Devex

Devex is a international development portal providing recruiting and business information services. The website is intended by its creators to help members find jobs, projects, news and professional connections. As this is written the site claims more than 150.000 members drawn from the fields of international development and humanitarian relief.

"This Is Your Brain on War"

Source: Foreign Policy, November/December 2008

A recent report commissioned by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to map the future of cognitive warfare, envisions

improving a soldier’s ability to process information with chemicals that alter brain chemistry or computer hardware that interfaces directly with the brain. “There’s the potential to not only bring someone up to a certain level of function, but actually enhance their function, make them smarter or faster than they would be otherwise,” says Jonathan Moreno, an expert on neuroscience and warfare at the Center for American Progress who worked on the report.

Comment: It would be more useful to have ways to improve knowledge workers minds, or to improve the educational system with aids to learning. I suppose those will come long before society is ready for them. JAD

Towards a Taxonomy of Knowledge

Image source: "Assessment of Student Learning", University of South Florida

"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess."
F. A. Hayek

Reading the above quotation by Friedrich Hayek it occurs to me that it might be useful to do a posting with suggestions towards a taxonomy of knowledge. Such a taxonomy should be useful in assessing the status of knowledge in a society and thus in identifying particular weaknesses and planning the appropriate means to overcome them.

There are many ways that one can classify knowledge, and they can be used separately or in combination. Note that I am not focusing on classifications of information, such as might be used with modern relational databases, but rather with information that is internalized as skills, knowledge or understanding.

The most common classification of knowledge is by subject, as in the Dewey Decimal System or that of the Library of Congress. Alternative structures, still classifying by subject, are used by encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Knowledge can also be classified by the credibility of its assertions, and there is a great deal of epistemological basis for doing so. In science, for example, more credibility is attached to an observation that has been replicated many times than to one that has been reported by a single laboratory, or to a theory such as the theory of gravity or the theory of evolution that is long established and supported by many observations. The courts accord more authority to a large body of precedent than to a single case. Note that the degree of credibility assigned to an assertion depends on different criteria in different institutions. A scientist may feel that an observation used as forensic evidence has a different level of credibility than does the jury for which it is adduced.

Social/Institutional Embodiment

One can classify knowledge by the way it is embodied. I suggest that the difference between knowledge and information is that someone or something has to “know” it for information to be transformed into knowledge. Knowing involves “remembering/storing” the information and being able to recall or utilize that information. Since the information can not be stored and used without something to do so, one says that the information is embodied when it becomes knowledge. We are most familiar with knowledge of the form of information embodied in people. Increasingly we have information embodied in machinery, such as in robots that are found in many factories or in the control systems for chemical plants. I suggest that more generally, we may consider knowledge to include information embodied in physical plant, thus including that involved in an assembly line, etc. Similarly, information can be embodied in supplies and thus correspond to another type of knowledge. Thus improved seeds embody information developed in the crop improvement research and modern drugs embody information developed through pharmaceutical research and development.

I would also suggest that there is a form of knowledge embodied in institutions. Thus the structure and processes of an organization may not be fully understood by any of its living members, but they represent information that was used to develop an organization that functions effectively. So too, there is information embodied in other institutions. For example, the water temple system in Bali results in the expansion of the rice field system and allocation of water among fields in ways that no one fully understands, but which serves to keep insect populations in check while producing crops of rice.

Thus I suggest the following ways that knowledge is embodied:

• · In people,
• · In plant and machinery
• · In supplies
• · In institutional structure and process

Classifications within these categories then can be applied to knowledge. Thus one can discuss the knowledge of elites versus popular knowledge within the category of knowledge embodied in people.

Institutional Processes of Social Construction

I suggest that most knowledge is socially constructed, jointly construed by several or many people rather than held by individual based on direct observation. Social construction takes place within a social context, and one can classify knowledge according to the social contexts in which it is constructed. For example, one could define classes such as the following (from U.S. culture):

• · Scientific knowledge, constructed by a scientific community through a well-known process of theory construction, hypothesis testing, replicated controlled observations, and peer review.
• · Technological knowledge, constructed by technological communities such as engineering, agronomic and biomedical, composed of professionally qualified personnel, or constructed by communities of skilled craftsmen.
• · Judicial knowledge, constructed by trial, based on codified bodies of law and common law, construed by a jury of peers based on presentations by trained and licensed advocates under the supervision of authoritative judges.
• · Legislative knowledge, constructed in legislative bodies through a process of hearings, analysis by full time staff, consultations with constituents and interest groups, and debate in public and in private.
• · Bureaucratic knowledge, constructed within bureaucratic organizations using processes that have been illuminated by decades of studies in management and organizational science.

Other institutional modes of social construction of knowledge, such as religious, market, community, etc. could be added to the list.

Culture

The way in which knowledge is socially constructed depends greatly on the culture in which the institutional knowledge system is embedded. Thus judicial knowledge is different in Anglo-Saxon common law systems versus the French Napoleonic legal system or the Arab/Islamic legal system.

We frequently find differentiation between the knowledge of “modern” societies versus traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge. Local knowledge is used to encompass both the knowledge held by many indigenous communities and many local communities that rely on traditional knowledge sources. So too, in the example above, I have used the term Arab/Islamic as an umbrella term to cover a number of related by differing cultures. Thus the cultural categories lend themselves to hierarchical structures.

Image source: Green Chameleon

Knowledge for a soft landing?

This blog focuses on knowledge to enhance economic and social development and to reduce poverty, especially in poor nations. But that orientation presupposes that there will be economic progress. For the next few years, I am afraid, there is going to be more economic recession than economic progress. I suspect, therefore, that there will be more need for and interest in knowledge to prevent or reduce economic decline than knowledge for development.

• economists might focus on mining the experience with stimulus packages and the management of recessions,
• management might focus on knowledge and skills to help them deal with falling sales and downsizing,
• social scientists might focus on social policies to help deal with increasing unemployment and decreasing expectations,
• educators might focus on policies to prepare students for niche occupations that survive recession well, and for riding out the hard times,
• ecologists might focus on dealing with marginal lands that are going out of production due to contracting markets for primary products, and on the demands of rural populations that have added recourse to harvesting wild products when facing downturns in employment and markets,
• epidemiologists might focus on the changes in morbidity and mortality that will result from worsening economic conditions and how to ameliorate the problems that will arise.

Knowledge systems that are working well during economic expansion may not work equally well in times of contraction. They may not make the shift needed to deliver the most relevant knowledge to the right people, and indeed may suffer from personnel cuts and lack of investment.

Lets hope that donor agencies and governments, not to mention academia make the switch.

A concern about the Republican campaign tactics

In the final days of this campaign, John McCain seems to have used innuendo to imply that there is something to hide in Barack Obama's relations with Rashid Khalidi. USNews reports:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, appearing on Fox News' On The Record, said Khalidi "has made very incendiary remarks about Israel. ... He has a connection with the PLO. He worked for...WAFA, he was their spokesman. I believe Khalidi's wife was the translator for that organization, which was affiliated with the PLO. There is no dispute about the fact that he has a very hostile view to the state of Israel."

Compare Giuliani's comment with that of Scott Horton in Harpers Magazine responding to similar charges in the conservative magazine The National Review:

This doesn’t sound much like the Rashid Khalidi I know. I’ve followed his career for many years, read his articles and books, listened to his presentations, and engaged him in discussions of politics, the arts, and history. In fact, as McCarthy’s piece ran, I was midway through an advance copy of Khalidi’s new book Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East.......Rashid Khalidi is an American academic of extraordinary ability and sharp insights. He is also deeply committed to stemming violence in the Middle East, promoting a culture that embraces human rights as a fundamental notion, and building democratic societies. In a sense, Khalidi’s formula for solving the Middle East crisis has not been radically different from George W. Bush’s: both believe in American values and approaches.

Or to this by Juan Cole in his blog, Informed Comment:

The increasingly sleazy John McCain, who once promised to run a clean campaign, has now attacked my friend Rashid Khalidi and attempted to use him against Barack Obama. Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the Middle East Center at the University of Chicago for some time, and he and his family came to know the Obamas at that time. Knowing someone and agreeing with him on everything are not the same thing.

Here is Amazon.com's description of Khalidi from the page assigned to his book:

Rashid Khalidi, author of six books about the Middle East—Sowing Crisis, The Iron Cage, Resurrecting Empire, Origins of Arab Nationalism, Under Siege, and the award-winning Palestinian Identity—is the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. He has written more than eighty articles on Middle Eastern history and politics, including pieces in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many journals. Professor Khalidi has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation; he was also the recipient of a Fulbright research award. Professor Khalidi has been a regular guest on numerous radio and TV shows, including All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Nightline.

Comment: Khalidi certainly seems a serious scholar. I have been reading Juan Cole and I hold his opinions in great respect, as I do the editors of Harpers Magazine. If they can be believed, the Republicans are denigrating the reputation of a scholar in their negative campaigning. This is wrong per se.

It also undermines the quality of discussion with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we are to have a knowledge based foreign policy, the quality of the political discussion is extremely important. JAD

Hayek on knowledge

I just read "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by F.A. Hayek (American Economic Review, XXXV, No. 4; September, 1945, pp. 519-30). which I should have read long ago. Here are some quotations from the paper:

"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess."

"Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place."

"If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them."

Comments: Fortunately, Hayek focuses on the problem of achieving a good allocation of resources in a complex system where decisions are made with imperfect local knowledge. Unfortunately, he treats knowledge as exogenous, not dealing with the allocation of resources:

• to improve knowledge about resources.
• to improve knowledge of technology to exploit resources
• to improve knowledge of how products can be better distributed to consumers
• to improve knowledge of the institutions of society that influence the production and distribution of goods and services
• etc.

Fortunately Hayek recognizes that economic planning can be fully centralized, partially centralized (e.g, in industrial sectoral organizations) or decentralized (as in market institutions and spontaneous "local" groupings). It is not clear that he approaches the possibility of a mixed strategy allocating some planning responsibility to each level may be superior to any pure strategy.

It is interesting to see how much the developments since this was written have outmoded Hayek's concerns. Today of course, Communism has fallen and with it much of the emphasis on central planning. Moreover, a great deal of work is being done to institutionalize systems (especially those utilizing the evolving global information infrastructure) to better exploit local knowledge of time and place. Think of just in time manufacturing and inventory systems. His recommendation that decision making be decentralized to allow the person with the most relevant and accurate knowledge to make the decision is now not only an accepted defense of market economies, but a "common knowledge" among management theorists.

Hayek is reacting to what he feels is an excessive focus on the infrequent decisions such as where to build a factory or what product to produce, at the expense of the large number of smaller decisions. It seems to me that the perception of focus depends on who you talk to. Senior executives and directors of firms and governments, given their limited time and intellectual resources, tend to focus their attention on such decisions. If you talk to the guy on the factory floor, or individual consumers, or the point of sale salesclerk, they focus on quite different decisions, and there are a lot more of them! Economists must simplify models, and in 1945 they had to simplify much more than we do now, since computers have allowed them to model complexity much more successfully. Besides, I suspect that most economists see senior executives and directors as much more of their audience than factory workers, salesclerks or consumers.

Still I strongly recommend that people interested in knowledge for development read this classic article. JAD

The Candidates on Education

Image source: Education Week

The National Education Association has compared the positions of Obama and McCain on Education. The NEA summarizes:

Expand Early Childhood Education

• Obama: Supports
• McCain: Opposes expansion, supports better coordination

Increase Student Aid for College

• Obama: Supports
• McCain: Opposes

Tax Employees' Health Benefits

• Obama: Opposes
• McCain: Supports

Reduce Class Size

• Obama: Supports
• McCain: Opposes

Congressional Earmarks: A Tragedy of the Commons?

Cartoon source: Property Task Force

John McCain has tried to make a campaign issue of Congressional Earmarks, and Barack Obama has responded that they represent an inefficiency of the legislative process, but are small potatoes relative to the size of our current economic problems. Both Obama and Sarah Palin have been described as seeking earmarks for their constituents in the past.

It seems obvious that if the rules permit earmarks, a legislator should seek to get earmarks passed that benefit his constituents; if he/she does not, all the earmarks will go to the districts of other legislators and his constituents will lose out. It also seems obvious that if the rules permit earmarks to be passed without scrutiny by the legislative body as a whole, a legislator should seek to take advantage of those rules for the benefit of his/her constituency.

The problem is that if all the legislators follow this process, a lot of money will be misallocated to low priority projects, and the country as a whole will lose. Thus if every legislator does that which benefits his constituency under the current rules, then the average constituent will lose. This seems to be typical of a "tragedy of the commons."

We know that the way to avoid such a tragedy is to have institutions that keep people from over-exploiting a resource. Those rules can be formal or informal. The Congress could develop a culture in which legislators thought first of the good of the country and only second of the demands of their constituents, but I don't see that happening, and I am not sure that the cure would not be worse than the disease. Formal rules seem more likely and practical. I like the proposal by Senator Obama to create an open database of proposed earmarks, searchable by the public and the bureaucracy, identifying the sponsoring legislators, and up for a long time before action is taken on the legislation in the Congress.

The problem does not affect only our legislators, and we have all sorts of people and interest groups seeking their own advantage rather than the public good. I am old enough to remember World War II when the crisis brought most people to consider the public interest first or at least with higher priority than we do now, and when "profiteering" was a damning epithet. Perhaps in the current situation, with two wars and the economy in the pits, we could see a little more of that willingness to put first the public interest.

'Tech giants in human rights deal'

Source: Maggie Shiels, BBC News, 28 October 2008

'Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have signed a global code of conduct promising to offer better protection for online free speech and against official intrusion.......The guidelines seek to limit what data should be shared with authorities, in cases where free speech is an issue.'

Obama and McCain Campaigns Weigh In on Issues Affecting Women in STEM

Earlier this summer, the Association of Women In Science (AWIS) and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) submitted a list of questions to both the Obama and McCain campaigns regarding the candidates' positions on issues which affect women in STEM. Read a side-by-side comparison here.

Read the response of

• The Obama campaign
• The McCain campaign
• The two campaigns side by side
  

"Microsoft: Let's Get White Spaces Going (PC Magazine)"

Excerpt from Yahoo! version of the story:

Several days after Microsoft chairman Bill Gates jumped into the white spaces debate, the software giant reiterated its commitment to white spaces and called on the Federal Communications Commission to quickly approve rules that would allow for the emerging technology to come to market.

"We're pretty convinced … that there's virtually no risk" to digital TV signals posed by white spaces devices, Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, said during a Monday conference call with reporters.

Utilizing white spaces is "a great opportunity for the U.S. not to just develop the technology but lead in its deployment," something that has not been done with broadband deployment, Mundie said.

Comment: The broadcasters probably don't see any way that opening up the white space can help them, and suspect the rest of the world will find ways to use it that will cause them discomfort. Lets hope, and demand, that the FCC represents the public rather that the broadcasters on this one! JAD

Where does all the computer power go: cloud computing

The Economist of October 23, 2008 has a survey focused on cloud computing and the implications of the rise in cloud computing for corporations. I excerpt from some of the articles:

"CORPORATE IT: Let it rise"

"CORPORATE IT: Where the cloud meets the ground"

This is Microsoft’s new data centre in Northlake, a suburb of Chicago, one of the world’s most modern, biggest and most expensive, covering 500,000 square feet (46,000 square metres) and costing $500m. One day it will hold 400,000 servers.........

There are an estimated 7,000 such data centres in America alone, most of them one-off designs that have grown over the years, reflecting the history of both technology and the particular use to which it is being put. It is no surprise that they are egregiously inefficient. On average only 6% of server capacity is used, according to a study by McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Uptime Institute, a think-tank. Nearly 30% are no longer in use at all, but no one has bothered to remove them. Often nobody knows which application is running on which server. A widely used method to find out is: “Let’s pull the plug and see who calls.”

"CORPORATE IT: On the periphery"

by the end of this year Amazon will have sold nearly 380,000 Kindles, says Mark Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup, a bank. “Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world,” he recently wrote in a note to clients, in a reference to Apple’s iconic music player.......

it is safe to say that, once the next generation of wireless networks is up and running, hundreds of millions of devices will come, like the Kindle, with built-in radio connectivity (see chart 5). Digital cameras will automatically upload pictures. Smart meters will send readings of how much electricity a house consumes. All kinds of sensors will be able to send messages, even things like dipsticks when tanks of liquid are low.

The relationship of these devices to cloud computing may not be obvious. But if huge data centres and applications make up the cloud itself, then all the hardware and software through which it connects and communicates with the real world are its periphery. In IT speak, this is known as the “front end” or “client side”.

As the Kindle and other examples show, this layer does not have much to do with the user interface or client device of old. It will do a lot of computing itself. It will come in all shapes and sizes, depending on what the user wants to do. And it will not just distribute information, as the web does, but collect it as well........

Whatever the buzzword, the principle is much the same. Servers no longer dish up simple hypertext markup language (HTML), the web’s early lingua franca. Increasingly, web pages are bona fide pieces of software that are executed in the browser. Users of Web 2.0 sites who venture into menu items such as “view source” in their browsers can sometimes see thousands of lines of code.

In recent months the browser has become even more of a platform for other programs, akin to an operating system such as Windows. The main driver of this trend is Google, with its huge strength in distribution that can only gain from more and more software being offered as a service. In May 2007 the Silicon Valley firm launched Gears, a program that allows web applications to be used offline, and in September this year it released a new browser called Chrome. Its most important feature is that it can execute several sophisticated web applications at once.

"CORPORATE IT: Highs and lows"

"CORPORATE IT: Computers without borders"

IT industry leaders note that officials from many countries have begun to take an interest in the cloud. Some just want data centres to be built in their country to create jobs; others are concerned about issues of law enforcement and jurisdiction. The danger, they say, is that cloud providers might be obliged to build more data centres than are needed and have to comply with many different regulatory regimes. Some of them have been floating the idea of “free-trade zones” for data centres where common rules would apply.

Check out the links provided with the authors acknowledgments and sources.

Comment: While the global recession may slow the investment needed to make the changes suggested by The Economist, I suspect that a watershed change is coming. Note that more control of cyberspace will be given to the countries that can afford the data centers and the development of the software that the data centers make available.

Developing countries should benefit, and indeed may even have opportunities to to technological leapfrogging, using cloud computing to avoid the need to develop the human resources to maintain intra-corporate information systems.

The cyberspace cloud with autonomous data sensors and input devices, huge and cheap computing capacity, and a universal user population untied from their PCs will result in far more changes that those described above. I am sure that developing nations are not ready for those changes. JAD

Quotation

"Notwithstanding the high sounding pronouncements that routinely emanate from the White House and the State Department, the defining characteristic of U.S. foreign policy at its most successful has not been idealism, but pragmatism, frequently laced with pragmatisms first cousin, opportunism."
Andrew Bacevich
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

Are our brains different than those of our ancestors

Mitchell Leslie wrote in Sandford Magazine several years ago:

(W)hat turned humans into a planetary power? Lacking evidence to answer that question, we can only guess at the cause or causes. Among the dozen or so experts focusing on “the leap,” most favor cultural, social or demographic explanations, Klein says. They speculate, for example, that humans suddenly crossed a threshold of creativity after a long, slow buildup in population, or that a radical population boom set off a maelstrom of competition between groups, inspiring rapid innovation.

A few researchers reject the whole notion of a sudden behavioral revolution, arguing instead for slow cultural evolution. Some of the so-called hallmarks of modernity, they say, showed up tens of thousands of years earlier. Noting that the brain reached its full size at least 130,000 years ago, these anthropologists think humans had all the intellect they needed from then on and that modern advances arose one by one over a vast period of time.

Klein suggests a third possibility—a strictly neurological scenario that has gained few followers in a field of study dominated by cultural explanations, he says. Humanity’s big bang, he speculates, was sparked not by an increase in brain size but by a sudden increase in brain quality. Klein thinks a fortuitous genetic mutation may have somehow reorganized the brain around 45,000 years ago, boosting the capacity to innovate. “It’s possible this change produced the modern ability for spoken language,” he says.

Clearly, speech eases communication. But it also fosters something less obvious and equally important. Spoken language, Klein says, “allows people to conceive and model complex natural and social circumstances entirely within their minds.”

Today's Washington Post, in an article ("Learning About Learning: Brain Research May Produce Results in the Classroom" by Nelson Hernandez0 today notes

One of the most startling recent revelations in neuroscience has been that the brain's structure is much more flexible (a concept called neuroplasticity) than was previously thought.

The brain is the organ of thought. The brain may or may not have changed much genetically over the past 130 thousand years, but the way it is used has changed a lot. Neuroplasticity implies not only that brain will assign portions of itself away from seldom used functions to much used functions, but that practice makes it better at the functions that are practiced.

Take athletics as a metaphor. A professional boxer hits much harder than the average person, not only because he has learned how better to throw a punch, but because he has built the muscle power to do so through his training. So too, competitive runners train to run faster, and competitive weight lifters build their muscles and don't look the rest of us.

The first Homo sapiens 130,000 years ago were hunter gatherers. Think how they used their brains. They lived short lives in small communities, and their lives depended on finding food in the wild and avoiding accidents and predators. As children they must have learned mostly by watching their elders. Vocabularies probably would have been simple, heavily biased towards what one would find where.

How different from modern Homo sapiens in the United States, most of whom live in cities, dealing almost exclusively with the artifacts of modern civilizations, having attended schools and learned from books, subjected to a bombardment of information from radio, television, the Internet and media that are even in elevators and on the sides of buses.

Functionally the brains of the first hunter gatherers micht have been as different from modern humans as are the bodies of Michael Phelps and Akebono, the sumo wrestler.

An indicator of the pain so far in developing nations

Source: "Emerging markets: A taxonomy of trouble,"
The Economist, October 23rd 2008

Republican Senator Mathias Endorses Obama

Source: Editorial, The Washington Post, October 28, 2008.

Charles McC. Mathias Jr., a Republican, represented Maryland in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1961 to 1968 and in the U.S. Senate from 1969 to 1986. He writes:

This decision, and this hard-fought race, have been difficult for me. In 1860, my great-grandfather ran for the Maryland Senate from Frederick on the anti-slavery Republican ticket. At the top of that ticket was Abraham Lincoln. In 1912, my grandfather rallied to Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose. Most of the Mathias family has voted Republican ever since. In 1964, as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, I astounded many of my friends and supporters by voting for Barry Goldwater, despite disagreeing with many of his views and despite his lack of support in my congressional district. I publicly endorse the Democratic candidate for president with a sense of the historic significance of the choice before us all.

Tony Hillerman is Gone

The Washington Post published an obituary for Tony Hillerman today. He was an author who brought me and my wife many, many hours of pleasure. We have read all his 18 mystery novels set in the Navajo reservations of the Southwest, going back and rereading them periodically. We have also read others of his 30 books.

He told a good story, producing books full of the flavor of the landscape, and respectful of the Navajo culture and way of life. We already miss the anticipation of a new Hillerman book.

'Microsoft To Offer 'Cloud Computing''

Image Source: Reuters

Source: Dina Bass and Brian Womack, Bloomberg News via The Washington Post, October 28, 2008

Microsoft has announced a program called Windows Azure that stores and runs customers' data and programs in the company's computer-server farms. Microsoft didn't disclose a release date or pricing for Azure. Windows Azure will be marketed as making it easier and cheaper for corporate clients to manage their software and information technology systems. 'Amazon and Salesforce.com have already gotten their cloud computing models in operation.

"At the U.N., Many Hope for an Obama Win"

"A lot of bad feeling" about the past eight years."
William Luers of the United Nations Association
(Neilson Barnard - Getty Images)

Source: Colum Lynch, The Washington Post, October 26, 2008

I quote:

An informal survey of more than two dozen U.N. staff members and foreign delegates showed that the overwhelming majority would prefer that Sen. Barack Obama win the presidency, saying they think that the Democrat would usher in a new agenda of multilateralism after an era marked by Republican disdain for the world body.

Obama supporters hail from Russia, Canada, France, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Indonesia and elsewhere. One American employee here seemed puzzled that he was being asked whether Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was even a consideration. "Obama was and is unstoppable," the official said. "Please, God, let him win," he added.

Comment: My own impression is that the U.S. foreign policy experts that I know, as well as the people from the international community with whom I have worked, as well as my family members who are citizens for foreign countries overwhelmingly support Obama.

In part this is a response to his life history and that of his parents, in part it is a response to the wisdom of his foreign policy pronouncements over the past several years, in part it is a response to the negative views of the foreign policy of the Republcan administration over the past eight years (and of the earlier Republican Congressional leaders) and in part it is due to distrust of McCain's views and temperment. Some might suggest that we ignore the views of the international community, but I think they are enough to strongly support Obama's foreign policy credentials. JAD

"Global crisis threatens to undo all UN's work-Ban"

Source: Patrick Worsnip, Reuters,24 October 2008

"U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned his top lieutenants on Friday that the global financial crisis jeopardized everything the United Nations has done to help the world's poor and hungry.

"''It threatens to undermine all our achievements and all our progress,' Ban told a meeting of U.N. agency chiefs devoted to the crisis. 'Our progress in eradicating poverty and disease. Our efforts to fight climate change and promote development. To ensure that people have enough to eat.'

"At a meeting also attended by the heads of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Ban said the credit crunch that has stunned markets worldwide compounded the food crisis, the energy crisis and Africa's development crisis.

"'It could be the final blow that many of the poorest of the world's poor simply cannot survive,' he added, in one of his bleakest assessments of the impact of the financial turmoil."

Musing: The Global Recession and International Migration of Skilled People

Source of the map: "Brain-Drain: a Visual Map." CoolTownStudios, November 20, 2006

People move from one country to another because they perceive the opportunities in the receiving country to be better than those in the country of departure. I don't mean just the economic opportunities, although they are certainly important. But there are social and other opportunities that matter. Certainly, many highly educated people are motivated to utilize their knowledge and skills to help people, especially people of the society from which they come. The opportunities to enjoy close relationships with friends and families also count, and the development of low cost communications networks (especially the Internet) has encouraged emigration by reducing the cost and difficulty of communicating with family at a distance.

I have found it useful sometimes to think of the flow of international migrants in terms of demand pull and supply push. I have posted often in this blog on the importance of creating conditions in the United States that attract people with technological skills and knowledge and with entrepreneurial and innovation skills to maintain the economic growth of the nation; that is I have posted on the need to keep the demand pull factors high here for immigration of appropriate scientific and technological personnel.

I have suggested that often developing nations push their scientifically and technologically trained people to emigrate because they allow conditions to exist that are unattractive to those people -- low salaries, poor working conditions, and often lack of opportunity to utilize their education productively. Surprisingly, developing nations often expend large amounts of resources to train excessive numbers of professionals, at least to train more people than the nation will put to productive work. Not surprisingly, the well trained, underemployed people often leave.

International migration of scientific and technological professionals has both benefits and costs to the home country. The costs may seem obvious, but they are only real if the country is willing and able to utilize the talents of the migrant. I recall a time when Bolivia had a union of unemployed doctors with something like 130 members; it was not surprising that many of its doctors emigrated to the United States. Bolivia was not using their expensive training. On the other hand, the remittances from the expatriate professionals can be quite useful.

I would also note that Israel, recognizing that its scientific and technological community is not capable of maintaining world-class standards in isolation, strongly encourages its scientific and technological professionals to travel and work abroad on a regular basis. The lessons they learn abroad are brought home on their return, keeping the country at the frontier of global science and technology.

The Crisis and its Likely Impact

I think that we are in the early stages of a multiyear global recession, and that the recession will tend to both increase supply push and decrease demand pull for international migration of S&T professionals. Financial downturn in developing nations will probably result in reductions of their attractiveness for S&T professionals: fewer S&T jobs, lower pay, fewer exciting professional opportunities.

I would suppose that the same factors would apply in developed nations, but the situation may be not be so simple. Often, I think, the United States seeks to attract S&T professionals from developing nations to work at lower salaries in fairly routine professional roles. It may recruit foreign medical graduates to provide family medicine in rural areas or foreign S&T graduates to fill teaching positions in community colleges or even at the secondary school level. The cuts in funding for these kinds of jobs may be less than for the more prestigious jobs in high technology industry or research intensive universities.

Of course, the market is segmented, and I assume that the highest prestige organizations will still seek to attract the most gifted scientists, engineers, and other technological professionals from wherever they are found, and will be successful in doing so from developing countries.

The economic crisis may provide opportunities for policy makers in developed and in developing countries to build S&T capabilities for the future. If I am right, generally there will be fewer attractive opportunities for S&T personnel globally. A company, state, province or country that moves counter to the general trend may be able to accumulate a strong S&T capacity during this period and put it to work for the future. Once a community of such people is working productively and producing useful results, its members should be much less likely to leave for future greener pastures.

Musing: The Global Recession Will Be Very Hard on Science for Development

When it rains it pours!

Any reader of this blog will realize that I advocate strongly for science to be applied to the reduction of poverty and more generally to development, especially in poor nations. Science is key to understanding their natural resources and their management, to improving agricultural productivity, to the understanding and combating the diseases of poverty, and (the social sciences) to managing their economic, political and social institutions.

Not only do poor nations have less money to spend on science than do rich countries, they tend to spend a smaller portion of their GDPs on science than do more affluent countries. On the other hands, the scientifically powerful countries of the North don't devote much of their scientific effort to the problems of poor people in poor nations. As a result, there is a major need to develop the scientific capacity of poor nations, in order that they can tackle the problems that are of their own national priority and that are also inadequately supported by the global scientific enterprise. Indeed, science should not be considered only for its instrumental value for the solution of immediate problems, but for the more fundamental value a scientific establishment has for the knowledge systems of the society.

I suggest that the economic crisis will have serious negative impact on the development of the science needed in and for poor nations.

• politicians in most countries find expenditures on science easy targets in times of financial retrenchment. Investments in science are long term, and pay off only slowly, the scientific community has itself little political power, and popular support for science is weak. So poor countries themselves will probably cut funding for science.
  
• politicians in the North are likely to target international scientific expenditures, foreign aid, and research on problems of less direct impact to their home countries especially as they cut overall support for science.
• Corporations will also probably cut funding for research and development as a short term response to worsening business conditions, and will be especially likely to cut funding for R&D for applications targeted for developing nations, since the market demand for such applications will be seen to be diminishing.
• Funding for foreign travel, graduate education of developing country scientists in the North, for foreign journals, etc. will probably all go down.

I am not suggesting that funding for science for development should be reduced, quite the opposite, but that it is likely that it will be reduced considerably over the next several years.

The Wolves of Yellowstone

Image Source: "First Outing," Todd Fredericksen from a film by Bob Landis, Trailwood Films Wildlife Art Gallery

According to today's Washington Post, 13 years after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowston, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took steps to remove the gray wolf of the northern Rockies from the Endangered Species List. "Environmentalists howled, calling it a last-gasp effort by the Bush administration to delist wolves."

The Post states that

for every 100 wolves at least six months of age, only 74 will live through the year, Bangs says. Of those that will not, 10 will be killed by government agencies because they attacked livestock. Another 10 will be killed illegally. Another three will die accidentally -- struck by a car, for example. And three will die from natural threats, including being killed by other wolves.

So how many wolves are there in the Rockies?

Last winter, Bangs says, there were 1,513 wolves in the northern Rockies. But the population has dropped this year, and there will probably be about 1,450 come winter......

Smith also suspects that there's an element of self-regulation of population. Yellowstone is now dense with wolves -- 171 of them spread among 11 packs. (The larger Yellowstone ecosystem has about 350 wolves.)

"At some point wolves control their own numbers through killing one another," Smith says.

I have read that there is good evidence that the wolves are a keystone species in the larger Yellowstone ecosystem, and that the predation of moose is resulting in changes in their grazing patterns that in turn is benefiting the plant communities. If they are a keystone species in Yellowstone, then I would guess they could be important in the larger ecosystem of the northern Rockies.

Comment: I can understand why the guys raising cattle and sheep want to eliminate wolf predation on their herds and flocks, but 1,500 is a very small population to maintain a species, and the northern Rockies is a very big space. The larger Yellowstone ecosystem, if it can support only 350 wolves is too small to protect the species.

I think this again is the Bush administration combining pseudo science, an ideological predisposition to distrust environmental regulations, and an unholy desire to pander to their (increasingly narrow) constituency that is pulling a fast one in the administration's dying days. This is worth a stand by all those interested in biodiversity, the protection of world heritage (The United States has had Yellowstone inscribed in the list of World Heritage sites maintained by UNESCO's World Heritage Center), the environment, and wolves specifically.

There must be a way to protect enough wolves to establish a sustainable population. The government could indemnify the owners of any calves or sheep killed by wolves. Laws could be more strongly enforced to prevent poaching. Research, if strongly supported over time, should provide means to keep the wolves within defined ranges and to reduce or prevent their predation on domestic animals. JAD

If we make the mistake of electing the McCain-Palin ticket, the wolves are probably in for a very hard time in the next administration. See my posting "Palin Versus the Wolves".

"Financial Meltdown Worsens Food Crisis: As Global Prices Soar, More People Go Hungry"

Source: Ariana Eunjung Cha and Stephanie McCrummen, The Washington Post, October 26, 2008

Excerpts:

Oxfam, the Britain-based aid group, estimates that economic chaos this year has pulled the incomes of an additional 119 million people below the poverty line. Richer countries from the United States to the Persian Gulf are busy helping themselves and have been slow to lend a hand........

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 923 million people were seriously undernourished in 2007.......

Commodity prices have plummeted in recent weeks as investors have shown increasing concern about a global recession and a drop in the demand for goods. Wheat futures for December delivery closed at $5.1625 on Friday -- down 62 percent from a record set in February. Corn futures are down 53 percent from their all-time high, and soybean futures are 47 percent lower. Such declines, while initially welcomed by consumers, could eventually increase deflationary pressures -- lower prices could mean less incentive for farmers to cultivate crops. That, in turn, could exacerbate the global food shortage........

In June, governments, donors and agencies gathered in Rome to pledge $12.3 billion to address the world's worst food crisis in a generation. But only $1 billion has been disbursed. An additional $1.3 billion, which had been earmarked by the European Commission for helping African farmers, is tied up in bureaucracy, with some governments now arguing that they can no longer afford to give up that money.

Comment: This looks very complicated. In the short term, the price of food has gone down, but so too has the funding available for food aid.

In a time frame of a couple of years, I worry about both the cut back in farmer plantings reducing supply, and the impact of the financial crisis in developing nations reducing the ability to buy food, as well as a cut in donor funding.

Agriculture may be in serious trouble? JAD

The Coming Financial Crisis

Dani Rodrik, a very competent economist, writes in his blog (October 26, 2008):

Paul Krugman frets that we are about to witness the mother of all currency crises in emerging markets, and I am afraid that he is right. As I wrote in my previous post, the financial crisis in the developing world has just started and there are indications that it will get a lot, a lot worse. What is different with this phase of the crisis is that it cannot be addressed by governments in the affected countries issuing their own fiscal guarantees and domestic currency. These countries need external lines of credit, and they need it fast before the scale of the problem becomes truly unmanageable.

The solution is clear. The IMF, possibly along with central banks of the G7, has to act as a global lender of last resort to emerging markets.

Comment: These guys should know! Fasten your seat belts, the going is going to get rough! JAD

"Has humanitarianism in its current form become part of the problem, rather than the solution?"

Source: "Human rights and wrongs," by Michael Williams, guardian.co.uk, Sunday October 26

This is a review of Conor Foley's book titled The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War. It cites some of the dangerous aspects embraced by some of the individuals and organizations currently promoting humanitarian assistance:

• exagerating the severity of humanitarian problems to generate political support for their humanitarian relief,
• promoting other values (such as women's rights, literacy for children, and sex education that derive from liberal Western tradition) in programs intended to deal specifically with hunger or disease,
• directing humanitarian assistance where it might produce political advantage rather than where it would be likely to help the most people and/or people most in need.

Most serious is the effort to gain public support citing humanitarian concerns for interventions in foreign countries that are motivated by less palatable political goals (justifying an invasion in the name of "democratization" when it is more motivated by support for an ally, economic advantage, and/or modification of the balance of power in a geographic region.

Comment: Williams and (apparently) Foley have belled a cat that definitely needed belling. As "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," and as "patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels," so to I might say that "the road to the imperialistic exercise of power is covered with protestations of humanitarian motives." Few seem willing to come out publicly and challenge claims based on declared humanitarian goals.

The problem is perhaps exacerbated by the reality that many, probably the majority of people who are actually on the ground providing humanitarian assistance are very well and highly motivated, and that they do a lot of good. The lengthening of lifespan in developing nations, the reduction of the threat of famine, and the reduction of the portion of the world's population that live in abject poverty speak for themselves. When good people are exploited for cynical purposes I get angry.

A related problem is that people and organizations with true humanitarian motives can be wrong, especially when they advocate based on ideology rather than knowledge. I have found that to be a problem with new technologies, where "do gooders" with little understanding of the technology have slowed applications due to poorly founded fears triggered by the novelty (e.g. biotechnology for crop improvement, nanotechnology for industrial development). There are also environmentalists who fail to properly recognize the needs for poverty alleviation, and people focusing on economic development who fail to properly recognize the needs for a sustainable environment.

The donor agencies appear to run scared of the NGO's, and I think there are good projects and programs that have been delayed or canceled due to fear of the fuss that would be raised by NGO advocates, where those advocates had largely unjustified fears.

Donor assistance with humanitarian motives is important. The question is how do we protect against errors caused by cynical or well intentioned arguments based on humanitarian ideas and misuse of humanitarian programs themselves. A first step is being aware that such problems can and do occur, and having achieved that recognition to examine claims and programs and act to correct abuses. JAD

From The Urban Dictionary:

cheneyism

a figure of speech expressing a fantasy, generally used to manipulate

(ie. "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." --March 16, 2003, or
"I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." -- June 20, 2005)

He used many forms of cheneyism is his relationships with women, most commonly, "Of course I'll still respect you."

Donna Edwards Endorsements

Donna Edwards and son Jared.

The Gazette has endorsed Donna Edwards for the 4th Congressional District of Maryland. From the endorsement by the Washington Post:

WHEN VOTERS in Maryland's 4th Congressional District, which stretches from Prince George's County into Montgomery, dislodged Rep. Albert R. Wynn in the Democratic primary this year, they put considerable faith in the potential of an energetic but untested newcomer, Donna F. Edwards. Ms. Edwards, a civic activist, had proved herself to be an effective advocate for causes such as raising the minimum wage and curbing domestic violence. But could she produce results in Washington? Four months into her service, which began when Mr. Wynn resigned and she won a special election, Ms. Edwards has shown that she deserves a full term in Congress.......

Her opponent, Republican Peter James, is a crusader against deficit spending who endorses such extreme remedies as abolishing the Federal Reserve and who has issued a local currency to underscore his point. The currency hasn't caught on; neither should his candidacy.

Comment: Is someone really suggesting at this time we abolish the Federal Reserve? It seems to have responded to the current economic crisis in a way that has kept us out of a new depression, and the Fed is now lead by the foremost expert on economic crises in the United States. JAD

SCIENCE ADVICE: ADVISING THE PRESIDENT ABOUT ADVISORS.

Bob Park wrote yesterday in his blog:

Science magazine today has a brief assessment of where the candidates stand on ten science policy issues ranging from national security to space. Obviously staff written, it wasn't much help. We need to know to whom the future President will turn for advice on science-related matters. Presidents can call on anyone: FDR relied on Vannevar Bush, Truman on Isadore Rabi, Eisenhower to Killian and Kistiakowski, and Kennedy to Wiesner, none of whom are any longer available. Alas, the stature of the science advisor diminished seriously under Nixon and Reagan. It may have hit bottom in the 2003 state-of-the-union address when Bush announced his hydrogen initiative; it was clear that he had not bothered to check with his science advisor. The job is no longer seen as the "nation's top scientist." Whatever influence the science community has should be used to persuade the next President to select a wise science advisor as quickly as possible and rely on the science advisor's counsel.

Comment: If you don't want scientific advice, and don't plan to use it if offered, don't appoint a highly visible, highly respected, active and effective science advisor. If you do, both you and the advisor will be bothered.

Lets hope Obama is more interested in getting it right than in satisficing his special-interest constituencies, that he wants and seeks out science advice, and that he is successful in finding someone who can manage the advisory process in the White House and front for its science policies and conclusions drawn on scientific evidence. JAD

"The Misused Impact Factor"

Kai Simons makes an interesting point in an editorial in Science (10 October 2008).

Each year, Thomson Reuters extracts the references from more than 9000 journals and calculates the impact factor for each journal by taking the number of citations to articles published by the journal in the previous 2 years and dividing this by the number of articles published by the journal during those same years.

The data is used widely; researchers and research institutions are judged according not only to the numbers of their publications but also the impact of the journals in which they publish. Money hangs on the judgment, both in terms of salaries for the researcher and endowments for the institutions; so does prestige and promotion.

The problem to which Simons refers is the increasing efforts made by journal editors to increase the estimated impacts of their journals. They do this not merely by choosing the best and most important articles that they can find, but by publishing more survey and other kinds of articles that tend to produce high ratings.

This is an example of a general problem with indicators. They are often imperfect measures of that which is important, and if people seek to maximize the indicator value rather than do what is most important, they can be dangerous.

I recall one of my friends long ago telling me that as an Indian Health Service physician he discovered that their production index gave more points for physician supervised preventive services than for those provided by unsupervised nurses. So he moved the nurses and his desk into a common area and did his paper work while the nurses were providing their services. This now counted as supervision, and his productivity numbers were greatly increased.

The lesson is that one should not confuse what is measured with what is important. This is not a criticism of the people designing indices, but of the bureaucrats who misuse the data they produce.

U.S. Cuban Cooperation in Science

Source: "Editorial: U.S.-Cuban Scientific Relations," Sergio Jorge Pastrana and Michael T. Clegg, Science 17 October 2008: Vol. 322. no. 5900, p. 345.

The foreign secretaries of the U.S. and Cuban Academies of Science call for increased scientific cooperation in this editorial. They feel the need to suggest areas in which cooperation would be fruitful, but I discovered in 15 years of funding international scientific collaboration projects that the scientists themselves do a great job in figuring out whether a collaborative project will advance their interests. I would prefer an investigator initiated, peer reviewed process for selecting projects.

The more fundamental issue is whether the time is ripe for scientific diplomacy. My guess is that it is now time. The people of Cuba and those of the United States should come together, and the government of Cuba may well be ready for raproachment either now or soon. Scientific diplomacy is a good first step, as is cultural diplomacy more generally.

'Where They Stand on Science Policy"

Source: Science 24 October 2008: Vol. 322. no. 5901, pp. 518 - 519

Download the PDF here.

"U.S. SCIENCE AGENCIES: Media Policies Don't Always Square With Reality"

Source: Eli Kintisch, Science 24 October 2008: Vol. 322. no. 5901, pp. 512 - 513.


"Most U.S. government agencies don't allow their scientists to talk freely with the media, according to a survey by an advocacy organization that has been highly critical of the Bush Administration's track record on scientific integrity. A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) gives some agencies relatively high marks for adopting policies that allow considerable openness but notes that those policies are not always followed. The culture in the majority of the 15 agencies UCS examined "has become [such that] talking with the press has become fraught with risks," says UCS's Francesca Grifo."

Comment: Thanks to Francesca and the UCS! The UCS is not "an advocacy agency" as I usually think of that term, but rather a body that developed from the community of concerned atomic scientists at the end of World War II who wanted to act to prevent nuclear war. In the six decades since it was founded, the UCS has continued to promote the ethical use of science in a variety of areas vital to the public interest. JAD

"Making One World of Science"

Source: Mohamed H. A. Hassan, Editorial, Science 24 October 2008: Vol. 322. no. 5901, p. 505.The global scientific community is divided

into three worlds: the North, the surging South, and the stagnant South. The global community now faces the critical challenge of preventing lagging countries from falling even farther behind.

The United States continues to dominate global science. In 2007, U.S. scientists published nearly 30% of the articles appearing in international peer-reviewed scientific journals, which is comparable to the percentage a quarter-century ago. But China, responsible for less than 1% of publications in 1983, has recently surpassed the United Kingdom and Japan to become the world's second leading nation in scientific publications. China now accounts for more than 8% of the world's total, whereas India and Brazil produce about 2.5 and 2%, respectively, of the world's scientific articles. All told, scientists in developing countries generate about 20% of the articles published in peer-reviewed international journals.

It is gratifying to see such progress made by the surging South. But we cannot ignore the fact that these advances have been largely limited to just a few countries. The top five performers (China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and Mexico) contribute well over half of the scientific publications from the South. By contrast, sub-Saharan Africa, a region of 48 countries, produces just 1% of the world's scientific publications.

Comment: Investment in science in the scientifically stagnent South does not look like a paying proposition for the national governments in those countries, since it is high risk and long term. On the other hand, that investment is not a high priority for donor agencies. Many don't fund science as a priority and are not staffed to do so. The international financial institutions (such as the World Bank or the Inter American Development Bank) do not have many science projects in the scientifically stagnent countries because such projects would be too small to justify their high project development and oversight calls. The effort to create a mechanism funded by the rich countries but under the management of the larger community of nations, under the United Nations system, has failed due to the unwillingness of the major donors to fund such an effort. So the editorial is right on target, but fails to suggest a way to finance the long term capacity building effort that is needed. JAD

A Republican War on Social Science?

Image source: "The Republican War on Science," Earthfirst, June 5, 2008

I have been listening to an old talk by Chris Mooney on his book, The Republican War on Science (vua C-SPAN3 History). He makes the points that the Bush administration has two key constituencies -- the Christian Right and Big Business -- and that its political appointees when confronted by a difference between the interests of these constituencies and the advice of their government agency's scientists follow the constituency and overrule the scientists. He notes that think tanks run by these two constituencies have developed their own "sciences" and (in my words) make arguments based on bad science to counter the legitimate science of the government science bodies and organizations such as the National Academies and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He singles out the administration's actions vis a vis

• reproductive biology (abortion, stem cell research, HIV prevention) and the teaching of evolution in response to the interests of the religious right, and
• regulatory science (environment, climate change, biodiversity, offshore drilling, occupational health) in response to the interests of big business.

Mooney, acknowledging that

• all political appointees tend to respond to their constituencies,
• a tension between politics and science has existed in many administrations, and
• there is no metric for politicization of "scientific" decisions of government

suggests that there is evidence that the Bush administration has taken the anti-scientific approach to new hights. He notes that in the first years of the Bush administration the Congress, under the control of the Republicans, did not provide the checks and balances to the Bush administration's war on science that the Constitution would encourage, and that the Republicans had previously eliminated the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment that provided an independent source of scientific assessment to the legislative bodies.

It occurs to me that the problem might be even more acute in terms of the Bush administration's willingness to ignore social science than that relating to natural sciences.

• Does the current economic crisis result from a substitution of a pseudo scientific economic analysis promoted by big (financial) businesses for sound economics? Was the deregulation of the financial industry accepted by mainstream economists for ideological reasons? Were the warnings of mainstream economists about the housing bubble (and the earlier dot.com bubble) not attended to due to ideology?
• Did the willingness of the Bush administration to get into simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stem from attending to the pseudo-scientific social science of the neo-cons in response to the neo-con political constituency, rather than listening to the mainstream social scientists in the intelligence community and academia who challenged the assumptions that those country societies were relatively homogeneous, would welcome American intervention, and would quickly adopt democratic processes and rule of lay law if given the opportunity. (The CIA and, in the past, USAID employ many PhD social scientists, and had strong social soundness analysis capabilities.)

If this hypothesis is right, a Bush administration "war on social science" may have had even more dramatic impact in the failure of Bush administration policies than did the "war on natural sciences".

New Treaty Aims to Protect Shared Transboundary Aquifers

According to the Environmental News Service, the UN General Assembly on Monday will receive the draft Convention on Transboundary Aquifers. When it comes fully into force, the Convention (or multilateral treaty) will apply to 96 percent of the planet's freshwater resources - those that are to be found in underground aquifers, most of which straddle national boundaries. Underground aquifers contain 100 times the volume of fresh water found on the Earth's surface but they have been neglected under international law despite their environmental, social, economic and strategic importance.

UNESCO has published the first-ever world map of shared aquifers and a monograph assessing those water resources. The publications were timed to coincide with the submission to the General Assembly of the United Nations of the draft Convention on Transboundary Aquifers.

The first thought is that the Convention will apply to those aquifers shared between the United States and Mexico and those shared between the United States and Canada, thereby simplifying cooperation across our boundaries in the management of these important resources. However, the security of the United States might be even more enhanced by the reduction in the probability of conflict between other nations over the management and allocation of waters from their shared aquifers (Israel and Palestine/Jordan/Lebanon, India and Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, etc.). Wars in other regions seem often to drag us into their conflict.

Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries

The gap between rich and poor has grown in more than three-quarters of OECD countries over the past two decades, according to a new OECD report.

OECD’s Growing Unequal? finds that the economic growth of recent decades has benefitted the rich more than the poor. In some countries, such as Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and the United States, the gap also increased between the rich and the middle-class.

Countries with a wide distribution of income tend to have more widespread income poverty. Also, social mobility is lower in countries with high inequality, such as Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, and higher in the Nordic countries where income is distributed more evenly.

Comment: I suspect that the gap will widen still more in the next couple of years, since it seems to me that the economic hard times are going to hit the poor more than the rich, and those unable to protect themselves more than those who have the education, resources, and contacts to ride out the troubles.

Of course, this report of the OECD does not address the poverty gap between rich and poor countries, which is complicated. However, there are many poor countries that have advanced little since 1978, while the richest countries have progressed, with the spread of country GDPs expanding. JAD

Emerging Market Vulnerability

Source: "West Is in Talks on Credit to Aid Poorer Nations," MARK LANDLER, The New York Times, October 23, 2008.

"The International Monetary Fund, which is in negotiations with several countries to provide emergency loans, is also working to arrange a huge credit line that would allow other countries desperate for foreign capital to borrow dollars, according to several officials.

"The list of countries under threat is growing by the day, and now includes such emerging-market stalwarts as Brazil, South Africa and Turkey. They have become collateral damage in a crisis that began in the American subprime housing market."

Comment: There is an old saying: "When the G7 sneezes, the developing world comes down with pneumonia". Unfortunately, the developed nations seem to have come down with a nasty economic "cold", that is going to last for a while. We are beginning to see the repercussions in the developing world. JAD

Insights(?) from math about the economy

Example 1 from Control Theory


The top figure is a plot of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the past two months (from CNN Money). The figure under it shows a "ringing response" of an underdamped system to a step change in its forcing function. If we want the volatility of the stock market to be less in response to a major change in understanding of the market fundamentals, perhaps we need to increase damping in the system. That might involve regulation of trading institutions and reduction of speculation on market prices.

Example 2 from Complexity Theory

The prototypical situation of complexity theory is lots of actors interacting, making independent decisions based on locally available information. The prototypical insight from complexity theory is the existence of "emergent properties" that are visible in the ensemble but not (necessarily) to the individual actors, and certainly not deliberately planned by those actors.

The model might be applied to American society, and the huge level of debt (federal, state, corporate, consumer) might be thought of as an emergent property of their individual decisions. One might look for a state variable, characteristic of the individual actors to help explain the functioning of the complex set of actors. A metaphor might be temperature as a state variable in modeling of climate change, where global warming affects all the cells in the simulation of the global atmospheric system. The willingness to consume in excess of income might be considered such a state variable in a (complexity theory based) simulation of the economy. Many have suggested that there has been a wide spread increase in the willingness of Americans to go into debt, in short greed for immediate consumption and lack of concern for the future.

There should be means to set the temperature of the economy, to reduce the willingness of actors to accumulate debt for immediate consumption. One thinks of schools and churches, the media, and the government. The financial services industry in our capitalist system works on the basis of profit maximization of the individual enterprises, and has invented all sorts of new instruments to maximize those profits. The Great Depression resulted in regulation to assure that banks did not accept too much risk in the effort to maximize profits, but since the Reagan Revolution the U.S. government has been in the power of people who thought that such regulations were excessive; they did not impose limitations on risk on the new financial instruments that were being created, and the financial industry responded by inventing new instruments to avoid existing regulations.

One might infer that we need to get people to return to deferring immediate gratification in favor of investments which would yield long term benefits.

Example 3 from Systems Theory

A key principle of systems theory is the utility of defining a system of entities that interact strongly, separating it from a surround that includes entities that react much less strongly with the elements of the system that those elements do with each other.

The United States went through a long history, developing financial policies on the basis that the American economy would be a system and the economy of the rest of the world its surround. Monitary policy would be under the control of the Federal Reserve System, and fiscal policy would be under the control of the Federal Government.

In the aftermath of World War II and the Great Depression, the community of nations created the Breton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank, etc.), recognizing that there were interconnections among national economies, in order to regulate the functioning of the international system. Essentially, the Breton Woods institutions managed a global economic system consisting of weakly interacting national systems. In the intervening period, Europe has recognized that the European economies are interacting strongly with each other. The European Union has created and is continuing to evolve institutions to manage the economy of Europe as an single integrated system.

Globalization and the rise of BRICs to comparable status with the G7 have changed the nature of the world. The current crisis seems to suggest that the assumption that national economies can be regarded as independent systems is no longer valid. That in turn would suggest that, as was done in Europe, the nations of the world consider a stronger set of global economic institutions to manage an increasingly interconnected global economy.

A Map Can Tell You a Lot

Source: Q1 2008 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report via Frenzy.com

This map is a little out of date, although I think the pattern it shows seems to be holding as the sub-prime mortgage crisis continues. It serves to make my point as to how much you can learn quickly from a good map. (Click on the map to see the full version.)

The obvious lesson of this map is that a lot of the red states (in the sense of Republican) don't have a foreclosure problem, and that the problem is concentrated in states with lots of immigration -- parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, and the Denver area of Colorado. It is also wide spread in the Northeast corridor (from Washington D.C. to Boston), the southeast, the northwest, and the triangle formed by Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.

The foreclosure crisis seems more acute in large metropolitan areas and less serious in rural areas. That would suggest that it is felt far more acutely by people in Democratic strongholds, and less acutely by people in Republican strongholds. Of course, its repercussions in terms of the crisis in financial institutions, the recession, the employment downturn, and the government crisis as it tries to respond to these situations will affect us all.

SNL's Take on Presidential Endorsement

Two Video Endorsements for Obama

Colin Powell Endorses Barack Obama



Ron Howard's Call For Obama With Andy Griffith And Henry Winkler

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

A Friend Sent This To Me

You can personalize it, and send it to your friends. It is a great reminder to vote!

The new issue of Bridges is out

Bridges is a science and technology policy magazine published by the Austrian Embassy in the United States. The new issue (October 2008) is out with articles on innovation policy in the United States.

USAID and the "Global Development Commons"

Henrietta Fore, the Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and Administrator of USAID, introduced the Global Development Commons in the following video:

Read more about the original intent of the Commons.

The initiative was received with some excitement, although it appeared to duplicate many of the functions of the Development Gateway. Indeed, Mark Fleeton, the president of the Development Gateway Foundation was invited to talk at the meeting at which the initiative was announced in Washington.

The overlap with the Development Gateway was curious in that the DG Foundation, which runs the DG portal, is a U.S. non-governmental organization which has been funded by a number of other nations, private U.S. donors, and international organizations, but without major support from USAID. After nearly a decade it has established a significant presence on the World Wide Web and recruited an large community of users.

Check out the Global Development Commons website.

I find USAID's Global Development Commons website disappointing, in that it seems merely to provides a modest amount of information about USAID's activities and a few links to its programs.

The initiative is closely identified with Administrator Fore, a Bush administration appointee who no doubt is soon to be out of office. Rumors are that the bureaucracy has not put much effort in implementing her initiative, perhaps for lack of resources allocated to it, or perhaps feeling that a new administration will probably ditch the effort in order to put the resources into its own initiatives.

Japan's Initiative on Science and Technology Diplomacy

Japan has produced the world's
smallest humanoid robot

Calestous Juma sent me a notice of a November 3rd presentation on Japan's new directions in international scientific and technological cooperation:

Governments around the world are increasingly recognizing the critical role that science and technology plays in diplomatic relations. Japan's "Science and Technology Diplomacy" initiative represents one of the most elaborate efforts to strengthen the scientific and technological content of its diplomatic activities. This shift in foreign policy is occurring at a time when global economic trends are less favorable to traditional development assistance models. The initiative is likely to have far-reaching implications on Japan's cooperation with developing countries. This seminar will: (a) review the evolution of the role of science and innovation in development cooperation; (b) examine the relevant features of Japan's "Science and Technology Diplomacy" initiative; and (c) outline new avenues for development cooperation in light of the current global economic crisis.

The seminar is one of a series being held at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science in International Relations.

Read more about the Initiative.

President Bush Calls on Nations to Continue Foreign Aid

President Bush yesterday, at the White House summit on Foreign Aid, called for continued commitment to increasing foreign assistance. While recognizing that the current global economic crisis would create pressures on governments to cut back on aid, he stressed that doing so would be an economic and moral error.

Comment: The Bush administration is in the latter stages of preparing a budget to submit to Congress in January, and may well follow President Bush's prescription in that budget. However, it is his successor who will have to move that budget through the Congress and deal with the crisis over the next four (or eight) years. It is that successor's administration that will have to convince other donor governments to devote their resources to foreign aid, and that will have to deal with the governments of aid recipient countries to assure that they merit aid and use it well.

My guess is that President Bush is whistling in the wind, and that there will be a significant cut in funding for foreign assistance in the next few years. I would also guess that security supporting assistance will be protected from such cuts, given the political interests in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan; as a result, many of the world's poorest nations will suffer disproportionately large cuts.

Cuts in foreign assistance would be a major problem for the poorest countries which depend on aid to fund a significant portion of government expenditures. I expect there to be major problems for other developing nations. Most developing countries export raw materials and import manufactured goods. The economic crisis is going to cut the demand for the raw materials; since foreign debt must be paid, the result probably will be a significant reduction in the ability to import the capital equipment needed for development.

China, India and other countries that have been successful in development in recent decades have seen foreign direct investment provide much more financing than has foreign assistance; they have justified that investment in significant part by rapidly increasing exports of manufactured goods and in part by rapid development of their internal markets. The global crisis will tend to dry up the sources of capital, reduce the demand for their manufactured exports, and indirectly cut the growth rate of their internal markets. We will have to wait to see how closely the developed and developing countries have been linked by globalization, but I am not sanguine about the near-term economic future of the newly industrializing countries.

The current decrease in food availability on international markets and increase in food prices has already caused an increase in hunger and driven an estimated 75 million more people into poverty. Unfortunately, things are likely to get much worse for many of the world's poorest people before they again start to get better.

President Bush may be forgiven for his (forced?) optimism, given that he was speaking at a White House event that no doubt has been in planning for many months. What else could he say to the gathered audience?

On the other hand he pointed with pride on a key foreign assistance initiative of his administration, the Millennium Challenge Corporation. The MCC is generally considered to be a failure, having only delivered some ten percent of the funding that had been appropriated to it. JAD

More information:

• The President's Speech
• The White House Summit on International Development
  
• The Washington Post coverage of the speech and summit
  

Lets Use the Global Information Infrastructure to Create a Portal Providing Knowledge for Poverty Alleviation

Half the people in the world try to get by on $2/day or less; one of six is trying to do so on $1/day. Unfortunately, many of them fail to do so and die. Poverty of course is not just a matter of money. The poor suffer from hunger, ill health, inadequate shelter, lack of power, lack of respect, and lack of choices in their lives. The reduction of world poverty is probably the greatest challenge facing the world today.

More than a billion personal computers are connected to the Internet. More than three billion mobile phones are in use around the world. Many of the world's poor people can access the global information infrastructure via their phones or indeed via community telecenters. For many more, people seeking to help them escape poverty can access the Internet as proxies for the poor themselves. Moreover, connectivity continues to improve with historically unprecedented rapidity.

In the not too distant past, it was assumed that economic progress resulted from the accumulation of capital, increasing the capital per worker. In recent decades, however, it has become clear that increases in productivity from better ways of doing things can exceed those from capital accumulation. Indeed, the combined improvements from capital accumulation and improved ways of doing things provide the rapid growth needed to overcome poverty reasonably quickly.

The question then is can we find ways to utilize the global information infrastructure to provide the poor with knowledge that they can use to work their own way out of poverty. One way to do so might be the development of a portal that would attract, organize and make that knowledge available to the poor and their agents.

Certainly a part of this knowledge would concern technologies appropriate for poor people to use in their productive activities, such as agricultural techniques appropriate for small farms in tropical areas, manufacturing techniques appropriate for cottage and micro-industries, and techniques appropriate for artisanal mining, forestry or small scale fishing. However, a "knowledge for poverty alliviation portal" would also include information on health and hygiene practices, construction practices, education and learning, communications, as well as on organization and means of achieving political expression. In short, the scope of the portal could be as broad as the needs of the poor for knowledge to improve their lot in life.

There already exist portals illustrating the kinds of tools that could be combined to create such a portal.

• Wikipedia has enrolled a huge community willing and able to provide information and has institutionalized means for quality assurancce, attracting huge numbers of information seekers.
• YouTube provides a platform on which people can post or view video clips, a facility that would be important for often iliterate poor people.
• LinkedIn provides a platform for social networking, helping people to find others with the expertise that they need for a specific purpose.
• Babelfish provides pretty good translation among many language pairs, and illustrates the potential to provide information to poor people all over the world in languages that they can understand.
• Google is based on webcrawlers that can find useful information all over the World Wide Web, and algorithms to organize that information, to interpret inquiries and to rank responses in order of potential utility.

I would guess that such a portal might include all of these capabilities and others developed to meet the needs of providers and users of knowledge for poverty reduction/elimination. It might include "crowd sourcing", "social networking", "call center", and other approaches. Platforms such as eBay and Amazon, which serve commercial purposes, demonstrate the power of an appropriate platform to create new institutions to link people with needs and those with the ability to satisfy those needs.

I would suggest that the design of the platform requires not only technological expertise, but that of educators, psychologists, artists, social scientists, and others to figure out how best to communicate knowledge from those who hold it now, to those who need it to better the lives of the poor and to the poor themselves. Indeed, I suspect that often the best sources of knowledge needed by poor people are other poor people who have already successfully faced the problem.

An Example

Let us take as an example to explore how this portal would differ from others such as the Development Gateways, Eldis, Dev-Zone, or the Global Development Commons. One of the best ways to get information is to ask the right questions of the right people. The FAQs sections on many popular websites suggest how powerful the technique is.

Formulating the question: It is not easy to formulate a good question. Google illustrates a portal that has proven very effective in figuring out what someone really want to know from the the "lame" question he in fact poses. The problem would be likely to be more extreme for a portal intended to help poor people in developing nations to obtain knowledge that would help them to overcome their own poverty and that of their families and neighbors. One could provide help desks to assist users in posing questions, or develop algorithms that could infer the likely needs of the user and help interpret the information demands from the questions actually posed.

Finding the right person to answer the question: One might use a combination of crowd sourcing and social networking to track down the right person to answer a well posed question. The system might learn by including quality tracking and user satisfaction indices, and use that information to better guide respondent selection.

Helping the respondent answer well: One can imagine tools that would assist the respondent to understand the culture and educational level of the questioner, and to tailor the response to the questioner. Availability of tools to provide video or audio as well as text and images in the response would no doubt help in communication. Obvious tools would include translators to allow questioner and respondent to operate in different languages.

Interactive capabilities: Clearly communication is facilitated by a process that allows both clarification of questions and clarification of answers. Moreover, a considerable portion of communication among humans is by body language, tone of voice, and other tacit means. A great portal would allow these means of communication.

Storage and Organization of Q&As in knowledge bases. VITA (Volunteers in Technical Assistance) for years ran a program in which volunteer experts responded to technical questions from developing nations. The organization saved the responses, and eventually had extensive files that could be used to respond to a significant portion of the questions without calling on a volunteer. The manual system eventually failed, I suppose because of its cost and the difficulties of keeping the information timely. The new portal should clearly save the Q&As and organize them in such a way that a new user could access relevant information from the stored records. It should be possible to develop technological solutions that would reduce the problems of cost and obsolescence of the information.

Independent validation of information and Feedback: Scientific knowledge systems are especially valuable because they subject assertions to peer review, because observations are subject to replication, and because (ideally) negative results as well as positive results are included. At a simpler level, Amazon has developed procedures to tap professional reviews of books with reader comments and reviews to help evaluate the quality of the books it sells. So too, the proposed portal should include systems to validate the questions and their responses and record feedback from users.

How Do We Get There?

Such a portal could not come into existence magically.

• Financing would have to be obtained for its development and maintenance. How could that be found?
  
• There would have to be a core team to take charge of the conceptualization and development of the platform. How would that team be recruited and housed?
• A broader team of experts on knowledge for development would have to be recruited to advise and consult on the portal, and means would have to be found to effectively consult their expertise and incorporate it in the thinking about the portal.
  
• Permission to use existing tools in the portal would have to be obtained, and new tools would have to be developed. How would this be done?
• A community of contributors would have to be recruited and prepared to make their contributions. Who would do so, and how would it be done?
• The target population of seekers and users of knowledge would have to be further identified, and then a process would have to be developed to connect the knowledge recipients to the portal. How would that be done?
• The development community would best be consulted about the plans for the portal, involved in the portal's development, and encouraged to incorporate the portal in development programs.
  

This is an idea on which I would welcome comments and a significant dialog.

The Global Financial Crisis

David Price, who with his partner Peter Baldwin has created Debategraph, sent me an email suggesting this interesting application of their technology. It provides a visual tool for understanding the debate about the current financial crisis. As you can see, the results of the analysis can be pasted into one's own blog.

Thank you David both for the direction to this analysis and for creating Debategraph and making the tool available to registered users under Creative Commons license.

Muhammad Yunus: Building Social Business Ventures (preview)

Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Development Gateway Prize and the Nobel Prize, talks about the institutions needed to promote social business enterprises, such as the Grameen Bank (a microlender) and other enterprises he has created. He suggests that there should be markets for investment and lending to such enterprises, since existing financial enterprises have not evolved for their support.

Again, Yunus has a very interesting idea. Wall Street investors in my lifetime have expanded their view to consider not only profits but risks and have developed portfolio investment strategies that increase profit for a specified level of risk by selecting investments with uncorrelated (or even better, negatively correlated) risks.

I suggest that we need simple indices for social businesses to be added to profit and risk. For example, how about an index of social benefit per unit investment, and an index of the risk involved in achieving those social benefits.

Destroying species by the millions and destroying the environment

Source: "Biodiversity: Fewer creatures great and small," The Economist, October 16th 2008.

I quote extensively:

Common birds are in decline across the world. Almost one in four species of mammals is in danger of extinction. If current trends continue until 2050, fisheries will be exhausted. As it is, deforestation costs the world more each year than the current financial crisis has cost in total, one economist argued.......

In 2002, under its auspices, they vowed to bring about “a significant reduction” in the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010. The pledge became one of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations’ eight fondest ambitions for the world. Yet this target now looks unattainable.....

The IUCN also released a “comprehensive assessment” of the status of all known species of mammals. It found that 22% were threatened or extinct, and the well-being of a further 15% was unknown. For amphibians, the outlook is grimmer: a full 31% of them are at risk, and the status of a further 25% is uncertain. Sampling of species in other categories suggests similarly dire outlooks, with some 24% of reptiles and 32% of crabs thought to be threatened. For the most part, these findings do not reflect the latest data on global warming. But another IUCN study released at the congress found that 35% of the world’s birds, 52% of its amphibians and 71% of its warm-water corals were “particularly susceptible” to the threats from warming.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is studying global warming for the UN, said 20-30% of species could die out if global average temperatures rise by more than 2°C or so. And even today’s rate of extinctions, one Barcelona delegate noted, is 1,000 times faster than the norm before man made a mess.

Source: National Geographic

Comment: "The footsteps of civilization are written in shifting sands." Look at the photo of Mohenjo Daro in India, once one of the cradles of civilization and now a ruin in the desert. As Jared Diamond explained in his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, many civilizations in the past have failed when their economies and populations grew to the point that they could not survive an environmental downturn, leaving ruins in the midst of a degraded environment, the remnants of their populations either fleeing or living in much reduced circumstances.

In the past, civilizations only had the size and power to ruin a limited piece of the environment. Today our powerful, global society is seriously degrading the environment of the entire earth. Will we choose to fail or will we choose to take the necessary steps to protect the environment. One of the first and most important of those steps will be to stop the loss of biodiversity. JAD

The Health Care Crisis -- Without Comment

Source: "Health care: In need of desperate remedies," The Economist, October 16th 2008.

Life Expectancy at Birth (years)
United States 78.06
Germany 78.75
Canada 80.34
Britain 78.70
Japan 82.02
Mexico 75.84
China 72.88
India 68.59
Source: CIA Factbook via Wikipedia

"Over 8.1 million American children—one in 9—were uninsured in 2007."
"A weakening economy, a growing number of poor children, the continued erosion of employer-based coverage, and the Administration’s antagonistic policies will put additional pressure on those programs to keep up with the increasing demand."
Source: "Still Too Many Uninsured Children," Families USA, August 2008.

Source: "Health Coverage in Communities of Color: Talking about the New Census Numbers," Family USA, September 2008.

"Logistics in Africa: Network effects"

Source: The Economist, October 16th 2008.

"African trade has not changed much since the end of the colonial era. Unprocessed raw materials go out; finished goods come in. The trade imbalance is vividly illustrated by the ships sent from Asia to pick up empty containers left at African ports. Within Africa, moreover, it is difficult and costly to move goods. The continent has only a few broken-down railways. It has nothing resembling a transcontinental motorway. Even the British colonial dream of a road connecting Cape Town with Cairo failed.

"Today, getting a container to the heart of Africa—from Douala in Cameroon to Bangassou in the Central African Republic, say—still means a wait of up to three weeks at the port on arrival; roadblocks, bribes, pot-holes and mud-drifts on the road along the way; malarial fevers, prostitutes and monkey-meat stews in the lorry cabin; hyenas and soldiers on the road at night. The costs of fuel and repairs make even the few arterial routes (beyond southern Africa) uneconomic. A study by America’s trade department found that it cost more to ship a ton of wheat from Mombasa in Kenya to Kampala in Uganda than it did to ship it from Chicago to Mombasa."

Comment: The map indicates that Uganda is relatively better served by transportation infrastructure than are other African nations. Maybe so, but when I was there a couple of years ago land and lake transportation costs were still very high. There was no oil pipeline, and oil products had to be trucked in from the coast at very high cost. Most of the colonial railroads no longer functioned, and the one that did was in bad shape and expensive. The port facilities on Lake Victoria had deteriorated badly. The secondary road system that would connect the largely rural population with markets was very inadequate. And of course the other aspects of physical infrastructure -- energy, communications, water, sanitation -- were similarly underdeveloped. The lack of an adequate physical infrastructure was very costly to extractive, manufacturing and service industries and was a major disincentive to investment in these sectors.

There was a huge need for professional engineers, and for an industry that would utilize professional engineering services to build and maintain the nations physical infrastructure. Of course, a poor African nation also needs sources of financing to make the investments in infrastructure. That fact in turn leads to difficult questions of political-economy which could not be addressed in this posting, even were I competent to address them. JAD

California and UK Government to Jointly Fund Stem Cell Research

According to the BBC, an agreement was just signed

"between the UK and California to make it easier to obtain joint funding for stem cell research. Under the deal, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine will fund the work of California team members while the UK's Medical Research Council will pay for work carried out in Britain."

Comment: This suggests that due to the religious ideology which the Bush administration has imposed on the U.S. federal government, the British may be more likely to benefit economically from the stem cell research which the Government of California has taken the initiative to fund than is the rest of the United States. JAD

Palin is wrong, real Americans live in big cities

Sarah Palin seems to be pitching her campaign to rural and small town Americans. It occurred to me to check the figures, which are shown in the following table from the Bureau of the Census.

The most recent data I could find was from 2000, and at that time almost three out of ten Americans lived in urban areas with populations of five million or more. 57.5% lived in metropolitan areas of one million or more. Four out of five lived in cities. I have news for Sarah. These are the folks who make American run.

"Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science"

Source: Neal S. Young, John P. A. Ioannidis and Omar Al-Ubaydli, Public Library of Science: Medicine, October 7, 2008.

Summary: "The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winner's curse,” a more general statement of publication bias, suggests that the small proportion of results chosen for publication are unrepresentative of scientists' repeated samplings of the real world. The self-correcting mechanism in science is retarded by the extreme imbalance between the abundance of supply (the output of basic science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the increasingly limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact). This system would be expected intrinsically to lead to the misallocation of resources. The scarcity of available outlets is artificial, based on the costs of printing in an electronic age and a belief that selectivity is equivalent to quality. Science is subject to great uncertainty: we cannot be confident now which efforts will ultimately yield worthwhile achievements. However, the current system abdicates to a small number of intermediates an authoritative prescience to anticipate a highly unpredictable future. In considering society's expectations and our own goals as scientists, we believe that there is a moral imperative to reconsider how scientific data are judged and disseminated."

Read more about the article:

• "Scientific journals: Publish and be wrong," The Economist, October 9th 2008
• Richard Smith, More evidence on why we need radical reform of science publishing, PLOS Guest Blog

Natural Heritage Is Grander Than Cultural Heritage

View from the rim at Bryce Canyon

View of cliffs at Zion Canyon

View from the north rim of Grand Canyon

On our recent vacation, we visited three national parks: Bryce, Zion and Grand Canyon (north rim). The three reflect the wearing away of the Colorado Plateau, a huge geological structure that occupies most of four states. The bottom strata of Bryce and the top strata of Zion are of the same age; the bottom strata of Zion is of the same age as the top strata at the Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon alone is some ten miles across where we visited it. Driving among the National Parks revealed mile after mile of wonderous landscape, in many places almost the equal of the national parks themselves.

I am a Vice President of Americans for UNESCO, and have been very interested in UNESCO's World Heritage Center, and its list of hundreds of cultural and natural sites that have been identified through an exhaustive process of expert review to be so important as to justify recognition as part of the common heritage of mankind, worthy of permanent protection. The Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon National Park) has been designated as a World Heritage site (but Bryce and Zion have not been so designated).

I have been fortunate enough to visit a number of the cultural World Heritage sites, such as the Taj Mahal, the pyramids at Giza, and Manchu Picchu. Don't get me wrong. These are wonderful places, beautiful, full of cultural significance, and worthy of our greatest efforts to assure that they are preserved for future generations.

Still, they seem small and insignificant when compared with the natural grandeur of what has been called the Grand Circle in the American Sourthwest. One might think that the Grand Circle National Parks, millions of years in formation, could not be damaged by mankind. Yet we were told that the structure of the managed forests of the north rim of Grand Canyon are quite different in structure and appearance than the isolated, unmanaged forests on mesas within the Canyon. People are trying to understand how to manage the waters of the Colorado River in such a way as to maintain the ecology within the Canyon.

When the first national parks were established in the United States, they were wilderness sites that were visited by tiny numbers of people. The people who had the foresight to create a system for the protection of the sites were indeed gifted leaders. Now, millions of people per year visit Bryce, Zion and Grand Canyon nationa parks. Not only do Americans visit them, so do people from all over the world. (We heard many languages, some we could not identify on our trip.) Still, those visitors represent only a tiny fraction of the world's population. With the advances of the Global Information Infrastructure, virtual visitors will no doubt soon outnumber in-person visitors.

I suggest that mankind is increasingly capable of destroying these sites, even as mankind is increasingly able to appreciate them. Therefore it is increasingly important that we learn how to fully protect these sites of natural wonder and conserve them for posterity.

The effect of political divisions

I am just back from a trip to national parks in Utah and Arizona (Zion, Bryce and Grand Canyon). On the trip I visited the Navajo Bridge across the Colorado River. It is located at Lees Ferry (see the following map). When it was built some 80 years ago it was the only bridge across the Colorado River for 600 miles.

The area shown in the map that is north of the Colorado River and south of the Utah-Colorado border is known as the Arizona Strip. Think about it. While it is part of Arizona, communication with the rest of the state was prior to the completion of the bridge very difficult, while communication with southern Utah was direct and simple. Yet the Arizona Strip developed as part of Arizona subject to Arizona laws and paying Arizona taxes rather than as part of Utah subject to Utah laws and taxes.

Source of map.

The following map is used to illustrate the distance from Kanab, Utah to Franconia, Arizona, about seven or eight miles. I happened to drive from Kanab to Franconia and back, a round trip that took about a half hour by my watch. However, the two towns are in different time zones, according to the decisions by their state governments. (And if you cross the Colorado on the Navajo bridge, going between the Navajo reservation and Arizona you also change time zone.) It must be a pain in the tail for close neighbors to be in different time zones.

Source of map.

Someone, long ago, created an artificial line separating two territories, which became the line separating two states. That line has had effects on the people who live in the region, or like myself who merely travel across the line. The need to reset ones watch with every crossing is a minor example, but for me it was a very graphic example of the impact a seemingly nominal change in the political map can have.

WP Has Run Out of News

The Washington Post today has published the following image and caption covering about one-quarter of a page in the style section, in an article that purports to be about voter anxiety as the election draws near. I can only conclude that the paper has run out of real news, since otherwise I would be forced to consider the possibility that the editors have no news sense or no concern with using their limited space to more fully inform their readers (which presumably include the political leaders of the world's most economically and militarily powerful nation) about the critical events taking place in the economic crisis, the two ongoing wars, the war on terrorism, or the other 200+ nations of the world. It is of course a very nice picture of a pretty girl! JAD

War, economic meltdown, climate change, health care, all reported on a 24-hour news cycle. Anxiety has mounted for citizens like Washington's Rachel Ament, shown in her apartment. (By Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)

A thought on why we don't intuitively understand the current economic crisis

The human mind is not well equipped to understand the economy. The events of the last month should make that clear. We can understand how supply and demand curves determine the price at which goods are traded. We can understand how a market can clear at a price for which no remaining buyer will pay more for a good and no remaining seller will accept less.

Leontiev suggested the interconnectedness of economic activities, with the outputs of many economic activities forming inputs for other activities, and consumers siphoning off the final products. Assuming linearity, he was able to draw upon matrix algebra to calculate the equilibrium values for all the economic production activities.

Linear programming approaches in economics expand the approach to find solutions to economic systems that satisfy sets of inequalities and optimize some objective function, again assuming linearity.

In fact, economic systems are really complicated. A set of complex non-linear differential equations might be a better approximation of what is happening (linear approximations seem reasonable when changes are small, but as changes get large their approximation seems likely to fail). Moreover, issues of uncertainty and crowd psychology suggest simulations using complexity theory might have a place in modeling the economic interactions we have been seeing.

Our poor monkey brains did not evolve to allow us to intuit the behavior of such complex systems.

NYT documents two new failures of the Bush administration

"Federal Officials Seek to Relax Rules for Dumping Mine Waste"

The Interior Department has advanced a proposal that would ease restrictions on dumping mountaintop mining waste near rivers and streams, modifying protections that have been in place, though often circumvented, for a quarter-century......“The new rule will allow coal companies to dump massive waste piles directly into streams, permanently burying them,” warned Joan Mulhern of Earthjustice, an environmental group that has fought the practice.

"29th on Infant Mortality"

The infant mortality rate in this country declined sharply in the 20th century but then plateaued from 2000 to 2005.......What is particularly shameful is how poorly this country compares with other industrialized countries. In 1960, the United States ranked 12th lowest in the world in infant mortality. By 2004, the last year for which comparative data are available, it had dropped to 29th, tied with Poland and Slovakia. Even with the improvement (between 2005 and 2006), it is still likely to rank 29th, far behind many Scandinavian and East Asian countries that report rates below 3.5.

How do we judge government leaders? Not by the success of policies they don't understand

Cartoon source: Dear Kitty. Some Blog

Joshua Partlow, in his review in today's Washington Post of THE DICTATOR'S SHADOW: Life Under Augusto Pinochet by Heraldo Muñoz notes that while the economic policies implemented under Pinochet's administration were successful, and were developed by economists he supported, Pinochet himself understood them only poorly.

I lived in Chile in the pre-Allende, pre-Pinochet epoch, and I don't think that there would have been a rejection of state socialism without a military dictatorship, although I guess a much less dreadful dictatorship might have institutionalized the "Washington Consensus" like policies. But that is not the point I would make.

The question is, how do we judge someone like Pinochet. If he failed to have the economic expertise to adequately judge the likely outcomes of the economic policies put in place by his administration, or indeed of the policies that would otherwise have been in place, then it seems to me that he should not be credited with their success. Other dictators have imposed economic policies which they too failed to understand, and those policies had disastrous effects (Idi Amin comes to mind). On the other hand, Pinochet may not have fully understood the human suffering that he was unleashing on the people of Chile through his military policies and the policies that suppressed internal opposition.

Perhaps, given our inability to adequately predict the outcomes of government policies, we should not judge political leaders by those outcomes. Perhaps we should judge them by the processes that they use to develop those policies, and whether those processes reflect the wisdom embodied in our public institutions. The American revolutionaries of the 18th century were right in substituting local democracy for distant monarchy, but had great respect for democratic process. They deserve credit, so revolution per se is not necessarily wrong. My guess is that Pinochet deserves our reprobation.

"African chimps decline 'alarming'"

According to the BBC, citing a study in Current Biology, the population of the endangered West African chimpanzees in Ivory Coast has fallen by about 90% in less than 20 years. The Ivory Coast was thought to be one of the last strongholds for thesd chimps (Pan troglodytes verus) but rather than the expected 8,000 to 12,000 chimps, the researchers found only about 1,200. The pressure on the chimps is due in part to reduction of the forests in which they live and in part to poaching, since they are hunted for meat; both pressures come from increasing human population pressure and from a government which can not adequately protect the animals.

According to Wikipedia:

While it has long been known that modern chimpanzees use tools, recent research indicates that chimpanzee stone tool use dates to at least 4300 years ago. A recent study revealed the use of such advanced tools as spears, which West African Chimpanzees in Senegal sharpen with their teeth, being used to spear Senegal Bushbabies out of small holes in trees.

Comment: I guess in a world in which genocide is still permitted to continue in Darfur and can occurred in living memory in Ruanda and Burundi, and where millions have died in violence in the Congo, the failure to protect our closest living relative species is not surprising. It is still very, very wrong! JAD

Will Americans Sacrifice?

The Bush administration has embarked on two wars (and a so called war on terrorism) without asking the American public to sacrifice current consumption to pay for the wars. I suspect that decision, combined with an excessive ideological commitment to unregulated capitalism and an excessive faith that environmental problems are overestimated or can be solved, has led to the current complex of problems facing the United States and the burden this administration has placed on future generations.

I was a child during World War II, but I remember taking my little money to school and buying saving stamps to support the government's costs of the war. I remember paper drives and saving tin foil and rubber bands to help the war effort. There was rationing of gasoline and food. A large portion of the male population joined the military, and an unprecedented portion of the female population went to work, taking jobs in factories as well as offices and shops. Everyone, children and adults, men and women, worked to help the nation to win the war.

My earliest memory is December 7, 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor. September 11, 2001 was a comparable affront to American sensibility, and Americans would have united to support the government in any effort required to retaliate against the terrorists and prevent future similar attacks. Indeed, if asked I think the public would have mobilized to support wars on Iraq and Afghanistan under the impression that they were responsible for 9/11. Of course, had the public devoted itself comparably to these wars, when their justification proved false the backlash would have been more like the antiwar movement of the Vietnam years than has been the pallid movement of today. But then, we might have sent enough troops to keep the peace in Iraq, and enough troops and aid to help build and sustain a better society in Afghanistan, and not been in the difficulties we find today.

"GLOBAL: Donor response to food crisis inadequate, agencies say"

Source: humanitarian news and analysis, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

I quote extensively:

Food security experts say international donors’ response to the world’s food crisis has been inadequate when compared to interventions to contain the global financial meltdown.

“Huge financial resources have been mobilised by the international community in a matter of days” in response to the global financial crisis, wrote Teresa Cavero in a report by the international NGO Oxfam released on 16 October – World Food Day.

While the US government put up US$700 billion to bail out financial institutions in one day, on 3 October, total global development aid for 2007 was $104 billion, according to Alexander Woollcombe, food security advocacy adviser at Oxfam in Dakar.

This year’s food crisis threw an additional 75 million people into hunger and poverty in 2007 according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The World Bank estimates there are currently 967 million malnourished people in the world.

"The Presidential Nominees’ Visions for the US, The UN and Rebuilding Our Credibility"

Source of Graph: Foreign Policy
Survey data published in June

Check out the review of foreign policy positions in The Interdependent (magazine of the United Nations Association of the United States), Vol. 6, No. 3, Fall 2008.

The brief overview of the policies of McCain and Obama indicates that their public pronouncements are very similar, and that even the Republicans are repudiating many aspects of the Bush administration's foreign policy. The main difference seems to be that Obama would push negotiation harder than would McCain.

The real differences between the two men in foreign policy may be more of temperament -- coolness in the face of complex policy challenges and the degree to which the likely reaction to a crisis is negotiation and collaboration versus shows of force.

The more important difference may be in the nature of the administrative team that would be put in place by a Republican versus a Democratic President, and the ability of the administration's team to work with the Congress to develop a coherent, bipartisan foreign policy.

In this case, we might be well advised to see ourselves as others see us. The rest of the world has much more faith in Obama's foreign policy ability than in McCain's.

The Human Waste Crisis

Again, from The Economist:

Two-fifths of the world’s population has nowhere to defecate except open ground. That is 2.6 billion people whose drinking water contains their and their neighbour’s faeces; whose food is contaminated by the flies that lay their eggs in human waste; who live in filth and very often die because of it. And yet this particular curse of poverty is all too often overlooked. Politicians and celebrities are enamoured of “clean water”—but less keen on posing next to the latrines that must be built to keep water that way.

Image Source: Composting Toilet & Latrine Technology in Developing Countries

The Economist's article, a review of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George, makes the point that we don't talk enough and don't worry enough about the disposal of human waste, which is a killing problem in developing nations and an increasing one in water scarce developed nations. This is a topic that deserves much more research and development.

Its Official: The Economy Will Slump

Source: The Economist

'In its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook, the IMF cut its 2009 forecast for global GDP growth to just 3%. In its previous update, in July, it had said the world economy would grow by 3.9% next year."

Comment: Per capita GDP growth of course is lower than GDP growth in countries with growing populations, as is the case in most developing nations. It is also known that economists are worse in predicting GDP in rapidly changing economic conditions than in more stable conditions. However, the conditions are bad and likely to get worse. JAD

Scientific Integrity of Government Agencies

The Washington Post today has an article on the restrictions imposed on scientists in government agencies in sharing the scientific information produced in the agencies with the public and the scientific community. Based on a study done by the Union of Concerned Scientists (under the direction of my old friend and colleague, Francesca Grifo, the article states:

The Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration have among the most restrictive policies in the federal government on releasing scientific information to the press and public, according to a "report card" being issued today by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, by contrast, do a commendable job of making scientific research and expertise available, the report said.

After a year-long review of press office policies of 15 federal agencies, the group concluded that the agencies handled information requests inconsistently and that there appears to be significant confusion in some agencies about what their policies are.

The report, begun after high-profile complaints by some government scientists that they were not allowed to openly discuss their findings, is based on surveys filled out by 739 researchers and some follow-up interviews, on information gathered through Freedom of Information Act requests, and on searches of agency Web sites for their stated policies......These were the grades awarded by the UCS: A: CDC; B-plus: Nuclear Regulatory Commission; B: NASA, NOAA, Census Bureau, National Institute of Standards and Technology; C: National Institutes of Health, U.S. Geological Survey; D: Fish and Wildlife Service, EPA , Bureau of Land Management, Consumer Product Safety Commission; F: OSHA.

Comment: The study adds data confirming that the Bush administration has been working to impose its ideological agenda on government science. Thus, the low grades go to organizations that provide data relating to stem cell research and environmental quality. Fortunately, both Obama and McCain have pledged to improve the situation if elected. JAD

Two thoughts about the debate last night

Energy Policy

The candidates were asked whether their policies would end the energy crisis within their first term if elected. Of course not! But the first term could put in place the policies we need to beat the energy crisis. In fact, both candidates agree that the energy crisis is of very high priority, that it requires dramatic change from the policies of the Bush administration, and the candidates even agree in large part on the directions for a new and improved energy policy.

Unfortunately, it will be hard to move to such a policy (and as experience has shown perhaps even more difficult to sustain it). There are many powerful individuals and corporations that profit from the current policies.

Thus I suggest the candidates both pledge now that win or lose they will lead their factions of their parties to negotiate a new energy policy for this nation. The pro-change Republicans and the pro-change Democrats can produce such a policy if they are willing to negotiate the few points that differ among themselves.

Education

The candidates were asked why the United States pays more than any other country for education yet scores badly in international comparison testing, and what they would do about it.

First, the problem is not that we spend more money on education than do other nations. We are among the very richest nations, and we can and should afford to spend more on education.

Second, there is a statistical glitch hidden in the data. The United States has traditionally had a large portion of its children go on to higher education. If one tests the top ten percent of one country's children and compares them with the top half of another country's children, one can expect the country that educates fewer to score better.

But the real reason, as we all know, is that we allow there to remain an underclass. Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics don't get as good an education in this country as do Whites and Asians. Part of the problem is in the schools that they attend, part is in the family support that the kids receive, part is in the peer culture which we allow to continue, and part is in the limited opportunities imposed by prejudice.

Farouk Hosni: Candidate for UNESCO Director General

Farouk Hosny -- 2001 -- Acrylic on Canvas - 105x205 cm

Zamalek Art Galary

Farouk Hosni, having served for two decades as Egyptian Minister of Culture, has been nominated by his government to be the next Director General of UNESCO, and is considered to be a leading candidate. He is also know internationally as an abstract artist. One of his paintings is reproduced above. The second term of office of the current Director General, Koïchiro Matsuura, ends in October 2009.

Minister Farouk Hosni is controversial. He of course would bring strong qualifications to UNESCO, both as an experienced minister of Egyptian cultural policies and as an artist in his own right. He has however been involved in controversies, and his decades of service in the Egyptian cabinet itself raises concerns in the minds of some.

It seems likely that someone from an Arab country will be elected to the post of DG, and several countries with large majority Islamic populations have already indicated their support for the Egyptian candidate. Moreover, news reports indicate a serious effort to enlist support from other regions of the world.

SNL Nails the VP Debate

Foreigners Will Not Take a McCain-Palin Presidency Seriously

If you doubt that the McCain-Palin resort to gutter politics (see my previous posting) is going to have foreign policy repercussions, this is what BBC News says:

A Democratic spokesman accused the Republicans of gutter politics.

"What's clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy," Hari Sevugan said.

Commentators say Mrs Palin's attack forms part of a broader Republican strategy to attack Mr Obama's character.

That is about as negative as a news story can get. The editorials will be worse. BBC News is read all over the world, and is very influential. It provides more information to leaders of foreign nations than do the media used by the McCain-Palin campaign for their attacks.

The Republicans are Getting Desperate and Resourting to Unjustified Attacks

The folk who ran George W. Bush's campaigns, Karl Rove et. al., are infamous for their willingness to use ugly and untrue charges in attack adds when their candidates are running behind. I have read that a lot of those same people have joined the McCain campaign. I know that John McCain has expressed repentance for politically motivated moves that he has made in past losing campaigns, but I thought he was above the current move towards attack adds. On the other hand, he has chosen a running mate who is a self professed equivalent of an attack dog with lipstick, and who seems to have few other qualifications for the office of vice president.

The Washington Post today reports that Sarah Palin is publicly charging that there is a close relationship between Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weatherman Underground, and Barack Obama, citing a New York Times article.

Palin told Republican donors in Colorado that Obama "is not a man who sees America as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world."

First, I thought Sarah Palin was a strong, born again Christian, and I would have guessed that she would think God was the "greatest force for good in the world.

The New York Times story in fact says:

the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

According to Wikipedia:

William Charles "Bill" Ayers (born 26 December 1944)[1] is an American elementary education theorist, and former leading 1960s militant. He is known for the radical nature of his activism in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum and instruction.

He went underground for years, but after federal charges were dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct, eventually surrendered to the authorities.

It sounds like he was an antiwar activist who did some very unwise things in his youth, but turned his life around, and became active in his local community, who is now being defiled by innuendo without any chance to defend himself. In any case, I thought in the United States we hold a man innocent until proven guilty.

Certainly Obama's connection with Ayers, participating in occasional joint meetings, is much less damning than McCain's association with convicted felon Charles Keating, for which McCain was formally reprimanded by the Senate.

Palin is not alone in making this baseless charge. I note the comment by John McCain, also quoted in the article in The New York Times:

In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, asked, “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”

Now I realize that Senator McCain ran bombing runs in North Vietnam in his youth, but I do not feel that fact alone should disbar him from holding high office in the United States, much less from associating with serious candidates for office. There are lots of other reasons why I don't think Senator McCain should be elected President -- his lack of economic wisdom, his close contacts with lobbyists and gambling interests, his reprehensible promotion of Keating even after the Saving and Loan scandal became public, his support for all of the worst policies of the Bush administration and the likely continuation of those policies if he is elected, and his narrowly hawkish foreign policy views are enough for me. Were they not sufficiently damning, the possibility of Sarah Palin suddenly becoming an unelected president, as eight vice presidents have done in the past, is truly frightening. Now I can add to the reasons for voting against the McCain-Palin ticket their letting their campaign go into the gutter.

This blog focuses on Knowledge for Development, and I usually refrain from commenting on the election. There are a lot more knowledgeable people for that. But the use of false claims during the election campaign does is a misuse of the media that fits clearly in the content of this blog.

Herbert Hoover, a very good man but a terrible president, vetoed Congressional bill after Congressional bill at the start of the Depression, and let an economic crisis develop into a global economic depression. We can not afford to let the current economic crisis evolve into something much worse.

George Bush and his administration told us that they had definite information that justified our going to war, and that the war would be short, liberating a people who would welcome our troops and quickly create a democratic government. They were tragically wrong, at a cost of thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, tens of thousands of dead innocent Iraqis, huge damage to the Iraqi nation, and damage to the American foreign policy we may never be able to repair.

We can not entrust economic policy over the next four years to candidates who gain office by gutter politics. We can not entrust our foreign policy and the conduct of two wars to candidates who gain office by gutter politics. If I can't trust what they tell me when they are running for office, how can I trust what they tell me if they get into office???!!! And if I can't trust what they tell me, how can we expect markets and foreign nations to do so?

An AT Cooking Stove

Source: "Green homes: Another green revolution," The Economist, September 4th 2008.

Many people in developing nations use wood burning stoves indoors for cooking. Usually inefficient, the result is a big burden of time or money to obtain the wood and health problems due to indoor smoke. Using a carefully designed stove to enclose the fire and direct heat into the cooking pot, fuel consumption and pollution can be reduced dramatically.

Engineers at Colorado State University have developed stoves with simple carburettors that can cut particulate emissions by 75% and fuel consumption by half. Their design is now being commercialized by an NGO called Envirofit. It produces four models in China and India that sell for $10-80.


Ron Bills, Envirofit’s boss, hopes to sell 10m stoves worldwide by 2013. The Colorado State team, meanwhile, has devised an experimental stove that generates electricity using a thermoelectric device and powers a white light-emitting diode (LED).

Michael Palin for President

Michael Palin for President

This says it all!

Social Capitalism/Capitalist Socialism

The Bill Moyers Program had a guest, Emma Coleman Jordan, who made a very interesting point with regard to the experience of the past couple of weeks. We are seeing companies becoming so large that if they fail, their failure could trigger a chain reaction that will cause grave problems for not only the economy of the nation but of the world. Consequently, the government has to step in and save those enterprises if they get in sufficient trouble. The means of saving these companies this time has resulted in even larger companies being formed by mergers and acquisitions of the failing firms by others that are more sound.

This does not sound like the laissez faire capitalism, and indeed the federal government is taking ownership in the companies through warrants and other mechanisms, as well as regulating them to see that they don't fail. It has the authority to force top executives to resign and to force the sale of the firms. The financial capacity of the federal government in form backs these enterprises. At the same time the power of shareholders and their designated managers is weakened.

This does not sound like socializing the enterprises, as many nations have done to many key enterprises in the past. For most of the time and for most purposes the Board of Directors and the corporate managers are responsible for running the firms, the firms are run for profit, and investors share in those profits. Indeed, the firms through the political action of their executives and investors, through political action committees, and through trade associations have considerable influence over the political systems of government.

Perhaps we are seeing a new mixed system with features of both socialism and capitalism being created. Indeed, when five financial institutions have a combined portfolio of four billion dollars, the scale of activity is beyond that of historical capitalist enterprises.

In a previous posting I noted that the regulation of these companies required the use of computer models to assess the risk that they were incurring (and we now discover passing on to the federal government and to the taxpayer). There is a problem with such computer programs. They can fall into error"

• If they are built on theory which proves to be incorrect or inadequate,
• If they are parameterized with data which proves to be incorrect,
• If they are run with data on initial conditions or current conditions which proves to be incorrect or insufficient,
• If they embody assumptions that prove incorrect, or
  
• If they are implemented incorrectly, containing for example programming errors.

These models are so large and complex that they are very hard to understand. Indeed, they may be the product of teams of people over time, such that no one fully understands the model as it is being used.

A part of the current problem is that the federal regulators did not construct independent models which they could run to make independent estimates of the risk in the portfolios of the largest financial firms, but rather depended on the models which the firms themselves operated and used for their decision making. Thus if, as proved to be the case, the firms made bad choices and accepted too much risk, the regulatory agency was unlikely to be able to perceive that risk in advance.

We have yesterday a government investment of nearly a trillion dollars in the financial sector. If the government is on tap to make such investments, albeit if only once a century, in order to try to save the economy from deep recession, then it better have independent means to understand and monitor the risks involved, and means to impose regulations to manage those risks.

Add the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project to the Memory of the World

Eleanor Roosevelt and United Nations 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights'

Eleanor Roosevelt was a great American in her own right as well as in the role of spokesperson for her husband. Among her greatest accomplishment was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She chaired the United Nations Committee that drafted the Declaration. Her enormous prestige, in my opinion, made the Declaration possible. Her skill in the chair brought people together who were otherwise seldom able to negotiate successfully. It was her recognition that, while cultures differ as to why people have these rights, they can agree on a fundamental set of rights which must be regarded as universal.

"Once more we are in a period of uncertainty, of danger, in which not only our own safety but that of all mankind is threatened. Once more we need the qualities that inspired the development of the democratic way of life. We need imagination and integrity, courage and a high heart."
Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt was a lifelong supporter of the United Nations and of UNESCO. Not only did she chair the U.N. Human Rights Committee from 1946 to 1952, but she wrote a book to encourage people to support the United Nations, and contributed to the UNESCO Courier. (see "The Children Fight for Life" and "Partners: The United Nations and Youth")

UNESCO's Memory of the World Program seeks to guard against collective amnesia, calling upon the preservation of the valuable archive holdings and library collections all over the world ensuring their wide dissemination. The Memory of the World Register lists documentary heritage which has been recommended by the International Advisory Committee, and endorsed by the Director-General of UNESCO, as of world significance and outstanding universal value. Currently, the only U.S. contribution included in the Register is The Wizard of Oz.

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers is a project, hosted at George Washington University, dedicated to bringing Eleanor Roosevelt's writings (and radio and television appearances) on democracy and human rights before an audience as diverse as the ones she addressed. Thus there is not only an organization responsible for maintaining the documentary legacy of this great woman, but one that is actively promoting the dissemination of her works and their use in education.

I can think of no more appropriate collection for the United States to nominate for inclusion in UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Not only do they qualify as of outstanding universal value, there is no better collection that would symbolize the U.S. efforts to create UNESCO as a means for international cooperation to advance peace and human rights.

If you agree, contact the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and second this suggestion.

John Daly
(This is my opinion, and does not necessarily represent that of Americans for UNESCO.)
Eleanor Roosevelt hosting UNESCO visit to Val-Kill in Hyde Park, NY, 1948

A Couple of Papers on Innovation

How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?
Jennifer Hunt, Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle
NBER Working Paper No. 14312
Issued in September 2008

We measure the extent to which skilled immigrants increase innovation in the United States by exploring individual patenting behavior as well as state-level determinants of patenting. The 2003 National Survey of College Graduates shows that immigrants patent at double the native rate, and that this is entirely accounted for by their disproportionately holding degrees in science and engineering. These data imply that a one percentage point rise in the share of immigrant college graduates in the population increases patents per capita by 6%. This could be an overestimate of immigration's benefit if immigrant inventors crowd out native inventors, or an underestimate if immigrants have positive spill-overs on inventors. Using a 1950-2000 state panel, we show that natives are not crowded out by immigrants, and that immigrants do have positive spill-overs, resulting in an increase in patents per capita of about 15% in response to a one percentage point increase in immigrant college graduates. We isolate the causal effect by instrumenting the change in the share of skilled immigrants in a state with the initial share of immigrant high school dropouts from Europe, China and India. In both data sets, the positive impacts of immigrant post-college graduates and scientists and engineers are larger than for immigrant college graduates.

The Agglomeration of US Ethnic Inventors
William R. Kerr
July 17, 2008

The ethnic composition of US inventors is undergoing a significant transformation - with deep impacts for the overall agglomeration of US innovation. This study applies an ethnic-name database to individual US patent records to explore these trends with greater detail. The contributions of Chinese and Indian scientists and engineers to US technology formation increase dramatically in the 1990s. At the same time, these ethnic inventors became more spatially concentrated across US cities. The combination of these two factors helps stop and reverse long-term declines in overall inventor agglomeration evident in the 1970s and 1980s. The heightened ethnic agglomeration is particularly evident in industry patents for high-tech sectors, and similar trends are not found in institutions constrained from agglomerating (e.g., universities, government).

Comment: More evidence that our economy benefits as we invite skilled immigrants to work in our economy, and especially in the technology industries. Our future economic welfare depends greatly on the innovations these people bring to our shores. JAD

More Aid is Needed for Hurricane Devistated Haiti

Photo by Donna Edwards

"Congresswoman Donna F. Edwards (D-MD), Congressman Kendrick B. Meek (D-FL), and Congresswoman Yvette D. Clark (D-NY) traveled to Haiti to see firsthand the situation there after four devastating hurricanes hit the country in the last several weeks, including the latest Hurricane Ike. The Congressmembers, along with several others, have signed onto a request by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) for immediate disaster relief for Haiti. They also called on the Bush Administration to grant temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians in the U.S. to enable them to send money and aid back to their country."

Comment: I have worked in Haiti, and I know that most people of that country need help in the best of times. It must be truly desperate in the aftermath of these hurricanes. In these circumstances, humanitarian concerns should trump political ones. Moreover, the government has shown this week that it can move quickly when there are important stakes at play. For some Haitians this will be a matter of life or death. JAD

Donna Edwards Votes Yes

After voting against the Emergency Economic Recovery Act earlier in the week, my representative voted in favor of the Act today.

"While it saddens me to know that this isn�t the best bill that we could have developed, I believe it is the first step on the road to economic recovery," continued Rep. Edwards. �Today�s vote is by no means the end of the story. I and my colleagues are committed to taking aggressive action to solve this economic crisis not for Wall Street, but for hard-working, families in my district and across the country."

Comment: The ideal is the enemy of the good, and politics is the art of compromise. In this case, the damage of spending more time negotiating improvements in the bill might have cost more as the markets reacted to uncertainty than any benefit that might have been gained by further improvements, JAD

A radical failure of the SEC and its chief

Source: "The Reckoning: Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt," STEPHEN LABATON, The New York Times, October 2, 2008.

This story notes that in 2004, the Securities Exchange Commission loosened the rules as to how much the five largest financial firms could leverage their capital.

Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly.

As part of the ruling, there was supposed to be an increase in SEC surveillance of the bank portfolios. This is what the Times says:

The 2004 decision for the first time gave the S.E.C. a window on the banks’ increasingly risky investments in mortgage-related securities.

But the agency never took true advantage of that part of the bargain. The supervisory program under Mr. Cox, who arrived at the agency a year later, was a low priority......

In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the agency also decided to rely on the firms’ own computer models for determining the riskiness of investments, essentially outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to the banks themselves......

The commission assigned seven people to examine the parent companies — which last year controlled financial empires with combined assets of more than $4 trillion. Since March 2007, the office has not had a director. And as of last month, the office had not completed a single inspection since it was reshuffled by Mr. Cox more than a year and a half ago.

The few problems the examiners preliminarily uncovered about the riskiness of the firms’ investments and their increased reliance on debt — clear signs of trouble — were all but ignored.....

Last Friday, the commission formally ended the 2004 program, acknowledging that it had failed to anticipate the problems at Bear Stearns and the four other major investment banks.

“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” Mr. Cox said.

Comment: Just think about that. The regulatory agency assigned seven people to an office responsible for the information on which to evaluate the safety of a seven trillion dollar portfolio, and left that office without a director for more than a year, during which the banks actually failed. It used the same computer models to evaluate the risks on which the companies were making their own decisions.

The United States is offering advice to developing nations on managing their own economies. Perhaps it should look to its own problems first! JAD
Christopher Cox is a lawyer who was appointed to the SEC after 16 years in the House of Representatives. He was elected from Orange County, California, one of the most conservative constituencies in the nation. I recall one Orange County Representative who gave speeches on the floor of the Congress warning against the spear carrying Africans who were unbeknownst to the rest of use, invading the United States. How about the one with two families, whose daughter went to jail after seducing a 13 year old student in her class?

Read about Cox:

• The Wikipedia entry
• An old Orange County Register profile
  

Google Project 10 to the 100th

Google has announced a project under which it will devote U.S.$10 million to fund development of "ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible". People are invited to submit their ideas by October 20th. Google will select 100 of these for public comment. It will then select the best for funding.

Categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

African agricultural research 'neglected ' by donor policies

Source: SciDev.Net

A lack of emphasis on agricultural research in development policy over the last quarter of a century is one of the main reasons for the deterioration of African farming, according to a UN report released this month (15 September).

The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report on Africa's economic development also cites the small size of each country's research stations, isolated researchers and high staff turnover as other factors that helped "prevent the attainment of a critical mass of scientific and technical staff".

"In Sub-Saharan Africa there are problems with agricultural research, which determines the rate of technological change," Sam Gayi, lead researcher of the report told SciDev.Net.

"Can science policy advice be disinterested?"

Bruce Smith, author of The Advisers, a book on scientific advisory committees in the U.S. government, reviews The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics by Roger A. Pielke Jr. I have found in the past that both of them were worth reading.

Apparently Pielke

identifies four major models of science advising—the pure scientist who prefers not to offer advice, the science arbiter who is objective but willfully innocent of policy realities, the science advocate, and the honest broker (his favorite) who is objective but responsive to the practical realities of policymaking—and tries to point out where each is appropriate.

Smith questions how useful these categories are, and while he is correct that it is hard to actually determine which category an advisor may fall into at a given time, I can see how the categories are useful for expository purposes.

I think the key element of Smith's critique is:

A key assumption of the book is that what is really wrong with science advising is that scientists lack a clear view of their choices and of what they are doing. Pielke seems to believe that once scientists get this straight, the rest of what needs to happen in the advising process will fall into place. I wish it were that simple.

Whether the scientists do or do not have it right is a small part of the overall problem, for in truth the scientists are bit players in this whole drama. What congressional staffers, civil servants, presidential advisers, journalists, media talking heads, and politicians at all levels do or think is far more significant.

It occurs to me that both Pielke and Smith may be right. For a scientists involved in providing science advice, a clear view of his/her choices and role may be very important. If Pielke is seeking to clarify the situation for scientists embarking on advisory services, many of whom are quite naive, that is a useful function which might have a wide audience. On the other hand, Smith seems to be suggesting that the entire system might be made to work better and that the scientific advisor's understanding is not the critical element in that improvement; that seems true to me.

One issue is why the scientific advice is requested. In my first experience with an advisory panel (many decades ago), the NIH officials that called for the panel clearly wanted a justification that they could use in asking for money. The distinguished scientists invited, who differed greatly among themselves in their ideas as to priorities for research in their field, could all agree that the field should get more money. I suspect one could have, and did, predict that outcome in advance. The advisory committee exercise was essentially ritual that had to be performed to allow bureaucratic acceptance of a foregone conclusion. Smith would be correct were he to suggest an alternative institutionalization might be more cost effective, but ritual has its place.

Of course scientists have specific knowledge that they should provide to the policy making process. Scientists chosen for advice also have devoted their lives to a field, and want to advocate for the things they care about. I think we all agree that both informing others from their specialized knowledge and advocating for their interests are good things to do. We like to differentiate between the two.

It is perhaps easier to do so in some contexts than others. Smith and Pielke take climate change as an example, and that is so complex an issue that it is not surprising that ones values and ones knowledge get intertwined.

Take a different example, that of the stem cell lines that are acceptable for federal funding under the Bush administration guidelines. Questions as to how many such lines exist and how stable they are may be more easily separated from one's value positions on the status of a human embryo than questions of the origins of climate change from ones feelings about the environment.

I do feel, however, that both the organizers of scientific advice and the givers of that advice try to identify the statements which are warranted by theory, research and scientific consensus and differentiate them from one's more general opinions.

While I am at it, we know that scientists almost always think scientific results will come more easily and rapidly than they actually do, and we know that many (perhaps most) important results are unexpected. Advice should be managed to take such human characteristics into account.

A Comment on FACA

In the Summer 2008 number of Issues in Science and Technology there is a brief section (in From the Hill) titled "Bill introduced to close FACA 'loopholes'”. Citing concerns from the Congress that the advisory process has not been as open and unbiased as the Congress intends, the article states:

Testifying at the hearing, Sidney Shapiro, associate dean for research and development at the Wake Forest School of Law, cited several loopholes in FACA, which he argued allow the work of advisory committees to be completed in settings not subject to FACA regulations. He mentioned a “contractor loophole,” which allows agencies to hire private companies to organize advisory committees that are not subject to the FACA regulations; a “subcommittee loophole,” which allows agencies to divert the substantive committee work to subcommittees not subject to the regulations; and a “non-voting participant loophole,” which allows non–committee members to be involved in the work of the committee as long as they do not vote. FACA requires that members of federal advisory committees be designated as “special government employees” and thus be subject to official conflict of interest guidelines. Subcommittee members at the hearing expressed concerns about the last loophole, arguing that nonvoting members are able to strongly influence the work of committees without being subject to FACA regulations.

Comment: I thought a lot about scientific advice for some 20 years in which I worked for the U.S. Government and was responsible (among other functions) for obtaining scientific advice for my agency. I strongly agree that agencies need scientific advice that is as good as possible. Ideally it should be provided by disinterested scientists who are experts in the subject of interest, but sometimes it is all but impossible to find experts who have no interests in the issue for which advice is being sought. In those circumstances, it seems to me that one tries to get opinions from people with contrasting interests, and of course to be sure interests are declared so that they can be taken into account in considering the advice. I think a good scientific advisory committee always involves people who are not on the committee in its work, if you consider "involve" in a broad sense. There are always staff members from the Agency involved who provide information and assistance to the committee. When I used advisory committees I found it useful to have outsiders watching to provide feedback on possible problems in the process of the committee. Experts call upon their colleagues for informal advice. (A phone call is made: "I have a proposal that involves the use of method x. I have never used it, but I thought you told me that you had troubles with it two years ago. Remind me what they were......Do you think it would be a good idea to suggest a the proponent consider y as an alternative method?) It would be shooting the peer review process in the foot to install controls that would stop that kind of interaction. Indeed, good advisory committee meetings should be open. So you have an expert sitting in as an observer. I find it good practice to let the observers comment on the proceedings at an appropriate time. Even the "contractor loophole" should be considered carefully. Getting advice, as is the case in getting any kind of information, costs time, effort and money. Complying with FACA rules and regulations is actually quite costly, especially in terms of time. For important and complex policy issues, it is of course worthwhile to take the time and effort to use a transparent, open process to get the best possible advice. A contractor can often get outside advice faster and cheaper than can the government staff can through the FACA process. So there is a range of issues on which the the FACA process would be too slow or complicated to be used, but in which a contractor could provide timely and cost-effective advisory services. Do you really want a law that prevents a government agency from using such services? The result would be government agencies making decisions on a range of intermediate issues without advice that would generally improve the decision making. I would also mention that it is possible to use a civil society organization which would be likely to have very strong ethical controls to assure high quality, disinterested advice. The National Academies are prototypical of such organizations, but I also managed relationships with professional societies for such advice when I worked for the government. JAD

Musing about The Proud Tower

I have been reading The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman. The author does an interesting job of showing how an economic and technological revolution was creating pressures that would lead to the world wars that would bring down the ruling classes in a European catastrophe.

The British government was run by a landed aristocracy, the German and Russian monarchies also by ancient aristocracies, and the French government led by people who felt that embarrassing the Army by reversing its gross injustice to Dreyfus would be bad policy were it to diminish the prestige of the military. In all cases there were oppositions and indeed peaceniks, but their power was contained. The United States also was extending its power with the Spanish American War, holding Caribbean and Phillipines Islands, and under the sway of Mahen beginning to build an imperial navy.

It is not surprising that there were people in all these countries who felt that military aggression was a useful policy for their nation; we have plenty of those blockheads even now in the United States. It does seem surprising that people in so many countries felt that their nation could maintain or achieve military superiority. But even more surprising is the fact that in so many countries the pro-war factions held dominant national power.

I suppose that is the real lesson that Tuchman is teaching. The ruling classes were still acultured to a militarism that had once brought their ancestors to power, and had not yet been disastrously destructive for many of their countries. The militarism was increasingly dangerous in a world in which military technology had advanced greatly, and nation states had developed the institutional power to wage wars of unprecedented destructiveness. The result would be the catastrophe of World War I, followed by the even more catastrophic World War II.

It seems likely that it has not escaped Tuchman's notice that our military technology has advanced greatly in the last century, our economic power and governmental institutions are capable of conducting even more destructive wars, and our political leadership continues to exhibit a worrisome tendency to live by old and outmoded cultural ideals.

The Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis: A Tragedy of the Commons

When I think of a "commons" I think of the lands held in common in the past by villages in England. All the people in the village had equal right to graze their sheep in the village commons. Each villager individually would profit more by grazing more sheep on the commons. But if the village as a whole tried to graze more sheep than the commons could support, they would ruin the land and everyone would suffer. Thus the tragedy. Unless the village could agree on managing the commons in a way that guaranteed its continued health then the villagers each by seeking to maximize his own benefits would reduce the benefits for all.

In the mortgage industry, each firm has an equal right to attract customers and make mortgage loans. Each firm profits more by making more (good) loans. But there are only so many potential borrowers who can afford a mortgage. In the past lenders had been restrained from making loans to people by banking regulations and practices that encouraged them to limit the risk they accepted in their portfolio. With the development of mechanisms allowing them to make mortgage loans, package them into bundles and pass the risk on to market investors, thos past restraints were removed. The firms then had the incentives to make more and more loans, and collectively put a lot more money out on loan than the borrowers could collectively pay off. The market crashed.

Of course, the situation is not quite that simple. Wnen sheep overgraze a common pasture, it is not simply that all the grass is gone. Weeds invade, erosion occurs, soils deteriorate, and the pasture degrades. So too, in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the overlending lead to increased housing prices, overbuilding, excess investment in housing, and a housing bubble. As mortgage funding becomes less available, the bubble burst, the supply of houses on the market goes up while the number of buyers and their ability to buy goes down, prices fall, the market for new homes goes down, builders suffer.

It sounds to me like a tragedy of the commons. The prevention is to institutionalize methods to prevent the firms from "overgrazing" the field of potential mortgage borrowers. We call the institutionalized controls "regulations". I think the institutionalization term is well chosen. We need not only new laws and regulations, but also effective oversight mechanisms and agents to see that the laws and regulations are enforced.