Political versus Governmental Knowledge Systesm

I was thinking how different is the knowledge system faced by candidates for the presidency versus that for the President in office.

National campaigns in the United States have to be large, complex institutions to have any chance of success. They develop a complex system to discover what the voters want and how well the candidates are responding to those wants. They develop large and complex systems to communicate to the voters. There is a system to understand the nation and the world and to monitor events that might affect the campaign, but those systems are focused on the needs of the candidate to be seen as in command of the facts, rather than to analyze the facts in depth.

The administrative branch of the United States government has a far more extensive knowledge system, with the major function of coordinating governmental activities. It however has a far more extensive system for informing the decisions of the President than any campaign could afford. One hopes that the intent is not to provide information to help someone convince the voters to vote for him, but rather to inform decisions critical to the prosperity and security of the United States and all its citizens.

More generally, there doesn't seem to be much relationship to the skills and abilities needed to get elected and the skills and abilities needed to do a good job as head of the most influential government administration in the world.

We need more and stronger Inspectors General

The Washington Post reports:

Inspectors general appointed to uncover waste, fraud and misconduct in federal agencies often lead underfunded and poorly staffed units and are not as independent as the public has been led to believe, according to a study released yesterday by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

The study noted that more than half the 64 inspectors general are not appointed by the president or subject to Senate confirmation hearings. They are appointed by agency heads who in many cases control the watchdogs' budgets and have on occasion retaliated against them over unfavorable reports by cutting funding or denying promotions to staff members, the report said.

"The inescapable conclusion is that an IG who lacks independence is an impostor -- even calling such an office 'Inspector General' confuses the press and public and can create pitfalls for potential whistleblowers," the nonprofit advocacy group concluded.

Comment: The Inspectors General represent an important component of the knowledge systems of our government agencies, and they should not be compromised in the ways this article describes. JAD

U.S. Human Rights Abuses?

Source: "New High In U.S. Prison Numbers: Growth Attributed To More Stringent Sentencing Laws," N.C. Aizenman, The Washington Post, February 29, 2008.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.

Comment: Great Britain tried to reduce crime by more and more draconian penalties for more and more offenses, and failed. It looks like the United States is falling into the same trap.

Is is a human rights abuse of our minorities that we find it necessary to place so many more of them in jail than does any other nation?

We criminalize narcotics abuse, when we might better use other approaches to reduce the problem. There must be a whole variety of technological approaches now that could substitute for incarceration for many crimes, with less interference with human rights.

We should use the information to make better public policy! JAD

What Bush Doesn't Know!

The Washington Post today has an article noting that President Bush is losing his common touch.

Peter Maer of CBS News Radio asked what seemed to be a straightforward question. "What's your advice to the average American who is hurting now, facing the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline, a lot of people facing . . . "

"Wait, what did you just say?" the shocked president interrupted. "You're predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline?"

"A number of analysts are predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline," Maer explained.

You could've knocked Bush over with a feather. "Oh, yeah?" he said. "That's interesting. I hadn't heard that."......

On Wednesday, the $4-a-gallon forecasts had been on the front page of the New York Times, and on NBC's "Today Show" and CBS's "Early Show." In the days before that, the prediction -- made by AAA, among others -- was in the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, the Dallas Morning News, even the Kansas City Star. The White House press secretary took a question about $4 gas at her Wednesday press briefing. A poll last month found that nearly three-quarters of Americans expect $4 gas.

and:

At yesterday's session, NBC's David Gregory invited him to criticize Democratic presidential candidates for not knowing much about the expected new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev. "I don't know much about Medvedev, either," Bush replied.

Agence France-Presse's Olivier Knox asked Bush why he was going to the Olympics in China despite the country's human rights record. "I'm a sports fan," the president reasoned.

"Federal R&D Funding Down in FY 2007"

The new National Science Foundation InfoBrief reports:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) tracks federal funds obligated annually for research and development and R&D plant. The most recent data, for FY 2007, show an estimated $116.4 billion in total obligations, almost the same level ($116.9 billion) reported for the previous year. However, when the data are adjusted for inflation, they reflect a nearly 3% decrease in R&D and R&D plant obligations, the first such decline since FY 2000.

The American Mobility Project

The Economic Mobility Project is a unique nonpartisan collaboration of The Pew Charitable Trusts and respected thinkers from four leading policy institutes — The American Enterprise Institute, The Brookings Institution, The Heritage Foundation and The Urban Institute.

This research is very disturbing:

For more than two centuries, economic opportunity and upward mobility have
formed the foundation of the American Dream and remain at the core of our nation’s identity. But today, while there is widespread agreement that income inequality is higher than at any time since before World War II, too little attention has been given to the more fundamental and increasingly intriguing issue of economic mobility — the prospects for climbing up (or falling down) the economic ladder within and across generations.

Recent studies suggest that there is less economic mobility in the U.S. than researchers originally believed. And, in sharp contrast to the view of America as the land of opportunity, we may be a less mobile society than many other nations. This suggests that the time is right for a rigorous and nonpartisan initiative designed to spark an informed national discussion of the state of economic mobility in America.

College Used to be a Meritocratic Economic Mobility Machine in the U.S.

A couple of days ago the New York Times published an article by ERIK ECKHOLM titled "Higher Education Gap May Slow Economic Mobility". That is the source of the figure to the left.

A notable finding:

The researchers found that Hispanic and black Americans were falling behind whites and Asians in earning college degrees, making it harder for them to enter the middle class or higher.

Questioning a McCain Comment

According to today's Washington Post, John McCain took a comment by Barack Obama (that he would reserve the right to return forces to Iraq if al-Qaeda was to return after a withdrawal of American troops) out of context and used it to attack Obama.

"I have some news," McCain told voters at a rally here Wednesday morning. "Al-Qaeda is in Iraq. Al-Qaeda is called 'al-Qaeda in Iraq.' My friends, if we left, they wouldn't be establishing a base. . . . they would be taking a country. I will not allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender."

I don't know, but are we really concerned that al-Qaeda would take control of Iraq, and that the Kurd, Sunni and Shiite factions would let that happen? Admittedly, I am taking McCain's comment out of context, but I hope that is not the outcome he is worried about.

This is really a question, but is the direct threat from a resurgent al-Qaeda in an independent Iraq not really that there would be a new safe-haven for al-Qaeda more extensive and protected than that which exists today, and comparable to those which existed in the past in Afghanistan and Sudan. There seems to be safe havens in Pakistan and other countries, but less welcoming to the anti-Western terrorists than that which existed in Afghanistan under the Taliban controlled government.

The United States should certainly withdraw troops from Iraq eventually. I don't want to see a permanent base in that country as there are permanent bases in other nations. My hope is that we find a withdrawal strategy that is reasonable in terms of the obligation we have incurred to the Iraqi people through our invasion of their country, and in terms of the stability and security of the Gulf states, the Levant, Central Asian nations, and indeed the whole world.

The brief report of McCain's statement makes me think he is focusing on a mosquito while ignoring an onrushing freight train. JAD

Bush Administration Fails to Fund Expectations

Source: "U.S. BUDGET: House Panel Berates Science Adviser on 2009 'Shortfall'" by Jeffrey Mervis, Science 22 February 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5866, p. 1023.

Last week members of the House Committee on Science and Technology complained that President Bush has failed to honor his financial commitment to U.S. innovation in his 2009 budget request. The America COMPETES Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by the president authorizes spending of $43 billion over 3 years to increase the U.S. pool of scientific talent and boost research spending. "Although the budget proposes spending 84% of the authorized level for DOE science, 93% for NSF, and 71% for NIST, it falls short of the overall target by $2.1 billion (see graphic)."

Comment: The administration says that the next president should meet the funding targets Bush set, but the Bush administration itself will not do so in the period in which it is within it power to do so. JAD

Should Peer Review be Confidential?

The current edition of Science magazine has an editorial by Donald Kennedy recommending that peer reviews remain confidential. It recounts the story of a legal action by a drug manufacturing firm seeking access to peer reviews for articles concerning one of its products. The New England Journal of Medicine, which is the subject of the action, guarantees reviewers anonymity, and is resisting showing the reviews to the company.

I spent many years managing peer review processes, and thinking about them and have a few comments.

• I have found it useful to tell reviewers that I would forward the text of their reviews directly to the scientist making the reviewed submission, and that the text should be professional and suitable for professional communication among peers. After all, it is the original author who will have to refute the criticisms, revise his/her work, and/or go back to the bench to do better next time. In fact I tended to edit the reviews to try to assure such professionalism.
• I have also found it useful to offer the reviewers that I would not inform the reviewed of the reviewer identity. Of course, sometimes the identity can be guessed from the nature of the review.
• It is important that if you can not in fact guarantee confidentiality, you should not tell reviewers that have a guarantee. Reviewers are at best underpaid for their work, and more often do reviews pro bono, and for that reason it is especially important not to mislead them.
• Sometimes reviewers feel the need to submit their own data with a review. Doing so provides a basis for the editors to continue an interchange with original authors on their submissions. I can understand that sometimes that data should be held confidential. It might, for example, not yet have gone thru its own peer review process and been published, and thus open to misinterpretation if made public. It might alternatively be commercially proprietary. It seems to me that the reviewer should not be offered confidentiality unless such a justification is made. It also seems to me that the law should allow for confidentiality in selected cases.

The case of epidemiological data about the efficacy and/or safety of pharmaceuticals has an ethical aspect, in that there are public health issues. I wonder if in such cases, the court might appoint a scientific advisory panel to review the confidential data, under bonds of confidentiality, to assure that patients would not be endangered by its being withheld.

How will e-learning change in the next half century

I was talking to a group of graduate students about the use of information and communications technology in international education yesterday, and suggested that the technology would transform education in their lifetimes. For that reason, we are trying to get students used to current technology. In our current course we are using electronic reserves, email, online readings, social bookmarking, discussion boards, a classroom with computer and projector, video clips and Power Point presentations in the classroom, computers to analyze data and display information in an interactive fashion.

It made me think. It is now 50 years since I first taught at a university. I had the previous year learned to program on the Standards Western Automatic Computer, SWAC. Built in 1950, the SWAC was perhaps the first computer made using existing technology, simply to function as a computing device, rather than as an experimental device to advance the state of technological art. While it was already being replaced, it was deemed more than adequate for undergraduates. It was a machine lacking even an assembly language, with a tiny memory and millisecond clock speed.

Of course there were no video recorders, few sound recorders, and the sales of color TVs had begun only five years previously. UCLA had, as I remember, two computers, and was seen as a leader in the field. Lasers were being invented, as were integrated circuits, and fiber optics were in the future. Had anyone suggested that in my lifetime there would be a billion personal computers, each with many times the power of the largest commercial machine, all connected by an internet that included satellite linkages I might well have suggested psychiatric care!

What does the future hold from today's students? I simply can not immagine!

"FCC Head Says Action Possible on Web Limits"

Source:Cecilia Kang, The Washington Post, February 26, 2008.

Excerpt:

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission yesterday sharply questioned Internet service providers who control consumers' Web access over their networks, and suggested the agency could intervene against the practice.

Kevin J. Martin made his remarks at an unusual off-site hearing to address complaints that cable provider Comcast restricts the flow of content -- such as video and music clips -- through file-sharing service BitTorrent. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet and a proponent of so-called net neutrality rules barring online traffic controls, offered opening remarks. "While carriers will assert the need to manage networks in their current state of evolution, we need to remember that Internet freedoms are most properly thought of as consumer-centric," he said.

Comment: Good for Martin and Markey! I hope they continue to view net neutrality as a consumer right, and act to protect those rights.

Net neutrality is also important to maintain an open environment that allows innovation, while this technology is new and growing, Doing so is important to our economy, and to our political and cultural systems.

I can imagine situations in which a provider might reasonably have to deviate from net neutrality (e.g. an earthquake knocks out some of the cables, and some management needs to be done to assure service to critical customers such as government and hospitals until the system can be repaired; a terrorist is surrounded in a building and the government asks that he be denied Internet access until apprehended). But I would hope that the FCC would police this authority carefully to assure that service providers not abuse it. JAD

The Complexity of Cultural Diplomacy

Last year there was a special session of the Executive Board of UNESCO to discuss excavations that had been started by the Israelis on a ramp leading to the Al Aqsa Mosque. Those excavations, described as prudent technical work to assure the safety of the ramp by the Israelis, and as deeply suspicious by some Arabs, lead to demonstrations at the work site, and a request by the Arab nations for a discussion at UNESCO. An informal working group met in private to draft a resolution which was eventually accepted unanimously by the Executive Board. The resolution referred the matter to the World Heritage Center and its collaborating Intergovernmental Organizations, strongly encouraged the parties to the dispute to cooperate in its resolution, and required the UNESCO secretariat to monitor the process and report back to the Executive Board. The Israelis have since interrupted the excavation, the parties have been meeting to discuss solutions to the problem, and the process continues, fortunately without new outbreaks of violence

At the nominal level, the issue was protecting the most important site in the Jewish religion, a site of almost equal importance to Muslims, and a site of considerable importance to Christians, as well as protecting the safety of the pedestrians going to the Al Aqsa Mosque. More fundamentally, this is a key point of the conflict among three cultures. The political control of the holy places has triggered violence for centuries, including the Al Aqsa Intifada. The protection of the world heritage site has been the subject of debate at UNESCO for a generation.

Last night we did a role playing exercise in my class on UNESCO with students playing the parts of the members of the informal working group (Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, the United States and Norway) as well as the secretariat. I was struck by the complexity of the process involved in drafting a one page resolution. Of course, that resolution (which went almost unnoticed in the United States except by the diplomatic community) was an item of considerable interest in the middle east. More importantly, it avoided or at least postponed a flash point in the world's most explosive region.

The Israeli and Palestinian authorities were both seeking to be recognized by other states as legitimate governments with the right to negotiate for their peoples. On the other hand, each faced various factions within their own polity, some of whom favored violence over conciliation, and some of whom denied the rights of the other party. The Egyptian and Jordanian authorities, whose governments enjoy high levels of foreign aid, also have constituencies that are strongly concerned with the issues underlying the conflict; their nations have in the past been involved in Israeli-Palestinian wars, and their region is in turmoil. The United States delegation to UNESCO represented a nation in which Israel and Palestine are hot political topics, a nation at war in two other Muslim countries, and one about to enter an electoral campaign. Norway, with a highly experienced and respected diplomat at the helm, was not merely a distant neutral observer, but the representative of the European Union with its own diversity of strongly held views, and a representative of the community of nations that would hope that the conflict could be defused if not resolved at UNESCO. Moreover, the individual negotiators were individuals with their own views facing a prolonged negotiation (stretching far into the night) with a need to report to their colleagues from the 50 or so other nations participating in the Executive Board.

Even the Secretariat of UNESCO headquarters and the World Heritage Center had complex tasks. Their charter of course called for protecting the peace, encouraging the dialog among nations and among cultures, and protecting world cultural heritage. But the leaders of the organization also had to be responsive to the 191 nations, each with a vote in the governing "General Conference", most of whom sided with the Palestinian cause. They also had to be responsive to the countries that supply the majority of the organizations budget, and the United States and United Kingdom had left UNESCO in the past when the organization had acted in ways that they would not accept, leaving a deep hole in the budget, Moreover, there was bureaucratic conflict about the degree of control that UNESCO headquarters would exercise over the World Heritage Center, which has its own, independent governance.

One of the students caught me in a hallway after the class, exclaiming that she had no idea that diplomacy was so complicated!

I suspect that few Americans understand how important is can be that there exist organizations such as UNESCO where representatives of different governments can negotiate and try to find ways to peacefully resolve the religious, cultural, political and indeed economic issues that divide them and serve as potential flash points for future conflicts.

Looming Food Security Crisis for the Poor

Grain prices are rising quickly. Several factors are involved. There has been bad weather in several grain growing areas in the last year. Increased incomes in China and India are increasing demand for meat, and thus indirectly for feed grain. Animals eat a number of pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat for the table. Some land is being taken out of agriculture in China and India. Oil prices are rising, leading to increased costs for fuel and other inputs for farmers, as well as for the transport of food to market. Major grain exporting countries are restricting exports by adding export taxes to their grain exports.

The World Food Program has stated that, due to the cost increases, they will either have to have more money to buy food or have to reduce their food distributions.

The affluent will divert money from other uses to pay the added costs for the food that they want. The poor will face a much worse problem unless the world rallies to their aid.

A More Precise Language for the Characterization of Knowledge

Knowledge is a function of the brain. We know the brain is an evolved organ, and we know that the brain is fallible: even a healthy brain forgets; we misperceive things which we observe personally; we know examples of optical illusion; we misremember things we once knew.

Knowing is intimately related to our ways of remembering. We have skills which we have learned, but can not describe in words, yet we remember how to do things. We say "I will know it when I see it", meaning that the knowledge of the appearance of something is somehow in our brains, but not in a way that allows us to recreate the image. Those with dementia remember things from the distant past but not from the recent past. And of course, we have explicit memories which allow us to articulate that which we recall.

We know that different human brains function differently. Unless you learn a language early in life, your brain may well lose the ability to perceive sounds in that language that differ from those in your native language. Some people have perfect pitch. Mozart could reportedly hear a piece of music once and play it back perfectly from memory, introducing variations to show how it could be done differently. Most people can not produce an acceptable portrait of someone they know well, while there are artists who can do so easily from memory. There are sculptors who reportedly can see a sculpture complete within the block of raw material, and simply have to carve away the excess material that hides it from others. There are people with eidetic memories. Chess masters and experts in other games can remember the details of past play with a clarity and accuracy that is beyond the ability of the amateur.

We know that some of the things we believe to be true are not true. Indeed, we can assign confidence to our knowledge. We say "I know it as well as I know my own name." We say "I think" or "I believe". Gamblers regularly decide as to whether their confidence in their estimates of the odds in a betting situation justify a bet.

We use fiction to develop emotional knowledge, to empathize with the protagonists of the fictional piece, or to learn how someone might feel under given circumstances. We draw upon the visual arts and music to develop other kinds of understanding, other ways for which our brains can react to the world.

Spanish has two words, two concepts (conocer, saber) both of which translate into English "to know". Thus Spaniard speakers distinguish two ways "knowing". It would seem that English should have at least as many words for knowledge as Eskimos have for snow. that for a concept so important to the knowledge society, we should have the precision and flexibility in our language that the Eskimos have developed to talk about snow.

The brain is a very complex organ, and as we learn more about it we will learn more about the ways it stores information. This should provide us with help in improving the language, as we develop different terms for the different forms of storage.

How do we come to "know" something? There is knowledge gained independently, through direct observation or through an individual's independent reasoning. But we are social animals, and much of what we know we learn from others.

As this blog has pointed out, our culture had developed institutions with their own knowledge processes. Legal institutions produce verdicts which help us to decide whether someone is guilty or innocent. The institutions of our intelligence services produce findings as to which postulates about foreign government actions are credible or not credible. Scientific institutions produce results which indicate which hypotheses are tenable or discredited. Religious institutions produce consensus among the faithful as to which beliefs are dogma and which are heresy.

Perhaps we need to use a language which distinguishes among the different sources of information from which we gain knowledge in order to allow us to discuss our knowledge in a more precise way. Perhaps too, we need a language which captures more fully the confidence we have in specific items of knowledge.

Increasingly, as a culture, we have the ability to store and retrieve information from our surround. We can do this in books and images, in videos and recordings, and in computer memories. We can embed knowledge in institutional structures and processes, and indeed in physical objects. Robots embody the information needed to carry out manipulations that men would once have learned to preform. pharmaceuticals can embody the knowledge gained through medical science to effect a cure of a disease.

Famously, President Bush described himself as "the decider". Equally famously, he has often decided that the scientists were wrong with respect to their statements about environmental threats, and has had to reverse those decisions in some cases. He decided that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that there were linkages between Al Qaeda and Sadaam. Still controversially, he decided that that a "war on terrorism" was required following 9/11 rather than using another metaphor for the required international action to reduce the threat from terrorist activity. Using the word "know" to describe what Bush chooses to believe, independent of the bases of those beliefs seems inaccurate. So too, Scott Adams' characters in the cartoon strip Dilbert exemplify lots of different ways that people in organizations come to hold beliefs which they characterize as "knowledge", but which are radically different one from another. A language that differentiated these states of mind, one from another, might help avoid some of the dysfunctional behavior that Bush and Dilbert's characters display.

The knowledge economy, which is coming, will have the majority -- perhaps the large majority -- of the workforce as knowledge workers. With an ever increasing power over the environment, an ever increasing ability to modify and even destroy that environment, it seems prudent to have an ever more accurate means of describing the knowledge on which we base action. The knowledge society may also allow unprecedented freedom of the mind to explore and learn, a freedom that is valued to the members of our species. Not only are we likely to spend more time thinking about other than satisfying our basic human needs, we are being provided with an increasingly powerful array of technologies for obtaining and processing information in the process. All of these factors militate for a more precise and accurate language to deal with what we now lump under terms such as "knowledge," "understanding," "belief," and "skill."

McCain's Projection?

According to Wikipedia:

In psychology, psychological projection (or projection bias) is a defense mechanism in which one attributes to others one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or/and emotions.

McCain has recently implied that Barack Obama was imprudent on the basis of a remark he made during a debate.

McCain was one of the Keating five, formally sanctioned by the Senate Ethics Committee; he had accepted favors from a lobbyist, his wife was in business with the guy, and yet he participated in meetings with regulators seeking to influence their actions. Now we find a lobbyist apparently bragging to her colleagues about her influence over McCain, getting him to write letters to regulators asking for more rapid decisions, and do disturbing his aids that at least one reports telling the lobbyist to cool it! His campaign is being run by lobbyists, and lobbyists have been generating a large part of his campaign financing. Perhaps it is McCain who lacks prudence?

McCain charged that Obama is not honoring his commitment to use public financing for his presidential campaign if he receives the nomination.

McCain has apparently borrowed money for his primary campaign on a pledge of using public financing, and now seeks to abandon that public financing and the pledges he made. Perhaps McCain it is McCain who is reneging on his promise.

Bob Watson Wins AAAS Prize for Scientific Cooperation

The 2007 AAAS International Scientific Cooperation Award goes to climate scientist Robert Watson, chair of environmental science and science director of the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K. Watson was cited for his outstanding contributions toward promoting international scientific cooperation in scientific research, communication, and training, and his work on environmental and sustainable development. Watson also holds the position of chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

"Dr. Robert Watson has been for a decade the world's foremost promoter of international scientific cooperation. His efforts chairing panels of thousands of scientists who described and documented our current environmental crisis have been unparalleled and have contributed greatly to the consensus on the nature on that crisis.

Congratulations Bob!

Read more!

"Judge Shuts Down Web Site Specializing in Leaks"

Source: ADAM LIPTAK and BRAD STONE, The New York Times, February 20, 2008.

A federal judge has ordered Dynadot, its domain registrar, to shut down Wikileaks.Org. In support of freedom of speech let me report that if you want to read the documents that it posts that are generally leaked by wistleblowers, you can do so using its Internet Protocol address (http://88.80.13.160/) or mirror sites registered in Belgium (http://wikileaks.be/), Germany (http://wikileaks.de) and the Christmas Islands (http://wikileaks.cx).

E. O. Wilson's Wish

Each year, the great TED conference chooses three people who are allowed to make a "TED Prize Wish". The honor comes with a $100,000 check, but more importantly it allows the winner to present his wish to a face-to-face audience of movers and shakers, and records his presentation to disseminate over the Internet.

E.O.Wilson won a TED Prize and made his wish last year. Noting that we know very little about the biosphere, and are destroying it rapidly in spite of our ignorance, he used his wish to ask for help in creating the online Encyclopedia of Life.

Wilson is perhaps the world's foremost expert on ants. His theoretical work on biodiversity and sociobiology has changed biology. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for his writings. He is always worth hearing, but seldom more than in this presentation.

As you no doubt know, physicists are increasingly sure that most of stuff of the universe is "dark matter and energy" which we can't detect and don't understand. Wilson pointed out that microbial life is the "dark matter" of the biosphere is microbial life, which we usually can't detect and don't understand.

Watch Professor Wilson's great talk!

Two Science Leaders Call For More $ for Research

• Arden Bement gives a short interview on the Charlie Rose show calling for the rollback of government science funding to be halted and reversed. Dr. Bement is the Director of the National Foundation for Science and former head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

• Alan I. Leshner writes:

  Here we go again. on 4 February, President Bush released his fiscal year (FY) 2009 budget request to the U.S. Congress, and the news for research funding is once again mixed. Some agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy's Office of Science, are proposed for very substantial increases, but others, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are slated for flat funding or worse. This news comes after a dismal FY 2008 science funding outcome. If the new Bush budget proposal is adopted, U.S. research will see its fifth consecutive year of decreased support (in inflation-adjusted constant dollars) as compared to the increasing research investments by other nations. The news is important not only for the U.S. scientific community but also for its many international collaborators.

  He is the Chief Executive Officer of the AAAS, and this is from his current editorial for the AAAS flagship publication, Science. He calls for scientists to take on the job of educating the public so that they will demand more government funding for science and technology.

Transformational Diplomacy

The Advisory Committee on Transformational Diplomacy, created by U.S. Secretary of State Rice, produced this report recommending major changes in the way U.S. foreign policy is implemented by the State Department. Its recommendations focus on six broad categories: * Expand and Modernize the Workforce of the State Department; * Integrate Foreign Affairs Strategy and Resources; * Strengthen Our Ability to Shape the World; * Harness 21st Century Technology; * Engage the Private Sector; * Streamline the Department of State’s Organizational Structure. With the integration of the U.S. Agency for International Development into the State Department, some recommendations also are intended to apply to USAID and U.S. development assistance. The Department of State, January 2008.

I note that the report asks that scientific and technological literacy be increased in the diplomatic corps, as well as business expertise. The recommendations also suggest that U.S. diplomacy utilize information and communications technology much more effectively in the future than it has done in the past.

See a video of Secretary Rice presenting the report to the public!

A Thought About Testing

Source: "Medication Under a Microscope: Studies Raise Questions About Drugs' Efficacy Against Disease" by Rob Stein, The Washington Post, February 19, 2008.

Many studies of pharmaceutical efficacy focus on an intermediate outcome rather than a health outcome. Does a drug for diabetics control blood sugar, rather than does it reduce the probability of complications of diabetes? Does a drug reduce cholesterol, rather than does it reduce the probability of cardiovascular disease?

This approach makes sense if and only if the intermediate indicators is really implicated as a causal factor of the negative health outcome. It is much stronger if there exists a tracking system that allows public health officials to track whether, when approved and used in the population, the drug is associated with better health, or whether there is too high a rate of side effects.

One aspect of the decision as to whether this process is acceptable is cost-effectiveness. If one were using a comparable technique for quality control of a pot manufacturing line (e.g. testing the quality of clay being used to make the pots rather than the strength of the pots coming off the line) that would be enough. Who cares if a few pots break?

In the case of pharmaceuticals, one wants to balance the health risks to the subjects of the research with the health risks to patients who will take the drug if it is approved.

I have hope that we will do much better in the future in figuring out which patients are helped and which are not helped by drugs. There seems to be a lot of interaction of the pharmaceutical and the genetics and epigenetics of the patients. So too, there is a lot of placebo effect. Perhaps as we know more, we can generate information more effectively and more safely.

Institutions and Technology Transfer

This is the fourth in a series of postings that I began with a posting on the World Bank's report titled Global Economic Prospects 2008: Technology Diffusion in the Developing World. I continued with "A Thought About Wealth and Technological Diversity". The third in the series was "Still More on Wealth, Markets and Technological Diversity."

I wrote about the creation of common markets and my idea that the growth of larger market areas has lead to a more complex web of technology. Of course, the elaboration of the transportation and communications infrastructure has made possible the larger market sizes, which in turn is related to the developments in transportation and communications technology.

I want to think more about other institutions.

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and the Information Revolution both involved periods of globalization. The Industrial Revolution took place in the context of colonial empires which were dismantled in the 20th century. On the other hand, the 20th century saw the proliferation of thousands of intergovernmental organizations. The webs of colonial institutions in the Industrial Revolution and of intergovernmental institutions in the Information Revolution have had major impacts on the international flows of technology. Think about the World Trade Organization and the various UN decentralized agencies such as WHO, FAO, and UNIDO, as well as the International Financial Institutions such as the World Bank.

The rise of multinational corporations in the 20th century is another factor which has influenced the rate of technology development and flows among countries. Of course firms producing goods in poor areas of the world for markets in rich areas is not a new phenomenon. However, it seems new to me to see multinational firms moving their high technology production lines away from their home countries to Asia is a new phenomenon. Newer still is the movement of research and engineering functions to developing nations. It seems obvious that these multinational firms are a new institutional form with major implications for the location of technological capacities.

Still More on Wealth, Markets and Technological Diversity

I seem to be embarked on a series of posting, as I think through an issue on technological indexes. I began with a posting on the World Bank's report titled Global Economic Prospects 2008: Technology Diffusion in the Developing World. I continued with "A Thought About Wealth and Technological Diversity". This is the third in the series.

Think about the Industrial Revolution. It was the epoch of mass markets. Large numbers of people were able to emerge from subsistence levels to satisfy the next emerging felt needs (here I refer to Maslow's needs hierarchy). Mass production involved mechanization to realize economies of scale, through the American System of manufacturing extending to Ford's auto production lines. Steam engines powered the factories as well as the railroads and steamships that distributed the manufactured goods through their mass markets. The telegraph helped to schedule the system, as did the emergence of large, hierarchical organizations. The printing press lead to the development of catalogs and print media funded by the advertisers selling into mass markets.

In thinking about the Information Revolution, i am guided by books such as The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson and Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn. The post-industrial societies are populated by people who have largely satisfied their basic needs, and are more motivated by needs for self actualization. The technology allows targetting smaller and smaller segments of the market, and manufacturing more diversified products. The Internet and point to point communication replaces mass media, and transportation systems allow much more disaggregated distribution patterns.

I suggest that the Industrial Revolution took place in a time in which circumstances encouraged and rewarded innovations promoting mass markets, while the Information Revolution is taking place in a time in which circumstances encourage and reward more innovations promoting highly differentiated markets for some goods, while continuing to reward mass markets for other goods (commoditization of computer operating systems, commercial aircraft, commercial freighters, etc.), often those which require very large initial investments prior to production.

Think then about the size of markets. Assume it takes 50,000 units to justify a productive activity. That would be one person out of 1000 if the geographic market included 50 million people. It would require only one person out of 10,000 if the market included 500 million people. This would suggest that expanding markets, as has been done by the creation of multinational regional markets such as the European Common Market, can also encourage innovation in manufacturing, distribution, advertising, and business models.

Thus I would suggest that higher per capita income found in rich nations encourages more innovation to meet the increasingly diversified markets responding to increasing attention to self actualization needs, and that the expansion of markets across national boundaries also encourages more innovation. In this latter case, there is both the innovation involved in new mass production activities, such as would be involved in the creation of satellite communications systems and commercial airliners, but also in the creation of new products for niche markets and the processes for their manufacture, sales and distribution.

Since World War II, the poorest countries have remained very poor, while rich countries have continued to grow richer. Thus the range in per capita GDP has grown larger. Moreover, the European Common Market and the North American Free Trade Association have increased the market size for the richest nations. (Indeed, for some high income products markets have indeed become much more global.) If my argument above is correct, then the technology gap should have become much wider between the largely subsistence economies in the poorest nations and the post-industrial economies of the most affluent regions.

Think of a society's technology as a complex structure of interlocking units, which is pyramidal in form. The peak technologies in the modern world might be those which allow the planning of a manned voyage to mars, or the creation of a web of satellite communications and remote sensing devices, or perhaps the World Wide Web built over an infrastructure of a billion computers connected via a global fiber optic and satellite communications network.

While there may well be a more rapid transfer of technologies to developing countries at the base of these pyramids -- cell phones, improved seeds, new pharmaceutical products -- I don't see much transfer of the ability to travel to other planets or to build satellite networks to developing nations.

Moreover, new peak technological capabilities are being created in developed nations that can barely be recognized in developing nations. For example, models are being created to simulate the human body going down to a cellular level, using ganged networks of supercomputers.

I suspect that the technological gap between rich and poor nations is greater now than at any time in the past. In terms of the metaphor of the structure of a societies technologies, comparing the rich areas of the world versus the poorest, the rich have both a more complex and extensive structure and higher technological peaks.

David Baltimore on the Bush Administration

Source: "Tell Us What You Really Think, Professor Baltimore," Science Now,February 15, 2008.

Outgoing AAAS president and Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrapped up his Friday night opening address at the AAAS annual meeting sayin: America needs a political change, and President George W. Bush has been bad for science and bad for the world.

"I've held my breath awaiting new leaders in Washington ... who I consider true Americans," he said. The lines elicited neither applause nor boos from the crowd of about 1200. He called for a science debate among presidential candidates. "The United States allowed itself to become mesmerized by the terrorist threat," he said. Baltimore marveled at "how much growth there is in Europe while the US has been fighting in Iraq," blasted Congress and the White House for passing "a budget that does not meet the needs" of American science, and called on Americans to "hold our head low in penance for the horrors inflicted by our country in Abu Ghraib."

A Thought About Wealth and Technological Diversity

A number of economists have suggested that technological innovation is the route to wealth, or at least the route that has been taken by modern developed nations. My last posting suggested the converse -- that wealth might be a good surrogate indicator of technological innovativeness.

Subsistence economies are relatively simple. Subsistence farmers work long and hard to eke out a living from their land, and have little time to produce goods other than the bare necessities.

As economic productivity continues, the portion of income spent on necessities tends to decrease. There is only so much one can eat, so much clothing the average person cares to own. Even in an age of McMansions, there is only so much people are willing to allocate of their income and wealth to shelter.

Economic progress then means people will opt for leisure, or they will opt for new products. Thus the more an economy grows the more differentiated its portfolio of goods and services.

Economies have been getting bigger, but even in our age of globalization, I think most goods are produced and consumed within a limited geographic area. That area may now be North America rather than an individual state, or Europe rather than an individual European nation. But within the market area of a rich market, there is a huge and complex set of products produced and consumed.

Correspondingly, therefore, there is a huge and complex set of technologies involved in those products and their production. Moreover, as economists have pointed out, the continued economic growth of those regions depends on continued innovation in products and processes.

Economies rising from subsistence to greater affluence can be expected to follow to some degree the path previously taken by now affluent countries. They will seek a better, more varied diet for their people, education and health services to meet basic needs, etc. To some degree they are more likely to pick up product and production technologies that have already been used in richer countries.

They are more likely to focus inventive activities on adaptation of technologies to better meet their needs, and to deepening of technological capacities, as opposed to inventing totally new products and services -- although that too is possible.

In our globalizing world, developing nations may import technology with which to produce for export markets, taking advantage of their sources of cometitive advantage (raw materials, low cost labor, etc.).

They are unlikely to start from scratch to build a new and complex industry to satisfy a demand that has yet to be created.

Global Economic Prospects 2008: Technology Diffusion in the Developing World

Source: The Economist (February 7, 2008)

The World Bank has issued its latest edition of Global Economic Prospects. This, 2008 edition focuses on technology diffusion to the developing world.

Summary: "Technological progress in developing countries between the 1990s and 2000s has been very strong, outpacing that in developed countries by 40 to 60 percent, according to a World Bank report, Global Economic Prospects 2008: Technology Diffusion in the Developing World. But the gap between rich and poor countries is still very wide."



The report was also the basis for a long article in The Economist of February 7, 2008.

COMMENT

I suspect that this indicator does not really work. Lets think about technology and development for a bit.

Scandinavian nations are not at the technology frontier for growing mango and papaya, nor are they heavy users of madical techniques for the treatment of tropical diseases; Equatorial countries don't utilize a lot of techniques for treatment of frostbite, nor is their technology for heating very strong. Obviously technology transfer is of concern for economic development only where that technology can be usefully utilized in the recipient country.

More to the point, the technology that a country needs depends on the industries that it operates. There are only a few nations in the world that have industries building commercial jet aircraft. Similarly, we see few nations with large scale silicon chip factories, manufacturers of railroad equipment, etc. Ethical pharmaceutical development and manufacture too is an industry concentrated in a few developed nations. An index that focused on the technologies in these industries would find very little transfer to developing nations, and practically none to Sub-Saharan Africa.

There is of course a considerable literature on "high technology exports". This makes sense, but runs into the problem that new technologies are continuously being invented, and older technologies are being mastered in new countries and the related productive activities transferred to them. It seems to me that the division between "developed nations" and "less developed nations" is useful, even though some newly industrialized nations are making the transition between the two states. I think the developed nations tend to have and continue to develop high technology industries, and the World Bank report perhaps obscures this phenomenon.

The issue for developing, and indeed all countries, is whether they are using the best technology to serve their needs.

It is well known that worker productivity is enhanced through appropriate capital investment. Buying a worker appropriate machinery with which to work can greatly increase productivity. Providing a farmer with irrigation and leveled land can similarly increase the productivity of his labor, as can providing him with working capital to purchase improved seed and chemical inputs.

It is for that reason that economists use changes of total factor productivity as an indicator of technological progress. While capital investment usually involves changes in technique, it is useful to distinguish the economic progress that comes primarily from increasing capital per worker, and that which comes from working smarter.

It seems to me, however, that it may be more useful to open the black box, and use expert judgment to measure the quality of technology in use in developing nations. Is the poor farmer using seed that embodies the best genetic potential for his needs? Does he have the best machinery he can afford? Does he have chemical inputs that are appropriate to his needs and resources, at the times he needs them? Is the agricultural research system developing the new varieties and practices that the farmer needs in a timely fashion, and are the extension and other institutions making them available in a timely fashion?

One could make a similar example for health technologies. Does the patient get the best treatment and medication that he can afford? Is the medical system innovating appropriately and in a timely fashion? Are the health service practioners updating their techniques appropriately and in a timely fashion. Does the health education system help families to learn about new hygiene and public health interventions?

There is a concept of a technological frontier. The frontier marks the best that the society knows how to do with available resources. We are concerned with both how far actual productive enterprises are from that technological frontier, and whether the frontier is advancing sufficiently rapidly. We can conceptualize producers simultaneously:

• increasing productivity through new capital investment;
• moving closer to the technological frontier through increasing mastery of available technologies,
• advancing the technological frontier through innovation. and
• moving into new productive enterprises that offer new and more beneficial ways of employing resources.
  

Kosovo Versus the Confederacy

With the debate on the separation resolution in Kosovo, it occurs to me share something that President Grant wrote in his memoirs. The United States fought a Civil War when southern states sought to secede from the Union; the northern states won and continued the Union.

Grant wrote that in 1776, probably no one in North America would have thought that colonies did not have the right not to join the Union. He thought their claim to the right to secede would have been reduced in 1789 when the Constitution was written. But Grant wrote that the war with Mexico and the subsequent purchase of a huge tract of land clearly established the right of the Union to maintain itself against states that sought to secede. The cost in money and blood was high, and the northern states had, according to Grant, the right to demand that the area joined to the Union as a result stay part of the Union (they would have joined the southern states).

He did not address the Louisiana Purchase, which also might have been seen as a joint undertaking of all the original states, creating a larger Union.

"Delay Of Report Is Blamed On Politics"

Subtitle: "Document Suggests Public Health Risks Near Great Lakes," by Kari Lydersen, The Washington Post, February 18, 2008.



"The lead author and peer reviewers of a government report raising the possibility of public health threats from industrial contamination throughout the Great Lakes region are charging that the report is being suppressed because of the questions it raises. The author also alleges that he was demoted because of the report.

"Chris De Rosa, former director of the division of toxicology and environmental medicine at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), charges that the report he wrote was a significant factor in his reassignment to a non-supervisory "special assistant" position last year."

The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative group, has posted portions of the disputed report on its Web site.

Comment: Do we really need another charge of the Bush administration blocking a scientific report? It is not only fish killed by pollution that stinks! JAD

What you read may not be what you get

Source: "So Who's Counting?" by Peter Baker, The Washington Post, February 18, 2008.

At a briefing in Dar es Salaam yesterday about the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Mark Dybul, the president's global AIDS coordinator, said:

"The president is requesting an increase for our contribution to the Global Fund, an increase above his last year request from $300 million to $500 million."

"A casual listener might think the United States is increasing its contribution to the Global Fund. Not really: As is often the case with Washington budget claims, it's important to look at exactly what is being asserted. Bush did request$300 million for the Global Fund for the current fiscal year, but Congress decided to go further and approved $841 million. So even though Bush's request for $500 million for the next fiscal year is higher than he requested the year before, in reality it would cut the contribution back from the $841 million it is getting in cold hard cash this year."

How Kids Learn

Source: "Playing to Kids' Learning Mode Can Be a Flop," The Washington Post, February 18, 2008.

"The theory: Children can be identified as visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners -- that some do better by seeing material, some by hearing it and others by experiencing it -- and learn best when lessons are presented to appeal to their best modality.

"The debunker: Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, says that the theory seems to make sense but that research shows it isn't entirely true."

Quotations

From today's Washington Post:

Sir Francis Bacon, 1605: For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things . . . and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture.

Education reformer John Dewey, 1909: [Critical thinking is] active, persistent and careful consideration of a belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds which support it and the further conclusions to which it tends.

The Economist on E-Government

Source: The Economisf, February 14, 2008.

Grand Challenges of Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering has announced the results of its effort to identify the Grand Challenges of Engineering:

• Make solar energy economical
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration methods
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Reverse-engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Advance personalized learning
• Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Scientists Without Borders

Scientists without Borders is a new initiative created by the New York Academy of Sciences. The venture aims to address health and other problems in the developing world by bringing together scientists from disparate specialties, organizations, and locations.

The first project of Scientists Without Borders will be a Web portal. This portal is to assemble information about the location, goals, needs, and other attributes of research-based and capacity-building projects taking place in sub-Saharan Africa as well as a roster of scientists who are willing to help. Eventually it will expand to include the rest of the developing world.

Three from WP's Outlook Section

Three related op-ed pieces in the Outlook section of today's Washington Post caught my attention today:

1. "The Dumbing Of America" by Susan Jacoby

   Jacoby has written The Age of American Unreason, taking off from Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In her op-ed piece, she decries new trends in the United States:
   a. the substitution of watching video for reading,
   b. the erosion of general knowledge (people don't know geography or languages), and
   c. increasing arrogance about that lack of knowledge.



2. "The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading" by Howard Gardner

   Gardner agrees that we are reading less, but suggests that the use of media has changed radically in the past, and the current change is just part of that long term process. He suggests that the ability to read and write will continue to be important, that the standards of "good writing" will continue to evolve, and that new forms of literacy will arise (and become important to our evolving culture. Still, he recognizes that we will give up important capabilities if we lose the knack of reading complex books.

3. "Not Reading An Iota in America" by Randy Salzman

   Salzman recounts an experience in Juvenal Court where a large number of people sat for hours with nothing to read. He recognizes that one of the gaps between mainstream culture in the United States and the underclass culture is that the people in the latter culture do not read even as much as do average Americans.

Comment: The authors are of course correct in recognizing a reduction in reading in the United States, and I fear a dumbing down of the U.S. public in recent decades.

I am old enough that I can look back in my own life. As a child I went to the movies once a week, read a lot, and listened to the radio a lot. I often read while listening to the radio. Those were the days before television. I was 13 before there was a telephone in my house. I used both the school library and the public library, and there were books in my home. We took a daily paper.

In the television age, I watched television, went to fewer movies, listened to radio but only in the car, and continued to read. I often read while the television was on, multitasking.

In the age of the personal computer, I continue to read (using my Kindle now as well as books), and subscribe to a newspaper and several magazines. But I spend hours a day on the Internet. Email and blogging tend to substitute for a lot of conversation. I continue to multitask (the TV is on in the background as I write this, occasionally consulting the articles cited above via the Internet). I still teach at the university level, and I belong to a book club (as I did a very long time ago.)

I note that I remember very little of the material I so patiently absorbed during decades of reading complex materials. I now am very demanding that the things I read compress their key points, and I love the Internet format. Note that I have just introduced the three articles above, linking them with hypertext. The interested reader can read them in depth, while others can just skip down the page.

We are already pushing "information literacy" which includes both the ability to find information quickly in cyberspace and to evaluate the trustworthiness of that information. There is numeracy, which is I suppose a specific aspect of quantitative literacy, or the ability to utilize quantitative data and tools. There is scientific and technological literacy. How about political literacy, cultural literacy, and geographical literacy? I am sure we will identify other forms of literacy in the future, and indeed demand that our children become literate in these new ways.

Perhaps we will need a "multitasking literacy" which includes the ability to include important content in the media to which we are attending, and to attend sufficiently to the most important content to absorb what we need.

None of the three authors discusses "wisdom". The president of the United States literally has millions of people working to provide him with the information he needs, with great accuracy and clear information on its reliability, in the most convenient format for absorption and utilization. He should gain more knowledge in a month than most of us can absorb in a year. However, it takes what we call wisdom to use that knowledge well, and to make good decisions for the welfare of our nation and our world. JAD

USAID/s Global Development Forum

Henrietta Fore of USAID, and Director of foreign assistance talks about the Global Development Commons and invites you to participate in it.

The Global Development Commons (GDC), an initiative by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is intended to bring together the ground-breaking changes taking place in development with the rapid advancements in information technology and web communication. According to USAID Frontlines (page 2):

Taking a cue from Wikipedia – the popular online, user-generated encyclopedia – the Commons initiative is designed to be a “shared responsibility” of all who use it. USAID will, however, monitor its implementation, publicize its existence, and encourage new partners to join.

The GDC is to build and improve on the existing development information architecture (websites, portals, blogs, chat rooms, conferences, gatherings, etc.) to create a comprehensive network that allows users to search for information, facilitate dialog, and trade or exchange products and ideas. The physical components of the GDC - meetings and forums such as global HIV/AIDS conferences and joint donor-recipient country planning processes - should gather relevant stakeholders to discuss and share ideas with members of the commons. When these communities are linked together, they create a landscape of existing development-oriented information sites (both physical and virtual).

International aid experts and officials attended a USAID forum to discuss the GDC on Nov. 27, 2007. The forum’s keynote speaker was James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress (who is leading an effort by the Library of Congress and UNESCO to develop a World Digital Library). Other speakers involved in projects similar to the GDC included Mark Fleeton, chief executive officer of the Development Gateway Foundation; Helga Leifdottir, chief coordinator of the U.N.’s ReliefWeb; and Corey Griffin, director of Microsoft’s International Development Aid Agencies.

More information should be available on the Global Development Forum soon.

"The Knowledge Connection"

Source: E.D. Hirsch Jr., The Washington Post, February 16, 2008.

This looks like a very good article recommending that a scientific panel be convened (again) to recommend improved approaches to teaching kids to read and understand what they have read. He complains that current programs implementing No Child Left Behind intent to improve reading skills are poorly conceived because they are not based on the best understanding of how to teach reading for comprehension.

Hirsch writes:

Why has the No Child Left Behind law left so many children behind? According to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading achievement of eighth-graders has declined since the law was passed in 2001, and the large reading gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children -- "the achievement gap" -- has stayed where it was. Today's eighth-graders had recorded gains in fourth grade, but these have not led to improvements in later grades -- when reading scores actually count for a student's future.......

Consider the eighth-grade NAEP results from Massachusetts, which are a stunning exception to the nationwide pattern of stagnation and decline. Since 1998, the state has improved significantly in the number of eighth-graders reading at the "proficient" or "advanced" levels: Massachusetts now has the largest percentage of students reading at that higher level, and it is No. 1 in average scores for the eighth grade. That is because Massachusetts decided in 1997 that students (and teachers) should learn certain explicit, substantive things about history, science and literature, and that students should be tested on such knowledge.

The sure road to adequate progress in reading is adequate progress in knowledge. Congress and the states should note that the best tests to "teach to" are subject-matter tests based on explicit content standards for each grade. Massachusetts's results confirm that this is the best way to measure and to achieve real progress in reading. The revisers of No Child Left Behind, and all who are connected with our schools, need to be cognizant of -- and do something about -- the critical knowledge connection.

Comment: It seems reasonable to me that children who have basic reading skills will actually learn to comprehend better what they read if they read to learn the content of what they are reading. Of course, well written materials that are accessible to the students and interest them, in the hands of good teachers are also important. Perhaps more important still are communities where parents read, and where all the children read and discuss what they have read for pleasure and edification.

Incidentally, here is another case in which the Bush administration got the science wrong. JAD

Unfettered Free Speech Now???

The Washington Post has an op-ed piece today by Bradley A. Smith which appears to promote free speech in U.S. elections. It specifically calls for SpeechNow.org to be freed of federal election laws which would require it to be registered as a political action committee.

As far as I can figure, Smith is an expert on election law, but he was also a Republican member of the Federal Election Commission. So is his opinion real and simply something that would as a side effect empower Republicans, or is it a an disingenuous advocacy of a weakening of the election law.

The basic issue is not whether we all have the right to talk around the water cooler about politics. it is whether we will allow those with more financial resources to have a hugely disproportionate influence due to their ability to buy time on the media which form public opinion.

FutureGen Plant

The Washington Post today has an editorial titled "The Demise of FutureGen: The cancellation of a clean-coal project shows there's no silver bullet for climate change." It begins:

PRESIDENT BUSH announced in 2004 and then continually promoted a public-private venture he hoped would usher in an era of clean coal and be a cornerstone of U.S. efforts to address global warming. The FutureGen plant would have created electricity by stripping coal of harmful carbon dioxide and pumping the gas underground. The result would be power generation with zero greenhouse gas emissions. In December, Mattoon, Ill., was selected as the site for the coal plant. And then, on Jan. 30, Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman pulled the plug.

Comment: I am no expert on this technology. I have read accounts which suggest that there are few places with a geology that would guarantee that carbon dioxide sequestered underground would stay there.

What does seem clear is that this is another failure of the Bush administration's science and technology capacity. Either it was wrong a few years ago in promoting this huge project, or it is wrong now in its drastic modification. JAD

Varieties of Capitalism

I have just started Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity by William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan and Carl J. Schramm.

The authors, all associated with the Kauffman Foundation which seeks to promote industrial innovation, make the point that there are many different forms of capitalism practiced in free market nations. They define four categories:

• entrepreneurial
• big-firm
• state-directed and
• oligarchic.

They suggest that the most successful form of capitalism in promoting economic growth and wellbeing is a mixed entrepreneurial and big-firm capitalism.

The authors seem obviously correct in holding that with the departure from the international scene of Communism, we can more easily attend to the differences of among capitalist systems. Clearly many countries have been working for a very long time to create capitalist economic institutions that best fit their needs and concerns.

Now all we need to do is figure out the best combination of social safety net and free market economy, and then figure out the best political system, and work out the details of a political economy combining the two.

Thought based on an Interview of Lee Siegel

The interview of the author of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob was by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, a comedy program. Siegel points to some dangers of internet mediated interaction. His point seemed to be that too many people were role playing on the Internet, and the lack of clues provided in the actual presence of the person doing the role playing made it too easy for others to be taken in.

Clearly there is a basis for that position. We get a lot of information from seeing the person we are communicating with. Indeed, we get information from smelling people. If we are in the same physical environment with the person, we know whether that person is sweating from the heat of from tension. A lot of that communication is implicit rather than explicit, but it takes place. We can also better provide feedback to the person we are communicating with if we are physically present.

And surely Siegel is right that young people should be warned about those who would exploit their credulity using chat rooms or social networking sites, and the credulous should be helped to deal with the unscrupulous.

But people love to play, and role playing is something we do all the time. Poker has become a popular for television programming largely because it is fun to watch people fooling each other, and getting caught in the act. In this political season, it seems very clear that candidates are using these skills of deception, and that voters need to use their skills of detecting deception -- both of which are learned in part through play.

Of course, there is a huge area of Internet mediated communication that is not deceptive, including I suspect the majority of communication that goes on in chat rooms and social networking sites. Lets hope that we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

My son suggests that Siegel's book is not likely to be that good, so I didn't provide a link to it. The interview, which is linked above, is fun.

Symposium on Comparative Analysis of National Research Systems

The Symposium on Comparative Analysis of National Research Systems was held in UNESCO headquarters in Paris, 16-18 January 2008. it provided a venue of discussion on the basis of Professors’ Johann Mouton and Roland Waast studies on knowledge and research systems of 52 low and middle-income countries. About 130 experts were invited to compare and exchange knowledge and views on the methodology and the quality of the country reviews.

The meeting publications provide a mapping of research systems, with special emphasis on national policies, infrastructure, human capacities and investment. The other objective of the meeting was to highlight the importance of launching a flexible template with appropriate indicators that may be used by interested countries to give them the opportunity to study their research systems and to compare them on a wider scale with the view of identifying priority needs for policy making and capacities building.

The Internet Freedom Preservation Act

There is new legislation that needs your support to protect net neutrality.

My Grandniece showing good taste

The Clintons and Vinod Gupta

Screenshot from Vinod Gupta's website. This is from BlogsofWar. The original is from Web Archives (January 12, 2006)

I am surprised that I had not heard of the relation between the CEO of infoUSA and the Clintons. CNNMoney.com reports:

InfoUSA is currently faced with a shareholder lawsuit and Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. The shareholder lawsuit claims the company misspent millions, some of it on Bill and Hillary Clinton. The lawsuit questions why InfoUSA founder Vin Gupta used private corporate jets to fly the Clintons on business, personal and campaign trips, why Gupta gave Bill Clinton a $3.3 million consulting contract and why the company paid for luxuries Gupta enjoyed.

National Public Radio questioned the financial arrangements for use of Clinton campaign mailing lists by a Gupta company. Underwire, a Wired blogger mentions:

Conspiracy theorists on the web have wondered whether or not an October poll by the polling company, declaring that African Americans support Hillary over Obama, was accurate.

Education for Sustainable Development

I am coordinating a class this semester at George Washington University. It is titled UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century. (I will send the syllabus to anyone interested in starting a similar course.) This video was used by students Monday evening in their class on UNESCO's Education Program.

The five minute video is from the official international launch of the Decade for Sustainable Development on 1 March 2005 in New York, USA. This video was produced by the Center for Environment Education, India. It features comments by Director General Matsuura of UNESCO.

Donna Edwards Wins

Yesterday was a long day that I spent in the cold as a Democratic precinct watcher.

I have been posting my support for Donna Edwards in the Democratic primary for the 4th Congressional District of Maryland. I am pleased to report that she gained 60 percent of a terrific turnout in the primary, and Al Wynn -- her opponent -- is the first incumbent to be defeated in the primary elections this year. Congratulations to Donna Edwards!

Innovation for Development: The Tokyo International Conference

Japan is hosting the Global Health Summit in February, 2008, the Tokyo International Conference for Economic Development in May, and the G-8 Summit in July. The year 2008 also marks the mid-term for the Millennium Development Goals. Professor Kiyoshi Kurokawa is directly involved in planning each of these activities. He discusses Japan’s vision for each of these major events and the essential of science, technology, and innovation in promoting sustainable, inclusive development in Africa and elsewhere. The streaming video presentation is 77 minutes long. The website has links to related materials from the World Bank.

An Interesting Book List

Bill Moyers has posted a list of books recommended by viewers of his public TV program, as important for the incoming president to read before he takes office.

"Malicious programs hit new high"

Source: BBC News, 8 February 2008

Lead: "The number of malicious programs found online has reached an unprecedented high, say security firms." The article continues: "Reports vary but some estimates suggest there were five times as many variants of malicious programs in circulation in 2007 compared to 2006. Security company Panda Software said it was getting more than 3,000 novel samples of so called malware every day. Criminals pump out variants to fool anti-virus programs that work, in part, by spotting common characteristics."

U.S. Universities Expanding Overseas

Carnegie Mellon University’s campus in Doha, Qatar,
where an American education is available to Persian Gulf students.

We knew this but a new New York Times article confirms:

The American system of higher education, long the envy of the world, is becoming an important export as more universities take their programs overseas.

In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts in countries with limited higher education opportunities. American universities — not to mention Australian and British ones, which also offer instruction in English, the lingua franca of academia — are starting, or expanding, hundreds of programs and partnerships in booming markets like China, India and Singapore.

And many are now considering full-fledged foreign branch campuses, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. Already, students in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar can attend an American university without the expense, culture shock or post-9/11 visa problems of traveling to America.

NSA In Charge of U.S. Government Cyber Security

Last month, President Bush signed a classified directive putting all cyber-defense and counter-offensive activity for government networks under the aegis of the National Security Agency. As one might expect, this generated some comment in cyberspace (e.g. see the Slashdot coverage). Part of that of course is due to the well earned distrust of the Bush administration's attitudes towards civil liberties.

I don't really know enough about cybersecurity to offer an opinion. Clearly attacks on the government and other information infrastructure are a serious threat, both in terms of the ease of mounting them and their potential impact. Equally clearly, protecting against such threats is a large and complex, evolving task which requires a highly-professional, well-equipped, well-organized staff.

I suspect there ought to be a government agency that provides protection for the national information infrastructure -- which is primarily non-governmental. The federal government has as one of its most important functions the protection of this country from foreign threats. It is also our major source of protection from interstate crime. Thus, I look to the federal government to protect the national information infrastructure from both foreign and domestic threats. So perhaps one concern is that the President's initiative has not gone far enough.

By reputation, the National Security Agency is the strongest government agency in terms of technical capacity to deal with cyberspace. Thus, at least initially, there would seem to be a reasonable argument for the NSA to be asked to provide protection.

My guess is that it takes time to figure out whether an attack in cyberspace is being made from a source within the United States or in a foreign country. Moreover, many attacks would seem likely to involve servers both here and abroad. Even assuming that one could figure out the source of a malicious attack, it might be too late to respond when that information was developed. This might be especially true if, say, the NSA determined an attack was domestic, and then tried to turn over responsibility for responding to a domestic agency. So again, there seems to be an argument that a single agency be designated to be responsible for all cybersecurity.

Of course, there is a concern that an agency charged with protecting the nation's information infrastructure might be misused to spy on our own citizens and residents. (I am not sure that we should not also be concerned about inappropriate spying on foreign nationals. Some of the reports of past bugging of friendly governments suggest that we need strong controls on surveillance abroad as well as at home.) I suggest, however, that such risks can be managed, and made small enough to accept in order to improve our cybersecurity.

Perhaps what we need is a strong agency to take responsibility for cybersecurity nationwide, including for both governments and the private sector. I suppose the Transportation Safety Administration could be a conceptual model for such an agency.

There is a major split in the U.S. Government between domestic and foreign policy functions. Nonetheless as globalization continues, more and more functions have to cross that artificial boundary. The Federal Aviation Administration has to deal with airplanes crossing our borders all the time. The Food and Drug Administration monitors the manufacture of pharmaceuticals outside the United States when they are to be shipped here. Still, it might be as well to have a single agency protecting our infrastructure against domestic and foreign attack, and to eventually allow the NSA to go back to its primary function of gathering information for the intelligence community. Or not!

"Human races or human race?"

The Economist has an interesting article this week, citing research by Lluís Quintana-Murci and his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute which sheds light on the diversity of human genomes. The researchers

found 55 genes that showed evidence of having undergone significant localised evolution. Six controlled skin pigment and hair development. Four helped the immune system combat disease-causing organisms, such as malarial parasites, that are a problem in some places, but absent from others. A further six regulated metabolism in various ways, probably in response to the different diets enjoyed by different people. (Some of these genes are of wider interest as they are involved in obesity, diabetes and hypertension.) Nine others had various other jobs that were also of no political significance. All in all, the school of thought which holds that humans, for all their outward variety, are a pretty homogenous species received a boost.

There were, however, 30 locally selected genes whose functions are as yet unknown. And it is possible that others have been overlooked. This result promotes the brotherhood of man. But it is probably not the last word on the matter.

Comment: Assuming only two alleles for each of the 55 genes, that suggests 32,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations possible.

I might question whether we know enough about human genetics to understand how genes affect the human organism and its behavior.

I think we are far, far away from understanding human diversity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights seems like a good approach to dealing with other people and other peoples until we do get that understanding. JAD

Freeplay Energy

Freeplay Energy made a splash a few years ago marketing its windup radio. It now has a number of products. One is a clamp mounted device that can be plugged into a OLPC XO (One Laptop Per Child) computer to power the device for a kid who does not enjoy being wired into a source of electric power. It now also has a number of lighting devices, which combine the windup energy source with fiber optics. The Freeplay Foundation, an organization separated from Freeplay Energy by a firewall, seeks to support the use of the Freeplay radio for development purposes.

This is an example of fairly high tech in a simple. low-cost format, solving problems in serving poor people in developing countries.

"A human rights statistician finds truth in numbers"

This is an interesting article by Jina Moore in The Christian Science Monitor (February 7, 2008) on Patrick Ball, the man credited with bringing the power of quantitative analysis to human rights prosecution. My hat is off to this guy who is willing to apply difficult but necessary analytic techniques to human rights cases. There can be few professions harder on ones morale, and few with greater social value in todays world.

We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United Nations has proclaimed a year long commemoration, from last December 10th to December 10th, 2008. Someone should honor Patrick Ball as part of the effort.

Quotations from Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

"To measure is to know."

"If you can not measure it, you can not improve it."

"In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be."

"Training In Developing Nations: A Handbook For Expatriates"

This looks like an interesting and useful book. I have taught in developing nations as well as in the United States, and some tips would have been useful. The editor, John L. Daly, is the Director of the Public Administration Program of the University of South Florida. To the best of our knowledge we are not related, although we share the same name.

Training in Developing Nations: A Handbook for Expatriates
by John L. Daly (Editor)
M.E. Sharpe; New Ed edition (May 30, 2005)

• Click here to read the book online on Google Books.
• Click here for a review of the book.

More Money Correlates with Less Religion

Source: "Among Wealthy Nations … U.S. Stands Alone in its Embrace of Religion," Pew Global Attitudes Project

Judicial Activism verses Restraint

I just answered a survey that focused in part on my opinions about "judicial activism" and "judicial restraint". The questions seemed to assume that a judge's duties consisted enrirely of interpreting the law. That might be the job of judges on the supreme court, who are charged I guess with determining often whether laws are constitutional, on the bases of cases decided under the laws in question.

As I understand the role of most judges, it is at least as much to interpret the facts before him, thereby determining how to apply the law. Judges also provide order in a process that allows advocates to bring controversial issues to closure. They help juries to do their jobs. They sometimes I guess encourage participants to settle issues out of court.

My point is that the surveys that I am asked to take often have badly written questions. The interviewers are not allowed to deviate from the questions. As a result, the answers don't mean much. I am not sure that a phone survey is really the way to get at public opinions on an issue as complex as judicial activism. On the other hand, one can write survey questions in a way to favor preselected responses.

Washington Post Endorses Donna Edwards

The Washington Post today endorsed Donna Edwards for the Democratic nomination for the 4th Congressional District in Maryland. I quote:

Ms. Edwards, a lawyer and foundation executive, has been an effective, energetic advocate for a range of liberal causes -- the environment, higher minimum wages, stemming domestic violence, campaign finance reform. As a community organizer, she has been an unstinting voice for improving mass-transit options, although sometimes at the expense of building roads that the 4th District badly needs. Even in cases where she clashed with local developers, however, she won their respect as a sensible and no-nonsense adversary. Poised, persistent and principled, she would make a fine representative for the 4th District.

Mr. Wynn has long touted what he regards as a pragmatic ability to work across partisan lines. We're all for bipartisanship, but in Mr. Wynn's case, too often his stances have been unthinking and out of step with his district's interests. His vote to scrap the estate tax suggested he was indifferent to his own middle-class constituents. By flip-flopping on fuel-efficiency standards and opposing campaign finance reforms, he showed his contempt for clean air and clean government. And he seems scarcely aware of the import of his votes to permit federal courts to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case and to support a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning: granting federal courts a license to meddle in private affairs and cramping free speech.

Mr. Wynn has been conscientious in his backing for small business and jobs programs, and he cites his years of legislative experience as an argument for reelection. But we think the district can do better and would with Ms. Edwards.

Donna Edwards for Congress in Maryland's 4th!

Dan Weber writes:

A new survey of 400 likely Democratic primary voters in the district shows Donna Edwards leading incumbent Albert Wynn by eight points as we head into the final days of the primary campaign.

Donna Edwards has the support of:

SEIU
UFCW Local 400
UNITE HERE
Sierra Club
Progressive Neighbors
Clean Water Action
League of Conservation Voters
Friends of the Earth Action PAC
Progressive Maryland
Progressive Cheverly
Progressive Democrats of America
Democracy for America
Democracy for Montgomery County
Montgomery County Student Government Political Action Committee
EMILY's List
National Organization for Women
Feminist Majority Foundation
Women's Campaign Forum
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now! (ACORN) PAC
People for the American Way
Maryland Del. Aisha Braveboy
Maryland Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez
Maryland Del. Joseline A. Pena-Melnyk
Former Maryland Del. Obie Patterson
Mayor Adam Ortiz, Edmonston
Duchy Trachtenburg, Montgomery County Council Member, At-large
Valarie Ervin, Montgomery County Council Member
Nancy Navarro, President of the Montgomery County School Board
Linda Thomas, Prince George's County School Board Member
Danny Glover, Actor and Activist
Gloria Steinem, Feminist Activist

And she has my support!

A Thought About Language Diversity

More than half of the 7000 languages spoken in the world are in danger of disappearing. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing. UNESCO is the site of efforts to protect these endangered languages, and especially to protect language diversity in cyberspace. Certainly there is an argument that the language in which people most easily and effectively think and communicate should be protected for the benefit of those people. Moreover, it may well be that the loss of languages will also entail the loss to all mankind of knowledge and understanding which is expressed only in those languages.

In the United States there is a debate on how to handle Spanish, which is in some parts of the country a second official language. There is a general agreement that it is useful to have a single national language that can be understood by all citizens. On the other hand, in parts of the country the majority of people are more comfortable in Spanish than English.

With increasing immigration worldwide, there is a need not only in the United States but in many countries to handle residents who do not speak the official language, or who do not speak it well. The need to find ways to deal with children in the schools who speak other than the majority language is especially complicated, since on the one hand the schools are ideal for teaching the majority language, but on the other hand, kids can't be expected to learn the content of the school curriculum in a language that they don't speak well or at all.

It occurs to me that the great civilizations seem to be held together by a common language -- Greco-Byzantine, Roman, Chinese, ancient Egyptian, British Commonwealth. I suppose a part of this is that those in political power impose their language. However, a common language may facilitate commerce. A large population speaking a common language may create a critical mass for the growth of knowledge and understanding. It may create a common culture which supports the idea of nationhood. And of course, it simplifies administration of public organizations.

Learning an international language is of course possible in addition to learing one's own local language. However, it is difficult to do so.

So do we really want to spend a lot of effort in saving dying languages, or would we be better off in promoting the diffusion and improvement of world languages?

Yes We Can!

Check out this great video based on Barack Obama's speech.

The Bush Budget

Source: SSTI Weekly Digest for February 6, 2008.

I quote:

The last budget request of a lame duck administration rarely musters much attention from Congress as its focus is turned toward the next administration and, for entire the House of Representatives, its own re-election. Not one of the previous seven budgets of the Bush years has been passed on time, so no one in Washington expects this one to be the exception.

Nevertheless, the fiscal year 2009 request provides the Bush Administration one final opportunity to outline how it would like to see the federal government spend its money. As in every previous budget request from the Bush White House, that doesn’t include much for economic development programs. “Highlights” for economic development programs include:

* Every economic development program in the Department of Agriculture is either slated for elimination or deep cuts.
* The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) would receive only $4 million, down from $89.6 million in FY08.
* Grants from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) would be slashed 60 percent, dropping from $250 million to $100 million.
* SBA grant programs for entrepreneurial assistance efforts, such as the Small Business Development Centers, SCORE and Women’s Business Centers, would see a $10 million cut for a combined total in FY09 of $87 million.
* The Minority Business Development Agency, while requesting a continuation level of $29 million, would be prohibited from spending $12 million in grant funding until the last day of the FY08 fiscal year – leaving the funding extremely vulnerable to rescissions during the year.
* Community Development Block Grants would see at least a $660 million cut according to the Housing and Urban Development request.
* The Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund would be cut to $29 million, nearly 70 percent less than the $94 million appropriated in FY08.

Whether or not this tired assault on the federal government’s role in encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship gains much traction during Congress’s budget sessions this summer remains to be seen.

Bamboo as a Building Material

Source: "Eco-friendly bamboo, 'vegetal steel,' gains ground" by JOSHUA GOODMAN, Associated Press via The GlobeandMail.com, February 1, 2008.

The building material of choice for the 21st century might just be bamboo. "The relationship to weight and resistance is the best in the world. Anything built with steel, I can do in bamboo faster and just as cheaply," said Colombian architect Simon Velez, who almost single-handedly thrust to the vanguard of design a material previously associated with woven mats and Andean pan pipes.

Velez created the largest bamboo structure ever built: the 55,200-sq. ft. Nomadic Museum, a temporary building that recently debuted in Mexico City and takes up half of the Zocalo plaza.

Read more about Guadua as a building material.

Anthropogenic Changes in Hydrology

Human influences. Dramatic changes in runoff volume from ice-free land are projected in many parts of the world by the middle of the 21st century (relative to historical conditions from the 1900 to 1970 period). Color denotes percentage change (median value from 12 climate models). Where a country or smaller political unit is colored, 8 or more of 12 models agreed on the direction (increase versus decrease) of runoff change under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "SRES A1B" emissions scenario.
Source: "CLIMATE CHANGE: Stationarity Is Dead: Whither Water Management?" by P. C. D. Milly, Julio Betancourt, Malin Falkenmark, Robert M. Hirsch, Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, and Ronald J. Stouffer, Science 1 February 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5863, pp. 573 - 574.

"Mobilizing Science-Based Enterprises for Energy, Water, and Medicines in Nigeria"

Mobilizing Science-Based Enterprises for Energy, Water, and ...
Read this FREE online! Full Book | PDF Summary

My old friends and colleagues, Mike Greene and Rita Colwell, published an editorial in Science magazine last week. It suggests that there are appropriate technologies that could improve the lives of the poor in Nigeria, and that there are business models that would allow these technologies to be used effectively. The editorial was based on a recent report published by the National Academies of Science.

Here are a coupls of excerpts:

In Karnataka, India, the Solar Electric Light Company (SELCO) sells, installs, and services solar home lighting systems to tens of thousands of poor villagers-- at a profit. Local subsidiaries of WaterHealth International of California franchise storefront water stores and community purified water systems in developing countries--at a profit. Potters for Peace of Nicaragua supports local companies manufacturing ceramic water filters. These are sustainable solutions in the sense that they do not depend on donor funds or ongoing financial support from a government, because the profit comes from sales to consumers alone......

Mobilizing Science-Based Enterprises for Energy, Water, and Medicines in Nigeria, a recent study issued by the U.S. National Academies and the Nigerian Academy of Science, addresses the potential for a sustainable approach to supplying these basic services to Nigeria's poor by encouraging private companies to become involved. This study revolved around the findings of three workshops that joined successful entrepreneurs from other countries, including executives of SELCO, WaterHealth, and Potters for Peace, with Nigerian business leaders and scientists. They prepared business models, including cost estimates, adapted to the Nigerian market for companies to manufacture, sell, and install solar photovoltaic units and water filtration systems for the rural and urban poor, and to produce the ingredients for and manufacture artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs), the most effective treatment for malaria. The malaria venture differs from the other two because of complexities in the malaria drug market. If a global subsidy for ACTs moves forward as expected, Nigerian products would have to meet international quality standards to qualify for the subsidy, and national regulatory quality controls would need to be developed and enforced, without which Nigerian ACTs could not compete with imported products.

Edwards Versus Wynn

The Washington Post had another article yesterday about the race between Donna Edwards and Al Wynn for the 4th Congressional District Democratic nomination (which in this liberal district is tantamount to election). Several other candidates are running, but don't have a realistic chance of election.

It sounds like Wynn is getting desperate, and going to negative tactics. I notice that Donna Edwards has a lot of advertisements on cable television, and they are quite good. Wynn has apparently generated some serious opposition from unions and environmentalists, as well as among those concerned with the rapid development of the Information Technology, while Donna Edwards has found supporters not only in the district, but in the national community of people interested in the environment and in promoting democracy.

Of course, candidates simplify treatment of issues in their campaigns, Donna Edwards does have more discussion of the issues on her campaign website. Still, voters tend to vote not on the issues so much as for the candidate that they feel will best represent their interests in the Congress. Donna Edwards seems to me both more likely to be an active advocate for our district, and to reflect my political philosophy in the Congress.

I bet most of the Democrats in this district share that view.

No wonder Al Wynn is running scared.

The Right to Education

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds, among other rights, that everyone has a right to basic education. I find that most people agree with the concept of that as a universal right.

We understand that education has an instrumental value. More educated people tend to earn more, contribute more to their community, have healthier families, etc. Saying that there is a right to education however, says that whether education pays off or not, society has a moral obligation to educate people.

It seems to me that global society is seeing a divergence of command of knowledge, both among countries and within countries. The great universities, the great knowledge intensive companies, the most wired societies are farther than ever from the traditional institutions of Africa. I recall Nevin Scrimshaw who earned a PhD, MD, and MPH, and board certification in a couple of fields, who is the author of over 650 publications and an author or editor of more than 20 books. That is an amount of book learning that simply could not have been obtained long ago.

It seems to me at least possible that countries could advance more rapidly economically or socially by allocating educational resources so as to maximise social benefits, while denying some people basic education. A poor country might benefit more from more public health physicians and engineers, and might be tempted to spend less on educating mentally challenged kids or minorities in order to afford the training of the experts it needs. We in the United States might decide to drop subsidies for some vocational education and community college kids in order to get a few more MIT PhDs.

But if we define a right to basic education, and rights trump expediency, we can not morally accept such options.

That of course leaves open the question of how much education do people have a right to enjoy? In this country, we feel that free and compulsary education is appropriate for our citizens through at least high school, and qualifying students can go to community colleges and public universities. (Note that we put aptitude and accomplishment as qualifications to the right to highly subsidized education in public universities.)

However, we don't feel the responsibility to see that kids in poor countries have a comparable basic education, and indeed many Americans don't feel that kids of illegal immigrants living here have equal educational rights to the children of our citizens.

An alternative formulation is in terms of educational needs. Subsistence farmers, mothers, citizens -- all these roles would seem to have associated needs for knowledge, and while basic literacy and numeracy may be common across all these roles, some of the needs clearly differ from person to person.

Does a person have a right to the basic education to provide the knowledge that we say he/she needs?

It is easy to say people have a right to basic education, but it may be difficult to operationalize that right!

Woops!

Source: "Why Voters Play Follow-the-Leader" by Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, February 4, 2008.

Excerpt:

How do we form preferences when we do not fully understand complex issues? We fall back on heuristics, or mental shortcuts. New research suggests the most powerful of these is to find leaders with whom we feel cultural kinship -- and then follow whatever they recommend.

"It is much easier to look at someone and say, 'What are those person's values -- are they like mine or not? If they are like mine, I can trust this person to come up with policies that are in my interest because they share my values,' " said Donald Braman, an anthropologist at George Washington University Law School. "This is what happens in a lot of politics."

Comment: Actually this seems like a pretty good heuristic, assuming the person you trust not only shares your values, but has considered the issue and come to a reasoned decision.

Unfortunately, some candidates have figured out that they can lie to the voters about what their values are, and get elected to make decisions that their constituents would never approve. JAD

A Thought About Choosing the Riht Metaphor

If you want to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

If your boat is sinking, the last thing you want to do is stop bailing.

So what is the right way to get out of Iraq?

American Political Families

We know that there have been two Bush family presidents, with a Senator before them. Hillary is running with Bill having been president, and Mitt Romney's father also ran for president. There were two Roosevelt presidents, and FDR's wife (who was also Teddy's niece) and sons were prominent in Democratic politics. There were two Adams presidents, a third Adams ran for president (and the photographer Ansel, and the writer Henry were also from that family). There were also two Harrison (grandfather and grandson) presidents, and the Kennedy family has generated a bunch of national leaders.

In today's Washington Post, William Booth tells us:

A full 45 percent of the members of the first Congress in 1789 had a relative who was also serving, according to Pedro Dal Bó, professor of economics at Brown University and co-author of a study on congressional dynasties. "The number of members with relatives is too high to explain away by the relatively smaller population of the United States at the time," Bó says. Two hundred years later, 10 percent of Congress has a close relative who has also served in the House or Senate. And in case you're wondering, the phenomenon crosses party lines.

The evidence is all around us: the Gores, the Murkowskis, the Rockefellers, the Bakers, the Doles, the Bonos, the Meekses, the Dodds, the Tsongases, the Chafees. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to hold the position, is the daughter of former congressman Thomas D'Alesandro Jr......

Stephen Hess, a historian at the Brookings Institution, first made his name as the author of the 1966 book "America's Political Dynasties," which begins with the fact that there have been 700 families with two or more members of Congress, and they account for 1,700 of the 10,000 men and women who have served in the House and Senate.

Edwards Versus Wynn

There is another article about the Edwards-Wynn race for the Maryland 4th District in today's Washington Post. I am a resident of that District, and I support Edwards.

Excerpt:

Prince George's County lawyer Donna F. Edwards has raised more in campaign money over the past four months than U.S. Rep. Albert R. Wynn, a sign that what was once an upstart effort to oust the eight-term incumbent has turned into a serious challenge......

Edwards's latest filings reflect previous reports. She received the bulk of her money, 95 percent, from individual donors.......

Wynn has been largely funded by political action committees, including many that represent large companies and industry groups. Seventy-one percent of money raised in the latest period came from PACs.....

Independent groups, including the Service Employees International Union and the League of Conservation Voters, have been pouring money into the district in independent efforts to oust Wynn. They say that he has catered to corporate interests and allied himself too often with Republicans.......

The liberal group moveon.org recently bought more than $150,000 in TV ads, and the League of Conservation Voters has spent more than $120,000 since December. All told, more than $1.2 million in independent expenditures have been logged against Wynn......

But last week, the political action committee of the National Association of Realtors reported that it is spending more than $300,000 on an independent effort to support Wynn.

Comment: I have no doubt that in this District, people should vote with the Employees International Union, the environmentalists, and MoveOn.org, and against the realtors. JAD

Vote for Donna Edwards!

Democracy for America
(the organization started by Howard Dean and his brother)
says about Donna:

We know where Donna Edwards stands. She is the consistent progressive in the race we can count on to fight for our values everyday, not just during election season. Yet, her opponent Al Wynn has been on the run, flipping positions and double-talking his record since the campaign started.

While Donna has stood up against the war in Iraq since the beginning, Congressman Wynn voted with Bush on Iraq from day one. With Democrats like Al Wynn, the GOP doesn't even need to run a Republican. Support Donna Edwards today with $15 and let's kick Bush Democrats out of Congress.

"U.S. Flu Outbreak Plan Criticized"

"It Does Not Anticipate Strain on Hospitals, Local Health Officials Say"
Christopher Lee, The Washington Post, February 2, 2008.

Excerpt:

The federal government's voluminous plans for dealing with pandemic flu do not adequately account for the overwhelming strain an outbreak would place on hospitals and public health systems trying to cope with millions of seriously ill Americans, some public health experts and local health officials say.

The Bush administration's plans, which run more than 1,000 pages, contemplate the nightmare medical scenarios that many experts fear, but critics say federal officials have left too much of the responsibility and the cost of preparing to a health-care system that even in normal times is stretched to the breaking point and leaves millions of people without adequate access to care.

Comment: We are spending money on a war against Iraq, which did not represent a real risk, and it is taking the money that should have been spent to beef up the CDC and our medical readiness, which would have been helpful for lots of real risks. Thanks President Bush! JAD

"Acceptance Slow for Bush's Space Plan"

"With Some Scientists Skeptical, NASA Turns to Advertising Firm to Generate Appeal"
Marc Kaufman, The Washington Post, February 2, 2008.

The Bush Administration apparently has been cutting back on space science in order to plan for manned voyages to the moon and Mars. Of course the big ticket items for NASA to accomplish the manned space mission would come, not in the Bush administration's watch, but during future administrations. Faced with a two trillion dollar cost of the wars the Bush administration has started, and the tax cuts that it still wants to make permanent, it is hard to see where that money will come from.

A lot of scientists say money would be better spent now on cheaper science missions rather than manned space flight. I recently read that the Congress is not funding the major international program to which we are committed to develop fusion power. I think that too would be a higher priority than manned flight to Mars, in part due to our international obligations.

Not to mention that we should reduce the debt we are leaving for future generations, provide health insurance for everyone (especially the kids) and provide a stimulus package that will pay for itself by reducing the recession.

Not surprising that there is slow acceptance for the space plan.

My problem is that I wish we could affort that program, because it would be a great adventure, will long term payoff. But Bush has wasted the money on the wrong things, badly managed.

Do our brains allow us to act ethically?

Source: "Morality Studies" by PAUL BLOOM, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, February 3, 2008. This is a review of Experiments in Ethics, by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

The review focuses on Appiah's discussion of modern brain and psychological research which indicates how heavily influenced our behavior is by the specifics of the situation in which it occurs. This can be at quite a trivial level, such as whether we see someone needing help with a package while we are smelling fresh bread; it can be at a more profound level, such as whether we are in combat or in peaceful surroundings. On the basis of findings from research on the modification of choices by circumstances, the value of educational efforts to build character is challenged.

Clearly, there is a need for philosophers to study ethics, to shed light on the nature of ethical conduct. We can not simply decide that anything that anyone wants to do is OK. There are better and worse choices, and the better choice obviously need not always be the one that it most intuitive, or that is chosen.

I would suggest that an important educational objective would be to help people understand how external stimuli may affect their decision processes, so that they can resist the impulse to act wrongly. Character is not doing the right think when it is easy, but rather doing the right thing when it is hard. The person of good character should be one who has thought in advance about the right things to do in different circumstances, and perseveres in choosing the right action even in circumstances that would lead others to wrongful behavior.

As I posted the other day, I seems to me that there is also a need for the philosophy of ethics to be informed by an understanding of the neurology and psychology, as well as the sociology of actual choices. Genocide happens when the psychology of the situation created within their society leads them to decide to kill "the other". A philosophy that does not understand such pressures seems to me to be a poor thing.

A thought about presidential elections

In the Democratic debate yesterday, the candidates were asked about a Clinton-Obama ticket. I think it is premature to talk about Chelsea Clinton and Malia Ann Obama running for president. Chelsea will not be 35 until 2015, nor Malia Ann until 2034,