" (1942)
after the Irish of Anthony Raftery

There is a recording of Samuel Barber's setting of this piece on YouTube.

A Cautionary Message from History

Sailing from Byzantium by Colin Wells describes how Byzantine sources influenced Italy after the Dark Ages, influenced the Arabs after the rise of Islam, and influenced the Slavic peoples. One of the themes of the book is the tension between Athens and Jerusalem:

• Athens refers to the humanistic tradition, derived from ancient Greek philosophy, that is both secular and rational;
• Jerusalem refers to the faith-based tradition, derived from revelation, mystical and other non-rational sources.

The book makes the point that the tension existed in Western European, Russian, and Arab cultures, but the tension was resolved in quite different ways. Italy, during the Renaissance sought out and learned from the ancient Greek and Roman sources preserved and elaborated in Byzantium – especially “Athens”, while Russia (according to Wells) ultimately adopted much more of the mystical tradition – “Jerusalem. Wells describes the Arabs as adopting practical knowledge from ancients via Byzantium, but less of the philosophical. An inescapable question arises. Why did different aspects of Byzantine culture catch hold and prosper in each of the three adjacent areas? I can't begin to answer that question, and I think there are few people who could with any degree of legitimate confidence.

The book chronicles the complex political history from the fall of the Roman Empire until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. Dynasties rose and fell, war was a common feature, causing boundaries to expand and contract, and trade routs changed, while ruler succeeded ruler. Monotheistic religions triumphed over polytheistic ones; the period saw the rise of Islam and the split formalized between the orthodox and roman churches. Indeed, this was a time when languages changed significantly, sometimes by the unification of linguistic groups. Wells points out that Arabs in the Umayyad empire adopted Byzantine laws as they confronted the needs to govern more urban societies, incorporating them into the body of sharia law.

I was struck especially by the degree to which the culture of writing and books disseminated by its own timetable, influenced by far from synchronous with the evolution of political or religious institutions.

By chance, last month I was in Jordan and had the opportunity to visit several museums. They showed items of material culture such as mosaics and oil lamps. They tended to be labeled with terms like Nabatian, Ammonite, Moabite, Greco-Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, or Moslem. Yet there was an apparent continuity in these objects from epoch to epoch. Thus material culture was changing at a pace that appeared to be different than that of political institutions.

The thousand-year period was long enough to have seen both environmental and climatic changes, although Wells does not describe them. Still, the little ice age occurred toward the end of the period he describes, which is described in other sources as having serious economic and social repercussions. It seems likely that changing patterns of urbanization, changing population densities, and changing technologies over a thousand years would indeed influence the environment, which would in turn influence economic and social institutions.

Culture is a historically-contingent and complex web of political, social, economic, religious, legal and other institutions adapted to the environment in which the society lives, the knowledge and technology it commands, the wealth it owns, and the opportunities and threats deriving from its neighboring societies. Changes in one aspect of intangible or tangible culture are enhanced or hindered by the characteristics of other aspects of that culture. As Wells points out, the changing military situations engendered religious actions which then influenced the spread of book culture. All of this was contingent on the characteristics of influential individuals, and on unpredicted events such as storms that destroyed fleets, epidemics, or deaths of leaders.

A broad sweeping history such as Wells’ suggests how very complicated is the process of nation building, and how much it seems beyond our understanding much less our ability to manage closely. Not only is the process likely to be one that lasts centuries rather than decades, but it is one that is highly contingent on processes that are essentially unpredictable.

The history of the spread of the culture of the book, and of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem seems especially cogent at a time in which so many people hope to develop knowledge societies. I was especially struck by the historical swings of pendulums from rational Athens to mystical Jerusalem, and the seeming triumph (at least for long periods) of anti-rationalists. This seems a book with a cautionary message for our time.

William T. Golden, Key Science Adviser, Is Dead at 97

New York Times obituary.

Among a great many activities in support of science and science policy in the United States, William Golden played a key role in the creation of the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the posts of science advisors in the White House and State Department. He is credited with helping to create the AAAS fellowship programs which have brought thousands of scientists to Washington to learn about and be involved in government policy processes (while he served in key roles in the governance of the AAAS). He also is credited for creation of the Carnegie Group which allows ministers of science from the G8 countries to meet regularly on an informal basis.

Legislative Knowledge Systems

My daily newspaper informs me that the U.S. House of Representatives is considering a resolution that would term as "genocide" the process in which large numbers of Armenians died in Turkey almost a century ago. This would seem to be a question of fact. How many people died, how did they die, and what were the intentions of the people responsible?

I have pointed out in this blog that different social institutions approach questions of fact in different ways. Courts would hold judicial hearings with experts interrogated by lawyers representing the adversaries in the case. Forensic anthropologists would use an approach from their scientific perspective, presumably try to locate the remains of the dead, examine them, and determine scientifically the causes of death, extrapolating from such data the likely purposes of the perpetrators. Historians, dealing with so old an event would lack eye witnesses to interrogate, but would mine original documentary sources and the analysis of those sources by earlier historians. In both the latter case, professional bodies would presumably seek to form a consensus through peer review of alternative positions put forth by members of their professions over a period of years or decades.

Legislators vote to define the belief of the legislative body. In theory, they would do so after legislative hearings in which expert witnesses testify and are interrogated by legislators from the different parties. In theory, legislators would consult their constituents as to what they desired the results to be. The newspaper tells me that in this case, the legislators listen to the legislative liaison from the White House and State Department, as well as to public figures with international affairs expertise, not about the facts of the case but about the foreign relations repercussions of the possible House action.

I would make two comments:

1. I will not be more nor less likely to believe genocide actually took place no matter what the vote is, given the quality of the process.
2. Doesn't the House of Representatives have better things to do than argue about labels for an event that took place around World War I? How about doing something about the war in Iraq, for example!
   

Scientists at Work on Robobugs

"Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs", by Rick Weiss, The Washington Post, October 9, 2007.

Excerpts:

"Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small planes. All told, the nation's fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000 flight hours last year -- a more than fourfold increase since 2003.....

researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are inserting computer chips into moth pupae -- the intermediate stage between a caterpillar and a flying adult -- and hatching them into healthy "cyborg moths." The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs -- camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.....

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made a "microbat ornithopter" that flies freely and fits in the palm of one's hand. A Vanderbilt University team has made a similar device. With their sail-like wings, neither of those would be mistaken for insects. In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly fly-like robot airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per second. "It showed that we can manufacture the articulated, high-speed structures that you need to re-create the complex wing motions that insects produce," said team leader Robert Wood. The fly's vanishingly thin materials were machined with lasers, then folded into three-dimensional form "like a micro-origami," he said. Alternating electric fields make the wings flap. The whole thing weighs just 65 milligrams, or a little more than the plastic head of a push pin. Still, it can fly only while attached to a threadlike tether that supplies power, evidence that significant hurdles remain.

Comment: This technology should soon be applied to development applications in poor nations, from traffic monitoring to assessment of disaster situations, to mapping and environmenetal modelling. JAD

"From Child on Street to Nobel Laureate"

Read the full article by Christopher Lee in The Washington Post, October 9, 2007.

Mario R. Capecchi, who just won the Nobel Prize, was only 3 when his mother was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany as a political prisoner. She had "sold her possessions, giving the money to a peasant family that she asked to care for her son. But the money ran out in a year."

"They didn't have the resources to keep me and maintain their own family," the scientist said in a telephone interview yesterday. "So I went on the streets."

Capecchi moved from town to town, hungry most of the time and occasionally living in orphanages or traveling with gangs of other homeless children who stole food from carts while other members of the group distracted the vendors. "Just surviving from day to day pretty much occupies your mind," he said in a 1997 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune.

He spent years on the streets and nearly died of malnutrition in a hospital near Bologna, where he lay naked and feverish on a bed, existing on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and a small crust of bread. His mother, who was liberated from Dachau by U.S. troops in 1945, found him at the hospital after searching for more than a year.

Comment: This is an amazing story, and one that adds luster to the character of a man who has achieved more than all but a very few people in spite of his horrible childhood. The story suggests how much we may be giving up as a society by not rescuing the millions of kids living in poverty not dissimilar to that Capecchi barely survived. JAD

The Red Queen, the Rain Maker and Other Myths

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
The Red Queen, Alice in Wonderland

Many countries aspire to develop knowledge economies. The experience of innovating clusters such as Silicon Valley suggests that the biggest profit margins are enjoyed not by those who work hardest nor those who most need them, but by those who can create a commanding position by inventing new products and or new ways of doing things, and who can use that position to appropriate a large share of the profits from their innovation. In a globalizing economy, there are many competitors for business, and the competition for markets based on low cost production can drive profit margins for the producers very low. The firms that own the intellectual property rights, or who otherwise command the market can have the inputs they need produced at very low cost, and can profit by selling at their own high prices.

Some nations have large markets, provide their governments with the ability to offer access to their internal market as a bargaining chip; especially fortunate are the governments with large internal emerging markets, since the offer of early entry into a growing market is especially enticing to many companies. Smaller countries too can have access to large markets, such as those that have access to the U.S. or European markets; their governments however don't control the access to those markets; a firm that doesn't get the deal it wants with country A can go to country B and get access to the same market. China and India, in theory, can demand access to technology from those firms that it allows into their markets. Small countries in large markets compete for corporate presence.

There are a number of relatively small oil exporting countries that seem to be embarked on a path of using their mineral wealth to buy technology and to create innovative capacity. How successful they will be in that effort will await the judgment of history.

Still, it sometime seems to me that leaders in small countries lacking oil income feel that they can command the transfer of technology and even of innovative capacity in the same way that China, India, Kuwait or Kazakhstan seek to do. Their governments however must seek to influence the decisions of business leaders in the global economy who have many options.

Looking at emerging fields such as software, biotechnology and nanotechnology, where many countries are making investments in science and technology to obtain a position in the emerging global markets, the Red Queen's comment comes to mind. A country has to run fast to keep pace with the competition, and very fast actually to get a competitive advantage.

Communism, if one thinks about it, failed in large part because it doesn't work to have a central government instruct the economy to "go forth, be fruitful, and multiply". The West succeeded by a process in which countries created conditions were innovation was possible and innovators had incentives to do their thing. It would seem that the leaders in small countries seeking entry into large markets should find it obvious that they can not command the multinational companies of our day. Still, some seem to have an almost magical belief in the efficacy of written mission statements.

Countries seek to build this capacity in order to improve the lives of their citizens. The question arises as to whether by allowing immigration to staff these new industries the country benefits its own citizens or those of other countries. That is a key issue in the U.S. immigration debate. It seems clear that by bringing in more competitors for the existing jobs, a country will tend to depress the pay level for those jobs. Immigrants will not only benefit from the jobs, but homeboys will receive less than they might have were labor in short supply.

I suggest, however, that there are "rainmakers", people who make their home green (the color of money) by creating jobs. These are the innovators, the technological experts, the entrepreneurs, and those who command investment capital. Immigration policies that keep out the rainmakers are counterproductive.

Does this make any sense?

How to choose a graduate program

A former student wrote to me asking for suggestions about choosing a graduate program. It occurred to me that the answer might interest others out there.

Choosing a graduate program is indeed a big challenge. For most people, graduate school changes their interests and they come out different people than they went in. And of course you don't know very much about the schools.

First point is that people can have very different experiences at the same school. It is probably more important to find the right mentor than to find the right department, and almost certainly more important to find the right department than to find the right university,

If you are sure that you are going for a PhD, then you should know that there are only some 400 research intensive universities in the United States, and you probably want to choose a research intensive university. There is a world ranking of universities which is heavily weighted by research productivity, which you might look at:

Academic Ranking of World Universities - 2007

There are good websites with resources on graduate schools, such as this one:

College and University Rankings

The National Academy of Sciences does a ranking of research doctorate programs in the United States. The most recent one was published in 1995. A new one is being developed now, and there is an available methodoligical study that might help you to see what those ranking mean. Even when published, however, these rankings tend to describe the departments as they were (when their current reputation was formed), rather than as they will be during a future period of study.

I would point out that a PhD is a specialized degree intended to prepare students for careers in research and university teaching. Rita Colwell told me she is involved in an NAS study which will recommend the development of master's programs to train laboratory managers. The recipients would be people who love research, and would have not only the technical capacity to carry out research, but the managerial skills to manage a research laboratory. In many other fields, the journeyman professional degree is at the Master's level. That would be a degree that would prepare the holder to offer professional services (such as engineering) but not to do research nor necessarily to teach at the university level.

Some graduate programs are basically factories for turning out graduates. Some of the large MBA programs have that reputation, and I suspect that some of the programs providing master's degrees for teachers are similar. There is an advantage to these programs, in that they often provide a good standard of training, a path for the student with high probability of success, and a no-nonsense approach very suitable with people with an outside life. I personnally prefer programs which are more individualized and flexible.

State universities offer subsidized education, but if costs are a problem be aware that support is often available, especially for doctoral students, through teaching and research assistantships. Teaching assistantships are helpful for those wanting to teach, and in developing mastery of material for the qualifying exams. Research assistantships are a big help for carrying out the research needed for the doctorate.

Ultimately, I think the selection of a thesis or dissertation advisor is the most important decision. There are lots of stories around about people who chose a very famous and productive scientist or scholar as advisor only to discover the person was a jerk. Recommendations from current of former students and a track record of people who have gotten degrees from the professor are good guides. Sometimes however a young faculty member, with little track record as a research advisor, is the best choice. Starting graduate school in a relatively large department, which would offer a wide choice of graduate advisors, might be useful for someone thinking they are likely to go on for a PhD.

Of course, educational opportunities are not the only criteria for choosing a graduate school, expecially at the Masters level. Choose a place where you will be happy. Climate counts, Friends count even more.

Ultimately, you have to make the decision yourself. "You pays your money and makes your choice."

Add your comments, in case any students find this posting, and could benefit from alternative views.

Two Interesting Reports

These two recent reports from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation website are interesting:

1. "Capturing Value in a Global Innovation Network: A Comparison of Radical and Incremental Innovation", Jason Dedrick, Kenneth L. Kraemer, Greg Linden, Personal Computing Industry Center, UC Irvine, September 2007.

This study compares the gross profit margins along the supply chain for iPods and laptop computers. Apple is described as a radical innovator, having found "the right combination of hardware, software and content distribution to have a winning product." HP and Lenovo laptops are described as examples of incremental innovations, building on an earlier radical innovation of laptops. Apple achieved high levels of gross profits "in the formative years of a new technology, when the technology direction is not yet defined'. The "results show that, on average, countries tend to occupy well-defined spaces in global supply chains. The innovative countries innovate, while the other countries nip at their heels and capture a small share of the value created. These relationships are not written in stone, but are slow to change."

2. "The Globalization of R&D and Innovation: How Do Companies Choose Where to Build R&D Facilities?" Robert D. Atkinson, Testimony before the Committee on Science and Technology Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation of the U.S. House of Representatives, October 4, 2007.

Excerpt: "In the last decade the share of U.S. firms’ R&D sites located in the United States declined from 59 percent to 52 percent, while the share in China and India increased from 8 to 18 percent.4 According to a recent survey of U.S. R&D managers, over 60 percent of U.S. companies surveyed are investing in R&D in China, 50 percent in India, and 20 percent in Eastern Europe. Although 65 percent of U.S. companies are increasing their R&D investments in Asia, just 29 percent are doing so in higher-cost Western Europe – the traditional destination for U.S. corporate R&D.5 From 1994 to 2003, R&D performed by U.S. firms outside the United States increased significantly in low-wage nations like Mexico, China, and Malaysia, and also in mid-wage nations like Ireland, Israel, and Singapore (see Figure 1)."

The annual national economic burden of brain-related disorders has reached over $1 trillion

Source: "Brain Tech is Here: Neurotechnology Leaves the Nest but Waits for Policy Push" by Zack Lynch, Science Progress, October 4th, 2007.

Lynch's article on the coming developments in neurotechnology, and the need for a policy push in the area, is interesting and useful.

I point out however that it is on a website, Science Progress, that seems very good. Thanks to my son for pointing it out. Check out, on that site, Chris Mooney's "New Paradigm for Science Communication: The Culture Wars Teach Us a Lesson":

We’ll be hearing it a lot today: 50 years ago, the Soviets launched Sputnik. In the ensuing melee, the U.S. government established an exceedingly strong relationship with the nation’s scientific community and relied upon its expertise to find a way to increase our national scientific and technological competitiveness. Science-in-policymaking reached a zenith—and then started a precipitous decline.

The culture wars exploded. Our national politics became more polarized and contentious. Science fights erupted regularly around environmental, regulatory, and moral issues. In some cases science advisers were even fired.

And then came the Bush administration, demonstrating just how large the gap between a president and the nation’s knowledge base can really get. Today we look around anguished and feel sorely tempted to label the 1950s and early 1960s a golden age of scientific inquiry married to effective government policymaking.

Science Progress is a project of the Center for American Progress, a liberal thinktank.

fellowforce.com: Open Innovation Platform

A new website named fellowforce.com was launched recently. According to openBusiness Web site, "Their business model is quite simple. It is a bit like the ‘monsterboard.com for innovation’. In the same easy way as posting a vacancy, organizations can post their innovation challenges or toughest problems. They already offer various challenges with interesting rewards." Fellowforce was founded in 2007 by two friends, Ruben Robert and Jack Allerts. As innovators themselves, both Ruben and Jack had experienced the difficulty of finding a way to present their ideas to the right people in organizations, and they decided to find a solution to address this. That was the starting point for a company that connects organizations worldwide with innovators through open space. In May 2007 they launched their venture with the ambition of becoming the leading platform for open innovation and problem solving.

Click here to go to FellowForce.Com

People interested in that website might also be interested in Innocentive. It is an online marketplace for solutions to technical problems, started in the pharmaceutical industry.

There is also the Government Innovators Network at Harvard University.

From Donald Kennedy's Editorial titled "Mixed Grill"

Science 31 August 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5842, p. 1145

"Secrecy and concealment. I've complained about policy-makers in the U.S. administration who suppress scientific results if they don't support a particular political objective. Although most attention went to the case of Jim Hanson at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a few others, a rich lode of new material is opening up. Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks at the Department of the Interior, may be the champion science-buster of them all. The department's inspector general revealed that MacDonald interfered regularly by bullying staff to change recommendations on endangered species habitat, exposing the department to litigation. She resigned abruptly, shortly before being called to testify before Congress. And in a different space, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) learned that some of the agency's trailers occupied by Hurricane Katrina victims had formaldehyde concentrations 75 times the maximum recommended dose. What did the general counsel do? He advised employees not to initiate testing because it might 'imply FEMA's ownership of the issue' and invite litigation. Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), on learning this, pronounced it 'sickening…an official policy of premeditated ignorance.'"

"The Brain/Education Barrier"

Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek and John T. Bruer's editorial in Science (Science 7 September 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5843, p. 1293) begins:

In an era of translational science, researchers often find themselves in the mixed company of policy-makers, legislators, and educators looking for "evidence-based" practice. That's how it was earlier this year in March, when a distinguished international group of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists convened at the University of Chile in Santiago for the conference titled Early Education and Human Brain Development, which many Chilean ministers, educators, and scientists attended to learn how brain science might transform education. On day one, however, it became clear that myths about brain-based pedagogy dominated participants' thinking. The Chilean educators were looking to brain science for insights about which type of preschool would be the most effective, whether children are safe in child care, and how best to teach reading. The brain research presented at the conference that day was mute on these issues. However, cognitive and behavioral science could help.

I think it is obvious that cognitive science and behavioral sciences hold information of potential value to educators (including self educators). That is not to say that brain research is not of great potential value in the promise it holds for the future. Indeed, I would guess that by the end of the century understanding of brain physiology and biochemistry, and the development of neuro-pharmacology will transform learning.

Reproduced in full and in full agreement

Foreign scientists and engineers working in the United States constitute a growing share of the country's innovation capital. Last year, that pool of talent contributed to 26% of U.S. patent applications filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). That's over three times more than their percentage in 1998, an explosion likely triggered by increased delays in the awarding of green cards and citizenship to immigrant scientists, according to researchers who did the study (www.globalizationresearch.com).

Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues counted up the share of patent applications filed at WIPO's U.S. office that listed a U.S.-based foreign national as one of the inventors. In another part of the study, the researchers estimate that more than 1 million foreign-born workers are waiting for employment-based green cards. "There are a lot of very bright people that we brought to the U.S. in order to create intellectual property," says Wadhwa. "Let's keep them."

Source: Newsmakers, Science, Volume 317, Number 5843, Issue of 07 September 2007.

In its entirety and without comment: "BORN TO SHOP?"

Women have an evolved knack for remembering where to find edible plant matter, a new study argues.

Rafts of studies have shown that men trump women at many spatial skills, a spillover from our past, say evolutionary psychologists, when men were the hunters and women the gatherers. Studies have also shown that women beat out men in recalling objects' locations. But no one had tested this skill with foods.

So a team led by Steven Gaulin of the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, tested modern city dwellers on the closest thing to foraging: browsing in a farmers' market. After looking around the stalls, the 86 subjects were asked to remember where they'd seen particular foods. The test involved dead reckoning, a male-dominated skill, rather than navigating by landmarks, a female forte. Yet women were 27% more accurate than men in recalling food locations, the scientists reported online 21 August in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"The results fit well with the foraging adaptation theory that explains why women should perform better than men in such a spatial cognition task," says evolutionary psychologist Andreas Wilke of UC Los Angeles. But he notes that both sexes "were significantly more accurate in locating high-calorie food items," such as avocados and olive oil.

Source: Random Samples, Science, Volume 317, Number 5843, Issue of 07 September 2007.

THE GONZO SCIENTIST: A Summer Camp for Grown-Ups

Read all of John Bohannon's column for Science magazine.

I quote, without comment:

During one session, I witnessed the verbal equivalent of a professional wrestling match between Richard Dawkins and the celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Dawkins stepped into the ring first. The wily Oxford professor of popular science may be 66 years old, but he can handle himself in a fight. He's lean, fast on his feet, and he wears silky suits that are hard to grip. His opening was by the book, first maneuvering to put the fight on his own terms. Scientific arguments will get you nowhere in a God rumble unless you can establish that science has something to say about religious matters. A long and circling mini-lecture on the anthropic principle did the job. Then, to get at the throat, he made a big flying leap: Scientific laws as we understand them should apply to God. And then came Dawkins's surprise attack: To have created the Earth, let alone the universe, God must be a vastly more intelligent and complex being than we are. Our own excellence in design is already the vastly improbable result of natural selection. Ergo, by the laws of probability, God almost certainly doesn't exist.

A bearded man swaggered onstage and the game was on. Rabbi Shmuley deployed a fighting style perfected by "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, the Canadian kilt-wearing wrestler. During Piper's legendary feuds with Hulk Hogan and Mr. T, he famously exclaimed, "Just when they think they got answers, I change the questions!" And that's just what the rabbi did. His opening was actually a double attack, starting with a classic Piper eye-poke: Dawkins says that he has a problem with religion because it's not true. He lives in England where they have a queen, but he hasn't attacked the royal family. Is it true that some people are born more special than others? Then, taking advantage of the momentary distraction created by this dubious statement, the rabbi followed with a savage foot stomp: Dawkins is married, so presumably he believes in the institution of marriage. But is marriage a true institution? According to evolution, love is a trick played on the mind to ensure that you have sex and propagate the species. Dawkins says he doesn't believe in love. And most evolutionary biologists don't either. There was a lot more on both sides.

"Cultural Modeling in Real Time"

Read the full article by V. S. Subrahmanian (Science 14 September 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5844, pp. 1509 - 1510).

I quote:

Accurate forecasts depend critically upon the ability to build behavioral models of the people and groups involved. Social scientists have traditionally constructed cross-cultural models by conducting either in-person or written surveys (1), or living with such groups (2), and then hypothesizing and testing correlations in collected data by means of various statistical models (3). None of these strategies will work in countries riddled with conflict like Iraq and Sudan today. Old surveys are likely to be outdated. Questionnaires and survey respondents may be influenced by the climate under which the survey is taken. In conflict situations, data must be gathered with real-time methods. However, building behavioral models in real time is particularly difficult (see the figure).

Computational social models may offer the best solution in cases where conventional data gathering is not possible. Tools such as The Resource Description Framework Extractor (T-REX) (4) use socio-cultural-political-economic-religious (SCPER) variables provided by social scientists in conjunction with other data sources (e.g., surveys), if available, and automatically extract relevant data from news sources, blogs, newsgroups, and wikis (i.e., collaboratively written information sharing sites). Other efforts such as the KEDS project (5) extract variables from specific news sources. The SCPER variables can include financial activities, violent event information, or political relationships. The source data can be automatically analyzed to recognize spikes in such activities, providing "early warnings" of potential conflicts. Unlike past methods, these methods do not require previous knowledge of the groups being investigated.

Comment: This is perhaps another example of the phenomenon described in my last couple of postings, where computers are likely to replace or at least complement heuristic decision making based on expertise developed through conventional study and experience. JAD

"FINANCIAL CENTRES: Marketplaces on the move"

Read the full article in The Economist, September 13th 2007.

Excerpts:

• Over the past decade financial exchanges have changed out of all recognition. From Stockholm to Singapore, they have modernised and expanded. Fortunately for investors, most of the changes have been for the better. They have brought more choice, faster trading and greater efficiency. Trading costs have come down, too. This matters to financial centres, because exchanges are still at the heart of the world's financial network.
• Much of the transformation is being driven by the increasing sophistication of investors and financial intermediaries, particularly big investment banks, which direct the bulk of capital flows around the world. (Of course, much of that sophistication is the result of use of computers and communications technology to quickly analyze information and communicate at a distance.)
• As a result, the world's biggest exchanges are vying as never before for a share of highly mobile global capital. Their vast computerised hubs and their ability to zip transactions around the world in split-seconds allow them to play a dual role reminiscent of the marketplaces and sailing ships of medieval times. The most successful are those with attractive goods on offer, competitive prices and speedy response times.
• Given the rise of electronic trading, exchanges may have become more virtual than physical marketplaces, but the broader impact of exchanges on cities—their “multiplier effect”—keeps on growing. An official at the London Stock Exchange notes that although its total listing fees (as opposed to trading fees) in the past financial year were a relatively puny £28m ($56m), fees generated by advisers to new companies on the exchange—lawyers, investment bankers, accountants, public-relations firms and so on—were estimated at £3.5 billion.
• John Thain, head of the New York Stock Exchange, notes three key trends in the evolution of modern exchanges: demutualisation, diversification and globalisation. These are already having a profound effect on the global financial system—and are linking financial centres more closely together than ever before.

Comment: Here we have another example of the digital divide, where it really counts. The ICT intensive centers of world finance, located in developed and a few emerging economies, are reaping huge benefits from the globalization of finance. JAD

"Algorithms: Business by numbers"

Read the Briefing in The Economist (September 13th 2007) subtitled "Consumers and companies increasingly depend on a hidden mathematical world".

Excerpts:

• computers have made algorithms far more valuable to companies. “A computer program is a written encoding of an algorithm,” explains Andrew Herbert, who runs Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain. The speed and processing power of computers mean that algorithms can execute tasks with blinding speed using vast amounts of data.
• UPS uses algorithms to help deliver the millions of packages that pass through its transportation network every day in the most efficient way possible. The simplest routes are easy to draw up. If a driver has only three destinations to visit, he can take only six possible routes. But the number of possible routes explodes as the destinations increase. There are more than 15 trillion, trillion possible routes to take on a journey with just 25 drop-off points—and an average day for a UPS driver in America involves 150 destinations. The picture is further complicated by constraints such as specified drop-off and pick-up times for drivers or runway lengths and noise restrictions for aircraft. “Algorithms provide benefits when the choices are so great that they are impossible to process in your head,” says UPS's Jack Levis....UPS reckons that VOLCANO (its computer system for aircraft routing) has saved the company tens of millions of dollars since its introduction in 2000.
• Jeff Gordon, who looks after innovation for Convergys, a call-centre operator, says that the efficiency of algorithms is as crucial to his industry as the quality of call agents: “If you get the algorithm wrong and put customers into the wrong hands you degrade the experience. No one likes being handed off to someone else.”
• Dunnhumby, a data-analysis firm, uses algorithms to crunch data on customer behaviour for a number of clients. Its best-known customer (and majority-owner) is Tesco, a British supermarket with a Clubcard loyalty-card scheme that generates a mind-numbing flow of data on the purchases of 13m members across 55,000 product lines. To make sense of it all, Dunnhumby's analysts cooked up an algorithm called the rolling ball.....The rolling-ball algorithm is in its fourth version. Refinements occur every year or two, to add new attributes or to tweak the maths. All these data then feed into a variety of decisions, such as the ranges to put into each store and which products should sit next to each other on the shelves. “All this sophisticated data analysis and it comes down to where you put the biscuits,” laments Martin Hayward, director of consumer strategy at Dunnhumby.
• Algorithms are most commonly associated with internet-search engines. “The tussle between MSN, Google and Yahoo! is about whose algorithm produces the best results to a query,” observes Microsoft's Mr Herbert. Ask.com, another search engine, has even tried to popularise the term in an advertising campaign. Few other types of companies are so obviously dependent on algorithms for success, but the role that they play is rising in importance for two reasons.

Comment: Most of us use personal computers for things which now seem pretty pedestrian such as word processing, email, and searching the net. Most of us don't use much math. But the computer is a marvel at data crunching.

I recently heard a former astronaut mentioning that his young son wanted a new iPod with twice the memory of his current iPod. The astronaut said "no way", since the kid's current iPod already had one million times as much memory as the computers on the space craft that first took him into space. My point is that the PC on your desk or in your lap is a very powerful computational engine.

The economic benefits from computers are probably going to come from the big returns from relatively few, very smart large scale applications as much as from the millions of relatively simple, straight forward, small applications. JAD

"Automated decision-making: The death of expertise"

Read the full article in The Economist, September 13th 2007.

From the review of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres:

Mr Ayres predicts that automated decision-making will soon see other professional jobs going the same way as that of the bank-loan officer, once well-paid and responsible and now a mere call-centre operative, paid peanuts to parrot the words a computer prompts. Doctors will have to face up to the fact that computers can diagnose illnesses better than they can, and teachers will find that although their presence is needed to engage their pupils, their professional judgment often is not. When teaching small children to read, for example, tightly scripted lessons, their exact content and timing honed by randomised trials, do best.

"'Abstinence only' education does not slow the spread of AIDS"

Read the full article in The Economist of September 20th 2007.

"Abstinence-only does not work. Abstinence-plus probably does."

Last month Dr Underhill published a review of 13 trials involving 16,000 young people in America. The trials compared the sexual behaviour of those given an abstinence-only education with that of those who were provided with no information at all or with whatever their schools normally taught. Pregnancies were as numerous in both groups. Sexually transmitted diseases were as widespread. The number of sexual partners was equally high and unprotected sex just as common.

Having thus discredited abstinence-only teaching, Dr Underhill and her colleagues decided to evaluate the slightly more complicated message of “abstinence-plus” using 39 trials that involved 38,000-odd young people from the United States, Canada and the Bahamas. Their results are published in the current issue of Public Library of Science Medicine.

This tuition—compared, as before, with whatever biology classes and playgrounds provide—reduced the number of pregnancies in three out of seven trials (the remaining four recorded no difference). Four out of 13 trials found that abstinence-plus-educated teenagers had fewer sexual partners, while the remainder showed no change. Fourteen studies reported that it increased condom use; 12 others reported no difference. Furthermore, in the vast majority of cases, abstinence-plus participants knew more about AIDS and HIV (the virus that causes the disease) than their peers did. And the tuition often reduced the frequency of anal sex (which brings a greater chance of passing on HIV than the vaginal option). In contrast to the fears of the protagonists of abstinence-only education, not one of the trials found that teenagers behaved in a riskier fashion in either the long or the short term after receiving abstinence-plus instruction.

Comment: I would characterize this as "Duh", except that the Bush administration does not seem to have thought of this obviously likely possibility. Of course, it is important to have meta-analysis of a body of research on so important an issue to be sure. But Duh! JAD

"Annual Deficits Continue for U.S. Trade in Advanced Technology Products"

Read the full InfoBrief from the National Science Foundation.

Lead: "During much of the 1990s, U.S. trade in advanced technology products produced consistent trade surpluses for the United States and stood in stark contrast to the steadily growing annual trade deficits from U.S. trade in general merchandise (figure 1). But beginning in 2001 and coinciding with the end of the dot-com boom, the trade balance for U.S. technology products began to erode.[1] By 2002, U.S. imports of advanced technology products exceeded exports, resulting in the first U.S. trade deficit in this market segment. The technology product trade deficit has continued each year since then, standing at $38.3 billion in 2006 after reaching a high of $44.4 billion in 2005 (figure 1 and table 1). The deficits in this market segment reflect the growing imbalance of U.S. trade with Asia and especially with China.?

"Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Taiwan Lead S&E Article Output of the Non-OECD Countries"

Read the full InfoBrief from the National Science Foundation.

Lead: "Scientific research, development, and innovation, key drivers of economic growth, have been concentrated in the 30 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).[1] However, countries outside the OECD have been increasing their S&E capabilities and are rivaling the OECD member countries. One indicator of scientific research capability is the production of scientific and engineering articles in the world's leading scientific and engineering journals.[2] OECD nations, with 584,000 articles in 2003, accounted for 84% of the world total, compared with 87% a decade ago.[3] Among the non-OECD countries and economies, five—Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Taiwan—produced two-thirds of their scientific article output (figure 1). This InfoBrief discusses trends in output, portfolio, and international collaboration of scientific articles produced by these five countries and economies."

"Expenditures for U.S. Industrial R&D Continue to Increase in 2005; R&D Performance Geographically Concentrated"

Read the full InfoBrief from the National Science Foundation.

Points that caught my attention:

• Companies spent $226 billion in current-year dollars on research and development (R&D) performed in the United States during 2005 compared with $208 billion in 2004.
• During 2005, the top 10 states accounted for two-thirds of the industrial R&D performed in the United States. Companies in California, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Washington, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut (listed by decreasing level) reported aggregate R&D expenditures of $152 billion.
• The types of companies that carry out R&D vary considerably among the top 10 states, reflecting regional specialization or clusters of industrial activity. For example, the motor vehicles industry accounted for 74% of Michigan's industrial R&D in 2005, whereas it accounted for only 5% of the nation's total industrial R&D.
• The computer and electronic products manufacturing industries accounted for 19% of the nation's total industrial R&D, but they accounted for a larger share of the industrial R&D in Massachusetts (41%), Texas (38%), Illinois (38%), and California (33%) in 2005. These states have clearly defined regional centers of high-technology research and manufacturing: Route 128 and Cambridge in Massachusetts; the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas; Champaign County in Illinois; and Silicon Valley in California. Over 70% of R&D performed in the United States by computer and electronic products companies in 2005 was located in these four states, representing 14% of all industrial R&D nationwide.
• The R&D of chemicals manufacturing companies is particularly prominent in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, all of which host robust pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Together these three states represented over 40% of the nation's R&D in this sector in 2005.
• The R&D services sector is even more concentrated geographically, with California and Massachusetts accounting for over 40% of R&D in this sector. This sector consists largely of biotechnology companies, contract research organizations, and early-stage technology firms. These companies maintain strong ties to the academic sector and often are located near large research universities.

National Medical Record Systems

Image Source: Networking Health: Prescriptions for the Internet
Committee on Enhancing the Internet for Health Applications:
National Research Council (2000)

Read "Your Health Data, Plugged In to the Web" by Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, October 5, 2007.

Microsoft has launched a free, ad-supported, online health portal called HealthVault yesterday that allows people to upload their electronic medical records to the Web and share the information with doctors.

"HealthVault works as a sort of depository for medical data. Consumers can download records such as lab reports or X-rays from their health-care providers' Web sites, or data from digital devices such as glucometers, and enter it into their HealthVault account. All data are encrypted, and consumers can choose to send any of the information to other health-care providers, family members or even physical trainers."

Google and Steve Case's Revolution Health reportedly have been working on similar portals. In the United States, WebMD and Revolution Health, have already offered consumers online storage for health data. Revolution Health, started by AOL co-founder Case, also plans to allow users to download prescription records into their accounts through a partnership with Medco. The American Heart Association has a Blood Pressure Tracker and a High Blood Pressure Health Risk Calculator online.

"U.S. Outpaced by Medical-Record Projects Overseas" (Source: The Washington Post)

The United States lags behind some countries in creating a secure, electronic medical-record system. A look at state-run or state-sponsored programs in other nations:

Germany: The first country to begin development of a national health information technology network, Germany issues electronic health cards that carry names, dates of birth and insurance details. Prescriptions can be included on the card electronically. People can decide what, if any, personal medical information, such as drug allergies or chronic conditions, is stored on the cards.

Britain: The National Program for IT established an integrated health-care record service, an archiving system for X-ray and electronic scans and electronic appointment and prescription-transmission systems. In a typical day this year, the electronic patient registry received 1.4 million queries, the electronic appointment service made 16,000 bookings, the electronic picture archives stored 1 million digital images and 100,000 electronic prescriptions were transmitted.

Canada: Canada Health Infoway was launched in 2001 and is implementing the nationwide adoption of electronic health records, including a lifetime record of an individual's health and care history, including lab and radiology test results, past treatments, and prescription and immunization information. The organization expects to have electronic health records for half of the population by the end of 2009.

Norway: Electronic patient records that document patient X-rays, lab results and other information have been widely used for many years. All of the country's hospitals have installed electronic systems, but patient records are not yet comprehensive, easily exchangeable or accessible to patients.

The Bush Administration and Children

Source: "United States Has Higher Death Rate Than Most Other Countries"
Excerpted from a report prepared by Save the Children

"Although the under-5 mortality rate in the United States has fallen in recent decades, it is still higher than many other wealthy nations – 2.3 times that of Iceland and more than 75 percent higher than the rate of the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden."

So why did President Bush veto a bipartisan bill reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program? According to the WP, 72 percent of Americans supported the bill Bush vetoed.

According to last week's Science magazine:

After U.S. high school students did poorly on TIMSS in 1995, the government has decided not to participate in another version to be given next year.

In 1995, the United States lagged behind most of the world on a test of advanced mathematics and physics taken by graduating high school students from 16 countries. That won't happen again, if the Bush Administration has its way: It has decided not to participate in the next version of the test.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), says it is bowing out of 2008 TIMSSA, an advanced version of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study given quadrennially to younger students, because it can't fit the $5 million to $10 million price tag into its flat budget.....

But many leaders in the mathematics community believe that the Administration opted out because it feared another poor U.S. performance would reflect badly on its signature education program, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.....

Leaders from the U.S. mathematical community, including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society, are up in arms at the department's decision, first reported last month by the newspaper Education Week. They argue that this elite group of students needs to be monitored because they are most likely to major in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields in college and become the next generation of scientists and engineers. "It's inconceivable to me that the government wouldn't fund our participation," says Stanford mathematician R. James Milgram, a member of the IES advisory board that expects to take up the issue at its 30 to 31 October meeting. "The 1995 test was extremely important in showing that a problem exists," he notes. "And the only way to know if we're beginning to turn things around is by looking at new data to see if we've made any progress."

Comment: If the Bush administration gets its way, the cost to the government of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon reach $600 billion. How important is the so-called "war on terror" as compared to our children and our future (which depends on those children)? The government will be able to afford to assure medical insurance for all children if it asks for just a little more tax from the rich, and the decision that we can't afford a few million dollars to see how well our kids are doing in school as compared with those in other countries is simply ludicrous! JAD

George Will Quotes Obama's Economic Advisor

Read "The Democratic Economist" by George F. Will in The Washington Post, October 4, 2007.

Austan Goolsbee is an economist employed at the University of Chicago. He suggests that the stagnation of middle- and working-class incomes is a most pressing problem, and Goolsbee says its root cause is "radically increased returns to skill."

In 1980, people with college degrees made on average 30 percent more than those with only high school diplomas. That disparity has widened to 70 percent. In the same year, the average earnings of people with advanced degrees were 50 percent more than those with only high school diplomas; today, it is more than 100 percent.....

The solution is to invest more in education, which will raise wages, reduce inequality and move toward equilibrium. The GI Bill was, he says, so prolific in stimulating investment in "human capital" -- particularly, college education -- that for a while the return on it went down relative to high school.

Goolsbee says

globalization is responsible for "a small fraction" of today's income disparities. He says that "60 to 70 percent of the economy faces virtually no international competition." America's 18.5 million government employees have little to fear from free trade; so do auto mechanics, dentists and many others.

Goolsbee's rough estimate is that technology -- meaning all that the phrase "information economy" denotes -- accounts for more than 80 percent of the increase in earnings disparities, whereas trade accounts for much less than 20 percent.

Comment: I am not enough of an economist to have my opinions count as compared to those of a professor at the University of Chicago. It does seem to me that policy and institutions must count, and that better policies and stronger institutions would have mitigated the worsening of income distribution. Still, I like the policy recommendation of more education. JAD

How the electronic communication and computation revolution changed everything.

October 4^th is the 50^th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik I. It seems like a good time to think about the big picture.

Edison invented the electric power system in the 19^th century. He was, as I understand it, the person who developed the ensemble of generation, transmission and use of electric power. The initial development of electrical power focused on its use to provide light and motive power. Of course the telegraph was invented prior to Edison’s invention of the light bulb, and the telephone about the same time, but both were electromechanical systems, not electronic. Similarly, the invention of the radiotelegraph at the turn of the century was an important step in the development of information and communications technology, but it too was not yet electronic. Perhaps the start of electronics was Lee De Forest’s invention of the triode in 1906.

The 20^th century then started with the existence of electrical power systems and vacuum tube technology for the amplification of electrical signals, plus the understanding of the potential of reproduction of sound and images and of transmission of signals by wire and wireless.

There followed the inventions we all know so well – radio, television, the transistor, the digital computer, the integrated circuit, the laser, fiber optics, the Internet, the World Wide Web, etc. These inventions were of course complemented by developments in software, storage technology, manufacturing technology and the rest. With the emerging convergence of these technologies it is perhaps easier to see in retrospect that the 20^th century saw the emergence of a complex information technology system based on electronics, operated on the electrical power infrastructure. Each succeeding killer application added to the system tended to exhibit synergisms, albeit that some technologies reached their evolutionary limits and were replaced.

There has been a world of analysis describing the economic impacts of the development of this technological system over the century. Of course, major new industries were created manufacturing and distributing the devices embodying these technologies, as well as industries providing content for radio, television, and the Internet. The electronic information and communication technology revolution also revolutionized the productive economy. Think of advertising, computer aided design and manufacturing, and the impact on logistics. Think of financial services and travel.

As a result of the technology we have seen globalization, industrial restructuring, and organizational restructuring in all industries. The labor force has been radically restructured, in terms of geographic location (to cities), of industry (the growth of high technology industries, and the decline of extractive industries), and function (the growth of white collar jobs, wage premiums for those who more effectively appropriate electronic information and communications technology).

There has also been a huge impact on political systems. There are now more than 100 countries in the world with some degree of democracy, according to the freedom foundation. The growth of citizen participation in governance must be in part due to a vastly better and more rapidly informed public, worldwide. The transistor radio made radio affordable everywhere. Today there are half as many mobile phones as people, and one sixth of the world is connected to the Internet.

I would suggest that the electronic information and communication revolution was the key driving force for extending education, in the sense that it increased the returns to investment in education and allowed the demand for educated persons in the workforce to increase radically.

People obviously spend a lot of time interacting with the electronic information and communication technology infrastructure, devices that embody the technology, or products and services that depend upon or have been improved by the technology. Thus social interactions are increasingly mediated by the technology, and social systems have been modified in response to the incentives and disincentives inherent in the technology and in the economic and political system responses to the technology.

The point of this posting is that the evolution of this technological system has been ongoing for a century, and in fact can be seen as intimately linked with earlier (industrial revolutions). Indeed, the invention of the printing press initiated a technological system innovation process which has continued for five centuries, with still evolving economic, political and social ramifications.

My hunch is that “you ain’t seen nothing yet”. The evolution of the system will continue. Some of the directions are probably predictable as continuations of current trends – connectivity will continue to increase, costs will continue to come down, new killer apps will continue to appear. The repercussion trends will also continue – globalization, deepening of educational stocks, increasing incomes, democratization, etc.

Some developments are much less probable, but still likely targets for foresight exercises. I would guess that the 21^st century will see a convergence among electronic information and communications technologies, and on the one hand genetic and biotechnologies and on the other hand cognitive and behavioral technologies. The technology should also provide means to study and understand global systems, to identify their problems, and to begin to aid decision makers in considering their amelioration.

And there will be “black swans”. These are developments that will be so far from our thinking that they will surprise us all. Who knew that the triode, or the Internet protocol would change the world!

Anoother population trend

Source: "The Urban Revolution" by David E. Bloom and Tarun Khanna,
Finance and Development, September 2007, Volume 44, Number 3

Home run hitters and terrorists: steroids and Al-Qaeda in cyberspace

There is a fairly narrow distribution of the length of hits by professional baseball players. The outfield length in a baseball stadium is calculated so that a small percentage of the longest hits go over the fence as home runs. The introduction of steroids has resulted in stronger players who can hit the ball harder, and who therefore are more likely to hit a home run.

Most people have pretty similar levels of political activity. Some however are much more active, and some much less active than average. A small percentage of people are willing not only to die for their political beliefs but also to terrorize and even kill others for them. I suspect that the number of terrorists must be small, for too many in any society would be destructive for that society. However, as experience in the Middle East has shown, the number of suicide bombers and terrorists can be increased, in part by recruitment and training. The Internet appears to have been used to recruit, encourage and train terrorists for radical Islamic causes.

The common element in these two examples is that they address behaviors that are at the tail of the distribution. There are basically two ways to increase the number of individuals who fall above the specified limits – move the entire distribution while keeping its shape, or extend the tail of the distribution. One can give steroids to all baseball players, or one can select the best hitters and give only them steroids/

Could one say that there is a network madrasas that provide training that moves their entire student bodies in more radical directions, or that the sites on the Internet recruiting and training terrorists take people from the radical end of the distribution and make them more likely to step over the threshold to terrorism?

Jarret Brachman, who spoke to the National Academy of Science’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board today, suggested that the webmasters of the various Al-Qaeda websites are not a homogeneous bunch, Some target an audience already at the most radical extreme of the community of muslims, while others address a much wider audience. Indeed, he suggests that Al-Qaeda might now be better considered a ideological movement than a organization, that its proponents are not a monolithic community, and that their presence in cyberspace is based on community of interest.

Is this important? I suspect it might be. Approaches that might work against an organization or network of terrorists might not work against an Internet based viral process.

UNESCO was created on the proposition that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that we must build the defenses of peace. Perhaps we should consider a revision to add that since terrorism begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that we should build the defense against terrorism.

"Proving That Seeing Shouldn’t Always Be Believing"

A Conversation With Hany Farid in the New York Times, October 2, 2007.

The new field of digital forensics recognizes that it is now very easy to falsify pictorial evidence.

The Federal Office of Research Integrity has said that in 1990, less than 3 percent of allegations of fraud they investigated involved contested images. By 2001, that number was 26 percent. And last year, it was 44.1 percent.

Even what you see is just evidence to be weighed and confirmed.

Support the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act of 2007

The Internet is too important to fool around with. Don't tax it.

Foreign Policy: The List: Five Population Trends to Watch

Foreign Policy: The List: Five Population Trends to Watch:

"Between 1992 and 2004, 31 countries in sub-Saharan Africa lost an average of 0.7 percentage points of economic growth per year because of HIV-AIDS, the International Labor Organization estimates. By 2020, 23 sub-Saharan countries will have lost more than 9 percent of their working-age populations, with Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe losing over 35 percent of their workforces. With able-bodied working-age adults dropping out of the population, who will be there to teach children to read, grow food, work factories, run government agencies, and keep the economy going?"

Musing about historiography

It occurs to me that history is very often written about the succession of rulers, ruling parties, and ruling regimes. Clearly, when there are changes at the top others things are often changed as well. Indeed, when a people are conquered by another people, wholesale changes are triggered.

It also occurs to me that change seems to characterize the modern world, and that some changes occur much more rapidly than others. Thus, for example, the cadre of political appointees can be changed relatively rapidly, while it takes years for a population to learn a new language. People change religion at a different rate than they change their agricultural or industrial technology. New laws can be passed and promulgated, but the people may chose not to obey them for a long time. The understanding of which causes in the past resulted in which changes must be very hard to develop -- more so than the histories I read would suggest.

Would it not be nice to have good mathematical models describing cultural dynamics? Such models might represent the inertia inherent in different aspects of culture, and the forces available for inducing social and economic change. Even qualitative information might be useful.

Aspects of culture are interdependent, and ideally one would like to see a matrix that showed how the an overall set of social forces collectively influence the overall set of cultural elements.

The point I am making is that history, as it is generally written, may emphasize political forces for change while leaving out other forces; it may emphasize the modifications of relatively sensitive cultural properties, while neglecting the cultural properties with more inertia.

When the Bush administration forced regime change in Iraq, prosecuted deBathification, disbanded the Iraqi army, changed the constitution and laws, and introduced a variety of radical economic reforms, they seem to have had a very inaccurate view of the likely outcomes. Was their misunderstanding of the complexity of the situation, and of the resistance of key cultural elements to change, simply the result of reading histories that misrepresented the complexity of culture?

Now is the time to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty

The nations of the world drafted a convention in 1982 which provided a comprehensive set of rules on control of coastal waters and navigation rights. The United States refused to ratify that convention, in large part due to its provisions on deep sea mining. Indeed, the delegation of the United States played a leading role in the negotiations leading to that convention, and it was seen as very favorable overall to U.S. economic and security interests. Recognizing the importance of U.S. participation, the nations went back to the drawing board and renegotiated the sea bed mining; the revision was signed in 1994.

Today, there are 150 signatories to the treaty. The Bush administration has recommended that it now be ratified, and the Congress has begun to hold hearings on the ratification. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte recently said:

Joining is a win/win proposition. We will not have to change U.S. laws or practices, or give up rights, and we will benefit in a variety of ways. The United States already acts in accordance with the Convention for a number of reasons:

1. First, as noted, we are party to a group of 1958 treaties that contain many of the same provisions as the Convention.
2. Second, the United States heavily influenced the content of the 1982 Convention, based on U.S. law, policy, and practice.
3. Finally, the treaty has been the cornerstone of U.S. oceans policy since 1983, when President Reagan instructed the Executive Branch to act in accordance with the Convention’s provisions with the exception of deep seabed mining.

Thus, we are in the advantageous position in the case of this treaty that U.S. adherence to its terms is already time-tested and works well.

At the same time, the United States would gain substantial benefits from joining the Convention – these can be summarized in terms of security, sovereignty, and sustainability.

Negroponte should know, since he has followed the negotiations since he was Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Environment and Science and Technology some 25 years ago.

Unfortunately, conservative forces have decided they will make a major effort to torpedo the treaty. Lets not let them succeed in that negative effort. Not only is it to our economic and security interest to do so, ratifying the treaty would help to reestablish our credibility within the community of nations. We should support the agreements we negotiate.

Quotations

From "Innovation and the BioPharma Industry" by Joseph Jasinski (Program Director, Health Care and Life Science, IBM) presented at The Globalization of Innovation: Emerging Trends in Information Technology, Biopharma, and Financial Services at the National Academy of Sciences, April 20, 2007.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
Popular Mechanics, 1949

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, 1977

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
Bill Gates, 1981

“Prediction is difficult, especially about the future”
Neils Bohr, 1957

Thinking About the Value of Human Responses as Evidence

Read "Confessions Not Always Clad in Iron" by Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, October 1, 2007.

Excerpts:

psychological research conclusively undermines is the widespread notion that innocent people never plead guilty.

That assumption has informed centuries of law enforcement, and decades of movie plots and murder-mystery novels. The whole point in many investigations is to get the bad guy to confess. Laboratory experiments and dozens of case studies, however, show it is not hard to get innocent people to confess.

"Innocence is a state of mind that puts innocent people at risk," said psychologist Saul Kassin at Williams College, who has studied the phenomenon. Innocent people, Kassin found, are more likely to waive their constitutional rights to remain silent and to have a lawyer present. Innocent people also assume that innocent people do not get convicted, or that objective evidence will exonerate them. Nearly a quarter of all convictions overturned in recent years based on DNA and other evidence have involved false confessions.

While false confessions often involve the mentally disturbed -- John Mark Karr last year confessed to being involved in the murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, despite convincing evidence that showed he was innocent -- Kassin and Gary Wells, a psychologist at Iowa State University, say the problem is not limited to the mentally ill.

In one experiment, Kassin asked volunteers to perform a challenging task on a computer but warned them not to touch the "Alt" key or risk damaging a computer. Volunteers were told that the computer had been damaged and were asked whether they hit the banned key. In reality, the volunteer did nothing wrong. Most volunteers denied it, but as the initial task they were given was made difficult, they became less sure because they were distracted. When researchers had confederates lie about having seen the volunteers hit the Alt key, the number of people who confessed went up to 100 percent. Every stage of increased pressure led ever larger numbers of volunteers to believe they were really guilty.

And:

Interrogation experts such as Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid and Associates, a Chicago-based firm that has trained tens of thousands of interrogators, and Pete Blair, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Texas State University, say false confessions are rare. Blair said laboratory experiments don't say much about the real world -- where confessing to crimes can involve serious penalties -- and that Craig's case had all the hallmarks of a guilty politician trying to save his skin.

"Everybody who confesses tries to retract," added Buckley. "When you talk to your lawyer, he says, 'we should challenge that so we will say you were coerced or abused.' That is very, very common."

Comment: A general rule it to regard everything that you are told by another person as "something you are told by another person". Yet too often we regard what we are told as fact. Even if you are being told what the informant believes to be true, people are fallible. Moreover, people don't always tell you what they believe to be true.

I would tend to believe a scientist (such as Kassin quoted above) whose incentives are to fairly state conclusions based on evidence rather than a businessman selling interrogation services (such as Reid quoted above) whose incentives are to make profits for his company. But both reports should be treated as input data rather than statements of truth.

I would note that professional interrogators are in the unfortunate situation that they can not always check the results of their interrogation with other, more reliable evidence. It is pretty natural for them to believe that the confessions that they produce are valuable. Indeed, I think that confessions are a valuable source of evidence, but one easily overvalued by those whose jobs are to obtain confessions when possible. JAD

Numbers Count or How Much You Can Learn from A Few Numbers

Read "U.S. Pays Steep Price for Private Security in Iraq" by Walter Pincus, The Washington Post, October 1, 2007.

"The contract that Blackwater Security Consulting signed in March 2004 with Regency Hotel and Hospital of Kuwait for a 34-person security team offers a view into the private-security business world.....Regency was a subcontractor to another company, ESS Support Services Worldwide, of Cyprus....And ESS was a subcontractor to KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which had the prime contract with the Defense Department.....Under the contract, Regency was to pay Blackwater $11,082,326 for one year, with a second year option, to put together a 34-person team that would provide security services for the "movement of ESS's staff, management and workforce throughout Kuwait and Iraq and across country borders including the borders of Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey and Jordan."....The team would be made up of two senior managers, 12 middle managers and 20 operators. Regency was to provide Blackwater personnel with housing and necessities, including meals, as well as office space and administrative support. In addition, Regency would provide basic equipment, including vehicles and heavy weapons, while Blackwater was responsible for purchasing individual weapons and ammunition......the average per-day pay to personnel Blackwater hired was $600. According to the schedule of rates, supplies and services attached to the contract, Blackwater charged Regency $1,075 a day for senior managers, $945 a day for middle managers and $815 a day for operators. According to data provided to the House panel, Regency charged ESS an average of $1,100 a day for the same people. How the Blackwater and Regency security charges were passed on by ESS to Halliburton's KBR cannot easily be determined since the catering company was paid on a per-meal basis, with security being a percentage of that charge......

"How much more these costs are compared with the pay of U.S. troops is easier to determine. An unmarried sergeant given Iraq pay and relief from U.S. taxes makes about $83 to $85 a day, given time in service. A married sergeant with children makes about double that, $170 a day. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad overseeing more than 160,000 U.S. troops, makes roughly $180,000 a year, or about $493 a day. That comes out to less than half the fee charged by Blackwater for its senior manager of a 34-man security team."

Comment: Of course, the actual cost of keeping a soldier in Iraq is much more than his pay, but still, one must conclude it is much less than the cost of a Blackwater employee under this contract to provide security to another contractor.

I suspect that there is more public concern and Congressional oversight focused on troop levels than on the budget for support of efforts in Iraq. I also suppose that the Bush administration's belief that private sector efficiency is greater than that of the public sector may be influenced by attitudes formed during the long history of ties of its members to government contractors. JAD